#and he started the video off with 'look at this example of far left racism!!!!'

[mx-paint]

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[theliterateape]

I Like to Watch | Zack Snyder’s Justice League

by Don Hall

Mythology is fun.

As a kid I loved reading Edith Hamilton’s book on the Greek gods and the myths. Hercules, Perseus, Apollo, and Hera—this fell completely in line with my love for superhero comics. The strangely petty human traits of envy, greed, and lust combined with the power to level cities make for some great storytelling.

Zeus was basically Harvey Weinstein in the retroactive revision we’re mired in today. If Harvey could’ve changed into a golden animal and boned unsuspecting ladies looking for careers in Hollywood I’m pretty certain he would. The gods and demi-gods of the Greeks dealt with daddy issues, mommy issues, bad relationships, and fighting. Lots of fighting. Sometimes for the good of humanity but more often for the glory of winning.

Zach Snyder is in the business of tackling myths and reframing them with a style all his own. His career has become its own myth.

From Dawn of the Dead (not so much a reboot of Romero's zombie mythology but a philosophical reimagining of the genre that arguably jumpstarted The Hollywood fascination with it), 300 (a borderline homoerotic take on the myth of the Greek underdog), and Watchmen (a ridiculously ambitious attempt to put one of the most iconic takedowns on the potential fascism of the superhero legend machine ever written) to his nearly single-handed hack at answering the Marvel juggernaut with Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder is in the artistic business of subverting and re-envisioning the mythologies we embrace without even seeing them as such.

Snyder's style is operatic. It is on a grand scale even in the most mundane moments. The guy loves slow motion like Scorcese loves mobsters and Italian food. When you're tackling big themes with larger than life stories, the epic nature of his vision makes sense and has alienated a good number of audience members. With such excess, there are bound to be missteps but I'd argue that his massive take on these characters he molds from common understanding and popular nomenclature elevates them to god-like stature.

Fans of Moore's Watchmen have much to complain about Snyder's adaptation. The titular graphic novel is almost impossible to put in any other form than the one Moore intended and yet, Snyder jumped in feet-first and created a living, breathing representation of most, if not all, of the source material's intent. Whether you dig on it or not, it's hard to avoid acknowledging that the first five minutes of Watchmen is a mini-masterpiece of style, storytelling, and epic tragedy wrapped up in a music video.

Despite a host of critical backlash for his one fully original take, Sucker Punch is an amazing thing to see. More a commentary on video game enthusiasm with its lust for hot animated chicks and over-the-top violence that a celebration of cleavage and guns, the film is crazily entertaining. For those who hated the ending, he told you in the title what his plan was all along.

The first movie I saw in the theaters that tried to take a superhero mythology and treat it seriously (for the most part) was Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie. Never as big a fan of the DC characters as I have been of Marvel, it was still extraordinary to see a character I had only really known in pages to be so fully realized. Then came Burton's Batman movies. The superhero film was still an anomaly but steam was gaining. Things changed with Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, then Raimi's Spiderman, and those of us who grew up with our pulpy versions of Athena, Hermes, and Hades were rewarded with Nolan's Batman Begins. A far cry from the tongue-in-cheek camp of the 1966 TV Batman, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne was a serious character and his tale over three films is a tragic commentary filled with the kind of death and betrayal and triumph befitting the grand narrative he deserved.

I loved Singer's Superman Returns in 2006 because it was such a love letter to the 1978 film (down to the opening credits) but by then, the MCU was taking over the world.

Snyder's first of what turns out to be an epic storyline involving perhaps seven or eight movies was Man of Steel. It was fun and, while I had my issues with the broodiness of Kal El, the odd take on Jonathan Kent, and a redheaded Lois Lane, I had no issue with Superman snapping Zod's neck. Darker and more tragic than any other version of the Kryptonian, it was still super entertaining.

Then came Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. By 2016, Marvel had codified their formula of serious characters wrestling with serious issues of power and responsibility peppered with lots of good humor and bright colors. Snyder's desaturated pallete and angst-filled demi-gods was not the obvious road to financial competition.

I'll confess, I hated it. BvS felt half-rendered. Lex Luthor was kind of superficial and played as a kind of Joker. The whole Bruce Wayne wants to kill Superman thing felt undeveloped and the "Martha" moment was just stupid.

When Joss Whedon's version of Snyder's Justice League came out in 2017, I was primed for it to be a turd and I wasn't surprised. So much of it didn't work on any level. I dismissed it as DC trying and failing miserably and was comforted by the coming of Thanos.

Following Thanos and the time heist was COVID. Suddenly, we were internationally sidelined and the movie theater industry caved in. Streaming services started popping up like knock-off smartphones and Hollywood was reeling, doing anything and everything to find a way back. Since Whedon's disastrous helming of Snyder's third act, fans online had been demanding to #ReleasetheSnyderCut but no one was ever really taking them seriously until all movie production was shut down for a year.

The stage was set to remedy a mistake (or at least make some bucks on a do-over of a huge box office failure). Snyder had left the production in part because of the suicide of his daughter and in part due to the constant artistic fights over executives looking for the quippy fun of the MCU but he still had all the original footage. Add to that the broiling accusations that Joss Whedon was "abusive" during the reshoots, the path seemed destined. For an additional $70 million and complete control, Snyder delivered a four hour mega-movie streamed on HBOMax.

Of course, I was going to watch the thing as soon as I could.

The Whedon version opens with an homage to the now dead Superman (including the much maligned digitally erased mustache on Henry Cavill). The SynderCut opens with the death of Superman and the agony of his death scream as it travels across the planet. It's a simple change but exemplifies the very different visions of how this thing is gonna play out.

Snyder doesn't want us to be OK with the power of these beings unleashed. He wants us to feel the damage and pain of death. He wants the results of violence to be as real as he can. When Marvel's Steve Rogers kicks a thug across the room and the thug hits a wall, he crumples and it is effectively over. When Batman does the same thing, we see the broken bones (often in slow motion) and the blood smear on the wall as the thug slides to the ground.

The longer SnyderCut is bloated in some places (like the extended Celtic choir singing Aquaman off to sea or the extended narrations by Wonder Woman which sound slightly like someone trying to explain the plot to Siri). On the other hand, the scene with Barry Allen saving Iris West is both endearing and extraordinary, giving insight to the power of the Flash as well as some essential character-building in contrast to Whedon's comic foil version.

One thing I noticed in this variant is that Zach wants the audience to experience the sequence of every moment as the characters do. An example comes when Diana Prince goes to the crypt to see the very plot she belabors over later. The sequence is simple. She gets a torch and goes down. Most directors which jump cut to the torch. Snyder gives us five beats as she grabs the timber, wraps cloth around the end, soaks it with kerosene, pulls out a box of matches, and lights the torch. Then she goes down the dark passageway.

The gigantic, lush diversity of Snyder’s vision of the DC superhero universe—from the long shots of the sea life in the world of Atlantis to the ancient structures and equipment of Themyscira— is almost painterly. Snyder isn't taking our time; he's taking his time. We are rewarded our patience with a far better backstory for the villain, a beautifully rendered historic battle thwarting Darkseid's initial invasion (including a fucking Green Lantern), and answers to a score of questions set up in both previous films.

Whedon's Bruce Wayne was more Ben Affleck; Snyder's is full-on Frank Miller Batman, the smartest, most brutal fucker in the room. Cyborg, instead of Whedon's sidelined non-character, is now a Frankenstein's monster, grappling with the trade-off between acceptance and enormous power. Wonder Woman is now more in line with the Patty Jenkins version and instead of being told about the loss of Superman, we are forced to live with the anguish of both his mother and Lois Lane in quiet moments of incredible grief.

To be fair to Whedon (something few are willing to do as he is now being castigated not for racism or sexism but for being mean to people) having him come in to throw in some levity and Marvel-esque color to Snyder's Wagnerian pomposity is like hiring Huey Lewis to lighten up Pink Floyd's The Wall or getting Douglas Adams to rewrite Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I loved Snyder's self-indulgent, mythologic DC universe.

So much so that I then re-watched Man of Steel and then watched the director's version of BvS (which Snyder added approximately 32 minutes). The second film is far better at three hours and Eisenberg's Lex Luthor now makes sense. Then I watched Zach Snyder's Justice League a second time.

After nineteen hours of Snyder's re-imagining of these DC heroes and villains, I saw details that, upon first viewing, are ignored or dismissed, but after seeing them in order and complete, are suddenly consistent and relevant. Like Nolan or Fincher, Snyder defies anyone to eliminate even one piece of his narrative no matter how long. With all the pieces, this is an epic story and the pieces left at the extended epilogue play into a grander narrative we will never see.

Or maybe we will. Who knows these days?

[patriotsnet]

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

[cxhnow]

How Chloe x Halle Turned Their Tennis Court Into An Award Show Arena

How the young R&B duo crafted performances during isolation that are a lot grander than just singing into a webcam

For BET’s first virtual awards show this weekend, Chloe and Halle Bailey performed in a haunted jungle lair before appearing in different costumes and moving to a candy-apple set that made it look as if they had been transported to an old TLC video from the ’90s.

Bringing music videos to life for a flashy award-show performance is Pop 101, but the sisters who perform as Chloe x Halle have pulled off high-concept performances from their backyard over the past few weeks, making them a prime example of how artists can navigate album promotion in the age of Covid-19.

“Making the transition to performing at home was natural for us. It reminds me of our YouTube days,” says Chloe, 22. She’s referring to the song covers she and her sister uploaded from their living room as young girls that showed off their knack for creating hypnotic harmonies. Those videos got the attention of Beyoncé, who signed them to her Parkwood Entertainment imprint in 2015 and had them perform on her last two stadium tours.

“Being at home performing to the cameras and trying to build an audience, we’ve kind of gone back to that,” Chloe continues, “but of course now that we have learned a lot more we are able to take it to another level.”

Chloe and her sister, Halle, 20, are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on a Zoom call from their Sherman Oaks home, where they’ve lived with their parents and younger brother, Branson, since relocating to Los Angeles from Atlanta as young girls.

Over the past month, their schedule has been packed with filming performances and doing promotional shoots for their sophomore album, Ungodly Hour (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia Records), the follow-up to their Grammy-nominated debut studio album, The Kids Are Alright. It was released earlier this month and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Top R&B albums chart.

Work on the album was completed in October, and they shot the visuals for their singles “Do It” and “Forgive Me” over a November weekend before Halle left for London to start rehearsals for Disney’s upcoming live-action adaptation of its classic musical The Little Mermaid. And then coronavirus came and changed everything.

“Our plans shifted,” says Halle, who flew home to rejoin her family. “But we feel like this album is supposed to bring some healing and some joy during these times. It worked out.”

Andrew Makadsi is Chloe x Halle’s creative director who helps form the group’s music videos, photo shoots and performances for the release of Ungodly Hour. “As artists were doing more Covid performances, I started to feel like people were being reminded that they were in a pandemic—all of the content began to look and feel claustrophobic,” says Makadsi. “We wanted to create an escapism for people that would make them forget what we’re going through—even if it’s just for four minutes.”

As the sisters spoke over Zoom, a small crew was at work prepping the Baileys’ tennis court for their next shoot. Originally, the court was used because it was an ideal outdoor space to do social-distancing photo shoots—which is certainly the most action the girls, who have only played tennis twice, have given the court. “And then it clicked that we could turn our tennis court into a concert arena,” says Chloe.

“Everyone is wearing masks and practicing social distancing. We limit the people [on-set], and no one comes into the house,” she says of their DIY shoots. “It’s different, but it has been pretty fun.”

A drone circled as they danced in front of dreamy images of water and sky stretched across the court for a Today show performance last month. Dozens of trippy spotlights swirled around them on the court for their appearance as part of YouTube’s streaming event for high school graduates. The tennis court also served as the location for that BET performance where they recreated their music videos for “Do It” and “Forgive Me.”

And when protests over police brutality and systemic racism swept the globe, Chloe and Halle pushed the release date of the album back a week and reached out directly to mobilize fans to action by voting, donating or signing petitions.

“We aren’t able to tour these songs [right now] ... but it has been exciting to be able to do these performances at home, because we want to lift people’s spirits,” says Halle.

Chloe x Halle and their team had to quickly figure out how to handle the album’s rollout, which was originally slated for June 5. They didn’t want to hold the album as they were anxious to release the music, which shows off a side of the women that’s far edgier than their days performing at the Obama White House Easter Egg Roll.

The first hurdle was creating the visuals for their song “Catch Up” after it was selected as the album’s lead single. The pandemic made shooting a traditional video impossible, so Makadsi improvised from his New York home by commissioning an artist in Spain to do a painting of the duo and the song’s guest artist Swae Lee. That image was then animated by a European post-production studio. Chloe and Halle debuted the song during BET’s Covid-19 April relief special from inside their LA garage, with their father and younger brother acting as the cameramen and production crew. “We shot it all on iPhone,” says Makadsi. “It all really started from there.”

The duo says working from home has allowed them to safely push boundaries as performers. As for challenges? “The Internet can be really frustrating,” says Makadsi, noting that he’s banged his head against the wall more than once over poor internet connectivity. Chloe x Halle have filmed only one performance away from home, and that was for an appearance on Global Citizen’s Unite For Our Future livestream this past weekend. They wanted to perform amid a shower of lasers, something that can’t be pulled off outdoors. Instead, they shot at a downtown soundstage with a small crew who followed Covid guidelines.

“It has been interesting seeing how the entire industry has had to adapt,” Chloe says. “The possibilities are endless, and I love it because it’s forcing you to pull things out of yourself that you didn’t know you could do.” [x]

[maplecatra]

i am back for a brief moment!!! so, i live in the USA, if you are curious about the current political situation, here’s what’s going on:

several politician figures who are running for elections for positions have been using social media to say that the blm organization should be caterogized as a terrorist orginization, using the fact that the website says they are looking to disrupt the nuclear family idea and raising their kids in “villages” of friends and family. this way of raising kids, by the way, is very good for them because it gives them a strong community of role models that will help raise the kids and give them a more varied experience with people early on.

antifa, or antifascist, has now been classified as a terrorist orginization.

president trump is continuing to send armed police to peaceful protests, it has been appearing less in the media now. the peaceful protests for justice that aren’t disrupted by the police are not reported on making many americans who haven’t actively been following in support of the the cause believe that there are no longer any protests and that the only protests that happened were turned into riots by bad civilians supporting blm. in truth, most of the violence and rioting is started by either undercover cops or people who came to make the movement look bad.

the current black lives matter protests spurred by the death of george floyyd and pushed on by the police brutality that has killed many innocent black people is now the biggest civil rights movement of all time. there are protesters in most places now, and even the news channels, which are largely supportive of the police and avoid supporting anyone that is a victim of the police recognized the death of george floyyd as completely unwarranted and an outrage. some news channels who had not suported other innocent black people who died from police because of an excuse the cops made have taken a complete 180. others have used the chance to take videos of the riots and censor them to not show what the police have done. at one point, the news broadcasted a video that was cut off of the protests. it cut off right before the police car drives through a group of civilians.

police so far, both in past riots and current peaceful protests have:

blocked ambulances from areas in the riots where people have set up first aid kits.

driven past peaceful protests with a gun out their window

killed a black shop owner who had supplied them with free food previously and left his body in the streets for over 12 hours

gotten extremely physical with peaceful protesters, grabbing people who have done nothing wrong aggressively and forcing them down, or in painful positions.

used excessive force even with a crowd and many people recording, using violent action of protesters not resisting arrest and only not causing possibly long lasting injuries because another cop or another person the cop seems to deem an ally lifts them off at least 2 times

have taken photos with protesters faking peace for the media and tear gassing them immediately

shootig rubber bullets into crowds, which are lumps of rubber a little less than the size of your palm with metal shrapnel designed to ricochet outward. these prices of metal shrapnel have enough power to go through a persons leg, and are lethal as they are. in close range, however, they become even more dangerous and cause more damage and also panic.

