#do i think that it has something to do with the former american president specifically? of course not.

[andromeda3116]

you know i wonder where the essay is, i certainly don't have it prepared, what it reflects about society, that the '99 trigun was a fun action western-sci-fi anime with a plot that wove itself out slowly and had plenty of heart that got serious eventually but was also a quirky romp through most of its run

and the '23 trigun stampede is a dystopian sci-fi set in a crumbling desert that can barely support life with a dark plot that drags you under immediately and also does have a lot of heart but ultimately appears to have the theme of scavenging that heart from a place that gives you no reason to believe it exists

like, as time capsules i feel like it's unintentionally saying something about us, about where we've come to and come from, that the same basic story is told in two such wildly different ways, after less than a quarter-century

[qqueenofhades]

I would like to... gently shake the people going 'Dick Cheney/Alberto Gonzalez/[insert neoconservative architect here] endorsing Harris is entirely and only a bad look for Harris' because that's not the point. And like, I get feeling weird about it (I've been unimpressed with Dick's backpedaling since Liz Cheney got primaried), but: Trump is proving too extreme for THE PEOPLE WHO MADE HIM POSSIBLE. This is their consequences. THAT'S the point.

Look, this is what I think about it: I fucking hate Dick Cheney and all the architects of the Bush Junior neoconservatism-early-aughts-War-on-Terror-Patriot-Act-No-Child-Left-Behinding Republican Party that laid the groundwork for the Tea Party and then for Trump. If there was any justice in the world, Dubya would be at the Hague for a war crimes tribunal and not allowed to sit in Texas painting dogs and enjoying a quiet retirement. But he was fortunate to be the president of the most powerful country in the world, and America doesn't obey international law unless it feels like it, so that's what we get. (And yes, someone asked Dubya if he was going to endorse in 2024, following Cheney, and was told, no doubt with much pious handwringing, that "President Bush retired from presidential politics many years ago." But he's still raising money for MAGA Senate candidates in Pennsylvania, evidently. Fuck you, George W. Bush. Kids these days don't say it enough.)

However, since literally the entire pre-Trump establishment Republican party is now deciding that Trump is too insane, fascist, and dangerous even for them, I'm not surprised but still annoyed that Online Leftist Logic (TM) has translated that to "Harris must secretly be an early-noughties hard-right neocon Republican and that's why they want to vote for her!!!" Most if not all of them have said that they openly disagree with her policies but are voting for her anyway because she is the only way to maintain American constitutional democracy. And yes, we're all shocked that DICK FUCKING CHENEY, architect of the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, felt that there was in fact a line of fascist government overreach that he wasn't willing to cross, but if that's the case -- if even these completely terrible warmongering corporate assholes are like "uh Trump is too bad even for us to support," then you should, I don't know, maybe listen to that. But as ever, I search for logic in vain.

Likewise: Harris has made zero policy concessions to these Republicans and she never went fishing for Cheney's endorsement specifically. She didn't suddenly declare Iraq a totally okay and normal thing in order to get Cheney and his warhawks on board, and yes, Old Dickhead probably has no small amount of personal motive to get back at Trump considering what he did to Liz. But that's the thing where apparently political motives should only ever be pure, moral, and Perfect, and taking the right action for the "wrong" reasons is still disqualifying because you weren't thinking enough pure moral thoughts while you did it, or something. I don't give a fuck why Cheney decided to vote for Harris, because I don't respect his opinion and can't foresee myself ever doing so. But because we are in an unprecedented historical moment where even DICK GODDAMN CHENEY thinks that Donald Trump is too dangerous to ever have power again, I will thank him for doing that and that alone and then tell him to hit the f'n road if he thinks he deserves a scrap of credit or Democratic policy concessions for it. He doesn't. He sucks. But he's still making a choice that we need to see made at this moment, and people who don't get that, as usual, can STFU.

Basically: Cheney's endorsement is not directed at you, and it's not intended to move voters who already fit your profile and therefore think, like I do, that Cheney can eat shit. It's directed to all the career-Republican-politician types who can see him doing that and decide that they can do the same thing. Hell, we just had 17 former staffers of Ronald Reagan announcing their Harris endorsement (in addition to the 200+ Bush, McCain, Romney alumni who already signed on and all the ex-Trump officials at the DNC) and going so far as to insist that Ol' Ronnie Raygun himself would have supported Harris. Now look. I hate Ronald Reagan more than any other twentieth-century president. The degree to which he ALSO laid the groundwork for incredible damage to America cannot be overstated. But because I am not an idiot, I can see that this does not mean Harris has suddenly turned into Reagan in her policies. So. Yeah.

The other thing to note here is that Harris has seen the advantage in cultivating a bipartisan coalition and making a cross-party case for voting her to preserve American democracy. Now, a lot of the Republicans have said that they are going to stay Republicans and they want to purge their party of Trump and MAGAism, they are trying to buy time for that transition to happen by voting for Harris, and while I have never voted for or agreed with a Republican in my whole life, I actually think that's a good thing! I don't WANT to fear the end of American democracy every four years because the Republican Party has become a screaming shitgibboning insane vehicle of American Gilead while inciting stochastic terrorism against Springfield, Ohio and everyone else who doesn't bow down to Trumpist Dear Leader and his KKK alt-right Elon Muskified supporters! I don't WANT this howling fascist conspiracy-theory-puppet-of-Vladimir-Putin black hole of violence to be just what we have to accept as the center-right (except you know, now far-far-far-far-can't-see-it-with-a-telescope-right) party in America! I would prefer it if we had a functioning democracy again where both parties were engaging in fair competitiveness and good faith and had the basic premise of making people's lives better, even if they disagreed about how to do it! I would REALLY like it if we could go back to the days of disagreeing about taxes and foreign policy and social welfare -- you know, NORMAL THINGS -- instead of Commander Vance and the Project 2025 foot soldiers trying to install a theocratic fascist dictatorship! I WOULD LIKE THAT A WHOLE LOT!

That said: I have pretty much reached my limit with asking people to vote. I have done it for 8+ years (since before Trump was elected the first time) and I'm done. Either you know the stakes of this election at this point, or you're so blindly and stupidly committed to misunderstanding them that there's nothing I or anyone else can possibly do to convince you. I still see people posting a lot of stuff from the bad-faith anti-democratic leftist cranks and arguing with them endlessly and... why? Why? Why are you giving them the oxygen and exposure that they crave, and which is giving them more attention than anyone else is giving them? Block them. Mute them. STOP ENGAGING WITH EVERYTHING THEY SAY EVEN IF YOU'RE TRYING TO REFUTE IT. It's not going to work, and at this point, it's not remotely conducive to winning this election. The Great Myth of the Undecided Voter (TM) is another one that, I hope, can finally bite the dust, and the actual undecided voters who are out there are not the ones posting dirtbag leftist bullshit about Harris on The Website Formerly Known as Twitter. This election is now completely down to a numbers game: who can make their identified voters turn out to vote. So please. Spend your time and energy on reaching those folks, who might want to or have said they will vote but need a push or extra help to make sure they do.

That being the case, if lifelong Republicans want to vote for Harris and help defeat a Trump dictatorship, they're actually being more helpful for the cause of American democracy than every single shrieking Online Leftist out there, and maybe they should think about that. I'm amused at how they still think they can make demands of the Democrats, because -- when your entire plan from the word go has been "I'm not voting for the Democrats and there's nothing you can do to make me!!!" -- why are you surprised that they don't take your thoughts and opinions into account? That's the basic simplest Democracy 101 version of how electoral politics works. If you have removed yourself from their voter pool and laugh and scoff at any suggestion that you should enter it, then they're not gonna listen to you or think that they should make policy to appease you (which is good, because most of these people are fucking nuts). That's why they're blowing a gasket disowning AOC, still one of the most left-wing members in the House, because she wants to actually win and make real changes in society and has reached a happy-ish marriage with the Democratic party, instead of virtuously losing her seat and becoming irrelevant like some other members of the Squad who got primaried out this year. And the Democrats have accepted many of AOC's views as mainstream policy! She didn't change, but she stayed in the party and worked with it, and the party as a whole is moving to where she was all along. But because any hint of compromise or working to get results, rather than just posting self-righteous screeds on the internet, is Bad, she had to go, I guess. Or something.

Anyway. That's the that on that. If you want to win this election, target and talk to the people who have already identified themselves as likely or possible voters, they just need that extra push to become definite voters. I'm over the anti-democratic hypocritical leftist cranks as much as I am the screaming shitgibboning racist-mob-inciting fascists. If it takes some Republicans gritting their teeth and getting on board the "let's save American democracy" boat with me, then fine. They're actually willing to do the smallest tiny thing to make that outcome come about, and that means, for right now, they are the enemy of my enemy and I'll accept their help. After that, I would in fact like it if we had a sane center-right party again, once Trump is in jail and we can fumigate the MAGA rot. It's up to them.

[preet-01]

*in Oliver Twist voice* may I please have more of the maxiel political au?

You have me obsessed bestie

Of course you can bestie!!! Here is some married Maxiel discussing why Daniel agreed to the arranged marriage set in early 2026. This specific scene won't be in the fic because there's a different version of it with Daniel and Joe that explores their relationship and the weight of the family name.

First Meeting and Iowa Campaign Trail

Max doesn’t dare to say he fully understands Daniel. He understands bits and pieces of him, but not the entirety of him.

It is, of course, very annoying. He likes to know everything.

But he deals with it. Slowly learning about the new parts of Daniel and burrowing it deep in his mind where all of his Daniel facts live.

Like Daniel loves his career, lives for it, but yet he’s willing to give it up and marry Max just when talks of Daniel being a future Attorney General start.

“Why marry me?” Max asks one night. It’s much too late to change anything, they’ve been married for over a year now and everything is gearing up for his presidential run announcement. But Max remains curious about Daniel tying himself to Max and not continuing down the career path that his mother had expected of him.

Grace Ricciardo had been utterly shocked, but still supportive when Daniel introduced Max to them as his fiancé. Joe Ricciardo hadn’t been shocked, no the former governor had almost seemed apologetic to Daniel. So Max really did not understand the Ricciardos as a whole. At least Daniel's sister had just been very straightforward in her threats. Michelle Ricciardo, Max thinks, is the scariest of the four Ricciardos he'd met.

“A little late for that now, Maxy,” Daniel says. His brown eyes are focused on some case file that he’ll probably argue in front of the Supreme Court. Max doesn't understand why Daniel would be willing to leave something he loves so much to be the First Man. He doesn't understand how Daniel would be willing to leave behind arguing constitutional rights and wording at the highest court to just pick china patterns or Christmas decorations. He doesn't understand why Daniel would want to leave a challenging career where he can make a mark on history to just be a footnote in Max's career, a pretty bauble that the American public will look at.

Max’s own work is long forgotten as he takes in Daniel. So focused on what he needs to do despite it being the first day of a long weekend.

