#but i wasnt convinced ever since i wrote it and a couple days ago i was like “yeah no i gotta fix this”
Text
Dadbastianweek 2023 - Day four: Different Kids
Sebastian sighed, finally alone in his own room in the servant quarters, feeling more rested than he ever had in the past couple of years, and yet also somewhat more annoyed.
It was quite the troublesome situation the one he found himself in - having his own Young Master stuck in bed, paralysed by fear in a way that even the demon, who was with him more often than anyone else during the day, never got to see, and ending up serving a different kid- but if he wasn't able to adapt to this type of situation, what kind of butler would he be?
It was an all around different experience - as one should expect. While his former master was cold and prideful, even at a young age, the other one was kind and wild.
Where the head of the Phantomhive household would have given him an annoyed grimace or -at most- a roll of his one visible eye for any of his inhumanly perfect acts of showmanship, the young witch praised even his less impressive tricks, and lit up like a child on Christmas.
The demon couldn't say this was unwelcomed, as he was proud of his own skills, and the usual lack of response from the one he was supposed to serve was quite annoying, if amusing, however, he still had his share of problems, even with the gentler master of the two.
While, for all the problems he'd always given him, even as a ten years old his usual Young Master had at least the good sense of being polite during his meals (thanks to a mix of being brought up as a noble who's expected to have decent manners, being too prideful to act like a starving beast, and generally being too low-energy to bother) the green witch was quite...unlady-like. And while he could at least prod her a bit, he wasn't allowed to be as strict as he would have liked. First off, because she was a Lady, and while demons didn't quite care about being rude to a different gender as humans were (or cared about their own gender in general), his persona as 'Sebastian, the perfect butler' cared quite a bit.
Second of all, he simply couldn't.
While his former charge knew of his demonic nature and either didn't care about being roughed up by him during their past lessons or couldn't do much of anything about it, the whole village would have been even more against them if he made the Young Lady cry, and they would have lost their only ally there. The Phantomhive Earl would have also been extremely upset at it because -for someone who said he didn't care about anyone- he really cared about innocent people's well being, especially of those who aided him or showed him honest affection. Although, the demon mused, he would have taken an angry Master over the current spineless and pathetic one he currently had any day.
The lack of teasing had also been...boring. Worsening the Phantomhive's household head's already constantly sour mood had become a favorite hobby of his, and although usually childish or annoying, some of his Young Master's biting remarks were quite entertaining.
However, for already explained reasons, that bit was out of the table when it came to the Green Witch.
He had almost hoped in stirring some drama when his newly appointed charge had questioned his former Lord's past, wich -Thanks to the condition set by the young Phantomhive himself, wich made it so he couldn't lie- would have given him the perfect excuse to spill everything about their contract to a moral human being.
The result could have been extremely entertaining.
Mayhaps the lady would have tried to defend the slightly older kid, and the demon would have had to kill her, wich would have alerted the villagers and brought them to their death as well. Maybe the chaos would have made his Young Master angry enough to snap out of the pitiful state he was in, or if not, the demon could have at least let out some steam. He was getting restless...Honestly, he hadn't been so bored in years.
But no. The Young Lady had shown some courtesy that his lord would have certainly appreciated, but him, at that moment? Not so much.
It was somewhat amusing, at least, to see the lady's former butler squirm when the little girl thoughtlessly said things like "You're so much better than Wolfram at this!" or "You should be more like him, Wolfram". They were said without trace of real malice - but the man was clearly bothered to be seemingly thrown away by the child he saw as his own family.
He found from past contracts that human jealousy could be the foundation for the most entertaining tragedies, but his own household never gave space to such emotions. His young master did show preference in his servants, but only in the way that Sebastian was the one he disliked the most, and treated accordingly. And even if the demon appeared to be the best butler in all of England, Tanaka was too respectable of a man to feel jealousy for a fellow co-worker, or even act on it, and the rest of the servants were just too naive to feel any sort of anger or sadness because of Sebastian's skills in the first place.
(With a start, he realized he somewhat preferred his original experience with the Phantomhives, but quickly shook his head. It was probably because he found it easier to work with people who didn't throw a tantrum over him simply trying to do his job.)
The amount of annoyance displayed by the German man couldn't be enough to get his mind off the situation at hand, though.
Bard, usually way too enthusiastic when it came to cooking, passed the whole time zoning out. Mey Rin had been caught crying by the demon more than once, though she tried her best to keep it hidden. Tanaka was even quieter than normal, and Snake's usually serious expression looked even more grim.
Finny was with the young master most of the day, but when he came back, his expressions was uncharacteristically grim with worry.
They all looked like they were mourning someone - wich was not only ridiculous (the child was only throwing a temper tantrum after all) but also...not as entertaining as he thought it would be.
He'd always been bothered by those idiots' chaotic streak, but as they wandered around, looking like ghosts...Sebastian didn't like it. It felt ever worse to think about what they'd look like when the child would actually be dead.
When they were most annoying, the butler liked to think about seeing them one last time when they discovered their former Master's corpse, face full of mourning. Even entertained the thought of giving away his identity, just to make spice it all up that much more, before officially disappearing from their lives.
This should have been a nice taste of that, so why was he feeling so...weird, all of a sudden?
How annoying.
Shaking his head, the demon set up to continue his research.
That child had better recover soon.
#no lie i extended this like yesterday and the day before#it should have ended with Sebastian thinking about destroying the village and Sieglinde#but i wasnt convinced ever since i wrote it and a couple days ago i was like “yeah no i gotta fix this”#so it became phantomfam agenda once again lmao#i unfortunately have no complete entries after this one so this is where we part#dadbastianweek#dadbastiandifferentkids
22 notes
·
View notes
Text
dream merch discord recap (june 12, 2021) - disclaimer: i may have missed some things or mistakenly heard other things, apologies in advanced for that!
he has not played the new minecraft update
dream “knows” the date george is coming to florida but he’s not saying it :p
dream doesn’t have anyone muted on twitter
dream guesses his favorite disney princess is belle
sapnap has seen dream’s feet before
he’s not actually connor’s dad in the dsmp lore
dreamnap do not have nicknames for each other D:
dream likes olives but especially black olives
his mother makes homemade pickles
he doesn’t have a phone case
he has dropped his phone from his ear onto concrete in the parking lot before and the screen didn’t crack
dream has six fingers /j
he pours cereal first not milk when making cereal
dream calls sapnap nick most of the time :D
what’s your dream car? “idk the one that gets me to point A to point B consistently”
he finally fixed his sleep schedule, woke up at 8 am today
mrbeast owes dream a tesla because he never sent dream the audio file
dream is a very analytical person - he thinks with numbers/data
creativity is one his strengths that he is the most proud of
3 to 4 years ago, dream used to say george looks like shawn mendes a lot, now he doesn’t resemble him as much
patches is currently sleeping <3
swimming is very relaxing to dream, he swam the other day!
many houses in florida have pools than other places, even the cheapest houses in orlando have pools
dream has merchendise defects (misprints on merch) + milestone merch and he wants to give them away to those who live in orlando (probably to anyone but the event will be held in orlando) though he doesn’t want it to be a covid super-spreader thing so once you pick up your item you gotta dip. just all an idea though
he has been donating them to charity too though :)
dream has likely read Heroes of Olympus before a long time ago
he says that he’ll do a give away of his childhood books with his signature on it
he was obsessed with the series (Percy Jackson)
he really liked the Alex Rider series
has all of Maximum Ride books, 39 clues books
has read the legend series, the twilight series, and the maze runner
has all/read of the harry potter books, divergent, eragon
he would read all the time, to the point he would read more than one book a day (a book worm he says)
dream had a goal to read 200 books in a year and he wind up reading about 150
he doesn’t want to call it a library but- growing up he had something like that that had 600 or 700 or more books in it (privileged he admits it)
he has not read a book since he started youtube (about 2 years)
dream has a folder called Book that has his own writing in it
word count: 76000 words for one of his stories
another one he wrote 5 chapters of
he sounds very excited/embarrassed talking about the stories he wrote he’s so endearing
the very first paragraph of one of his stories (he was young when he wrote this) “What exactly is darkness? is it the lack of light? is it a pit of nothingness? ... your mind is full of darkness...” then he couldn’t continue.
the story is about a kid who wakes up in a cell and has no idea where he is with other people who are in the same situation
dream has a world building document
he has a sequel to the first book he has ever written
he found a query letter that he wrote because he wanted to get his book published- he finds it very funny
he’s calling himself a nerd but idk it’s kind of endearing
“as you can tell i’ve always been incredibly cool and not a nerd at all! ever.”
he cringes at his own old videos
dream took a lot of inspiration from witches and wizards by james patterson for writing
the story is written in a way where the main character is actually writing the story so you’re getting input from the main character during it. there’s a lot of sarcasm in it and it’s making dream laugh
very first person narrator
he feels like it’d be very cool if he were to publish his works he wrote when he was 16 on amazon or something but he probably never would because he’d have to read through all of it and it’s just embarrassing for him
dream used to video call sapnap fairly frequently- even before youtube
he strictly remembers, a very long time (at least 7 to 9 years) ago he was at his old childhood house he video called sapnap. he was wearing a (technically) suit and he remembers specifically that he was giving sap a tour...
“snazzy in a suit”
he had no reason to put on the suit (wow time is a flat circle huh)
drista is pretty close to sapnap’s height, she’s like 5′7″ but sap is still taller than her
dream filmed the whole thing when he and sapnap met but... it’s... gone because when he was clipping that one clip for twitter... it edited the whole video
he’s sure when they meet up with george they will film that too :D
DREAM IS PRETTY SURE THAT HE AND GEORGE WILL MEET THIS YEAR-- HE SAYS A 95% CERTAINTITY the five percent is like either restrictions or visa issues
dream does not play any instruments but he had a guitar hanging on his wall when he was younger...
dream is convinced they’re the same height but also sapnap is probably taller??
they had george compare his height to a door frame and dreamnap were googling for any doorframes to find any possible chance that george is taller than 5′8″ ... nothing came up
there’s a chance they’re both lying about being 5′8″
sap and george will literally just show up in stilts to prove they’re taller than each other /j
dream without shoes is between 6′2″ and 6′3″ with shoes he’s 6′3.5″
dream is talking about awesamdude’s fake height arc again LOL
dreamnap are very private people so they don’t bother each other but george doesn’t care and would just barge into their rooms and start bothering them- they were all joking about that over a voice call
he will visit europe
he thinks that greece would be a cool place to visit because sapnap’s family is from there :) so it’ll be like a nice “treat” to go back with sap :D
dream isn’t entirely sure that the dream team meet up will happen this year but he’s working out the details because he wants to make sure it’s safe
he’s talking to youtube about his face reveal
it’s up to george if he wants to eat healthy when they finally move in
dream just has a lot of meat and vegetables in his house
spinach with chicken is good
not much fruit (only apples and tomatoes)
“DRISTA IS 5″ is trending on twitter LOL (her height got cut off)
dream doesn’t want people flying to different places because he doesn’t want to encourage travel so he wants to do all of the meet ups with a two day heads up at most
he thinks that it’s awesome that ranboo and tubbo are meeting soon !! :D
it’s very cool to dream to see how far everyone’s has come since the beginning of the dsmp. everyone has done so much
dream finalized his youtube plan a couple weeks before he uploaded his video and he was talking to drista about how he was gonna be a big youtuber in a parking lot :”)
she was the first person he really ever talked to about it
dream would love to teach george how to drive it’d be really funny :D (a very good video or a livestream idea)
dream knows how to ride a bike, he used to have to bike to school
he can’t explain dnf.gay he has no clue he is not responsible. sapnap was the one who found it LOL. he is adamantly exclaiming that it was not him
dream doesn’t worry about views/likes/dislikes a lot- mainly views but that’s for the new uploads
he hasn’t uploaded in like a month and a half (*cries*)
he wants to stream at some point but he doesn’t know when
he wants to play geoguessr but not now... he doesn’t want to alt stream rn- maybe tomorrow!
he is insisting that the splash text on his minecraft home screen is by callahan
he asked callahan to send him bunch of text files that are dream team related so that the splash can rotate through it but callahan thought it was funny (it is) to put only dreamnotfound <3 so it doesn’t ever change at all and dream doesn’t even know how to change and he has asked callahan to change it but he said no (even though dream pays him LMAO)
the video referenced in the padilla’s video is still in the works, it might be handed over to sapnap though !
he has no idea if he will be in MCC pride yet
padilla got dream’s input for the video, dream found him to be a very nice guy ! :) it’s the first interview that dream did that wasn’t by a person with a negative opinion of dream
dream felt relaxed doing the interview with padilla
?????? he’s blaming callahan for his “dnfisreal” nickname in bedwars
he’s blaming callahan for a lot of dnf-related stuff
callahan runs the dream fanart account thus the liking of dnf content
he’s so insistent that it was callahan
dream admits that he was lying about the twitter and other stuff but for sure callahan did code the splash text in LOL
dream liking that tweet “the chances of george doing a hot tub stream is the same of dnf dating” was “funny” he wasnt trying to do any commentary...
the inside joke of “oh it’s all just a joke to you” originates from george and sapnap actually always fighting (like them yelling and shouting at each other) and george said something really mean and sapnap was hurt then geroge said “it was just a joke” and sapnap replied with that line and ever since then it’s been a meme LOL
he says that everyone does the hand-on-the-passenger-seat-while-reversing thing
dream is offline raiding with his chat with 6k people
dream appreciates us and will talk to us soon!
#dreamwastaken#dreamblr#long post#really long post xd#summary#not really a summary... literally just everything he said#merch discord
302 notes
·
View notes
Text
A Bad Feeling Pt 1
Levi x Reader
Part 1
Paring: Levi Ackerman x Cadet reader
Warnings: 18+ attempted rape/assault, cursing, mention of injury, violence
Summary: Reader feels uncomfortable around a overly friendly captain. Are they just over reacting? Or is there something else going on. What will Levi do when he finds out?
***************************************************
A.n. ok so I literally wrote this in one go, it's probably trash but I wanted to post it anyway. Please lemme know what you think in the comments! Thank you!
"Y/n! captain Oro is asking for you" you did your best to hide the discomfort Armins words made you feel.
You smiled what you hoped was a convincing one and nodded. With a deep breath you made your way to Captains Oro's office.
Ever since you had been introduced to him those few weeks ago, he had taken a special liking to you. At first you had been excited, having such a highly skilled and well known captain take notice of you was one of the best feelings. Especially since your squad leader, Levi wasn't exactly heavy on praise.
Everyone loved Captain Oro, he was known for his strength and stamina on the battle field. He was both charismatic, and charming. Your fellow cadets practically swooned over him. You couldn't help but also get caught up in his perfection. At first that is..
Over time you noticed things about your meetings that put you on edge. An unnecessary shoulder touch here, a too low pat on the back there. Something was off. And although you had done your best to distance yourself from him, it was hard when your squads often had to work together.
But it was hard to say anything against him because even your cold blooded captain seemed to enjoy his presence.
Once you brought it up to your friend Sasha, about how you felt he was being too friendly. But she waved her hand and basically said you were worrying for nothing, he was just a friendly guy. And you were being dramatic.
Maybe you were overreacting? If captain levi approved of him, surely that meant he was a decent person right? Maybe he was just being really really friendly.
You decided to give him a chance and knocked on his door when you finally arrived.
"Come in" a muffled voice came from the other side.
With a click you entered the candlelit room. It was nearing sundown after all.
"Ah cadet y/n! Perfect, I was wondering if I might ask your opinion on something?" He smiled angelically and gestured towards a parchment on his desk.
"Of course sir" you nodded and approached him, reminding yourself of what sasha said. Just relax.
From the way the parchment was positioned you had no choice but to come to his side of the desk.
"Do you see this area here?" He gestured to what you now saw was a map. "What do you think of leading a squad through here instead of what we originally planned?"
The next 30 minutes you spent completely and professionally discussing strategies. Being the member of your squad that was best at this, made him asking for you completely justified. You felt bad for ever doubting his intentions.
"Thank you y/n, I think I have a better idea of what course we should pursue on our next expedition" he smiled sincerely.
"I'm glad I could be of service" you nodded and allowed a relaxed smile to pass your features. Feeling stupid you had judged him so harshly.
" If you wouldnt mind just one more thing?" You nodded as he pulled out a stack of papers.
"If you could look over this report of the last mission before I send it out? See if theres anything else to add?"
"Sure, I'd be happy to Captain" you grabbed the stack.
"And please if you can, return them to me tonight, I'll need them for the meeting bright and early"
"Yes sir, I'll finish it asap, good evening" and with that you exused yourself.
Tonight? It was already sundown. Well whatever, hes so busy he probably doesn't know what time of day it is.
You found a quiet spot amonsgt the crowds in the common room and got to work.
************************************
"Oi brat, it's passed curfew, go to your room now, we have important work tommorow" the unmistakable voice of your captain rang through the now empty hall.
You looked up in surprise and meet his usual scowl, not even realizing how late it had gotten.
"Hai, s-sorry captain, I'll go now" you gathered the report and quickly left, not wanting to receive another scolding for taking too long.
Oh crap you still had to deliever the report. Changing routes you snuck quietly down the familiar hallways. Not particularly feeling like running into Levi again. Something about him always made you act just a little dumber and it was definitely not because of your non existent crush on him...definitely not.. he was just intimidating is all.
*knock knock*
You waited patiently but there was no answer. Crap did he already go to bed? But he knew I was coming? Ugh what should I do? He needs these reports..
With a sigh you change direction again and head for his personal chambers. There was no way you were getting in trouble for not delivering these reports on time.
You smiled when you saw dim light flood from beneath the door.
Lightly you knocked, "Captain Oro, its y/n, sorry it's so late but I have the rep-" you were cut off abruptly when the door swung open and there stood Oro.
Except he looked nothing like the Oro you were used too seeing. His hair was loose from it's normal slicked back do, and the edges were dripping slightly. His shirt was loosely thrown on revealing a decent amount of skin. He must've just bathed.. you could see why the girls were so obsessed with him. He was, platonically speaking, a very gorgeous man.
You were taken aback but reminded yourself that you did knock after hours so of course he wasnt going to be all soldiered up.
"U-um s-sorry Captain, I have the reports" you averted your eyes and shoved the reports in his direction.
"Ah y/n, thank you, would you please put them on my table? My hands are still slightly wet." He laughed holding them up innocently.