used teargass to clear out an area where trump was scheduled to have a photo shoot. after teargassjng all the protesters out he took photos and said some things about how proud and brave he was.

they have gone to the supply tents of some peaceful protests and have broken all the water bottles and ruined the food so they had no supplies

currently, the US is becoming a facist nation. our president has stated that he is against antifa, has quoted hitler in a speech, has set up borders that send immigrants back into dangerous conditions or just take their kids into dangerous conditions. ICE has begun spraying harsh chemicals on and around the detention camp that is irritating the eyes, lungs and skin of the immigrants inside sometimes 3 times a day or more.

closer to the start of donald trumps term, he had disbanded the pandemic response team, and now refuses input from actually doctors and scientists. when they suggested they pause meat plants, donald trump refused and stated that they should keep working. after people started suing meat companies because of covid cases, they brought up an article with a subsection that they stated allowed them to keep working. millions have been wasted on this. upon closer inspection of the article, which was implemented by donald donald trump who stated that meat plants would keep running, does not say that meat plants are legally allowed to stay open.

our current political climate is incredibly right leaning, and bernie sanders is the only current candidate who has somewhat centrist ideas. most people in power are right wing, which means that many ideas donald trump proposes will be approved and anything that the other branches proposed will be approved by trump.

trump has a past of sexually harrasing women. it was leaked by a well known hacker that donald trump had been prosecuted for raping a 13 year old girl. he and jeffery epstein, a pedophile who ran a child sex trafficking ring for high profile people on a private island, had been fighting over who would take the virginity of the young girl. it was said that jeffery epstein killed himself before he could go to jail, but the leading theory and the most likely as well is that one of his high profile clients had him killed so he wouldn’t tell anyone their name.

trump has consistently harmed and mocked many race minorities in the US, and while parading that he has many avid minority supporters. the reality of it is that if you attend a single trump rally you will find only white people.

donald trump has made people feel more confident about being open in their racism. this appeals to many white people who believe minorities want to actively harm them when they try to gain justice for themselves, and especially for white people who were shoving these feelings down because they recognized that it was not a popular opinon but who still felt constantly motivated to share it. trump supporters are always bigoted, even if they don’t believe they are. they believe their opinion is not biggoted despite it showing incredible hypocrisy. for example, some say they support the lgbt community but don’t think they should be in kids media. that shows that they believe that only cishet characters are appropriate. and even if you haven’t heard them say anything biggoted or they say “i don’t support him but he shares my political alignment so i have to vote for him” they are bigoted. simply by supporting a person like donald trump you are supporting his ideals, his action, and a person who acts like that in a seat where he can access much more people who can become victims and can use his position to spread his biggoted opinions on every inch of news

as a result of the protests, donald trump now has a bunker. he has called trump supporters who were yelling and acting rudely “nice people” and peaceful blm protesters “savages”

the government is currently trying to make it harder for local post offices (the USPS) to function. they’re trying their best to pass things and many people haven’t noticed. taking out the USPS would take out local newspapers, which are a very reliable source. they share the voice of the people and do not have a reason to not give unbiased information. this means we will be fed mostly propaganda if this happens.

to bring up old news, i would like to take a moment to remember the time donald trump put the government in lockdown (?? he just basically pressed pause) for i think 60-70 days till the officials were begging him to stop. i don’t remember what happened to spur that on but i certainly still think that the response was inappropriate.

the US is becoming a facist nation. donald trump is putting markers on his supporters by giving them a free gift and mass emailing how to get them. the US is becoming a facist nation and it feels like my world is burning down and collapsing in on itself. people often ask why no one noticed that hitler was a horrible disgusting monster, but the reality of it is that they don’t show it until they’re in power, and then they slowly start to coax people into the idea that he is not bad. even if many americans recognize that donald trump is horrible, a devoted group of many aggressive registered voters just keep falling for it because they are tired of holding their ugliness and hatered toward others in check. no one noticed until minorities started to be put in camps and be killed by the people in power.

i’ve lived in the US my entire life and was always fed on the idea that places in the middle east were always poor and less than the US, that they were pitiful and needed the protection of our armies. i know that’s not true now, but action movies and media keep on circulating the idea that the USA is better than everywhere else and that everywhere foreign (other than canada, no one talks about canada really, and russia, the uk and australia are pretty safe) is strange and gross and any food that comes from them is censored and dulled to fit into one aisle. it’s not right, and young children are still constantly being fed these harmful ideas that they have to unlearn later in life.

the US is becoming a facist nation and the older people in my life, even if just by 2 years, refuse to recognize it.

if your outside of the US, ask any friends there if they have a plan to leave if they need to. it’s heading into a direction where it might become dangerous, the best thing to do is to be prepared.

if you can add on anything about the situation, please do. If youre from the US you can share your feelings on the situation and ways to help as well

[nerdsideofthemedia]

Filmmaking and Bumbleby (RWBY)

I have this posted on the nerdsideofthemedia a while back, but since I’m not going to be writing many more posts here for a while, I’ll post it here too.

This is an analysis of the finale of V3.

Because I am going to talk about writing and filmmaking, so I think I have to say this: I don’t have an education in those fields (so people who do, feel free to correct me). What I know I learned either by analyzing things myself or via reading/watching videos from people who have an education in those fields. While I have attempted to write stuff, so far I’ve thrown everything in the garbage.

Writing process

This obviously changes from a writer to another, but it usually goes something like this: outline (which can be more or less complete or skipped, if you’re one of those), writing, editing, editing, editing. Editing is the phase where one and others read what they wrote and perfect it. A ton of stuff either is cut or is rephrased, entire scenes can be cut, others are put together, etc. Seriously, the first draft and last usually look nothing alike. The number of edits is dependent on the time and experience of the writers. And yes, I know CRWBY isn’t great handling time, so I understand maybe they don’t edit as much as they should or do it in a more superficial way, nonetheless that phase exists.

Kuleshov effect

Kuleshov was a Soviet filmmaker who defended viewers deride more meaning from two sequential shots than one. He did his own experiment, shooting a man with a neutral expression and intertwining these shots with different things: like a plate with food and a dead child. Hitchcock also did a variation in which he showed a close up of a man, then a woman with a baby, cut to the man smiling. In this case, the man is a sympathetic figure.

Then, he changed the middle shot to a woman in a bikini, so it was: close up of a man, woman in bikini, man smiling. And the conclusion is: the guy’s a pervert.

This is the power of editing in filmmaking: create meaning. And to quote Dan Olson (whose video on the Kuleshov effect is linked below): “Because this meaning becomes inherent to the sequence, a careful consideration of placement, order and timing is necessary to both create desired meaning and to avoid undesired meaning”.

Let’s look at RWBY’s “Heroes and Monsters”:

“ I will make it my mission to destroy everything you love”

They hear Yang call Blake, cut to Yang, cut to Adam again.

Then Adam turns to Blake to judge Yang’s importance to her, so we cut to her again and he takes his conclusions.

“… starting with her” 

“Love doesn’t have to mean romance”. Sure, but to use such a loaded word in that context is to put romantic meaning undoubtedly on the table, not just as a possibility, but due to the stakes and how the entire scene is edited as likely. It seems like a pretty deliberate choice since the writers could have chosen to phrase it differently like “I’ll destroy everything you care about”, but they didn’t. And they confirm this was indeed deliberate in V5, when Sun does fight Adam for a while yet, when choosing a word to connect him with Blake via Adam, they went for… “classmate”. Remember the writing process? Editing – still a thing in there too.

The entire scene is done in a way that Adam not only understands the importance Yang has to Blake, but also for the audience to associate the word “love” with those 2, even if Adam only discovers they are in love in V6.

After the fall of Beacon, Sun looks at an injured Blake and Yang while the first apologizes to the latter with tears in her eyes. That shot exists for Sun to realize the connection between the 2 girls, not for him to see Blake injured, otherwise it would have been better if Yang had been kept out of the frame, not to mention that he had already seen her injured. 

No, this shot doesn’t exist to show Sun seeing Blake injured, because he already knew that. When Weiss arrives and sees Yang and Blake injured, he’s already there. Plus, he was the one who told Ruby Yang was going to be OK.

If the point was to make him notice Blake’s injuries, it makes no sense for their hands to appear. Yang would have been kept out of the frame, instead of taking up more space than Blake. If the point was to show him notice an injured Blake, it would have made much more sense to use a sequence like this: 

Sun’s expression should be a bit different in the last to emphasize concern. Or they could have had the entire like the one they showed, but with a different angle in a way to cut Yang out of the frame.

In the original RWBY, the shot of Blake is seen through the perspective of Ruby, not Sun’s. Instead, we only got a shot of him with both girls. No close ups, no particular importance placed on Blake, their hands near the middle of the shot, with Yang taking up more space than Blake.

To me, this is the moment where Sun realizes Blake’s feelings for Yang, it’s the reason why he brings up Yang in V4 after his injury.

CRWBY could have done the same with their hands: Sun – BB hands – Sun again, but this way they left it more ambiguous which was probably the intention. It would have made no sense for them to go for subtlety if it was meant for Black Sun, because the audience was more than aware he was interested in Blake since V1 and subtlety had never entered the equation when it comes to them. For example, when they first meet, it was even used slow motion with him winking at her. I’d say BS was intended to be a red herring from pretty early on.

My previous posts on RWBY:

Bumblebee was Always the Plan

Bumblebee was Always the Plan part 2

Faunus and the White Fang: The Portrayal of Racism

BB & Renora

Weird Post on Weiss’s Clothes

Foils: Adam and Yang (this one is in wordpress; it was my first one and I didn’t have Tumblr then)

Let’s talk about Adam Taurus

(I didn’t post this one on Tumblr because the title and tags could lead Adam fans thinking this was about “his wasted potential” when really it defends the decision of killing him off and explains why it happened)

Kuleshov effect:

Folding Ideas (Dan Olson – watch his videos. He’s great): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy2Vhnqtu8I

Hitchcock explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNVf1N34-io

Kuleshov effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc

[irinapaleolog]

DISCLAIMER: This article is intended for educational and research purposes only. It has been published to shed light and correct understanding on the escalating issue of hatred of women online. By extension, this article also aims to inform readers on right-leaning and left-leaning internet hive minds and their negative influence on culture, politics, and society.

T/W: This article contains mentions of sexual assault, violence against women, suicide, incest, racism, anti-semitism, sexism

If you’re a woman who is active in an online, women-dominated fandom space, then you’re well aware of everything this article is about to tell you.

You’ve read every death threat.

You’ve gone through the sometimes graphic — but always malicious — anonymous message or tweet explaining every way in which some person you’ll never know would like to harm you.

You may have been banned from a fan forum or had your messages wiped from a Discord channel by a bot or mod who decided that your thoughts and your words as a woman were not allowed around here.

You’ll probably remember all the times your sexual identity, your race, or your religious affiliation was questioned and erased.

You have read every time the latest hive mind online has labeled you a sexist. A racist. An abuse apologist. A school shooter. An inbred. A Nazi. A mental case. Inhuman.

You probably know somebody whose had their information put up on Reddit threads or 4chan forums or alt-right YouTube channels for everybody to see. The aim? To determine if maybe they could find ways to hurt that individual in person or — at the very least — make their life a little harder.

And of course, you know all too well that all the threats, lies, bullying, defamation, doxxing, and dehumanization is driven by the internet’s systemic fear over women enjoying media made for them, on their own terms, and on their own time.

We’ve experienced countless cycles of this outrage, ranging from comic book heroes to k-pop. One of the most recent iterations, however, is driven by a desire to see two fictional space wizards kiss in a galaxy far, far away.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what it’s like to be a fan of “Reylo” in the Star Wars fandom, well, it looks a bit like this:

All of the screenshots, located above, catalog a small sample of the four years of hate sent to “Reylos:” fans who are interested in the canon romantic dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. These fans are predominately women.

And, no, let’s get this out of the way: These hate posts, while directed towards fans of a fictional pairing, have nothing to do with fictional characters. This hate has everything to do with policing and punishing women for collectively enjoying fiction in a way deemed incorrect by various political and social agendas. The end goal is always the same — bully these women until they become silent.

Defining a “Bullying Hive Mind:” The “Alt-Right” vs “Antis”

The ways in which bullying hive minds reach this end goal are dependent on the political alignment of the cyberbully. Either they are pursuing an agenda dictated by alt-right circles or one dictated by factions of the progressive left, both of which gained internet popularity in the early to mid 2010s.

Most people — whether it’s because you’ve kept up with the aftereffects of the 2016 election or because you’ve spent anytime on YouTube as of late — are familiar with the alt-right. This group leans male and is driven mostly by insecurity, overt misogyny, and a sense of ownership over what they think are “male-dominated spaces” being overrun by women. It’s another example of extreme conservative thinking: what was mine should stay mine and anybody who thinks differently than me needs to get out of my way.

Arguably the biggest example of alt-right hate and harassment online is Gamergate, an anti-women bullying campaign that first arose on 4chan. The movement’s aim was to push women out of gaming journalism, game design, and gaming fandom by sending death threats, rape threats, stalking women, and dehumanizing women to their peers.

The event bolstered the anger, insecurity, and sexism of young men into an online hive mind that continues today, most notably in Gamergate’s successor “Comicsgate,” which orchestrated the attempted sabotage of Captain Marvel’s release.

These people are not hard to find. They parade their ideas on Reddit or, increasingly likely, on monetized YouTube channels. Their tactics often include spreading misinformation using false “evidence;” discrediting women’s interests by reducing them to “mental cases;” dogpiling; and doxxing.

In Star Wars fandom, this right-leaning group refers to themselves as “The Fandom Menace.” The group was created by former Comicsgate supporter Ethan Van Sciver, who goes by ComicArtistPro Secrets on YouTube. He frequently uploads videos — clickbait title and all — with common alt-right buzz words like “SJW.”

The Fandom Menace was formed in response to The Last Jedi — a more inclusive, forward-thinking addition to the Star Wars franchise that was inspired by the writings of Robert Bly, a leader in the mythopoetic men’s movement. The focus on feminine power and multiple women with complex character development and speaking roles within the film — in addition to the death of Luke Skywalker — powered this hate group to see Star Wars under Disney as “feminist propaganda.” They were driven by the belief that Disney was attempting to erase men from the Star Wars fan community. This led to several targeted hate campaigns including one that ran actress Kelly Marie Tran off of social media.

Where the alt-right works to monetize their hate through public YouTube channels, left-leaning circles are less well known to the general public. Reactionary left-leaning circles that operate within fandom spaces tend to skew younger (mostly generation-z and late millennial) and are predominantly women. They rose in 2015 with the onset of Tumblr and in response to the changing dynamics within “shipping” fandoms. For the uninitiated, “shippers” are groups of people within fandoms who center their attention around a specific relationship within that fandom (e.g. Rey and Kylo Ren).

In online spaces, this reactionary, left-leaning group is better known as “antis.” This name was given to this group after they became known for demonizing, demoralizing, and/or dehumanizing any individual in a shipping fandom who they deemed to be promoting “problematic” content through the fiction they consumed.

Anti harassment campaigns follow a consistent pattern where genuine concerns about real-world injustice are misinterpreted and applied to fictional properties in an attempt to create a 1:1 comparison and exert power over another (often marginalized) group. They start by leveraging performative accusations around real world issues such as sexism, racism, homophobia, sexual assault, and gendered violence against fictional characters deemed by the group to be representative of these problems. The guilt-by-association of these characters is then applied to the people who like these characters, and a general warning is issued: “stop supporting them, or else.”

When this accusation is ignored, it is then weaponized into bullying campaigns that aim to belittle and discredit women through dangerously shallow and irrational pearl clutching. The motivations and levels of participation in these harassment campaigns vary, but they tend to move from one large fandom to the next, focusing on whatever pop culture character will award them the most clout.

