Pouting, he dragged his gaze upward, taking in the sharp cheekbones and the familiar twitch of thin lips.
“…Jiu-ge?”
Shen Yuan had totally the right to be shocked. In his humble, unprompted opinion.
His Er-ge—relatively normal, designer-suit-on-a-midnight-tanghulu-run Er-ge (oh, he knew all about those shameful nightly outings), the “touch some grass, A-Yuan” Er-ge—was apparently in his xianxia LARP era?
The long-ass hair in an elaborate updo with a haircrown. A fan with a bamboo motif. The tryhard, multilayered robes where even the inner sleeves were embroidered.
The inner sleeves.
What kind of madman does that? His brother, it seemed.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen, gege, Shen Yuan cackled internally.
Shen Jiu blinked, hand twitching as if sensing the disrespectful thoughts, his gaze sharpened with sudden, laser-like intensity.
No worries, Jiu-ge, Shen Yuan assured him silently, not willing to try his luck with the sarcasm specialist, I just won’t let you live it down for the next century.
You can find it in the first chapter mentioned below ^^
💬 1 🔁 1 ❤️ 3 · ✨️ First chapter of (I had a dream I had) Everything I Wanted is up ✨️
You can read it here:
https://archiveofourown.org/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The GOP says it's the "party of the working class" and indeed, they have promoted numerous policies that attack select groups within the American ruling class. But just because the party of unlimited power for billionaires is attacking a few of their own, it doesn't make them friends to the working people.
The best way to understand the GOP's relationship to worker is through "boss politics" – that's where one group of elites consolidates its power by crushing rival elites. All elites are bad for working people, so any attack on any elite is, in some narrow sense, "pro-worker." What's more, all elites cheat the system, so any attack on any elite is, again, "pro-fairness."
In other words, if you want to prosecute a company for hurting workers, customers, neighbors and the environment, you have a target-rich environment. But just because you crush a corrupt enterprise that's hurting workers, it doesn't mean you did it for the workers, and – most importantly – it doesn't mean that you will take workers' side next time.
Autocrats do this all the time. Xi Jinping engaged in a massive purge of corrupt officials, who were indeed corrupt – but he only targeted the corrupt officials that made up his rivals' power-base. His own corrupt officials were unscathed:
Putin did this, too. Russia's oligarchs are, to a one, monsters. When Putin defenestrates a rival – confiscates their fortune and sends them to prison – he acts against a genuinely corrupt criminal and brings some small measure of justice to that criminal's victims. But he only does this to the criminals who don't support him:
The Trump camp – notably JD Vance and Josh Hawley – have vowed to keep up the work of the FTC under Lina Khan, the generationally brilliant FTC Chair who accomplished more in four years than her predecessors have in 40. Trump just announced that he would replace Khan with Andrew Ferguson, who sounds like an LLM's bad approximation of Khan, promising to deal with "woke Big Tech" but also to end the FTC's "war on mergers." Ferguson may well plow ahead with the giant, important tech antitrust cases that Khan brought, but he'll do so because this is good grievance politics for Trump's base, and not because Trump or Ferguson are committed to protecting the American people from corporate predation itself:
Writing in his newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan describes all the ways that the GOP plans to destroy workers' lives while claiming to be a workers' party, and also all the ways the Dems failed to protect workers and so allowed the GOP to outlandishly claim to be for workers:
For example, if Ferguson limits his merger enforcement to "woke Big Tech" companies while ending the "war on mergers," he won't stop the next Albertson's/Kroger merger, a giant supermarket consolidation that just collapsed because Khan's FTC fought it. The Albertson's/Kroger merger had two goals: raising food prices and slashing workers' wages, primarily by eliminating union jobs. Fighting "woke Big Tech" while waving through mergers between giant companies seeking to price-gouge and screw workers does not make you the party of the little guy, even if smashing Big Tech is the right thing to do.
