“In today’s unanimous decision, the Tennessee Supreme Court explained that, under state law, a life sentence is a determinate sentence of 60 years,” the court wrote. “However, the sixty-year sentence can be reduced by up to 15 percent, or 9 years, by earning various sentence credits (good behavior. & getting involved in prison based education programs while incarcerated) Therefore, the Supreme Court concluded that a defendant serving a life sentence for a first-degree murder committed on or after July 1, 1995, may be eligible for release after serving at least 51 years of the sentence.“
For those of you who haven’t yet caught up to this story:
Cyntoia Brown was a 16 yr old girl, who at the time of the incident was living in a room at a Nashville InTown Suites with Allen (the man who propositioned her for sex) because her pimp and boyfriend Garion McGlothen, nick-named “Kut Throat,” insisted that she needed to earn money.
After Allen took her to his house, he showed Cyntoia multiple guns, including shotguns and rifles. Later in bed, as she described in court, he grabbed her violently by the genitals, his demeanor became threatening and, fearing for her life, she took a gun out of her purse and shot him.
Call Governor Bill Haslam (615)-741-2001. she has a Clemency hearing May 23rd. DEMAND JUSTICE!!
#StayWoke
The parole board split on whether Cyntoia should be granted clemency. /BillHaslam can still grant her clemency before he leaves in January. You can reach him at: phone #: (615) 741-2001; e-mail: bill.haslam@tn.gov
Obviously if the teenager sees the relationship as a source of love, acceptance, and power, she’s going to be “into” it. And it leaves her messed up later on, because she’s been encouraged to think it was consensual. That’s the whole point of grooming. Everyone please, please, PLEASE read the essay Fiction, Reality, Fandom and Adulthood: a media academic and CSA/incest victim’s account (link, thanks @theautisticjedi for bringing it to my attention) to see what fandom’s rampant excuses for child sexual abuse do to kids trapped in or recovering from that situation.
They’re trying to erase the existence of the rape victims of Japanese soldiers in World War II because they think the reminder of their crimes might make Japan a little bit cross
Duterte, the absolute coward, is more worried about women criticizing him than actually honoring the women this country needs to remember
Please don’t let these women be silenced.
I stand in solidarity with the Filipinas who suffered as our grandmothers did. You are our grandmothers, too.
[I don’t think Dukat was really evil until after his daughter was killed. And even then, he had had a mental breakdown and was hallucinating, so I don’t think he was fully responsible for his actions.]
Oh my God what the FUCK anon Dukat was responsible for the deaths of millions of Bajorans during the occupation, and he wanted Bajorans to thank him for it. In fact Ziyal was his daughter from a Bajoran woman during the occupation. Like what the hell. The man is a known mass murderer and rapist long before his daughter was even born, and he wasn’t evil? What does someone have to do to even count as evil in your eyes?
This is the literal dictionary definition of pornography, “the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement.” There has never been a definition of pornography that excludes drawn and written material and includes only photography and footage of real people. Photography and video, after all, are extremely recent blips in the very long history of pornographic material. Erotic novels and poetry are pornography. Erotic illustrations, comics, and paintings are pornography. Erotic statues and reliefs are pornogrophy. Erotic live action movies and photography simply joined the preexisting tradition of porn when the technology became available, involving new potential for violence and exploitation due to the need for live actors and models.
So yes, if your writing and pictures and so on consist of the depiction of erotic behavior by or done to children intended to cause sexual excitement, meaning intentionally portrayed in an erotic and sexually exciting way (as opposed to, for instance, accounts or depictions of child sexual abuse), it’s pornography that involves children. It may not be as illegal or evil as photographs and videos of actual children being forced into sexual acts, but it’s still pornography that treats children’s bodies as objects of desire. I don’t see what’s so difficult to understand about it.
Book 1 was so ineptly written that it was fully possible to dismiss non-bender oppression as a thing that never existed and was made up to wipe out benders–and that’s how large sections of the fandom took it, in fact.
And look, Fantastic Racism in general is very easy to get wrong (looking at you, X-Men, Zootopia, too many others to name…) but LoK is particularly egregious in implying that movements for equality are essentially largescale frauds, especially when the writing is inconsistent enough to imply in places that discrimination against non-benders is in fact a problem that exists.
Abrupt fix-it at the last moment in Book 1. We’re not even allowed to experience the full tragedy of lost bending (and like, bending isn’t real so why are we supposed to care again?), that consequence has to be taken away by divine intervention because Korra was sad.
