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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Why they're smearing Lina Khan

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course — not just Khan — but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasn’t just that she had such a radical vision — it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against “woke” Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasn’t that tech had got too big and powerful — it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who’ll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the “Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold” narrative).

This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP’s crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is “woke.” Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

Biden’s ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy’s enemy, led to Khan’s historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.

Crucially, these new appointees weren’t just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act — with no further Congressional authorization — to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs’ abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckin’ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working — for the first time since Reagan — to protect Americans from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems’ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent technocrats, “realists” who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can’t cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg’s far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They’re trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

And by declaring noncompete “agreements” that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: America’s billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch’s head. Not only that, he’s given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn’t be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they’re coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC’s revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it’s a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:

Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

For Wilson to question Khan’s ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson’s GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he’s practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright’s employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working “personally and substantially” while serving at the FTC.

George Mason’s Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials — both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems — “worked directly for a company that has business before the agency”:

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014–21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they’d regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where she’s represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest’s worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

There’s a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trump’s FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including “nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders”:

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a “conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.”

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan’s “conflict” is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official’s advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. It’s simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).

But there’s more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ethics-official-owned-meta-stock-while-recommending-ftc-chair-recuse-herself-from-meta-case-8582a83b

Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she’s investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans’ personal information:

https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74

Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC’s war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.

But Khan’s opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0–4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.

These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley’s judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn’t think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they’d gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft’s execs pinky-swore that they wouldn’t abuse that power.

Corely’s deference to Microsoft’s corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC’s motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.

This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation’s radical, massive merger shouldn’t be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That’s pretty convenient for future mega-mergers — just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can’t be investigated because the deadline is looming.

And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn’t exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending “dump trucks” of money buying games studios was to “spend Sony out of business.”

Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There’s plenty of good reason to hate both — they’re run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.

Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax — and it broke every one of those promises.

Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didn’t end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by “productivity” as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have “spent the competition out of business,” you’re a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.

The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in — in this case, it’s with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix’s — and then claw all that value back until all that’s left is a big pile of shit.

The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesn’t take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, “All of this is for a shooter videogame.” The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn’t because it won’t be harmful — it’s because she doesn’t think those harms matter.

But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley’s ruling means that “deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today.”

Ronald Reagan’s antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Don’t they know they’ve lost? the commentators said:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159

They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss Mike Ybarra: “Your tax dollars at work.”

https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440

But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason that’s surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.

The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don’t want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.

The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/

We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize — this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]

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maybe-boys-do-love · 4 months ago

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It's wild that the whole global trend of gay-focused happy ending romance shows and movies has only been going on for *looks at calendar* a measly ten years!

Just ten years ago. 2014. That's when you get the discovery of a market for queer romance series and films with happy endings. That year the OG Love Sick in Thailand came out. Brazil puts out The Way He Looks, which deserves so much more credit than it receives for influencing the aeshtetics of the genre. Looking premieres on HBO, and although it had low ratings, it's an important touchstone. And, despite Nickelodeon’s censorship and shifting the program from tv to its website, the Legend of Korra confirms Korrasami in its season finale.

The next year, in 2015, we get Love Sick season 2, and China, pre-censorship laws has a few options: Happy Together (not the Wong Kar Wai one lol), Mr. X and I, and Falling In Love with a Rival. Canada, premieres Schitt's Creek. In the US, Steven Universe reveals Garnet as a romantic fusion between two female characters, and will proceed to just be so sapphic. Norwegian web series Skam premieres and sets up a gay protagonist for its third season, which will drop in 2016 and entirely change the global media landscape.

Then, 2016! This is the MOMENT. That aforementioned Skam season happens. Japan puts out the film version of Ossan's Love and anime series Yuri!!! on Ice. China has the impactful Addicted Heroine, which directly leads to increased censorship. The US has Moonlight come out and take home the Oscar. In Thailand, GMMTV enters the BL game and Thai BL explodes: Puppy Honey, SOTUS, Water Boyy, Make It Right, plus, the Thai Gay OK Bangkok, which, like its influence, Looking, is more in the queer tradition but introduces two dramatically important directors to the Thai BL industry, Aof and Jojo.