"You could be Attorney General," Max continues on. He'd read Sebastian's file on Daniel and done his own research. Daniel was more than qualified, certainly more qualified than the previous five Attorney Generals.

"You're a Senator, Max. Don't be so naive," Daniel retorts.

"How does my job-"

"Have you ever wondered why Seb manages campaigns instead of running his own?" Daniel cuts him off. The file is on the table and forgotten as Daniel turns to look at Max. "Or why Fernando Alonso-Webber has never become President despite his many, many attempts and strong qualifications?"

Max hadn't ever thought of that. He didn't need to...

"The Senate will never approve me for the Attorney General position. Doesn't matter how many cases I argue in front of the Supreme Court or how widely renowned I become as a lawyer," Daniel sighs. "We're not as progressive in this country as you may want. The Senate is not going to elect a male carrier as the Attorney General. And the majority of the country is not going to elect a carrier as President. Hell, only three carriers, male and female, have gotten the party nom. Just because I can birth a baby, they'll say that I'm not competent enough. That I won't be able to focus on the job, that I won't be tough when needed."

"Things aren't like they used to be," Max tries to argue, but he knows the numbers of carriers are low in both chambers of Congress, even fewer in the Cabinet despite President Hamilton's many attempts at changing it.

"I came to terms with it a long time ago, Maxy, just like Seb did. And there's more to being the First Man than just china patterns and looking pretty. Though I will excel at those," Daniel tells him.

"It shouldn't be like that," he states. It's wrong how in the past the country remains. His chances of winning were low due to being unmarried, and Daniel's chances of going further in his career were even lower due to being a carrier. His ability to birth children shouldn't impact his career.

"It won't be like this forever, eventually things will change. And I hope that it happens during your presidency," Daniel says. There's a sparkle in his brown eyes that hadn't been there before.

"I'm not elected yet, and might not ever be." Max knows that so far they've gone about things with the assumption that come November 2028, Max would be President-Elect. But things don't always pan out and there is a good chance that Max won't win.

"I wouldn't have married you, Maxy, if I had any doubts about your chances at the Presidency."

He doesn't understand all of Daniel, but he does understand bits and pieces and he's willing to learn every little idiosyncrasy that makes up Daniel.

___

I am loving all the discussion about this au and writing this has been so much fun!!!!

[beguines]

As I have outlined earlier in this book, the institution of psychiatry does not work in a vacuum, somehow above the everyday norms and values of wider society; rather, they are a profession with a particular conservative zeal for upholding the current social order through their work. When behaviour becomes unacceptable to the needs of capitalism, the profession seeks to pathologise such deviance. This process does not happen overnight but through a progression of debate, research, and movement towards a collective focus on such areas. In this case, the research on shyness from Philip Zimbardo (1977)—the former president of the American Psychological Association—is seen as key towards the development of social phobia as a category of mental illness. Significantly, his research did not suggest that shyness was a mental illness, but rather noted a concern that people with such characteristics were likely to be seriously disadvantaged as society began to change. Zimbardo (emphasis added) commented on the "condition,":

"Shyness is an insidious personal problem that is reaching such endemic proportions as to be justifiably called a social disease. Trends in our society suggest it will get worse in the coming years as social forces increase our isolation, competition, and loneliness. Unless we begin to do something soon, many of our children and grandchildren will become prisoners of their own shyness.

The traits of shyness—including timidity, mistrust of others, and a lack of self-assertion—were conceptualised as increasingly problematic within contemporary society and therefore a justifiable focus for psychiatric activity. This is tacit acceptance that such behaviour has not been found to be a mental disorder as a result of rigorous testing but rather is socially dictated and culturally relative; shyness becomes a "social disease" (i.e., a social deviance) in need of treatment. Thus, "the rise of social phobia," states Cottle, offers a glimpse not so much at the anatomy of a specific illness as at the still inherently subjective nature of psychiatric medicine and the cultural forces that help draw the boundary between what we are told to think of as normal and what we are told to consider pathological."

Concerned with the need for workers to conform to the desired norms and values necessary to "succeed" in neoliberal society, the psy-professions have stigmatised and "othered" those once considered only shy, introverted, or reticent co-workers. This process of psychiatrists labelling the shy as mentally ill has also been previously highlighted by Scott who acknowledges that, in comparison, the non-shy self "embodies the cultural values of contemporary Western societies: ambition, assertiveness, competitiveness and individualism. This dominant ideal can be used to stigmatize those who fail to live up to such expectations, whose difference is attributed to individual pathologies rather than to an unrealistic cultural ideology."

The success of psychiatric hegemony here is that since the original construction of social phobia in 1980, workers have become more inclined to self-label and entertain the possibility of therapy and drug treatment for their failure to be more sociable and assertive at their place of work. This situation has further legitimated the extension of the psy-professions in the areas of unemployment, job training, and work, reinforcing the neoliberal focus on the self as the site of change, while simultaneously depoliticising the increasingly alienating work environment and constant pressures on employees to upskill and be "more employable" in the jobs market. Through the pathologisation of such "non-sellable" traits, Lane argues that what counts as acceptable behaviour within the population has been narrowed to such an extent that "we now tend to believe that active membership in community activities, the cultivation of social skills (becoming a 'people person'), and the development of group consciousness are natural, universal, and obligatory aims."

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

[dumbestthingiveeverheard]

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 7/25/2023

Fifth Place: The Babylon Bee

Today, the right-wing satire website ran the article "Scientists Unveil Periodic Table Of Genders." Even ignoring the fact that this is the millionth or so time they've run a joke similar to this--you do realize what this implies, right? That the side in favor of transgender rights and who affirms non-binary identities have science on their side while you guys don't. In fact, this is even quite similar to a pro-transgender rights meme I saw posted a few years back.

Fourth Place: Matt Gaetz

The Hill reports today "Gaetz introduces legislation to end ‘unqualified’ birthright citizenship." Of course, given birthright citizenship has been upheld by the Supreme Court, repealing it would require a Constitutional Amendment, not just an act of Congress--something Matt would know if he took even the basic class on how our government works.

It should also be noted that Matt is trying to use this bill “to reflect the original intent of the 14th Amendment’s ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ clause,” which refers to a part which quite literally reads that citizenship applies to everyone “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”  If the original intent of that language was not that everybody born in the United States is automatically a citizen, which was the understanding held by the Senate when the Amendment was passed (as seen by a Senate Judiciary Report regarding the Amendment) and by then-President Andrew Johnson, then somebody should really have told those who wrote it to use different words.

This is a small aside, but one thing you'll notice if you listen to the rhetoric the right pushes on the Constitution is that they always seem to think the people who wrote it put some Asterix next to each part that implies something they wish it didn't which the rest of us are just too blind to see but totally shows the amendment is counter to everything they don't like. Although I am not going to sit here and pretend like the left can be guilty of the same thing--especially regarding the Second Amendment--it is not only worth pointing out that the right does it far more, but also that the right does it exclusively to take away the rights and freedoms of American citizens--or, in the case of Matt right here, to take away the status of citizen from millions of people.

Third Place: Hillary Clinton

Regarding the recent heat wave sweeping the country, the former Secretary of State wrote on Twitter:

Hot enough for you? Thank a MAGA Republican. Or better yet, vote them out of office.

First off, why the MAGA Republicans specifically? Don't Reagan and Bush Republicans also have a great deal of responsibility? How about Gingrich Republicans--you know, the ones who literally did everything possible to stop the environmental progress your husband's second in command tried to make!

Let's not forget that this is the same woman who dropped references to Climate Change from her speeches during her 2016 Presidential Campaign after Bernie Sanders endorsed her, who refused to endorse a carbon tax, and who encouraged other countries to embrace fracking as Secretary of State.

Second Place: Greg Gutfeld

It's not everyday the Auschwitz Museum feels the need to condemn something said on cable news, but Gutfeld's provided just such an occasion. Specifically, the organization criticized the Fox News host's use of Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search For Meaning while defending Florida's educational standards which say that slaves learned useful skills during their enslavement, in response to the Jewish Jessica Tarlov bringing up a hypothetical similar situation related to the holocaust. His statement was the following:

Did you ever read Man’s Search for Meaning? Vik Frankel talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility, utility kept you alive!

Can we just talk about the implication that the Jews who died in the Holocaust did so because of lack of skill? What the fuck, Greg?

Winner: Ron DeSantis

I am honestly starting to believe that the DeSantis campaign is run by people who really don't want DeSantis to be President. Remember that ad late last month which called Donald Trump to much of an LGBT ally that was put out by a pro-DeSantis Twitter account? It turns out the DeSantis campaign made that ad internally and then gave it to this account in hopes of passing it off as something done by a crazed supporter. Said ad was mocked all across the internet both for the idiotic claim that Trump was some stern fighter for the rights of LGBT people and also because DeSantis was trying to run to the right on an issue that many Americans no longer agree with the right on.

At this point, all one really has to do if they one to debunk the idea of a DeSantis nomination is point out how badly Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz all did when they ran on platforms rather similar to DeSantis back in 2008, 2012, and 2016 respectively. The fact is that every Republican Presidential Primary for the past decade or so has featured one candidate who is the preferred President of the nutjobs and, although they do a good job being second place, they never progress past that. The average American--fuck, the average Republican--does not want what these people sell, and the reason is because they understand that hating other people isn't going to improve their lives, while hate is the only thing these people offer.

Ron DeSantis, you've done the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[ausetkmt]

Comedian Chris Rock recently got into trouble after posting a meme with a picture of Betty White, the former “Golden Girls” actress.

“The first thing people say when a mass shooting is announced,” Rock wrote in the caption. The unspoken punchline: Bet he white.

Some white critics called Rock a racist. But the comedian’s defenders invoked an old argument: He can’t be racist because he’s black. While others can debate whether Rock is a racist or not, the reaction to his meme raises a bigger question:

Why can’t blacks be racist?

There’s a popular belief that people of color can’t be racist because they don’t have enough power. Racism, the thinking goes, transcends prejudice. It’s a system of advantage based on race and people of color don’t have the institutional power to oppress others.

But Ibram X. Kendi systematically demolishes this notion in his provocative new book, “How to be an Antiracist.” Kendi, a lean man with long dreads and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western history, says the notion that black people can’t be racist is tainted by racism itself.

“Like every other racist idea, the powerless defense underestimates black people and overestimates white people,” Kendi says.

Kendi’s new book is essential reading for anyone trying to figure out why racism remains such a destructive force in American life. There is arguably no better commentator on race in America today. Kendi’s previous book, “Stamped from the Beginning,” won a National Book Award. He is also the founding director of The Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University and a 2019 Guggenheim fellow.

In his new book Kendi explains why there is no middle ground between being a racist and someone who says “I’m not a racist,” why Americans are trained to see deficiencies in people instead of policy and why he fears a second term of President Trump.

