rachandruin

[rachandruin]

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hey man how's it going

Ngl I totally forgot fandom discourse was a thing. I don’t care man, I have car payments

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I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.

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@tranfalgarlaw TIRAMISU SLAG

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i need pepple to understand that in the first place leather has always been made from the byproducts of butchering animals for meat, otherwise the skin is just tossed and unused. there were some companies farming for leather for a while, particuarly alligator leather, but those were not the norm. peta did so much harm in their campaigns against leather as a concept (its not unethical. yoi get the skin when an animal dies. thats why most leather clothes in the usa are cow leather, bc thats the biggest meat animal here) that its almost impossible to buy anything "leather" that isnt made of plastic that it so fragile and shitty that the very Thread Holding It Together rips the fibers apart. it will last for maybe a year two if youre lucky, and wont biodegrade and was made out of something that isnt naturally occurring in the first place and is one of the biggest causes of pollution globally

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"Fandom" is universally a bad thing and I will die on this hill

Making your consumption of a media property a tentpole of your personality to the point where a minor change in it brings about genuine anxiety is deeply unhealthy and you should seek professional help

I don’t like this actually

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

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The internet has become so fundamentally unusable that something is going to have to replace it within ten years

If anyone was wondering, Duolingo just got even worse.

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People who hit their children, even "just" a spanking, should be dragged out of their homes and publicly beaten and I will die on this hill

““When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.””

— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via jillymomcraftypants)

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Lot of mfs these days don't understand what a boycott means

It means that thing is dead to you. You do not engage with it, you do not support it. You restructure your life in whatever way needs to happen to ensure it is no longer a part of it.

If that's too difficult for you, if you want to have your cake and eat it, then you are not the person you think you are or want to be perceived as.

You can’t have “fuck JK Rowling” in your bio and then turn around and beg Ben Barnes to be in the HBO series btw

You can’t say you “hate JKR” and then say “I’ll only watch the reboot if wolfstar is in it”

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If you want a perfect microcosmic example of what a fascist government/society looks like, look at a HOA

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They had me in the first half I'm NGL

It's nice that some people are very gentle, play with their dogs and praise them and take an interest in their individuality, but realistically not everyone has that kind of time. Poor people have fewer options for taking adequate care of their dogs, are under more day to day pressure and have less patience for training them, so they're more likely than rich people to resort to hitting them. It's not like it's unusual or necessarily traumatic for a dog to be smacked when it disobeys a command, and it is an effective teaching method, even if it's not strictly ideal. Half the time the dog knows what it's doing and it's acting up to be a little shit on purpose. Leaving the dog on its own and ignoring it until it stops crying is a viable alternative. You could also try taking away its toys, or stop taking it to the park for a week. Frankly, some dogs are born bad and beating them is the only way to make them behave. Other dogs have it worse anyway.

^ things people will say about small children without batting an eye

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This is the funniest fucking thing anyone has added to any of my posts