#the five

[odinsblog]

More of this for Fox News interviews, please.

👉🏿 https://colorofchange.org/newsaccuracyratings/

👉🏿 https://blog.oup.com/2018/04/crime-news-media-america/

👉🏿 https://aninjusticemag.com/white-shooters-are-most-often-responsible-for-mass-school-shootings-6e7b647b5cce

[dduane]

I've found a new toy

Heh heh.

...And I can think of entirely too many things this could be used for. :)

(the original post is here)

[scarlet--wiccan]

Here's the full suite of Hellfire Gala variant covers unveiled today, April 19th. I'd say the fashion designs are, on the whole, improved from last year, but they're also less fantastical and more geared towards dressed-up interpretations of existing costumes than the first Gala.

[the-starry-pool-au]

A prophecy foretold, of the new stars breath…

[thepastisalreadywritten]

By Parissa DJangi

August 18, 2023

Some say he was a surgeon. Others, a deranged madman — or perhaps a butcher, prince, artist, or specter.

The murderer known to history as Jack the Ripper terrorized London 135 years ago this fall.

In the subsequent century, he has been everything to everyone, a dark shadow on which we pin our fears and attitudes.

But to five women, Jack the Ripper was not a legendary phantom or a character from a detective novel — he was the person who horrifically ended their lives.

“Jack the Ripper was a real person who killed real people,” reiterates historian Hallie Rubenhold, whose book, The Five, chronicles the lives of his victims. “He wasn’t a legend.”

Who were these women? They had names: Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.

They also had hopes, loved ones, friends, and, in some cases, children.

Their lives, each one unique, tell the story of 19th-century London, a city that pushed them to its margins and paid more attention to them dead than alive.

Terror in Whitechapel

Their stories did not all begin in London, but they ended there, in and around the crowded corner of the metropolis known as Whitechapel, a district in London’s East End.

“Probably there is no such spectacle in the whole world as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten great city of East London,” Walter Bessant wrote in his novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men in 1882.

“It is even neglected by its own citizens, who had never yet perceived their abandoned condition.”

The “abandoned” citizens of Whitechapel included some of the city’s poorest residents.

Immigrants, transient laborers, families, single women, thieves — they all crushed together in overflowing tenements, slums, and workhouses.

According to historian Judith Walkowitz:

“By the 1880s, Whitechapel had come to epitomize the social ills of ‘Outcast London,’ a place where sin and poverty comingled in the Victorian imagination, shocking the middle classes."

Whitechapel transformed into a scene of horror when the lifeless, mutilated body of Polly Nichols was discovered on a dark street in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888.

She became the first of Jack the Ripper’s five canonical victims, the core group of women whose murders appeared to be related and occurred over a short span of time.

Over the next month, three more murdered women would be found on the streets of the East End.

They had been killed in a similar way: their throats slashed, and, in most cases, their abdomens disemboweled.

Some victims’ organs had been removed. The fifth murder occurred on November 9, when the Ripper butchered Mary Jane Kelly with such barbarity that she was nearly unrecognizable.

This so-called “Autumn of Terror” pushed Whitechapel and the entire city into a panic, and the serial killer’s mysterious identity only heightened the drama.

The press sensationalized the astonishingly grisly murders — and the lives of the murdered women.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane

Though forever linked by the manner of their death, the five women murdered by Jack the Ripper shared something else in common:

They were among London’s most vulnerable residents, living on the margins of Victorian society.

They eked out a life in the East End, drifting in and out of workhouses, piecing together casual jobs, and pawning their few possessions to afford a bed for a night in a lodging house.

If they could not scrape together the coins, they simply slept on the street.

“Nobody cared about who these women were at all,” Rubenhold says. “Their lives were incredibly precarious.”

Polly Nichols knew precarity well. Born in 1845, she fulfilled the Victorian ideal of proper womanhood when she became a wife at the age of 18.

But after bearing five children, she ultimately left her husband under suspicions of his infidelity.

Alcohol became both a crutch and curse for her in the final years of her life.

Alcohol also hastened Annie Chapman’s estrangement from what was considered a respectable life.

Annie Chapman was born in 1840 and spent most of her life in London and Berkshire.

With her marriage to John Chapman, a coachman, in 1869, Annie positioned herself in the top tier of the working class.

But her taste for alcohol and the loss of her children unraveled her family life, and Annie ended up in the East End.

