#tories are destroying the country
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Please sign and reblog this if you care about Britain having a government that knows what the fuck it’s doing. Thanks a lot :)
#general election#uk general election#britain#politics#uk politics#tories out#tories are destroying the country#vote labour#labour#general election now#fuck the tories#united kingdom#westminster#prime minister#london
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so we've got two main options to vote for on July 4th, and both of them are genocidal and transphobic, amongst other things
man, remember when Labour felt more for the people?
#uk politics#i despise this country so fucking much#vent#rant#i've lived in this country for almost my entire life#i don't wanna leave just because some fucks destroyed this country and want to justify their behaviour#i wonder how much of the countryside where i grew up has been demolished now#fuck the tories#fuck the tory scum
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hear me out: liz truss double agent for scottish lib dems
#her mission was to bomb the tory party#local paisley women destroys 12 year strong government#the fucking election process was longer than her time in office i love this country#anyway call a ge or ill murder people#uk politics#british politics#liz truss#conservatives#politics#im right
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#if this turns out to be the implosion of the tory party#and i get to watch it in real time?!#delicious#if there ever was a decent tory#(sorry just sicked up a bit in my mouth)#they left the party when it became apparent the government would be happy to destroy the country#if it meant they got to say we got brexit done#uk politics
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Solidarity with the junior doctors on strike - I really hope they keep fighting until they get a decent pay offer and major quality of life changes too.
You have to be so committed and dedicated to get into and through med school, but if you can't afford to live during your first years as a doctor (and don't forget they are often forced to move every six months) then you're going to become burnt out and disillusioned with the system. It doesn't matter how much they'll earn as consultants if they never get there.
The NHS is one of the biggest achievements of this country - we cannot let the Tories destroy it or have a two tier health system. And that relies on all the staff being involved being treated decently.
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As fun as it is to clown on the coronation, everyone, please, PLEASE keep your focus on the ones who decided to spend millions on it.
Our government could have said no and insisted on a smaller coronation/cheaper one or made it so the money came from royal funds, but they didn't. One; because the members of the Conservative party are actual scum and are quite happy to watch the country crash and burn as long as they can line their pockets. And two; it's because it's a good distraction regardless of where you land on the anti/pro monarchy scale. With people focusing on that, they are less likely to pay attention to the fact that the tories spent £3billion on a migrant scheme that doesn't work... Clowning on charles and the coronation may be fun, but they aren't the true rot that is destroying the country.
Remain strong. The Conservatives have lost badly in the local council elections (despite their attempts at voter suppression in the form of visual ID ) But there's no guarantee that they will be ousted in the next election.
Keep fighting, keep protesting and remember that at the end of the day, it's our government who decided to spend millions on the coronation while millions of people starve and struggle.
for the love of God, VOTE AND BRING YOUR ID WITH YOU!!!
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i wrote more reborn au. it is the situation described previously when tori has a non-team 4 mission go awry
i might change the timeline a little, but for now: tori is 16, and she has an official position in R&D so she takes fewer out of village missions. i might change it later but she gives her rank as tokubetsu jounin, because my interpretation of this rank is that you have some sort of high-value jounin-level skill (like fuinjutsu) but your OVERALL skills aren't really jounin level. so she got promoted hella fast after making chunin, but she gets stuck at this rank a while whereas itachi and deidara get to full jounin like immediately lmao. also she and itachi have been fake-dating a few months, but that's not relevant to the following
uuh also this has some stuff that i feel like doesn't punch as hard as it should without context to foreshadow it, so apologizes if some details seem to come out of nowhere???
--
The mission started off uncomfortable and it didn’t get much better.
The premise was this: a research team had tracked some rare scrolls all the way into the boonies of a tiny jungle territory between Fire Country and Water Country, which had historically been traded back and forth between both countries but was currently maintaining its status as an independent state after the fallout of the Third Shinobi War. It had no native ninja clans, but enough powers had occupied it that both Kiri and Konoha occasionally sent in probes to figure out if there were any leftover ninja-related valuables.
The idea was that a ninja village had the rights to ninja materials, even if they’d both technically agreed not to interfere with the tiny nation. Tori understood everyone in her life just accepted this as a morally neutral fact of the world and elected not to analyze it further for her own sanity. It wasn’t like she wasn’t ready and willing to forego her own ethical framework when it was convenient.
So the research team had followed some local leads to unearth an ancient and abandoned shinobi stronghold of unknown origin, but had been blocked from accessing it because the fuuinjutsu protecting it was so old no one on the team could figure out how to break it. This was how Tori was chosen for the back-up team Minato was sending in: if you wanted someone to disentangle an unknown and strange set of seals quickly and without damaging the surrounding structure, Tori was your girl. There simply wasn’t anyone else as good except Kushina herself, and Kushina had way more in-village responsibilities.
The risk of spending a long time at this location was that Kiri would inevitably notice and send their own team in, and then even if they avoided an outright conflict, Konoha risked Kiri running off with the scrolls or whatever other treasures happened to be in the stronghold, if any. This was how the rest of the Tori’s team was picked: combat ninja for back-up.
“Oh, this is the most fun part about being a fuinjutsu specialist, you know,” Kushina had told her, when she’d gone over to pick up fuinjutsu supplies from her office. “You get sent on all sorts of weird missions to all sorts of places, and work with all sorts of people!”
Kushina was… maybe more social and likable than Tori. Kushina could make friends with a rock. Tori, in contrast, somehow started a feud with half the people she met.
It started with some weird comments. Tori pulled a bottle of insect repellant out of a storage seal during one of their breaks on the first day, and her teammate made a snide remark about Tori living a life of luxury.
“...do you want some?” Tori offered.
She was literally just using a store-bought spray in a standard-design storage scroll. Kushina had told her off more than once for over-relying on storage scrolls which could be easily stolen or destroyed or lost, but she’d seen other shinobi do this. She’d seen their captain do this, earlier. This was normal behavior.
The weird comments continued from the same teammate, who was a rank-and-file jounin with no additional titles. Mostly they were jabs at her main designation being R&D: surprise she could clean fish, condescendingly assuring her she wouldn’t have to fight and risk chipping a nail. The comments got an occasional snicker from other ninja, but they weren’t overtly hostile and definitely not as mean as whatever the fuck Itachi might say just in friendly conversation. She gritted her teeth and beared it.
The guy was only like nineteen or twenty. Tori wasn’t sure what his problem with her was, since he was pretty young for a jounin and couldn’t be so untalented that it would make sense for him to have a chip on his shoulder, but also he was young enough that maybe he just hadn’t matured very much yet. Or maybe it was just that she was even younger and already a tokubetsu jounin and– gasp!– a woman. People generally highly praised Deidara and Itachi for making jounin so young, but their talents were generally more obvious, and also they were men. Shinobi were less sexist than the surrounding civilian attitudes toward women, but the misogyny still crept into their culture. Sometimes some men just got upset when women were smarter or stronger or higher ranked than them. Even Kushina occasionally got pushback.
(Not that no one ever acted jealous or insane to Itachi or Deidara– it was just that they got it less often, and people rarely acted like that twice, because both boys were nightmare people.)
So she ignored her teammate and didn’t think much of it. Sometimes people were just assholes. In Oto or in Akatsuki, this might have led to him doing something unspeakably horrible to her, but this was Konoha. Konoha ninja could be petty and mean and jaded, but they didn’t do that.
