#american guilt

[learningfromlosing]

can't tell you how embarrassed I am to be american

[tornbluefoamcouch]

Artista: Unknown mortal orchestra Álbum: Sex & Food Ano: 2018 Faixas/Tempo: 12/43min Estilo: Indie/Psychedelic Pop Data de Execução: 18/10/2023 Nota: 4,8 Melhor Música: American Guilt

[rozecrest]

there are 41 days left to fulfill the municipality of gaza's life-saving campaign!!!

water is life. infrastructure must be rebuilt. about 190k usd are left to reach this goal.

donate here! every dollar gets us closer!

if you have a clean and consistent water source that is a privilege. it always has been in this world. here is a chance to give that back to a place in dire need. take it! this goal can and must be filled!

[intheholler]

[johnbitchsociety]

I feel like both internet liberals and leftists have a tendency to reverse-Great Man Theory Ronald Reagan at the expense of any insight into the history of his policies or the conservative movement that led up to him.

[alwaysbewoke]

the lies white people tell themselves to escape accountability and a real adult conversation on race, racism and history is just so sad smfh

[mad-girlslove-song]

ethel cain literally suffered more than jesus christ

[visuac]

beware of false prophets

[whetstonefires]

wrt whatever's going on in the sandman tv fandom--the thing about Hob Gadling in the format I am familiar with is that of course you can't ignore the slave trading phase. Because the point of Hob is that he's an eight hundred year old Englishman.

that's his basic concept. there's a reason he's a contemporary of Chaucer; Middle English is when English starts to be recognizably the same language, is about as far back as the English can really be considered to have a continuous cultural identity at all.

hob is self-absorbed and self-satisfied and has almost no imagination; he grows as a person, but not really of his own volition. he is totally normal except that he doesn't die.

he is an everyman, and he is an address to the concept of the everyman, to the white Englishman who expects the everyman to look like him as a matter of course. he's history, but he's the particular history of his nation.

in the 18th century the average Englishman didn't think slavery was too terrible a thing, and in the late 20th (and early 21st) century he does, and this is true even when they are literally the same guy.

how does Hob square himself with himself; how does England carry what it has been and done, these eight centuries? what role do your crimes play in your identity? (how do you make moral judgments, if not by general consensus?) it's not a question the story is meant to be able to answer, just to throw into relief.

and of course, recurring theme: you can never leave your past behind you, but you are always more than the sum of your transgressions.

it's just, does that matter? to who?

[bebemoon]

look for the name: MARIA FERNANDA

catholic guilt clothing "icons" corset

jean paul gaultier graphic printed mesh mini skirt in black and grey

r13 low rider leather cowboy boots

christian dior saddle shoulder bag w/ buckle and key charms

{beauty and hair} frances bean cobain c. 2o15

[jukeboxjunk]

flannery o’connor is a great christian writer because she understands the horror that comes with true faith . the operating feeling in her stories always boils down to “isn’t it terrifying, that this is happening and God is real?”

[eddiediazenjoyer]

can i speak. i think that eddie Catholic Guilt is hard to believe and dare i say. not real. for many reasons. one of them being Not All Latinos Have Catholic Guilt especially not in the way that white catholics conceptualize it. and TO ME it’s a bit of a cop out . and i don’t think we should believe eddie when he says that’s the reason for literally anything bc it’s a really convenient excuse for being insane and repressed but i just don’t think it’s true . and i think that something much more nuanced is afoot (aka a complex racial identity and relationship with expectation).

