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catboygretzky · 20 hours

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Do I even want to know what happened in the last 24 hours 😭 I'm almost afraid to ask but I'm also insanely curious

You probably don't want to know but I'll tell you because you have no choice. This will be long and...awful. But there are sources so that's fun! Please keep in mind that this was all released within 24 hours on Thursday, September 20th, 2024 and that, unfortunately, I haven't mentioned everything.

But! The GOP was certainly having a wild one yesterday.

To start things off:

The first 'Big News' to break was about Mark Robinson.

For those saying 'who the fuck is Mark Robinson', he's the current (R) Lt. Gov of North Carolina that is running for Gov. Before yesterday, he was best known for openly hating LGBT+ and Jewish folks, being a Holocaust denier, being (forcefully) anti abortion, saying it was better when women couldn't vote, anti immigrant, hating the civil rights movement, etc, just being a hateful Evangelical nasty fascist. MAGA to his core. Trump has endorsed him, saying he should be cherished and calling him "MLK on steroids". (Robinson is Black).

So, yeah, that's bad enough right? Yesterday it got even worse. CNN released a report about some comments he made on a porn site forum 12 years ago, the most prominent being 'i'm a black NAZI'. He also commented that he wished slavery was legal and that he'd own a few, and called himself a 'perv' that used to 'peep' on women in public locker rooms when he was a teenager.

Also the tale as old as time that I'm sure you could guess when I mentioned 'GOP' 'loudly transphobic' and 'porn site scandal' - trans porn was a favourite of his. Because of course.

Also of course - the GOP hasn't taken him off the ticket, and he will continue to be the nominee for governor in North Carolina!

Read the article, there's more about him and the situation in general. Mind the warnings.

Now on to our favourite worm brained bear eating anti vaxxer conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Junior! I'm putting this under a read more now.

The first thing to drop about him yesterday was the news of an investigation after he allegedly cut off the head of a dead whale and took it home 20 years ago. Now I bet you're thinking, wow that's bad! Unfortunately for RFK Jr yesterday got worse. It was then revealed that he (70) was having an affair with right wing journalist Olivia Nuzzi (31) after New York Magazine suspended her.

Everything I learn about RFK Jr I learn against my own will.

Saying goodbye to RFK for now, let's move on to Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida! This Matt Gaetz, with the botox if you didn't recognise him.

Scary lookin, right?

This isn't a completely new story (here's an article about how he alledgedly paid for sex with a minor) but new court filings were released yesterday alledging that he attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal.

Sure is great to have such trustworthy men representing this country!

OKAY, on to the next.

This wasn't really breaking news because this is just Trump being Trump but he gave a speech at an ANTI ANTISEMITISM EVENT where he preemptively blamed the Jews for being the reason he'll lose this election, telling them they need to get their head checked if they vote for Harris (that's pretty much part of his stump speech by now though) and saying he'll reinstate his Muslim ban. White fascist blaming Jews? Wow, I did Nazi that coming.

I genuinely could go on, I really truly could.

Oh! Kamala Harris went on Oprah and it was really nice and not at all insane and she talked to the family of the first known victim of Trump's abortion ban and it was very touching. Trump's official social media then posted a clip of her talking about her gun and saying 'If somebody breaks into my house, they're getting shot' like it was a snatch when in reality Republicans in the comments are saying 'actually, this would make me vote for her'. Thanks, Trump Team for the free advertising!

Misc:

Chris Rufo (known racist and anti immigration right wing activist) got revealed to have an illegal immigrant wife, and then got revealed to be a user of Ashley Madison (database where people go to cheat on their partners)(Robinson was also on Ashley Madison).

Jasmine Crockett during her thing and ripping white republicans to shreds. (idk this was just fun to me)

Actually Republicans and Project 2025 got ripped to shreds and shut down in general by multiple Congress members.

GOP is on the brink of causing a government shutdown, because of COURSE they are.

Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX over “invasion” of land on US/Mexico border.

Anyway there's actually MORE believe it or not but I can't remember if it happened yesterday. Thank you for reading, I'm always open to discussing current events. I don't think it's a well known fact that I'm into politics because I don't talk about it on tumblr because people are kinda stupid. Anyway!

#mark robinson #donald trump #robert f kennedy jr #matt gaetz #kamala harris #current events #rape #human trafficking #antisemitism #racism #transphobia #us politics

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outrunningthedark · 2 days

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Seeing as you are my favorite logical fandom person - any updated thoughts on the Buddie ban as it seems to be true. 2 articles from 2 shippers that previously shoehorned it in, are suddenly not mentioning it or "the elephant in the room."

[Thank you for the kind words, nonnie. 🤗] Curious, isn't it? (And observant of you!) Remezcla was another Eddie Diaz-centric interview, so a question about sexuality could have worked if Buddie wasn't mentioned specifically, but...[crickets]. And honestly? This was probably the best time to ask because once the episodes start airing and we find out that Eddie's search for guidance is tied to Shannon and Chris and the struggle to get his life in order, it's not very appropriate to be like "...But there's still a chance, right?" USWeekly is the more surprising of the two, IMO. Just a quick little update where Ryan could have easily teased some Buddie scene in the first couple episodes and instead it's more mustache talk and confirmation that Eddie will fall in line at first because that's what he knows. 🤭 I don't know how much Buddie friendship talk they'll be in these interviews - you know these journalists are gonna jump on whatever scenes have Eddie feeling left out, lmao - but what I *do* know is that the odds of Buddie as a canon couple being discussed are less than zero as long as Buck has a boyfriend!

