Doesn’t matter if they know what they’re doing or not (but they certainly do) or if they’re doing this ‘ironically’ (a cop out excuse to claim plausible deniability when they get called out) this fascist nazi Captain Planet blog is influencing its readers in a bad way, and you should be aware of how. Because honestly I’ve used some of those techniques too.
“But it’s all a joke!” No it’s not. It’s masquerading as a joke, hiding behind that claim if the heat gets too intense, but it’s not a joke.
Well, except maybe for the fact that the right wingers are laughing at you trying to figure it out, ‘getting confused’ or defending parts of what’s been said.
The short premise is that the more positively you feel about a personality on the internet, the more likely you are to agree with them, and the more likely you are to side with them on issues that you didn’t previously have an opinion on. At some point you file them away in your brain as ‘someone I agree with’ and use them as a shortcut for ‘If they said this, I agree with them’. It’s a very human thing, it’s why advertisers pay so much for celebrity endorsements.
So part of what this Nazi Captain Planet rper is/was doing (I can’t believe I typed that phrase with my own two hands, what even is 2019?) is making you feel attached to them, and partly it’s training your brain to accept and normalise their rhetoric.
So how does a blog set about accomplishing this?
Start with an easy one- giving you a nickname or term of endearment. It makes you feel special, and like you belong to something. They use Planeteers, I used Vetlings. People crave belonging.
Then have an approachable front: a much loved cartoon character. The trusted profession of veterinarian.
Now if you’re trying to do this deliberately, start getting people into a quick habit of agreeing with you. Pick neutral ground that’s hard to criticise - protecting the environment is good, don’t litter, we want good things for our pets, etc.
And once you’ve got people agreeing with you on multiple points in succession, it becomes easier to get them to agree with, or at least tolerate, the next point. Especially if you’re on a relatively unassuming blog about ‘saving the environment’ or animal health.
Did you ever try that trick as a kid where you ask someone to repeat the word ‘silk’ out loud ten times in a row, and then ask ‘what does a cow drink’? A bunch of them will automatically reply ‘milk’ instead of ‘water’ because you primed their brain.
So you can use this repeated behavior to desensitise readers to an idea, get them used to agreeing with you, until you slip some things in which they might normally side-eye.
It’s making the brain practice how you want it to think before the main event. It’s showing your work so that other people can apply it to other situations. I’ve done it too, rather more unintentionally most of the time on this blog, though I use it when communicating directly with clients.
For example, in my writing I can lead you down the garden path of:
“Purebreds have problems because they haven’t had new genes introduced in generations”
> “mixing of breeds is a good thing”
> “breed purity is a bad thing, maybe not immediately but it is bad”.
Then I will often leave readers to make the last step on their own, because I trust they’re intelligent and reasonable, and a conclusion you reach yourself has more sticking power than any I just hand you.
So when you conclude “racial purity is a completely bullshit concept and detrimental to the health of those ‘races’, are Nazis actually trying to make us as screwed over as German Shepherds?” you will hold that opinion more strongly than if I just said it to you.
Similarly, a different blog leading you down the path of “Invasive species are a result of globalism and must be removed” with “there are three types of people: black, Jews and normal” is leading you towards the path of “blacks and Jews are not normal, they are invasive and we should remove them” and then that goes to “but humanely! We can humanely euthanize invasive species!” and I’m sure you can see where that is going. It also co-opts real conservation talk and terms, but it’s glossing over the fact it’s trying to get you to think about people this way, often with as much plausible deniability as they can muster. Throw the thoughts out there, see what sticks, then backtrack if it doesn’t work.
On that note of backtracking, this is where Dogwhistles come in.
A Dogwhistle is a phrase that on its own looks perfectly benign, or even makes sense in context, but has a specific meaning for a particular subgroup of people that change the context. Just like dog whistles are heard by dogs, but not by people.
A classic example is the phrase ‘family values’, which often means anti-LGBT+ in a Christian context even though it sounds like it should mean something supportive.
