#Shellshock propaganda is here

[misteria247]

Gonna do some propaganda for one of my favorite aus, Shellshock so sit down and please accept my ramblings!

Y'all should totally place your votes into the Shellshock au because in this au includes-

Baby turtles! More specifically baby Rise turtles!!!!

Awesome uncles Leo, Donnie and Mikey!!!!

Mama Mona Lisa and Papa Raph!!!!

Raph and his beloved wife Mona being super cute and domesticated!!!

The Hamato clan growing bigger with the adorable babies!!!!!

There's a hella amazing fanfic that goes with this awesome au!!!!

As well as beautiful artwork by none other than the talented artist and creator of the au, @lieutenantbiscute!!!!

Absolute family shenanigans involving the boys!!!!

Mama Mona and Papa Raph smothering their babies in trademark affection!!

Auntie April, Auntie Karai and Uncle Casey!!!! (Like come on that's amazing!!!!)

So many amazing things!!! So many awesome bits and pieces!!!! And did I mention there's some angst material in this au??????????????? Cuz mmmmmm girl there's some delicious fucking food in this au.

So please vote for the Shellshock au to be included in the Tmnt au polls!!!! Cuz it's amazing!!!!!

[synthient]

Doctor Who: Matrix Pastiches Reviewed

Because it turns out DW has a lot of them! The three categories I'm considering will be: 1) Visual engagement with The Matrix, 2) Thematic engagement with The Matrix, and 3) Quality of the overall episode vs quality of its Matrix pastiche

Contestant #1: The Long Game/Bad Wolf

(I'll be bundling our two Station Five episodes together, even if they aren't technically arranged as a "two-parter")

Visual engagement with The Matrix

Right off the bat, we get probably the best-looking Matrix imagery that was possible on a BBC budget circa 2005. A lot of other media going for a "Matrix aesthetic" stops at either the cyberspace visual language, bullet time, or the costuming, so I think it's actually pretty fun and novel that the Station 5 eps go for the pod people instead. Through the labor-zombies (still puppeteered by their jacks in death), and the Controller (conscious, aware, had a brief normal childhood before being sold into instrumentality), we push the horror in some fun new directions.

Thematic engagement with The Matrix

Does manage to at least gesture toward labor exploitation and state propaganda. Draws a nice if underbaked connection between news media fearmongering and anti-migrant policies. Gets a little incoherent and borderline reactionary with its conspiratorial angle (not that that's completely absent from the matrix proper). Featuring a "philosophical debate" that dips a bit more into parody. And we do manage to presage Resurrections via Don't Be A Tech Guy Who Sucks.

Quality of the overall episode vs quality of its Matrix pastiche

The Station Five eps are both a little mid, to me. Adam just isn't compelling, even in a love-to-hate way. Weirdly victim-blaming and misanthropic about the game show contestants. Each episode's parodying of the BBC is a bit too buffoonish to work, and leans a bit too hard on The Alien Behind The Curtain to have any teeth in regards to the real BBC. But I do kind of love Scary Capitalist Snow Hell feat. Simon Pegg. And the Matrix bits, imo, are some of the most charming moments. Decent episode, good Matrix pastiche.

Contestant #2: New Earth

Visual engagement with The Matrix

We get some very direct riffs on both the shot where Neo absorbs the full horror of how many pods there are, and the There Is No Spoon elevator cable sequence. It Green.

Thematic engagement with The Matrix

"Something something Catholicism" is, in fact, a core theme of The Matrix, and I'd say catgirl nuns are solidly in the spirit. "Don't be an evil vapid bimbo who surgically alters her body"? Well, no. (Granted, the most charitable read is that the ep is basically ambivalent on bodymodding - Cassandra's deal is gross, "evolution" and "mutation" are good, and turning yourself into a cat woman is neutral as long as you don't give people every disease in the world). "Don't give people every disease in the world"? Well, sure man, I guess.

We get some nods toward not buying into "human purity" (coded as class purity, and maybe vaguely racial?), and some lines about "we're part of the machine, so we know how to destroy the machine" that make sense as part of the Matrix pastiche and make much less sense in the context of the actual episode. Meanwhile, the NYPD are the heroes of the hour, here to bust all the bad guys and shepherd our shellshocked pod escapees off to some brighter future that we don't have to think too hard about the logistics of.

Quality of the overall episode vs quality of its Matrix pastiche

Gotta be honest: I did not enjoy New Earth very much. It has some fun ideas, and we get pretty visceral with the pod-based body horror again. But the sexism of how it handles Cassandra and Rose just makes the whole thing sort of unpleasant. And this also may have been one of the episodes he was looking back on re: "we didn't have 14 regenerate in 13's clothes because I didn't want it to look like we were making fun of gender nonconformity."

The Matrix pastiche itself is, like, fine? Just kind of shallow and mostly confined to iconography (while the themes of the rest of the episode sometimes tip into anti-thesis). Bad episode, decent Matrix pastiche.

Contestant #3: The End of Time

Visual engagement with The Matrix

If you're asking "wait, End of Time is a Matrix pastiche? In what way?" - it's because the whole Master storyline is riffing on the Reloaded/Revolutions version of Smith. Accordingly, the extended visual gag of the Master turning everyone in the world into himself is straight from the Smith playbook. And the effect looks bad, as a subtle homage to the fact The Matrix's agent possession effect also looks bad.

Thematic engagement with The Matrix

As a Matrix scholar with a Smith concentration: End of Time really, really gets Smith. It gets that he's an evil gay guy trying to excel to the extreme at his fascist upbringing, even though the authority figures he wants to impress will always see him as fundamentally "diseased." It gets the mommy and/or daddy issues that drive him. It gets that he's the shadow self. It gets that he's a Looney Tunes character. It gets that his public breakdown is as much self-harm as other-people-harm, and emphasizes that via the Doctor as concerned friend. They even put that guy on a dog leash (sexual style).

The "Master race" joke is kind of tasteless, but does get at something essential about Smith's machine-supremacy-as-cope and repulsion/fascination with Morpheus (and it's not like mixed-bag racial politics aren't a Matrix quality). "Is the Master in drag making fun of gender nonconformity?" well kind of, but it also slays

Quality of the overall episode vs quality of its Matrix pastiche

Maybe a controversial take, but I really liked End of Time. It's got the homoeroticism, it's got the Gallifrey Sucks reveal, it's got funny strobe light skeletor running around eating people. The Doctor's Got A Gun. Wilf's there. The "billionaire who evilly...loves his daughter? and they're the only people of color in sight besides Cannibalism Victim #2 and Barack Obama?" subplot does kind of flop. But overall, a good blend of the thematically compelling and the sillyfunny. Much like The Matrix itself in that way... Good episode, good Matrix pastiche

Contestant #4: Extremis

Visual engagement with The Matrix

Little-to-none. We're doing The Matrix almost purely as premise, not aesthetic. 12 wears sunglasses, I guess? But he'd been doing that for a minute

Thematic engagement with The Matrix

Return of "something something Catholicism" - this time, our take is roughly "kind of sucks that the pope is homophobic. But I'd still help that guy out if he were in trouble. On account of once upon a time, the pope was a hot lady and we had sex."

[gets blinded] [turns out to be reversible as soon as they actually want to do more stories with this guy] ? That did happen to my buddy Neo.

"Have you guys heard about the allegory of the cave?" ✅

Killing Yourself, is, in fact, a theme of the Matrix movies. I do have to give them that.

