#Jane Hamilton

[myfavoritepose2]

[citizenscreen]

Vivian Keefer, Barbara Pepper, Lucille Ball and Jane Hamilton taking part in the Screen Stars' Polo Game at the Uplifter's Field in 1934.

[midwestgothicisbestgothic]

"A lot of the people of the Midwest came from the Northeast. We're of the same stock. Yet something must have happened when we crossed the Ohio River Valley because I have sensed that there's more of an openness and flexibility of spirit out West."

Jane Hamilton

[perfettamentechic]

9 febbraio … ricordiamo …

9 febbraio … ricordiamo … #semprevivineiricordi #nomidaricordare #personaggiimportanti #perfettamentechic

2022: André Wilms, attore francese. Nel 1989 partecipò al film L’insolito caso di Mr. Hire. Apparve anche in film tedeschi, tra cui Europa Europa, e finlandesi, tra cui alcuni lungometraggi; per uno di questi, Vita da bohème, ottenne il Premio per miglior attore non protagonista agli European Film Awards del 1992. Nel 2017 affiancò Charlotte Rampling nel film Hannah. (n.1947) 2020: Mirella Freni,…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The true, tactical significance of Project 2025

TODAY (July 14), I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! NEXT SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Like you, I have heard a lot about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's roadmap for the actions that Trump should take if he wins the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect:

https://www.project2025.org/

But (nearly) all the reporting and commentary on Project 2025 badly misses the point. I've only read a single writer who immediately grasped the true significance of Project 2025: The American Prospect's Rick Perlstein, which is unsurprising, given Perlstein's stature as one of the left's most important historians of right wing movements:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

As Perlstein points out, Project 2025 isn't new. The Heritage Foundation and its allies have prepared documents like this, with many identical policy prescriptions, in the run-up to many presidential elections. Perlstein argues that Warren G Harding's 1921 inaugural address captures much of its spirit, as did the Nixon campaign's 1973 vow to "move the country so far to the right 'you won’t even recognize it.'"

The threats to democracy and its institutions aren't new. The right has been bent on their destruction for more than a century. As Perlstein says, the point of taking note of this isn't to minimize the danger, rather, it's to contextualize it. The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions, so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats. The project of the right is grounded in a belief in Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is "that which leads to elite status."

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a hereditary meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God's favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.

So we should be alarmed by the right's agenda. We should be alarmed at how much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory. The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

The right wing coalition needs to pander to forced-birth extremists, racist extremist, Christian Dominionist extremists (of several types), frothing anti-Communist cranks, vicious homophobes and transphobes, etc, etc. Pandering to all these groups isn't easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things – the post-Roe forced birth policies that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly unpopular among conservatives, with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition. Even more unpopular are policies banning birth control, like the ones laid out in Project 2025. Less popular still: the proposed ban on no-fault divorce. Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular, but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage's "Husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office":

https://twitter.com/fakedansavage/status/1805680183065854083

The constituency for "husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office" is very small. Almost no one in the GOP coalition is voting for all of this, they're voting for one or two of these things and holding their noses when it comes to the rest.

Take the "libertarian" wing of the GOP: its members do favor personal liberty…it's just that they favor low taxes for them more than personal liberty for you. The kind of lunatic who'd vote for a dead gopher if it would knock a quarter off his tax bill will happily allow his coalition partners to rape pregnant women with unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and force them to carry unwanted fetuses to term if that's the price he has to pay to save a nickel in taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

And, of course, the religious maniacs who profess a total commitment to Biblical virtue but worship Trump, Gaetz, Limbaugh, Gingrich, Reagan, and the whole panoply of cheating, lying, kid-fiddling, dope-addled refugees from a Jack Chick tract know that these men never gave a shit about Jesus, the Apostles or the Ten Commandments – but they'll vote for 'em because it will get them school prayer, total abortion bans, and unregulated "home schooling" so they can brainwash a generation of Biblical literalists who think the Earth is 5,000 years old and that Jesus was white and super into rich people.