"S-sure" god why were you stuttering so much, you fight goddamn titans for a living?! But somehow you were more nervous now than when a 10meter was clawing at you.
You entered the room and tried to avoid looking around too much.
You always wondered what the inside of the higher ups rooms look-
*click*
You whipped around, alarm bells suddenly back in full force.
"Captain what are you-"
"You're such a good girl, you know that y/n?" Oros whole demeanor changed and you cursed yourself for not trusting your earlier instincts.
"U-um" you really did not know what to say or do as he took a couple steps closer.
"Always so obedient for me, I think you deserve a reward don't you?"
Shit
"That's not...that's not necessary captain, I really should be going" you tried to lunge for the door but he was quicker and much much stronger.
"I don't believe I dismissed you cadet..." he purred pinning your arms to the door in the blink of an eye.
You were by no means weak, but your struggles were useless against him.
"Let me go" it took all your strength not to stutter in fear.
"How adorable, you know I love it when you follow my orders so well, but I think..." you shivered in disgust as you felt his lips near your neck and press down.
"I'd like to see you fight me as well" you whimpered as he sucked and bit down on the soft flesh.
"S-stop it, p-please" he smirked and looked into your fearful eyes with his lustful ones. "Stop? But that's not what you really want is it? You see I know exactly how girls like you are" he chuckled darkly and moved one of his hands to grip both your arms, while the other slid lower. You gasped when he cupped your breast. "S-stop! I'll, ill scream If you don't!" You felt a tear slide down your shaking form.
"Scream?" He snickered like you had told the funniest joke.
"Go ahead and scream doll, itll be very interesting to see what happens"
"W-what?" You were utterly confused.
"Think about it, if someone walks in on us, what would they think? Seeing a cadet after hours in her superiors chambers?"
"B-but I! I was bringing the reports i wasn't-!"
"Do you honestly think theyll care what you have to say? Who do you think theyll believe y/n? You a nobody cadet who's been fighting titans for 3 seconds? Or me, a selfless hero whos saved countless of scouts lives? All I have to tell them is that you came into my room and tried to seduce me. When I tried to restrain you, you screamed. Who do you think theyll listen too? Why else would you be here so late at night?"
"Y-You're..you're insane, you're not a hero, y-you're a coward who-" he grasped your jaw harshly causing you to wince.
"I'd watch that mouth of yours y/n" he squeezed harder. I am your superior after all, and we wouldnt want any nasty rumors going around that would have you suspended from the survey corps now would we?" He bent down and to your horror pressed his lips against yours.
Fuck fuck what do I do?!? Hes blackmailing me now. I cant fight him, hes too strong, think think think.
But your mind was blank when his cold lips pressed against your lips again. "Open your mouth" he ordered in a voice laced with animilistac lust.
You abruptly turned your head away desperate to get away.
"Heh, always such a tease" he traced a finger up and down your cheek, flipping over your lips. "I'll enjoy this-"
"CAPTAIN ORO, COMMANDER ERWIN REQUESTS YOUR PRESENCE IN HIS OFFICE IMMEDIATELY" a voice shouts from the other side of the locked door.
With an annoyed sigh, Oro pulls away slightly, "Did he say why?" He lazily looks over in the direction of the door.
"NO SIR!"
"guess it can't be helped... Alright tell him I'll be there shortly" he yelled out.
"Hai" the footsteps recended and you stood deathly still.
He pulled away from you and you immediately pulled your wrists to you, they were an angry red, and it scared you how much strength he had so effortlessly displayed.
"Sorry doll, it looks like we'll have to continue this another night" he stepped away and began dressing normally as if he hadn't just been assaulting you 5 second ago. You quickly make for the door but his voice falters your step, "Oh and y/n?"
You dont look at him, but fear held you in place until he finished, "If you mention our little moment to anyone, you know what will happen" you nodded quickly, anything to appease him and get out.
When the door shut behind you, you felt the flood of tears break through.
D-did, d-did that really happen?!?
You held a hand to quiet your sobs and quickly dashed through the hallways.
You're heart thumped and you felt the need to vomit. You hadn't felt this way since the first time youd encounted a titan. All you wanted to do was get to the safety of your room, just through the hall.
It felt like a bucket of cold water had been thrown on you when a cold voice shouted out and halted your movements. Please not now, oh god any time but now.
"Oi cadet y/n are you deaf as well as dumb? I asked you a question.
"Why are you out past curfew?" he sounded definitely annoyed and you gathered all your strength to hold the sobs out of your voice.
Without turning around you answered, "I-I had to deliver some r-reports..I'll head to my room now.." you stepped forward hoping he would let you go but you were not so lucky.
"Oi brat, did you hit your head? I didn't dismiss you yet. Not to mention you haven't even addressed me properly, maybe some time cleaning up horse shit will remind you how to respect your superiors" fuck he was definitely angry now.
Still you didn't turn around, you couldn't..."S-sorry Captain Levi, I'll do better in the future.." you barely could even focus on the words coming out of your mouth, your heart was beating a mile a minute. Please just leave me alone!
"Hahh" Levi uttered in disbelief and severe annoyance, even the most novice of cadets turn around when being spoken to by a superior. "Are you trying to piss me off brat?!?"
"No sir..." still you didnt turn around, but gulped in fear when you heard sharp footsteps near you.
"Cadet y/n, you have three seconds to turn around and salute me properly before I throw you into the cells for insubordination" he ordered in his dangerously calm voice, that you never thought would be directed at you.
Having no other choice you slowly turn around, hoping to god the darkness of the room would be enough to hide your current state.
You kept your head down, letting your hair fall over your face, but gave a proper salute. Hiding the Wince that came when the tender flesh of your wrist had to bend.
Your eyes were trained on the floor. And you tried to remember how to breathe normally again.
"At least you remember how to-" abruptly his harsh scolding stopped.
Why did he stop?! Fuck did he notice something. No no calm down, he probably just is coming up with another punishment...right?
Wrong...
Levi was far from being done with dicisplining you but he caught sight of your bruised wrist and furrowed his brows immediately. He knew for a fact the last time you spoke in the hall those had not been there. He was quick to take in the rest of your demeanor and knew immediately that the reason you were acting disrespectful was because something was wrong.
"Cadet y/n.." he said suspiciously slow and not full of anger anymore.
"Y-yes?" Please dont ask me, please dont ask me, please dont-
"Look at me"
*******************************
Part 2 here
Okay so that's part 1! Please comment and lemme know what you think🥰also I'm super sensitive so please no hateful comments. Thanks for reading!
#levi x y/n#levi x you#levi x reader#levi x oc#levi ackerman#levi ackerman x reader#levi ackerman imagine#levi ackerman x cadet#levi ackerman x cadet reader#snk#attack on titan#attack on titan fanfic#levi ackerman fanfiction#self insert#part 1#injured#rape#hurt#comfort#captain
1K notes
·
View notes
Note
dear tumblr user crim wickedpact pls write the essay/dissertation about nicky being shakespeare's fair youth (if you have time, ofc!!)
Not To Imply Nicky Was Shakespeare’s Fair Youth But Ive Read The Fair Youth Sonnets & Nicky Was Definitely Shakespeare’s Fair Youth, an essay by me, tumblr user crim wickedpact
background knowledge: our man shakespeare wrote some 120 sonnets about a young man referred to as the Fair Youth during the mid 1590s; there has been some debate among shakespeare enthusiasts whether shakespeare’s interest in the Fair Youth was platonic or romantic (but like. they were definitely romantic). no one knows for sure who the Fair Youth was, but it was definitely nicky and my first and most important piece of evidence regarding this hypothesis is the ‘lmao babe do you remember that guy who had a crush on me?’/ ‘i try not to remember the guy who had a crush on you’ look joe and nicky exchange when Merrick brings up shakespeare during the movie. especially since gina confirmed in a tweet that joe and nicky canonly did know shakespeare
my second piece of evidence is that it just Works (except for a couple small facts like.. the Fair Youth was prolly closer to his 20s than his 30s. and the fact that shakespeare implies that the Fair Youth slept with his mistress at one point. but he doesnt know what hes talking about shhh we IGNORE)
long post under cut
A. The Description Matches
when describing the Fair Youth (who I’ll call the FY from now on), shakespeare says he has a ‘gold complexion’ and ‘beautiful eyes’ and compares him to a ‘summer’s day’. He says the FY has “A woman’s gentle heart" and “An eye more bright than [women’s are], (...) Gilding the object whereupon [they] gazeth”
As much as shakespeare’s perceptions of sexuality and gender are very........ late 1500′s (whoo boy sonnet #20 is a wild ride) ...... the description does match, and also:
B. The Fair Youth Refused to Get Married
it’s never really said why one way or another (shakespeare assumes it’s because the FY is selfish) but the FY didn’t/wouldn’t take on a wife and have a kid, and this was something that was a real sticker for our man Willy S. because, as he says in his sonnets a million times: beauty doesn’t last forever, but having a child not only passes down the FY’s beauty, but also blesses the woman the FY would have a child with (im not saying shakespeare wanted to bear the FY’s children, but he definitely did)
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
(ie. If you don’t renew yourself/ have children, you deprive the world and deprive a woman from having your child, since what woman out there is so beautiful that she wouldn’t want to bear your child?)
Like.
1.) if nicky is the FY then so many of these poems center around the idea of nicky growing old sometime soon and that must have been pretty funny to Nicky and
2.) the fact that shakespeare would have been So Desperate for nicky to find a wife must have been the opposite of funny to joe. considering the ease of his and nicky’s relationship and the fact that being gay in late 1500s england was probably not a walk in the park, it is very likely shakespeare wouldn’t have known they were in a committed relationship-- or at least not known how close they actually were. Thus:
C. The Rival (aka. Joe)
shakespeare mentions having a poetic rival in regards to the FY in several sonnets. In sonnet #21 he talks about how he’s not like Those Other Writers who use grand metaphors to talk about their muses
So is it not with me as with that Muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,
(ie. I’m not like other poets who, when inspired by a ‘painted beauty’ use heaven and every other beautiful thing on the planet to make a grand comparison to their muse: he specifically lists the sun and moon as examples as well as other beautiful things)
He then goes on to say
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother's child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air:
(ie. my love [the FY] is as beautiful as any other beautiful person, though I wouldn’t compare them to the stars/heavens (which is what he means by the 'gold candles’. those are stars.))
So shakespeare insults poets who compare their subjects to the sun, moon, and stars (amongst other things) and in the comics, Joe does literally exactly that
That man is the stars in my sky, and the sun that lights my days. That man is the moon when I'm lost in darkness, and warmth when I shiver in cold.
shakespeare also goes on to say in the same sonnet “Let them say more that like of hearsay well / I will not praise that purpose not to sell” which is to say ‘let people who like that kind of language use it, I wont because I don’t want anyone else to have the subject of my affections (the FY)’.
(which is a bit of a contradiction regarding his feelings abt the FY getting married, but these sonnets are full of contradictions. shakespeare was a confused dude; man spent the first 100 or so sonnets convinced the FY loved him back only for him to start wondering if the FY ever loved him near the end)
(not to mention Marriage For Love wasnt really.. much of a thing in Ye Olden Times but thats a different conversation. so shakespeare prolly didnt associate marriage with love/competition? anyways)
Shakesy-boo goes on to complain about this rival several times. In #79, he says
Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give,
And found it in thy cheek: he can afford
No praise to thee, but what in thee doth live.
(ie. everything ‘your poet’ (as the FY apparently favored this unnamed rival) says about you, he takes it from you in the first place. he talks about your virtue, but learned the word from watching your behavior. he calls you beautiful but only discovered beauty by looking at your face. every compliment he gives you he took from you in the first place)
[and, as a smaller example, he also bemoans the fact that people want to paint the FY in #67, saying, “Why should false painting imitate his cheek, / And steal dead seeming of his living hue?”. and yknow. Joe’s an artist.]
And then another example in #86
Was it the proud full sail of [the rival’s] great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
(ie. he’s talking about how he’s having difficulty writing abt the FY and is rhetorically asking if ‘the proud sail’ of the rival’s verses was the reason his ‘ripe thoughts’ were killed in their ‘womb’. He then asks (again rhetorically) if it was the rival’s ‘spirit’ (or creativity, maybe) ‘’’‘by spirits taught to write’’’’ that killed his own drive to write. none of the analyses I’ve read really explain what shakespeare means by ‘spirits taught to write’, other than maybe being a joke or reference to something we dont know, but... ‘taught by dead people to write in a way mortal people can’t’ very much sounds like a description of an immortal poet, eh?)
Which brings me to,
D. Willy Boy Thinks There Are 500 Year Old Writings About the Fair Youth
shakespeare talks about people having written about the FY ‘500 years ago’ from the late 1500s in #59 which......................... would have been around 1100 AD. :thinking face:
Oh that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done,
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
(ie. Oh if I could look back 500 years and see how you were described in some old books so I could see/reference what people used to write about you)
Which again brings me to,
E. I’m Not Saying shakespeare Stole From Joe, But:
1.) In #22, shakespeare says this,
For all that beauty that doth cover thee,
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
(ie, your beauty is due to the ‘clothes’ my heart gives you-- probably means something like ‘you’re beautiful because i love you’. goes on to say his heart lives in the FY’s chest, and the FY’s heart lives in shakespeare’s chest)
so: shakespeare tells the FY he has shakespeare’s heart. in comparison, Joe calls nicky ‘my heart’ in the comics...... :thinking face x2:
2.) In #109, shakespeare tells the FY ‘thou art my all’,
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all.
which rings similar to Joe’s ‘he’s all and he’s more’ as well as (from the comics) ‘he is my everything’
and just saying. joe looks pretty #done the mention of shakespeare.
F. The last One
Despite shakespeare writing 30+ poems about the FY eventually growing old, the very last poem he writes about/for the FY says,
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein showest
Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self growest.
(ie. you [the FY] have power over the ‘mirror’ (fickle glass) of time as well as time’s ‘harvesting’ ability (sickle hour) and as you grow older, you remain beautiful while your lovers [shakespeare] wither and grow old)
The transition from ‘get married and have a baby before you get old!!!!’ in #1-20 to talking about the FY’s presence in 500 y/o books in #59 to admitting the FY isn’t growing old in #126 kinda seems to imply shakespeare learning of/about nicky’s immortality at some point, and this last poem is him accepting it.
TLDR: not only does it make perfect sense if nicky was the Fair Youth from the FY sonnets, but it also makes perfect sense if joe was the Rival from the FY sonnets. its canon nothing will convince me otherwise
1K notes
·
View notes
Note
Have you considered a bit of prompt where the both hero and villian are taking a break because how bloody they are and they start verbally fighting and hero says somthing along the line of"I have to be good, I have to be the hero" and villian retorts with among the lines of "Your no hero" Thanks my dude, also honored to be your first prompt giver.I always love to see your writing pop up.
Hey! Thank you honestly so much! I know this sounds kinda cheesy but I'm honestly so happy about your feedback!
And thank you for the prompt! I believe you meant it in a more funny, sarcastic kind of way but I just wrote what came into my mind and it went a different route. Sorry.
But I'm gonna come back to this prompt when I'm in a more fitting mood! Anyway I hope you like this!
-----------------
The sounds of their swords and their continuously shorter breaths was the only think the hero could hear. With every clash, it was if their energy was dragged out of their own body, fighting a war with their body itself, to stay for just a little while longer. But the fight has been going on for too long and the tremble of their body was bordering on violent. The hero barley escaped the villians sword, pressing their own sword just enough against the others, just enough to not be sliced in two.
Now there was only the panting for air to be heard. The hero vaguely registered that the villian was in just as bad of a shape now, as they were. That neither of them had the power for another collision of swords. That their only chance was to push harder, to make the other surrender by being the last one to stand, even if that meant standing there, trembling, bleeding and out of energy. But before the hero had time to process, let alone act on them, they buckled. It wasnt clear who lost their balance first and it didnt really matter now did it? .
With barley a sound, their swords started gliding down on one another, and with them their wielders.
Tho everything seemed to suddenly slow down, the ground coming closer and closer, the hero was unable to react properly. Shortly before they collided with a ground, they held up their arms a little, knowing full well how much that will hurt. But better than their head.
The hero tried to focus on their breath, taking air in, longer and deeper with every breath. Their head was buzzing and the ringing in their ears filled up any other senses. It was as if their body existed only to the end of their lungs, pounding against their ribcage, taking away their senses. Curling their hands into fists, the hero tried to get a grasp of their body again. Trying to remember how to feel it and even more so: how move it. With a couple more longer and deeper breaths, the hero tried to sit up. It took longer than they wanted but when they finally sat, clutching their chest, hoping it would ease the burn in their lungs, they could finally think clearly again. They pressed their eyes closed, trying to focus a bit more for a second and then tried to keep moving.
This time it was easier. Somewhat at least. They tried not to stare at the villian or to think of their obviously failed mission. But it seemed like they were cursed with exactly that. The villian looked just as defeated in all the wrong ways, they felt themselves. Down on the ground, bleeding and panting, with an expression screaming, they weren't done yet. The villian rolled onto their back, closing their eyes. The hero tried not to think of the amount of pain the villian must be in. And how all of this was their fault.
'It doesn't matter.' The hero tried to tell themselve. ' they're a villian. They deserved this. If they just would've listened, if they would've tried to do better, to BE better, this wouldn't have happend'. More convincing. But it only working barley. 'Just cause they did a few things wrong, doesn't mean, they deserve THIS', another part of them argued.
The hero collapsed onto the wall the villian had already pulled themselves up against. They sighed.
"This isn't over. Just so were clear." The hero finally croaked out. " This isn't over." The hero could feel the villians gaze boring into them. "Why ?" The villians voice quivered but the hero couldn't really judge them. After all, they weren't in a much better shape either. They tried to gather themselves enough to answer. "What do you mean 'why'? " "Why do you always have to keep fighting? Why are you doing this?" The villian sounded desperate now, fear and confusion laceing their voice equally.
The hero still didnt dare to look at the villian. To scared what they'd see. Too scared to wonder about, who would heal the villians wounds, who would embrace the villian and comfort them, when they got home. Too scared to remember they weren't supposed to think about these kind of things.
" I have to. I have to do good. To BE good. To be a hero." The lack of firmness surprised them. The flatness of their voice, combined with a lulled voice sounded unconvincing. Even to themselves.
"You're no hero"
The hero hadn't been prepared for their body flinching this hard. All of their wounds seemed to close and reopen again, stones settling heavily in their stomach.
The villians whisper cut deeper than their sword could've ever had.
With burnin eyes and trembling lips, the hero finally turned their head, meeting the villians eyes. Keeping their hand, pressed tightly to their chest again, as if to hold their body together and keeping it from shaking so violently, the hero could barley hear their own words. "What?", they whispered, just as desperately as the villian had earlier. They knew it was a foolish question. One they shouldn't have asked, furthermore shouldn't have even THOUGHT about asking. Since when did a hero need the validation of their villian?
But the hero knew that this wasn't about validation. Or at least it shouldn't be. It should be about moral. About what is right and fair and what is wrong and unfair. 'Everybody knows: the lines between those things are blurred. Sometimes what is right isn't fair and what's fair isn't right.', the voice in their head was taunting them. 'Maybe it wasnt really taunting, maybe it was begging?', the hero contemplated.
"You're no hero. I know you think you a-." The villian coughed and then pulled themself up, to sit a little more comfortable. It didn't look more comfortable. ' But how could it, when-' "I know you think you are a hero but you're not.", the villian interrupted their thoughts.
"Look at the mess you've made of the city. How many buildings crashed and burned because of you. How many people were in it, you couldn't save. That I couldn't save. And look at me! Look at yourself! How long are you gonna fight for them? For what they represent? Its obvious, that you dont believe in them. That you're just doing you're task, like you're a robot. Making excuses after excuses, that you're doing the right thing, never looking back at the chaos you create just to point fingers at everyone else. So tell me: Why? Why are you fighting a fight that you dont believe in? What do they have on you? Just: Why?"
The hero hadn't noticed how close the villian had come. How they were now basically leaning into one another. Their opponents eyes were filled with tears and desperation, their hands twisting the heros shirt.
'They dont have anything on me.', Is what they don't say. 'I'm helping them because I want to. Cause I belie-'
Memories of their time with the Organisation, of their training, of their fights filled the heros mind. The time they were recruited, how happy they were to be part of something, something big. The first time they managed to be top of their class and how since then, that hadn't changed a day. All the times they ditched a party or meeting or hang out in favour of going up against the villian. All the times they've been told about the evil nature of the villian. All the times they berated themselves for doubting the Organisation. All the times they wondered 'what was even the point in fighting this fight, if the ones, who seemed to truly believe in the fight, wouldn't dare to fight it themselves. Who would rather sit behind a monitor and lecture them on all the ways they fucked it up this time.
"Say something. " The villians desperate cries pushed them back into reality, into the present. "Dammit. Just say something. Why aren't you sayi-" The hero caught the villians hand, that had reached out to take a swing, which wouldn't have done any damaged anyway.
"I'm sorry." The hero finally croaked out. "I am so sorry." The hero finally took in all the damage they had done to the villian not only half an hour ago. Examining the villians torn clothes revealing, purple bruises and red, angry cuts. Examining the broken gear, hanging off of their belt and the bloodied ground. Examining the beheaded statue nearby and cuts in the ground and walls, marking the frequently rising violence of their fight.
Finally the heroes gaze dropped back onto the villian. At their messed up hair and busted lip, just to follow the path of a long gone tear back into the villians eyes. "I am so sorry.", the hero repeated. This time their voice didnt crack. Instead there was the firmness and passion, they had missed before. The villian held their gaze for few calculating seconds, nodded and leaned into the hero. The hero laid a protective arm around them, pulling them even closer, ignoring the pain it caused.
The hero knew they had a lot to make up for. A lot of things to take a responsibility for. Afterall the fight wasn't over yet. But it was between the two. Them against the Organisation. And at the next fight, the hero had a hunch, they will actually believe they are a hero. And more importantly: they will belive in the fight itself. Cause what is a hero worth, what's a fighter worth, who doesnt believe in the war they're fighting?
#villian x hero#villian hero#hero x villian#hero au#super hero#villian prompt#villian#coldflash#drarry#sterek#supercorp#pansy x hermione
126 notes
·
View notes
Text
Traitor-Kylo Ren (Star Wars The Force Awakens)
A/N: I can't belive I havent published any Star Wars content here. I've had my SW one shot book on wattpad for years and thankfully it has gotten plenty of views and it has been one of my favorite books i've published. Kylo Ren is my favorite so expect many one shots on him😙 i wrote this back when The Force Awakens came out and I am pepud of it considering I wasnt a huge SW fan.
"Are you sure that once he sees you again, he'll react and turn to light side again?"
I stare up ahead and watch all of the trees covering in snow,I feel the cold air and snow crushing my skin making me shiver even more with the thought of seeing Ben once again. I look over to Finn and Rey who are staring at me confused. I nod my head a couple of times as I begin to bite my lip which is something i often do when i'm nervous.
"I'm sure besides he killed Han Solo...he was a dear friend of mine and i can assure you that i'll convince him to be good again. I know he's still good deep inside that deep cold frozen heart of his." I sigh and I can imagine how much he has grown since we last saw each other.
<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>
"Ben! Tell your friend (Y/N) that supper is ready!"
"Alright Mom!"
I smiled to myself while I was picking up different colored flowers and making a crown out of them.Ben's mother Leia showed me her beautiful garden a month ago and she told me if i would like and watch over her flowers to which I agreed.
Every spring new flowers grew around the huge harden and one flower caught my attention. It was a single black rose. It was surrounded by beautiful red ones,I always though that the other matching roses would grow but it didn't.
I would pass by the same bushes and it was the same everyday. "My mother is calling you, idiot." He smacked the flowers out of my hand,making them all fall to the ground. I pouted and glared up at the boy dressed entirely in black.
I jumped onto him but he stopped me and pushed me away making me fall down on my butt. I tried to not cry but failed. "Ben! What did you do to (Y/N)?" Leia came over and helped me to get up,and wrapped her arms around me.
"Ben. Apologize to (Y/N) right now!"
Ben looked over to his mother surprised that she yelled at him.He smirked down at me "I'm sorry you're so weak and pathetic." He left without saying nothing else and I can tell Princess Leia was angry at her own son. "I'm so sorry (Y/N). Ben has been acting strange lately. Come in i'll make you something sweet to eat."
That day Ben was turning fourteen years old and became distant with all of us. While Leia was talking with her husband. Meanwhile everyone was talking about adult stuff i felt Ben staring at me. I looked over the corner of my eye and saw him glaring at me. I stood up from my chair making everyone look at me "May I be excused?"
"Is everything alright kiddo?"
I nodded over at Han and stepped aside "Yes...i just need some fresh air."
While making my way outside I heard everybody talking happily about Luke training Ben and that they'll be gone for a while. I'll admit ever since Ben and I met. I felt a connection towards him,a strong powerful connection. He was the Yin and I was the Yang in our relationship.
We became closer and eventually we started dating a year ago. Even though I was two years younger than him,i can tell that I loved him more than just a friend.
"(Y/N)"
I quickly looked back and saw him behind me,his hands behind his back probably hiding something. "What do you want?!" I ask him with a glare. He looks down at me,angry. Yep this was our relationship. Of love and hate.
"Stop whining about everything and woman up, You're already twelve so I suggest you train harder and try to impress me." He stared at my eyes and I into his dark brown ones.
"If you came here to scold me than you should just leave!" I folded my arms and looked away from him. I heard him coming closer and he took my hand "I won't leave you alone. You're just too stubborn and childish." He grabbed both of my hands and gave me the single black rose that was resting in the garden.
"We're supposed to get married remember? Mother and Father agreed to this before we were born." I gave him a small smile.
"I know." He smiled down at me and held me tight in a hug. "You'll never leave me right (Y/N)? No matter what happens you'll always stay by my side?"
"....I swear I will, Ben."
<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>
"Go up ahead i'll catch you two in a minute."
Rey and Finn both nodded and ran down to confront Ben. Well now most known as Kylo Ren. I watched them run into the forest, "Now's my chance to prove that i've gotten stronger and smarter. I promise i'll bring you back Ben." I grabbed my lightsaber and placed it on my sweater as I began to chase them.
I ran which was impossible in the snow. But i managed to find them "You are all traitors! You were supposed to kill her and now look at you!" My eyes widen and I saw Ben just a few feet away from me.
"(Y/N)" Rey whispered.
Ben stood still and slowly looked behind him. "Well isn't it little (Y/N) , She's not so little anymore i see."
"I've changed Ben."
"BEN IS DEAD!! My name is Kylo Ren and i'm the commander of the first order."He glared at me and fully turned his body to see me well.
"I know that already. You killed your own father Ben-"
"HE WAS NOT MY FATHER! CALL ME BEN ONE LAST TIME AND I WILL RIP YOUR HEAD." I stared into those brown lifeless eyes. "I swear I remember how I killed you parents,"
"I dont care! I know there is still good in you...I'm bringing you back with me."He smirks and grips his lightsaber tighter.
"Your going to send my back to my mother so she can scold me and convince me to be good again? No no (Y/N), that will never happen again. I'm going to finish what Darth Vader started."
He started to laugh once he saw me a bit scared. "Did I scare little (Y/N)?" He looked down at my hands and stared at them confused. "Your still wearing that filthy ring."
"Yes. I still have hope that we'll go back and get married." I say with tears in my eyes now. I shake my head and held onto my hair that kept getting on my face.
"You still believe that iI want to get married?!"
"You were getting married to him?!" Finn suddenly shouts. Ben looks behind and glares at him.
"Please come home...Ben."
He drew his lightsaber and began walking towards me,furious. "Oh shit." I start walking backwards and He does seem like he's gonna kill me.
"Don't touch her!" I hear Rey shout. She starts to attack him along with Finn but Ben defeated them. "Now i'm going to kill you."
My breathing quickens and I start to run away from him, "IIt's not fair if you keep running away." I look behind me and see nobody there. I scream once he appeared behind a tree and nearly chopped my head off.
I drew my purple lightsaber and swung it at him making him scream in agony as he holds his face. "Ben. Please listen to me this isnt y-you. I want you back..I still love you Ben!!"
He swung his lightsaber at me making my hiss as I hold onto my leg that started bleeding a bit. "Finally. The time has come to kill you. You were the one who made me feel loved and never lonely..But that needs to change."
He pushed me and I fell onto the snow and I closed my eyes prepared to die "At least you'll be the one to kill me." I opened my eyes and saw him inches apart from my face.
"You promised to me thay no matter what happened you would stay by my side...Don't ever come and look for me or next time I WILL kill you." I stared up at him confused.
He leaned down and kissed my lips. I kissed him back and when we parted he drew his lightsaber and stabbed it onto my shoulder. "AHHH!" I hold my shoulder and cry.
"I hope we don't see each other again." He placed something on my pocket and walked away like nothing happened. I heard Rey shouting at Finn and they both came and helped me get up.
We arrived at the Millenium Falcon and Chewie greeted us. "Where did Kylo go?" "Don't ask that to her her! She needs to be heled first. That bastard will pay."
They placed me on a seat and they took off my sweater and lowered my shirt as they bandaged my shoulder which had a huge wound. "He'll never change. We gotta tell General Leia about this." I confused reached over the pocket and took out what Ben placed inside. His matching ring.
"Yes. He will never to back...that makes me an enemy and a traitor..." I was never there for him. So I guess this means that we will most likely never see each other again....
#star wars#star wars the force awakens#star wars x reader#star wars imagine#kylo ren#kylo ren x reader#ben solo#rey#finn#han solo#leia skywalker#chewbacca#adam driver#general leia#the resistance#first order#sith#jedi
17 notes
·
View notes
Text
i.
It was early morning in Financial District. Commuters bustled around the siblings as they exited the subway station onto William Street. The pair stopped abruptly in front of the shop just outside of the station, much to the dismay of a woman behind them, who nearly ran into them with a curse.
Sarah Jacobs had worked hard to get to this point. And damn it, she was proud of herself. Sure, it didnt look like a lot right now- a tiny little hole in the wall right next to the entrance to the A and C train that was probably about the size of her bedroom in her tiny Manhattan apartment- but it was hers and she was proud to own the place.
Davey held up the key with a soft smile. "Planning on going in any time soon?" He asked lightly. She grinned as she took the key from his fingers and unlocked the door, stepping in. It was musty, dusty, dirty, and a bit stuffy, but none of that mattered. What mattered was what it was going to look tomorrow, and then the next day, and the day after that.
She clapped her hands together and set down her bag of cleaning supplies. "We've got a lot of work to do, Davey!"
ii.
Davey carefully placed the finishing touches on the flowers in stock, making them look nice in their holders. He stepped back, hands on his hips, and smiled. He turned to watch his sister as she carefully wrote the last few things on her chalkboard behind the counter.
The store looked perfect. Picturesque, to the point where Davey wouldnt be surprised if photographers came in looking for the perfect picture. Sarah set down her chalk and brushed her fingers off on her apron. She turned, nervously brushing stray hairs behind her ears, and straightening her light blue blouse. "Hows it look, David?"
He gave her two thumbs up. "It looks like a hipster's wet dream," he promised her teasingly.
She laughed and threw a rag at him. "You're such an ass, get out of my store with your gross face! You're gonna be late for class."
He snickered and leaned over the counter to grab his bag. "I'll turn on the open sign and unlock the door on my way out. If I dont, you probably never will."
As he left, he saw a young woman hesitating outside, looking curious. He held the door open. "Going in?" He asked.
She shook her head and hurried away down the street. He shrugged and headed to class. Sarah would have customers soon enough.
iii.
After the fourth day of trying to peek in the flower shop to and from class, Katherine Plumber finally gave in and slipped inside. A soft ring of the bell alerted the quiet shop, and she looked around in awe. Exposed brick on one wall, plants in baskets hung from the ceiling, fairy lights strung across the walls. Beautiful displays of potted plants and cut flowers alike. A chalkboard hung behind the counter listed prices and deals and specials, and then the most beautiful woman Katherine had ever laid eyes on came out of the back room, smiling brightly at the sight of a customer.
Dark hair in loose curls that reached her ribs, brown eyes that seemed to sparkle in the light, circle frame glasses perched on her nose. She wore a yellow turtleneck and high waisted mom jeans with scuffed converse, and a well worn apron. On her apron, someone stitched in the name "Sarah" with blue thread.
"Can I help you with anything?" The shopkeeper asked her cheerfully, and Katherine never felt more out of place.
"Just- just looking," she stammered awkwardly. She tugged at the sleeves of her leather jacket, glancing down at the pins and patches adorning it and hoping there wasnt anything that the sweet shopkeeper would take the wrong way. Usually, she didnt care if other people didnt like her opinions, but damn it, the girl was pretty as all get out, and her big ass "punch nazis in the face" patch on her back didnt really fit with the whole soft flower shop vibe.
She bit her lip, looking at the plants and trying not to stare at the girl. She focused on the many different colors of roses instead.
"'Fuck Cops'- now that's a sentiment I can get behind," the girl said, but she was so much closer this time, and Katherine jumped at the sudden noise.
Katherine blinked slowly. "Oh, uh. Yeah," she said, and laughed a little, internally cringing. God, she sounded like an idiot.
She giggled. "Sorry, I'm just excited to see a customer. I havent had a lot so far, I just opened a couple days ago."
"I know," Katherine said quickly, and quickly winced when the girl cocked a brow. "Sorry, no, I meant, I know you opened a couple days ago, I take the A train to school every day, so."
She snorted and nodded. "I see, a bit less creepy when you put it like that," she said teasingly. She held out a hand to shake. "I'm Sarah. Welcome to Newspaper Row Flowers."
"Katherine," she replied, shaking her hand. She smiled a bit. "You know Newspaper Row was actually over on Park Row, right? Next to City Hall?"
Sarah laughed, cheeks pink. "Oh, I know. It's because my great grandmother used to own a flower shop over next to the old Tribune building on Park Row, and that's what she called it. She lost her shop in the Depression though, and died when I was young, and it was my mom's dream to open a flower shop in her honor. She never managed to, and uh. Well, she died too, a couple years ago, so I did it."
Katherine's heart felt like it was melting in her chest. God, how could she already have so much affection for this girl she only just met? "I'm sorry for your loss. But you've really created something wonderful here, and I'm sure they would both be proud."
Sarah beamed, and Katherine would do anything to make her smile like that again.
iv.
"And so Davey's like 'what the fuck', and Les is like 'who is this guy' and Jack is straddling the windowsill, looking at us like he expects my dad to get a gun, and finally, Dad is like 'hes not Catholic, is he?' And poor Davey is like 'no, pa', and for some godforsaken reason, Mom assumes that means hes Jewish. And knowing he doesnt have a family, immediately invites- and by invites, I mean loosely intimidated- Jack to come celebrate all holidays with us. And so now, instead of breaking it to Mom that Jack isnt religious, Davey just let's them believe it. Cause I mean, they're pretty fine with the whole gay thing, but god forbid we be romantically involved with someone who isnt Jewish." Sarah finished explaining with a laugh and roll of her eyes. "So yeah, that's why Jack is here fucking around with a dreidel even though Hanukkah has passed. Hes convinced that theres a secret trick to it that he has to master by next year."
Jack looked up and pouted sourly in her direction. "We all know Davey cant be that good based on luck alone!" He said for the thousandth time.
Katherine laughed, elbows on the counter. Her red curls were pulled back in a ponytail and she had her signature leather jacket on. "Sounds like your family is a real fun bunch. Ironically, my dad is the exact opposite, he doesn't care if I dont marry into a Jewish family, but he very much cares if I marry a girl."
Sarah made a face. "Gross. He sounds like such an ass whenever you talk about him."
Katherine nodded. "Probably because he is," she said very seriously. And then the two erupted into giggles.
"Ew, go get a room," Jack complained.
"You're in my shop, Kelly!"
V.
"Sarah, I need your help with something." Katherine came in looking nervous, an expression Sarah rarely saw on her friend.
"Of course, anything, what do you need?" Sarah said immediately, abandoning the flowers she was making out of newspapers.
Katherine swallowed, pausing. Her fingers fidgeted with the necklace around her neck. "Um. Well. There's uh... there's this girl I really like. And she... she's just amazing, and I want to tell her that I really like her. And she loves flowers, so..."
Sarah smiled and cooed, even though her chest hurt an awful lot. "That's so-" heartbreaking? Disappointing? Sad? "-cute! Flowers are such a good way to express feelings. Do you want to do it through flower language or do you have specific flowers you want to do it with?"
