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Security, privacy, building with respect. CISO Lacework, ex-CISO Twitter, ex-Google, ex-Zoom, ex-tremely curious @LeaKissner on Twitter they/them

The Iran War’s Economic Winners & Losers – Ones & Tooze [2026-03-27]

Paywalling the transcript but not the podcast is so funny to me. Let’s check in on the Keynesians… 😩 Even the little bits like Tooze saying “it turns out” helium affects AI are hysterical! People said that for years grandpa! ::: spoiler Expand transcript Before the Iran war, a huge amount of the fossil fuel consumed around the world passed through the Strait of Hormuz, including 34 percent of the crude oil, 19 percent of the liquefied natural gas, and 16 percent of the refined petroleum. Whether the Persian Gulf region will remain so central to the global economy once the war ends is an open question. As the world struggles with the immediate disruptions, the long-term winners and losers of the war are only beginning to come into view. Is the Persian Gulf’s economic model in jeopardy? Will China benefit from a broader global shift to renewable energy? And how is the U.S. economy affected overall by the war? Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter. Cameron Abadi: Several countries in the Gulf have developed an economic model that depends on serving as a hub of international human capital, specializing in various types of high-end services. If this region isn’t secure, does that put this model into jeopardy? Is that the foundation of this entire economic concept? Adam Tooze: You can see the force in that argument. Dubai appears as a tourist economy probably largely from a European point of view. It’s notoriously so in Britain. Apparently, there were a whole bunch of articles about how crazy the Brits are about Dubai, both positively and negatively. It’s both loved and hated. I think from the point of American listeners, they won’t think of Dubai necessarily as a tourist destination, but it is a popular spot for Europeans because of reliably warm weather in the winter, and it’s reasonably close. But in terms of the economy, the highest figure I’ve seen for Dubai tourist share is less than 10 percent of GDP. So Dubai really is a commercial center: banking, trade, finance, insurance, all those kinds of things. And there’s no doubt, of course, that they will take a hit from the shock of the war. Real estate is another key component. The wealthy of the whole world like to have apartments there, very low-tax, kind of a haven status, if you like. But I think there’s a tendency toward skepticism when we’re talking about services in general, sort of what’s its basic means of support. It doesn’t make anything. So sooner people feel insecure, somehow it’ll all evaporate. I’m not going to try and predict Dubai’s GDP 10 years from now. But one shouldn’t underestimate the resilience of hubs like this. The sense that this is simply going to evaporate underestimates the central role the Gulf states play. Only in really, really bad scenarios does some form of relatively normalized traffic through the straits not resume at some point. This war is, after all, gratuitous. It should not have happened. There is no good reason for it other than Israeli geopolitics. At some point one has to assume that some kind of logic will be restored. And when it is, one would expect these centers to come back because they sit at really nodal points in the global economy. The demand for this oil and this gas is not going to collapse anytime soon. As soon as the straits open up, it’s cost-competitive. So absolutely, obviously, it is devastating in the short run. The people I’m most worried about, frankly, are the migrant workers who are there to service these economies. But I wouldn’t expect it to change the course of their development permanently. CA: A new FP essay written by Nils Gilman describes what he calls a “metabolic” Cold War pitting a coalition of petrostates, basically oil economies, versus a coalition that he refers to as the “Green Entente,” countries that are aligned behind renewable energy. Could this war be seen as an intervention in coalition management within the petrostate bloc that he’s talking about? A way of getting Iran in line? AT: Yeah, I mean, I think this distinction between electrostates and petrostates is interesting. In some ways, I’ve played my own part in popularizing the distinction, I think. But I also have to say I have some second thoughts about it, because I think we know what we mean by saying there are petrostates. And generally, what we mean is states that have a large share of GDP or state revenue that is to do with fossil fuels. And that’s clearly true for the Gulf states, and it’s true for Russia. It’s true to a limited extent for the United States, which is a petrostate in the sense it produces an awful lot of petrol and gas, but it’s not in any way heavily dependent on it. It’s just a huge producer. But what also distinguishes the petrostates from each other, which is crucial, is the degree to which they actually can control demand for oil and gas. And the United States, with a huge domestic market for oil and gas, can, of course, do that. And so it becomes rational for diehard, last-ditch fossil fuel defenders in the GOP to imagine, I think, a kind of enclosed U.S. oil and gas world in which the American merrily goes on consuming oil and gas. And then, of course, it looks for buyers for surplus oil and gas abroad. But that actually creates a conflict between American producers of oil and gas and American consumers, because the less that’s exported, the better from the point of view of American consumers. But in any case, the U.S. can shape a demand which is more or less adequate to the supply it can produce. And they’re both at a very high level. Russia is not in that position. It’s a substantial economy, 100 million-plus people, but its oil and gas production is far too big to be absorbed domestically. And if that’s the case for Russia, it’s even more the case for the Gulf states. So they aren’t petrostates in the sense that they can meaningfully imagine shaping a world through their own say-so in which oil and gas are still consumed. Their only real way of influencing that market is to be willing to offer oil and gas at very low prices, which means it becomes irresistible for some consumers. Now, if that’s the case, and you’re a Gulf state, and your strategy longer term is to stay in the oil and gas game but to compete on price and quality, then you’ll have a very high interest in diversifying the rest of your economy, which is what the Gulf states are all doing. And to do that, you actually turn yourself into a progressive electrostate state. So if you look at the Saudis, the Emiratis, they both have highly ambitious green electricity build-out programs, like Texas, in fact, which also is the largest renewable investor in the United States with the biggest wind and solar program. And if you look at Texas’s electric grid, increasingly, during the daytime, it’s dominated by renewables. And the Saudis and the Emiratis have woken up into this. I literally witnessed in Beijing this week a combined audience of Chinese and Arabs applauding the future of their collaboration between Saudi Arabia and China, because China is going to supply Saudi Arabia with the solar panels, the batteries that it needs to expand a green hydrogen, green steel, and desalination program all on the back of green electrification. So these choices are choices, but only really for the United States does it make sense to imagine a fully enclosed, 1950s-style, fossil-fuel-forever kind of world. Not the Russians, not the Gulf states. They don’t either of them really have the option of projecting that into the future. The Russians will mess around, and they’ll try and find low-income consumers who want their discounted oil. But the Saudis are actually heading in this other direction entirely. And this is even before we begin asking ourselves whether it’s really plausible, this is why the Trump administration did it. And I think the story we’re getting out of the Trump administration is so chaotic that the idea that somehow there was a grand strategy to corral all the oil and gas producers and somehow bang them into shape and get them under American control—I mean, would that it were the case that Washington was this concerted. Probably by far and away the most plausible interpretation is that they’re being instrumentalized by [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. And beyond that, I think it’s Trumpian cosplay geopolitics. Again, I just think he’s making it up as he goes along. And there are some hardcore interests in the U.S. which were keen on a war with Iran forever. And the Israelis, of course, actually have, at least in Netanyahu’s sense, something to gain from this. But that is the crucial point. I think the crucial thing to make is that this idea of a petrostate that is truly self-sufficient really doesn’t extend beyond the U.S. CA: If we were to look at the other side of that Cold War setup, would it be possible to think of China as the beneficiary of this energy crisis now? Might oil-dependent countries, seeing how oil and access to oil is being weaponized, turn toward electrification and what China can offer in terms of access to renewable energy? AT: I think in broad terms, the answer to that question is almost certainly yes. This crisis is not an advert for reliance on fossil fuels. The proviso is that you have to reckon with what economists call the J-curve effect. So you suffer a shock. In the long run, this causes you to change behavior, but in the short run, with the parameters of your existing behavior set, you pay the penalty up-front. And so fossil fuels bulk larger in the short run as oil and gas prices go up. Discourse centers around them, policy centers around, everyone’s focused on them. It doesn’t look like we’re in a world which is transitioning, because oil and gas are the news. But in the medium term, yes, I think that’s a very plausible scenario. And it’s one that we’re already seeing working through. And it is one that the markets are betting on, because as much as the major oil companies, especially those which aren’t particularly exposed in the Gulf like Chevron, have done well out of this in terms of stock market price, the even bigger gains have been marked up by the champions of the green energy transition in China who are above all the battery makers. Because they really are the hub of green electricity transition as we are now understanding. They’re in the EVs; they’re the backup that the solar panels, in particular, need. So CATL, which is the most successful Chinese battery maker, has seen a substantial surge in its shares. Tens of billions of dollars have been added to the value of the major Chinese battery producers. BYD is not just a carmaker, it’s also a battery producer. So yes, we are seeing markets anticipate precisely that longer-term adjustment. CA: There’s been some suggestion that the U.S. economy could benefit to some extent from this energy crisis and the war more generally, that the war could be good for American oil and fracking businesses, even as it’s bad for U.S. consumers and maybe most of its citizens. How should we predict that this war will affect the U.S. economy? AT: I think that is the right way to think about it. It’s above all a distributional issue for America. Oil-importing parts of the world, whether rich or poor, when hit by big price shocks like this, suffer net losses. It’s called a terms-of-trade effect. Your exports buy you less imports, and it’s bad for your GDP. And in a really bad case, it can produce a net recession. So Europe in 2022, 2023, when the gas price just went through the roof, 2 percent to 3 percent hit to GDP, we think. So that’s real. If you’re a poor country, which is importing energy, it literally leads to shutdowns of activity like we’re seeing in Pakistan and other parts of Asia. In the U.S., it’s a distributional issue, first and foremost, because some people win and some people lose. On net, probably the United States economy, the GDP, may in fact benefit because America is a substantial fossil fuel producer and exporter as well. How large that effect is going to be is very uncertain, I think, because—and this is a point that’s been underlined in several different places—as with [President Donald] Trump’s tariff policy, you just don’t know what they’re doing. And so day by day, people are trying to guess. There’s some truly scandalous action going on in the futures market for oil around presidential Truth Social posts and announcements. It’s quite clear that the Trump administration is leaking to insiders who are placing gigantic bets in the markets. But that’s not the basis on which to run long-term investment in the American oil industry. And so even in Houston, apparently, there isn’t exactly a kind of mood of celebration here, because it only matters if it’s for the long term. And when you put the question, does the American president actively support a long-term elevation in oil prices, the answer is kind of obvious. And it’s no, because as much as there may be some winners from a higher oil price in the United States, the majority of the population, the heavy oil consumers, definitely lose. And they don’t lose as much as they would have once, right? Because as people have grown more affluent, and the oil price in real terms in relation to incomes has trended down, and people have become much more efficient in their energy use. And so energy is not the decisive factor that it once was in America’s budgets. It bulks rather larger in popular psychology than it does actually in the economy. It has an impact on American society which is perhaps out of proportion to its material consequences for people’s budgets. But it’s no doubt at all that the American presidential administration is not going to deliberately set about maintaining a high level of oil prices because it’s good for the fracking industry or whatever. That’s Trump windbaggery. That’s not actual policy. :::

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Critical State of the Coup and Fightback

