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xtruss · 1 month

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Gaza A 'Repeat Of Auschwitz Without The Gas Chambers'—Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, Maung Zarni Says

It Is Clear That “The Tetrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, Illegal Regime Of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗’s Isra-hell” Is Committing Genocide In Gaza.

— TRT World | Saturday April 27, 2024

Palestinian children, deprived of the basic necessities of life, including basic food supplies, wait in line to receive food distributed by charity organisations as Israel blocks aid. Photo: AA

Palestinian children, deprived of the basic necessities of life, including basic food supplies, wait in line to receive food distributed by charity organisations as Israel blocks aid. / Photo: AA

What is happening in Gaza is a “repeat of Auschwitz” and a “collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” a prominent human rights activist and genocide scholar has said.

Maung Zarni, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his lifelong pro-democracy work and research on genocides, believes it is clear that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The activist and scholar from Myanmar, who has studied genocides and Nazi concentration camps extensively, said he has “paid close attention to what has been done by Israel, not just since Oct. 7 … (but) for decades.”

Genocide is simply the “destruction of a population or populations under occupation,” he explained in an interview.

“Palestinians have lived under Israeli occupation for over 50 years,” said Zarni, who has been nominated for a Nobel by 1976 winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire.

“Not just in Gaza, but in all occupied territories ... There are 3 million Palestinians in West Bank also under occupation,” he added.

Referring to the case against Israel brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa, Zarni said the court normally makes “very conservative judgments or rulings.”

However, an “overwhelming majority of the judges on the ICJ decided that the case presented by South Africa met their bar of plausibility of genocide,” he said.

“The court was convinced by the evidence presented,” he emphasised.

“On the face of the evidence presented in a single day, (the court) was convinced that Israel is very likely, very plausibly violating its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

‘Repeat of Auschwitz’

Zarni said what has been happening in Gaza for more than 200 days now “is only the latest episode,” asserting that “Israel has institutionalised the destruction of the (Palestinian) population.”

“What we are seeing in Gaza is simply mass extermination without the gas chambers,” he said, referring to the brutal Nazi method of killing prisoners in concentration camps during World War II.

“You don’t need to destroy a population with gas chambers only. If you are able to carpet bomb … 80 percent of the living space, the residential area, most schools, hospitals, you are destroying the population.”

Zarni also pointed out Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement that “no one in Gaza is innocent.”

“That’s 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinian people, including infants. Half of the 2.3 million Palestinians are children and youth,” he said.

“So, what we are seeing is the repeat of Auschwitz in Gaza.”

What is happening in Palestine's Gaza is a "repeat of Auschwitz" and a "collective white imperialist man's genocide," a prominent human rights activist and genocide scholar has said.

Maung Zarni, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his lifelong pro-democracy work and research on genocides, believes it is clear that Israel - assisted by Western nations - is committing genocide in Gaza.

Genocide is simply the "destruction of a population or populations under occupation," the activist and scholar from Myanmar explained in an interview.

"Palestinians have lived under Israeli occupation for over 50 years," said Zarni. "Not just in Gaza, but in all occupied territories ... There are 3 million Palestinians in West Bank also under occupation," he added.

Zarni said what has been happening in Gaza for more than 200 days now "is only the latest episode," asserting that "Israel has institutionalised the destruction of the (Palestinian) population."

"What we are seeing in Gaza is simply mass extermination without the gas chambers," he said, referring to the brutal Nazi method of killing prisoners in concentration camps during World War II.

"You don't need to destroy a population with gas chambers only. If you are able to carpet bomb ... 80 percent of the living space, the residential area, most schools, hospitals, you are destroying the population."

‘Collective Punishment’

Zarni said he has visited Auschwitz four times for research on one of the biggest Nazi death camps, where some 1.5 million people were killed.

“I made a documentary for the Burmese about Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, the calorie intake was minutely calculated by the SS (Nazi elite death squads),” he explained.

When Jewish prisoners killed 4 SS officers and blew up a crematorium with the help of Polish workers from a nearby village, the Nazis “responded with collective punishment, killing the entire barracks of 500 Jewish inmates in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest camp,” he said.

“That is what we are seeing today because Hamas resisters killed 1,000 civilian and Israeli soldiers in the areas where 11 original Palestinian villages were erased to the ground, and Zionists moved in and settled,” said Zarni.

“So, what did Israel, the IDF, and the Netanyahu government do? They adopted the SS strategy of collective punishment.”

‘White Man’s Genocide’

Zarni also emphasised the role of Western nations in Israel's war on Gaza, criticising their support of the Israeli government.

“This isn’t simply Israel’s genocide. This is a collective genocide,” he said.

“This is the white imperialist man’s genocide, the white man’s genocide. Just look at the amount of money and weapons provided to Israel, by firstly the US, second the UK and third Germany, and there were so many European states that have stood up for the Nazi-like Israeli government,” the rights activist added.

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theharpermovieblog · 6 months

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#HARPERSMOVIECOLLECTION

2023

www.tumblr.com/theharpermovieblog

I watched Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny (2023)

Thank you James Mangold for doing what Steven Spielberg failed to do.

Indiana Jones finds himself chasing down the other half of an artifact created by Archimedes, believed to be able to time travel.

I'm a huge Indiana Jones fan since childhood. I'm also one of those annoying fans who will take any opportunity to talk about the sacrilege that was Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. So, rather than do the typical type of review I do, I'm going to basically just list what I don't like about this film and what I do like about it. But overall, I stand firmly in the camp that this 5th entry into the series is a solid film that does the series and character justice.

WHAT I DON'T LIKE:

First off it's a little too long. While I never found myself bored, at 2 and a half hours it could have lost maybe 15 minutes. But that's it. There wasn't much to cut, but a few things could have been tightened up.

Second, I'll always feel slightly uncomfortable with CGI in Indiana Jones movies, but that is just a very nerdy old-person reaction. Some of it just looks extra fakey. Plus, there are reasons I love the CGI as well, which I'll get to later.

Those are my biggest problems with the film. That's it. I know, you'd expect there to be a lot more, but no.

WHAT I LIKED:

First, James Mangold as a director knew exactly how to make an Indiana Jones movie. Certain aspects of the direction and editing, hit the right beats, tone and overall structure. This was, without a doubt, an Indiana Jones movie from top to bottom.

Second, The cast and characters were fantastic. From the old cast members to the new additions the whole thing works in a way that KOTCS couldn't pull off. Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Mads Milkkelsen are perfectly placed to hold up the story and are welcome additions.

Third, the story is fantastically told. The whole Dial Of Destiny thing is a fine artifact to chase, but more so the overall story and relationships work really well. Indy dealing with turmoil and family trauma is touched upon without interfering with the adventure or the action. It's all very organic. Also, the use of CGI and de-aging to help tell a decades long story really makes for a fully rounded adventure, which deals with an aging character. Sure the De-aging works better in certain shots than others, but to get a classic Indiana Jones opening with a young Harrison Ford fighting Nazis is more than worth a few rubbery moments.

Throughout, the film is action packed and paced beautifully.

Finally, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Can an action/adventure movie work with an 80 year old man as the hero? Overall, yes it can. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character does come in to do some heavy lifting action, but she never takes over for Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones. He's running, jumping, driving, fighting, and using his head to solve the case, and it's believable and fun to watch him go. The adventure never slows down and therefore neither does Indy.

For a movie that I was so ready to dislike, I was more than pleasantly surprised to find a movie I'd be happy to own next to the original trilogy. I'll probably watch it again soon, just to treat my inner child who has been so beaten down by disappointment.

(And as an added bonus, the way they deal with KOTCS's Mutt character gives him both dignity and pleases the fans like me who hated him so very very much. Hard to do, but they pulled it off.)

#indiana jones

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normal-horoscopes · 2 years

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i feel like 80% of neopagans are like 'european cultures were so much better before getting tainted by those dirty backwards semitic religions' totally oblivious to the racist implications of that and another 10% are just open fascists not in denial about it (not that xianity isn't racist it basically invented racism as we understand it it just wasn't racist enough for them)

Ehh, I do at least feel like much of the bigotry in neopagan spaces just comes from ignorance rather than malice. In my experience, it's people who grew up in some vaguely Christian religious background but left for some significant reason, and who want to engage with religious/spiritual ideas outside of Christianity.