By 2017, Taiwan enters the game with its History series. Korea’s BL industry actually kicks off with Method and Long Time No See. Thailand’s got too many BLs to mention. Call Me By Your Name, though not a happy ending, makes a big splash that will send ripples through the whole genre, and God's Own Country offers a gruff counter-argument to problematic age differences and twink obsessions. This is also the year of Netflix reboot of One Day At a Time bringing some wlw to the screen, and the Disney Channel has a main character come out as ‘gay’ on Andi Mack ( I’m am ready to throw fists with anyone who thinks the Disney Channel aesthetic isn’t a part of current queer culture). And I'd be remiss not to mention the influential cult-following of chaotic web-series The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo: "Sometimes things that are expensive...are worse."

All this happened, and we hadn’t even gotten to Love, Simon, Elite, or ITSAY, yet.

Prior to all this there are some major precursors some of which signaled and primed a receptive market, others influenced the people who'd go on to create the QLs. Japan has a sputtering start in the 2010s with a few BL films (Takumi-Kun, Boys Love, and Jujoun Pure Heart). Most significantly in the American context, you have Glee, and its ending really makes way for the new era that can center gay young people in a world where queerness, due to easy access to digital information, is less novel to the characters. And the QL book and graphic novel landscape was way ahead of the television and film industries, directly creating many of the stories that the latter industries used.

There's plenty of the traditional queer media content (tragic melodramas and independent camp comedies) going on prior to and alongside QL, and there are some outlying queer romance films with happy endings that precede the era but feel very much akin to QL genre tropes and goals, many with a focus on postcolonial and multicultural perspectives (Saving Face, The Wedding Banquet, Big Eden, Maurice, My Beautiful Launderette, and Weekend). I don't mean to suggest that everything I’ve listed ought to be categorized as QL.

Rather, I want to point out how all of these new-era queer romance works are in a big queer global conversation together, in the creation of a new contemporary genre, a genre that has more capacity and thematic interest to include digital technology and normalize cross-cultural relationships than other genres (there's a reason fansubs and web platforms are so easily accepted and integrated to the proliferation of these series).

You're not too late to be part of the conversation. Imagine being alive in the 1960s and 70s and participating in the blossoming of the sci-fi genre. That flowering is where gay romance sits now. Join the party.

#just constantly gob-smacked to be alive right now #i know there's plenty of reason to be horrifically distressed about the condition of the world #queer history #thai bl #japanese bl #korean bl #chinese bl #skam

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neil-gaiman · 1 year ago

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Hello Neil,

thank you for so much for season 2! It was beautiful and felt delightfully Pratchett-esque at some points.

I have a feeling that in the few years between GO 1 and 2 there has been a seismic shift in LGBTQ+ content in mainstream media, lifting it out of the subtext. Do you think that even a few years ago you would have been able to write and film GO2 the way you did? You insinuated that you and Terry already talked about it in 2006 and I cannot believe that an explicit, undeniable romance would have been possible to make with a big publisher or studio back then.

I don't want to sound patronizing or dismissive. I was given a GLAAD award a quarter of a century ago, in 1997, for writing stories for mainstream publishers about gay characters (in that case for Death: The Time of Your Life). These were the same characters comics and stories I was writing when Terry and I were first writing Good Omens in 1989, which was only a decade before Russell T Davies' first season of Queer as Folk launched on UK television in 1999.

I was very happy that the story of Salim and the Djinn in American Gods (published in 2001) was filmed as written in the first season of the American Gods TV show (shot in 2016 and aired in 2017 before we even shot Good Omens Season 1) (and got its own GLAAD love).

So from my perspective this is the same stuff I've been doing for the last 35 years. I haven't seen a seismic shift. I made the Season 1 I wanted to make. I made the Season 2 I wanted to make.

