#but for some of them seeing this post spread around so uncritically might just be my fucking breaking point of caring

[faggotry-enjoyer]

there is SO MUCH bullshit going on at this university and i want to talk about it on here so bad but it's too specific to do so without coming dangerously close to full on doxxing myself

[newstechreviews]

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released fake advertisements found on Facebook in the walk up to the 2016 election. As politicians on each side argued over whether the ads changed the election results, the heart of the revelation was way more disturbing. The Russian ads targeted the American public to deepen wounds on divisive issues and spread false information. Facebook said the posts were “ what we saw from these actors was an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” according to Colin Stretch, the general counsel for the company.

In 2020, less than one month before the election, America seems even more divided and deeply fractured after a turbulent year with a deadly pandemic, economic pain, and a chaotic presidency. With many Americans on lockdown, social media has been a vital form of communication — but one that is also driving dangerous conspiracies. From the false QAnon conspiracy, which promotes Trump as the final defense against a “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elite who traffic, rape, and cannibalize children, to fake claims that COVID-19 is a hoax, the spread of disinformation on social media is deepening divisions that some fear could lead to a further rise in civil unrest in the coming weeks.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSigns showing various conspiracy theories at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Convoluted messaging from the White House on these fake theories doesn’t help. During the Oct.15 NBC Town Hall President Donald Trump denied knowing what QAnon was, and then quickly contradicted himself, saying, “What I do know it is they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard but I know nothing about it.”

To combat the spread of false information, on Oct. 15 YouTube announced “efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence.” Facebook also recently said they would ramp up their fight against disinformation, particularly QAnon, by removing pages and groups from the app, but it may not be effective—or it may be too late.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, an LA-based photographer originally from England, spent more than a year covering America political rallies and protests he mostly found on Facebook. He began to see the conspiracies manifest themselves through the believers caught in the fervor of misinformation that show the social media platform’s darkest side as a divided reality.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester with a Pizzagate and QAnon sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Speaking via Zoom, he recalls how it all began.

When did you start noticing conspiracies in the political landscape?

I always had an interest in documenting people with fringe beliefs; it used to be a lot more difficult to find. I started seeing more of it in the real world in 2019, and there’s been a huge explosion of conspiratorial thinking both online and off since COVID started.

We’ve always lived with conspiracies — like the moon landing was fake, or conspiracies around who killed JFK. I think they’ve gotten worse this year because: A, social media makes it easy for people with the same beliefs to connect more easily, and B, everybody is stuck at home, spending all their time on the internet, which makes it easy to fall down these rabbit holes.

It’s also something you see when the world is in turmoil, and things are unstable. People don’t know what they can trust. I think it’s a lot easier for people to cling on to something like QAnon, which is an easily understood—if imaginary—battle between good and evil, than the complicated reality of the world.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteAnti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

Can you tell me about the process of finding conspiracies in the social media landscape?

I’m in a lot of Facebook groups. That’s the only thing I use Facebook for these days. I’ve joined various QAnon, far-right, Three Percenter, and militia Facebook groups. The ‘groups’ tab on Facebook shows a curated newsfeed from the groups you’re in. I use that and Facebook’s events pages to keep up on real world happenings.

Many of the pictures here are from anti-lockdown rallies. But the boundaries between these things have become incredibly blurred. The event might be a Trump Rally, but you’re still going to see a huge anti-lockdown presence and QAnon signs.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protestor’s sign at a rally calling for the reopening of California from coronavirus lockdown measures in Los Angeles, May 24, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA QAnon shirt at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA anti 5G sign at a pro-Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Aug. 8, 2020.

Do you find it hard to question supporters about Trump?

It can be hard to find common ground with people at these events, because many of them refuse to admit Trump is at fault, no matter how trivial the issue is.

Which is by design. I don’t think Trump cares if he’s seen by people as a liar. He just wants to bring reality into question as much as possible because that’s the most convenient thing for him, ultimately.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtester at a Save Our Children rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Sept.r 5, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at an anti-lockdown protest in Downtown Los Angeles, July 13, 2020.

I have a family member who started posting “Save the Children” messages about children being trafficked. They believe this is the biggest story that the media is not reporting. As a reporter, I’m like, human trafficking is an important issue, but this is not the same. It’s hard to have a conversation and not seem uncaring.

Yes, it very difficult to have a critical conversation that’s about a campaign to stop child abuse, because you sound like your pro-child abuse. But the type of human trafficking they’re talking about isn’t really happening in this country. Human trafficking exists and is bad, but the reality is more complex and is often linked to abuse, survival sex work, and homelessness. It’s not what you see in Taken and Rambo 5.

Can you tell me what they say is happening?

They think millions of children are being snatched in grocery stores and parks and sold on the internet for people to sexually abuse or cannibalize. Some believe thousands of children are being kept in underground lairs under Central Park and LA’s Getty Center. But the data does not back that up.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

In your work on Instagram, I’m shocked by someone holding up a sign about Tom Hanks being a pedophile. When you publish that work, I fear the photographs could be removed from the original context. What’s the best way to present this work?

It’s difficult but I sort of think the rules have gone out of the window a little bit. In the past I’d maybe lean toward not wanting to amplify toxic views or give people more attention, but the ‘Tom Hanks is a pedophile’ thing is a huge narrative in the QAnon world, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people who think Tom Hanks is murdering children to cannibalize them or has been executed or replaced by a body double. I think it’s important to look at the specifics of what these people believe, rather than speaking generally about “the QAnon conspiracy theory,” because it shows how ridiculous these things are.