Quality of the overall episode vs quality of its Matrix pastiche

The thing about Extremis is that for the most part, it's perfectly watchable and entertaining, even at its most baffling. Still has fun dialog and solid characterization. Still has Mackie and Capaldi doing their best with the material. It just climaxes with such a stupid twist that it kind of kills the whole thing. And that twist is the very fact that it's doing Matrix pastiche at all. Decent episode, bad Matrix pastiche.

Winners of the Matrix Pastiche Awards:

Worst visual engagement with The Matrix:

n/a: everyone's either doing their best with 5 bucks and a ball of lint, or not really visually going for The Matrix at all

Best visual engagement with The Matrix:

The Long Game/Bad Wolf

Worst thematic engagement with The Matrix:

Neck-and-neck between New Earth and Extremis. But I think NE's anti-thesis and aesthetics-without-theme narrowly beats Extremis's "relevant themes but done clumsy and bad"

Best thematic engagement with The Matrix:

The End of Time

Best Matrix pastiche sans rest of the episode:

The Long Game/Bad Wolf

Best episode sans Matrix pastiche:

The End of Time, but Extremis is shockingly close

Most Memeable Moment:

"Super Mario would kill himself"

[allonsos-evil-lair]

Fan Art/Propaganda for @lieutenantbiscute‘s ShellShock AU

Based on a scene from the most recent chapter in the fic. [Link here]

Please vote for ShellShock in the @tmntaucompetition and vote for ShellShock Raph in the @rottmntpeepawpolls

[morningstargirl666]

oh wow oh wow oh wow. I just read TBBW and the other wolfblood stories and I am absolutely 100% blown away. your writing and world building is absolutely incredible and your mastery of each character and their relationships is something to be admired. like holy shit. one of my favorite parts is how you developed the werewolf lore so much -- I always thought they could do SO much better (and you did!!). ((also also I absolutely LOVE sam as a character, he's amazing and I love his interactions with everybody)) but question for you: how do (some) werewolves consider the curse a gift if the trigger is killing someone (in canon at least)? I can't recall if that was the only way to trigger it in TBBW or not. but ty for sharing your story! <3

omg omg HI!!!

First of all, thank you so much for all the nice words! Absolutely love that you have enjoyed my self-indulgent crusade against canon lmao 😂 I feel very honoured! Love you so much ✨❤️

And your question! Funnily enough, this is going to be explored in more depth in the editing I've been doing to The Little Wolf...it's uh...not 11k anymore. [nervous laugher] More like...30k? Once I've finished it, I'll re-post, so watch out for that update.

ANYWAY as for my lore around the werewolf curse, I've had it in my head for a long time (hence me laying the groundwork in for TBBW, how it's gift, not a curse etc). There's a LOT to it, so let me try and explain in a coherent way:

So. First, the way the wolf is triggered is slightly different than canon. In my head, all that werewolf backstory (that came in I think in The Originals but don't quote me on that) where a witch cursed people to turn on a full moon after they themselves had killed someone, creating the werewolf species - is bullshit. That did not happen here. In TBBW and its related stories, werewolves evolved. Whether they started off as witches who meddled in shapeshifting magics, or simply evolved as an adjacent species to the human race I'll leave unclear (i feel that werewolves probably tell their children legends of how werewolves came first, man and wolves evolving from them lol, like their little own creation story). And like the scientific theory of evolution, werewolf packs have different traits/attributes because they reproduced with certain gene pools. Some are stronger, some are faster, some - like Lycaon and Klaus, werewolves from North America and Scandinavia (because the continents used to be joined, especially during the ice ages I think) - are larger, like Dire Wolves.

Now, my theory is, like I said, is that lycanthropy isn't a curse. It's sorta like a defence mechanism? So strong emotions of fear, anger, panic, anything that comes with trauma or what ignites that fight/flight instinct, coming of age even - that's what triggers it, what awakens the wolf and brings it forth and any death that happens because of that anger is merely a consequence, not a cause. Now obviously, hundreds of years ago, people didn't have an understanding of mental health or the idea of trauma, not really. I mean shellshock was a term more broadly used after the World Wars, which is barely 100 years ago. So, werewolves wouldn't have seen this scientific/logical reasoning behind it.

However, they also didn't believe it was merely taking a life that caused it. That reasoning, came from fear, people like Mikael who feared werewolves because of their power and strength. It's basically propaganda from the winning side of the feud between supernatural species. Like you said, werewolves believe it to be a gift. Perhaps even, a gift from the gods themselves.

In The Little Wolf it's going to be explained that they believe Death demands a sacrifice, but Death also doesn't care how that sacrifice is given. Yes, you can awaken the wolf if you kill a man. But you also awaken the wolf if you watch a family member die in front of you, grieving their loss. Furthermore, I always thought you also have to consider how killing someone a thousand years ago wasn't a horror or crime it is now. People killed to survive, to defend their families, even to prove their worth. I'm not talking about cold-blooded murder, but killing as warriors. Most cultures it was probably even an act of coming of age.

Here's a snippet from the The Little Wolf that probably explains it better, where young pack members are being initiated into Lycaon's pack:

The Alpha stared down at the young wolves, his eyes kind as he stood before them, assessing each of them in turn.  “Will you answer their call tonight?” He asked; a question for them and them alone. A chorus of ‘Aye’ answered him, the young wolves keeping their heads bowed. The Alpha nodded and turned, gesturing for an elder wolf-woman to step forward, her face wrinkled by time. In one of her hands hung a cluster of necklaces, each unique to its owner, and in the other, a bowl of blood, drawn from every member of the pack. The first, a silver trinket forged from the metal of the enemy’s sword he had slain. The second and third, necklaces made of small bones from the animal they had killed on their first hunt alone. The fourth, made of wooden beads that used to decorate necklaces adorning her mother’s breast, a possession of a relative recently lost. Many feared the wolf-men because of the way their wolves woke, satisfied only by Death herself. But what was little known, was Death did not discriminate. She did not care either way, if the death you witnessed was dealt by your own hand or by the cruelty of fate. The Alpha himself had befallen such a trial, his wolf woken the day of his father’s death, taken by the floods of a great storm that had robbed his mother of her mate. Death was Death, a notion that transcended all languages and cultures, timeless in its power and prestige. Just as there was a Beginning, there had to be an End. And only through seeing death, did one truly understand the nature of life.

Does that make any sense? Lol there's a lot to it (and tbf there's probably more I'm forgetting to say). Klaus, despite Mikael's abuse, never triggered the wolf for reasons that will be explained in The Little Wolf.

Thanks so much again, I've had the shittiest day and your ask arriving in my inbox really brightened it. So thank you ✨

[linuxgamenews]

Explore the Fiery Woodlands of Montello in the Isonzo WW1 FPS

Montello expansion releases Free for Isonzo WW1 FPS game on Linux, Steam Deck, Mac, and Windows PC. Thanks to the creativity of BlackMill Games. Available on Steam and Humble Store. BlackMill, the team behind the WW1 Series, is bringing even more content to Isonzo on Linux and Steam Deck. The latest title set on the Italian Front during World War I. A brand-new, free map expansion is now available, taking place in the fiery woodlands of Montello Hill. On top of that, players can also check out the new Shellshocked Units DLC Pack. Due to equip their characters with fresh gear and weapons. Battle Through the Flames on the Montello Map The free Montello update gives us a thrilling new map to fight on, inspired by the Second Battle of the Piave River in June 1918. This battle, also called the Battle of the Solstice. Since it was one of the last major clashes between Austro-Hungarian and Italian forces. It was a key moment in the war, and now you get to experience it in Isonzo. On this new battlefield, you'll fight through shelled farms, burning woodlands, ruined villages, and narrow trenches. All while making tactical decisions with your team on the Montello Map. It’s not just about running in guns blazing – teamwork and strategy will be key to victory. To help you out, two new weapons have been added for Austro-Hungarian soldiers. The iconic Mosin Nagant rifle, known as the M.91 Russisches Repetier-Gewehr in the game. Also the Schwerhandgranate fragmentation grenade. These will come in handy as you push through the chaos.