Katherine bit her lip. "Well, I was hoping a bit of both, but I'm not sure what kind of flowers she likes, so I was hoping you'd help with that."
Sarah nodded. "Of course! Let's get to work, hm?"
In the end, the bouquet consisted of red carnations (admiration), gardenias ("you're lovely"), mistletoe ("kiss me"), and white violets ("let's take a chance on happiness"). Sarah very gently wrapped the stems in newspaper and tied it with some twine while Katherine wrote something on a card.
Katherine paid and took the bouquet from Sarah, carefully fixing the card in it. She stayed after the transaction, simply standing there and staring at the flowers in her arms.
"What are you waiting for? Go get your girl!" Sarah chastized with a laugh. She needed Katherine to leave so she could take an early lunch and cry a little.
"You're right," Katherine said. She took in a big breath and let it out slowly before jutting her arms out, offering the bouquet. "Here."
"What?" Sarah asked, eyebrows furrowed. "Did you change your mind or-"
"They're for you," Katherine said, staring at the wall. "Just- read the card?"
Sarah blinked slowly and took the bouquet carefully, and opened the card.
In it was written simply:
"I like you, Sarah. Have since I first came into your shop. And I'd like you even more if you went to dinner with me?"
Sarah very gently put the bouquet down on the counter. And then she kissed Katherine.
+1
A year and a half later, Sarah come home to find a bundle of myrtle at her place on the table. Instead of a string, there was a ring. Myrtle, the Hebrew emblem of marriage.
Katherine cleared her throat, smiling softly. "Your parents will have at least one kid who marries into a Jewish family. If-if you say yes, that is."
Sarah's eyes filled with tears. "How could I not?"
#newsies#newsbians#sarah jacobs#katherine plumber#katherine pulitzer#5 plus 1#flower language#flower shop au#aesthetics#newsies fanfic
27 notes
·
View notes
Text
a month ago i watched every Twice video in order, some of them for the first time, because Twice was finally clicking for me and i was “getting it”. i wrote a little thing about which songs i liked and which i didnt, and i wanna expand on that cause my opinions have gotten more fleshed out over the last couple weeks of listening to them, and also some of them have changed. i just really like reviewing things, i hope that’s okay lol
so here are two or three sentence reviews of every Twice title track, in order
Like Ooh Ahh: i think this is one of their best songs, personally. it’s not as much of the bubblegum stuff they go for after this, but it’s extremely catchy lol, the “i just wanna fall in love!” and the “ha~~ ooh-ahh hage!” gets stuck in my head a lot. i just love the way this song’s instrumental sounds too, the aesthetic of it
Cheer Up: um okay so from hot to cold... this is my least favorite Twice song. i’m listening to it right now as I’m writing this, and I’ll listen all the way through, but i haven’t listened to it all the way through very often. i think the chorus feels out of place, so does the “be a man, real man” thing. i don’t like that. that ruins the song for me lol. i also don’t like the chorus much haha, it sounds like theyre saying “chore up” cause they went with 치얼업 (chi-eol/eor-eop) instead of like... even just “chireop” or “chi-eo eop”... they dont usually have ㄹ for an english r sound at the end of a word...
TT: ah okay nice we’re back on track lol, this song is fantastic and totally deserves to be their most popular song (at least in terms of music video views). when i first heard it i didnt like it cause i didnt like anything Twice lol... then when I listened to every Twice title track in order as i was beginning to “get it”, i liked everything except the “i’m like TT, ahhh, just like TT, ahhh” haha, i thought the fact that it was about the emoticon was weird and didnt fit the video, and the “ahh” was goofy haha. but now? god its so catchy lmao i always whisper-sing along to this part when i listen to this song haha. i love the echo-y reverb-y synths in the verse, and the instrumental in the chorus when paired with the vocal melody just makes it one of the best choruses in kpop lol. i think TT is their best song. the rap break doesnt feel like a rap break, it fits sooooo naturally in with the song, it’s so impressive. this song is so impressive
Knock Knock: initially i liked this song a lot, and i still do, but... this would be another group’s best song, easily, but for Twice... it’s a bit overshadowed haha. the guitar plus the synth is really cool though, its rare to hear a calming, sort of mellow, soft song with as high a BPM as this haha. one of the writers, Mayu Wakisaka, also was a composer for Loona’s Hi High and Fromis 9′s Love Bomb... and you can totally see that lol. all of those songs have high BPMs and are wildly catchy. still, idk, i like this song but i dont have a ton to say about it
Signal: this song is weird in a good way, i love really unconventional instrumentals. it sounds as alien and outer space as the music video haha. at first the “sign-eul bonae signal bonae” kinda annoyed me, but i got more used to it. i don’t listen to this song much, but i should change that, honestly. though another thing is that the music video has a lot those things where it adds sounds from the video that arent in the regular song, and has an intro i gotta skip every time lol, but like thats not a huge problem, i can just listen to the song elsewhere haha
One More Time: this song sounds like something you’d hear at a hockey game lmao. i dont even know really what i mean by that, i dont go to hockey games lol.... anyway. i like this song, but again, it’s kinda overshadowed. if i’m in the mood for the vibe this song has, there are other Twice songs that have it that i like more. it’s refreshing every once in a while though.
Likey: this song is so good!!! it didnt stand out at first, like, there’s not really a huge gimmick like some of the others... “likey likey likey” is kind of the same sort as the “just like TT” and “knock knock knock on my door” and stuff from other songs, but for some reason it feels less prominent in this song. i dont think this is their most iconic song ever, and its not genre-defining or one of the ones you’d mention first when talking about Twice, but it’s just a really solid song. one of my favorites
Heart Shaker: yeah, heart shaker is alright. it was apparently just a couple months after likey, and it feels like a similar concept? maybe it’s just the music video giving me that impression. it’s alright. the music video has the longest part with the distinctive way Twice shoots dance scenes... in that very nauseating way lol... but i don’t mind it lol i’m used to that by now
Candy Pop: so like, was this song sorta made for kids specifically? i guess i’m mostly just being influenced by the music video cause i’m watching it while writing this. i dont like the video much lmao it’s like a pokemon ripoff complete with Officer Jennies and Jin-young Brock. the song’s not bad though, it’s catchy but it’s a little too sugary sweet for me (which makes sense given the concept i guess). i like a lot of ideas in the instrumental though... because it was also written by the people who did Knock Knock, including the writer of Hi High and Love Bomb.
What is Love: this isnt their best song ever, but it’s undeniably one of their most solid. i listen to it a lot haha. the music video has a cool concept, i like when groups do this kind of thing (interpreting scenes from movies or famous music videos or popular culture). i don’t have much to say other than that i like it a lot, it’s one of my favorites i think
Wake Me Up: okay here we go, this is another one of the three Twice singles I just don’t really like. it’s a fine song up until the chorus. i just can’t get over the shift upwards in.. uhh.. scale? octave? pitch? one of those lol, or something else, i dont really know music terms like that very well haha. yeah though i just find it offputting.
Dance the Night Away: it’s alright. i’m pretty neutral on it. i was put off at first but i’ve gotten used to it. though still, i’m not that into it. i get that its a dance focused song and the choreography does look a lot more intense than their other choreos, and thats cool, but that doesnt make me like the music in and of itself. it’s a summer-jam type of song, and i’m not as into those anyway. there’ll never be a better kpop summer-jam than Red Flavor anyway lol
Yes or Yes: this is the other Twice that i don’t like haha. i just think the constant “you only one choice: yes or yes” thing is kind of annoying haha. also the chorus is catchy in a way that i dont think its especially exciting... it’s an earworm because i think it’s slightly annoying, not because it’s satisfying. of the songs that i’ve said i don’t like, this is the one i could see myself getting into the most. this might not always be in my “bottom three”. it is right now though
Fancy: this was the first comeback they had since i’ve been into kpop, and even though i wasnt into Twice at the time, i wanted to try it out just to see if it would change my mind, and it did somewhat.... sorta. it got the ball rolling for sure. it came out on my birthday, the same day as the Loona Fire dance cover haha, that was a good birthday. yeah this song is great, i think it’s better than any of their 2018 comebacks, personally. the concept isn’t all that different from normal Twice, it just appears that way cause the video is so lavish and elegant. it didnt convince me to be a Twice fan on that day it came out, but I liked what I thought made it different from the other Twice songs I’d heard. but now? what I like most about it is how very Twice it really is. the thing is, I wasn’t into Twice probably because the only songs i’d heard were Yes or Yes and Cheer Up, and those songs are still my least favorites lol. Fancy doesnt sound that out of place when you take into account their whole discography! i looove the video and i loooove the chorus so much, this song is great and i wonder if they’ll be able to top it if they have another comeback this year
Breakthrough: okay so in the last one i said i wonder if they’ll be able to top it this year, i meant in terms of Korean comebacks lol. cause in terms of just songs in general, if i include their new Japanese comebacks, they’ve already topped Fancy. this song is the one that finally won me over. this is the song that made me a Twice fan. now, this one is a little outside their typical concept, but they’re really really good at it nevertheless. i wonder if Twice is going a bit more in this direction? at least maybe half the time, alternating between the two styles now? cause Breakthrough continues a bit down the path that Fancy set for them. in any case, i love basically everything about this song, I’m so glad it got me to finally love their music
Happy Happy: so you know how I said that Breakthrough was a change from the bubblegum fun-fun style they’ve had and that move is what got me to finally be into Twice? well that made me think I’d like Happy Happy less haha, but actually I listen to it way more than I listen to Breakthrough, I like it more overall. this is a very Twice-style song, and that’s fine because it’s fantastic. this song genuinely makes me happy
oops didn’t i say i’d try to keep it to two or three sentences?
anyway yeah my favorite Twice songs are TT, Happy Happy, Breakthrough, Likey, and Like Ooh Ahh in that order i think
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
Took me 8 years to let it go. 8 years is 365×8=2920. Out of those 8 years there wasnt one night she wasnt my last thought. Can you imagine hugging a pillow tightly and wishing it was her over and over again like a nightmare that never goes away and youd push all your love out to her into the universe in hopes shell feel and call you for once, but she never will, or worse one of the few girls that really loved you while you hung onto a love that never really existed being beside you and you have tears rolling down your cheek because all you want is that someone who doesnt see you as anything more than the guy who will boost her self esteem. You broke a beautiful, sweet, and innocent girls heart because you still chose to hold onto the hope that one day shed want you half as much as you want her. You know she would never be able to look at you as you do her yet You hurt every girl the same way and they actully loved you. It took 8 years and meeting someone for an instant whos already out of my lkfe as quickly as she appeared to finally realize i had to let it go. Fighting for something that wasnt meant to be for that long just because you had convinced yourself that ome day it was going to turn into a perfect love story. I wasted most of my 20s waiting and waiting for the only person i wanted to see the world with. I literally didnt take trips to certain places when i could have just because i dreamt about waking up there with her and i didnt want to experience it any other way. I was subconciously crippling myself, over someome that i gurantee probably thought about me 20 times to my 2920. I did mad drugs, i fucked mad hoes. I did so much self destruction. For someone who couldnt comprehend my love yet alone reciprocate. My heart has felt broken for such a long time its maddening. A couple months ago i told her i didnt want to see or talk to her again. I kept all her social media open and everytime i saw her name my entire chest would physically hurt and i would get terrible anxiety. I really didnt want to cut those ties, but i slowly blocked them one by one, i just blocked her tumblr and it was so hard. I was 17 when she told me i should get one and ive always loved looking at everything shed repost or her qwarky thoughts. Basically it was very odd to feel this much emotion over blocking someone on a social media page, but tumblr has been like a journal and outlet for my depression and ive always been so grateful for the messaged and connections ive made on here, basically the reason i wrote this is to tell anyone, whether youre a girl or boy or gender fluid or what have you, YOU ARE AN AMAZING INDIVIDUAL AND DONT YOU EVER LET ANYONE MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE YOUR LOVE AND YOUR PERSONALITY ARNT WORTH ANYTHING. Dont let one person effect the loves you can have with others. Be stromg and let toxic friendships/relationships/friendzones in the past. Truly disattach yourself from them. I feel so different now than i have since i was 17. I really thought that this one girl was everything and nothing could replace her, i conciosly chose to stop lying to myself and let it go and let myself heal. If you relate to anything im saying. Im here for you and if you want to talk dm me, ill support anyone trying to better their mental health and the way they view themselves. Love is a motherfucker, but your thoughts are the motherfuckiest of them all. *drops mic as josie by blink182 trails behind me as i ride my steed into the pink and orange sky meltinf away into moonlight
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
12x22: Dean Winchester is going to die
Well, when I was new, I wrote a whole post about this, about how early episodes but especially 12x11 foreshadowed that Performing!Dean was going to be deconstructed by the end of the season... Fans self.
The death of Performing!Dean in this episode was BEAUTIFUL. It was EXQUISITE. I couldn't have asked for MORE!
I literally grabbed and punched @amwritingmeta in the leg I don't know how many times as I paused it to point and shout.
1. The Grenade Launcher
So, the grenade launcher = performing!Dean metaphor. We had hoped and boy did they deliver! Did anyone else notice, while Dean was *ahem* knocking down the seemingly unpenetrable physical walls, that, maybe it was my weird link, but it seemed to me that the flashing ‘red’ lights in the MoL bunker were decidedly pinky-purpley in colour rather than standard alarm bells red and the flashlights glowed on the blue side of white... (the MoL HQ lights are also brightly pinky-purple to keep the theme going, I mean honestly what self respecting 1950s MoL guy chose this for the bunker instead of the usual red? Please!) Just saying.
“It wasn't long ago I thought we had it made. We had Cas back, we had mom back. I mean it wasn't perfect but still...”. This is it. Dean’s facade has been coming down all season, but at this point now, he just doesn’t see the point in holding it up anymore.
And what does Sam do? HE OPENS UP TO DEAN. He tells Dean how he feels, the reasons why he followed the MoL - that it was “easier than leading”, that he made a mistake. This enables Dean to be truthful himself, in the end, now. Again, they have had many times to reflect on their own deaths but this is another time similar to 11x23 where he can really reflect on what he has lost, and now what is that? Cas and Mary.
Dean uses the grenade launcher, that he’s been dying to do since forever, blows down the impenetrable seeming wall, saves the day. How meta do we need to go? It’s BLATANT. The choice in the colour of the lights, the dialogue, his feelings... the walls are Dean’s facade and the grenade launcher is his way of breaking it down. YES. This has been building all season and much prior to this other meta writers have said that he grenade launcher is associated with Dean’s hidden side, his bisexuality, Destiel etc... this is meta gold, THIS is a meta aspect Dabb was talking about. Toni even then parallels the tearing down of Mary’s mental wall with Dean’s physical use of the grenade launcher, just moments after. It is so well put together :D
Also, I have long believed that the bunker had to go. It represents too much the MoL side of things and the whole ‘living below ground’ thing is way too underground / metaphorically bad. For me they need a real, healthy home which is in between Bobby’s hunter house and the MoL bunker. Hopefully they will find a nice modern MoL home with kit but that isn't so hidden above ground somewhere next season to take over and make their own :D
2. Sam the MoL leader
“Real hunting isn’t just about killing, it’s about doing whats right... I want you to follow me”. We have wanted this for Sam all season, the MoL story fits his personal arc so well (so did Eileen, still bitter), this is Sam’s endgame. Sam said just moments earlier that he didn’t want to lead, but now he is, because it is necessary and because he is good at it. I believe he will now see that this is what he wants and will work towards this for his endgame.
This then leads to...
3. Dean and Sam - ending the brodependency and Dean as Sam’s parent
Dean lets Sam go, the dialogue is amazing. “You’re ready for this... you got this” paralleled with an actual mom/daughter conversation between Jody and Alex.
Dean literally talks to Sam like a parent letting their child go off to college and I had to pause this for a long long moment to process and scream “they’re actually going there!” not even knowing what was coming next... man...
Then comes the Mary / Dean scene.
4. Dean and Mary
This was always going to be what Mary led to for Dean’s arc. After Amara had started this addressing of Dean’s facade in season 11 and Mary is basically an extension of Amara this season re: Dean (in the same way that she still has to influence Sam’s arc re: Lucifer, that is for next season). I LOVED how BLATANT and textual they made this, the actual lack of subtext because it was all in the ACTUAL TEXT!
Firstly, Dean considers letting Toni go, which I had expected, to show the difference between our boys (morality) and the MoL as monsters.
Then... “Dad was just a shell...I had to be a father and a mother to keep him safe, and that wasnt fair, and I couldnt do it, and you wanna know what that was like? They killed the girl that he loved, he got possessed by Lucifer, they tortured him in hell and he lost his soul...But I forgive you, for everything.” MY HEART!
Ok, yeah, they did the thing, they brought Jess up 30 mins before killing the guy that Dean loves after not mentioning her for.... A DECADE? And paralleling one of the few scenes we ever saw her in with Dean/Cas too? After we already had the parallel with Dean seeing Cas when driving along, same as Sam did? So, only the scene of Sam and Jess in the bar and the scene where Dean actually meets her haven't been paralleled now with Dean/Cas? I’M LIVING!
But seriously. The rest is exactly what we, the audience needed to understand Dean and to show casual viewers Dean’s inner angst in order to understand the facade coming down, this is exactly what Dean needed. He has come full circle, this is the start of the culmination of the end of Performing!Dean (which Jensen has no said at Jibcon will be furthered in season 13!).
Dean actually TELLS Mary in his mind that he hates her, but that he loves her. That he had to be Sam’s mother and father, and that it wasn't FAIR. This is so important, that he didnt just say that it happend and that it sucked, but that it wasn't FAIR and that he did not DESERVE IT.
This is Dean addressing not just his mother but how HE feels about it, how he feels about HIMSELF, that he is saying that he DESERVES MORE and has SELF WORTH.
These are all the words I have been using since 12x01 re: Dean . I’m so happy!
5. Ketch kills Toni, Mary kills Ketch after Dean beats him to a pulp, PERFECT, Jody kills Hess, again perfect.
This had to happen to keep our boys on the ‘don't kill humans unless they HAVE to’ side, especially after Dean considered letting Toni go. Thank you.
6. Winchester family reunion
Sam’s forgiveness of Mary, Dean’s reaction to the happy family hug (it’s great but someone is missing...). “Who we are... we kick ass. We save the world”
SAM AND DEAN ARE ACCEPTING THEMSELVES THIS SEASON. In 12x09 Sam said it, now Dean says it. After all the angst this episode and for Dean all season...