A lot of them feel kinda lost, which I sympathize with, I've been there. A lot of them say cringe shit on the internet because they don't know any better, which I sympathize with, I've been there. A small chunk of em are just Nazis. Y'all know my opinion of Nazis.

Part of the reason I run this blog is to encourage people to really look around and really truly engage with the ideas floating around in the Occult Milieu.

I'm rambling, but I think if you catch people early, if give people the resources they need, they turn a personal magical practice into something that makes them happy while adding good to the world.

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megashadowdragon · 3 years

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How Evil Are The Villains of One Piece? - One Piece Discussion | Tekking101

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The fact that Blackbeard was fine with passing 40 years of his life being almost nobody until he found what he was looking for makes him the most terrifying villain in One Piece. He didn’t chase fame or notoriety. They came for him. It gives him that subtle cosmic protection that Luffy has had throughout the series. A strong candidate for Pirate King True, the absolute resolve to just WAIT for that long, plotting and scheming till your plan can be put into motion at the perfect moment? That dedication means he has an extremely strong will and will do whatever it takes For Akainu I think Danzō Shimura from Naruto: A military man who crosses all the established lines of the organization in which he works, to protect said organization? And even he has the opportunity to take on the most important position to continue his work? Yes, I think 10/10 Danzō Shimura

I’d like to think Eren Yeager walks into the villain party just like “shoot my bad, I got an invite to this address but it must be a mix up..” and everyone there is like “haha! The new guy’s hilarious, you’re definitely one of us Eren!”

Just like “haha! You murdered most of the world’s population, you’re DEFINITELY one of us! Hahaha!!” most is a slight understatement. Ghenghis Khan wiped out 10% of humanity, Nazis are in the nearing 1% range with all that Russian blood added to the Pyre. Conquistadors if we're including unintentionally spreading viruses, about 2.5% for their era. 80% Eren is legit extinction level event. And that's just the humans, he wiped out all life from Trees to livestock to basically everything that wasn't a bird. I mean did the Titans trample every whale on their March? I can't see most of them surviving.Show less

the difference between 50.1% and 80% is pretty large. In politics 51% is believable for a majority, 80% is authoritarian rigged election. You could argue if Kiritsugu Emiya from Fate Zero took the holy Grail deal he killed most of humanity, but uh killing everyone but like 3 people warrants a little more than the "Most" categorization.Show less

Doflamingo: "i shot my dad in the back as a kid." Eren: "That's cute i ate mine as a kid." Mingo: ... "wait what ?" Eren: "You heard me." As a comparison to Akainu: Pain from Naruto. Pain was also chasing his ideal for a peaceful world with an iron fist with the Bijuu, and Akainu gives me a bit of those vibes. I would give Akainu a solid 8/10 Pains tho, because he has no "solution" to the state of the world here, he just wants to exterminate what he thinks is evil. doffy killed his father because his action lead to the death of his mother and getting torture and crucified by a mob" there, i fixed it bruv ;)

#one piece

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legendary-defender-of-fandoms · 3 years

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My thoughts on The Jungle Cruise Movie

So, my initial prediction was surprisingly more on the money than I thought it would be - Skipper Frank (Dwayne Johnson) is basically a live-action Grunkle Stan. I nearly screamed in the theater when one of his first lines was “No refunds!” But I think Stan himself would be happy with his representation on the big screen. I certainly have no complaints! And while I just said Frank is basically live-action Stan, there are plenty of differences between the two.

The movie as a whole was thoroughly enjoyable - a fun mix of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl,” the Indiana Jones movies, the Brendan Frazier Mummy movies, and the actual Disney attraction. Some jokes might go over folks’ heads if they haven’t been on the ride (specifically Dr. Albert Falls, but there may be a few more jokes that only diehard Parks fans will catch), but there was good physical comedy, everyone turned in a solid performance, the effects were pretty good, and there were some interesting themes touched on by the main characters. The only things that I thought could’ve been a bit stronger were the villains. They weren’t awful, but I think they could’ve used a little fine-tuning.

The Kaiser’s son & his evil gang of proto-Nazis were clearly inspired by the Nazis of the Indiana Jones franchise. Which is fine, I guess. Gives the story higher stakes as everyone races to get to the magic tree first, but their tech & behavior make it clear they’re not based on real people. My only true complaint here is the Kaiser’s son was a bit too goofy. It was probably a deliberate choice to fit with the goofy tone of the movie (which is fine for a movie based on a ride that’s 80% dad jokes by volume), but I think he could’ve been a bit more intimidating if he was less goofy. Have him present the air of being a proper gentleman willing to pay handsomely for plot devices & sounding perfectly chivalrous as he calmly asks for plot info before he murders a village of innocent indigenous folks, then go into terrifying assassin mode when he needs to make sure there are no witnesses who heard his name or can relay the secret locations. But again, his silliness is fine.

The leader of the conquistadors, on the other hand, could use a quick rewrite. They tried to give him a Tragic Backstory so we’d sympathize with why he murdered a whole bunch of innocent people to steal their magic tree, but c’mon. He’s a CONQUISTADOR! All of them were heartless, greedy bastards who slaughtered the innocent for shiny yellow rocks. It would’ve been more compelling & thematically appropriate if he’d wanted immortality for himself and then had to deal with the Monkey’s Paw Immortality he wound up with. And he NEVER brings up the details of his Tragic Backstory, almost like it was added at the last minute to make him seem complex. But simply going after immortality would’ve made him more compelling than trying to give him some sort of justification for his actions.

#gravity falls #stanley pines #grunkle stan #the jungle cruise #light spoilers

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peacensafety · 3 years

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This is everything about WandaVision up to Episode 5, with most of it concentrating on Episode 5. I have seen Episode 6 at this point, but I will respect the one week spoilers rule that is part of Nerd Culture.

:read more:

First of all, some basics about this series. This is an homage to different American sitcoms. Why American sitcoms when the main character is Sokovian? No one knows.

In the comic books, Wanda Maximoff is a mutant, not a science experiment like in the MCU. She and Pietro are the twin children of a Mutant named Magneto and a human named Magda (who is sometimes a Romini, and originally from Transia). Magneto is referred to as an Omega level mutant. Wanda is born with mutations, able to control Hex Powers, which is whatever the comic book writer needed to move the plot along. Sometimes her original powers have to do with probability, but like, 30 years ago, they started calling it chaos magic, and then she had extra reception to magical powers, and basically, it’s all very vague and ill-defined. She’s like the only one immune to Phoenix powers, and that’s a huge deal. She is not considered an Omega Level Mutant because she does not have completely mastery over her powers, not because she isn’t powerful enough. In the comic book series House of M, she is powerful enough to rewrite the entire universe, that was retconned in The Children’s Crusade, but then her powers are called Mutant Magic in A vs X and she’s got cosmic chaos magic. She’s supposed to serve The High Evolutionary at this point, which has made her more powerful. In the MCU, she was genetically altered by the Mind Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones. So when Wanda, AKA The Scarlet Witch, is in a story you can expect it to be about ridiculous amounts of power.

The assumption that you can make pretty quickly in the series is that Wanda Maximoff is in charge of this alternate reality, and quite possibly created it. Knowing what we know about Wanda, we assume it’s because she broke after the death of Vision and couldn’t deal with that death after the death of her parents (because of the Sokovian civil war) and Pietro, her twin brother, who was killed by Ultron. It’s stated pretty early on that Wanda could have defeated Thanos by herself (this is most likely true, one time in the comic books she decided to remove every mutant power in the known universe and she did for a couple of years. Is she more powerful than Jean Gray? Sit down with some nerds and listen to them argue, because that call will never be settled in a peaceful manner). Wanda has brought back Vision (who was killed by Thanos before he made his wish on the Stones, making him dead dead instead of mostly dead like half of the population of the universe) and in the MCU, this makes almost sense as her powers were given to her by the Mind Stone which brought Vision to life in the first place, with some interference from Tony Stark (Iron Man). In the first couple of episodes, they bring in Billy and Tommy (Speed and Wiccan) and the twins make themselves grow up pretty quickly.

