#and when i said they were marxists she straight up said well that would be good

[spidergvven]

accidentally started talking about palestine w my mom and not only did she agree that israel was a far right apartheid state but when she started talking about hamas this hamas that terrorism blah blah blah i explained the pflp to her and she was like well that would be fine which had me dumb founded. like. one state solution communist palestine and she was like yeah. sounds good.

[my-chaos-radio]

Release: January 13, 1997

Lyrics:

Just tell me what you've got to say to me

I've been waiting for so long to hear the truth

It comes as no surprise at all you see

So cut the crap and tell me that we're through

Now, I know your heart, I know your mind

You don't even know you're being unkind

So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways

Just use me up and then you walk away

Boy, you can't play me that way

Well, I guess what you say is true

I could never be the right kind of girl for you

I could never be your woman

I could never be your woman

I could never be your woman

I could never be your woman

When I saw my best friend yesterday

She said she never liked you from the start

Well me, I wish that I could claim the same

But you always knew you held my heart

And you're such a charming, handsome man

Now I think I finally understand

Is it in your genes? I don't know

But I'll soon find out, that's for sure

Why did you play me this way?

Well, I guess what you say is true

I could never be the right kind of girl for you

I could never be your woman

I could never be your woman

I could never be your woman

Oh, I could never be your woman

Well, I guess what they say is true

I could never spend my life with a man like you

Songwriter:

I could never be your woman

I could never be your woman

I could never be your woman

Oh, I could never be your woman

Irving Wallman / Bing Crosby / Prakash Mishra / Max Wartel

SongFacts:

"Your Woman" is a song by British music producer White Town. It was released in January 1997 as the lead single from the album Women in Technology. It features a muted trumpet line taken from a 1932 recording of "My Woman" by Lew Stone and his Monseigneur Band. The song peaked at No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart. Outside the United Kingdom, the single reached No. 1 in Iceland, Israel and Spain, peaked within the top 10 on the charts of at least 12 countries, and reached No. 23 in the United States.

In the booklet of their 1999 album 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields' frontman Stephin Merritt described "Your Woman" as one of his "favourite pop songs of the last few years." In 2010, the song was named the 158th best track of the 1990s by Pitchfork.

Jyoti Prakash Mishra, White Town's sole member and the writer of "Your Woman", had garnered some notoriety within the United Kingdom's underground music scene in the years leading up to the song's mainstream release. In 1997, the song was heard by Mark Radcliffe (a BBC Radio 1 presenter at the time) who played it, helping Mishra gain much recognition in a short time.

Mishra has stated that the lyrics could stem from or be related to multiple situations. He says "When I wrote it, I was trying to write a pop song that had more than one perspective. Although it's written in the first person, the character behind that viewpoint isn't necessarily what the casual listener would expect".

Mishra wrote that the themes of the song include: "Being a member of an orthodox Trotskyist/Marxist movement. Being a straight guy in love with a lesbian. Being a gay guy in love with a straight man. Being a straight girl in love with a lying, two-timing, fake-arse Marxist. The hypocrisy that results when love and lust get mixed up with highbrow ideals." Mishra admitted that being signed to a major label (EMI) did not allow him to express creative control, and the loss of his anonymity due to the song's popularity drove him "mad".

The '>Abort, Retry, Fail?_' message that appeared on some inlay cards was explained by the artist: "Well, this cheerful message became a kind of shibboleth for me and sort-of characterises what's been going on for me the last few years." The song was created using free MIDI sequencing software for the Atari ST and a cheap multitrack cassette tape recorder.

The accompanying music video for "Your Woman" was produced in black and white silent film style. Most of the outdoor scenes were filmed in Derby.

In the video, there are numerous elements of acting, cinematography and editing that suggest an old fashioned film style. The exaggerated gestures of Chloé Treend, the hat wearing woman, helpless and fearful, and those of her quick tempered lover hint at the acting style from 1920s expressionist films. The ostensive metaphors, such as the use of hypnosis on the woman by the man or the recurring shots of crossroad signs bearing names of romantic relationship related attitudes, remind of the 1920s and 1930s efforts to express subjectivism in film.

The use of circular masks, as to emphasise focal points or for a mere elegant look, also belongs to the aforementioned period. At the point where the woman first enters the man's bedroom and in the final rope scene, match cuts are used in a manner resemblant of that from silent experimental films. Mishra can be seen for brief moments on television screens in the background.

There is also a scene where the woman closes the door on the man's arm, as she tries to escape from his advances. This is a direct reference to scene from Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un chien andalou (1928).

[beetlebitchywitch]

Yes, Professor

So our discord server might have come up with some professor AU’s for the Conglomerate and we might’ve gone a weeeee bit feral. So here’s what came of me deciding to target @realmonsterboyhours with two of her favorite boys, Zhuk and Bajo. Enjoy!

(If you’re unaware of the Conglomerate, a Mafia!Beej AU with 5 iterations of him, click here to get the full rundown courtesy of @monsterlovinghours

Warning: NSFW, some degradation, double teaming, spanking, just a fun time to be had

“Professor?”

“Hmm? Ah yes, come in, dorogoy.” 

You hesitated in the doorway to his office, taken aback for a moment by the lavishness of the decor before you slowly entered, shutting the door behind you with trembling hands. You took a deep breath, thankful that your professor’s eyes were trained on his tea as he raised his bobbing tea bag in and out of the steaming mug. The truth was, Professor Zhuk had always intimidated you. Though he was a physically imposing man, it was his regality that truly made you feel small next to him. He spoke with an air of confidence and intelligence that no other professor could match, save for-

...Oh dear God. 

“Buenos dias, querida,” Professor Escarabajo said from the plush armchair in the corner, a playful smirk playing on his lips. You stopped in your tracks, your brain sprinting to try and catch up with this unexpected turn of events. You knew you had to see Zhuk to speak about your grade in his Marxist Literature class, so why would the head of the History Department be waiting for you as well? You felt your cheeks stain a light pink despite your desperate attempts to keep yourself in check, already shrinking under the intensity of the professor’s mirthful gaze. 

“This is my colleague, Professor Escarabajo,” Zhuk said cheerily, seemingly unaware of your growing nervousness as he gestured to the other man. “He will be joining us for our brief meeting. I hope that this won’t be a problem?”

You avoided his gaze, simply nodding as you sunk into the chair across from the two of them, thankful for the plush softness enveloping your body. After a moment, you felt composed enough to meet Zhuk’s gaze with a polite smile, folding your hands in your lap to disguise the telltale tremble of an intimidated woman. 

“Not a problem at all, sir,” you replied softly, thumbing over the soft fabric of your skirt. 

“Excellent,” he said, sipping at his tea- Earl Grey, you suspected, given the earthy aroma- before fumbling with his little gold reading glasses, sliding them over the bridge of his nose as he read through a few papers strewn across his desk. 

God, what you wouldn’t give to be those pa-

No. Stop. You couldn’t be having those kinds of thoughts in front of the man you’d been fantasizing about for weeks. Christ, watching him command a classroom, demanding the attention of his students with a booming voice as he masterfully took you all through the intricacies of some of the most complicated literature you’d ever read...it made you want to throw yourself out of your chair and beg him to fuck you in front of the rest of the class. 

But you couldn’t think of that. Not here, not in his office, not in front of another professor. You pinched your leg softly, hoping to distract yourself away from the fantasies that could only be making your cheeks redder by the second. 

“Now, it seems you’ve been struggling on your reflections for Marxist Literature,” he said, looking over what you assumed to be a stack of the assignments you’d managed to turn in on time. “Tell me how I can be of help to you, moy dorogoy.” 

You felt like you were short circuiting, your mind lulled by the sweet timbre of his beautifully accented voice, especially when he called you something in Russian that you were aching to know the meaning of. Gulping, you straightened your body in the chair, attempting to look as professional and put together as you knew you could never be in their presence.

“Well, Professor, Marxist Literature has honestly been a challenge for me,” you replied, hoping honesty would truly be the best policy. “I find it hard to look at literature from a Marxist lens when I’ve learned so little of his political theory in my classes up until this point.” 

“Ah, should I tell Professor Scarabee that he’s slacking off in his teaching?” Escarabajo asked, his golden eyes alight with mischief. Your stomach lurched, oh God you were going to vomit, you couldn’t handle even the gentlest of teasing from this professor who was somehow just as handsome as Zhuk, except rougher, clearly looser, and apparently feeding off of your evident nervousness, if the look in his eye was anything to go off of. 

“No, no, not at all!” you stammered. “I haven’t had the pleasure of being taught by him, but I’m sure he’s great at what he does, Professor Escarabajo.” 

“Please, querida,” he said, his playful smirk softening as he gave you a little wink. “Call me Bajo.” 

“Bajo…” you replied, and, despite everything, giving him a little smile of your own. 

“Yes, well…” Zhuk said, clearing his throat to regain your attention. You snapped back, your stomach churning with anxiety as he stared you down. “I am happy to provide you with a few extra lessons, dorogoy. In fact, it seems to be fate that Professor...Bajo was here with me today. He just so happens to know quite a bit of Marxist political theory, yes?”

“Indeed I do,” Bajo replied, lounging back in the plush chair. “And I have nowhere to be. Will you allow for a bit of extra tutoring, pequeña?” 

This felt like something straight out of a romance novel. Two gorgeous professors giving you a private study session behind closed doors? You nodded, shooting them a thankful smile as you tried not to let those kinds of thoughts into your mind. You needed to learn about Marx, and your professors were kind enough to help you, so you wouldn’t waste their time getting distracted by the demands of your body. You pulled out your textbook and sat back in the chair, ready to finally get some work done. 