Time and again, the leaders of the conservative movement prove themselves capable of acts of breathtaking cruelty, and undoubtedly many of them are depraved sadists who genuinely enjoy the suffering of their enemies (think of Trump lickspittle Steven Miller's undisguised glee at the thought of parents who would never be reunited with children after being separated at the border). But it's a mistake to think that "the cruelty is the point." The point of the cruelty is to assemble and maintain the coalition. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the point:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

The right has assembled a lot of power. They did so by maintaining unity among people who have irreconcilable ethics and goals. Think of the pro-genocide coalition that includes far-right Jewish ethno-nationalists, antisemitic apocalyptic Christians who believe they are hastening the end-times, and Islamophobes of every description, from War On Terror relics to Hindu nationalists.

This is quite an improbable coalition, and while I deplore its goals, I can't help but be impressed by its cohesion. Can you imagine the kind of behind-the-scenes work it takes to get antisemites who think Jews secretly control the world to lobby with Zionists? Or to get Zionists to work alongside of Holocaust-denying pencilneck Hitler wannabes whose biggest regret is not bringing their armbands to Charlottesville?

Which brings me back to Project 2025 and its true significance. As Perlstein writes, Project 2025 is a mess. Clocking in an 900 pages, large sections of Project 2025 flatly contradict each other, while other sections contain subtle contradictions that you wouldn't notice unless you were schooled in the specialized argot of the far right's jargon and history.

For example, Project 2025 calls for defunding government agencies and repurposing the same agencies to carry out various spectacular atrocities. Both actions are deplorable, but they're also mutually exclusive. Project 2025 demands four different, completely irreconcilable versions of US trade policy. But at least that's better than Project 2025's chapter on monetary policy, which simply lays out every right wing theory of money and then throws up its hands and recommends none of them.

Perlstein says that these conflicts, blank spots and contradictions are the most important parts of Project 2025. They are the fracture lines in the coalition: the conflicting ideas that have enough support that neither side can triumph over the other. These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking "LOOK AT ME" sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.

The right is really good at this. Perlstein points to Nixon's expansion of affirmative action, undertaken to sow division between Black and white workers. We need to get better at it.

So far, we've lavished attention on the clearest and most emphatic proposals in Project 2025 – for understandable reasons. These are the things they say they want to do. It would be reckless to ignore them. But they've been saying things like this for a century. These demands constitute a compelling argument for fighting them as a matter of urgency, with the intention of winning. And to win, we need to split apart their coalition.

Perlstein calls on us to dissect Project 2025, to cleave it at its joints. To do so, he says we need to understand its antecedents, like Nixon's "Malek Manual," a roadmap for destroying the lives of civil servants who failed to show sufficient loyalty to Nixon. For example, the Malek Manual lays out a "Traveling Salesman Technique" whereby a government employee would be given duties "criss-crossing him across the country to towns (hopefully with the worst accommodations possible) of a population of 20,000 or under. Until his wife threatens him with divorce unless he quits, you have him out of town and out of the way":

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Final_Report_on_Violations_and_Abuses_of/0dRLO9vzQF0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22organization+of+a+political+personnel+office+and+program%22&pg=PA161&printsec=frontcover

It's no coincidence that leftist historians of the right are getting a lot of attention. Trumpism didn't come out of nowhere – Trump is way too stupid and undisciplined to be a cause – he's an effect. In his excellent, bestselling new history of the right in the early 1990s, When the Clock Broke, Josh Ganz shows us the swamp that bred Trump, with such main characters as the fascist eugenicist Sam Francis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke

Ganz joins the likes of the Know Your Enemy podcast, an indispensable history of reactionary movements that does excellent work in tracing the fracture lines in the right coalition:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-clock-broke-106803105

Progressives are also an uneasy coalition that is easily splintered. As Naomi Klein argues in her essential Doppelganger, the liberal-left coalition is inherently unstable and contains the seeds of its own destruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Liberals have been the senior partner in that coalition, and their commitment to preserving institutions for their own sake (rather than because of what they can do to advance human thriving) has produced generations of weak and ineffectual responses to the crises of terminal-stage capitalism, like the idea that student-debt cancellation should be means-tested:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

The last bid for an American aristocracy was repelled by rejecting institutions, not preserving them. When the Supreme Court thwarted the New Deal, FDR announced his intention to pack the court, and then began the process of doing so (which included no-holds-barred attacks on foot-draggers in his own party). Not for nothing, this is more-or-less what Lincoln did when SCOTUS blocked Reconstruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

But the liberals who lead the progressive movement dismiss packing the court as unserious and impractical – notwithstanding the fact that they have no plan for rescuing America from the bribe-taking extremists, the credibly accused rapist, and the three who stole their robes. Ultimately, liberals defend SCOTUS because it is the Supreme Court. I defended SCOTUS, too – while it was still a vestigial organ of the rights revolution, which improved the lives of millions of Americans. Human rights are worth defending, SCOTUS isn't. If SCOTUS gets in the way of human rights, then screw SCOTUS. Sideline it. Pack it. Make it a joke.