Other characters that come in and play a part are Monica Rambeau (from the Marvel Comic Book Universe and the movie Captain Marvel, who is also the future Captain Marvel), Darcy Lewis (MCU character last seen hanging out with Thor), and Jimmy Woo (another MCU character, an FBI agent in charge of Scott Lang’s house arrest from Ant-Man and the Wasp).

Let’s also talk about some background about where Disney plans to go in the next 5 years. First of all, they have already acquired rights to do an X-Men series. If you have DisneyPlus (which you do unless you’re pirating this series), you know that the X-Men movies have mostly been added to the Marvel Channel rather quietly and unobtrusively. Also, there are rumors that all three movie Spidermen have signed on to the next Spider-Man movie (Toby McGuire, James Garfield, and Tom Holland). Also also, Disney has made a statement that Deadpool will be in the universe pretty soon. So we know that the endgame for Disney is a combination of all of the Marvel Comic book universe.

Things that I have noticed that are fun about this series: all of the commercials are nerd shout outs. The commercials all have something to do with time, with two being blatantly about clocks or innovation. The commercials for the most part have the same two actors in it (are they SWORD agents?). The first is a Stark toaster, which is weird, but okay, and it is the first time we see color (red, maybe an Iron Man shout out?) used in the series. The second is the Strucker watch, a blatant time reference, and Strucker if you recall from the movies is that dude who was experimenting on Wanda and Pietro when they were in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In the comic books he’s Wolfgang von Strucker, or Baron Strucker, a former Nazi officer and agent of Hydra, and he never ages, and he shows up to try and do a genocide in the books all the time. The third commercial is about taking a break? HydraSoak bath powder. We all get the willies anytime Hydra is mentioned, so relaxing with Hydra is something we don’t want to do. This is also the first time that I think maybe this isn’t all Wanda? Also, this isn’t time appropriate (and this might be an influence from my real world job, and not some intentional message from Marvel) but mixed-race kids on a commercial in the 70s? That would have never happened. Are things starting to unravel, because this would have been super weird at that time and Marvel has been strict about time appropriateness so far, even so far as including gender roles. The last commercial is Lagos, the paper towel commercial. Paper towels are about cleaning up, right? Because these folks in the commercial spill everything. Also, we see the first incident of gender roles not being respected in WandaVision, because we see a dude wipe up his own spill. Anyway, Lagos is that Nigerian city where Wanda killed a bunch of people, including the King of Wakanda, on accident in Captain America: Civil War.

So in episode 2, SWORD is teased with the little logo on the beekeeper’s outfit at the end of the episode when he comes out of the sewer. The group outside Westview is verified to be SWORD in episode 4. Let’s talk about them a bit. These dudes in the comic books were all about space and going into space and doing space things, but then Thanos does a snappy thing. After the snappy thing (and this series is set 5 years after the Snap) they start doing nanotech and AI. In the comics Maria Rambeau is in charge, and after she dies, dude named Tyler Hayward takes over. Watch Tyler Hayward. I personally do not think he is actually Tyler Hayward, and if someone is acting and looking like someone else, we know which villain has probably just inserted himself into the show (if you’ve been watching the interviews, Tom Hiddleston shows up as a call-in fan of the show and demands to know why he didn’t have a series because he’s been dead a couple of times and Vision is stealing his Schtick). I don’t know that for sure, it could be sloppy writing? Maybe they ran out of character archetypes?

At the end of episode 5, this is when the next five years of the MCU comes into play. Wanda is missing her twin, probably because of her sons, and the doorbell rings. Standing there is Pietro Maximoff. Now the crazy part of this is that he is the wrong Pietro Maximoff (the better one, not the one that has been in the MCU movies, the X-Man Quicksilver). He’s standing there and does the weird Uncle Jesse thing from Full House, (which, if you’re paying attention to the real world, Wanda Maximoff is played by the younger sister of the Olsen twins who played Michelle on Full House in the 80s), but Wanda recognizes that he is the wrong Pietro. Darcy, who is watching the broadcast from outside the Hex, states that Wanda has recast Pietro. But has she? This woman is incredibly powerful, why would she bring back the wrong Pietro? What if she is not in charge? Wanda is really freaked out by this, and that is when I realized I needed to write everything down.

Here are my lingering questions: We have all seen Into The Spiderverse a dozen or so times. Is this how Disney is going to handle the Multi-Verse? Is Pietro the wrong Pietro because of Miles Morales and his rag-tag group of Spidermen? Does this mean that Nicholas Cage is going to be in the MCU? Is Wanda as in charge as we think she is? Can we expect to see Magneto (Wanda’s and Pietro’s dad in the comics) show up to either support his children in the Hex or fight on the side of SWORD? Maybe Professor X will come and get Wanda, Pietro, Timmy, and Billy? Will we finally see if Jean Gray is more powerful than Scarlet Witch (she’s not). Is Hayward a problem of inconsistent writing or is he Loki? Is a multi-verse a way to address Chadwick Bosemen’s death for a proper replacement of Black Panther? Hurry up and watch Episode 6 so we can talk about this stuff!

#WandaVision #WandaMaximoff #Vision #Wiccan #Speed #quicksilver #marvel #CaptainMarvel #MonicaRambeau #DarcyLewis #JimmyWoo #MCU #Marvel Comic Books #Snap

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mittensmorgul · 4 years

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The Tumblr Beta Version: an objective analysis

I was tempted to just type “it sucks.” And while that is an objective analysis, it’s not exactly helpful. I’ve sent several requests to @staff and @support to restore my account to the old tumblr dashboard format, and received the same automated reply twice now. I’ll copy/paste it here so everyone is on the same page:

(lol, I had to go back and edit this, because apparently the beta version doesn’t display block quotes on the dash. So I’ve also put the block quotes in italics... hopefully it’ll display properly... note after editing: nope, it doesn’t display italics either... how the heck am I supposed to differentiate quoted text? I’ll start each quoted bit with an asterisk, I guess...)

*Thanks for reaching out about the beta dashboard.

*We're currently testing it out, and your account seems to have been selected to take part in the test. Thanks for your patience while we work on it! At this time there is not a way to opt out of testing. You may see your Tumblr experience return to normal as we continue testing.

WE CAN ONLY HOPE.

*In the meantime, check out some of the new features available only in the beta dashboard:

OKAY TUMBLR, IF YOU INSIST, though I would MUCH rather have back all the functionality I personally invested into this website through xkit... you know... making the site ACTUALLY FUNCTIONAL. Let’s see what this beta version has given me instead of functionality:

*Change Palettes: Go to the person icon, then click "Change Palette." You'll find the classic Tumblr blue, dark mode, and a few other color palettes for your dash.

So I tried out all the color palettes. In addition to the ones mentioned here, there’s one that’s trying to look like a green screen terminal that gives me flashbacks to the early 80′s. There’s a reason we stopped using green screen terminals... Another one is “canary yellow.” It’s very yellow. The “classic tumblr” isn’t actually classic tumblr... all the post boxes are dark blue with grey type, not white with black type. And all the other colors are the insanely bright fluorescent of the new Dark Blue standard tumblr scheme. Which means links are practically invisible unless I highlight them. It’s migraine inducing. The one theme with a light colored background is called “Concrete” or “Cement” or something like that and even that only works for about half an hour before the migraine aura really kicks in. I just want my Old Blue via xkit back. You know, what tumblr actually used to look like. I don’t want any of these horrible color palettes. None of them work for me.

*The new "meatballs" menu: This is where you can copy the post link, unfollow the Tumblr who made or reblogged the post, or report a violation to our Community Guidelines.

I could do all of this from the user menus with xkit, too. I don’t regularly report violations or have the urge to block people I have chosen to follow. Why on earth would I want to do any of this? And why would I want these features located directly beside the post link copy feature?

You know what I do miss? I miss the xkit timestamps feature. I didn’t have to hover dangerously close to the KILL IT WITH FIRE meatballs menu in order to see when a post was made, and in this era of disinformation and misinformation spreading around this site faster than Covid-19, being able to see when a post was ORIGINALLY created is a far more useful feature than an easier way to block people. For reference: I currently have three blogs blocked. Two of them are pornbots. One is a nazi. If I don’t want someone’s content on my dash, I don’t follow them. This “feature” is entirely useless to me.

*A quick note: Pagination is not supported in this beta test, but we're collecting feedback to send to our engineers.

THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST. This beta test might actually be tolerable if I wasn’t trapped into endless scrolling. If I could page through my dash, refreshing it every ten posts or so. You know why? Because once I scroll about 30 posts down my dash, tumblr starts overheating my laptop under the load of ALL THOSE POSTS. Things start malfunctioning-- it takes longer and longer to load new posts the farther I scroll. And the keyboard navigation (both page down and hitting J to advance to the next post, and even just using the down arrow to scroll as I read a long post) freeze and stop functioning. One of my laptop fans has actually begun to malfunction.

You know why this wasn’t a problem on the old version? If the data load got to heavy, I could open a post in a new tab, click view on dash with xkit, and voila! Brand new tab! I could close the malfunctioning tab and everything would be refreshed to normal! But without pagination, THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Also, after reblogging a few posts, the beta version of this site breaks, and doesn’t open a post tab to add commentary or even tags. It just... reblogs the untagged post with no warning whatsoever. You know... that’s really really not cool. I tag EVERYTHING. Well, almost everything. The tags are the only way to keep track of the 40k+ posts on my blog. And warn people that I am posting potential spoilers, or other specific content. It’s REALLY inconvenient to have to either immediately go to my blog to edit the post and add tags, or even comments. The alternative is to scroll up to open individual posts I want to reblog in a new tab, and then reblog directly there. Ironically enough, THOSE pages actually open with xkit installed, and everything (surprise!) functions perfectly there.

It’s perfectly reasonable to understand why this specific issue has limited the number of posts I reblog. Reblogging content should not be this much of a hassle. Creators have been complaining for a while that reblogs have drastically slowed down, and I think making it even more annoying and difficult to reblog posts will not help this problem.

Also, with xkit enabled, there’s a function that auto-loads images as you scroll, so the images are always visible BEFORE they appear on screen. I don’t have to look at the colored boxes and wonder if this is a post I’ve already seen or something I should sit and wait for. Don’t even think about watching tumblr videos. Loading priority is given to the ads that you cannot pause or dismiss, so that video loads and plays in choppy two second bursts instead of being given priority. Since that’s the content I am actually here to consume, it kinda makes me want to do the opposite of patronizing anyone who advertises here with graphically intense ads. And then when you scroll away, with xkit, gifs and videos you’ve scrolled past STOP loading and playing, which I think might be contributing to the intensity of the resource hogging that’s literally melting down my laptop.

And for reference, I have a pretty decent little gaming laptop. A blogging platform shouldn’t be driving it to the brink of frying itself. I didn’t realize just how much xkit worked to streamline this and provide basic functionality to this site.

*And lastly, if you're an XKit user, know that the XKit team is working hard to update things on their end to make it compatible with the beta dashboard.

And this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what I’ve lost without xkit. And this is a really REALLY garbage response to user complaints. “Oh, yeah, sorry we made our site suck even worse, but those nice people who do our jobs for free will surely fix our garbage soon!”

Dear wonderful people at @new-xkit-extension, I love you, and I miss you, and while I wish xkit worked with this beta version I’ve been forced into living with, I truly feel for y’all who are trying to deal with this nonsense on behalf of all of us.

And to the folks at Tumblr... maybe try to just... make your site actually more like xkit. You know, actually functional. None of these special new features are useful or functional to me. I respectfully request for a fourth time to be removed from this inane beta test.

Give us OPTIONS. Let us display ALL THE TAGS without having to click a button. Let me have back my Activity+ that actually allowed me to interact with people from my dash! That showed me real-time inline notifications in a way that I could reply to with a single click! Bring me back to my column of open messaging conversation icons so I have easy access to the people I talk with throughout the day instead of closing them all every time I refresh the page. I already feel socially isolated in freaking quarantine, please stop shutting off all my avenues of communication!

Let us have pagination! I mean, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to force heavy users of this site into a beta version that doesn’t allow us to opt out until your engineers had actually figured out how to make it work in a very basic way.

*Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with!

YES. PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS BETA TEST NOW. I have let you know exactly what I want from this site. I just want it to ACTUALLY WORK. For someone who spends 12+ hours a day on this site, this beta test version is NONFUNCTIONAL. PLEASE ALLOW ME TO OPT OUT. I AM LITERALLY BEGGING YOU. I WILL ACTUALLY PAY YOU CASH MONEY TO ALLOW ME TO OPT OUT OF THIS AND GO BACK TO HAVING A FUNCTIONAL BLOG AGAIN. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!

PLEASE!

I AM OFFICIALLY AT THE END OF MY PATIENCE FOR ENDURING THIS NIGHTMARE.

(one final quick note... I’ve only been back on my dash long enough to make the parenthetical edits-- i.e. adding italics that don’t display and then adding the asterisks at the beginning of each section of quoted text, and already my laptop is overheating again. For reference, I originally typed this entire post from within my tumblr inbox page-- which still functions normally with xkit-- and spent over an hour on it. My laptop was fine the entire time. Clearly the issue is this beta version of the website. I will never forgive tumblr if y’all fry my literal only portal to the outside world at this time. PUT ME BACK TO NORMAL NOW. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING AND ENTIRELY UNACCEPTABLE. Thanks)

(oops apparently i lied... when the asterisks and the previous final note failed to display, I thought that seemed suspicious, and realized that I literally needed to refresh my entire dash in order to see edited changes. Funny how xkit enabled me to do that in real time, which is just another bit of functionality I’ve lost with this beta program. Please guys, this is really, really not working for me at all, just put it back.)

#tumblr problems #staff #support #xkit #was this good enough for you? because I am totally done with this if that wasn't completely obvious #please end my suffering

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arcticdementor · 4 years

Link

There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That specter is most commonly dubbed ”strasserism”, though it has other names, such as ”redbrownism”, ”nazbolism”, or more unwieldy names like ”Angela Nagle leftism”. When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as me and the people I knew were concerned, ”strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-nazis is their petty, internicine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.

At the beginning of the first half of the 2010’s, the left I was a part of was finally starting to feel hopeful again, after the disorientation and loss of direction that came with the fall of actually existing socialism. During the long winter years of the 90’s and early 00’s, people either hopelessly and bitterly clung to a prophecy that everyone else had now fully discarded, or they tried finding new boutique causes to replace the ones that had failed. To take my native Sweden as an example, two of the more significant new causes were opposing the neo-nazis and opposing globalization. There were some victories – or at least, people liked to think so – but the idea of actually achieving political power was dead in everything but name. The left mostly came to accept the role as the social conscience of liberalism, or in the case of antifascism, fancied itself as the Batman protecting end-of-history Gotham City. The streets of triumphant liberal society might have been gritty, the politicians corrupt and undeserving, but antifascist Batman still rose out of bed every night to protect the craven and the low from monsters lurking in the shadows. Or so they liked to think. Most of the time, they just hung out and drank beer.

…

All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

…

We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

…

Partaking in this ritual of self-depreciation does not mark you as an outsider. It is only if you break the rules of the game, only if you acknowledge the man behind the curtain, only if you point to the basic truth hidden behind this outer layer of ironic self-mockery that you become one of us, one of the so-called strasserites. This truth is a fairly simple marxist truth. Classes have class interests, and so the idea that you could have a political movement – the left – that was well and truly dominated by one class, yet still wholly committed to the class interests of another class, but also just too bumbling and out of touch to ever do a good job of looking out for the class it supposedly ”really” cares about is, to put it extremely mildly, a dubious idea. It is much more likely that a political movement dominated by one class will also be more or less entirely dedicated to pursuing the class interests of that class, while also being unable to take any strong action that goes against the interests of its dominant class.

