#Qanon jackass

[rejectingrepublicans]

Word is she’s been booted from the campaign for drawing too much bad press.

[angelx1992]

[perseruna]

heyyyy do you have any details/sources for the ca*ill being a jackass thing? ngl i watch twn for yen and jaskier so i was already planning on continuing to season 4 but i'd love some reasons to be actively excited for the actor switch. but i haven't kept up on the behind-the-scenes stuff so i'm kinda lost on that front if you're up for sharing any of what you know!

okay guys buckle up this is THE anti henry cavill megathread xoxo

First of all him dating a teenager as a 33 year old fully grown man literally gross and disgusting.

Also as this quote implies they started dating a year prior and only went public when she was 19 so they supposedly started dating when she was 18.

His entire dating history is a MESS. Sure the women he dated are not him, but he chose to date them, I wouldn't even associate myself with people like these let alone be in a relationship with them. He dated the infamous transphobic TERF Gina Carano, albeit before her loud controversy, but I doubt her harmful views were any different back then. His current gf has a history of doing black face.

His "Me Too" comments.

His comments on the Me Too movement are literally so vile. If you don’t want to be called a rapist, just don’t rape women, it’s literally as simple as that. They’re even more foul because they’re promoting the idea that women lie about their abusive for fame, promoting that harmful rhetoric especially in our times is incredibly dangerous.

Now onto his on set behavior.

We can't talk about his set behavior without mentioning the deuxmoi set leak. Here's the transcript of it:

[Transcript:

There’s something I really really wanted to read to you guys--it has to do with why Henry Cavill left The Witcher. I know that was something that you guys were super interested in when it happened, and I just recently got this message. Somebody was like “Hey, do you want to know what really went down?” And I was like “Sure!” So let me just read it. It says:

“At the beginning of the show, Henry was good to work with. A lot of difficult demands that made people feel like he wasn’t a team player, but that’s not unusual for a really big star. Though in TV it truly usually doesn’t happen until the second season. But in season two and three something shifted and he became really impossible for women to work with, which is always a big problem, but even worse here because the showrunner is a woman. He would try to overrule her and try to get changes made last minute across the board without her knowledge, which, if you know anything about showrunning, is completely fucked. The showrunner has to sign off on every miniscule detail down to the buttons on a costume. Female writers and directors were suddenly being completely ignored on set, unable to do their jobs. Every department head was complaining. He started making comments—it wasn’t a sexual thing, he wasn’t grabbing anyone or being lewd, but it was disrespectful and toxic all the same.

“He is deeply addicted to video games, to the point where it was like working with any other addict. He was distracted, he was late, he was obsessive, and a lot of people think the misogyny came from gamer world. Video game bro language is not how you talk to coworkers, and he wouldn’t stop. Someone on the show compared it to watching someone get brainwashed by QAnon, like his whole personality shifted. Eventually his disrespect escalated. He would rewrite scenes without even alerting the other actors in the scenes until it was time to shoot. He decided that he didn’t want any romantic scenes at all—no kissing scenes, no shirtless scenes, et cetera. He wanted complete control of storylines but really had no idea of the limitations of TV, structure, budget, et cetera. He formed a weird alliance with one writer who was also a gamer, who eventually got fired after multiple HR complaints were made and after that writer left, Henry did anything he could to hold up production and cause problems.

“Eventually top brass at Netflix was tired of him costing them money with delays and HR investigations and the showrunner was asked to construct a potential exit for him. Netflix reached out to him personally and he was given one final warning, and violated that warning with an email he sent to the entire writing staff right after that meeting. That was it. It’s very disappointing.”

End transcript.]

Now believe me or not, but I know from a really good source that the leak was indeed real.

There's a lot of patterned behavior that tracks with what we know of him and his past controversies.

After that leak came out, there was a lot of people from different places coming to comment that ‘yes’ they’ve heard a very similar story adding a little bit more details of their own.

this quickly deleted tweet from one of the writers/producers:

there were rumors about him being an asshole to Anya specifically.

He went on record that he doesn't "understand" sex scenes. Which I know the sex discourse is rampant nowadays and each to their own, but he specifically signed up for a role that requires those scenes and then refused to do them and was allegedly nasty to Anya about it and with the way he talks about women...

Also it’s important to touch upon the “writer he had a weird alliance with” that man in question is Beau DeMayo of the recent fame of getting fired by Marvel from X-Men ‘97. He was previously allegedly fired from The Witcher for being emotionally and physically abusive. And he allegedly got fired from X-Men for being abusive as well. One of The Witcher writers tweeted this after Beau smeared them for “disliking the books” Beau was literally the first person to start that narrative.

The fact that it was HIS idea not to say lines of his dialogue in S1 and instead grunt. To the point that Joey had to take Henry’s lines and make it his own, so the plot would make sense, he talks about it in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Oyh0t117t0U&, and then once S2 press arrived Henry was talking about how he was trying to fight the big bad writers to give him more lines. Ridiculous.

