#I'm a product of the American education system

[exquisitedeadpanda]

To be honest, Australia has always seemed like the best English-speaking country for me (an American) to live.

Maybe it's because I'm from the Southwest United States, where everything also wants to kill you. So the flora and fauna don't deter me. But by all other metrics, y'all just seem like Americans who actually have their shit together.

While we're installing our very own fascist government in just a week, y'all already have:

Mandatory and preferencial voting

Universal health care

Minimum living wage

Abolished capital punishment

Strict gun control laws

So if anyone is willing to sponsor a visa...

It’s so funny to me when Americans say they wouldn’t go to Australia because it’s too dangerous as we have snakes and spiders.

You had 604 mass shootings last year. Killing 754 people and injuring 2,443.

We only have 2 snake fatalities a year and no one has died from a spider bite since 1979.

[everybody-hit-the-pyro-cue]

specialized education and gifted children programs are so fucked up I see the purpose but the execution and expectations are genuinely horrific I've yet to meet a single one of us that's doing okay besides from those who just reached their breaking point and chose to stop caring

[licorice-and-rum]

SOC and Neoliberlism

So, as promised, here it is my analysis of Six of Crows and how neoliberalism is amazingly portrayed in Ketterdam, and how the city is an example of what happens in a community that is not provided for.

Before we begin, I wanted to say that English is not my first language, and, considering I read SOC in Brazilian Portuguese, I might translate some names literally or differently from the English version but I think it's manageable to read and understand my point. If not, I'll edit the text.

The first thing we have to understand is how neoliberalism works and the theory behind it, and then we'll talk about how it's portrayed in Ketterdam.

So neoliberalism is a theory born more or less at the end of the 20th century (70s-80s), and it finds its roots in laissez-faire capitalism, meaning that it's a political current that tries to suppress and/or eliminate the State's influence from the market. The neoliberalist view understands that the market can supply by itself the population's needs without help or limitations imposed by the State.

The thing here is that most people listen to this and think neoliberalism is about electronics, cars, and other stuff. The truth is, that neoliberalism aims to suppress the presence of State-run facilities in ALL corners of society, such as health care, housing, water access, electricity, etcetera.

So, we can use the American and Brazillian health systems to understand it better, for example:

In the US, the ones providing health care for the population are great corporations - they decide the price of care, they work together with pharmaceutical companies to define medicine prices, and the laws that bind them are pretty much only offer and demand. There is almost none State intervention to provide the population with accessible health care.

However, this brings problems, of course: not everyone (actually, most people) has real access to health care simply because they can't afford it, or they can't afford it without taking a big financial hit, which threatens their other basic needs, such as food, housing, water, electricity, etcetera. Not everyone can provide for their medical needs, such as diabetic and disabled people.

That leads to:

(a) an increase in poverty;

(b) a decrease in educational levels - if you don't have the means to pay for higher educational levels because of health care debt, or if you're sick and need to go to class and tough through it but you're not really learning anything, and so on, which leads to a major workforce in base level production and a minor class who has access to this education;

(c) an increase in overworking people - meaning that we have a lot of people taking on several jobs to be able to pay for things like health care, which increases the competitiveness between people, making individualism levels go up and breaking up human beings' natural sense of community.

I could also talk here about how this breeds isolation and increases the potential for mental health problems but I think you got what I was saying.

On the other hand, we have the Brazilian health care system (SUS), which is a universal gratuitous medical care service through the whole country. Its purpose is not profit, it's providing health care for the community, so therefore, any SUS unit is bound by State law and run by the State. By law, every SUS unit must provide for anyone who enters its premises in need of medical care. Everyone, Brazillian and foreigners, poor or rich, must be treated if they need to. It's the law.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's all rainbows and flowers, there are definitely many problems in SUS. However, what I'm trying to showcase here is that, when the needs of a population are met, the population itself is more resilient, their life quality goes up and so does their participation in their community.

On the other hand, in neoliberalism, when the State is absent from these areas of community service, the market is, in theory, the one providing for the community. In practice, however, what we observe from neoliberal policies in cities with a great poor population in Latam for example, is that when the State doesn't provide for the community, the market is unable to step up for them because of their obscene prices.

The poor population that doesn't have their needs met by the State or the market sees a great boom in criminal activities within their spaces. That's mainly why criminal organizations are so present in slums and favelas throughout Latin America: criminal organizations are a way for the community to provide for themselves and, as a means to become more powerful, they provide for the community in exchange for their services (not to say they do that for the good of their hearts, of course not).

It's why it's so common, for example, that criminal organizations such as PCC in Brazil pay for kids from favelas to undergo Law school, for example.

And that's is where I wanted to go to start the conversation in SOC: one of the main traits of Ketterdam is the Barrel and, in the Barrel, we have the presence of many criminal organizations, such as the Dregs, the Dime Lions, the Menagerie staff (not the girls, ofc), etcetera.

This, as observed by Kaz himself, is one of the only ways to survive on the Barrel - you filiate yourself to a gang because you need to be able to provide for yourself and, more times than others, for your family as well.

Kaz's story is actually a perfect example of how Ketterdam is the representation of America in the early 20th century in full policies of laissez-faire (neoliberalism): as we can see in Titanic and many other historical fictions, the said American Dream had people believing the US to be this economical paradise where they could all enter the market and become millionaires.