I think a lot of media ignores some of the more out-there sides of these conspiracies because they’re worried about amplifying it. Or it’s difficult to use traditional reporting methods to report on them. Like, if you were to approach Tom Hanks for comment on a story about people accusing him of being a cannibal pedophile, he’s probably not going to respond. And that might lend legitimacy to the theory.

I’m hoping the context and the way I take the photos makes it clear that I think many of these things are absurd. I wouldn’t be posting these conspiracies if I felt there was a chance people were seeing my photos and thinking these things were real. I’m, hopefully, not going to post a sign that has some made-up facts about human trafficking that might seem real if you just stumbled across the picture.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester stands on Tom Hanks’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you talk to and engage with the people you’re photographing?

Yes. I posted a video recently of a woman I interviewed on Tom Hanks’ star on the Walk of Fame, where she explained that she believes Tom Hanks is killing babies to extract a chemical called adrenochrome, which he uses to keep himself young, and that he’s escaped to Greece to avoid prosecution.

I empathize somewhat. It’s easy to understand how people end up falling for these conspiracies about powerful people if you have Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein operating in full view of many powerful people, doing a lot of really F-ked up things for years, and that’s true. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that Tom Hanks is killing babies?

What are the other conspiracies that you think are harmful right now?

I’m seeing a lot of anti-Antifa and anti-BLM stuff in the Facebook groups I’m in. “Antifa/BLM riots” are the biggest story on my Facebook right now. If these groups were your main source of information, you would think that the ’94 LA riots have spread across the country and that people are being executed by BLM in the middle of the street. It’s making people extremely scared of these protests, and I think you’re seeing that in the violence that they’re being met with.

These are huge groups that have tens of thousands of members where it’s just a constant feed of those kinds of conspiracies that are met uncritically. A lot of people trust these groups more than they trust mainstream media outlets.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you notice Facebook cracking down on this at all?

I think Facebook is mostly dealing with it from a PR perspective. They’ve removed some QAnon groups, but that’s had very little impact on my toxic feed of Facebook groups. The “Save Our Children” groups are still there, “Against Human Trafficking” is still there, which is essentially just QAnon-lite.

I don’t think they have any real interest in stamping out misinformation. That would require a huge investment from them. I don’t think you can use an algorithm to block this stuff. People will find a way around it.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA man with an anti-antifa sign at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020,

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteThe group Justice 4 Prince protesting outside the Grammy’s in Downtown Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSave Our Children protesters walk past an Arby’s restaurant in Los Angeles, Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA child with a QAnon sign at an anti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

[phooll123]

New top story from Time: A Photographer’s Journey Through the Dangerous New Age of Conspiracies in America

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released fake advertisements found on Facebook in the walk up to the 2016 election. As politicians on each side argued over whether the ads changed the election results, the heart of the revelation was way more disturbing. The Russian ads targeted the American public to deepen wounds on divisive issues and spread false information. Facebook said the posts were “ what we saw from these actors was an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” according to Colin Stretch, the general counsel for the company.

In 2020, less than one month before the election, America seems even more divided and deeply fractured after a turbulent year with a deadly pandemic, economic pain, and a chaotic presidency. With many Americans on lockdown, social media has been a vital form of communication — but one that is also driving dangerous conspiracies. From the false QAnon conspiracy, which promotes Trump as the final defense against a “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elite who traffic, rape, and cannibalize children, to fake claims that COVID-19 is a hoax, the spread of disinformation on social media is deepening divisions that some fear could lead to a further rise in civil unrest in the coming weeks.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSigns showing various conspiracy theories at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Convoluted messaging from the White House on these fake theories doesn’t help. During the Oct.15 NBC Town Hall President Donald Trump denied knowing what QAnon was, and then quickly contradicted himself, saying, “What I do know it is they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard but I know nothing about it.”

To combat the spread of false information, on Oct. 15 YouTube announced “efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence.” Facebook also recently said they would ramp up their fight against disinformation, particularly QAnon, by removing pages and groups from the app, but it may not be effective—or it may be too late.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, an LA-based photographer originally from England, spent more than a year covering America political rallies and protests he mostly found on Facebook. He began to see the conspiracies manifest themselves through the believers caught in the fervor of misinformation that show the social media platform’s darkest side as a divided reality.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester with a Pizzagate and QAnon sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Speaking via Zoom, he recalls how it all began.

When did you start noticing conspiracies in the political landscape?

I always had an interest in documenting people with fringe beliefs; it used to be a lot more difficult to find. I started seeing more of it in the real world in 2019, and there’s been a huge explosion of conspiratorial thinking both online and off since COVID started.

We’ve always lived with conspiracies — like the moon landing was fake, or conspiracies around who killed JFK. I think they’ve gotten worse this year because: A, social media makes it easy for people with the same beliefs to connect more easily, and B, everybody is stuck at home, spending all their time on the internet, which makes it easy to fall down these rabbit holes.

It’s also something you see when the world is in turmoil, and things are unstable. People don’t know what they can trust. I think it’s a lot easier for people to cling on to something like QAnon, which is an easily understood—if imaginary—battle between good and evil, than the complicated reality of the world.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteAnti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

Can you tell me about the process of finding conspiracies in the social media landscape?

I’m in a lot of Facebook groups. That’s the only thing I use Facebook for these days. I’ve joined various QAnon, far-right, Three Percenter, and militia Facebook groups. The ‘groups’ tab on Facebook shows a curated newsfeed from the groups you’re in. I use that and Facebook’s events pages to keep up on real world happenings.

Many of the pictures here are from anti-lockdown rallies. But the boundaries between these things have become incredibly blurred. The event might be a Trump Rally, but you’re still going to see a huge anti-lockdown presence and QAnon signs.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protestor’s sign at a rally calling for the reopening of California from coronavirus lockdown measures in Los Angeles, May 24, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA QAnon shirt at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA anti 5G sign at a pro-Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Aug. 8, 2020.

