“new study shows that 87% of all americans class superman as american citizen despite being born on a different planet, but only 49% avoided eye contact when asked about why martian manhunter doesn’t count”
“area woman thanking her lucky stars that batman and superman fell out on the same day she was due to go to boss’ niece’s bat mitzvah”
“arkham guard astonished by trip to iron heights, only now learning what locks are for”
“area man pretty sure he should be making more than $60k a year if his boss has 10 billion dollars to waste on robotic exosuit”
“breaking news: lex luthor sues superman for loss of earnings, claims that continually losing fights to him is negatively affecting his work ethic”
A lot of criticism of delivery apps focuses on the fact that they offer convenience and variety, which I find much less compelling than criticizing the fact that the apps often send their contractors on fetch quests from Hell.
There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.
But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.
I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”
That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.
As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.
And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”
A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.
But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.
I guess the opinions of delivery workers only count when they are politically convenient.
Boo hoo i'll be able to add more physical storage to my phone and be able to change out batteries if they degrade as well as all these other optional features I won't have to touch
I love how they add totally absurd things no one is asking for to make the idea look crazy. And still, I must emphasize, failing to make this look like a bad idea.
"Is this what you want? Is this ugly stupid bullcrap what you want??" the biggest loudest idiot in the room asks, holding up a picture of the hottest looking shit I've ever seen
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.
So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.
Enter the gray economies.
Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.
Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.
Because what do these groups actually do?
They:
set norms for compensation and contracts
regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting
provide a framework for dispute resolution
establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)
That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.
Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!
The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.
That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.
Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code
Again: not altruism. Stability.
And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.
Which is very historically grounded.
On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.
Pirate codes, for example, often included:
compensation for injury
shared distribution of loot
limits on captain authority
Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).
So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:
The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.
The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.
And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.
If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.
If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.
But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?
You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.
So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.
Kegare, Shinto Buddhism and how it gets reflected in Japanese video game writing. (Fire Emblem and Zelda Botw/Totk centric)
Gonna blab on a very specific aspect of Japanese Shinto :D. This is not talked about often despite the sheer amount of stuff out there so here's me talking about it.
So. It often goes something like this. The Hero gets a powerful magical weapon at some point. They fight through the Big Bad's army of mooks while they may journey throughout the land. Eventually, they, or the weapon mcguffin gets powered up by a higher power, and at the climax, the Hero/es comes through to take down the evil big bad Demon King-esque malevolent monster/dragon/non-human out, thereby succeeding in saving the world.
Any of that sound familiar? It should, for anyone who has engaged with just about any Nintendo media from Mario to Fire Emblem to Breath of The Wild.
This big bad character archetype is also known as Maou, or the Demon King. 魔王 can also be translated into Sorcerer/Magic King, but the negative evilness associated with it is more apt. TvTropes even lists this as a trope (link)!
The why they are often times taken down this way though, kiiiind of lies within Shinto Buddhism. (And by extension many of other culture/religion's concept of 'ritual cleanliness', but for this post I'm ignoring them! Sorry!)
I'll switch gears a bit to culture/religious stuff and talk about Kegare under the cut.
I think everyone who has ever touched any Nintendo or Japanese related media has ran into the concept of 'kegare', or 'spiritual uncleanliness' multiple times without realizing it.
Kegare (穢れ or 汚れ) is the concept of 'spiritual dirtiness'.
Translated as 'pollution' or 'defilement', to be kegare'd is to be dirtied in some form, often times through action. Generally speaking, kegare is a negative energy typically generated upon contact with death, childbirth, disease and menstruation. But it can also come into state through particularly powerful, negative state of emotions such as hate, jealousy, guilt and anger as well. Note that Kegare isn't by itself a moral or judgemental concept, but rather a force of nature. Kegare is not sin, and therefore cannot be seen as such!
You can think of kegare as bad vibes, bad juju, or even miasma. They're very similar concepts.
With enough bad vibes (basically), a place, object, or a person can be polluted so hard that evil spirits might manifest and cause harm to both them and their surroundings. Hence why Japanese media loves depicting places with bad vibes like the hospitals to be full of yokais or ghosts looking to cause harm.
This is why characters who harbor ambitions of taking over the world are seen as Maous. It's why characters like Hegemon Husk!Edelgard, Grima, Ganon, Mr. Grizz all fit into this evil, ambitious, resentful, almost force-of-nature-like beings who brings with them death to the world. Because they aren't just bringing death with them, they're about to unleash the largest tsunami of bad vibes they can into the world too!