The result of it is the Great Depression, of course, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

When Kaz and Jodi leave Lij for Ketterdam, Jodi believes he'll become a merchant - which is a pretty common belief of those who arrive at Ketterdam, as Pekka Rollins and Kaz himself state in Crooked Kingdom.

The reality of it, though, is much harsher, because the truth is that when you have a market that controls everything, as we see in Ketterdam with the Merchant's Guild (I think that's how it's translated?) and the Stadwatch as a police force, you see perfectly how neoliberal policies really work in real life:

You have a higher class who controls the market and the riches (question: who do you think got the money Shu Han sent to Ketterdam at the beginning of the first book: the people of the city/country or the merchants in the "government"?), and a lower class that, without support from the State or the market to have their needs met will turn to their own means to do so.

So you have the trafficking that brought Inej to the island, the unlimited gambling that Jesper was trapped in, the cons Jodi and Kaz fell for - it's all product of liberal policies.

And so, you have Ketterdam and its neoliberal policies (:

(I really love to make this kind of analysis, please, if you have something you want me to talk about, don't hesitate to ask)

[thedreadvampy]

I think there's a huge gap in language when talking about British legislative and social racism bc some of the most overt and unchallenged legislative racism lately is against GRT people and a lot of countries (especially America) do not use the term GRT.

The G in GRT stands for Gypsy (using this bc it's as-self-described, like it's the term the British GRT community uses often) and bc this is for a lot of people exclusively a slur and bc it has a lot of historical weight, people will often object to use of the expanded acronym slash try to correct it to Roma or Rroma.

But the GRT community as a political class and as a group subject to racism includes, but is not synonymous with, Roma, cause it also includes Irish Travelers (who are another large nomadic minority ethnic group, aka Pavee), Scottish, English and Welsh Travelers (a mix of indigenous nomadic groups), and other nomadic peoples in Britain.

In some, but not all, contexts, GRT also includes non-ethnic nomadic communities: New Age Travelers (people living nomadic lifestyles by choice - full-time caravanners or van lifers), Bargees (people living full time in canal boats) and showmen (traveling funfairs and circuses). Not being a specific ethnicity, New Agers and Showmen have a different relationship to racism and marginalisation than Roma and Travelers (a settled Roma or Traveler family are still Roma or Traveler, it's not just a question of lifestyle and community) but obviously anti-Traveler legislation and bias harms everyone living nomadically.

I think (and I'm not GRT and my thoughts should be taken with a truckload of salt, I just feel like it's worth explaining what the terminology actually means) that a lot of the nuance around GRT identity is kind of lost in transnational discourse (particularly with Americans) because. the G bit of GRT has been used as a blanket term for hundreds of years to refer to multiple groups of nomadic peoples in Europe and so there are ethnocultural groups included under that term who aren't Roma but also are GRT and are racialised as GRT.

People racialised within the GRT community (as Roma or Travelers) experience way higher rates of social and economic exclusion than any other ethnogroups in the UK, including if they're settled (living in brick-and-mortar housing, which around 75% of people recorded as GRT do).

Both Roma and Traveler kids are systemically excluded from education (Gypsy/Roma kids are 6x more likely to be suspended from school and 7x as likely to be expelled than the national average, and Traveler kids aren't much better off (4x more likely than average to be suspended and 5x as likely to be expelled)). GRT people face systemic employment discrimination, being 6x more likely than average to be long term unemployed and 1/4 as likely to be offered high-level or management positions. GRT folk have the worst health outcomes of any ethnic group, and consistently report high levels of medical discrimination and trouble accessing healthcare. As a result, GRT infant mortality and maternal death is way higher than average, and GRT life expectancy is 10+ years shorter than average. GRT communities are disproportionately criminalised, settled GRT families have spoken often about having been treated as inherently suspicious on the basis of their ethnicity.

A lot of people write these issues off as being, like, a product of a nomadic/no-fixed-address lifestyle, but a) it's a problem with the system if our social care systems don't account for the fact that some people are nomadic, itinerant or have no fixed address. there is no reason why nomadic life needs to be more dangerous or excluded than settled. but also b) as stated a majority of GRT people included in these figures do have fixed addresses. it is just racism.

Homelessness is also a huge problem in the community, with many landowners refusing to rent land to Travellers, residential camping berths being oversubscribed by something like 10,000%, and significant difficulty accessing affordable housing. The land which is available to Traveling communities is increasingly ringfenced, often specifically with the intention of discouraging nomadic communities.

given that it is. racism. with an exceptionally long and brutal history of genocide, criminalisation and systemic social exclusion. it is also striking how often open, sometimes genocidal, racism against GRT people is handwaved or accepted as normal. anti-GRT legislation is explicitly passed on the regular. people are incredibly comfortable referring to all GRT people as thieves, scroungers, criminals and frauds. I have had literal circular mailings offering to "remove vermin, pests and Gypsies from your land." and yet calling this racism is often treated as an overstatement. Even though it's explicitly ethnically-driven bias, and has deeply entrenched social impacts affecting everyone racialised as GRT regardless of cultural behaviour or lifestyle.

anyway that's what GRT means, it stands for Gypsy/Roma/Traveller and it's an extremely underserved and marginalised racialised group in the UK and Europe. It includes Romani ethnic groups, but also includes non-Roma ethnic groups (like the Pavee) and Roma subgroups (like Sinti). They're united by a common experience of anti-nomadic racism, criminalisation and social exclusion and, as an aggregate group, are consistently among the most directly disadvantaged racial groups in the UK.