Swedish-born Elizabeth Stride was an immigrant, like thousands of others who lived in the East End.

Born in 1843, she came to England when she was 22. In London, Stride reinvented herself time and time again, becoming a wife and coffeehouse owner.

Catherine Eddowes­­, who was born in Wolverhampton in 1842 and moved to London as a child, lost both of her parents by the time she was 15.

She spent most of her adulthood with one man, who fathered her children. Before her murder, she had just returned to London after picking hops in Kent, a popular summer ritual for working-class Londoners.

At 25, Mary Jane Kelly was the youngest, and most mysterious, of the Ripper’s victims.

Kelly reportedly claimed she came from Ireland and Wales before settling in London.

She had a small luxury that the others did not: She rented a room with a bed. It would become the scene of her murder.

Yet the longstanding belief that all of these women were sex workers is a myth, as Rubenhold demonstrates in The Five.

Only two of the women — Stride and Kelly — were known to have engaged in sex work during their lives.

The fact that all of them have been labeled sex workers highlights how Victorians saw poor, unhoused women.

“They have been systematically ‘othered’ from society,” Rubenhold says,"even though this is how the majority lived.”

These women were human beings with a strong sense of personhood. According to biographer Robert Hume, their friends and neighbors described them as “industrious,” “jolly,” and “very clean.”

They lived, they loved, they existed — until, very suddenly on a dark night in 1888, they did not.

A long shadow

The discovery of Annie Chapman’s body on September 8 heightened panic in London, since her wounds echoed the shocking brutality of Polly Nichols’ murder days earlier.

Investigators realized that the same killer had likely committed both crimes — and he was still on the loose. Who would he strike next?

In late September, London’s Central News Office received a red-inked letter that claimed to be from the murderer. It was signed “Jack the Ripper.”

Papers across the city took the name and ran with it. Press coverage of the Whitechapel Murders crescendoed to a fever pitch.

Newspapers danced the line between fact and fiction, breathlessly recounting every gruesome detail of the crimes and speculating with wild abandon about the killer’s identity.

Today, that impulse endures, and armchair detectives and professional investigators alike have proposed an endless parade of suspects, including artist Walter Sickert, writer Lewis Carroll, sailor Carl Feigenbaum, and Aaron Kosminski, an East End barber.

"The continued fascination with unmasking the murderer perpetuates this idea that Jack the Ripper is a game,” Rubenhold says.

She sees parallels between the gamification of the Whitechapel Murders and the modern-day obsession with true crime.

“When we approach true crime, most of the time we approach as if it was legend, as if it wasn’t real, as if it didn’t happen to real people.”

“These crimes still happen today, and we are still not interested in the victims,” Rubenhold laments.

The Whitechapel Murders remain unsolved after 135 years, and Rubenhold believes that will never change:

“We’re not going to find anything that categorically tells us who Jack the Ripper is.”

Instead, the murders tell us about the values of the 19th century — and the 21st.

[dailydamnation]

And then five minutes later…

Illyana Rasputin chaperoning the Hellfire Gala (2022)

I like Illyana showing herself to be a softie. Let the people with a heavy load on their shoulders have a little fun.

[edwardseymour]

i can't remember if i posted this to my old blog but it’s important so either way i am going to post it here as well: hallie rubenhold (historian who covers sex work, author of ‘the five’ and ‘the covent garden ladies’ — which was adapted into the show ‘harlots’) follows julie bindel, a radical feminist journalist from the uk, who is sex-work exclusionary, and one of the Big Names™️ in mainstream british transphobia.

[odinsblog]

Whoa. Fox News has finally turned on Trump. Not that they deserve any accolades or anything. Their entire network backed Trump for wayyy too long to be rewarded now for their extremely late, conveniently well timed change of heart.

LOL, I refuse to applaud the henchmen for switching their allegiance from the Joker to the Red Skull.

It’s just kinda interesting to see any Fox News show pretending to be outraged over Trump’s treason. Like watching a dog walk on its hind legs.

[bonniehooper]

Top Picks of 2023

My Top 20 New Favorite Actors - #12: Kim Min-kyu

Introduction to Him: Business Proposal

[smashpages]

Immortal X-Men #13 (Marvel, July 2023) Hellfire Gala Variant Cover by Luciano Vecchio

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Fox News’ Jesse Watters had some particularly harsh words for homeless people when discussing California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) recent comments about the issue in the state.