…

There was a socialism before Marx, and it was utopian and based on human reason and moral progress. There are good reasons for why this brand of socialism fell out of favor, but within its context one can definitely hold the view that a small class of enlightened and educated well-to-do people, acting out of the goodness of their own hearts, will eventually bring about socialism by lifting up the poor, racist and/or stupid proles. You don’t have to agree with it, but it fits together.

A central premise of marxist, materialist or scientific socialism, on the other hand, is that classes simply cannot act this way. Classes pursue their own interests and act politically not out of greed, or generosity, or any other personal bit of sentiment, but due to historical and economical pressures. It is this very simple fact that makes the ”materialism” of someone like Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin magazine, and of most leftists of his stripe in general, so incredibly contradictory. For it to work, there has to be an unstated agreement among the faithful to never seriously use the tools of marxist analysis on the left itself. Any and all self-examination must remain on the level of personal discussion (”can person so and so really be a socialist, when her parents are so rich?”). The punishment for transgression against this agreement, for breaking the most sacred code of Omerta the modern left has, is swift and severe: you will get cancelled for this, and you will be added to the ever growing list of ”strasserites” and ”secret nazis” who tried to lure the faithful away from the true path. What happened to Angela Nagle is instructive in this regard; her article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, was an attempt to argue against unrestricted immigration from a class-based, materialist perspective. It’s quite likely – and also quite amusing – that she would probably have recieved less sustained hate online if she had written that immigration shouldn’t be allowed as long as non-white people talk funny and smell bad.

…

I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles but to underline the point that the sin that earns people the label of ”strasserite” or ”chud” or ”redbrown nazi” has nothing to do with racist animus, or even the issue of immigration more generally. Conjuring up the threat of racism and the ghosts of Nazi Germany is not done because it is true, but because it is necessary. In my case, having a father who came to Sweden to work from central Africa proved to be an embarassing but fairly minor speed bump on the way to declaring me a fighter for aryan blood purity. There is nothing foolish or irrational about any of this; our esteemed comrades are simply doing the only thing they can do, faced with a contradiction they are unable to resolve and a movement that is rapidly falling apart.

…

While I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself, I would claim that the ”strasserite” class-analysis of politics in the west and the role of the left today has a few central features. To start: as the economies in western countries have shifted over the past decades, a new sort of class of people has sprung up and grown in social and political importance. In the united states, the most common name for this class is PMCs; the professional-managerial classes. Their name is less important than their function and political trajectory. To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is – no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying – a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

The particular form of ”pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. Vote for us, and we’ll give you higher benefits and free broadband, Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the north. It didn’t work. This mode of ”charity” is hardly selfless – it would be a free ”gift” from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians, and like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the giver. Its main function would also surely be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists start seriously debating why ”racists” should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future ”worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to the working poor.

The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. ”Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?”, this activist wrote: ”I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves”. Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that ”the evils of capitalism” are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point. Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.

We should not make fun of an activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid middle class grades can no longer achieve the middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic ”demotion” – in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers – cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other stupid fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like a normal person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.

…

The grand political divide that sundered the house of modern ”socialism” boils down to the question of which class should have its interests taken care of in the first instance. It is all well and good to talk about ”doing both”, or try to soothe workers by saying that once socialism wins, nobody will work, so they’ll all be taken care of then. A century ago Joe Hill mocked the preachers who tried to placate starving workers by promising them there’d be plenty of pie up in the sky after they were all dead. Today, Aaron Bastani does an even more pathetic job within that vaunted political tradition, promising the british working class asteroid mining and fully automated communist holodecks once The Revolution(tm) succeeds. Until that day comes, though, it can’t really be helped that they’ll have to stay under the thumb of – and fight the battles for – the downwardly mobile professionals, huh? After all, who will build all those fancy asteroid miners if little Junior suddenly has to work at Starbucks like a common plebeian?

This is not a question of left incompetence, or Brexit suddenly wrecking everything, or something that Bernie woulda, coulda, shoulda done. The left is bleeding working class support everywhere. The left is picking up support among the more affluent and well-to-do stratas everywhere. The left is merging with greens and liberal ”progressives” everywhere. This is not incompetence, or cowardice. It is not personal, nor can it be fixed by the actions of individual persons; it is a vindication of historical materialism, and it is playing out right before our very eyes.

It is time for the ”socialism” of the professional and managerial classes and the socialism of the working classes to part ways. The former is moribund and a historical dead-end. The latter, I think, still has a case to be made for it. More importantly – and personal experience from outside the left bears this out – it still has an audience that is willing to listen to it.

…

Workers aren’t stupid. They’re not evil. They haven’t been ”tricked by the media”. They need no false shepherds to guide them, no well-paid moral commissars to teach them to not randomly slaughter their neighbors because of muh racism. They have abandoned the left parties because the left parties have abandoned them, not ”culturally” as some proponents of identity politics would like you to think, but materially. They know their own class interests, and they know that the left is inimical to those interests. This is good news, at least for those of us with the courage and political will needed to help them free themselves from their so-called ”betters”. Let the Labour activists of London lament over how ”disappointed” they are that the working class has stopped following orders. We will not be like you. We will not promise new masters and new yokes to live under, new aristocracies and ”vanguards” to subsidize, new cadres of people selling them moral sermons and sensitivity courses. We will promise them a chance at revenge.

#malcom kyeyune #read the whole thing #professional managerial class

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queenlua · 4 years

Text

radicarian said: how dumb are we talkin'

under a cut because the diehards can’t find me there

(note: um this got long, apparently i have a lot of art-criticism-y thoughts about this)

so there’s this subreddit that was created for “respectful” negative critiques of The Last Jedi, right?

and i find this amusing for a bunch of subtle inside-baseball reasons.

to dump my cards on the table:

* i keep Star Wars discourse at forty-foot-pole length, and

* while i really enjoyed The Last Jedi, and thought it did a lot of interesting things,

* it managed to attract a fanbase that seemed to love it for really dumb/cringe-y lefty/SJ reasons—if i see another “TLJ is about punching nazis” take i will scream, and yet

* of course the haters hated it for even dumber, bad-at-watching-movies reasons (“wah i don’t like that Luke was a depressed old dude wah” omfg y’all do you just want Ep4 re-released forever and ever—okay, yes, that’s what Ep7 was, you’ve made your point)

obviously this “respectful critique” subreddit is more palatable than like, idk, nerds screaming at Disney or whatever, but it embodies this fascinating faux-intellectual discourse that i see creep up time and time again on the internet. i’m familiar with this subculture because these are totally the forums i would’ve hung out in when i was twelve, haha :P

scroll through the archives and you’ll find endless weird, obsessive, nitpicky critiques of the new movies. people are salty because some obscure point of Force lore/mythos were rendered inconsistent by the new films, people are salty because Anakin’s sacrifice was “undermined” by the new baddies, and also Rey is a Mary Sue, blah blah...

and it feels like when you’re a kid, and you learn about the list of logical fallacies for the first time, and then spend the next several years pointing out the fallacies in every political debate, as if the problem with election cycles is the words ad hominem and non sequitur. like, yeah, kinda? but you are missing the forest for the trees, buddy.

similarly, so often what people assert is “bad writing” is this annoying memetic thing, where one dude launches their contrarian take on Why [X] Sucks, and maybe they’re even right that the piece feels unsatisfying, but often their critique amounts to a bunch of obnoxious nitpicks and checkboxes rather than a compelling narrative of what, on the whole, isn’t working.

but then a bunch of contrarian nerds latch onto that take, and parrot the same boring nitpicks back at each other forever, and because they’re being “contrarian”, they’re convinced that they’re Smarter Than Those Other People, and they end up forming a whole weird negging version of the fandom based around pseudo-intellectual gamesmanship.

and again: i get it. i wrote my fuckin’ 80-page takedown of every single page of Eragon as a twelve-year-old, i get why people find it fun, i’ve engaged in my share of it over the years, but nowadays it just bores me.

in general, as i’ve gotten older, i increasingly cringe whenever someone describes something as “categorically bad game design” or “bad writing” or whatever—not because i think all writing is equally good; of course it isn’t. but, (1) usually other adjectives are so much better for describing what exactly is happening—writing can be subdued, flat, frenetic, brash, stilted, hollow, uneven, etc, and these all tell you so much more than “dumb” or “stupid” or “illogical” or “bad”. and (2) other descriptions often give a better sense of what was being attempted, so you can actually judge the piece by what it was aiming for—and sometimes, the answer is “this isn’t bad, it just wasn’t meant for you,” a thing that fans often find intolerable but i think is actually kind of neat. (random example: ff13 was not flawed merely because it lacked open-world exploration. it was trying to tell a different story and give a different experience, and you can have an interesting discussion about whether that experience works, but if you spent the whole time being pissed that it’s not ff7 then of course you’ll hate it.) and finally (3) the rare stuff that i just find bad bad bad is usually not worth raging about at any particular length. i don’t learn much or feel good about doing exhaustive takedowns of every Eragon-tier novel on the market; i haven’t even got enough time to read all the good stuff.