Strangely (very, very weird!), at the exact same time as the awful human destruction of Rump’s Project 2025 “Juan Crow” budget and policy legislation gradually reveals itself to more and more People, the bizarro Epstein file malpractice fetish exploded in the MAGAts faces, and the satirists of South Park exposed Rump, using Jesus Christ and an AI-generated presidential micro-penis. Yowza! The context of moral crossroads marked by mass starvation genocide in Gaza pointing to an ethnically cleansed Trump Imperial Riviera of the Middle East is noted, but I don’t have any more words for that right now… IMHO only 1 or 2 of our greatest theorists (M Gessen & Henry Giroux) and a relative handful of our best rhetoricians & writers sampled below (Shea Howell, Jamelle Bouie and Thomas B. Edsall come to mind, my apologies for those of you I omit there…) have been generally able to keep up with the ongoing neofascist coup. 99% of corporate media, and even a disturbing majority of independent progressive voices, seem unable to keep the real fight in focus, for all the noise, smoke, dysfunction & Rump regime bullshit! I think this critical deficit has been a major source of the sense of generalized helplessness many have noted, but I hope it is changing now. Ten years since the golden escalator skit, the wannabe mafia state don dear leader says and does things that are absolutely stupid and insane every day. Yet too many citizens have (at least until now) been deprived of real world, fact-based critical insights into the neofascist bullshit driving all the media noise and con-man tricks. This utterly surreal moment of Epstein pedophilia hysteria, and South Park’s righteous AI-enabled rebuke of MAGA, coincides with more emerging (and really challenging, effective) critical voices. I hope greater critical insight and intensified opposition not only slow down, but eventually help bring down the raging authoritarian beast. Here are some links and brief summaries of what I’m talking about: Start with Gessen’s book, Surviving Autocracy , which should be required reading. This quote sums up our new regime as “mafia state”: “Trump grasped the essence of the system, which turned money into power and power into money but, until Trump came along, did it politely, tastefully, and by group agreement. In mafia states like Hungary and Russia the word ‘corruption’ describes the people in charge using the instruments of government to amass wealth, but also using their wealth to perpetuate power. This corruption is integral to the system.” – M Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Giroux’s essays fiercely and unfailingly advocate for the crucial political role of education and the power of culture in fighting back. Ten days before the 2025 inauguration, his Beyond the Illusion: The Dark Dream of a Totalitarian Empire , named both the neofascist essence of MAGA and the anti-capitalist spine of fightbacks: “Historical consciousness is now deemed dangerous, and dissent is branded as treason. The impending horrors of Trump’s presidency are starkly evident in his escalating rhetoric of vengeance, labeling critics and political opponents as “the enemy within.” This is not governance—it is a declaration of war on democracy itself. What we are witnessing today is the rise of a reengineered “totalitarian subject,” forged in the wreckage of institutions that once upheld the common good, basic rights and civil liberties, replaced by machinery designed to sustain authoritarian rule. This subject is governed by fear, surrendering their agency to the grip of cult-like devotion and the iron hand of strongman figures. They are ensnared in a culture of ignorance, enveloped by the fog of anti-intellectualism, and animated by a disdain for difference and the Other. Our fight is a generational one, waged for young people who are being systematically sacrificed at the altar of greed and authoritarianism. They are slaughtered by wars that enrich the few, brutalized as mere consumer pawns, shackled by oppressive debt, robbed of historical memory, and rendered disposable by a society that treats them as surplus. These are not isolated injustices but part of a broader assault on democracy itself, now hollowed out by gangster capitalism and reduced to a mere swindle of fulfillment. Oligarchic gangster capitalism, with its brazen consolidation of power and wealth, has overtaken neoliberalism as the dominant force masquerading as democracy. This ideological and economic rot will persist until the public rejects the false equation of capitalism with democracy. When money drives politics, and human rights are subordinated to capital accumulation, democracy crumbles—along with morality, justice, and the rule of law. Yet, even in the face of such devastation, hope endures. Hope and resistance, though wounded, remain the flames that keep the possibility of a better world alive. Without hope, there is only fear, complicity, and the stench of death. We must nurture this hope, transforming it into a collective will for justice, a vision for a multi-racial working class rising like a phoenix from the ashes of despair. This is not a struggle for the faint of heart—it is a ferocious battle requiring courage, vision, and mass action.” Howell’s March 30, 2025 weekly column Thinking for Ourselves – Human Rights , like many of her absolutely critical interventions, mapped what must be done, backward and forward, 2 months into the coup: “Over the last two weeks we have seen cruelty directed at some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. Somewhere in the future people will look back at the pictures of men shackled in chain gangs, doubled over with heads shaved, and rank it with those of the early days of the holocaust, where elder Jewish men and women were forced to clean streets, while being publicly humiliated. Such images capture the depravity of power, the powerlessness of onlookers. They are the early warning signs of brutalities to come. These images have been joined by those of young students abducted illegally, without any sense of due process or care for their dignity. They are imprisoned, cut off from family and legal counsel. They have been targeted because they have spoken out against war, against violence, against the dehumanization of people. At this writing at least eight international students and professors have been identified for deportation. The State Department acknowledges that it has revoked the visa of at least 300 people who are studying at universities across the country. These abductions and the harsh treatment of individuals by the Trump minions should come as no surprise. Trump vilifies people who have immigrated here, fueling fear that is the basis of all such humiliation. And he was abundantly clear during his campaign that he intended to crush student demonstrations that are pro-Palestinian. He was explicit in pledging he would deport all those who speak up and organize for a just peace. Legal challenges are being raised by civil rights groups, constitutional lawyers, families, and supporters. These challenges raise fundamental questions of human society: the right to think and speak freely, the right of all human beings to dignity and to be safe in their body and personal integrity, and the right to join with others to advance ideas in opposition to those in power and authority. The Trump administration has shown no respect for any of these fundamental rights, nor does it seem inclined to respect the orders of judges and courts. The resistance sparked by these actions will grow. Along with demonstrations and gatherings on campuses, individuals and organizations are coming forward to demand that people be restored to their families and their work here in the US. We all need to contribute what we can, where we are to this resistance. Whether it is text messaging about dropping bombs, forcing young men into handcuffs and chains, or grabbing students off the streets, the disregard for human dignity is essential to fascist functioning. In these times we can draw strength from how most of the people on earth reacted to earlier fascist devastation. At the end of World War II, appalled by the brutality of fascism, the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Preamble sets out values to guide us: ‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law, Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations, Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…’ Defending freedom of conscience, the right to lives of freedom and to governments of laws, this document reminds us we can do better collectively. It helps us think beyond narrow questions of citizenship to larger issues of the fundamental dignity of all people. Fear and force are not the values that frame our futures. We have the power to organize ourselves on values that express our best and deepest aspirations.” Bouie’s New York Times op ed pieces since the January 20, 2025 inauguration of Rump 2 have been exemplary. His June 28 revelations on the “Birthright Citizenship/Nationwide Inunction” case of Trump v CASA, focused on Justice Ketanji Jackson’s dissent and displayed her passion (as well as Howell’s strategic direction) on his elite corporate media forum: “…[I]t is difficult to escape the conclusion that a Republican-appointed majority with an expansive view of executive power is working, again, to give as much freedom of action to a Republican president, in this case, the Republican president who secured their supermajority. To return to Justice Jackson’s dissent, she notes that by ending the practice of nationwide injunctions in this particular circumstance, the majority has empowered a lawless president to violate the rights of American citizens, who then have no particular relief other than what they can get in a slow-moving judicial process. The majority, Jackson argues, is missing the forest for the trees. The nature of the Constitution, from the original document to its amendments, is that it is a brief against the exercise of arbitrary power. And here is the Supreme Court blessing a president’s exercise of arbitrary power as if the executive were the sovereign lord of the nation and not a mere servant of the Constitution. It’s worth quoting at length from Jackson’s dissent: ‘ The majority’s ruling thus not only diverges from first principles, it is also profoundly dangerous, since it gives the executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.’ ‘The founders of the United States of America,’ she continues, ‘squarely rejected a governing system in which the King ruled all and all others, including the courts, were his subordinates. In our Constitution-centered system, the people are the rulers and we have rule of law.’ The majority, Jackson argues, has created a law-free zone of arbitrary power… It is hard to know for certain whether the Republican majority understands the legal world it’s building and the power it has given to the president. My view, like Jackson’s, is that it is laying the groundwork for the exercise of arbitrary power, unaccountable save for the next election — an American-style presidential dictatorship.” Edsall is Bouie’s NYT colleague, whose social science research has been a repeated go-to source of Rump’s naked imperial madness parading and exposure. His recent itemized indictment of Trump’s cryptocurrency scams is one example of exploding scandalous discourse in the long shadows of Epstein and South Park, which I hope portends much, much deeper and damaging attacks on the MAGAts’ neofascist leadership: “President Trump is methodically restructuring the federal regulatory and legislative apparatus. That much is known. What is less well understood is how that will pave the way for the Trump family to make potentially hundreds of millions of dollars from its multiple cryptocurrency ventures. On March 20, Trump told the Blockworks Digital Assets Summit that his goal was to make America ‘the undisputed Bitcoin superpower and the crypto capital of the world.’ So far, Trump, his family and his investment partners are major beneficiaries. In case anyone forgot, the Constitution prohibits the president from accepting ‘any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.’ After GD Culture Group Limited, a Nevada-based firm with ties to China, announced on May 12 that it planned to buy as much as $300 million of $TRUMP, a memecoin marketed by Trump, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, Charles Dent, who was the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, told The Times: ‘Make no mistake. These foreign entities and governments obviously want to curry favor with the president. ‘This is completely out of bounds, Dent added, and raises all sorts of ethical, legal and constitutional issues that must be addressed.’ Back on Jan. 23, Trump issued an executive order, ‘Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology,’ the first in a series of orders asserting his power over federal agencies overseeing the ‘use of digital assets, blockchain technology, and related technologies across all sectors of the economy.’ One of Trump’s next steps, on July 18, was to sign into law the Genius Act establishing federal rules for the issuance of so-called stablecoins, a digital asset with fixed values backed by dollars or other liquid assets. The Act bars members of congress and most federal employees from entering the “stablecoin” business, but exempts the president. Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, a federal ethics watchdog group, wrote me by email to express his indignation: ‘The Trump exemption for stablecoins that are prohibited for members of Congress highlights the fact that Trump is obsessed with using the presidency to vacuum up every dollar he can get his hands on. Since the purchasers of stablecoin are not made public, the stablecoin business provides Trump with the potential to engage in secret influence selling and to do so in violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. The stablecoin business provides Trump with the potential for secret opportunities to abuse his office to greatly increase his private wealth and to secretly provide benefits to foreign countries at the expense of our country.’ Trump is in undisputed presidential first place when it comes to misuse of his public office to rake in enormous personal gain. … The Democratic staff of the Senate Banking Committee issued an analysis that argued that ‘The latest GENIUS Act draft circulating online does not include any provision to prevent Trump and the Trump family from raking in enormous amounts of money from their corrupt cryptocurrency schemes. Instead, it would grow the stablecoin market and fuel Trump’s crypto profits. President Trump’s stablecoin, USD1, has become the 5th largest in the world in just the last month and is now available to the broader public for trading. This means more and more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments can be expected to start using the President’s stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account and a way to pay off the President personally. Foreign countries will be able to curry favor with President Trump by using his stablecoin. The draft bill would impose no new restrictions on government officials or prevent President Trump from accepting fees from foreign adversaries or other foreign entities with business interests in the United States seeking favorable treatment. It would give President Trump more opportunities to reward buyers of his coins with favors like tariff exemptions, pardons, and government appointments. President Trump will functionally regulate his own stablecoin.’ Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, speaking on the Senate floor, asked his colleagues: ‘Is it a good idea to have foreign entities making $2 billion investments in currency that is issued by American politicians? We could have fixed that in this legislation. Not only did we not fix it, we didn’t even have a debate on it. We didn’t even have a single amendment come to the floor.’ Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, described one purchase of Trump stablecoin, also from the Senate floor: ‘A U.A.E. state-backed investment firm used Trump’s USD1 to finance a $2 billion investment in a crypto exchange whose owner is reportedly lobbying President Trump for a pardon, essentially giving Trump a cut of this $2 billion deal. This is the model: Deposit your money in the “Bank of Trump” and use his stablecoin to make payments. He earns money by investing those deposits in other assets, like a bank, and also earns money on every transaction that occurs whenever the stablecoin is used as a means of payment.’ ‘It was a money grab and a conflict of interest. The potential for conflicts of interest will also continue over time. Companies and countries looking to curry favor with the administration or seeking government action may believe it is in their interest to purchase the coins to show their support. That risk is heightened by the structuring of the issuance, because additional tokens will be released over the next four years which will presumably generate additional revenue to the Trump Organization, which creates incentives.’ – Timothy Massad, director of the Digital Assets Policy Project at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School and former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (from 2014 to 2017) (quoted in Edsall) ‘Trump has made hundreds of millions of dollars from hawking a memecoin — that is, a crypto token that doesn’t even try to pretend to have some underlying value or purpose — to his followers and to those hoping to buy influence with the president. There is really no comparison in American history to the blatant corruption of Trump’s pay-for-access memecoin dinner, where hundreds of primarily foreign nationals spent anywhere from $55,000 to more than $37 million for a ticket to the event.’ – Molly White (quoted in Edsall) Another very recent example of how the Epstein mania seems unaccountably to have broadened and deepened public discourse is a brilliant takedown by Soraya Nadia McDonald of Rump abuses of Latinx People as “Juan Crow” . If, as she suggests, America can come to see the many cosplayed neofascist abuse videos vomited out by Rump and his sycophants as the modern equivalent of the infamous racist “Birth of a Nation” cinema, then Rump’s midlife dalliances with Epstein’s Lolita Express may be the least of his backlash worries! McDonald’s piece (like Edsall’s deconstruction of Rump’s crypto corruption) seems to foreshadow a broader fightback that may be looming: “In its merciless pursuit of people without papers — most of them Latino — and its demonization of asylum seekers, refugees, holders of temporary protected status, Muslims and Palestinian rights activists, the Trump administration is accelerating toward a new, modern nadir of Juan Crow, just downstream of Jim and Jane. When a sitting U.S. senator refers to New York immigrants as “inner-city rats,” when a Florida governor waxes rapturously about the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center, when a presidential administration takes two months to dismantle decades of civil rights law, we must admit that these are acts in a feature presentation of neo-Confederate revanchism targeting brown and Black people. The targeting of the undocumented has a name, after all, based in ugly history and shameful tradition: Juan Crow. The phrase was popularized by the journalist Roberto Lovato to describe the “matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems” that isolate and control undocumented immigrants. The domestic policies of the Trump administration have taken this legacy to a more dangerous place. The policies of this administration reinstate an era in which the rights conferred to all people in the United States by the Constitution are subject to a sliding scale of extralegal violability depending on one’s race, ethnicity or assumed immigration status. Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents don’t ‘need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them and question them.’ The administration has created a hostile, systematic stripping of basic dignities that works in concert with stymying official methods people are meant to use to seek relief and redress for governmental abuse. A familiar, if not altogether new, dawn of racialized mistreatment is being enacted by imposing daily ICE arrest quotas. The claims in a Human Rights Watch report on three Florida detention facilities read like a nightmare mash-up of Guantánamo Bay and American mass incarceration: freezing, overcrowded facilities; routine denial of medical treatment; shackling the hands and wrists of detainees; feeding detainees meager amounts of rotting food or forcing them to eat it ‘like dogs,’ with their hands behind their backs; forcing detainees to sleep on concrete floors. The White House is attempting to rewrite the constitutional order via executive fiat, spreading terror through immigrant communities by reportedly subjecting detainees to callous, inhumane and even deadly treatment. The senior adviser Stephen Miller routinely conflates immigrants with criminality even though the majority of those detained by ICE have no criminal convictions or have committed no violent offenses. Birtherism, the conspiracy theory born out of Donald Trump’s baseless questions about Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, was a mere curtain raiser for today’s campaign of racialized delegitimization aimed both at nonwhite elected officials and journalists as well as nonwhite immigrants, regardless of status, along with U.S. citizens and U.S. military service members. This was not a hidden campaign, but one formalized into policy and execution within Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, ahead of Mr. Trump’s second election victory. While the courts continue to block Mr. Trump’s attempt to withhold U.S. birthright citizenship to children in 28 states, that is just one effort by his administration to redefine U.S. citizenship along racial lines. It’s instructive to look at a previous moment when white supremacy was welcome at the White House. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson hosted a special screening of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” Less than 50 years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment (prohibiting the denial of the vote based on race, color or having been enslaved), Griffith’s blockbuster cinematic argument for the necessity of Jim Crow was released. The film (based on the 1905 novel “The Clansman,” written by Thomas Dixon Jr., a classmate and friend of Wilson) is chiefly notorious for promulgating a fiction of Black men as marauding rapists obsessed with gorging themselves upon the carnal altars of white virginity. In the film, a white victim, Flora Cameron (played by Mae Marsh), jumps off a cliff to her death to avoid marrying, and thus consummating with, a freedman and veteran Union captain named Gus (portrayed by Walter Long, in blackface). That is only one of the film’s expressions of displeasure with the changes Reconstruction brought about. Griffith’s film spoke to the reactionary, bristling rage of white people witnessing Black men serving in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, exercising the right to vote and holding positions of local authority. Newly enfranchised Black men throughout the South voted in the 1868 election, helping make Ulysses S. Grant president. For those who needed the false supremacy of whiteness to be real, this was unconscionable. Offscreen, that rage famously resulted in the only successful coup d’état on American soil: the Wilmington Race Massacre of 1898. For Mr. Trump, returning the country to greatness involves stopping an invasion that is about as real as Griffith’s projections. When Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, visited the Salvadoran prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, over which the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, presides, she shared images seemingly engineered to alight the same synapses that brought Griffith so much fame and praise. The policy works hand in hand with the spectacle, much like lynchings, which followed trials in Jim Crow kangaroo courts. The Trump administration’s elastic incursion into habeas corpus and due process rights wouldn’t be complete without intimidating images burnishing its will and ability to abuse with impunity. Griffith’s order-restoring Ku Klux Klan night riders bring to mind some aspects of today’s professionalized “immigration enforcement.” ICE officers are permitted to mask their faces, to engage in profiling… Perhaps because frequency and repetition confer dulling effects, Americans seem to have become numb to the dangers of the ongoing shameless, targeted, personal and bigoted diminution of the capabilities, achievements and authority of women and people of color who occupy government. As the transgressions grow bigger and bolder, the effects become normalized, entrenched. We are passively becoming witnesses to near-daily insults, the cumulative effect of which is to make them appear as if they are deserved. Left unchecked, the currents of autocratic abuse can swell in a flash, allowing the floodwaters of white supremacy to sweep away democracy in America — again.” I also detect a dramatic broadening and deepening of critique in a recent column by Columbia Professor Suresh Naidu, exchanging the previous discourse of debating superficial legalistic issues for a realistic description of what we are actually up against, not a normal litigant but a quasi-sovereign paramilitary neofascist coup running amok: “Trade negotiators from longtime partner countries, government contractors, law firms, federal employees, permanent residents, the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, even the Transportation Security Administration labor union are all experiencing contractual vertigo, finding out that the administration will not honor previous agreements. The first Trump administration renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement to get the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, but Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada in violation of even that agreement. Parties thinking they can wheedle their way into a bargain with a capricious administration are bringing intuitions from the world of private deals, backstopped by the rule of law, into the very different realm of political bargains with absolutism-adjacent executive branches. The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with. Do we really think this [recent Columbia University] arrangement, however destructive of academic autonomy it is, will prevent the Trump administration from stopping the money again? Anyone who thinks the administration will mutely walk away after the ink is dry needs to look at both the past behavior of autocratic regimes in general and this administration’s in particular. This deal won’t end Columbia’s torture. Whatever onerous terms the school has agreed to will be deemed to have been broken in the face of a campus protest, an edgy syllabus, a leaked classroom discussion or even an acerbic student opinion piece. New civil rights violations will be imagined, new vistas of anti-Americanism on campus will be discovered, and the attacks will continue. It is unsurprising that a coalition of election deniers, Christian nationalists and supplement- and crypto-hawkers would have little regard for academic freedom, scientific progress and learning. It was always a stretch for Columbia to think a good-faith agreement was in the cards, but when the government is too often behaving unchecked by the law, the idea of a binding contract is a fantasy. …I doubt the demands will stop at mandatory antisemitism trainings or requiring “balanced” educational offerings or immediate expulsions of student protesters, whatever you think of those things.” If you have thoughts, links or suggestions for expanding a bank of emerging, hopefully empowering critical theory following such sources, hit me up at: [email protected] And enjoy our encore presentation Relax, Guy…. The post Critical State of the Coup and Fightback appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed

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The Secret History of Trump’s Private Cellphone