Isonzo - Free Montello Expansion - OUT NOW

New DLC: Shellshocked Units Pack Besides the free Montello update, you can also add some grit to your soldiers' appearance, the Shellshocked Units Pack is here. This DLC features Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops who have been through the wringer – torn clothing, improvised gear, and weathered looks that show the toll of war. It’s a stark contrast to the shiny uniforms you’d see on propaganda posters. Bringing a raw and authentic vibe to your Isonzo experience. Get the Edition That Suits You Along with the new map and DLC, Isonzo now offers the First Wave Edition, which includes over 140 cosmetic items from the previously released Elite, Veteran, Reserve, and Alpine Units DLC packs. It’s a great way to jump into the title if you want a bit of everything. And for those who want it all, the Ultimate Edition is packed with hundreds of items, giving you the complete Isonzo experience. The Montello map, Shellshocked Units DLC is on Steam, priced at $9.99 USD / £8.50 / 9,99€. All the new editions are available now on Steam, priced at $9.89 USD / £8.24 / 9,89€ with the 67% discount. And on Humble Store, priced at $26.99 USD / £22.49 / 26,99€. So suit up and head to the front on Linux and Steam Deck (playable), with Mac & Windows PC.

[masterabating]

oh, buddy, you bet your ass i understand power. and anyone who's right about it knows it's just shifting the bed of life to try to have it over anyone but themselves

look, man, i don't know how to break it to you. but the shit you live with isn't as normal or okay as you think it is. i'm not really blaming you, fuck only knows what propaganda you grew up with, but it doesn't have to be like that. we ran the numbers on our supercomputers and shit. society actually functions better without murder in it. i'll get casey in here if you don't believe me.

all i'm saying is that there are options. laws and scripture can only ever grow out of the people who wrote them. if those people think murder is okay, they'll make a world that justifies it. if whatever gods you've got think murder is okay, same thing.

we don't kill people here. 99% of people have never killed anyone. the government can't just kill people openly. society acknowledges that murder is wrong because life has value and because it's a violation of consent to kill people who do not want to die. hell, if people heard about how things work over there, i bet there would be fucking riots trying to get someone to do something about it. or fuck, i dunno, maybe everyone would be so shellshocked that we as a society would need to take a few decades to process it. most people never even hear it's possible for things to be that bad.

normal's relative, man. that's why it's fucked up.

whoop ok that's definitely not happy loud noises downstairs

[thanksjro]

Eugenesis Part Three, Scene Three: The Eighties Weren’t All That Great, Actually

Nightbeat, Sunstreaker, Hoist and Grapple come out on the other side of the wormhole in 1984, on the Ark, just as according to plan. Nightbeat reminds everyone to not touch anything, lest they alter their present, only for that rule to be broken literally immediately.

Luckily, we seem to be working on Elegant Chaos time-travel rules, so things are working out okay.

But how do we know that? We haven’t been in the past for two minutes, surely the current state of the present is still up in the air.

Turns out Optimus never actually intended for any of the robots aboard the Ark to ever wake up or be found. He made sure that would happen by activating the Sidestep Drive- a molecule wiggler that renders the ship completely invisible.

So, Hoist just turned off the Sidestep Drive. He was always intended to, since Optimus had no intention of letting anyone out of the Ark crash alive.

That’s some dark shit, Optimus. I can’t believe this is the same guy who tells dad jokes and shoots hoops with the kids.

The gang splits up to look for clues, leaving Nightbeat all on his lonesome, as he reflects on when the Ark had gone missing. There’d been a lot of propaganda, some of it getting outright bizarre- think along the lines of cannibalism- but at the end of the day, all they’d known at the time was that Optimus Prime and a majority of the Autobot’s finest warriors just weren’t around anymore. He remembers how he’d not been picked for the fated mission, and retroactively feels incredibly grateful for it, despite having been incredibly disappointed at the time.

On a lower level of the ship, Grapple and Hoist are poking around looking for Optimus. Hoist wanders off to make sure his mind crystal didn’t get broken in the crash- Hoist was one of a group of Autobots who had their minds copied and placed onto the Ark in secret, just in case extra troops were needed after launch. It’s fine. Which is good, because it keeps the time-stream from getting too terribly convoluted.

Sunstreaker, on the other hand, is having a horrible time. He’s just found his own mangled body, his face having been more or less erased by an acid pellet that had been fired at him millions of years prior. Nightbeat apologizes, having not considered the fact that Sunstreaker had actually been on the Ark when he’d picked him for this mission. Yeah, that’s kind of a massive oversight, my guy. I can’t believe nobody said anything.

They find Optimus in the same room.

I guess it’s just physically impossible for anyone to write these two bastards without any Undertones™ bleeding into it at some point. “Journeys end in lovers meeting”, indeed.

Nightbeat, he’s a FUCKING SEMI-TRUCK.

While Nightbeat’s busy fat-shaming the robo-messiah, everyone else is busy trying to get him unstuck from Megatron. He makes the call to bring Optimus back online in the future, so he doesn’t have to see how thoroughly wrecked the Ark crew is.

The team carries Optimus back to the future, pall-bearer style. There’s a brief moment of panic when Grapple realizes that they haven’t found Optimus’ trailer, which is also a part of him and shares space in his mind? Weird to think that Optimus’ detachable butt shares his consciousness. Luckily, the reformatting hasn’t taken place yet, so his trailer doesn’t currently exist.

It’s not everyday you gotta kidnap your dead leader from the past to fight a bunch of tentacle monsters. I think I can forgive Nightbeat for being a little short here.

Meanwhile, Sixshot is watching the cleanup of his fellow Decepticons’ corpses via Laserbeak’s surveillance footage. It’s looking grim for the ‘Cons; at least sixty percent of their forces are now dead or imprisoned by the Quintessons. Soundwave’s definitely dead.

Still got my doubts about that, but will see if those doubts bear any fruit.

Sixshot sends everyone away, so he can focus on how scared shitless he is about what’s currently transpiring.

The birth and pregnancy theming is ratcheting up in this Part to an alarming degree. Roberts, you’re obsessed.

Sixshot recalls the last time the Quintessons had invaded, where all of his friends- very powerful, nigh-indestructible friends- had been reduced to crumpled cadavers. He himself had hidden under their bodies, shellshocked to the point of considering self-terminating to save himself from a similar fate. He’s still shaken by the experience, hiding two miles underground in a steel silo, with no intention of ever coming out. He can still hear their screams.

That’s some pretty severe PTSD, Sixshot. Maybe you should make an appointment with Rung to work through all that trauma.

Up on the Conquest, General Quantax orders for his troops to get ready to bring the heat to the Autobots.

Roberts is really over here using the nonsense time units from the comics. This was before they had the Wiki, so he probably had some unofficial guidebook, or his own notes, to work off of. Good on him; that’s dedication to the craft right there.

A breem isn’t even ten minutes. Nightbeat better hurry on home.

Speaking of home, Prowl’s running in the halls like a hooligan, getting everything set up for the impending attack.

This just in, local jackass would rather have all of his friends murdered than face any sort of criticism. More at 11.

Quark comes up to him and asks if they can walk together to the munitions room. Prowl says yes, except no, because he’s already where he needs to be. Prowl, I think he asked because he’s scared, so maybe do the guy a solid.