Tori hadn’t gotten to go into the jungles of this world often, and her mood did brighten even as the weather got hotter and more humid and they had to slow down as the foliage got denser. She liked seeing the shift in trees from Hashirama trees to broad-leafed jungle trees, seeing strangler figs and hearing tree frogs and finding the prints of a large cat. She even found delight in the presence of native giant leeches they also imported to their Forest of Death.
“The anticoagulants they excrete actually have a lot of medical applications,” she said cheerfully, poking one gently with a stick. They could also kill you if you let one attach for too long.
“Uh, okay,” said their captain. “Keep on task.”
“When you let a researcher out of the lab,” another teammate joked to the one who kept ragging on her. Tori rolled her eyes.
It took almost an entire week to get to the stronghold. During this time, the teammate that was ragging on her got both the other ninja with them to also start on the same sort of stupid jokes. Tori pulled a branch off a squat little tree and offered it to the teammate who’d started it all.
“Here, it’s an insect repellent,” she said, smiling as sweetly as she could. “Since you forgot to bring yours.”
For some reason, this just made the teammate meaner. By the time they researched the stronghold, she was getting accusations that she was only here due to favoritism from the fucking Hokage.
“On task,” the captain sighed, having also laughed at a couple of the jokes.
Whatever, Tori thought.
The lead of the research team, at least, didn’t even blink when he saw her. He was technically part of R&D. She had a reputation there.
The stronghold was a small, stone building overgrown with strangler figs. The research team had already removed the foliage from the entrance and revealed the seal protecting it, which probably saved at least half a day’s work. Still, the fuinjutsu on it was a mess, and it took Tori a couple hours to disentangle what was even going on.
The research leader bounced his knee in anticipation the entire time. Apparently they’d found evidence the night before of other shinobi in the area, and they were afraid Kiri could show up at any moment.
“Can’t you do that faster?” Tori’s captain asked as she made notes on her own scroll.
“Not unless you want me to risk blowing it up,” Tori replied.
“Well, try harder,” he said.
She wondered, vaguely, if he would have this attitude towards her if he hadn’t spent a whole week listening to someone make demeaning comments about her. Maybe she should have tried to nip that in the bud sooner? Usually she’d prefer an opponent underestimating her, but these were people she needed to trust her skills… she’d promised herself to stop thinking of everyone she met as an enemy until proven otherwise.
Well, whatever. The nice thing about her boss being a fuinjutsu master was that if this captain tried to report on her being too slow, Minato would put him straight immediately.
She got the seal off in record time. Instead of opening into the little building, the door led to a staircase that went straight down into the earth. Tori held back a comment about Oto also being arranged like this. She didn’t need to remind her asshole teammate that she was a foreigner on top of whatever he didn’t like about her.
“Great,” the research lead sighed.
The next several days were spent exploring the tunnels that turned out to be underneath the building. They were carved out by an underground river, which still flowed through the main passages. The remains of wooden walkways over it were still apparent, but the structure had largely rotted away and they were forced to walk on the walls or the river itself. There were more fuinjutsu-covered doors leading to narrow rooms and more fucking stairways down, in a confusing labyrinth of passages that mostly held nothing of value.
The combat team was roped into searching the tunnels in order to cover more area quickly, since there was the ongoing anxiety that Kiri could show up any minute. They all seemed bored by the slow progress of Tori opening up new passageways only for no one to find anything but rotting wood furniture and, once, some old and useless cookware. Tori was having fun, at least. Whoever had set up the security seals must have been high when they did it.
Then everything went to shit all at once.
Tori was taking her lunch break, squatting in the corner of an empty room and eating a protein bar, when her asshole teammate showed up to report he’d found another fuinjutsu-covered door. Many of the rooms had puddles from the river leaking through cracks, and the jounin rushed in so quickly he didn’t even bother water-walking over them.
The door he’d found was different from the rest, with an ornately carved stone door frame. It also wasn’t wood like the rest had been, held together against time by fuinjutsu. This door was a solid block of rock, a giant disc on the side of the door frame.
“I bet Hokage-sama will give us a bonus if we’re the ones who find the scrolls,” he said, his excitement obvious as Tori poked at the door. “They do that for object recovery, right?”
“I think that’s only if you find something that wasn’t a part of the mission parameters,” Tori replied, taking a step back to squint at the full seal. There wasn’t a universal pattern to them, but she was getting pretty quick about identifying and then dismantling the relevant parts.
“Pft, what do you know,” her teammate replied, kicking at a puddle.
“No offense,” Tori started, pulling out her brush and a jar of ink, “but what is your problem with me?”
Her teammate didn’t answer, watching her paint very carefully over the seal. The stone wheel that made up the door groaned and slowly rolled aside.
The room inside was definitely different from the rest. The back wall was nothing but running water, held in place by more fuinjutsu that formed a gently glowing web of chakra over it. There was also actual decoration on the exposed stone walls, carved and then painted in. In the center of the room was a stone pedestal with an obvious scroll box.
Tori’s teammate was obnoxious, but he was still a jounin and not an idiot. He waited for Tori to flick chakra-infused ink into the room and then perform a jutsu to check for traps.
The room itself was safe. The problem was that the pedestal was obviously boobytrapped.
“Can you undo it?” her teammate asked, peering at the box. It matched the description the research team had.
It was hard to reveal the seals on the pedestal and take a look. They were, in fact, more insane than what was on all the doors. Unlike the doors, these were meant to be somewhat permanent, not meant for anyone but the sealmaster who made them to take off.
“It’s… going to take some time,” Tori said cautiously. “But, shit, this array itself is probably valuable.”
She pointed to how it scattered down the pedestal to the river wall and then up and across the ceiling in a nonstandard shape. If it were disrupted, the seal holding the water back would break, immediately flooding the room. At the same time, the bit on the ceiling would collapse… something. Either the ceiling itself or wall with the exit.
There was a mechanism also holding the box in place and locked shut, so no random person would be able to move it or open it and then accidentally set off the trap. Breaking that part of the seal wouldn’t be any more difficult than the doors, but Tori would need some time to figure out how to disentangle this mechanism from the deathtrap so they didn’t set it off and could remove the scrolls safely.
“Alright,” the jounin said at length. “But you have to make it clear I’m the one who found it.”
Tori really, really didn’t think this mattered, but before they could decide what exactly to do, two strangers walked into the room. They were both wearing Kiri headbands.
“Are you kidding me?” the jounin said, stepping between Tori and the Kiri-nin and drawing a kunai.
She hadn’t noticed it over the rush of the river in front of them, but now that Tori was concentrating, she could hear the shouts of a fight outside.
“Oh nice, you found it for us,” one of the Kiri said. Both had swords drawn. Tori drew her own kunai and shifted into a fight-ready stance.
“Surely there’s a diplomatic solution to this,” she tried.
“Oops, too late,” the other Kiri-nin answered, flashing teeth at her.
Tori’s jounin teammate took a step back and whispered out of the corner of his mouth: “I’ll engage them. Get the box off.”
“But–” Tori started.
Behind his back, he signed that they’d flash step out. Tori nodded slowly. It was risky, and she wasn’t sure she could flash step quickly enough to not get caught in the trap, but a really good jounin could.
This was the best part of Konoha, she thought. Even assholes had your back.
One of the Kiri-nin chucked a handful of kunai at them, and Tori fully turned to back to face the seal on the pedestal. She heard the clink of her teammate batting the blades out of the air with his sword. Yes, even this guy had her back, no questions asked.
