immiamarais - Tumblr blog

immiamarais · 22 days ago

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i’ve been on sorta a kick of different late 2000s to early 2010s procedurals recently and here are my thoughts on a few:

monk: genuinely tony shalhoub is an incredible actor and while i do like the show. i do not think it’s necessarily my favorite out of all the ones i’ve watched recently. it gets very repetitive after a while but it is very comforting for me to be able to watch a show n know that it will be solid and interesting :)

white collar: literally insane how good this show is n how little people talk about it. matt bomer is such a great actor and his chemistry with the other cast members is so enjoyable!! he kinda has no chemistry with some of the women he’s put with but i forgive him bc he is so pretty…

leverage: another really good show… honestly it’s very pulpy and campy but that means it’s always going to be fun and enjoyable and every episode ends basically happy!! i think parker, eliot, and hardison are easily a top 10 trio in all of fiction… they just play off of each other rly well

psych: peak. tv has not gotten better than this and probably will never. i have never laughed so hard at a tv show. i love u dulé hill if ur seeing this.

burn notice: love but also not as much as i love my other bad boy anti hero procedurals. sometimes it is like soooo agressively masculine bc they’re trying to seem cool n idk i think it doesn’t always work… i still love u tho don’t worry.

house: peak television again. if i didn’t have an intense fear of illness and hospitals i’d watch it more. honestly crazy how life changing every episode is from this show n how genuinely crazy they let hugh laurie act.

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immiamarais · 22 days ago

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Kind of awesome being raised under a rock because I hear about a movie and go yeah I’ll check that out. Never heard of it before. Watch it. Get my DICK blown off. And then am like. Wow…… has anyone else heard about this critically acclaimed film with a 96% on rotten tomatoes that great filmmakers cite an inspiration for THEIR critically acclaimed films……..

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immiamarais · 22 days ago

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The first part is ready! I did it because I need more Leesaku, hehe

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immiamarais · 24 days ago

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All right, I see enough of it going around that I need to address this doomerism among young Americans. Call this a LONG RANT (TM) or just an old man shouting from his porch if you will.

INTRODUCTION

Young people. The United States is not "falling apart". The world is not under threat of imminent collapse. Society is not coming apart at the seams, it is not going to disappear, and we do not need to prepare to replace it. The worst that will happen is that a lot of people will lose rights that they've gained over the last century and the government will become a whole lot less representative of the country it governs.

Don't get me wrong, this is bad, but it's not "start stockpiling dried food and weapons to prepare for societal collapse bad", and thinking that it is will stop you from doing a lot of the things that could be done to stop what's actually happening.

A BIT OF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The current state that we live in, particularly here in the US, is very new. Are the attacks on trans and gay people terrible? Absolutely. Is the return of white supremacy horrifying? Definitely. Are the efforts to deny rights to women deplorable? Yes. But you have to understand just how new many of the good things that are now under attack actually are.

I'm not even 40 yet and, when I graduated high school, 13 states still had "sodomy" on the books as a criminal offense. Gay people didn't even get the right to marry until I had already graduated college. The Violence Against Women Act didn't pass until I was almost out of elementary school. The Rodney King riots happened recently enough that I can actually remember watching them on the news.

And forget about me, Ruby Bridges desegregated the first previously all-white school in New Orleans in 1960. She's only turning 70 last year (as did the Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned segregation in the first place) and is very much alive. So are a lot of those people in the famous pictures screaming racist abuse at her. The US Supreme Court decision that established a right to interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia, 1967) isn't even old enough to retire yet and Martin Luther King Jr., who often feels like a fairly distant historical figure to us, would only be 96 this year if he had lived.

All of this is to point out that, not only are the rights we're defending actually fairly new in US history, much less world history, but that many of the people who opposed these rights when they were put in place are still very much around and they're still unhappy that those rights exist.

WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING

Here's the thing, what's really happening is not the destruction of the American political and social system, it's just a sustained effort to hijack and twist them. If the MAGA crowd have their way, the institutions of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Presidency, and the entire administrative state won't actually collapse or cease to exist, they'll just be changed such that they only represent the values and desires of white, Christian men. It'll be a disaster, to be sure, but it won't destroy the fundamental structure of how you live.

Frankly, what's the most creepy about it is how little you'll actually notice the change.

What you have to understand about government is that it's not some impartial reading of rules. There's a huge amount of discretion built into the system. And, to be clear, this is a good thing. No set of rules written in stone could ever hope to cover every situation that real people find themselves in. We allow officials at all levels to make judgement calls. They're guided by the rules, but they have a lot of room to make different decisions within those rules because we want them to consider the real-world circumstances.

Of course, given all of that, you can see how important the person in a given position can be. We've already seen a movement around the country focused on district attorney elections because, if you can replace a fire and brimstone conservative with a progressive or vice-versa, you can completely change how justice is administered in a particular jurisdiction.

MAGA conservatives have figured this out as well and they focus on it to a greater extent than just about anyone else. The death threats they send to, for example, election administrators aren't intended to destroy the apparatus of election management. They're intended to force the person out of the office for fear of their safety in the hopes that they can be replaced by a MAGA loyalist. As I said, the person is important.

This is happening now at just about every level, but many of those opposed to the MAGA movement misunderstand what's going on. They're not trying to destroy our governing institutions, they're trying to capture them.

THE HAZARDS OF DOOMERISM

The answer, of course, to what the MAGA crowd is doing is to outfight them. Polling fairly consistently shows that no more than about 30% of Americans actually believe MAGA nonsense and even less than that actively seek to put it into practice. If enough other people come out and reject their candidates, reject their ideas, and insist that authorities deal appropriately with their threats of violence, they will lose. And, let's face it, MAGA supporters are overwhelmingly older than the American population at large; if we hold them off long enough they'll die off, this isn't a group that's set to continue into the future.

By succumbing to doomerism, the idea that everything is already lost and that, rather than take over society, the MAGA crowd will destroy it, people are turning away from the one thing that could actually stop this takeover; political action. If you think that society is actively collapsing, you're not going to invest your time and energy in it, you're going to spend your time preparing for said collapse and attempting to shield yourself from the worst effects of a Mad Max world.

And, let's be clear, no amount of hoarding of dried food, guns, and seeds will do anything to protect you from a government that is committed to denying you basic rights. Doomerism, whether passively lying down and awaiting the end or actively preparing for the collapse of society, only distracts you from doing anything about what is actively happening.

CONCLUSION

Society is not about to collapse. I know it makes great disaster porn and gives people a sense of black and white certainty in a complex and often confusing world, but what's actually happening is that society and government are being captured one institution at a time by people who want to return to a time when only straight, white, Christian, cisgender men had any rights or representation in society. By embracing a narrative of societal collapse, you are disengaging from both society and government, making it easier for these people to capture them and, when society doesn't collapse, you're going to find that none of the things you've done to prepare for "the end" won't help you a bit.

This is the whole point, though, who benefits from you dooming it up? It's the people who want to do all the things that you don't like! They benefit from you giving up on society, they benefit from you failing to defend important institutions, and they benefit from you letting them get their people into important positions, so don't do that!

By giving up on society and becoming a doomer, you're letting all the things you dislike happen, but instead of society collapsing so that you don't have to deal with it, what's actually going to happen is that society will continue to exist under the control of people who want to take away all of your rights and opportunities. But here's the thing, that can only happen if you let it. Fascists (and that's exactly what the Moral Majority/Tea Party/MAGA/Whatever-they-call-themselves-next-week crowd are) make a lot of noise and threaten a lot of violence because they're trying to intimidate you into not fighting them, they're actually very weak and can't win if you stand up to them.