Fuck it.

This isn't to argue for left seccession from the progressive coalition. As we just saw in France, splitting at this moment is an invitation to literal fascist takeover:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/melenchon-macron-france-left-winner

But if there's one thing that the rise of Trumpism has proven, it's that parties are not immune to being wrestled away from their establishment leaderships by radical groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

What's more, there's a much stronger natural coalition that the left can mobilize: workers. Being a worker – that is, paying your bills from wages, instead of profits – isn't an ideology you can change, it's a fact. A Christian nationalist can change their beliefs and then they will no longer be a Christian nationalist. But no matter what a worker believes, they are still a worker – they still have a irreconcilable conflict with people whose money comes from profits, speculation, or rents. There is no objectively fair way to divide the profits a worker's labor generates – your boss will always pay you as little of that surplus as he can. The more wages you take home, the less profit there is for your boss, the fewer dividends there are for his shareholders, and the less there is to pay to rentiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Reviving the role of workers in their unions, and of unions in the Democratic party, is the key to building the in-party power we need to drag the party to real solutions – strong antimonopoly action, urgent climate action, protections for gender, racial and sexual minorities, and decent housing, education and health care.

The alternative to a worker-led Democratic Party is a Democratic Party run by its elites, whose dictates and policies are inescapably illegitimate. As Hamilton Nolan writes, the completely reasonable (and extremely urgent) discussion about Biden's capacity to defeat Trump has been derailed by the Democrats' undemocratic structure. Ultimately, the decision to have an open convention or to double down on a candidate whose campaign has been marred by significant deficits is down to a clutch of party officials who operate without any formal limits or authority:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-hole-at-the-heart-of-the-democratic

Jettisoning Biden because George Clooney (or Nancy Pelosi) told us to is never going to feel legitimate to his supporters in the party. But if the movement for an open convention came from grassroots-dominated unions who themselves dominated the party – as was the case, until the Reagan revolution – then there'd be a sense that the party had constituents, and it was acting on its behalf.

Reviving the labor movement after 40 years of Reaganomic war on workers may sound like a tall order, but we are living through a labor renaissance, and the long-banked embers of labor radicalism are reigniting. What's more, repelling fascism is what workers' movements do. The business community will always sell you out to the Nazis in exchange for low taxes, cheap labor and loose regulation.

But workers, organized around their class interests, stand strong. Last week, we lost one of labor's brightest flames. Jane McAlevey, a virtuoso labor organizer and trainer of labor organizers, died of cancer at 57:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/jane-mcalevey-strategy-organizing-obituary

McAlevey fought to win. She was skeptical of platitudes like "speaking truth to power," always demanding an explanation for how the speech would become action. In her classic book A Collective Bargain, she describes how she built worker power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey helped organize a string of successful strikes, including the 2019 LA teachers' strike. Her method was straightforward: all you have to do to win a strike or a union drive is figure out how to convince every single worker in the shop to back the union. That's all.

Of course, it's harder than it sounds. All the problems that plague every coalition – especially the progressive liberal/left coalition – are present on the shop floor. Some workers don't like each other. Some don't see their interests aligned with others. Some are ornery. Some are convinced that victory is impossible.

McAlevey laid out a program for organizing that involved figuring out how to reach every single worker, to converse with them, listen to them, understand them, and win them over. I've never read or heard anyone speak more clearly, practically and inspirationally about coalition building.

Biden was never my candidate. I supported three other candidates ahead of him in 2020. When he got into office and started doing a small number of things I really liked, it didn't make me like him. I knew who he was: the Senator from MBNA, whose long political career was full of bills, votes and speeches that proved that while we might have some common goals, we didn't want the same America or the same world.