Newsom appeared on Monday night’s Hannity where he acknowledged the city’s homelessness problem as a “disgrace.”

On Tuesday’s episode of The Five, Watters said homeless people “have failed in life:”

“Being in a city run by Democrats is like being in a bad marriage where you pretend everything’s great — you know the couples — but it’s just so they don’t have to talk about how bad things really are because once you acknowledge there’s a problem, you have to do something about that. So Gavin’s now at maybe mid-field, but he has to understand, homelessness is not about lack of affordable housing — It’s about drug addicts that want to wander around and live in tents on the sidewalk. And so, you can’t coddle antisocial behavior, you can’t subsidize anti-social behavior — you have to stigmatize it. You can’t celebrate people with purple hair and nose rings, four kids with four different men who are dressed like trash, and make them out to be some sort of cutting-edge heroes.You have to call them what they are: These are people that’ve failed in life and they’re on their deathbed. And if we’re not honest about it, we’re never going to fix the problem.”

It took a moment for the rest of the co-hosts to figure out what to say to that, but Judge Jeanine Pirro finally weighed in.

“There’s one group in San Francisco that’s so inundated with crime, and drugs, and homelessness, they did their own GoFundMe and raised $25,000 so they could buy these 1,400-pound planters so that the homeless there couldn’t pitch a tent in their neighborhood,” she said. “Maybe we ought to do more of that… and by the way, the people in these, the homeless people — they’re the walking dead.”

Pirro said when she was a judge, she asked a homeless man what he did for a living so she could set bail.

“He said, ‘I am the walking dead.’ He was a druggie. I mean, he knew it.”

Watch the video.

Jesse Watters wants viewers to know: he really, really hates homeless people. In a segment on Friday night, the primetime Fox News host launched into a tirade against San Francisco’s homeless population. “San Francisco’s been hollowed out,” Watters said, monologuing over footage of homeless San Franciscans. “All that’s left is rich tech titans working from home and just bags of flesh mutating on the sidewalk.” Over the course of nearly ten minutes, Watters also called San Francisco’s homeless population “urine-soaked junkies” and “vagabonds and zombies.” He referred to the city as a “fentanyl caliphate” that had given its homeless population permission to “rape, rob, and steal” without consequence.

[emmafrostcovercollection]

Inferno #1 (2021) - Brooks Wraparound Variant

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Greg Owen at LGBTQ Nation:

Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters paraded his ignorance proudly last weekend as he cluelessly pontificated about gender dysphoria, gender reassignment surgery and childhood sexuality, all while promoting a conspiracy theory that doctors are eager to get kids’ genitals “chopped off”. “We adopted a young child, and at age five, he was playing with dolls, and everybody knew he was gay, or was going to be gay. And it’s not like all of a sudden we took him to the doctor and chopped him off,” Watters reportedly babbled, implying that’s exactly what greedy medical professionals are out to do.

“A lot of these people are just gay, or lesbian,” Watters claimed to know about trans kids. Referring to doctors, he added, “And what they’re doing is they’re intervening in a regular gay or lesbian life, and that’s a new experience, and it never used to be like that.” Watters apparently believes there’s no difference between being gay and being transgender. Liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov at least gave a semblance of balance to the panel discussion on Friday night by rebutting Watters’ claim. “Well, ‘gay’ and ‘trans’ are different, and that’s not how ‘gay’ works, either,” she told the host. “I don’t believe it is,” Watters replied, perfectly summing up the primacy of feelings over facts among the far right. The segment about trans kids, gender transition and puberty blockers started with Watters’ specious argument that access and advances in gender-affirming care and surgery are an indication that doctors are conspiring to exploit trans kids for monetary gain.

During a recent episode of The Five, co-host Jesse Watters put out a whopper of a claim that trans kids are " just gay or lesbian" and pushed the anti-trans pseudoscience-laden conspiracy theory that doctors are profiting off of gender-affirming care.

From the 04.05.2024 edition of FNC's The Five:

[theleotorrio]

The Five and matching lyrics from Heaven's Gate by Amelié Farren

My immortal evolutionary traits are still in tact

I am unapologetic for the sympathy I lacked

I left my body back in California 'cause I'm weak

Overdosed on Phenobarbital,

It's part of my mystique.

[sarcasticsciencefictionwriter]

We are not now that strength which in old days Moved Earth and Heaven, that which we are, we are, One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield.