SpunkyBackpack

Every couple of months I feel contractually obligated to remind you why I hate Dragon Age: The Veilguard: • Three games worth of choices? Basically irrelevant. • Your world states from Origins, DA2, and Inquisition? Decorative. • Years of carefully built lore? Compressed into “the elves did it.” • Except wait! Not even the elves, because now the Executors (a secret Illuminati faction we’ve never heard of) have apparently been manipulating events behind the scenes the entire time. So congratulations: Illusion of choice ×1000. But wait, there’s more: • The Chantry/Maker mystery—one of the most interesting religious conflicts in the setting—basically sidelined. • The Old Gods/Archdemons lore thread that fueled the entire Blight storyline? Suddenly background noise. • Decades of political tension between nations like Orlais, Ferelden, and Tevinter reduced to set dressing. • The morally gray world that made Origins special replaced with something that feels way safer and flatter. • Characters constantly explaining the lore instead of letting the world breathe. • The tone shift that makes the setting feel less like dark fantasy and more like fantasy theme park dialogue. Ten+ years of buildup and mysteries and it all boils down to: “Actually there was an even more secret secret group controlling everything.” Amazing. Glad the last three games were basically optional reading.

Asking for more grace for the person who shouted a racist slur instead of for Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, who had to push through being embarrassed in front of their peers. But that’s often the expectation — that Black people are just supposed to be ok with being disrespected and dehumanized so that other people don’t feel bad.

Only one side of this debate has been extreme. Only one side has issued threats. Only one side has tried to hound people out of their jobs, silence dissent, and intimidate those who ask difficult questions. I fought for Hilary Cass to be put in the House of Lords when I was Secretary of State because I understood the weight of what she’d done and the storm that could engulf her. Though I did not agree with every line of her report (serious people rarely agree on everything), I recognised courage when I saw it…and courage calls to courage everywhere. One of the things I disagreed with Dr. Cass on, was allowing puberty blocker trials to go ahead. Conservatives will continue to oppose them. When things go wrong, it is not doctors who get the blame. It is politicians. So much of what has gone wrong in politics is politicians too scared of a backlash when they’ve got tough choices to make. They outsource all responsibility to outside experts who necessarily look at issues through a single (and often narrow) lens. If we are going to fix the many things wrong in our country, we are going to need politicians with the judgment, resilience and intelligence to tackle VERY complex problems with difficult trade-offs. That’s what I’m recruiting for in a renewed Conservative Party because we are the only ones who can and will do things properly.

The Supreme Court recognised "trans women" are men. That's reality.