#glaad awards #salim and the jinn

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doyoulikethissong-poll · 10 months ago

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Iggy Pop - Lust for Life 1977

"Lust for Life" is a 1977 song performed by American singer Iggy Pop and co-written by David Bowie, featured on the album of the same name. The song is known for its opening drumbeat, played by Hunt Sales. The rhythm was based on the Armed Forces Network call signal, which Pop and Bowie picked up on while waiting for a broadcast of Starsky & Hutch. The drumbeat has since been imitated in numerous songs, including "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" by Jet and "Selfish Jean" by Travis; however, Sales's use of the rhythm was not original, as it was itself derived from "You Can't Hurry Love", released in July 1966 by The Supremes, and "I'm Ready for Love", released in October 1966 by Martha and the Vandellas.

The song's lyrics contain a number of references to William S. Burroughs' experimental novel The Ticket That Exploded, most notably mentions of "Johnny Yen" (described by Burroughs as "The Boy-Girl Other Half strip tease God of sexual frustration") and "hypnotizing chickens".

In a 1995 interview, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and manager Danny Sugerman stated that the opening lyrics were about their deceased heroin dealer, nicknamed "Gypsy Johnny", arriving at Wonderland Avenue, with his heroin and his "motorized dildos".

"Lust for Life" gained renewed popularity in the late 1990s after being featured in the 1996 British film Trainspotting. The song was heavily featured in the film's marketing campaign and subsequent soundtrack album, resulting in a new UK chart peak of number 26 after being reissued as a single. It also reached number 39 on the US Radio & Records Alternative chart, number 44 in Canada, and number 2 in Iceland. A remix by the Prodigy was included in Trainspotting's 2017 sequel, T2 Trainspotting.

"Lust for Life" received a total of 72,7% yes votes!

youtube

#finished #high yes #low no #70s #iggy pop #david bowie #english #o1 #o12

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fandomtrumpshate · 18 days ago

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Unlisted Fandom Challenge 2025— on your marks, get set, GO!

Not that you need any encouragement — we've got almost as many write-in fandoms now (not even THREE DAYS into signups) as we did in total last year! There are currently 158 write-in fandoms. 158.

And if your fandom isn't here ... we'd love you to sign up as a creator and add it! We're ready to set new records, so let's do this.

This post will include the WHOLE LIST of write-in fandoms. Under the cut because 158 fandoms = very long post. Future Unlisted Fandom Challenge updates will feature portions of the list and info about the rest.

Ready? Okay then:

