#thinking we're the ones that civilized people

[sleepynegress]

On Challengers...

Okay.

So, here's the thing. It's decent.

It's sassy, catfighty, but with dudes using rackets and tongue-wrestling, and the tennis scenes are tense, but... it wasn't at all confidently scandalous like I would've expected.

....Like I feel like they didn't push it far enough, somehow? And not even in the way you might think, with dicks a-swingin and thrusts abundant. Remember, the movie Closer? -I think that came out in 2007ish and was rated PG-13??? Or could have been if not for the language.

Natalie Portman has a similar nudity clause to her contract and *STILL* had the absolute sexiest scene with Clive Owen.... .....Which I'll put in this post to demonstrate what I mean. This felt like it held back at moments... When it came to pushing desire, between the men and/or with Zendaya, with one or the other. It just felt so tame to me given the hype. I was hoping for a return to artistic sensuality in film again, instead of this weird sort of by-rote-feeling purity culture we're having rn. (I'm watching Love Lies Bleeding tonight and I BET that delivers. Lesbians, salude!) I was hoping for Cruel Intentions' lush cut with The Dreamers' sensuality..if that makes sense?? AND some good-good tennis. THAT did deliver. WOW, some of the shots for that were eye-popping. A critic I follow noted that her issue (she always has the best takes I don't agree with all of them but they are always well-articulated) was that Zendaya was not fleshed out as a central figure, especially as a BLACK WOMAN. It was yet again another case of a Black woman dropped down from the moon coming from no people of her own, but just somehow existing in a sea of white people with not a hint of Black friends or loved ones.

Hell, they could've even laid out *her people* like the brilliantly underrated Beyond The Lights with Minnie Driver playing the stage manager mom to Gugu Mbatha Raw's biracial pop star. But that comes down to the white male gaze fucking it up, yet again. I looked up the screenwriter and just kind of nodded knowingly with an 'oh, yeah that's what I expected, that explains it...' He simply didn't have the range beyond a sort of vague tennis fetish for brown girls in short skirts grunting and swinging and wanting to do something with that. He admitted that Naomi and another Black woman player's interaction on the court *inspired* this...

Perception of Black women doing ANYTHING can be so heavy with a weirdly asexual gaze from white women and hyper-sexualized by white men. And if desire/centering tips in the "wrong" direction deemed by prejudice and our assumed place....*yeesh* we catch hell. You're either bafflingly too ugly to be treated with desire (whew the incel bigots are big mad that it's Zendaya and not a Sweeney-type) or only deemed good enough for it, because of that white gaze. And resented regardless.

*sigh* Can't win for losing. But I digress. Zendaya's co-stars are the oddest looking mystical-dwarf-head ass forest creature white boys with big ears, but they GAVE in the acting department. Mike Faist is a STAR. He has a sort of laidback sweetly confident rizz. But he definitely is the lovechild of a young Scott Glenn and DJ Qualls. I want to put him in a western immediately because he has Civil War photo face.

Mike O'Connor has that desperate dirty hairy scruffy thing like dude from The Bear. Like you KNOW he has a scratch tat somewhere and would do the dirty with his partner in the toilet stalls or anywhere else. Hollyweird is strange about beauty standards man. Back in the day, they used to pretend old white men, who looked like they smelled like Barbasol mixed w/ urine would somehow be sexy to a twentysomething. Now, we have this dichotomy of thankfully a little more of a diverse gaze for the centered "bombshell" other than blonde with large breasts number 32637263872.... but we also have some actresses cutting fat out their cheeks and being Ozempic thin. *sigh* ...While the "basic" hot boys are punching the air rn because they are also passé. Got to have something interesting going on in the face for everyone now, I think. Can't just be AI "pretty" anymore. Thankfully.

....Anyway. It is good, but with those caveats I laid out.

P.S. ICONIC for me is seeing Zendaya's Black-ass nose bridge drawn large on that poster. P.P.S Thank LUCA for doing the queer elements well... I personally don't think it went far enough, tho...

Mike bottoming for all, including getting pegged by Zendaya would've happened in my version of this... at least implied, come on (ficwriters?) Oh! and here are the clips from Closer, but then it was a successful play first, so the script is more substantial in that.