The Nazi and alt-right ones change periodically. From relatively old school ones like ‘14 words’, the number 88, and ‘final solution’, to more recent ones like putting names in (((brackets))), particular emojis and even ‘Subscribe to Pewdiepie’.
Yes, ‘Subscribe to Pewdiepie’ became a Nazi dogwhistle, regardless of whatever you might think of Pewdiepie. If it was thrown into a context where it didn’t necessarily seem to belong, it changed the meaning of those words. And if that person was called out on it, they’d backtrack and claim they simply liked the content. And the bigger the meme became, the easier it was for them to use.
Ah, you might think by now, but lots of people also use ‘Subscribe to Pewdiepie’, emojis and sentences with 14 words. And 88 is a perfectly ordinary number, a birth year even, there are times when it’s really just being used legitimately?
Of course there are. But when you start to see a lot of them together, it starts to look suspicious.
And if you are a minority regularly targeted by such a hateful group, it starts to look really very intimidating. So if everybody starts reblogging these dogwhistles from a colourful Captain Planet blog, it makes it look like there are far more Nazi supporters than anything else. And it isolates those minorities.
This is why it’s so insidious that they claimed something like Captain Planet - a character with significant nostalgia, a show with a pretty diverse group of main characters and a good message, and co-opted it into spreading these dogwhistles and priming unwary minds to think these rhetorics, these training ideas, are reasonable.
“But it was clearly a troll, lmfao!”
Oh hell no. These are real tactics. They will say it’s a joke, it’s trolling, or that you’re overreacting, but that’s part of the plan to seed these ideas. Don’t defend it. Don’t fall for it.
Please show support for the Bojack Horseman crew as they struggle to unionize!
They are currently in their sixth season and are still a non-union production. This means they do not currently have the wages, protections, benefits, and healthcare afforded to union productions.
…so let’s get a couple things straight about Donald Trump and LGBTQ rights:
The Trump Admin. has made a conscious effort to ignore the very existence of Pride Month up until 2019. (1)
As soon as Trump was inaugurated, the “LGBTQ rights” pages and recognitions on government websites were removed. (2)
The Trump admin canceled plans to ask questions regarding sexual orientation on the 2020 US census. (3)
Trump and Pence attempted to have the Commerce Department remove sexual orientation and gender identity from their equal employment policy. (4)
Against expert advice of military leadership, medical authorities, budget analysts, the U.S. House, 70% of Americans, and the armed forces of allied countries, Trump and Pence banned transgender people from the military. (5)
The Trump Admin. ordered Betsy DeVos and the Dept. of Ed. to rescind non-discrimination protections for transgender students, against expert advice of medical, legal, and policy professionals. (6)
Betsy DeVos and the Dept. of Ed. announced they would reject civil rights complaints from transgender students. (7)
Betsy DeVos refused to rule out federal funds for private schools that discriminate. (8)
The Trump Admin. announced a proposal that would gut anti-discrimination protections for transgender patients in health care spaces, essentially permitting harm against trans patients. (9)
May, 2019 - The Trump Admin. proposed a regulation that would enable medical professionals to deny ALL forms of care to LGBTQ patients solely based on the provider’s personal beliefs. (10)
Trump Admin. has established a new office within HHS whose sole purpose would be to defend physicians and other medical professionals who refuse care to LGBTQ patients. (11)
Trump Admin. granted a federally-funded foster program to discriminate against families who are LGBTQ or whom do not identify as Christian. (12)
Since the fall of 2018, Trump and Pence have been attempting to circulate a federal government-wide regulation that would essentially erase trans people from all existing protections and acknowledgment. (13)
Trump Admin ordered the Centers for Disease Control to stop using the word “transgender” in official reports in an effort to erase data dissemination on trans people. (14)
Trump Admin. proposed a rule that would eliminate data collection on LGBTQ foster youth and parents, erasing all official knowledge of the needs of LGBTQ children in these spaces. (15)
Trump Admin. specifically ordered questions on sexual orientation to be removed from surveys of programs that cater to the elderly and disabled, directly striking at older LGBTQ Americans and persons with disabilities. (16)
Ben Carson and the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are removing the words “inclusive” and “free from discrimination” in HUD’s official mission statement while scaling back enforcement of non-discrimination regulations. (17)
HUD and Ben Carson are permitting emergency shelters to deny access to transgender persons who are homeless. (18)
HUD and Ben Carson trim the number of LGBTQ-related questions in federal surveys. (19)
Trump Admin’s Justice Dept. has filed a brief In the U.S. Court Of Appeals that argued federal civil rights laws do not protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. (20)
Trump’s Justice Dept. and Jeff Sessions issued guidelines to protect religious objections to public policy. (21)
Trump Admin. defended the baker who refused to bake a same-sex couple a wedding cake. (22)
Trump Admin is rolling back protections that provide safe accommodations for transgender inmates. (23)
By executive order, Trump Admin. rolled back non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ federal contractors. (24)
The Trump Admin. ordered the State Department to deny visas to same-sex partners of foreign diplomats. (25)
May, 2019 - The Trump Admin. changed rules so the child of a same-sex couple born abroad via surrogate would be considered “born out of wedlock” and would not be granted U.S. citizenship. (26)
One of my favorite “zero effort” spells is a mirror spell.
I carry a compact with me (mirrored on both sides) and whenever something happens that I need to reflect on or someone does something that I think THEY need to reflect on, I write my name (or the other persons name) on one side of scrap paper and a brief synopsis of what needs to be reflected on on the other side and I close it in the compact.
Then I just leave it closed up until I think it’s been long enough.
Soo, because it recently came up again, during hospital lab work, and in case I got any writers among my followers:
If you want to induce drama by having your character bleed and need a transfusion, do not try to be dramatic by making them AB.
You can put literally anything into an AB person as long as it’s Rh compatible and the other antibodies are out, too. But strictly AB0 speaking? AB is the universal acceptor. So yeah it’s rare to have an AB person, but hospital have ‘emergency’ blood at hand that’s 0neg and therefore can go into anyone who needs it as long as the antibodies fit.
If you want drama, give your character 0neg and have the hospital be fresh out because they had a big surgery/accident/whatev before. 0 people can only get 0 blood so if you’re out of that and suddenly someone comes in bleeding like a faucet? That’s panic time. AB people bleeding like a faucet is only a problem if you’ve run out of the proper Rh group (or out of literally everything) because you can stuff them with B or A as well if you got nothing else at hand.
• Tol is reading a book and Smol snuggles up under their arm
• Smol can’t reach something so Tol picks them up
• Tol is the soft gentle kind half of the OTP and Smol is a tiny ball of rage
• Smol always likes to compare height and hand sizes to Tol and always stands on their tiptoes so they can be taller but then Tol just ends up lifting Smol into the air
• Tol always uses Smol as an armrest to annoy them
• Smol sometimes gets mistaken for a young child and gets all defensive so Tol has to calm them down
Ex-villains and hero(es) turning the
events of previous battles into bizarre inside jokes.
Ex-villains embracing the power of
friendship and love.
Ex-villains putting up walls and
keeping to themselves until the heroes teach them what it means to
trust someone.
Ex-villains messing up and being
forgiven because redemption is a process, not an endgame.
Ex-villains being shy and uncertain
about their new place as a hero.
Bonus: Ex-villains hiding behind their
hero friends during moments of shyness and uncertainty.
Ex-villains being tempted back to the
dark side only to realize how much their newfound friendships mean to
them.
Ex-villains pretending to return to the
dark side, and using their villain cred to be a mole/saboteur on the
heroes’ behalf.
Ex-villains taking the same skills and
character traits that made them effective villains and using them for
good.
Ex-villains defeating current villains
by being better at those skills and traits
than they are.
Ex-villains being rejected by almost
everyone except the very few willing to give them the benefit of the
doubt.
Ex-villains being ferociously
protective of those few.
Ex-villains convincing old allies and friends to follow them to the light side.
Ex-villains helping their hero friends
through guilt and self-doubt by reminding them that your mistakes don’t
make you and it’s never too late to turn things around.
Ex-villains receiving unconditional
trust and affection from someone small and innocent, and having no
idea what they’re supposed to do with that.
Ex-villains reuniting with heroic loved ones that they don’t have to fight against anymore.
Ex-villains looking around at their new
friends and their new home and having to sit down and ride out a
sudden wave of powerful emotion because they can’t remember the last
time they felt content.
Ex-villains restoring our faith in the fundamental goodness of humankind.
Okay, real talk about a sensitive subject: Tony Stark is an extremely high functioning alcoholic.
High functioning alcoholics can function like normal people, for the most part, even when smashed. They don’t slur their words or stumble or show any real overt signs of drunkenness until they are WAY past the normal threshold. The tipoff is the smell. You can smell the liquor on them even if they haven’t spilled a drop. Sometimes, I think it comes through their pores.
Alcoholics usually have a higher tolerance for alcohol, built up like an immunity to poison…because that’s basically what it is. Often they will begin their day with alcohol, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the ever present hangover. Some can’t function normally without it. But high functioning alcoholics will generally seem normal while intoxicated.
If you suddenly remove all alcohol, some of them experience delirium tremens (DTs), which you’ll need to look up if you want to use; they are rough and can be fatal if not experienced under the care of a medical facility.
Now, not all Tonys are alcoholic, I’m just taking about the ones who are. High functioning alcoholics are not silly drunks or cartoonish. They can walk a straight line, they can even operate vehicles (they are still impaired, they just hide it better).
He doesn’t slur or slide his consonants. He doesn’t fall down. Hell, drinking might actually calm normal mood swings for him. He could still be charming. He could be MORE charming while drunk.
And remember, people are alcoholics for REASONS. It’s self medication. Nobody is addicted to alcohol for fun. Nobody gets there on purpose.
Addition for those who feel like writing something featuring a character in withdrawal, here’s some info:
Alcohol withdrawal is one of the worse withdrawals a person can go through. Even in hospitals with access to advanced medical care, it can still prove fatal.
Withdrawal can start as soon as 2 hours after the last drink, but usually starts somewhere between 6-24 hours. The initial symptoms include shakiness, nausea, vomiting, sweating, anxiety, headache and insomnia. While these symptoms can sometimes last for several weeks, at this point they are non-life-threatening. For some people, this is all the withdrawal symptoms they will experience.
If you feel like continuing your character’s torture, between 12 and 24 hours after their last drink, visual hallucinations may begin. These usually won’t last beyond 48 hours, and your character will typically know they are hallucinations and not real. The hallucinations typically take the form of spiders, snakes, or other creepy crawlies.
If that is still not enough for your whump goals, in some patients tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizures start 24-48 hours after the last drink. While the seizures are usually self-limiting, this is where the withdrawal starts to get potentially dangerous- about 3% of people who develop withdrawal-related seizures will develop status eplepticus, a condition in which a seizure may last for more than 30 minutes, deprives the body of oxygen, and may cause brain damage.
Now, if you’re really looking to put your character in danger, Delirium Tremens is the next step. This starts at about days 3-10 (peaks around day 5) and is hugely dangerous- untreated, 35% of people who develop DTs will die. Even with medical treatment, this number only goes down to about 10%. That’s one in about 10 people will still die even under medical supervision.
DTs symptoms include: High blood pressure, visual and/or tactile (touch) hallucinations which the person cannot distinguish from reality, tachycardia (high heart rate), fever, confusion, severe shaking, severe anxiety, profuse sweating, additional seizures, irregular heartbeat.