She barely watched the fight as she concentrated on her own work. Her teammate was a good fighter, and he managed to counter both ninja while also keeping any attacks from hitting her. It only took a few minutes for him to kill one of the Kiri-nin, after which the second backed off and tried more mid-range attacks.
“Got it,” Tori finally announced. Her teammate pounced on the Kiri-nin, plunging the sword into her.
“Do it,” he told Tori, turning to her with the wild eyes of man high on his own bloodlust.
“As soon as I release it, the seal–” Tori started to warn.
The Kiri-nin he’d left crumpled in the corner groaned and rolled onto her feet unsteadily, still alive.
“It’s okay, I got you,” her teammate said, wrapping an arm around her waist. “The faster we move, the faster we can back-up our teammates.”
“Right,” Tori agreed, poising her paintbrush. “On the count of three.”
What happened next was such a slimy move that it completely blindsided Tori, even if it shouldn’t have. Training herself to no longer assume that people were just going to screw her over for no reason had been a bad idea, it turned out.
She called one as she made the last of her brush strokes. Her mouth started on the syllable, and the jounin adjusted his grip on her so his hand was around the supply pack at the small of her back. He leaned over and put his hand over the box, his grip adjusted wide enough to wrap the last joints of his fingers over the top. This would be a weird as fuck hold for a joint flash step, but Tori didn’t give it a second thought. He just moved to put his hand on the box. That was their mission.
And then he flash stepped through the rubble suddenly raining down on them, taking the box and Tori’s pack with him, leaving Tori behind to be knocked over by the sudden wave of water.
The first few moments of the room flooding were chaos. Part of the ceiling and the entire wall collapsed, and debris hit her shoulder and legs as the water battered her around.
It calmed eventually, with the water only waist deep. Tori spat out water and fumbled for one of the glow sticks in her weapons pack.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” the wounded Kiri-nin asked when Tori lit up the room. “Holy shit, did he leave you on purpose?”
Tori bit her lip. Yes, he totally had. What the fuck. Konoha ninja weren’t supposed to be like this.
When Tori didn’t respond, the Kiri-nin wrote her off and started yelling at the collapsed wall for help. There was no evidence anyone heard her at all.
The good news was that the river wasn’t rushing in. Its source must have also partially collapsed, leaving the river at a small trickle.
“The water had a way out,” Tori announced, wading toward the back wall. “Maybe we can…”
She tried diving. When she found nothing, the Kiri-nin also tried. The exit the water had been taking before was completely sealed off.
“Oooh, we’re fucked,” the Kiri-nin sighed. “What the fuck was your friend’s plan?”
“I don’t…” Tori started. He should have taken her with him. It was well within his abilities. He’d told her.
He’d also taken her travel pack with all her fuinjutsu supplies. She still had some kunai and shuriken and a flare and a couple glow sticks in her weapons pack, but those would hardly help. She had a few scrolls still on her, but none of those were going to get her out.
The water was getting higher. Tori found she was shaking. Konoha ninja weren’t supposed to do this.
Old Tori had been physically weaker, but she hadn’t been this gullible, this stupid. She hadn’t been able to afford it.
“I-I can stop the water,” Tori told the Kiri-nin, embarrassed that her voice sounded like she was on the brink of tears.
The Kiri-nin eyed her with something that was either pity or disgust or both.
“Is this your first life or death mission, little girl?” she asked.
Tori let out a hysterical laugh. No, actually, she should have anticipated this happening from the first weird comment. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“I’m sixteen,” Tori said. “They’ve sent me into worse.”
She said this more to remind herself. She’d survived worse. She’d just been an idiot, thinking she’d finally been in a position to trust people.
The Kiri-nin snorted.
“Whatever, Konoha. Don’t stop the water yet. That might be the only way out.”
The Kiri-nin performed a series of water jutsu, meant to scope out the walls and floor and ceiling and find any gaps they could take advantage of, either to drain the water or send a message for help or get out. It would make sense if the person who set up the trap also left a way to get out, rather, let themselves back in to retrieve their scrolls.
Tori wondered if the Kiri-nin would actually help her if she identified a way out, or if she’d also spitefully leave her for dead. How sad would it be, if she was betrayed by her own comrade and saved by a random Kiri-nin?
Tori didn’t get to find out the answer to the question, because the Kiri-nin didn’t find anything. If there was a way back in, it wasn’t accessible from the inside. The Kiri-nin leaned back against a wall, panting with exertion and holding her side where Tori’s teammate had stabbed her.
“I’m a medic,” Tori offered. Her medical supplies were off with her treasonous teammate, but she could still do some chakra-based stuff.
“Shut up,” the Kiri-nin groaned. “Okay, I’m going to dive again and try to get out through the river’s entrance.”
“You sure you don’t want me to at least stop the bleeding–”
“Shut up.”
The Kiri-nin dived. When she didn’t come back for a very long time, Tori waded over to the river’s entrance and attempted diving herself.
There wasn’t an opening big enough to fit her body through. Instead, she found the Kiri-nin’s body with her arm wedged into a crevice that must have collapsed further when she stuck her arm in. Tori couldn’t dislodge it to try and drag the woman back to the surface. She was dead, anyway.
Tori pulled one of her remaining scrolls from her vest and set up a barrier to block the influx of water. It was now up to her chest.
Then she pulled herself up to sit on top of the water and very quietly freaked out.
It wasn’t being trapped in a sealed room with two dead Kiri-nin that freaked her out, exactly. It wasn’t even that she had no idea if any of her teammates outside were alive or aware she needed help. It wasn’t even necessarily that her teammate had seemingly turned on her for stupid reasons.
It was that she had gone out of her way to assume an asshole was just an asshole, that Konoha ninja were the exception to the rule she’d learned through both her shitty lives, like an idiot. It stung, worse than she would have thought it would.
Her barrier eventually ran out of chakra, and as she watched it flicker and die, a horrible thought struck Tori.
No one was going to come help her, because her teammate was not going to report her as alive but trapped. He was going to report her as definitively dead, because there was no way he’d let her be seen alive to tell her side of the story.
Maybe, once they got back to Konoha and formally reported her KIA, Minato would send someone for her body. They usually only did that for people with stealable bloodline limits, but Kushina would probably push for it. Or maybe, if the rest of the team was all killed by Kiri or otherwise too injured to go back themselves, Minato would eventually send someone to check up on them. Neither scenario was a timeline where Tori would still be alive if she stayed in here.
In the best case scenario, her team beat off the Kiri-nin, and then someone came looking for her. The asshole teammate would protest, would insist she was dead in a collapsed and inaccessible room, but maybe someone would insist on retrieving her body.
It seemed unlikely. She’d already been too charitable with her assessment of this team. None of them were coming for her.
She had two more scrolls with barriers to hold back the water slowly seeping in. Neither of them had enough chakra to last more than a couple hours, but she could recharge them a few times with her own chakra, although without food, chakra would become a finite resource. She had maybe a day before she drowned using just these tools.
She could make a seal, of course. Her teammate had taken her supplies, and the ink and brush she’d had out before we lost in the flood, but she still had a body full of blood and plenty of surfaces to draw on. It wouldn’t be easy or neat, since blood required different calculations and wet, uneven rocks would be hard to draw on, but she could do it.
Her first idea was to tap into one of her storage dimensions. She had some food squirreled away in one, and some fuinjutsu supplies in another. The one she’d stuck a bunch of spare camping supplies in probably even had a better light source.