This is how filthy I expected Challengers to be, and it's just. not. Nothing in The Challengers touches the heavy heady nastiness in this scene IMO, but something in that movie should have, dammit! Note they never even touch each other.

[leam1983]

Lisan al-Ghaib

The Hellsite has a thing against White Savior narratives, and for good reason. The idea that general-purpose Natives have some elixir for mindfulness, mental health or even sociopolitical stability is nothing new. It's as tokenistic as you think if you take it at face value, but I think the more classic examples in the genre like Dances With Wolves or, God forbid, Avatar (a revised copy of the previous title, in many ways) tend to focus on something that's a smidge more positive - namely in that the Other - not the Noble Savage, so much as someone with an entirely external perspective - has the power to help us progress. A very debatable posture.

In effect, the classic examples in the genre contend that it's not really about "saving the Natives" or even becoming their saviour, but rather about the unformed or troubled protagonist finding themselves thanks to the Natives' input. I've always thought that Wolves' Sioux never needed Dubar, Dunbar needed them. The Na'vi never needed Jake Sully, some other member of the people would've eventually filled in the blanks and become Toruk Makto. Instead, Jake Sully needed the Na'vi to fix himself. There's nothing magical there, despite the First Nations spiritualism that mostly coats the genre, ripped out of its context and sort of propped up the same way mindfulness is now pulled out of its own context and served up to the masses, as if living with a little anxiety or stress were somehow a symptom for something more insidious. The world forgot Herbert's object lesson, and suggested that for some people, especially damaged goods, the only way to find purpose is to subsume yourself in another culture. You emerge as the saviour, kill the monster, and fulfill your role in the story.

Taking up someone else's problems to fix yourself isn't an actual solution; I think any two-bit psychologist could tell you that. Even if Dunbar and Sully emerge whole and healed from their own tales, they're behavioural abnormalities. Power doesn't allow you to stay humble. Power corrupts.

Ask Shaddad. Ask the Bene Gesserit. Ask the Harkonnens, who never saw their end coming.

Back when Frank Herbert first wrote Dune, Eastern mysticism was taking off much in the same way we're seeing meditation and yoga. He pulled an interesting bait-and-switch in showing us a protagonist who seemed set to go from a mostly nameless aristocrat to your typical conquering hero - but he realized that some faiths can be noxious. Some currents can twist the mind. After all, Paul Atreides' own stories addresses the fact that he comes to align with fundamentalists, and does so willingly.

In many ways, George Lucas tried to play the same melody with Anakin Skywalker being set up as the Force's hero, only for the will of the Galaxy to be made manifest through his son, instead. The problem is, unlike Herbert, Lucas lacks subtlety. The danger of messianic thinking more or less deserves a dream-state vignette on Dagobah, where Luke beheads Vader and sees his own face in the depths of his father's mask. Herbert, in comparison, makes those fears concrete. Paul was on shaky ground the moment he embraced the moniker of Muad'Dib, and slipped into something I might as well call psychosis, after drinking the Waters of Life.

Chani lost the man she fell in love with. Paul Atreides lost himself.

White Savior narratives aren't meant to be seen as the Civilized Man saving the day. They're meant to be seen as an outsider protagonist needing an external point of view to face the abyss, more or less.

If you're an optimist, the protagonist is thankful for the wisdom he's received and plays his part, not for prophecy or for Ego - but for basic care and consideration. Consider Shogun's Blackthorne, by the end of the series. He wasn't one to calculate his next move - he's clearly a man of passion. Japan gave him something to hold onto - and then squeezed around him like a vice made up of niceties and political manoeuvring. Yoshii Toranaga, on the other hand, is the chess player. Blackthorne's fate is the grimmest of the brighter ends of the White Savior genre. He didn't save anyone or anything; he merely proved useful.

If you're a pessimist, you turn to Dune or to any of your local Fire-and-Brimstone preachers.

Considering, when I hear the Hellsite dismiss Dune as just another story written by a White guy about some other White guy saving some vaguely Middle-Eastern-coded people; that tells me a lot of armchair critics haven't picked up the books or watched the movies.

If anything, Dune's very premise gives reason to those of you who decry Colonialist rhetoric. Dune isn't just a seminal science-fiction classic; it's also a warning about what happens when faith goes haywire, and of what happens when the balance of power tips in the worst direction possible.

