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today anti-LGBT legislative package passed in Georgia (Sakartvelo)

Civil Georgia

Anti-LGBT Legislation Passed in First Reading - Civil Georgia

On June 27, the parliamentary majority passed in first reading an anti-LGBT legislative package cons

can we talk about that for a moment?

i'm living in tbilisi now. i'm not sure i'm gonna stay here after THAT, unfortunately. sakartvelo is a great country. i'm so fucking grateful it welcomed me and my family here.

please speak about georgia. speak about sakartvelo. this is NOT OKAY. the "georgian dream" party wants to create russia 2.0 out of georgia. this is the exact same legislation package that made me and millions of other queers leave russia.

i don't see any posts about this because oh well it's soccer european championship going on or something but GUYS THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT.

Mass kidnappings of kids are not unique to the Middle East. Putin's Russia has been doing it since its illegal annexation of Crimea and its de facto occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014. And it's grown greatly since Russia's invasion of Ukraine started in February of 2022.

This is a form of genocide as defined by international law. Putin and his cronies are war criminals and there is indeed a warrant for his arrest on the basis of his abduction of Ukrainian children from occupied parts of Ukraine.

This invasion has been going on for nearly two years – not just two months. There are thousands of Ukrainian child hostages held by Putin's kleptocratic mafia-terrorist state.

Can I just say, your beliefs on neopagans are a breath of fresh air compared to what one of my friends believe, namely that all Neopagans are white supremacists or some other such nonsense. I don’t personally believe in Neopaganism but my brother-in-law is one and is one of the friendliest guys around, so it always frustrates me when my friend says shit like that.

Unfortunately, Nazis have co-opted Norse myth since their inception. The "Black Sun" icon is composed of a wheel of SS marks. But they're not actually S.

It's actually the rune called Sowilo. It's where the "Sig" rune comes from and Sig eventually became Sieg, which is the first half of the Nazi chant. Translated it means "hail victory".

Unfortunately this has tainted a lot of Norse myths and concepts.

I don't think neopagans are bad people inherently. There is, unfortunately, a small percentage of neopagans (particularly Odinists) that are white supremacists explicitly because of the Nazi's appropriation of Norse myth.

But, on the whole, the entire religion should be separated from the Nazi stigma. The Hindus, Buddhists, etc, aren't demonized (or shouldn't be) for their use of the swastika and Norse neopagans shouldn't be demonized for using icons like Mjolnir or the Valknut.

Thoughts and info on TTB!Optimus Prime as I’m putting together the plot in a master copy; 

- Omar Parvez (Optimus Prime/Orion Pax) actually trained under Sedgewick Princeton, Police Commisioner of London, known fondly as ’Ol’ Sentinel’ (due to their decorated service and high number of arrests) and was something of an apprentice to him. The reason Omar was assigned to patrol the Dead End and its surrounding precinct was because two previous Chief Superintendents had resigned from the post due to their inability to turn it around, as well as the stress that took on them, and Sedgewick positioned it as a trial by fire for Omar to prove he had what it took to work directly in Scotland Yard as Deputy Commissioner.

Omar took up the challenge, but quickly realized after the first two weeks of struggling to adapt standard policing tactics to the area that what he learned in the academy wasn’t going to work here, which is when he decided to try and and solve the issue holistically/win the trust of the locals instead of fighting them; He gets Ronan Chase/Ratchet to establish a free clinic, funds a small public library which doubles as a secondary education centre due to school closures in the area (He lives/sleeps in a second floor office here, because trying to do good means actual sacrifices to time and money, and he’s ok with that), oversees the creation of community gardens to support local food banks struggling with food shortage, builds genuine rapport with locals and studies extensively about the housing crisis/liaisons with activists involved with the cause to finds solutions for the issue for the people of his jurisdiction. (A long time ago, he promised a kid—-a young Morgan Trayton/Megatron— on the other side of the fence that he wanted to be a cop to make the world a better place for everyone, and he hasn’t forgotten that kid or that promise)

Now, crime slowly but steadily goes down as kids have safe places to be, people are fed and housing initiatives are put into place, but what he’s doing is seen as out of his scope of duty (You sure you a cop?) and more importantly to the higher ups, he isn’t making the arrest quotas which means private cells aren’t being filled and less bodies are available for prison labour, which Sedgewick isn’t happy about.

“Boy, you know I like you, but the system works for a reason and you work for the system.”

They get into their first argument as mentor-apprentice when Sedgewick lets it slip that while he’s proud of the fact that Omar had managed to ‘tame’ the Dead End to some extent, the whole idea was to drive out/cage the undesirables and THEN develop the place, not fix it first and let undesirables leech off the goods when there’s big buyers out there looking for the first time to invest in property within this shithole.

You turned it around! That’s great! Now get with the rest of the program!

The cracks solidify when Omar shoots back that he was assigned to this district—not a system—-and he’s going to serve this district and its people, all of them regardless of class, until someone can prove wrongdoing on his behalf in any form, and if that means giving up on that promotion to Scotland Yard next to his mentor, so be it. 