Okay, Tori decided, standing on the water, here I go.
xXx
Two days passed, and no one came for her. With food and fuinjutsu supplies, she’d been able to wrap a double barrier around the main source of water, but it must have been slowly seeping in from somewhere else too because the water level was still slowly rising. She could no longer stand fully on the water surface, and she’d had no good way to sleep.
She tried a controlled explosion on the wall she knew led to an open passage, but instead she’d just collapsed more of the room. There must not have been anything above her but more earth.
The explosion had also shaken the Kiri-nin’s body loose, and Tori didn’t really have anywhere to put it, so she was just… floating.
Tori’s new plan was to get a message to Konoha. Maybe a regular team wouldn’t get to her in time, but Minato could. She wasn’t sure he would, but…
She struggled to cling to this hope, even though it turned out trust was a lie and Konoha-nin were the types to just fuck you over for no reason.
Tori didn’t really have a good way to send a message herself. Between Itachi’s crows and Deidara’s animated clay, they’d always taken care of it when she’d been on a regular team. She’d never had a need to invent her own way. She stuck some messages into storage dimensions she knew Kushina also had the key to, but she wasn’t sure why Kushina would check them unless she knew Tori was in danger.
Which she wouldn’t know, because Tori’s teammate was an asshole.
She did know a couple time-space jutsu, but those were notoriously difficult, and she didn’t know any that wouldn’t require another person. She wasn’t even sure any solo ones existed, besides the Hiraishin, because usually you at least needed a receiver.
Tori ran option after option through her brain. She didn’t know shit about summoning jutsu, which would be super useful in this situation if not just for the ability to reverse summon. Could she logic her way through how they must work and then reverse engineer it…?
No, she’d have better luck reverse engineering the Hiraishin. At least she knew some of the theory behind that one.
Sitting on the water, the top of her head brushed the ceiling. Or maybe she should focus on making a full-wall seal to keep the water out. That she was at least positive she could do. But that would take so much time…
Tori stuck her head between her knees and willed herself not to cry. She still felt so fucking stupid, and the lack of sleep and floating corpse weren’t helping. Of course she shouldn't have trusted the guy who was making fun of her the whole time. Of course, of course, stupid, stupid, stupid.
She mentally flipped through everything she knew about time-space jutsu, feeling hysterical. She’d tried the Hiraishin before, and nothing had even happened because only two people in the world had ever managed it. Even with entire villages trying to beat it during the war, no one had even come close. It would be deeply stupid and arrogant of her to push forward assuming she could accomplish what entire teams of more experienced shinobi had failed to do.
She was developing a crick in her neck from being bent forward as she approached the ceiling, so she laid down on her back. All her clothes were already wet regardless.
Except, she had spent a lot of time thinking deep thoughts about the Hiraishin, because, well, it didn’t make sense no one had been able to copy it. Minato had left seals all over the place. No one had even been able to figure out how to undo them without removing the entire object the seal was on; it was why Iwa had been so terrified of them sneaking even one in.
The markers are only a guide for the actual jutsu, Minato had said when she’d asked, and then when she’d asked again and again, Only I can use them, because only I have my chakra.
But why couldn’t someone else use his chakra? She just couldn’t shove this explanation into her understanding of how space-time jutsu worked. Most of them worked using another user as a receiver on the other end, or else by using multiple people to throw something to a receiving array, and none of them worried about chakra incompatibilities. Tori had been considering using a fucking tree as a receiver, if she’d had the foresight to set up a tree-powered seal to be her receiver. And why the fuck hadn’t she done that, if she’d thought about it so much? How had she never anticipated being trapped with no hope of back-up? Old Tori would have never. Stupid, stupid, stupid–
Actually, Tori thought, sitting up on her elbows. Hiraishin wasn’t receiver-less, was it? Minato just did both jutsu on one end but somehow the marker anchored the receiving jutsu, somehow slingshotting him through space. Or at least that was the only way Tori could conceptualize it possibly working. You could, in theory, use an already active seal as an unmanned receiver; it was just that you needed to be really, insanely good to make a seal that complex that could stay active for long periods of time. That was why Tori’s idea had used a tree’s chakra to power the receiving end. But if you just had, like, some sort of tiny, self-sustaining guide for your receiver jutsu….? That was probably why it had to be Minato’s own chakra.
Tori had no idea how to simultaneously do two jutsu and also do them so lightning fast it was basically instantaneous from having the thought to teleporting, the way Minato did. But why couldn’t she include both in a seal, with one of his markers as the anchor? At the end of the day, Tori had taught herself to use fuinjutsu almost entirely with other people’s chakra. Her original concept she’d been working on (but never tested, like an idiot) had been based around a goddamn tree. She’d done extensive testing on how chakra from different sources varied and how to optimize jutsu to it. She could totally hijack one of Minato’s seals.
She was worryingly close to the ceiling now, even flat on her back. She drew a copy of a Hiraishin marker and then got to work painting a combination send-and-receive transport seal around it.
xXx
Tori found herself on a dark forest floor, gasping for breath. She had no idea where she was, but at least she was no longer under fucking water. Pine needles poked into her back as she collapsed, staring up into the canopy. The trees had spindly arms and the full moon peeked through.
The forest was still and quiet. Tori was working very hard on not hyperventilating.
I’m alive, she promised herself. I’m breathing.
Her body was shaking from adrenaline. She’d gotten a working seal painted in time, even if she’d had a hell of a time activating it. She was fine. She was alive.
She got about three seconds of time to lay there and breathe before Minato was suddenly on top of her, a rasengan waving in her face. Tori shrieked.
“It’s me, it’s me!” she screeched. The rasengan, being made mostly of chakra, gave off its own weak light, and Minato’s face was dead-serious as he commanded that she give various identifying codes to confirm her identity. Tori’s brain was already scattered and panicked from barely escaping drowning, and her answers came out garbled. Finally she yammered, “Who else would be hijacking your seals?”
Minato was quiet for a few moments, and then he released the rasengan. Rather than reabsorb the chakra, he let it spiral out in a gust of wind that made Tori shiver.
Minato stood. He was in his pajamas, and one knee was damp from where he’d been kneeling on her stomach. He offered her a hand. In the moonlight, his face looked weary.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked, sounding exhausted. “Report.”
The phrasing of the command meant that even if he was in his pajamas, he was talking to her as Hokage right now. Tori did her best to straighten up and explain herself like she would for a mission or a lab experiment gone wrong, but her story quickly turned into an upset ramble.
She didn’t know if her team was alive. She wasn’t even sure how much time had passed. Her teammate had been an asshole to her and she’d ignored it but she shouldn’t have because that was her clue she shouldn’t have trusted him with shit–
“How did you get here?” MInato cut her off. His voice was barely restrained emotion, stress and anger. Tori felt almost taken aback. She’d thought he’d care more than she nearly died.
She felt stupid that she was this upset over a bunch of nobodies leaving her for dead, about being this incoherent over almost dying. Wasn’t she tougher than this? Why did Minato being mad at her make her want to cry?
She walked him through the logic of her escape efforts. If Minato had any personal thoughts on her initial attempts or her aside that the Kiri-nin’s body had just been hanging out, he didn’t show them. His eyebrows did raise higher and higher as she described her eventual solution to her predicament.
“You just came up with that?” he asked. She couldn’t tell if he was dumbfounded or furious.
Maybe this will be when they decide I’m too dangerous and kill me, Tori thought. She’d thought she’d been safe from this inevitability, but maybe not.
