I love how whenever ATLA recognizes Sokka is smart enough to solve a problem but it’d be too fast they just stick him in some kind of situation. Like he COULD’VE stopped jet from drowning a town so they tied him up and dumped him in a forest. He COULD’VE figured out what that spirits deal was so they lost him in the spirit world for 24 hours.
This is how writers should deal with characters who are too smart for the arc instead of making them suddenly dumber for no apparent reason.
If you frequently find yourself in random situations while your friends happen to be experiencing problems maybe you, too, are too smart for the narrative.
literally everything people say about public defenders on the internet is so wrong and frustrating even when they’re trying to be sympathetic to us. and I certainly said some of that same kind of shit before I did this job. I didn’t get it yet. I get it now. the only people who really do get it are the people who’ve done it and the people who are in or also working with the communities we serve. representing a factually guilty person is the absolute least of any public defender’s fucking problems at any given time and the last thing I would ever lose sleep over lol
what a lot of people in the notes on the post that inspired this train of thought seem to imagine public defenders struggling with and getting upset about: finding out a client committed the crime they're accused of and having to grapple with the morality of defending a person who Did Harm To Others and what that means for the attorney as an individual immortal soul or whatever the fuck
Things that I have actually struggled to deal with in my 2 years as a public defender so far (non-exhaustive list):
Having to put the criminal records and self-esteem and livelihoods of clients I believed were factually innocent, people I'd developed relationships with and knew how much they had to lose if something went wrong, in the hands of a group of strangers who I'd had no more than 20 minutes to question about their knowledge and beliefs and biases.
Worrying those strangers would favor the young, handsome white male prosecutors' arguments over my innocent clients who've had rough lives and it shows on their faces, because of whose voice sounds "authoritative" and who "looks like a criminal".
Never feeling like I had enough time to prepare a case for trial because I also had over 100 other cases pending at the same time.
Put simply, it is harder to represent a factually innocent person than a factually guilty person. I think basically all defense attorneys agree on this. It's more emotionally taxing because of the stakes. There are always material stakes for all of our clients, but for a factually innocent person there are also moral stakes.
Representing people who are technically guilty of the crimes they are charged with, but no one was actually harmed, and maybe the law itself is unfair, and also my client was certainly racially profiled and overcharged. And having to put that in the hands of a jury, because my client wants to maintain whatever dignity they can to the bitter end.
Not being able to just say to the jury, I don't give a fuck whether my client is technically guilty. He's a poor Black man, so he was guilty in the eyes of the American legal system before he was ever arrested. He gets that. I get that. Do you get that? Who gives a shit whether he's factually guilty of a technicality DUI that happened 2 or 3 years ago? What the fuck are we doing? Are we all just here to give another black father a criminal record? Fuck you all.
Representing multiple very young men charged with DV assaults who grew up with fathers who abused their mothers, or parents who abused them, in and out of foster care, multiple generations of cycles of violence and substance abuse passed down from parent to child. It doesn't excuse it. Of course it doesn't. They have done harm to their own partners and they know this isn't the example they want to set for their own kids. But they're human - the idea that abusers are somehow inhuman just sets you up to fail to recognize abuse when someone you love is the person doing it - and what the fuck other ways of dealing with difficult situations and relating to other people were these guys ever supposed to learn? They didn't have the opportunity to learn anything else. They never had a fucking chance.
And if they don't have a lot of history yet, maybe there's still time to turn it around. One of them talked to me about how badly he wanted to break the cycle and not have his kids grow up to be like that. I hope he can do it. I don't know if he will. That's what haunts me about that situation. Not the fact that I had to represent his interests in court. That's just my job.
Family after family after family who call 911 for help for a loved one in a mental health or substance-related crisis. And then the cops show up and throw their loved one in crisis in jail sometimes over the weekend because if you lash out at someone you live with for literally any reason that counts as domestic violence which means the cops legally have to arrest someone. And 24-72 hours later the family is in court upset telling the judge if they knew this would happen they never would have called 911. Cannot stress enough this happens like weekly in misdemeanor court.
