We are one Iowa caucus into the absolute shitshow that is going to be the US 2024 elections, and I'm already sick of seeing takes downplaying the risk that Trump and his fascist followers represent.
Look. Around 1900, my mother's grandparents immigrated to the Lower East Side of New York City. They brought with them children born in Europe (Poland? Ukraine? which country they were in depends on what year we're talking about) - we're not 100% sure they were THEIR children, even, but there were three, and they were young, and they came. But my great-grandparents had siblings, parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, huge families. And while my understanding is that an attempt was made to convince those folks to move to the US, none of them ultimately opted to.
They all kept in touch as they were able, exchanging letters and pictures, but through World War 1, through the 20s, through the Great Depression, through the worsening situation in Europe in the 1930s, my entire extended family who chose not to immigrate...continued to stay.
I think we all know how this story ends.
I have an entire family photo album of people whose names I will never know, because after every single one of them died in the Holocaust, my great-grandparents and grandparents couldn't bear to even label them. And they were PEOPLE, poor, vibrant, eager to maintain connections with their loved ones abroad. One was a Klezmer musician, and we have photos of him with all the different instruments he played. They're so real on the page, and they all ended in ashes.
And you know how that started? Fascism started with every inch allowed, with every well-intentioned moderate who tried to maintain a middle position even as the whole ground shifted right beneath their feet and even "middle" became extreme, every "no that change isn't coming fast enough, I want instant full improvement NOW" liberal who felt that doing nothing was better than accepting a slower improvement in the (truly awful!) post-World War 1 living situation in Germany.
Most of the members of my extended family also downplayed the risks. They never imagined that the worst could happen to them. They never fathomed how bad things could become.
And now I have their example always before me to know and to scream:
I KNOW HOW BAD THINGS CAN BECOME. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FAMILY THEN.
I WILL NOT LET THAT HAPPEN TO MY FAMILY NOW.
People look at me like I'm crazy when I say I've got our passports ready (and have had since before the 2020 election).
Look. I don't know what will happen if Trump is elected, but there's a very real possibility he will, and he's been extremely clear about saying what he'll do. He did a lot of the things he said he'd do last time. I expect he'll continue to do the things he says he'll do. And the things he say he'll do will lead to the deaths of more people than we can imagine - in the US, in Palestine, throughout the world.
Don't tell me there's a middle ground here. Don't tell me I'm over-reacting. Don't tell me the worst won't happen. Don't tell me the risk is mild. Don't tell me we're safe.
We. Are. Not. Safe.
The lives of dozens, hundreds, of members of family were lost in the 1940s amid the horrifying statistic "6,000,000 dead Jews."
I will not let my life (as a Jew), my wife's life (as a disabled woman), my son's life (as a biracial boy), my daughter's life (as a biracial trans girl), be part of the statistics that come from our a second Trump presidency.
If you won't vote like YOUR life depends on it, vote like someone ELSE'S life depends on it, because IT DOES.
And if you can't even do that much, at least shut the fuck up and stop spreading your poison around. You're wrong. The danger is real. Downplaying it now won't make your conscience feel any clearer when it actually happens, and comforting everyone else downplaying it will just make you that much more complicit.
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Forever obsessed with the way that Bridge to the Turnabout revolves around Morgan, Diego, Iris, and Misty deciding they alone know what's best for the people they care about, with that assumption being inherently false due to it having been constructed on outdated, heavily biased memories
Morgan wants Pearl to be Master because SHE wanted to be Master, so she assumes her plan's the best thing for Pearl, even though we can clearly see that it would ruin Pearl's life
Diego's using Maya as a proxy for Mia, believing that since he couldn't save Mia he has to save Maya, but his grief blinds him to the fact that he doesn't actually have a personal relationship with Maya
Iris is, once again, going along with a plan because she assumes others know best, but she's also an ambiguous enough character that you could interpret her as trying to fulfill an obligation to Pearl (her sister), Maya (the future Master), and Phoenix (who she wasn't able to protect last time)
And Misty is trying to save her daughter, but she's also the one who ran away when Mia and Maya were children, thereby putting them directly in danger of Fey clan politics in the first place
Diego, Iris, and Misty have multiple opportunities to tell Pearl, Phoenix, or Maya what's going on, but they're so set on viewing them a certain way that they can't see them as they really are. Like, Phoenix has been Maya's closest friend and biggest supporter since Mia's death, and he's a major caretaker of Pearl too, so why not let him know what's happening? Pearl genuinely doesn't know what Morgan's asking her to do -- she could almost certainly be talked out of the channeling if she understood that Maya would be in danger, so why not tell her? And Maya has already been involved in several extremely dangerous situations, including a previous plot by Morgan, so why not tell her? Especially since it's her life on the line?