Do you find it hard to question supporters about Trump?

It can be hard to find common ground with people at these events, because many of them refuse to admit Trump is at fault, no matter how trivial the issue is.

Which is by design. I don’t think Trump cares if he’s seen by people as a liar. He just wants to bring reality into question as much as possible because that’s the most convenient thing for him, ultimately.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtester at a Save Our Children rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Sept.r 5, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at an anti-lockdown protest in Downtown Los Angeles, July 13, 2020.

I have a family member who started posting “Save the Children” messages about children being trafficked. They believe this is the biggest story that the media is not reporting. As a reporter, I’m like, human trafficking is an important issue, but this is not the same. It’s hard to have a conversation and not seem uncaring.

Yes, it very difficult to have a critical conversation that’s about a campaign to stop child abuse, because you sound like your pro-child abuse. But the type of human trafficking they’re talking about isn’t really happening in this country. Human trafficking exists and is bad, but the reality is more complex and is often linked to abuse, survival sex work, and homelessness. It’s not what you see in Taken and Rambo 5.

Can you tell me what they say is happening?

They think millions of children are being snatched in grocery stores and parks and sold on the internet for people to sexually abuse or cannibalize. Some believe thousands of children are being kept in underground lairs under Central Park and LA’s Getty Center. But the data does not back that up.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

In your work on Instagram, I’m shocked by someone holding up a sign about Tom Hanks being a pedophile. When you publish that work, I fear the photographs could be removed from the original context. What’s the best way to present this work?

It’s difficult but I sort of think the rules have gone out of the window a little bit. In the past I’d maybe lean toward not wanting to amplify toxic views or give people more attention, but the ‘Tom Hanks is a pedophile’ thing is a huge narrative in the QAnon world, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people who think Tom Hanks is murdering children to cannibalize them or has been executed or replaced by a body double. I think it’s important to look at the specifics of what these people believe, rather than speaking generally about “the QAnon conspiracy theory,” because it shows how ridiculous these things are.

I think a lot of media ignores some of the more out-there sides of these conspiracies because they’re worried about amplifying it. Or it’s difficult to use traditional reporting methods to report on them. Like, if you were to approach Tom Hanks for comment on a story about people accusing him of being a cannibal pedophile, he’s probably not going to respond. And that might lend legitimacy to the theory.

I’m hoping the context and the way I take the photos makes it clear that I think many of these things are absurd. I wouldn’t be posting these conspiracies if I felt there was a chance people were seeing my photos and thinking these things were real. I’m, hopefully, not going to post a sign that has some made-up facts about human trafficking that might seem real if you just stumbled across the picture.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester stands on Tom Hanks’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you talk to and engage with the people you’re photographing?

Yes. I posted a video recently of a woman I interviewed on Tom Hanks’ star on the Walk of Fame, where she explained that she believes Tom Hanks is killing babies to extract a chemical called adrenochrome, which he uses to keep himself young, and that he’s escaped to Greece to avoid prosecution.

I empathize somewhat. It’s easy to understand how people end up falling for these conspiracies about powerful people if you have Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein operating in full view of many powerful people, doing a lot of really F-ked up things for years, and that’s true. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that Tom Hanks is killing babies?

What are the other conspiracies that you think are harmful right now?

I’m seeing a lot of anti-Antifa and anti-BLM stuff in the Facebook groups I’m in. “Antifa/BLM riots” are the biggest story on my Facebook right now. If these groups were your main source of information, you would think that the ’94 LA riots have spread across the country and that people are being executed by BLM in the middle of the street. It’s making people extremely scared of these protests, and I think you’re seeing that in the violence that they’re being met with.

These are huge groups that have tens of thousands of members where it’s just a constant feed of those kinds of conspiracies that are met uncritically. A lot of people trust these groups more than they trust mainstream media outlets.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you notice Facebook cracking down on this at all?

I think Facebook is mostly dealing with it from a PR perspective. They’ve removed some QAnon groups, but that’s had very little impact on my toxic feed of Facebook groups. The “Save Our Children” groups are still there, “Against Human Trafficking” is still there, which is essentially just QAnon-lite.

I don’t think they have any real interest in stamping out misinformation. That would require a huge investment from them. I don’t think you can use an algorithm to block this stuff. People will find a way around it.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA man with an anti-antifa sign at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020,

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteThe group Justice 4 Prince protesting outside the Grammy’s in Downtown Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSave Our Children protesters walk past an Arby’s restaurant in Los Angeles, Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA child with a QAnon sign at an anti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

  via Blogger https://ift.tt/355cvlw

[viralnewstime]

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released fake advertisements found on Facebook in the walk up to the 2016 election. As politicians on each side argued over whether the ads changed the election results, the heart of the revelation was way more disturbing. The Russian ads targeted the American public to deepen wounds on divisive issues and spread false information. Facebook said the posts were “ what we saw from these actors was an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” according to Colin Stretch, the general counsel for the company.

In 2020, less than one month before the election, America seems even more divided and deeply fractured after a turbulent year with a deadly pandemic, economic pain, and a chaotic presidency. With many Americans on lockdown, social media has been a vital form of communication — but one that is also driving dangerous conspiracies. From the false QAnon conspiracy, which promotes Trump as the final defense against a “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elite who traffic, rape, and cannibalize children, to fake claims that COVID-19 is a hoax, the spread of disinformation on social media is deepening divisions that some fear could lead to a further rise in civil unrest in the coming weeks.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSigns showing various conspiracy theories at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Convoluted messaging from the White House on these fake theories doesn’t help. During the Oct.15 NBC Town Hall President Donald Trump denied knowing what QAnon was, and then quickly contradicted himself, saying, “What I do know it is they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard but I know nothing about it.”

