in the bitter watches of the night @la-tarasque - Tumblr Blog

hi!! sorry if you've been asked this question before, but as someone who wants to be a lawyer, how do you deal with defending people that morally you really don't agree with? thanks!

I get a lot of versions of this question, and I answer it seriously every time, because it’s both important and not important at all. Anyone who asks respectfully gets my whole ass answer.

It’s just not really about that. My job isn’t about defending the idea of hurting someone else. It’s about stopping the state from inflicting further hurt, torture, pain. It’s about pushing back for some fairness against a monumentally stacked system. And it’s about stuff that’s normal human stuff that counts as crime for some reason.

Yeah, it’s hard to do a sex abuse case. Sometimes the images stick around and it bothers me. But honestly? Mostly those cases have real plausible theories of innocence or they’re cases that I will lose because the evidence is there, and the question is not whether the perpetrator will go to jail but how long.

Those cases are so rare, though. I get so much pointless bullshit. Felony of a teen taking mom’s car without permission. Two kids that try to break into a car and get so scared by the alarm that they run away. Trespassing on dad’s house because his new girlfriend wants you to stop coming around. It’s just human stuff, and the violence of the state is not necessary or helpful.

I also reject the idea of punishment completely. The state has a responsibility to stop people from hurting other people again. But inflicting pain doesn’t do it, we know this by now. So I argue for mercy and for real solutions to real problems. I’m here to build a future, not get caught up with doing violence to someone because of the past.

So yeah, sometimes it’s hard, but mostly my conscience is dead clear: I’m not responsible for the crime. The damage has been done. I want to start the healing process, and I want it for everyone involved. When that’s not possible, I just want to tell the authorities they don’t get to just Do What They Want.

The more I do this job, the more I am a genuine pacifist who is against violence in all forms, and actually I don’t see a contradiction between that and what I do for a living. State violence is a pervasive evil that tears apart families, communities, and countries, and it’s far more damaging and awful than any individual crime. The average prosecutor has more blood on their hands than a serial killer, but it’s invisible: people who died in jail, who froze to death on the street, who were shot in a drug deal. Their violence begets violence.

When I get blood on my hands, it’s because I put my hands over the wounds and try to stop the flow. I’m okay with it.

Also: people don’t ask doctors how they can stand to treat bad people. Why ask me?

bemusedlybespectacled

#i find people have such an inherent misunderstanding of the roles of defense attorneys (understandably but still)#in that most people i talk to seem to be envisioning me personally defending the right of people to commit crimes or that like. Crime Is#Good Actually#‘yeah this person did X but they should never face any consequences ever please and thank you judge’#(and people think this would WORK??? a different tangent on a lack of legal education and cop shows being awful etc)#meanwhile i am simply protecting people’s rights. yes even those people’s#idk i could write my own post but op Gets It and also a prosecutor just filed the DUMBEST motion ive ever seen and i need to respond to that#instead lmao (via @anixit26)

The number of people who respond to my post about how even the guiltiest person in the world deserves rights with "but not [crime I think makes you undeserving of rights]!" is truly insane. People really truly think that being accused of a crime makes you irredeemably evil and protecting the rights of those accused means you are also evil.

1kr

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Abakan 27, 1967

supreme-leader-stoat

I have a very rough idea in my head that I don't think I can clearly articulate beyond "And that concludes tonight's reports on German air forc—WHAT'S THIS? IT'S KING ARTHUR WITH A STEEL CHAIR"

the-writers-wrench

IDK what this is about, but I want to know more.

supreme-leader-stoat

This isn't exactly the same idea but it could be but there is more rattling around in here so:

The Blitz here manages to qualify as Britain's Darkest Hour, thus triggering the return of Arthur from the Realm Avalon.

He does not speak a lick of modern English. He speaks an unholy mishmash of Brittonic and Late Classical Latin.

(Honestly I can see the latter becoming a plot point if they manage to get their hands on a Roman Catholic priest to act as a translator. It wouldn't be a perfect arrangement, but probably better than anything else.)

Truthfully he probably gets mistaken for a madman.