My interest in Biden over the past four years has had two areas of focus: how can I get him to do more of the things that will make us all better off, and do less of the things that make the world worse. When I think about the next four years, I'm thinking about the same things. A Trump presidency will contain far more bad things and far fewer good ones.

Many people I like and trust have pointed out that they don't like Biden and think he will be a bad president, but they think Trump will be much worse. To limit Biden's harms, leftists have to take over the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, so that he's hemmed in by his power base. To limit Trump's harms, leftists have to identify the fracture lines in the right coalition and drive deep wedges into them, shattering his power base.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

[in-love-with-movies]

Live and Let Die (1973)

[myiliterallyhavenolifegoals]

my smug ass opening the gc to explain the pyramids of mars to the nuwho girlies

[kyleetryme]

do Hamilton and six crossover pls pls pls

btw hamiltons henry!

[schnitzelsemmerl]

Musicals as incorrect quotes but it's stuff my friends said:

Jefferson: WE NEED TO SACRIFICE HAMILTON

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Eliza: yes, this is my daughter Philip. Freshly born.

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Hamilton: (screeching) HE IS USING VIOLENCE

Jefferson: wut

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Aragon: jesus was a carpenter too! :D

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Ocean: I CANT READ ITS TOO LOUD IN HERE (its completely quiet)

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Cleves: WHERE IS MY AWESOME GERMAN BREAD?????

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Washington: ok thats it im adopting all of you

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Seymour: I'm either 16 or 56 and theres no in between.

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Jefferson: this cabinet battle contains product placement! (begins fangirling over macaroni)

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Mischa: (to an 8-year old) what are you smoking

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Cleves: DER ELEFANT FRISST EINE VASE!!!

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Ocean: theyre all bullying me :(

Father Markus, getting bullied by a bunch of teens: I'm starting to feel the same way

[iliveinyourfridge67]

Moot hunting day 2

I like pjo, rtc, stardew valley, Hamilton,mean girls, six, art,six of crows, I'm lesbian MOOT ME IF U LIKE ANY OF THESE THING

[azrantimes]

Ahh my favorite genre of musical songs: Wife of famous historical douchebag laments about her life and her conflicted feelings towards her husband and his other lovers/passions

[under-a-lilac-moon]

18th century jon so he can wear his hair in a queue and prance around being a silly pretty little guy and when he travels to the usa he sees alexander hamilton and is like 'el-oh-el these 'revolutionaries' who think they're so great while they're actually just colonisers i'm gonna go back to england and fight for abolition while staying silly through the horrors even though the magnus institute doesn't exist yet'

i think that would be pretty delightful if just for long-haired jon

[imobsessedwiththeatre]

Six and schuyler sisters

[ectosbiologlst]

why is your vote so important again?

You don’t just save the universe from lord English and NOT have some sort of sway in the vote

Dirk and Eridan huh…

[coochiequeens]

Rip Curl could just have had three brand ambassadors, one for the men's line, one for the women's line and a trans person for a body inclusive line. But no they did the lazy thing and fired the woman and have a man wearing women's clothes.

By Shay Woulahan January 28, 2024

An Australian brand that specializes in swimwear for surfers has come under fire after bringing on a trans-identified male as one of their “female” brand ambassadors. Rip Curl’s controversial move comes just months after the company dropped Bethany Hamilton, a shark attack victim, for voicing her opposition to trans-identified males competing in female sporting competitions.

Rip Curl cut ties with Hamilton in November 2023, despite her status as one of the most celebrated female surfers in Australia and abroad. The decision came after Hamilton publicly opposed gender ideology policies which permit males to compete against women.

Last February, Hamilton shared two videos to her Instagram account questioning October 2022 guidelines adopted by the World Surf League, in accordance with the International Surfing Association, which granted males who claim a transgender status permission to compete against female athletes.

“Is a hormone level an honest and accurate depiction that someone indeed is a male or female? Is it as simple as this?” she asked. In her follow up video, she questioned the policy again. “Am I just a hormone number? Is it as simple as that?”

In her reaction to the new guidelines, Hamilton had also threatened to boycott the World Surf League, and has been outspoken in support of fairness in women’s sports on social media since.

On January 24, Rip Curl posted a video on their women-focused Instagram page, Rip Curl Women, which featured Sasha Jane Lowerson, a trans-identified male surfer.