Bridge to the Turnabout is a story of good intentions, but ultimately all that those good intentions did was rob Maya, Pearl, and Phoenix of their agency and lead to unnecessary tragedy
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Leon's immortality predates the Cup of Life, y'all. he's just Like That
I'm assuming people have probably talked abt this already but if they have, I haven't seen it (i'm relatively new here), so I'm bringing it up myself lol.
(It's important to note here that in the end credits starting from s2e2, Rupert Young has always been referred to as playing Sir Leon, so it is the same character.)
Remember s2e13 The Last Dragonlord, when Arthur asks his knights who among them are willing to ride out with him to fight this big-ass dragon, and Leon is the first to volunteer? And they then show Leon, with Arthur and the others, as they ride out to fight Kilgharrah in that weird-ass square field?
...And then Kilgharrah one-shots literally everyone except for Arthur & Merlin???? And when the two return, they're just like, "yeah all the other knights died valiantly defending the kingdom, very sad" ???????
Personally, I believe this only leaves us with two (2) options:
The writers just straight up Forgot (or maybe ignored) that Leon was one of the knights that died, and just kept writing him in bc he was a well-liked character,
Or,
2. They're therefore implying that, canonically, when Arthur&Merlin got back to Camelot and said that all the knights were dead, they were just straight-up wrong. Which means that Leon had to just... find his own way home, I guess, after having been freshly charbroiled by a fucking dragon.
Merthur: None of the other knights made it, even Leon :(
Leon, covered in burns, wheezing on the ground in that big-ass field: QUIT TELLING PEOPLE I'M DEAD
Merthur: sometimes we can still hear his voice :(
The wiki says that "many believed he'd been killed" when he "was injured by the great dragon," but that "this was ultimately disproven by his return in Series 3"...
...which I believe falls squarely into #2 listed above lmao. He wasn't dead, just injured. They just fucking left him there.
TL;DR: yes, he's immortal, but it's not even from the cup. he's just Built Different
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legitimately insane how to some people, "we should wipe out this ethnic group that we've violently constrained to a ghetto because they're just genetically more violent and dangerous" is a reasonable and justifiable statement but it's Nazi Rhetoric to say something like, "it's bad that Israeli civilians are being killed but acknowledging that as tragic includes acknowledging that the almost daily state-sanctioned murder of civilians by the Israeli government is also tragic and unacceptable"
btw guys speaking of Nazi shit - can we check in, alongside what's been done to Palestinians in the last 75 years, what's the Israeli government's take on the Azerbaijani government's newest round of ethnic cleansing of Armenians? oh are the Israeli government's actions maybe not determined by Jewish identity, but by a commitment to colonial supremacy which puts them on the same page as other violently genocidal states like Azerbaijan, the US, and the UK? god can you Even Imagine?
(framing speaking against Israeli war crimes as inherently antisemitic requires understanding the Israeli state as representing all Jewish people, when it doesn't even represent all Israelis.
framing Israeli war crimes as synonymous with Jewish identity is pretty fucked up if we're being honest. I don't think that controlling water and power and movement for a captive population and shooting children dead for throwing stones is an inherent value of Judaism, any more than I think the torture carried out at Guantanamo Bay is an inherent value of Christianity - in both cases they're atrocities carried out by a far right genocidal government using religious identity as a shield.
Calling statements like "Israel is committing genocide against the people it's displaced" inherently antisemitic is doing more to further the idea that all Jewish people are associated with Israel than saying "the Israeli government is doing war crimes," which is a statement of fact about a country that exists and does war crimes. Is criticism of Israel as a nation often used as cover for antisemitism? Absolutely. Does that mean the Israeli government isn't doing literal war crimes repeatedly, on record, while talking publicly about scrubbing an ethnic group off the map? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh well in the last 48 hours they've definitely cut off water and power to almost 600,000 civilians and allegedly used white phosphorus against civilians so in an extremely factual and unambiguous way yeah man those are Literal War Crimes whoever does them.)
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