As one of the biggest current pop culture “ships,” Reylos have drawn the antis’ ire on both Twitter and Tumblr since the ship’s inception in 2015. The following accusations have been leveled against fans of these characters since 2015. These accusations include:

That Reylos support real life abuse by wanting a romantic pairing between two characters who begin as enemies in an epic myth.

That Reylos are racists because they support a romantic pairing between two white characters.

That Reylos are sexist because Reylos write sexually explicit fanfiction between the “pure” heroine and the “bad guy.”

The importance of these causes and people’s ability to engage with them in good faith is recklessly diminished by blaming valid, real life concerns on women who are enjoying a fictional pair of characters from a film series. It disregards the fact that the women shipping these characters are not a homogeneous group in either their identity or their background. It erases the abuse that some shippers have experienced first-hand — -abuse they should not be forced to out on the internet in order for their shipping to be seen as socially acceptable.

When the Left Leans Right

Launching targeted harassment at any group of women celebrating an enemies-to-lovers ship won’t gain antis clout among their peers. As mentioned previously, Reylo is specifically targeted because it’s arguably the biggest ship in one of the biggest franchises in the world. This means that while Emma Watson said that the enemies-to-lovers dynamic in Beauty and the Beast is about “inclusion and love,” that classic Disney film is old and it’s been done. There is no longer a large, activated community around it, and, as such, there is little incentive to bully the women who enjoy it.

Once antis do decide to bully a ship, however, one of the main accusations leveled at followers of enemies-to-lovers ships is that what they are supporting is “dangerous” to society. To antis, symbolism and subtext in fiction are bypassed in favor of literal and often severe interpretations of a story’s greater meaning. This means that, theoretical little girls and grown women who are unable to separate fiction from reality are put at risk of harming themselves and others because of what they see in fiction.

The irony of this is that a group of mainly women confidently trying to convince other women that they must be protected from complicated romantic dynamics in fairytales is taken from a page in the American conservative playbook that is still used today. For decades, American conservatives have used popular media to scapegoat real issues in society that are easier to pass off as a consequence of the media our society consumes rather than what our society actually teaches and perpetuates.

For example: In 1948, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham began to publish magazine articles and books that claimed that comic books led to juvenile delinquency. While he had no scientific evidence, his writings caused a societal outcry that led to an investigative Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Here, conservative politicians demonized comic book writers and the comic book industry, declaring that “this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding its children, through comic books, a concentrated diet of crime, horror, and violence.”

The subcommittee eventually lead to the Comic Codes Authority — a comics industry created code that put restrictions on the art their creators could produce. The code stifled the industry for almost a decade.

Around the time the subcommittee’s investigation was coming to a close in 1955, the pearl clutching continued on television in a special news report entitled “Confidential File: Horror Comic Books!”

More propaganda video than actual news report, the narrator speaks over several young boys alone in the woods reading comic books. The narrator states:

“When I was a boy and hung with the gang we did a lot of things, we roasted potatoes, we went on expeditions, we tipped over garbage cans now and then, we wrote nasty remarks about the teacher on the sidewalk, but we never spent an afternoon sitting around like this, reading.

What a wonderful thing this would be if they were reading something worth while, something that would stimulate their desires to build and to grow. But they’re not reading anything constructive…they’re reading stories devoted to adultery, to sexual perversion, to horror, to the most despicable of crimes…

One of the wonderfully appealing things about children is that they haven’t yet come to the age where reality and unreality are divorced. The emotional impact of something they read in a comic book may be much the same as a real life situation they would witness.”

The news report goes on to show young boys stabbing trees with a knife and almost killing their friend with a rock after reading horror comic books.

This same outlandish, conservative mindset is what we see today in left-leaning anti culture. The difference now, however, is that these ideals are being regurgitated and repackaged for young girls as each generation of women gains more power within a patriarchal society.

For girls, the preoccupation is not around whether or not they will commit violence, but rather, who they will have sex with and how they will be treated as they grow within a historically male-dominated culture. The idea that women will get themselves into toxic, abusive relationships because they consume hyperbolic myths and fairytales instead of the real consequences of imposter syndrome, insecurity, and the restriction of women to explore their worth in society is no different than what conservatives said about boys in 1950s America. They asserted that boys would become violent psychopaths because they consumed multi-colored panels depicting fictional, exaggerated violence instead of the real life wars our countries waged, fear mongering on the news, or the pro-gun culture surrounding them daily. Both thought processes are damaging to the growth of our societal beliefs.

In fact, the fear and discomfort of women exploring sex within their own spaces is something that is threatening to groups on both the left and the right.

John Boyega’s New Years Eve Tweet: What Caused It and Why Did it Blow Up?

All of the screenshots above were taken within 4 days following a blow up on Twitter involving Star Wars actor John Boyega, a few sock puppets, and whole load of serial anti and alt-right accounts.

If you’ve been on Twitter this year, chances are you have noticed John Boyega trending. The 27-year old actor (best known for his portrayal as Resistance hero Finn in the Star Wars sequel trilogy) gained traction on Twitter New Year’s Eve when he posted a tweet of characters Rey and Kylo Ren fighting (as they do in a movie entitled, well, Star Wars) with the caption “Star Wars Romance.”

To anybody who had never touched fandom Twitter, the tweet appears harmless enough. However, the tweet was successful in doing exactly what it intended and exactly what lurking hate accounts who successfully orchestrated the bullying barrage wanted the tweet to do. It galvanized a hoard of antis and alt-right trolls and their following to — by their own admission — bully Reylos.

This particular incident began with Twitter user @crogman, a sock puppetnow going by the name of @solo_sebes. The sock puppet account appeared on Twitter in mid December 2019 and quickly entrenched itself in a community of Reylos by retweeting and posting Reylo-positive tweets and joining in on post The Rise of Skywalker discourse. The account was also quick to energize antis of the Rey/Kylo dynamic.

Now that the sock puppet is embedded deeply enough into the Reylo community that somebody within that community would see controversy on their timeline between @crogman and Boyega, @crogman tweeted at the Star Wars actor, “bro you’re extremely disgusting and gross also fucking disrespectful…you cannot be this jealous of adam driver dude as a black woman im fucking ashamed that someone like you represented us in star wars.”

The comment was included with a screenshot of John Boyega on Instagram writing “@heyfabrice it’s not about who she kisses but who eventually lays the pipe. You are a genius.”

Boyega’s Instagram comment was in response to a fan suggesting that Rey (played by Daisy Ridley in The Rise of Skywalker) was now available after her canon romantic partner, Ben Solo (played by Adam Driver) died saving her life.

Boyega’s comments upset some fans on Instagram who found that his comments suggested that a woman’s worth in romantic relationships — fictional or not — was a prize to be won by the man who gets to have sex with her first.

The sock puppet account inflamed a situation that would likely have stayed on Instagram. While antis correctly identified that the account was fake and was indeed blackfishing, antis incorrectly claimed that the account was created by Reylos to justify a group of white women attacking Boyega on social media. Instead, the account was clearly a plant meant to goad the actor into directing hate at Reylos.

This is proven by the fact that the account under its new username attempted to instigate hate towards Boyega’s co-star Daisy Ridley in the comments of Reylos’ posts shortly after New Year’s Eve.

Additionally, @crogman was not the only account never associated with the Reylo community that was used to inflame the situation with Boyega. User @FaberLima1 tweeted at Boyega under @crogman’s tweet writing “you are paying mico and only worsening your image. Better stop (and erase while you have time).”

Boyega responded to this tweet with several laugh emojis.

The account @FaberLima1 at the time of this screenshot has 6 followers and no tweets past December 25th. Like @crogman, the account posts Reylo-positive posts utilizing popular hashtags within the fandom including #BenSoloDeservesBetter, a hashtag created by fans of Ben Solo to express their dissatisfaction with his character’s ending.

Also like @crogman, the account was created in July 2019 yet has tweets only traceable in December, signifying that the account has been nuked perhaps multiple times.

Shortly after @crogman’s tweet to Boyega, antis began to push common anti-Reylo accusations. This included accounts who had never actively bullied Reylos. For example, user @sxidey posted several tweets accusing Reylos of “sexualizing Rey,” “harassing John”, and giving “money to the military.”

The latter accusation is a common left-leaning talking point against Reylos who support Adam Driver (a former marine). This particular comment was a reference to a Gofundme started by Ben Solo fans on Reddit. The Gofundme is raising money for Driver’s charity, Arts in the Armed Forces.

The account, however, had only had one recent mention of Reylo two days earlier on December 28th. The account itself is also new, joining in October 2019.

It’s possible that the account is simply a new anti account on Twitter. Regardless, the listing of anti accusations against Reylos almost at the exact time of @crogman’s post reveals the motive of inciting hatred against members of the Reylo community.

Another account, @itsjoey56138220, was also inflaming the situation early on underneath @crogman’s tweet with accusations that Reylos were racist.

Unlike @sxidey, this account has a history of inciting hate against Reylos with outlandish conspiracy theories including one theory that Reylos were created by the alt right who caused “ex Twilight bitches” to make the ship popular. The account has also claimed that Reylos are racist because Reylo shippers want a “whites only romance.”

Boyega, in response to users including two sock puppet accounts with no association to Reylo — and encouraged by anti accounts sewing seeds of hatred across Twitter — finally took to his own Twitter account to tweet:

The tweet, which currently sits at over 190k likes, caused tens of thousands of hateful, targeted tweets towards a group of fans made up predominantly of women and girls. It also resulted in several hate videos by alt-right YouTubers totaling hundreds of thousands of views, several hacked accounts, and the suicide baiting of a teenage girl.

The New Years Incident By The Numbers: How Boyega’s Tweet Set Off The Left and Alt-Right

Following Boyega’s tweet, reactionary users on both left and alt-right Twitter felt further emboldened to hate on a group of women they had been discrediting, dehumanizing, and sending death threats to for years. For myself, the event presented an opportunity, albeit an unfortunate one, to track these groups’ behaviors and quantify them. Ultimately, I had the goal to break down how these incidents are organized to hate on women, whether for purposes of clout or their desire to purge women from fandom spaces.

For this analysis, I took a sample of tweets that contained the word “Reylo” (the search pull also included its plural form “Reylos”) from December 31, 2019 (the day of Boyega’s tweet) to January 3, 2020. After cleaning the accounts to the best of my ability of “pro-Reylo” tweets, I was left with 25,012 tweets that contained negative and neutral comments about Reylos and the Reylo dynamic. I sifted manually through about 7k of these tweets to find key themes, which I verified utilizing a text mining analysis of the tweets.

I emerged being able to quantify the following key themes:

Hate, Trolling, Cyberbullying

Abuse, Toxicity

Racism

Sex, Sexualized, Objectification

Mental, Psychotic, Unhinged

“Hate” received the most individual tweets at ~2.2k tweets and received ~31.4 likes per tweet on average. Tweets containing themes “abuse” and “racism” received a slightly higher avg like count at 38.7 avg likes and 35.4 avg likes, respectively. These themes, along with tweets dealing with “sex” were all mentioned over 1k times.

What this suggests is that a smaller number of accounts with a wider reach were posting more substantive tweets with a focused agenda, while tweets containing “hate’ keywords were more likely to be lobbed out by anyone, including accounts with very little reach.

Tweets mentioning the theme of Reylo fans being “mental” cases had less tweets at 602 total tweets. This theme was pushed strongly by the alt-right circles involved as opposed to leftist circles, which dominated the conversation on Twitter. While this analysis does not focus on the alt-right’s reaction on YouTube, Twitter was used as a place to spread YouTube reactions created by notable Fandom Menace members.

Keyword Group: Hate

The “hate” keyword group quantified tweets containing any mention of trolling, cyberbullying, or hate towards Reylos. The fact that “hate” reveals itself as a top keyword provides further evidence that this event was viewed as implicit approval to bully a group of fans consisting predominantly of women. Anybody involved in sending Reylos hate were, by their own admission, the bullies and were cheering John on for “trolling” women and “putting [women] in their place.”

“Reading Reylo hate to cheer myself up”

“I don’t like Finn’s character either, but I love how John is putting Reylos in their place.”

“Seeing John Boyega troll the Reylos is the greatest way to end 2019”

The clear agenda to send hate towards a group of women and teenage girls was further validated by the fact that the incident was received positively by all sides of the political spectrum, from “progressive” antis to members of the alt-right. The members included the Fandom Menace and alt-right leader and Pizzagate supporter Jack Posobiec.

Both groups took advantage of the situation utilizing the same tactics they typically employ. The alt-right took to YouTube and Twitter to discredit women among their followers by using buzz-words such as “SJW” and “Twilight.” “Twilight” — which was mentioned 103 times in association with “Reylo” between 12/31/2019 and 1/3/2020 — is often used to describe any piece of media enjoyed predominantly by women.

The goal is to degrade women’s interests among their peers by pushing the narrative that Reylos are silly girls consistently preoccupied with the same trivial, valueless media.

Examples of tweets from the alt right include the following:

“John Boyega ripped the Reylo’s a new asshole. You haven’t seen this many acne riddled fatty Tumblr Girls lose their shit since Twilight ended.”

“My thesis: Reylos and most of these Neo Star Wars fans are just ex Twilight fans and self hating beta male cucks who attached themselves to the franchise like parasites. Next they will glom onto whatever film series is hot and continue their rot.”

“StarWars was so great before Disney. Now its plagued by psychotic Reylo fans, Tumblr freaks, representation-screeching SJWs, radical feminism activists, ex-Twilight fans, &wine-guzzling Disney-fan mothers caked Karen. &these are the people they’re now targeting for their fandom.”

On the other side of the spectrum, long-time anti accounts spearheaded the harassment of Reylo shippers, leveraging Boyega’s tweet to bombard Reylo shippers with hate messages. This included viral tweets from accounts with a history of anti behavior across multiple fandoms, along with multiple tweets from accounts with history of targeting Reylos.

For example, Twitter user @Iovestour tweeted, “oscar isaac going off about disney’s blatant homophobia & john boyega telling reylos to fuck themselves all within two weeks i love men men are my friends.” This tweet has more than 48k likes. You’ll be hard pressed, however, to find any tweets by the account past November 2019, even though the account has been active since March 2018.

All tweets made under the account’s former name “blinkapologist” have been deleted — a trait uncharacteristic of your normal Twitter user just looking to share their opinions and maybe curate the news. Past tweets (to which blinksapologists’ tweets and replies have been deleted) reveal a pattern of anti behavior including a history of going after individuals supporting fictional characters the anti finds problematic, utilizing extremist parallels to real-life events.

A reply to @Iovestour in June 2019 reveals the user had allegedly called victims of the Holocaust Nazi supporters. The accusation appears to have been said to supporters of Marvel character Wanda Maximoff.

Along with antis with history across multiple fandoms inciting hatred against Reylos, this event also revealed itself as a targeted harassment campaign due to the frequency in which some accounts tweeted at or about Reylos.

Boyega’s tweet caused some anti accounts within this sample to tweet over 50 times about Reylos in the span of 4 days including sadgeorgelucas1, who tweeted about Reylos ~100 times, drhorotiwtzfine, who tweeted about Reylos ~75 times, and saltandrockets, who tweeted about Reylos ~65 times.

This is not abnormal. Several of these top accounts were also consistently bullying Reylos. The accounts highlighted in red in the chart below are anti-Reylo accounts that were also included as mentioning Reylo frequently between December 31, 2019 to January 3, 2020. This includes once again drhorowitzfine, who has mentioned Reylo negatively ~1,150 times between 2017 to 2019. Other top anti accounts include winniethepoe1, who tweeted about Reylo ~320 times from 2018 to 2019 and ~25 times during Boyega’s New Year’s Eve incident.

Of course no harassment campaign can be waged without finding ways to make the people being bullied look like they were worth being bullied. One of the two main “arguments” thrown against Reylos included the predictable anti accusation of Rey and Kylo’s “abusive” relationship poisoning the mind’s of women and girls. Since Reylo shippers had made the decision to create transformative works and discuss a fictional romance found to be impure by the antis, Reylos could now be cyberbullied in real life for their morally reprehensible decisions.