to me he was really like. barely raised catholic tbh. he was raised AROUND folk/cultural catholicism which ofc impacted how he was raised and his perspective. but this kind of catholicism is so different from institutionalized (and white) catholicism it's difficult to even compare the two. and i honestly don’t think that the catholicism is the main problem. like his parents just don’t strike me as being devout in the way that imparts guilt onto their children (they have fun OTHER ways to do this). i think they are traditional and crucially. catholic when it’s convenient and when it allows them an avenue for control (biggest example here is eddie getting pressured into getting married to the girl he impregnated as a teenager.) but to me. this stemmed from complex cultural traditions and beliefs. which catholicism is an easy simple explanation for . but isn’t really the root of the problem. it's a part of it ofc but honestly i think things are often ascribed solely to catholicism bc catholic guilt is a widely applicable perspective when it honestly doesn't make much sense. like i think that eddie being a mixed race mexican-american has more to do with anything than catholicism does. and again. these things are interwoven. but not in a way that it makes sense to blame capital c Catholicism for things where culture (and cultural catholicism) makes way more sense as an explanation

like ik that eddie talks about how he was raised going to mass every sunday etc etc. but even the way he says that he just... stopped... says so much. like the fact that he was even allowed to do that tells me that his parents honestly never really cared that much about that kind of devotion. and the way he talks about it really makes it sound to me like he was one of those kids that never really bought into it at all and so the institutionalized teachings of the church never really got to him. what did get to him however is the folk catholicism/mexican-american teachings of Right and Wrong (aka you get somebody pregnant you commit to them. you feel emotions you tamp them down in order to protect others etc.) and this is not necessarily Catholicism in it's classic conception.

i have no idea if this makes sense and it is really hard to explain how this interplay works if you haven't grown up in it but basically.... hegemonic constructions of catholicism are vastly different from the kind of "catholicism" that i think eddie was raised in. and bc of that i think that "catholic guilt" is a weak explanation for eddie's perspective and best and just. inaccurate at worst. and we should NEVERRRR listen to eddie when he gives too clean of an explanation for his repression. that man is a liar

[tomorrowusa]

Don't think that patiently explaining the legalities and details of the Trump indictment will change the minds of the MAGA crowd about it. Those folks, like Trump, simply don't believe in the rule of law.

There may be some Republicans who secretly believe the charges have merit but are scared shitless of what may happen if they say so in public.

A reasonably healthy party might give its indicted leader some benefit of the doubt, while calling for judgment to be withheld before he has his day in court. But Republicans correctly understand that their party will consider Trump an innocent martyr regardless. The sickness of the Republican Party as it is presently constituted is that there is no conceivable set of facts that would permit it to acknowledge Trump’s guilt. What has brought the party to this point is the convergence of its decades-long descent into paranoia with its idiosyncratic embrace of a career criminal.

Yep, the GOP has been drifting in this direction for a long time. Trump's emergence finally nudged them into being a full-blown paranoid cult.

The Republican Party’s internal culture has been shaped by what Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. Hofstadter specifically attributed this description to the conservative movement, which, at the time, was a marginalized faction on the far right but has since completely taken control of the party and imposed its warped mentality on half of America. To its adherents, every incremental expansion of the welfare state is incipient communism, each new expansion of social liberalism the final death blow to family and church. Lurking behind these endless defeats, they discern a vast plot by shadowy elites. In recent years, the Republican Party’s long rightward march on policy has ground to a halt, and it has instead radicalized on a different dimension: ruthlessness. Attributing their political travails to weakness, Republicans converged on the belief that their only chance to pull back from the precipice of final defeat is to discard their scruples. A willingness to do or say anything to win was the essence of Trump’s appeal, an amorality some Republicans embraced gleefully and others reluctantly. Trump, by dint of his obsessive consumption of right-wing media, grasped where the party was going more quickly than its leaders did. This aspect of Trump’s rise was historically necessary. All Trump did was to hasten it along.

This is Trump's legal philosophy (if you want to call it that) in a nutshell...

Trump was not raised in a traditional conservative milieu. He came into a seedy, corrupt world in which politicians could be bought off and laws were suggestions. He worked with mobsters and absorbed their view of law enforcement: People who follow the law are suckers, and the worst thing in the world is a rat.

Trump is basically a petty mobster. That explains why he hates the FBI.

