#hey hey we're living in an existential nightmare

[rig-a-rendal]

[sinhasaheart]

Sin meets his lover's parents ?

Seized tightly by the arm, Sinestro is hurried from the center of attention. "What are you doing here?" Hal asks him, not annoyed or worried but just confused.

That confusion is returned by Sinestro. "How can you know me? Why have we met?"

They come to a stop near the edge of the room and Hal looks up at Sinestro with a faintly amused expression. "I see. You're having some kind of existential crisis. I know I'm not the best choice for a Green Lantern but -"

Someone passes by a little too close and Hal falls quiet. It gives Sinestro the opportunity to consider his options in this strange world.

"Hey." Fingers tighten on Sinestro's arm and Hal leans against him eagerly. "Do you want to meet my parents? We're having lunch." One thumb is jabbed back over Hal's shoulder where indeed, those who are supposed to be dead live once more.

There's a pause. This surprise is more understandable to Sinestro than the confusion of himself somehow existing in this dream world.

"Very well," Sinestro agrees and he's led back over to the table Hal vacated moments before.

Martin Jordan is an older version of Hal with greying hair and, as Sinestro learns by playing along with the scenario, an unusual willingness to retire. One such as Hal can never conceive of it. Naturally, the dream distorts reality.

No more obvious example of this distortion can be found than Hal's mother. Jessica Jordan makes a point of being supportive of Hal which has Sinestro raising an eyebrow.

It's boring and domestic and most offensively false with no sign that Hal will break the illusion. Though Sinestro recognises the desperation beneath it, the sacrifice, the yearning, he still considers it weak. If one is to surrender to fantasy life, one must ensure fantasy life is real.

"We're wasting time here, Jordan. I... cannot apologise." And on that note, Sinestro carefully picks up the knife at the side of his plate and attacks.

"Sinestro!" Plainly shocked, Hal leaps back from the violence before him but then recovers himself and tackles Sinestro to the ground. "Stop! What are you doing?" His grip is strong but Sinestro struggles fiercely.

"I am reminding you not to dream of me if you desire to remain sleeping peacefully," Sinestro growls. He throws Hal off and pins him down. "Welcome to your worst nightmare."

[punksrespectpronouns]

I think more people need to be aware of this idea. Like illness is so moralized in our society and they act like it's something in our control. Like if we meditate enough or do enough therapy we can prevent the massive burnout and existential nightmare that the world currently is.

These ideas are subtle but they moralize the blame like it's something we can control. When oftentimes it's systemic issues that we did not cause. I can not strong well my way out of being disabled and I shouldn't have to.

Like current society especially when it comes to current covid responses. The powers that be to be going, "oh what's wrong with you? why are you mentally ill" like it's something we have any control over. meanwhile we're still in a pandemic and so many people have died. and the gov response now seems to be let's just get back to normal whatever it takes. and that it doesn't matter if disabled people die

When we are in a housing crisis and a livable wage and employment crisis. People don't have enough to live. And our rights are being threatened, like abortion access and trans healthcare is being demonized. With many people losing access to these essential services. of course people aren't mentally healthy right now! what do you expect!

Yet people treat mental illness like it's something we can mindfulness our way out of. When I try and find resources for my OCD so many people talk about it like it's an addiction. like it's something I have to overcome as if that's even possible. these ideas are toxic. Your disability is not something you have to "overcome".

This insta post from woke science talks about the topic well...

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A post shared by Dr Ayesha Khan═طبیبہ عائشہ خان (@wokescientist)

And hey I get it. I instinctively take the blame for this stuff too, because at least that means I have any control over it. But so don't. And I think all this really does is make people feel bad about how their coping. And by acting like systemic injustices are within an individuals control to change. By perpetuating these ideas were (unwittingly) freeing society of the responsibility of changing these things. Make a more accessible world. If you want suicide rates to go down, fund affordable housing, let people get their basic needs met and not blaming them for societal problems.

Book - Disfigured: on fairy tales, disability, and making space by Amanda

[Image Description below the cut:

3 pictures of pages from the book "Disfigured"

Image 1 - Text reads:

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag notes that disease has often been associated with moral failings.

Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it... Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning invariably being a moralistic one.

In literature, this has also been the case with disability. In the same way that sufferers of a disease become poster children for the ravages of the disease itself (TB, cancer, AIDS), disabled people become iterations of loss, of struggle, of the ways in which the world is not kind to those who are different. And in the same way that disease, for Sontag, then becomes a metaphor - something is a cancer, something spreads like the plague.

Image 2 - Text reads:

And in the same way that the medical model places the fault of disability at the body of the disabled person and lifts the medical professional up as the 'expert,' in the same way that the charity model removes the blame for society from the shoulders of the magnanimous philanthropist and rein forces hierarchical norms, psychological theories of illness lift the blame and responsibility for illness from the shoulders of society and place it squarely within the fault of the patient.