Sedgewick can’t find any, Ronan/the local activists serve him a whole helping of loopholes to cover the initiatives they’d put into place, and this is the reason why Optimus Prime and Sentinel Prime don’t get along in this universe, and  why Sentinel is all too happy to throw Optimus under the bus when he gains the ire of the Senate and fires him the moment a chance presents itself.

“So much wasted potential.”

”… What’s happened?” ”Nothing. Everything. I lost my way.”

This was honestly meant to be a short piece, but my crippling weakness for dads + found families means my muse took the wheel for some Morgan Trayton/Megatron and Thaddeus Marshall/Terminus over the years.

(For the curious, Terminus raises Megatron as something of his son in this Human AU! Also that panel with Megatron beaten up is basically the night he came back from police custody after going out for a drink with Impactor in the city.)

I’m going to post separately because I don’t want to keep hijacking the interview quote that someone who clearly loved the show posted.

When TFATWS first ended I was disappointed, but not resentful. Sam and Bucky got where they needed and Anthony and Sebastian looked like they genuinely enjoyed the time making it. There was healing, albeit a bit awkwardly rushed in episode 5, but it got both the characters to a better place than at the start.

Then I watched interviews about the creative process and I haven’t stopped fuming since. Skogland freely admits that she had no idea about the characters or the story before she came in to pitch her idea, which was simply “this is the most important story of the century”. Which of course it is, but her wording gives a sense of how she approached the telling - she is using the characters to tell a particular story, rather than telling a story about the characters while addressing those same issues they want to convey.

Now there’s nothing wrong with writing a story around the portrayal of a social issue, particularly one as topical as TFATWS did. But crafting a story around an idea, then using established characters takes a level of finesse that neither Skogland nor Spellman had - as well as a level of love and respect for the characters’ histories that neither of them cared about.

The level of pain on Sam’s face when he heard about Isaiah being imprisoned and experimented on for 30 years is completely undermined by his lack of empathy for Bucky - who was imprisoned and experimented on for 70 years. We can meta the heck out of those scenes (and I have - check my AO3/shameless plug) but it doesn’t change the sense that the intention of the creators was to make us horrified at the the prolonged victimisation of a black man, while at the same time minimising a very similar victimisation of a white man. Throughout the series, Sam empathises immensely with Isaiah and Karli, but barely sympathises with Bucky and John Walker - while pre-TFATWS Sam definitely would because managing vets with PTSD was his line of work.

As someone who enjoys writing stories, I know how hard it is to use the "connect the dots" method of story writing, because it's always hard to connect dramatic scenes in a logical way that works within the world and for the characters. Civil War did it with some success, but here the creators were barely trying. I also know that as a writer you need to be very cautious about your biases, because it's so tempting to always keep your favourite character in the best possible light which inevitably means another character will have to do all the problematic things to push the plot along or create conflicts. This is the sense I'm getting with TFATWS and that's what irks me the most. It just reeks of lazy, biased writing, because half the time it completely broke Bucky's character and didn't make sense for his motivations. Keeping Sam "in the best possible light" also meant he avoided conflicts at all costs which ironically made him come across like a pushover who sympathised more with his enemy than his friends and allies.

I might come across sounding like I hate Sam but I don't - otherwise I wouldn't have just written 16k words from his POV. I hate what they've turned both him and Bucky into for TFATWS, by using him to sell a particular story without making the story about him, as it really should have been. And let's face it, Sam-Bucky only worked because of Stackie's amazing chemistry, because as much as Anthony waxes lyrical about the "tenderness" and "bro code" between Sam and Bucky, I definitely couldn't see it on screen for the first 4.5 episodes until they suddenly became a married couple in episode 5.

Mustafa,JESUS.

His new bio😂

For people just finding out about Ali,he used to be a cop in Chicago but left after realizing how corrupt the system was.

The Ukrainian letter of solidarity with Palestine, in part, reads:

“We, Ukrainian researchers, artists, political and labour activists, and members of civil society stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine who for 75 years have been subjected to and resisted Israeli military occupation, separation, settler colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, land dispossession and apartheid. We write this letter as people to people.

Our solidarity comes from a place of anger at the injustice, and a place of deep pain of knowing the devastating impacts of occupation, shelling of civil infrastructure, and humanitarian blockade from experiences in our homeland. Parts of Ukraine have been occupied since 2014, and the international community failed to stop Russian aggression then, ignoring the imperial and colonial nature of the armed violence, which consequently escalated on February 24, 2022.

Aware of the pragmatic geopolitical reasoning behind Ukraine's decision to echo Western allies, on whom we are dependent for our survival, we see the current support of Israel and dismissing Palestinian right to self-determination as contradictory to Ukraine's own commitment to human rights and fight for our land and freedom. We as Ukrainians should stand in solidarity not with the oppressors, but with those who experience and resist the oppression.

We strongly object to equating of Western military aid to Ukraine and Israel by some politicians. Ukraine doesn't occupy the territories of other people; instead, it fights against the Russian occupation, and therefore international assistance serves a just cause and the protection of international law. Israel has occupied and annexed Palestinian and Syrian territories, and Western aid to it confirms an unjust order and demonstrates double standards in relation to international law.”

#Poor Garou 

mentally I’m here