Reylo is also referred to as “abusive” because some still try to stretch the narrative that Rey and Kylo’s relationship is incestual, and therefore Reylo’s are promoting incest.

The idea that the relationship is incestual goes back to a 2016 fan clash over who Rey’s parents were. Many fans wanted Rey to be a Skywalker or a Solo, which would make her related to Kylo Ren, the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo. The event involved Reylos being frequently lobbed with accusations of incest, and they were at one point banned from discussing Rey and Kylo’s dynamic on a popular Star Wars forum, Jedi Council Forums.

Another common theme was that Reylos were “toxic.” This theme was mostly fed by alt-right circles and originated with a post by Fandom Menace supporter Dataracer117, who has a history of harassing Reylos.

Dataracer117 has a history of voicing his contempt for Disney and their “radical feminist propaganda.” This is most notably seen in his involvement in Comicgate’s attack on Captain Marvel. This included digging up screenshots by fans of Captain Marvel who spoke out against the sexism being aimed against the film, accusing all the accounts of being “Captain Marvel bots.”

Like the Captain Marvel incident, Dataracer117 posted a tweet with screencaps that Reylos were allegedly sending death threats to JJ around the time of Boyega’s tweet. Despite Dataracer117’s history attempting to devalue women in fandom communities and despite the screencaps being debunked by the Reylo community, the screencaps gained traction around Twitter, YouTube, and in media publications including Buzzfeed. They were further used to create the narrative that Reylos are “unhinged.”

This narrative inflamed alt-right accounts, and they began to frequently frame Reylos as mental cases. Discrediting women is nothing new (in fact you can easily read about it in this essay on Western puritanical conditioning against women in the 17th century), and is to be expected from a community who dedicates their time to driving women away from their online spaces.

The second accusation that was used to fuel harassment against Reylos was the claim that Reylos were racist against Boyega. They claimed that Reylos’ harassment of the actor led women to be upset with Boyega over his Instagram comment. This led to harassment on his Twitter — which remember, was started by a sock puppet account not associated with the Reylo community.

While racism is a prevalent concern that needs to be addressed within all fandom communities-and questions over inherent privilege due to one’s community are something to be examined-no support was given to back up these particular claims about the Reylo community during this incident.

This is not to say, however, that isolated incidents have not occurred outside of this specific accusation within the Reylo fandom, as they would within any large and global group of people. However, these incidents are statistically insignificant to the population of people who discuss Reylo positively on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (which, according to the sample number of accounts who have discussed Reylo between 2015 to 2019, can be quantified at over 40k individuals. The true number is dependent on how many accounts — currently almost 70k — discuss Reylo negatively within the sample).

This particular accusation of racism has several layers to it and I would like to break them down separately.

“But Reylos Read Explicit Fanfiction”

The first part of this is that the nature of Boyega’s Instagram comments allowed antis and alt-right circles to attack Reylos on NSFW fanfiction and fanart written and drawn for and by women. It also allowed antis to draw more criticism around the ways in which Reylos analyzed The Last Jedi, a film with many allusions to the writings of psychoanalytics including Sigmund Freud.

After the release of The Last Jedi, the Reylo community, who had written long form meta analysis on the Star Wars saga since 2015, wrote lengthy metas about the symbolism in the film. Much of this symbolism was reflective of Rey’s sexual awakening throughout her journey in the movie.

Antis took issue with this and saw this as “sexualizing” Rey’s character. They asserted that women exploring sexuality through the lens of a fem-gaze narrative written for women was appalling, degrading, and out of line.

For anti and alt-right circles, the Reylo community’s openness to discussing sex in Star Wars through meta, fanfiction, and fanart by women (and generally for women) meant that Reylos could not take offense to Boyega’s questionable comment that suggested to some of his fans that Rey was a sexual prize to be won. The narrative antis spun was wholly unable — and unwilling — to separate women discussing sex in their own communities as different from men offering their sexual “jokes.”

This justification for bullying Reylos felt eerily similar to “she was wearing that, she asked for it.” It’s a highly socialized sexist line of reasoning women deal with daily and one that was readily accepted in this incident.

2. “But Reylos Ship Rey With The White Character”

Since 2015, Reylos have been accused of racism on the grounds that Reylos did not prefer Rey to be in a romantic relationship with the black male protagonist. This claim is presented without any evidence to back up the accusation.

Furthermore, the people who ship Rey and Finn (known as “Finnrey”) have done little to celebrate this pairing and act as a fan community. In fact, they have consistently acted more like a group that seeks to find ways to activate hate against Reylos instead of create content for their ship.

The two data visualizations below show every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Reylo” between 2015 to 2019 vs every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Finnrey” between 2015 to 2019. The gray in these charts represent the number of accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. The purple represents the overlap — that is the accounts who have tweeted at least once about the other ship.

The first observation is that the number of users discussing “Finnrey” is small in comparison to the number of accounts discussing “Reylo.” Finnrey was mentioned by 7,780 accounts while Reylo was mentioned by 69,484 accounts.

As mentioned, gray = accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. Purple = accounts who have tweeted about at least one other ship. So, in this case, out of the ~7.8k accounts that tweeted about Finnrey, ~60% of accounts mentioned “Reylo” at least once (4,665 accounts total). This number represents only ~7% of accounts who have ever talked about Reylo.

This data is supported by other statistics comparing the two ships. For example, on fanfiction website Archive of Our Own, the fic tag for Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren has ~16k fics. There are another 12k fics in the tag for Rey/Kylo Ren. The fic tag for Finn/Rey has under 2k fics.

3. “Reylos Have Bullied John Since 2015”

The most damaging false claim to come out New Year’s Eve was that Reylos had been attacking Boyega (and other Star Wars actors) with racist tweets since 2015.

It is very true that the actor has received heinous racist attacks. Most notably, the actor was attacked on social media following a #BoycottEpisodeVII hashtag that was started by two 4chan trolls in an attempt to get racist Star Wars fans to take the bait. It is well known that this hashtag was the work of racist alt-right accounts.

Since the hashtag, other attacks have been levied on Boyega. One of these attacks included a surge of outcries against him by The Fandom Menace, after a tweet posted in June 2018 stated: “If you don’t like Star Wars or the characters understand that there are decisions makers and harassing the actors/actresses will do nothing. You’re not entitled to politeness when your approach is rude. Even if you paid for a ticket!”

The Fandom Menace took the opportunity to bring their anger over Boyega’s comments to Twitter and YouTube, much like Comicsgate did when Brie Larson spoke in favor of diversity.

Reylos, however, are now being blamed for these attacks without any supporting evidence. They are also being blamed for the harassment of Kelly Marie Tran. The actress was bullied off of social media by alt-right trolls on her Instagram page, along with antis who saw her character kissing Finn as “sexual assault.”

You will not find any evidence linking the Reylos back to the targeted harassment of any Star Wars actors over the years. Predictably, however, you will find that the people who used this accusation to their advantage admitted that their own motive was bullying.

For example, Twitter user @notlipglosse tweeted “the way this man waited until he got his last star wars check so he could freely make fun of the racist stans who have bene harassing him since 2015 %@&@*!?!?!?” This tweet (at the time of the screencap) gained ~92.2k likes. A tweet posted on December 19th, however, reads “the way we’ve been bullying Reylo stans and calling them delusional and they won…,” further supports the data that this incident was about inciting hatred towards a group of fans predominately made up of women.

Another example is from user @irisckp. Shortly after Boyega’s tweet, the user tweeted “NOT THIS REYLO AND HER MUTUALS ACTING LIKE JOHN BOYEGA HAS BROUGHT SOME TYPE OF OPPRESSION WHEN HE WAS RACIALLY ABUSED BY REYLO’S FOR YEARS. HE HAD EVERY RIGHT.” Again this tweet was presented without evidence that Reylos had “racially abused” Boyega.

The tweet is referring to a livestream from a young woman in the Reylo community who candidly expressed discomfort over the false accusations and bullying. The livestream was taken by antis and used to further bully the young woman.

This bullying eventually descended into suicide baiting that resulted in the woman’s account being deleted. However, this did not stop antis from pushing the woman to kill herself. It also did not stop them from telling the teenager’s father, who had gotten involved in combating the harassment, to “live tweet your reaction when you find your daughters lifeless body dangling from her rooms ceiling fan.”

After @iriscpk’s initial tweet, the user admitted that they had “never seen Star Wars” (like a portion of antis bullying Reylos that night) and that “Reylo” is used as an umbrella term for their unsupported accusations of racism against Boyega.

The tweets again reveal that viral tweets making accusations against Reylos had no merit, and were not based in any evidence they had seen with their own eyes. These users were looking to be involved in the latest conversation despite the lack of evidence or knowledge and despite the real harm being done to the community the tweet targeted.

This supports the hive mind behavior behind this cyberbullying attack. There was no concern for any person hurt. There was no concern for the misinformation that was being spread. And there was no concern for the very real issue of racism in online spaces.

This was only ever about a group of women getting hurt and, hopefully, getting off the internet altogether.

Why This Matters and What This Means for Art and Society in The Digital Age

If you have gotten this far and you find this article absurd, you should. This much vitriolic hatred, ugliness, and anger over women analyzing and creating media for a romantic pairing in a Hollywood blockbuster is, to put it mildly, overblown. Unfortunately, it’s the reality. And it’s a reality that has even deeper repercussions if not addressed.

I wrote this article not only in a hope to correct the misinformation against a group of women in the Star Wars fandom, but also to address a larger issue of what it means when these hate campaigns are so readily accepted by the general public, by journalists, and by other fans.

The internet will continue to evolve as it already has. It will evolve into an ecosystem that will touch every single moment of our lives. It is a future that will be as brilliant as it will be terrifying and when we are so willing to demonize a group of women with no evidence but a tweet with a lot of likes, it shows that we are not prepared.

We are living in an age where art is being dictated to what a few executives read online, or what a data analyst may write up in a report. We have seen how Disney has made a movie based off of fan service easily found in Reddit threads. We have seen Paramount shift the schedule of an entire film to redesign a character after apparent outrage. We have seen Disney remove James Gunn from a major movie project following a targeted alt-right campaign to get him removed. And we have seen this with Warner Brothers choosing to green light their films using AI.

This pattern is concerning in part because we are willing to create art via algorithm. But, it’s also concerning because, unless these algorithms are properly coded and taught overtime to understand hive mind mentality, the machines that churn social listening data will be regurgitating intelligence corrupted by organized and hateful groups. These groups aim to restrict freedom of speech, diversity, and meaning in our art for the sake of political agendas laking any evidence, any substance, or any valuable goal.

I also wrote this article because it is not only our art that is at risk, but the ways in which we communicate as human beings online. The ability to see individuals — namely women — as inhuman or as less than with no second thought is something we should all understand is a problem. We have a deep inability to question what we see on our Facebook feeds, our Twitter timelines, or in our Instagram photos . We also live in an age where entire governments are being overturned by algorithms and social media ads. We are quick to blame Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and YouTube for this, and yes, while, those platforms have a responsibility of their own, we need to realize that it is our responsibility as well to always question what we see and search for evidence if it is not provided to us.

This example of bullying women in an online community is not necessarily synonymous with political elections, but it still presents yet another moment where people are failing to believe hard evidence over buzz words, sensationalized headlines, and clear, often spelled out agendas.

Until we learn not to react to everything we see, and listen to the people around us who come with facts, this type of behavior will continue, this type of behavior will get worse, and this type of behavior will impact us politically, socially, and culturally as we become more and more integrated as a digital society.

On January 10th, John Boyega posted a video to his Instagram account showing himself mocking tweets by women in the Reylo community. He did not blur out the names. These women were specifically targeted. The event created ~50k tweets continuing to bully women. Media outlets including Forbes, IGN, Cinemablend, Esquire, and The Wrap picked up the story. They all applauded the video.

In response, Reylos trended #reylolove — stories about how women in the community had positively impacted their lives.

They also created a charity event for anti-cyberbullying charity Cybersmile, which you can donate to here.

[bigtittyhimmler-blog]

Luke Turner fights antisemitism

It is without pleasure that I must announce that the door of the third bathroom stall to the left in Berlin Ostbanhof train station has chosen to participate in a virulent antisemitic hate campaign against me by slamming itself shut on my exposed dick, inflicting serious damage to my penile tissue, and causing the end of my dick to turn purple and swell alarmingly. While this attack was shocking, it was sadly not unexpected. Doors have a long and documented history of collaboration with far-right ideology. For instance, the Nazi architect Albert Speer’s designs frequently involved doors or door-like structures. This attack was clearly intended to evoke cruel and disgraceful antisemitic tropes: by mutilating my dick, the door alluded to the notion of the ‘castrated Jew,’ while also mocking the religious practice of circumcision.

This vile attack has forced me to withdraw from the bathrooms at Berlin Ostbanhof train station, where I can no longer allow strange men to fuck me in the ass. I encourage my fellow artists, writers, and curators to do the same. I suggest that the train station be demolished entirely, and replaced with a public showing of my 2014 artwork WHAT IS A TWIG, consisting of a black canvas printed with the words ‘what is a twig’ in a different shade of black. I have written to every company that posted advertisements in the Ostbanhof, asking them why they continue to support structurally antisemitic institutions. While I am still awaiting a reply, I am shocked that trains are continuing at stop at this station, literally platforming abuse.

It should be obvious why this is taking place. The violence against me has severely disrupted #TRUMPISARIGHTWANKER, a performance art piece in which I livestream myself gently masturbating for eight solid days to footage of my previous work, #TWOFINGERSFORTRUMP, itself a video installation that shows me masturbating to my 2017 intervention, #BUGGERTRUMP. (This last work, an extended touring project, was sabotaged by alt-right fascists who perforated one of my testicles with a kebab skewer.) My art aims to create a participatory, welcoming, and loving digital space in which the public is invited to take part in the process of artistic production by telling me how wonderful I am. As such, it’s a powerful rebuke against the politics of racism and division.

I wish I could say that this assault was an isolated incident. However, as a result of my courage in speaking up against people I don’t like, there have been multiple racist attacks on me and my work from within the art world in only the last 36 hours:

Instagram user “@squantblort” published a photograph of a frog sitting on a lilypad. The frog has an unfortunate association with the fascist ‘alt-right’ movement, which has repeatedly threatened, harassed, wedgied, and humiliated me. This image was ‘liked’ by CUNY adjunct Daniel Daintree, a supposedly ‘left-wing’ intellectual who clearly has no problem indulging in racist imagery. I demand that Daintree be fired.

Well-known New York artist Julia Klurpell had a dream about me in which I was a glob of tar floating in a gutter. Associating Jews with gutters, filth, disease, and sewage is a rancid and ugly antisemitic trope, deployed frequently in Nazi propaganda. Despite the art world’s silence on this utterly unacceptable dream, I’m brave enough to insist that there is no possible excuse for platforming racist harassment inside your own head. I demand that Klurpell submit to a full frontal lobotomy.

In the Crafts 4 Kidz workshop in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, an eight-year-old boy failed to spin a bowl on a potter’s wheel, and said that ‘the Turner is stupid.’ Attributing personal failures to Jewish influence is a shocking and vile antisemitic trope. By allowing this child to remain on its premises, the Crafts 4 Kidz workshop has directly platformed hate speech and enabled harassment against Jewish artists. I demand a) a full and sincere apology from the workshop b) that the child be permanently deplatformed from Crafts 4 Kids, along with all other workshops, galleries, exhibition spaces, biennales, and places that look nice, c) that before he’s ejected the child’s ceramics are smashed in front of him, d) that all Crafts 4 Kids employees take turns stamping on the shards of broken pottery, and e) restitution of $1.6 million. Only then can the Crafts 4 Kids workshop begin to repair the damage wrought by its long history of complicity with fascism.

