One Big Damian Fic Rec Post

lol Alistair and Rhys out swinging swords at ghosts and looking like a couple of nutters to the untrained eye. Do you still have the fic or maybe it was an ask about chonklet deluxe being held by a horrifying wraith and screaming like the damned?

A little bit! And it was initially an ask. This fic is brand spanking new because I forgot how cool of an idea that shitpost actually was if I took it seriously. Please be warned that this fic is gory and involves child endangerment, a bastardization of mythological creatures and just general violence. Also here on ao3.

Rural Lancashire, 1590

Dusk draped heavily over the world as the last light of day darkened into a thick grey. Arthur had ducked out the door to catch the midwife as she crossed his property on foot. If he was quick, he could often walk her as far as the edge of the village and consult her on whatever it was Alfred had done now. Teething, his first words, the seizures that had gripped him last spring, croup, the rare occasion Alfred was ever colicky. She was a steely woman with hair to match and indulged him at least, giving the best advice she had after decades of bringing children into the world. He'd hardly paid attention to the labours of women, and children so often died that there was rarely time to pay them any heed as they went from the cradle to the casket so quickly.

He had turned back to make his usual beeline for the house, pushing past and between the square hedges and sprawling kitchen garden. Some of the stronger-smelling herbs must have been finally in season; there was a reek Arthur couldn't quite identify. He had hardly cleared the fence when he heard Alfred's usual cry, demanding attention. The baby was a social thing, as personable as Rhys or Brighid and twice as bold about his want of company. He didn't like waking alone, wrapped up cozy in the cradle or otherwise.

Another sound, shrill and high. This one sent a spike of anxiety through Arthur's spine. He paused for the shortest moment. Then he was moving. That was not the cry of a baby who was lonely or wanted to be picked up. That was a terrified howl from his boy. He shot into the house, through the atrium, up the stairs, and into the nursery. Heaving, he flung open the heavy oak door. The smell was there again. The figure of a woman stood in relief against the low fire, Alfred cradled in her arms and screaming. For a stupid, foolish moment, he hoped it was the scullery girl he had told to mind the baby should he begin crying. But the smell. He took a step forward. At a new angle, he could see rotten eyes staring at his son, a cheek missing to decay and teeth gleaming through the gap.

"Baby." Came the garbled sound from long-dead vocal cords.

"You do not belong in this realm," Arthur said, cooly gesturing for her to hand him the child. His guts churned, bile in his throat. The revenants were often as confused as they were disgusting, pulling themselves out of whatever corner they had died and remained undiscovered. "Give me the child."

The Revenant turned to him. "Mine."

"You do not belong in this realm," Arthur said again, gesturing to Alfred again. He was losing patience with fear, the ceaseless screaming from Alfred turning into a hopeless, frightened sob. She tilted her head, and it fell limply to her shoulder, tendons snapping on the other side. She lifted one hand to push it back onto her neck, and he saw her hand for a moment in the light. Her fingers were torn freshly away. Oh, good Christ, this one had crawled out of her grave as they sometimes did when there was an infant's ceaseless crying above them. But Alfred had never stepped foot in the churchyard, and it was nearly a mile and a half away in the village.

"Rhys!" Arthur screamed, praying to god his brother was in the house and not out in the lambing pens.

The woman transferred Alfred almost tenderly to one arm and lunged at him, hand outstretched and her rotting jaw open. It couldn't close and Arthur couldn't hit her; Alfred was a heavy child and would fall to the floor as a leaden weight, and his soft little body would smash. Arthur was cold. Alfred was still crying.

"Give me my fucking son." He lunged, snatching at her arm. A layer of grey slime came away, and he retched even as he got fingers wrapped into the swaddling nearest Alfred's feet. He was suddenly wrestling a corpse, each of them struggling to get their hands on the blanket. One of Alfred's arms had slipped free, and he flailed, a fresh rolling scream emitting from his tiny scarlet face. Arthur had never seen him so flushed. He tried to shove her away and kick at the rotting creature, but more of something wet disintegrated from her legs. His hand was suddenly slick with gore and a piece of her fell to the floor with a putrid plop, unseen under the half-rotten chemise she had been buried in. She almost looked to grin at him and pulled Alfred closer.

"Let go!" He commanded, trying to get a purchase, but his hands were too slippery. He lunged after her as she retreated towards the door. "Let him go!"

Then a sword was through her belly. Something degassed like fetid blacksmith's bellows. Arthur's senses nearly abandoned him at the smell, but his hands closed around Alfred and tugged him to his chest, and he shot back against the wall, as far from the thing as he could get.

"I know. I'm sorry." He gasped, a clean hand cradling Alfred's head. "I'm so sorry."

The creature groaned and collapsed to the floor on its knees, struggling as its guts dissolved around the blade. Rhys stood behind her, still in his lambing clothes and boots, mother's leaf-bladed sword in his hands. He lifted it, and her head fell from her shoulders. The rotting eyes followed Arthur across the room. He watched as Rhys found one of the seams of her skull with the tip, plunged the sword in, twisted like he was splitting a log, and this time, she lay still, dismembered.