Everyone is already pointing out that the cast looks so much happier without him, and it’s very true. Henry was never present on close to any BTS pics from filming the previous seasons, or on any cast dinners or birthdays. He wouldn't even do any shared interviews with the other three mains but only had solo interviews which to me was giving disrespectful like you're an ensemble you’re not the only lead here. It felt like he was above them to sit down and answer questions with them. When they were doing press junkets in Brazil and Poland Anya, Joey and Freya would always arrive together and leave together with that man leaving all the events early and by himself. And like people who post quotes from the cast about him being perfect from press junkets as “proof” are insane to me like Obviously they’re going to say nice things about him, not only they're newcomers, and he's an established industry name, but they’re doing PRESS for a show that he’s a STAR of (well, was lmao)

The fact that he never defended Anya from the racist trolls, even though most of them were HIS fans. Like she had to go through so much and that man couldn’t make a single comment about it as a leading man BUT he could make a whole IG post because people were being mean to his gf and calling her out for doing blackface.

And sure people might say that a lot of these are unverified sources, and I’d get it if it was a singular case, but there are a ton of these accounts that all match each other. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

[alix-in-july]

"Lying" as a Lion secondary

The only time I really lie is when it's something stupid and I don't feel like dealing with it. Like "have you experienced shortness of breath in the last two weeks?" I have asthma and long COVID. I'm not going to answer yes and get my appointment cancelled unless I've actually had a respiratory illness. So really I'm being true to the spirit of the question, just not the letter.

Similarly, I don't mind exaggerating to get the results I should be getting anyway. As you may know, dealing with women's health issues is hell. Often doctors don't take you seriously until things are really bad. I had to go through 6 months of testing before a surgeon agreed maybe I did need an endometriosis surgery. So I definitely didn't feel guilty saying my pain was an 8 when it was a 4. The surgeon acted so shocked after the surgery. 🙄 I told you, jackass.

If I don't feel comfortable expressing my opinions, I'll just stay quiet or try to find something I can agree with. I think I've mentioned before that my mom is a toxic Lion Badger who has gotten really sucked into QAnon-adjacent stuff. I don't feel like getting called a communist every day so I just ignore texts about politics. If I'm really mad at someone but can't confront them for some reason, I can't even bring myself to look at them or engage at all.

Sometimes it's fun to mess with people, though. Like my daughter's soccer league has a lot of Mormons in it for some reason. I have some pretty bad/traumatic history with that sect so to cope I decided it would be fun to see how many people I could get to assume I'm LDS by dressing like one and using certain phrases (oh my heck!). I don't consider this lying because I'm going to answer honestly if they ask if I'm Mormon. There's no way I could lie convincingly about that even if I wanted to, which I don't. That would feel super slimy.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Tait at The Guardian:

Donald Trump has reposted a crudely misogynistic comment about Kamala Harris on Truth Social in a move that reprised his past record of sexist behaviour and brazenly flouted pleas from members of his own party to emphasize issues over personal attacks. With fresh polls showing Harris further improving her standing – and widening the gap with her opponent among women voters – Trump drew online opprobrium by sharing a vulgar post on his social media site implying that the Democratic nominee owed her political rise to sexual favours. The post – originally posted by another user – featured photos of Harris and Hillary Clinton alongside the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” The comment was an oblique reference to innuendo surrounding Harris’s former relationship with Willie Brown, the San Francisco mayor. The mention of Clinton – Trump’s defeated opponent in the 2016 presidential election – alluded to the affair between Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, and her husband Bill Clinton in the 1990s, which came close to ending his presidency.

It was not the first time Trump had made lewd references to Harris. On 18 August, he shared a video by the Dilley Meme Team, a group of rightwing content creators, to the soundtrack of a parody of the Alanis Morrisette song Ironic that contained the lines, “She spent her whole damn life down on her knees”, as an image of Brown appeared behind a picture of the US vice-president and her husband, Doug Emhoff. But the latest post appeared among a flurry of other extreme posts on Wednesday that also included tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory that holds that Trump is waging war against an elite network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government, business and the media.

[...] However, the CNN host Anderson Cooper – in a lengthy segment – said the posts took Trump’s previous campaigning to a “whole other level”. “This is the Republican candidate for president and the 45th president of the United States, talking about two women who, no matter what you think of their politics, are two of the most accomplished women in American political history,” Cooper said.

Sexist jackass Donald Trump launches vile attacks against Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris on Truth Social by retruthing a grossly sexist meme insinuating that both Harris and Clinton rose to political fame by doing sexual favors.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The far-right “ReAwaken America” gathering in Manheim, Pennsylvania, this weekend wasn’t your typical pro-Trump rally.

It was a whole different level of crazy.

The QAnon-peppered programming frequently flew off the rails Saturday, as speakers took severe issue with everything from McDonald’s being part of the “deep state” to “demonic satellites” controlling the voting system in the United States.

The day’s activities kicked off with a prayer asking for Trump’s eyes to be opened so he could be shown when to “implement divine intervention.”

“You will surround him, Father, with none of this deep-state trash, none of this RINO trash,” the speaker—who led the prayer—yelled as attendees thrust their hands into the air.

Other speakers included Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, though the crowd favorite appeared to be organizer Clay Clark, who frequently took to the microphone to accuse McDonald’s of being part of the “deep state” and ask about Michelle Obama’s gender.