So fight back. Stop pretending that you're helpless and that nothing you do matters. Maybe you can't change the entire world by yourself, but every single thing you do adds up. Even just helping one person is enough, you could be the one to bring just one more person into the fight who tips the balance. More importantly, it's not a black and white, fascists win vs. fascists lose, situation; everything is in shades of gray. Every action, every good deed, every win makes the long term better than it would have been otherwise. If we lose trans rights but keep gay rights, that sucks, but it's still better than losing both and it means that we can focus our efforts on getting trans rights back instead of having to fight for both of them again.

Ultimately, though, doomerism isn't some brave position, it's the coward's way out. Giving up is exactly what the MAGA people want you to do, do you want to give them the win without even fighting for it?

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immiamarais · 3 months ago

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Hi. Things are bleak, I know that. I know that we paid for Trump's last term with blood and it is likely the price will be blood again.

But listen to me. LISTEN.

You do not have to force yourself to witness horrors as an act of activism. It is not a form of activism. You can put your phone down, you can block that horrific video. We cannot win if you cannot fight and you will not be able to fight if you are hopeless.

Do not let them guilt you into this. People who are exhausted are easier to walk over. Take care of yourself, find community where you find joy.

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immiamarais · 4 months ago

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this is literally me on tumblr.com

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immiamarais · 4 months ago

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not huge on anime and i’ve never heard a vocaloid song in its entirety but every time i see miku i’m like yeah baby it’s miku that’s my friend miku

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immiamarais · 5 months ago

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I love it so much you can’t imagine!!!

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immiamarais · 5 months ago

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There's something so hard in challenging what you've been taught during your childhood because when you try to challenge it, you're not just challenging yourself. These things were taught to you with utmost confidence, clarity, loudness, and sometimes even force and violence, by people who seemed to fully believe it. They would go as far as humiliate and ridicule you for even thinking anything else, for daring to believe anything positive about yourself, or the world.

It feels painful and triggering to try and break out of it, because you still hear echos of their words in your head, calling you naive, stupid, snowflake, weakling, pathetic, spoiled, they've defined who you are if you try to challenge their narrative. And then if all that is not true, then all those people were teaching you something so fucked up, and you have to now chage the way you look at them, the way you feel about them, and they've also gone and put a blockade on that.

They've told you what you're allowed to think of them, how grateful you need to be for everything they've done or are still doing for you, they've showed you what happens if you dare to see them in negative light, or even think a negative thought about them. They've taught you to be ashamed of questioning them, to be scared of challenging them, to not even think for a second they could be wrong. If you attempt to go against their word, you again hear their words in your head, calling you selfish, ungrateful, heartless, harmful, toxic, abusive, cruel, vicious, evil. It's almost instictive to try and defend them, to find a way to rationalize why would they do what they did, because you don't want to be vicious, you don't want to be heartless, you have to keep proving that you have a heart, by finding excuses for the abuse that was dealt to you, by finding a way to make it 'okay' that they did this to you.

It's not a coincidence you have so many blocks, and so much pain to go trough if you try to doubt it, they made it so on purpose. They could see that one day you'd figure out they lied to you, and they wanted you to bury yourself in shame and pain and guilt, rather than be able to engage with a logical thought, so you wouldn't be able to build your own narrative, you'd have to stick to what they told you, so you'd evade all of the extra pain.

And in the end, if you do manage to break trough all of that pain and see clearly what they did to you is wrong, your reward is the realization that you have no family. That you grew up in abuse, that your experiences are not normal, they're filled with neglect and pain and trauma. People you believed were your parents, were never on your side. They were never safe, they never had good intentions, they never raised you. You grew up alone. You were lied to. Your innocence, inexperience and young stages of brain development were used against you, to bond and trap you with people who never cared what happens to you. They only cared for how they could make use of you and would keep doing it until the end of your days.

The process of challenging it is so painful, it's reasonable that most people don't want to go trough with it, and don't want to be pushed, and will push back if it's pointed out to them. There's just too much pain to experience on that route. Nobody would take it willingly, unless they have no other choice.

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immiamarais · 7 months ago

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