#anonymous #tina speaks

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mariacallous · 1 day

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When most Americans think of fascism, they picture a Hitlerian hellscape of dramatic action: police raids, violent coups, mass executions. Indeed, such was the savagery of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Vichy France. But what many people don’t appreciate about tyranny is its “banality,” Timothy Snyder tells me. “We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life.”

Snyder, a Yale history professor and leading scholar of Soviet Russia, was patching into Zoom from a hotel room in Kyiv, where the specter of authoritarianism looms large as Ukraine remains steeped in a yearslong military siege by Vladimir Putin. It was late at night and he was still winding down from, and gearing up for, a packed schedule—from launching an institution dedicated to the documentation of the war, to fundraising for robotic-demining development, to organizing a conference for a new Ukrainian history project. “I’ve had kind of a long day and a long week, and if this were going to be my sartorial first appearance in Vanity Fair, I would really want it to go otherwise,” he joked.

But the rest of our conversation was no laughing matter. It largely centered, to little surprise, on Donald Trump and how the former president has put America on a glide path to fascism. Too many commentators were late to realize this. Snyder, however, has been sounding the alarm since the dawn of Trumpism itself, invoking the cautionary tales of fascist history in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, and in The Road to Unfreedom the year after. It’s been six years since the latter, and Snyder is now out with a new book, On Freedom, a personal and philosophical attempt to flip the valence of America’s most lauded—and loaded—word. “We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this,” he writes. “Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Snyder unpacks America’s “strongman fantasy,” encourages Democrats to reclaim the concept of freedom, and critiques journalists for pushing a “war fatigue” narrative about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired?” he asks. “We’re not doing a damn thing.”

Vanity Fair: The things we associate with freedom—free speech, religious liberty—have been co-opted by the Republican Party. Do you think you could walk me through how that happened historically and how Democrats could take that word back?

Timothy Snyder: Yeah. I think the way it happened historically is actually quite dark there. There’s an innocent way of talking about this, which is to say, “Oh, some people believe in negative freedom and some people believe in positive freedom—and negative freedom just means less government and positive freedom means more government.” And when you say it like that, it just sounds like a question of taste. And who knows who’s right?

Whereas historically speaking, to answer your question, the reason why people believe in negative freedom is that they’re enslaving other people, or they are oppressing women, or both. The reason why you say freedom is just keeping the government off my back is that the central government is the only force that’s ever going to enfranchise those slaves. It’s the only force which is ever going to give votes to those women. And so that’s where negative freedom comes from. I’m not saying that everybody who believes in negative freedom now owns slaves or oppresses women, but that’s the tradition. That’s the reason why you would think freedom is negative, which on its face is a totally implausible idea. I mean, the notion that you can just be free because there’s no government makes no sense, unless you’re a heavily drugged anarchist.

And so, as the Republican Party has also become the party of race in our country, it’s become the party of small government. Unfortunately, this idea of freedom then goes along for the ride, because freedom becomes freedom from government. And then the next step is freedom becomes freedom for the market. That seems like a small step, but it’s a huge step because if we believe in free markets, that means that we actually have duties to the market. And Americans have by and large accepted that, even pretty far into the center or into the left. If you say that term, “free market,” Americans pretty generally won’t stop you and say, “Oh, there’s something problematic about that.” But there really is: If the market is free, that means that you have a duty to the market, and the duty is to make sure the government doesn’t intervene in it. And once you make that step, you suddenly find yourself willing to accept that, well, everybody of course has a right to advertise, and I don’t have a right to be free of it. Or freedom of speech isn’t really for me; freedom of speech is for the internet.

And that’s, to a large measure, the world we live in.

You have a quote in the book about this that distills it well: “The countries where people tend to think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from.”

Yeah, thanks for pulling that out. Even I was a little bit struck by that one. Because if you’re American and you talk about freedom all the time and you also spend all your time judging other countries on freedom, and you decide what the measures are, then you should be close to the top of the list—but you’re not. And then you ask, “Why is that?” When you look at countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, or Ireland—that are way ahead of us—they’re having a different conversation about freedom. They don’t seem to talk about freedom as much as we do, but then when they do, they talk about it in terms of enabling people to do things.

And then you realize that an enabled population, a population that has health care and retirement and reliable schools, may be better at defending things like the right to vote and the right to freedom of religion and the right to freedom of speech—the things that we think are essential to freedom. And then you realize, Oh, wait, there can be a positive loop between freedom to and freedom from. And this is the big thing that Americans get a hundred percent wrong. We think there’s a tragic choice between freedom from and freedom to—that you’ve got to choose between negative freedom and positive freedom. And that’s entirely wrong.

What do you make of Kamala Harris’s attempt to redeem the word?