6 Jeff Satur - Music Videos 4 Control (Remedy Game) 4 Zhen Hun / Guardian (drama and novel) 3 Cabin Pressure 3 Dungeon Meshi 3 Fire Emblem Awakening 3 Fire Emblem Fates 3 Roswell New Mexico 3 Schitt's Creek 3 The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison 3 Transformers 3 Zhen Hun / Guardian (drama) RPF 2 Animorphs 2 BBC Ghosts 2 Biggles Series — W. E. Johns 2 Binan Koukou Chikyuu Boueibu (Cute High Earth Defense Club) franchise 2 Cherry Magic 2 Dangan Ronpa 2 Dead Boy Detectives RPF 2 Detective Conan 2 Dungeons and Daddies (Podcast) 2 Five Nights at Freddy's - All Media 2 Inception 2 Iron widow 2 Kingdom Hearts 2 Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury 2 Sailor Moon 2 The Blue Wolves of Mibu 2 The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (TV series) 2 The Poppy War 2 Tiger & Bunny 2 Tower of God 2 Voltron: Legendary Defender 2 What We Do In The Shadows 2 ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 / JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken / JoJo's Bizarre Adventure 1 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) 1 Alien Stage 1 Among Us 1 Arctic Monkeys/The Last shadow Puppets 1 Avatar: Legend of Korra 1 Baseball RPF 1 BBC’s Musketeers 1 Beyond Evil 1 Black Doves 1 Boygenius (Band)(RPF) 1 Bridgerton (TV) 1 Brokeback Mountain 1 Bullet train 1 Canji Baojun De Zhangxin Yu Chong (The disabled tyrant's pet palm fish) 1 Cassette Beasts 1 Castle 1 Challengers 1 Charmed (1998) 1 Conclave (2024) 1 Danger Force (TV) 1 Dead by Daylight 1 Descendants 1 Destiny 2 1 Digimon 1 Dimension 20 1 Dishonored 1 Dishonored 1 1 Downton Abbey 1 Dr. Stone 1 Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey 1 Emma - Jane Austen 1 Fangs of Fortune 1 Flight Rising 1 Formula 2/3 RPF 1 Ghosts (BBC or American) 1 Grantchester (TV) 1 Gravity Falls 1 Grimm 1 Happy Ending (Thailand TV 2025) 1 Hatoful Boyfriend 1 Haven (TV) 1 Helluva Boss 1 Henry Danger (TV) 1 High School Musical (Movies) 1 Hikaru no Go 1 HLVRAI - Half-life VR But the AI is Self-Aware 1 In Stars And Time 1 IndyCar RPF 1 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 1 Jeeves and Wooster 1 Jet Lag The Game RPF 1 Kane and Feels 1 Kraven the Hunter 1 Kuroko no Basuke / Kuroko's Basketball 1 Law & Order 1 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit 1 Lies of P 1 Live A Live 1 Lord Seventh/Qi Ye 1 Lovecraft Mythos 1 Lucifer (tv) 1 Mass Effect 1, 2 or 3 1 Mononoke (2007 series and 2024 movie) 1 MotoGP RPF 1 My Time at Sandrock 1 NBA RPF 1 Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜) 1 Norah Grant Bruce's Billabong books 1 Oh No! Here Comes Trouble 1 Omniscient Reader 1 Once Upon A Time 1 Order of the Stick 1 Outlast games 1 Over the Garden Wall 1 Pacific Rim 1 Pathologic 1 Persuasion - Jane Austen 1 Pirates of the Caribbean 1 Power Rangers (2017 movie) 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 1 Princess Tutu 1 Prodigal Son 1 Puella Magi Madoka Magica 1 Quantum Break 1 Resident Alien 1 Resident Evil 1 S.C.I Mystery 1 S.W.A.T. (2017 show) 1 She-Ra Netflix 1 Shipwrecked Comedy 1 Slow Horses 1 Sonic the Hedgehog (Games) 1 South Park 1 Spinning Silver (Novik) 1 Squid Game 1 Starkid Musicals (no hp) 1 Stephen King's It 1 Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical 1 Super Sentai 1 The A Team (either the 2010 movie or the 1980s series) 1 The Coffin of Andy and Leyley 1 The OC 1 The Pairing - Casey McQuiston 1 The Paradise of Thorns 1 The Umbrella Academy 1 the vampire diaries universe 1 The Venture Maidens 1 The West Wing 1 The X-Files 1 Thousand Autumns 1 Tron 1 Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles 1 Turning 1 Universal Century Gundam 1 Valdemar Series by Mercedes Lackey 1 video games by Arkane Studios 1 Voltron 1 Wander Over Yonder 1 Watcher Entertainment/BuzzFeed Unsolved RPF 1 White Collar 1 Wind Breaker 1 Wonka 1 Word of Honor 1 X-Files

WHEW! That's a long list! And we'd love to see it get longer :)

If you're thinking of signing up and want to write in your fandom, we encourage you to make a promo post to grab the attention of others in your fandom so they come sign up, too. If you've already written in your fandom and want to see the number of signups grow ... we encourage you to create a fandom promo as well! We have an image generator you can use to add bling to your promo, or browse the 'fth promo reblog 2024' tag for inspiration.

And a quick request — if you are copying the name of your fandom over from the AO3 tags and it contains the | character, please change it to a /. The scripts and sheets in the back end of FTH do not like the | character.

#fth 2025 #unlisted fandom challenge

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newyorkthegoldenage · 6 months ago

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One of the artists commissioned to create a new work for the 1939-40 World's Fair was the sculptor Augusta Savage. A leading member of the Harlem Renaissance, she was the only black woman to be so honored.

Her piece, intended to celebrate African-Americans’ contributions to music, showed a kneeling black man holding a bar of music and 12 black chorus singers representing strings on a harp, the sounding board of which was no less than the hand of God. She called it Lift Every Voice and Sing, a nod to a poem by her friend James Weldon Johnson that was later set to music and adopted as the black "national anthem" by the NAACP.