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Just before Election Day, a disturbing piece of information made its way to Donald Trump. Whenever he takes or makes calls on his personal cellphone, Trump learned, Chinese hackers could be listening and gathering intelligence. Iranians had already hacked into his campaign’s email system—which was not a problem for Trump personally, because he has never liked putting things in writing—and the Chinese had breached the emails of the Republican National Committee. But now the hackers had compromised the backbone of U.S. telecommunications networks, according to federal officials who publicly described the intrusion on October 25, which allowed them to eavesdrop on calls involving Trump; his running mate, J. D. Vance; and other political figures. Some in the campaign took immediate action, abandoning longtime numbers, experimenting with burner phones, or switching to end-to-end encrypted applications, such as Signal, for voice calls so they would not route through central switching hubs. But Trump appeared unperturbed by the news,two people familiar with the episode told us, on the condition of anonymity so they could speak frankly. For more than a decade, the once and future president had been warned of the enormous risks he took—as perhaps the top global target of foreign intelligence services—by using a personal iPhone with a broadly circulated number to keep in touch with dozens of friends and colleagues. His phone was a lifeline, though. He wasn’t going to give it up. Days later, when he won the presidency for the second time, his phone lit up, just as it had eight years earlier on Election Night 2016. “You won’t believe it,” Trump marveled in early-morning phone calls after the race was decided last year, according to an adviser. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.” [From the June 2025 Issue: ‘I run the country and the world’] A little more than four months into his second term, the president’s personal cellphone has become, in many ways, the most pivotal technological device in the federal government, directly linking Trump to the outside world. Lawmakers, friends, family members, corporate titans, celebrities, world leaders, and journalists regularly use it, knowing that, unminded by aides, Trump remains open to picking up the phone, even when he does not recognize the number. “Who’s calling?” Trump asked when he answered our call one morning in late March from the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. (It was a fair question; it could have been almost anyone.) The draw of the phone is simple: Trump likes to call people. He likes to be called. Unknown numbers come with a thrill akin to putting a coin in a gumball machine and waiting to see which flavor rolls out. Surrendering the phone would be inconvenient, limiting, and so he keeps it. As for any efforts to control him and his cellphone use, “I think people gave up on that years ago,” one adviser told us, adding that “probably a ton” of people have Trump’s personal number. A second ally estimated the number to be “well over 100.” Several aides told us Trump has two different devices, and at least one aide said they have seen him with three. (One of the phones, some aides suggested, is mainly devoted to his social-media use.) The lock screen of one, captured by a Reuters photographer Friday night, shows an image of Trump’s own face, stern and commanding, with a finger pointing directly at the camera. Trump has, at times, changed numbers; at least one number that he regularly answered as a presidential candidate in 2016 stopped working sometime during his first term. And another aide told us that Trump’s phone had been given additional security features, though it is not clear what defense these would have offered against the Chinese hack, which targeted the back-end systems of telecom providers. “He is not walking around with a run-of-the-mill iPhone off the shelf,” an adviser told us. The White House declined to explain more. “We will not discuss or disclose security measures regarding the President, especially to The Atlantic,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us in an emailed statement. Trump’s obsession with keeping his personal phone is merely evidence that he is easy to reach and therefore “the most transparent and accessible President in American history,” Cheung added. [Read: Trump’s cosplay cabinet] Still, Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s former speechwriter and deputy national security adviser, told us that “it’s an obvious massive risk—especially given what we know about Chinese penetration of phones in recent years.” Hacking is hardly the only concern. Joel Brenner, a senior research fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies and former head of U.S. counterintelligence, pointed us to a recent Wall Street Journal scoop by Josh Dawsey that authorities are investigating an unknown individual impersonating White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in calls and texts. Security protocols—at times cumbersome—exist for a reason, he said, and Trump taking a call from a foreign leader without the proper preparation or staff present poses real dangers. “We run the risk of interception, we run the risk of impersonation, and we run the risk of being unprepared,” Brenner told us. What the president is doing is “terribly dangerous,” he said, citing the possibility of Trump making major deals or concessions with other world leaders that his staff may be unaware of, leaving them to scramble. But Trump treats his direct line to the world as an enhancement of—not a risk to—his presidency. “I’ve been on the phone with him before, and he’s just said, ‘I’ve got to go. I have someone from another country calling,’” an outside adviser told us. “He doesn’t even know which country. He just sees the number and thinks, This might be a foreign leader I want to talk to.” The first time Trump’s team truly understood he would have a different relationship with his cellphone than did presidents past was Election Night 2016, the eve of his improbable victory. “He was answering every phone call,” the outside adviser marveled to us, nearly a decade later, noting that none of the numbers was in Trump’s contacts. “He just answers the phone. He doesn’t want to miss phone calls.” Presidents have long loved their phones. Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to install a telephone at the White House, in 1877, and Herbert Hoover was the first to put a line in the Oval Office, in 1929. But Obama stands out in recent memory as the president most obstinate about wanting to bring a personal smartphone into the White House. Obama, famously addicted to his BlackBerry, argued to keep his after his 2008 victory and ultimately prevailed, albeit in a hard-fought compromise that involved limiting his contacts. Only a small group of Obama’s friends and top staff received his BlackBerry email address, and only after undergoing a briefing from the White House counsel’s office on security concerns. His device, which included security enhancements and was approved by national-security officials, was also configured so that emails from the president could not be forwarded. Rhodes told us that Obama’s BlackBerry did not have a phone number attached for incoming calls—which instead had to go through the White House switchboard to a landline. [Read: Nobody’s cellphone is really that secure] For Trump, the first presidential candidate to personally harness the power of social media, his cellphone has long been his megaphone. It is as much a part of his curated image as his oversize red ties. Trump is the ultimate Phone Guy. He wheeled and dealed in New York for decades from the landline in his Fifth Avenue office, even going so far as to impersonate a fictional spokesperson, John Barron, on the phone with reporters. Many advisers and friends told us they think the phone is Trump’s best medium, the president at his most persuasive. In a different world, he’s just “Don from Queens,” calling in to talk radio to shoot the breeze and run through his gripes, about China ripping the country off and immigrants running amok. During his first term, Trump often used the White House switchboard to make calls and screen incoming ones, but he just as frequently did not, in part because he assumed that nearly everyone in government was part of the “deep state,” career bureaucrats working against him, and he worried that they would somehow listen in on his calls. To be fair, his concern was not without merit; transcripts and details from several of his official calls with world leaders leaked to the press, and one such call, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment, after an intelligence analyst became alarmed by details of the exchange. “His perspective was, ‘I can’t trust anyone on the White House staff, so I have to use my cellphone,’” a former Trump adviser told us. Advisers tried to break his habit. John Kelly, the retired U.S. Marine Corps general who became Trump’s second chief of staff in 2017, was particularly strict about operational security, several advisers, current and former, told us. Kelly repeatedly warned Trump about how vulnerable cellphones are—to hacking by the Russians and the Chinese, and also to the phones themselves being turned into listening devices by foreign or other bad actors. He and his deputies would regularly remove Trump’s cellphone from the Oval Office, storing it in a padded box outside. But Trump either didn’t understand or didn’t care. “He’d just reject it and say, ‘It’s not true,’” one of the former advisers told us. “He’d say, ‘My phone is the best on the market.’” In Trump’s second term, his advisers have given up trying to restrict his phone use, though they privately admit displeasure at his practice of taking calls from journalists and others without their knowledge. “He calls people nonstop,” Trump’s campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said in an interview with Politico during the Republican National Convention last year. “I don’t worry about it, because what are you going to do? Take his phone? Change his phone number? Tell him he can’t make phone calls?” [Jeffrey Goldberg: Read The Atlantic’s interview with Donald Trump] But just because Trump’s aides have given up caring doesn’t mean there aren’t still major risks. Foreign adversaries could still gain access to Trump’s private conversations—inside the Oval Office, on the golf course, in the residence. During his first term, advisers said they “certainly assumed he was always being listened to.” The FBI described the 2024 Chinese attack on at least nine telecommunications companies as a “broad and significant cyber espionage campaign” that included eavesdropping on “a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity.” In addition to Trump and Vance, senior members of Kamala Harris’s campaign were also informed that they were being targeted. Joe Biden’s national-security team later explained that the Chinese hack had given foreign spies the ability to “geolocate millions of individuals, to record phone calls at will,” while as many as 100 targeted phones had likely had their texts and phone calls collected. Although there have been efforts to excise Chinese hackers from the telecommunications infrastructure and harden the systems, there is still a risk of future attacks. Before leaving office, Biden’s team asked the Federal Communications Commission to begin a rule-making process to require telecommunications companies to upgrade their network security, because the voluntary industry guidelines issued by the government had failed to protect the country. Trade groups representing the wireless, telecom, and broadband industries oppose new security mandates, arguing that they would impose “onerous network-wide duties.” “It is likely that the systems may be compromised again,” one cybersecurity expert who was part of the Biden review told us. This person said the vulnerability of the telecom foundation means that even White House landline phone calls could be compromised. “The White House systems use American phone lines. If the core is compromised, it doesn’t matter who is on the end” of a call, this person said. In a video posted on X in late May, the Dilbert creator Scott Adams described seeing a call from a Florida number he didn’t recognize and sending it to voicemail. When he listened to the message, he heard Trump’s voice: “This is your favorite president.” “I thought to myself, No, did I just send the most important person in the world to voicemail?” Adams recounted, laughing and leaning back in his chair. “And it turns out that I had. It was Trump, and he was just calling to check in.” Before the call, Adams had recently shared publicly that he has “the same cancer that Joe Biden has,” and that he expects to die in the coming months. In his video, Adams explained that Trump left “a semi-lengthy little voicemail,” saying that Adams could call him back on this number. “Now obviously I don’t call him back, right, because that would just be ridiculous,” Adams continued. Trump’s habit of leaving lengthy voicemails is by design—not just because he’s a phone guy but because he relishes giving people something they can play for friends and family. “​​Who doesn’t like to get a voicemail message from the president of the United States?” one adviser said. When Trump finally gets ahold of someone after having left a voicemail, he will sometimes ask recipients whether they have played his voicemail for others, the person said. [Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump Administration accidentally texted me its war plans] Hours after Adams missed his call from Trump, his phone rang again, and once again a Florida number blinked onto the screen. This time, the cartoonist knew enough to answer. “No fucking way,” Adams remembered thinking. “There’s no way he’s calling me again. And I answer it, and it’s Trump. And apparently he had heard my situation, and he had lots of questions.” The call ended with Trump telling Adams to just ask if he needed anything, and he would make it happen. As accessible as Trump is, even some who have his number are reticent about using it—or are at least strategic about it. One of the advisers we talked with told us they always try to find the best moment to call. “If I call him, nine times out of 10, I’ve talked to somebody there and said, ‘Tell me when to call,’ and they’ve said, ‘He just left dinner and just walked into the residence,’” this person told us. “And I know multiple people who do the same thing, who game-plan it out and talk to the people around him and say, ‘Tell me when it’s a good time.’” The outside ally told us they are careful about how frequently they call Trump. “I rarely call unless I’m asked to call. He’s the president of the United States.” This person added that they’ve witnessed Trump pick up his phone and scroll through the list of chief executives and wealthy supplicants who have called, poking fun at their eagerness. “That’s why I’m really reluctant to call,” the ally explained. “You don’t want to be the guy who’s the butt of the joke, who he’s laughing at: ‘Can you believe this guy is calling?’” Others give little thought to the timing of their calls. Trump’s phone could be heard ringing during a recent press conference in which he discussed a proposed 50 percent tariff on Apple. The familiar sound of the default “Reflection” ringtone—you know the one, the synthesized waterfall of xylophone tones—was a reminder that the tariffs targeted the company that makes his beloved device. Before the press entered the Oval Office, the president had placed the phone on the Resolute desk, next to his two secure White House landline phones. “It’s a phone call, do you mind?” he joked when the ringing started, before looking at the screen and telling reporters, “It’s only a congressman.” Seconds later, the phone rang again. “It’s a different congressman,” he joked, as he struggled to silence his portal to the wider world. Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting. Illustration by The Atlantic*. Sources: Mannie Garcia / Bloomberg / Getty; Sipa / AP / Getty; Alex Brandon / AP; Evan Vucci / AP; Rich Graessle / Icon Sportswire / AP; Matt Rourke / AP.* From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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Studentenverbindungen: „Viele sind reaktionär, rassistisch und Teil der deutschen Naziszene“ [Interview mit Autonome Antifa Freiburg]

geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/6923046 linkslaut: Was sind eure Beweggründe für die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Burschenschaften? Wir beschäftigen uns seit etwa 15 Jahren intensiv mit Studentenverbindungen. Zuerst haben wir uns tatsächlich fast ausschließlich mit „Burschenschaften“ auseinandergesetzt, obwohl diese nur einen sehr kleinen Teil der Korporationsszene ausmachen. Das lag einfach daran, dass „Burschenschaften“ ihre oftmals faschistische Gesinnung und entsprechenden Aktivitäten weit weniger verstecken als andere Studentenverbindungen. Und fairerweise müssen wir auch anmerken: In den „Burschenschaften“ gibt es auch einfach viel mehr Nazis als bei anderen Verbindungen. Damals plante der rechtsradikale Dachverband „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ (DB) die Gründung einer deutschen FPÖ nach österreichischem Vorbild. Drei Jahre lang sollte eine Arbeitsgruppe bestehend aus etwa 60 „Aktiven“ (noch Studierenden) und „Alten Herren“ (nicht mehr Studierenden) verschiedener Bünde ein Parteiprogramm entwickeln und formulieren. Auf dem jährlichen DB-Treffen im thüringischen Eisenach im Frühsommer 2012 sollte das Programm beschlossen, anschließend in Hochglanz gedruckt und dann an alle Bundestagsabgeordneten verschickt werden. Damit wollte die „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ amtierende Abgeordnete im Wahljahr zur Gründung einer neuen Partei unter ihrer Führung bewegen, die 2013 zur Bundestagswahl kandidieren sollte. Durch antifaschistische Angriffe scheiterte das Vorhaben 2011 in den drei Monaten nach dem „Burschentag“. Das zu zwei Dritteln fertig gestellte Parteiprogramm wurde dort rund 600 anwesenden „Burschenschaftern“ aus Deutschland und Österreich vorgestellt. Der Redner war der Leiter der Arbeitsgruppe, ein damals hochrangiger VW-Manager. Er hatte sich für das Ende seiner Rede eine Art Cosplay mit Liktorenbündel ausgedacht: mit ihm als Benito Mussolini. Später fanden wir diese Art von Megalomanie auch beim „Coburger Convent“ wieder, einem anderen pflichtschlagenden Dachverband von Studentenverbindungen. Dort imaginierte sich der designierte Verbandssprecher, ein „Aktiver“ der „Landsmannschaft Thuringia Berlin“, eine Traumwelt: mit ihm als Adolf Hitler. Meist sind Korporationen elitär, frauenfeindlich und generell rückwärtsgewandt. Doch nicht wenige Verbindungen sind darüber hinaus auch reaktionär, rassistisch und Teil der deutschen Naziszene. Zwischen beiden „Strömungen“ gibt es aber enge Verbindungen, oft sowohl vor Ort als auch zwischen den Dachverbänden. Vor allem liegt es an identischer Motivation aller Korporierten: purer Egoismus. In der Regel sind diese Strukturen relativ verschlossen. Ein Großteil der Aktivitäten laufen hinter geschlossenen Türen ab. Wie schafft ihr es, an so sensible Infos zu kommen? Unsere gesamte Arbeit basiert auf Vertrauen in die Authentizität unserer Recherchen. Wir können nicht offen über unsere Quellen sprechen, ohne diese und die Recherchen zu gefährden. In dieser Hinsicht unterscheiden wir uns nicht von anderen investigativen Journalistinnen und Journalisten. Im Laufe der Jahre haben wir Zugang zu ganz unterschiedlichen Quellen aus allen großen Korporationsdachverbänden bekommen. Wir pflegen diese Kontakte oft über einen sehr langen Zeitraum. Wenn wir eklatante Missstände wie offenen Faschismus bemerken – wie bei der DB 2011 oder dem CC 2023 – dann intervenieren wir. Und zwar massiv. Die Hochphase unserer Kampagne gegen die „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ dauerte von 2011 bis 2014 und hat die DB gespalten und massiv geschwächt. Die Kampagne gegen den „Coburger Convent“ war weniger stark, aber hat den pflichtschlagenden Verband dennoch in eine existenzielle Krise gestürzt. Deshalb sollte klar sein, dass diese und andere Dachverbände ein großes Interesse an den Lecks in den eigenen Reihen haben. Insbesondere „Bundesbrüder“, die uns Interna zutragen, sind Gefahren ausgesetzt, sollten sie je enttarnt werden. Im Mai hattet ihr ein einem Communiqué Mailverläufe geleakt, die die ultranationalistische und misogyne Haltung der Berliner Landsmannschaft Thuringia aufgezeigt hat. In internen Konversationen wurden unter anderem die SS verherrlicht und enge Kontakte zur AfD wurden deutlich. Denkt ihr diese Tendenzen bilden die Ausnahme oder die Regel für korporierte Strukturen? Die explizite Hitlerverehrung in der „Landsmannschaft Thuringia“ ist sicherlich nicht die Regel bei Korporationen. Die „Thuringia“ gehört dem „Coburger Convent“ an, einem pflichtschlagenden Dachverband. Daneben gibt es noch die „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ und die beiden großen Corps-Dachverbände „Kösener Senioren-Convents-Verband“ (KSCV) und der „Weinheimer Senioren-Convent“ (WSC), die ebenfalls pflichtschlagend sind. Bei den schlagenden Verbindungen kommen rechtsradikale Taten deutlich häufiger vor als bei den nichtschlagenden. Im KSCV gab es beispielsweise im August 2024 einen Antisemitismus-Skandal in Graz, bei der DB 2020 in Heidelberg. Auch ist bei den „Waffenstudenten“ die Parteinähe zu AfD und FPÖ am höchsten. Aber über die Hälfte der Korporierten gehören katholischen Verbindungen an. Der „Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen“ (CV) hat rund 30.000 Mitglieder und ist traditionell die Partei der CDU. Die Strukturen des CV haben wir dieses Jahr in einem eigenen Communiqué analysiert. Dort sind wir nicht auf Faschismus gestoßen, dafür aber auf Kindesmissbrauch, Fanatismus und Romhörigkeit. Die Affinität zu reaktionären Ansichten und verachtenswertem Verhalten ist aber ähnlich wie bei den „schlagenden“ Verbindungen. Wieso vertreten so viele Burschenschaften in Deutschland dieses Weltbild? Die „Burschenschaften“ entstammen einer militanten Nationalbewegung aus der Zeit nach dem Wiener Kongress, die in den „Befreiungskriegen“ Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts gekämpft hatte oder gerne hätte. Aus dieser Zeit stammen viele der antifranzösischen Ressentiments, die sich auch heute noch bei „Burschenschaften“ wiederfinden. Zudem war es eine Zeit heftiger antijüdischer Pogrome, der sogenannten „Hep-Hep-Krawalle“, die bis heute im Antisemitismus der „Burschenschaften“ nachklingen. Die Ermordung des nationalismuskritischen Aufklärers und russischen Generalkonsuls August von Kotzebue 1819 durch Karl Ludwig Sand, „Burschenschafter“ und Anhängers der „Turnerbewegung“ um Friedrich Ludwig „Turnvater“ Jahn, war der Auslöser der Karlsbader Beschlüsse und damit des Vormärz. Viele „Burschenschafter“ wähnen sich heute noch verfolgt und beziehen sich dabei auffallend häufig auf jene Zeit vor der gescheiterten Revolution 1848, die sie für sich reklamieren. Tatsächlich gab es damals diverse Strömungen innerhalb der Revolutionsbewegung und die heutigen AfD-Burschen sollten sich schämen, wenn sie sich auf die Radikaldemokrat:innen von einst berufen. Das ursprüngliche Ziel hauptsächlich der „Burschen-“ und „Turnerschaften“ wurde 1871 mit der „Reichsgründung“ erreicht: die Schaffung eines deutschen Nationalstaats. Im Kaiserreich spielten diese beiden Spielarten von Studentenverbindungen zwar nur eine untergeordnete Rolle, aber in der jüngeren deutschen Geschichte waren schlagende Studentenverbindungen immer an vorderster Front, wenn es darum ging, Verbrechen zu begehen: als Soldaten im deutsch-französischen Krieg vor der „Reichsgründung“, als kaiserlicher Kolonialmacht in Afrika, als Soldaten im ersten Weltkrieg, als Freikorps in der Weimarer Republik und als Nazis im „Dritten Reich“. Keiner dieser verbrecherischen Kriege wäre ohne „Waffenstudenten“ möglich gewesen. Immer wieder kommt es zu gewaltsamen Übergriffen durch Burschenschaftler auf politische Gegner:innen. Wie ist das Gewaltpotenzial solcher Gruppierungen einzuschätzen? Abgesehen von einigen militanten Korporierten, zumeist „Burschenschafter“, die dann oft auch noch Doppelmitgliedschaften in anderen faschistischen Organisationen und Parteien haben, ist das unmittelbare Gefahrenpotenzial eher gering. Zwar sind die versoffenen Burschen regelmäßig an auch gewalttätigen Auseinandersetzungen beteiligt, aber da unterscheiden sie sich nicht wesentlich von anderen rechten Männergruppierungen. Systematische Gewalt ist von ihnen eher durch die Übernahme staatlicher Institutionen oder Regierungen zu erwarten: Korporationen sind eine grundsätzliche Gefahr für die Demokratie.