To combat the spread of false information, on Oct. 15 YouTube announced “efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence.” Facebook also recently said they would ramp up their fight against disinformation, particularly QAnon, by removing pages and groups from the app, but it may not be effective—or it may be too late.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, an LA-based photographer originally from England, spent more than a year covering America political rallies and protests he mostly found on Facebook. He began to see the conspiracies manifest themselves through the believers caught in the fervor of misinformation that show the social media platform’s darkest side as a divided reality.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester with a Pizzagate and QAnon sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Speaking via Zoom, he recalls how it all began.

When did you start noticing conspiracies in the political landscape?

I always had an interest in documenting people with fringe beliefs; it used to be a lot more difficult to find. I started seeing more of it in the real world in 2019, and there’s been a huge explosion of conspiratorial thinking both online and off since COVID started.

We’ve always lived with conspiracies — like the moon landing was fake, or conspiracies around who killed JFK. I think they’ve gotten worse this year because: A, social media makes it easy for people with the same beliefs to connect more easily, and B, everybody is stuck at home, spending all their time on the internet, which makes it easy to fall down these rabbit holes.

It’s also something you see when the world is in turmoil, and things are unstable. People don’t know what they can trust. I think it’s a lot easier for people to cling on to something like QAnon, which is an easily understood—if imaginary—battle between good and evil, than the complicated reality of the world.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteAnti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

Can you tell me about the process of finding conspiracies in the social media landscape?

I’m in a lot of Facebook groups. That’s the only thing I use Facebook for these days. I’ve joined various QAnon, far-right, Three Percenter, and militia Facebook groups. The ‘groups’ tab on Facebook shows a curated newsfeed from the groups you’re in. I use that and Facebook’s events pages to keep up on real world happenings.

Many of the pictures here are from anti-lockdown rallies. But the boundaries between these things have become incredibly blurred. The event might be a Trump Rally, but you’re still going to see a huge anti-lockdown presence and QAnon signs.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protestor’s sign at a rally calling for the reopening of California from coronavirus lockdown measures in Los Angeles, May 24, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA QAnon shirt at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA anti 5G sign at a pro-Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Aug. 8, 2020.

Do you find it hard to question supporters about Trump?

It can be hard to find common ground with people at these events, because many of them refuse to admit Trump is at fault, no matter how trivial the issue is.

Which is by design. I don’t think Trump cares if he’s seen by people as a liar. He just wants to bring reality into question as much as possible because that’s the most convenient thing for him, ultimately.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtester at a Save Our Children rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Sept.r 5, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at an anti-lockdown protest in Downtown Los Angeles, July 13, 2020.

I have a family member who started posting “Save the Children” messages about children being trafficked. They believe this is the biggest story that the media is not reporting. As a reporter, I’m like, human trafficking is an important issue, but this is not the same. It’s hard to have a conversation and not seem uncaring.

Yes, it very difficult to have a critical conversation that’s about a campaign to stop child abuse, because you sound like your pro-child abuse. But the type of human trafficking they’re talking about isn’t really happening in this country. Human trafficking exists and is bad, but the reality is more complex and is often linked to abuse, survival sex work, and homelessness. It’s not what you see in Taken and Rambo 5.

Can you tell me what they say is happening?

They think millions of children are being snatched in grocery stores and parks and sold on the internet for people to sexually abuse or cannibalize. Some believe thousands of children are being kept in underground lairs under Central Park and LA’s Getty Center. But the data does not back that up.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

In your work on Instagram, I’m shocked by someone holding up a sign about Tom Hanks being a pedophile. When you publish that work, I fear the photographs could be removed from the original context. What’s the best way to present this work?

It’s difficult but I sort of think the rules have gone out of the window a little bit. In the past I’d maybe lean toward not wanting to amplify toxic views or give people more attention, but the ‘Tom Hanks is a pedophile’ thing is a huge narrative in the QAnon world, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people who think Tom Hanks is murdering children to cannibalize them or has been executed or replaced by a body double. I think it’s important to look at the specifics of what these people believe, rather than speaking generally about “the QAnon conspiracy theory,” because it shows how ridiculous these things are.

I think a lot of media ignores some of the more out-there sides of these conspiracies because they’re worried about amplifying it. Or it’s difficult to use traditional reporting methods to report on them. Like, if you were to approach Tom Hanks for comment on a story about people accusing him of being a cannibal pedophile, he’s probably not going to respond. And that might lend legitimacy to the theory.

I’m hoping the context and the way I take the photos makes it clear that I think many of these things are absurd. I wouldn’t be posting these conspiracies if I felt there was a chance people were seeing my photos and thinking these things were real. I’m, hopefully, not going to post a sign that has some made-up facts about human trafficking that might seem real if you just stumbled across the picture.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester stands on Tom Hanks’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you talk to and engage with the people you’re photographing?

Yes. I posted a video recently of a woman I interviewed on Tom Hanks’ star on the Walk of Fame, where she explained that she believes Tom Hanks is killing babies to extract a chemical called adrenochrome, which he uses to keep himself young, and that he’s escaped to Greece to avoid prosecution.

I empathize somewhat. It’s easy to understand how people end up falling for these conspiracies about powerful people if you have Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein operating in full view of many powerful people, doing a lot of really F-ked up things for years, and that’s true. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that Tom Hanks is killing babies?

What are the other conspiracies that you think are harmful right now?

I’m seeing a lot of anti-Antifa and anti-BLM stuff in the Facebook groups I’m in. “Antifa/BLM riots” are the biggest story on my Facebook right now. If these groups were your main source of information, you would think that the ’94 LA riots have spread across the country and that people are being executed by BLM in the middle of the street. It’s making people extremely scared of these protests, and I think you’re seeing that in the violence that they’re being met with.