It seems even the OCs know that Prowl sucks.

You want to be a good leader, but don’t want to put forth any actual effort in making people want to follow you. Maybe you should get a WWOPD? bracelet.

Prowl closes the door on Quark. He goes over to the desk and takes a look at the message First Aid’s left him.

That’s right, I’d nearly forgotten that Rodimus was possessed by the robot devil. Prowl’s pretty irritated by the pronoun game, seeing as Rodimus banned the name ‘Unicron’ from the Autobase lexicon in fear of it rousing the embodiment of evil living inside the Matrix.

If the climax of this book is Rodimus Goddamn Prime giving birth to the Antichrist, I am going to lose my fucking mind.

First Aid goes on to state that they still can’t get Unicron out of the Matrix, so whoever gets it next is going to also be subjected to this unwanted demon pregnancy Roberts what the fuck with this parallel. I know that Unicron basically haunting the Matrix was established in the comics, but come on.

That message ends, and Prowl, like any sane person, thinks long and hard on whether he’s ready for that sort of responsibility. Bold of you to assume that the Matrix would even be interested in your slimy ass.

The next message brings more great news- First Aid informs him that Rodimus had a massive seizure, and more than half of his brain’s been effectively turned to mush. He’s calling for High Command to pull the plug, before they pour all of what’s left of their energon into someone with a eight-percent chance of survival.

You’re really doing this, aren’t you Roberts? You’re going to kill Rodimus Prime. Astounding.

Chromedome calls. The Quintessons are on their way. Lots of them.

[misteria247]

*The sounds of a distant buzzing can be heard before the screen flashes a bright light then fades to black*

*Words begin to appear on the screen for the viewers*

Greetings! This is Bootyyyshaker9000, reporting in. It has come to my attention that there is a voting competition going on. Since I, as well as my red clad companion, have been banned from doing anything lethal, I have decided to do the next best thing.

Hacking the writer's phone.

If she and my brothers, both biological and adopted, won't allow me to shine by being semi-lethal, then I'll just shine in this area of the playing field. Now, I have come to deliver a few messages here. First, a congratulations is in order for the two aus who've won, those being Two Souls by @virgilisspidey and Shellshock by @lieutenantbiscute. I'm clapping for your victories, and I'm looking forward to seeing you both compete in the second round.

I know this sounds sarcastic, but I can reassure that I'm being sincere.

Second, some propaganda for Saturday's constants.

Vote for WDTYG by @iamheretemporarly and WOWC by @lucatea this Saturday. This is not a suggestion unfortunately. But rather a trade off. You vote for them, and I don't hack your bank accounts and use your savings for some of my projects. That totally does not involve Uranium.

None whatsoever. Don't look into it.

Now this concludes this hacked message. A reminder to vote for these two aus @tmntaucompetition when the time comes.

Bootyyyshaker9000 out.

*The screen goes black, before a slight static tone rings out and the screen returns to normal for the viewers*

[starshipcaptainjojo]

Sorry to be the party pooper, but I was in NYC that day and for those of us who were there and who were scared, it’s always so weird to see posts like this one.

I’m not sure how to explain how it is to be a New Yorker who was old enough to understand what was going on, but too young to understand the ramifications of 9/11 when it happened.

I was in Middle School. And in Manhattan, with family spread across the city. And to us it was scary and horrible and traumatic. Many people’s parents died at the school I went to. For the rest of the school year we had to all process our trauma together.

Like. It was terrifying. We all thought any one of us could be next... but in 10 years time the whole ‘Bush did 9/11″ and “Islamaphobia” thing had changed the whole conversation for the rest of the world. New York had a very strange few months following 9/11. We all had to try to come to terms with what happened, try to pick up pieces, find someone to blame, and try to figure out what to feel. And you know what they said? They said “NEVER FORGET”

UM. WE WON’T! We were there! But the rest of the world got this message too! And then there’s Mr. Canadian Patriot up there. Some people glommed onto this and made it their IDENTITY. People who weren’t even there. It polarized people. “Hate Muslims and anyone who doesn’t look like you or THIS COULD HAPPEN AGAIN” And yikes! Yikes forever! “Never Forget!”

Nowadays when people don’t take it seriously I like to imagine they’re thinking of the Titanic. Because somehow that makes it easier. It emphasizes the right things. It was a tragedy, the way tragedies are for people who live them told by history... but then it was so sensationalized (like a movie with DiCaprio in it) and it became a meme and it became a thing to look back on as a cautionary tale (shoddy workmanship and classism.)

But I think not taking it seriously is rubbing me the wrong way because there is no ‘not taking it seriously’ for those of us who were there, but the sentiments being expressed by the Youth are also CORRECT!

You’re so right to fight the propaganda! You’re right to say “sure we won’t forget this. But we won’t forget how IT WAS USED to make the world worse. Here’s a spongebob meme.”

But I guess the only thing I want to make sure of is that when you’re mocking it, what you’re mocking is the sensationalized nature of the event. I want to ask you to remember that actual people died. People we knew. People who left kids behind in a middle school, shuttled outside the auditorium by shellshocked teachers so they could use whatever Nokia cellphone still worked to call whatever remaining parents or guardians the kids had left.

Don’t mock them.

But yes, you’re right. We won’t forget the way this was sensationalized. And for those of you who didn’t live through it, think of it a bit like COVID. So many people died who didn’t have to. So many people did nothing who should. And many people did something who shouldn’t. This kind of grief is complicated, and in 20 years kids will laugh about COVID and use a spongebob meme that says “WeAr A mAsK” and we’ll think “yeah that’s about right” but the grief will stay too.

As someone around for 9-11 and the "NEVER FORGET NUMBER #1 GREATEST TRAGEDY EVER IN HISTURY" response to it I am in thrilled and invigorated by the fact that younger people just make amogus memes and TikTok nonsense about it. A huge chunk of America cared more about it than any entire genocide and thought you would cry learning about it. They hoped it'd make every generation patriotically angry forever and ever and want to join the military. Instead you Photoshop the towers into squidwards house and shit. Never stop lol

[impressivepress]

Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 review – when anything was possible

Lenin, dead at 53, appears in monumental close-up in an open red coffin. The queuing mourners, also painted on the spot, are diminutive by comparison. Six years later, in 1930, he is revived as a lifesize portrait of intellectual power, working on his writings (the chair opposite significantly empty, as if inviting the passing worker to join the dialectic).

Lenin grows into a bronze colossus, shrinks to a china figurine, becomes an abstract canvas. He is a dinner plate, a headscarf or a porcelain vase. The leader, dead or alive, comes in all shapes and sizes.

That stands for Stalin and Trotsky too, though the latter is much less of a presence in the Royal Academy’s enormous Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 (his face, indeed, scissored right out of that headscarf). But this is no display of communist propaganda. What makes Revolution such a momentous, even historic exhibition is that it brings together all of the art from that period. Not just the Soviet dross – socialist realist utopias, hymns to mechanisation and films of peasants waiting gratefully for the arrival of the first steam train – but the art of the avant garde too. It is the first time we have been able to see the art of the Revolution whole.

After the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, no social group was more caught up in the revolutionary spirit than artists, composers and writers. And their ambitions – quite possibly for the first time in history – were identical with those of the country’s rulers. Both believed that art could have a purpose beyond itself, that it could help to remake an entire nation, from posters and murals to the uniforms of factory workers and even dainty Trotsky teacups.