"Are you all right?" Rhys said, stepping over the body to look at him. He approached close enough to pull the blanket away to look at Alfred. Arthur tried to meet his brother's eyes. "Arthur?"

He couldn't. He could only close his eyes, hold Alfred tighter and collapse down the wall. Alfred pressed as tight as he dared against his sternum, and Arthur tried to breathe. Alfred's crying had softened, terror fading to a heartbreaking relief, and Arthur kissed his head. To close. Too fucking close.

"He's fine," Rhys said; his voice was much softer this time. "You're both fine, I promise."

Nah dude, some police are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. They go through a lot of shit so that they can try and help people. I hate most of the shit police do. I don't like being told what to do either. But people are fucking killing cops. That's people killin people and it's fucked. You're the death of your own cause if you condone violence and murder ya dumb fuck. Black lives matter, let's protect them by not murdering good people and giving nazis any sort of argument.

Gonna break down this response as clearly as possible. 

The origins of the police are evil. 

It has been shown repeatedly that the police were formed to oppress the working class and (1, 2) and enforce white supremacy (1, 2, 3). In fact, the early U.S. police grew directly out of slavery.

The police aren’t the people you think they are.

The police don’t care about you – they don’t even have a constitutional duty to protect you. They’re allowed to take your property without your consent (the NYPD seizes so much property they can’t even log it in their computers). In fact, cops are more likely to steal your property than burglars are. They commit hundreds of crimes and human rights violations against people like you & me and get away with it because they cover for each other.

Cops tend to be unusually aggressive, authoritarian, and secretive (Greene & Heilbrun, 2011). They are more than twice as likely to commit domestic violence than the rest of the population, and (once again) they cover for each other when doing so. The police are on the side of neo-Nazis (1, 2). In fact, many times the police themselves are the neo-Nazis/klansmen (1, 2, 3). And even besides all this, cops do all kinds of other shady shit – for instance, undercover police are used to instigate fights during protests and rallies.

The police terrorize those of us who are marginalized.

The police disproportionately arrest Black people for drugs even though white people use drugs more often. They disproportionately pull Black people over for traffic stops. The police terrorize people with disabilities.They are viciously anti-indigenous – and always have been. Police terrorize sex workers. There are countless examples of police brutalizing homeless people (1, 2, 3). The police have a lengthy history of brutality against the LGBT community (1, 2). They terrorize women of color and get away with it (1, 2, 3). They kill massive numbers of people each year – and a disproportionate number of their victims are Black and native. On top of that, recent data suggests cops may kill up to twice as many people as we even thought they did. And while police love to defend themselves by saying they have the most dangerous job, that’s not even close to being true.

The police’s best kept secret: We don’t need them! 

A world without the police is completely possible (1, 2, 3, 4). We have resources for resolving violence as communities without the need for state intervention (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 – as some examples). We as communities are better capable of resolving violence than the police are, because we don’t have the vested interest in the status quo that they have. Even if a few cops are well-intentioned here or there, it doesn’t change that the role of the police is to work against the vast majority of us in the interests of the (white) elite few. 

Why are you so invested in the police when they are complicit in your dehumanization?

My mother is starting a business to reintroduce buffalo into Southern Texas. To do this, she needs help making money so her loans will get approved. We are a part of the Lipan Apache Tribal Band of Texas, a state recognized tribe, so bringing the buffalo back to our homeland means a great deal to us. For more info and if anyone is willing to donate, please visit the link in the reblog.

meirl

Text: Sometimes in the dead of night on the way to the kitchen for a glass of water, I see an extra door in the hallway, black and imposing. 

Petitions - UK Government and Parliament

Petition: Reverse the decision to block the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill

I want the Government to reverse their decision to block the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, as this legislation contains importa

hey if you're a UK resident can you sign this petition and if not please rb to spread the word

this is an official UK government petition that they have to respond to if it reaches 10,000 signatures

So here's a wild idea: cops should never kill anyone for any reason in any circumstance. A cop killing someone represents, at best, a failure to correctly deescalate the situation. Any cop who kills anyone should be immediately banned from being a cop ever again AND put on criminal trial (no internal investigations). If they are found not guilty of murder, then they can go get another job doing something else. But no one who has ever killed another person should still be a cop.

Watch me get progressively lazier with the backgrounds on this one 🙈

Read “How to be a Dragon” on Webtoon!

since I’m thinking about this instead of studying for bar prep:

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;

A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;

Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman. 

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses. 

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings. 

I’m just saying that there are implications behind them that are deeply disturbing (“if I decide you’re guilty, you’re less of a person to me”) and that it’s the primary driving force behind most of the issues in our criminal justice system.

Rutger Bregman is the Dutch historian who became a global sensation after an appearance at this year’s Davos summit, where he accused attending billionaires of ignoring taxation. Now he has created another viral moment in an extremely uncomfortable interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

Bregman so riled Carson with his accusations of hypocrisy, critiques of Fox’s conservative agenda, and attacks on Donald Trump that the TV host called him a “moron” and angrily told him: “Go fuck yourself.”

Source

Lot more people around the world are going to watch this now than if it actually aired. Speaking truth to power is the best viral content!