[ktempestbradford]

blink blink

How can y'all not know Gary, Indiana exists? Have none of you heard of Michael Jackson?

Americans not knowing American Geography is never not funny to me

LA isn't in a desert, Connecticut is a state, they don’t speak Dutch in Pennsylvania, Gary Indiana exists

[garfield-is-my-god]

Today is my birthday, my 18th birthday to be exact. This is going to be a rant and likely long. If you do not wish to read this entire thing, I do not blame you. I do, however, encourage people to donate to families in Palestine. I will provide links at the bottom.

I don't know how I feel about today, especially after this year. I have seen unimaginable levels of pain coming out of the global south. Horrific amount of pain and suffering, not just to the people and animals who live there, but towards the environment as well. All for what really, you spend your entire life paying for things you need so you don't die. For what? Why do live like this? Why is this the way things have to be? Your tax dollars are being used to bomb the global south. Children are being slaughtered by the dozens. I, like many Americans, wasn't taught the complete truth about America's involvment in global atrocities. This doesn't mean you should sit there and pretend it doesn't exist. What the actual fuck is wrong with some of you people? Kamala was never going to be a salvation. The amount of vitriolic racism liberals spewed the week following the election because their side lost. If you geniunely think that Democrats give a single fuck about your rights, they don't. I'm sorry that Trump won, but they are both facists. Also, stop blaming Arabs, third-party voters, and Hispanics/Latinos. Maybe look inward to find why your preferred candidate didn't win. If you went somewhere that was on the BDS list simply to "own it" to people in Gaza, you are despicable. You do not care about liberation, you only care for your own comfort. Your privilege is showing.

Something that I have been thinking about is how young the people is Palestine are. You have people around my age being responsible for their entire families' lives. That is actually insane. This genocide has been ongoing for 13 months. Israel has been colonizing Palestine for the past 76 years. This has affected entire generations, entire families, whether they live in Palestine or were displaced. These were very real, complex people that are just gone now. I can't think about the martyrs without being angry at the system. Without being angry about my passive complacency in the system.

The systems that are oppresing those in Palestine are the same systems oppressing you right here. You don't think that killing thousands of innocent people there is because they care about the people here. There are billions of dollars that is being used to annihilate children in the Middle East. Politicians don't care about you. You are just a statistic to them. You need to get involved in your communities. Protect the most vunerable people around you. Protect the children everywhere. Take the time to educate yourself. Stay up to date with the news. Take care of your loved ones. Protest. Boycott. Take action against the systems that bind us.

Donate to Palestinians:

This is Maha, a 4th-year engineering student. She has her mother and father, as well as, 5 siblings; 2 sisters and 3 brothers, 4 of whom are married with children. She is hoping to raise money to help her and her family leave Gaza. She is at 5% of her goal. $1,632 / $30,000

This is Fayez Al-Kafarna, a 28 year old computer engineer from Northern Gaza. He is supporting 2 families, his own and another family. He is the sole provider for both. There are food shortages, lack of hygiene products and medical supplies. He is at 42% of his goal. $10,465 / $25,000

This is Aya, a 27-year old woman living in Gaza. There are 8 members of her family, including her. She has a 3-year old son, Bassam. She is trying to evacuate her and her family from Gaza to Egypt. She is at 8% of her goal. €4,667 / €55,000

Please donate if you can.

[incesthemes]

since you asked me this question for wincest wednesday...what are YOUR headcanons on the boys' knowledge of languages? :o

YES THANK YOU!!!!!! :) i love talking about languages and supernatural and languages in supernatural

so when i first watched through the show, i actually had a pretty extensive list of languages i thought they would have reasonably acquired some knowledge on:

classical languages (latin, classical greek)

native north american languages (particularly of the siouan and uto-aztecan variety, and navajo, all for geographical reasons)

some modern italic languages (spanish, french, italian, etc), maybe less so modern germanic languages

some old norse (mainly via the two eddas)

some japanese, picked up later in the series and mostly by dean (to honor bobby's memory)

some other ancient or dead languages (aramaic, sumerian, old english, etc)

a very small spattering of enochian, whatever is available for humans to learn

american sign language (sam only)

my reasoning for this was for practical reasons: these are the languages of the cultures that the monsters they hunt originate from, and so the lore is going to be accessible only or predominantly through those languages. especially later in the series, you see them interacting with non-english texts quite often (whether or not they know the languages in question is up to that episode writer's whims, i guess, continuity be damned). i also like the interpretation of both sam and dean as being highly self-educated, and since they're both rather serious about hunting, this would be a natural extension of the knowledge they'd need to acquire to actually excel in their work. for this headcanon, i really like dean being more practical in his knowledge of languages and sam being more academic because it aligns with their areas of specialty in hunting :3