This was a new world in which anything was possible – in art as in life. Ivan Puni’s gloriously beautiful Spectrum: Flight of Forms sends Cyrillic letters up through the moonlight-blue paint like freed doves. Alexei Shchusev’s mausoleum for Lenin is a hybrid of pyramid, suprematist geometry and Cunard liner. Konstantin Yuon imagines whole new planets shooting up the picture plane and exploding in beams of coloured light, like the painter Mikhail Matiushin’s visionary rayonist stripes.

It is staggering to see how fast new ideas were crisscrossing Europe even before 1917. Picasso invents cubism; Kazimir Malevich adapts it in Moscow a few minutes later. Aristarkh Lentulov and Boris Grigoriev portray Bolshevik leaders like Cézanne painting Mont Sainte-Victoire. There are post-impressionist onion domes, futurist samovars and wild experiments with space and viewpoint in film and photography. Above all, there is the great revolution in Russian art.

It is all here: from Kandinsky’s first abstract paintings to Tatlin’s ghostly flying machines to Lyubov Popova’s constructivist textile designs. In pride of place is an entire Malevich gallery in which his marvellous Suprematist Construction of Colours tilts away at some stratospheric future in turquoise, pink and bright yellow on white board. Black Square, sharply subversive against the white square on which it floats, feels like the most dynamic antithesis to figurative painting. And believing that the only way to serve the people was through the universal language of abstraction, Popova and Rodchenko rejected even the barest of symbolism, filling the world with their geometric constructivism and its legacy of concentric circles.

How was the post-revolutionary peasant to be painted? In films, he’s a hero tanned by the Soviet sun, singing merrily home after a day in the fields or grinning at the sight of a newfangled milking machine. But in paintings he may be anything from a war-scarred veteran with snow on his boots to an array of dazzling rectangles. Malevich’s Red Square appears irrefutably abstract until you consider its subtitle: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions. It’s not so hard to discern the life force in that forward-moving shape.

Barefoot, strapping and headscarved, women workers heave hay bales and churns. In the extraordinarily futuristic pictures of Alexander Deineka, surrounded by an armoury of spools and weaving machines, they look like sci-fi robots. Isaak Brodsky paints a shock-worker, as these super-strong labourers were known, half-naked and raised up on scaffolding against the night sky – a Muscovite Michelangelo.

But when he got home, what might he eat? A nearby interior shows a child standing before a table bare of everything but a crust. It is not the least aspect of this tremendous show – superbly co-curated by the RA’s Ann Dumas with two professors of Russian art from the Courtauld – that it keeps on changing the picture, so to speak. You can be looking at a lifesize reconstruction of El Lissitzky’s design for a worker’s capsule apartment, all streamlined beds and pre-Corbusier cantilevering, and then turn to an image of real Moscow lives – Red Army veterans home from the civil war, dazed and unemployed, cigarette sellers shivering on the streets.

Lissitzky himself appears in a glamorous snapshot like a Russian Camus. Rodchenko photographs his friend Mayakovsky, in all his shaven-headed charisma. Man Ray photographs Eisenstein, taking an urgent phone call, as extracts from his films play through the show, and Meyerhold, the great theatre director, appears in hyperreal sketch, graphic watercolour and matinee-idol closeup. Every kind of portrait brings these almost unimaginably remote figures closer.

Russian state art could generalise the proletariat to an inhuman degree. Boris Kustodiev’s The Bolshevik, in which a giant carrying the red banner stomps through a snowbound city, nearly treading on the tiny workers below, contains not one single portrait of a human being. The crowds accompanying Lenin, or marching for freedom, are a faceless blur. This show brilliantly punctuates the widescreen propaganda with sudden closeups of living Russians: villagers struggling to put up a telegraph pole, a peasant returning shellshocked from the front, two philosophers walking through a forest – walking, as it might be, to their fate. For so many of these lives, brought momentarily back from the darkness in this exhibition, would soon be lost.

History runs like wind through this art, shaping everything we see. Figures rise and fall, leaders come and go, deprivation, war and famine creep into the landscape. Ration cards, designed by avant garde artists, show the apportioning of bread – twice as much for the workers as the bourgeoisie – while ex-icon painters are forced to produce lacquered boxes commemorating Red Army triumphs. Dmitry Moor’s devastating black and white print Help!, showing a skeletal peasant throwing his hands in the air, is exemplary. A masterpiece of graphic art, it was meant to justify the sequestering of church funds but it stands, now, as an image of Stalin’s Terror.

The paint grows thin, the surfaces crack; it’s a wonder some works have survived when their makers were suppressed or murdered. (Lenin in his coffin hasn’t been seen for 90 years, ironically, because he couldn’t be shown dead.) The brief but soaring flight of the Russian avant garde falls to earth in a silt of Stalinist kitsch, and what follows is condensed in the intensely moving Room of Memory. The faces of Mayakovsky, Meyerhold and the two philosophers appear on screen before us among police mugshots of the peasants, librarians and housewives who will be shot or worked to death in the gulags. But here they live once more, like this art, in our eyes.

~

Laura Cumming · 12 Feb 2017.

[chestnutpost]

Michael Jackson Doc ‘Leaving Neverland’ Stuns Viewers

This post was originally published on this site

“Leaving Neverland,” the HBO documentary detailing an investigation into child sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson, generated an array of emotions for viewers after it debuted Sunday.

The film centers around Wade Robson and James Safechuck, two men who say Jackson repeatedly molested them when they were children. The first half that aired Sunday detailed their experiences, including perspectives from relatives who knew Jackson at the time and described him as a harmless, childish pop star.

Robson and Safechuck were separately brought into Jackson’s inner circle as children under the guise of mentorship. The men allege that the pop star introduced them to kissing, pornography, masturbation, oral sex and more while they were kids. They said they only realized in their 30s that their alleged respective experiences with Jackson amounted to assault. 

Many, including activists and celebrities, tweeted their support for the alleged victims.

As a former child actress, I can’t help but watch this documentary and think about how wrong it is for children to be put in the position of performing for the soul purpose of pleasing adults. It’s such a slippery, dangerous, often abusive slope. #LeavingNeverland

— Amber Tamblyn (@ambertamblyn) March 4, 2019

who would leave a seven – yes 7 – year old boy with a grown man – makes no sense to me as a mom –

— ROSIE (@Rosie) March 4, 2019

Speechless. #LeavingNeverland

— andy lassner (@andylassner) March 4, 2019

Other viewers were more critical of the documentary and its subjects. Some even used hashtags such as #MJInnocent and #MuteHBO to express their discontent.

Do not watch that bullshit about Michael Jackson.. play his music instead.

— Paul Mooney (@PaulEalyMooney) March 3, 2019

from a storytelling standpoint #LeavingNeverland is a very bad documentary. I’m up to listen the stories of survivors of any abuse. I’m on their side always, but this being about the greatest megastar in the world and a dead person, I expected a lot more of facts and research.

— Gabriel Torrelles (@gabetorrelles) March 4, 2019

In 1993, Michael Jackson gave HBO and Oprah their biggest ratings ever.

He solidified them as household names and boosted their companies profits.

Now 25 years later, they are working together to destroy his legacy and lynch him in death.

Despicable. #LeavingNeverland

— 🌴 (@BBonTheBrain) February 27, 2019

The family of Jackson, who died in 2009, has called the film “a public lynching.” In a statement, the Jackson estate called the movie “a one-sided marathon of unvetted propaganda to shamelessly exploit an innocent man no longer here to defend himself.”

What do you want to say about your brother as #LeavingNeverland is about to hit the country?

“I want them to understand and know that this documentary is not telling the truth. There has not been not one piece of evidence that corroborates their story.” — Marlon Jackson pic.twitter.com/O73o19flry

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) February 26, 2019

Oprah Winfrey, who taped “After Neverland,” an interview with Robson and Safechuck that will air on HBO Monday, anticipated the backlash.

