#People for the American Way

[tomorrowusa]

Norman Lear died at the age of 101 this week. Jimmy Kimmel's tribute to him captured brilliantly what Lear was all about – and was appropriately funny as well.

Lear may be best remembered for making sitcoms which resembled real life a bit more while innovatively integrating social commentary into them.

But Lear was also a lifelong progressive who founded People For the American Way (PFAW).

Home - People For the American Way

A notable offshoot of PFAW is Right Wing Watch.

Homepage | Right Wing Watch

Right Wing Watch is a must for keeping an eye on extremists like House Speaker Mike Johnson.

House Speaker Mike Johnson Will Be Honored Tonight at Christian Nationalist Gathering

So a big Thank You to Norman Lear for the laughs and for his efforts in trying to nudge America in a progressive direction! ❤️🗽

[lenbryant]

Matt Baume tells the story of American treasure Norman Lear.

[bryanharryrombough]

1982

People knew.

We were warned.

Life and Liberty for All Who Believe (1982) is a documentary produced by Norman Lear's People For the American Way.

It features Burt Lancaster trashing Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich for their extremism and bigotry.

The film chronicled the first massive meeting of the religious right, held in Dallas, Texas in 1980, where Paul Weyrich famously proposed voter suppression as winning tactic for far-right Republicans.

[eklaysea]

This is from my "People for the American Way" protest work. Unions and the aforementioned ActBlue Sweetheart supported it. It was your basic lefty gripe fest. At that time, I felt comfortable recording Protests; they were always peaceful. No one ever asked me, "Who are you?" "Why?" Today I would fear a beatdown.

https://wp.me/pfXTa2-1W5

The above link takes you to the page for this image. there are 2 downloads: Full-size image as shown—Below that link is one for the Zip file with the same JPEG and the original RAW if you want to edit it differently.

This work and all images on my site are Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY)

[subterra-rose]

Honestly pokemon is the ideal universe not just because there’s cute animals that are your life companions, but because they have walkable cities and adequate biking infrastructure

[headspace-hotel]

by the way (i sadly cant share this document cause it was sent to me personally and i dont think its online) i've been reading a compilation of earliest writings by European settlers about Kentucky and its fucking wild

the main thing they mention is the river cane, everywhere. Cane cane cane cane cane on every page. Canebrakes stretching for miles and miles, dark woodlands of massive trees spaced wide apart with canebrake as the understory

But also they talk a lot about: Huge fields of strawberries that seem to turn red in spring with all the strawberries getting ripe. Raspberries. Groves of American plums, even some AN ACRE big just a huge patch of plum trees. Cherry trees. Huge grape vines growing up one in every four trees. Persimmons and pawpaws. Walnut trees. Hickory trees. Oak trees. And sugar maples. EVERYWHERE. And the canebrakes absolutely TEEMING with turkeys, passenger pigeons and quails

Reading the descriptions of looking out into a valley and seeing herds of 200-300 bison frolicking in the clover and river cane almost makes me want to cry...

It's crazy how much they talk about plum trees because plum trees are so rare now!

Really it's wild seeing how abundant the edible woody plant species and berries just-so-happened to be when Europeans first came. Right?

To me it seems like obvious pieces of evidence that indigenous people were actively cultivating this land. It was a landscape scale agriculture fully integrated with the ecosystem.

Even more so because it started to collapse very soon after settlers came. The sugar maple trees were mostly killed by settlers hacking indiscriminately into them with hatchets for maple syrup making without caring about the trees survival, the livestock running loose destroyed the native clover and cane causing invasive grass to grow back, and the bison...reading about the bison is so sad!

The wasteful slaughter of bison began very early. Lots of writers talk about other settlers killing bison just to say they killed one, or killing several of them and barely taking one horse load of meat from them, or seeing traders killing bison by the hundreds just to take the most valuable parts and leave the body to rot...And the writers knew it was wrong! but they couldn't stop the others from doing it. So bison were basically gone from around Lexington before 1800 :(

Settlers even killed the bison for wool--this was fascinating to me, they described making their cloth out of nettle bast fiber and bison wool. Native Americans also used bison wool for textiles, but as far as I know they didn't kill them for it (tho i reckon they might have used the wool on a bison they killed)...the wool peels right off in big clumps in the spring. Same thing with mountain goats, indigenous peoples would just gather the mountain goat wool when it naturally shed. But the settlers were killing bison to shave the wool off and it said only the young ones had good wool so if they killed a bison that didn't have good wool on it they would just kill another one.

They destroyed the river cane not knowing that bamboo was strong and useful for practically everything. Destroyed the native pastures of buffalo clover, Kentucky clover, running buffalo clover and God knows what other extinct or undiscovered clovers. And now wild strawberries and raspberries are hard to find, American plums very rare, persimmons rare...

The settlers didn't understand this land, didn't try to understand it, they were full of greed and just tried to force their idea of agriculture and their idea of society onto it, and watched in bafflement as the natural abundance and beauty of the land around them fell into decay and ruin from their abuse.

[bellaciao-ciao-ciao]

[p0th]

[thedrowsydoormouse]

This might sound harsh (and if it does, I genuinely don't care) but if your media literacy is so shit that you think the point of that episode was "military good, protesters bad" and not the extremely obvious "valuing conspiracy thought above all else and blatantly ignoring what you can clearly see as true with your own two eyes will rot your brain and leave you without the ability to exist and interact with the world around you" then I do not think you should be watching Doctor Who. They all but spell it out for you in the Doctor's speech at the end. I genuinely do not know how they could have made the point any more obvious short of having Conrad played by someone like Alex Jones. I should not be seeing nearly as many posts as I have completely missing the point.

[tigwalen]

[lenbryant]

RIP Norman Lear. How great to have lived so long and made so much change in the world.

[capydoodle]

have compassion for yourself and for others. it seems hopeless but any small amount of good you can do is just that much more love in the world

[leupagus]

The thing about the "one day we will wake up to his obituary" meme

is that it's a lie.

JD Vance just turned 40. Stephen Miller is 39. Nick Fuentes is in his mid 20s and Andrew Tate in his late 30s. Tulsi Gabbard is just 43, Kash Patel is 45. And statistics (as well as your own lived experience, I'd imagine) shows that white men in their teens and twenties have veered SHARPLY right in the past ten years.

Yes, Trump will likely not outlive most of us; he's pushing eighty and is clearly in poor health. McConnell is in his 80s and retiring anyway; even Henry Kissinger, may his memory be a pox, eventually died.

But it's not so much that that's cold comfort to the elderly and the terminally ill, to the people who were and are and will be outright killed by the bastards whose obituaries we long for. It's that you cannot, if you're young and healthy, reasonably believe that when the bad ones die, more bad ones — who are your age, who are younger, and who one day will be young enough to be your grandkids — won't replace them.

Evil is old, but it's not the sole province of the elderly. Think of the classmate who delighted in being cruel to you; the twentysomething coworker who made your work life a misery; the thirtysomething friend-of-a-friend who outright scared you. None of those people were awful because they were old; they were just awful. And they won't change, and they won't stop hurting others if they have any power to do so.

We cannot be content to outlive them; we have to defeat them, now. Let's not wait.

[trashy-greyjoy]

being delusional is half the fun of shipping, idk what y'all are on...

[itsalmostavengers]

But what if Steve was the massive slut and Tony was the one who hadn’t touched another human being in over three years. What then.