CNN talked with Kendi about the book. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I think people will understand the people who are actively supporting racist policies. I think people will (also) understand people who are actively supporting anti-racist policies, and how they are anti-racist. But what about the people who are literally doing nothing? The status quo – what is mainstream – is racial inequity. So to literally do nothing in the face of the status quo of racial inequity is to essentially support the status quo. It’s just like, for instance, what slaveholders wanted people in the North to do in the face of slavery, which was nothing.

You have white people who are in positions of power to shape policies, and then you have everyday white people. Who should we focus on? Should we see those people in positions of power as pretty much the same as ordinary white people? I’m saying, no we should not. Specifically those whites who are in positions of power, who are using that power to defend or institute racist policies, they are the source of this race problem.

For us to focus our efforts on any white person who says something or does something that’s racist as opposed to those in positions of power – whenever we take the focus off of those people in positions of power, we are taking the focus off of the source of the problem. By taking our focus off of the source of the problem we’re allowing that problem to fester. And by allowing that problem to fester we’re making the lives of black people worse. That’s how hating white people becomes ultimately hating black people.

So generally white people say, I’m not racist, and black people say, I can’t be racist. There’s a similar form of denial that is essential to the life of racism itself. You have black people who believe that they can’t be racist because they believe that black people don’t have power and that’s blatantly not true. Every single person on earth has the power to resist racist policies and power.

We need to recognize that there are black people who resist it, and there are some who do not because of their own anti-black racism. And then you have black people, a limited number, who are in policy-making positions and use those policy-making decisions to institute or defend policies that harm black people. If those people were white we would be calling them what they are – racists. If they’re black, they’re no different. They’re racists.

His policies will have an even more damaging effect on so many communities, the way in which his racist ideas are dividing and conquering Americans. That will only grow deeper. White domestic supremacist terrorists – they will continue to rise and harm Americans, specifically because the President is not willing to view them as as a domestic terrorist threat. And ultimately I think he will try to run again in 2024. He will try to figure out a way to operate as a king.

Yes. Cynicism is the kryptonite of change.

Yes. The reason why I believe that is first based on my reading of history. In 1860, if you had talked about eliminating chattel slavery, people would have said that was completely impossible. Slaveholders are extremely powerful. They’re the richest people in the world. In 1790, if we were having a conversation about Haiti becoming a free black republic by 1804, people would have said that’s impossible. Haiti is the most profitable colony in the world. There’s no way the French or any European power would allow Haiti to be lost to freedom. If someone said that someone named Barack Hussein Obama would become President of the United States, people would have said that’s impossible.

[mariacallous]

Hi Boss,

I turn to you as the most thoughtful lady around for something I'm... I guess struggling with.

So listening to the Podcast "A Little Bit Culty" and the hosts started talking about how "both sides" in (American) politics "feel a little bit culty" they cited the labels they'd been called for expressing that most softly in the past "Trumper, and what was it? LibTard?" and basically saying "us vs them" is culty and that demonizing other is and how you can agree with some stuff without being 100% on the same side (which I do agree with)

and of course as a dyed in the wool true believing Democratic Democrat, my knee jerk gut reaction was "NO" but I'm struggling somewhat to come up with an intellectual non-emotional response to that. Now maybe it's one of those things where people claim victory because you had an emotional response to being told you're the same as conspiracy theory, white nationalist, homophobic anti-science nut jobs.

I would also point out being called a "Trumper" isn't an insult as such, its saying "you're a support of a former American President" vs LibTard which is saying being a liberal makes you mentally subnormal.

idk what are your thoughts, are there "a little bit culty" elements on the left? are they influential? and how much of the right is... kinda a cult?

I think they're oversimplifying and conflating things, for the most part - that both-sidesism thing is so easy to pull out and point to.

That said...

One of the things that struck me from rewatching The Way Down was when one of the commentators/speakers/experts they had said/argued that a cult is "a group of people who have a common bond or belief which maybe is not mainstream" and then went on to say that what is usually discussed is a "destructive or abusive cult" where, "instead of the group existing to serve the needs of the followers, the followers exist to serve the need of the leader" because obviously that kind of distinction is not made (how cults are defined and whether it is inherently pejorative or negative is a huge debate and is a whole other thing tbh).

The examples that they provided are actually pretty horrible ones to justify their argument - "us vs them" has been around since time immemorial and is actually one of the most consistently mainstream things around. Political polarization is not (inherently) "culty", and the issue of demonizing your opponents is just as mainstream.

Being called a Trumper (or Trumpeter or MAGAhead or whatever) is not the same as being called a libtard for the reasons you point out - like the implication of mental deficiencies or issues with Trumper et. al is implied whereas with libtard that's just explicitly and directly insulting someone's mental capacity.

I think that a lot of the BernieBros or leftists are "a little bit culty", at this point, based on how they've been acting and responding ever since 2015. There's a rigidity and continued fixation on a particular person or particular set of specific legislation or other totemic acts as the key to personal and political salvation and anyone who doesn't believe or follow them the right way is suspect and not worthy of support/deserves castigation, but even they aren't on the same level as the right.

Because the fundamental difference between the culty or ideologically extreme elements of the right versus the left is that the former is actively and loudly arguing for the death of and general violence towards those they oppose or perceive to be in opposition to them, and, for the most part, the left isn't, and certainly not to the same extent or same capacity and capability. It's like saying the chihuahua and the caucasian ovcharka are equally aggressive and equally equipped to attack.

[bikerpoliticalreport]

Steve Bannon Weighs In On Trump’s Possible 2024 Running Mate

Former President Donald Trump has yet to announce a running mate for his 2024 campaign but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t settled on someone. Previous reporting claimed that the 45th president would likely choose a female running mate and several names have been mentioned.

   Former White House Steve Bannon shared some interesting information about former President Donald Trump’s potential 2024 running mate. During an episode on the “War Room” podcast, Bannon revealed one interesting name.

   “By the way, I just want to make an aside before I bring Derek Harvey in. When I did Q-and-A and I did about an hour of Q-and-A, they had a little technical problem. But I did Q-and-A, which I think people were here. I want to make sure people understand this,” Bannon said.

   “Somebody asked about Robert F. Kennedy and the great speech at Hillsdale, his opening speech and what did I think about his prospects. And I said, “Look, I’m a Kari Lake person, but if Kari Lake becomes governor, as she should if this court case, or if not, she runs for the Senate. If she’s not available to be Trump’s VP that Bobby Kennedy would be, I think, an excellent choice for President Trump to consider. There was a standing ovation and this was a very hardcore MAGA war room posse crowd,” he added.

   Bannon thinks 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could be Trump’s running mate.

   “I think that that is a signal to the political elites in this country that something very different is going on. And I thought it was quite extraordinary. Robert Kennedy Jr. has huge support for the American populist movement. Look for the GOP elites to start their attacks on Bobby any day now,” Bannon continued.

   Trump’s team recently shared some interesting insight into his potential running mate.

   Trump insiders spoke to the Daily Caller and said the 45th president is likely to pick a vice presidential candidate that is “loyal,” has “charisma,” and is “ideologically aligned” with him.

   “No candidates have publicly announced their intent to be Trump’s VP, but the former president has indicated that a lot of people’ are ‘auditioning’ behind the scenes. Trump insiders told the Caller that although there haven’t been any formal discussions to narrow down the pool, there are a set of characteristics that will likely be considered,” the Daily Caller reported.

   “We do know one thing about Trump, is that he puts a lot of weight on how well you present yourself. That really matters to him, so I suspect that will matter for his VP choice,” a GOP consultant close to Trump told the Caller, adding that the person needs to be “TV ready.”

   “Loyalty. That’s the necessary characteristic of anyone who wants to be VP. President Trump and the movement was dragged down by disloyalty in the White House,” a source close to Trump said.

 While the insiders did not name anyone specifically in the interview, they did at least share some insight into the type of person he would be interested in.

   A recent Politico report stated that an unnamed Trump adviser said the 45th president is likely to choose a running mate “from three general lanes of candidates: women, conservatives of color, or a trusted adviser.”

   “Once you get past those two issues — loyalty and Trump going more with his gut — Trump has a lot of leeway in who he would pick,” said Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s lead pollster in 2016 and 2020.

   “He’s not necessarily looking to balance the ticket geographically, but what he can do is pick to balance gender, race, ethnicity — a lot of different lanes there. It could be everything from a Tim Scott in South Carolina to an Asian American in California or somebody Hispanic in Texas. There are so many choices and paths. And there’s lots of time to go,” he added.

   According to a report from the Washington Examiner, these four Republican women could be high on Trump’s shortlist: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and former Arizona journalist Kari Lake.

   The Washington Examiner reported:

   Sanders, the youngest governor in the United States and the longest-tenured press secretary in the Trump White House flew up political draft boards after she delivered what Trump supporters agree was an “exceptionally strong” response to Biden’s State of the Union on Feb. 7.

   Noem was elected as South Dakota’s first female governor in 2018 after spending more than a decade in the House of Representatives and has made a name for herself as a leading Republican lawmaker in the so-called “culture wars.”

   Stefanik, the current chairwoman of the House GOP conference, was elected as a centrist Republican in 2015 but, after serving on the president’s defense team during his first impeachment, has shifted increasingly to the right. She frequently touts her strong ties to Trump and even endorsed his 2024 run days before he announced his candidacy.

   Lake is perhaps the strangest potential pick and one many current and former Trump advisers hope he avoids. The former Phoenix-area news anchor lost her Trump-endorsed 2022 gubernatorial bid against Democrat Katie Hobbs, but she only further endeared herself to the former president by repeatedly claiming that widespread fraud occurred in the 2020 election.

   One name not mentioned in the Washinton Examiner report is Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Her name has been floated in the media recently.

[back-and-totheleft]

An unrepentant contrarian

Director Oliver Stone was wounded by the criticism he faced when he brought out his epic political drama JFK in 1991. “I was more of a younger man. It was painful to me,” he said recently. It didn’t do the film any harm to become the centre of controversy – it received eight Oscar nominations and was a box-office hit – but Stone was offended at being described as a dupe who had allowed himself to become the mouthpiece of conspiracy theorists.

JFK was based on an investigation by former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, played in the film by Kevin Costner, whose writings were dismissed as “hallucinatory bleatings” by Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association at the time and one of Stone’s more vituperative critics. The film urged viewers to believe that the facts of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 had been covered up, starting with the number of times he had been shot and from where, through who did it and why, ending with who knew the truth and why they stayed silent.

Essentially, his position hasn’t changed. Stone blames the CIA specifically, plus a supporting cast of officials who smoothed over or botched any real investigation; he also blamed Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president and successor, hinting that he might have been in on the plot. “The Warren commission (into Kennedy’s assassination) was a sham,” he says now. “They (meaning the intelligence agencies) appointed it.