“Well,” Tori replied slowly. The fact that no one could hijack his seals had been bugging her for years. He knew this, because his and Kushina’s own dismissive attitudes were why she’d been stuck on it. He knew this about her. She shouldn’t have to lie and back off. “I’ve been mulling it over, and I thrive under stress.”
Minato sighed loudly. He still seemed tense, but he wasn’t exactly angry, she didn’t think.
“We need to destroy it, even if you think the passage is inaccessible,” Minato told her. “Tori, I cannot stress how dangerous it is to leave evidence–” He cut himself off, frowning. “Shit, I can access it.”
And then he was gone. Tori shifted awkwardly, peering around her. She definitely wasn’t anywhere near Konoha. The amount of pine meant she’d probably ended up way further north, although she didn’t have enough light to be identifying exact species to narrow it down much further than that. How the hell did Minato aim this thing?
Tori was soaked, and the forest was colder than a Fire Country night. She shivered and peeled off her outer layer, wringing it out. A few minutes later, Minato returned, now also wet.
“Good news is, I destroyed it for you,” he told her. He still sounded stressed, but there was a hint of relief in there. “So that problem, at the very least, has been resolved.”
Minato was not mad at her for breaking his jutsu, per se, but everything about his body language was deeply tense. He banned her from ever drawing it up again without his direct supervision, or even mentioning the idea of it to anyone. Now that Tori wasn’t afraid of dying alone in a cave, it occurred to her that Minato had hundreds of his seals in Konoha. Tens of them were in his house alone. One was in the Kyuubi’s seal. If an enemy could do what Tori just did, they were all fucked.
Tori was very certain no one else on the planet could do what she did in this very specific regard, including Minato himself. But perhaps a motivated person could copy her, or an informed person could follow her line of research to figure it out themselves.
“Okay,” Minato finished his very long list of commands on things she was never even to think about doing again. He took a deep breath. “Now we can move on to the other problem. Your teammate did what?”
She walked him through the story again, and was relieved that she seemed too tired to cry. That asshole wasn’t worth her tears, although she still felt deeply stupid and almost embarrassed as she described what happened to Minato. She felt like a whiny kid recalling the passive aggressive comments, and then like a moron when she described trusting his plan.
When she was done, Minato said very slowly, “I want you to understand that I believe you, Tori. However, as Hokage, I will have to do an investigation before making any decisions.”
Tori frowned. “So no one sent a message?”
Minato raised an eyebrow. “Tori, you beat any message they could get to me.”
That seemed wrong, as Tori had also had this whole upsetting detour where she’d nearly drowned in an underground room.
“Okay,” Tori replied dully. “What do you want me to do?”
If he made her go back to her mission, she was going to throw a fit. Instead, he put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“You successfully completed your assigned part of the mission,” he said. “And, as much as you scared me, I’m really glad you didn’t die. I think you should get some rest.”
He brought her to his home. Tori had not seen full light in days, and even the kitchen overhead light made her squint and blink rapidly when he switched it on.
“I want to hear what they report before they know you made it back alive,” he told her in a hushed tone. “So lay low and hang out here a few days.”
Tori squinted at him. “That’s pretty mean,” she assessed. “I like it.”
She wasn’t sure how he would treat this situation if it happened to another shinobi. Certainly he wouldn’t let most people stay in his home; they didn’t exactly have a revolving door of house guests. It made her feel better, she thought as she showered off in the guest bathroom, to be reminded someone did value her as more than a tool or an obstacle.
Even if he commented about the mission first, her brain reminded her traitorously.
When she stepped out of the bathroom, a set of women’s pajamas had appeared neatly-folded on the guest bed. They were almost definitely Kushina’s, and given Kushina was significantly taller than her, fit comfortably loose. Tori stepped out of the guest bedroom to find Kushina angrily chopping vegetables in the kitchen.
“It’s 2 AM,” Tori told her. “What are you doing?”
Kushina paused, sticking her bottom lip out at Tori. She was wearing a baggy shirt that came down to mid-thigh and her hair was braided back and wrapped for sleep. Tori barely had time to react before she was in a hug.
“I’m working out my feelings in a productive way,” Kushina said, releasing her. “Besides, you need to eat.”
Tori did not want to admit she wanted a longer hug. Instead, she persuaded Kushina to let her eat cup ramen instead of the full course meal Kushina appeared to be preparing to make. Kushina did insist she felt better chopping things up and she was only saving herself time doing it later for dinner, so Tori sat at the table and listened to the rhythmic sound of Kushina taking out her anger on some carrots.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Kushina insisted more than once. Minato might have told her the basics to explain Tori’s presence, but surely Kushina didn’t know all the details of Tori’s mission. She was in no place to know if Tori had actually done anything wrong or not. Still, sometimes Kushina’s blind faith was reassuring.
“Thanks for the PJs,” Tori told her before escaping to bed.
She’d never stayed overnight in the Uzumaki-Namikaze house. She’d only ever seen the guest bedroom to dump her coat off before a party. But the bed was comfortable and had a thick comforter, and she found herself bone-tired. She fell asleep immediately.
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First of all, Scotland, for passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act and trying to protect trans people, thank you. Thank you for treating us as humans, thank you for recognising our identities.
However....
fuck you JK Rowling. fuck your TERF rants that endanger our lives. fuck your Nazi attitudes.
fuck you Police Scotland for proving that you're fucks and will not take this law seriously, even when someone intentionally, repeatedly, maliciously and gleefully breaks this law in a very, very public forum.
fuck you Police Scotland for not only refusing to take action when someone is breaking this law intentionally, repeatedly, maliciously and gleefully, but also proving that
1) this new law will NOT be taken seriously by you
2) this tells every TERF and Tory out there that the law is NOT valid, and that the law does NOT include queer people, specifically in this case Trans people; and
3) this tells every queer/Trans/enby/multi-sex/hermaphrodite person that we are NOT actually protected as this new law promises, and you can and will continue abusing us and destroying our lives.
Fucking thanks. Cos it wasn't obvious enough that every day gets more and more dangerous for us trans/enby people, so thanks for just making it clear to the fucking world that even when someone mocks this law openly, you don't fucking care because we are not fucking people. Got it.
So fuck you Police Scotland, specifically, for doing NOTHING when someone blatantly flouts this law. Fuck every one of you ACAB fuckers.
fuck everyone who still works with you, Rowling and still even speaks to you after knowing what you are.
fuck everyone who still buys anything related to the Harry Potter franchise knowing the money is going into the pocket of someone like this. Because she sends that money back out to fucking Anti-Trans orgs that hurt us.
fuck you HP fans who plan to watch her new tv show. You cannot be a fan of a massive transphobe trying to destroy us, and an ally at the same time. so fuck you.
fuck harry potter fans who wear HP merchandise stuff knowing what she has said and done, yes I don't care if you bought it before she said it, fuck you because you know exactly what she represents. Not apologising. Yeah, I'm totally judging you if you're wearing HP merch, even if especially if you're queer. I don't care how much HP meant to you as a child. I don't care about fucking nostalgia. I care about the Trans lives that are in danger every day because of monsters like this fucking woman.
fuck you Rishi Sunak for backing and legitimising this horrible woman and her bigotry.
fuck you British politics, fuck you Tories. Fuck you all for destroying this country and making every day more dangerous for Queer people.
fuck you CEO David Zaslav. fuck you Warner Bros. for being willing and happy to work with this fucking woman for her fucking franchise so she can continue to fucking make millions and fucking fund anti-trans orgs.
fuck every single one of who who protects, excuses and funds this fucking behaviour. And fuck every one of you who doesn't give a fuck at everything that is happening.
fuck these fucking fucks. fuck you TERFs and transphobes and fuck every single one of you fucking fucks.
