#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.

[prcg]

La demanda acusa a ERIC de violaciones de la privacidad y los derechos de los votantes

Activista izquierdista de la ley electoral David Beckercon la ayuda del Departamento de Transporte de Wisconsin, llevó a cabo un plan para privar a los ciudadanos de su privacidad y su derecho a votar, según un pleito presentado ante un tribunal federal por un organismo de control de las libertades civiles. La denuncia acusa a Becker de utilizar las dos organizaciones sin fines de lucro de…

[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

[p0th]

[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

[trashy-greyjoy]

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

[m-a-d-e-l-e-i-n-e]

I hope leftists who think they’re above voting for president or are voting for Jill Stein or whoever because it’s their stupid way of protesting the system feel good about themselves, especially if Trump wins partly because of your negligence 😍 I know you’re not doing shit to plan the proletarian revolution, especially before January, so you guys better not complain about something harming you that you didn’t even bother to try and change

(edit: changed the last part bc I wrote “…if life gets a lot worse for you” cause that does nottt sound right at all and I apologize for writing that)

[lenbryant]

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

[centaurianthropology]

One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation.  People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him.  He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work.  He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad.  That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.

And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone.  Look at Martinaise.  Look at the world in which Harry lives.  It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours.  More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people.  And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them.  The buildings are still half-destroyed.  The bullet holes are still in the walls.  The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound.  The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few.  Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is.  He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.

Harry is not unique in his trauma.  He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied.  He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM.  Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets.  The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines.  The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is.  Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’.  It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that.  Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating.  Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads.  The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor.  They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die.  Mental health care?  What mental health care?  Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist.  There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists.  How would they even start?  If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest.  Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol.  He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father.  So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.

To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative.  Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.

All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta.  If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!

[navree]

Incorrect, the fact that Biden has dropped out and a candidate with history of supporting medicare for all and being more receptive to a ceasefire in the I/P conflict has made me go from "I cannot morally support the Democratic nominee" to "I am voting for the Democratic nominee despite the fact she isn't perfect in every respect." I'm really happy this played out. The Dems for the most part abandoned the old Obama platform and it feels like its possible an actual progressive agenda could come to pass in my lifetime.

Kamala 2024!

If you weren't going to vote Democratic in this election before Biden dropped out you're a dorkass loser who does not care about any of the issues you're yammering about here and also a fundamentally bad person, and I hope you get run over by a bus.

But you got one thing right in all of this gibberish, Kamala 2024.

[belowtheworldin80days]

feeling weird about americans flooding xiao hong shu because a lot of the viral posts that i've seen online have an undertone of asian fetishism to them mixed with treating chinese people like zoo animals doing a trick

[jupitergalactica]

guys.. whats taking the third video so long… why are my senses tingling….