“Lyndon Johnson basically didn’t want problems because he says he feared war with Russia over Cuba. That was his excuse. But if he’d really looked at the case, if he had had proper intelligence agencies working with him, he (would have known) that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with this assassination. Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy wrote to (Russian president) Khrushchev saying, ‘We know it’s not you; we know it’s a right-wing plot from our own country’. And that’s what it was.”

Since the film came out, a good deal of documentation has been released into the public domain that he says bears out his original case. He puts that case in JFK: Destiny Betrayed, which is now available as a four-part series. A two-hour movie version will open soon.

JFK is exhaustive in its detail and exhausting to watch. There are so many names and faces of people who either had something to do with the assassination and its aftermath or have an opinion about it that it is probably impossible to stay across them all. At the same time, a fair level of knowledge is assumed. In the first episode, we dive straight into the aftermath of Jack Ruby’s arrest for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. If you don’t know who they are, you’re going to spend a lot of time on Google.

Even Stone recognises that watching four hours of amassed evidence, much of it to do with bullet angles and the irregularities of Kennedy’s autopsy, is a big ask. “That’s why we did two hours,” he says. “The four-hour series is more of a scholar thing. I think it’s less effective and more boring, but you have to understand why it’s there. And there are some great things in it.”

Most interesting for anyone who isn’t a grassy-knoll buff is the background to Kennedy’s political development. “You get much more into who Kennedy was before he came to office,” says Stone. “We see he went to South-East Asia as a senator, where he sees the French losing the war in Vietnam. We see these unpopular, courageous stances as a senator and congressman and that he takes a lot of heat for it. Because you can’t understand who he is as a president until you see what forms his morality.” Kennedy believed America should be an anti-colonial force; anything else was un-American.

This is the real backbone of the film and series because it provides some ballast for the ostensibly weakest part of his case: why the CIA, in cahoots with the FBI, the mafia, the political right and the corporations that formed the military-industrial complex, would find a popular American president sufficiently threatening to kill him in broad daylight.

“He is one of the most important presidents because he was for peace at a time when we were on the brink of war,” says Stone. “In 1960, when he ran, the Pentagon was ready to take out Russia on the first strike. This was what their thinking was: ‘We gotta nail these bastards now’ … That was their Dr Strangelove thinking. Johnson put us right back smack into the middle of the biggest war we’d ever had since WWII and it was a disaster, as you know. A debacle.”

Of course, Oliver Stone is a contrarian, as evidenced by his lionising of American bogeymen such as Vladimir Putin (“a very patient man”), Hugo Chavez and the egregious former dictator of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, in soft-soaping documentaries. He refused to join the hand-wringing about Donald Trump, even at his most fractious. “I don’t see Trump as a major figure compared to (George W.) Bush. I don’t.” he says. “Bush really set the agenda for the country. We went into a global war, the war on terror.”

The invasion of the Capitol last January, which one might think would worry someone anxious about the survival of American democracy, didn’t trouble him either. “I think a lot of the press has made it bigger than it is. I think there are more important things going on than that January 6 event. People were pissed off, that’s all.” What appals him, as a supporter of Julian Assange, are the likely ramifications of any security breach. “How they’re going to spy on every American because of this stupid thing.“

One thing he does concede is the shift of the entire political spectrum to the right. Religion, which he once thought was fading from American life, has now returned as a right-wing political force. “It’s one of the great tragedies of my life, because it’s changed the nature of life in America. It’s made us more stressed, more harried, the wars have continued without reason,” he says.

And we should know it. “In Australia, you’ve been the victims of CIA plots for a long time but you’re not the only ones,” he says. “You know you’re not an ally. You’re a satellite of the US and it’s a shame you don’t realise it.”

Follow the money, he says. Follow the military hardware. Take note.

-Stephanie Benbury, "An unrepentant contrarian won’t change his position on JFK’s murder," The Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 1 2021

[garudabluffs]

In 2024, both Biden and Putin are up for re-election

Loose Jingles, RE: Nord Stream 1 and 2

"And Consortium News ran a piece from Craig Murray, a regular contributor, who decried the need for Hersh to resort to self-publishing when the MSM refused to go after the Nord Stream story. In "Sy Hersh and The Way We Live Now," Murray begins by saying,

We recall that the controversial Glenn Greenwald quit The Intercept, which he co-found, because they were wanting to "censor" his journalism -- specifically his intended 2020 October Surprise story about Biden family corruption. Murray continues with his piece by laying out -- with graphs -- just who benefitted monetarily from the explosion of the pipelines. Norway, most of all.

I have also followed the doings in Ukraine, from the 2016 DNC doings leading up to the Russian invasion last year here, here, and here."

"What the US brought about is the miraculous rise of Volodymyr Zelensky, a former dance contestant and comic actor on TV, with zilch previous political experience, who rose because he was a grooming project for Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky.

The oligarch has been banned from entering the US by the State Department, due to his "significant role" in corruption in Ukrainian politics. According to a Daily Beast article, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said "he was also concerned about Kolomoisky's 'current and ongoing efforts' to 'undermine Ukraine's democratic processes and institutions.'" This is funny. Zelensky played a highschool teacher, in the hit series Servant of the People, who was outraged by the nations's corruption, and fired up so many fellow citizens that they elected the actor, Zelensky, leader of Servant of the People Party, president of Ukraine.

Deputy Prime Minister and man behind Zelensky, Mikhail Federov explains why it doesn't matter if Zelensky has any political savvy and what he can bring to the table. And yet this CIA asset is almost daily asking/pleading/demanding US billions -- and US jet fighters -- to defend its oligarchs against Russia (and, presumably, its oligarchs). Recall that the US totally understands that the economic sanctions placed on Russia and its oligarchs could well lead to regime change. Like Federov says, Zelensky has already "monetized and made "something out of nothing" to the tune of many billions."

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Loose Jingles, RE: Nord Stream 1 and 2

By John Hawkins       (Page 2 of 2 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page.   2 comments, In Series: Op-Eds

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And Consortium News ran a piece from Craig Murray, a regular contributor, who decried the need for Hersh to resort to self-publishing when the MSM refused to go after the Nord Stream story. In "Sy Hersh and The Way We Live Now," Murray begins by saying,

We recall that the controversial Glenn Greenwald quit The Intercept, which he co-found, because they were wanting to "censor" his journalism -- specifically his intended 2020 October Surprise story about Biden family corruption. Murray continues with his piece by laying out -- with graphs -- just who benefitted monetarily from the explosion of the pipelines. Norway, most of all.

I have also followed the doings in Ukraine, from the 2016 DNC doings leading up to the Russian invasion last year here, here, and here. I think it's telling what Victoria Nuland stated, in 2014, according to one of her Wikipedia entries, drawn from a book: Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy, "Following the Maidan Uprising of 2013, Nuland stated that the United States had 'invested' $5 billion to bring about a 'secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.'" What the US brought about is the miraculous rise of Volodymyr Zelensky, a former dance contestant and comic actor on TV, with zilch previous political experience, who rose because he was a grooming project for Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky.

The oligarch has been banned from entering the US by the State Department, due to his "significant role" in corruption in Ukrainian politics. According to a Daily Beast article, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said "he was also concerned about Kolomoisky's 'current and ongoing efforts' to 'undermine Ukraine's democratic processes and institutions.'" This is funny. Zelensky played a highschool teacher, in the hit series Servant of the People, who was outraged by the nations's corruption, and fired up so many fellow citizens that they elected the actor, Zelensky, leader of Servant of the People Party, president of Ukraine.

Deputy Prime Minister and man behind Zelensky, Mikhail Federov explains why it doesn't matter if Zelensky has any political savvy and what he can bring to the table. And yet this CIA asset is almost daily asking/pleading/demanding US billions -- and US jet fighters -- to defend its oligarchs against Russia (and, presumably, its oligarchs). Recall that the US totally understands that the economic sanctions placed on Russia and its oligarchs could well lead to regime change. Like Federov says, Zelensky has already "monetized and made "something out of nothing" to the tune of many billions.

It should also be remembered that the US policy of infiltrating various Russian infrastructure, including its grids and communication structure, with worms and malware are an act of war, too. Or, so it seems, according to a 2019 NYT article, "U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia's Power Grid," in which the authors strongly formally suggest, as many of us have long suspected, that the Internet is a literal battlefield, with all of the implications of that designation applied. The authors (David Sanger and Nicole Pertroth) tell us:

A similar authorization --without direct presidential approval -- was behind the Nord Stream sabotage, according to Hersh. Handy plausible deniability for any commander-in-chief up for re-election, should something go wrong.

By the way, where in the world is Cofer Black?'

An Ed Snowden Coincidence

It has made me wonder for some time why Ed Snowden had only one Substack post of 2022. Not too long ago in an interview on unrelated matters, I asked JFK Assassination researcher Jefferson Morley to weigh in on Snowden's one post for the year -- his first since Christmas Eve 2021. Morley wise not to overspeculate mere thought that Snowden had a growing family, was in a difficult position, and needed to keep them safe by sticking to a regimen of tweets instead of analytical Substack blog entries. Fair enough. But it doesn't explain why he wrote that one piece, which stands out for its loneliness. And the subject of the one piece for the year is the CIA: "America's Open Wound:The CIA is not your friend." What follows is a well-written article on the Agency's history of subterfuge from blowing things up to mind control. Presumably it was written to address the 75th anniversary of the Agency's founding (New Yorker took stock of the CIA a month after Snowden's piece and could even be derived from it.) But now it seems an interesting coincidence that his blog piece was published just a week before the Nord Stream explosion. There have been no Snowden Substack pieces since. And it remains to see whether they'll be any other Hersh pieces.

And BTW, Ed, I love ya, man, but what am I paying you $5 a month for to subscribe to your Substack site if youintend to pony up one story a year? Strange times.'

[sage-advice-wrapped-in-rice]

Interest Groups: An Interesting Dilemma

Another essay I wrote for a political science class I’m taking. Please don’t argue with me in the comments I don’t care about your opinion.

Interest groups have been an essential component of public representation and opinion for centuries in the American political sphere. They are catalysts for change and have been an integral part of the efforts our government has made to address issues such as civil rights, climate change, and gun control. They are a direct extension of the American people, which is why we should take an in-depth look into the positive and negatives that make up interest groups, and seek to maximize their beneficial effects.