HOWEVER, when i started my rewatch, i also watched the pilot commentary with eric kripke, and he said something very striking to me:

Blue collar, low tech guys and their weaponry should be blue collar, greasy, worn down. It's always been really important to me. I'm mean—I'm just—I'm from a small town in Ohio, and you know, it's always been important to me that these guys just be, you know, Motorheads... and... love classic rock... and know how to handle a chainsaw, and that was to me, more interesting than—spells and magic. And... even to this day in the writer's room they always bring that stuff up, and I'm always like, 'Forget it! Where are the chainsaws?'

it's very obvious in the final product that this was the intention of course, and as i continued to watch i kept this vision in mind. there are three things that have stood out to me since then:

in 1x04, sam tells dean that "christo" is latin for god. it's actually greek (for christ, not god), and it would also be in the wrong declension, which could imply that sam actually isn't really familiar with greek or latin. this could imply that sam is actually just parroting something he's been told in the past (probably by john), without actually knowing it himself

in 2x04, dean flips through a book in ancient greek, and later when they dig up angela's coffin, they find more greek lettering on the inside. dean calls the letters "symbols" which could imply he's not familiar enough with greek to even know what kind of writing system it has, or to recognize greek writing for what it is. sam, too, seems equally baffled at the "symbols"

in 5x05, sam interviews a hispanic woman in somewhat awkward spanish. when dean asks about it, sam replies "freshman spanish," meaning he hasn't learned beyond a freshman, introductory level of the language, and that he learned it through formal education rather than on his own

these moments are super important to me because they really cut through the idea that sam and dean have extensive or even moderate training in foreign languages. instead, they paint the picture of rather sheltered kids who were largely kept away from the world or only limited in their exposure. i imagine, from this, that john was the one who did most of the research on their hunts, and if sam or dean participated they were relegated to controlled, prescribed roles. especially from the 1x04 example, i can extrapolate that they probably haven't examined the information they've been given too deeply; it implies a level of blind trust in john's skill, to the extent that sam isn't even aware of what language he's speaking in to reveal a demon.

as a result my most up-to-date headcanon is that sam and dean both grew up entirely monolingual, and that they didn't actually even start acquiring new languages (sam's freshman spanish exempted) until their network was cut out from under them (bobby's death and then garth's disappearance) and they found the bunker, with its myriad resources to research and study and its stability to house a library for those purposes. before then, i can see them picking up on very minor latin, like a few words here and there, but not actively pursuing any of this learning until they were forced to learn it themselves. what languages they know or how deep their knowledge goes is wildly contradictory in canon so that means i can do whatever i want, which is exactly the point where i wrap back around into my initial headcanon and start adding those languages back into their bunker era repertoire of skills.

(for the record i do generally have opinions about how much they each know of each of those languages and where their strengths in language learning lie, because i think WAY too much about this)

to my own dismay (as a lover of languages and linguistics), i've found this interpretation to be much more in-line with kripke's vision of the show, whether or not the more subtle details were intentional or not (seriously, who on the set of this show decided on "christo," i NEED to know). It also gives an interesting dimension to their early life as being highly sheltered and isolated and kept away from the hunting life while simultaneously being inescapably part of it.

this is a really long way of saying "monolinguals," but in my defense i've been building this interpretation and headcanon for nearly a year straight now. because i pay way too much undue attention to the use of language in supernatural.

[ballet-symphonie]

what's the deal with joy womack ? I got into ballet after the whole scandal at the bolshoi and i've always heard bad things about her but I don't really know the story. Also she apparently lied about her position at POB?

Ooof I'll try to do the quick version based on what I remember, she is basically one drama after another, she tends to...misrepresent information. She left BT after saying she had to pay or even sleep with someone to get soloist parts. This was disputed by some, and confirmed by others.

After she went to work i the Kremlin Ballet Theatre of Moscow, she became a leading soloist with them, despite often calling herself a principal. There was some tension here as she was making vlogs filming class despite her coworkers asking her not to and occasionally sharing some no-so-nice information about her coworkers, things got messy when she divorced her ex and she left, even after she got promoted to principal.

After Kremlin, she won a prize at Varna in 2017, did some unsuccessful company auditions, and did short stints at Universal Ballet in Korea and guesting around Bulgaria and Poland. At one point she was going back Russian State Theatre Arts Ballet Pedagogy and Choreography (GITIS) for higher education in pedagogy. She has repeatedly expressed disdain for both the American and Russian systems, and there is a lot of speculation that this, along with her desire to be a principal *asap* hindered her career.

She was at Boston Ballet for a short period, but didn't like the setup, said she preferred being in Russian/European companies where they provided more individual coaching and often more benefits (housing) and with low layoffs...yet she has also repeatedly complained about the low pay/exchange rate when she was working in Russia. She left here when COVID happened.

After trying a couple of times, I believe she got a "contractuelle" position at POB, where you're generally hired for specific productions (eg, something with a huge corps, or for a specific choreographic nice that a dancer excels in). POB, with its extremely involved hiring and promotion systems/competitions, takes a while to move dancers into the corps sometimes. I'm not sure if she was offered a corps contract and didn't take it, or didn't get one, but regardless, she's no longer working with POB.