This whole episode was for me the culmination of the deconstruction of Performing!Dean this season, which has been the main theme carried through on the character - driven side of things, it was beautiful.
In many ways I view this as the character - led season finale and 12x23 as the plot - led season finale (which I will post my thoughts on right up next).
I cannot WAIT to see the result of this episode come across next season.
We have not only now Performing!Dean pretty much dead or on his way out, the Dean Winchester is going to die metaphor was fully used and was fantastic, but coupled with Cas being brutally taken away from Dean, the parallels with 2 key canon romantic couples (Sam/Jess and Cain/Colette) in this within SECONDS of each other, plus the Jibcon revelations that we will see more of Dean’s reaction to this in season 13, apparently crying (and Jared not even hiding Destiel jokes now) make me pretty much 100% convinced Destiel is really endgame now.
Aside from this we now have Dean accepting himself, his internal self acceptance arc coming to a close, Sam’s MoL arc coming up and I will touch on the other aspects of the story for Sam in the next post as they are relevant to Lucifer / Jack, and Cas’s arc too...
Season 13 is already set up for exactly the endgame I am wishing for!
Tink’s Endgame Wishlist :
- Mol! Sam (and Eileen, Chuck I’m still bitter about that though, I really hoped her death would turn out to be a misdirection). Pretty much CHECK.
- Hunter / Mol collaboration with Sam and Dean as leaders. Pretty much CHECK.
- End of the brodependency, Dean acknowledging he was Sam’s parent and letting him go. CHECK.
- End of Performing!Dean. Pretty much CHECK.
- Human!Cas and self worth and belonging for his arc. TBA probably next season, what happened this season makes no sense if not to lead to this.
- Destiel. Pretty much CHECK. (And now after seeing Jibcon and the boys just joking about it all the time? Yeah, I don't think they have an issue with this!).
- ALL THE RAINBOWS
#spn 12x22#performing!dean#mary winchester#destiel#dean is bi#bi!dean#bunker#tinks meta#spn 12x22 meta
554 notes
·
View notes
Note
Holiii!! I saw the pic of Liam and Honey😍😍😍 Asdfahs. They are so cute! And also, i love Liam's eyes. It'a such a nice colour!! And i also saw the gifs!! I love that gif of Louis. HE LOOKS SO SOFT. I could cry. And Harry😂😂😂 Its such a mood. I always flip people off like that. Jajajaja. AND THE GIF OF HARRY WITH THE PINK JACKET. 😍He is dancing funny and i love hiiim. Oh, and i havent read that fic but i'll read it asap and then i'll tell you about it. Promise. Thanks for the rec💖 (1)
Hiiii, Love!!!! I’m so sorry it took me so long to answer! but yesterday I was busy, and when I came home my head hurt like a b*tch, 😖😖. Liam’s eyes very pretty, aren’t they? Everyone likes him better (poor honey). I always flip people like that too, jajaja, that’s why I needed a gif, and I found the best, jajajaja. I couldn’t resist. I’m already rereading that fic,😅. I love re reading things I read a long while ago, bc my English has improved a bit since I came to tumblr, and it’s like reading things for the first time again, so cool.
It wasnt hard being updated bcs OT was everywhere, but yeah. I always try to engage in my friend’s hobbies. & some of them do the same. One of my friends used to be a 1D fan before i met her, and though she is not longer in the fandom she tries to be updated. She sends me memes or things that remind her of 1d. She even watched a video of BG without me knowing/telling her about it. I dont deserver her. Ay, and last week she watched freddieismyqueen videos with me on a free period. I 💖 her (2)
HOW DID YOU FRIEND MANAGE TO QUITE?!?!?! Jajajajaja It feels imposible (not that I have tried…). And she sees things and isn’t intrigued about what is happening?? She should write a self help book,jajajaja. “How to suite one direction: the guide”,jajajaja. But she sounds cool and supportive of you, so keep her, jejeje.
Well, you just described me. Talking in public always end up in one of those two options. I have always wanted to do a road trip!!! You are totally invited of course. JAJAJAJA. Well, it just…happened? Our friend was having a very bad time and he was going through a lot of things and we didnt know how to cheer him up. And then one night we just starting watching a video of AuronPlay reading a fic, and he was happy for the first time in months. (3)And so my cousin said “what if we write him a fic?” And i said “omg, yes”. And thus was born. Its a crack fic. We just put in there his family, his biggest celebrity crush, our friends, ourselves and a couple of animals and started writing nonesense. He hasnt read anything yet, bcs we want to finish it first, and me and my cousin (and our siblings, bcs they wanted to help) only hang out alone sporadically. But we laugh a lot writing it. I hope he laughs too when he finally reads it. (4)
You, your sister and your cousins sound so cool. And your friends too. I’m gonna have to migrate and adopt you all, jajajaj. I’m sure your friend is gonna love it. It’s a recipe for success. Keep me updated when you show him and his reaction,please!!
“How does a gay look like?” Like someone with no toxic masculinity. But i see your point. Judging on looks is not cool. (And i dont usually do it. I watched their behaviour or their words. When someone doesnt ever use gender pronouns and just say “they” “parter” “somebody” im just👀👀👀 i see what u are doing). Yes yes. What you said makes sense. I understood. Dont worry. I have never heard that quote, but i think i could marry whoever wrote this. So much truth!! 😱 (6)
Tbh I never payed attention to that, :/ (heteronormative mind and all that). If I had, maybe I had known about a lot of my high school friends’ sexuality. Looking back, we were just a group of friends, boys a girls, nobody cared about boyfriends/girlfriends (we were friends from 12-16). Then we went our separate ways, and we lost touch. And now I see in Facebook that they are gays and lesbians, and I’m like… :/ we didn’t know much about those things back then. And I hope I didn’t make any comments who could offend/affect them. But it makes me so happy to see them being themselves and living with they’re boyfriends and girlfriends… 😊 I just wish I could have been a better friend back then 🤷🏻♀️. But now I pay attention to that. And I always try to show support in a non invasive way. And try to educate people about who they’re been homophobic, or make not appropriate comments… like there’s this boy (around 16) that likes to paint his nails. And I love everything to do with nails. And, at the shop, I comment on people’s nails (if I know them enough, lol). And I always try to say something nice to this guy. To normalize the fact that he has his nails painted (and no make a statement that I approve of it, if someone else is listening, so they don’t make rude comments around me). And then my friend’s sister is Lesbian. But their mother is so ancient-minded… like, my friend has a dit of fat, and she’s always making comment about how she should be skinnier bc she won’t ever find a husband 😒. And her sister is very thin. And once, she was working as cleaner in a /cuartel de la guardia civil(?)/. And their mother was always: hmmm, I hope she finds a good guy there, bc she’s never had a boyfriend. And I always thought: I wonder why, lol. Well, she finally came out to her parents, and while they don’t treat her different (which I don’t know if it’s good or no), they’re like “waiting” she changes her mind. And hoping she finds a boyfriend. Anyway, her mother is friends with my mom, and she comes to visit at the shop sometimes, and she always has a comment to make about what people do or don’t do. And I get so angry 😡. I’m always correcting her. But she doesn’t listen. And I feel sorry for my friend and her sister. So whenever I have the chance I saw her my support, and always talk about these things, lol. (I talk so much about lgbt+ things, that my family associates me with it, to the point that every time they see a rainbow or whatever they tell me: look look! And I just satisfied with it. At least they don’t make so much homophobic comments anymore 😒)
YOUR MOM IS AN ANTI? How? “Why would they fake a baby?” Thats a good question with awful answers. I miss RBB&SBB.😍 (I havent explained that to anybody, yet. But once while playing a game my cousins choose Rbb as his nickname so i choose Sbb and our friends started making questions and we where like? 1d things? Long story, leave it for another day? I’m glad they dont remember it bcs i wouldnt know how to explain that😂😂). Was your friend a fan of 1d too? (7)
Well, she isn’t a nasty anti, jajajja, but she doesn’t think they’re together. Not for nothing special, just that she thinks they would say it if they were together. And since they haven’t say it, they aren’t together. But I’ve shown her the famous Christmas pic, and she doesn’t Thing B was ever pregnant. And I show her pics of F to ask for an outsider opinion, and she doesn’t think the kid looks like Louis at all, lmao. So, I think if they ever come out, she wouldn’t care at all. Bahhh, I’ve talked about RBB/SBB with my friend sometimes, but it’s so bad of a thing, that we don’t come to a conclusion. She isn’t a fans, sadly. But she likes celeb gossip, and I like to talk, so… yesterday she came to visit/ to get her arms waxed (bc that’s my other unofficial job) and she ended up staying for 2 hours. Bc we had see each other briefly lately, couldn’t sit and talk properly in a while. And she always asks me about 1d, bc she knows I love to talk about it,jajaja. And I have a sideblog where I reblog things to show her. And well, yesterday we talked a little about BG, and I showed her the no-belly pic, and she was… 😳. And she thinks louis and Harry must be together, at least at some point, bc the way the touched wasn’t in a friendly way. She now has a boyfriend, and she kept saying: I’m not a very touchy person with my friends or my family, but when I’m with him I always want to touch him or kiss him, and that’s what those two were always doing. And I’m always: do you think that for real, or are you just saying it so I stop talking?? Jajjaja. And yes, she’s convinced they are/were together. She asked me if I think they’re still together, and I told her that now more than ever, but it’s a long story, so we should talk about it another time, bc lol, we were just talking about it for a couple of hours, and we both had things to do. So, we’ll keep talking another time.
Of course, I dont share that info with everybody, but I dont mind my friends knowing. I have this one friend that i bother everytime i get frustated bcs of a fic. I tell him the plot, and what is happening and i cry about it (and he laughs at me but at least he listens). Sometimes i make him choose which one should i read next when i cant decide. (9)
I almost did a fic reference yesterday talking with my friend, and I stopped myself midsentece, and laughed (I thought of you,jajaj) and she was so confused!! But she’s used to my weirdness, so we just laughed it way. And I kept talking, jajajajaj.
Girl, i have 6 dioptres😂😂 Thats what i have forbid myself from reading on the phone. No, i havent read that one, but its now on the list. I’ll tell you when i do! Though it make take a while :( (I understand you. Dont worry). (10)
😳 6?!!?! Please take care of your eyes!!! Stop reading… everything!! Jajaja. No, I’m kidding. I know about people who has 8… so you’re still ok,jajajaj. I have 1, but my ophthalmologist told me I’m very sensitive to change, bc I thought I had 27463 diopters, bc I saw so poorly 🙄🙄.
Yes, i also like IDGAF more than New Rules. They have overplayed that one. Have you heard Blow Your Mind? I love that one. It’s also a single so…i guess you have heard it? You’ll get amazing shots, i’m sure. Honey was sleeping on you? 😭😭😭😭 I love hiiim (11)
I listened today Room for 2 and Homesick, and I think I like them. I’ll have to listen this new one two. For me, to like a song, I have to heard /a lot/ (not as much as Despacito, please). It has to have a catchy tune. That’s why I think a like Carolina, or Woman, or Kiwi, and I don’t understand why people is so fidyfvbure about the lyrics, jajjaja.Honey is always sleeping on me. The other day Liam was sleeping between my legs, and Honey came and just laid on top of my poor limo. And I wanted to kill him, bc liam never comes to sleep with me. They’re so different… but I love them both.
Oh, my little sister. I just wanted to tell you that yesterday was her birthday. She almost cried when she saw that me and my older sister had brought her Flicker deluxe as a present. (We hadnt bought it yet. Dont judge us). She was freaking out just bcs of that and i was laughing so hard thinking that she’s gonna pass out when she sees the rainbow flag her friends have gotten her for Nialls show. And also another pair of Cds. She wont survive the show. Poor thing. But she was so happy 😍😍 (12)You start next week? Okay. I’ll ask again next wednseday. Have a nice daaaay!!
Not judging, you’re amazing sisters!! Awww, poor thing!! She will have an amazing time at Niall’s concert, for sure. And, yes, please, tell her to bring the flag. I’m so happy seeing how people are starting to bring rainbow flags to niall concerts too. And have you seeing that he has taken pics with rainbow flags?? He even brought one to the stage the other day!! It makes me inexplicably happy to say everything covered in rainbows. There was so much at Harry’s show too, my sister said it looked like a pride parade. Hey, Dunkirk it’s about to start khbkhdfbvkjdnfvkjndfv. But, have YOU SEEING THE NEW ROYAL BABY WAS NAMED AFTER LOUIS?????? AND HIS TWEET?!?!? IM SCREAMED!!!! Dijffvjkbdded. Bye love. I have to feed my cats before the movie starts!!! Aaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!
#anon#I just saw ask 5 is missing??#kjdjeidobcioedcboie.#sorry#Dunkirk is about to start and I’m sihdbkddhvhbjefv#EDIT: anon!! I forgot to ask you if you’re the middle sister?? me too!! I have so much to say of how that position influence people's#personality#jajajajajaa#and I can related to Harry and Louis too#🤦🏻♀️
0 notes
Text
The Muddled Link Between Booze and Cancer
A couple years ago, a researcher named Curtis Ellison took the podium in a crowded lecture hall at Boston Universitys School of Public Health to tackle a question that had divided the universitys public health community: whether moderate drinking should be recommended as part of a healthy lifestyle. Ellisons take? I mean, its so obviously yes, he told the crowd.
Youve heard Ellisons pitch before: A glass a day can make for a healthier heart and a longer life. On stage, he told the story of Jackrabbit Johannsen, a famed cross country skier who lived to be 111. Johannsen had four pieces of advice for a long and healthy life, Ellison said: Dont smoke, get lots of exercise, dont drink too much. He paused. On the other hand, dont drink too little, either. The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.
But Ellison wasnt going unchallenged. Watching from the other side of the stage was Tim Naimi, a public health professor at BU who studies binge drinking in the same building as Ellison. He was there to argue the less attractive position: Drinking is distinctly unhealthy. And not in the typical ways you might associate with alcoholism, but in the sense of increased cancer risk—even for moderate drinkers.
Alcohols potential health benefits may have been oversold by industry-funded research, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
For folks within the realm of public health, thats no surprise. The World Health Organization has recognized alcoholic beverages as a Group 1 carcinogen since 2012, meaning evidence supports a link between alcohol and increased cancer risk. This past March, Jennie Connor, a preventative and social medicine researcher from New Zealands University of Otago, published a review of studies looking at the correlation between drinking and cancer, concluding that there is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites in the body and probably others. Her analysis credits alcohol with nearly 6 percent of all cancer deaths worldwide.
Connors use of the word cause separates her from most alcohol researchers and cancer advocacy groups in the US, where the conversation revolves around a more delicate term: risk. American consumers and researchers are both uncomfortable—or at least unfamiliar—with the idea of alcohol as health threat. When the American Institute for Cancer Research put out a survey to measure public perception of various cancer threats, less than half of respondents believed that alcohol was a risk factor for cancer. Which is odd, because 56 percent thought GMOs were, even though theres no scientific proof that they are.
To be fair, the science around how alcohol impacts the body is still nascent. Ellison and Naimis debate wasnt a mock trial: The public health community is split among people who think alcohol has its benefits and those who caution against its risks. The WHOs designation puts alcohol in the same category as processed meats and sunlight: Theyre carcinogenic, but that label doesnt tell you how much is how carcinogenic. Consumers are faced with the conflicting message that moderate drinking can actually increase their level of good cholesterol and decrease their risk of heart disease, which kills more people in the US than anything else.
Lots of us drink and wed really like to believe drinking is good for us, says Naimi. But the research around that has really fallen apart in the last couple years. Since Ellison made his confident statement into that mic two years ago, Naimi and many of his peers have gone on the offense against the studies that support alcohols potential health benefits, saying they may have been grossly oversold by industry-funded research—in the end, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
Bias in Booze Science
In late 1991, Ellison went on 60 Minutes to share the good news about red wine and heart health, and the idea took off. Underlying his claim were years of observational studies that compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers. A handful of studies found that the moderate drinkers were actually healthier than the non-drinkers.
But in recent years, alcohol scholars like Connor and Naimi have criticized those studies for whats become known as a sick quitters bias. Some of the groups of non-drinkers that were compared to moderate drinkers were actually groups of former alcoholics or people who were too sick to continue drinking, so they were generally sicker than the healthier moderate drinkers. When Naimi adjusted the results in a meta-analysis that took the bias into account, the study still showed that moderate drinkers were better off than non-drinkers when it came to heart health—but not by nearly as much as originally thought.
Ellison says recent studies have gotten more sophisticated about eliminating those selection problems. But thats not the only source of bias in the literature. In the summer of 2014, the journal Addiction published a scathing editorial that outed Ellison for receiving unrestricted educational donations from the (alcohol) industry. That money had supported his work at BU, along with his leadership of a peer group that wrote positive reviews about studies highlighting the potential health benefits of drinking.
It wasnt the first time the journal had called out the often-cozy relationship between alcohol academics and industry. Trade organizations like the Distilled Spirits Council, which represents alcohol companies and is the largest alcohol lobbying arm, often work hand in hand with regulators and researchers. Some researchers go on to work for their industry connections, like Samir Zakhari, a former director at the US National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (the National Institutes of Healths alcohol research division). After he retired from the NIH, he went to work for the Distilled Spirits Council.
The council, for its part, doesnt buy the newer research that highlights the link between alcohol and cancer. Frank Coleman, a spokesman for the DSC, says that many of those meta-analyses are flawed, skewed by cherry-picking data points.
The Trouble with Analyzing Alcohol
Those biases are a direct challenge to the validity of science on alcohol and health. But even if they didnt exist, the nature of drinking still makes it extraordinarily difficult to come up with reliable results. Health risks, including those for cancer, are based on a complex interplay of variables—lifestyle factors, age, genetic predispositions—and they play out differently in each individuals body.
People who drink a bit of wine each day, for example, tend to sit down and drink it with meals. And theyre predominantly wealthier, more privileged consumers—making them predisposed to better health, says Ellison. Beer drinkers also tend to be more susceptible to binge drinking, he says.
Those factors can be difficult to separate from alcohols isolated effect on the body. Were not studying beer or wine specifically, says Ellison. Were studying people who drink them. Even low calorie beers come with a lot of empty calories, says Kenneth Portier, who directs the statistics and evaluation programs at the American Cancer Society. Drink enough of it and it can put you in that other risk factor: obesity.