A prosecutor submitting victim impact statements for the sentencing of a colleague's client who absolutely had killed their partner, and it was awful - but the victim impact statements were provided by the victim's family, many of whom she was estranged from, and many of them misgendered and deadnamed their dead "loved one". And the prosecutor just threw them all into the public record unredacted. Because of pressure to "listen to victims", in this case coming from the transphobic family.
A 16-year-old getting held in juvenile detention on unproven charges an 18-year-old would get released from adult jail on, because while the 18-year-old is presumed to have the autonomy to find another place to stay, if the charge is related to someone who lives in the 16-year-old's parents' house - or their parents straight-up just don't want them going home - well, then, they can't go home, which means they have nowhere to go. so let's keep them in jail.
On the flip side, having 18-year-olds get released to homelessness because their well-intentioned parents called the cops for whatever reason (see above) and now the court is imposing a no-contact order with someone who lives at their house.
A kid who got pulled over and charged with DUI/physical control of a motor vehicle while under the influence on her 18th birthday. She was a senior in high school. She had never been in trouble before. She had no criminal record. The law doesn't require someone to be booked and held in jail for a first-time DUI charge with no history, so the jail's policy is that they usually don't do that. If it was just the DUI she would have been cited and released. But the cop also cited her for 2 counts of minor in possession. So, because she had non-DUI charges, I guess, they booked and held her in jail. If it had been just one day earlier she would have been in juvenile detention. She cried. I almost cried. I sat in the attorney meeting booth with her for an extra half hour until they kicked us out for the lunchtime visiting area closure, just so she could be in a quiet space with a friendly face instead of back in the adult jail dorm. That was all I could do.
Tiny old people in jail. Tiny old people, deep in dementia, deeply upset, who got angry - personality changes including becoming very quick to anger are common with dementia - lashed out at family members and got arrested on domestic violence charges. (Again, see above.) And all I could see was my own late grandmother, who was a tiny old lady with dementia who lashed out all the time, but she was a rich white lady who could afford to live in a home with professional caregivers who were trained to handle those situations and deescalate, instead of having to rely on overwhelmed family members. And getting praise from teammates for how well I handled those clients and their jail hearings, and knowing it was because there but for the grace of god go we.
A guy who stole 2 beers from a grocery store, products that cost like $13 total, getting held on $1000 bail because he has warrants in other counties. $1000 bail when he's charged with taking $13 worth of beer. From a gigantic corporation. And he stayed in jail. Because if someone is stealing from a grocery store, they probably don't have $1000 to pay.
I think people who talk about the moral conundrum of public defenders get too stuck on the defender part and forget the public. Public defenders, by definition, simply do not represent the worst of the worst. People who hurt others because they can, quite literally can, because frankly most of them don't end up getting arrested and prosecuted for the ways they hurt people in the first place. And if they do, they can usually afford to hire a private defense attorney. I think most of us know the actual statistics about rape and abuse reporting, but for some reason that goes out the window when people talk about public defenders. (The reason is racism.)
Acting with (perceived) impunity is a privilege. It's for rich (and mostly white) people. The vast majority of crimes prosecuted in the U.S. are crimes of poverty and addiction (and that includes many violent crimes - yes, really), and that vast majority is where public defenders operate. There aren't moral quandaries in knowing what our clients did. The part that hurts is understanding the systems that have led them to this place, and knowing what those systems are going to keep doing to them once their case is resolved, and not being able to do jack shit to stop it.
Yes, when the original post is deleted from the server (not just the blog, but the Tumblr servers), there is no root post for notes to be added onto, and also no root post for time to be counted from, so it starts from zero. Most computer operating systems use Unix, which was launched in 1971 with t.he epoch date of midnight on January 1, 1970 as 1. Therefore zero is one second behind that date: December 31, 1969. Also, very unfortunately, this also means nobody except you and anyone you reblog it to will see this explanation, as you cannot open the notes to see comments when there are no notes.
fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals. protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.
the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity. make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged. and strike. attack.