If one had only refrained from some behaviour or practised others or been more devout or had more faith, the illness might have been avoided. (In the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries, it was believed in some circles that melancholy patients might have avoided cancer if they had been happier; in the eighteenth century, those who were deli cate and high-strung and prone to fits of excitability and high emotion might have avoided tuberculosis by practising a calmer, quieter kind of life.)

This sort of thinking sounds ridiculous now - except that when it comes to disability, it's often still engaged in, albeit in subtler (and arguably more damaging) ways. Disabled people are still brought to faith healers; they are told to drink more water or drink green tea or do detoxes or try hypnosis to remove barriers of the mind as a way of overcoming physical impair ments. Disabled people are encouraged to 'push through' and 'exercise' and are reminded over and over again that the only disability is a bad attitude.

Image 3 - Text reads:

As with the charity model, psychological approaches to disability work to take the blame away from society and put it on the individual - to make disability not a lived, mundane reality but a temporary struggle that can be overcome if one has the inner and outer strength to do it. (The corollary here is that those who do not 'overcome' their disabilities - or fail to appreciate the so-called 'accomplishments' they make in the world of the disabled body's lowered bar - fail because of their own lack of strength or effort.)

Your disability is causing you pain? Do yoga. Struggling because of mental health issues? Meditate. The more you focus, the more you'll improve, and the less society at large needs to worry about having different kinds of dance classes or accessible entryways or accessible bathrooms or clearly marked accessible parking, to say nothing of captions or ASL or quiet rooms that offer respite from external stimuli.

After all, the kingdom didn't need to change for the Maiden Without Hands, did it? She got her hands back because of her faith. (The only disability is a bad attitude.) She did that all on her own.

ID ends]

[qqueenofhades]

I was already distressed about the political and social situation in the US, and then this happens. Are there any examples of societies that fought back against fascism and won, without civil or international war breaking out? Surely there must be some success stories in history. How did other societies overcome fascism, are there lessons to be applied to our current situation? Please tell me we're not doomed, because I have no hope for the future.

Sigh.

Okay.

I’ve been through... a lot of the stages of grief by now. That is, rageposting on tumblr, venting to my friends via text, drinking, crying while drinking, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, feeling the crushing weight of certainty that we’re all screwed and nothing matters, crying while talking to my sister, crying generally, lying in bed some more, and am currently still in bed while writing this, but am struggling to put on my internet historian aunt hat and offer some comfort to the stricken masses.

First off: This is bad. I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t bad. We all knew RBG had cancer again, but it was pretty fixed in our minds that she would somehow manage to hang on until after the election. 45 days before the biggest presidential election of all time, in the middle of this year, when names including Ted “Zodiac Killer” Cruz and Tom “Time for Roe vs. Wade to go, block federal funding from being used to teach about slavery, send in the military to crush the BLM protesters” Cotton have already been floated as some of her possible replacements? With Trump and McConnell determined to work as fast as possible to steal this seat as brazenly as they can, because they are literal fascists who don’t care about their own example (Merrick Garland was nominated in FEBRUARY of an election year and McConnell held it up for being “too close to the election?”)

Ugh. Anyone who doesn’t get that this is bad or acting like people are overreacting doesn’t get what’s at stake. And when, as we’ve said before and are saying again now, the future of everyone who isn’t a white straight rich Republican man in this country depends on an 87-year-old woman with cancer for the fourth time? Something’s wrong here. RBG’s death did not have to leave us in this total existential panic, and oh yeah, maybe this could have ALL BEEN AVOIDED AND WE COULD HAVE ALSO HAD THREE (3) NEW LIBERAL JUSTICES SECURING PROGRESSIVE LEGISLATION FOR A GENERATION IF SOME OF YOU HAD JUST FUCKING VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING SIXTEEN.

(Why yes I am still mad about that, I will be bitter until the end of time that we were consigned to four years and counting of this completely avoidable nightmare because of apathy, misogyny, and Leftist Moral Purity TM, but we’re talking about the future and what can still be done here, not what’s in the past.)

Anyway. Here’s the bright side, which admittedly sucks right now, but it’s been the answer all long:

VOTE.

You have to fucking vote, and you have to fucking vote for Biden/Harris. Everything that we’ve been talking about is no longer a hypothetical; it’s happening right now. This is not just some Awful Worst Case scenario, and it’s not somehow being spouted by privileged white liberals ignoring the struggles of the masses. (Viz: that awful fucking text post with its simpering self-righteousness: “are you punching nazis or just telling oppressed people to vote blue?” I hate that text post with a fiery passion and it’s the exact kind of morally holier than thou leftist propaganda that wouldn’t surprise me if it was generated by a troll farm in Krasnoyarsk.) My dad is disabled and lives on Social Security. Trump’s second-term plan to end the payroll tax takes SSID out by mid-2021, so... I guess that’s my dad fucked then. I’m a gay woman with long-term mental illness, no healthcare, no savings, no current job, and a lot of student debt. My sister has complex health problems and relies intensely on publicly funded healthcare programs. All my family have underlying conditions that would put them at worse risk for COVID (age, asthma, immune issues.) These are just the people IN MY HOUSEHOLD who would be at risk from a second Trump presidency. It says NOTHING about my friends, about all the people far less fortunate than us, and everyone else who IS ALREADY DYING as this nation lurches into full-blown fascism. That is real. It is happening.