“We’re all gonna get it, I’m gonna get it, we’re all gonna get it,” she told press during the taping of the special, referring to potential anger from Jackson fans.

Still, Winfrey and others felt it was important that people see the documentary that shed light on the pop star’s alleged dark past.

“I know people all over the world are gonna be in an uproar and debating whether or not Michael Jackson did these things or not, did he do it or not do it, whether these two men are lying or not lying,” she said. “But for me, this moment transcends Michael Jackson. It is much bigger than any one person. This is a moment in time that allows us to see this societal corruption. It’s like a scourge on humanity and it’s happening right now. It’s happening in families.”

The strong reactions to the film come not long after the film’s premiere at January’s Sundance Film Festival, where it also left attendees shellshocked. As HuffPost reported, the festival’s director, John Cooper, introduced the documentary with a trigger warning and told attendees that mental health professionals would be available to speak to them in the lobby.

Feel sick to my stomach after watching Part 1 of #LeavingNeverland doc. Michael Jackson witnesses/sex abuse victims coming off very credible. It’s so sexually explicit that counselors are in the lobby. #SundanceFilmFestival2019

— Mara Reinstein (@MaraReinstein) January 25, 2019

Director Dan Reed also stood by his film. 

“I’m realizing now the magnitude of his influence and how many people adore him, how he’s woven into the fabric of so many people’s lives,” he told HuffPost in an interview at Sundance. “[Now we’re] challenging his reputation, and we’re not the first [people] to do it. But I believe that this film has a completeness and a credibility that hasn’t been matched before. This is really the first time that survivors of child sexual abuse and Michael have spoken out.” 

Reed also told HuffPost that the film is meant to be less about Jackson and more about the trauma that arises from child sexual abuse.

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.

The post Michael Jackson Doc ‘Leaving Neverland’ Stuns Viewers appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/michael-jackson-doc-leaving-neverland-stuns-viewers/

[liveonlinematches]

Supporters of Manchester United have taken to social media of their droves this night to heap reward on marvel hero Ashley Younger following his first-half appearing as opposed to Watford.

Matchup

Jose Mourinho’s facet travelled to Vicarage Street for a (reputedly) difficult conflict with the in-form Hornets this night, with the trio of Marcos Rojo, Paul Pogba and Zlatan Ibrahimovic as soon as once more incorporated of their squad following long damage layoffs.

The Pink Devils got here into complaints at the again of an incredibly hard-fought victory over Chris Hughton’s Brighton on the weekend, incomes two wins and two attracts from their ultimate 4 fixtures throughout all competitions.

Watford, in the meantime, put a shaky run of sort in the back of them with spectacular wins over each West Ham and Newcastle during the last two weeks, with Marco Silva’s facet sitting in Eighth-place within the Premier League desk.

Groups

The beginning lineups of each golf equipment noticed Marcos Rojo restored to United’s XI in a Three-man backline, having been rested on the weekend following his superb efficiency as opposed to Basel within the Champions League ultimate week.

Paul Pogba additionally shook off a knock to start out, with Jesse Lingard changing Marcus Rashford in Jose Mourinho’s lineup.

The staff information is in! Right here’s your #MUFC XI to tackle Watford… #WATMUN http://pic.twitter.com/Ib4RBPywDA

— Manchester United (@ManUtd) November 28, 2017

Marco Silva, in the meantime, makes simply 1 exchange from his facet’s Three-Zero victory over Newcastle on Saturday, with Sebastian Prödl changing Miguel Britos on the center of the Hornets’ defence:

| #watfordfc XI v @ManUtd: Gomes (GK) (C); Mariappa, Prödl, Kabasele; Femenía, Cleverley, Doucouré, Zeegelaar; Hughes, Richarlison; Grey.

Subs: Karnezis (GK), Wagué, Janmaat, Capoue, Carrillo, Pereyra, Deeney. http://pic.twitter.com/EdIc6KEZrs

— Watford FC (@WatfordFC) November 28, 2017

On the double

An end-to-end opening to the conflict noticed Watford glance bad at the spoil, with Kiko Femenia, Richarlison and Andre Gray in particular shiny.

On the other hand, a person second of brilliance quickly lit up complaints, as Ashley Younger’s candy 1/2 volley from not anything at the fringe of Watford’s field put United forward after 20 mins.

And, to the amazement of audience looking at on, it was once quickly 2-Zero, with that guy Ashley Younger as soon as once more the difference-maker.

After a surging run from Paul Pogba ultimately noticed the Frenchman grounded 25 yards from function, Younger stepped as much as curl probably the most magnificent of free-kicks previous the helpless Heurelho Gomes in Watford’s function.

Response

The gang at Vicarage Street have been shellshocked, as have been lovers of Manchester United, who briefly took to Twitter to sing the praises in their surprise hero:

Ashley younger is on havent observed him installed a shift like this since United beat Arsenal Eight-2!

— CheekySport (@CheekySport) November 28, 2017

League objectives this season:

Cristiano Ronaldo: 2

Ashley Younger: 2 http://pic.twitter.com/Zvc9wgkrZU

— Dream Crew (@dreamteamfc) November 28, 2017

ASHLEY BECKHAM YOUNG http://pic.twitter.com/Mmkqw8LWi3

— Ali (@FutbolBallack) November 28, 2017

Bloody hell!! Younger’s on

— Charlie (@sheshe_tom) November 28, 2017

Simply completed paintings to find Ashley Younger’s the G.O.A.T.

— Sam Homewood (@SamHomewood) November 28, 2017

Roberto Carlos has photos of Ashley Younger on his bed room wall. Move it on. http://pic.twitter.com/pR2zI2Zyk6

— Switch Similar (@TransferRelated) November 28, 2017

Ashley Younger’s unfastened kick were given me like… http://pic.twitter.com/nKCfplrsSv

— EPL Bible (@EPLBible) November 28, 2017

Sensational from Younger

— Pilib De Brún (@Malachians) November 28, 2017

Endlessly Younger. I wanna be Endlessly Younger. What a unfastened kick!!

Ashley Beckham Younger

— Jan Aage Fjortoft (@JanAageFjortoft) November 28, 2017

FUCKIN HELL…. ASHLEY YOUNG. TAKE A BOW! #MatchdayMac #MUFC #WATMUN

— Complete Time DEVILS (@FullTimeDEVILS) November 28, 2017

Ashley Ballon d’Or Younger

— Tom McDermott (@MrTomMcDermott) November 28, 2017

ASHLEY YOUNG AGAIN OH MY GOD ALL MY ENGLISH CRISTIANO RONALDO PROPAGANDA HAS FINALLY PAID OFF

— José (@MourinhoMindset) November 28, 2017

Working away with it

Anthony Martial has since made it Three-Zero, slotting house hopefully following a perfectly-weighted layoff from Romelu Lukaku.

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js !serve as(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)(window, record,’script’,’http://ift.tt/2B7CqrW;); fbq(‘init’, ‘1821170621460215’); // Insert your pixel ID right here. fbq(‘observe’, ‘PageView’); (serve as(d, s, identity) (record, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));

http://ift.tt/2iZiP6O football

[aenor-llelo]

genuinely appreciating the opposition of active/passive expressions here. tubbo and techno having such blatantly furrowed expressions while tommy and philza look so shellshocked. also the vertical line-up of epaulettes vs capes is nice. 

the piece overall has excellent symmetry and the faded use of l’manburg flag colors matches the whole, well, propaganda feeling. 

as if the words above their heads are words they feed themselves. 

their personal propaganda.