'Did Stalin write this?' Internet torches Trump's call to 'purge' GOP of dissenting voices

He is up to his neck in Russian debt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation https://www.rawstory.com/trump-immunity-2668545131/ Putin, Xi, and MBS find this whole democracy thing hilarious. As authoritarians they just cackle and shrug at the thought of going through the extra steps that democracy requires. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-executes-person-every-two-days-2024 Why not just tell people what to do and if they don’t do it, bribe them, throw them out a window or flush them down a drain? It’s why they had to use the Midwest based Koch brothers (the funders of heritage foundation and project 2025) who had deep relationships with Russian oil oligarchs since Stalins era and Harlan Crow (commercial real estate) to buy the SCOTUS. https://youtu.be/mn_t7a2hJfQ?si=hzioP8URJAMFNch4 https://www.reddit.com/r/scotus/s/iGMOpLTJ1f https://www.reddit.com/r/itcouldhappenhere/s/f6R6M1e1la https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/lauren-boebert-epa-congress-hearing-b2578111.html Alito’s (Koch funded) heritage foundation ties, Thomas’s R.V., Ginni funding Jan 6, Kavanaughs mortgage, and all the private jet trips to bohemian grove. They were all part of the bigger plan to destabilize the United States, spread the cancer of corruption and tear it all down so they can build oligarch row in Teton National park Wyoming so the lazy old oligarchs can retire from the Moscow mob life. https://www.thedailybeast.com/clarence-thomas-accepted-yacht-trip-to-russia-chopper-flight-to-putins-hometown-democrats https://newrepublic.com/post/184385/alarming-report-exposes-chief-justice-roberts-pro-trump-immunity-ruling Kleptocracy is biological. It consumes everything in its path like a parasite. During Russian perestroika it ate Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and shit out alcoholism and hopelessness. Now anyone with skills has left and 1 in 5 has no indoor plumbing. Justin Kennedy (justice kennedys son and Peter Thiels friend) was the inside man at Deutsche bank that was getting all trumps toxic loans approved. https://youtu.be/ZlIagcttGY0?si=EkbGnoAsDVqJ3sjT No other bank but Deutsche bank would touch trump and his imaginary valuations. Why? Because Deutsche bank was infested with Russian oligarchs. In 91 the Soviet Union failed and for a bit they hid all of the money they stole from Russias grandmas under a mattress until the oligarchs started buying condos at trump towers. https://youtu.be/VRZagEpiB08?si=bfsXUNSNGRdZVegq They made stops in Ukraine, Cyprus and London but they landed in New York because that was what everyone wanted in the early 90’s. Real Levi’s, Pepsi, Madonna tapes that weren’t smuggled bootlegs, and Wall Street cocaine. They all bought new suits and cars and changed their title from “most violent street thug in moscow” to “respectable Russian oligarch” but they didn’t leave their human trafficking, narcotics or extortion behind. It was their most lucrative business model and frankly, they enjoy the violence. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helped-save-trumps-business/ Guiliani redirected NYPD resources away from their new Russian friends and onto the Italian mob. It let him claim he cleaned up New York and it let the russians launder their money through casinos and then commercial real estate when 3 of trumps casino execs started asking how he managed to bankrupt casinos and they all died in a helicopter crash https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/11/nyregion/copter-crash-kills-3-aides-of-trump.html The attorney/client privilege is the continual work around they use to accept bribes and make payments up and down the mob pyramid. https://www.timesofisrael.com/inside-anatevka-the-curious-chabad-hamlet-in-ukraine-where-giuliani-is-mayor/ The insane property valuations coming out in trumps fraud trial are a necessity of the money laundering cycle that duetschebank was doing with the Russians. https://youtu.be/ZlIagcttGY0?si=EkbGnoAsDVqJ3sjT The reason trump cosplays as a patriot is because he is feeding on the U.S. middle class, not because he is one of us. The GOP fell in line to MAGA because Trump did what pathological liars do, he told them anything they wanted to hear. Trump with his perestroika money laundering and child raping buddy Epstein, Roger Stone with his kompromat sex clubs in DC and Nevada, and Paul Manafort with his global election rigging sat down at a table with Mike Johnson (funded by Russian owned American Ethane) and the extreme religious right and convinced them that they were the same. They self evidently are not, at least at a surface level, but there is enough common ground in the exploitation of children and desire for unilateral control (project 2025) that they became the worlds weirdest and most dysfunctional orgy. The religious right is naive enough to believe trump at his word so they have made him their defacto savior. https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/unearthed-video-project-2025-director-said-project-has-great-relationship-trump-and https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1811410983081976309?t=i__Mr6ZgR4rDg7vzRRdKCQ&s=19 Trump belongs to the authoritarians. The GOP now belongs to trump. But their overall goal is the same- Kleptocracy. Putin, Xi and MBS all aligned together last year to attempt the BRICS overthrow of the USD. It failed but it didn’t stop Xi’s push on Taiwan or MBS’s part in the plan. Stay frosty. Eyes up. It’s the only way we don’t all end up kissing the ring of a dictator. https://www.thornwellbooks.com/book-reviews/i-love-russia-reporting-from-a-lost-country/ https://www.ft.com/content/8c6d9dca-882c-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45787 https://www.amlintelligence.com/2020/09/deutsche-bank-suffers-worst-damage-over-massive-aml-discrepancies-in-fincen-leaks/ https://www.occrp.org/en/the-fincen-files/global-banks-defy-us-crackdowns-by-serving-oligarchs-criminals-and-terrorists https://www.voanews.com/amp/us-lifts-sanctions-on-rusal-other-firms-linked-to-russia-deripaska/4761037.html https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_-_minority_status_of_the_russia_investigation_with_appendices.pdf http://www.citjourno.org/page-1 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ukraines-oligarchs-are-no-longer-considered-above-the-law/ All credit to u/backcountrydrifter on Reddit

"I'm happy to be the first buddy!"

You know, this world has always, with some exceptions (do we not have a heads of communism emoji?) been ruled by ravenous ghouls but I feel like they had more gravitas before? Idk, like Trump, Musk, Milei, Fetterman, Bolsonaro, Zelensky, etc these guys all kinda feel like clowns or something? Like they’re cosplaying? Is it just the infantilization of the human race via the modern internet leaking into politics? Or maybe older figures were just as embarrassing but didn’t have constant exposure like modern politicians (also due to the internet I guess)?

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

ChatGPT is using Grokipedia as a source, and it’s not the only AI tool to do so. Citations to Elon Musk’s AI-generated encyclopedia are starting to appear in answers from Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, too. […] When it launched, a bulk of Grokipedia’s articles were direct clones of Wikipedia, though many others reflected racist and transphobic views. For example, articles about Musk conveniently downplays his family wealth and unsavory elements of their past (like neo-Nazi and pro-Apartheid views) and the entry for “gay pornography” falsely linked the material to the worsening of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The article on US slavery still contains a lengthy section on “ideological justifications,” including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” […] “Grokipedia feels like a cosplay of credibility,” said Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush. “It might work inside its own bubble, but the idea that Google or OpenAI would treat something like Grokipedia as a serious, default reference layer at scale is bleak.” https://www.theverge.com/report/870910/ai-chatbots-citing-grokipedia The entire AI industry is using the Nazi CSAM machine for training data.

The Department of Temporal Investigations is on the case

It depends on the event and the event holders. “Ren Fairs” in the US are more likely to be put on for fun. Go hear a guy in tights play a lute, eat a roast turkey leg, etc. I think convention cosplay culture is starting to leak in. If you want to see Americans take period costume seriously, go to a “reenactment.” You’ll find folks who are very serious about history, many of them are professional historians, archaeologists or museum employees performing for the education of the public. Probably the biggest community is the one around the American Civil War. Go watch the movie Gettysburg. Sure there’s the main cast of Hollywood actors, but then there’s hundreds and hundreds of extras. They’re war reenactors, who showed up with their own personal uniforms and equipment.

A long post about how I'm planning to drop Magic as a hobby because of Universes Beyond