It makes me happy if it’s at the center of a political discussion. And by the way, going back to your first question, it’s interesting how the American right has actually retreated from freedom. It has been central for them for half a century, but they are now actually retreating from it, and they’ve left the ground open for the Democrats. So, politically, I’m glad they’re seizing it—not just because I want them to win, but also because I think on the center left or wherever she is, there’s more of a chance for the word to take on a fuller meaning. Because so long as the Republicans can control the word, it’s always going to mean negative freedom.

I can’t judge the politics that well, but I think it’s philosophically correct and I think we end up being truer to ourselves. Because my big underlying concern as an American is that we have this word which we’ve boxed into a corner and then beaten the pulp out of, and it really doesn’t mean anything anymore. And yet it’s the only imaginable central concept I can think of for American political theory or American political life.

Yeah, it’s conducive to the joy-and-optimism approach that the Democrats are taking to the campaign. Freedom to is about enfranchisement; it’s about empowerment; it’s about mobility.

Totally. Can I jump in there with another thought?

Of course.

I think JD Vance is the logical extension of where freedom as freedom from gets you. Because one of the things you say when freedom is negative—when it’s just freedom from—is that the government is bad, right? You say the government is bad because it’s suppressive. But then you also say government is bad because it can’t do anything. It’s incompetent and it’s dysfunctional. And it’s a small step from there to a JD Vance–type figure who is a doomer, right? He’s a doomer about everything. His politics is a politics of impotence. His whole idea is that government will fail at everything—that there’s no point using government, and in fact, life is just sort of terrible in general. And the only way to lead in life is to kind of be snarky about other people. That’s the whole JD Vance political philosophy. It’s like, “I’m impotent. You’re impotent. We’re all impotent. And therefore let’s be angry.”

Did you watch the debate?

No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I’m in the wrong time zone.

There was a moment that struck me, and I think it would strike you too: Donald Trump openly praised Viktor Orbán, as he has done repeatedly in the past. But he said, explicitly, Orbán is a good guy because he’s a “strongman,” which is a word that he clearly takes to be a compliment, not derogatory. You’ve written about the strongman fantasy in your Substack, so I’m curious: What do you think Trump is appealing to here?

Well, I’m going to answer it in a slightly different way, and then I’ll go back to the way you mean it. I think he’s tapping into one of his own inner fantasies. I think he looks around the world and he sees that there’s a person like Orbán, who’s taken a constitutional system and climbed out of it and has managed to go from being a normal prime minister to essentially being an extraconstitutional figure. And I think that’s what Trump wants for himself. And then, of course, the next step is a Putin-type figure, where he’s now an unquestioned dictator.

For the rest of us, I think he’s tapping—in a minor key—into inexperience, and that was my strongman piece that you kindly mentioned. Americans don’t really think through what it would mean to have a government without the rule of law and the possibility of throwing the bums out. I think we just haven’t thought that through in all of its banality: the neighbors denouncing you, your kids not having social mobility because you maybe did something wrong, having to be afraid all the damn time. African Americans and some immigrants have a sense of this, but in general, Americans don’t get that. They don’t get what that would be like.

So that’s a minor key. The major key, though, is the 20% or so of Americans who really, I think, authentically do want an authoritarian regime, because they would prefer to identify personally with a leader figure and feel good about it rather than enjoy freedom.

You mentioned the word banality, which makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil.” What would the banality of authoritarianism look like in America?

So let me first talk about the nonbanality of evil, because our version of evil is something like, and I don’t want to be too mean, but it’s something like this: A giant monster rises out of the ocean and then we get it with our F-16s or F-35s or whatever. That’s our version of evil. It’s corporeal, it’s obviously bad, and it can be defeated by dramatic acts of violence.

And we apply that to figures like Hitler or Stalin, and we think, Okay, what happened with Hitler was that he was suddenly defeated by a war. Of course he was defeated by a war, but he did some dramatic and violent things to come to power, but his coming to power also involved a million banalities. It involved a million assimilations, a million changes of what we think of as normal. And it’s our ability to make things normal and abnormal which is so terrifying. It’s like an animal instinct on our part: We can tell what the power wants us to do, and if we don’t think about it, we then do it. In authoritarian conditions, this means that we realize, Oh, the law doesn’t really apply anymore. That means my neighbor could have denounced me for anything, and so I better denounce my neighbor first. And before you know it, you’re in a completely different society, and the banality here is that instead of just walking down the street thinking about your own stuff, you’re thinking, Wait a minute, which of my neighbors is going to denounce me?

Americans think all the time about getting their kids into the right school. What happens in an authoritarian country is that all of that access to social mobility becomes determined by obedience. And as a parent, suddenly you realize you have to be publicly loyal all the time, because one little black mark against you ruins your child’s future. And that’s the banality right there. In Russia, everybody lives like that, because any little thing you do wrong, and your kid has no chance. They get thrown out of school; they can’t go to university.

We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life. It’s not going to be some external thing. It’s not like this strongman is just going to be some bad person in the White House, and then eventually the good guys will come and knock him out. When the regime changes, you change and you adapt, and you look around as everyone else is adapting and you realize, Well, everyone else adapting is a new reality for me, and I’m probably going to have to adapt too. Trump wants to be a strongman. He’s already tried a coup d’état. He makes it clear that he wants to be a different regime. And so if you vote him in, you’re basically saying, “Okay, strongman, tell me how to adapt.”