These are huge groups that have tens of thousands of members where it’s just a constant feed of those kinds of conspiracies that are met uncritically. A lot of people trust these groups more than they trust mainstream media outlets.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you notice Facebook cracking down on this at all?

I think Facebook is mostly dealing with it from a PR perspective. They’ve removed some QAnon groups, but that’s had very little impact on my toxic feed of Facebook groups. The “Save Our Children” groups are still there, “Against Human Trafficking” is still there, which is essentially just QAnon-lite.

I don’t think they have any real interest in stamping out misinformation. That would require a huge investment from them. I don’t think you can use an algorithm to block this stuff. People will find a way around it.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA man with an anti-antifa sign at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020,

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteThe group Justice 4 Prince protesting outside the Grammy’s in Downtown Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSave Our Children protesters walk past an Arby’s restaurant in Los Angeles, Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA child with a QAnon sign at an anti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

[thepalaceofsans-souci]

Hi, I was wondering if you could talk some more about slavery in Sweden or direct me to some sources? I saw a mention of it in one of your posts and I never knew about it, I'd like to learn more. Thank you!

Yes! Thanks for asking! I don´t know if there´s any good sources in English but here´s the wikipedia page which to my knowledge is fairly accurate, though using a language that is a little uncritical in my opinion (not calling it slavery for instance, which it definitely was).

So, briefly there was this agricultural system in Sweden which stretched way back, which allowed poor men to sell themselves and their families a year at the time to a land-owner, making them “statare”. This was implemented all over Sweden but was most common in the south where I live since the soil here is more fertile and there were many big farms. 

If a man sold himself to a land-owner, the land-owner would have complete control over him and his family´s life down to deciding when they could eat or sleep. At large farms you can still see these huge bells, “vällingklockor”, which would ring to summon all the “statare” for meals if they were out working the fields. Grown-ups would have to work for most of the day, every day. Children would have to work from a very young age as well and pregnant people would have to work up to the day they gave birth and then start working again the next day. The newly born children would be taken care of by other, often very old, “statare” who worked specifically with taking care of babies. The families would be encouraged to have many children - since they sold themselves and their families, land-owners prefered “hiring” men with large families. Statare would be “paid” in housing and food stuff, and if they were lucky they might get paid in money for working “over-time” (as if they weren´t already working inhumanly long hours) doing stuff like milking very early (hence the Swedish word “mjölkpengar” meaning a little extra pocket money). Some land-owners were absolutely fair and would treat their “statare” as regular employees but some were awful, not shying away from corporal punishment.

Theoretically “statare” only sold their freedom and basic human rights for a year at the time, but as they couldn´t make money (or with great difficulty) they couldn´t leave. They might be able to sign a contract with another land-owner, hoping they would be kinder but they couldn´t leave the system all together. Complicating this whole thing, people who didn´t own any money or land on their own did not have the same rights as others and did not count as citizens which meant that “statare” couldn´t vote for many many years.

The “statare” system was absolutely not unique for Sweden, but it was unique in being implemented up unto 1945 and having effects lasting into the 21 century as former “statare” formed a large part of the Swedish working class. Around 1900, 35 000 families were subject to this systematic enslavement. Taking into account that Sweden isn´t a very big country that is a whole lot of people.

My great grand parents on my mother´s side grew up as “statare” but managed somehow through the help of their families (my mom is not sure how) to buy their own small piece of land and were in that way released from the plight of the non-land-owning masses. My step grand mother were born to “statare” and must have spent her first few years in life in slavery, though as the system was abolished she went on to become a nurse. She desperately wanted to become a doctor, but couldn´t afford to study because obviously her parents hadn´t any money since they had been enslaved all their lives. One of the villages I grew up in, came into existence as a village for people enslaved by the owner of a large estate close by. It is not at all surprising then that in the Southern part of Sweden were I grew up, there are a lot of villages like this were people are largely poor, unemployed, and uneducated. As a result the Swedish nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, have been able to spread their propaganda through out these villages making the south of Sweden the foot hold for racism and distrust of “the establishment” (the government, the media, the school system).

So basically I learnt about this since one of the most fruitful movements within Swedish literature history was the writings of “statare” or the children who had grown up in “statar” families during the 20th century. A lot of these writers had no formal education but had managed to learn how to read and write and decided something had to be done about the absurd system they were or had been living in. Their works are filled with this absolute rage and can be a very difficult read at times because the things they are describing are just so horrible and bleak. The work of these writers were largely a driving force behind the abolishing of the “statar” system.

If you can find any translations of her works I really recommend Moa Martinson, Ivar Lo-Johanson, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson. Moa Martinson is especially a writer close to my heart since she describes the lifes of female “statare” and other women from the Swedish working class.

[trippinglynet]

Larry Harvey inteview by Richard Peterson (1994)

Ritual, Community and Burning Man An Interview with Larry Harvey, Burning Man's Founder

By Richard Peterson

December 1994

In 1986, on the heels of a broken relationship, former punk club manager Larry Harvey took to a small local beach with his eight-foot wooden "Man," which he intended to burn, providing some personal catharsis. A small group gathered for the impromptu ritual. Ten years later, "Burning Man" stands four stories tall, and attracts upwards of 10,000 people to Nevada's Black Rock Desert, in an annual counter-cultural spectacle which speaks not just to the popularity of a good party, but to the human desire for ritual. Richard Peterson met with Harvey to discuss ritual and its place in America today.

Peterson: What made you start Burning Man?