Somehow manages to steal a Spitfire out from under the RAF's nose, proceeds to use it to bring down like half an enemy squadron on his own, then lands in a field in the middle of nowhere.

Police and RAF converge on his location on account of the whole "stealing a plane" thing. They eventually overwhelm him with sheer numbers, but he manages to knock out an impressive number of them in the process. I mean, come on. It's Arthur.

leseigneurdufeu

"a catholic priest" i mean yeah sure why not but JRRTOLKIEN himself was alive and a teacher at the time so go big or go home.

supreme-leader-stoat

You know what sure why not let's just make literal real-life JRRT himself a character in this Arthurian return story, he deserves it.

chainsawsdreamer

@seajr DUDE

#I want to read/watch/whatever this

unicorndeathrace

Petrova Line

transparentgentlemenmarker

Les dances à travers le monde

apollosdrunkenmixup

my favourite thing about this is some are very traditional dances integral to that country/culture; and some are one individuals favourite move

and he approaches all of them with enthusiasm and a surprising amount of skill

sani-86

Watching this makes me happy

fishey-me

Joyful. 🥰

maudit

profeminist

RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the amazing graphic novels Persepolis about living during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in the 70’s and 80’s. She also created the animated movie based on the graphic novels, which is where these gifs come from.

Gifset source

missbliss12

Reblogging in honor of Marjane Satrapi, one of THE great graphic novelists. Her comic Persepolis was a crucial text for shaping my belief that comics can deeply explore identity, culture, politics, and history.

A post about emergency cleaning and tidying passed through my dash and while I didn't want to pollute useful advice with this I still felt my process is closer to Gaston's and I needed to share

#Gaston Lagaffe

bastardcircus

I started volunteering at this farm share program a couple years ago, where I help pass out boxes of veggies in exchange for some veggies for myself, which is great for a broke grad student but it led to me creating truly the most visually ABHORRENT meal I have ever made in my life.

I got some purple carrots, right? And I was excited because they're (A) free carrots and (B) they're purple, which is not something you see often. They taste just like regular carrots, so after devouring one to test the flavor, I decided that I'd use the rest in an upcoming batch of chicken soup.

MISTAKE. THAT WAS A MISTAKE.

You see. The thing about purple carrots is that their purpleness does not stay in the carrot when you leave it in a crockpot for like, six hours. The purpleness goes into the soup. It goes into the soup, where it turns the chicken purple. And the onions purple. And the celery, and the garlic, and the noodles, and any other thing you could possibly have put in that soup, varying shades of Very Purple.

I made a GIGANTIC pot of this soup that turned out toxic purple-brown, with individual components stained various ludicrous colors of purple (the noodles were a bafflingly nice shade of lilac) and it was the most dubious thing I've ever eaten. I took this soup to work. My coworkers were so confused and repulsed and I had explain that no, this is actually just soup, just regular chicken soup, but accidentally tie-dyed by the addition of two (2) purple carrots.

And you wanna know the real kicker as I explained all this? The carrots? The formerly purple carrots?

They ended up green.

#snort

aropride

this was written 100 years ago but it reads like a post i would make on my tumblr blog in 2026

#re-reblog

annabelle--cane

love when an absolute nightmare of a character is introduced and all you can think is "jesus christ buddy what the hell is your problem" and the narrative gives you a hot minute to stew before explaining Exactly what is Their Problem. and you just sorta sit back in your metaphorical rocking chair and think "huh. yeah okay fair. that would do this to a person, yes."

#black sails said you will stew for a full season and a half. longer even about certain things. and it was iconic and remains iconic.#<- prev #and Black Sails did this for all the characters #or nearly #and then you get #Ned Lowe who is evil for the fun of it #Berringer who is evil but loves his family #and Alfred Hamilton who is evil.

mxnrique

HAPPY PRIDE

gatheringbones

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

— Beyond Words, by Carl Safina

acdhw

transfagholmes

[ID: gifs from the Granada Sherlock Holmes series. Watson (Hardwicke) says, “Cockfighting is forbidden by law.” Holmes smiles, holding a cigarette in one hand, then says seriously, “Many things are forbidden by law.” End ID]