Yeah, we could talk about Project 2025 all day. This new effort to bureaucratize tyranny—which was not in place in 2020—could really make the banal aspect a reality because it’s enforced by the administrative state, which is going to be felt by Americans at a quotidian level.

I agree with what you say. If I were in business, I would be terrified of Project 2025 because what it’s going to lead to is favoritism. You’re never going to get approvals for your stuff unless you’re politically close to administration. It’s going to push us toward a more Hungary-like situation, where the president’s pals’ or Jared Kushner’s pals’ companies are going to do fine. But everybody else is going to have to pay bribes. Everyone else is going to have to make friends.

It’s anticompetitive.

Yeah, it’s going to generate a very, very uneven playing field where certain people are going to be favored and become oligarchs. And most of the rest of us are going to have a hard time. Also, the 40,000 [loyalists Trump wants to replace the administrative state with] are going to be completely incompetent. When people stop getting their Social Security checks, they’re going to realize that the federal government—which they’ve been told is so dysfunctional—actually did do some things. It’s going to be chaos. The only way to get anything done is to have a phone number where you can call somebody at someplace in the government and say, “Make my thing a priority.” The chaos of the administration state feeds into the strongman thing. And since that’s true, the strongman view starts to become natural for you because it’s the only way to get anything done.

You’ve studied Russian information warfare pretty extensively. A few weeks ago the Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian state media outlet RT for their role in surreptitiously funding a right-wing US media outfit as part of a foreign-influence-peddling scheme, which saw them pull the wool over a bunch of right-wing media personalities. Do you think this type of thing is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Russian information warfare?

Of course. It’s the tip of the iceberg, and I want to refer back to 2016. It was much bigger in 2016 than we recognized at the time. The things that the Obama administration was concerned with—like the actual penetration of state voting systems and stuff—that was really just nothing compared to all of the internet stuff they had going. And we basically caught zilcho of that before the election itself. And I think the federal government is more aware of it this time, but also the Russians are doing different things this time, no doubt.

I’m afraid what I think is that there are probably an awful lot of people who are doing this—including people who are much more important in the media than those guys—and that there’s just no way we’re going to catch very many of them before November. That’s my gut feeling.

While we’re on Russia, I do want to talk about Ukraine, especially since you’re there right now. I think one of the most unfortunate aspects of [the media’s coverage of] foreign wars—the Ukraine war and also the Israel-Hamas war—is just the way they inevitably fade into the background of the American news cycle, especially if no American boots are on the ground. I’m curious if this dynamic frustrates you as a historian.

Oh, a couple points there. One is, I’m going to point out slightly mean-spiritedly that the stories about war fatigue in Ukraine began in March 2022. As a historian, I am a little bit upset at journalists. I don’t mean the good ones. I don’t mean the guys I just saw who just came back from the front. [I mean] the people who are sitting in DC or New York or wherever, who immediately ginned up this notion of war fatigue and kept asking everybody from the beginning, “When are you going to get tired of this war?” We turned war fatigue into a topos almost instantaneously. And I found that really irresponsible because you’re affecting the discourse. But also, I feel like there was a kind of inbuilt laziness into it. If war fatigue sets in right away, then you have an excuse never to go to the country, and you have an excuse never to figure out what’s going on, and you have an excuse never to figure out why it’s important.

So I was really upset by that, and also because there’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired? We’re not doing a damn thing. We’re doing nothing. I mean, there’s some great individual Americans who are volunteering and giving supplies and stuff, but as a country, we’re not doing a damn thing. I mean, a tiny percentage of our defense budget—which would be going to other stuff anyway—insead goes to Ukraine.

And by the way, Ukrainians understand that Americans have other things to think about. I was not very far from the front three days ago talking to soldiers, and their basic attitude about the election and us was, like, “Yeah, you got your own things to think about. We understand. It’s not your war.” But as a historian, the thing which troubles me is pace, because with time, all kinds of resources wear down. And the most painful is the Ukrainian human resource. That’s probably a terribly euphemistic word, but people die and people get wounded and people get traumatized. Your own side runs out of stuff.

We were played by the Russians, psychologically, about the way wars are fought. And that stretched out the war. That’s the thing which bothers me most. You win wars with pace and you win wars with surprise. You don’t win wars by allowing the other side to dictate what the rules are and stretching everything out, which is basically what’s happened. And with that has come a certain amount of American distraction and changing the subject and impatience. I think journalists have made a mistake by making it into a kind of consumer thing where they’re sort of instructing the public that it’s okay to be bored or fatigued. And then I think the Biden administration made a mistake by not doing things at pace and allowing every decision to take weeks and months and so on.

What do you think another Trump presidency would mean for the war and for America’s commitment to Ukraine?

I think Trump switches sides and puts American power on the Russian side, effectively. I think Trump cuts off. He’s a bad dealmaker—that’s the problem. I mean, he’s a good entertainer. He’s very talented; he’s very charismatic. In his way, he’s very intelligent, but he’s not a good dealmaker. And a) ending wars is not a deal the way that buying a building is a deal, and b) even if it were, he’s consistently made bad deals his whole career and lost out and gone bankrupt.

So you can’t really trust him with something like this, even if his intentions were good—and I don’t think his intentions are good. Going back to the strongman thing, I think he believes that it’s right and good that the strong defeat and dominate the weak. And I think in his instinctual view of the world, Putin is pretty much the paradigmatic strongman—the one that he admires the most. And because he thinks Putin is strong, Putin will win. The sad irony of all this is that we are so much stronger than Russia. And in my view, the only way Russia can really win is if we flip or if we do nothing. So, because Trump himself is so psychologically weak and wants to look up to another strongman, I think he’s going to flip. But even if I’m wrong about that, I think he’s incompetent to deal with a situation like this. Because he wants the quick affirmation of a deal. And if the other side knows you’re in a hurry, then you’ve already lost from the beginning.

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waugh-bao · 1 year

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Charlie Watts had joined us on the sofa, replacing Woody who had wandered off, still hiccupping.

Was Charlie looking forward to the tour? His expression was a monument to the phrase ‘No Comment.’

Keith laughed.

“He always says he doesn't want to go on tour, but he always does," said Richards, helpfully interpreting the Watts silence. "He's one of these guys who appear over the poop deck, after it's all over and says 'I quite enjoyed that'. He just pretends he doesn't want to do it, 'Cause he does really, or else why would he still be here?”

…

[Later] Stu played them back an old number on a tape machine, so they could remember it.

“What's all this?" demanded Keith, and then giggled to Charlie.

“Oh he's always a one for innovations."

Keith pretending to be gay is a disturbing experience.

(Chris Welch for the Record Mirror, September of 1981)

#…#I have no words #and also #from the context of the whole article #where the journalist is talking about how #Keith is telling mick to go ‘put on a pretty frock’ and shaking his hips #and only treating Charlie nicely #he definitely means ‘gay’ in the way we understand it #not the antiquated usage #once again #holy fuck #the rolling stones #charlie watts #keith richards #middle aged married band #quote #ian stewart #ronnie wood #also Keith serving as the Charlie to English interpreter is so cute

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jakeperalta · 5 months

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hitting "not interested" on these posts isn't enough I need a gun

#i have to just try to stop the algorithm from showing me any gilmore girls content #because it's always a matter of time until it circles back to 'the teenage girl at the center of this coming of age story is actually evil'#like you can find her annoying and not enjoy her as a character or whatever. that's personal taste #but if you're a professional journalist writing about how she's the VILLAIN then i am revoking your qualifications #where is the reading comprehension?? the common sense???#'___ is the true villain' takes are a plague on society #talking

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batsplat · 2 months

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if more people knew Herstory (aka 2004 season and sete&vale) so many questions wrt 2015 season(mostly “why would vale….”) would immediately be answered addfghjk like guysssss guyssssss

it is kinda funny that there's a simple cheat code out there to understanding most of valentino's career but it's just about long enough ago that most people simply... ignore it. like there's a three year span that more or less tells you what you need to know about him. it's like you say! pretty much every possible "why would vale..." secretly has a straightforward answer, and 9/10 it's something that was established in 2003 to 2005. simple as

if anything it's almost annoying because it's too easy. the 2004/2015 stuff in particular is incredibly funny. oh, so you say you have a controversial last lap at assen where valentino beat a rival in direct combat and said rival reacted surprisingly poorly, making valentino reevaluate his relationship with the rival? might that tell you something about how a seed of suspicion once sown can remain dormant for months until valentino is given cause to revisit it? valentino quite literally says in his biography that he could never have hated biaggi because he wasn't a friend and didn't have the power to hurt him... the sepang pressers thing is genuinely just silly, I know this is mainly a function of when they happen in the calendar but what a bizarre coincidence. 2015 is like a slightly more opaque funhouse mirror version of 2004 - but so many of the major beats are virtually identical. which means you've got a season Out There where a younger less experienced less guarded less cynical valentino basically walks you through his internal processes so you get a really good handle of what his deal is. he's piecing together his identity as a competitor going forwards in real time - and then in 2015 he just reminds you of what exactly that identity involves. it's a reaffirmation and not a departure... he's not that inscrutable after all, in the end

#i kinda feel like i've done my civic duty on that front like it's now easily available for the people if they choose to Perceive #with the vale/marc rivalry in particular obviously you'll always be hampered there if you're not paying much attention to pre-2013 #but also the sete stuff is open to BORING bad faith interpretations so i'm extremely fine with the details remaining niche #u do sometimes see a take where u go Well Ackshually if u consulted this obscure interview from 2004 - but that's the devil talking #it's fine and valid to not care about valentino's interiority but obviously there's only so far u'll get with that #//#brr brr #batsplat responds #fun story: the sepang 2004 presser isn't available in full in the actual motogp search function #so for ages I heard the commies refer to it in various races and was SO frustrated because I had like. a minute's worth of clips #and then I did some creative googling and eventually discovered it WAS on the website but just not. searchable #first time I watched it my mouth dropped open cartoon-style like wdym this is a thing that happened this is a thing that exists #it is absolutely BIZARRE that this is out there it genuinely broke my brain. and nobody talks about it???????#probably for the best but you really wouldn't know valentino's villain origin story is literally just. out there. like you CAN watch it #I've heard some people canonically were already motogp fans in 2004 and it's kinda incredible this has been completely memory holed #if I'd been a journalist in that presser I would literally never shut up about it. not a SINGLE sepang 2015 article makes reference to it #I have not seen a single person apart from myself make the EXTREMELY obvious connection and I just?? how is that possible??#IT'S LITERALLY IN THE SAME PLACE MOST LIKELY THE SAME ROOM LIKE THIS ISN'T A BIG LEAP #maybe he really is some kind of malevolent demonic creature because at this point... people were canonically in that room y'know #curse tag #idol tag

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pop-punklouis · 10 months

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#just got around to reading taylor swift’s profile for Time and…..#and i’m saying this as someone who went to her show #who spent a lot of money to see her with my sister #and who genuinely likes her and her music #the profile was fucking bad lmfao #reading through it i kept wincing at how cringe-girl boss-capitalism it all was #and then the entire part where the journalist refuses to challenge taylor’s narrative about being canceled in 2016 #even though she FELT canceled her numbers and success did not show it at all with reputation #like. a journalist just. spoke about it in their own article but not TO her #when it’s so important for anyone but especially journalists to challenge people’s narratives especially inner narratives that might warp #the reality of the situation #it was just a puff piece obviously but god was it…. not good imo dkdkkd #also her talking about mastermind and how it connected to the end of phantom thread made me wanna 💀#like girlie go back to your eras tour enough interviews for now #it did its job. but at what cost to my brain to read for both @ taylor and @ the journalist

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britneyshakespeare · 5 months

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i feel bad for raquel lee bolleau and i feel like what she's saying about the lack of transparency behind quiet on set is a bigger issue that the consumers of this type of content don't want to talk about or criticize. social media has led to a huge boom in tragedy porn and trauma porn about the entertainment industry but especially the children's entertainment industry, especially especially from the eras when the largest demographic in that audience were consuming it themselves.

it's already been problematic in itself that there is an oversaturation of unresearched and repetitive videos on the exploitation of former child stars. it seems like the creators and audience don't often ask themselves "have we gotten enough of this? do we need another take on it? is another video full of dan schneider rumors and gossipy forum posts really adding to the public discourse?" i don't know quite at what point it becomes exploitative that this content continues to be made, and be evergreen in social media algorithms. the volume, the reach, and the general lack of quality control are the evil triad. because we are far past the point where i really believe everyone consuming this stuff cares about exploited children. there's far too many people gawking and not reevaluating the systems of power involved. or, to put it more concretely: how many times do we all need to watch those clips of ariana grande squeezing the potato and spilling water on her neck? at what point is this just personally disrespectful and retraumatizing for the victims that for the most part we, the consumers of internet content, are claiming to advocate for?

quiet on set is the first time traditional media got involved in this niche. there is still a lot of value in some of the discoveries made by the series. but it does not have completely clean hands in this either. it does not feel like everyone involved in making the executive decisions cared nearly enough about the vulnerability of former child stars they recruited to share their stories, or hell, whose stories were told without their involvement, such as amanda bynes and racquel in episode 5. these people did not even give statements.

the focus of this docuseries was far too broad and not coherent enough at the end of the day. and they did not give enough support to all of the people they roped in to tell their stories about childhood trauma. i have a hard time trying not to be completely cynical about its whole production, because i really want to believe that many of the people who worked on it do care. not every individual involved knew or had control over the injustices that happened in its own production. but the executives? fuck em. they greenlit this thing, and probably incentivized the creators to make these episodes as fast as possible, because they knew it would be a cash cow. something as sensitive as THIS series should not be so poorly produced just because it will be a guaranteed smash.

#i am not going to watch episode 5. not unless investigation discovery addresses raquel sufficiently #text post #quiet on set #in many ways i think i'm just elaborating on what raquel has said herself. go watch her personal tiktoks #i think mainly where i deviate from her is that we all should be way more critical of the system we're contributing to #i already had criticism for how they talked about drake bell without any balance #i understood that they needed his involvement of course. it'd be extremely unethical not to have him #and i think for the most part his episode is the best part of the series. except for the very end #it's clear they had some favoritism with the former childstars they used for this #i think bell had such a good experience himself is because they knew they needed him. bc of how much he adds to it.#much of the series is really poorly placed together. like 100s of 'dark side of nickelodeon' youtube videos have been #but at the VERY least these youtubers have an excuse of not being professionals or journalists #this shit? should be doing WAY better.#and it's not. that's depressing. can we stop demanding all of these victims should come forward if this is the best they get?

