We almost impeached a president for cheating on his fucking wife but we can’t even impeach Trump for putting children in fucking cages
Y’all are fucking annoying
It’s worse than that. We didn’t almost impeach Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was impeached–the senate just ruled to keep him in office.
And what we impeached him for was perjury and obstruction of justice.
Aka lying and getting in the way of official investigations.
You know. The things Trump has been doing since day one. On live TV and twitter. Where we have fucking proof of it.
Yet here we are. And there he fucking still is.
This is why we have to vote this November, guys. We have got to take back congress. Trump will almost certainly be impeached if we can get enough seats back.
Please please, I beg of you. Even if you don’t love your democratic candidates this November; even if they’ve done ‘problematic’ things in the past–please vote. The people who sat it out in 2016 because they didn’t love Hillary, or were bitter about Bernie, or fucking voted third party–they are the ones who carry the weight of this administration. The republicans went in undivided. The democrats went in split. And now children are being torn from their families, legal citizens are being deported, and we have fucking Nazis on the rise again.
I get that you want your politician’s views to align perfectly with yours. I do. But sometimes in politics you have to chose the lesser of two evils. We didn’t do that in 2016.
I beg of you. Do it this year.
You may not be able to find a progressive candidate whose ideas precisely align with yours…but I PROMISE you that the fascist racist misogynist white supremacists have candidates whose ideas EXACTLY align with theirs.
Good news, tungle.hellsite, the first positive update we’ve had in years lets you write text posts with MAXIMUM GAY! Absolutely RAGINGhomosexuality on main!
I get the distinct feeling this is not what I’m supposed to be seeing, Functioning Website dot com
uhhh yeah they do, there’s a pretty obvious page that asks you if you’re over 18 to proceed. the only way you *don’t* see that is if you’ve already registered and said you were over 18.
that “proceed” page can literally just link you right to the fic. even without an account. no need to enter any info at all. people lie about their ages online bud
so? don’t enter an adult-only space and be surprised it’s for adults?
Dusty, this building with the giant neon VB sign out the front serves alcohol, how was I supposed to know that was gonna be the case?
also, a thirteen year old absolutely can go to the library and borrow something nsfw in many places. That is their right as a borrower, and often parents have to sign a form acknowledging that the librarians are not responsible for what content kids check out, their parents or guardians are responsible. as in, if you take your thirteen year old sister to the library, it’s your job to make sure she doesn’t borrow fifty shades because it sucks
also, there are adult books that are literally about children but are not for children. lots of them. sometimes authors write books about people without the book being for those people, this is a thing that happens, it has always happened, william shakespeare did not write romeo and juliet as a kids’ play
and if you don’t think people ever lie about their age (or use fake id) to get into 18+ movies (or buy alcohol or cigarettes, or mature rated computer games like gta) when they’re underage, you must only know very, very well-behaved teenagers
Also sometimes there’s a copy of American Psycho in the high school library and neither the librarians nor the parents apparently notice when the seventeen-year-old borrows it and reads it.
That would be the most egregious example I guess. How did that happen? Why would you have that book in a high school library?
I started reading smutty fanfic at about the age of fourteen. Some of it was light, but some of it was stuff I definitely shouldn’t have been reading at that age. Whose fault was that?
Mine.
As inverted as it sounds, give kids some credit. I read all of the warnings hpff.net had to offer. I chose to click on the links marked “mature” and I chose to keep scrolling after reading author’s notes that warned for explicit content. That’s on me, not the people who ran the site, not the people who wrote the fic. It’s not the job of fic housing websites to be parents, babysitters, or moral guardians, and it’s not the job of fic writers to be those things either. If you’re worried about minors being exposed to age-inappropriate content, great! Focus on educating minors about internet safety and making responsible decisions. But blanket “think of the children!” statements don’t actually help .
“I doubt my 13-year-old sister could go to the library and rent something nsfw” have you ever been to a library? actually, no, scratch that, have you ever read a fucking book?
I read books written FOR CHILDREN (as in, they were classified as for ages 10 and up) that very frankly talked about sex. where the characters talked about their breasts growing and dealing with that. periods. having sexy feelings for people. and violent! people fighting, people getting hurt, wars. I read one where the one guy got struck by lightning, it was very graphic.
lots of books written for children aren’t all happiness and fluff.
Or you are a bored ten year old stuck at home i the summer and start reading your dad’s westerns and your grandmother’s romance novels. Not to mention Your brother’s Cujo and It.
Kids will put a book down if it’s too traumatic.
I read vampire erotica in 9th grade biology class. In front of god and everybody. I bought it in front my parents (with my allowance), and the book store owner, and read it in class in front of my teachers.
My husband read “It” when he was 10. It by the way is ABOUT KIDS and trust me when I say G rated things DO NOT happen in that book.
The first time I saw Rocky Horror Picture Show it was with the explicit permission of my mother with firm instructions that if I had any questions or didn’t understand anything that I was to ask. I was 12. I was fine.
Also Jesus Christ have you SEEN some of the things made FOR kids. Dark Crystal? Labyrinth? Animorphs?
Listen there is nothing on AO3 that is gonna mess anyone up like Dark Crystal. And trust me if there is any one with half a brain who can’t handle it they will click away from it.
Maybe I’m embracing the crab bucket a little here but jees people if a kid wants to consume nonkiddie things no one except maybe maybe their parents will stop them. Children are dark man. Do you not remember being a kid?
The thing in this entire post that leaves me most puzzled is – why shouldn’t a 17-year-old get to read “American Psycho”? And while the librarians presumably noticed – we noticed everything – why should they object to the situation?