Here’s the good news and what you can do:

Democrats are fired up and mad as hell, and they’ve already donated $31 million between the announcement of RBG’s death last night and today, and that number is climbing every second.

You can help by donating to Get Mitch or Die Trying, which splits your donation 13 ways between the Democrats challenging the most vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate. That also has raised EIGHT MILLION BUCKS in the less-than-twenty-four hours.

You can donate RIGHT NOW to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, vote if your state offers early voting, request your mail-in ballot, or hound everyone you know to ensure that they’re registered.

You can call your US Senators (look up who they are for your state, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICAN OR YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE OR ARE UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2020) and phone the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 to voice your insistence that they respect RBG’s last wishes and refuse to vote on any Trump nominee until after January 2021.

The other good-ish news is that I woke up to an email from the Biden campaign this morning about how they’re well aware of this and they’re already on it. BUT WE CANNOT COUNT ON EITHER THEM OR THE SENATE DEMOCRATS TO BE ABLE TO STOP IT. Because Joe Biden is not president and the Senate Democrats do not have a majority, if the Republicans manage to rush a nominee and a vote and all 52 GOP senators vote for that nominee, hey presto, tyranny by majority, a SECOND stolen Supreme Court seat, and a 6-3 hard conservative majority for the next generation. Even if Roberts or Gorsuch sometimes defect on procedural grounds, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer (who is also 82 and thus ALSO might soon be replaceable, thus resulting in an EVEN WORSE ideological swing) would be outnumbered on everything. This is terrible. I’m not even gonna pretend it wouldn’t be.

BUT:

If Joe Biden is elected with a Democratic Senate and House, IT MATTERS. It gets us off the fascism track, it gives us the ability to make progressive law and have it enacted without going to die in Mitch McConnell’s Kill Stack, it gives Biden the executive authority to nominate liberal judges and change Trump’s worst outrages on day 1, it stands as a huge example of a nation managing to reject fascism by democratic process, and while yes, we’d still have a terribly rigged Supreme Court, Democrats would control all the other branches of government and be able to put safeguards in place. The other option is outright fascism and the end of American democracy for good. This may sound alarmist. It’s not. It’s literally what the situation has ended up as, as all of us who were begging people to vote for HRC in 2016 saw coming all along.

So yes. That’s what you need to do, and what WE need to do. We need to make as much goddamn noise as possible, protest, contact elected representatives, make sure everybody pulls their weight and ferociously fights the promised attempt to ram through a new justice before Election Day, all that. But even if that does happen, THEN WE NEED TO FUCKING DONATE, ORGANIZE, AND VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT. ALL OF US. NO EXCUSES. NO MORE TWITTER LEFTIST ECHO CHAMBERS. NO MORE. THEN, EVEN WITH A RIGGED SUPREME COURT, WE WILL ALL BE SAFER ON NOVEMBER 4TH AND CAN TRY TO FIX WHAT’S BROKEN.

The stakes are just too high to do anything else.

May her memory be a blessing, and a revolution.

[rig-a-rendal]

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platonic ‘babe’ supercut

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don't do that.

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the monkees 90s-2010s reunion is horror because they dragged the shambling corpse of this Thing this Machine these Wind-Up-Toy-Dolls out onto the stage and made them go through The Motions again and again and again and this Thing, you see, this Entity, it should have died in the 60s! it WANTED to die!!! it tried and it failed. rope was too long, stomach got pumped, and now it has to slap on its makeup and crawl back inside the skin of three other people it hardly knows past the way it remembers them to be. and then it has to smile. and sing the old songs.

[rig-a-rendal]

Hey, Hey, We're Living in an Existential Nightmare!

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there's this very strange thing that happens where I have several mutuals who are MUCH Bigger Names than I am in the monkee online space. and whenever they interact with my meta posts/existentialism project posts, a lot of people seem to get a kick out of them! and that's awesome! but then all those people - and the other Big Names - interact with my mutuals' posts and send them asks and EXPLICITLY REFERENCE MY WORK USING SPECIFIC PHRASES I MADE UP FOR THE PROJECT... and completely ignore me. im not angry here I'm just feeling left out. :(

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s2 e10 recap!

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so here’s the best shot i could get of the season 1 board. i know. i cried over this.

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hello.

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s2 e9 recap

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s2 e17 recap

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s2 e16 recap

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eyyyyyyy we got some discourseeeeeeeeeeeee !!!!!!!!