YES
i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word.
above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that
Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money
TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)
WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it
Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me
Thin people are absolutely relentless with this. "But I have to TELL them!" "I can't just not SAY something!" "We can't just PRETEND it's fine to be fat!"
They really seem to think the main reason people are fat is because we're simply drowning in approval and no one has been brave enough to inform us that it's better to not be fat, actually
I genuinely think it's related to what I observe about singleness, virginity, and ace/aro topics: people's entire worldviews are threatened by fat liberation. And having your worldview challenged is scary... especially because so many people have put so, so much personal effort into Not Being Fat, so much self-hate into gaining weight, so much self-denial of food they like and forcing themselves into activities they hate, to avoid being fat.
And fat liberation says "It's okay to be fat!" and fat people say "I'm happy being fat and I don't try to become skinny!"
And it scares people that that is an option. It scares people to think that they have sunk so much time, so much effort, so much misery into avoiding being fat. And this person in front of them is just... not even trying. Rejecting the game. Saying You Don't Have To Do That.
If they accept that they didn't have to do that... then they made themselves so unhappy, for so long, for no reason.
They want their effort, their unhappiness, to have been worth it. To have meant something.
So they have to believe that being fat is wrong, bad, gross, a moral failing, and the only reason anyone would be happy that way is if they just don't know better. Because the other option is to realize and admit that they suffered unnecessarily for years and it meant nothing at all.
I don't think there are any fat people who don't know they're fat and who aren't aware their lives would be easier if they weren't. I don't think that's a type of person who actually exists in our society.
Much of the time when I'm talking about fatphobia, I'm talking specifically about medical fatphobia and my experiences struggling to access treatment for various issues - like how I now have eight screws and a metal plate in my right ankle, because I broke it, the first surgeon refused to do the surgery I needed and dismissed me because I'm fat, and so I needed a much more invasive surgery five years later.
It is telling, I think, that when I talk about those things I invariably get a lot of replies going "You can't make me want to fuck fat people! >:(" and assorted comments about how gross fat people's bodies are.
First of all, bold of you to assume I'd want to fuck YOU.
Deeply weird thing to frame an issue about access to medical care in terms of "Do I want to fuck this person?", you know, the human rights issues I was talking about. "Only people I think are hot should have access to competent, appropriate medical treatment and human rights" is not the slay you think it is.
I had a friend who'd had suicidal ideation since she was a small child who refused to increase her antidepressants - which made her want to not die - to a therapeutic dose because "but what if I gain more weight?"
This shit kills people, and they want to talk about "Ew, I think your body's gross".
It's telling that people are so fucking threatened by the idea fat people might exist and just live their lives.
So just so we're all clear ICE agent Jonathan Ross straight up murdered Renee Nicole Good in broad daylight and the government is calling HER the terrorist
the purpose of friends is to have people who unconditionally hate your shitty exes & relatives. like maybe YOU have a complex relationship with your father but i sure don't. i'm outside his house with a gun. he's not the unforgivable asshole who raised me he's just an unforgivable asshole
The House of Representatives will vote next week on a proposal to force the government to release more Epstein files
President Donald Trump is engaging in a “huge miscalculation” by dismissing the bipartisan group of lawmakers pushing the government to release more of the Jeffrey Epstein files, according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the latest reminder of her growing status as a Trump critic inside the GOP.
Greene, speaking with CBS Mornings on Friday, reiterated her belief that the president did not engage in any wrongdoing during his friendship with the late sex offender, but said she felt the White House has been wrong in dismissing Republicans seeking more information as “stupid.”
“Just being very honest with you, it’s something that I don’t understand,” the MAGA rep said, arguing that releasing more Epstein information sends a powerful message that the government “will not protect the predators,” even if they are tied to rich and influential people.
coming down hard @its-just-levi - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
snowghoul
ellievsbear
yousharknotpass
gamechangershow
izzy806
theartofmadeline
2087
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
areudirty
blakekathryn
stormborns