The work stood 16 feet tall and was made of plaster that had been lacquered to look like black basalt. She was paid $360 for it (around $8,000 in today's dollars) and it was placed in the courtyard of the Contemporary Arts Building, near one of the Fair’s gates. Fair officials renamed it The Harp, which Savage reportedly hated. Small metal replicas were sold as souvenirs, and images of it were reproduced on postcards.

When the Fair ended, Savage had no money to remove and store her sculpture, or to cast the large piece in bronze, as she had with other, smaller works. So, like all the other "temporary" artwork created for the Fair, it was destroyed by a bulldozer.

In 2017, a NY Times op-ed piece by the filmmaker Aviva Kempner proposed that a full-size replica of the sculpture be created and placed in front of the National Museum of African-American History & Culture in Washington. So far, there has been no movement towards carrying that idea out.

Photos: top and center, NYPL. Bottom, illustration from the book Harlem: Negro Metropolis (E.P. Dutton 1940) via The Wolfsonian–FIU.

#vintage New York #1930s #Augusta Savage #Lift Every Voice and Sing #black sculpture #black art #1939 World's Fair #lost artwork #The Harp #1930s New York #African-American art #World's Fair art

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alpaca-clouds · 17 days ago

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"I thought you wanted this!" Religious Zealotism in Castlevania

Something Castlevania Nocturne Season 2 made me think about a lot about is its relation to religious zealotism, and how generally speaking religious zealotism is a theme that has been around since the first season aired in 2017.

And there is one very interesting aspect to this: Only one character escapes the grasp of religious zealotism for good - at least from all we know. And that character is Isaac. (Though I guess we also can talk about Mizrak.)

The Bishop & Emmanuel

The unnamed Bishop, who gets killed by Blue Fangs in season 1 of the show, and Emmanuel both are Catholics. They are similar in their motivation - and yet also very different.

The Bishop is very self-righteous. He claims he is acting in the will of God, even though obviously nothing he is doing has actual basis in the bible - especially not in the New Testament, which I remind you does explicitly state that it does undo a variety of rules from the Old Testament. Lisa was in the end just helping people with knowledge that he did not understand, and he killed her for it. Even if her husband had not been Dracula, who then exacted revenge on humanity for it, probably killing thousands in the process, the bishop would have probably doomed quite a lot of people through it. People, who without Lisa's medicine would have died even without Dracula's genocide. We maybe should not give a whole lot on what Blue Fangs says, but generally speaking I think that his entire thing with "your work makes God puke" is not too far off. Still, the Bishop very much clearly had very successfully convinced himself that he was indeed doing God's bidding. Of course God never thanked him for it, and he - like most other people - eventually ended up being killed by Dracula's creatures.

In Nocturne then we have Emmanuel. I wrote about his motivation already. He is different from the Bishop in that he does not think fully that he is enacting God's direct will, but thinks he is still acting in the name of God. He thinks he works for God, if he stops the heretic Revolution and then also Erszebet. Still, he is of no illusion about the fact that his actions will eventually end him up in hell. It is still zealotism that makes him act like this, though. He is absolutely certain of the fact that he is doing what he is doing for heaven and for God. In this he has convinced himself to not even do the kind of Witchcraft that definitely is forbidden by scripture, as he makes a deal with what he thinks is a demon. But of course, just like other religious men before him, he absolutely is convinced that this is still for the greater good. (Insert obligatory Hot Fuzz reference here.)

And just like the bishop in season 1 of Castlevania, Emmanuel obviously eventually dies because of this, not finding protection through his religion.

Drolta

Drolta is quite interesting in regards to the religious Zealotism, because she is the kind of Zealot that we very rarely see in media.

I talked about it before: Western media at the very least tends to be iffy about depicting religion in any strong sense outside of the religion of a possible exorcist in a horror movie (which tends to be Catholicism, as to Americans apparently Catholicism is a very magic religion, I assume). If we see Zealots they are usually Christian or Muslim.

