good morning, evil genius

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.

I'm asking this as someone who has HARDLY EVER written anything before

HELLOOO!!! THIS ISNT A SILLY QUESTION AT ALL this actually one of the first things my lecturer taught us when i started my uni course!

Describing environments, weather and outfits is one of the trickiest things in a novel/fic because if done at the wrong moment it can take the reader out of the story and break the flow that a paragraph has, SO HERE ARE MY TIPS FOR WRITING SCENERY:

One of the most important things to think about when writing is that a reader is going to be entering a story with pre-conceived ideas and images of everything that will be mentioned inside it. E.g., if the author writes about a 'house' and its innards, the reader will often put in its place an image of a house from their own memories, because of this when an author goes out of their way to describe anything inside that house it will break the flow and immersion that the reader had.

To stop this, you want to describe as little as possible while retaining as much of your concept as you can. What this means, is you need to describe the "vibe" of a room and any important objects inside it.

Examples of this: "The room was cold, damp where rotten wallpaper sagged astray from each wall." Here, we know that the room has been abandoned/is in a state of disrepair, but the readers imagination is not hindered - they are still able to insert their own furniture and layout. The exception to this rule is as I mentioned previously, when an important object lies within the room.

Let's say that a messy room is important to a characters personality, or, that a character needs to pick up an item from a table, or interact with any kind of furniture (as most characters do.) Continue to use this rule, but add to it.

Example: "The room was cold, damp where rotten wallpaper sagged astray from each wall. It's contents, a sofa and a small coffee table, lay rotten with disuse; littered with scraps of old trash and food wrappings. 'Character-A' took a small, cautionary step forward and grabbed at a half melted piece of chocolate from atop of a couch cushion, a grimace settling across her face." Instead of bombarding the reader with a full paragraph description of the room at once, you are slowly feeding objects to them and telling them how they are supposed to feel about the environment. Without hindering the readers imagination too much, you guide them into seeing the version of the room that you want them to.

A key thing to note is that you should always mention how light or dark a room is, as it sets the tone for an entire scene.

When it comes to outdoor environments, there is a lot more freedom to describe and explore your surroundings. Since being outdoors means a character is going to be in a much larger space with less semantic connotations, a reader is going to have a harder time inserting their own images into this environment.

There are two approaches you can take to describing an outdoor environment: The worldbuilding approach or the pathetic fallacy approach:

Example of worldbuilding: "I took a sharp breath, a cloud of condensation forming before my face. A crisp chill filled the air, carried along by dry, orange leaves that rattled across the pavement and stuck to the wet concrete." This scene suggests the story takes place in late autumn/fall or perhaps early winter, it has no relation to the main characters emotion and merely serves as an environmental tool to help the reader understand the time and place in which the story takes place.

Example of pathetic fallacy: "My nostrils flared as I let out a sharp breath, the air before my face fanning out into a sodden cloud. A crisp chill filled the air and sunk itself deep into my bones, it bit at the swollen skin beneath my eyes; delicate from tears freshly shed, and carried along with it dry, brown leaves that rattled across the pavement and stuck to the wet concrete." By connecting the weather to the main character, there is an inherent connection between it and their emotions. Pathetic fallacy uses the weather as a tool to set the mood for the main character. E.g., if it is storming then the reader will understand the main character is upset, if it is sunny the reader will understand that the main character is happy.

SOME IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE:

It is always relevant to describe the characters surroundings. There should be a description every time they enter a new room; how in-depth this description is should be dependent on how important the room/environment is to the story - if the room only appears once, then it isn't necessary to give it too much thought, but if it is a room that the character will enter multiple times then you want to be as descriptive as possible so that they can remember it when the character returns.

With creative writing, there are no rules; what I've said in this post isn't definitive and does not need to be followed, if you believe that your work would be best understood if you offered your audience an in-depth description of the environment (something that should most commonly be done if the surroundings are not 'common', i.e., a fantasy world or something wildly specific) then you shouldn't stop yourself from doing that! Writing is all about experimenting and figuring out what works best for you.

Environments shift dependent on the perspective in which the fic is being written in, 1st POV often creates a biased narrative that follows the strict memories of the main character which allows an author to be more creative with the psychology of an environment (an example of this would be the 'Red Room' from Jane Eyre and how Jane's memories of the room paint it differently from how the room really is), while 3rd POV allows a more realistic and direct description.

Things when bad: kids and children are involved!

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.

Impeachment/Removal: How to remove a president who has committed high crimes/misdemeanors; requires a simple majority in the House (Republicans control it) and 2/3rs majority in the Senate (Republicans control it). Democrats impeached Trump in the House twice already but lacked the votes in the Senate to convict and remove him.

25th Amendment: What to do when a president dies or is declared unfit for office. Requires the commitment of either Congressional leadership (Republicans), or the Cabinet (Republicans), plus a 2/3rds majority from both chambers.

The US has always been the primary structural agressor in this relationship. The 1953 coup, the decades of sanctions, the military encirclement, repeated threats of regime change, decades of anti Iranian policy (by every single administration) and all the war crimes we're seeing take place now. This entire environment was built by the US.

And then we (USA + Great Britain) overthrew their parliament and backed the shah, who subsequently instated a single-party political system. We also sued Iran for damages!

The Circumstances are, more often than not, public-health adjacent: it’s expensive and I can’t afford it. There’s a risk to my body and I am uninsured. Minimum wage isn’t a living wage in most places.

A cursory look at the website finds the usual Puritan gaslighting—placing the onus on individual people to do their own individual healing (in our special community of course—the one with The Only People Who Truly Understand You)—without attempt to place this within the larger socio-economic shitshow that’s been brewing since far beyond our country’s inception.

I did notice they have a place to share your own experience (men or women only; sorry enbies et al!)…. So…. Do with that information what you will.