Also – know what they’ve got in libraries specifically for kids? Sex ed books. Just saying…
Christ! Did you ever notice these on every bloody fic at AO3? (I guess not, why read the rules when you can ignore them and blame others for your ignorance):
General Audiences
Teen And Up Audiences
Mature
Explicit: only suitable for adults
The work was not given any rating
They are there for a reason, like tags, so you can curate your reading experience responsibly. And by responsibly I mean DON’T FUCKING READ IT IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT OR IF IT IS OBVIOUS IT IS NOT FOR YOU.
As for children accessing A03? Kids are their parents’ responsibility. AO3 writers and librarians and bookstore clerks are not obligated to parent other people’s children who, unsupervised, access material not meant for them.
That said, Infantilising older teens and young adults is frankly offensive to them, like they are three and cannot stomach anything that goes beyond Peppa Pig or Sesame Street.
One thing is right, though. You cannot compare books. Books are aimed at whoever wants to buy them on the mass market, fanfic is targeted to a very small closed group, often in smaller ships, less than a handful or two of people, it is tagged, has a declaration of warnings and triggers, it is posted on sites meant for fics, and, oh, it’s free, so you don’t lose anything by clicking the red X in the corner to get out of there.
Besides the ratings and the archive warnings, the tagging system (and, even more so, the culture about tagging) on AO3 makes it much easier to tell what sort of story and content you’re getting than you can get from any published book.
The way I see it, America will eventually have the choice between forgiving student debt or facing the massive destabilization caused by an entire generation being unable to build any wealth.
By destabilization I mean that the millennial generation will eventually become aware of the fact that they will be enslaved by their student debt for most of, if not their entire lives.
Many in this generation still had parents that were able to save and contribute financially to their children’s college education, but that’s also going to be a thing of the past when everyone has their own debt burden to carry well into adulthood – meaning the problem will become unimaginably worse for the next generation.
Once people realize this, you’ve got a social powder keg unheard of since the social question poised by the industrial revolution.
The entire student loan system is little more than a scheme meant to extract every last bit of present and future wealth from society’s youngest members, and the longer it continues, the uglier its inevitable end is going to be.
and so many millennials are choosing not to get married, or have kids because of all the debts they owe.
its having much more severe consequences than people want to admit.
Oh, it’s even worse than you think, because many millennials are making the conscious decision to default. There are no real legal penalties for defaulting (debtors prison, for now, is still not a thing). You’ll get letters threatening to sue you and garnish your wages, but they are almost always empty threats. It doesn’t happen. Your credit will be destroyed, but it is technically possible to live life without anything requiring a good credit score. These are the people who will never own property, never take out a car loan, or make any other large purchases requiring financing, but they were already so strapped paying student loan payments, they couldn’t afford those things anyway!
So where does it get “even worse”? The only real penalty for not paying those loans is that the government can, and will, withhold your social security when you reach retirement age. So 25 years from now we’re going to have a generation full of retirement age people who will not be able to retire for one of two big reasons: 1) they spent their youth living on the fringe paying massive student loans debts, and therefore own nothing to keep them afloat (like a paid off house) and they have to keep working to pay rent and survive, or 2) they chose to default so they could actually live some semblance of a life, but now they can’t stop working because no Social Security checks are coming.
Either way, it’s a massive disaster that the government WILL end up holding the bag for. They will either forgive the loans, or they will have to take the weight of all those old millennials dropping into the safety net. They will also have to deal with the high umemployment of generation Z, which will be a direct result of the Millennials not leaving the workforce to make room for them.
Hey real quick I also want to add on here that this is also impacting Boomers – part of the reason we’re seeing more boomers working past retirement age than expected is because a lot of them are currently on the hook for their kids’ student loans since a lot of them are parents of older millennials.
My parents just refinanced their house to get a better interest rate on my sister’s student loans (because of course they cosigned with her). The loans are taking away my sister’s income and ability to save while destabilizing my parents’ credit/housing/future. My mom is retired on disability and my dad was getting ready to retire, but I guess he’s probably going to be taking up one of the increasingly rare faculty positions at the community college where he teaches for a few more years.
My sister turned thirty a few weeks ago. It’s been eight years since she graduated. She’s done a really impressive job of paying down her loans, put $100k toward it. Only $150K left to go. So if she keeps earning at the rate she has been and paying off the loans – which prevent her from renting or saving for a house, she still lives with my parents which is the only reason she’s been able to put that much money toward her loans – she should be done in about another 12 years, when she’s 42. My parents will be in their seventies at that point.
My mom’s parents died when they were 52 and 58. She’s already lived longer than anyone else in her family. My dad’s parents died when they were 67 and 76 – though my 76-year-old grandfather had been in a nursing home for seven years at that point. Paying for the nursing home for an aging parent also impacted my parents’ ability to save and pay down more of their mortgage, btw; as did paying the copays for my mom’s treatment after her heart attacks and for her bypass surgery. Maybe my dad will live long enough after paying my sister’s student loans to enjoy a few years of retirement. Maybe he won’t get Alzheimer’s like his dad and he’ll have some time to get to know his grandkids if my sister and I can ever afford to have any children.
Maybe my mom will die and her life insurance policies will pay off the loans and the house.
I’m realistic enough to recognize that’s more likely than winning the lottery, and to recognize that they’re lucky to be able to afford life insurance that might bail them out of this disaster.
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Anyway the current system is shit and something’s gotta give.
backup 