Speaking of Korra, we don’t get to watch her struggle and work her ass off the way we saw Aang or even Roku do in the brief flashbacks we got. She comes pre-equipped with water, earth, and fire at the age of five, and never even has to grow into the spiritual values of Airbending. She had her other three elements taken away and Airbending abruptly came to her because she needed it in her desperate hour. She doesn’t grow through work or by trying, but by being put in danger and pain. Looking back, this substitution of female suffering for hard work and organic development foreshadowed her end of Book 3-Book 4 trauma storyline.
As a tangent, and because I need more people to piss off apparently, this replacement of suffering for work is strongly reminiscent of Rey in the new Star Wars. Both Korra and Rey are willing to work hard, but that’s not how they actually make the most dramatic gains. Either they’re born with their prodigious talents or the work they did put in happens off screen. Their most meaningful gains come from being violated in some way by male characters, by being kidnapped, having their powers stripped, being poisoned, tied up…
I mean this is just a thinly veiled version of rape as a heroine origin story, where the thing that makes a woman truly powerful is not the hard work she puts in but the fact that some man treated her like an object.
Why are creators afraid to let women struggle? Why do we have to be born prodigies who are violated into our destinies? Yes, trauma and the way we face up to it can make us stronger, and I don’t want to take away from anyone who felt empowered by Korra’s or Rey’s stories. But when I see three seasons dedicated lovingly to Aang working to master the four elements, then Korra just getting it within a season because she had her bending stripped after being physically held down, I’m going to be just a little salty at the different ways male and female protagonists are treated.
Raava and Batu were bullshit concepts that used the trappings of yin and yang to express a stark good-evil duality. If you don’t understand what yin and yang are then stop distorting the fuck out of the imagery. And for that matter it’s pretty iffy to impose a very Christian struggle between cosmic good and evil on a universe built on Asian cultures and mythologies.
This show doesn’t even know what it wants to be. Book 2 took a complex and interesting story of a civil war between literal brothers and a moral/political debate about military interventionism, and made it into a kaiju slugfest. While the slugfest was entertaining, what the hell happened to that earlier story? It’s like Book 1 all over again, they avoided actually dealing with the political storyline they set up early in the season by shunting it aside to magic punching.
Bolin’s abuse was played for laughs. I will never not be mad about this. Because male victims of abuse are not already ridiculed enough in real life, right? Fuck whoever thought this was a good or okay idea.
Speaking of abuse, the Water Tribe brothers from Book 1 (not to be confused with the Water Tribe brothers from Book 2) dying by murder-suicide was horrifying. Hey it’s not like victims of parental abuse already feel broken and unworthy to live, let’s totally validate that by endorsing the position that the only way they have to go is death.
The brothers’ fate is such a far cry from the empowering storylines Zuko and even more minor characters like Mai and Ty Lee got escaping and recovering from their own abuse, it’s insulting for them to even exist in the same franchise.
And yeah, lots of abuse victims are assholes! But Azula was 10,000x more memorable and better written than the asshole brothers ever were, and what’s more, hers was not the only abuse victim narrative in her show–she worked as another perspective of abuse victims precisely because Zuko and the others had very different stories. LoK doesn’t have any such nuance. Just blow them up because that’s all they’re good for and we shall never mention them again.
Asami, Bolin, and Mako could have been replaced by sock puppets for all the development they got in the show. They had potential but were so massively underused while the story spent all its energy changing tracks mid-season and lurching all over the place trying to be everything. Why not do something with the characters you already have.
This show has a really big fucking underlying problem with class. The supposedly good people, Korra, Tenzin, Lin, Su-yin, Iroh II and so on are essentially aristocrats, sons and daughters of heroes and world leaders who, in the case of Korra and Tenzin, have entire organizations dedicated to serving and helping them. Their servants and the orphans they graciously take in, on the other hand, are either invisible or become traitors and Big Bads.
I mean while I squeed at Korrasami, I get cynical about it at times and wonder if what really made Asami the endgame mate for Korra and not Mako was that Asami is the daughter of a rich industrialist who inherited everything from her dickish dad, while Mako is an orphan who grew up on the streets.
Even among the underdeveloped trio of Asami, Mako, and Bolin, it’s clearly Asami who did the best in terms of character development at least toward the end, reconciling with her asshole would-be murderer dad, while Mako and Bolin’s far more interesting mixed heritage family was swept under the rug.
Speaking of which, MAKO WAS TOTALLY IN THE RIGHT FOR SNITCHING KORRA’S AWFUL INTERVENTIONIST PLAN TO THE PRESIDENT AND YOU CAN FIGHT ME ON THIS. Both Korra and Iroh II can get fucked for acting like the New Republic was their fucking property and casually trying to plunge it into war. Fuck that noise and fuck those entitled brats.
Too bad the showrunners were too cowardly to follow up on this actually interesting political and interpersonal conflict, but inconsistency and lack of follow-through are pretty much LoK’s calling cards so what else is new.
L.J.'s Obsessions 