“What gender is Michelle Obama?” Clark asked. The crowd overwhelmingly yelled back: “Male.”

Then, without missing a beat, Clark began claiming there was a “war on food” and alleged a shady left-wing entity was pushing for the feeding of “insect burgers” to the masses.

Clark didn’t stop there. Elsewhere, the organizer—whose gathering once triggered an anthrax scare—called people that wear masks on planes “jackass-er-y.”

Fresh off of a video emerging of Stone calling Ivanka Trump an “abortionist bitch daughter,” the longtime informal Trump adviser attempted to flip the script, claiming videos showing him encouraging violence were actually part of “continued harassment” against him.

“I am guilty of the crime of supporting President Donald Trump,” he said. “Loving him for 40 years.”

Right-wing doctor Stella Immanuel, best known for her belief in demon sperm, urged attendees to pray that both satellites and voting machines be destroyed.

“We need to pray and crush… the demonic satellites. We need to send a holy ghost virus into their computers, to destroy them, so they will not function, or until our election is over,” she said, to the crowd’s applause.

Earlier on Friday afternoon, Eric Trump—a longtime staple at fringe anti-vaccine confabs—took to the stage and phoned up his father to address the QAnon-friendly conference.

“We love you all,” said the ex-president, who was at times muted by Eric Trump’s phone not being close enough to the microphone. “And we’ll be back doing things that… We’re going to bring this country back because our country’s never been in such bad shape as it is now.”

Eric added that he advised his father—who has been subpoenaed to appear before the Jan 6. Committee—to testify due to it being “the greatest entertainment.”

“Who wants to pop a beer, make some popcorn, and watch Donald Trump talk about election fraud in the United States of America,” he continued.

But perhaps the craziest message of the weekend thus far was from Julie Green, a self-identifying prophet, who told the crowd she had a message directly from God.

“Says God, you can’t stop my son, who is the rightful President,” Green said on Friday evening. “He is on his way back, and how he takes his position back on center stage, you will never see that coming because you won’t see me coming. And I am with him.”

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

on the whole Kanye issue, amongst his recent anti-semitic hate spew. I deeply wish those that are *somehow* still fans of him seriously stop and see how extremely dangerous his rhetoric is. Truly stop calling this Uncle Tom MAGA whipping boy a "Genius " and realize that this jackass been unrevealing for years now.

Please stop giving this brainless QANON, Trump-loving dumb 'N**** ' fool money or quit making excuses for his horrid asinine actions.

There are other black musicians / artists who are so much thousands times way better then Kanye will ever be or has been that are more deserving than this piece of shit.

[incarnateirony]

It's honestly kinda funny, T's only been half watching this entire mess, so he's only half smelled the Q mess, and assumed it was all the outer lemmings which, fair, is kinda where this started, spare one I flagged from the beginning and set up into this acme trap as well.

Either way, while I was updating him he had started warning me about how dangerous the real center of Q was even if it started as a psyop of a bunch of illuminati shitheads handing jackasses texts they wouldn't understand and would set themselves up with (QED why the illuminati account smelled me out during all of this)

So like, while he was like, wait this explains the radio transmissions I get, yea. Well. Thing is. I was literally taking attack that Noiz had kinda flagged on, and T unconsciously barfed up the name I needed to like instantly troubleshoot it. So he's talking about the shit Q can o like "he specializes in taking out god level fuckers."

Meanwhile, my root buzzing in every euphemism: yeah man, yeah I know. Hold please.

Anyway. Sathariel ain't shit. I was dropping Satanael with Messiah, Thanatos and Izanagi-no-Okami last year, Saturn's been in my hand since I was a teenager in almost everyform, watchu talking about willis

T/John: ................

This morning:

I don't know how to explain this, but Qanon is a giant illuminati psyop trap for dark bullshit to destroy in the era from the OTO that I backrode on the works of because I knew how to and I snapped and I was just. The one it fell on, because cocaine bear is literally Same Empty Ass Demonic Bitch Energy as is compelling Qanon right now. And even people in other parties, one could say.

The frogs are boiling themselves.

But uh. Yeah. I think they might be. Backcasting with and for me right now.

This is a trip.

Goddamnit cocaine bear was it really that hard to figure out you had to rebuild your path ground up and take me off your goddamn altar and website and gallery in every fucking form once you realized the octopus jibberish bullshit

I was trying to be lowkey about all this shit when I tried to disappear man

If I heard one more goddamn word about "belief." And then while I have my hand up Q member asses getting them to bark they start confessing they just believe whatever "tastes good" until I boot sequence them into confessional mode.

[afusionoffandoms]

Hey so a lot of indigenous (Sami) shamans, including the chairman of the Arctic Shaman Circle, are extremely uncomfortable with people calling that horned jackass from QAnon a shaman, so maybe don’t? Though I don’t expect anyone to care because it’s a European thing even though the indigenous peoples in Europe have been treated just as poorly as those from other continents.