The Louvre is in Europe, a continent historically occupied by Nazis, and contains none of my works.

When I started furiously retweeting myself about all this, twitter user “@homosexual_kumquats” harassed, gaslit, and cruelly taunted me, telling me to ‘calm down dude’ and ‘get a grip.’ This gaslighting is clearly an example of antisemitic denialism, insinuating that Nazi hate crimes like the Holocaust or the eight-year-old boy’s pottery comment were ‘false flags,’ invented by Jews. Who is “@homosexual_kumquats”? How are they connected to the violent hate campaign being waged against me by the door, the frog, the dream, the child, the Louvre, the sky, and the moon? I am going to spend three months exhaustively going through their social media history. I am going to find out where they live, and install listening devices in their home to see if they ever laugh at any joke at my expense. I am engaged in calling out fascism and antisemitism in the art world, and if anyone publicly states that this is ‘bizarre’ or ‘creepy’ or ‘obsessive,’ or that I’m a ‘dead-eyed narcissist,’ or that I’m ‘pathologically fixated on trying to cause suffering for others under the flimsy pretense of fighting oppression,’ or that I ‘hide behind a Jewish identity to deflect any and all criticism of my stalkerish fixations,’ or that I believe ‘all such criticism of myself or my deeply weird behavior is inherently illegitimate and racist,’ or that I’m a ‘big dumb crybaby bitch who can’t stop writing open letters every time someone upsets me,’ or that I’m ‘the heir to the vast Turner-Bianca PLC textiles fortune, and have used that money to buy myself an art career I don’t really deserve, which is kinda par for the course in the industry, but instead of actually producing any worthwhile art I’ve chosen to deploy my incredibly privileged position to mount endless crusades against extremely marginal art-world figures while ludicrously positioning myself as a perpetual victim,’ or that I’m a ‘habitual liar and hysteric,’ or that I’m ‘drunk on moral self-righteousness,’ or that I ‘keep pretending that the contemporary art scene, which is probably the safest place for Jewish people in the world, is actually a hive of antisemitism, because some weirdos who make frog sculptures don’t like me,’ or that I’m ‘riding the coat-tails of a popular and necessary movement against fascism to pursue my own personal vendettas,’ or that I ‘seem to take particular delight in trying to disrupt the careers and livelihoods of young women,’ or that my face ‘looks like a squished bug,’ or that I ‘got my dick trapped in the door at a train station bathroom while jerking off to footage of myself and now it’s turned all gross and purple,’ then this can only be because they’re fascists and antisemites themselves.

[yes-supreme-justice-blog]

Open Letter To Forsyth County

FORSYTH EXPOSED

Open Letter

An Open Letter To Forsyth County

August of 2018, a 19-year-old UGA student didn’t return home on time, the overly zealous and dramatic parents of Byron Grogan, contacted the police. The Forsyth County Sheriff’s department, outside standard procedures in a missing person, is reported, initiated a full-scale search effort. Enlisting the help of Park Rangers, members of the community, the media, and even police dogs. Byron was safely found alive when he stumbled into his parents Suwanee home in the wee hours of the night. Forsyth County utilized the best of the best, of their resources when a 19-year-old white resident sent all of his parent’s calls to voicemail. Three months later, Tamla Horsford, also a resident of Forsyth County was found dead, in the backyard of her friends home. Forsyth County then assigns it’s the dumbest investigator to supervise the case, Andy Kalin. Byron Grogan got helicopters, boats, community shock and worry, and even a police dog and all Tamla Horsford got was Andy Kalin. Tamla Horsford was black.

Dear Forsyth County, I have some questions.

I have poured over hundreds of hours of video and social media post, before writing this letter. I wanted to get a better understanding of, what #blacktwitter was calling a murder and a poor attempt at a cover-up, in Tamla Horsford’s death. And like Forsyth County, I spent all that time investigating and I am still not any closer to understanding any of this. But, unlike the Sheriff’s department, I actually proofread my stuff before releasing it.

This subject matter evokes a lot of emotion within my soul. This letter has been weeks in the making, I did not want to get too far off topic or too deep into my feelings when addressing this subject matter. But music has been my outlet since I was a child, it has given me a way to express my emotions when I had no words, it has been the noise I needed when I could not sleep. And music has been the soundtrack of my life. My favorite artist is Michael Jackson, his music moves my feet and my soul’s conscience, with his help, through his lyrics, here is my

Open Letter To Forsyth County.“Carry me / Like you are my brother / Love me like a mother / Will you be there?”

November 4th, 2018 Jeanne Meyers made a call to 911 to report her friend was unresponsive in her backyard. As per her statement, she began to call 911 before even seeing the lifeless body in her yard. What stood out to me the most was her tone, it was flat and had no emotions.

So this is where it gets odd for me. During the 911 call, Jeanne’s voice is, slightly labored but calm, she’s middle-aged and out of shape. She speaks in a very matter of fact tone. Without being prompted, she gives the 911 operator her alibi, which is again, is odd to me. Her friend is lying lifeless, and instead of asking how to help, she’s walking the 911 operator through her version of events. This is called an alibi.

Jose Barrera then takes control of the call and talks to the 911 operator. He introduces himself to her and I am sure they know each other. As if almost on cue, with no prompting, Jose begins to walk the 911 dispatch operator through his version of events. And refers to his girlfriend’s friend, as “the woman we believe to be deceased.”

Looking at her as she lay motionless, probably pacing back and forth, walking the 911 operator through his poorly constructed alibi. Jose continues on, the 911 operator asks him, repeatedly did he assess her, or did he check her pulse? “NO, but I did bend her leg back, and she appears to be stiff.”

During the entire 911 call without “assessing her,” he believes that she is dead, not one of the 4 people present, attempts to provide aid to her when the police arrive no medical personnel accompanies them. No statements are taken that day, her car is driven to her home be police, and aside from crime scene tech taking photos to illustrate how her body was positioned, no evidence was gathered and no statements were made.

According to online training documents that I found online, basic standards for training of Probation officers involves CPR. Jose Barrera failing to administer aid to Tamla Horsford, given his training and employment background and after repeated prompting by the 911 dispatcher is somewhat suspicious

Responding officers, crime scene techs, and the coroner where on scene, but medical professionals were noticeably absent from any of the reports given to open record. By Georgia law, a medical professional has to present to declare a person dead according to § 31–10–16.

As Michael Edward Christian, walks around Jeanne’s backyard and speaking to his pal Jose, he requests that all the guest present who left return. As they do, I am sure he probably trips over his own two feet somehow and notices an inanimate object in the grass, and declares she had a medical emergency from a ground level fall and then succumbed to her injuries a few hours later. Remember Byron Grogan got police dogs, Tamla’s death investigation was done by Michael Christian and Andy Kalin.

“If they say, why, why, tell them that it’s human nature.”

And 2 weeks later, Jeanne produced an email from ARLO stating the batteries in her camera were dying, and they needed to be replaced. And in the forwarded email to Detective Christian, Jeanne alluded that she was not astute enough to know how to replace the batteries in the cameras.

A quick trip to Best Buy and a phone call with ARLO determined this to be a lie. If Jeanne has ever replaced batteries in a child’s toy or even a sex toy, I am sure Jeanne would have been able to change them. She has 3 sons, a boyfriend under 30 and an ex-husband, and none of these people were able to help Jeanne change some damn batteries, I call foul.

From the beginning, this investigation clearly was not a significant concern or important to Forsyth County. “Persons of interest” interviews took place days later including one that happened 3 weeks later. More than enough time for possible corroboration, cover-ups, and lies.

As Jeanne sat next to her aunt Madeline Lombardo, as if she were assisting one of her children with their homework. Jeanne Meyers directed her aunt on what to write in her statement. And while her aunt gave detectives her oral statement during her interview, Jeanne barged her way in yielding gifts in the form of gift cards for the detectives.

“Situation, aggravation / Everybody allegation / In the suite, on the news” “All I want to say is that / They don’t really care about us.”

As I look back on the history of Forsyth County, mainly racism. I wonder did that have any bearing on the handling of this investigation? According to his self-written biography, Ron Freeman started his career over 30 years ago, in 1987. The same year that was plagued with racist counter marches by white nationalist and hateful bigots in robes calling themselves the KKK. Did any of this history have a part in the way this case was handled?

Sheriff Ron Freeman, Judge Jeffrey Bagley, District Attorney Penny Penn, Judge David Dickinson, Coroner Lauren McDonald, and Judge Phillip Smith this letter is too you. You all are elected officials and are in place for two purposes, to serve the citizens of Forsyth County and to protect their constitutional rights.

But instead, you misuse the authority and power you are given in its complete capacity. I will provide you with some examples:

Bagley, Dickinson, Smith, and Penn, you 4 especially Bagley are amongst the top 5 corrupt officials along with Sheriff Ron Freeman. Instead of using the authority given to you to protect the community that has elected you, you instead use it to further create a racial divide within Forsyth County. How many wealthy defendants have you given a “sweetheart” deal too? How many rapist, child molesters, and sexual predators still roam the streets freely because of the “sweet deals” their overpriced attorneys have afforded them?

Seriously how many sexual predators are going to be able to be free of the label of a “registered sex offender” when their probation is done, but their victims will forever carry that burden of pain. You, Judge Bagley, are a despicable round little man, you like the lack as mentioned above any sort of integrity or moral compass. How do you from an ethical standpoint preside over a case that you are friends with the defendant and the attorney. Is that why Frisky Hands Frank Huggins got off with only probation for sexual assault on a teen.

“Tell me what has become of my rights / Am I invisible because you ignore me? Your proclamation promised me free liberty, now /I’m tired of bein’ the victim of shame.”

Ms. Penn how many DUI’s has the sheriff’s office covered up for you now? I lost track when you were required to pay for the damages out of pocket. Can you also explain to me why you love sending blacks to prison? The question, for you, Penny Penitentiary Penn, wasn’t your job as a public defender to keep your clients out of prison, so why did the majority of your cases end up with plea deals that ended in prison? I mean the number alone would make even Dickinson blush.

Dickinson, what about you sir, you old grumpy goat. Why the significant disparity in sentencing and bonds when it comes to black defendants? But you give rich white kids breaks? Like the kid a few years ago who was already on probation for underage drinking, has a serious DUI, kills his passenger and you give him a low bond, and you sentence him on the low end for his offense so he can “enjoy his life” and he will also be able to get his license back? I know you remember Adam Robert Joesph Di Millo. You sentenced him to just 5 years in prison, you gave him a low bond you even let him “stay in rehab” before going to prison. It’s not like in prison he is going to have access to an open bar now is he Dicky?

And you Ronnie or do you prefer to be called Ron? I really could care less. You ran this big campaign hinged upon you’re more ethical, you’re smarter, more qualified, and hell you probably think you are better looking than Piper(no, you’re not). But I hate to tell you bud, the results have come in and that sir, like everything out of your mouth was determined to be a lie. I am not sure if it is because you have low self-esteem and you just want to have friends, and you desire to be liked, or is it you like to have the authority to selectively, administer the law.

Like all of these scandals that are popping up like teenage acne out of your office. Todd Maloney, Chris Barrett, and I hear you may have dug a hole and stuck Ben Finley in it because you don’t want his sexting scandal to get out. Why is it hard for you to be ethical and adequately administer the law. And why are you still friends with Creepy old man Frank Huggins? Why do you sympathize with racist Ronnie? I mean, that’s the reason why you are no longer at the City of Brookhaven, you stuck your chubby little neck out for Chris Shelton after he was fired, right Ronnie? For that photo, he posted of himself online in blackface. That’s the real reason you needed a two-year head start, to start your campaign. Now Chris Shelton is a deputy coroner, who got him the job? The man was fired for having poor judgment in thinking it was ok to be a racist, yet here we are again, and you have re-hired someone who was already fired, and fried for good reason. Ironic how you went on about Piper being dumb and turns out he was quite the opposite. When he fired the 11 of you, Barrett and Shelton included, that was one of the best things to happen to Forsyth County. So

And what do you do Ronnie? You come back and you bring the unwanted guest with you. Maybe instead of acne, you’re more like herpes? You know you were fired, and you and the other 10 rightfully unemployed people went to court on 4 occasions trying to get your jobs back.

And here we are, and no one has been held responsible for the death of Tamla Horsford. Ronnie, can you explain to the people why?

Nichole Lawson

Matt Meyers

Let’s backtrack a little bit there Ronnie back to your campaign. Anna DeBlois was your campaign manager, right? Didn’t her husband Brian give a hefty donation? Stacy and Tom Smith are friends with DeBlois, they are also good friends with you and your wife, right Ronnie? Did this have anything to do with the way Tamla’s case was handled? Brian was one the 11 fired by Piper, he also got creepy Frank the job at Lanier Tech, and he knew Huggins was a sexual predator right? Which is why Paxton forced him into early retirement..

“Tired of injustice / Tired of the schemes Your lies are disgusting / What does it mean”

Ronnie my boy! So let me make sure I got this correct, the Deblois’s are good girlfriends friends with your wife, and the Deblois are really good friends with Nichole and Steven Lawson as well as Stacy and Tom Smith. Jose Barrera and Andy Kalin are also really good girlfriends, back when Andy was employ be the courthouse. Then you brought him over to the sheriff’s department after he helped your campaign, right?

So just off things, I can prove on paper, you and 4 persons of interest have a connection and a friendship, Jose Barrera knows personally at least 75% of the people that work at the courthouse or the Sheriff’s department. Not only that, you got racist Chris Shelton working at the coroner’s office, where Tamla’s body stayed for two days.

So Ronnie, why wasn’t this case turned over? Clearly, there are conflicts. No one within Forsyth County clearly has any ethical values. Penn, Dickinson, and Bagley don’t keep getting re-elected because they are just great people, they keep getting re-elected because no one is running against them. So, this is what I am going to do, I have written an identical letter, with just a little less satire and I have emailed it to every elected official in the state of Georgia. I also have crafted a message to more progressives encouraging them to run. And just like Penny Penn can indict a ham and cheese sandwich, I am sure someone will be able to successfully run against you all ending your corruption and conspiracy.

Truly Yours,

Supreme Justice

www.forsythexposed.com

[study-with-nina]

[taken from my blog]

I'm an avid reader. There's nothing I love more than diving into a new novel, whether it be nonfiction about a recent scientific discovery or a centuries-old classic. In 2018 alone, I read 46 books, and started three more that I will finish in the new year. Since making a commitment for my New Year's resolution to read 40 books in 2018, I have read some astonishingly good novels. Here are ten of my favorites, in no particular order.

[in the interest of transparency, I will note that any books purchased through the links provided will provide you with a discount as well as give me a small commission (:]

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

This book was actually the first book I read this year, and it still has a special place in my heart. The Book Thief is a story about a young German girl growing up during the Holocaust, and her love of reading that pits her against Hitler's regime. It was refreshingly somber to see the Holocaust era from a new view -- not that of a Jewish person, nor a soldier, but a civilian child growing up surrounded by hate speech and propaganda. Liesel's actions and her love for her little family tugged at my heartstrings many times, and this book is one of the few that makes it onto my "reread someday" list. (P.S., the movie is incredible as well, and is one of the few that seems to follow the book as accurately as possible.)

2. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

I actually finished this book in record time -- I just could not put it down. The Hate U Give is a gritty, realistic view into what it's like to grow up black in America, and the unique set of challenges that black people face in regards to police brutality and everyday racism -- from friends as well as foes. After 17-year-old Starr witnesses her friend's death at the hands of a cop, she must decide whether to keep her mouth shut or risk bringing attention -- mostly negative -- to herself. Who will believe her, anyway? This book was so profoundly impactful while being written in the voice of a teenage girl, conflicted and alone. Definitely one of my top books of all time.

3. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Honestly, I didn't have high expectations coming into this book. I had seen posters for the movie, and assumed it was just another 3-star read with a profitable idea to make into a movie. I am glad to say that I was wrong. This book, set in the year 2045, follows the adventures of teenager Wade Watts as he navigates the world of the OASIS, an online utopia in which citizens live out their lives, in search of a formidable prize hidden someone in the OASIS's thousands of worlds. Wade is a lower-income resident, and the OASIS is all he has -- so he's willing to risk it all for the chance to win the prize and discover the secret of the online universe's creator. This novel is fast-paced and well-written, and is a must-read for anyone who loves anything 80s, as the challenge is focused around 80s culture. (Call Ferris Bueller -- we're going on one heck of an adventure.)

4. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Despite the books listed previously, I typically tend to read nonfiction or classic literature, and don't often branch out into contemporary fiction. But I had heard rave reviews of Little Fires Everywhere, so I decided to check it out, and it quickly became a favorite of mine. The narrative reminds me of that of East of Eden by John Steinbeck, my favorite novel of all time, in the way that it follows the struggles and interconnectedness of a family, somehow without having an explicitly describable plot ("I don't know, they just...exist") but still managing to pull you in just as deep. Like East of Eden, Little Fires Everywhere follows the story of two very different families: the Richardsons, a large, wealthy family with multiple strong, conflicting personalities; and the Warrens, a small, close-knit mother and daughter duo who never lay roots in any one place. The story has a sort of coming-of-age feel to it, as the lives of the Richardson and Warren teens and their age-appropriate struggles are discussed, but also a hint of mystery as Mrs. Richardson attempts to track down the origins of the mysterious Mia Warren. This book made me laugh, cry, and everything in between, and I was so obsessed that I finished the 11-and-a-half-hour-long audiobook in the span of five days (despite the fact that I worked double shifts most of those days). Again, this book is definitely one of my favorites of all time, and one of the rare stories whose characters you still wonder about long after the book is over.

5. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

I have never taken an economics course (though I have dabbled in Crash Course videos here and there) and economics is not an important component of either of my majors (Biological Sciences and Political Science). However, this book was so intriguing that I promptly forgot both of those points. Misbehaving is an excellent introduction to behavioral economics, written simply enough that someone with little to no background knowledge in economics (such as myself) can comprehend, but still intricate enough that the material couldn't fit in a ten-minute Youtube video. Thaler, one of the earliest behavioral economists, describes how the subject came into importance among other economic and business-related topics, as well as how its marriage of economic and financial principles and behavioral psychology lend important insights to businesses as well as individuals. The difficulty of the content is offset with plenty of easy-to-understand examples, and the book reads like a history driven by discovery, with reviews of behavioral economics principles along the way. Though the subject of economics is not one that interests me as much as, say, politics or medicine, I still thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would recommend it as an interesting read that serves as a light workout for your brain.

6. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women” by Kate Moore

I'd be lying if I said this book didn't make me cry multiple times. The Radium Girls is a true story of America's dial painters, the hundreds of young women who painted radium onto watches during the First World War, and the consequences of their position on their health and livelihood. In the days of World War I, jobs for women were few and far between, and becoming a dial painter was the most coveted position among women in their late teens and early twenties, unmarried and looking for some pocket money to buy the latest trends. This narrative follows the story of these dial-painters and how their distinct, omnipresent glow of radium dust went from being wondrous to becoming deadly. As the poisonous radium attacked these young women's bodies, causing them to rapidly and irreparably decay, the radium girls fought for the right to be heard, and to stop the radium industry from pulling any more girls into its vehement trap. This book was deeply heart-wrenching, following the lives of a few bright-eyed young dial painters to their young graves, and a valuable insight into the suppression of women's voices in the early 20th century.

7. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This novel was another popular book that I didn't expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a biography of the life of fictitious movie star Evelyn Hugo, as told to the young and relatively unknown reporter Monique Grant. Evelyn unfurls her story, from escaping poverty to begin her acting career in her late teens, and the myriad of men that came into and left her life across the span of her career and its aftermath. I won't spoil the big twist (or two) that the novel provides, but it most certainly wasn't the "straight bullsh*t" I was expecting based on its title. It is an intense, poignant life of a woman who dared to obtain what she wanted by any means possible, only to discover that her heart lied elsewhere.

8. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

This book was a humorous yet momentous glance into the life of a woman named Eleanor Oliphant, who is perfectly fine, thank you very much. Eleanor doesn't really fit in at the office; her harsh realism and her inability to understand social cues make that quite difficult. But that's fine, because Eleanor has it all planned out. Every week, she follows the same plan, never deviating from her schedule of Wednesday night calls with Mummy, Friday night frozen pizzas, and sleeping off a vodka hangover every Saturday morning. However, when Eleanor and her coworker Raymond save the life of an elderly gentleman who fell near them on their way to work one day, Eleanor's life begins to change in profound ways, and she realizes that maybe "fine" isn't the best way to be, after all. Eleanor's story was touching yet hilarious, and was yet another novel that I could not put down. For anyone looking for a novel starring an out-of-the-ordinary heroine and lacking a predictable romance component, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the novel for you.

9. The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

This fast-paced, gritty novel breaks the wall between the life of a president and the nation, and introduces us to the world of Washington politics and the counterterrorism approach. The President is Missing follows President Duncan, a tenacious war veteran, as he attempts to circumvent impeachment trials brought forth by members of the opposite party while maintaining the secret of a massive, nation-decimating cyber threat from the citizens of the U.S. This narrative is fast-paced, with twists and turns at every stop, and kept me guessing until the end what the outcome would be. The novel reads like a classic James Patterson thriller with the added expertise of a former president to reveal the intricacies of American politics and the battles of the elites.

10. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

My final novel is one that I finished a mere four days prior to writing this post, but one that already has a special place in my heart. Quiet explores the world of introverts, from their underrepresentation in U.S. culture and their hidden talents unique from extroverts. Though I identify as an ambivert (both extroverted and introverted), I felt this was an incredible analysis into the powers of introverts, and why American society should stop trying to force the extrovert ideal on those that are not born to be extroverted. I particularly enjoyed how Cain drew in principles of biology, psychology, and business, and described not only how introverts are wired differently from birth, but their benefits to jobs that are even as high-stakes and fast-paced as the stock market. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who struggles with introversion (if you dread speaking in front of a class, this is probably you) or anyone interested in the biological basis of personality and behavior.

Out of the 46 books I read in 2018, those are the ones that have stood out to me the most, and I would certainly recommend each and every one of them. If you would like more book recommendations, feel free to ask -- I'm always reading something new! Happy new year!

[milkdrinker123-blog]

When I was younger.

Isolated

Victim, Noun. A person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action. The word originated from Latin - victima.

Falsehood, Noun The state of being untrue, a lie.

When I was thirteen years old I was schooled in an all-boys high school. Optimism filled my soul and I was much more eager to learn that all the other classmates. I had a dedicated motivation in my heart to learn mathematics and digital studies in the hopes to learn to code and make video games. I was Naive, but that was the motivation pushing me forward in learning. I selectively isolated myself so I could listen and get work done with no hassle. The first couple of days were all right, but I (for some reason I can't remember) was moved to another group class. I didn't mind much and got along fine with the boys in there, there wasn't an issue. I got through the year and did... all right to say the least.

Trouble for me started around year ten, though I don't remember how. It all just seemed out of the blue and unexpected. My naive attitude was something to make fun of with harassment and bullying, one kid burnt the back of my head with a lighter when I was dozing off in a chair. When I asked about why they targetted me, they couldn't give me an answer, it usually resorted to something stupid like "you're gay" or something like that, the people that I thought were my friends ended up wanting to hurt me more than the people bulling me. Threats about breaking my teeth and bashing me into the ground I thought were just boyish jokes - but when the look in their eye told me they were serious I moved desks and away from everyone.

The first time I ever got hurt was during a game of bullrush. The aim is to run from one side of the field to the other and not get tackled. One classmate grabbed my arm and slammed me into the ground - he friendly to me before so whether it was intentional or not I do not know. The inside of my lip was cut from the braces, my nose was broken and sore, and I was bleeding with dry grass in my mouth. After going to the medbay, my parents just picked me up - I didn't get any apology and things started spiraling down from there.

I started becoming depressed and took a lot of days off school. When I came back, no one was happy. I never thought about hurting myself because most people at the school did that for me. I escaped in literature and video games. I spent most of my nights playing Skyrim to have an empty feeling of someone thanking me for helping them. I felt isolated and removed from everyone at the school. The guidance counselor helped me in some instances but talking about it didn't really clear up the horrible emotions I had boiling in the pit of my stomach, the only thing that ever made me happy genuinely was just playing video games, saving the world from dragons and NPC's thanking me for it.

I went back to school one day and I punched a taller kid who was picking on me in the face, he punched me in the throat and knocked me to the ground. I still remember the cold floor and the laughing. By god the laughing. I pitifully got myself off that floor and the teacher hushed me and the taller kid out to the teacher's office. I was a blubbering mess, to be honest.

Before the year ended, my parents thought the best thing and had me change schools, I was more than happy. Albeit the first few months were a bloody mess with me not able to talk in conversations like a functioning person. But before December I had a small group of friends, and then I didn't because of some bullshit. But It all resolved itself.

I'm in year 12 now, things have been smooth sailing so far, a couple of bumps but I manage to make it decently. When I met a couple of people from my previous school and politely asked why they still didn't give me an answer. And at that point, a thought dawned on me, its a mob.

To give a clear example of how the mob works it goes as followed.

I had a friend I made in primary school and for a while, we still hang out, he then starts to group with some people who are a "group" and I see him less and less. When I don't see him anymore and he doesn't want to talk to me and repeats things that the group says to me, he isn't my friend anymore. He's become part of the mob.

The mob has a ringleader, the instigator, Typically its the baddest egg of the group, the one who disrupts the class and openly tells the teacher to go fuck themselves. They have an opinion and everyone just agrees with it. And anyone who doesn't fit a quota of the ringleader deserves shit. Again I will say that I don't remember what I said, or did to provoke them, but as it stands they won't listen. When someone holds power, the gullible will follow.

Today, a mob mentality seems to be the norm in society. fitting into a more - If you're not with us you're against us. Sort of thing. And its the young adults of this society and to an extent, even the adults. A toxicity of racism, sexism, Phobias, and regression in the minds and words of the grown-ups who are "Mature".

I'm not particularly good with politics. But where I stand on in the belief of life, some people will call me a bigot, and the ones that did didn't give me a good reason other than I hurt their feelings or because it "didn't work with them".

Where I stand on most things is this: Feminism (currently) is nothing more than a label for angry women to wear. To Blame and harass men for being men; manspreading, mansplaining, man everything. Not fighting for the rights of literal oppressed women in middle eastern countries, and generally just complaining about Men.

Racism is now a power structure where, if you're white you've got a silver spoon in your mouth. Being white is in itself an act of racism because a long time ago there were slave owners who were white. It seems encouraged to call white people racist or white supremacist for sampling having a color of skin.

LGBT+ has only gotten more neurotic with the word of gender being a simple thing, to a complex and unending meaning with new genders and definitions for those genders. Paranoia grows when a common person asks about when does this ludicrous spectrum end, and it goes far to say that the normal and hetro are somewhat afraid of these far-fetched definitions and thus they must another thing to openly and actively hate against.

So here I stand. A white middle-class male, an enemy of groups of people that have never met me and hate me for the things that I am. And to be honest - I can't hate them, I can't hold any anger or be spiteful towards these groups. I can criticize them as they can criticize me if they wish. But to genuinely be angry and want to see them hurt I can't. I still have the benefit of a doubt that any stranger on the street will be genuine to me if I am to them. Kindness goes far and opinions of normal politics shouldn't dictate how you treat people. Both the left and right have problems and if we can't meet in the middle and talk about these problems like mature grown-ups, then let god burn down the buildings until we learn how to work together.

You don't have to be friends with everyone, but you can be tolerant and not be a pitiful person like I was.

Here is my final note, If you really are oppressed, then you wouldn't be reading this.

[patriotsnet]

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

[calacuspr]

Calacus Weekly Hit & Miss – Thierry Henry & The National League

Every Monday we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the previous week.

HIT – THIERRY HENRY

There has been much debate in recent weeks about the value of sports stars taking the knee.

Players and broadcasters make sure they push messages about the importance of equality and the fight against racism, but we have seen lately some players refuse to comply because they are seeing no progress.

Crystal Palace and Ivory Coast forward Wilfried Zaha, for instance, said that he will no longer take the knee before matches because he feels it is “degrading” and isn’t leading to real action on racism.

While discourse on racism and equality is certainly a step forward, there remain doubts about the progress being made on and off the sports field and in society in general.

Social media is one area in particular where racism and trolling are rife, with so many black players in particular facing racist abuse, even from their own ‘fans’.

Recently, Swansea midfielder Yan Dhanda hit out at social media companies after he became another victim of online abuse on Instagram.

South Wales police launched an investigation after Dhanda received a private message following Swansea’s 3-1 defeat against Manchester City but the player criticised Facebook, which owns Instagram, for not being proactive enough. The account holder was prevented from sending direct messages “for a set period of time”.

The former Arsenal and France striker Thierry Henry, decided this week to take stronger action, deleting his social media platforms until greater action is taken to address the racism that pervades those channels.

Henry, who recently left his role as head coach at Montreal Impact, has 10 million followers on his Facebook page, along with 2.7m on Instagram and 2.3m on Twitter.

He said: “Hi Guys, from tomorrow morning I will be removing myself from social media until the people in power are able to regulate their platforms with the same vigour and ferocity that they currently do when you infringe copyright.

“The sheer volume of racism, bullying and resulting mental torture to individuals is too toxic to ignore. There HAS to be some accountability. It is far too easy to create an account, use it to bully and harass without any consequence and still remain anonymous. Until this changes, I will be disabling my accounts across all social platforms. I’m hoping this happens soon.”

Speaking on CNN, Henry added: “It's not a safe place and it's not a safe environment. I wanted to take a stand on saying that it is an important tool that unfortunately some people turn into a weapon because they can hide behind a fake account.

“I'm not saying it's not good to have social media, I'm just trying to say that it has to be a safe place.

“Basically, I did what I felt and I hope it can inspire people to do the same thing if they feel the same way.”

Oliver Dowden, Minister for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), said nobody should be forced to disable their social media accounts due to abuse.

He commented: “Social media firms must do more to tackle this and we are introducing new laws to hold platforms to account,” he said.

“This is complex and we must get it right, but I’m absolutely determined to tackle racist abuse online.”

But where is the deterrent when Patrick O'Brien, 18, sent 20 messages to Ian Wright on Instagram after losing a Fifa video game match in May 2019.

The teenager, who blamed his loss on picking Wright as one of his players, was given probation rather than a criminal conviction when the case came to court in February.

Wright said: “It seems to be a fad now - a black player plays poorly, or they think they've played poorly, and they come with all the emojis, or whatever it is.

“There are ways of being able to catch people. I don't think they [social media companies] are vigilant enough, nowhere near. How much do they really care deep down?”

“Seeing this judgement, I can only wonder what deterrent there is for anyone else who spouts this kind of vile racist abuse.”

The social media platforms make promises and declarations about how seriously they take online abuse, but until they take consistently more robust action and legal punishments better reflect the pain and suffering caused by trolling, the problems will endure. 

MISS – THE NATIONAL LEAGUE

The Covid-19 pandemic has had huge ramifications on sports clubs of all shapes and sizes.

Professional and amateur football clubs in the UK are one such group that has suffered severe financial losses, largely stemming from a ban on spectators from attending matches.

While elite teams have been able to fall back on other income streams such as broadcast and sponsorship revenue, professional and semi-professional non-league sides have been left to fight for their existence due to the lack of matchday income.

With the cost of hosting matches and paying players often outweighing money coming into clubs in the absence of fans, some sides have been forced to take drastic measures including the postponement of fixtures.