Though many interest groups do not have specific political biases, a fair amount do and, no surprise, those are usually the ones we hear about the most. Groups like the NRA and Majority Forward tend to have strong political leanings, the NRA being conservative and Majority Forward being more liberal. Personally, I think interest groups that align more with one party or the other aren’t really the ones that represent the people the best. They’re usually private interest groups that have their own agenda outside of what they say publicly. I think that whichever group can create the most news gets “represented” the most in the media. The NRA is actually a great example of that despite the fact that they are actually a public interest group, and technically they’re a nonprofit. Gun control has been a hot topic for a while and with each new shooting there comes a call to action for politicians to do something about it, and the NRA is always demonized, sometimes rightfully and sometimes not. However, the president of the NRA is always somehow talking to or being seen with some member of the Republican party, which makes it seem like all Republicans align themselves with the NRA. Groups like Majority Forward are less well known but they seem to be more concerned with the actual political aspect of being an interest group. Their job is more or less about working against Republican and conservative campaigns and organizing voter registration and turnout events. They still don’t really show how they align with the opinion of the public, but it has influence over elections. Both of these interest groups have effects on elections and therefore on the people. In terms of actual representation of the public I think interest groups that are largely politically motivated shouldn’t be included. There are, however, plenty of interest groups that actually represent values of different groups of people. AARP is a great example, especially because our tax dollars are funding things they help with, like Medicare. It shows that the general public believes that the elderly of our society should have care and have access to people who will tell them their options and help them into retirement and general life as a senior. 

The influence over democracy that interest groups can have varies widely. In certain cases they can sway elections drastically. ExxonMobil is a perfect example of this. In the 2016 election they worked very closely with the Trump administration. ExxonMobil being an oil company means it has many resources and connections and they can afford lobbyists. It worked so well for them that when Trump was elected they had five cabinet nominees that had either previously worked for ExxonMobil or been funded by them(Rowland-Shea et al., 2022). One of these nominees was for secretary of state and it was Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of the company. Does ExxonMobil have the best interest of the people at heart? I would bet not. It is an unfortunate truth that money controls a good amount of our government. It’s been that way since nearly the beginning of the United States government and sometimes interest groups, like ExxonMobil, perpetuate that. Because of this, they can sway elections in unfair ways which is why we can't rely solely on interest groups to fill in the gaps created by our current form of voting.  On the other hand, like I mentioned before, interest groups can help to mobilize people. They can work to make sure all different groups of people are heard and represented, and they make sure all these groups have a way to find pertinent political information about policies that directly affect them. Interest groups are also a great way to tell which issues are of most importance to the people especially because a lot of interest groups provide public goods. If a group that provides a service that doesn’t require the support of the people gets a lot of support anyways(meaning money), it shows that people are invested and interested in this cause. Because of the support it then gains from those people the interest group is then able to have more influence in the government. They can hire lobbyists and afford advertisements and create change in society. They can almost be seen as an extension of the popular vote, and would be better at representing what the people want if all interest groups worked that way.

Like most things, the necessity and usefulness of interest groups is not entirely black and white. They can have real influence in our government and daily lives. The NRA has an iron grip on the Republican party and I’m sure some Republican voters are happy about that. AARP has an iron grip on the senior population of America and we are definitely better off with them in existence. Interest groups also enforce the important idea that everybody should have representation in our government and it’s even better that most interest groups are run by regular people not involved in politics. There are groups like the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute that research issues that affect these racial groups and put information out on legislation that affects them. Since, historically, certain racial groups are often overlooked or underrepresented in the government and elections these interest groups show more accurately what the people that belong to them want and how they feel. Religious groups like the American Jewish Congress and Catholic Charities USA do a lot of charity work and advocacy, but still don’t really align themselves with political parties. What I think these groups do is bring people together and that provides an outlet and community for them to speak up politically and put their support into different causes and candidates publicly. Because popular sovereignty is inherently flawed in our system of government, interest groups are needed to make sure important issues and groups of people are not overlooked or ignored. It’s the people advocating for themselves which unifies them and enforces the idea that the people do have power and are capable of creating change and having influence. Despite the clicheness of the phrase they really embody the spirit of “be the change you want to see.”At the same time they can cause even more corruption and tampering in elections and other government processes. To decrease this side effect, more emphasis should be put on congressional testimonies by interest groups with less influence. Certain amounts of time could be set aside to specifically listen to what interest groups want to say as opposed to only hearing it when issues that apply to them are discussed in congress. This would give public interest groups, that don’t have as many resources as private ones, more of an opportunity to be heard and create positive change in our government.

Interests groups have helped shape America into the country that it is today. Through their actions they represent the more specific interests and concerns of the American people that can be overlooked when all we get to directly vote for in the federal government are representatives. Despite that they are also very flawed, and the system allows for them to be that way. America is not what it was fifty years ago and we are better(and maybe a little worse) for it. Part of that is due to the efforts made by interest groups. We need to protect and improve interest groups so that fifty years from now America will see an even greater benefit.

Works Cited:

Rowland-Shea, J., Alexander-Kearns, M., Lee-Ashley, M., & Marano, H. (2022, September 1). How Exxon won the 2016 election. Center for American Progress. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-exxon-won-the-2016-election/ 

[maxwell-grant]

What are your thoughts on Jekyll/Hyde and his archetype of the human periodically changing into a monster ?

Jekyll & Hyde was the 2nd horror story I read following Frankenstein, I got it off the same library and it always stuck very strongly with me even before I got into horror in general. I even dressed up as Jekyll/Hyde as a kid for a school fair by shredding a lab coat on one side and asking my sister to make-up claw gashes on my exposed arm and paint half of my face, although in hindsight I think I ended up looking more like Doctor Two-Face than Jekyll/Hyde, but I was 12 and didn't have any Victorian clothing to use so I had to make do. The first film project I tried doing at film school was intended to be a modern take on Jekyll & Hyde, and I didn't get much farther than a couple of discarded scripts

Much like Frankenstein, Mr Hyde as a character and a story is something that's kind of baked into everything I do artistically. And it's not just me, as even in pop culture itself, none of us can escape Mr Hyde. I would go so far as to argue Mr Hyde may be the single most significant character created by victorian fiction, if only by the sheer impact and legacy the character's had.

(Fan-art by guilhermefranco)

Part of what makes Mr Hyde such a powerful and lasting icon of pop culture is that the very premise of the book invites a personal reading that's gonna vary from person to person. Because everyone's familiar with the basic twist of the story, that it's a conflict of duality, of the good and evil sides, but everyone has a more personal idea of what those entail. Some people make the story more about class. A lot of readings laser-focus on sex and lust as the driving force, and there's also a lot of readings of Mr Hyde that tackle it to explore a more gendered perspective, and so forth.

I don't particularly take much notice of the Jekyll & Hyde adaptations partially because the novel's premise and themes have become baked so throughly into pop culture and explored in so many different and interesting ways, that I'm not particularly starving for good Jekyll & Hyde adaptations the way I am for Dracula and Frankenstein. The Fredric March film in particular is one that orbits my head less because of the film itself (although I do recommend it), but because of one specific scene, and that's when Jekyll first transforms into Hyde on screen.

Out of all the things they could have shown him doing right that second, they instead took the time to show him enjoying the rain.

Just Hyde taking off his hat and letting it all cascade on his face with this sheer enthusiasm like he's never been to the rain before, never enjoyed it before, and now that he's free from being Jekyll, he gets to enjoy life like he never has before. It's such an oddly humanizing moment to put amidst a horror movie, in the scene where you're ostensibly introducing the monster to the audience, and it makes such a stark contrast to the rest of the film where Hyde is completely irredeemable, but I think it's that contrast that makes the film's take on Hyde work so well even with it's diverging from the source material, even if I don't particularly like in general interpretations of Hyde that are focused on a sexual aspect.

Because one, it understands that Jekyll was fundamentally a self-serving coward and not a paragon of goodness, and two, it also understands one of the things that makes Hyde scary: He wants what all of us want, to live and be happy. He's happy when he leaves the lab and dances around in the rain like a giddy child, he's happy when he goes to places Jekyll couldn't dream of showing up, he's happy as a showgirl-abusing sexual predator. Hyde is all wants, all the time, and there's not that much difference between his wants, his domineering possessiveness, and the likes exhibited by Muriel's father and Jekyll's own within the very same film, which also works to emphasize one of the other ideas of the original story, that Edward Hyde doesn't come from nowhere. That no monster is closer to humanity than Mr Hyde, because he is us. He is the thing that Jekyll refused to take responsability for until it was too late.

(Art by LorenzoMastroianni)

While many of the ideas that defined Mr Hyde had already been explored in pop culture beforehand, Hyde popularized and redefined many of them in particular by modernizing the idea. He was the werewolf, the doppelganger, The Player On The Other Side, except he came from within. He was not transformed by circumstance, he made himself that way, and the elixir merely brought out something already inside his soul. To acknowledge that he's there is to acknowledge that he is you, and to not do that is to either lose to him, or perish. Hyde was there to address both the rot settling in Victorian society as well as grappling concerns over Darwinian heritage, of the realization that man has always had the beast inside of him (it's no accident that Hyde's main method of murder is by clubbing people to death with his cane like a caveman).

I've already argued on my post about Tarzan that the Wild Man archetype, beginning with Enkidu of The Epic of Gilgamesh, is the in-between man and beast, between superhero and monster, and that Mr Hyde is an essential component of the superhero's trajectory, as the creature split in between. That stories about dual personalities, doppelgangers, the duality of the soul, the hero with a day job and an after dark career, you can pinpoint Hyde as a turning point in how all of these solidified gradually in pop culture. And I've argued otherwise that The Punisher, for all that his image and narrative points otherwise, is ultimately just as much of a superhero as the rest of them, even if no one wants to admit it, drawing a parallel between The Punisher and Mr Hyde. And he's far from the only modern character that can invite this kind of parallel.

The idea of a regular person periodically or permanently transforming into, or revealing itself to be, something extraordinary and fantastic and scary, grappling with the divide it causes in their soul, and questions whether it's a new development or merely the truest parts of themselves coming to light at last, and the effects this transformation has for good and bad alike. The idea of a potent, dangerous, unpredictable enemy who ultimately is you, or at least a facet of you and what you can do. That these are bound to destroy each other if not reconciled with or overcome.

You know what are my thoughts on the archetype of "human periodically changing into a monster" are? Look around you and you're gonna see the myriad ways The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde's themes have manifested in the century and a half since the story's release. Why it shouldn't be any surprise whatsoever that Mr Hyde has become such an integral part of pop culture, in it's heroes and monsters alike. Why we can never escape Mr Hyde, just as Jekyll never could.

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde.

He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close… - Hunter S. Thompson

There is a scene in the movie Pulp Fiction that explains almost every terrible thing happening in the news today. And it's not the scene where Ving Rhames shoots that guy's dick off. It's the part where the hit man played by John Travolta is talking about how somebody vandalized his car, and says this:

"Boy, I wish I could've caught him doing it. I'd have given anything to catch that asshole doing it. It'd been worth him doing it, just so I could've caught him doing it."

That last sentence is something everyone should understand about mankind. After all, the statement is completely illogical -- revenge is supposed to be about righting a wrong. But he wants to be wronged, specifically so he'll have an excuse to get revenge. We all do.

Why else would we love a good revenge movie? We sit in a theater and watch Liam Neeson's daughter get kidnapped. We're not sad about it, because we know he's a badass and he finally has permission to be awesome. Not a single person in that theater was rooting for it to all be an innocent misunderstanding. We wanted Liam to be wronged, because we wanted to see him kick ass. It's why so many people walk around with vigilante fantasies in their heads.