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rodlaveraryna · 5 months

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never forget people like aryna and iga are byproducts of the media they consume

#like internal misogyny is everywhere in tennis media #there is so much lacking in media coverage for wta #they never have those fun games that the atp people play that could introduce new fans to fun personalities #even though there are so many fun personalities in women’s tennis #and there is NO detailed wta technical analysis out there even though that’s the kind of content that connects a lot of people to tennis #and that’s not even getting started on all of the underhanded ways journalists talk about wta players compared to how they write about atp #and all the other non tennis places where we can find internalized misogyny #blame the system not the individuals

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queer-reader-07 · 3 months

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#full transparency i didn't read the whole the whole live-blog twitter thread about the podcast episode #but i started reading the first one #because i kept seeing people talk about them #and idk they were giving me bad vibes. like parts of it felt. idk victim blamey???#also it started off by being like 'this isn't a power imbalance if it's just a fan and a famous author'#which i just simply don't agree with #to me it is an imbalance if one of you is a literal celebrity and the other is a barely adult fan of yours #that's just my own opinion #but the whole thing just gave me a bad taste. like there was a lot of 'what she just laid there and didn't say anything?'#which is so. maybe i'm jaded but idk maybe she did even if she didn't like it #and also there's been multiple cases of confirmed abuse/assault that i've read about/seen where everything looked happy on the outside #like the fact that she sent him 'loving' messages the day after isn't enough for me to conclude that this woman is lying #and like. i'm not saying she can't be lying #but i also don't think there's enough evidence either way #at worst the allegations are true #and at best they're false and the people who published this piece are capitalizing off allegations of SA #both fucking suck #i said i'd stop talking about this but a lot of people's talk of the situation is rubbing me the wrong way #i was talking to a friend abt this and she was like 'the outlet and the journalists being sketchy doesn't mean the accusers are too'#which is personally how i feel as well #like yeah you're right the people who broke the news have red flags all around #but i wouldn't put it past people like this to capitalize off SA. real or not.#vent #rant

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ithilienns · 3 months

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watching fan commentary on the lotr filming process is so hard because every five seconds they make it so painfully obvious that the only thing they know about nz is that it's where lotr was filmed

#they hear 'island nation' and think that means there are no people and no infrastructure #which is just... i don't know where to begin to unpack it #do they think island and southern hemisphere = underdevelopment?#and thus bring all the imperialist and racist assumptions attached to that without understanding what nz is?#(not that such thinking would be acceptable in any situation)#just no concept of what a country with a smaller population looks like or how it magically manages to function despite not being us-sized?#remember when theonering fansite got into a beef with a journalist on twitter #because they were (incorrectly) claiming that the tax on pj's wealth would fund our covid programme?#cause i do #like that is genuine misinformation at that point all so you can clap your fave guy on the back #talking about how amazon was able to build full-scale sets or whatever and keep them hidden because we had strict border controls for covid #and there's 'not a lot of people living there'#it's embarassing guys please stop #el's ramblings

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dimitrscu · 2 years

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i want malenia to have unbreakable poise… and all her attacks one shot you.. and she heals back to full, so to add insult to injury as you’re dying you see her health bar go back to 100%.. and then she tea bags you as the “you died” screen pops up and a laugh track starts playing

#look this is funny because the way some people talk about her fight you’d think this is how it actually is #‘malenia’s too hard so you have to cheese her to win’ imagine admitting that out loud to the internet #it’s the same vibe as that copy pasta #where that journalist said he used cheats to beat sekiro and didn’t feel bad about it #‘you cheated not only the game but yourself…’ lmao #tbh though i’ve noticed a bit of a running theme with these types of comments and it has a little less to do with the fight #and a little more to do with the fact she’s a woman #they say all the disgusting crap they can think of and it so obvious #the comments about her disability too are just… it’s exhausting at this point tbh #souls games bring out the best and worst in people #her fight is hard there’s no doubt about it #but the way they make out its impossible is so stupid #she has two attacks that can be difficult to deal with but there’s plenty of clips out there showing you how #and trust me if i can learn to do it then anyone can

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badolmen · 11 months

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Hm. Maybe ending up on some list for that email.

#ra speaks #personal #current events #sorry I emailed my senator about current events ™#and bro gave the most 🥺 we NEED to commit war crimes. for the Jews. 🥺 response ever #and I feel that my response was fair. bafflement at his disregard for human life. confusion regarding how he thinks more war crimes will #‘bring peace’ with support for a ‘two nation solution’ like my dude. what?#‘oh there’s gonna be so much antisemetism 🥺’ oh. where was your statement last year? the year with the highest antisemetic incidents #on record in the US? huh? why aren’t you acknowledging the rise in Islamophobic violence in retaliation for the Hamas attack?#why are you talking about this like Israel isn’t committing genocide and war crimes like they’re just dealing w terrorists #by bombing civilian hospitals and gunning down journalists? what is wrong with you?#I’m hoping I got the general vibe of. ‘oh. you’re heartless and will be remembered for turning a blind eye to one of the worst ethnic #cleansing of the century. good luck being remembered as anything but a coward or warmonger. may you shrivel in the annals of history.’#without you know. coming off too. uh. passionate.#but hey at least his email looked like it was written by a human. the govnor got me some janky auto reply like ohhhh I get it fuck you too

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thethief1996 · 11 months

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I can't stop thinking about the news out of Palestine. Israel is sieging al Shifa hospital. Videos of people's limbs being severed off are haunting (graphic video tw). The hospital has ran out of fuel and 39 babies in incubators are fending for their lives by themselves, because Israel has stationed snipers around the hospital and is shooting all medical crew that walks into their sight.