But, the state of kegare can be purified away. There are 2 main ways to do so. Misogi, and Harae.
Misogi (禊)
By standing under a waterfall or washing the body with water, kegare can purified. Notably though, one must be dressed in white during this ritual cleansing. This specific concept is known as Misogi, and you might have come across it in botw already:
In BoTW, Zelda attempts to purify herself in order to unlock the power of the Goddess. By visiting important spiritual places and washing herself in its water in white, she's performing Misogi.
In Fire Emblem Heroes, Naga will suggest this to Kiran, the Player Character:
But misogi isn't exactly why big bads get the holy weapon whacking treatment. If you have noticed, misogi affects only the willing individual taking part in ritual cleansing. The real reason is actually...
Harae (祓)
Harae can mean 2 things. To drive out, or, exorcise. Consenting or not, harae essentially drives out or purifies kegare in another person, place, or object through rituals.
Harae can involve ceremonies, song and dance, using a ritual cleansing tool(!) such as the onusha.
As an example of the former, Azura in Fire Emblem Fates essentially embodies the power of misogi through her association with waters and purification. Here, she tries to exorcise the evil inside of Garon. She is actually performing harae!
As an example of the latter, the cleansing tools.... Why, it should be sounding familiar now.
Be it the Falchion, Yato, Fire Emblem, Breidablik, The Creator Sword, the Master Sword, Ocarina of Time, The Twilight Bow, they all share 2 very similar traits:
Be powered up by the good juju power/light
Whack the big bad maou with it, sometimes unleashing light in the process
In this context that I'm presenting, they are all tools of purification/exorcism. Sit down and think about this. Think about all the Japanese JRPGs you've played so far and see how much this clicks.
The Hero gains a weapon/tool/relic, powers it up in some way or is inherently already powered, and then uses that to smack the big bad and win. Sometimes the tools can be the heroes themselves, but it is often the very similar song and dance (heh). Hell, you can even extend this beyond Fire Emblem and Zelda. Maybe even extend it to anime and manga, and you might find the same themes in places you don't expect.
It's kind of neat to think about. Essentially, the hero not just defeats the big bad, but kind of purifies them as well.
But! There's another reason why weapons are often the divine relics needed to deliver the finishing blow in video games, and why they are almost always associated with characters of authority.
The Imperial Regalia of Japan/ The Three Sacred Treasures
There exists 3 treasures which represents 3 primary virtues and are part of the enthronement ceremony in Japan. They have never been shown to the public to symbolize authority, so no one but the authority knows what they look like. The above image is just an artist's impression of what they might resemble. They exist, supposedly.
The Sword is known as Kusanagi no Tsurugi, the mirror as Yata no Kagami, and the jewel as Yasakani no Magatama. They represent Valour, Wisdom and Benevolence respectively. They are said to be brought into this world by Japanese gods, passed to the first emperor of Japan, Emperor Jimmu, who said to be a descendant of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess.
Yep, this is also why Fire Emblem is always about noble blooded people with divine weapons.
Yep, these are also the original inspiration for the triforce in The Legend of Zelda.
I won't get into the details behind the Regalia's story in this post, it's too long! Linfamy has done a video about the Regalia if you're interested.
Hopefully this was interesting. Again, feel free to take the ideas here and read up on it externally. So many, many videos and posts and I've not seen people talk at all about this. Sadge.
But before I close off this post, there is a negative side to this kegare concept, in which real people are discriminated against in Japan. ...Remember the association with death for kegare? Yeah... Uhm, someone needs to take care of the dead in any society and butcher livestocks for food, so what happens to those people? ...Messed up things, actually. If you are interested to learn about this, feel free to check this video out (link). Warning: it's a huge downer of a video.
And I think I've spent enough time writing this! Ty for reading this far if you did! ❤️
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?
#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.
i have no particular feelings about the kid who shot charlie kirk. like it's not like anyone got radicalized off the back of that killing. it immediately became a gigantic joke. erika kirk started running around rallies doing aerial silks to kid rock songs. candace owens done lost what was left of her damn mind. nick fuentes is basically the same amount of influential he was always going to be. tradcathy at work outed herself as a hardcore antisemite by agreeing with the nick fuentes "charlie kirk was assassinated by the jews" theory. kids on the subway love to sing that we are charlie kirk song like it's the "let's get together and kill barney" of our time. all taken together it just kinda stands as an example of how nihilistic and pointlessly ultraviolent the late american empire became shortly before the fall of the emperor trump
tangentwithtanner
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