“But how long can we keep playing, game after game— No, losing game, after losing game?

It's all Propaganda!”

Propaganda - Crusher

Oh boy this sure did take awhile to finish ey, but I did it! I wanted to colour drop L'Manburg's flag for this but they're so ,,, idk the word,,, bright? Vibrant?? So I muted it oop. Just know that it's intended to resemble the flag somewhat

I just think Orphan's Path's New L'manburg arc is very interesting

Propaganda by Crusher

[clubofinfo]

Expert: When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ‘rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, both Official Enemies, were denounced and demonised, in accordance with the usual propaganda script. One piece in the Evening Standard described Assad as a ‘monster’ and a Boris Johnson column in the Telegraph referred to both Putin and Assad as ‘the Devil’. As the respected veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn put it: The partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron. This, he said, was ‘the nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria.’ Media reporting focused laser-like on ‘Last calls (or messages or tweets) from Aleppo’. There were heart-breaking accounts of families, children, elderly people, all caught up in dreadful conditions that could be pinned on the ‘brutal’ Assad and his ‘regime’; endless photographs depicting grief and suffering that tore at one’s psyche. By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led ‘coalition’ from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to ‘liberate’ the city from ISIS, with ‘victory’ declared a few days ago. Most pointedly, western media coverage has not, of course, demonised the US for inflicting mass death and suffering. As Cockburn pointed out, there were ‘many similarities between the sieges of Mosul and East Aleppo, but they were reported very differently’. He explained: When civilians are killed or their houses destroyed during the US-led bombardment of Mosul, it is Islamic State that is said to be responsible for their deaths: they were being deployed as human shields. When Russia or Syria targets buildings in East Aleppo, Russia or Syria is blamed: the rebels have nothing to do with it. For example: Heartrending images from East Aleppo showing dead, wounded and shellshocked children were broadcast around the world. But when, on 12 January, a video was posted online showing people searching for bodies in the ruins of a building in Mosul that appeared to have been destroyed by a US-led coalition airstrike, no Western television station carried the pictures. Cockburn summarised: In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. […] Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee. Mopping Up Pockets of Resistance In October 2016, the US-led coalition stepped up its bombing raids and artillery attacks on Mosul, over and above what had already been an intensive military campaign following the city’s capture by ISIS in 2014. According to a new report by Amnesty, 5,805 civilians were killed as a result of attacks launched by the coalition between February and June of 2017. As with Iraq Body Count figures for the whole of the country, this figure is likely to be much too low. Moreover, it excludes the first few months and the final few weeks of intensive bombardment. Amnesty says that the people of Mosul were subjected to: a terrifying barrage of fire from weapons that should never be used in densely populated civilian areas. US political writer Bill Van Auken comments: In Amnesty’s typically cautious fashion in dealing with the US government, the report stated that “US-led coalition forces appear to have committed repeated violations of international law, some of which may amount to war crimes.” Van Auken adds: While Amnesty indicts ISIS with far greater conviction than it does the US military, it raises no questions as to who is responsible for ISIS in the first place, much less the historical roots of the human catastrophe inflicted upon Mosul. As informed people are all too aware: ISIS had been well-armed, funded and trained for use as a proxy force in the wars for regime change orchestrated by the CIA and Washington’s regional allies, first in Libya and then in Syria. This is all part of a bigger picture involving decades of: war, sanctions, invasion and occupation inflicted by US imperialism on the oil-rich country, resulting in the decimation of an entire society, the loss of well over a million lives, and the turning of millions more into homeless refugees. Media coverage of the ‘victory’ over ISIS in Mosul has omitted this history, of course; just as it has either ignored or downplayed the huge numbers of civilians killed by the coalition there. True, there are now reports emerging of the plight of civilians leaving Mosul, and the BBC has noted Amnesty ‘allegations’, while giving prominent space to a coalition spokesperson dismissing the Amnesty report as ‘irresponsible and an insult’. But if BBC News was genuinely impartial, for the past few months it would have regularly headlined the destruction wreaked by the US-led coalition, with particular emphasis on the massive civilian death toll. Instead, this BBC headline said so much about its coalition-friendly stance: Battle for Mosul: Iraq army mops up final IS pockets. The article’s opening line was: The Iraqi army has been mopping up the last pockets of resistance from Islamic State (IS) militants in Mosul, after a long battle to recapture the city. And how many civilians had been killed by these US-backed forces in ‘liberating’ the city? The piece did not say. On March 17 this year, as many as 240 civilians were killed in an air strike on Mosul by the coalition. Patrick Cockburn reported that three buildings were reduced to rubble, while many people were seeking refuge in cellars. For months before and after this atrocity, BBC News had featured several reports from its correspondent Jonathan Beale who was ’embedded’ with Iraqi troops. These pieces had titles like ‘On the ground with Iraqi forces in battle for Mosul’, and they were sprinkled with propaganda phrases such as: The US-led coalition appears confident that fighters of the so-called Islamic State (IS) will be defeated in Mosul. a brutal fight for every street. The troops both battle hardened and battle weary. We hear coalition aircraft overhead. Then a whoosh and a thud, followed by an explosion…There’s another whoosh, thud and boom and then a plume of smoke from an air strike. No-one can question the bravery of the Iraqi forces. this is unforgiving, urban warfare and for the Iraqi forces there is still a mountain to climb. This was a bang-bang style of ‘journalism’ that obscured or blanked the deaths of civilians being killed in the ‘Battle for Mosul’, as the BBC News television studio graphic called the massive bombardment, time after time, for months on end. It was always ‘Battle for Mosul’; never ‘US air strike massacres civilians’ or ‘US seeks hegemony in the Middle East’. It’s Good (‘Us’) vs Evil (‘Them’). The BBC website offered a single article, titled ‘Can civilian deaths be avoided in RAF strikes on IS?’, as a pitiful ‘balance’ to the rolling barrage of pro-coalition propaganda. Tellingly, Beale’s piece revealed its propaganda stance in closing with the perspective of RAF Air Commodore Johnny Stringer who said: We have an opponent who just hates us and everything we stand for. We have to deal with that and defeat them militarily. And that is why we’re here. Beale ended the article with a line of his own, indicating that the BBC correspondent stood full-square behind the coalition: They are fighting a brutal enemy, who unlike them, has no worries about killing civilians. Once the ‘last pockets of resistance’ in Mosul had been ‘mopped up’, the BBC could then publish a typically whitewashing report on its website headlined, ‘Mosul: Iraq PM in city to celebrate victory over IS’. And, of course, no questions were asked about the democratic credentials of the Iraqi government that had ‘liberated’ Mosul. Does Iraq have free elections, a free press and full respect for human rights? These issues have been of little or no concern for the corporate media since a puppet government was installed, amid much PR posturing, in 2004. ‘A Heroic Fight Against Terrorists” The propaganda pitch of BBC News towards government power is longstanding; indeed it was hard-wired from its Reithian origins, as we have pointed out many times. Sometimes this propaganda bias is most obvious when its news reporters examine the propaganda of Official Enemies, blithely unaware of how it reflects on themselves and their own employer. On December 15, 2016, Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford delivered a classic example on Aleppo in this segment shown on BBC News at One (the BBC also published this article). Consider her words: On the ground in Syria, Russia’s special forces – shown here for the first time on state television. The commentary is all about a heroic fight against terrorists. No mention here of any civilians caught up in the bloodshed. Imagine Rainsford saying this of Western reporting on Mosul: The commentary is all about a heroic fight against terrorists. No mention here of any civilians caught up in the bloodshed. Then, to camera, Rainsford said: For Russia, the conflict in Syria was always about projecting its power and influence. As the West stalled [sic], Moscow moved in. The message to Russians here that they were helping to protect the world from terrorism. The message to the world, that Russia under Vladimir Putin is a political and military power to be reckoned with. A BBC News reporter would never point out that war in the Middle East is about the US ‘projecting its power and influence’. Rainsford continued, over library footage of the severe damage done by Russian forces to Grozny: As to brutal bombing campaigns, Russia has done that before. This is not Aleppo, but Grozny in Chechnya – a city flattened in what President Putin also called a war on terror. In this latest conflict, he’s faced no calls at home for restraint. Finally, over a clip of ISIS fighters with captured Russian arsenal at Palmyra: But, with all the focus on Aleppo, this happened. Russian troops were forced to abandon their positions in Palmyra, as militants from ISIS moved in. Recapturing this Syrian city was also once trumpeted by Russia as a great victory. Can you imagine BBC News ever doing a comparable segment analysing US or British propaganda about the assault on Mosul? Or Sirte in Libya? Or Fallujah? Or Belgrade? Have BBC News journalists not, in fact, effectively ‘trumpeted’ each of these ‘as a great victory’ for the West? So, it is a worthy task for the BBC to critically assess the propaganda of the evil enemy, but not that of ‘our’ own side. Another standard feature of BBC News, as with all corporate media, is to identify with the victims of Official Enemy military action, far more than with victims of ‘our’ military action. Thus, last year, Bridget Kendall, could report in this fashion for the BBC: What looks like a Russian fighter jet in the skies over northern Syria. And then this. Suspected cluster bombs. Imagine being in one of those buildings, apparently north of the city of Aleppo yesterday.’ (BBC News at Ten, February 1, 2016; clip captured by Media Lens reader Daniel Collins in this tweet; our emphasis) A BBC News reporter would never invite the audience to ‘imagine being in one of those buildings’ – in Mosul or Baghdad or Gaza, for instance – hit by ‘our’ bombs or those of a major ally, such as Israel. As with the BBC, so with the Guardian. Consider a Guardian editorial last October highlighting a quote by Assad on Aleppo that he had to: keep cleaning this area and to push the terrorists to Turkey to go back to where they come from, or to kill them. The editorial continued: International diplomacy pays lip service to the idea that such actions are, if proven, war crimes. And what, then, of Mosul? The west, too, faces a chance to demonstrate that it does respect the constraints of international law. Soon western-backed Iraqi forces will aim to retake Mosul, Islamic State’s last major stronghold in the country. The conduct of the battle will determine whether victory comes at an unacceptable humanitarian cost. The Guardian seems to have missed the fact that the West has, for decades, regularly flouted, rather than respected, ‘the constraints of international law’. This blindness and ignorance was already obvious from the title of the Guardian editorial which included the tragi-comic plea, ‘The crimes committed in the wars of the Middle East must in the end be punished. Meanwhile the west must not add to them‘ [our emphasis]; as though the West had not, in fact, already contributed the overwhelming bulk of crimes in the Middle East. We have not been able to find a single Guardian editorial since October 2016 appraising the US-led assault on Mosul. The contrast with its anguished comments on Aleppo is stark. In June 2016, the paper gave its view on the battle for Aleppo, saying simply: ‘stop it now’, and describing it as ‘an urgent humanitarian catastrophe’. In October 2016, a Guardian editorial stated that ‘Russian and Syrian warplanes above Aleppo appear to be intentionally targeting civilians’, and demanded the enforcement of international law. And, in November 2016, the Guardian spoke of ‘the West’s grim failure’ to stop ‘a humanitarian and military disaster’. The editorial also noted that: Russia’s propaganda machine is hard at work alongside the Syrian regime’s, trying to frame these events as the “liberation” of a population described as hostages of Islamic terrorists. Again, to emphasise, at the time of writing, there has been no Guardian editorial examining whether the ‘victory’ of the US-led coalition in Mosul has ‘come at an unacceptable humanitarian cost’; or exposing the West’s propaganda campaign promoting ‘liberation’. It’s no surprise. After all, that would come too close to demolishing the myth of benevolent Western power; and the Guardian’s own role in propping up the fiction. Conclusion Neil Clark rightly observes that: The very different ways in which the respective ‘liberations’ [of Aleppo and Mosul] were portrayed tells us much about the way war propaganda works in the so-called free world. The bottom line is that what we are seeing in Iraq, and much of the rest of the world, is an imperial Western project targeting countries that 1) do not conform to the West’s dictates; and 2) are unable to defend themselves adequately (unlike China, Iran or nuclear-armed North Korea, for example). Clark notes that: The truth of what has been happening is too shocking and too terrible ever to be admitted in the Western mainstream media. Namely, that since the demise of the Soviet Union, the US and its allies have been picking off independent, resource-rich, strategically important countries one by one. David Whyte and Greg Muttitt point out that when the UK invaded Iraq, the Middle East country had nearly a tenth of the world’s oil reserves, and that government documents ‘explicitly state’ oil was a motive for the war. But the Chilcot Report shamefully avoided this evidence and ignored oil as a driving force for the invasion. As Mark Curtis says, after an illegal invasion and one million dead Iraqis, UK trade minister Greg Hands recently had the gall to boast that: UK companies and brands are already well established in Iraq: from BP and Standard Chartered to G4S and JLR The minister added: Iraq has the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserves, sixth largest gas reserves, and huge untapped potential across both. The minister proclaimed proudly that UK firms are ‘strategically well-placed’ to exploit this massive potential. Could the real motivation for the 2003 war be any clearer? Moreover, Perpetual War is a highly lucrative business for arms manufacturers and the military machine in the West. As Bill Van Auken observes: US commanders have made it clear that they don’t see American forces leaving the country [Iraq] in the foreseeable future. And the Pentagon has asked for nearly $1.3 billion in its 2018 budget to fund continued support for Iraqi security forces. And let’s not forget that UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia have been deemed ‘lawful’ by the High Court ‘after seeing secret evidence’. With the nightmare of a US/UK-supported, Saudi-led assault on Yemen – beset by mass starvation, poverty and a cholera epidemic – the appalling reality of Western ‘democracy’ is once again exposed. http://clubof.info/