Long, long ago, the people in charge figured out that the easiest and most reliable way to bind a society together was by controlling and channeling our hate addiction. That's the reason why seeing hurricane wreckage on the news makes us mumble "That's sad" and maybe donate a few bucks to the Red Cross hurricane fund, while 9/11 sends us into a decade-long trillion-dollar rage that leaves the Middle East in flames.

The former was caused by wind; the latter was caused by monsters. The former makes us kind of bummed out; the latter gets us high.

It's easy to blame the news media for pumping us full of stories of mass shootings and kidnapped children, but that's stopping one step short of the answer: The media just gives us what we want. And what we want is to think we're beset on all sides by monsters.

The really popular stories will always feature monsters that are as different from us as possible. Think about Star Wars -- what real shithead has ever referred to himself as being on "the dark side"? In Harry Potter and countless fantasy universes, you have wizards working in "black magic" and the "dark arts." Can you imagine a scientist developing some technology for chemical weapons or invasive advertising openly thinking of what he does as "dark science"? Can you imagine a real world leader naming his headquarters "The Death Star" or "Mount Doom"?

Of course not. But we need to believe that evil people know they're evil, or else that would open the door to the fact that we might be evil without knowing it. I mean, sure, maybe we've bought chocolate that was made using child slaves or driven cars that poisoned the air, but we didn't do it to be evil -- we were simply doing whatever we felt like and ignoring the consequences. Not like Hitler and the bankers who ruined the economy and those people who burned the kittens -- they wake up every day intentionally dreaming up new evils to create. It's not like Hitler actually thought he was saving the world.

So no matter how many times you vote to cut food stamps and then use the money to buy a boat, you could still be way worse. You could, after all, be one of those murdering / lazy / ignorant / greedy / oppressive monsters that you know the world is full of, and that only your awesome moral code prevents you from turning into at any moment. And those monsters are out there.

They have to be. Because otherwise, we're the monsters - 5 Reasons Humanity Desperately Wants Monsters To Be Real, by Jason Pargin

(Two-Face sequence comes from the end of Batman Annual #14: Eye of the Beholder)

For good or bad, Hyde has become omnipresent. He's a part of our superheroes, he's a part of our supervillains, he's in our monsters. He lives and prattles in our ears, sometimes we need him to survive, and sometimes we become Hyde even when we don't need to, because our survival instincts or base cruelties or desperation brings out the worst in us. Sometimes we can beat him, and sometimes he's not that bad. Sometimes we do need to appease him and listen to what he says, about us and the world around us. And sometimes we need to do so specifically to prove him wrong and beat him again.

But he never, ever goes away, as he so accurately declares in the musical

Do you really think That I would ever let you go...

Do you think I'd ever set you free?

If you do, I'm sad to say It simply isn't so

You will never get away FROM MEEEEEE

(Art by Akreon on Artstation)

[tanadrin]

Honest question: how do you expect anyone to build a life that will be just fine irrespective of politics?Everything in my life which I’ve used to try and deal with shit has been destroyed by this pandemic, and the country is about to reelect the demagogue whose policy has been making that worse. This isn’t catastrophizing - the situation is a catastrophe. Is the solution just “move to a different country lol?” Because I imagine you know that’s actually rather hard.

if you’re American, and by “reelect the demagogue whose policy has been making that worse” you mean Trump

(if you’re not, and are referring to some other demagogue-led country, ignore this bit)

then I have to point out that 538 is giving Trump about a 12% chance right now, and he’s behind in both national and swing-state polls, and while 12% is not nothing, it is also only a 12% chance. multiply all pessimism contingent on a Trump victory by 12%, and all potential optimism contingent on a Biden victory by 88%. Remember that even a 2016-sized polling error does not give Trump a greater than 50% probability of winning; a Trump victory would require a Dewey-beats-Truman sized polling error, and while that’s happened before (when Truman beat Dewey, natch), it’s happened once before in the era of modern Presidential election polling. The odds right now of Democrats winning the Presidency, holding the House, and having a slim majority in the Senate are at about 70% (again, per recent 538 reporting), so catastrophism about the outcome of the American election is... well, catastrophism! Because the situation the US is facing is not actually catastrophe.

I know dirtbag left doomerism is popular on Twitter these days, but it’s, pardon my uncharitability, fucking stupid and just as divorced from reality as Fox News-poisoned right-wing conspiracism. On balance the likely outcome of this election is Democratic control of the legislative and executive branches, and--though this would be contingent on a strong Dem majority in the Senate, and popular appetite for it--there’s a nonzero chance of Dems packing SCOTUS and having control of all three branches of government. Small chance, to be sure, but far, far larger than it’s ever been in my lifetime.

(and if you think ACB being confirmed means a 99% chance that SCOTUS will steal the election... that is also stupid. the supreme court is only relevant in a handful of very specific circumstances where the election is nearly a tie, and those are not very likely circumstances! it would be very bad if we got Bush v Gore 2.0, yes; and being concerned about SCOTUS picks to avoid that kind of thing is reasonable; but letting fear of that scenario dominate your predictions for how the election will turn out would be extremely fucking stupid. I would put more money on the Dems packing the court in 2021 than I would on the court deciding the 2020 election. Not a lot, you understand; but I’d much sooner bet 50 euro on the former than the latter.)

(again, if you’re not American, ignore all the above; but AFAIK other likely demagogue led-countries you might be from, like Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Russia, the Philippines, and the UK, do not have upcoming elections.)

You build a life with meaning outside of politics the same way you build a life with meaning in general. Dan Savage (yeah yeah I know) talks about this w/r/t people who are lonely and have no short-term, or even long-term, prospects of a romantic relationship. You read, you have hobbies, you make friends, you refuse to let bitterness and rage consume you--and in this day and age, you get off social media, if that’s where your bitterness and rage is coming from--and you develop yourself as a well-rounded person so that if you do stumble into a scenario where a romantic relationship seems possible, you are an interesting and fun person to be in a relationship with, because you have a full and complete life outside that relationship.

So too with any other sphere of life. If thoughts of politics and anger against politicians is consuming your life, fucking stop consuming news about politics. It’s not doing you any good. By all means, vote in elections, even volunteer for political organizations, but also read, cultivate hobbies, make friends, get out of the house, get in shape, learn to bake--find out who you are in all areas of life besides the one making you miserable, in short. Yeah, coronavirus makes all this harder. It doesn’t make any of it impossible. I know it’s driving us all a little crazy--me included, and I’m a married Extremely Online homebody--but it won’t last forever. And you get to choose what to do with yourself in the meantime. You get to choose how consumed with resentment and frustration at the world you’re gonna be. You get to choose every day whether you’re going to let the fear that nothing is possible for you govern your behavior, or whether you’re going to try to accomplish something (however difficult, however small) despite the circumstances around you.

If you write 300 words a day--a short newspaper column--then in six or seven months you’ll have a novel. If you do 20 minutes of exercise a day, in six months you could be in the best shape of your life. If you spend an hour a day playing with Python, in six months you could be a fairly competent programmer. And so on and so forth. Mutatis mutandis, as far as the things you’re actually interested in, but the underlying point holds: just because the world feels like it’s going to hell in a handbasket doesn’t mean you can’t build up your life in other areas. The ‘rona doesn’t stop you from having an online or socially-distanced book club, or from hanging out with friends outdoors, or from getting drunk on raid night with your WoW guild (A++ can recommend, btw).

And if you really can’t, if the anxiety or the anger or the worry or the sheer overwhelming weight of it all means you can’t even manage modest effort in the things you care about, you should assign a much greater likelihood to the possibility that your brain is broken, that your thoughts are lying to you (they do that sometimes!) and that your life might be greatly improved by some combination of anti-anxiety medication/antidepressants and talk therapy. Because God is dead, depressive realism is horseshit, and we have to make our own meaning in the world; and the human brain is, in fact, usually very good at that when it’s firing on all cylinders.

[taylorswifthongkong]

Taylor Swift broke all her rules with Folklore — and gave herself a much-needed escape The pop star, one of EW's 2020 Entertainers of the Year, delves deep into her surprise eighth album, Rebekah Harkness, and a Joe Biden presidency. By Alex Suskind

“He is my co-writer on ‛Betty’ and ‛Exile,’” replies Taylor Swift with deadpan precision. The question Who is William Bowery? was, at the time we spoke, one of 2020’s great mysteries, right up there with the existence of Joe Exotic and the sudden arrival of murder hornets. An unknown writer credited on the year’s biggest album? It must be an alias.

Is he your brother?

“He’s William Bowery,” says Swift with a smile.

It's early November, after Election Day but before Swift eventually revealed Bowery's true identity to the world (the leading theory, that he was boyfriend Joe Alwyn, proved prescient). But, like all Swiftian riddles, it was fun to puzzle over for months, particularly in this hot mess of a year, when brief distractions are as comforting as a well-worn cardigan. Thankfully, the Bowery... erhm, Alwyn-assisted Folklore — a Swift project filled with muted pianos and whisper-quiet snares, recorded in secret with Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner — delivered.

“The only people who knew were the people I was making it with, my boyfriend, my family, and a small management team,” Swift, 30, tells EW of the album's hush-hush recording sessions. That gave the intimate Folklore a mystique all its own: the first surprise Taylor Swift album, one that prioritized fantastical tales over personal confessions.

“Early in quarantine, I started watching lots of films,” she explains. “Consuming other people’s storytelling opened this portal in my imagination and made me feel like, Why have I never created characters and intersecting storylines?” That’s how she ended up with three songs about an imagined love triangle (“Cardigan,” “Betty,” “August”), one about a clandestine romance (“Illicit Affairs”), and another chronicling a doomed relationship (“Exile”). Others tell of sumptuous real-life figures like Rebekah Harkness, a divorcee who married the heir to Standard Oil — and whose home Swift purchased 31 years after her death. The result, “The Last Great American Dynasty,” hones in on Harkness’ story, until Swift cleverly injects herself.

And yet, it wouldn’t be a Swift album without a few barbed postmortems over her own history. Notably, “My Tears Ricochet” and “Mad Woman," which touch on her former label head Scott Borchetta selling the masters to Swift’s catalog to her known nemesis Scooter Braun. Mere hours after our interview, the lyrics’ real-life origins took a surprising twist, when news broke that Swift’s music had once again been sold, to another private equity firm, for a reported $300 million. Though Swift ignored repeated requests for comment on the transaction, she did tweet a statement, hitting back at Braun while noting that she had begun re-recording her old albums — something she first promised in 2019 as a way of retaining agency over her creative legacy. (Later, she would tease a snippet of that reimagined work, with a new version of her hit 2008 single "Love Story.")