Harvey: Well we don't have a lot of rituals in this society really. Well we have some rituals in this society; we have football games, we have the Super Bowl. But when the Super Bowl is over, when a football game is over, you've had your thrill but suddenly you begin to realize that it was inherently meaningless. There was no transcendence. You can listen to the post game reports and the interviews with the athletes, but they're a tremendous let down.

Everybody's become cynical about Christmas or about most of the holidays; we've observed they've become occasions for consumption and little more. What we do out in the desert, indeed does have a transcendent focus in a very graphic and physical way. The Man stands at the center of the experience. He is the culmination of the celebration. In his burning, he transcends himself. The fireworks are actually rigged so that they eventually erupt out of the top of his head and spill out into the starry sky overhead. The entire world at Black Rock revolves around the Burning Man in a very...

Let me say something about ritual. You know, people talk about the need for ritual, and the need for community, and the need for all these things, but they often go about it in a very self-conscious way. We need a ritual culture. But the only problem is, ritual cultures work because in traditional societies they are completely taken for granted. They're just part of being a human being. You do this because your ancestors did it, and your father did it, and your grandfather did it, and we do this because we're human beings. The trouble with us, in the modern world, is that we have fewer and fewer inherited traditions that we can experience in this same unselfconscious way that traditional cultures do. And when you try self-consciously to create such a thing, it doesn't work very well. I see people doing art events in which they allude to primitive culture. They paint themselves with mud. I saw a guy in a photo spread, it was an art event. They painted themselves with mud, except he was wearing a Rolex, which put the lie of the whole affair. The trouble is, when you go about such things self-consciously, it distances you from the experience in a way that just doesn't work very well.

Peterson: You mean when you're trying to imitate somebody else's culture that's not your own?

Harvey: You're trying to imitate somebody else's. Indeed, that's very much like young children dressing up like their parents, and not believing, in the event, that they really are their parents. There's a kind of a terrible threadbare quality about it. Originally the core ritual around the Man was the raising and the burning. That required that people act together, perform a cooperative action that had enormous expressive quality. But essentially we didn't have to assign any meaning to it. It was very apparent that we were going to raise him. We all had to pull on a rope. And we did so for absolutely practical reasons. It was a very moving experience, but we didn't consciously assign any meaning to it. We did it because it was fun.

What we've done, as time has gone on, is evolve rituals. But always based on the immediate need to act for a practical reason, and I found that by doing that you can avoid this terrible self-consciousness. There are two methods we have come to employ in formulating ritual: work and play. If you get people working together, say if you're helping somebody move, and a group of friends get together. Suddenly you've got five people working together in this very cooperative way. For the sake of a shared goal together. It can be a very meaningful experience. You know why you're doing it, you don't have to think about it. You're working with others. You are all performing different roles in the process and defining yourself in relation to one another. Work, of that sort, has an element of ritual about it. When you can get people working, to perform a task, to work well, you have to forget about yourself. If you're hammering a nail, you can't think about the meaning of the nail, you can't think about the trajectory of the hammer. What you have to do is concentrate on the nail. You just have to do it. You can't think about it.

Peterson: So you're working to some objective, the objective becomes the cohesion of the group.

Harvey: Yes. It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process. We're always standing back and looking at it from the standpoint of our isolation from the ongoing spectacle. But when people work together the goal supplies a transcendent value that takes people out of themselves. That automatically orders them in relation to one another. You've made society from the experience of work.

I remember a couple of fellows a few years ago, they were local ranch hands I think, and they watched dubiously for awhile as we worked on what might have appeared to be a pagan idol. Finally they started asking a few questions, "What are you doing there?" and I said, "Well, we got to attach this there, it goes over this boom and it gives us some leverage and, you want to help? Would you grab that line?" "Yeah, sure." And within moments they had been incorporated into our society. They had been assigned a role. They were a member of the greater whole. They shared our same goals. Through the simple act of helping out.

Peterson: Then there's some ownership of it , they're a part of it.

Harvey: Exactly. And indeed, that is one way you can constitute ritual and constitute culture without making people self-conscious. Another way we've evolved is play. If you think about it, play is very similar to ritual. The gameboard, the playground is a space set apart from the ordinary world that is governed by peculiar rules.

There isn't much difference in an Aborigine or a Shaman dancing the dance of some totemic animal, and thereby becoming that animal, and somehow mystically participating in it's life, and a child playing at the same role. It involves the same suspension of disbelief. If you get people playing together they cease to ask what the experience means and they begin to simply do it for it's own sake, for the sake of the delight. Once you get people playing together and working together they will surrender themselves to the experience in an uncritical way that opens their hearts, that makes them available to the act in much the same unselfconscious way that people in a traditional cultures perform their rituals without particularly thinking about them, but simply as a direct expression of what they are. Not even consciously as a way of affirming what they are, but as a direct expression of that. That really is how traditional culture works. They do it because that's simply something they to do that is an attribute of their humanity.

Peterson: Do you design rituals, or do they just basically happen?

Harvey : We do both. We encourage people to invent ritual, to invent games. Every year someone will devise some kind of performance art. You can call it performance art, you can call it ritual. I think performance art is basically an attempt to recreate ritual, for the most part, at least that's the impulse behind it. Last year suddenly this giant hand appeared next to the Man with a mysterious circle in the center. Nobody new what it meant. It got burned, I have no idea who did it. It was enormously expressive.

Every year things get invented. If something delights everyone and there seems to be an instant consensus, if this was indeed an expressive and meaningful thing, whatever it might mean, as long as it strikes a chord, we tend to find out who did it, encourage them to continue, or adopt it and somehow incorporate it into the things we consciously plan from year to year. And by that means we acquire a measure of received tradition. We're building a body of that. It's all a result of spontaneous contributions on the part of people.