And now, if you go to her website she's starting a foundation and a school and company....? This is in addition to her freelancing around and the project prima bars that I think no longer exist and some film work. She's just a lotttttt and does not portray herself as the most self-aware or humble person.

As far as my personal interactions with her go, I know she came to audition at my company before I started my professional career and was not accepted. I took a couple classes with her in NYC by chance, the diva attitude was overtly present.

I didn't do much googling here, of course open to corrections of this mass of speculation

[lisztomaniac-mp3]

friendly reminder that this is how the american education system works:

Chemistry - B - 86.5%

Spanish 1A - A - 92.6%

Video Production - A - 93.5%

Health 2 - B - 83%

Statistics - C - 79.5%

Marketing - A - 95.8%

Sports History - F - 55%

English - C - 76.8%

TLDR: get your shit together our society is shit and the cut off for a failing grade shouldn't be 50-60%

full thing below ↓

If you're American, l probably wondering why tf this matters. I remember a long while ago reading a Tumblr thread of a bunch of people from Europe and I believe even a person from Brazil being absolutely horrified that 50% or 60% = F. Y'know why? Because it's bullshit. If you succeeded with 50-60% of the material, you didn't fail. The grading system is fucked. The entire education system is idiotic and I guarantee everyone here that I could fix it. Our education was made to pump out factory workers, and despite the very small miniscule changes that have been made, the system is stuck. The cogs are rusty and they need replacing. The entire idea of grading is outdated and doesn't work. We are a society based around reward and punishment, but most of all our society based on capitalism is falling apart. Kids are having a constant unending pressure of the idea of needing to work to make money to survive, I watch my 66 year old grandmother riddled with anxiety and depression and undiagnosed autism struggling everyday because she works 5 days a week and is bullied in the workplace. But this is the only thing she knows, it's engrained in her mind that she must work until she is dying from pain both physical and mental until she gets paid so she can continue to maybe just for one more month live comfortably in the middle class. And so I return to education, and all I can think is the rational fear of bad grades because society tells you that if you get bad grades you won't go to college and college is vital for your success and if you don't go to college you will end up becoming a depressing houseless meth head. But I can tell you right now that you can succeed without college and you can become a houseless meth head even if you're successful. And who set that system up? Who's going to give housing and rehabilitation resources to the houseless meth head? We are the new generation we are the change we can change. We can change the education system to help students flourish, like in finland. I don't want to be cringe but generation z is the end of an era and generation alpha is the beginning of another and I don't care if there's millennials or generation betas that want "in" because if you are willing to be apart of the change then you can be the change. That's my cringe thesis about the future generation. If my children have to live with the crushing weight and pressure to succeed I'm going to have a fucking problem. Put your heads back on and send a letter to congress, sign petitions, protest, become informed because unfortunately it's all on us at this point.

[calliesmemes]

SUFFS: THE MUSICAL

ASSORTED SENTENCE STARTERS pulled from the Tony award winning production SUFFS, a new Broadway musical about the decades-long Suffrage movement and the fight to secure women’s’ rights to vote amidst the turbulence of the First World War.

CHANGE gendered words and in-universe phrases as needed.

SPECIFY muse for multimuses.

CONTENT WARNINGS include misogyny and swearing.

ACT ONE

❛ Welcome, gentlemen! ❜

❛ God bless the land of freedom we hold dear. ❜

❛ We'll tidy up our politics until they are pristine. ❜

❛ Don't we deserve a little prize? ❜

❛ Don't worry, it's all right. ❜

❛ Just hold your fury in. ❜

❛ That’s the only way we can win. ❜

❛ Don't get so defensive; don't be so aggressive. ❜

❛ I don't wanna be a meek little one in games they play. ❜

❛ I wanna march in the streets. ❜

❛ Should I try to take the lead alone? ❜

❛ My ideas just dwindle and die. ❜

❛ Will I truly be able to change the world? ❜

❛ I’ll be there on the day when we finally finish the fight. ❜

❛ What's the emergency? ❜

❛ How will we do it when it's never been done? ❜

❛ How will we find the way where there isn't one? ❜

❛ That was a great speech. ❜

❛ When we take on a tyrant, we burn him down. ���

❛ That’s not leadership; it’s cowardice. ❜

❛ I'm so sick of rhetoric with no action to back it. ❜

❛ When we show up, we show up for all of us. ❜

❛ I’ve never felt so alive before. ❜

❛ I feel a part of something bigger than me. ❜

❛ I feel my word about to change. ❜

❛ I'm a great American bitch. ❜

❛ I'd rather be right than rich. ❜

❛ I seduce whoever I please. ❜

❛ Come on, we'll do it together, get up.. ❜

❛ I must honor the promises of my campaign. ❜

❛ Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. ❜

❛ We'll be glad to educate you. ❜

❛ Will I feel like a failure no matter what choice I make? ❜

❛ If I don't give my all to my calling, I'll never be able to forgive myself. ❜

❛ If we were married, I promise to cherish you just as a gentleman should. ❜

❛ You've got to admire the ease with which men can squeeze us into such a rigid role. Daughters are taught to aspire to a system expressly designed to keep them under control. ❜