[duhragonball]

‘21

Amidst all the popular hype for seeing the end of 2020, it didn’t hit me until about lunchtime what the real highlight is that I’ve been waiting for: For the first time since 1999, the year finally ends in “numberty-number” again.    It low-key irritated me that we had to call it “two thousand three” and I was relieved when “twenty-thirteen” caught on, but it still wasn’t right because it was too short, and now we’re back in the sweet spot, and I should be safely dead by 2100, so that’s one less thing I gotta deal with.

Really, even “numberty hundred” rings true to me.    “Nineteen hundred” sounds like a year.    “Twenty-one-oh-six” sounds like a futur-y year, which is even cooler.   So did “Two thousand five”, until I was actually living in it, and it sounds even worse now that it was a long time ago and adults will talk about their childhood happening in that year.    Daniel Witwicky would be old enough to get married and grow a fancier beard than me.    That’s nuts.    My point is that, honestly, it’s the year 3000-3019 that I have to worry about, so if I ever decide to go vampire, those will be the years I hide in the ocean or force society to reset the calendar, whichever’s easier.  

I spent New Year’s Eve finishing Superliminal, which I bought on Steam after I watched Vegeta play it on YouTube.  It has a similar look and feel to the Stanley Parable, so if you liked one you’d probably enjoy the other, although Superliminal has a different theme.  I kept hoping I’d find some secret passage that I wasn’t supposed to take, and a narrator would scold me for finding the “Chickenbutt Ending”, but it doesn’t work that way.    Superliminal’s all about puzzles and awesome visuals, but it does have the same soothing design aesthetics as TSP.   Honestly, I enjoyed just wandering around in Stanley’s office, and Superliminal does the same thing with a hotel and several other settings.   It’s nice.

This got me thinking about how I kind of did everything there was to do in The Stanley Parable, and I sort of wished they would add new stuff to the game, but I’m not sure there would be much point to that.    I could play the older version, but it presents the same message, just with different assets.   The Boss’s Office would look different, but it’d be the same game.   And this got me thinking about various “secret chapters” in pop culture.  Secrets behind the cut.

I first heard about this idea in the 2000′s, when fans invented this notion that there was a secret chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.    I read a website that tried to explain the concept, and of course it lauded J.K. Rowling with all this gushing praise for working an Easter egg into the book, a literary work of “well, magic.”  

That pretty well sums up my distaste for Harry Potter, by the way.    These days, JKR has thoroughly crapped all over her reputation and legacy, but in the 2000′s it felt like half the planet was in a mad rush to canonize her as a writing goddess, to the point where fans were congratulating her for writing secret chapters that didn’t actually exist.   The idea was based on lore from the books about Neville Longbottom’s parents.    They were patients in a mental hospital, and he’d go to visit them, and they would give him bubble gum wrappers, intended to demonstrate how far remove they’ve become from reality.   The secret chapter lies in those wrappers, which all read “Droobles Best Blowing Gum” or some such.    What if Neville’s parents were only pretending to be mentally ill, so as to throw off their enemies?   Naturally, they would want to stay in contact with their son, so the bubble gum wrappers would have to contain coded messages.    Said code involves unscrambling the letters on the wrappers to make new words, like “goblin” or “sword” or “Muggle” or “Dumbledore”.    The problem is that you can also use it to make other words like “booger” or “drool” or “booobbiess.”   Play with it enough, and you can make the code say anything you want it to say, which means it’s no code at all.   

But the idea was that the not-yet-published sixth HP book would reveal all of this gum wrapper nonsense, and Neville would decode the messages and discover all of his parents’ super-cool adventures.   I’m not sure why we needed a secret chapter if Book 6 was going to explain all of this anyway in several not-secret chapters, but that was the whole point.   Fans didn’t have Book 6 yet, and they were so desperate to read it that they started trying to extrapolate what would happen next based on “clues” from the previous five.    That’s like trying to figure out what Majin Buu looks like by watching the Androids Saga.   I guess some wiseguy would have guessed that he’d resemble #19, but that’d just be blind luck.  

And when you get down to it, this whole secret chapter business is really just a conspiracy.   This is literally how Qanon works.   Some anonymous jackass posted vague “hints” on an imageboard, and people went goofy trying to interpret them and figure out what would happen in the future.   They call it “research” because they spend a ton of time on this, but there’s no basis to any of it.    It took me a few minutes to figure out that you can spell “Muggle” with the words in “Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum”, but that’s not research and it doesn’t prove anything.   But all these guys keep looking for “Hilary Clinton goes to jail next week” and lo and behold that’s all they ever find.   

In the same vein, the gum wrapper thing was really a complaint disguised as a conspiracy, disguised as a “magical secret chapter”.   At least a few fans wanted to see more Neville in their Harry Potter books, they wanted Neville’s parents, or someone like them, to have cool spy adventures or whatever else.   The point is, they clearly weren’t getting what they wanted out of the printed works, but they didn’t want to turn against their Dear Beloved Author, so they started casting about for an alternative reality, one where J.K. Rowling wrote a cooler story and hid it in the pages of the one that actually went to press.    So instead of just saying “Hey, Order of the Phoenix was kind of a letdown, I hope there’s more ninjas in the next book,” they said “Rowling is a genius because I wanted ninjas and she’s definitely going to give them to me, I have the gum wrappers to prove it.”