Peterson: This is a growing tradition, I mean some of the traditions are kind of, have been fixed. You're definitely in the realm of what is traditionally considered religion and that area, you're on the same kind of ground.

Harvey: We're definitely on the same kind of ground.

Peterson: Most religions don't encourage the creation of a new ritual. (Laughter)

Harvey: No they don't.

Peterson: It's kind of like, "this is the way it is."

Harvey: Well that's distinctly what divides us from religion. Historically religions have pretty uniformly derived from some kind of primary mystic experience. The charismatic figure goes out in the desert, comes back with this wonderful visionary message for their fellows, and that vision then gets translated into a religious observance.

We take people to the threshold of religion. Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It verges on the wholly other. It contemplates a realm of profoundly irrational experience. I think that kind of experience is the fountainhead for all religions. Essentially what happens to religions is that a priestly class intrudes in the process and stations itself between the believers and the immediate, the overwhelming, the unfathomable, the irrational, the transcendental experience that inspired the religion in the first place. They become the keepers of the mystery. They place themselves between the communicants of the religion, and the immediate experience. And then they dictate the terms on which you can have contact with this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms. We create a mystery alright, and we encourage others to create a mystery. But we don't propagate any doctrine; we don't insist on any metaphysical interpretation. We just invite people to the experience itself.

If you look at what we're doing, it's on the pattern of stone age ritual, you know. Using pretty slender means, we evoke something tantamount to a megalithic temple complex. It involves a pilgrimage to a remote place, an initiation. The focus of our whole ritual is sanctified in the sense that it's removed entirely from the world. Put in a place profoundly apart from ordinary experience. The Black Rock Desert is about as far apart from ordinary experience as you could get. It involves meditation on an extraordinary object, which in its setting seems to be incomparable to anything else, to be almost not subject to the normal rules of our perception. It culminates at last in a act of sacrifice. It's all done on a cosmic scale. This is plainly the stagecraft of religion. That's what we practice, yeah.

Peterson: But it sounds very much like you're almost creating the environment for people to have what the Eastern religions experience of being in the moment, you're creating an environment that that tends to, can happen.

Harvey: Well ritual time, the sense of ritual time, tends to do that you know. When you're in ritual time, it's as if time didn't form a line, but that it exfoliated out of an eternal moment. It flowered out from some central point. Ritual time is always the same time repeated again, and again, and again.

Peterson: But maybe now that's normal time, maybe the concept of linear time is a Western abstraction.

Harvey: Oh I don't know, I tend to live on linear time. I keep a datebook. You could maybe make the distinction that the world of our existence happens on linear time. The world of cause and effect, the conditional world happens in linear time. That's how we lead our lives, that's what we believe.

But there is another kind of time, I think, there's sacred time. Ritual time isn't linear. Everything does happen in one moment, in one sense I suppose. Things that happen to me happen in linear time. I stepped off the curb, and a car came along and hit me: that happened in linear time. But I think our most basic sense of being real in an immediate way doesn't have much to do with linear time.

When I act, I always define myself as acting in the immediate moment, that's where I occurs. Me doesn't occur there. Me occurs on a line. I think that our most immediate sense of being happens in a kind of sacred time. I do this, I think this. It always involves this sense of being that suddenly connects with the world. "I" is always an immediate experience.

Peterson: Well a couple of areas that we've talked about before a little bit that I'm interested in, is this whole sense of forming of community and the Burning Man as a incubator of community, an experiment of community.

Harvey: Well it seems to me, that all real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our situation in the desert is an incubator for community.

Peterson: Do you find any other moral values to this experience?

Harvey: I have the feeling that all the evil in the world is produced when people are not allowed to be what they are. The Black Rock experience allows people to spontaneously manifest their being. I think evil is produced when people aren't allowed to do this. I think it begins in childhood.

A child says, "Look at me dad, look at me". They're not asking you to critique their action. They're asking for a simple act of witness. They simply want to have what they're feeling, what they are, confirmed by your gaze, in the immediate moment: "Look at me now!" And you better look at them if you want to gratify their wish. Untold amounts of evil are produced when children say "Look at me now" and the adult looks away, refuses to respond. Or says, "Oh you're not doing that right." All the child is asking is that you witness its being, is that you confirm for it that it's real, that what is coming out of it is valid and real in the immediate moment of its expression. If you refuse to give children that kind of attention it cripples their souls. We've created an enormous playground out there where everyone is invited to be. There can be no greater suffering, no greater pain than want of being. It mars the soul. Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to become ourselves.

[snkret-photography]

A Thousand Miles

There’s a very common theme among those that I date and I can’t seem to figure out how I attract these kind of people. Maybe it’s an innate thing that I secretly crave or an attribute that I myself wish to do but just don’t have the willpower. Could be the spillover of  other parties affecting my current behaviors. It could be avoidance theory. But one thing is for certain, it’s not for me. So many times do guys I date and girls I’m friends with tell me, “it’d be nice if you texted me that you missed me or that you’re thinking of me sometime.” And every single time I cringe at the thought of spreading that false hope. Partially because you give what you get and I RARELY have those messages on my phone. As a matter of fact, there are 2 people I know in the amount of people who have asked me to do it  who do send me those messages and usually I am annoyed by the receipt. It’s a 2-factor annoyance that, I think, makes a lot of sense but then again I am often characterized as unemotional so I could just be missing something.