Ellison doesnt deny that there is a link between alcohol and cancer—he just thinks its only relevant for heavy drinkers. But that starts a whole new debate: What exactly constitutes moderate drinking, and how do you study moderate vs. heavy drinking in study participants with vastly different body sizes, metabolisms, and socioeconomic backgrounds? In order to guide people in making informed decisions, researchers will need resources from somewhere outside the alcohol industry to conduct randomized studies that can isolate alcohols impact on the body over the course of decades.
Still, the less-than-perfect current evidence suggests that about 15 percent of breast cancer deaths are alcohol-related, says Naimi. Nearly 20,000 cancer deaths are attributable to alcohol every year in the US alone, he says, and were not even the worlds biggest drinkers. Simultaneously, the craft beer market has grown into a $22.3 billion industry and AB InBev and SAB Miller, the worlds two largest alcohol companies, are in the midst of a mega merger. If there was ever a time to come to a consensus about what exactly alcohol does to our bodies, it would be now.
Shaping the Message
Connors analysis of existing alcohol research was a turning point for the conversation on booze and cancer. But once youve decided that alcohol is a substantial public health risk, you still need to convince drinkers of that fact. And its a lot easier to tell people drinking is good for them than to explain how and why it isnt.
Things that are familiar to us are perceived as less risky, says Portier. Most of us have been around alcohol our whole lives and we know people who drink and theyre not dead.
It becomes even more difficult to construct a coherent public health message when consumers hear conflicting information. For each drink a woman has per day, her relative risk for breast cancer alone can increase by about 7 percent, says Susan Brown, whos in charge of health education programs at Susan G Komen. But people are often surprised and disappointed that theres an association between alcohol and breast cancer, she says. Many times, they’ve heard that moderate drinking is good for them. That may be confusing or masking the message, she says.
So right now, health groups like Susan G Komen and the American Cancer Society simply emphasize drinking in moderation. In public-health speak, thats defined as one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men (think of a drink more as a glass of wine or a bottle of fairly light beer, rather than a double martini).
But for most consumers, the concept of moderation is most closely tied to the phrase drink responsibly, an alcohol industry catch phrase that reminds customers not to drink too much—without actually defining how much is too much. I worry sometimes that the breweries are trying to change the perception of risk to benefit their own equation, says Portier.
Thats where policy comes into play. In the UK, for example, the Department of Health changed its alcohol guidelines from saying it was safe to drink moderately to acknowledging that there are a number of serious diseases, including certain cancers, that can be caused even when drinking less than 14 units weekly. While the risk for moderate drinking was low, they write, there is no level of regular drinking that can be considered as completely safe.
Related Video
Fun With Powdered Alcohol: You Can Stop Being Scared Now
Look back at the public health messages around tobacco and youll notice they all share a common, simple message: stop smoking. There was no level of moderation that was considered risk-free, so there was no conversation around moderation. Alcohol, on the other hand, has a much more complex message: dont drink too much, make sure you understand what too much means for you, and mitigate the risk of drinking by assessing any other risk factors you may have in your life. Not exactly great fodder for a catchy PSA. But in a world where drinking is so closely tied to culture, it may be the best option.
It all comes down to perception of risk and how you want to live your life, says Portier. Someone who is at a higher risk for heart disease than cancer, for example, may feel more inclined to have a glass of red wine each night than someone who has a strong family history of breast cancer. People should make their own decisions about how much they drink, says Naimi. But I certainly think that people deserve to be more aware of this than they are now.
To get there, Naimi goes back to the idea of conducting long term, comprehensive, randomized studies. Thats something both sides are anxious to see more of. Zakhari, the alcohol expert who works at the Distilled Spirits Council, says its crucial to look at alcohol consumption over a long period of time, since cancer usually develops very slowly. These studies always ask women, how much did you drink last week, last month, last year, he says. But what they were doing last week or last month or last year has nothing to do with the initiation of cancer 20 years earlier. Its like someone has food poisoning today and the doctor asks them what they ate for Christmas in 1980.
Not that help isnt on the way—sort of. According to the Wall Street Journal, AB InBev and Diageo (another heavyweight alcohol producer) are planning to work with a handful of other alcohol companies to pay for a randomized study that will look at the health implications of drinking. Itll be run by the NIAAA, the same government division where Zakhari once worked.
Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/07/the-muddled-link-between-booze-and-cancer/
from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/the-muddled-link-between-booze-and-cancer/
0 notes
Text
The Muddled Link Between Booze and Cancer
A couple years ago, a researcher named Curtis Ellison took the podium in a crowded lecture hall at Boston Universitys School of Public Health to tackle a question that had divided the universitys public health community: whether moderate drinking should be recommended as part of a healthy lifestyle. Ellisons take? I mean, its so obviously yes, he told the crowd.
Youve heard Ellisons pitch before: A glass a day can make for a healthier heart and a longer life. On stage, he told the story of Jackrabbit Johannsen, a famed cross country skier who lived to be 111. Johannsen had four pieces of advice for a long and healthy life, Ellison said: Dont smoke, get lots of exercise, dont drink too much. He paused. On the other hand, dont drink too little, either. The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.
But Ellison wasnt going unchallenged. Watching from the other side of the stage was Tim Naimi, a public health professor at BU who studies binge drinking in the same building as Ellison. He was there to argue the less attractive position: Drinking is distinctly unhealthy. And not in the typical ways you might associate with alcoholism, but in the sense of increased cancer risk—even for moderate drinkers.
Alcohols potential health benefits may have been oversold by industry-funded research, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
For folks within the realm of public health, thats no surprise. The World Health Organization has recognized alcoholic beverages as a Group 1 carcinogen since 2012, meaning evidence supports a link between alcohol and increased cancer risk. This past March, Jennie Connor, a preventative and social medicine researcher from New Zealands University of Otago, published a review of studies looking at the correlation between drinking and cancer, concluding that there is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites in the body and probably others. Her analysis credits alcohol with nearly 6 percent of all cancer deaths worldwide.
Connors use of the word cause separates her from most alcohol researchers and cancer advocacy groups in the US, where the conversation revolves around a more delicate term: risk. American consumers and researchers are both uncomfortable—or at least unfamiliar—with the idea of alcohol as health threat. When the American Institute for Cancer Research put out a survey to measure public perception of various cancer threats, less than half of respondents believed that alcohol was a risk factor for cancer. Which is odd, because 56 percent thought GMOs were, even though theres no scientific proof that they are.
To be fair, the science around how alcohol impacts the body is still nascent. Ellison and Naimis debate wasnt a mock trial: The public health community is split among people who think alcohol has its benefits and those who caution against its risks. The WHOs designation puts alcohol in the same category as processed meats and sunlight: Theyre carcinogenic, but that label doesnt tell you how much is how carcinogenic. Consumers are faced with the conflicting message that moderate drinking can actually increase their level of good cholesterol and decrease their risk of heart disease, which kills more people in the US than anything else.
Lots of us drink and wed really like to believe drinking is good for us, says Naimi. But the research around that has really fallen apart in the last couple years. Since Ellison made his confident statement into that mic two years ago, Naimi and many of his peers have gone on the offense against the studies that support alcohols potential health benefits, saying they may have been grossly oversold by industry-funded research—in the end, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
Bias in Booze Science
In late 1991, Ellison went on 60 Minutes to share the good news about red wine and heart health, and the idea took off. Underlying his claim were years of observational studies that compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers. A handful of studies found that the moderate drinkers were actually healthier than the non-drinkers.
But in recent years, alcohol scholars like Connor and Naimi have criticized those studies for whats become known as a sick quitters bias. Some of the groups of non-drinkers that were compared to moderate drinkers were actually groups of former alcoholics or people who were too sick to continue drinking, so they were generally sicker than the healthier moderate drinkers. When Naimi adjusted the results in a meta-analysis that took the bias into account, the study still showed that moderate drinkers were better off than non-drinkers when it came to heart health—but not by nearly as much as originally thought.
Ellison says recent studies have gotten more sophisticated about eliminating those selection problems. But thats not the only source of bias in the literature. In the summer of 2014, the journal Addiction published a scathing editorial that outed Ellison for receiving unrestricted educational donations from the (alcohol) industry. That money had supported his work at BU, along with his leadership of a peer group that wrote positive reviews about studies highlighting the potential health benefits of drinking.
It wasnt the first time the journal had called out the often-cozy relationship between alcohol academics and industry. Trade organizations like the Distilled Spirits Council, which represents alcohol companies and is the largest alcohol lobbying arm, often work hand in hand with regulators and researchers. Some researchers go on to work for their industry connections, like Samir Zakhari, a former director at the US National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (the National Institutes of Healths alcohol research division). After he retired from the NIH, he went to work for the Distilled Spirits Council.
The council, for its part, doesnt buy the newer research that highlights the link between alcohol and cancer. Frank Coleman, a spokesman for the DSC, says that many of those meta-analyses are flawed, skewed by cherry-picking data points.
The Trouble with Analyzing Alcohol
Those biases are a direct challenge to the validity of science on alcohol and health. But even if they didnt exist, the nature of drinking still makes it extraordinarily difficult to come up with reliable results. Health risks, including those for cancer, are based on a complex interplay of variables—lifestyle factors, age, genetic predispositions—and they play out differently in each individuals body.
People who drink a bit of wine each day, for example, tend to sit down and drink it with meals. And theyre predominantly wealthier, more privileged consumers—making them predisposed to better health, says Ellison. Beer drinkers also tend to be more susceptible to binge drinking, he says.
Those factors can be difficult to separate from alcohols isolated effect on the body. Were not studying beer or wine specifically, says Ellison. Were studying people who drink them. Even low calorie beers come with a lot of empty calories, says Kenneth Portier, who directs the statistics and evaluation programs at the American Cancer Society. Drink enough of it and it can put you in that other risk factor: obesity.
Ellison doesnt deny that there is a link between alcohol and cancer—he just thinks its only relevant for heavy drinkers. But that starts a whole new debate: What exactly constitutes moderate drinking, and how do you study moderate vs. heavy drinking in study participants with vastly different body sizes, metabolisms, and socioeconomic backgrounds? In order to guide people in making informed decisions, researchers will need resources from somewhere outside the alcohol industry to conduct randomized studies that can isolate alcohols impact on the body over the course of decades.
Still, the less-than-perfect current evidence suggests that about 15 percent of breast cancer deaths are alcohol-related, says Naimi. Nearly 20,000 cancer deaths are attributable to alcohol every year in the US alone, he says, and were not even the worlds biggest drinkers. Simultaneously, the craft beer market has grown into a $22.3 billion industry and AB InBev and SAB Miller, the worlds two largest alcohol companies, are in the midst of a mega merger. If there was ever a time to come to a consensus about what exactly alcohol does to our bodies, it would be now.
Shaping the Message
Connors analysis of existing alcohol research was a turning point for the conversation on booze and cancer. But once youve decided that alcohol is a substantial public health risk, you still need to convince drinkers of that fact. And its a lot easier to tell people drinking is good for them than to explain how and why it isnt.
Things that are familiar to us are perceived as less risky, says Portier. Most of us have been around alcohol our whole lives and we know people who drink and theyre not dead.
It becomes even more difficult to construct a coherent public health message when consumers hear conflicting information. For each drink a woman has per day, her relative risk for breast cancer alone can increase by about 7 percent, says Susan Brown, whos in charge of health education programs at Susan G Komen. But people are often surprised and disappointed that theres an association between alcohol and breast cancer, she says. Many times, they’ve heard that moderate drinking is good for them. That may be confusing or masking the message, she says.
So right now, health groups like Susan G Komen and the American Cancer Society simply emphasize drinking in moderation. In public-health speak, thats defined as one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men (think of a drink more as a glass of wine or a bottle of fairly light beer, rather than a double martini).
But for most consumers, the concept of moderation is most closely tied to the phrase drink responsibly, an alcohol industry catch phrase that reminds customers not to drink too much—without actually defining how much is too much. I worry sometimes that the breweries are trying to change the perception of risk to benefit their own equation, says Portier.
Thats where policy comes into play. In the UK, for example, the Department of Health changed its alcohol guidelines from saying it was safe to drink moderately to acknowledging that there are a number of serious diseases, including certain cancers, that can be caused even when drinking less than 14 units weekly. While the risk for moderate drinking was low, they write, there is no level of regular drinking that can be considered as completely safe.
Related Video
Fun With Powdered Alcohol: You Can Stop Being Scared Now
Look back at the public health messages around tobacco and youll notice they all share a common, simple message: stop smoking. There was no level of moderation that was considered risk-free, so there was no conversation around moderation. Alcohol, on the other hand, has a much more complex message: dont drink too much, make sure you understand what too much means for you, and mitigate the risk of drinking by assessing any other risk factors you may have in your life. Not exactly great fodder for a catchy PSA. But in a world where drinking is so closely tied to culture, it may be the best option.
It all comes down to perception of risk and how you want to live your life, says Portier. Someone who is at a higher risk for heart disease than cancer, for example, may feel more inclined to have a glass of red wine each night than someone who has a strong family history of breast cancer. People should make their own decisions about how much they drink, says Naimi. But I certainly think that people deserve to be more aware of this than they are now.
To get there, Naimi goes back to the idea of conducting long term, comprehensive, randomized studies. Thats something both sides are anxious to see more of. Zakhari, the alcohol expert who works at the Distilled Spirits Council, says its crucial to look at alcohol consumption over a long period of time, since cancer usually develops very slowly. These studies always ask women, how much did you drink last week, last month, last year, he says. But what they were doing last week or last month or last year has nothing to do with the initiation of cancer 20 years earlier. Its like someone has food poisoning today and the doctor asks them what they ate for Christmas in 1980.
Not that help isnt on the way—sort of. According to the Wall Street Journal, AB InBev and Diageo (another heavyweight alcohol producer) are planning to work with a handful of other alcohol companies to pay for a randomized study that will look at the health implications of drinking. Itll be run by the NIAAA, the same government division where Zakhari once worked.
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/07/the-muddled-link-between-booze-and-cancer/
from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/163887195402
0 notes
Text
The Muddled Link Between Booze and Cancer
A couple years ago, a researcher named Curtis Ellison took the podium in a crowded lecture hall at Boston Universitys School of Public Health to tackle a question that had divided the universitys public health community: whether moderate drinking should be recommended as part of a healthy lifestyle. Ellisons take? I mean, its so obviously yes, he told the crowd.
Youve heard Ellisons pitch before: A glass a day can make for a healthier heart and a longer life. On stage, he told the story of Jackrabbit Johannsen, a famed cross country skier who lived to be 111. Johannsen had four pieces of advice for a long and healthy life, Ellison said: Dont smoke, get lots of exercise, dont drink too much. He paused. On the other hand, dont drink too little, either. The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.
But Ellison wasnt going unchallenged. Watching from the other side of the stage was Tim Naimi, a public health professor at BU who studies binge drinking in the same building as Ellison. He was there to argue the less attractive position: Drinking is distinctly unhealthy. And not in the typical ways you might associate with alcoholism, but in the sense of increased cancer risk—even for moderate drinkers.
Alcohols potential health benefits may have been oversold by industry-funded research, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
For folks within the realm of public health, thats no surprise. The World Health Organization has recognized alcoholic beverages as a Group 1 carcinogen since 2012, meaning evidence supports a link between alcohol and increased cancer risk. This past March, Jennie Connor, a preventative and social medicine researcher from New Zealands University of Otago, published a review of studies looking at the correlation between drinking and cancer, concluding that there is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites in the body and probably others. Her analysis credits alcohol with nearly 6 percent of all cancer deaths worldwide.
Connors use of the word cause separates her from most alcohol researchers and cancer advocacy groups in the US, where the conversation revolves around a more delicate term: risk. American consumers and researchers are both uncomfortable—or at least unfamiliar—with the idea of alcohol as health threat. When the American Institute for Cancer Research put out a survey to measure public perception of various cancer threats, less than half of respondents believed that alcohol was a risk factor for cancer. Which is odd, because 56 percent thought GMOs were, even though theres no scientific proof that they are.
To be fair, the science around how alcohol impacts the body is still nascent. Ellison and Naimis debate wasnt a mock trial: The public health community is split among people who think alcohol has its benefits and those who caution against its risks. The WHOs designation puts alcohol in the same category as processed meats and sunlight: Theyre carcinogenic, but that label doesnt tell you how much is how carcinogenic. Consumers are faced with the conflicting message that moderate drinking can actually increase their level of good cholesterol and decrease their risk of heart disease, which kills more people in the US than anything else.
Lots of us drink and wed really like to believe drinking is good for us, says Naimi. But the research around that has really fallen apart in the last couple years. Since Ellison made his confident statement into that mic two years ago, Naimi and many of his peers have gone on the offense against the studies that support alcohols potential health benefits, saying they may have been grossly oversold by industry-funded research—in the end, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
Bias in Booze Science
In late 1991, Ellison went on 60 Minutes to share the good news about red wine and heart health, and the idea took off. Underlying his claim were years of observational studies that compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers. A handful of studies found that the moderate drinkers were actually healthier than the non-drinkers.
But in recent years, alcohol scholars like Connor and Naimi have criticized those studies for whats become known as a sick quitters bias. Some of the groups of non-drinkers that were compared to moderate drinkers were actually groups of former alcoholics or people who were too sick to continue drinking, so they were generally sicker than the healthier moderate drinkers. When Naimi adjusted the results in a meta-analysis that took the bias into account, the study still showed that moderate drinkers were better off than non-drinkers when it came to heart health—but not by nearly as much as originally thought.
Ellison says recent studies have gotten more sophisticated about eliminating those selection problems. But thats not the only source of bias in the literature. In the summer of 2014, the journal Addiction published a scathing editorial that outed Ellison for receiving unrestricted educational donations from the (alcohol) industry. That money had supported his work at BU, along with his leadership of a peer group that wrote positive reviews about studies highlighting the potential health benefits of drinking.
It wasnt the first time the journal had called out the often-cozy relationship between alcohol academics and industry. Trade organizations like the Distilled Spirits Council, which represents alcohol companies and is the largest alcohol lobbying arm, often work hand in hand with regulators and researchers. Some researchers go on to work for their industry connections, like Samir Zakhari, a former director at the US National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (the National Institutes of Healths alcohol research division). After he retired from the NIH, he went to work for the Distilled Spirits Council.