Last month, the National League confirmed that clubs would not be fined or have sanctions imposed on them for non-fulfillment of matches during the Covid crisis, news which was largely welcomed by clubs.

However, the League has since reversed its decision and imposed fines and suspended points penalties on several clubs across the National League, National League North, and National League South.

It is a decision that has shocked many with critics arguing that enforcing financial penalties on clubs for deciding against playing matches behind closed doors because they lacked the money to do so makes little sense.

Every organisation should have the right to change their mind or approach should circumstances change, but it must be communicated clearly and this move by the league could be viewed as trying to profit from something that is out of anyone’s control.

Dover Athletic have undoubtedly been hit hardest by the National League’s decision after they were expunged from the competition for failing to fulfil their fixtures.

The Kent club have only played 15 times this season compared to at least 25 by the rest and they will play no further part in the current campaign having had their previous results wiped out.

They have also been handed a 12-point deduction to start with next season and a £40,000 fine for being in breach of league rules.

Dover's owner and chairman Jim Parmenter shared his grievances with Sky Sports News: ""We have been hung out to dry and made an example of to the rest of the league with this draconian punishment. They are trying to implement a rule book that is not designed to deal with issues like a pandemic.

"We've stuck our necks out while there are seven or eight other clubs in a similar situation scared stiff of the type of action the league has taken against us.

"We have demonstrated we cannot afford to continue, nor finance a loan, so how does issuing us with a £40,000 fine help football?"

The National League's statement read: "The panel had regard to financial information provided by Dover Athletic and fully respected the responsibility of the club's directors under company law. However, the panel also had to consider the integrity of the competition and the actions of Dover in relation to the other 22 Clubs that continue to incur much costs as they fulfill their fixtures.

"In view of the current financial situation and in order to reflect the approach taken in other cases of breaches of rule 8.39, the independent panel reduced the initial fine by 20 per cent to £40,000."

Dover were not the only side impacted by the decision, with National League South side Dulwich Hamlet taking to social media to express their shock at being fined £8,000 and given a suspended eight-point deduction.

“Solidarity to the other clubs affected, sometimes you wonder why you do this in the first place. We'll work together for the good of the game and hope that change is swift,” the club tweeted.

The past 12 months have been an incredibly uncertain time and this has invariably led to difficult decisions having to be made, but the National League has made a series of mistakes in how it has communicated with its clubs and stakeholders.

Alongside ensuring the health and safety of players, coaches, officials, administrators, and spectators, the National League should be trying to do everything in its power to ensure all 66 clubs stay afloat, but that has clearly not been the case.

This sorry tale underlines the importance of regularly communicating with all stakeholders to explain why decisions have been taken and to avoid any unexpected shocks or U-turns that will have long-term implications.

[easyhairstylesbest]

How TikTok Made Pro-Choice Activism Cool Again

In Charlotte, NC, a man referred to as Chris has unwittingly become a TikTok celebrity. He doesn’t have an account—that we know of—and it’s unclear if he’s even aware of his popularity, but his own dedicated hashtag, #christok, has more than 174 million views.

Chris isn’t the typical subject of viral internet fame. He looks to be in his late 50s. He shows up to an abortion clinic in Charlotte just about every day dressed in business casual attire with a sign that reads, in bold white letters, “THOU SHALL NOT MURDER.” His voice is low and dull, even when shouting about unborn children seeking vengeance from God.

But Chris has become a sort of canvas onto which the women of Charlotte for Choice can project the realities and follies behind the everyday grind of pro-choice activism. Since summer, the local organization of abortion clinic escorts and defenders has posted countless videos of him and other anti-abortion protestors outside their local clinic, A Preferred Women’s Health Center of Charlotte, in order to show the world exactly what patients are up against.

“Any video with Chris in it, people go crazy for,” said Reiley, a 20-year-old clinic defender and TikToker (@loveurmother) with more than 445,000 followers. In September, she posted a video dissecting Chris’s “4 moods”, which range from “waiting for patients to harass” to “pouting because you can’t harass patients.” There are also videos of him arguing with clinic escorts, stretching out his tired knees, arguing with other anti-abortion protestors, and getting inadvertently roped into a dance off. The women at Charlotte for Choice have made national headlines for their posts, including a viral video of a clinic defender sticking it to a protestor by referring to God as “sky daddy.” It’s all part of a growing trend on the Gen Z-driven platform—one that’s having as much impact offline as it is on.

This content is imported from TikTok. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

“It was actually TikTok that made me become an escort in June,” said Amy, a 20-year-old in suburban Detroit. (Several sources in this article asked to be identified by only their first name or nickname to protect their privacy.) Amy, who goes by the moniker @basicasstrashcan, was the first clinic escort to grace my own TikTok For You page, the app’s algorithmic homepage curated to each user’s tastes and interests. (If a video winds up in the #FYP algorithm, it’s almost guaranteed to get a high viewership.) In the first video I saw from Amy, she rated clinic protestors on a scale of 1-10, docking points for poor dress or shrieking at patients, all set to a mash-up of Super Mario theme songs.

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Amy’s own introduction was through Hannah (a.k.a. @42069horndog), Charlotte for Choice’s first TikToker who started as a clinic defender this summer with her mother, a long-time volunteer with the group. “I just thought she was kind of funny,” Amy said. “But I was also morbidly curious about the protestors. Like, what’s with these people?” She ended up calling a few local clinics in June and has been volunteering pretty much every Saturday since.

“I don’t want you on the sidewalk just yelling at people. I want you to understand the perspective of the greater movement and what it means.”

Now, Charlotte for Choice has a waitlist of people who want to train as volunteers, and the organization says that this influx of interest has taken place just over the past few months—since Hannah, Reiley, and others have been posting about their experiences on TikTok. Currently, the organization offers two volunteer opportunities: clinic escorts, who help patients get from their cars into the building, and clinic defenders, who use counter-protest methods to distract anti-abortion protestors by directly engaging with them from a safe distance. Volunteers must also undergo a training session that covers the basics of anti-racism and reproductive justice. “I don’t want you on the sidewalk just yelling at people,” said the training lead and media strategist for Charlotte for Choice, who asked to remain anonymous, citing privacy concerns. “I want you to understand the perspective of the greater movement and what it means.”

In the United States, most clinics are what are known as “non-engagement clinics,” where volunteers are not allowed to directly engage with protestors. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, for example, recommends non-engagement, though each affiliate is able to decide how to manage the protestors at their own clinic. “The aim of the recommendation is to not feed or escalate protests, conflicts, or activity outside of health centers, in order to lessen the chaos patients may encounter,” a PPFA spokesperson told ELLE.com. “Our recommendation comes from the desire to center patients’ experiences.”

Still, the practice of clinic defense has been around since the 1980s, initially as a response to anti-abortion extremists attempting to block patients from getting their abortions, which eventually resulted in the passage of the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The law was designed to create a buffer between anti-abortion protestors and clinic patients, but activists say that the FACE Act has been, at best, loosely enforced, especially during the Trump administration. Anti-abortion protestors continue to disrupt patient care and harass visitors with alarming tactics, from shaming patients with bullhorns to carrying assault weapons with their protest signs.

An anti-choice rally outside a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, Missouri, in June 2019.

Michael B. ThomasGetty Images

“There is always a place for de-escalation tactics,” said Kim Gibson, a member of the non-profit Pinkhouse Defenders in Jackson, MS, home to the state’s last remaining abortion clinic. “But [anti-abortion protestors] are there to escalate the situation.”

The Pinkhouse Defenders have been engaging with protestors since 2013, and last year, Gibson formed a spin-off group, We Engage, to organize and encourage counter-protests at clinics and government functions. Both groups have been posting their encounters on Facebook since 2018 but then realized TikTok was where the action was happening. In December, they posted their first videos to the platform with guidance from the team at Charlotte for Choice.

The influx of TikTok content is owed in part to a strategic change in Charlotte for Choice’s approach this summer. Though the Preferred Women’s Health Center has worked with Charlotte for Choice defenders for years, the two groups decided to band together to move toward a more full-fledged counter-protesting model. It was a controversial move—in early December, the New York Times reported that a handful of Charlotte for Choice board members resigned due to the more confrontational tactics, and they’re not alone in their reservations. But pro-engagement activists insist that, so far, nothing else has worked.

According to the Charlotte for Choice’s media strategist, the Preferred Women’s Health Center has seen an estimated 60,000 protestors over the last four years, with no sign of letting up. Most Saturdays, a Charlotte-based group called Love Life draws hordes of protestors in matching blue T-shirts, sometimes in the thousands, on a piece of land directly across from the clinic’s administrative building—something that Charlotte for Choice believes patients shouldn’t have to face alone. Since this summer, they’ve unofficially renamed the land “Pro-Choice Park” and “Christian Coachella.” They play kazoos and loud music and stand on top of cars with signs in counter-protest.

“Engagement is not for every clinic,” the strategist conceded, adding that the goal isn’t to make the protestors go away—that would be naive. “We just want to make it difficult for them to exist in that space comfortably.”

A happy but unexpected side effect of the newfound TikTok frenzy is that now, not only is the brazenness of anti-abortion protestors on full display, the viral videos are also filling a void for some Gen Z activists. On the political stage, reproductive healthcare continues to get left behind, even by those who support it. Democrats didn’t once mention the term “abortion” at the national convention this year, and even though the party platform has become increasingly progressive on the issue—touting LGBTQ+ inclusion and the repeal of the Hyde Amendment—Dems aren’t always connecting with their base. In a recent Times report, Gen Z and millennial activists associated with racial justice movements expressed lukewarm feelings toward “reproductive rights messaging that is focused strictly on legal abortion access.”

Meanwhile, Republicans had no problem going on anti-abortion tirades at their own convention and pushing for anti-abortion policies that have, for decades, chipped away at reproductive healthcare access, making it nearly impossible for many people, especially those who are low-income or from marginalized backgrounds, to access the safe and legal care they need. The party’s political fervor against abortion seems to match that of protestors on the ground.

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The clinic volunteers I spoke with all said they supported abortion rights before they began working at their local clinics, but collectively, it just didn’t seem like that big of a priority. “I thought that it was important and that people should have access to it, but I was never one to fight for it,” said Jaicie, a 20-year-old clinic defender in Charlotte with over 250,000 TikTok followers on her account @jaiciesmall. In a recent video, she attempted to challenge a couple of men dressed in dark clergy uniforms to a staring contest as they chanted Hail Marys outside the clinic; she managed to get one of them to crack a smile.

Exposure to the odd and often menacing behavior of right-wing protestors at abortion clinics seems to be effectively galvanizing for some Gen Z activists—more so than legislative talking points or complicated court cases taking place in various states across the country. “When I could see patients visibly afraid and terrified and then see this huge group of pro-life protestors out there, yelling at them and degrading them and making them feel guilty about this decision that they’re making, that was when it all clicked for me,” said Jaicie, who started defending at the Charlotte clinic after she saw a friend of hers from middle school volunteering on TikTok. Though she’s begun to post videos herself, she acknowledges that the priority is, and has always been, patients’ safety. “Our goal is to make patients feel comfortable and safe going in to get their procedure. That is number one.” Helping patients is one of the best parts of the job, said Reiley. She’s even had people reach out after the fact to thank her and other clinic defenders for making them feel better protected.

“I always felt like I was powerless…But being out here clinic defending, I see first hand how it makes a difference.”

However, the feedback on TikTok isn’t always positive, and volunteers say they’ve experienced death threats and trolling. Jo, a 19-year-old in Yuba City, CA, who posts her counter-protest content under the name @virgobb, said she had her original account taken down for “hate speech” and enlisted the help of her pro-choice community to regain the thousands of followers she once had. People have also faced harsh consequences for their activism offline. Anti-abortion protestors have taken legal action against at least two Charlotte for Choice volunteers, and many reported receiving harassment in public, at home, or their place of work, according to the organization’s strategist.

But despite the trouble, they say their efforts are rewarding. “I always felt like I was powerless, especially because I don’t have a lot of money,” Jo said. “I grew up poor. I’m a minority, and I never felt heard. But being out here clinic defending, I see firsthand how it makes a difference…It just makes me feel like I’m legitimately doing something about it.”

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They’re also proud of the community they’ve built online. “We made it so that you can no longer ignore these issues,” Jaicie said. “We’re putting this right on your screen, in your face, while you’re trying to have fun and watch TikToks. Yes, we are having fun, but we are also posting a really important message—reproductive health is huge, and you have to pay attention to this.”

As for the future of pro-choice activism, the clinic volunteers I spoke with all have different ideas about what could be useful, from bolder messaging to increased awareness about fetal development. Meanwhile, Chris from Charlotte will keep holding his giant sign, shouting Bible verses, and harassing patients. Perhaps the most meaningful response at our disposal, at least for now, is to hold his antics up to the world and tell him to shut the hell up.

Annie Werner Annie Werner is a writer from Texas living in New York.

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How TikTok Made Pro-Choice Activism Cool Again

[bill-the-baker]

The Free Nation of America: Section 1, Chapter 2: The Rise of the Social Justice Warrior

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In the years following Obama’s victory, substantial efforts to fix the country were made. Obama’s first term brought about the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often referred to as Obamacare), allowing those unable to afford the high prices of private healthcare to finally gain access to the help they needed. He also repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, within the military, which silenced and threatened the safety of homosexuals in combat, attempted to settle the crippling growth of the nation’s debt, withdrew America from an unjust war in Iraq, and finally captured and killed Osama bin-Laden, the main organiser of the September 11th attacks. And this was all in the space of four years.

The next four years involved further help to LGBT individuals, the prevention of global warming and the reduction of unemployment, which passed on from the events of the Great Recession. The Obama Administration marked a time for progress and rejuvenation. Finally, it seemed that America’s problems were under control, after the disaster that was the Bush Administration, with Obama ending his eight years in office with a 60% approval rating.

Though, there was still that 40% that chose to not side with him. The political right saw him as being a burden to the future of the “right to bear arms”, especially after he made a speech advocating for the control of firearms following the Sandy Hook Shooting, which took place in December 2012, resulting in the deaths of numerous young schoolchildren. Even some loyalists were disappointed in the fact that, despite making efforts to reduce numbers during his time in office, he was unable to convince Congress to close Guantanamo Bay.

Many Conservatives and Republicans held many of these ideas against him, but were cast off and laughed at, due to the absurdity of their ideas. Fundamentalist religious groups, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, claimed he was the Antichrist, who was going to bring about the end-times, with a major part of Senator Rick Perry’s 2012 Presidential Campaign being centred on Obama declaring a “war on religion”, because gays were allowed to openly serve in the military, whilst kids can’t pray in school. Though many of these arguments simply boiled down to the colour of his skin. Nevertheless, these faceless arguments secured the fact that, for these eight years, the right had lost and the left had won.

Obama’s actions were supported heavily by numerous people across America, with his progressive nature being a strong factor as to why he was seen as a popular figure in a certain group that had gained traction in recent years. Some commentators, such as Second-Wave Feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers, state that they all stemmed as far back as the 1990s, with the start of the Third-Wave of Feminism. Some see it as a result of increased access to information. Whilst some simply suggested that they weren’t raised properly.

And, in some of their methods, the third argument actually didn’t seem very far-fetched. According to archived internet footage, there are large amounts of so-called protests that feature bizarre, confusing and outright absurd methods to get a point across. Take, for example, the Ukrainian group, FEMEN, who protested Conservative ideas and corruption by assaulting leaders, breaking into government buildings, and urinating on portraits of unpopular figures, with their breasts exposed at all times. However, there was also the other kind of protesters. Ones that definitely fit the comparison of privileged, ungrateful children, with a lot of growing up left to do. Here are a few examples of their strange actions:

The first in this large list of events all stems from the first event to truly highlight the failure of these movements in the modern day. It’s April 4th, 2013, at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. A meeting with members of the Canadian Association for Equality (CAfE), an Egalitarian organisation, with primary focus placed on men’s issues, was interrupted by a large string of chants made by self-declared Feminists. One of which was named Chanty Binx (according to all sources I could find), who became the unofficial figurehead of a doomed movement. They yelled and chanted at the group, calling them MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists), which, in their language, is a stone’s-throw away from declaring them woman-haters. The first phase of this event concluded with a false fire alarm, evacuating everyone inside, and taking the situation to the streets.