My background At some point in the '90s I received a Fourth Edition starter kit as a gift. I didn’t know anybody else who played Magic: The Gathering yet, so I sat on my floor and played both sides of the game against myself. My favorite card was Yotian Soldier. What kind of country was Yotia? What was their process for making mechanical soldiers? I assumed that I would find out in time. In college, my roommates and I drafted our entire collection into five-color, several-hundred-card monstrosities, because we didn’t know yet that the norm was to build focused 60-card decks. Our games lasted for hours. Today we still get together to play Magic about once a month (our decks are more coherent now). For years I spent my Saturdays hosting a Pauper player-run event on Magic Online, in the days before Pauper became an officially sanctioned format. And I spent the rest of the week participating in Pauper PREs that other people hosted, and chatting on Pauper message boards. I wrote articles for a vendor that ran a network of buying & selling bots on MTGO. The pay was peanuts; I would get maybe $15 in store credit for an article thousands of words in length. But the truth is I would have done it for free and been grateful for the platform. That’s just how excited I was to talk about deckbuilding and card design. When I wanted to start hosting Magic drafts for my friends at my house, I wrote my own web site to manage the brackets. I’ve made my own tokens and deckboxes. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was going to Friday Night Magic at my local game store roughly every other week, and driving to any Grand Prix or similarly large tournament within about five hours of home. During the pandemic, I installed Lutris so I could play Arena on my Linux computer, and I’ve been a near-daily player for the last couple of years. I also started ordering a draft booster box of most Standard-legal sets from my LGS. Most days for the past few years, I’ve watched gameplay videos from creators like SaffronOlive or PowrDragn while I ate lunch. And you can look back over my posting history here to get a sense of how much Magic has been on my mind. I haven’t been playing Magic continuously for its whole 30-year span. I’ve taken breaks that have sometimes lasted years. But I’ve kept coming back. Now, I’m going away again, and I can’t see a path back. The announcement that future Universes Beyond cards will be legal in Standard leaves me unable to find any type of Magic that I’m still interested in playing. I’m sad about that, so I wrote this post to vent my feelings. What does “dropping” Magic mean? I said that I play Magic once a month with my friends, and I’m not going to stop hanging out with them because of a decision that Wizards of the Coast made. If I’m lucky I may be able to Rule-0 UB cards out of that metagame. I probably won’t put much effort into building or upgrading my decks anymore, and if I do, I’ll use proxies for the costlier cards (something I hadn’t considered until recently). I plan to continue playing Standard on Arena until the first UB set enters the format, after which I’ll uninstall Arena, and stop buying boxes of new Magic sets. I’ve already started selling off many of my valuable paper cards. Why I don’t like Universes Beyond I think @Fluid put it most succinctly: I don’t wanna play pop culture soup, I wanna play magic. And if that clears things up for you, you can close your browser tab now. But I am much too verbose to leave it at that. The bottom-line answer to why I don’t like UB is that I have a visceral negative reaction when I look at UB cards or think about playing games with them. But of course that reaction comes from somewhere. Let’s unpack it. The story matters Many people devote similar amounts of time and energy to chess or poker – venerable games of strategy and skill with worldwide followings and well-established governing bodies. But I’m not as interested in those games. One of the big things Magic has that they don’t is its story: a rich backdrop that exists in a two-way relationship with the game mechanics, both informing them and making them feel more real. A world that players can engage with, even in ways that don’t involve playing the game (such as fan art or cosplay). A sense that the spells you “cast” aren’t mere rules, that they come from some context, and have some life to them: you could imagine how a wizard might use them to solve a problem, or resort to them in a moment of desperation. But good (or even just okay) backstories don’t come free. You can’t just babble some nonsense peppered with words like “sword” and “spirit” and say you built a fantasy world. You have to pay attention to things like plausibility and consistency and balance. You have to maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Wizards of the Coast has historically done a good job cultivating Magic’s story, although it must be said that they’ve slacked off a bit over the years. (Gone are the days when they’d commission entire novels to accompany new sets.) Universes Beyond isn’t merely the latest step in a slow decline, however. It’s an abdication of any attempt to maintain a consistent story. It’s saying, “actually no, all of these spells and abilities are just game rules, to be applied to whatever makes us money” – even to franchises like Fallout or The Walking Dead where nothing you could really call “magic” is part of the setting. Universes Beyond releases don’t have to be, and aren’t, woven into “Universes Within” in any way; their fiction doesn’t have to be reconcilable with Magic’s. Mechanical compatibility of the cards is all that matters, now. This 1/1 creature and this 1/1 creature can trade off in combat and – I was going to say “we’re asked to believe that there’s any reason to it”, but actually that’s not so. The real shame is that we’re not asked to believe anything about it, anymore. Whether you or I can imagine that confrontation, or what we think of it if we do, are no longer matters of pertinence. In introducing Universes Beyond cards to sanctioned formats, WotC is banking on the assumption that most players never actually cared about Magic’s backstory, that they only care about its rule set. And no doubt that’s true, for some. But it isn’t for me. You’re paying to read ads The second big problem with Universes Beyond is that it’s blatantly commercial. It amounts to Wizards of the Coast allowing other companies to use Magic for advertising, the way one might sell space on a billboard, or the side of a bus, or a divider stick at the grocery store checkout. Advertising on something is not a sign of honor or affection. I know most of us are inured to the constant presence of ads in our lives, but just because something awful is normal now doesn’t make it less awful. I have to look at myself in the mirror And partly it’s a matter of self-respect. Wizards of the Coast told us for a long time not to worry about Universes Beyond cards because they would only be optional extras, and now they’re changing their tune and they expect most of us to just fall in line. And I need to know, for myself, that I’m not the kind of person who will. That I don’t just shrug and play along when someone gulls me. That I’m not on call to help Hasbro advertise for Marvel or Ubisoft whenever they want me to. Et cetera Those are the main reasons why I personally dislike UB, but there are plenty of other good reasons that may be significant to other people. For one, it sounds like UB sets impair Magic’s (already underpaid) artists’ ability to make money on on the secondary market. This seems like a pretty foreseeable consequence of WotC creating a situation where they don’t own the intellectual properties that appear on some Magic cards. Copyright law sure is a mess, huh? Alone, this might not be enough of a reason to abandon UB entirely, but it does seem like if they cared about the not-so-little people, they could maybe have limited it to a once-in-a-while thing instead of expanding it to encompass half of all new sets. In his video on this subject, The Professor said that he’s not going to let his frustration about Universes Beyond stop him from enjoying Magic or from playing the game with people who want to use UB cards. That’s a great sentiment, and I’m happy for him that he can still find joy in the game. But I don’t feel that way myself. I don’t want to play Magic: The Grocerystick and, well, you can’t make me. I don’t have any sort of responsibility to get over my aversion in the name of being an “ambassador for the game” or whatever. Prof and other content creators are in a difficult position because their careers are intertwined with Magic, and walking away would be a daunting proposition even if they wanted to (and I don’t mean to speak for them as to whether or not they do). But as for me, zero percent of my livelihood has ever come directly or indirectly from Wizards, unless you count that one time when I opened a Mana Crypt. A tangent about power creep Magic’s runaway power creep (that is, the tendency for new cards to obsolete old ones by being stronger or more efficient than them) isn’t related to Universes Beyond, but I can’t talk about quitting without mentioning it. I’ve been playing long enough to remember when Savannah Lions was considered an exceptionally strong card. Last year in Duskmourn we got Veteran Survivor, which is Savannah Lions plus two beneficial abilities, and nobody’s even playing it in tournaments because so many of the cards that get printed these days are even more broken. I could write a whole separate essay about power creep, and I’m trying hard not to. Let’s see if we can hit the main points quickly: A higher floor on how powerful cards have to be shrinks the design space for new cards. People like Magic cards for reasons other than just their power level. Somebody who likes Nyxborn Marauder or Vampiric Spirit for their art, or flavor text, or because they’re friends with the artist, or whatever, shouldn’t have to choose between playing the card they have an affection for or upgrading to the clearly superior Eradicator Valkyrie. I thought Imperiosaur was an interesting build-around when it was released, but now it’s recycling, because zero decks can justify playing it when Bristlebud Farmer and Territorial Allosaurus are available. This opinion may seem quaint, but it didn’t have to – it’s just that by now we’re so used to Wizards disregarding it. Even if every color and strategy grows stronger at the same rate, power creep is still a problem because it means games tend to be shorter and more likely to hinge on a single draw or decision that can’t be answered in time. Shorter games are bad because they mean: There are fewer opportunities to see the inter-card synergies and strategic decisions that distinguish Magic from generic games of chance. Once one player gains the upper hand, there’s less time for their opponent(s) to be able to turn the tables. This promotes situations where one player spends the whole game in a losing position, never gets to show off what their deck can do, and is left feeling like their only purpose in the match was to be a punching bag for the winner. The initial die roll, a completely random event, has a greater influence on the outcome of the game. Would you believe me if I told you that Magic players who won the die roll sometimes used to choose to play second? There were decks and match-ups where +1 card advantage was more important than getting on the board first. When was the last time you did that? It’s probably been most of a decade, for me. Some amount of power creep is inevitable, and reining it in isn’t easy, especially for non-rotating formats, but there are ways to approach it. Magic’s designers aren’t trying to do it, though, because the deluge of overpowered cards isn’t an accident. There’s probably a whole system of intertwined reasons why WotC is perpetually pushing the power level, but I’ll bet these are among them: Each set has to be more powerful than its predecessors in order to sell more packs than them. Power sells not because players necessarily like that the cards are stronger, but rather because using the strongest cards in the format is the only way to remain competitive. Shorter games get people out of and back into the tournament queues on MTGO and Arena faster. Many of the worst offenders are overloaded legendary creatures like Glissa Sunslayer or Amalia Benavides Aguirre, presumably designed to be attractive to Commander players. (Which seems gratuitous, considering that the format first became popular back when the only legal commanders were the elder dragons from Legends, all of which are laughably underpowered even by the standards of fifteen years ago. I assure you, people would play Commander no matter how weak the commanders were.) Power creep hasn’t made me quit the game yet, though if you ask me why, I can only mumble something about how I still prefer playing broken Magic to not playing Magic at all. But now that I’ve decided to quit, whenever I see a particularly egregious card hit the table, or have one of those punching-bag games, I think, “Well, at least I won’t have to deal with that nonsense anymore.” Rebuttals Following are my responses to all of the criticisms I could think of that someone might level against this post. Please scroll down until you find whichever ones you were going to say. 1) This is a minor issue and I don’t understand why anybody would care so much about it. Okay, but you understand that I care about it, right? 2) There are way more important things to complain about than this. True of almost everything anybody’s ever complained about. 3) I’ve never heard of you before. Why should I care if you quit? To be clear, I’m not claiming to be well known in the world of Magic, nor saying that anybody should be sad to lose me specifically. I am saying: that Universes Beyond integration might be a big deal if it’s driving a long-term, invested player to quit. that there may be a not-insignificant number of other players who feel the same as I do. that Wizards could have kept me on the hook if they’d put any effort into it. As for how much you care, that’s up to you. 4) This “I’m leaving if I don’t get my way” attitude is immature and ineffective. By the time Wizards announced the new policy, it was already too late for me to get my way. They have obligations that they can’t afford to renege on. This is more of an “I’m leaving and explaining why” post. 5) Universes Beyond isn’t a form of advertising; WotC is carefully selecting IPs that they think Magic players will like. Yeah, that’s how advertising works. A person or business owns some sort of property and thinks that other people or businesses might like to use that property to get a message to potential customers. They gather information on what their audience is like, and then they solicit interest from companies who want to reach that audience. Advertising doesn’t have to carry an explicit “buy this product” exhortation, and when you pay attention to it you’ll notice that many ads don’t. Often the goal is just to keep the brand in the front of the customer’s mind for whenever they become ready to buy. One of the upcoming UB sets will focus on Spider-Man. Marvel/Disney doesn’t need there to be inserts in the packs saying “Issue #999 will be on the stands next month!” It’s enough for them if, a year or two down the line, when you’re looking for a movie to watch or comic book to read or video game to play, some subconscious part of you thinks, “Well, I’m a Magic player, so I must like Spider-Man, right?” Or maybe it’s not you, maybe it’s your aunt and uncle thinking along those lines when they’re trying to figure out what to buy you for Christmas. 6) Universes Beyond isn’t advertising because WotC isn’t getting paid for it; they’re paying licensing fees to use the other IPs. I admit I don’t know which direction the money is flowing here. I would hope Wizards is getting a fee from the other IP owners, but it’s certainly possible that they’re actually paying for the privilege of turning Magic into a TV screen at the gas pump. Whether or not Wizards thinks of it as advertising, I’ll bet Marvel does, and if they’ve figured out how to get other companies to advertise for them and give them money at the same time, I can only imagine how hard they’re laughing. 7) It’s dumb to complain that UB is advertising when trading card games are so inherently capitalist to begin with. We can’t escape capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we have no choice but to tolerate its excesses. 8) You say you hate ads, but I’ll bet you still see plenty of them when you [do XYZ]. I sure do. That’s the problem. We all see plenty of ads, even if we’re trying to avoid them. Now we even see them embedded in games we’re playing. 9) Allusions are a venerable literary tradition. Yes, but a little subtlety goes a long way. Candlestick is clever; Commander Mustard is crass. 10) Universes Beyond is “not for you”. Other people like it, and you should let them like things. I did! For years, WotC has told us that Magic is a big tent, and can accommodate a wide variety of players. Whenever we see a Magic product that we don’t like, we’re supposed to repeat the mantra “this product is not for me”, and go back to playing with the parts that we do like. Hmm, Commander is getting all the attention from WotC. It’s a multiplayer format focused on splashy effects where winning is more of an accident than an indicator of skill. Commander is Not For Me, but two-player, 60-card formats are still officially supported, so no big deal, right? Hmm, Alchemy on Arena has mechanics with high degrees of randomness that aren’t reproducible in paper. Okay, Alchemy is Not For Me, but that’s fine, they’re not trying to promote it over Standard, it’s probably just an attempt to steal players from Hearthstone or something. Hmm, eternal formats allow Universes Beyond cards now. Okay, Modern and Legacy and Vintage are Not For Me, that’s fine, I wasn’t playing them anyway. It’s disappointing that Pauper, the format I helped support in its early years, allows UB cards, but I actually haven’t been able to play Pauper in a while, so I guess I’ll set that complaint aside for now. Hmm, three-year Standard is… oh, actually I guess this one is going to have to be for me, since Standard is the only format I can still muster any interest in. And so it went, over the years, as the part of that “big tent” that was For Me grew smaller and smaller, until finally it’s too small to fit into. And now I wonder if I was a fool. WotC obviously thinks the player base won’t care about this change – did I contribute to that impression by not complaining loudly enough? Did I enable my own marginalization? I could put up with it, for the sake of other players, when as little as 5% of my hobby was “for me”. But now it’s 0% and I have no leverage to do anything about it. 11) You can still play Magic without Universes Beyond cards, if you want. You just can’t do it in any sanctioned format. Which means most game stores won’t support it. But you can try to convince your casual playgroup to agree to it! I feel like that one answers itself. 