Of course, the world seemed to be against you from the start, because you simply couldn’t grasp a single thing the two of them were trying to teach you. It felt like your brain had turned to mush, the difficult political concepts sloshing around inside your skull and never finding a place to stick. Your answers were sloppy, your insights poor, and with every passing minute, you could feel the tension in the room grow. Zhuk was a patient man, you could tell he was trying to be gentle with you, but there was only so much even he could take. You could hear the growing aggravation in his voice, which only served to discombobulate you further. Finally, when you couldn’t even form an answer to the simplest of questions, Zhuk tossed your papers frustratedly onto his desk, running his fingers through his hair. 

“Dorogoy,” he began, his voice deep and tense in a way that made your muscles clench. “We are doing all that we can to help you, but we are of no use to you if you refuse to pay attention.”

“N-no!” you stammered, feeling hot shame flush your cheeks once more. “That’s not it!” 

“Then what is it, pequeña?” Bajo grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose as he took deep, slow breaths. “Because I refuse to waste my time trying to help a student who won’t repay the favor by actually listening.” 

“That’s...I-I…” you fought the urge to curl in on yourself, your fingers digging into your sides as you tried and failed to put yourself together. Suddenly, Bajo stopped, looking down at you curiously before a broad grin spread across his face. 

“Look up at me, querida,” he demanded, putting two fingers under your chin to lift your face so your eyes met. Your cheeks were already shamefully flushed, but the minute you looked into his deep, golden eyes, they grew even redder, your breath coming out in soft, shaky pants. You could see the satisfaction in his gaze as he let go of your chin and turned to Zhuk. 

“I believe I see the problem, amigo,” he said slyly, striding back towards his chair and taking a seat, resting his elbows on his knees as he leered at you. “The only thing distracting our student from us...is us.” 

“What are you talking about, Escarabajo?” Zhuk replied, looking you over quizzically. “She seems fine to...oh.” 

You looked up at him with a soft gasp at the last word and were startled by the look in his eye. What started as confusion slowly morphed into realization, and realization quickly and readily became hunger. He looked at you like a man starved looks out over a Thanksgiving feast, and though it sent a shiver down your spine, you couldn’t look away. Could this be real? Could the man you spent class after class fantasizing over be looking at you like he wanted you back? The very thought felt shameful, and yet...right.

“So you see it too, hmm?” Bajo asked, startling you out of your reverie. “How naughty of you, mariposa. What ever are we to do with you?” You watched as he looked at Zhuk, his eyes silently asking, begging for permission. Zhuk nodded, letting his eyes flit over to you, frustration still present despite the ever-growing presence of lust, lust, God, you couldn’t even deny it. 

“Get up, dorogoy,” he commanded, and the unwavering dominance in his tone had you scrambling from your seat before you could even process what you were doing. You watched fearfully as Bajo strode confidently over to Zhuk’s desk, reaching into the desk drawer to pull out...a long, wooden ruler.

...Christ.

“You know what’s coming, don’t you, tonta?” he said bitingly, smacking the ruler threateningly against his palm. You could feel your legs tremble as you nodded, sniffling under your breath knowing you were about to get what you deserve. “Good girl. Over the desk.” 

You hesitated for a moment, a rush of mixed feelings taking you over; fear, shame, excitement, curiosity, desire...it was that last one that got your feet moving, and when you reached the desk, you bent over and braced your arms against the dark wood, the slight breeze against your bare legs making the blood rush to your cheeks once more. You kept your eyes trained on the desk beneath you, shivering at the sound of Bajo’s deep, foreboding chuckle. 

“What an obedient girl,” he mused, touching the ruler to your thigh and dragging it up to flip your skirt back, revealing your black, lacy panties. You jumped as his cold hand took hold of the waistband, pulling them down just enough to expose your ass in a way that somehow made you feel more exposed than if he’d taken them off altogether. You could feel Zhuk’s eyes on you, watching silently from behind his desk with his arms crossed in front of him, and you felt it best to sneak a glance at his face. You nearly choked on your tongue at the sight of him, gazing intently at the roundness of your ass like he didn’t know whether to kiss it, smack it, or make love to it. You never imagined your professor looking at you in such a way...well, no, you did, but you never expected those thoughts to come true. 

“You will count them for us. Do you understand?” he finally said, his words dripping with a stoic desire that somehow fit him just right. You nodded nervously, your fingers already curling against the wood in anticipation. You heard the whistle of the ruler through the air before you felt it, smacking against your ass loudly though still drowned out by your even louder cry as the pain radiated across your skin. Still, you remembered their command and were afraid of what might happen if you did not obey. 

“O-one…” you whimpered, your voice thick with unshed tears. 

“What a smart girl,” Bajo said mockingly, bringing the ruler down again with a sharp crack. “Though apparently not smart enough to pay attention. Is it going to take a fucking spanking for you to learn your lesson, mierda por cerebros?” 

Tears spilled from your eyes as you stammered out a quiet “Two...”, a hot rush of shame filling your belly not at your lack of attention span, but from how much you liked his degrading words and the pain of each smack of the ruler against your slowly reddening ass. And God, the fact that Zhuk was just watching, staring you down as you were slowly taken apart by his colleague...

“Don’t you have something to say to us, gatita?” Bajo asked angrily as he brought the ruler down for the tenth time. “You made us waste an hour trying to teach you something that you couldn’t pay attention to because you were too busy being a fucking slut. Don’t you feel like you owe us something?”

“I-I...I’m sorry,” you whimpered thickly, watching as your tears dripped onto the wood of Zhuk’s desk. 

“Louder, malenk’iy,” Zhuk said sternly, finally moving closer to you and brushing his hand over the raised welts on your ass. You hissed, but still bucked into his touch.

“I’m sorry!” you cried out. “I’m sorry, sirs! I wasted your time, I was a bad girl, I’m sorry!” 

“Si,” Bajo said softly, running the ruler soothingly over your ass for a moment before suddenly, his hand was in your hair, yanking your head back so he could press his mouth right against your ear. “And you forgot to count.” 

Oh fuck. A deep sense of dread filled your belly, your eyes widening as your tears continued to pour down your cheeks. 

“I, no wait, I’m sorry! Please, sir!” you begged, but his hand in your hair only tightened, pulling a choked off whimper out of your lips. 

“Escarabajo,” Zhuk interjected, placing his hand on top of Bajo’s in your hair. Yes, your knight in shining armor, come to rescue you from your fate- “I believe it’s my turn.” 

...Well, shit. 

Your entire body shivered as Bajo’s hand was quickly replaced with Zhuk’s larger one, his touch gentler as he gripped your hair, pushing your head down until your cheek was pressed against the cool wood. 

“You were a very bad girl, kukla,” he said sternly, using his free hand to finally pull your panties down until they pooled around your ankles. “Wasting our time, forgetting to count...perhaps a stricter punishment is in order.” 

Your breath came out shakily as you heard him quickly unzip his zipper, his cock slapping against a welt on your ass and pulling a hiss from your lips. He chuckled darkly at the sound, letting his fingers trace gently over your reddened skin. 

“What do you say, Escarabajo?” he asked, shooting Bajo a bemused look. “Would you like to keep her quiet for me?” 

You could only imagine the wicked grin on Bajo’s face as he and Zhuk rearranged you, Zhuk still behind you while Bajo stood in front of you, your head now hanging off the edge of the desk and at eye-level with his hardening cock. He quickly freed himself from his pants, stroking it just inches from your lips with a soft groan. 

“You bet your ass I would. Time to put your mouth to better use, muñeca,” he said, rubbing the head of his cock against your lips. You opened them obediently, allowing him to slide inside and moaning softly at the weight of his cock against your tongue as he hit the back of your throat with ease. Zhuk’s fingers, now wet, slid between your legs, teasing at your entrance before sliding inside, making you gasp around Bajo’s cock. 

“That’s it, gatita,” he crooned, slowly starting to fuck into your mouth. “Fuck, she feels like fucking heaven, mi amigo.” 

“Treat him well, kotenok,” Zhuk said, his voice hushed as he marvelled at how wet you were from a simple spanking. “See if this teaches you how to be a good girl, da?” 

You moaned your assent around Bajo’s cock, looking up at him obediently as you did your best to pleasure him, bobbing your head in time with his thrusts as Zhuk’s fingers sent little bursts of pleasure all the way to your fingertips. You felt properly full, your mouth stretched around Bajo’s cock while a second and third finger slid inside you, Zhuk doing his best to stretch you in preparation for what you’d been fantasizing about for weeks. You never expected a second partner thrown into the mix, but you wouldn’t complain about the taste of him in your mouth, the delicious stretch in your jaw as you swallowed him down, the wonderful groans as he fucked down your throat…

It felt like an eternity when Zhuk finally pulled his fingers out of you, and you groaned in protest despite the ache slowly forming in your jaw. He chuckled, smacking his hand cheekily against your ass and amusing himself with your pained squeak. 

“Are you ready for your punishment, dorogoy?” he asked, dragging the head of his cock through the wetness of your folds. Confusion and dread took hold in you- you knew you had to be punished, but what could he possibly have in store that they hadn’t already put you through? Finally, he pushed inside of you, his thick cock stretching you more than you could’ve imagined as you let out a long, low groan around Bajo’s cock. When he finally bottomed out, he groaned softly, reveling in the way your pussy clenched around him. With a smirk, he grabbed your hair from behind, holding onto it like a leash. “Because if you’re going to cum...you’re going to have to beg.” 

Oh God. You could tell Bajo was getting close, his groans growing higher pitched and his thrusts growing more erratic, his cock sliding fully into your throat with each thrust inside. Your ministrations grew sloppier as you felt hot rushes of pleasure radiating through your body as Zhuk began to take you, his cock dragging so perfectly inside you. It was all rushing to your head, the feeling of being taken so completely, filled to the brim, taken apart piece by piece with unrelenting pleasure. You gazed up at Bajo, your eyes going cloudy as you silently pleaded for him to cum in your mouth, spill inside you, make you his. He obliged a second later, pushing fully into your mouth and holding your face against him as he spilled down your throat, his choked off moan reverberating throughout the small room. You obediently swallowed every drop, gasping for air as he pulled out of you and immediately slumped into the nearest chair, running his fingers through his hair with a blissed out look on his face.