Like surprise-dropping Folklore, like pissing off the president by endorsing his opponents, like shooing away haters, Swift does what suits her. “I don’t think we often hear about women who did whatever the hell they wanted,” she says of Harkness — something Swift is clearly intent on changing. For her, that means basking in the world of, and favorable response to, Folklore. As she says in our interview, “I have this weird thing where, in order to create the next thing, I attack the previous thing. I don’t love that I do that, but it is the thing that has kept me pivoting to another world every time I make an album. But with this one, I still love it.”

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: We’ve spent the year quarantined in our houses, trying to stay healthy and avoiding friends and family. Were you surprised by your ability to create and release a full album in the middle of a pandemic?

TAYLOR SWIFT: I was. I wasn't expecting to make an album. Early on in quarantine, I started watching lots of films. We would watch a different movie every night. I'm ashamed to say I hadn't seen Pan's Labyrinth before. One night I'd watch that, then I'd watch L.A. Confidential, then we'd watch Rear Window, then we'd watch Jane Eyre. I feel like consuming other people's art and storytelling sort of opened this portal in my imagination and made me feel like, "Well, why have I never done this before? Why have I never created characters and intersecting storylines? And why haven't I ever sort of freed myself up to do that from a narrative standpoint?" There is something a little heavy about knowing when you put out an album, people are going to take it so literally that everything you say could be clickbait. It was really, really freeing to be able to just be inspired by worlds created by the films you watch or books you've read or places you've dreamed of or people that you've wondered about, not just being inspired by your own experience.

In that vain, what's it like to sit down and write something like “Betty,” which is told from the perspective of a 17-year-old boy?

That was huge for me. And I think it came from the fact that my co-writer, William Bowery [Joe Alwyn], is male — and he was the one who originally thought of the chorus melody. And hearing him sing it, I thought, "That sounds really cool." Obviously, I don't have a male voice, but I thought, "I could have a male perspective." Patty Griffin wrote this song, “Top of the World.” It's one of my favorite songs of all time, and it's from the perspective of this older man who has lived a life full of regret, and he's kind of taking stock of that regret. So, I thought, "This is something that people I am a huge fan of have done. This would be fun to kind of take this for a spin."

What are your favorite William Bowery conspiracies?

I love them all individually and equally. I love all the conspiracy theories around this album. [With] "Betty," Jack Antonoff would text me these articles and think pieces and in-depth Tumblr posts on what this love triangle meant to the person who had listened to it. And that's exactly what I was hoping would happen with this album. I wrote these stories for a specific reason and from a specific place about specific people that I imagined, but I wanted that to all change given who was listening to it. And I wanted it to start out as mine and become other people's. It's been really fun to watch.

One of the other unique things about Folklore — the parameters around it were completely different from anything you'd done. There was no long roll out, no stadium-sized pop anthems, no aiming for the radio-friendly single. How fearful were you in avoiding what had worked in the past?

I didn't think about any of that for the very first time. And a lot of this album was kind of distilled down to the purest version of what the story is. Songwriting on this album is exactly the way that I would write if I considered nothing else other than, "What words do I want to write? What stories do I want to tell? What melodies do I want to sing? What production is essential to tell those stories?" It was a very do-it-yourself experience. My management team, we created absolutely everything in advance — every lyric video, every individual album package. And then we called our label a week in advance and said, "Here's what we have.” The photo shoot was me and the photographer walking out into a field. I'd done my hair and makeup and brought some nightgowns. These experiences I was used to having with 100 people on set, commanding alongside other people in a very committee fashion — all of a sudden it was me and a photographer, or me and my DP. It was a new challenge, because I love collaboration. But there's something really fun about knowing what you can do if it's just you doing it.

Did you find it freeing?

I did. Every project involves different levels of collaboration, because on other albums there are things that my stylist will think of that I never would've thought of. But if I had all those people on the photo shoot, I would've had to have them quarantine away from their families for weeks on end, and I would've had to ask things of them that I didn't think were fair if I could figure out a way to do it [myself]. I had this idea for the [Folklore album cover] that it would be this girl sleepwalking through the forest in a nightgown in 1830 [laughs]. Very specific. A pioneer woman sleepwalking at night. I made a moodboard and sent it to Beth [Garrabrant], who I had never worked with before, who shoots only on film. We were just carrying bags across a field and putting the bags of film down, and then taking pictures. It was a blast.

Folklore includes plenty of intimate acoustic echoes to what you've done in the past. But there are also a lot of new sonics here, too — these quiet, powerful, intricately layered harmonics. What was it like to receive the music from Aaron and try to write lyrics on top of it? 

Well, Aaron is one of the most effortlessly prolific creators I've ever worked with. It's really mind-blowing. And every time I've spoken to an artist since this whole process [began], I said, "You need to work with him. It'll change the way you create." He would send me these — he calls them sketches, but it's basically an instrumental track. the second day — the day after I texted him and said, "Hey, would you ever want to work together?" — he sent me this file of probably 30 of these instrumentals and every single one of them was one of the most interesting, exciting things I had ever heard. Music can be beautiful, but it can be lacking that evocative nature. There was something about everything he created that is an immediate image in my head or melody that I came up with. So much so that I'd start writing as soon as I heard a new one. And oftentimes what I would send back would inspire him to make more instrumentals and then send me that one. And then I wrote the song and it started to shape the project, form-fitted and customized to what we wanted to do.

It was weird because I had never made an album and not played it for my girlfriends or told my friends. The only people who knew were the people that I was making it with, my boyfriend, my family, and then my management team. So that's the smallest number of people I've ever had know about something. I'm usually playing it for everyone that I'm friends with. So I had a lot of friends texting me things like, "Why didn't you say on our everyday FaceTimes you were making a record?"

Was it nice to be able to keep it a secret?

Well, it felt like it was only my thing. It felt like such an inner world I was escaping to every day that it almost didn't feel like an album. Because I wasn't making a song and finishing it and going, "Oh my God, that is catchy.” I wasn't making these things with any purpose in mind. And so it was almost like having it just be mine was this really sweet, nice, pure part of the world as everything else in the world was burning and crashing and feeling this sickness and sadness. I almost didn't process it as an album. This was just my daydream space.

Does it still feel like that?

Yeah, because I love it so much. I have this weird thing that I do when I create something where in order to create the next thing I kind of, in my head, attack the previous thing. I don't love that I do that but it is the thing that has kept me pivoting to another world every time I make an album. But with this one, I just still love it. I'm so proud of it. And so that feels very foreign to me. That doesn't feel like a normal experience that I've had with releasing albums.

When did you first learn about Rebekah Harkness?

Oh, I learned about her as soon as I was being walked through [her former Rhode Island] home. I got the house when I was in my early twenties as a place for my family to congregate and be together. I was told about her, I think, by the real estate agent who was walking us through the property. And as soon as I found out about her, I wanted to know everything I could. So I started reading. I found her so interesting. And then as more parallels began to develop between our two lives — being the lady that lives in that house on the hill that everybody gets to gossip about — I was always looking for an opportunity to write about her. And I finally found it.

I love that you break the fourth wall in the song. Did you go in thinking you’d include yourself in the story?

I think that in my head, I always wanted to do a country music, standard narrative device, which is: the first verse you sing about someone else, the second verse you sing about someone else who's even closer to you, and then in the third verse, you go, "Surprise! It was me.” You bring it personal for the last verse. And I'd always thought that if I were to tell that story, I would want to include the similarities — our lives or our reputations or our scandals.

How often did you regale friends about the history of Rebekah and Holiday House while hanging out at Holiday House? 

Anyone who's been there before knows that I do “The Tour,” in quotes, where I show everyone through the house. And I tell them different anecdotes about each room, because I've done that much research on this house and this woman. So in every single room, there's a different anecdote about Rebekah Harkness. If you have a mixed group of people who've been there before and people who haven't, [the people who’ve been there] are like, "Oh, she's going to do the tour. She's got to tell you the story about how the ballerinas used to practice on the lawn.” And they'll go get a drink and skip it because it's the same every time. But for me, I'm telling the story with the same electric enthusiasm, because it's just endlessly entertaining to me that this fabulous woman lived there. She just did whatever she wanted.

There are a handful of songs on Folklore that feel like pretty clear nods to your personal life over the last year, including your relationships with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun. How long did it take to crystallize the feelings you had around both of them into “My Tears Ricochet” or “Mad Woman”?

I found myself being very triggered by any stories, movies, or narratives revolving around divorce, which felt weird because I haven't experienced it directly. There’s no reason it should cause me so much pain, but all of a sudden it felt like something I had been through. I think that happens any time you've been in a 15-year relationship and it ends in a messy, upsetting way. So I wrote “My Tears Ricochet” and I was using a lot of imagery that I had conjured up while comparing a relationship ending to when people end an actual marriage. All of a sudden this person that you trusted more than anyone in the world is the person that can hurt you the worst. Then all of a sudden the things that you have been through together, hurt. All of a sudden, the person who was your best friend is now your biggest nemesis, etc. etc. etc. I think I wrote some of the first lyrics to that song after watching Marriage Story and hearing about when marriages go wrong and end in such a catastrophic way. So these songs are in some ways imaginary, in some ways not, and in some ways both.

How did it feel to drop an F-bomb on "Mad Woman"?

F---ing fantastic.

And that’s the first time you ever recorded one on a record, right?

Yeah. Every rule book was thrown out. I always had these rules in my head and one of them was, You haven't done this before, so you can't ever do this. “Well, you've never had an explicit sticker, so you can't ever have an explicit sticker.” But that was one of the times where I felt like you need to follow the language and you need to follow the storyline. And if the storyline and the language match up and you end up saying the F-word, just go for it. I wasn't adhering to any of the guidelines that I had placed on myself. I decided to just make what I wanted to make. And I'm really happy that the fans were stoked about that because I think they could feel that. I'm not blaming anyone else for me restricting myself in the past. That was all, I guess, making what I want to make. I think my fans could feel that I opened the gate and ran out of the pasture for the first time, which I'm glad they picked up on because they're very intuitive.

Let’s talk about “Epiphany.” The first verse is a nod to your grandfather, Dean, who fought in World War II. What does his story mean to you personally? 

I wanted to write about him for awhile. He died when I was very young, but my dad would always tell this story that the only thing that his dad would ever say about the war was when somebody would ask him, "Why do you have such a positive outlook on life?" My grandfather would reply, "Well, I'm not supposed to be here. I shouldn't be here." My dad and his brothers always kind of imagined that what he had experienced was really awful and traumatic and that he'd seen a lot of terrible things. So when they did research, they learned that he had fought at the Battles of Guadalcanal, at Cape Gloucester, at Talasea, at Okinawa. He had seen a lot of heavy fire and casualties — all of the things that nightmares are made of. He was one of the first people to sign up for the war. But you know, these are things that you can only imagine that a lot of people in that generation didn't speak about because, a) they didn't want people that they came home to to worry about them, and b) it just was so bad that it was the actual definition of unspeakable.