❛ Don't let her get to your head, focus on your speech instead. ❜

❛ What was I thinking enabling her? ❜

❛ What if she ruins what I’ve been mounting for years? ❜

❛ You just publicly implied I'm a disloyal disgrace. ❜

❛ If you have something to say, say it to my face. ❜

❛ Why are you fighting me? I am not the enemy. ❜

❛ I want us to meet someone. ❜

❛ You really put the rage in suffrage. ❜

❛ I’ve got a surprise; close your eyes. ❜

❛ It feels like we’re right back at the start. ❜

❛ Too bad for them, they're up against a queen with a spine of steel. ❜

❛ You are the bravest person I've ever met. ❜

❛ Don't you wanna face the villain down and demolish him? ❜

❛ They ought to be frightened of you and me. ❜

❛ Dammit! Why are you the only person I can never turn down? ❜

❛ We'll hold a rally first thing. ❜

❛ Don't you think we've waited long enough? ❜

❛ I need to plan a memorial fit for a queen. ❜

❛ I used to wish I could be in her shoes. ❜

ACT TWO

❛ We rose up in defiance, yes we chose to risk it all. ❜

❛ The old way always dies. ❜

❛ I may not be a great man, but I am a man who upholds his vows. ❜

❛ You will sit down, shut up, and eat your food. ❜

❛ Hold it together; see it through. ❜

❛ Don't let despair get the best of you. ❜

❛ What a coward you’ve become. ❜

❛ Fight your own war. ❜

❛ You promised me we would burn him down. ❜

❛ What have they done to you?! ❜

❛ Decades of defiance take their toll. ❜

❛ God, I wish I had her courage. ❜

❛ All rumors in the press are entirely false. ❜

❛ You're deep in pain, you feel insane, and no one can talk you off the ledge. But that's exactly how those crooked kings want you to feel. ❜

❛ I know I’m intense — It's just how I cope in a world that's gone crazy. ❜

❛ All I've ever wanted is to change things for the better. ❜

❛ Is it so insane to want my own choice? ❜

❛ it's time we burn him down. ❜

❛ Thank you for finally sharing a cup of tea with me. ❜

❛ Who cares who gets the credit or the blame? What matters is the work gets done. ❜

❛ I know you think I'm this arrogant kid, but I've just always known it's my calling to see this movement through. ❜

❛ I feel like a parent made to reprimand my child. ❜

❛ I'm so tired of fighting. ❜

❛ God, how I wish we could really be wed. ❜

❛ I'm proud of you. ❜

❛ Even when you drove me to my wits end, the best thing I've ever been is your friend. ❜

❛ I won’t live to see the future that I fight for. ❜

❛ Progress is possible, not guaranteed. ❜

❛ You’ll rarely agree with whoever’s in charge. ❜

❛ The future demands that we fight for it now. ❜

[pattern-recognition]

re:the brutalism post, what do you mean when you say "the landscape" of the US? My interpretation is that you're talking in terms of literal landmass and how populations are dispersed, so I'm confused about why that'd present a more significant barrier to successful socialist organizing in the US than it did in other, larger countries like China or Russia that have seen successful large-scale socialist/communist movements. I don't mean this as a gotcha - I really don't feel that I'm educated enough to know why it might be notably different in the US.

Where i was going with that post before it evolved into a discourse about brutalism, which i never really intended, was towards the atomization of American social life. More so than any aesthetics of architecture form and what they mean, I was motioning towards the ways in which the built landscape in the US is specifically designed to isolate people, dehumanize them, and make living as hard as possible for people without the privileges of wealth. The most obvious example is the homelessness crisis and car based infrastructure. it’s true that there are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people, but even then those homes are of the most deleterious type, even compared to other capitalist nations like Francs, Britain, etc. American zoning laws, in most cities, eschew affordable high-rise apartment buildings for single family, two story at most, housing that forces people into having a vested interest, wether they like it or not, in capitalist real-estate speculation through mortgages and whatnot. The phenomenon of suburbia in the United Stated was specifically an anti-communist one and heavily parallels the Wehrbauer system in Nazi Germany. The latter, should it have come to fruition fallowing Gerneralplan Ost (the mass genocide of all eastern european peoples and subsequent resettlement of eastern europe by Germanic colonizers) would have been structured around a system of semi self reliant small business owners and peasants (and I use this word in the Marxian sense, as in small land owners in control of their own means of production) who would act as a bulwark against both physical reprisals by freedom fighters (the Wehrbauers were intended to be heavily armed) as well as an ideological one because communities where everyone is a petit bourgeois would be resistant to Marxist agitation. The parallels to contemporary American suburbs, as well as the settlement and colonization of the west through manifest destiny, should be obvious.

[street-corn]

January 29th, 2024 marks the 28th anniversary of the Star Trek Voyager episode "Threshold." This episode is often heralded as one of the worst episodes of Star Trek ever made and I've previously made the observation that everyone seems to dislike the episode for entirely novel reasons. While it's easy to predict that someone will dislike the episode, I find that the exact reason why can only be found by asking. Is it how it ruins established cannon? Is it the bad scientific understanding of how evolution works? Is it plot related as the crew avoids using an easy way home? Is it the poor parenting? Is it dialog and writing? Is it the lizard sex? There's usually a mix of reasons that I suspect one could use as the basis of Some Kind Of MBTI quiz.