“Ooh, gatita, look how pretty you are when you get fucked,” he crooned, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees to watch you intently. “Give it to her a little harder, amigo, she can take more than that.”

Zhuk obliged, grunting as he sped up with ferocity, pulling on your hair to lift you off the desk so your back was pressed fully against his chest, his hand moving down to wrap around your throat as he took you so hard you thought he was trying to breed you. The very thought sent a warm shiver down your spine, along with Bajo’s eyes watching happily as your tits bounced from each of Zhuk’s thrusts. The head of his cock dragged perfectly against your G spot, pulling pitiful moans from your fucked out mouth.

“What a good little slut,” he growled, mouthing roughly at your neck. “Does someone want to cum?”

“I don’t know, mi amigo, she doesn’t seem to want it that badly,” Bajo said flippantly, his eyes glinting with mischief. You groaned in protest, trying to reach down to circle your fingers around your clit, but your hand was immediately slapped away, Zhuk growling a warning into your skin. 

“I told you to beg,” he snarled, hovering his fingers teasingly over your clit, just an inch away from where you needed them to be. “Better make it pretty, too, if you want to cum.” 

“P-please!” you whimpered, desperation quickly bubbling up inside of you as the pleasure halted just on the edge of oblivion, needing just a little more in order to boil over. With each thrust, the desperation grew, your hands frustratedly scrabbling for purchase on the desk as you were assaulted and teased with pleasure that refused to finally peak. “God, I need it so bad! Sir, please, please let me cum!” 

“I can’t hear you,” he growled, tightening his hand around your throat until your voice was only a mere squeak. Bajo watched with delight, amused and aroused at the sight of you struggling and failing to beg for what you needed. “Louder!” 

“PLEASE!” you cried out, frustrated at the bare whisper you somehow managed with the large hand clamping down on your throat. You whined at the sound of their laughter, but it quickly turned to a soft cry as his fingers finally descended on your clit, rubbing in perfect little circles as you finally toppled over the edge, cumming with a silent scream. The pleasure rushed through you like waves, and you sunk deeper and deeper as each one passed until you finally succumbed to the darkness quickly clouding your vision. 

When you came to, you were surrounded with a pleasant warmth. Your eyes slid open to find your head nestled onto Zhuk’s chest, with Bajo curled up behind you with his head buried into your shoulder. You blinked away the fuzziness at the edges of your vision to see Zhuk smiling down at you, resting his head against his pillow.

“You got me to the bedroom while I was out?” you asked, nuzzling further into their embraces.

“Of course. It wasn’t exactly difficult, tsvetok,” Zhuk chuckled, stroking a hand comfortingly through your hair. 

“What did you think, mariposa?” Bajo asked, pressing a sweet kiss to your shoulder before hooking his chin over it, smiling over at you. “Were we convincing?” 

“Incredibly,” you yawned, smiling sleepily at them. “You make quite the literature professor, moy muzh.” 

“Mm, well I’m glad you convinced us to humor you,” Zhuk replied, leaning down to press a soft kiss to your forehead. “Now go to sleep, moya lyubov. You’ve earned it.”

He didn’t need to tell you twice. Your eyes slipped shut happily, comforted by the embraces of your favorite boys as sleep once again claimed you. 

[chiseler]

"¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!”

Lolita Lebrón

Amid all the righteous shrieking and arm-flapping that accompanied the coverage of the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of yahoos and half-wits, commentator after commentator proclaimed such an assault on the sanctity of The People’s House was unprecedented, at least since the torching of the Capitol building during the War of 1812. If your limiting the parameters to “A mob of yahoos and half-wits spurred on by clumsy bald-faced lies and ridiculous conspiracy theories stormed the Capitol building, convinced they’d be able to overturn the results of a presidential election by making a terrible mess,” then yes, sure, I can’t think of a comparable example in our history. If, however, these commentators are speaking in more general terms about violent, politically-motivated attacks inside the American International Pictures logo, then I’m afraid, yet again, a brief history lesson is in order. Let’s work our way backwards from January 6th.

In a strange and eerie precedent, if on a smaller scale, on the afternoon of July 24th, 1998, Russell E. Weston Jr. stormed through the Capitol’s document door, an entrance generally reserved for elected officials and their staffs. According to interviews after the fact, Weston was a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds who was convinced America was about to be besieged both by a strange new disease and an army of cannibals, and wanted our nation’s leaders to know about it.

Jacob Chestnut, Jr.

When Weston zipped through the metal detector just inside the entrance, the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver he was carrying set off the alarm. After Capitol police officer Jacob Chestnut, Jr. asked him to kindly back up and go through the machine again, Westin drew his revolver and shot Chestnut in the head, killing him. He then took off down the hall, ducking into what turned out to be a suite of offices occupied by senior Republican congressmen. At that particular moment, it was also occupied by plainclothes special agent John Gibson, who’d drawn security detail that day. Weston promptly shot Gibson as well, but before he died, Gibson returned fire, shooting Weston four times. Weston survived, and is presently still being held in an institute for the criminally insane.

Fifteen years earlier, on November 7th, 1983, members of a third-rate radical group calling themselves The Armed Resistance Unit (ARU) planted a bomb on the second floor of the Senate Wing. When it went off around midnight, no one was hurt, but the blast did cause an estimated $250,000 in damage. A communique released by the ARU said the bombing was in response to American military action in Grenada and Lebanon. Thirteen years before that, on March 1st, 1971, The Weathermen, in what would soon be recognized as their standard m.o., planted a bomb in one of the Capitol’s many bathrooms. Again it was timed to go off in the middle of the night. No one was hurt, but the next day a few people were inconvenienced. In taking credit for the bombing, The Weathermen claimed it was in response to the continued U.S. bombing of Laos. Or maybe just Laotian bathrooms—amid all the hippie lingo and Marxist doggerel, it was hard to tell.

But those were all small potatoes, tepid attacks waged by crazy people driven by delusional fantasies and supposed revolutionary groups who had no clear idea what a real revolution entailed. But exactly seventeen years before the Weathermen, in essence, flushed an M-80 down a congressional toilet and called it a mighty blow against U.S. imperialism, it was a different story, which may explain why it’s so forgotten today.

In order to fully understand the events of March 1st, 1954, we need to step back a ways, to the end of the Spanish-American War.

As part of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which brought the war to its end, Spain handed control of Puerto Rico over to the U.S.. There was just one problem with this. A year earlier, in the 1897 Carta de Autonomía, Spain had already granted Puerto Rico independence from colonial rule, meaning come the end of their scuffle with the States, Spain was no longer in any position to be handing Puerto Rico over to anyone.

Well, everyone seemed to overlook this little technicality, and Puerto Rico became an American commonwealth.

In 1950, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act, which declared the U.S. would continue to provide security for Puerto Rico and handle any international treaties that might involve them.  At the same time, the people of Puerto Rico would be free to elect their own government, so long as the U.S. approved of their choices. While Puerto Ricans would be considered U.S. citizens, they would not be allowed to vote for president, nor would they have any representatives in Congress.

This did not sit especially well with the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, which had been pushing for Puerto Rican sovereignty since its formation in 1922.

The ruling (and U.S.-backed) People’s Democratic Party, however, gave the passage of the Congressional act a big thumb’s up. In response, the Nationalists, still calling for the recognition of the 1897 Carta de Autonomía, launched a sloppy and bloody revolt in cities across Puerto Rico. The uprising was quickly squashed with a little help from the PDP’s friends to the North, who provided both manpower and military hardware.

Two Puerto Rican nationals living in New York at the time, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, had a better idea. Down in Washington, with the White House undergoing renovations, Harry Truman had taken up temporary residence in Blair House, the presidential guest house. He was a sitting duck, they figured. Freedom-loving people around the world may have been able to ignore a little three-day skirmish in their homeland, but they wouldn’t be able to ignore the assassination of a U.S. president.

The pair armed themselves and took a train down to Washington. Once they arrived at Blair House, apparently convinced they’d simply be able to kick in the front door and shoot Truman, Torresola and Collazo were surprised to find the place guarded by dozens of secret service agents, city cops, and White House security officers. In the brief gun battle that ensued, Torresola was killed, as was one of the cops. Collazo was taken into custody and later sentenced to death. Two years later in 1952, Truman commuted his sentence to life in prison.

Also in 1952, gleaning that the natives were getting restless, Truman decided it might be wise to appease them by offering a simple vote on the matter. So later that year, the people of Puerto Rico, given the chance to put a free and open democracy into action, went to the polls, where they were freely and openly allowed to choose between the kind of limited autonomy they presently experienced, or complete U.S. control. The fact that “independence” was not among the choices offered was lost on nobody, especially the Nationalists, who for the most part skipped the vote. Those who did vote overwhelmingly chose to stick with limited autonomy.

A radical wing of the Nationalist Party, enraged by the scam of a so-called referendum, began hatching a plan to call attention to the struggles of the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Initially, the four-person team—Lolita Lebrón, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, Rafael Cancel Miranda and Irvin Flores Rodríguez—decided to launch a series of violent attacks around Washington, coinciding with the opening of the Interamerican Conference in Caracas on March first, 1954. As the date approached, however, Lolita Lebrón, self-appointed leader of the group, decided splitting up to try and hit several targets at once around Washington was maybe not the wisest move. They’d get better results if they concentrated their efforts on a single target—namely the U.S. Congress.  

So on the morning of March 1st, like Torresola and Collazo before them, Lebrón met the other three at Grand Central Station. Armed with semiautomatic pistols, they boarded a train for Washington. Upon arriving, they marched straight to the Capitol building and found themselves seats at the back of one of the visitors galleries overlooking the House floor.

Down on the floor, Congress was debating whether or not to continue allowing Mexican immigrants to work as migrant laborers on American soil. Upon Lebrón’s signal, a cry of "¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!,” the four stood, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, pulled their guns and began firing.