[ckret2]

If axotolt is a defense attorney, what about a stork prosecutor. They're one of the animals that eat axotolt, and there is the stories of storks delivering babies. Representing all the zillion of lives Bill destroyed and the zillions that never came to be after the dimensions were destroyed

A coherent pantheon is the opposite of what we're going for here. If it's deeply symbolic and if there are salient meaningful ties between the different members, it's failed our goal.

This isn't like, the gods of Mount Olympus who are all part of the same organization. They're not a club or a team. I'm calling them a "pantheon" tongue-in-cheek style. They have no relation to each other. Most of them didn't know each other before the scene I'm dumping them in. There is no evidence that they are, in fact, actually gods. What they are is:

for whatever reason, extremely powerful. (Powerful enough that "gods" is the only strong enough word to describe them.)

and

due to being extremely powerful, qualified to deal with extremely big problems.

Problems like an entire dimension breaking. (Hence why they've got a civil engineer on the scene.) They didn't actually know the whole damn thing could catch fire. It's sort of impressive.

The reason I opened this up to suggestions is because 10 different people have better odds of thinking up 10 totally disconnected completely random things than one person is of thinking up 10 things that don't have any relationship to each other.

This is the TV show that went "what should Bill's minions look like? Um... fuck it, dentures with legs and lava lamp with a bowler." This is the TV show that shoved aside bigfoot, mothman, chupacabras, jackalopes, aliens, werewolves, and vampires to go "you know what? Wax figures." This is the fanfic that had a magic hair growth lotion that accidentally grows extra limbs and a crane game full of creepy haunted dolls. Y'all are going too deep. Shallow it up.

(Also I don't need suggestions for the gods' jobs—just weird design ideas. I already have the scene I'm going to use them in; I can handle assigning them jobs.)

[cookie-nom-nom]

“The only thing that we're not doing is we're not shooting [immigrants] who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” -Greg Abbott, Texas governor

Hey, so in case y'all aren't aware, the governor of Texas is defying the Supreme Court's order to take out razor wire on the border that severely endangers the lives of people trying to cross, under the grounds that Texas is protecting itself from invasion. Abbott is threatening to pit the Texas national guard against Federal troops. It's probably a bluff, but praying for Republicans to be rational rarely works. Extremists are literally calling for succession from the United States.

I don't think it'll come to fighting, but the fact Abbott is so openly defying federal orders and blatantly threatening militant action is pretty terrifying. Especially if he's just allowed to do this, which would set a very dangerous precedent for what states can get away with.

[thegreenleavesofspring]

Anyway maybe the Calvinists and the Catholics should try. You know. Talking to each other instead of making the sorts of assumptions that wouldn't be out of place on the preschool playground, and only based on half the available information.

[shanghaichicane]

.

would it KILL my roommate to not play loud music/watch tv with the volume up at night when im trying to/getting ready to sleep like. girl you KNOW how thin these walls are

[vamptastic]

i think my constant seething rage is honestly very reasonable. i literally live in florida.

[the-busy-ghost]

Actually our dating conventions are entirely arbitrary and almost anybody’s concept of when the Middle Ages began or ended is justifiable and valid, in fact to some extent even the concept of the ‘Middle Ages’ is entirely arbitrary.

That being said it is hilarious to me that the English pick 1485 as the end of the Middle Ages, that’s so specific. Creates the wonderful idea that the minute Henry Tudor stepped onto a field in Leicestershire all the locals started updating their wardrobe like “Well guess we’re in the Early Modern Period now, better get rid of all this old stuff”

[dmclemblems]

“our fine leaders” look i love me a good dimitri and lorenz friendship and hearing him call dimitri a fine leader is a high honor from lorenz i am blessed by this

[ponyo2008]

never met anyone whos as proud of being a rude asshole like usamericans

[thefunniestguy]

how the fuck do you make friends in college AHHGHGHHGH . send tweet

[skippingseaglass]

people are my religion and this is fucking blasphemy

[medicinemane]

You know, it bothers me the way it seems like people have totally forgot about Iranians... thought we were all on the same page, wasn't it... women, life, freedom? (I legit don't remember, but the reason for that is it wasn't my slogan to say. Maybe it sounds strange, but that's how I felt, so I never actually wrote it, which makes it harder to remember)

Just feels like for a brief window there we were all talking big talk about supporting them, but then it all kinda dried up

I'll be totally transparent about one of the reasons this keeps coming up for me, russia is a major ally of Iran, Iran supplies the kamikaze drones russia hits civilians with... you know they're not giving them away for free... I worry what the Iranian government uses anything it gets to do... I don't really hear anything from Iranians anymore (though once again I fully admit that most of what I was hearing was second hand, I never had found an Iranian to directly follow... I don't know if anyone's still talking)

I just... I legit worry that people talk a big game about Gaza right now, but will they in a year?