Treatment includes:
Benzodiazepines- the body uses these chemicals similarly to the way it uses alcohol- meaning they can help decrease or postpone withdrawal without exposing the person to actual alcohol. They can also decrease blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and occurrence of seizures, making them ideal drugs for treating withdrawal.
Antipsychotic medications (often haloperidol) for treating hallucinations
IV Glucose (D5W), which decreases risk of DTs or worsening withdrawal.
IV Electrolytes
IV nutrient replacement- particularly thiamine, folate, magnesium and niacin. These are typically vitamins and minerals the body has a difficult time absorbing after long-term alcohol use, and replacing them reduces risk of complications.
If caught early and treated aggressively, the person has a higher chance of surviving. One problem is that the medications (particularly the benzodiazepines) must be given in very high doses to be effective. Medical professionals may not recognize this need and so may not prescribe or administer appropriate amounts of the drugs to counter the withdrawal symptoms. This is a very real problem and sometimes results in under medication, which can be extremely dangerous or uncomfortable to the person in their care.
When you think of your magic that can make people fly, think of disabled people for whom that might be their only reliable form of transportation.
When you think of your technological wasteland where people live far apart from each other and only talk in text online, think of Autistic and Deaf people no longer forced to speak aloud.
When you think of your human sacrifices, think of those who have
historically been sacrificed in the name of progress, who have been
considered disposable, and the power of humans to convince themselves their will is right.
When you think of the differences between your world and all us others, think of the ways the most vulnerable might be affected.
Be diverse in writing.
If you take inspiration from cultures not your own, bring the people of that culture into your work, to breathe life into the connection.
If you write beyond the edges of this world, use that to broaden your understanding of people unlike yourself and homes unlike your own, not as an excuse to write away the Other.
If you set tales in the present or the past, close or far, remember the people who have been erased yet are not missing, and give them a mirror in your works.
If you create a story that will be read by the people of this world in the present day, let the characters of that story reflect your audience.
Be diverse in editing.
If, when you have plotted your story, you find that you have written your characters to every privilege you own yourself, have heart, and write; and learn to see the moments that can be rewritten from less privileged perspectives.
If, when you have finished writing your first draft, you find that
none of your characters has been marked with marginalized identifiers,
have heart, and revise; there will be other drafts.
If, when you have published your first work of fiction, or your second or your sixth, you find that your work does not reflect the diversity of the world, have heart, and be proud; there will be other works, and you have done a great thing, bringing the richness of your imagination into the hearts of your audience.
If, when you have published your second work of fiction, or your third or your seventh, you use your knowledge of diversity to write it to the best of your ability, know that someone out there will read it, and be glad that they see themselves in the pages; and that is the legacy of your choice.
(This is inspired by @writingwithcolor, as well as my own experiences as an Autistic trans man and unpublished writer.)
i dont know why every like, forced bedsharing fic is always AND THEN, DESPITE THEIR ATTEMPTS TO KEEP TO THEIR OWN SIDES OF THE BED, THEY WOKE UP IN A TENDER EMBRACE like
have any of you ever… ever shared a bed, with anyone,
Symptoms: >What are the symptoms that 90-100% people with the disease have? (qualifying symptoms, in essence) >What are the symptoms that 60-90% people with the disease have? >What are the symptoms that 40-60% people with the disease have? >What are the symptoms that 10-40% people with the disease have? >What are the symptoms that less than 10% of people with the disease have? (rare symptoms, in other words)
What is the prevalence of this hereditary disease? (Obesity and poor eyesight, for example, are very prevalent, whereas hereditary angioedema is not.)
What factors increase the risk of a child having this disease?
Is it genetic (like schizophrenia), viral (HIV) or environmental (obesity)? >Is it a combination of genetic and environmental (like diabetes)?
What treatment options are available? >What are the most successful?
What is the mortality rate?
What medical complications can arise because of this disease?
What social complications can arise because of this disease? (Is it stigmatized? Does it prevent people who have it from socializing?)