After she was arrested, Lebrón insisted she’d only fired hers at the ceiling, saying, "I did not come to kill anyone, I came to die for Puerto Rico.” The other three, however, apparently hadn’t been paying attention during the planning sessions, and began shooting at Congress members. Cordero’s gun jammed, but Miranda more than picked up the slack, firing an estimated 30 rounds into the panicking Congressmen below. Three Democrats and two Republicans were struck, one seriously, but all five survived. All four Nationalists were arrested at the scene.

In June, after a 12-day trial in federal court on attempted murder and weapons charges, the four were found guilty, though Lebrón was found guilty of the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Although the prosecution had been pushing for the death penalty given the crime involved an attack on the very heart of American democracy, the judge instead handed down consecutive prison terms, fifty years for Lebrón and seventy-five years each for the other three.

In October, they were brought back to court to face further federal conspiracy charges. They were found guilty once again, and the judge tacked another six years onto their sentences. The four were then split up and sent to four different federal prisons.

Two decades after the attack on Congress, the next generation of radical Puerto Rican nationals calling themselves FALN, still fighting for Puerto Rican sovereignty, began a bombing campaign across the U.S.. It’s estimated they detonated over 130 bombs in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities, most notably the 1975 lunch time bombing of the historic Fraunces Tavern in the Financial District, which killed four Wall Street types.

In 1978, as the bloody, decade-long FALN bombing campaign rolled on, Figueroa Cordero was released from prison after serving 23 years of his 81-year sentence. The next year, then-President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentences of the other three. Some say it was part of a prisoner exchange deal to secure the release of several CIA agents imprisoned in Cuba, while others believe it may have been a direct response to the FALN, who, among other things, had been demanding the release of their revolutionary forbears.

Today, the Puerto Rican Nationalist attack on Congress and the FALN’s deadly decade-long bombing spree remain mostly forgotten. Meanwhile the bumbling rich-kid antics of The Weathermen and the merely bubbling antics of the Symbionese Liberation Army remain firmly entrenched in the American consciousness. The reasons for this are fairly simple and merely part of a long pattern. Groups like The Weathermen and the SLA may not have had any clear plans, may not have been driven by any personal injustices, and may not have accomplished much save for the kidnapping of one rich white girl, but they had great p.r.. They were (mostly) white, they were photogenic, and they didn’t really bother anyone. The four Puerto Rican Nationalists, the FALN and other forgotten groups like the Black Liberation Army were motivated by personal injustices. Their anger was justified, they did some real damage, and that made them a dangerous threat to those in power. They were also, y’know, a bunch of dirty Hispanics and Blacks, so better to just bury the issue. Who cares?

by Jim Knipfel

[safetypinkerton]

Hollywood Propaganda by Mark Dice 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hollywood-propaganda-mark-dice/1137833508

Christianity Under Attack

In order to destroy America, the conspirators are determined to eradicate faith in God and dismantle organized Christianity. Attacking Jesus and Christianity is a sacrament in Hollywood because the far-Left hates Jesus and everything He stands for. It’s not an overstatement to say that many in key positions of power in the entertainment industry (and politics) are Satanists who will someday openly embrace Lucifer as the rebel angel kicked out of Heaven for defying God.

  “I’m glad the Jews killed Christ,” ranted comedian Sarah Silverman in one of her comedy specials. “Good. I’d fucking do it again!” she declares, as her audience agrees in laughter.158 While accepting an Emmy Award one year Kathy Griffin said, “A lot of people come up here and they thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. He didn’t help me a bit…so all I can say is suck it Jesus! This award is my god now!”159

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be able to make fun of Christians, but no mainstream celebrity would dare make such insults or jokes about Muhammad because Muslims (and Jews) are vigorously protected against any criticism or mockery and only wonderful things can be said about them. Even a slightly edgy joke ignites a barrage of attacks with cries of “Islamophobia” or “anti-Semitism” and gears start moving in the well-funded and massive smear machines like the ADL and the SPLC which quickly move to destroy the person’s career before they can utter another word.

Hating Christians is almost as necessary as believing in climate change if you’re going to be a mainstream Hollywood celebrity. There are very few open Christians in Hollywood, most of them are has-beens like Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron who have been basically blacklisted since being open about their faith.

  Kevin Sorbo was banned from Comicon because he’s a conservative and “pals with Sean Hannity.”160 He and other Christian actors are stuck doing low budget films that get little attention. They’re allowed to exist (for now) as long as they never point out the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality. Only watered down and generic Christian messages are allowed to be said.

After Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and happened to discuss his “spirituality,” many online began attacking him for being a Christian and attending a church. Actress Ellen Page (a lesbian) from the X-Men and Inception tweeted, “If you are a famous actor and you belong to an organization that hates a certain group of people, don’t be surprised if someone simply wonders why it’s not addressed. Being anti LGBTQ is wrong, there aren’t two sides. The damage it causes is severe. Full stop.”161

Singer Ellie Goulding threatened to back out of her scheduled performance at the 2019 Thanksgiving NFL halftime show if the Salvation Army didn’t pledge to donate money to LGBT causes. She got the idea after her Instagram comments were flooded with complaints from her fans because the Salvation Army was sponsoring the game to announce their annual Red Kettle Campaign (bell ringers) fundraiser for the homeless.162 Since the Salvation Army is a Christian charity, Goulding’s fans freaked out, accusing them of being “homophobic” and “transphobic.”

They quickly bowed to the pressure and “disavowed” any anti-LGBT beliefs, which basically means they’re disavowing the Bible because even the New Testament denounces homosexuality in Romans 1:26-27 and 1st Corinthians 6:9-10. Many critics claim that only the Old Testament does, but the Book of Romans makes it clear that just because Jesus came to offer salvation doesn’t mean God’s law regarding homosexuality changed.

The Salvation Army also removed a “position statement” from their website that had made it clear “Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex,” and replaced it with one saying “We embrace people regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”163 One of the world’s largest Christian charities whose very name “The Salvation Army” refers to the salvation of Christ, cowardly bowed down to the Leftist activists out of fear they would be branded “homophobic.”

Christians are easy targets since they’re much more passive than Jews and Muslims when attacked, and Hollywood loves to stereotype them as a bunch of superstitious bigots who don’t know how to have fun. In the rare case that there is a movie favorable to Christianity that gets widespread distribution, that too is attacked.

Passion of the Christ was deemed “anti-Semitic” because it depicts the story of Jesus’ arrest, sham trial, and crucifixion.164 It was the most popular film about the events to be made and wasn’t a straight to DVD release like most others. With Mel Gibson behind it, the film became a huge success, which caused a tremendous backlash.

The ADL [Anti-Defamation League] denounced the film, saying it “continues its unambiguous portrayal of Jews as being responsible for the death of Jesus. There is no question in this film about who is responsible. At every single opportunity, Mr. Gibson’s film reinforces the notion that the Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob are the ones ultimately responsible for the Crucifixion.”165 That’s because that’s what happened!

Technically, the Romans did it, but at the behest of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem at the time. The Bible makes it very clear what led to Jesus being crucified. Pontius Pilate is quoted in Matthew 27:24 saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” and “It is your responsibility!” meaning the Jewish Pharisees. They were the ones who conspired to have Jesus arrested and killed for “blasphemy” and being a “false” messiah. Pontius Pilate even offered to release Jesus, but the crowd demanded he release Barabbas instead, another man who was being detained for insurrection against Rome, and for murder.166

A critic for the New York Daily News called The Passion of the Christ, “the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of the Second World War.”167 Many others angrily denounced the film when it came out in 2004. Some in the media even blamed it for a supposed “upsurge” in anti-Semitic hate crimes.168

When the History Channel miniseries The Bible was released in 2013, the same cries of “anti-Semitism” rang out.169 The New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss went so far as to say that it’s a “conspiracy theory” that Jews killed Jesus.170

Even though most Christmas movies aren’t overtly Christian and instead focus of the importance of families reuniting and spending time together, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to come under attack. As the war on western culture continues, the Marxists have set their sights on Christmas too.

Online liberal cesspool Salon.com ran a headline reading “Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda,” and complained they promote “heteronormative whiteness” because there aren’t enough LGBT characters or people of color in them.171

“Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world,” Salon said, “which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive White nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.”172

The article went on to say that because the Hallmark Channel airs so many Christmas movies, it is promoting, “a set of patriarchal and authoritarian values that are more about White evangelicals defining themselves as an ethnic group, and not about a genuine feeling of spirituality…The very fact that they’re presented as harmless fluff makes it all the more insidious, the way they work to enforce very narrow, White, heteronormative, sexist, provincial ideas of what constitutes ‘normal.’”173

The article wasn’t satire. Salon.com has a deep-seated hatred of Christianity, conservatives and families, and is another cog in the Cultural Marxist machine working to destroy the United States.

Comedian Whitney Cummings was reported to the Human Resources department of a major Hollywood studio after she wished the crew of a TV show she was working on “Merry Christmas” when they wrapped up for the year. She made the revelation while speaking with Conan O’Brian the following December. “Last year, I was working on a TV show, [and] got in trouble with Human Resources for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to an intern,” she began.174

Conan asked her if she was being serious and she said it was a true story, elaborating, “I was leaving, like on the 18th or whatever…and I was like, ‘Bye guys, Merry Christmas.’” When she returned from vacation after New Year’s she was called to HR and scolded. She joked, “I don’t even care how your Christmas was. It was just a formality. It’s what you say when you leave.”175

Conan O’Brien then replied, “In these times we’re in, that could trigger someone or offend them if it’s not their holiday.”176 She didn’t say which network it was, but she’s been involved with some major shows like NBC’s Whitney (where she played the main character), as well as the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, which she created and was a writer for.