Thank you for trying, Scotland. Thank you.
But please explain to the fucking POLICE and the fucking evil POLITICIANS that this new law means we are legally recognised as protected under the Scottish Hate Crime Act, so they all need to stop fucking about and treat it seriously.
and the fucking PRIME FUCKING MINISTER fucking backing this fucking TERF. I'm not surprised, just angry.
This is on you. so, fuck you if you are supporting these fuckery fucking fucks.
As is EVERY SINGLE FUCKING INCIDENT a trans person has in this fucking country. Every time someone fucking deadnames us, every time someone intentionally misgenders us, every time someone threatens our safety, every time someone fucking assaults us? every single incident is on your fucking head, you fucking fucks.
#fuck you harry potter fans for still funding this yes i mean it#fuck jk rowling#fuck rishi sunak#fuck tories#fuck terfs#fuck transphobia#fuck warner brothers#fuck ceo david zaslav#fuck harry potter franchise#fuck everyone who has worked with her knowing what she is#fuck british politics#fuck the tories#fuck you terfs#fuck you HP fans who know what she is and still wear her merchandise knowing what she is#acab#fuck police scotland for immediately proving that we are NOT equals deserving respect despite a law being fucking passed saying we fucking#fuck you BBC#fuck you Warner Bros Discovery#fucking fuck it all#trans people deserve respect#trans children deserve respect#leave trans people alone you fucking fucks#this kind of shit gets people murdered and you are treating it like a fucking joke#jk rowling is a transphobe#protect queer people#protect trans people#thank you scotland for trying to do the right thing#but have a word with your fucking police because they don't seem to understand#i mean acab obviously but fucking explain it to them please#thanks for trying scotland
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Tories destroying your country? Just fucking leave! Apparently!
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Tories really systematically destroying the country, stamping down on the people, and have the gall to say "it's disappointing" that they're loosing ground in local elections
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The Illustrious Client
First published in the US in 1924 and the UK in 1925, the latter as a two-parter, this forms part of Case-book.
The first part in The Strand ends with Watson seeing the newspaper headline about the attack on Holmes.
Northumberland Avenue is a street running from Trafalgar Square to the Thames Embankment. It includes a pub called The Sherlock Holmes.
The Carlton Club was founded by the Conservative Party and was long its defacto headquarters. Originally on Carlton Terrace, it moved to Pall Mall in 1835, with the building rebuilt in 1856. A direct hit by a German bomb in 1940 destroyed the building and the Club moved to 69 St James's Street, former home of Arthur's Club. Women were not allowed to be associate members until the 1970s and not full members until 2008, with Margaret Thatcher getting honorary membership when she become Tory leader in 1975. She later become club president in 2009, although by his point she had dementia and died in 2013.
The general consensus is that the "Illustrious Client" is no less than Edward VII himself, who Holmes may have previously gotten the Beryl Coronet back for.
Prague was then under Austrian rule.
The Splügen Pass, used for travel since Roman times, connects Switzerland and Italy and with its great height, hairpins and spectacular views, is considered one of the greatest driving challenges on the planet, having featured in Top Gear. The San Bernandino tunnel has taken most of the non-tourist traffic and it is now closed in winter for safety reasons.
Kingston upon Thames, known as Kingston for short, is a town located 10 miles SW of Charing Cross. Until 1965, it was in Surrey before becoming part of Greater London and part of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Surrey County Council were based there until 2021, when their offices moved to Reigate.
The Hurlingham Club in Fulham is where horse polo's rules were established - it even hosted Olympic polo in the 1908 London Games, but the fields were compulsorily purchased by the local council after the Second World War for housing. It was also home to pigeon shooting and was home of world croquet, still holding major events in the latter. Edward VII was a keen patron of the site.
Charlie Peace was an English burglar and double murderer, executed in 1879. He ended up featuring in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, which was oddly enough replaced between 2016 and 2022 with an immersive Sherlock Holmes Experience... which at £66.50 a ticket was a bit too expensive.
HMP Parkhurst, a Category B prison located on the Isle of Wight, merged in 2009 with HMP Albany to form HMP Isle of Wight, although each part retains its own name. Notable inmates include the Kray Twins, Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady and currently Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadžić.
Hypnotism was rather in vogue by this time.
Apaches were the name given to various criminal gangs in Paris; named after the Native American tribe. There are various suggestions as to how that came about.
Montmartre, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, was widely known for its artistic community during this time, with many a famous name living there due to the low rents. It's still there and development is restricted due to the historic character. Pigalle, Paris's red-light district, is next door.
Kitty Winter would feature as a character in Elementary, played by Ophelia Lovibond. Gruner turns up as well.
"Tinker’s curse" is Kitty saying, in the language of the time, that she does not give an [expletive deleted].
Ruritania is a fictional country first featured in the 1894 Anthony Hope novel The Prisoner of Zenda. It has become a byword for quaint small European countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
China was still an Empire in 1902, nominally ruled by the Guangxu Emperor, aka Zaitan, but an 1898 coup resulted in his loss of any real power; he was even in house arrest for a while. He died in 1908, probably poisoned by arsenic. His nephew, Puyi, would be the last Chinese Emperor and is beyond the scope of this article.
I cannot discuss Chinese pottery in any depth and so will not attempt to.
Some husbands might have questioned the gallantry of King Edward VII, who had a box for his mistresses at his coronation.
Armorial bearings are the "shield" part of a coat of arms. The British royal one traditionally depicted a bare-breasted woman as part of the harp on the bottom left, but this is no longer standard practice.
Edward VII, while having no actual political power, was able to exercise quite a bit of influence behind the scenes, especially in foreign and defence policy.
All criminal prosecutions are brought in the name of the monarch, rendered "R" (Rex or Regina) in text and "the Crown" when spoken). i.e. R vs. Winter. In addition, judicial reviews (i.e. is this government decision legal) are also brought in the name of the monarch, with the name of the actual plaintiff in brackets since a 2001 change to the format, e.g. R (Smith) vs. Secretary of State for the Home Department. It is common for initials to be used in those brackets to protect the identity of a plaintiff, such as the recent decision on flying migrants to Rwanda.
#letters from watson#sherlock holmes#the illustrious client#illu#acd canon#factoids#history#Edward VII
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i want to legitimately kill some people because i am SICK TO DEATH OF LIVING IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY. I AM SO TIRED TO HAVE TO WAKE UP IN THIS FUCKING REALITY IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY. I WANT TO SCREAM AND CRY AND THROW THINGS. THIS IS NORMAL TO SOME PEOPLE??? THIS IS FUCKING HELL AND IF I GO OUT TO PROTEST I'LL BE THROWN IN FUCKING JAIL. I FEEL SO HELPLESS AND NEXT YEAR IT'LL BE DECIDED WHO GETS ELECTED AND GOD FUCKING HELP THIS COUNTRY IF THE POPULATION VOTES TO RE-ELECT THE FASCIST TORY GOVERNMENT
#my mental health is in the fucking gutter#the tory party are destroying this country further and tearing up our rights and so many people are just like??? fucking okay with it???#vent#rant#i want to go back so badly#pLEASE#/srs#i have to live with all this shit in my head in this fucking country#i want to fucking die or kill somebody#or a bunch of people#personal#mental illness#trauma#these people are fucking MONSTERS#uk politics
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I'm doing reading at the moment for American Civil War and Canadian Confederation stuff and I just need to go key smash a little so pardon this but I've got Canada's peace, order, and good government versus America's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness stuck in my head now and it's driving me mad because... Well. Talk about parallels eh.