The council, for its part, doesnt buy the newer research that highlights the link between alcohol and cancer. Frank Coleman, a spokesman for the DSC, says that many of those meta-analyses are flawed, skewed by cherry-picking data points.
The Trouble with Analyzing Alcohol
Those biases are a direct challenge to the validity of science on alcohol and health. But even if they didnt exist, the nature of drinking still makes it extraordinarily difficult to come up with reliable results. Health risks, including those for cancer, are based on a complex interplay of variables—lifestyle factors, age, genetic predispositions—and they play out differently in each individuals body.
People who drink a bit of wine each day, for example, tend to sit down and drink it with meals. And theyre predominantly wealthier, more privileged consumers—making them predisposed to better health, says Ellison. Beer drinkers also tend to be more susceptible to binge drinking, he says.
Those factors can be difficult to separate from alcohols isolated effect on the body. Were not studying beer or wine specifically, says Ellison. Were studying people who drink them. Even low calorie beers come with a lot of empty calories, says Kenneth Portier, who directs the statistics and evaluation programs at the American Cancer Society. Drink enough of it and it can put you in that other risk factor: obesity.
Ellison doesnt deny that there is a link between alcohol and cancer—he just thinks its only relevant for heavy drinkers. But that starts a whole new debate: What exactly constitutes moderate drinking, and how do you study moderate vs. heavy drinking in study participants with vastly different body sizes, metabolisms, and socioeconomic backgrounds? In order to guide people in making informed decisions, researchers will need resources from somewhere outside the alcohol industry to conduct randomized studies that can isolate alcohols impact on the body over the course of decades.
Still, the less-than-perfect current evidence suggests that about 15 percent of breast cancer deaths are alcohol-related, says Naimi. Nearly 20,000 cancer deaths are attributable to alcohol every year in the US alone, he says, and were not even the worlds biggest drinkers. Simultaneously, the craft beer market has grown into a $22.3 billion industry and AB InBev and SAB Miller, the worlds two largest alcohol companies, are in the midst of a mega merger. If there was ever a time to come to a consensus about what exactly alcohol does to our bodies, it would be now.
Shaping the Message
Connors analysis of existing alcohol research was a turning point for the conversation on booze and cancer. But once youve decided that alcohol is a substantial public health risk, you still need to convince drinkers of that fact. And its a lot easier to tell people drinking is good for them than to explain how and why it isnt.
Things that are familiar to us are perceived as less risky, says Portier. Most of us have been around alcohol our whole lives and we know people who drink and theyre not dead.
It becomes even more difficult to construct a coherent public health message when consumers hear conflicting information. For each drink a woman has per day, her relative risk for breast cancer alone can increase by about 7 percent, says Susan Brown, whos in charge of health education programs at Susan G Komen. But people are often surprised and disappointed that theres an association between alcohol and breast cancer, she says. Many times, they’ve heard that moderate drinking is good for them. That may be confusing or masking the message, she says.
So right now, health groups like Susan G Komen and the American Cancer Society simply emphasize drinking in moderation. In public-health speak, thats defined as one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men (think of a drink more as a glass of wine or a bottle of fairly light beer, rather than a double martini).
But for most consumers, the concept of moderation is most closely tied to the phrase drink responsibly, an alcohol industry catch phrase that reminds customers not to drink too much—without actually defining how much is too much. I worry sometimes that the breweries are trying to change the perception of risk to benefit their own equation, says Portier.
Thats where policy comes into play. In the UK, for example, the Department of Health changed its alcohol guidelines from saying it was safe to drink moderately to acknowledging that there are a number of serious diseases, including certain cancers, that can be caused even when drinking less than 14 units weekly. While the risk for moderate drinking was low, they write, there is no level of regular drinking that can be considered as completely safe.
Related Video
Fun With Powdered Alcohol: You Can Stop Being Scared Now
Look back at the public health messages around tobacco and youll notice they all share a common, simple message: stop smoking. There was no level of moderation that was considered risk-free, so there was no conversation around moderation. Alcohol, on the other hand, has a much more complex message: dont drink too much, make sure you understand what too much means for you, and mitigate the risk of drinking by assessing any other risk factors you may have in your life. Not exactly great fodder for a catchy PSA. But in a world where drinking is so closely tied to culture, it may be the best option.
It all comes down to perception of risk and how you want to live your life, says Portier. Someone who is at a higher risk for heart disease than cancer, for example, may feel more inclined to have a glass of red wine each night than someone who has a strong family history of breast cancer. People should make their own decisions about how much they drink, says Naimi. But I certainly think that people deserve to be more aware of this than they are now.
To get there, Naimi goes back to the idea of conducting long term, comprehensive, randomized studies. Thats something both sides are anxious to see more of. Zakhari, the alcohol expert who works at the Distilled Spirits Council, says its crucial to look at alcohol consumption over a long period of time, since cancer usually develops very slowly. These studies always ask women, how much did you drink last week, last month, last year, he says. But what they were doing last week or last month or last year has nothing to do with the initiation of cancer 20 years earlier. Its like someone has food poisoning today and the doctor asks them what they ate for Christmas in 1980.
Not that help isnt on the way—sort of. According to the Wall Street Journal, AB InBev and Diageo (another heavyweight alcohol producer) are planning to work with a handful of other alcohol companies to pay for a randomized study that will look at the health implications of drinking. Itll be run by the NIAAA, the same government division where Zakhari once worked.
source http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/07/the-muddled-link-between-booze-and-cancer/
from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-muddled-link-between-booze-and.html
0 notes
Text
The Muddled Link Between Booze and Cancer
A couple years ago, a researcher named Curtis Ellison took the podium in a crowded lecture hall at Boston Universitys School of Public Health to tackle a question that had divided the universitys public health community: whether moderate drinking should be recommended as part of a healthy lifestyle. Ellisons take? I mean, its so obviously yes, he told the crowd.
Youve heard Ellisons pitch before: A glass a day can make for a healthier heart and a longer life. On stage, he told the story of Jackrabbit Johannsen, a famed cross country skier who lived to be 111. Johannsen had four pieces of advice for a long and healthy life, Ellison said: Dont smoke, get lots of exercise, dont drink too much. He paused. On the other hand, dont drink too little, either. The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.
But Ellison wasnt going unchallenged. Watching from the other side of the stage was Tim Naimi, a public health professor at BU who studies binge drinking in the same building as Ellison. He was there to argue the less attractive position: Drinking is distinctly unhealthy. And not in the typical ways you might associate with alcoholism, but in the sense of increased cancer risk—even for moderate drinkers.
Alcohols potential health benefits may have been oversold by industry-funded research, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
For folks within the realm of public health, thats no surprise. The World Health Organization has recognized alcoholic beverages as a Group 1 carcinogen since 2012, meaning evidence supports a link between alcohol and increased cancer risk. This past March, Jennie Connor, a preventative and social medicine researcher from New Zealands University of Otago, published a review of studies looking at the correlation between drinking and cancer, concluding that there is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites in the body and probably others. Her analysis credits alcohol with nearly 6 percent of all cancer deaths worldwide.
Connors use of the word cause separates her from most alcohol researchers and cancer advocacy groups in the US, where the conversation revolves around a more delicate term: risk. American consumers and researchers are both uncomfortable—or at least unfamiliar—with the idea of alcohol as health threat. When the American Institute for Cancer Research put out a survey to measure public perception of various cancer threats, less than half of respondents believed that alcohol was a risk factor for cancer. Which is odd, because 56 percent thought GMOs were, even though theres no scientific proof that they are.
To be fair, the science around how alcohol impacts the body is still nascent. Ellison and Naimis debate wasnt a mock trial: The public health community is split among people who think alcohol has its benefits and those who caution against its risks. The WHOs designation puts alcohol in the same category as processed meats and sunlight: Theyre carcinogenic, but that label doesnt tell you how much is how carcinogenic. Consumers are faced with the conflicting message that moderate drinking can actually increase their level of good cholesterol and decrease their risk of heart disease, which kills more people in the US than anything else.
Lots of us drink and wed really like to believe drinking is good for us, says Naimi. But the research around that has really fallen apart in the last couple years. Since Ellison made his confident statement into that mic two years ago, Naimi and many of his peers have gone on the offense against the studies that support alcohols potential health benefits, saying they may have been grossly oversold by industry-funded research—in the end, distracting consumers from the realities of cancer risk.
Bias in Booze Science
In late 1991, Ellison went on 60 Minutes to share the good news about red wine and heart health, and the idea took off. Underlying his claim were years of observational studies that compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers. A handful of studies found that the moderate drinkers were actually healthier than the non-drinkers.
But in recent years, alcohol scholars like Connor and Naimi have criticized those studies for whats become known as a sick quitters bias. Some of the groups of non-drinkers that were compared to moderate drinkers were actually groups of former alcoholics or people who were too sick to continue drinking, so they were generally sicker than the healthier moderate drinkers. When Naimi adjusted the results in a meta-analysis that took the bias into account, the study still showed that moderate drinkers were better off than non-drinkers when it came to heart health—but not by nearly as much as originally thought.
Ellison says recent studies have gotten more sophisticated about eliminating those selection problems. But thats not the only source of bias in the literature. In the summer of 2014, the journal Addiction published a scathing editorial that outed Ellison for receiving unrestricted educational donations from the (alcohol) industry. That money had supported his work at BU, along with his leadership of a peer group that wrote positive reviews about studies highlighting the potential health benefits of drinking.
It wasnt the first time the journal had called out the often-cozy relationship between alcohol academics and industry. Trade organizations like the Distilled Spirits Council, which represents alcohol companies and is the largest alcohol lobbying arm, often work hand in hand with regulators and researchers. Some researchers go on to work for their industry connections, like Samir Zakhari, a former director at the US National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (the National Institutes of Healths alcohol research division). After he retired from the NIH, he went to work for the Distilled Spirits Council.
The council, for its part, doesnt buy the newer research that highlights the link between alcohol and cancer. Frank Coleman, a spokesman for the DSC, says that many of those meta-analyses are flawed, skewed by cherry-picking data points.
The Trouble with Analyzing Alcohol
Those biases are a direct challenge to the validity of science on alcohol and health. But even if they didnt exist, the nature of drinking still makes it extraordinarily difficult to come up with reliable results. Health risks, including those for cancer, are based on a complex interplay of variables—lifestyle factors, age, genetic predispositions—and they play out differently in each individuals body.
People who drink a bit of wine each day, for example, tend to sit down and drink it with meals. And theyre predominantly wealthier, more privileged consumers—making them predisposed to better health, says Ellison. Beer drinkers also tend to be more susceptible to binge drinking, he says.
Those factors can be difficult to separate from alcohols isolated effect on the body. Were not studying beer or wine specifically, says Ellison. Were studying people who drink them. Even low calorie beers come with a lot of empty calories, says Kenneth Portier, who directs the statistics and evaluation programs at the American Cancer Society. Drink enough of it and it can put you in that other risk factor: obesity.
Ellison doesnt deny that there is a link between alcohol and cancer—he just thinks its only relevant for heavy drinkers. But that starts a whole new debate: What exactly constitutes moderate drinking, and how do you study moderate vs. heavy drinking in study participants with vastly different body sizes, metabolisms, and socioeconomic backgrounds? In order to guide people in making informed decisions, researchers will need resources from somewhere outside the alcohol industry to conduct randomized studies that can isolate alcohols impact on the body over the course of decades.
Still, the less-than-perfect current evidence suggests that about 15 percent of breast cancer deaths are alcohol-related, says Naimi. Nearly 20,000 cancer deaths are attributable to alcohol every year in the US alone, he says, and were not even the worlds biggest drinkers. Simultaneously, the craft beer market has grown into a $22.3 billion industry and AB InBev and SAB Miller, the worlds two largest alcohol companies, are in the midst of a mega merger. If there was ever a time to come to a consensus about what exactly alcohol does to our bodies, it would be now.
Shaping the Message
Connors analysis of existing alcohol research was a turning point for the conversation on booze and cancer. But once youve decided that alcohol is a substantial public health risk, you still need to convince drinkers of that fact. And its a lot easier to tell people drinking is good for them than to explain how and why it isnt.
Things that are familiar to us are perceived as less risky, says Portier. Most of us have been around alcohol our whole lives and we know people who drink and theyre not dead.
It becomes even more difficult to construct a coherent public health message when consumers hear conflicting information. For each drink a woman has per day, her relative risk for breast cancer alone can increase by about 7 percent, says Susan Brown, whos in charge of health education programs at Susan G Komen. But people are often surprised and disappointed that theres an association between alcohol and breast cancer, she says. Many times, they’ve heard that moderate drinking is good for them. That may be confusing or masking the message, she says.
So right now, health groups like Susan G Komen and the American Cancer Society simply emphasize drinking in moderation. In public-health speak, thats defined as one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men (think of a drink more as a glass of wine or a bottle of fairly light beer, rather than a double martini).
But for most consumers, the concept of moderation is most closely tied to the phrase drink responsibly, an alcohol industry catch phrase that reminds customers not to drink too much—without actually defining how much is too much. I worry sometimes that the breweries are trying to change the perception of risk to benefit their own equation, says Portier.
Thats where policy comes into play. In the UK, for example, the Department of Health changed its alcohol guidelines from saying it was safe to drink moderately to acknowledging that there are a number of serious diseases, including certain cancers, that can be caused even when drinking less than 14 units weekly. While the risk for moderate drinking was low, they write, there is no level of regular drinking that can be considered as completely safe.
Related Video
Fun With Powdered Alcohol: You Can Stop Being Scared Now
Look back at the public health messages around tobacco and youll notice they all share a common, simple message: stop smoking. There was no level of moderation that was considered risk-free, so there was no conversation around moderation. Alcohol, on the other hand, has a much more complex message: dont drink too much, make sure you understand what too much means for you, and mitigate the risk of drinking by assessing any other risk factors you may have in your life. Not exactly great fodder for a catchy PSA. But in a world where drinking is so closely tied to culture, it may be the best option.
It all comes down to perception of risk and how you want to live your life, says Portier. Someone who is at a higher risk for heart disease than cancer, for example, may feel more inclined to have a glass of red wine each night than someone who has a strong family history of breast cancer. People should make their own decisions about how much they drink, says Naimi. But I certainly think that people deserve to be more aware of this than they are now.
To get there, Naimi goes back to the idea of conducting long term, comprehensive, randomized studies. Thats something both sides are anxious to see more of. Zakhari, the alcohol expert who works at the Distilled Spirits Council, says its crucial to look at alcohol consumption over a long period of time, since cancer usually develops very slowly. These studies always ask women, how much did you drink last week, last month, last year, he says. But what they were doing last week or last month or last year has nothing to do with the initiation of cancer 20 years earlier. Its like someone has food poisoning today and the doctor asks them what they ate for Christmas in 1980.
Not that help isnt on the way—sort of. According to the Wall Street Journal, AB InBev and Diageo (another heavyweight alcohol producer) are planning to work with a handful of other alcohol companies to pay for a randomized study that will look at the health implications of drinking. Itll be run by the NIAAA, the same government division where Zakhari once worked.
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/07/the-muddled-link-between-booze-and-cancer/
0 notes
Text
Is the world really better than ever?
The long read: The headlines have never been worse. But an increasingly influential group of thinkers insists that humankind has never had it so good and only our pessimism is holding us back
By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude that everything was terrible, and that the only attitude that made sense was one of profound pessimism tempered, perhaps, by cynical humour, on the principle that if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, one may as well try to enjoy the ride. Naturally, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump loomed largest for many. But you didnt need to be a remainer or a critic of Trumps to feel depressed by the carnage in Syria; by the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean; by North Korean missile tests, the spread of the zika virus, or terror attacks in Nice, Belgium, Florida, Pakistan and elsewhere nor by the spectre of catastrophic climate change, lurking behind everything else. (And all thats before even considering the string of deaths of beloved celebrities that seemed like a calculated attempt, on 2016s part, to rub salt in the wound: in the space of a few months, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher and George Michael, to name only a handful, were all gone.) And few of the headlines so far in 2017 Grenfell tower, the Manchester and London attacks, Brexit chaos, and 24/7 Trump provide any reason to take a sunnier view.
Yet one group of increasingly prominent commentators has seemed uniquely immune to the gloom. In December, in an article headlined Never forget that we live in the best of times, the Times columnist Philip Collins provided an end-of-year summary of reasons to be cheerful: during 2016, he noted, the proportion of the worlds population living in extreme poverty had fallen below 10% for the first time; global carbon emissions from fossil fuels had failed to rise for the third year running; the death penalty had been ruled illegal in more than half of all countries and giant pandas had been removed from the endangered species list.
In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof declared that by many measures, 2016 was the best year in the history of humanity, with falling global inequality, child mortality roughly half what it had been as recently as 1990, and 300,000 more people gaining access to electricity each day. Throughout 2016 and into 2017, alongside Collins at the Times, the author and former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley the title of whose book The Rational Optimist makes his inclinations plain kept up his weekly output of ebullient columns celebrating the promise of artificial intelligence, free trade and fracking. By the time the professional contrarian Brendan ONeill delivered his own version of the argument, in the Spectator (Nothing better sums up the aloofness of the chattering class than their blathering about 2016 being the worst year ever) the viewpoint was becoming sufficiently well-entrenched that ONeill seemed in danger of forfeiting his contrarianism.
The loose but growing collection of pundits, academics and thinktank operatives who endorse this stubbornly cheerful, handbasket-free account of our situation have occasionally been labelled the New Optimists, a name intended to evoke the rebellious scepticism of the New Atheists led by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And from their perspective, our prevailing mood of despair is irrational, and frankly a bit self-indulgent. They argue that it says more about us than it does about how things really are illustrating a certain tendency toward collective self-flagellation, and an unwillingness to believe in the power of human ingenuity. And that it is best explained as the result of various psychological biases that served a purpose on the prehistoric savannah but now, in a media-saturated era, constantly mislead us.
Once upon a time, it was of great survival value to be worried about everything that could go wrong, says Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian and self-declared New Optimist whose book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future was published just before Trump won the presidency last year. This is what makes bad news especially compelling: in our evolutionary past, it was a very good thing that your attention could be easily seized by negative information, since it might well indicate an imminent risk to your own survival. (The cave-dweller who always assumed there was a lion behind the next rock would usually be wrong but hed be much more likely to survive and reproduce than one who always assumed the opposite.) But that was all before newspapers, television and the internet: in these hyper-connected times, our addiction to bad news just leads us to vacuum up depressing or enraging stories from across the globe, whether they threaten us or not, and therefore to conclude that things are much worse than they are.