That theme continues in the next verse, which is a pretty overt nod to what’s been happening during COVID. As someone who lives in Nashville, how difficult has it been to see folks on Lower Broadway crowding the bars without masks?

I mean, you just immediately think of the health workers who are putting their lives on the line — and oftentimes losing their lives. If they make it out of this, if they see the other side of it, there's going to be a lot of trauma that comes with that; there's going to be things that they witnessed that they will never be able to un-see. And that was the connection that I drew. I did a lot of research on my grandfather in the beginning of quarantine, and it hit me very quickly that we've got a version of that trauma happening right now in our hospitals. God, you hope people would respect it and would understand that going out for a night isn't worth the ripple effect that it causes. But obviously we're seeing that a lot of people don't seem to have their eyes open to that — or if they do, a lot of people don't care, which is upsetting.

You had the Lover Fest East and West scheduled this year. How hard has it been to both not perform for your fans this year, and see the music industry at large go through such a brutal change?

It's confusing. It's hard to watch. I think that maybe me wanting to make as much music as possible during this time was a way for me to feel like I could reach out my hand and touch my fans, even if I couldn't physically reach out or take a picture with them. We've had a lot of different, amazing, fun, sort of underground traditions we've built over the years that involve a lot of human interaction, and so I have no idea what's going to happen with touring; none of us do. And that's a scary thing. You can't look to somebody in the music industry who's been around a long time, or an expert touring manager or promoter and [ask] what's going to happen and have them give you an answer. I think we're all just trying to keep our eyes on the horizon and see what it looks like. So we're just kind of sitting tight and trying to take care of whatever creative spark might exist and trying to figure out how to reach our fans in other ways, because we just can't do that right now.

When you are able to perform again, do you have plans on resurfacing a Lover Fest-type event?

I don't know what incarnation it'll take and I really would need to sit down and think about it for a good solid couple of months before I figured out the answer. Because whatever we do, I want it to be something that is thoughtful and will make the fans happy and I hope I can achieve that. I'm going to try really hard to.

In addition to recording an album, you spent this year supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the election. Where were you when it was called in their favor? 

Well, when the results were coming in, I was actually at the property where we shot the Entertainment Weekly cover. I was hanging out with my photographer friend, Beth, and the wonderful couple that owned the farm where we [were]. And we realized really early into the night that we weren't going to get an accurate picture of the results. Then, a couple of days later, I was on a video shoot, but I was directing, and I was standing there with my face shield and mask on next to my director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto. And I just remember a news alert coming up on my phone that said, "Biden is our next president. He's won the election." And I showed it to Rodrigo and he said, "I'm always going to remember the moment that we learned this." And I looked around, and people's face shields were starting to fog up because a lot of people were really misty-eyed and emotional, and it was not loud. It wasn't popping bottles of champagne. It was this moment of quiet, cautious elation and relief.

Do you ever think about what Folklore would have sounded like if you, Aaron, and Jack had been in the same room?

I think about it all the time. I think that a lot of what has happened with the album has to do with us all being in a collective emotional place. Obviously everybody's lives have different complexities and whatnot, but I think most of us were feeling really shaken up and really out of place and confused and in need of something comforting all at the same time. And for me, that thing that was comforting was making music that felt sort of like I was trying to hug my fans through the speakers. That was truly my intent. Just trying to hug them when I can't hug them.

I wanted to talk about some of the lyrics on Folklore. One of my favorite pieces of wordplay is in “August”: that flip of "sipped away like a bottle of wine/slipped away like a moment in time.” Was there an "aha moment" for you while writing that?

I was really excited about "August slipped away into a moment of time/August sipped away like a bottle of wine." That was a song where Jack sent me the instrumental and I wrote the song pretty much on the spot; it just was an intuitive thing. And that was actually the first song that I wrote of the "Betty" triangle. So the Betty songs are "August," "Cardigan," and "Betty." "August" was actually the first one, which is strange because it's the song from the other girl's perspective.

Yeah, I assumed you wrote "Cardigan" first.

It would be safe to assume that "Cardigan" would be first, but it wasn't. It was very strange how it happened, but it kind of pieced together one song at a time, starting with "August," where I kind of wanted to explore the element of This is from the perspective of a girl who was having her first brush with love. And then all of a sudden she's treated like she's the other girl, because there was another situation that had already been in place, but "August" girl thought she was really falling in love. It kind of explores the idea of the undefined relationship. As humans, we're all encouraged to just be cool and just let it happen, and don't ask what the relationship is — Are we exclusive? But if you are chill about it, especially when you're young, you learn the very hard lesson that if you don't define something, oftentimes they can gaslight you into thinking it was nothing at all, and that it never happened. And how do you mourn the loss of something once it ends, if you're being made to believe that it never happened at all?

"I almost didn't process it as an album," says Taylor Swift of making Folklore. "And it's still hard for me to process as an entity or a commodity, because [it] was just my daydream space."

On the flip side, "Peace" is bit more defined in terms of how one approaches a relationship. There's this really striking line, "The devil's in the details, but you got a friend in me/Would it be enough if I can never give you peace?" How did that line come to you?

I'm really proud of that one too. I heard the track immediately. Aaron sent it to me, and it had this immediate sense of serenity running through it. The first word that popped into my head was peace, but I thought that it would be too on-the-nose to sing about being calm, or to sing about serenity, or to sing about finding peace with someone. Because you have this very conflicted, very dramatic conflict-written lyric paired with this very, very calming sound of the instrumental. But, "The devil's in the details," is one of those phrases that I've written down over the years. That's a common phrase that is used in the English language every day. And I just thought it sounded really cool because of the D, D sound. And I thought, "I'll hang onto those in a list, and then, I'll finally find the right place for them in a story." I think that's how a lot of people feel where it's like, "Yeah, the devil's in the details. Everybody's complex when you look under the hood of the car." But basically saying, "I'm there for you if you want that, if this complexity is what you want."

There's another clever turn-of-phrase on "This is Me Trying." "I didn't know if you'd care if I came back/I have a lot of regrets about that." That feels like a nod toward your fans, and some of the feelings you had about retreating from the public sphere.

Absolutely. I think I was writing from three different characters' perspectives, one who's going through that; I was channeling the emotions I was feeling in 2016, 2017, where I just felt like I was worth absolutely nothing. And then, the second verse is about dealing with addiction and issues with struggling every day. And every second of the day, you're trying not to fall into old patterns, and nobody around you can see that, and no one gives you credit for it. And then, the third verse, I was thinking, what would the National do? What lyric would Matt Berninger write? What chords would the National play? And it's funny because I've since played this song for Aaron, and he's like, "That's not what we would've done at all." He's like, "I love that song, but that's totally different than what we would've done with it."

When we last spoke, in April 2019, we were talking about albums we were listening to at the time and you professed your love for the National and I Am Easy to Find. Two months later, you met up with Aaron at their concert, and now, we're here talking about the National again.

Yeah, I was at the show where they were playing through I Am Easy to Find. What I loved about [that album] was they had female vocalists singing from female perspectives, and that triggered and fired something in me where I thought, "I've got to play with different perspectives because that is so intriguing when you hear a female perspective come in from a band where you're used to only hearing a male perspective." It just sparked something in me. And obviously, you mentioning the National is the reason why Folklore came to be. So, thank you for that, Alex.

I'm here for all of your songwriting muse needs in the future.

I can't wait to see what comes out of this interview.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

For more on our Entertainers of the Year and Best & Worst of 2020, order the January issue of Entertainment Weekly or find it on newsstands beginning Dec. 18. (You can also pick up the full set of six covers here.) Don’t forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.

[dumbestthingiveeverheard]

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 7/31/2023

Fifth Place: Erick Erickson

On 7/30/2023, Mr. Erickson tweeted the following:

Starting to see more and more progressives demand public swimming pools. Get ready for the next entitlement program.

Not public swimming pools! Anything but public swimming pools!

By the way, the top reply is somebody pointing out that the city Erickson lives in--has multiple public swimming pools:

I'm sorry, I can't get over this: Erickson is seriously concerned that progressives are going to--what exactly? Use tax payer dollars to make the community better? That's really something you view as a concern? As one Twitter user put it:

i like that the worst thing this guy can imagine is americans collectively deciding to use the wealth they produce and the taxes they pay to give themselves something nice

Fourth Place: Stephen Strang

Right-wing watch posted a clip of him on Friday talking about allowing drag queens to read to children, he says "They would not let someone dressed up in a Nazi uniform go in and read stories to children."

First off, who exactly is the "they" in this case? Second off, there is obviously no comparison between the ideology of the most genocidal and murderous regime of the twentieth century and people dressing in drag, and the fact that you think these two things are on even remotely the same level shows there is something wrong with you.

Third Place: Donald Trump

NBC reached out to forty-four of Trump's former cabinet officials to see how many of them would support his 2024 run for re-election--only four did. Those four, for those curious, are Mark Meadows, Ric Grenell, Matthew Whitaker, and Russ Vought. A Tea Party holdover who played a key role in the Freedom Caucus until he was made Trump's Chief of Staff and who appeared in a debunked creationist propaganda film, a small time ambassador who once got into a fight with Nick Fuentes over if he was immoral for being a homosexual, a failed Congressional candidate turned Attorney General, and a man who is only known for hindering Biden's transition to the Presidency, respectively.

What I find funny though is not that this group of nitwits have endorsed Trump's re-election, but that they are the only ones who worked with Donald Trump to have done so. If so few of the people who were around Donald feel comfortable giving him a second term, what should that say to the rest of us?

Second Place: Jonathan Chait

What's wrong with this picture?

If you said the fact that it implies the corruption of a Supreme Court Justice is on the same level as the corruption of the son of the President despite one actually having the power to impact people's lives and the other not, you'd be correct. However, this false comparison is the entire basis of New York Magazine's article "The Sleaze Problem: How Democrats can clean up the Supreme Court and address the Hunter Biden affair." Why Democrats need to address the Hunter Biden affair--which is little more than trumped up charges against a private system--I'm not sure.

The column even sees its author admitting that nothing Hunter Biden did was illegal while also accepting the incorrect notion that nothing Clarence Thomas did was illegal.

The article proposes that Democrats should propose an ethics code for the Supreme Court while aiming for Republican support through also creating a stricter ethics code around the actions of family members of politicians. Of course, Chait admits this wouldn't actually work because doing so would indict the Trump kids even more than Hunter Biden--but on the bright side, at least the Democrats now have an answer for the irrational and nonsensical charges against Hunter Biden. If only Democrats would play into GOP talking points, that would show them.

Winner: Samuel Alito

Did you know that nothing in the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate the Supreme Court? Well that's what Samuel Alito thinks--of course, it isn't actually true. Congress specifically has the power to stop courts from ruling on specific issues, to determine who is on the Supreme Court, and various other forms of regulation--but Alito doesn't want to mention that, because that could get in the way of his power grab.

Samuel Alito, you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.