The same thing happened all over again when the BBC Sherlock show took a turn for the nonsensical.    I don’t know from BBC Sherlock, but I watched the fascinating video critique by Hbomberguy, and it sounds like the show did tons of plot twists until it stopped making sense altogether in the fourth season.    If you skip to 1:09:00 in the video, you’ll hear about fan theories that suggested that season four was supposed to be crappy, as part of a secret meta-narrative plan that would be paid off in a secret, unannounced episode that would not only explain everything, but retroactively justify the crappy episodes that came before.    But it’s been a few years and it never came to pass, so I think we can call this myth busted. 

Most recently, I think we’ve all seen a lot of talk about the final season of Supernatural, where I guess Destiel sort of became canon but only one guy does the love confession and the other doesn’t respond.   But I guess he does say “I love you too”  in the Spanish dub, which means the English language version was edited for whatever reason.    It’s not exactly a secret episode, but the implication is that there’s more to this than what made it to the screen.    So the questions turn to what the screenplay said, what the writers and actors wanted to do, etc. etc.    My general impression is that SPN fans are a bit more used to crushing disappointment, so they’re not quite as delusional about this show being unquestionable genius, like Sherlock and Harry Potter.     Maybe this is an Anglophile thing?   Like, if you suck at something with a British accent, people will accept it more unconditionally?   

I had seen something on Twitter about how there should have been a secret Seinfeld episode in the 90′s.    Someone suggested it at the time, they tape a whole episode, then wait until 2020 to air it, because by then it would be worth a fortune.    But they didn’t do it, because it costs a lot of money to make a TV episode, and if you don’t air the show right away, you aren’t making that money back any time soon.    Yeah, you might recoup a fortune someday, but Seinfeld was making a ton of money then.    It exposes the fannish nature of the idea.    A fan would love to discover a cool secret chapter, but a content creator isn’t necessarily keen on making a cool thing and then hiding it where few people would find it.  

I thought about doing this myself recently.   Maybe Supernatural gave me the bug, but I thought “I’m writing this big-ass story, so what if I wrote me a secret chapter for it?   Wouldn’t that be cool?”     But no, it wouldn’t be cool, because it’d be the same work as writing a regular chapter, and the same stress I feel when I hold off on publishing it.    Except I’d just never publish it, I’d put it in some secret hole on the internet and hope that some superfan who might not even exist can decode whatever clues I leave.  

I mean, it’d be awesome if it got discovered and everyone loved it.    “Hey, I found this hidden chapter!   Mike’s done it again!”   And I could bask in the glory.   But what if no one finds it?  Then I just wasted my time, right?   I want people to read my work.   My monkey brain needs the sweet, sweet validation of those kudos and comments, folks.   Once I realized that, I understood why no one else would want to do a secret chapter either.    Easter eggs are one thing, but the bigger bonus features they put on DVDs were pretty easy to find, and with good reason.

I think that’s what made the Stanley Parable so appealing to play, because it teases you with the idea that you can “break” the game and find some extra content that you weren’t supposed to see, but as you go exploring all those hidden areas, it gradually becomes clear that this is just part of the game; you were meant to find all these things, and that’s why they were put here.      It’s hidden, but he secret aspect of it is just pretend.   

I suppose that what I like about games like TSP and Superliminal is the illusion of secrets more than the secrets themselves.    I like roaming through the hallways, having no idea what I might find ahead.    I kind of wish I could open all the doors, and not just the ones the game designers put stuff behind, but the reality is that there’s nothing on the other side.    I used a cheat code once  to explore the unused doors in TSP and it’s just a bright white field on the other side.   Interesting to look at, but not much of a reveal.   Honestly, the doors themselves are more appealing than anything that could lay behind them.  

And that’s probably what makes secrets so fun.   They could be almost anything, but once you open the present, the number of possibilities drops to one.   If they had ever made that Secret BBC Sherlock Episode, I doubt it would have lived up to expectations, but fans could amuse themselves by imagining what could have been in it.    In the end, though, things usually don’t justify the hype.  For every Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, there’s a Gobbledygooker debut at Survivor Series 1990.   It’s impossible to manufacture a secret with a guaranteed payoff.   

[le-fils-de-lhomme]

I mean the same right-wing jackasses who say “Please try and understand these QAnon people.” will always say that because they fear being implicated in what they have helped to create. But the people who are not these personalities but still defend these terrorists when they stand to earn nothing from these people, not clicks, not money are more baffling. They are more baffling because the types of people who tried to overthrow the government do not care for reality. They’re not going to put their differences aside to build a more perfect union. The only thing they want is a new reality built to their choosing which given the nature of these people they would also be very frustrated with that new reality very quickly.

[l-egionaire]

Okay, this is the last political post I'm going to for a long time and It will no doubt come off as controversial.

The whole "getting along with someone despite having extremely different political ideals or voting for someone you hate" thing can absolutely work.

For a bit of context, I'm a black man and during my last year of college in 2020, I ended up sharing a room with a Trump supporter.

Just to be clear, this guy wasn't a MAGA or Qanon nutjob. He was a pretty chill normal guy. The only reason i even knew he was a Trump supporter was that I mentioned him once and he said he felt Hilary would've been worse.