I'm frustrated because a lot of the support people and causes around the world get seems like it's almost more self masturbatory than anything real... sure, everyone really well and truly means it, but then they get bored and it's on to a new cause

So I worry the support will be fleeting... and I see some people really getting down in the mud in ways... well, I'm not a people keeper, I don't get to tell people what to do, but I wouldn't be very pleased if I was acting the way I see some people act and my real point is I worry they're doing all this shit and they're not even gonna stick it out with the cause... seen people get bored and dip to many times to trust it

I'm not perfect... I have a shit memory a lot of the time, and I got a lot on my mind, but I still remember Hong Kong... at least sometimes... even looked into it from time to time and the news never looks good

I remember the Uyghurs, though my shit spelling always makes me look it back up. I think about Syria and how forgotten they are. I do actually still keep up with Ukraine... and then I see connections between russia and Iran and assad and...

I don't know... this stuff eats a me a little... not a lot, not more than the helplessness we all feel about bad things beyond our control usually does... I just worry about people, how they act with shit

Worry that you roll around in the mud too long it starts getting hard to wash off, and I worry that people sometimes get in the mud less cause they're trying to help anything and more cause sometimes it feels good to have an excuse to get dirty... righteous anger that makes any behavior permissible

I don't talk about current events that are on everyone's radar nonstop cause I don't want to burn support out by just overloading people with horror... but I generally find murdering innocent people to be a bad thing, so yeah... I want to see a fucking ceasefire already

Don't talk about it, but I actually do care quite a bit... and I worry... I worry that it'll be forgotten the second the news cycle moves on like everything else is

Worry that every bit of vile behavior I've seen that was for high minded goals will turn out to be dropped in an instant...

Almost like that's not a bug, that's just the point

[crepuscularqueens]

nothing like a black sails fan’s ability to sense when someone is talking about joji

[reasonsforhope]

Note: I super don't like the framing of this headline. "Here's why it matters" idk it's almost like there's an entire country's worth of people who get to keep their democracy! Clearly! But there are few good articles on this in English, so we're going with this one anyway.

--

2024 is the biggest global election year in history and the future of democracy is on every ballot. But amid an international backsliding in democratic norms, including in countries with a longer history of democracy like India, Senegal’s election last week was a major win for democracy. It’s also an indication that a new political class is coming of age in Africa, exemplified by Senegal’s new 44-year-old president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

The West African nation managed to pull off a free and fair election on March 24 despite significant obstacles, including efforts by former President Macky Sall to delay the elections and imprison or disqualify opposition candidates. Add those challenges to the fact that many neighboring countries in West Africa — most prominently Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, but other nations across the region too — have been repeatedly undermined by military coups since 2020.

Sall had been in power since 2012, serving two terms. He declined to seek a third term following years of speculation that he would do so despite a constitutional two-term limit. But he attempted to extend his term, announcing in February that elections (originally to be held that month) would be pushed off until the end of the year in defiance of the electoral schedule.

Sall’s allies in the National Assembly approved the measure, but only after security forces removed opposition politicians, who vociferously protested the delay. Senegalese society came out in droves to protest Sall’s attempted self-coup, and the Constitutional Council ruled in late February that Sall’s attempt to stay in power could not stand.

That itself was a win for democracy. Still, opposition candidates, including Faye, though legally able to run, remained imprisoned until just days before the election — while others were barred from running at all. The future of Senegal’s democracy seemed uncertain at best.

Cut to Tuesday [April 2, 2024], when Sall stepped down and handed power to Faye, a former tax examiner who won on a campaign of combating corruption, as well as greater sovereignty and economic opportunity for the Senegalese. And it was young voters who carried Faye to victory...