Once Binx had begun to get an audience together, she put together a list of reassurances in that these issues are part of a patriarchal system, meaning that if they were issues to begin with, then people like her would be supporting this group. However, she also wants to be heard, as displayed by the utterance of the sentence “shut the fuck up” in-between points, and also by her belittling of the people she was speaking towards, by referring to them with such flattering names as “Mr. Ego” and “Mr. Entitled”, whilst going on to say that the reason they were doing this is because they are afraid of “Fascists”.

Whilst this next one isn’t exactly a protest as such, it was a major event that impacted the pop-culture scene in a major way. A year after the CAfE protests, Eron Gjoni, an ex-boyfriend of independent game developer, Zoe Quinn, released a post on his website detailing her past relationships with people involved in the video game industry, even during their relationship. This was then picked up by an editor for the gaming news website, Kotaku, Steve Totilo, who denied the legitimacy of these events, as well as his involvement in past relationships with Quinn. However, the formality of these news sites continued to come under fire, as it was revealed that a judge in an award ceremony, named Robin Arnott, who offered an award for Quinn’s game, Depression Quest, whilst involved in an affair with her.

News of these happenings was quickly responded to, by media critic, Anita Sarkessian, who stated that there was a large amount of sexism within the video game industry, and it was always there. She would go on to make an internet series, named “Tropes vs. Women”, which was funded by a large amount of supporters, but still allegedly lacked a notable list of facts, especially considering how she needed to look for more research, showing that she rarely actually played video games. Many people criticised her work, before the events went on to spawn death threats, causing her to flee from her house.

The news media was quick to respond, by calling out the entire culture surrounding the industry, resulting in backlash by many of those who considered themselves “gamers”, beginning the “Gamergate” crisis (it was a common act to place “gate” at the end of a word to represent a major controversy at the time, as this derived from the Watergate scandal, which lead to the resignation of former-President, Richard Nixon). A whole industry, now reduced to a stereotype, with them being ridiculed by outsiders to the events.

In 2015, an event that took place outside of North America, at Goldsmith’s University in London, England, in which Diversity Officer, Bahar Mustafa, announced on her Facebook page that she was hosting an event that specifically disallowed white male guests from attending. After accusations of racism and sexism in this event, especially after tweeting about how she wished to “kill all white men”, she responded in May of that year, with a student reading a speech, made by her, on how she, “an ethnic-minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist to white men”, stating how racism is purely based on discrimination and institutional power, something many considered ethnic minorities to lack. This would be a common argument on the justification of the actions of groups, such as the government of the Free Nation, later on.

Finally, another notable protest would take place at the University of Missouri in September-November of 2015, with this all beginning with racist threats made by white students online, before taking this out into the campus itself, with multitudes of students driving around in pickup trucks, yelling “white power”, and organising a meeting that was such a threat to the safety of black students, that they had to evacuate an entire campus.

An event this shocking and outrageous should be worthy enough to be recorded. However, it goes to show that the only evidence of the event’s existence was through a list of tweets made by a small group of students. One of these students later admitted that this entire event was false, and that this all started as a result of “a state of alarm”. In fact, one of the people who were supposed to be behind the group of Neo-Nazis, Sam Hyde, was not involved in any form of racist activity and was a well-known activist from Yale, who had previously protested against police brutality.

However, there was, as a matter of fact, a swastika smeared out of faecal matter in one of the bathrooms. This singular image, which could have been made by anyone, was all the evidence the students needed to secure the fact that racism was a serious issue on campus. What resulted would be a protest against the poor management of the university, in terms of attempts to curb these acts, by blocking a car carrying the institution’s President, Tim Wolfe, during a Homecoming parade, with the protest resulting in Wolfe ramming his car into a young student, named Jonathan Butler.

Again, this statement was all fabricated. Though there was a protest, which resulted in Butler being hit by Wolfe’s car, this was not the act of Wolfe, but rather because Butler ran up to the car whilst it was slowly advancing past the group. This is shown in the only video evidence of the event, which happens to show Butler’s deliberate movement towards the vehicle. However, this story was taken by the protesters, and was noticed by the news, with the ensuing outrage causing Wolfe to resign from the Presidency.

Since Wolfe’s resignation, the group behind the protest had become prominent figures in the university, and, with this newfound influence, state a new list of demands, with these being publicised in yet another protest, with this one in particular not being known for what took place within the event itself, but rather what took place around it, with reporters being told specifically to “get out”, displaying clear signs of the group silencing those merely suspected of dissent.

However, the protestors still wanted their voices to be heard, and this appeared to be achieved when numerous other universities organised protests in solidarity with this group, with many demanding “safe spaces” for ethnic minorities, and when they were condemned by others for doing so, white students said that they should also have their own spaces, effectively reintroducing segregation into these institutions.

In fact, once a major terrorist attack took place in Paris, France, which resulted in the deaths of 130 people, many of these protesters claimed that these people were focusing on the wrong issues, and even made a Twitter hashtag, namely #FuckParis, because blacks shouldn’t care about a country that was once their colonial masters, half a century earlier. And these actions all took place, because of a string of lies, and a swastika made of faeces.

One thing you may have noticed about these events is that they all involved the use of some form of “social media”, an invention that was popularised around the mid-2000s, which allowed for the common man to express their beliefs, anonymously and uncensored. This is how this group of people was believed to have spread to the extent they had in those years, with their only armaments being the mind and a keyboard.

From here, they began to make their personal beliefs available to the world. Beliefs on anything, from the wish of true equality, to the demands of death to all rich white men. And they gained an equal amount of supporters and detractors, over the years, bringing them to success and even stardom, as their view-counts increased by the day. These people also used the experiences they gained from these actions to get the expertise needed to work for jobs in the old media. And that’s what many of them chose to do.

Due to their popularity among the youth of the 2010s, many youth-oriented media groups, such as MTV and BuzzFeed, chose to hire these people, mostly for online programming. Their high viewership ensured that these people would have their ideas and beliefs spread to much larger audiences.

From then on, the media of both the left and the right was becoming extremely ideological. It ranged from simple, light-hearted videos, like BuzzFeed’s “36 Questions Women Have for Men”, which depicts men as all being woman-hating jocks, to countless hit-pieces on white people for having “white privilege”, and how these people need to pay for the actions of their ancestors. It even got to the point where people were so fearful of racist actions, that a sign which said “it’s okay to be white” was misconstrued as a white-supremacist message.

These ideas showed a change in politics, as many progressive ideas were passed into governments and courts across the world, with many members of the media also siding with these new ideas. However, despite this period of change, it took a much different direction than most had hoped for.

[bryonysimcox]

Keep On Pushing: Week 20 and a 1/2, Spain

Move on up, and keep on wishing Remember your dream is your only scheme So keep on pushing

In looking for a title for this week (and a half)’s blog, I was reminded of the words of Curtis Mayfield. These words, from one of my all-time favourite songs ‘Move On Up’ are also painted across the walls of my all-time favourite nightclub, World Headquarters in Newcastle.

‘Keep on Pushing’ feels like an appropriate mantra for the last ten days for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the longer life is affected by measures to manage the Covid-19 pandemic (despite us no longer being under strict lockdown), the more I have to push to stay positive. As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, part of that process is making my peace with a new 2020, one in which we travel less in the van, stay put in Spain for longer and innovate to make Broaden, our videography project, stay afloat amid it all.

On that note, the last week and a half has seen George and I make progress on a number of projects. I’m still working on the video about ‘Ecological Economics’ which I’ve been making for a while now, and last Saturday we recorded a voiceover to go with some of the footage of an interview I did with the wonderful economist Simon Mair. It was pretty fun to make a homemade vocal booth (basically a den made with chairs, sheets and cushions) in order to record the sound! I’ll be starting on animated graphics for that video too, so hopefully it’ll be out soon.

I’m really looking forward to starting a conversation about what alternative economic futures might look like post Coronavirus.

In addition to the Ecological Economics video, we’ve wanted to film the beautiful little town of Corbera for a while now. On Sunday we finally got around to doing just that as part of an initiative called ‘Have You Ever Heard Silence’. The project, started by a videography firm in Germany, seeks to bring people from around the world together to capture footage of life throughout the pandemic.

(images, left to right) Filming in the town of Corbera, recording a voiceover, and more shots for the ‘Have You Ever Heard Silence’ project. 

As part of this project, we wanted to capture the essence of the town when it’s still relatively quiet - before the cafes have filled up and the church opens its doors for service. So we headed out early morning, as the first signs of life emerged - people out walking their dogs, cafe owners setting up chairs and tables, and old ladies out in their aprons sweeping their front doorsteps. It was a special experience to capture this place that we’re staying in and have grown to love, and I can’t wait to see the footage as part of the ‘Have You Ever Heard Silence’ documentary.

I’ve started to cut together some of that footage into shorter videos on our instagram too, including one with a quote from writer and thinker Charles Eisenstein. It’s from his recent essay ‘The Coronation’, which is absolutely worth a read and presents an interpretation of this pandemic in a slightly different way than the mainstream save-lives-at-all-costs approach. He says:

“How much of life are we willing to sacrifice at the altar of security?

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(video) Shots from filming in Corbera.

The other reason that ‘Keep On Pushing’ felt an apt title is the ongoing struggle against systemic racism. I discussed some of my initial shock at George Floyd’s murder in last week’s blog post, but this week I have observed a shift both in terms of the messaging from the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement as well as a shift internally. As time unfolds, I push forward to process not only George’s killing, the ensuing protests (and even now, the counter protests from far-right groups), but the underlying issues at play in society and the potential solutions to such a systemic problem.

While the movement against racism is finally receiving mainstream visibility, it doesn’t mean this fight hasn’t been going on for centuries. In the words of Audre Lorde, “Revolution is not a one-time event”. There has been some fantastic archival footage doing the rounds on social media, of the likes of Gil Scott-Heron on racism and change back in the 90s, or of David Bowie calling MTV out for their lack of black representation in 1983. In a way, the more I realise people have been demanding justice, equality and fairness for so many years, fighting the same fight that people today are fighting in the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, the more shocking it is that there is still so much work to be done.

Revolution = Knowledge + Empathy + Action

This is Rachel Cargle’s ‘recipe for revolution’. I’ve found it to be such a clear, logical and empowering approach to changing a systematic problem and knowing where to start. And whilst this recipe is referring to a revolution where people are no longer discriminated based on race, I think this combination of learning plus feeling plus doing is a pretty powerful combination for taking on other issues too, like climate change, sexism and neoliberalism.

For me, part of this learning process has been looking back at my own life and the ways in which I’ve been on the receiving end of an invisible bias - a bias based on the colour of my skin. And time again when I ask myself this question, the most obvious (and also uncomfortable) example of this privilege is my experience of living in Australia (2016-19).

Moving to a country on the other side of the world gave me an insight into the kind of rigorous process migrants face as they try to obtain visas and work permits to get into places like Britain. And while the visa process I experienced as I transitioned my ‘Working Holiday Visa’ onto a ‘Skilled Temporary Worker Visa’ was invasive, expensive and unpleasant, I absolutely know it would be so much harder for people from ‘less favourable’ countries or with more ‘foreign-sounding’ names to go through the same process. On top of that, this kind of entry process discriminates against older people (you can’t get the Working Holiday if you’re over 30) or people whose skills aren’t deemed ‘Skilled’, or who don’t have the money for the process either. In so many ways, my experience in Australia was made easier because I’m white, I’m from the commonwealth and English is my mother tongue.

Beyond observing the ways in which I was treated in Australia, whilst I lived there it quickly became apparent that the country has a long way to go to reconcile its oppressive and colonial past, and the ongoing racism directed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Beyond the utterly appalling fact that these people weren’t even recognised as human beings until 1967, their subsequent treatment continues to be unjust. It is with sadness, and even shame, that I’m able to reflect so joyfully on my time spent in a country in which its own government treats the very people from that land so poorly. My memories of a beautiful country, a well-paid job and a fantastic circle of friends sit uncomfortably alongside a different reality played out in shocking statistics. First Australians are the most incarcerated race in the world, have some of the highest suicide rates globally, and there have been over 432 Indigenous deaths in custody (since the 1991 Royal Commission into this statistic).

Fuelled by statistics like these, and in light of global ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, Vanessa Turnbull Roberts recently made an utterly compelling speech. Vanessa is a Bundjalung woman, law & social work student and human rights activist, and she spoke in anticipation of a march planned the following day in Sydney. She spoke about the pain of Aboriginal people in Australia, the need for accountability, and the importance of justice in a way which was deeply, deeply moving. And whilst I highly recommend watching the whole speech, what she specifically said about kinship has really stuck with me:

“Law is what builds the colonial system. But where my sisters and brothers come from, we’re built off lore. L-O-R-E: where we work on kinship and we stand up for one another.”

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(video) Vanessa Turnbull Roberts speaking in Sydney.

There’s been a tendency for people to look at the situation in places like Australia or America and say that racism doesn’t exist in the UK. But the colonial systems which have affected those countries have deep roots tracing back to the UK, and the legacy of colonialism is alive and real there. Artists and activists like George the Poet (whose recent interview with Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight is well worth a watch) and Akala have spoken out about race and the UK. The voices of Black people living in Britain like these two inspirational guys have really encouraged me to peel back the layers of the UK’s history and to take a deeper look at the country that I’m from.

All of this has in some ways left me feeling overwhelmed and deflated. This past week, as I’ve balanced an unplanned period living in Spain with enormous systemic issues like racism (a strange dualism which I wrote about in last week’s post), I guess the single thread is that I’ve tried to keep on pushing. And someone who really embodies that impassioned quest for a better world is Tommy Caulker.

Tom Caulker is one of those people that I am honoured to have met. As a DJ, night-club owner, and activist for racial harmony, Tom’s life is his mission, and his mission is to make Newcastle a more tolerant and inclusive place.

(image) A portrait I took of Tom in his home back in 2015 for my blog post.

So I conclude this post with the third reference to ‘Keep on Pushing’, as those same words are painted across the walls of World Headquarters nightclub, the club that Tom Caulker founded. I first came across the club in my time at uni, and fell in love with the place’s unpretentious character, inclusive atmosphere, and the Northern Soul, funk and disco music that was played. It was only after I learnt a bit more about the club’s founder that I became intrigued in its story and its mission, and ultimately asked Tom if I could interview him (believe it or not for a blog post on here almost five years ago!).

In that interview, it became apparent that Tom is a man who lives his mission. He wears his heart on his sleeve, believes in a better world, and takes concrete actions to create that world. In that interview, we spoke about a short film that Channel 4 were in the process of making about him and the club. Five years on, and I’ve stumbled across the finished video and watching it in lockdown has been a real inspiration.

(video) The Channel 4 short documentary about World HQ.

In the video, Tom talks more about his experiences growing up in the UK and being subjected to racism at school, a formative background which influenced his later position at the renowned Trent House pub. In response to overt racism displayed by police, doormen and institutions in the North East in the 80s and 90s, Tom used music to promote inclusion - first at Trent House and later at World Headquarters, which he continues to run and DJs at. Tom describes the place as “a beacon of tolerance”. Far more than just a club, World Headquarters is a place that stands for something, and proudly displays its values on its walls through paintings, posters and slogans, of which include the mural of Curtis Mayfield with his powerful ‘Move On Up’ lyrics.

So as I wrap up another post, reflecting on the pleasure of interviewing Tom and the energy he exudes, I’m left feeling optimistic. There is much work to be done, but we’ve just got to keep on pushing...