In the description of the video, Rip Curl described Lowerson, 44, as “a West Australian waterwoman who loves the freedom found in surfing, disconnecting from the mainstream, and the feeling of dancing on constantly changing waves.”

Seemingly anticipating a flood of negative responses, Rip Curl locked their Instagram comments in an effort to limit discussion on their new ambassador.

Lowerson competed successfully in men’s surfing competitions prior to identifying as a “woman.”

“With a commitment to maintaining a positive space for all, we have disabled our comments. Thank you for your understanding,” the sportswear company added.

Lowerson drew criticism in 2022 after taking first in both the Open Women’s Longboard and Open Women’s Logger events at the West Coast Suspensions state championships. Just three years prior to competing in the women’s category, Lowerson, competing under the name Ryan Egan, had taken a top position in the men’s category.

Lowerson had previously celebrated the updated guidelines by World Surf League in February 2023 which permits men to compete in women’s swimming competitions if they reduce their testosterone below a level known to be much higher than what women naturally produce on average.

In advance of the ruling, Lowerson had already been competing in women’s competitions. In March 2022, Lowerson placed ninth in the Noosa Festival of Surfing, becoming the first “trans woman” to compete in surfing at the professional level. Two months later, he placed first in the Open Women’s and Women’s Logger divisions at the Western Australian State Titles. 

In an interview with THEM, a pro-trans publication, Lowerson said he began surfing many years ago but didn’t begin identifying as a woman until his 40s.

“I’ve been a professional longboard surfer for many years. And in that time, I hid in the closet basically. I tried to transition at 19 and again at 29. And now, in my early 40’s, I’ve been successful.”

Reacting to Lowerson being platformed by Rip Curl, many women online expressed anger that the brand would drop a disabled female surfer, only to then work with a male surfer who competes in female competitions.

Many women called for consumers to boycott the brand.

“Company @ripcurl hired a MAN to advertise their women’s line, rather than an amazing female athlete. Amazing. They hate women don’t they. Don’t buy anything from these people. #BoycottRipCurl,” one critic said on X.

“Imagine dropping an athlete that survived a shark attack and went onto be one of the best surfers in the world for a mentally ill Man competing in women’s surfing? Seriously Ripcurl? #BoycottRipCurl,” wrote another woman.

#BoycottRipCurl has been trending on X for the last two days as women continue to express their outrage.

Lowerson has made his Instagram account private following the backlash. However, Reduxx was able to obtain photos from the page showing Lowerson modeled sexually suggestive outfits with captions that related to his surfing career.

Since news of Lowerson’s partnership with Rip Curl first broke, female athletes have spoken out against the brand and in support of Hamilton.

Swimming Champion and activist for women’s sports Riley Gaines called out Rip Curl on X, encouraging her followers to boycott them.

In a follow-up post, Gaines stated: “Encouraging to see so many people reply that they’re throwing out their Rip Curl apparel and pledging not to buy from them again. I didn’t know people still wore Ripcurl anyways. RIP Rip Curl.”

Gaines has been outspoken against the inclusion of male athletes in female sports after she was forced to compete against Will “Lia” Thomas in the 200 freestyle final at the NCAA Women’s Championships in 2022. Gaines and Hamilton are expected to join forces to host a story hour for children on 2nd February in Springfield, Missouri to celebrate the launch of their new books, “Happy No Snakes Day” by Gaines and “Surfing Past Fear” by Hamilton. Trans activists are expected to protest the family event.

Skateboarder Taylor Silverman also chimed in to condem Rip Curl. Silverman has also been outspoken against males competing in female sports since voicing her own experience being displaced by males participating in women’s skateboarding.

Anyone else thinking that when this guy won his last event in a men's competition he saw a lot of younger competition and knew that his days surfing professionally was coming to an end unless he did something drastic?

"The 25- to 34-year-old age bracket is the largest, with 24 percent of the total surf population.

Surfing is dominated by youth – as 71 percent of the total surfing participants are in the 6- to 34-year-old age range. 

In fact, 87 percent of all surfers are younger than 44 years old. "

A quick Google search confirms that "sasha" is 44.

[merrymarvelite]

Cover of the Day: Amazing Spider-Man #178 (March, 1978) Art by Ross Andru & Joe Sinnott