“This election showed the resilience of the democracy in Senegal that resisted the shock of an unexpected postponement,” Adele Ravidà, Senegal country director at the lnternational Foundation for Electoral Systems, told Vox via email. “... after a couple of years of unprecedented episodes of violence [the Senegalese people] turned the page smoothly, allowing a peaceful transfer of power.”

And though Faye’s aims won’t be easy to achieve, his win can tell us not only about how Senegal managed to establish its young democracy, but also about the positive trend of democratic entrenchment and international cooperation in African nations, and the power of young Africans...

Senegal and Democracy in Africa

Since it gained independence from France in 1960, Senegal has never had a coup — military or civilian. Increasingly strong and competitive democracy has been the norm for Senegal, and the country’s civil society went out in great force over the past three years of Sall’s term to enforce those norms.

“I think that it is really the victory of the democratic institutions — the government, but also civil society organization,” Sany said. “They were mobilized, from the unions, teacher unions, workers, NGOs. The civil society in Senegal is one of the most experienced, well-organized democratic institutions on the continent.” Senegalese civil society also pushed back against former President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to cling to power back in 2012, and the Senegalese people voted him out...

Faye will still have his work cut out for him accomplishing the goals he campaigned on, including economic prosperity, transparency, food security, increased sovereignty, and the strengthening of democratic institutions. This will be important, especially for Senegal’s young people, who are at the forefront of another major trend.

Young Africans will play an increasingly key role in the coming decades, both on the continent and on the global stage; Africa’s youth population (people aged 15 to 24) will make up approximately 35 percent of the world’s youth population by 2050, and Africa’s population is expected to grow from 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion during that time. In Senegal, people aged 10 to 24 make up 32 percent of the population, according to the UN.

“These young people have connected to the rest of the world,” Sany said. “They see what’s happening. They are interested. They are smart. They are more educated.” And they have high expectations not only for their economic future but also for their civil rights and autonomy.

The reality of government is always different from the promise of campaigning, but Faye’s election is part of a promising trend of democratic entrenchment in Africa, exemplified by successful transitions of power in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone over the past year. To be sure, those elections were not without challenges, but on the whole, they provide an important counterweight to democratic backsliding.

Senegalese people, especially the younger generation, have high expectations for what democracy can and should deliver for them. It’s up to Faye and his government to follow."

-via Vox, April 4, 2024

[hellenhighwater]

You mentioned emotional stability, which I get, but it made me think of the meme about ‘how do you not cry when people yell at you’ and I’m wondering both: whether there’s as much yelling in law as in tv, and whether you’ve ever cried while doing law

Nowhere near as much yelling as TV!

The only people I've ever had yell at me are non-attorneys who are representing themselves and who do not understand how this whole system works, and generally speaking...they're not in a position where their yelling is hurtful? Every time it's happened it's been more like a person throwing a tantrum, and I just...can't take that seriously. No one I actually work with (or opposing counsel) has ever managed to yell at me. I have cut off a couple people who were working themselves in that direction and redirected things back to being civil.

Frankly: I will not put up with that shit.

The list of people who are allowed to yell at you in a professional setting is very, very short, and the circumstances where that is appropriate are few and far between. It does happen in some workplaces but that's a question of office culture and individual shitty temper. My boss would never yell at me--it's unprofessional--and if he did he'd have my resignation on his desk by the end of the day. Opposing counsel is not entitled to yell at me; I am their professional peer and I don't have to put up with it outside the courtroom, and if it's inside a courtroom, the judge is likely to shut that down.

We're lawyers. In this profession, it's widely seen that losing your temper is a sign that you have lost your professional regulation and it discredits your argument. That's true in and out of the courtroom.

I have come near tears in court, but mostly because if I hit a certain point of rage I will tear up. Twice, I've had a judge hand down a ruling so wildly unjust and unexpected that it threw me off balance and into immediate fury, but I've always been able to keep it together and carry on without actually crying.

Mostly the practice of law is just not that personal. Even if someone is yelling, it's not at me as an individual. I don't make the laws, I don't decide the facts, I just take these things and lay them out. If someone's mad, it's not usually a personal attack. And you learn to deal with and understand that kind of anger--often frustration--as you go.