A kemetic Zealot is something I have never encountered. But indeed, Drolta is a very interesting character through this. I wrote about her motivations, too. Her religion at this point is close to being a dead religion. And then the religious community she has gets murdered around her. She is a member of a cult (aka someone from a polytheistic religion just praying to one of the many gods). And thus she prays for a sign from her goddess. And the first thing that happens after this is that a vampire comes in to feed of the dead bodies. So to Drolta this is the sign she has been waiting for. And she, who clearly is afraid to be ever helpless again, decides the goddess wants her to be a vampire.

Now, she knows her goddess to be dead, and herself now being undead, she also decides that the goddess must want this too. Undead immortality. And thus she starts to reason herself into believing this is, what she has to do. And when she finally is confronted by her goddess she cannot even comprehend, that this could not have been what the goddess has wanted. That indeed the goddess was not aware of what Drolta was doing.

Her case is of course quite interesting in that she indeed gets opposed by her goddess herself, rather than just facing defeat in the end.

Mizrak

Before we talk about Isaac, we should quickly chat about Mizrak, too. Because within this conversation of Zealotism Mizrak is quite interesting exactly for being very, very religious, but not a zealot. Mizrak's religious experience in fact is very much focused on his doubt and his guilt. Yes, he strongly believes in the Christian God and in Catholic doctrine. He see him pray several times, and he soothes himself by saying prayers. Yet, he very much is doubting what gets presented to him. While every other character in this list goes to further and further extremes in the name of their deity, excusing those crimes to themselves by telling themselves it is what the deity wants, Mizrak cannot do that.

Mizrak does not know what God wants, and he does not claim to know. He is in fact at times clearly doubting God, partially probably because of his own homosexuality. Doctrine at the time said, homosexuality was a test given to the people to test them and their devotion to God. But of course, someone thinking critically about this, cannot help but conclude that this means God is quite cruel to test some people like this, and not others.

However, the point for Mizrak gets reached, when Emmanuel is about to kill Maria in his Zealotism. No doctrine, and no religious scripture will convince Mizrak that it is right to kill or even endanger a child - no matter to what end. And this is the point where he concludes that even if this was what God wanted, he - Mizrak - in that case cannot want what God wants, and he will in the worst case stand against God's will, because his moral integrity is stronger than his religious zeal. (This is the reason I like this character so much.)

Isaac

Finally we have Isaac, who is very much interesting in this - mainly in that the show does not quite as clearly telegraph his religious zealotism, if you have not read Muslim scripture (and that is more than just the Qur'an). I have seen quite a lot of discussion about why Isaac is so perfectly happy to commit genocide, despite his deeply held religious believes. After all, religion in general has strong opinions about killing people, right? And even if we were to assume that God was alright with killing non-believers, or non-Muslims specificially, "killing all the people in the world" would definitely include quite a lot of Muslims, right?

If you have however read the scripture, there is enough answer to this question in Isaac's dialogue. He does quote and reference scripture more than once, and from this it becomes quite clear: Isaac believes that the prophecized end times have begun and that he has been chosen by God to enact His will to end humanity, so that all the humans can eventually be reunited with God in heaven. (Please note: While it depends on the flavor of Islam people follow, Islam in general has an idea more closely to Hinduism, in that souls that end up in hell will be punished until their soul is redeemed. While in Hinduism this means a soul is ready for reincarnation, in Islam it means the soul can finally ascent to heaven and it is God's goal that in the end all his children will be in heaven. Which is why Isaac references several times that "hell will be empty". In Isaac's view he pulls souls from hell to enact God's will, which will cleanse them and allow them to eventually ascent to heaven.)

Isaac however is interesting in comparison to the other zealots of the show, as he allows himself to be reached by reason. After the Captain, the shopkeeper and Miranda talk to him, he does eventually come around to the believe that not only he was on the wrong path, but also that his zealotism itself was a sin. Which allows him to stop from going further on this path, and rather choosing a different goal, in which he eventually does want to help people.

#castlevania #castlevania netflix #castlevania nocturne #isaac laforeze #castlevania emmanuel #castlevania drolta #drolta tzuentes #religious zealotism #zealot #christianity #catholicism #islam #fandom meta #analysis

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