It is the interplay of the two forces, the paranoia of the right and the seamy criminality of the right’s current champion, that has brought the party to this point. Trump’s endlessly repeated “witch hunt” meme blends together the mobster’s hatred of the FBI with the conservative’s fear of the bureaucrat. His loyalists have been trained to either deny any evidence of misconduct by their side or rationalize it as a necessary countermeasure against their enemies. The concept of “crime” has been redefined in the conservative mind to mean activities by Democrats. They insist upon Trump’s innocence because they believe a Republican, axiomatically, cannot be a criminal.

That Manichean view fits in well with the radical Christian fundamentalist tendency in the GOP. Though instead of Jesus Christ, the credo of Republicans is to accept Donald Trump as their personal Lord and Savior. By that reasoning, Donald Trump is incapable of wrongdoing.

[rosieshipper]

Stan: Leave me alone baby

Rose: *looking mildly sad as she’s curled up inside Ford’s old lab coat*

Stan: *immediately bursts into tears and scoops her up in his arms* You’re my baby! You’re my baby and I love you so much!😭😭

Alternatively

Stan: I never understood why people care so much about their dumb kids. Until I got a dumb kid myself *picks up Rose*

Stan: I’ve only known Rose for a day and a half, but if anything were to happen to her, I would kill everyone in this town and then myself

Tags: @astralshipper @arickaandherfictionalothers @shibasparklez @wolfofthedead

[every-dayiwakeup]

If Billy Hargrove is your idea of evil, you’re a life virgin. Seriously, you must live in a hell of a security bubble.

 An abused teenager who spent the majority of his screen time in tears and being taken advantage of repeatedly isn’t evil. Labeling stuff you don’t understand as evil or problematic... do y’all ever get tired?? 

Being exposed to “the other side” is literally a part of life, and it’s not a bad thing. It can be good for you, actually. 

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

re: last post and rambling thoughts on torture before i pass out - the key thing about represented torture to me is a matter of bodies being humiliated and punished before an audience. there's a distinct line between who experiences bodily torture and gets violated on screen vs. the threat of or implied past torture. more important to me is the matter of who gets visually stripped of power before us, as the voyeuristic audience. when i speak on humiliation - it can be something as simple yet starkly different as dean getting to keep his shirt on while hooked up in hell vs. meg strapped to a table naked in s6. abbadon threatening dean with possession described as a kind of rape (9.02) vs. crowley making a rape joke before possessing sam a few episodes later. (and yeah, stuff like possession falls under the added filter of genre fantasy, separating us from the reality of the violation that's occuring). really, torture just comes down to one thing: what gets shown to us. what gets lingered upon.

no one's free from physical torture/humiliation on this show. but there's a hierarchy for depicted humiliation etched out on the basis of masculinity (a Hero can never appear too weak) and gender - but most importantly, divided by monstrosity/humanity - especially obvious in how it treats its women (thinking on the good charlie/bad charlie plot from s10. who gets brutalised on screen?). there's also the added dimension of race, and the brutality of deaths inflicted on characters of colour on this show. there's a difference between a regular on-screen death and an excessively cruel one. the difference between getting stabbed vs. being made to drink bleach while your wife watches (3.01) vs. your head garroted on screen (3.07). one carries heavier overtones of humiliation. because to bring it back around again - torture is a theatre of punishment, first and formost, just like a public execution. it functions as a warning, but it also acts as a social sacrificial ritual. a means of collective punishment.

and on this show, the lines get blurred between its metaphorical hierarchies (monstrosity/humanity) and incidental inclusion of real world systemic oppression (along the lines of represented gender/race/disability etc.). monstrosity often gets used metaphorically in speculative fiction to stand in for categories of marginalised people, and it also functions similarly on this show. it all boils back down to a fundamental truth: torture, just like sexual violence, just like abuse, is the natural language of hierarchies. it's the language by which power (re)asserts itself. everything falls under the umbrella of systemic violence.

Black Sails S2E1 because this is one of the clearest illustrations of this principle i've seen yet on tv

(yes i'm throwing Foucault's Discipline and Punish onto a harebrained Supernatural meta i'm writing at 2 am. what about it)