Trump's hatred of Big Tech is highly selective. He's not proposing to do anything about Elon Musk, of course, except to make Musk even richer. Musk's net worth has hit $447b because the market is buying stock in his companies, which stand to make billions from cozy, no-bid federal contracts. Musk is a billionaire welfare queen who hates workers and unions and has a long rap-sheet of cheating, maiming and tormenting his workforce. A pro-worker Trump administration could add labor conditions to every federal contract, disqualifying businesses that cheat workers and union-bust from getting government contracts.
Instead, Trump is getting set to blow up the NLRB, an agency that Reagan put into a coma 40 years ago, until the Sanders/Warren wing of the party forced Biden to install some genuinely excellent people, like general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who – like Khan – did more for workers in four years than her predecessors did in 40. Abruzzo and her colleagues could have remained in office for years to come, if Democratic Senators had been able to confirm board member Lauren McFerran (or if two of those "pro-labor" Republican Senators had voted for her). Instead, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Synema rushed to the Senate chamber at the last minute in order to vote McFerran down and give Trump total control over the NLRB:
This latest installment in the Manchin Synematic Universe is a reminder that the GOP's ability to rebrand as the party of workers is largely the fault of Democrats, whose corporate wing has been at war with workers since the Clinton years (NAFTA, welfare reform, etc). Today, that same corporate wing claims that the reason Dems were wiped out in the 2024 election is that they were too left, insisting that the path to victory in the midterms and 2028 is to fuck workers even worse and suck up to big business even more.
We have to take the party back from billionaires. No Dem presidential candidate should ever again have "proxies" who campaign to fire anti-corporate watchdogs like Lina Khan. The path to a successful Democratic Party runs through worker power, and the only reliable path to worker power runs through unions.
Nolan's written frequently about how bad many union leaders are today. It's not just that union leaders are sitting on historically unprecedented piles of cash while doing less organizing than ever, at a moment when unions are more popular than they've been in a century with workers clamoring to join unions, even as union membership declines. It's also that union leaders have actually endorsed Trump – even as the rank and file get ready to strike:
The GOP is going to do everything it can to help a tiny number of billionaires defeat hundreds of millions of workers in the class war. A future Democratic Party victory will come from taking a side in that class war – the workers' side. As Nolan writes:
If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise.
Nolan's remedy for the Democratic Party is simple and straightforward, if not easy:
The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either—the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.)
Let’s take a deep breath together. Inhale what’s true. Exhale what’s heavy.
Because I want to talk about something we don’t often hear in the manifestation space - this myth that to call in our desires, we must always be “high vibe.” That we must think only positive thoughts, smile through the pain, and keep our energy spotless like cosmic porcelain.
But here’s the thing; the Universe doesn’t need your perfection.
It needs your presence.
When we pressure ourselves to only be “high vibe,” we unintentionally slip into spiritual bypassing... dressing up our pain in positivity instead of sitting with it. We shame our sadness, silence our anger, and bury our jealousy, thinking they’ll block our manifestations. But what really happens?
We block ourselves.
Because the same walls that keep out grief also keep out joy.
The same avoidance that numbs pain also numbs pleasure.
You came here to feel all of it. The full spectrum. The messy, the radiant, the in-between shades that make you whole. Your emotions are not obstacles to your alignment.... they’re doorways to it.
So this week, let’s drop the performance of “I’m fine.” Let’s stop trying to spiritually “fix” what’s simply asking to be felt.
This is Tumblr—a place where you can be who and what you wish to be. Today I take advantage of that to bring to you an idea that I think will solve a couple of dire problems the National Basketball Association (an American professional sporting association for basketball) has been struggling with in recent years. The problems are two-fold:
(1) Division championships are meaningless. In the old days if you won your division, you earned a top seed. When there were two division, the division winner with the best record got the 1 seed, and the other division winner the 2. It didn't matter if there was a second (or even third) place team that had a better record: winning your division meant you earned a top seed. A good example is the 1991-92 season, where the Chicago Bulls (67-15) earned the top seed, but the 51-31 Boston Celtics earned the second seed as winners of the Atlantic Division, despite the fact that the Cleveland Cavaliers had a much better record at 57-25. Winning the division was incredibly important. Now teams are seeded by record throughout the conference. Division titles mean nothing.