While today it may seem impossible that Christmas movies may become a thing of the past, nobody could have ever guessed that reruns of the classic Dukes of Hazzard would get banned after the Confederate flag was deemed a “hate symbol” in 2015, or that Aunt Jemima pancake syrup, Eskimo Pie ice cream bars, and Uncle Ben’s Rice would be deemed “racially insensitive” and pulled from production a few years later.177

Once someone reminds liberals that the word Christmas is derived from Christ’s Mass and that it is actually a commemoration of the birth of Jesus, they may finally go over the edge and deem Christmas just as offensive as Columbus Day or the Fourth of July. And with the Muslim and Sikh populations increasing in the United States, the American standard of Christmas music playing in shopping malls and retail stores all month long every December may one day come to an end because it’s not “inclusive” and leaves non-Christians feeling “ostracized.”

[xxgoblin-dumplingxx]

Theoretical Knowledge

“Remember kids,” you say sitting on the desk, feet folded as you cradle a cup of coffee, “A theory is JUST a framework for understanding. So. As we discuss Marxist, Feminist, and Queer Theories, no. I am not telling you that you HAVE to use only those theories and you HAVE to see the world that way. So please. Please keep the tweetstorms to a minimum in class. Just remember. If you don’t understand the theories, you can’t argue against them effectively.”

You smile and set your coffee cup down. “That said, Tuesday, we’ll be starting with Feminist Theory. Please read the chapter before class and come prepared to engage in our preliminary discussion.”

College kids, mostly freshmen start to trickle out, gathering their things and clustering up a few at a time. You alternately loved and hated teaching lower-level courses. The amount of handholding that they needed to be housebroken for their upper-level courses got a little more astounding every semester but... Still. There was something lovely about helping them build a solid foundation for the rest of their careers. 

You pause to answer a few questions. Careful to help them find the correct information. People for the next class were queuing up just beyond your periphery and you direct the stragglers to you office hours. You can feel the grumpy glare of Barnes, the mathematics professor and you cringe internally. You were willing to bet that you were going to have a shitty email waiting on you this evening. Some tripe about respecting other people’s time. Like it was your fault they’d shoehorned your 100 level classes into the Mathematics building. It was all the way across campus and there wasn’t decent coffee to be found anywhere on any floor. It was a miserable utilitarian clusterfuck of a building. Still. On some level it was super fun to get under his skin. The grump ass.

But, you were a good girl. You ignored his impatient harrumphs and tried not to glare at him when he slammed his stuff down and startled you. You erased the board carefully and quietly gathered your things as he sent an attendance sheet around the room, starting his droning on about Proofs or whatever the fuck. You even smiled, just a little when you caught his eye.

Numbers left you cold. 

They reminded you of sitting on the floor in the hallway. Flecks of mica winking mockingly at you as you try to finish the times table drill through the tremors in your hands and the tears that are threatening to spill. 

They reminded you of desperation. Frantically searching couch cushions for change. Just 80 cents so that you could at least get some fries at lunch. You’’re sick. Too sick to go to school but you can’t miss Algebra and there’s no food in the house. 

Numbers are an immutable fact. You can’t change them. No amount of new information will change that 2+2 is 4. Or change the fact that when you run the numbers, you come up wanting. So you try, very hard not to think about how irritating Barnes is. How you hate the aloofness in his face and how badly you’d like to see him smile to see if it made his eyes look less... Less frozen. 

As you strode across campus, anxious to get out of the cutting wind and stinging snow, back to your warm office and good coffee. Back on what felt like Terra Firma where you could discuss Russian Literature, and Freud’s Bullshit, and witchcraft, and stupid tv. Things you understood. Things you’d studied just for the sake of knowing. Things that had lead you here. You pushed the thoughts of Professor James Barnes out of your mind. He was as he was, and with any luck, it would only be for a semester that your existence would cause him any more irritation. Still. As you unlocked your door and settled behind your desk... There had to be something to be done about him. Something to chill him out just a little bit. You were just considering texting your usual gang of miscreants and rogue academics. You weren’t sure if it was for a war council or just for a drink. But you were saved having to figure it out when a familiar red head hurled herself dramatically across your desk.

“Please. I’m dying. Tinder sucks. Can we please. Please. Pretty fucking please go out. I miss out,” she says.

“Tasha,” you laugh, petting her hair absently, not looking up from your email, but pausing long enough to pat her hair, “You’re the one that said we couldn’t go out anymore.”

“And I was wrong. So. Very Wrong.”

“Well I’m not opposed but you know that if we don’t invite the boys they’ll be sad.”

“Tap room?”

“Sounds great,” you say absently, glaring at the missive that had just popped up.

Natasha arranged herself in a more dignified position in you guest chair and helped herself to a coffee and a snack, “Your face is making a face,” she frowns. 

“It’s just my best Buddy over in the Mathematics department,” you sigh rolling your eyes.

“Barnes right?” she says taking a sip of coffee.

You nod and turn the screen so she can read it.

You watch her eyes scan the monitor and watch the frown lines materialize, “What the fuck. Like dude. It’s just flavored coffee.”

“Right?”

“Control freak.”

“For fucking real. Like. Ew.”

You roll your eyes and she picks up her phone, “Maybe one of the Boys will know something.”

“Maybe,” you shrug, refusing to respond with apologies. 

________

“Bucky!” Steve said leaning on the door frame, “Come on. We’re going out.”

“No thank you,” Bucky said snorting, “I really don’t want to have to carry your drunk ass home. Or listen to you spout Poli-sci bullshit to try and get girls.”

“Well the girls we’re going with are gonna be completely unavailable and uninterested. We’re gonna hit the tap room and watch the game.” Steve frowned at his friend who kept glancing at his laptop like he was waiting on something. 

“What did you do, Bucky?” he asked folding his arms.

“Nothing,” he huffed.

“Well if you scowl at your computer any harder it’s gonna burst into flames.”

“I’m just waiting on an email,” he said feeling uncomfortable under Steve’s scrutiny. Squirming slightly in his chair. 

“Who are you picking a fight with now?” Steve scolded.

“I’m not.”

“James.”

“I don’t know what she teaches. Some social science thing. But she leaves the lecture hall a mess and reeking of flavored coffee.”

Steve rolled his eyes, “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?” he snapped.

“Missing Yelena and taking it out on some random girl that’s just slightly messy.”

“I’m not.” he said petulantly, “It’s unprofessional to take up my time.”

Steve restrained an eyeroll with effort, “C’mon, ya grumpy fuck. You like Nat fine. And Sam is coming. You can’t just rot in your house and forget how to live forever.”

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah yeah,” Steve said dismissively, “Pick you up at 7.” And he was gone before Bucky had a chance to formulate a reply.

The truth was complicated. Bucky knew exactly what you taught. The Anthropology of Religion. Folklore. Witchcraft. He’d read everything you had ever written. He followed your Twitter. He just. He didn’t understand you. You had a mind suited for numbers. Logical. Straight forward. Applying science and advocating for greater understanding with reckless abandon. 

But all you studied was... Stories. None of it was real. it was smoke and shadows. Illusions. He could only assume you were the same way. An illusion. You were pretty enough. Funny. But there had to be something... broken inside you. Something that you were hiding. Something to be wary of. He just didn’t know how to explain that to Steve. 

Numbers he understood. They were what they were regardless. If there was a mistake, he made it. There was no one else to blame with numbers. They sang to him like nothing else did. They spoke to him and whispered secrets. 

They made him think of being warm in bed with a book of number puzzles and a cup of hot chocolate on a snow day. The joy of solving a problem he’d been teasing at for days. It was happiness in its purest form. Accomplishment. Order from chaos.

You were chaos to which he saw no order. He couldn’t find a pattern to you. A nimbus of coffee and lost trains of thought. Bucky did not understand you and as he stared at his laptop, waiting for a reply, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. 

He decidedly didn’t want to. And he couldn’t wait for the semester to be over.

Tags: @lancsnerd @blameitonthecauseway @thorfanficwriter @stevieang @etherealwaifgoddess

[velveetacrackncheese]

The whole "forced diversity" shit is so stupid and it really makes zero sense to me considering the points made by geeks either refer to the bad writing independent of whatever race of gender said character is, or referring to something that necessitates the need for a poc to be in a film which shouldn't have to be the case. Women and poc shouldn't have to justify their existence in popular media. I'm sorry to say this but black people weren't invented in 2019. Gay people were not invented in the 21st century, the real world really do be like that and it's fine for there to be shitty gay romcoms as much as it's ok for there to be good films with gay characters in it without people feeling the need to point at those bad films and say "See this is forced diversity. This is why we shouldn't make gay movies anymore" like it makes no fucking sense. That's not to say there isn't a such thing as hollow representation and being disrespectful of the people trying to be represented, but that's more or less an executive decision made to try and appeal to more audiences for marketing purposes (Le Fou from Beauty and the Beast) that at times can be tone deaf or just so shoddy that whatever representation was there was probably only implied or just in the background somewhere, but I don't know a single person who thinks tokenism is a good thing, and even if tokenism is what "forced diversity" is, then why is the term "forced diversity" used to refer to other instances of supposedly unjust casting then? Who's a fan of queerbaiting? I don't get it because even then, it comes down to how it's written and framed. A gay character simply being "That one gay" is typically the result of bad writing and honestly I'd very much call that half-assed diversity since clearly they don't care about their gay characters that much aside from having "the gay" in it and nothing else. But like I said, that's tokenism, and for some, the mere sight of gay characters in nerd culture is enough for the anti-woke police to come and arrest you for inclusivity crimes. Diversity itself isn't even the problem.

Nothing is even wrong with diversity for diversity's sake. Doesn't inherently have to damage a narrative, and if we're talking "agendas" the agenda first and foremost is to make money. Their little faux progressivism is just a marketing tactic. There's no secret coalition of people in Hollywood "forcing the gays in" because they just really like the gays. They don't care THAT MUCH. Queer Eye doesn't exist because imaginary cultural marxists exist in Hollywood to reinforce "the gay agenda". Queer Eye exists to perpetuate the whole "conventionally attractive, flamboyant, gay friend trope" that's tired since it exists to hit a certain itch for straight audiences. Same shit with RuPaul.

"Ah but they wrote this character as being a black woman."

Ok.

"But see they did that because they wanted to really be inclusive and have some black casting."

Aight.

"They did this because they wanted to promote a super duper communist sjw agenda"

Cool. Why is this a problem? What makes any of this "forced". Have all the past instances of progressive messaging in other forms of media not counted as forced or "sjw?" If they come off a certain way with it's themes, that's probably intentional. That sucks. Guess Star Wars was sjw propaganda all along since it's about killing space fascists.

"But that character used to be a white man that's forced :c"

Like idk what to say to this other than the fact that inclusion and the changing of races for the sake of inclusivity is fine as long as that character is still well written, and even if it isn't, shouldn't mean to condemn the changing of identity of said character. Although there is a point to be made regarding creating new diverse characters instead.

"They hired that actress because she's black."

As long as they hire her while concerning the significance of her skills and talents and use that for a stunning performance featuring a black woman, then I'm cool with thinking about inclusivity in the hiring process.

This whole thing about promoting diversity somehow meaning not being able to write something well is nonsense, because at a certain point you aren't even talking about diversity anymore, so why bring it up? Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, and if you want to get mad at executives for not giving the minorities they're representing the genuine care and fine touch they deserve, wouldn't it make sense to demand they write these diverse characters better? This especially matters if the narrative you're telling heavily relies on the identity of your cast, and is thus key to write those aspects regarding your characters well. A lot of this "forced diversity" talk just seems like lazy criticism while avoiding any substantial counter-criticisms by pretending to be nuanced about a very non-issue.

You'll have that one guy who goes on about how some scripts explicitly mention the identity of a character and it's like.... Do you think casting wonder woman as a literal woman, because her role necessitates she be a woman, is also forced diversity? It's literally in her name. What if there's a movie exploring themes of female identity and such. I feel like even if it isn't relevant, people just vaguely describe certain characters as male, female, whatever. When did scripts or directors stating that they wanted a woman playing a lead all of a sudden constitute as somehow forcing diversity LMFAO. "Oh well one is artificial while the other isn't" uh, what? Last time I checked all fictional narratives are artificially written and made into products for people to enjoy and consume. Nobody looks at the numerous bad films featuring straight white dudes and go "This is forced caucasity, this is why whites shouldn't be in movies" like what. I don't remember anyone making that argument when Samurai Cop or The Room was made.

I wish the people who complain about forced diversity would just say they don't like seeing certain demographics in their movies instead of playing 32-dimensional chess as a way to avoid getting called mean words. Like just peel the mask, this is so tiring. I'd rather you just say you don't agree with certain characters representing minorities you don't like instead of spawning a pointless debate. That's not to say everyone who pulls up the whole "forced diversity" schtick is bigoted, but y'all pls. The mask comes off when y'all claim Hollywood is "far-left" when the most left leaning thing in Hollywood is Mark Ruffalo.

[workersolidarity]

So... about to do some venting.

Started working at my job about three months ago. I was just supposed to do stocking, but I quickly was doing both stocking and cashier work.

In less than a month I was promoted to Assistant Manager.

It turns out my Store Manager was going to quit, but she said I had made her job so much easier, she agreed to stay on another month to give the District Manager more time to find a new Store Manager.

Well, I quickly saw why she was so frustrated with that place. A typical low-wage job, employees were often unwilling to do basic job functions or were literally not very intelligent and though they did the best they could, for a high pace, high volume store, it was never enough to keep up the store.

In any case, before I was even halfway trained, my boss had a moment with her boss and just walked out.

So for the last month, I've been doing everything in my power to keep the store running as smoothly as possible. But with only partial training, plus multiple employees having quit right after my Store Manager, that's not been easy.

To add to that, the only other Assistant Manager has pretty much refused to do more than the bare minimum, and won't even do simple parts of her job like taking out trash, and cleaning behind the counter.

I've basically been forced to clean up after my coworkers, do my job, and do many of the things the Store Manager would normally do.

However, another Store Manager from a different location has been making our schedule.

Well, today my cashier who was supposed to be in at 330 hadn't shown up by almost 5pm. The store was slammed busy, and I was getting food deliveries in the middle of it all. To top it off, the scanner that Managers use to check in food deliveries was missing.

As if that wasn't enough, to customers had a car accident in the parking lot and then a massive rain storm hit.

So I have deliveries, a huge line of customers, I came in to the area behind the counter looking like a grenade went off (I had the day before off, so of course the garbage behind the counter had built up until there was practically no room left), I have police borrowing my umbrella from me, I have fire trucks, ambulance, the whole works outside.

Finally I decided to text my fellow Assistant Manager and told her I didn't have a cashier, I was slammed and I didn't have time to look for phone numbers and make calls. So of course she immediately tries calling me. I didn't answer, I was too busy.

Finally half an hour later, I work through the line, took care of the deliveries and the police, ambulance and fire truck had all left.

Just then the Store Manager who's been making our schedule comes in. I guess my coworker had called her. She asks me what the problem is. I could immediately sense a bad attitude.

I told her my cashier hadn't shown up and I had been super busy until now. She tells me that my cashier was taking her tobacco sales class and would be in shortly and acted like I should already know this. But of course no one had told me and I had the day before off.

But instead of making sure everything is okay, she begins hounding me about how much of a mess the store was and basically accused me of being the reason our store has problems. She said my coworkers all said they do what they're supposed to and so she was insinuating it was me who's not doing my job.

At this point my stomach had dropped. I had put so much of my energy into the store over the last month. I'd worked myself into exhaustion multiple times, worked overtime because my District Manager had asked me to, and I had been staying late correcting lazy paperwork every night. Making sure everything was correctly accounted for, and filed away since no one else was.

Next she begins going in on me for leaving late every night. I tried to explain how I've been making sure everything is correctly counted, deposits were done properly and paperwork filled out like it's supposed to.

Instead she interrupts me to say I'm not supposed to be doing the nightly paperwork at night. I must have stood there with a stupid look on my face a few seconds too long because she started giving me a worse and worse attitude by the moment.

Mind you throughout this conversation, I'm taking customers and trying to understand how it is that I'm not supposed to fill out nightly paperwork at night.

This doesn't just go against the training I had gotten on closing the store by my old Store Manager, but also other Managers from different stores who'd come by to help out previously.

Also, this isn't like it's my first Management job or first time cashiering. I've been a Manager for multiple businesses, multiple times, and I have about 9 years of cashier experience.

So to tell me I'm somehow not supposed to be doing the nightly paperwork, like every business I've ever worked for does and just our store always has, she's basically telling me the only thing that matters is getting out by 1030.

She also adds that I'm the only one leaving late. This part is especially rich since there's only one other Manager and she fakes her paperwork to get out quickly. I've noticed it and corrected her work many times.

So at this point I'm getting defensive as she keeps talking down to me ( I would put money on it I have years more experience at this than she does but whatever).

She just keeps blaming me for everything wrong with the store despite there being no Store Manager, and despite the constant extra work I've been putting into this place.

All I wanted was to know why my scheduled coworker hadn't shown up and maybe a little help.

Instead I got talked down to by someone who doesn't work in my store, has no connection to the success or failure of the store, but sure has a lot of pre-made conclusions about the job I do.

As a Marxist-Leninist, I should know better by now than to expect anything but to be treated like trash. That's all I'll ever be to bosses, including bosses that have no connection to me or my place of employment.

Yet, I've still put so much hard work into this place, out so much of myself and my energy into my job. Just to be treated like another worthless piece of shit.

That's all I've ever been to almost everyone in my life, every employer, most of my family, and many others.

Why I expected anything different from this place, I have no idea. I seem to always fall for the line that one day I'll be appreciated if I just keep working hard.

As a Communist, I know better. In my life experiences, I know better. But still this hurt me, this upset me, and now I pretty much just want to never go back.

Why someone who doesn't even really know me other than in passing seems to think she knows I'm just some shitty worker despite never having seen me actually working, is well beyond me.

I just know I'm sick to death of being treated like such a worthless piece of trash. I already suffer from Bipolar II disorder and so I have frequent bouts of deep depression, low self-esteem, social anxiety, exhaustion, and to top it off, unless I know you really well, I'm mostly always soft spoken, and people often don't hear me when I say something.

So now I'm really depressed and feeling pretty fucking shitty about myself. I think I'd rather throw myself in front of an 18-wheeler than go back to work tomorrow.

So yeah. I just had to get all that out. I've pretty much been tossed straight into a Depression from that awful experience.

Feeling worthless and unimportant is a very familiar feeling for me, though I've only very rarely heard it in the workplace. I've always been a very hard worker and even if I was always replaceable, most employers have never had a complaint.

So that's where I'm at.

[nebris]

Hating Valerie Solanas (And Loving Violent Men)

by Chavisa Woods 

My fourth book, and first full-length work of nonfiction will be released by Seven Stories Press in June. 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism) is a 240-page memoir, written as in-scene vignettes, telling the stories of one hundred experiences of sexist discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual violence I have personally experienced and witnessed, beginning at age five, through the present day.

I recently shared an excerpt of this book on social media, and immediately an old friend who I’d long ago lost touch with, a man from the Midwest, began arguing with me, and compared me to Valerie Solanas. I could tell from the tone of his comment, he expected me to recoil at the mention of that name — Valerie Solanas — the direst of insults; queer female hysterical violent “femi-nazi” insanity personified. This name was meant to summon shame in me, like invoking some Goetic demon to bate and restrain my crazed feminism.

He’s not the only one who sees her that way. When so many people think Valerie Solanas, they think, “bat-shit crazy, violent, murderous, ridiculous, woman.”