Did I dislike this guys opinion? Hell yes. Did I dislike that he liked Trump? Absolutely.

But overall, he was a good guy. A good roommate. He was chill, shared his microwave and drinks with me, and was overall a pretty nice guy. And we never fought about politics because we just never brought it up. And even though we had to leave early due to COVID and I didn't finish the year with him, I still felt that he was a good roommate and a pretty cool guy.

Now, why am I saying this? I guess because I know political differences and who voted for who has become such a big division in the U.S. and I wanted to at least offer up the idea that people can get along with people who voted for the guy they were against.

And for those who say I am, no, I am not saying that you should try to get along with White Supremacists, MAGA assholes who worship Trump, Or psycho Qanon conspiracy theorists. I'm saying that if someone you love like a family member or friend or significant other voted for that asshole, I'd at least argue you shouldldn't mmediately terminate your relationship with that person. Can you be disappointed in their choice? Think they're making the wrong decision? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean you have to immediately throw that relationship away. If they're someone who has treated you with respect and you know are honest, good people, then you can ignore their bad political decision.

And you might say "How can I not talk politics with them?" Easy. Just don't. I don't honestly get why thats so hard. I almost never talk politics with my family or friends unless something politically big happened like the election or the attack on the Capitol. Otherwise? We just talk about literally anything else. My job, T.V. shows, personal stuff. Find things you can talk about and agree on with them on instead of always talking about something you can't.

And No, if your a gay or trans or nonbinary or POC person who feels upset with your family members choice, that's okay. You can feel upset by that. If your family member or friend is some hard-core MAGA nut screaming that Trump is the second coming, then no, you don't have to put up with them. If you're family member or friend is some Qanon conspiracy theorist person who keeps talking crazy, you don't have to put up with that. What I'm saying is, if someone close to you is someone who voted for that jackass but they're otherwise good people that you manage to get along with in other ways besides politics, don't let one bad choice turn you away from them. If you're one of those people who truly feel that a vote for Trump is something you can't forgive or accept? Then thats fine too. That's your choice to make and its absolutely okay. But if you're able to, you shouldn't let one otherwise poor political move in your loved ones life push you away from them. Not only does it hurt relationships but its just going to divide us as a country even more.

Now, why am I avocation for this despite not liking Trump and voting for Biden? Because frankly, after everything else that our country has been through in the last few years, and all the craziness that has come over the past few months, I'm hoping this message manages to get at least some people to come together. Because I don't want people to fight if they don't have to. And while I know that the insane, "willing to kill or die for the guy" Trump supporters won't go away, it'd be good to know people can still come together and aren't willing to let themselves be divided by some stupid celebrity president.

[oneinamillyon]

So hard to reconcile the person I used to watch play fighting games for hours on end with the covid-19 denying, qanon spouting jackass Gootecks (the pogchamp guy) became. I think a good 5-6 years ago, many trans people (myself included) felt much more welcome in the FGC as a whole than they otherwise would have if Gootecks and Mike Ross hadn't hosted Ricky Ortiz (a trans woman) on Excellent Adventures so many times.

That show was as diverse as the FGC itself, and it really sucks that the memories I have of watching it are colored by who Gootecks is now.

[charliejrogers]

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

In 2006, Borat was one of those great cultural touchstones that transcended the big screen. There was no aspect of pop culture after its release that wasn’t in some way affected. It perfectly coincided with the rising popularity of YouTube, such that those who hadn’t seen it (or couldn’t because they were too young to get into the rated R movie) could at least see many of its famous clips.  Everyone knew Borat in 2006. Everyone. You couldn’t go two fucking steps without someone going “very nice!” or “my wife!” It was such a wonderfully smart movie. It combined the best aspects of a Jackass movie, i.e. the trolling of innocent and unsuspecting bystanders, with a noble cause, to expose to the world the ignorant side of America. It was a novel and insightful look at our country.

In 2020… there is no insight in telling us that much of the country is ignorant of the truth, racist, or sexist. As Borat himself points out in this film, in the years between when he filmed the first movie (2005) and the new movie 2019-2020, America has become transfixed by their new “magical abacuses”, i.e. cellphones. Phones, the internet, social media, all of them expose us everyday to how the other half lives in their little social bubbles. We don’t have to wonder “do people really think this?” Just type whatever terrible or stupid theory you can think of into Google, and you’re guaranteed to find at least one person who endorses whatever heinous thing you just wrote. Again, this is portrayed within the film when Borat, confronted by the fact that maybe some of his core beliefs are lies, finds websites that say that (much to his anti-Semitic disappointment) the Holocaust was not real. So, one is left wondering… what can Borat bring to the table in 2020 that is fresh?