[misteria247]

Oroku Leo here to do some propaganda-

Tomorrow.

Vote for Two Souls by @virgilisspidey, Shellshock by @lieutenantbiscute, WDTYG by @iamheretemporarly, and WWOC (Feral Leo) by @lucatea.

This isn't a suggestion btw.

*pulls out a mini knife*

This is a threat-WRITER GIMME THE KNIFE BACK YOU CRETIN.

Jokes aside GO VOTE FOR THESE AMAZING PEEPS THEY DESERVE IT AND THEIR AUS ARE AMAZING TRUST ME.

To vote tomorrow go to @tmntaucompetition!!! They're hosting this fantastic event and none of this wouldn't have been possible without them!!!!!!

[misteria247]

Oroku Karai here for some more propaganda (oh boy)-

Today.

Vote for Two Souls by @virgilisspidey, Shellshock by @lieutenantbiscute, WDTYG by @iamheretemporarly and WOWC by @lucatea.

They are amazing and deserve all the votes. Btw this isn't a suggestion.

*pulls out a sword*

This is a threat-

*in the background the writer*

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU AND YOUR BROTHER I SWEAR-

Again jokes aside my lovely peeps-

GO VOTE FOR THESE AMAZING AUS!!! THEY DESERVE THE WIN!!!!!! VOTE FOR THEM @tmntaucompetition!!!! PLEASE AND THANK YOU!!! 💖