I was wondering if you consider it a good way to distinguish between Alfred and Matthew's approach to nationhood and their own lives in general, or do you think that was something more imposed on them rather than something they genuinely believe in? More Matt really. I'm sure Alfred believes in the latter wholeheartedly. I'm just not sure I buy Matt being that much more conservative than his brother, if that makes sense.
Ahhh very good question. So, in my opinion and read on Canadian history, the words themselves don't quite do the best job defining them and their approach to nationhood, but the interpretations of events and history and other factors that created the situations those phrases came from do.
There is some belief in Matt that fits the aims of 'peace, order and good government' but less because of any sort of British/Tory style conservatism or conservatism as in his reservedness than out of political compromise and certain demographic realities. There are two themes running through Canadian history. 1.) Keep the Americans out. 2.) Keep the Franucks in. Canadians and Canadian politicians looked at the American Civil War and drew the obvious lesson for themselves. The South ceded based on slavery, and efforts to create a Canada out of a handful of colonies had to include the French Canadians because we were still closer to half the population back then than the fifth we are now. Mechanisms had to be built into the new country from the get-go to help guarantee coherent and lasting unity.
Americans love to insist that Canada and the US are identical and Quebec is just French Texas or some other comparison with only surface accuracy but there are inherent differences between the two countries that Matt has to acknowledge. He doesn't have the advantages Alfred has of a country that can eat its own contradictions constantly and live. If he wants to survive in a condition that won't get him annexed or broken and consumed piecemeal by the United States, he has to put emphasis on law, order and both external and internal diplomacy. America fought and survived a Civil War, and Canada turned itself inside out to prevent one. Our motto is sea to sea latinate shit from the bible, but it should be "A good compromise leaves everyone angry." And 'peace, order and good government' is the result of that compromise between French and Anglo and the pro-British and pro-American and pro-'fuck all of you I just want to bring in the wheat'.
Matt values peace and compromises far more than Alfred. He views the world in shades of grey. Alfred and his idealism and power mean he has always felt the ability to do the right thing and always had faith he is doing the right thing, especially in comparison to his father and the British Empire in general. Matt, however, sees him and Arthur as practically the same.
Tldr: The British and American empires are blackholes. 'Peace, order and good government' is the cost of Matt keeping his center of gravity in a position to pull off the necessary maneuvers to keep himself from being sucked in and destroyed.
#the ask box || probis pateo#Alfred and Matt || lonely boys with the longest borders#matthew || my country is winter#alfred || o beautiful for spacious skies#Arthur || stone set in the silver sea#does this make sense? i hope it makes sense#its something ive thought about but not really put into words
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Another week, another phantom menace for Rishi Sunak. The people he is talking about, regarding his benefit reforms, do not exist. The 1.35 million people who could work but just don’t want to, who have a label of depression or anxiety but are just a little bit sad, who could have their benefits replaced by vouchers and find that incentivising: these people do not exist.
People are not signed off work because we are all a little bit more comfortable talking about our moods. People are not on disability benefits because Prince Harry did a podcast. We don’t have a “sicknote culture” because it’s too easy to get a sicknote. The pressure on GPs will not be lifted by parcelling out sicknotes to private contractors. Those with depression and anxiety severe enough to claim a personal independence payment (Pip) are catastrophically unwell. If numbers have surged over the past 14 years, which they have, it is because Conservative governments make you catastrophically unwell.
Pushback on this new narrative of cruelty has so far been pathetic: at the most, you might hear a minister challenged on the scarcity of NHS mental health provision. All that is true: child and adolescent mental health services in particular are now so poor as to be almost nonexistent. There are areas of the country where a child can wait so long for help that by the time it arrives, four years later, they are no longer a child. In a grim, idiotic irony that is the trademark of a government that marries callousness to incompetence, the more severe your illness, the more labyrinthine and inaccessible the treatment: hospital trusts might meet the referral targets for psychotic episodes, but most then fail to meet the standard for providing treatment. Waiting times for severe mental illness besides psychosis aren’t recorded and people describe it as endless limbo.
But the problem starts further up the pipeline: our mental health is worse because our general health is worse. “Britain is objectively sicker than it was a decade ago,” the epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote in January. Poverty is driving down life expectancy and driving up infant mortality – and, along the way, it’s destroying people’s sanity. Being chronically hungry – as the UN rapporteur noted in November, with some horror, that many people are in Britain – harms your state of mind, as does not being able to feed your children.
Debt, precarious housing, low wages, punitive benefit sanctions – any one of these factors might reasonably cause a person to fear for their existence. Successive Conservative governments have driven a large number of people to despair and now they want to engage us in a conversation about snowflakes. We shouldn’t dignify it.
If the premise is built on an untruth, it is not surprising that no single point is true, either. Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, is calling these ideas the “biggest welfare reforms in a generation”, but 14 years is much less than a generation and, in this time, welfare has been reformed significantly. Universal credit, introduced 11 years ago, was never benchmarked to a meaningful assessment of need, with the result that 90% of households claiming it, as of last summer, are unable to afford the essentials.
If that was the intention – to move low-income families on to the breadline – that is hands down the most successful reform the Tories have enacted. Pip, the benefit these reforms are coming for, was itself a reform of the disability living allowance. It is known for assessment criteria so harsh and nonsensical that, if anxiety isn’t one of your symptoms at the start of it, it generally is by the end.
The whole wheeze is underpinned by the fact that Sunak doesn’t have time to make meaningful changes to anything. Maybe he thinks he is laying a trap for Labour. Maybe he thinks the injection of fresh cruelty will boost his support in the local elections. If there is anything more disgusting than the sight of a half-billionaire rolling up his sleeves for a “benefits crackdown” in the middle of a cost of living crisis, the realities of which he wouldn’t be able to imagine even if it occurred to him to try, I can’t think of it.
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All The Concerts!
my mom wrote down every concert she's ever been to and it's a LOT, like in the triple digits
and it got me thinking if I could name every concert I've ever been to? I am fearful I might forget some tho my MS memory sucks but here goes:
New Kids on the Block
Boyz II Men/MC Hammer
Tori Amos (x7)
Switchblade Symphony
KMFDM with Nivek Ogre
VNV Nation (x2)
Air Supply (x2)
Terri Clark (lol I hated country when my family dragged me to this one, I was in my peak Snob Goth era)
Garth Brooks (happened much later when I had learned to embrace country)
Peter Cetera
Sarah McLachlan
The Editors
Radiohead (i hated this hahah, it was so fucking boring like their music. My friend bought the tickets and I had hoped seeing them live would make it click. It did not. I was bored and cold because it was raining in Seattle)
Coldplay (was so much better than Radiohead, seethe snobby indie rock fans)
Regina Spektor
The Decemberists (literally the worst concert I've ever seen. Again I did not buy the tickets but my friend who liked going to indie rock shows always bought two tickets in hopes of getting a date and I was her backup if she didn't. To be clear even though this and Radiohead sucked, I did have a great time with my friend both times)
Cake
George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic
Puscifer
Barry Manilow
ummm now I'm drawing a blank but I KNOW I've been to more shows and the stupid brain damage is making me forget. I've always been to see a fuck ton of tribute bands at this supper club, and tbh they were almost all really good. The Pink Floyd one especially. Also lol in middle school once this club I was in had a band come perform and they were like... a hair metal Christian band that took mainstream rock songs like "Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi and changed the lyrics to like... "LIVING 'CAUSE I PRAAYYYY" and it was fucking hilarious. It's driving me crazy tho because I know there are more actual real concerts I am forgetting -_-
so i guess if you count all the artists I saw multiple times, it comes to... *maths* 28 concerts? Which tbh does not feel like nearly enough.