(as a sidebar, you’ll notice that very little of my engagement in fandom is via “meta” essays, and this is kind of why—while there’s lots of interesting and wonderful meta that i adore reading, i’m personally uncomfortable writing it, because so often it gets embroiled in these weird fanwarish arguments about “good writing” and i just disengage.

the nice thing about writing fanfic is that it often embeds my feelings about the piece i’m responding to—but in a way that isn’t an argument or a game, it’s a here’s how this worked for me & how it made me feel, and you can write both fanfic that’s furious at canon and fanfic that’s elated with canon while still having something compelling and interesting and new to say, i guess.)

for another perspective on it: one of my favorite takes on TLJ was from a friend of mine, who was pissed because to her, it felt half-assed. it tried to do something bold, but flinched at the last moment: it didn’t go far enough to truly be a subversive weird arthouse film, nor did it nail any of the fun popcorn-cinema things you want from a blockbuster, and thus it failed at both.

that’s a fascinating perspective, one i don’t share but one i’m very glad to hear about. but i assure you that that’s not a take you’ll ever see posted on that subreddit, because it’s just a totally different tenor than the obsessive, nitpicky arguments they’d rather have.

and i find the “forum debate” style of argument staggeringly emotionally tone-deaf at times—like, here’s someone pissed that Rey somehow didn’t try hard enough to redeem Kylo in TLJ and that’s what made it bad, and just, wow. if you couldn’t hear—feel—the heartbreak in Rey’s voice when she says “please don’t go this way,” if it didn’t remind you of a time when someone let you down in the most brutal possible way, if you didn’t feel that moment of “oh, fuck, this isn’t what i thought it’d be”—then idk. uncharitably, i’d say you’re just going out of your way to be annoyed over even the bits that really really worked—but at the very least we’re just not really relating to this piece in an emotionally compatible way at all and our conversation stops there.

anyway, yeah!!! tl;dr sometimes i pass the time by eating popcorn and watching nerds who assert they are Better Than Other Nerds doing “takedowns,” basically

#this is only kind of about star wars #and mostly about why i don't do fandom discussions most of the time #ANYWAY YEAH THAT WAS A LOT TO TYPE #radicarian

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skaylanphear · 6 years

Note

Prior to season two, did you think Gabriel would be Hawkmoth? What was your reaction to the reveal? Any thoughts on his relationship with Adrien. The juxtaposition of SF and canon is interesting.

I had hoped that Gabriel wouldn’t be Hawkmoth, but I wasn’t surprised when that turned out to be the case. Mostly because making Gabe Hawkmoth is extremely restricting on the storyline and adds a whole new layer of drama to Adrien’s life on top of the fact that his father is an abusive asshole. Like, he’s got to grapple with that AND the fact that he’s Hawkmoth?

I’m also afraid that because of Hawkmoth’s relationship to Adrien, they’re going to attempt to redeem him, a trope that I am SO tired of in new cartoons. And, frankly, Gabe in the canon isn’t redeemable to me at this point, which is going to make what is likely an inevitable “happy” ending for the family all the more grating, unless Gabe decides to make himself the sacrifice that brings Mama Agreste back. Basically, given Gabe’s crimes, the only satisfying ending for him I could see is either he ends up in prison or dies, neither of which are good for Adrien.

Like, for me, the fact that Gabe was an abusive asshole that kept far too many secrets was enough drama between him and Adrien, so adding Hawkmoth on top of that is just… I dunno, contrived I suppose.

But I also like complicated, faulted characters who try to do what they think is right despite being assholes. I like the idea of Gabe knowing Adrien is Chat, knowing he’s in danger, and attempting to stop him despite the fact that he’s a shitty father and that their relationship will never be good. Like, it’s not so much that he’d be redeemed, because it doesn’t erase his abuse, as it is that it makes him a more interesting character (to me). That, and the fact that he’s not doing something like bringing back his dead wife makes him less sympathetic. My Gabe is an asshole because… that’s just what he is. There isn’t any kind of emotional justification to explain away his behavior.

In the canon, he’s just sort of this selfish sociopath that seems to only care for Adrien out of obligation, not because he’s dealing with any sort of inherent lack of parental instincts. And because he’s doing what he’s doing for a “reason,” it introduces this weak contrivance to eventually excuse away his behavior, which is just bad writing imo.

The Gabe in SF is an asshole that never should have been a parent. He loves Adrien, but admits that he’s not a good parent. This doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it makes the reasons why he does what he does more complex. He wants to protect Adrien and attempts to use the very things that push Adrien away to accomplish that–force, secrets, and lies. And because he’s an egotistical jerk, he doesn’t see the fault in what he’s doing so much as what he thinks is necessity. He loves his son and would go beyond what is acceptable to protect him, but he isn’t at all suited to have raised him in the first place.

Gabe in the canon is… just kind of insane. He seems to have very little regard for Adrien’s safety and when he does, it comes off more as an obligation than a necessity. He protects Adrien when Adrien is blatantly in danger in front of him, but is so caught up in his own power that he doesn’t consider Adrien’s safety when he sets akumas on his classmates. So either he thinks himself so powerful that no harm could come to Adrien (which has been proven false, so no), he assumes that Ladybug defeating him nullifies what he’s done so he’s not afraid of losing even when he bitches about it (which doesn’t excuse the fact that he kills people through his victims on a regular basis), or he really doesn’t care much about Adrien and only puts on a front went the obligation of parenthood rears its ugly head before him. I kind of view his character as a mixture of all three. Which isn’t to say that he isn’t complex and faulted. Rather, the problem is that because he’s such a horrible, horrible piece of human garbage, any nuance that could have been added to his character is completely overshadowed.

That isn’t to say SF Gabe is superior to canon Gabe. I just… prefer Gabe as a faulted, egotistical abuser who thinks he’s doing what’s best than I do egotistical abuser Gabe who has no guilt or remorse for the horrible crimes he’s committing every day.

I’m mostly exhausted of this notion that the worse a character is, the more redeemable the writers seem to think they are. Like, I don’t want canon Gabe to be redeemed–he’s too horrible. He’s a manipulator that preys on people’s emotions and then murders others through them. Like, that’s… really bad. Whereas bad parent Gabe, while not necessarily forgivable, is more realistically redeemable.

I don’t want another redemption arc for literally The Worst Possible Person. And when I look at how they handled Chloe’s arc, I can’t imagine that Gabe’s will go over any better.

Like, they went with the Gabe is Hawkmoth storyline, now commit. Either throw him in prison or kill the bastard. But they won’t do that. Because, one, he’s Adrien’s dad, and two, it seems to be out of style to kill villains these days.

Which I don’t understand. Like, I was watching the Rainbow Brite movie the other day and they straight up blow the Princess of Darkness into smithereens. Fucking Rainbow Brite, the shining symbol of rainbows and positivity in the 80s. Because that’s what you do with Saturday Morning villains like Hawkmoth–you get rid of them when the time comes because they’re irredeemable. If you want to redeem a character, you need to make their crimes far less terrible. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, not without doing a whole hell of a lot more work than the writers of ML are doing.

It’s just gonna be another Steven Universe where we’re expected to forgive the horrible space nazis because “they’re sad!” We’re going to be expected to forgive Gabe in the canon because “he’s sad!” And, like, no.

I wanted to keep Gabe as a bad person, but make him redeemable in the sense that he fights on the good side. That is why SF Gabe is the way he is–because I didn’t want to demote the complexities of his character and his relationship with Adrien to Saturday Morning villain expectations, because in the end, that just won’t work. It’d be like trying to redeem the Fire Lord–that’s not something you do.

And honestly, if ML proves me wrong and they give Gabe the treatment he deserves, then good on them. It’ll suck for Adrien, but I think pretty much everything is going to suck for Adrien at this point–there’s no getting around it. Honestly, the only redemption canon Gabe can get at this point is redemption through death. He needs to make the decision to sacrifice himself in order to save Adrien, Mama Agreste, or Ladybug.

Simple as that.

#miraculous ladybug #miraculous #ml #mlb #gabriel #skaylanphear replies #anoymous

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

Text

8chan, Trump, voter suppression: how white supremacy went mainstream in the US

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/11/el-paso-shooting-white-supremacy-8chan-voter-suppression?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Post_to_Tumblr

"In many ways, the Republican party has been preparing for minority rule for years now. The anxiety that drove the shooter in El Paso, as well as every other white supremacist mass shooter in recent years, has motivated Republican politicians to steadily demonize and disenfranchise populations that don’t vote for them. The problem long predates Donald Trump, but he’s given taken both the mask and the leash off of it."

8chan, Trump, Voter Suppression: How White Supremacy Went Mainstream In The US

The same anxiety that drives white supremacists has motivated Republicans to disenfranchise populations that don’t vote for them

By Luke Darby | Published:02:00 Sun August 11, 2019 | The Guardian | Posted August 11, 2019 7:54 PM ET |

Before he opened fire on an El Paso, Texas shopping center, killing 22 people and injuring dozens more, the accused gunman, Patrick Crusius, allegedly posted a manifesto online explicitly stating his motivation: he was trying to stop a “Hispanic invasion of Texas”. In April, another shooter attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and wounding three other people. In his a “manifesto” attributed to him, he claimed he was responding to the “meticulously planned genocide of the European race”.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 2018, still another shooter attacked a synagogue that he chose deliberately because the congregation helped with refugee relocation. He wrote online that they were trying to “bring invaders in that kill our people”. The man who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year, called immigration an “assault on the European people”..

All of these shooters were obsessed with the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, sometimes referred to as “white genocide”. It’s the idea that shadowy elites – usually Jewish, almost always liberal – are orchestrating the destruction of white culture through demographic change. The theory goes that white culture will be eroded mainly through migration and birthrates: more people of color are arriving in majority white counties, the ones already there are having more and more babies, and birthrates are declining for the soon-to-be-oppressed white people.

But the fans of this theory, and the idea of a demographic threat to a white (male) hierarchical structure, are no longer the preserve of extremists that lurk in the netherworlds of the internet. White supremacy, and the ideas and motivations that drive it, are flourishing in plain sight in the US.

Most notoriously, Donald Trump has become a fan of “great replacement” talking points. In the last week many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have called the president a white supremacist. But Trump is far from being alone, and in recent years the idea has caught fire among more and more mainstream Republicans. The looming threat of their losing political influence permeates every move the party has made for decades.

Anxiety about racial decline has a long past, but this specific modern version of it comes from the French writer Renaud Camus, who was known in the 80s as a pioneering gay novelist. He coined the phrase “great replacement” in a 2011 book of the same name, articulating the conspiratorial idea that black and brown migrants are invading Europe to destroy white culture.

It’s a weird path that takes the ideas of a race-obsessed French novelist into the Trump White House, but it has been helped along by Rupert Murdoch’s pugilistic network, Fox News. One of the network’s standout hosts, Tucker Carlson, is probably the most clear-cut example: in August 2018, he dedicated a segment of his show to a story about black gangs killing white farmers in South Africa and the government then seizing their land. It’s a widely shared rumor online, popular with white nationalists because it seemed like an example of a government literally committing white genocide, but there’s no evidence that it is true. Carlson ultimately retracted the story, but not before Trump tweeted that he was directing the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to investigate.

Even when Carlson’s show isn’t clearly cribbing notes from white nationalist forums, he’s promoting their ideas in slightly more coded ways. He has railed against diversity, asking rhetorically: “How exactly is diversity our strength?” In 2018 he complained about demographic change in the US, saying: “This is more change than human beings are designed to digest,” and adding: “Our leaders are for diversity, just not where they live.” Andrew Anglin, who founded the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, has called Carlson “literally our greatest ally”. After Carlson’s South Africa segment, Anglin said Tucker Carlson Tonight is “basically Daily Stormer: The Show.”

Experts in white supremacist thought largely agree that Trump is actively spreading the ideas that underpin this ideology. Christian Picciolini, US author of Memoirs of a Skinhead and former neo-Nazi who set up Life After Hate, a not-for-profit that aims to deradicalize extremists, said: “Donald Trump is using nearly identical language to what white supremacist movement language is, language that I used 30 years ago in lyrics and in promoting white supremacist ideology.”

Alexandra Minna Stern, professor on the history of eugenics and author of Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination, said: “The way I describe it is that President Trump has really set up a baseline for bigotry in political discourse in the United States that has helped create the terrain where this is more possible.”

And other frontline Republicans are following Trump’s lead. In 2017, the Iowa congressman and standard-bearer of the far right Steve King tweeted: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” In a 2018 interview with an extreme rightwing propaganda site in Austria, King proved he was fluent in white nationalist tropes, saying: “If we don’t defend western civilization, then we will become subjugated by the people who are the enemies of faith, the enemies of justice.”

The rise of white supremacy is being driven in part by demographic change – although racism has flourished in the US long before whites were in sight of losing their position as the majority. The US census predicts that by 2050 white people will no longer be the majority in the country. A Census Bureau report from 2015 predicted that by the time the 2020 census is conducted, more than half of American school children will be non-white, meaning that “majority minority” future will be baked in unless something drastic changes it.

White people will still be the the largest demographic, they will no longer be in a majority. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the number of white adults who believe “a majority non-white population will weaken American culture” is 46%.

Things look even worse if you are a Republican politician. Decades of playing to white grievances plus years of relentlessly maligning the first black president have stymied their ability to win support from non-white voters. After 2012, when Mitt Romney failed to even come close to unseating then president Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee commissioned a so-called “autopsy report” that predicted doom if the party couldn’t right itself: “America is changing demographically, and unless Republicans are able to grow our appeal the way GOP governors have done, the changes tilt the playing field even more in the Democratic direction. If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”

That hasn’t happened. Instead of trying to peel off voters who typical side with Democrats – women, minorities, moderates – Republicans have aggressively focused on making sure people who aren’t likely to vote for them don’t vote at all. In the US voter suppression – the act of denying the vote to minority and poor communities who are likely to be Democratic supporters – is thriving. In the last decade, 33 million people have been purged from voter rolls across the country – predominantly in districts with large percentages of non-white voters. In 2013, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The state of North Carolina passed voter suppression laws so flagrant that the federal court said they targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision”.

Last year voters in Florida overwhelmingly chose to re-enfranchise 1.5 million people with felony convictions; after the vote the state legislature chose to add a requirement that none of those ex-felons can vote until they repay all court fees, effectively bringing back the poll tax which restricted voting among minority groups for decades.

Carole Anderson, academic and author of last year’s One Person, No Vote and a leading figure in the fight against voter suppression, wrote in the Guardian last week about the 33 million Americans purged from the voting rolls. “To put this in perspective, that is the equivalent of the combined populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Phoenix and Dallas, as well as the states of Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Idaho. Not surprisingly, these massive removals are concentrated in precincts that tend to have higher minority populations and vote Democratic. Similarly, other voter suppression techniques, such as poll closures, deliberate long lines on election day, voter ID laws and extreme partisan gerrymandering all weigh disproportionately on minorities and urban areas.”

Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now

Paul Weyrich

Voter suppression isn’t necessarily a new tactic. In a 1980 speech to fellow conservatives, Paul Weyrich, one of the men who helped found arch-conservative institutions such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation, said: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

What has changed is the demographic projections. And if Republicans can’t compete in the new electoral landscape, then it is in their best interest to freeze the official electorate in place. One way to achieve this is partisan gerrymandering, redrawing voting districts so that they’re easier for Republicans to win. Incredibly, the supreme court in June ruled that federal courts were powerless to hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering – even in a case in which the party that controls the state legislature draws voting maps to explicitly elect its candidates.

In an excoriating dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan and the supreme court’s liberal justices accused the court’s majority of shirking its constitutional duty. “The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs and to choose their political representatives.

“The partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.

Of all times to abandon the court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one.”

Even in terms of raw numbers, the Republicans are at a disadvantage. There are 12 million more registered Democrats than Republicans in the US, but Republican control of the federal government is almost absolute. In part, that’s because institutions such as the electoral college and the Senate itself are wildly undemocratic, in the sense that both are structured so that one party can claim victory without actually receiving the most votes. In 2016, Democratic senators won 6m more votes than Republican ones, yet Republicans firmly held their majority.

The Senate distributes two seats a state, meaning that states with large multiracial populations and more Democratic voters (California, Texas, New York) get exactly the same representation as those populated by older – and often Republican – white people. As Jamelle Bouie noted in the New York Times: “Today, the largest state is California, with nearly 40 million residents, and the smallest is Wyoming, with just under 600,000 people, a disparity that gives a person in Wyoming 67 times the voting power of one in California.

“As it stands now, the Senate is highly undemocratic and strikingly unrepresentative, with an affluent membership composed mostly of white men, who are about 30% of the population but hold 71 of the seats. Under current demographic trends this will get worse, as whites become a plurality of all Americans but remain a majority in most states.”

And while elected officials can at least – in theory, and with ever-greater difficulty – be voted out of office, that is not the case for the justices on the supreme court who wield extraordinary power, as the recent partisan gerrymandering case reveals. Trump has so far appointed two supreme court justices.

Law professor Ian Samuel explained, in relation to Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation – Trump’s first appointment – that it was the first time “a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22m fewer – than the senators that voted against him”.

For his second pick, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s choice to replace the moderate Anthony Kennedy, the senators who voted against him represented 38 million more people than the ones who voted to confirm.

In many ways, the Republican party has been preparing for minority rule for years now. The anxiety that drove the shooter in El Paso, as well as every other white supremacist mass shooter in recent years, has motivated Republican politicians to steadily demonize and disenfranchise populations that don’t vote for them. The problem long predates Donald Trump, but he’s given taken both the mask and the leash off of it.

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gamesoflevitation · 2 years

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I posted 1,594 times in 2021

127 posts created (8%)

1467 posts reblogged (92%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 11.6 posts.

I added 629 tags in 2021

#centricide - 239 posts

#art - 238 posts

#jreg - 75 posts

#ryan ross - 19 posts

#fanfiction - 13 posts

#my writing - 12 posts

#mychem - 9 posts

#writing - 9 posts

#leftunity - 8 posts

#personal - 7 posts

Longest Tag: 126 characters

#ryan ross i love you so much i will never stop loving you my heart is full of love for you. it will be this way on my deathbed

My Top Posts in 2021

hi can you please explain centricide to me. i’m trying to read the wiki but i already have a headache and it’s just making it worse and you have a really good way with words so please. help.

AJMDNJSMXNXSJM ok SO! It’s a very dumb webseries where all the characters are played by the same dude and all the characters are humanized political ideologies. What could go wrong. So basically four extremists (based on the quadrants of the political compass) team up to kill the centrists bc it’s the only thing they have in common with each other: hating the centrists. The four extremists are Commie, Ancom, Ancap, and Nazi and obviously they don’t get along but they try to be a team for awhile and it’s a literal disaster lmfao but the music slaps. Sorry this probably made your headache worse. Watching it would make your headache 10x worse tho.

50 notes • Posted 2021-04-23 03:54:20 GMT

everyone shut up anarkitty is real and canon 🥰

55 notes • Posted 2021-05-11 21:00:09 GMT

centricide is the only media I can think of where the found family trope is canon and fandom rejected it

80 notes • Posted 2021-03-29 02:51:41 GMT

131 notes • Posted 2021-02-05 02:47:36 GMT

please 2021 please please please be the year of ryan ross please please 2021 ryan please ryan ross

207 notes • Posted 2021-01-01 04:15:13 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #my number 1 post didnt come tru :(

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tsunderin · 6 years

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Bethesda Round Up

Rage 2: This was... weird... and uncomfortable, but bless Andrew WK and the devs for trying. But man is this underwhelming AF. Calling the main guy a “main protagonist” gives me some hope that there are other, more interesting protagonists, but we’ll see. It would have been nice to have a create your own character thing--oh well. Love how the dev was like, “I could talk about all the parts of the game” and then gives us nothing. Fuck off, mate.

Elder Scrolls Legends: New graphics. Nice for people who enjoy the game.

Elder Scrolls Online Summerset: Sounds rad, but the Argonian DLC in Murkmire sounds better. Argonian’s don’t get enough credit.

Doom Eternal: More of everything Doom-y; the people who like Doom seem to be happy, so I’m happy for them.

Quake Champions: This is the point where I get pissed off at how rude and shitty the audience is. The poor guy comes out so excited for his game, and by the end he’s so... deflated. Sure it’s not Fallout or Skyrim, but jesus fuck. I’m rooting for you, Quake guy! I appreciate your improved mechanics to make things easier for beginners!

Prey: Adding a New Game+, a survival mode, and working on what seems like a roguelike DLC. “Infinitely replayable” or so they say. Another mode called Typhon Hunter, which is basically Prop Hunt (I mean... they referenced a space banana so I can only assume that someone watches the Achievement Hunter LPs of Prop Hunt). But I like the idea of the props being mimics hunting the “hider”.

Wolfenstein: Getting a port to the Switch, which is cool. And a new game, Youngblood, starring BJ’s twin daughters in the 80s. It’s a co-op game, and I’m very here for this, except the models for the daughters barely look muscular?? I hope I’m wrong, but I’m gonna be super pissed if they kept them “pretty” for fighting Nazis. And Cyber Pilot is coming out for VR, where you focus on hijacking mechs to use against them. The guy is very against Nazi’s and very pro-kicking the shit out of them, which I can get behind.

Fallout 76: It’s literally the same fucking trailer Todd spoiled in the Microsoft conference, but at least there was more to go on. And I liked about 5% of it. That 5% is that they based some of the enemies on WV folklore and that’s rad as fuck. Also they developed new technology for the graphics--thank god for that. FO76 is all online all the time, so it’s basically an MMO that you don’t have to play co-op, but it’s strongly suggested that you do. Death, at least, isn’t permanent, and you get to keep your character and progression no matter where you go (there aren’t separate servers, so no worries about characters being tied to a specific one). One of the “drawing factors” is that you can nuke other people whenever you want (granted you find the keys to the bunker). That’s fucking stupid--this is going to be the most unenjoyable online experience ever. Can’t wait to build a settlement and have it destroyed for no fucking reason. But hey, it’s coming out on November 14th!

Elder Scrolls Blades: A mobile game where you play as an exiled member of the imperial blades. There’s Abyss mode, which is a roguelike; Arena which is 1v1; and Town which is quest stuff. The “focus” is on rebuilding your town by progressing through the quests. It’s really mobile game sounding, and if they graphics are as good as they say they are phones are going to be exploding.

Starfield: New IP. In space. That’s... about it....

Elder Scrolls 6: There was nothing there???? Just a name on a backdrop with Skyrim music playing. You may as well not even have shown it. We already know it’s gonna come out eventually.

Final Verdict:

#E3 #E3pocalypse '18 #Bethesda

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