Pirate Lord Supreme

It is, by any metric, a small country masquerading as a city.

It governs more lives and more wealth than most nations. If democratic socialism — housing reform, public banking, equitable taxation — functions here, it obliterates the myth that such governance can’t work at scale. The fear isn’t ideological. It’s empirical. Because if Mamdani can keep the lights on, reduce homelessness, and maintain economic growth without catering to Wall Street, then the capitalist gospel collapses under its own dead weight.

What terrifies the establishment isn’t failure. It’s feasibility.

If it works in New York, there’s no reason it can’t work in Nebraska. If it works in Queens, it can work in Kansas City. And once proof exists, belief becomes irrelevant. The ship of democracy, fully refitted, will keep sailing — and no one can claim it isn’t American."

peter grieves in far from home, and begins to move on during the events of no way home.

"D-Doctor Robby, I-I—" Dennis uselessly stutters. He shoves his hands behind him, hopefully covering the mess on the back of his scrub bottoms. "I will, uh, I will—"

Robby casts a look around the bustling emergency department and loudly announces, "It is hot in here." Then, he peels his blue hoodie from his arms and drapes it across the seat of the chair, covering the stain. When his eyes land on Dennis, he says, "Why are we just standing around, Whitaker? Come with me."

Dennis tenses as Robby clamps his big hands down on his shoulders and wheels him away from the hub. The touching seems to be a regular habit with him, but the close way Robby walks behind him is new. It strikes Dennis that he is using his body to hide his leak. Dennis' insides are cramping, his back feels all sweaty, and—great—now his eyes are stinging too.

Robby takes him outside. Speaking lowly, he asks, "You use the decontamination shower yesterday?"

"No?"

"Didn't think so. It's just a big wet room, basically. Get cleaned up. I'll bring you new scrubs."

Dennis feels himself pale. "Is it that bad?" How long has he been walking around with a big bloody patch on the back of his scrubs, not realising that he's been leaking through his pad?

Robby turns him around so that he can hold his shoulders while looking at him face on. "Hey, it happens. There's menstrual products in the break room first aid cupboard. You want a pad or a tampon?"

Now Dennis feels himself flush. "Pad, please."

Robby nods. "There's period underwear there too. I'll bring you a pair. You okay, Whitaker? Can you keep your head in the game today?"

Against his better judgement, he says, "Yeah." He's focused through the pain of his cramps thus far, but how can he push this conversation about period products with his boss to the back of his mind?

"What about the chair?" He asks suddenly. "I can—I can clean it up later if you put it aside."

Robby smiles at him in a sort of quizzical manner. "I am not letting you clean a chair when there's patients to be seen, Whitaker."

"I meant after!"

"Still," Robby chuckles, "I'm not letting you. There's plenty of spares. And one of the few positives about working in an emergency department is that no one is ever surprised to find blood anywhere." He claps Dennis' shoulder and concludes, "Wash up, and I'll be back in fifteen minutes." Then he's off again, the same way he whirls away from patients and onto the next challenge.

Dennis keeps the door cracked open so he can watch him go. Then, once he is gone, he shuts it, and he strips. The dark brown stain on the back of his scrubs is mortifying, but not nearly as awful as the fact that his boss is actively fetching him a pad.

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.