However, rather than reveling in the episode itself, I want to address a bigger issue of how Star Trek fandom approaches its "worst ever episodes" lists that are a mere Bing search away. Too often I see episodes like Move Along Home (aka Allamaraine!) and Threshold at the top of "worst ever episodes" lists and I think its lazy or disingenuous to let these episodes dominate the conversation. Sure, the episodes are cheesy or campy, but they distract from the genuinely terrible episodes. The episodes that celebrate human rights violations, the episodes that propagate white supremacy, the episodes that teach the audience the wrong lesson, or the episodes that can cause physical discomfort to the audience. I would like to shine a light on a few of these episodes so we can properly discuss what it means to be a bad episode of Star Trek.

Tattoo Tattoo is an absolutely rotten episode. It's drizzled with misinformation and misconceptions about indigenous Americans. It states that indigenous people didn't have language, fire, and barely had any stone tool use (and implies they were too stupid to not migrate away from the cold.) So aliens, depicted as tall and strong, with blonde hair and blue eyes, taught them the basics of human civilization because there was no way this particular group of humans could figure it out on their own.

The Fight This episode is painful to watch. It's all of the worst parts about the Prophets of DS9 but without any allegory. It ruins cannon by making Boothby the Most Important Human To Ever Live. The episode, while late into the production of Voyager, continues the vision quest aspect of Chakotay, which ties it back to Tattoo. While not as offensive as other entries, it is worth putting on a list of actual bad episodes.

Cogenitor The NX-1 Enterprise meets some aliens with three genders. 98% of them are male and female but they also require a third gender to procreate, called the cogenitor. The cogenitors are kept as second class citizens. Their lives are owned by the state and their bodies are traded around to married couples that want to have children. They cannot own property, cannot vote, cannot socialize, are forbidden to become educated or literate, and are forced to wear gray drab clothing. Trip Tucker sees this and thinks its wrong. He teaches a cogenitor how to read. Unfortunately, the cogenitor uses this new skill to learn how oppressed their life is and how they are trapped in a system that cannot change, so they end their own life. Trip Tucker is treated as the villain of this episode. Gross.

Skin of Evil and Tears of the Prophets I'm bundling these episodes together because of their poor treatment of women and actresses behind the scenes. From a plot and writing perspective they do not treat their characters well. They can be summed up as "WTF moments." Behind the scenes it's extra terrible. From writing this I found out something fun and new…

Retrospect This is the episode where Tom Paris is convicted of murder and has to relive the memories of the murder over and over again. Behind the scenes, a certain producer was trying to spin that "women lie and never believe them about sexual assault allegations" while contract negotiations with Terry Farrel were going on. The plot is interesting, but the lessons the episode is trying to teach are wrong.

There are many other well known episodes that involve obvious racism and mistreatment of women, and I think they should make up the entirety of Star Trek's worst episode lists. But bundling campy and cheesy episodes like "Let He Who Is Without Sin…", "Sub Rosa", "The Way To Eden", and "Threshold" with the likes of "Code Of Honor" and "Turnabout Intruder" really confuses what it means to be a truly, awful, no good episode of television.

Anyways, let's watch some salamanders eat pepperoni pizza.

[realjaysumlin]

Let's talk dollars and cents worth making sense to start building our own wealth within the Black Africans by doing a lot of things together from all parts of the world. I'm going to go over a lot of stuff here and I do hope you participate in this discussion because it changes everything for all of us.

First, let me start by the currency exchange rates which is more important than getting into the process of joint venturing together. I'm going to use the Ghana GHS versus the USD. $100.00 American Dollars estimated value is almost at a 10 to 1 ratio and sometimes it's even more. But I sent $100.00 today after 2:00 central time zone USA which is 7:00 PM in Ghana and the recipient received 1200.00 Cedis, which is the currency in Ghana Africa.

Instead of buying designer brands who are not giving us anything back to us but making racist ideologies directed towards all Black Indigenous People globally, we don't need to be spending our hard earned money with them, we should be making our own shit.

Africa is the youngest continent in the world with the average age of 25 years old. There are more educated people who are unemployed in Africa right now and we need to start putting these people to work, which is something that we can easily do.

Africa has the best seamstress and tailors in the world and we can get them to make anything for us. The best exotic hides can be found in Africa better and cheaper than any place on earth. If you want handbags made out of the best exotic skins and dyes Africa is the best option we have on earth.

The African People themselves are the most honest and nicest people you will ever meet. It's really the bad attitude Black Indigenous People who come to Africa with their brainwashed stereotypes about Africa. I have seen this so many times when I go back and forth.

First of all the American educational system is inferior to Africa, a child in Africa middle school is on the average of a second year college level compared to the Americans. You are out of your league if you think you are smarter than an African child and you don't have a college degree.

These beautiful children speak on the average of three languages compared to most of you that only speak one and if you think you are better than a Nigerian when it comes to cleverness? You are better off to make yourself a student to a 10 year old Nigerian child, you are no match on their level of education, even though Nigerians do have a sense of arrogance and high opinions and you don't want to get in a debate with a Nigerian, because you are surely going to win.

All that aside, Africa needs money coming in from those of us who live outside of Africa with higher currency exchange rates. We should be importing cash into Africa and they will be exporting products that we can sell here for profit.