In a recent season of the popular television show, American Horror Story, for instance, Solanas was depicted by Lena Dunham as a demented serial killer who led a cult of murderous feminists to kill heterosexual couples — kids hooking up in cars, happy newlyweds and such — in a bloody, nationwide feminist murder spree. This, of course, is a completely fictional narrative, and for the purposes of this show, Solanas’s epitomal work, The Scum Manifesto, was interpreted as a literal, earnest text. Dunham portrayed Solanas as a frumpy, grumpy, clownish homicidal lesbian.

In the mainstream media and collective consciousness, Solonas has been written off as a worthless artist, and remembered only for her violent act against Andy Warhol.

All of this got me thinking about unconscious bias, and what it takes for us to denounce a female artist’s historical worth, versus what it does for a man.

William Burroughs shot and killed his wife while drunk and high, playing a game they called “William Tell,” wherein his wife placed an apple on her head, and he shot it off. He missed, killed her, and later wrote about it, implying it was possible he subconsciously wanted to kill her, because he was gay and resented having a wife. He served only two weeks in jail for this slaughter. Because the homicide occurred in Mexico, and through a combination of bribery and fleeing the country, he avoided serving any prison sentence.

Burroughs, of course, is still widely celebrated as a great author. I, in fact, had a poem published in a literary magazine a few years ago, the cover adorned with a photograph of him holding a rifle. This image was considered darkly humorous.

Almost every other author I’ve spoken with about the ethics of celebrating Burroughs and his art points me in the direction of compassion; he had a drug problem, he and his wife were “in it together.”

After the murder of his wife, he served as a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters. His body of work still remains relevant, is widely taught in English and Writing curriculum in colleges, and is written about reverently in current scholarly articles and in major media outlets worldwide. He is generally thought of as good man. In his bio on Wikipedia, the slaughter of his wife doesn’t even come in until the sixth paragraph. (I am citing Wikipedia, because it represents the most current, popular, collective opinions of the general public, not as a scholarly reference.)

Valerie Solanas, on the other hand, shot Andy Warhol, not killing him, but severely injuring him. He died twenty years later from health complications possibly exacerbated by the injury, as well as a speed addiction.

Solanas and Warhol had a documented horrible working/personal relationship, rife with insult. She saw Warhol as constantly demeaning her privately and publicly, even after featuring her in one of his films.

Warhol agreed to look at a play she’d written, possibly to produce it. She gave him the only manuscript to read, and he (claimed he) lost it, though she believed he threw it away to spite her. This was the catalyst for the shooting.

Pablo Neruda raped a servant while he was visiting her country as a diplomat. He wrote about it quite matter-of-factly and unapologetically in his memoirs (I Confess that I have Lived, first published in 1974, in English in 1977):

One morning, I woke earlier than is my custom. I hid in the shadows to watch who passed by. From the back of the house, like a dark statue that walked, the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen in Ceylon entered, Tamil race, Pariah caste. She wore a red and gold sari of the cheapest cloth. On her unshod feet were heavy anklets. On each side of her nose shone two tiny red points. They were probably glass, but on her they looked like rubies.

She solemnly approached the toilet without giving me the slightest look, without acknowledging my existence, and disappeared with the sordid receptacle on her head, retreating with her goddess steps. She was so beautiful that despite her humble job, she left me disturbed. As if a wild animal had come out from the jungle, belonging to another existence, a separate world. I called to her with no result.

I then would leave some gift on her path, some silk or fruit. She would pass by without hearing or looking. Her dark beauty turned that miserable trip into the obligatory ceremony of an indifferent queen.

One morning, I decided to go for all, and grabbed her by the wrist and looked her in the face. There was no language I could speak to her. She allowed herself to be led by me smilelessly and soon was naked upon my bed. Her extremely slender waist, full hips, the overflowing cups of her breasts, made her exactly like the thousands year old sculptures in the south of India. The encounter was like that of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes open throughout, unmoved. She was right to regard me with contempt. The experience was not repeated.

No one remembers him for this.

Charles Bukowski is on video kicking and punching his girlfriend during an interview about his writing, and was said to have been physically abusive to multiple female partners. He is still celebrated worldwide as a great poet.

Louis Althusser strangled his wife to death in an act of cold-blooded murder. In his Wikipedia bio, he’s described as, “A French Marxist philosopher, whose arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism.”

As I write this, the murder of his wife doesn’t receive mention until the last paragraph, and then it simply says, “Althusser’s life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her.”

He is widely celebrated. The murder of his wife is mentioned only in the context of his mental illness.

Valerie Solanas suffered from Schizophrenia. She was also a victim of childhood incest. Her father repeatedly raped her, and then she was sent to live with her grandparents as a teenager, and then her grandfather raped her, and then she ran away from home and became a sex worker.

The shooting of Andy Warhol is currently the first sentence of her Wikipedia bio. She is widely regarded and repeatedly portrayed as a worthless, angry, bat-shit crazy piece of human garbage. Where is this compassion that we are asked to have for male artists, for her?

She was a brilliant artist. The SCUM Manifesto is a masterwork of literary protest art, which is often completely misread. Much of it is actually a point-by-point re-write of multiple of Freud’s writings. It is a parody.

In his essay The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman, Freud suggests that a good treatment for lesbians would be having their (most likely already hermaphroditic) ovaries, and genitals removed and replaced with grafted “real” female genitals.

Freud’s exact words:

The cases of male homosexuality which (have) been successful fulfilled the condition, which is not always present, of a very patent physical ‘hermaphroditism’. Any analogous treatment of female homosexuality is at present quite obscure. If it were to consist in removing what are probably hermaphroditic ovaries, and in grafting others, which are hoped to be of a single sex, there would be little prospect of its being applied in practice. A woman who has felt herself to be a man, and has loved in masculine fashion, will hardly let herself be forced into playing the part of a woman…

In The SCUM Manifesto, Solanas posits that a good “treatment” for straight men is to get their dicks chopped off: “When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman (males as well as females think men are women and women are men), and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw (or to do anything else, for that matter; he fulfills himself as a drag queen) and gets his dick chopped off. He then achieves a continuous diffuse sexual feeling from ‘being a woman’. Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female.”

Freud’s texts are rife with suggestions of female castration and hysterectomies as treatments for all sorts of psychological troubles suffered by women, and in response, The SCUM Manifesto is infamous for suggesting castration might improve the behavior of men.

Freud posited that heterosexual women are sexually passive, engaging in sex only because they want children. He invented the theory of “penis envy.” He claimed that because girls do not have  penises, girls come to believe they have lost their penises, and eventually, seek to have male children in an attempt “to gain a penis.” He believed women, on some deep, subconscious level, viewed themselves as castrated males. In his theory of psychosexual development he posited that for women, sex (with males) may also be a subconscious attempt to gain a penis.

In his essay, The Taboo of Virginity, Freud writes: “We have learnt from the analysis of many neurotic women that they go through an early age in which they envy their brothers, their sign of masculinity and feel at a disadvantage and humiliated because of the lack of it (actually because of its diminished size) in themselves. We include this ‘envy for the penis’ in the ‘castration complex’.”

Solanas, replaces the envy of the penis, not only with envy of the vagina, but most often, with women’s emotional openness, complexity and individuality as the focus of men’s envy. She writes of men: “The female’s individuality, which he is acutely aware of, but which he doesn’t comprehend, and isn’t capable of relating to or grasping emotionally, frightens and upsets him and fills him with envy. “

At the time of the writing of The SCUM Manifesto, Freud was a celebrated figure in psychology, and his theories were being widely touted in academic and popular spheres alike. Solanas took issue with this, and wrote The SCUM Manifesto as a parody, mocking the popular, sexist, and hetero-centric thinking on gender and sexuality at the time. But the text is a reversal. In The SCUM Manifesto, Solanas directs everything Freud said with an equal amount of vigor and confidence back at men. So, instead of “female motherhood” being a primary drive, she reverses this to attack/analyze the “male sex drive” through the same line of thinking as Freud.

In his essay, Leonardo Da-Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Freud hypothesizes that homosexuality in men stems from their relationship with their father and mother. He proposes that homosexuality (which he assumes is a bad thing) is caused by a relationship with a mother who is too tender to her son (as in all his texts, he repeatedly states that children are naturally sexually attracted to their parents of the opposite sex), and a mother who is, at the same time, too assertive and independent in relation to her own husband (the boy’s father.) This causes the boy to see his mother figure, who’s also an object of his  sexual desire in childhood, as a man, not a woman. And this makes the boy gay. He writes:

In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of childhood, which is afterwards forgotten; this attachment was evoked or encouraged by too much tenderness on the part of the mother herself, and further reinforced by the small part played by the father during their childhood. Sadger emphasizes the fact that the mothers on his homosexual patients were frequently masculine women, women with energetic traits of character, who were able to push the father out of his proper place. I have occasionally seen the same thing, but I was more strongly impressed by cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or left the scene at an early date, so that the boy found himself left entirely under feminine influence. Indeed it almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure that thee son made the correct decision in his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex.

In The SCUM Manifesto, Solanas takes this analysis and flips it on its head through an extreme feminist lens, where becoming a “real (straight) man” is already assumed to be a bad thing. She writes: “The effect of fatherhood on males, specifically is to make them, ‘Men,’ that is, highly defensive of all impulses to passivity, faggotry, and of desires to be female. Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her. So he tells the boy, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, not to be a sissy, to act like a ‘Man.’ The boy, scared shitless of and respecting his father, complies, and becomes just like Daddy, that model of ‘Man’-hood, the all-American ideal — the well-behaved heterosexual dullard.”

While Freud accuses the mother of being to blame for the horrible fate of a boy becoming a homosexual, Solanas accuses the father of being to blame for the horrible fate of a boy becoming a straight man.