on the bucket list:
Vienna Teng
Brandi Carlile
Portishead (lol this will never happen but a girl can dream)
Beyoncé
Taylor Swift
TOOL
A Perfect Circle
The Amazing Devil (which is somehow even less likely than Portishead)
SO I'LL MAKE THIS A MEME. Tell me which concerts you've been to, and tell me which concerts you feel like you MUST see before you die. @deathinthesun @an-ivy-covered-summer @swiftzeldas @sylvieons and whoever else wants to do it~
I did get Taylor tickets last year HOWEVER they were... beyond atrocious, the seats. Like, upper upper deck, BEHIND the stage with like no visibility, not even of the screens, because again: BEHIND. I had like three people trying to get tickets that day and 2/3 of us failed but my friend succeeded and she was like "do you want me to buy these? they're upper deck" and I was like yeah yeah that's okay! We can look at the screens! And then I saw the "OBSTRUCTED VISIBILITY" thing and looked at the layout and I was like...kind of devastated, honestly? It's really hard for me to do an outing like that physically, it was outdoors in April (which translates to HOT in Florida) and I just didn't see myself able to endure 5 or 6 hours at minimum in the heat without like, passing out and dying. Not to mention I'm still really scared of being in a large space with that many people because my disease-modifying drug destroys most of my immune system. I ended up selling them, and... buying my vinyl collection lol. Taylor got a lot of that money again because I bought a lot of her records. I'm kind of bummed that maybe I missed my chance forever, but again, I don't think I could have physically swung it. Plus, of the three nights she did Tampa, the show I was supposed to go to had meh surprise songs while the other 2 nights had AMAZING ones, so I know I would have been salty about that too. ONE DAY THO.
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The other night, ahead of Purim, I had some drinks with colleagues. Later in the evening, a conversation with one of them turned to politics. Obviously. I asked her why she’s not a member of a union, and she said pretty bluntly ‘well, I’m a lot more right wing than you’. In the spirit of the mitzvah to drink until unable to distinguish between Mordechai and Haman, friend and foe, I decided to hold back my impulse to hiss, and simply asked her ‘in what ways?’
In truth, she and I agreed on most basic political points. The Tories are abusive, selfish pricks; Labour is wet and stands for nothing; privatisation has all but destroyed Britain; everyone deserves basic necessities like food, housing, even education; we have more in common with each other and with the homeless than we ever will with either Charles III or our bosses. She was also very supportive (far more so than most Brits I meet) of my experiences of antisemitism and transphobia.
Here’s where her right leanings shone through:
1) She obviously believes in meritocracy; those who are best suited to specific tasks deserve recognition. But then this is hardly an alien sentiment on the left, is it?
2) She believes hierarchies are necessary for systems to function; certain people are required to take responsibility for the group, and they supposedly must therefore be above the others. This directly contradicted something she said earlier, that we should all take more responsibility for our shared situation, with which I agreed, but she considered a right wing view. I also gave peer-review as an example of a fully functional non-hierarchical system, which she essentially ignored. An odd response given we work at a university.
3) She believes ‘socialism has never worked’. When I responded to this by saying ‘it’s working right now’ and pointed out that Cuba is thriving and has passed the most progressive LGBT and family rights legislation to date, and that China is the most populace country on earth with the highest GPD and a sitting communist party, she said she’s not informed enough about either of those, ‘but Nordic countries...’ which I interrupted, and we agreed that Nordic countries are not socialist, nor especially good examples of capitalism. We also agreed that capitalism isn’t very viable in the long term, and I made the point that any criticisms of socialism can be made tenfold of capitalism, plus dozens more condemnable. So I think this is just about a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘socialism’ even refers to, resultant of hegemonic propaganda?
4) She believes issues like transphobia and antisemitism (etc.) are problems on ‘both sides’. Now, I agree with this, but what I said was, the difference is that such prejudice or hate is a betrayal of leftist principles, whereas the same prejudice and hate actually props up many - if not all - right wing values.
One of our main talking points was my assertion that things like the NHS or Right To Buy council housing or tuition fees or whatever are really a question of priorities. I said that there are some things everyone deserves: healthcare, housing, food, power, education, transport, and we should prioritise them, especially as it’s entirely within our (or the state’s) capacity to provide these things. She agreed. However, she seemed stuck on the idea that the government should be expected to provide food. I am entirely unclear on why, but when I mentioned that supermarkets throw away enormous quantities of food she agreed it was despicable. I suggested that such food waste could be legislated against and/or wasted food could be claimed by local authorities to redistribute to those in need, but she seemed dubious. She did agree that local food programmes would be possible, though, yet she called this ‘traditional conservatism’, relating it to some imagined precept of charity. Now I don’t know what kind of topsy-turvy Bizarro world conservatism invests in practical charitable measures (rather than e.g. laundering the money of the rich), but I did assert: ‘when the Black Panthers were doing it, I don’t think anyone called it conservative’.
Anyway, my point about priorities was that strengthening the NHS or ensuring people are housed and fed are simply more important to me than the military, for example, so I suggested we could defund the military in order to re-allocate funding to more important services. Her response to this was, I kid you not, ‘well we can’t just tax the rich and assume that will solve all our problems’. I replied ‘well we could actually, and it would certainly go toward solving some problems, but my suggestion was to defund the military, not tax the rich.’
Now what can we learn from all this? As I said, I actually agree that we should all take more responsibility for our shared plight. The crucial difference, in my mind, is that the reason for doing that is so that we can all lessen one another’s loads, make things easier and more comfortable and even enjoyable for one another. C'est assez, languir en tutelle; l'égalité veut d'autres lois! But the conservative psyche has no desire to make things easier. Perhaps this is obvious from the constant overcomplication of adding obstacles in the form of strawmen. ‘Socialism has never worked!’ It has and it does, but who mentioned socialism? ‘We can’t just tax the rich!’ Yes we can, but who mentioned taxing the rich? ‘The money necessary to keep the NHS going is more than we have available!’ How much is being spent on the Coronation, and where is that money coming from? (spoiler: not ‘the rich’) ‘Helping the needy is a conservative value!’ Okay seriously WTF dude, but also, why then do conservatives stop leftists from doing it every time we try?
These aren’t just rehearsed talking points. These are symptoms of targeted hegemonic misinformation. No one is born conservative, one is made conservative, perhaps even by force. But to be conservative is also at odds with the fundamental experience of social beings; caring for one another, empathy. Part of right wing psychology is the desire to impose one’s own trauma on others, because after all one’s own experience, however brutal, must be the natural order.
Of course, dialectical materialism illuminates precisely the opposite. My experience and hers and indeed yours are not the same, and yet they are all true, even if they are at odds. The difference is that where the right wing practices an ongoing separation into ever smaller in-groups, our immortal science teaches us to understand, to reach out, to gather together and to unite. The revolutionary personality is driven by love, a desire to confront injustice, to heal the world. This is the final struggle, so let each stand in our place...
And tomorrow the International union shall be the human race!
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