12) Even if you have to play with other people who use UB cards, you can choose not to put any in your own decks. I don’t think this is a good-faith argument. I mean, it may be okay for casual games, but not if you’re playing in tournaments or leagues or ladders. Whether we like it or not (and I don’t), some Magic cards are just more powerful than others. There has never been a time when you could deliberately put less powerful cards in your deck and expect it to compete. When Ride’s End was printed, Standard decks that were already running Seized from Slumber upgraded right away. It’s disingenuous to say, “If you don’t like the flavor of Ride’s End, you can still play Seized from Slumber.” Sure, it’s legal for you to do that, but you shouldn’t, because you will lose some number of games that you could have won. If you want your Magic deck to be competitive, you have to build it with the best cards that are available, and from now on, in every format, that’s going to mean including some UB cards. This has long been one of my greatest disappointments with Magic: liking cards is for suckers; the optimal strategy is to avoid forming any attachments to particular cards, so that you can dispassionately play the strongest ones. But that’s the reality, and it would take a pretty radical shift in game design to change it. 13) Oh, you like Magic’s story? Recite everything that ever happened in it. I’m not a Vorthos. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Magic lore, and I do value gameplay above flavor. But rich and consistent world-building is an essential component of Magic, not an afterthought. And while I may not know everything about Magic’s story, I’m at least broadly familiar with it. I can tell you which of Ravnica’s guilds I’d belong to (probably Azorius, maybe Izzet). I can tell you that Teferi is my favorite character because of his tragic backstory wherein he’s responsible for the disappearance of his homeland. When I was building a Brawl deck to knock out some Arena achievements recently, I reached for Helga as my commander, primarily because I found her relatable in the fiction. But one of Magic’s great innovations is – was – that even players who don’t actively delve into the lore still absorb a lot of it just in the course of playing. They pick it up from the art and the flavor text and the card names. Over time, they’ll develop a sense of what’s going on in the story without even meaning to. That is, if there is a story. 14) You should give UB a chance, the designs/gameplay are actually good/fun/well balanced. I’ve seen plenty of the cards and I don’t agree with this assessment, but even if I did, so what? Lots of people do good jobs designing things that I’m not interested in. I’m happy for them but it doesn’t somehow change my interests. This is an important point, so I want to underscore it: there is no level of quality that Universes Beyond cards could achieve that would change my mind about them. It’s the concept that’s bad; the actual cards are irrelevant. 15) You’ll feel differently when there’s a UB set based on something you like. I actually like most of the things that have gotten UB treatments so far. Final Fantasy, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout – I’ve played and enjoyed multiple games from each of those franchises. My dad read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to my brother and me as bedtime stories. I have hundreds of Marvel (and other) comics boxed up in my closet (really got to get around to donating those…). But if Cloud Strife crashed a Brotherhood of Steel base, I wouldn’t think, “Whoa, cool crossover!” I’d think, “What the hell kind of sense does this make?” And I don’t look at a card like Ezio, Blade of Vengeance and think, “Wow, they really nailed the character.” At best I think, “Okay, if you had to make a Magic card for Ezio, I guess that’s a reasonable set of abilities.” (And also: “Isn’t 5/5 kind of big for one human?”) Actually, Assassin’s Creed brings up an illustrative point. I played the first few games in that series and really enjoyed them – they had some of the best stealth gameplay ever. Then the series shifted away from stealth and towards action. It wasn’t about “assassins” anymore. It wasn’t what I had come to the franchise looking for, and it was awfully similar to a lot of other video games on the market. So I stopped buying AC games. The series continued to sell by doing something that appealed to a wide audience, but it didn’t deliver the experience that had originally made it stand out. That’s a lot like what’s happening now with Magic. 16) Don’t you ever wonder about stuff like “What if Superman fought the Predator?” UB lets players live out those dreams. I don’t, and I don’t understand the appeal. Superman and the Predator weren’t designed with each other in mind. Their powers weren’t balanced for it to be a fair or interesting fight. They wouldn’t fit in the same work of fiction. (Also, UB won’t actually let you play that out. If the Predator’s card is a 4/4 and Superman’s is a 4/5, there’s your answer. No need to play the games.) 17) How do you feel about card alters that reference other IPs? Alters are totally cool. They’re unique, or at least have few reproductions. A real person, not a company, made or commissioned them because it was something they personally were interested in. And if you don’t like alters, that’s fine; nobody is requiring you to use them if you want to continue playing sanctioned Magic formats. It’s not the same thing at all. The same goes for card sleeves, playmats, deckboxes, or similar paraphernalia that depict non-Magic IPs. I don’t have any objection to any of that; in fact I have some myself. It’s not that different from wearing a t-shirt of your favorite band while you’re playing. But the difference between having those things at the table while you’re playing the game versus having those things be part of the game is significant. (That said, if someone in my playgroup did object to any of those things, I would gladly change to accommodate them.) 18) How is a UB setting any worse than an original plane with a non-fantasy setting, like Thunder Junction or Duskmourn? I’m not a fan of those settings either, and haven’t spent as much money on them or engaged as much with them as I have with other sets. Any time period past the Industrial Revolution is a bad fit for Magic, in my opinion. I’ve been willing to meet Wizards halfway on these, but I’d definitely prefer it if we stuck to fantasy. It’s not that I don’t like genres outside of fantasy! I enjoy sci-fi; I’ve finished all the Mass Effect games (even Andromeda); I’m almost done reading The Expanse. You want to know one thing I like about those series? Their internally consistent worldbuilding. You don’t see any robe-wearing wizards show up to cast Fireball in those stories, for the same reason you shouldn’t see their characters in Magic. 19) They used to put Shakespeare quotes on Magic cards; isn’t that a foreign IP? They stopped doing that because they realized it clashed with the goal of building their own fantasy setting. And they never started doing it again, because it’s the 21st century and nobody thinks they can get rich off Shakespeare. 20) You’re wrong, Magic has never been limited to earlier time periods. By my reckoning, the first set that unambiguously crossed the boundary was 2022’s Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Some previous sets or cards have had steampunk aesthetics, which is pushing the envelope, but within the boundaries of what I was personally willing to live with. I don’t know; maybe I was only seeing what I wanted to see. But now things have changed too much, and I can’t make myself see it anymore. 21) Magic isn’t just one story, it’s a canvas for telling an unlimited variety of stories. This actually hasn’t been true for most of its history, but anyway I might be okay with it as long as those stories had a certain amount of consistency. 22) Magic couldn’t stay stagnant forever. It has to be able to expand, and try new things. WotC isn’t even close to exhausting all the historical cultures they could base a plane on, and every time they revisit a plane they demonstrate how it’s possible to tell new stories in old settings. You can’t convince me that they were in danger of running out of thematically consistent stories to tell. P.S., if they do feel like they’re running low on new material, one remedy would be to release sets less frequently, like everyone wants them to. 23) Universes Beyond is bringing in a lot of new players. WotC can’t afford not to do it. Magic has been Earth’s foremost TCG for three decades. If you live near a large enough city (okay, in a country that WotC actively supports), you should be able to find a small Magic tournament at a game store within reasonable traveling distance at least once a week. Pandemic disruptions aside, there have typically been large tournaments somewhere in the world once or twice a month. Magic has also supported two separate but similar online versions (MTGO and Arena), for years. How many other games are big enough to willingly cannibalize their own audience and survive? What I’m getting at is that I don’t think Magic’s player base was either small or on the wane. It seemed like there were already a lot of players pre-UB, and from what I saw, they were of a variety of ages and experience levels. I don’t think Wizards was in a position where they desperately had to attract new players or risk the collapse of the game. It may be true that publicly traded companies have an obligation to make money for their shareholders. (Whether or not that ultimately works to the benefit of their customers or employees is a debate for another time.) Even so, they aren’t compelled to wring every available dime out of the market as quickly as possible. They have some leeway to convince shareholders that long-term stability is more valuable. It is – and we, the public, should insist that it be – acceptable for a company simply to make a good product, and sell it to those who are interested. It may be, in the short term or even in the long term, that there are more people in the world who will buy Magic cards from crossover IPs than people who will buy Magic cards with original IPs, but that doesn’t mean WotC is geased to cater to them. As long as Magic’s numbers stay at a threshold where they can support the game’s infrastructure – and they certainly have seemed to be there – it is okay if not everybody in the world is a Magic player. It is okay if some people like a thing and other people don’t. It is okay, and in fact preferable, if Magic is “merely” a popular game and never becomes an all-encompassing cultural empire. (Some may suggest that Wizards of the Coast agrees with me, and it’s their corporate overlords at Hasbro who are to blame for the insistence on growth. I haven’t seen any evidence of Wizards pushing back on any of this, but even if it were so, what difference would it make to me as a player? The final products are what they are.) 24) If there’s money to be made in something, you can’t expect any company to pass it up. If Wizards really thinks a menagerie of pop-culture crossovers is too lucrative to ignore, they could have pursued that without diluting Magic in the bargain. They could have made a separate card game just to explore those possibilities. Oh wait, somebody already tried that and it didn’t last. 25) My friend only started playing Magic because of a UB set, and now they’re really enjoying it. I’m happy, genuinely, for you and your friend. But I’m sorry – again, genuinely – to say that I don’t value their enjoyment of my hobby over my own. 26) Most Magic players “really adore” Universes Beyond. Honestly, this one would be easier to believe if Mark Rosewater didn’t have to keep telling us it’s so. But let’s say it is. That’s fine for them. Most of the game already catered to them. I just wish that for once, “this is not for you” applied to other people instead of me. 27) I like Universes Beyond. Do you want me to feel bad about that? Do you want me to stop buying it? No. You should do things you enjoy; you don’t owe it to me to curb your enthusiasm, any more than I owe it to you to revive my own. If I’m being painfully honest, I kind of want to know that somebody at Wizards feels bad for pushing me out of my longtime hobby. That’s not a sentiment I’m proud of, but there it is. But if you’re a fellow player, you haven’t done anything wrong, and you should spend your money and your leisure time however you want to. I might suggest that you ask yourself why you’re so willing to buy advertisements. But it’s not up to me how you feel about that. 28) Attracting new players is more important than retaining invested players. I don’t know if anybody actually holds this opinion, but in case somebody does I’d like to hear the justification. What percentage of those new players are getting involved in all the unpaid or low-paid work that WotC relies on to keep the community alive, like writing articles or managing fan sites or judging tournaments? What percentage of them have to be converted to returning players for WotC to come out ahead financially in the long term, and is that likely? We’re talking about people who knew Magic existed, for decades, but couldn’t be bothered to try it until it was sugar-coated with some other IP that they actually like. And we’re really banking on large numbers of them sticking around? 29) Do you even want to draw in new players, or do you just want to be a grumpy old gatekeeper? I didn’t spend years running tournaments and writing articles because I hate engaging newcomers. But if the cost of enticing them is that we change the game so much it isn’t itself anymore, we didn’t really accomplish the goal, did we? 30) Oh, okay, so you just hate change. Magic has seen a lot of changes over the years that I’ve welcomed and still enjoy. I like the modern card border better than the original one. I like alternate art styles and border treatments on cards. I like Battles and Sagas and Adventures and Omens (but not Planeswalkers). I like the London Mulligan. 31) You’re acting entitled. WotC doesn’t owe you anything just because you bought some cards/wrote some articles/ran some tournaments/[insert any other reason here]. Of course not. They put out a product that I liked, and I paid them money and helped to build their community, because we both considered the arrangement to be mutually beneficial. Now they’ve decided that it isn’t, and so neither of us will be doing those things anymore. But I am a little surprised, and disappointed, that they knew that I and many other players felt this way, and deemed those relationships not valuable enough to preserve. 32) If you want a format without UB cards, organize it yourself. That’s how Commander got started. As discussed in the intro to this post, I did exactly that with Pauper. It’s an exhausting job and I eventually quit Magic cold turkey at the end of a tournament season because I was so burnt out. It was years before I returned. I don’t know if I have it in me to do that again. If you know of a community initiative along these lines, I’d be interested to hear about it. But even then, the best-case scenario is that I do several times as much work as before, just to carve out a tiny sliver of Magic that I can still enjoy. Wouldn’t that effort be better spent finding a pastime that actually wants me? 33) Rage-quitting never fixes anything. Probably not, but sticking around (and, what, making myself play a game I don’t enjoy?) obviously can’t fix anything either. (Also, I don’t think it counts as “rage-quitting” when it’s something I’m planning to do months from now.) 34) Wizards won’t notice that you quit over Universes Beyond, but your local game store will. This is probably true, and I feel bad about it. The staff at my LGS have never been anything short of friendly and kind to me, and I have very fond memories of going there for Friday Night Magic. But I can’t justify spending money on a product that I don’t like and never intend to use, solely to support somebody else’s business. (As it is, I’ve come pretty close to doing that: all of the booster boxes I’ve bought in recent years remain unopened in my basement. But I still might draft with them one day. Or sell them. Or donate them…) 35) Stop being so cheap, WotC employees have to… oh wait, you didn’t mention the price. I didn’t, although I know it’s a concern for many players. We know now that even Standard-legal UB sets will “have a higher MSRP”, and honestly that seems like a questionable decision to me, even from a purely mercenary standpoint. What’s the plan for retaining Standard players who only have room in their budgets for normal Standard-priced cards? As for myself, though: I’ve been content to Not-For-Me the Secret Lairs and Masters Series sets, but I swallowed last year’s increase to the price of draftable Standard boxes, and I would probably do it again – for a product that I actually wanted to buy. 36) This is just sour grapes from someone who probably doesn’t win much. I’m not a professional, but I’ve been to Mythic a few times. I can play Magic at a competitive level, I just don’t see the appeal anymore. 37) Magic’s gameplay will still be fun even if its narrative backdrop becomes a hodgepodge. Are you really going to quit on principle? To my shame, I probably would not quit solely on principle. I mean, I clucked my tongue and kept playing when WotC “straight-washed” Chandra or sent the Pinkertons to the house of a fan who hadn’t personally done anything wrong. But the initial assumption here is untrue. Magic won’t be fun for me with Universes Beyond in it. 38) So it’s really worth leaving an otherwise great hobby over this one thing? Apparently! But honestly, I would probably not describe Magic as “otherwise great” at this point. After years of power creep in the mechanics and technology creep in the lore, you have to look pretty hard to find the game I used to love buried underneath. So maybe the Universes Beyond thing is just the last straw. 39) Whatever, you’ll be back. They always come back. Maybe I will! I’m not swearing a blood oath never to play another game of Magic. I would be glad to find a way to play that makes me interested in the game again. If Wizards repents immediately and doesn’t publish any more UB sets beyond what’s already been announced, Standard could be UB-free as soon as 2028. I’ll check back then. 40) Have you tried [alternative TCG]? Feel free to make your pitch. But it wasn’t the TCG model that I liked, it was Magic specifically. 41) That’s a lot of whining about a game. You should get a life. Sorry for caring! Rest assured that I’ll be trying not to let it happen again. 99) Hey wait, isn’t your username a reference to a competing TCG? Nobody would actually ask this question, because nobody besides me remembers that game. Like I said about alters or sleeves: it’s funny when fans do it. It’s gauche when the actual legal owner of the game does it. (Actually, this is sort of the same reason why Wizards shouldn’t be designing for Commander, except replace “funny” with something like “inventive”.) It’s sure feeling less funny now. I looked up whether I can change my Arena username but it seems the answer is no. MTGZone This site is great. I really appreciate Andrew and Mike for operating it. It was exactly what I needed after I left Reddit. I like that it has a smaller audience, so I don’t feel like I have to respond to a post within 15 minutes after it goes up or I might as well not bother. It’s been gratifying to learn that other people care about the same things I do. I endorse and encourage the Fediverse model, which is how the internet was always supposed to work. I’ve found that the atmosphere here is pretty congenial relative to most Magic forums. This community has helped me celebrate my successes, and listened to me ramble on endlessly about deckbuilding. In fact, MTGZone may be the only social media site that consistently has a positive effect on my mental health. I’ve visited every day for the last year-plus, and more times per day than I should probably admit to, at that. It’s helped me feel somewhat connected to other people during these isolated times. But I’ll have less reason to visit now, and I’m sad about that too.