Really good news, on the other hand, can be a lot harder to spot partly because it tends to occur gradually. Max Roser, an Oxford economist who spreads the New Optimist gospel via his Twitter feed, pointed out recently that a newspaper could legitimately have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last 25 years. But none would have done so, because predictable daily events, by definition, arent newsworthy. And youll rarely see a headline about a bad event that failed to occur. But surely any judicious assessment of our situation ought to take into account all the wars, pandemics and natural disasters that might hypothetically have happened but didnt?
I used to be a pessimist myself, says Norberg, an urbane 43-year-old raised in Stockholm who is now a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington DC. I used to long for the good old days. But then I started reading history, and asking myself, well, where would I have been in those good old days, in my ancestors northern Sweden? I probably wouldnt have been anywhere. Life expectancy was too short. They mixed tree bark in the bread, to make it last longer!
In his book, Norberg canters through 10 of the most important basic indicators of human flourishing food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the state of the environment, literacy, freedom, equality and the conditions of childhood. And he takes special pleasure in squelching the fantasies of anyone inclined to wish they had been born a couple of centuries back: it wasnt so long ago, he observes, that dogs gnawed at the abandoned corpses of plague victims in the streets of European cities. As recently as 1882, only 2% of homes in New York had running water; in 1900, worldwide life expectancy was a paltry 31, thanks both to early adult death and rampant child mortality. Today, by contrast, its 71 and those extra decades involve far less suffering, too. If it takes you 20 minutes to read this chapter, Norberg writes at one point, in his own variation on the New Optimists favourite refrain, almost another 2,000 people will have risen out of [extreme] poverty currently defined as living on less than $1.90 per day.
These barrages of upbeat statistics seem intended to have the effect of demolishing the usual intractable political disagreements about the state of the planet. The New Optimists invite us to forget our partisan biases and tribal loyalties; to dispense with our cherished theories about what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it, and breathe, instead, the refreshing air of objective fact. The data doesnt lie. Just look at the numbers!
But numbers, it turns out, can be as political as anything else.
The New Optimists are certainly right on the nostalgia front: nobody in their right mind should wish to have lived in a previous century. In a 2015 survey for YouGov, 65% of British people (and 81% of the French) said they thought the world was getting worse but judged according to numerous sensible metrics, theyre simply wrong. People are indeed rising out of extreme poverty at an extraordinary rate; child mortality really has plummeted; standards of literacy, sanitation and life expectancy have never been higher. The average European or American enjoys luxuries medieval potentates literally couldnt have imagined. The essential finding of Steven Pinkers 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, a key reference text for the New Optimists, seems also to have been largely accepted: that we are living in historys most peaceful era, with violence of all kinds from deaths in war to schoolyard bullying in steep decline.
But the New Optimists arent primarily interested in persuading us that human life involves a lot less suffering than it did a few hundred years ago. (Even if youre a card-carrying pessimist, you probably didnt need convincing of that fact.) Nestled inside that essentially indisputable claim, there are several more controversial implications. For example: that since things have so clearly been improving, we have good reason to assume they will continue to improve. And further though this is a claim only sometimes made explicit in the work of the New Optimists that whatever weve been doing these past decades, its clearly working, and so the political and economic arrangements that have brought us here are the ones we ought to stick with. Optimism, after all, means more than just believing that things arent as bad as you imagined: it means having justified confidence that they will be getting even better soon. Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis, Ridley wrote after the financial crisis of 2007-8, because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialise honestly for the betterment of all I am a rational optimist: rational, because I have arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence.
Illustration by Pete Gamlen
If all this were really true, it would suggest that an overwhelming proportion of the energy we dedicate to debating the state of humanity all the political outrage, the warnings of imminent disaster, the exasperated op-ed columns, all our anxiety and guilt about the misery afflicting people all over the world is wasted. Or, worse, it might be counterproductive, insofar as a belief that things are irredeemably awful seems like a bad way to motivate people to make things better, and thus in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Here are the facts, wrote the American economist Julian Simon, whose vocal opposition to the gloomy predictions of environmentalists and population experts in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for todays New Optimists. On average, people throughout the world have been living longer and eating better than ever before. Fewer people die of famine nowadays than in earlier centuries every single measure of material and environmental welfare in the United States has improved rather than deteriorated. This is also true of the world taken as a whole. All the long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.
Those are the facts. So why arent we all New Optimists now?
Optimists have been telling doom-mongersto cheer up since at least 1710, when the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz concluded that ours must be the best of all possible worlds, on the grounds that God, being perfect and merciful, would hardly have created one of the more mediocre ones instead. But the most recent outbreak of positivity may be best understood as a reaction to the pessimism triggered by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. For one thing, those attacks were a textbook example of the kind of high-visibility bad news that activates our cognitive biases, convincing us that the world is becoming lethally dangerous when really it isnt: in reality, a slightly higher number of Americans were killed while riding motorcycles in 2001 than died in the World Trade Center and on the hijacked planes.
But the New Optimism is also a rejoinder to the kind of introspection that gained pace in the west after 9/11, and subsequently the Iraq war the feeling that, whether or not the new global insecurity was all our fault, it certainly demanded self-criticism and reflection, rather than simply a more strident assertion of the merits of our worldview. (The whole world hates us, and we deserve it, is how the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner derisively characterises this attitude.) On the contrary, the optimists insist, the data demonstrates that the global dominance of western power and ideas over the last two centuries has seen a transformative improvement in almost everyones quality of life. Matt Ridley likes to quote a predecessor of the contemporary optimists, the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
The despondent self-criticism that frustrates the New Optimists is fuelled in part at least the way they see it by a kind of optical illusion in the way we think about progress. As Steven Pinker observes, whenever youre busy judging governments or economic systems for falling short of standards of decency, its all too easy to lose sight of how those standards themselves have altered over time. We are scandalised by reports of prisoners being tortured by the CIA but only thanks to the historically recent emergence of a general consensus that torture is beyond the pale. (In medieval England, it was a relatively unremarkable feature of the criminal justice system.) We can be appalled by the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean only because we start from the position that unknown strangers from distant lands are worthy of moral consideration a notion that would probably have struck most of us as absurd had we been born in 1700. Yet the stronger this kind of consensus grows, the more unconscionable each violation of it will seem. And so, ironically enough, the outrage you feel when you read the headlines is actually evidence that this is a magnificent time to be alive. (A recent addition to the New Optimist bookshelf, The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer, binds this argument directly to the optimists faith in science: it is scientific progress, he argues, that is destined to make us ever more ethical.)
The nagging suspicion that this argument is somehow based on a sleight of hand it would seem to permit any outrage to be reinterpreted as evidence of our betterment may lead you to another objection: even if its true that everything really is so much better than ever, why assume things will continue to improve? Improvements in sanitation and life expectancy cant prevent rising sea levels destroying your country. And its dangerous, more generally, to predict future results by past performance: view things on a sufficiently long timescale, and it becomes impossible to tell whether the progress the New Optimists celebrate is evidence of historys steady upward trajectory, or just a blip.
Almost every advance Norberg champions in his book Progress, for example, took place in the last 200 years a fact that the optimists take as evidence of the unstoppable potency of modern civilisation, but which might just as easily be taken as evidence of how rare such periods of progress are. Humans have been around for 200,000 years; extrapolating from a 200-year stretch seems unwise. We risk making the mistake of the 19th-century British historian Henry Buckle, who confidently declared, in his book History of Civilization in England, that war would soon be a thing of the past. That this barbarous pursuit is, in the progress of society, steadily declining, must be evident, even to the most hasty reader of European history, he wrote. It was 1857; Buckle seemed confident that the recently concluded Crimean war would be one of the last.
But the real concern here is not that the steady progress of the last two centuries will gradually swing into reverse, plunging us back to the conditions of the past; its that the world we have created the very engine of all that progress is so complex, volatile and unpredictable that catastrophe might befall us at any moment. Steven Pinker may be absolutely correct that fewer and fewer people are resorting to violence to settle their disagreements, but (as he would concede) it only takes a single angry narcissist in possession of the nuclear codes to spark a global disaster. Digital technology has unquestionably helped fuel a worldwide surge in economic growth, but if cyberterrorists use it to bring down the planets financial infrastructure next month, that growth might rather swiftly become moot.
The point is that if something does go seriously wrong in our societies, its really hard to see where it stops, says David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, who takes a less sanguine view of the future, and who has debated New Optimists such as Ridley and Norberg. The thought that, say, the next financial crisis, in a world as interconnected and algorithmically driven as our world, could simply spiral out of control that is not an irrational thought. Which makes it quite hard to be blithely optimistic. When you live in a world where everything seems to be getting better, yet it could all collapse tomorrow, its perfectly rational to be freaked out.
Runciman raises a related and equally troubling thought about modern politics, in his book The Confidence Trap. Democracy seems to be doing well: the New Optimists note that there are now about 120 democracies among the worlds 193 countries, up from just 40 in 1972. But what if its the very strength of democracy and our complacency about its capacity to withstand almost anything that augurs its eventual collapse? Could it be that our real problem is not an excess of pessimism, as the New Optimists maintain, but a dangerous degree of overconfidence?
According to this argument, the people who voted for Trump and Brexit didnt really do so because they had concluded their system was broken, and needed to be replaced. On the contrary: they voted as they did precisely because they had grown too confident that the essential security provided by government would always be there for them, whatever incendiary choice they made at the ballot-box. People voted for Trump because they didnt believe him, Runciman has written. They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump. The problem with this pattern delivering electoral shocks because youre confident the system can withstand them is that theres no reason to assume it can continue indefinitely: at some point, the damage may not be repairable. The New Optimists describe a world in which human agency doesnt seem to matter, because there are these evolved forces that are moving us in the right direction, Runciman says. But human agency does still matter human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing.
The optimists arent unaware of such risks but it is a reliable feature of the optimistic mindset that one can usually find an upbeat interpretation of the same seemingly scary facts. Youre asking, Am I the man who falls out of a skyscraper, and as he passes the second storey, says, So far, so good? Matt Ridley says. And the answer is, well, actually, in the past, people have foreseen catastrophe just around the corner and been wrong about it so often that this a relevant fact to take into account. History does seem to bear Ridley out. Then again, of course it does: if a civilisation-ending catastrophe had in fact occurred, you presumably wouldnt be reading this now. People who predict imminent catastrophes are usually wrong. On the other hand, they need only be right once.
If there is a single momentthat signalled the birth of the New Optimism, it was fittingly, somehow a TED talk, delivered in 2006 by the Swedish statistician and self-styled edutainer Hans Rosling, who died earlier this year. Entitled The best stats youve ever seen, Roslings talk summarised the results of an ingenious study he had conducted among Swedish university students. Presenting them with pairs of countries Russia and Malaysia, Turkey and Sri Lanka, and so on he asked them to guess which scored better on various measures of health, such as child mortality rates. The students reliably got it wrong, basing their answers on the assumption that countries closer to their own, both geographically and ethnically, must be better off.
But in fact Rosling had picked the pairs to prove a point: Russia had twice Malaysias child mortality, and Turkey twice that of Sri Lanka. Part of the defeatist mindset of the modern west, the way Rosling saw it, was the deeply ingrained assumption that we are living through times that are as good as theyre ever going to be and that the future we are bequeathing, to future generations and especially to the world beyond Europe and north America, can only be a disheartening one. Rosling enjoyed observing that if you had run this experiment on chimpanzees by labelling a banana with the name of each country and inviting them to pick one, they would have performed better than the students, since they would be right half the time, thanks to chance. Well-educated European humans, by contrast, get things far wronger than chance. We are not merely ignorant of the facts; we are actively convinced of depressing facts that arent true.
Its exhilarating to watch The best stats youve ever seen today partly because of Roslings nerdy, high-energy stage performance, but also because it seems to shine the bracing light of objective fact on questions usually mired in angry partisanship. Far more than when he delivered the talk, we live now in the Age of the Take, in which a seemingly infinite supply of blog posts, opinion columns, books and TV talking heads compete to tell us how to feel about the news. Most of this opinionising focuses less on stacking up hard facts in favour of an argument than it does on declaring what attitude you ought to adopt: the typical take invites you to conclude, say, that Donald Trump is a fascist, or that he isnt, or that BBC presenters are overpaid, or that your yoga practice is an instance of cultural appropriation. (This shouldnt really come as a surprise: the internet economy is fuelled by attention, and its far easier to seize someones attention with emotionally charged argument than mere information plus you dont have to pay for the expensive reporting required to ferret out the facts.) The New Optimists promise something different: a way to feel about the state of the world based on the way it really is.
Illustration by Pete Gamlen
But after steeping yourself in their work, you begin to wonder if all their upbeat factoids really do speak for themselves. For a start, why assume that the correct comparison to be making is the one between the world as it was, say, 200 years ago, and the world as it is today? You might argue that comparing the present with the past is stacking the deck. Of course things are better than they were. But theyre surely nowhere near as good as they ought to be. To pick some obvious examples, humanity indisputably has the capacity to eliminate extreme poverty, end famines, or radically reduce human damage to the climate. But weve done none of these, and the fact that things arent as terrible as they were in 1800 is arguably beside the point.
Ironically, given their reliance on cognitive biases to explain our predilection for negativity, the New Optimists may be in the grip of one themselves: the anchoring bias, which describes our tendency to rely too heavily on certain pieces of information when making judgments. If you start from the fact that plague victims once languished in the streets of European cities, its natural to conclude that life these days is wonderful. But if you start from the position that we could have eliminated famines, or reversed global warming, the fact that such problems persist may provoke a different kind of judgment.
The argument that we should be feeling happier than we are because life on the planet as a whole is getting better, on average, also misunderstands a fundamental truth about how happiness works: our judgments of the world result from making specific comparisons that feel relevant to us, not on adopting what David Runciman refers to as the view from outer space. If people in your small American town are far less economically secure than they were in living memory, or if youre a young British person facing the prospect that you might never own a home, its not particularly consoling to be told that more and more Chinese people are entering the middle classes. At book readings in the US midwest, Ridley recalls, audience members frequently questioned his optimism on the grounds that their own lives didnt seem to be on an upward trajectory. Theyd say, You keep saying the worlds getting better, but it doesnt feel like that round here. And I would say, Yes, but this isnt the whole world! Are you not even a little bit cheered by the fact that really poor Africans are getting a bit less poor? There is a sense in which this is a fair point. But theres another sense in which its a completely irrelevant one.
At its heart, the New Optimism is an ideological argument: broadly speaking, its proponents are advocates for the power of free markets, and they intend their sunny picture of humanitys recent past and imminent future to vindicate their politics. This is a perfectly legitimate political argument to make but its still a political argument, not a straightforward, neutral reliance on objective facts. The claim that we are living in a golden age, and that our dominant mood of pessimism is unwarranted, is not an antidote to the Age of the Take, but a Take like any other and it makes just as much sense to adopt the opposite view. What I dislike, Runciman says, is this assumption that if you push back against their argument, what youre saying is that all these things are not worth valuing For people to feel deeply uneasy about the world we inhabit now, despite all these indicators pointing up, seems to me reasonable, given the relative instability of the evidence of this progress, and the [unpredictability] that overhangs it. Everything really is pretty fragile.
Johan Norberg, who launched his book Progress two months before the US presidential election, watched the results come in on a foggy morning in Stockholm, at a party organised by the American embassy. As Trumps victory became a certainty, the atmosphere turned from one of rumbling alarm to horrified disbelief. We were all Swedes in the media, politics, business and so on I think it would have been hard to find a single person there who had hoped for a Trump win so pretty soon the mood was going downhill dramatically, Norberg recalled. And whats more, they didnt have any alcohol, which didnt help, because everyone was saying: We need something strong here! But they had it more set up like a breakfast thing. He smiled. I think Americans dont really understand Swedes.
The populist surges of the last two years in the US and Britain powering the rise of Trump, the Brexit vote, and the unpredicted levels of support for Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn pose a complicated problem for the New Optimists. On the one hand, its easy enough to characterise such anger directed toward political establishments as a mistake, based on a failure to perceive how well things are going; or as a legitimate reaction to real, but localised and temporary bumps in the road, which neednt constitute any larger argument for pessimism. On the other hand, it is a curious view of the world that sees such political waves solely as responses, mistaken or otherwise, to the real situation. They are part of that real situation. Even if you think that Trump supporters, say, were wholly in error to perceive their situation negatively, the perception itself was real enough and they really did elect Trump, with all his potential for destabilisation. (The New Optimists, says David Runciman, think of politics as nothing more than an annoyance, because in their view the things that drive progress are not political. But the things that drive failure are political.) There is a point at which it stops being so relevant whether widespread pessimism and anxiety can be justified or not, and becomes more relevant simply that it is widespread.
Norberg is no Trump supporter, and the election result might have seemed like a setback to an author promoting a book painting humanitys immediate future as entirely rosy. In it, he does warn that progress isnt inevitable: There is a real risk of a nativist backlash, he writes. When we dont see the progress we have made, we begin to search for scapegoats for the problems that remain. But it is in the nature of the New Optimism that negative developments can be alchemised into reasons to be cheerful, and by the time we spoke, Norberg had an upbeat spin on the election, too.
I think it might be that in a couple of years time, well think it was a great thing that Trump won, he says. Because if hed lost, and Hillary had won, shed have been the most hated president of modern times, and then Trump and Bannon would have used that to build an alt-right media empire, create an avalanche of hatred, and then there might have been a more disciplined candidate the next time round a real fascist, rather than someone impersonating Trump may prove to have been the incompetent, self-absorbed person who ruins the populist brand in the United States. This sort of counterfactual argument suffers from not being falsifiable, and in any case, its a long way from a position of straightforward positivity about the direction in which the world is moving. But perhaps it is the one genuinely indisputable truth on which the New Optimists and the more pessimistically minded can agree: that whatever happens, things could always, in principle, have been worse.
Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Read more: http://ift.tt/2vd39EI
from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2vPbR9t
via Viral News HQ
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
rattsbian
welcome 2 my web zone
kaussandholm7
Untitled
ferelrew
ferelrew
raajjebadi
Untitled
triyastech-blog
SolidWorks Reseller Andhra - Triyas Tech Solutions