First, the narrative was Israel would never bomb hospitals. Now, the hospitals are Hamas bases. Then, we respect journalists. Now, we have a fucking kill list of journalists because they are Hamas collaborators. First, we are not letting fuel in until the hostages are released. Now, we are not accepting the hostages back because that would stop our ground invasion and let Hamas win. And I could go on about every single lie they're making up. If you look up "Hamas rape" on google, the first link leads to Times of Israel saying Israel has found no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and only one eyewitness testimony out of 3.5k people attending the rave. If you Google "Hamas beheaded babies" the top links say they have no evidence for the claim besides word of mouth from extremist soldiers. Israeli extremists think about the ugliest goriest scene they can make out in their sick heads, tell that to a international journalist and they run away with it like it's gospel.

And children are being killed in the name of these lies. Thousands are being displaced in images that remind me of the pictures of Tantura 75 years ago, with their hands up so the tanks don't shoot them. Amputees are leaving the hospitals in wheelchairs hours after their surgeries because they are being shot at. Elders who survived the Nakba on 48 are having to walk towards Southern Gaza on foot (imagine walking from one end of your city to the other on foot), displaced again. People are cheering for the haunting images of white phosphorus bombs being dropped over Gaza. Gazan workers who were arrested in the West Bank are being thrust back into the bombings wearing numbered labels.

This is not normal. We are seeing the early stages of the settler colonial genocide of an indigenous population. Native leaders who have visited Gaza say its refugee camps look eerily like reservations. We can stop this. For the first time we are able to see wide scale accounts from the hands of the people suffering the genocide, and Israel is so scared of it they have cut all communications in Gaza.

This is our litmus test. I think we have never seen more clearly, with Palestine, Armenia, Congo and Sudan how colonialism has made our world a rotten place to live in.

The South African apartheid collapsed due to boycotts. We have to do everything in our power to stop Israel's hegemony. Even talking to a group of friends about Palestine changes the status quo. There's no world where we can live peacefully if Israel accomplishes their goals.

Keep yourself updated and share Palestinian voices. Muna El-Kurd said every tweet is like a treasure to them, because their voices are repressed on social media and even on this very app. Make it your action item to share something about the Palestinian plight everyday. Here are some resources:

Al Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, Mondoweiss

Boycott Divest Sanction Movement

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing protests and direct action against weapons factories across the US

Mohammed El-Kurd (twitter / instagram)

Muhammad Shehada (twitter)

Motaz Azaiza (instagram) - reporting directly from Gaza.

Hind Khudary - reporting directly from Gaza. Her husband and daughter moved South to run from the tanks but she stayed behind to record the genocide. The least we can do is not let her calls fall on deaf ears.

You can participate in boycotts wherever you are in the world, through BDS guidelines. Don't be overwhelmed by gigantic boycott lists. BDS explicitly targets only a few brands which have bigger impact. You can stop consuming from as many brands as you want, though, and by all means feel free to give a 1 star review to McDonalds, Papa John, Pizza Hut, Burger King and Starbucks. Right now, they are focusing on boycotting the following:

Carrefour, HP, Puma, Sabra, Sodastream, Ahava cosmetics, Israeli fruits and vegetables

Push for a cultural boycott - pressure your favorite artist to speak out on Palestine and cancel any upcoming performances on occupied territory (Lorde cancelled her gig in Israel because of this. It works.)

If you can, participate in direct action or donate.

Palestine Action works to shut down Israeli weapons factories in the UK and USA, and have successfully shut down one of their firms in London.Some of the activists are going on trial and are calling for mobilizing on court.

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing direct actions to stop the shipping of wars to Israel. Follow them.

Educate yourself. Read into Palestinian history and the occupation. You can't common sense people out of decades of propaganda. If your arguments crumble when a zionist brings up the "disengagement of Gaza", you have to learn more.

Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.

Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.

Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe. If you still believe in the two states solution, this book by an Israeli professor debunks it).

Call your representatives. The Labour Party in the UK had an emergency meeting after several councilors threatened to resign if they didn't condemn Israeli war crimes. Calling to show your complaints works, even more if you live in a country that funds genocide.

FOR PEOPLE IN THE USA: USCPR has developed this toolkit for calls, here's a document that autosends emails to your representatives and here's a toolkit by Ceasefire in Gaza NOW!

FOR PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace targeting the European Parliament and one specific for almost all countries in Europe, including Germany, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Austria, Belgium Romania and Ukraine

FOR PEOPLE IN THE UK: Friends of Al-Aqsa UK and Palestine Solidarity UK have made toolkits for calls and emails

FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA: Here's a toolkit by Stand With Palestine

FOR PEOPLE IN CANADA: Here's a toolkit by Indepent Jewish Voices for Canada

Join a protest. Here's a constantly updating list of protests:

Global calendar

Another global calendar (go to the instragram of the organizers to confirm your protest)

USA calendar

Australia calendar

Feel free to add more.

#free palestine #free gaza #save gaza #gaza under attack

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