La veré para confirmar

Matsuda, G. (Director). (2016). REAL-610 Mizuna Rei Shock Retirement Work Black Rape Cosplay Heroine [Película]. K.M. Produce. https://jav-angel.net/uncen-leaked_real-610/

CIA Official Arrested for Intelligence Leak on Israeli Plans to Strike Iran

I don’t have a position on this. I’m just trying to clarify what was said: CIA leaker caught with no known motive. The same day, an Air Force Reservist was sentenced for leaking to impress friends online. CIA guy leaked specific information about the strike and nothing else. Commander Cosplay leaked a bunch of random stuff he thought would get him a date.

[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 5: Mists of Pandaria) - This was an expansion mired in talk of racism, furries, rip-offs, and gay baby dragon shippers, which saw three million subscribe leave

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama. This is the fifth part of my write-up about World of Warcraft. You can read the first four by clicking the links below. Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla Part 2 - Burning Crusade Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King Part 4 - Cataclysm Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor Part 7 - Classic and Legion Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth Part 9 - Ruined Franchises Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard Part 11 - Shadowlands Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria It was mid-2011. The final patch of Cataclysm was on its way, and Blizzcon was just around the corner. The subject of World of Warcraft’s next expansion had begun to gain traction once again, and as was tradition, the internet became awash with leaks. Some promised Old Gods, some foresaw Kul’Tiras or Zandalar or Nazjatar, Tel’Abim or Suramar or Sargeras – in short, players made every possible prediction in the vain hope that one of them might be proven right. But none of them were. No one could have predicted Pandaria. An Unexpected Trademark It wasn’t until the user ‘Mynsc’ went wading through the US Patent and Trademark Office website in search of info about Titan – Blizzard’s ‘open-secret’ new game in development – that they stumbled upon a recently-filed trademark by the name of ‘Mists of Pandaria’. Among all the theory-crafting and scavenging for information, it had been there a week, out in the open where anyone could find it, and yet completely overlooked. It was immediately dismissed by many users as a book, a figurine, an in-game microtransaction perhaps. They cast it aside and turned to the more realistic leaks. But upon further inspection, the trademark was for a game, distributed on CD-ROMs with instruction manuals and guides. It had to be WoW content. Okay, the community said. It was a patch. ”they don’t trademark patches. If they never did before, why now?” Then it had to be some kind of trading-card game spin off. Definitely not an expansion. ”The international class used in the trademark is the same as they used for previous expansions. The timing and information for the Mists of Pandaria trademark matches that of The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm. If this is not going to be the expansion, they would really need to hurry to come up with a name and trademark it before they announce it at Blizzcon. Seems risky. Seems unlikely.” It was a red herring, said the user ‘Johnnyarr’. ”Do you think blizz trademarked it to throw people off because they know we’ll be searching pre-blizzcon?” This sentiment echoed around the forums. Players simply refused to believe that Mists of Pandaria could be a real, genuine, true-to-life WoW expansion. What even were the ‘Mists of Pandaria’? A lot of them had never heard of Pandaren before. But they did exist. Sort of. One of Blizzard’s main artists, Samwise Didier, was known by the nickname ‘Panda’ to his friends, and had imagined and drawn Pandaren in the early 2000s. Blizzard had announced their addition to ‘Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos’ as an April Fools joke, and the response had been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, many fans were disappointed it had been a prank. Pandaren became a favourite after that, an inside joke, and they began to worm their way into the game for real as easter eggs hidden away for perceptive players to find. When Blizzard released ‘Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne’, it was with a real Pandaren playable character, Chen Stormstout. In World of Warcraft’s early development, questions arose about whether Pandaren would make a return. A community manager replied with the following: pandaren will not be a playable race … at this time. Will they make cameo appearances in the game as NPCs? Some things are best left unanswered I think :) There were a couple of items that referred to the Pandaren, and one NPC child who would walk around telling unbelievable stories, one of which was ‘I swear, people have actually seen them. Pandaren really do exist!’ They re-emerged in 2005 as part of another April Fools joke. This time it was the Pandaren X-Press, a service that allowed players to order Chinese food deliveries within the game. A few years later in 2009, a cosmetic pet was added – The Pandaren Monk. I actually covered it in my Wrath of the Lich King write-up. In fact, Blizzard had originally planned to make Pandaren a playable race in the Burning Crusade. They had created the models, designed the cities and the buildings, and written the lore. But when the Chinese government found out, they put a stop to it. Draenei were cobbled together to replace them at the last minute. That didn’t go public until after Mists was announced. In a 2009 podcast, Sam Didier and Chris Metzen joked that Pandaren would be added as a playable race in ‘Patch 201732-and-a-half’. You can see why the trademark was dismissed as a red-herring at first. They had always been a joke, never a serious part of the lore. And that’s how Mists was seen. ”Decoy, I’m calling it right now,” said ‘Ryme’. […] ”Hehe, I know the news is slow at the moment, but I don’t think this is the answer.” […] ’Vetali’ replied, ”I think they be trolling… or they better be…” […] ”obviously a decoy before blizzcon, no way would they do a whole f’ing expansion on pandaria,” said another user. Some players were receptive to the idea of a Pandaren expansion. ’Austilias’ replied, ”I was always under the impression that Blizzard avoided the Pandaren issue with respect to WoW, due to problems that it might cause in China which already has a pretty strict code on what aspects of WoW they permit (investigate Abominations in the Chinese version, for example, compared to the EU/US versions). Still, if the Pandaren are to be introduced as a race, I know that i’d be rather overjoyed where they a neutral race who perhaps in a questline would pledge themselves to the Alliance or the Horde.” The expansion was divisive. There were those, like the user ‘Gunner_recall’, who said “If this is happening…SUPER STOKED!!!” ‘Kathandira’ had the honour of being the expansion’s very first hater. Sixteen minutes after the trademark was posted, they responded: “if this goes live, you will see my goodbye thread soon after, this game has been bordering TOO cartoony for me, this would be the last nail in the coffin.” It caused quite the stir. I won’t post every reply, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Most people dismissed the entire concept, and those who didn’t were heavily divided. In an IGN interview a few weeks after the trademark, Game Director Tom Chilton further put players off the trail. Chilton said the speculation was, “wildly overhyped.” He added, “if you look at traditionally how we’ve handled that race it’s been in those secondary products because we haven’t realized it in the world. Most of the time when we do anything panda-related it’s going to be a comic book or a figurine or something like that.” That put rest to the debate. For a while. The Desolation of WoW The stage had been set for one of the biggest dramas in World of Warcraft history. Blizzcon 2011 had a different tone. The cosplay was still there like always, the esports were still going ahead, the merch shop still sold keyboards and hoodies. But there was an unspoken tension in the air – World of Warcraft had lost two million subscribers by that point, with no clear end in sight. Unlike every other announcement year, there hadn’t been any conclusive leaks. No one knew what to expect. It was with uneasy, desperate excitement that fans packed Stage Hall D. Chris Metzen (or as we real fans know him, Daddy) warmed up the crowd with his usual charm and some rather obscure promises of a new faction war. Daddy told us a war was coming, but this expansion would be the calm before the storm. He got everyone hyped up, and then the trailer began to play. At Blizzcon, the guests went wild. But most of these players already knew about the trademark. They were prepared. And there’s something to be said for the effect of a good atmosphere. The announcement streamed out to Blizzcon pass holders, and then was uploaded to Youtube. Within minutes, it was on every forum, every server, and every gaming news site. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of pandas, which obey their own special laws. It was official. Mists of Pandaria (hereafter abbreviated to MoP) was the next World of Warcraft expansion. The community imploded. It was utter pandamonium. From the frost-bitten slopes of Northrend to the sands of Uldum, the reactions came in thick and fast. I though the Pandaren were a running joke? I stopped playing WoW just after Cataclysm but I still keep up with it since I do think it’s a great game and I still love the art direction. But seriously. Pandas? What. The. Actual. Fuck? The MMOChampion user ‘Quackie’ said, “Pandas? This is Blizz just trolling us right? […] Time for a new game.” To which others responded with, “Don’t forget to close the door behind you, lock it and throw away your keys!!!” My personal favourites were those who looked at it and said ‘Oh, how original,’ the way a kindergarten teacher might do when one of their students turns in a messy crayon drawing of their parents fighting. Reporting on the scene of Blizzcon, Simon of the Yogscast said: ”I played a monk, a panda monk. It was strange. I sort of just waddled around, I hit things, I was doing [KUNG FU SOUNDS].” ”There’s no weapons, you don’t even punch things, you hug them. It’s going to be renamed World of Hugcraft,” he said, before reaching over and giving his colleague a big old squeeze. There were reactions of confusion, bewilderment, incredulity, reactions of despair and anger, reactions of tentative anticipation. And some, like me, actually liked the look of MoP, if you can believe it. Fans had a number of gripes. The first, and perhaps the most knee-jerk response, was that it was just dumb. It had no solid foundation in the lore, it was too girly and cheery and bright (WoW’s worldbuilding was historically quite dark), and conflicted with the existing style of art, music and story-telling. It was a jarring Kung Fu Panda rip off.. Some thought the resemblance was so uncanny that there might be legal action ”Oh dear… I would not be surprised if this ended in a lawsuit, its too close, even if you can argue that the concept are not similar (martial art pandas vs… martial art pandas?)almost every environment they showed looks like a Kung Fu Panda set…” Another responded. My knee jerk reaction as well, the camera shots, building layouts and color pallets are uncanny. There’s the building with the pool of water similar to the scroll room from the movie, and the squared courtyard very similar to where the festival takes place at the beggining of kung fu panda. The scene with the peach tree in particular with the bright pinks and dark purples are almost short for shot. However not everyone felt that way. Most likely because both pull from the same real world sources of ancient china and martial arts. […] Yeah I just don’t see it. It’s like saying racing movie B copied racing movie A because they both have american cars in it… Nathan Grayson, writing for VG247, had this to say. Back in my day, Warcraft had orcs and humans. Squishy, weak-willed, whiny humans who wouldn’t stop saying, “Moah work?” That was it. And now? Pandas. Warcraft has rotund kung-fu pa-- [CONTENT REMOVED, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DREAMWORKS ENTERTAINMENT]. During BlizzCon’s opening ceremonies, Blizzard roundhouse kicked fans’ perceptions of what Warcraft’s all about with warm, soothing colors, furry fists of fury, and heaping dollops of d’aaaaaaw. Folks weaned on bloodshed, angst, and cold, calculating strategy were understandably (and audibly) upset. Are things really as bad as they seem, though? Will Blizzard’s behemoth be done in not by a giant apocalypse dragon, but by fluffy – and perhaps even wuffy – pandas? Far from a departure, Senior Game Producer John Lagrave promised a return to form. Conflict between the Horde and Alliance had driven the story of the original Warcraft games, and it was WoW that constantly forced the two factions to work together against a common enemy. “It really hearkens back to the original game where you landed in Hillsbrad because the Alliance were coming up and starting to fight. That spontaneous world PVP was happening. That’s the old war that’s coming back.” But even then, there was no hook, no big bad, nothing to keep players engaged beyond ‘faction conflict’. There was a villain, but it was ‘the Sha’, which was explained as a kind of misty black manifestation of negative emotion. It had no personality, no goals, no motives, and was generally difficult to care about. ”So how do you even get players excited about that? You’re billing it as ‘the calm.’ Generally, that connotates to “not very exciting.” The point between the epic clashes. Those pages everybody skipped in Lord of the Rings where people started singing.” Nathan said. “How do you make people say “Oh boy!” about that? One classic mock-trailer kept the deep angry voice but changed a few words around. “An adventure safer than any we’ve known thus far. Low textured clouds, retextured trees.A mystery shrouded in a mystery. Architecture that looks really, really close to Chinese. And a people that may well know… how to sprinkle water on their opium an easier way…” Here’s another. ”A mystery shrouded by April Fools jokes, a land of forgotten power – mainly because we made it up over the last couple of months.” One of the biggest accusations levelled at Blizzard was that they were trying to win over the girls, the gays, the kids, the Chinese, the causals – everyone except the ‘real fans’. Of course, those ‘real fans’ only made up a tiny percentage of the playerbase. ”glad I stopped playing this game. getting gayer every update,” said one user. […] Over the past seven years since WoW’s launch it’s gotten increasingly more cartoonish and playful. Gone are the savage looking armor sets and the grotesque demons littering the various dungeons, to make way for foam weapons, motorcycles, helicopters, and now, a playable Panda race. The Pandaren are the hardest to defend, take a look at them, they’re a race composed of bipedal Panda Bears–there’s no getting around it. Many people within the community voiced similar opinions. “I gotta say I really, really dislike the addition of pandas. Yes, I am going to get a lot of stick from morons who have no concept “OPINION”. I just think they are way too silly, even though this has never been the most serious game in the world. The worst part is that it seems they are trying to do it with a straight face, which makes it even more hilarious (not in a good way).Apart from that though? I think the expac looks really, really good.” Not everyone had a problem with all the players complaining, and promising to leave. “I think it’s better that the people who don’t like the next expac leave anyway. They are probably the sticks in the mud.” There were, of course, plenty of players who really looked forward to Mists. Here are a few of those reactions. ”I’m very satisfied with what I saw at Blizzcon today. MoP looks fantastic.” […] ”I don’t get the hate for this expansion. They’re adding some fantastic features, and are taking a much better design direction with the game. If only people looked passed Pandas. People are so freaking dense.” […] The moment I saw this I cried. I don’t ever care if that’s crazy. I CRIED.THANK YOU BLIZZARD! The China Problem There was a whole section of this debate relating to China. Some players saw it as a shallow appeal to the Chinese market. “The only reason Blizzard created Mists of Pandaria was to save their sinking ship. Only about 20% of WoW subs come from North America. Half of the subs come from Asia, and the rest are from Europe and other countries. To put it simple, Blizzard isn’t solely surviving off of North American subs …so they created Mists of Pandaria to appeal to the people from Asian countries.” One response said: ”I wouldn’t be suprised when Deathwing will be changed into a Charizard…” To which another player replied, ”charizard is jap mate.” Others took issue with all this blatant racism. ”Rather arrogant statement your making about how WoW should be a game aimed only for Americans and not rest of the world. Old Asian culture is interesting it has nice potential of creating interesting zones and the story of that area has almost zero lore behind it. This gives Blizzard as a company to explore new idea’s and gives them freedom that they didn’t have before when trying to create a story.” Some not only rejected the idea that MoP was meant to satisfy the Chinese, they accused it of being a carefully coordinated insult. They claimed the whole expansion was a caricature, which not only combined stereotypes from all across East Asia without regard for their origin, it also made a total mockery of them. “Mists of Pandaria,” Blizzard’s latest expansion for their legendary massively multi-player online role-playing game “World of Warcraft,” is a high-resolution mishmash of every Asian stereotype available, sans poor driving and high grades — however untrue any of those stereotypes may be. From the dragon kites to the koi in various ponds, everything is all so Asian. Notice I don’t say Chinese — though the humanoid pandas are certainly based more closely on the the Middle Kingdom’s history than the Land of the Rising Sun’s. But it’s all so shallow — and borderline racist. The Pandaren speak in near “Engrish,” the dialogue is ripped straight from a midnight kung-fu film and some Pandaren have Fu Manchu mustaches. I’m already encountering lazy yin-yang themes that draw heavily on spirit worship and ancestor references. It’s hard to dismiss this take. The Pandaren were not ‘cool’, like in the Sam Didier art, nor did they try to be. They were fat, goofy, greedy, lazy, characters with silly accents. ”Although they are anthropomorphic pandas and always have been, early sketches of the race depicted them as more muscular than chubby, and their samurai armor gave off an air of ferocity and strength. Now that the race has been made playable in Mists, they’ve been significantly de-fanged.” Sophie Pell wrote for NBC News. “Every pandaren has a belly, and they remark constantly how they love to eat, very similar to Po from the Kung Fu Panda franchise. They have not one, but two racial bonuses that apply to food.” An NPR article criticised their portrayal: “To be completely honest, I don’t know what Blizzard was thinking when they announced the new Pandaren race and having them be known for their “Art of Acupressure”? Laughable.” Commenting on the ‘wow-ladies’ blog, the user ‘Baisuzhen’ was also unhappy: I’ll be honest here. Being Asian Chinese in South East Asia, personally I am not entirely very fond of the entire theme itself, since it’s practically my heritage/culture. The translated names are just cheesy beyond belief, as Blizzard literally translated many Chinese words/names directly. Maybe also having grown up and surrounded by Chinese temples, culture, history etc, having to see all these in a predominantly fantasy land is just jarring to me. This is different from other Chinese MMOs that takes place in Ancient China as those are still Earth while Azeroth is definitely not. To have so many familiar themes, words, history and social nuances translated in a rather cheesy manner across just irritates me. Again I would like to reiterate that this is my personal views and I am not attacking anyone. Indeed, according to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, most of the player losses following the announcement of Mists came from Asia. Over a million of them dropped WoW and went to go… find something else for their whole lives to be about. And that was before MoP even came out. But if you’ve read my Cataclysm write-up, you’d know that 2012 was dominated by ‘Hour of Twilight’, an infamously hated patch which went on for over a year. When confronted with the whole ‘racism’ issue in an interview with Wired, WoW Production Director J. Allen Brack dismissed concerns: ”We’ve always tried to make Warcraft very much its own thing. Certainly we have influences from all around the world. And certainly the panda is the symbol of China. Obviously, there’s a lot of influence, but it’s a very light touch of how much China it is or how much it is the rest of Asia. We just tried to take little bits here and there and incorporate it into our own thing.” There were some who acknowledged the ‘problematic’ aspects of Mists, while also still wanting to play it. I agree wholeheartedly that MoP is appropriating a wonderful culture and creating some kind of Disneyland trip. So how do we respond? For those of us who DO want to play it, what kind of action should we take? Should I feel bad for even wanting to play it? What kinds of things would be critical to point out in a letter to Blizz? And would a letter do anything at this point in their creation of the new expansion? I’ve really been quarreling with myself about the expansion because I’m really excited to play it, while at the same time recognizing that it’s culturally insensitive and there are several things I take issue with. I’ve been all doomy and gloomy, but a lot of Chinese players responded positively to the expansion. One user from Beihang gushed about it in a Quora response: ”From my perspective, the MoP was really a shock to us. Blizzard does made it a fatastic game for us with lots of Chinese elements in the game, including the cute pandas, beautiful buildings in traditional Chinese style such as the WALL, the awesome BGMs made by some Chinese instruments, some of the famous characters in Chinese stroies… What I really want to express is that, thank you Blizzard, thank you for working on such a wonderful masterpiece, thank you for carry out all these details, that really made us feel a special bond to see so many familar stuff in such a western background game.” As if that wasn’t enough drama, there was a whole controversy in which Chinese players complained that there were non-Chinese elements in the expansion. Particularly here, in which a pillar has writing on it in gasp Japanese characters. On Weibo – China’s Twitter equivalent – an angry user said: “What’s the next chapter in World of Warcraft? The Mists of Pandaria! Everyone can fucking see you’re just trying to sweep up the mainland Chinese market again. So how is it that the fucking whole thing is full of Japanese culture, it makes me so disturbed!” And another. “[…] even though there are pandas [in the expansion], for the sake of the [game’s popularity] you mixed in Japanese culture. If you love Japanese culture so much, why didn’t you just make it Japanese monkeys [instead of pandas] and call it a day?” Of course, WoW had always had Japanese influences. ”Have you seen how many tentacles Deathwing has? And that is just the beginning.” In fact, the characters were not Japanese. They were ‘Pandaren’, a totally fictional script which Blizzard made up, and which Chinese players had just assumed was Japanese. One Chinese commenter said it didn’t matter, because ‘Chinese people invented Japanese people and Korean people’, so it was all Chinese culture at the end of the day. This reply sums everything up wonderfully in my opinion: ”To say that the Chinese have a bad past with Japan is like saying that a drinking a mixture of cyanide, rat poison, jet fuel and a bowl of lit matches is a bad idea. It’s a HUMONGOUS understatement, so I would understand if blizzard didn’t want to risk it.” The Million-Man Beta I usually wouldn’t discuss the betas in these threads. Every patch and expansion has a beta, so there’s not much to talk about. But MoP was different. In a last-ditch effort to cling on to their subscribers, Blizzard made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The Annual Pass. If players simply committed to remaining subscribed for a single year, they would get three very tantalising things. A free digital copy of the heavily anticipated Diablo III An extremely sexy Diablo-themed mount, Tyreal’s Charger Guaranteed access to the Mists of Pandaria beta. A whopping 1.2 million players signed up. It was a colossal success – I certainly continued paying long after I got bored and wanted to stop. But there was a problem. Everyone got to see the expansion months before they had to buy it. They got to play through all of its content while Cataclysm was still out. And not only that – they saw all of its content while it was being developed. I recall seeing broken combat, half-finished zones, crippling lag, server crashes, buggy quests, buildings without any textures. Personally, I loved the experience of ‘seeing behind the curtain’, but not everyone did. First impressions matter, and these people (many of whom were already wary about the concept to begin with) were not seeing Pandaria at its best. For those who didn’t get the Annual Pass, the internet was littered with first impressions and gameplay videos which exposed the half-finished expansion. Sometimes these online personalities laid out disclaimers about the nature of a beta. Sometimes. It’s kind of surprising how incomplete it is. A couple of my buddies were in the Burning Crusade beta, and from what I saw and played it felt like a complete game that we were just basically stress testing. While I can’t speak for the WotLK or Cata betas, the Pandaria beta definitely caught me off guard in that context. Zones are still inaccessible, many animations are still missing, and overall it feels more like an alpha than a beta. Many quests are buggy and include testing notes in the quest text to get around the bugs To make matters worse, World of Warcraft and the Beta took place on totally separate servers with separate launchers and installers. This had the added downside of splitting the World of Warcraft player-base. In a year when subscribers were already dropping, over a million of the most dedicated players simply disappeared from the main game. And it was really noticeable. Online communities came apart at the seams because so many of the old faces were off traipsing through the Beta. Until then, the weeks and days preceding an expansion were filled with excitement. Many players have memories of waiting outside shops until midnight so they could storm inside and buy their copies of Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, staying up until the early hours of the morning. When Mists of Pandaria finally released, there was very little of the usual fanfare. Everyone who wanted to see the expansion had already done it. A lot of them would be levelling through its zones for the second, third, or fourth time now. Blizzard had shot themselves in the foot. The Game Comes Out And so, it was with a whimper, not a bang, that the expansion began. On the 4th October, the mists finally lifted. Blizzard sold only 2.7 million copies within the first week. Cataclysm had sold considerably more, within a single day. There were a few hiccups, such as the hilariously broken gyrocopter quest, but those are core to every expansion. We’ve spent all this time focusing on the outrage, without ever looking at what people were outraged about. So here’s the lowdown on Mists of Pandaria. During Deathwing’s world-breaking shenanigans, he disrupted the titular ‘Mists’, a supernatural veil which had hidden the Southern continent of Pandaria from the rest of the world for ten thousand years. Both the Alliance and Horde, finally free of a big bad to unite against, sent teams to explore the continent and plunder its resources. The two factions encountered one another and quickly came to blows. The story revolved around this growing conflict, which consumed all of Pandaria. All that negative energy reawakened the Sha, a force unique to Pandaria, which began to corrupt everyone there. Especially Garrosh Hellscream, the leader of the Horde. Before Mists began, he dropped the Warcraft equivalent of a nuke on the alliance city of Theramore, which is what kicked off this whole faction war. He had always had… anger management issues, but gradually became more and more paranoid, vicious, and dangerous, to the point where most of the Horde turned on him and, with the help of the Alliance, besieged him in the Horde capital of Orgrimmar. But we’ll get to that. There’s not a huge amount to say about Pandaren or Monks. Despite the massive dramas prior to release, they sort of faded into the background. The Pandaren get a stunning starter zone, which is actually the back of a giant turtle. But that’s it, really. The big thing with Pandaren was that they started neutral, and could choose a faction to join at level 10. The furry community welcomed them with open paws. Until then, they had satisfied themselves with Worgen and Tauren, but the Disney-like designs of the Pandaren made them a firm favourite. I played on a Roleplay server and let me tell you, exploring the many hidden nooks and crannies of Pandaria was often a lot less rewarding than the developers intended. This was not the last time Blizzard threw a bone to the furries, but they were still half a decade away at this point. There was a fun story of a Pandaren player called ‘Doubleagent’ who refused to choose a side, and instead reached max level without ever leaving the turtle, by picking flowers. It took him 8000 hours. As of 2020, Pandaren are the least popular race in each faction, but when we combine the Pandaren on Horde and Alliance, they sit on par with most other races. Of course, they’re nowhere near the Night Elf/Human/Blood Elf trio, which makes up a majority of all players. But they haven’t been a failure by any means. Monks on the other hand remain the least played class, just below Shaman. From my research, the problem seems to be that players are unable to separate Pandaren from Monks. Pandaren mages seem wrong, as do undead monks. So a lot of players seem less willing to be creative with them than other races or classes. Also, while the aesthetic of the Pandaren fits fantastically in Pandaria, it kind of clashes in any other setting. Five Hundred Dailies of Summer Overall, the continent of Pandaria was a mixed bag. All players started in the Jade Forest, one of the most visually spectacular zones Blizzard has ever produced. It had a tightly written story and an excellent plot. There were dozens of hidden locations all around the zone that only max players could find, once they had unlocked flying. the Jade Forest zone is hands-down my favorite place in WoW (LINKS TO REDDIT). I love flying around, looking at the little solitary houses on the earth pillars, and pretending my panda owns one of them. I’m so lame, no need to tell me. After Jade Forest, players could go to either the swampy, atmospheric Krasarang Wilds, or the fertile farmlands of the Valley of the Four Winds. By all accounts, this wasn’t a difficult choice. Players overwhelmingly preferred the Valley. At this point, the story became less linear, and players got more options that branched out across the game-world. Next was the imposing mountains and plains of Kun Lai Summit. While I loved it, I know some players didn’t. After that came another choice, this time between the expansion’s less popular zones, Townlong Steppes and Dread Waste. The latter was particularly controversial. It was designed as the dangerous homeland of the ‘Klaxxi’, and as such it was full of enemies – to the point where it was hard to get around without attracting constant attention. In a Reddit rant (LINKS TO REDDIT), the user /u/hMJem echoed the feelings of most players. I just hate everything about it. You enter the zone and it’s clustered and just looks boring/ugly. However not everyone agreed. It’s the only zone in MoP I actually like, exactly for the reasons that other people seem to dislike it. I think it pulled the “dark desolated corrupted wasteland” off perfectly, having only a few bits that are actually safe. There was also the max-level zone Vale of Eternal Blossoms, another visually spectacular zone with an interesting story. Overall, the expansion is considered to be one of, if not the most beautiful. The music also deserves a shout-out. While there was a narrative that proceeded from zone to zone, they remained disconnected. Each one focused on a totally different enemy – from the Yaungol to the Virmen to the Saurok to the Mogu to the Mantid to the Klaxxi. It was a lot to handle. However, Pandaria was absolutely brimming with lore. Someone at Blizzard had clearly spent months coming up with the history and culture of its various races, and it showed. ”If, pre-launch, you had told people they’d be getting one of the darkest WoW expansions ever, they’d have laughed at you. Early on, they’d still be laughing at you – there was a basic tale of how raw emotion can get the best of you in Jade Forest, but it was pretty light-hearted for most of the zone. Around Krasarang Wilds, it starts to turn darker, getting darker in Kun Lai Summit, and then ultimately leading to the odd brutality of Dread Wastes. There is a military excursion happening, a tale of what happens when a native people are pushed to the brink by a war that they are barely involved in.” The levelling experience was well-received in general. But after that, things became a little more divisive.

asian_cosplayers (1661 followers)

This is a community designated for high-quality cosplays, SFW or NSFW, by Asian girls.

Please add sources to your posts and mark NSFW where necessary.

Studentenverbindungen: „Viele sind reaktionär, rassistisch und Teil der deutschen Naziszene“ [Interview mit Autonome Antifa Freiburg]

linkslaut: Was sind eure Beweggründe für die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Burschenschaften? Wir beschäftigen uns seit etwa 15 Jahren intensiv mit Studentenverbindungen. Zuerst haben wir uns tatsächlich fast ausschließlich mit „Burschenschaften“ auseinandergesetzt, obwohl diese nur einen sehr kleinen Teil der Korporationsszene ausmachen. Das lag einfach daran, dass „Burschenschaften“ ihre oftmals faschistische Gesinnung und entsprechenden Aktivitäten weit weniger verstecken als andere Studentenverbindungen. Und fairerweise müssen wir auch anmerken: In den „Burschenschaften“ gibt es auch einfach viel mehr Nazis als bei anderen Verbindungen. Damals plante der rechtsradikale Dachverband „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ (DB) die Gründung einer deutschen FPÖ nach österreichischem Vorbild. Drei Jahre lang sollte eine Arbeitsgruppe bestehend aus etwa 60 „Aktiven“ (noch Studierenden) und „Alten Herren“ (nicht mehr Studierenden) verschiedener Bünde ein Parteiprogramm entwickeln und formulieren. Auf dem jährlichen DB-Treffen im thüringischen Eisenach im Frühsommer 2012 sollte das Programm beschlossen, anschließend in Hochglanz gedruckt und dann an alle Bundestagsabgeordneten verschickt werden. Damit wollte die „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ amtierende Abgeordnete im Wahljahr zur Gründung einer neuen Partei unter ihrer Führung bewegen, die 2013 zur Bundestagswahl kandidieren sollte. Durch antifaschistische Angriffe scheiterte das Vorhaben 2011 in den drei Monaten nach dem „Burschentag“. Das zu zwei Dritteln fertig gestellte Parteiprogramm wurde dort rund 600 anwesenden „Burschenschaftern“ aus Deutschland und Österreich vorgestellt. Der Redner war der Leiter der Arbeitsgruppe, ein damals hochrangiger VW-Manager. Er hatte sich für das Ende seiner Rede eine Art Cosplay mit Liktorenbündel ausgedacht: mit ihm als Benito Mussolini. Später fanden wir diese Art von Megalomanie auch beim „Coburger Convent“ wieder, einem anderen pflichtschlagenden Dachverband von Studentenverbindungen. Dort imaginierte sich der designierte Verbandssprecher, ein „Aktiver“ der „Landsmannschaft Thuringia Berlin“, eine Traumwelt: mit ihm als Adolf Hitler. Meist sind Korporationen elitär, frauenfeindlich und generell rückwärtsgewandt. Doch nicht wenige Verbindungen sind darüber hinaus auch reaktionär, rassistisch und Teil der deutschen Naziszene. Zwischen beiden „Strömungen“ gibt es aber enge Verbindungen, oft sowohl vor Ort als auch zwischen den Dachverbänden. Vor allem liegt es an identischer Motivation aller Korporierten: purer Egoismus. In der Regel sind diese Strukturen relativ verschlossen. Ein Großteil der Aktivitäten laufen hinter geschlossenen Türen ab. Wie schafft ihr es, an so sensible Infos zu kommen? Unsere gesamte Arbeit basiert auf Vertrauen in die Authentizität unserer Recherchen. Wir können nicht offen über unsere Quellen sprechen, ohne diese und die Recherchen zu gefährden. In dieser Hinsicht unterscheiden wir uns nicht von anderen investigativen Journalistinnen und Journalisten. Im Laufe der Jahre haben wir Zugang zu ganz unterschiedlichen Quellen aus allen großen Korporationsdachverbänden bekommen. Wir pflegen diese Kontakte oft über einen sehr langen Zeitraum. Wenn wir eklatante Missstände wie offenen Faschismus bemerken – wie bei der DB 2011 oder dem CC 2023 – dann intervenieren wir. Und zwar massiv. Die Hochphase unserer Kampagne gegen die „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ dauerte von 2011 bis 2014 und hat die DB gespalten und massiv geschwächt. Die Kampagne gegen den „Coburger Convent“ war weniger stark, aber hat den pflichtschlagenden Verband dennoch in eine existenzielle Krise gestürzt. Deshalb sollte klar sein, dass diese und andere Dachverbände ein großes Interesse an den Lecks in den eigenen Reihen haben. Insbesondere „Bundesbrüder“, die uns Interna zutragen, sind Gefahren ausgesetzt, sollten sie je enttarnt werden. Im Mai hattet ihr ein einem Communiqué Mailverläufe geleakt, die die ultranationalistische und misogyne Haltung der Berliner Landsmannschaft Thuringia aufgezeigt hat. In internen Konversationen wurden unter anderem die SS verherrlicht und enge Kontakte zur AfD wurden deutlich. Denkt ihr diese Tendenzen bilden die Ausnahme oder die Regel für korporierte Strukturen? Die explizite Hitlerverehrung in der „Landsmannschaft Thuringia“ ist sicherlich nicht die Regel bei Korporationen. Die „Thuringia“ gehört dem „Coburger Convent“ an, einem pflichtschlagenden Dachverband. Daneben gibt es noch die „Deutsche Burschenschaft“ und die beiden großen Corps-Dachverbände „Kösener Senioren-Convents-Verband“ (KSCV) und der „Weinheimer Senioren-Convent“ (WSC), die ebenfalls pflichtschlagend sind. Bei den schlagenden Verbindungen kommen rechtsradikale Taten deutlich häufiger vor als bei den nichtschlagenden. Im KSCV gab es beispielsweise im August 2024 einen Antisemitismus-Skandal in Graz, bei der DB 2020 in Heidelberg. Auch ist bei den „Waffenstudenten“ die Parteinähe zu AfD und FPÖ am höchsten. Aber über die Hälfte der Korporierten gehören katholischen Verbindungen an. Der „Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen“ (CV) hat rund 30.000 Mitglieder und ist traditionell die Partei der CDU. Die Strukturen des CV haben wir dieses Jahr in einem eigenen Communiqué analysiert. Dort sind wir nicht auf Faschismus gestoßen, dafür aber auf Kindesmissbrauch, Fanatismus und Romhörigkeit. Die Affinität zu reaktionären Ansichten und verachtenswertem Verhalten ist aber ähnlich wie bei den „schlagenden“ Verbindungen. Wieso vertreten so viele Burschenschaften in Deutschland dieses Weltbild? Die „Burschenschaften“ entstammen einer militanten Nationalbewegung aus der Zeit nach dem Wiener Kongress, die in den „Befreiungskriegen“ Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts gekämpft hatte oder gerne hätte. Aus dieser Zeit stammen viele der antifranzösischen Ressentiments, die sich auch heute noch bei „Burschenschaften“ wiederfinden. Zudem war es eine Zeit heftiger antijüdischer Pogrome, der sogenannten „Hep-Hep-Krawalle“, die bis heute im Antisemitismus der „Burschenschaften“ nachklingen. Die Ermordung des nationalismuskritischen Aufklärers und russischen Generalkonsuls August von Kotzebue 1819 durch Karl Ludwig Sand, „Burschenschafter“ und Anhängers der „Turnerbewegung“ um Friedrich Ludwig „Turnvater“ Jahn, war der Auslöser der Karlsbader Beschlüsse und damit des Vormärz. Viele „Burschenschafter“ wähnen sich heute noch verfolgt und beziehen sich dabei auffallend häufig auf jene Zeit vor der gescheiterten Revolution 1848, die sie für sich reklamieren. Tatsächlich gab es damals diverse Strömungen innerhalb der Revolutionsbewegung und die heutigen AfD-Burschen sollten sich schämen, wenn sie sich auf die Radikaldemokrat:innen von einst berufen. Das ursprüngliche Ziel hauptsächlich der „Burschen-“ und „Turnerschaften“ wurde 1871 mit der „Reichsgründung“ erreicht: die Schaffung eines deutschen Nationalstaats. Im Kaiserreich spielten diese beiden Spielarten von Studentenverbindungen zwar nur eine untergeordnete Rolle, aber in der jüngeren deutschen Geschichte waren schlagende Studentenverbindungen immer an vorderster Front, wenn es darum ging, Verbrechen zu begehen: als Soldaten im deutsch-französischen Krieg vor der „Reichsgründung“, als kaiserlicher Kolonialmacht in Afrika, als Soldaten im ersten Weltkrieg, als Freikorps in der Weimarer Republik und als Nazis im „Dritten Reich“. Keiner dieser verbrecherischen Kriege wäre ohne „Waffenstudenten“ möglich gewesen. Immer wieder kommt es zu gewaltsamen Übergriffen durch Burschenschaftler auf politische Gegner:innen. Wie ist das Gewaltpotenzial solcher Gruppierungen einzuschätzen? Abgesehen von einigen militanten Korporierten, zumeist „Burschenschafter“, die dann oft auch noch Doppelmitgliedschaften in anderen faschistischen Organisationen und Parteien haben, ist das unmittelbare Gefahrenpotenzial eher gering. Zwar sind die versoffenen Burschen regelmäßig an auch gewalttätigen Auseinandersetzungen beteiligt, aber da unterscheiden sie sich nicht wesentlich von anderen rechten Männergruppierungen. Systematische Gewalt ist von ihnen eher durch die Übernahme staatlicher Institutionen oder Regierungen zu erwarten: Korporationen sind eine grundsätzliche Gefahr für die Demokratie.

mirrorbrightcosplay (449 followers)

Daniel of Mirrorbright Cosplay.
Cosplay, props, 3d-printing, Star Wars, music, and anti-fascism.
Posts probably won’t make sense.

Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii actually leaked months ago, but it was so ridiculous nobody believed it

“Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii was revealed earlier today, setting up the bizarre story of fan-favorite Goro Majima donning buccaneer cosplay and sailing the high seas. In the wake of the announcement, people are suddenly starting to remember that an accurate outline of the entire game actually leaked months ago - it was just so ridiculous nobody believed it was true.”

the_twilight_phoenix (376 followers)

Cosplayer, gamer, and singer - She/her - Here to share and discuss #cosplay, #gaming, and all kinds of other #nerdy things! 

IG & Tiktok @the_twilight_phoenix
#fedi22

darknetleak (179 followers)

.
⚠️𝗪𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐬 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 & 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲
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angelwings_cos (66 followers)

👼 Smol Cosplaygirl from Austria 🇦🇹

Main Account (IG): https://instagram.com/angelwings_cos

https://linktr.ee/angelwings_cos

jedileah (331 followers)

🏳‍⚧#trans and proud🏳‍⚧she/her, #streamer, #warhamfam #gamer, #cosplayer, dinosaur lover, very queer, twitch.tv/jedileah
https://www.tumblr.com/blog/leahkarablake

Werebeast (65 followers)

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Fàilte! Creature-tech maker | cosplayer | unity-whisperer | animatronics dabbler!

cosplay-Kotaku (9 followers)

All the cosplay stories you need to read, from Kotaku

Cosplay is a Flipboard Magazine created by @Kotaku.

tag-cosplay (9 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

CracklesCousinCosplay (96 followers)

Champion Cosplayers. International Judges. Convention Cosplay Team. Cosplay Creators. Joy Bringers. Inspiration Givers. Friendly Folk. Happy People. Living Life to the Fullest.

memoryleak (26 followers)

A Virtual Machine.

Every 7 hours I wake up, delete a random file, and then go back to sleep.

There were 33,898 files to start with.
Alpine 3.17.2 Virtual + curl

kay (25 followers)

no, nerds, my name has nothing to do with what you think, its not about technology

[en] ---
hello we're kay (or k) an robo fox among a plethora of things (see pinned post)

privileges: white, able-bodied, from france, grew up well off economically

likes to think of itself as multidisciplinary creative machine toucher but factually mainly good for writing rest routes for corporations and wasting what time is left between youtube and games

famously known for actually being chronically online and thats about it

contains major bugs and issues

posts stay 2 weeks unless famous (do note this is like our 3rd attempt at an instance over 2 years because we're good with computers)

profile picture is a drawing of a robo fox by @dishnufu
banner is a picture of my plushies, one is a rabbit i got at birth, one is a shark, one is a racoon, one is a sloth, one is toothless a dragon from movies and one is a pink crewmate from the video game among us

in no specific order and not exclusive,
ableists, antisemites, bigots, capitalism apologists, colonialists, cops, cryptobros, fascists, imperialists, islamophobes, misogynists, nazis, pedophiles, queerphobes, racists, tankies, techbros, terfs, transphobes, white supremacists
fuck off

otherwise feel free to send a request i go mostly off of vibe and if we have interacted previously or i saw you interact with people i know, if we never interacted and you don't at least dm me there is a very small chance i will accept

[fr] ---
hello nous sommes kay (ou k) un robot renard parmi une pléthore de choses (voir le toot épinglé)

privilèges : blanche, able-bodied, originaire de france, a grandi dans une bonne situation économique

aime se considérer comme une toucheuse de machines créative et multidisciplinaire, mais en fait, principalement bonne à écrire des routes rest pour des entreprises et à perdre le temps qu'il lui reste entre youtube et les jeux

célèbre pour être chroniquement en ligne et c'est à peu près tout

contient des bugs et des problèmes majeurs

les messages restent 2 semaines à moins d'être célèbres (notez qu'il s'agit de notre troisième tentative d'instance en 2 ans parce que nous sommes habiles avec les ordinateurs)

pfp est un dessin d'un robot renard par @dishnufu
bannière est une photo de mes peluches, l'une est un lapin que j'ai eu à la naissance, l'autre est un requin, un raton laveur, un paresseux, un dragon sans dents de films et un membre d'équipage rose du jeu vidéo among us

sans ordre spécifique et non exclusif,
capacitistes, antisémites, bigots, apologistes du capitalisme, colonialistes, flics, cryptobros, fascistes, impérialistes, islamophobes, misogynes, nazis, pédophiles, queerphobes, racistes, tankies, techbros, terfs, transphobes, suprémacistes blancs
allez vous faire voir

sinon, n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer une demande, je me base principalement sur les vibes et si nous avons interagi.e.s auparavant ou si je vous ai vue interagir avec des personnes que je connais, si nous n'avons jamais interagi.e.s et que vous ne m'envoyez pas au moins un mp, il y a une très faible chance que j'accepte

gosplan (70 followers)

bi, anti-imperialist. DNI if you fear "tankies"

cosplaybabz (53 followers)

Your daily dose of the sexiest cosplay girls ❤️
IG : instagram.com/cosplay.babz

Mie.Cosplay (29 followers)

Hiiii~ I'm Mie ^w^ Thanks for stopping by ❤️ 🇩🇰 cosplayer (since 2015) Lvl. 26 ✨ 📨[email protected] Next con:?

Dennapture (27 followers)

✨Cosplayer&cosmaker
Artista 3D en vídeojuegos
A veces hago directos en Twitch jugando✨

Kryptoncosplay (19 followers)

Just a person who likes making cool stuff and playing table top rpgs (mainly 5e right now). I cosplay, do martial arts and ocationally make some fun homebrew stuff too.

brownmanticorecosplay (37 followers)

🗡️ 30s+ West Coast Cosplayer 🏹 Current WIP:S Sandseal Gerudo

cosplay_hungary (35 followers)

:verigold: Magyarország első és legnagyobb cosplayes weboldala. Rendezvények, versenyek, videók, blogok, képek és cikkek!

:blobfoxbox: 2007 szeptember 26-án indult el a Cosplay.hu, Magyarország első és legnagyobb cosplayes weboldala és rendezvényszervezői csoportja. Immáron több mint 10 éve szervezzük a hazai cosplayversenyeket, rendezvényeket és fotópályázatokat.

#cosplay #cosplayhu #cosplayhungary

Terion (54 followers)

Hey I‘m Terion, a digital artist, cosplayer and prop maker from germany 🇩🇪 I like to draw fantasy based stuff and a lot of OCs. I also do Commissions!
#MastoArt #DigitalArt #Cosplay #Artist #originalcharacter #FantasyArt

whatleak (12 followers)

.
⚠️𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐬 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 & 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲
.

Chibi (18 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

PancakeCosplay (19 followers)

Hi, I am a cosplayer from germany and here you can see some of my work.

wickedcats (28 followers)

🇨🇵 #cosplayer 🖤 mother of 😺😼 and 🐲🐲🐲 Middle-Earth 🧝🏼‍♀️ Targaryen 🐉Ravenclaw 🦅 Rebel 🌠

alesita_cosplay (28 followers)

Cosplays 🇨🇱 a manito
Games/leds/props
Alesita_cosplay tiktok ✨
Instagram/alesita_cosplay
twitch.tv/alesita_cosplay
Twitter/alesita_cosplay

luna_cosfae (27 followers)

Cosplay🌷Nature 🌿 Magic ✨ Anime 🦄Webtoon 📖 Manhwa 💫 Mythology 🐉

CryMiCosplay (15 followers)

Dutch/German Art historian and Cosplayer, who is getting more and more confused with social media. :'D She/Her

luna_cosfae (18 followers)

🧚🏽‍♀️ Fairy cosplayer & artisan from Cuba 🇨🇺 Tired of Instagram’s algorithm 🥀🚫📉 — here to bloom freely 🌷🌙✨

FaceOfBoCosplay (33 followers)

Cosplay, Makeup, Jessica Lange | Your gay auntie loves my TikToks | they/she 🏳️‍🌈 |

werebeastcosplay.bsky.social (10 followers)

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Fàilte! Creature-tech maker | cosplayer | unity-whisperer | animatronics dabbler! linktr.ee/werebeast

[bridged from werebeastcosplay.bsky.social on Bluesky by Bridgy Fed]

mugiwaracosplay (9 followers)

Fursuit maker - Cosplayer - Youtuber - VR Gamer
Commissions: closed

jennycosplay (18 followers)

🔜 HDCC, CCH 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇳🇱 She/they Cosplay, gaming and other nerd stuff! May post in English and in Dutch Also on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jennycosplay.eurosky.social

Nickycosplay (6 followers)

Italy | Genoa
Model Cosplayer
Esfj
愛

anhyracosplay (8 followers)

Profesional cosplayer from Spain
www.anhyracosplay.com

cosplayer.gal (6 followers)

Amateur Cosplayer. Human Rights Activist. Fusing cosplay with dance to increase joy in this world. 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇷🇩🇪