First, and especially in the realm of relationships, it creates this false perception of care. Everyone operates and believes things completely differently, I am more than aware of this fact. However, when “I miss you” texts sit as such with no follow-through or plans in place, the idea that we’re supposed to just sit around missing each other does not really constitute much in the idea of building something with someone. In the recent guy I was dating, he never really took any initiative to text me first due to the fact that “it’s hard to make plans with me because I have the busy schedule but even if I couldn’t see him that it would be nice if I sent texts letting him know that I missed him/was thinking about him/wish I could see him.” I responded with okay, whilst in the back of my head going “that is never going to happen in a million years nor do I know how to fill your insecurities in wanting to be desired.” Instead, I simply made plans to see him. There was no followup text the next day saying that I wish I could see him or I missed him, simply what are you doing on Day X at Time Y. Because actions speak a fuck ton louder than words but also because our actions should reinforce what we’re saying. Even in one of my more serious relationships, he would always text me that he missed me or wished we were together but should I suggest such that we rectify that, it was always met with excuses and complaints. In all honesty, I never cared much for the sentiment of “I miss you” but it did not become a nuisance until it was embodied in a relationship standpoint. For me, if you’re into someone and you’re together then you should be constantly building upon each other and really enraptured by the other. I have friends that aim to spend more physical time with me than I do people I date. In that, if we’re dating, I want  to spend my time talking and being with you, not texting you because while I wait on your reply, there are about 30 useless apps filling my interests. So needless to say, if you can tell me that you miss me but not take any action to amend that situation, they’re just words that breed a false sense of hope and attention that no one needs. Sure, it feels nice to know that someone is thinking of and desires you, but it is also nice when someone is thinking of and desires you enough to take action and be with you, much different appreciation. Your experience may vary but I greatly appreciate someone who pops up and goes, we have 2 hours and we’re going to make the most of it. Can curse me out all day but I’m going to focus on the fact that you showed up just to see me because it was a feeling better than missing me. Actions are far more crucial because they are telling of a person and where they’re at and what they’re investing into. Words are inconsistent. Essentially you’ll say how you feel in a moment and in the next, you could say something completely different. There is also the matter of simply saying things because someone wants to hear it, ever-changing opinions that come with growth, knowledge and experience, and the miscommunication that arises from diction, medium, and perceived intention. Words count for a lot, but in this context of “I miss you”, they don’t mean shit. More often than not, it is reinforcing the idea that you want something you can’t have. When there is an agreement among parties as to time tables due to whatever obligations, “I miss you” serves as a reminder that keeps interests up and usually is followed by when you can meet on the specified terms. But when just freely sent and there is no followup and minimal barriers, it is simply telling you that you want something that you can’t have. OR the idea that you don’t want something enough to go get it. When you take a step back and are faced with, oh want it but timing is off and see the situations outside of a relationship where the timing is off but they still show up, makes you look at things differently. If someone wants something bad enough, they’ll do what they can to get it or at the very least pursue it. If you say you miss me but not showing up or making plans, then I assume you don’t miss me bad enough which means I didn’t need to know I was a blip in your thought process.

I began alluding to it past the offset that in relationships, there is a false sense of wanting and longing for someone, but at the end of the day, actions speak louder than words always. Vannessa Carlton got it right when she wrote that song. She said she missed and needed her man and that she’d walk a thousand miles just to see him. It wasn’t just the simple words of needing or wanting but the followup of actions in which I’m giving praise. Now I’m very aware it’s a song and she probably is saying it in the same breath of just sending a text, but it’s a White Chick’s CLASSIC and I simply needed any reason to reference it. (Also if you have not seen that movie, you have something to go do.) But back to topic, people are often times more talk than action. Sure they do things but more times than not, a person comments on things that they want more than they put effort into actually attaining those things. I can sit and talk all day about what I want or projects I want to do but what good does it do anyone if I simply talk about it and don’t execute? As a matter of fact, it really only serves me to talk about them. Talking about things we wish we could do produces a lot of the same dopamine reactions as doing the task and is a hell of a lot easier. When we talk about shit and receive positive feedback on it, we have far less incentive to go out and do the things we are talking about. We already have the satisfaction of knowing that someone supports the idea. Plus doing things takes up a lot of energy that realistically, tends to bring you down or present frustration until you reach a finished product. If I already got the go ahead from my friends that it sounds dope and is an amazing concept, what incentive do I really have to deal with bringing that concept to life and dealing with adjusting things to make it work? I already got the praise and at the end of the day, that’s more than what I was looking for. Same reason these fake hoes got all this shit to post to instagram but every time you talk to them, they ain’t got shit going on. They got the high from your double tap and copy/pasted comments of little substance so why go out and do real, hard shit. None. Not a damn one. Might as well sign up for flat tummy tea and just cake in on that diuretic. You don’t actually got to use it, just convince people that you did. In the year of doing better because I know better, I know that shutting up and putting up is a successful concept. I don’t need to tell nobody what I’m doing nor do I need to spread around false affirmations of care when I’m not going to do anything to prove that I care because I don’t care that much which is basically like not caring at all. Texting that I miss you without actually asking how you’re doing is much to what these niggas do when they want some ass. And guess what… formalities get you a formal “I’m good.” You wanna see me? Cool, when? You wanna fight? Cool, wus goodie? You want to start this project? Cool, have you actually put any work into it? Stop talking about it and start showing up.

In essence, just walk your thousand miles to get to where you want to be. In every situation, put in the amount of effort that you want back. So many times people come to me and talk about things that they want to pursue but aren’t doing anything outside of their normal habits. Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting different results. Idiocy is knowing better and not doing better. Complacency is showing smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's achievements.  These three work together like nobodies business. And it’s often times when people simply talk about things that you see all three at work.  I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of people just telling me shit. If your actions aren’t satisfactory but your words are, I’m taking you at face value. If my actions aren’t matching my words, I hope you let me know. And if we’re talking about more things than we’re doing, then I hope someone takes a step back and keeps us accountable. It’s an action that will help propel us further than we thought before.