The labor is cheaper in Africa just like in Asia but we need to focus on manufacturing stuff in Africa to be exported out to the UK and America. We can do this and I hope you will take the time to talk about this together because we don't need anyone but ourselves.

[digitalisnarcissus]

My problem with "they didn't teach us this in school" Americans is rarely what the American school system did or did not teach.

Yeah it's kinda worrying that you left school thinking that Alaska was an island or not knowing what a Poland is, but you're an adult!

You should not still be reacting with shock, anger, and dismay to every new piece of information because your one time education was not comprehensive enough. You live in the world. You will, if you are lucky, learn new things all the time until you die. Why are you calling the manager because they didn't stick everything you will ever need to know into your head before the age of 18?

Why is this piece of information about geopolitics now about you, aged eleven?

It's literally fine not to know things, it's neutral, I don't know a lot of shit, some of that's because I left school at 8 (don't worry about it) and some of that's because I'm an idiot.

Mostly it's just because no one person can know everything and we're all products of our culture.

Go read a little (or a lot) about the new information, or just scroll on with it now in you, I'm not your mum, all I'm saying is that you can skip the performative little song and dance, because intentionally or not it turns everything back into America being the centre of the known fucking universe.

[emotionalsupport-ljh]

Alright I'm gonna have to say something. There is a lot of info going around that doesn't make sense. There have also been bad arguments on both sides. I'm gonna try to synthesize what I've learned and what I think here so bear with me.

MiA has been on air for 6 years. It has aired globally; in America it aired on Adult Swim. It's on crunchyroll and Hulu if you have a subscription. Is it more likely that A. Anime fans are all p*dos or B. The anime was sold and heavily edited for marketability? I don't believe the amount of anime buffs that have talked so highly about it for so long would have done that had they known the truth.

Another point, we are citing a live from Aug. 2022. Why didn't anyone say anything then? In said live, Woozi is asked to recommend anime. He starts listing anime he had just started then ultimately recommends Komi Can't Communicate. That is it. As for the other idols, they most likely engaged with an edited version that kept some darkness but not the horrible awful parts.

It is not impossible for people to unwittingly enjoy something that is later revealed to be problematic. As far as anime goes, AoT and Ranking of Kings are examples of this. Stuff like that happens in western like in the cases of Harry Potter or Twilight. I will admit, I don't know when it was revealed that there was editing done to MiA, but it has been a recommended anime for years.

The source that posted is called Pannchoa and is notorious for causing problems, mistranslating, misunderstanding, and lying. I've also seen misinfo being spread by antis who want attention. Twitter is a cesspool, and unfortunately, a lot of children these days, especially american children, are victims of a deteriorating education system and lack reading comprehension skills as well as being chronically online. I'm a grown-up. I'm an adult. I'm not saying you have to agree but just take a moment to listen.

Many people have jumped to conclusions and straight up misunderstood things. I've had to cut off favs before, but I always read as much as I can first and make sure I understand before deciding. I hope this blows over quick; I cannot imagine the heartache and stress these boys are going through, or anyone else who likes anime who has posted about it, recommended it, or enjoys it. Let's be productive and drop the manga artist and company who sold it and everyone involved in its censoring and make this not happen again.

The argument that "they are grown men and can watch whatever" does not help. The argument that "watching true crime doesn't make you a murderer" does not help. What helps is finding what is real and not real.

If you're going to try and argue, pick someone else or pick another post. I will not engage. I've said my piece.

[existingisinconvenient]

Ramble #1

I've seen people ask arbitrary things like "What? Do you hate America?" In response to people who want to push for change in America, specifically when these people are liberals or communists.

In response, I would say no.

No, I do not hate America, but I don't love the rampant classism and racism. I can't love the way that our extremely overfunded police and army have in many ways contributed to the housing crisis. I refuse to love that capitalism prioritizes production over the safety and well-being of the workers that are at the forefront of that production.

I hate the way that the billionaires are the only ones who benefit from this fucked system. I hate that equality and acceptance are seen and used as marketing tactics by major corporations.

I hate that prejudice and bigotry are so heavily ingrained in American society that even the way we are educated as children is contributing to these false and classist narratives.

I hate that communism-which is a valid ideology that people should be allowed to freely express-is considered a dirty word. Communist is often used as an insult. Often times people flinch at communism more than they do at fascism.

Fascism is in practically every case inherently bad. It is an inherently flawed and sexist system.

Communism is neither bad nor good. It is an idea which strives for "utopia" and independence and prosperity for the working class.

So why is it that so many Americans fear and hate communists more than they do fascists? It makes no fucking sense, and it is almost entirely rooted in the conflict between America and The Soviet Union during the Cold War. WHICH STARTED ITS FIRST PHASE 1945!

So I will say once again that I don't hate America.

But I know that America could do better, could be better. We are all being killed by Capitalism, only the top 1% truly get anything from this system. I know that in order for us to have a truly democratic country things have to change.

I wish I could end this ramble with some important wisdom, or some call to action, but I can't. I'm just somebody sitting in their room at 4:00 AM and writing a blog post that nobody will probably ever care about.

So all I'm ending this with is a goodbye.

— S.H