(2) Super teams. Since divisions are meaningless but winning chamiponships is still the most important thing in the NBA, successful players go to teams that can pay the most money. The ones that have the most money are the teams that are most successful. With only two conferences, this usually results in two teams—one in the east, one in the west—being stacked. Players can either join that team or try to form another super team to rival them. And the ones that can rival them are other historically successful teams. All in all, it's a lack of parity, and the same teams winning every single time.
Now, it is assumed, amongst fans and sportswriters, that the league will eventually expand to Seattle, regaining their former Supersonics, and Las Vegas—the latter perhaps when LeBron James retires (he's expressed interest in being an owner for a team in Las Vegas in future). If that comes to pass (and no other teams change locations), I propose a radical realignment of the divisions, and concomitant playoff changes. These changes were inspired by the changes the NHL made in recent years. They had six divisions, like the NBA has now, but then when they expanded, went backward, to four divisions, and the results have been impressive.
If you need to refresh yourselves of the current alignment, you can do so here. Now here's the realignment I propose:
These are the four divisions the NBA had before expanding to six. Most of the membership is the same, but I'll note the discrepancies. First, the most easterly western conference team, the Memphis Grizzlies, has been moved to the east (I always found it absurd that a team in a state one state away from the Atlantic Ocean was in the western conference). The Toronto Raptors and Charlotte Hornets have been swapped, which makes geographic sense, and the Atlanta Hawks have been returned to the Central.
This gives us four divisions with eight teams each. Currently, ten teams from each conference go to the playoffs—kind of. Four teams in each conference are forced into a mini-tournament called the play-in. For this play-in, the 7th place team hosts the 8th place team and the 9th place team hosts the 10th place team in a one game playoff. The winner of the first game becomes the real 7th seed. The loser of the first game plays the winner of the second. The winner of that game becomes the real 8th seed. Then the playoffs proceed as they always have. Very strange.
I propose something radically different. Same number of playoff teams—even the same number of play-in teams—but it's all done inside the division:
Each division has its own playoff. The 4th and 5th place teams play each other for the right to take on the top place team in the division in the first round of the divisional series. Then the 2nd place team hosts the 3rd place team in the division. The winners of each series face off, the winner being crowned the ultimate division champion. Then the western and eastern conference division champions face off, resulting in conference champions, who face off in the finals. The bracket looks like this:
This means that one team from every division will always make it to the semifinals. Division championships are suddenly very important, and there's incentive for good players to try their luck on teams in different divisions if they can't make it in the division they're in. It takes two very large pools (the conferences) and separates them into four smaller pools. It will also ensure you get some nice, exciting playoff matchups in the early going, because every matchup is all but guaranteed to be a rivalry, as the matchups are always interdivision matchups.
For the curious, if this had happened for last season, it would've looked like this (less the two expansion teams):
Same exact playoff teams! And the first matchups would've looked like this:
Some of the matchups are the same, but we get some good ones earlier. Mavs-Pelicans would've been a lot spicier than Thunder-Pelicans. In general, we've got a lot better shot at getting better matchups earlier on, and good matchups at each stage. This is the NBA I want to see!
Thank you for coming to the Dothraki guy's Tumblr account.
The older I get, the more I am learning from children.
I have been working with children as a caregiver for almost 14 years -practically for half of my life. They have always been a part of my life. They are the true healers because they continously teach me to reaccess my inner child energy. To be joyous towards life, no matter how hard it may get. To never stop playing or being foolish. To keep taking risks, being courageous and to go for adventures. To collect things in Nature and dance. To move, to shake my body out and to laugh, to cry,to feel my emotions on the full spectrum. To never lose hope and to keep my dreams big. To follow my intuition and to speak and act from the heartcenter. To cherish Nature and to dance to the rhythm of life. To get creative whenever I can and to never lose connection to my creative energy, which is the Source of my Being. They truly are healers. And I am so grateful for having them in my life, for their lessons , for their reminder to always realign with my inner child, to see her smile. To be there for her. To reparent myself. Cause I know that when she is smiling and truly happy, than I am , too.