Unfortunately, the answer is… not a whole lot. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm feels mostly like a retread of 2006 with the only additions aiming more for “shock factor” than real comedy aimed to grab headlines (which it succeeded in doing). This is not to say this is not a funny movie. It is. The film’s opening where Borat describes the typical (fictionalized) Kazakh’s view of American politics is hysterical. In sum, America went to shit with the election of Obama, paving the way for other Africans to take power of the West (cue the photo of Justin Trudeau in Black face). Now with Trump in power, Borat is sent on a mission to curry Trump’s favor so that Kazakhstan and its leader will be viewed with the same favor that Trump has bestowed upon other “tough guys and tough guy countries” like Russia/Putin, the Philippines/Duerte, North Korea/Kim Jong Un, Brazil/Bolsonaro, etc. The gift is supposed to be an overly sexually aggressive chimp for Vice Pussy Hound (i.e. Vice President) Pence. However, Borat’s daughter Tutar sneaks into the crate with the chimp, and after a chain of events Borat has no choice but to gift his daughter over to Pence, and eventually Rudy Giuliani, instead.

It’s a simple enough plot but I think the movie gets a little too caught up in it. No one is asking for a plot line for this movie. If this were just a string of sketches with a vague whiff of a plot to transition between the sketches no one would fault it. In fact, that sounds like the first Borat. We are just here for the sketches. Yet the movie is looking to do a little bit more than the first movie. It’s not content to just say, “Hey, look at yourself, America! You’re fucked up! Let’s all laugh at you.” This movie has specific targets that dominate its focus: Trump and Trumpland.

This is, I think, an unfortunate choice not because I don’t approve of bashing Trump and Trumpland, but because whereas the first movie felt like comedy was king with the sociopolitical insights as a dominant undercurrent, here the story and the humiliation of Trump and his base is the end goal. This still makes for funny scenes, but when I think back to the first Borat (and as I re-watched clips of the first movie after finishing this movie), some of the greatest parts of Borat had nothing to do with politics or sensitive subjects. Much of the humor was just based around the ballsiness of Sacha Baron Cohen. This is a guy who when invited into a person’s home for dinner makes openly sexually complimentary remarks about two of the female guests, but explicitly states that the host’s wife is ugly. Never mind the fact that at that same dinner party, Borat hand-delivers his shit in a bag to a guest, claiming to not know how Western toilets work. It’s hilarious, it’s daring, and has nothing to do with politics.

In essence, the first Borat was such a success because Cohen played the character with such a believable naivete and loose grasp of English idioms, that he was a factory of malapropisms, a genius of comedic-timing, and a troll that could annoy the ever-living daylights out of anyone. There are as many scenes of him trolling nice, innocent people (like the driving instructor, the man who teaches him jokes, the group of feminists, or really any time he goes on the news) as there are scenes of him trolling people so that Cohen can make a political point or social observation (like the singing the wrong national anthem at the rodeo or his innate criticism of a Pentecostal Chruch’s weirdness). And in the end, the “point” of that plot at least had nothing to do with politics. You can watch this movie, get your laughs, remark at America’s racism, and still get your laughs.

Here, there really isn’t any scene I can think of that wasn’t done to make some sort of observation or political point. The closest I can think of are the bits towards the beginning before the plot kicks into high gear. There’s a recurring bit I love of him communication with the Premier of Kazakhstan via fax machine at a local UPS Store. The genius isn’t contained in the sentence I just wrote, but that he requires the aging worker of the UPS Store to hand-write all of his faxes for him and read any and all replies. Similarly, there’s a quick bit of genius at the beginning where Borat goes to a cellphone store and cannot understand FaceTime at all. He assumes the person on the phone must be the brother of the phone store worker he sees in front of him; they cannot be the same. Similarly he somehow enlists the help of a delivery person to re-seal the crate in which his daughter came to America in.

But otherwise, the jokes are there either to say, “Woah! Aren’t these Americans terrible?!” (whether he’s talking about QAnon’s theorists, anti-abortionists, or anti-maskers). Or there’s gross out humor, mostly about vaginas and periods, (or moon blood, as Borat calls it). As I said, these aren’t all unfunny. Probably my favorite sequence in the film sees Borat and his daughter at a pregnancy crisis center because Tutar has accidentally swallowed a little baby doll that was on top of a cupcake her father had “given” to her as a “treat” that was just supposed to be “their little secret” because women in Kazakhstan aren’t supposed to have sweets. So she ate the cupcake behind a dumpster. I’ll let you guess what happens when you enter a Christian pregnancy crisis center asking for them to take out the dumpster baby your Dad wasn’t supposed to be giving you… but it’s hilarious to see the worker sorta squirm his away around addressing the reality of incest.

But mostly, I felt kinda fatigued knowing that Cohen and co. were mostly trying to show me the “underside” of QAnon and anti-maskers… but as I said, in 2020, I am unfortunately well aware of both these groups, their psychologies, and their world. So merely highlighting that these ideas exist and that the people who endorse these ideas don’t really have a lot of great ideas otherwise, isn’t that novel as it might have been back in 2006.

Probably the more “interesting” side of the film is it’s focus on feminism. The film uses Tutar (played perfectly by previously unknown Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova and deserves all the praise she gets) to really expose how America, despite being a “feminist” nation, still shares many aspects with the fictionalized version of Kazakhastan where women are considered equivalent to livestock. The movie hopes to shed light on the far reaching effects of the patriarchy. The movie ends at the top of the pyramid with politicians who feel like it is their right to use their power to sleep with whomever they want (Trump’s obviously the true target of this criticism and I will say, the final Giuliani scene feels a little bit like entrapment… that said, I think it’s fair to say not every man would be so willing to fall into that trap). But leading up to that we see aspects of America designed to fit perfectly with the patriarchy’s demands. We hear from a shallow, vapid Instagram influencer that to get by women need to be docile and pretty, and we see a frankly horrifying discussion from a plastic surgeon talking about all the things wrong with Tutar that he would fix with surgery so that men would want her… despite the fact that she’s a beautiful woman and has nothing wrong with her! We live in a society that recognizes the horror of a patriarchical society, but still so clearly buys into it.

But in the end… you’re not watching Borat Subsequent Moviefilm to get an education on feminism and the problems with the patriarchy. That should be the extra cherry on top of a main course of hearty laughter. In focuses on the politics, Cohen and co. find plenty of laughs and memorable moments, but fail (perhaps inevitably) to recreate the signature naivete and bumbling oafishness of his titular interviewer, in the process losing some of the film’s humor and paradoxically its ability to leave a lasting message.

**/ (Two and a half stars out of four)

[incarnateirony]

Hilarious/Terrifying news times a fandom statement.

You know that fandom mindset that you must convince every obsolete moron of the obvious that has very clearly become the majority view (be it fandom majority or even breaking into major news outlets and reporters despite being a cult show with minimal coverage?), before you’ve won some sort of medal and the common sense obvious take is “real”? I remind you that our current very real universe is a walking Onion article where people legit perform this ridonculous shit.

today in news qanon is tracking a mr peanut/kobe/trump conspiracy and political trolls made people mass-watch shitty porn but fandom still thinks there's a magic point they can convince 100% of people of the obvious fact that a queer angel is queer in a tv show and until every jackass is silenced by some magical threshold that has never worked in any other TV show gay or straight, and until then regardless of Obvious Shit Is Obvious it doesn’t count.

We've reached the point of deep state baby peanuts to rationalize people's garbage, but sure, I'm sure you're all arguing with completely rational people that should have their platform honored for debate while our fandom even has goss as its own qanon. Which, conveniently, is the major organized core of most absurdist viewpoints manifesting into this fandom in a hive that people for whatever reason insist on giving legitimacy and platform for dealing with their bullshit.

But sure, I’m sure deleting and refusing to enjoy content crafted for you, that you used to enjoy when it was way the fuck less than it is now, and when that content barely existed, but it existed to you before you walked into a landscape driven by arguing with fandom qanon and their fringe ilk -- sure. Keep pushin’ the shit heap from gossanon. Hashtag activism.

Because some mythic GA that gossanon bashed your brains into believing in, after you wandered out of the GA yourself but you didn’t count, even while the GA is publicly enjoying that shit, and it’s literally everywhere now, but I’m sure some mister peanut/misha/cw shit adds up in their head to manifest whatever jackcrack dialogue of the week everybody’s chasing after.

Edit: As I say this, an old *actual* qanon trollbot that’s been periodically RTing a tweet from a conversation from a month ago just to annoyingly pop up in my mentions just popped up into my feed, on a conversation they unironically tried to dive into about bi representation as a complete fail lord, and boy, isn’t that an apt fucking summary.

Which actually brings to mind a memory of them posing as an 18 year old autistic kid welcoming and struggling with the idea before, once their ass showed, going complete troll-face, and for whatever godawful reason this is the kind of socky, bullshit, conspiracy theorist, complete lunacy people let steer the direction of “representation” discussion (with help from friends of theirs who have hot takes like “ships going canon isn’t fair because not everyone will like it/it’s not my ship” as their current final stand --yes, that’s been said). Lmao miss me with that kiddos. Wake up.

Here, lemme go to Qanon troll’s feed and show you the troll accounts it’s retweeting that for whatever godawful fucking reason people have been trying to hold actual discourse with for days. (Link begins at woman trying to argue with the trolloffs for easy thread-fold, feel free to scroll up through DAYS OF THIS SATIRE.)  After five days of shit stirring in walking parody, it managed to summon actual homophobes and other loons. This is essentially what fandom chooses to let be done to their conversation on the goddamn daily. No really, I shit you not. Read this post about how your biggest naysayers are trolls that have admitted the opposite of what you fucking choose to argue with. (x) Nothin’ like giving in to jackass sentiments to do damage to your own cause while being misguided to feel righteous.

Our breathing fandom trollbots that whip up the weekly argument carrot to chase are currently so deep in their denialist conspiracy fit that they’re eulogizing and debating with each other and losing faith in J2 as genuine people because they’ll never come out of a PR closet they were never in to begin with, and that makes more sense than admitting they’ve been chasing crack for 15 years. (x) (x) But please. Argue canon with them and whatever asshats they pull into their umbrella for convenience ala political fringers and their standard views just like the above tweet trolling, or opportunists of the “not my ship/not fair” brand that pretend this isn’t attached to ridic bullshit they ignore to find numbers to fall into in some magikarp splash of “all ships are still equal”. I’m sure that’ll have a huge impact on naturalized queer representation.

Stop.