As you can see from the above, The SCUM Manifesto in many places is an almost line-by-line mockery of Freud’s writings on women and homosexuals, and was never meant to be read as a literal, earnest text throughout. This does not mean it is intended as a joke or to be taken lightly, though. As some may have noticed in the above text, it is not without serious, meaningful and resonant critiques of patriarchal institutions. There is a lot of truth in this parody. It is a political satire. It is simultaneously dead serious, yet written with a nod and a wink. In keeping with the protest art of the time, if you didn’t get it, she wasn’t going to explain it to you. She was happy to make cocky comments, like, “I mean every word of it,” knowing, and indeed, hoping that the “squares” who didn’t understand the sarcasm inherent to the foundation of the text, would be that much more shocked at her effrontery.

Valerie Solanas just said, in a modernized (now dated) vernacular, exactly what Freud had said about women, only about men, and everyone freaked out, because when we talk about men the same way men have talked about women for centuries, it reads as grotesque and insanely violent, un-compassionate, and shocking, which was exactly her point.

Her work is still misinterpreted as a literal text by many to this day.

After shooting Andy Warhol, Solanas turned herself in to the police. She was charged with attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and pleaded guilty to “reckless assault with intent to harm,” serving a three-year prison sentence, including treatment in a psychiatric hospital. In a darkly ironic twist of fate she was subjected to a nonconsensual hysterectomy during her hospitalization. Shortly after her release from prison, she became homeless, and never published another work.

Michael Alig, known for being a famous party promoter and club kid in the 1980s (in the film about his life, Party Monster, he was played by Macaulay Culkin), brutally murdered his friend, Andre “Angel” Melendez, over an argument about a drug debt.

Alig cut his friend up into pieces and threw him in the Hudson River. He’s been released from prison and is currently working as a club promoter in New York City.

Since his release, he’s also appeared in an indie film with artists I know personally, called Vamp Bikers, in which Alig plays a homicidal sociopath who slowly, brutally murders his friend.

I accidentally watched this at a film screening I attended in Brooklyn years ago, having no idea what I was getting into. It made me want to throw up, seeing him happily take part in a campy fictional portrayal of a murder so similar to the one he actually committed, and being celebrated for this. Many people around me were excitedly saying they hoped that Alig might attend the screening.

His website, michaelalig.com describes him as an “artist, writer, curator.” You can hire him to produce your party, or buy one of his many pop art paintings for $500 a pop.

I think this is all abhorrent. I’ve had debates with friends over this, and have been asked, “Well, he served his time. Shouldn’t we have compassion? He was young and on a lot of drugs when he did that. Don’t you think he should get a second chance?”

Perhaps. Perhaps a chance at living as a free person again, yes, perhaps that, but definitely not a chance to be celebrated for being the famous club kid who murdered his friend. And it’s not lost on me that the person he murdered was a poor, lesser known gay man of color, and I wonder if he would have gotten out of prison so early if he’d been the one who murdered Michael.

Perhaps more shocking than this, is the life and reception of essayist and novelist Norman Mailer. When speaking about feminism and women’s liberation Norman Mailer said: “We must face the simple fact that maybe there’s a profound reservoir of cowardess in women that had them welcome this miserable, slavish life.”

In his book Advertisements for Myself, Mailer claims that a writer without “balls” is no writer at all:

I have a terrible confession to make — I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed, I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure — that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.

I would argue that Norman Mailer spoke and wrote just as violently, grotesquely and shockingly about women as Valerie Solanas did about men. But he was not saying any of these things or writing his sexist texts as a parody or protest of his own subjugation.

Norman Mailer is still widely celebrated for both his fiction and essays, including numerous works that take a stand adamantly against feminism and women in general. In 1968 and 1980 he won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2005, he won the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 1960, he attempted to murder his wife by stabbing her multiple times in the chest, barely missing her heart.

While his wife lay in the hospital in critical condition, a day after the stabbing, Mailer appeared in a scheduled interview on The Mike Wallace Show, where he spoke of the knife as a symbol of manhood. He was briefly arrested two days later, though his wife refused to press charges, saying that she feared for the safety of their children if she did so. She did, however divorce him once she recovered.

The parallels between Mailer and Solanas are as astonishing as their differences. The only reason I can find for the differences in how they are popularly viewed is that Mailer was a man, speaking and acting violently against women in a sexist society, and Solanas was a woman, doing the reverse in this same society.

I can’t help but conjure Solanas’s legacy when looking at the current questions that keep popping up on the subject of violence, art, and who we celebrate today. Do we forgive Louis C.K. for serially masturbating on countless women he worked with? What does forgiveness mean? Does it mean he continues to enjoy the same level of reverence and celebrity as before? Can we still enjoy Michael Jackson’s music knowing that he had ongoing sexual relationships with what seems to be an endless stream of young boys? Should we still be patronizing Woody Allen’s films? Is it alright to feel heartbroken over the loss of the Bill Cosby so many knew and loved? What of the beautiful works of so many beloved male authors I have spoken about above?

I do not have clear answers to these questions, nor do I think there is one rule of response that is correct for every situation, but I do know that the social hammer has come down hard on women who commit similar acts of violence, especially when those acts are directed at men. I do know that sexist bias has judged one of my artistic heroes much more harshly than her male counterparts.

I do not condone or celebrate Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol. But when people bring up Valerie Solanas as if she is a horrendous, murderous, bat-shit crazy, worthless, hysterical, violent criminal whose literary artwork is as valuable as the ramblings of a madwoman, suggesting that she should be written off as nothing more, I always think to myself, “Well, that’s exactly what she would have expected from this society.” Much less has changed since she first released the book in 1967, than I would have hoped. Those opening lines still remain eerily significant: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore, and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”

http://www.full-stop.net/2019/05/21/features/chavisa-woods/solanas/

[antoine-roquentin]

In El Salvador, the Reagan administration, with Abrams as point man, routinely defended the Salvadoran government in the face of evidence that its regular army, and allied right-wing death squads, were operating with impunity, killing peasants, students, union leaders, and anyone considered anti-government or pro-guerrilla. Abrams went so far as to defend one of the death squads’ most notorious leaders, Roberto D’Aubuisson, who was responsible for the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass, in March 1980.

It was Romero’s assassination that touched off a civil war in El Salvador—an alliance of the military and the oligarchs, which had ruled for decades with support from the United States, against a Marxist-inspired insurgency. Most of the support for the revolution came from El Salvador’s peasants, who had little to lose in seeking to overthrow a government that had resorted to brutal repression to keep them in miserable poverty.

To drain the peasant sea in which guerrillas swam, to borrow from Mao, the Atlacatl Battalion, whose officers had recently completed counterinsurgency training in the United States, launched a “scorched earth” operation in Morazon, a mountainous region where semiliterate peasants labored on their small plots of sisal and corn.

I began reporting from El Salvador for The New York Times in December 1980. Four American Roman Catholic churchwomen had just been raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers, another heinous crime that the Reagan administration sought to cover up. One year later, I was smuggled by guerrillas into Morazon. I was accompanied by Susan Meiselas, the photojournalist already well known for her work in Nicaragua. Simultaneously, but separately, Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post made her way into the area as well.

When we reached El Mozote, evidence of the massacre was still abundant. Skeletons were being picked over by vultures, the stench of death carried by the breeze.

My reporting and Susan’s pictures appeared in the Times, and Alma’s reporting in the Post, in January 1982. Immediately, the administration attacked us and sought to deny the stories, calling them guerrilla propaganda. The reports were not credible, Abrams said. As Abrams put it, El Mozote “appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.” So the murder of hundreds of children became a mere “incident.”

Ireturned to el mozote last year, the first time since the 1980s. I found a survivor, Amadeo Sanchez. He was 8 years old at the time of the massacre, a peasant boy who worked in the fields with his father. When word of the Atlacatl’s operation reached his village, the gunfire close enough to be heard and the helicopter gunships overhead, Sanchez told me he fled with his father. His mother remained in the village, with Sanchez’s three younger siblings, including a year-old brother. “I have done nothing wrong. Nothing is going to happen to me,” Sanchez recalled his mother saying.

From their hiding place amid rocks and weeds, Sanchez said he saw soldiers going house to house. In one house, they dragged out two teenage girls and led them to the river, Sanchez told me. Sanchez couldn’t see them, but he heard them screaming for their mothers: “Mom, they’re raping me.” Then he heard gunshots. All was silent.

A day or two later, after the soldiers had left, Sanchez and his father returned to the village. Sanchez said he found his mother and siblings dead. In one house, he said, he saw a woman, Mario Santos. In her bed. She had been shot in the forehead. Next to her was her daughter. One day old. Stabbed in the throat. On the wall, the soldiers had scrawled in blood, Un nino muerto, un guerrillero menos: “One dead child is one less guerrilla.”

(Sanchez also gave this testimony under oath to a judge who is now conducting a trial of some 18 military officers who are charged with the massacre.)

Omar didn’t have Sanchez’s testimony, but she would have been more effective in questioning Abrams if she had read from the United Nations Truth Commission report on the human-rights abuses in El Salvador during the civil war, which was released in 1993. Relying on classified U.S. government documents made available to the commission, as well as scores of interviews, the commission wrote:

On 10 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote in the Department of Morazán, units of the Atlacatl Battalion detained, without resistance, all the men, women and children who were in the place. The following day, 11 December, after spending the night locked in their homes, they were deliberately and systematically executed in groups. First, the men were tortured and executed, then the women were executed and, lastly, the children, in the place where they had been locked up.

Even if Omar had read that to Abrams and asked for his reaction, she probably would not have gotten a straight answer. Abrams is practiced at dissembling before Congress.

In 1982, in an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Abrams was asked by Senator Paul Tsongas whether he thought Roberto D’Aubuisson “would fit the extreme on the right.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Abrams replied.

“So, you’d have to be to the right of D’Aubuisson to be considered extremist?” Tsongas asked.

“You’d have to be engaged in murder,” Abrams responded.

D’Aubuisson was engaged in murder, as Abrams should have known.

A few months after the Romero killing, a Salvadoran soldier had gone to the American embassy and told a young political officer, Carl Gettinger, that D’Aubuisson had presided over a meeting at which the assassination was plotted and soldiers had drawn straws to see who would carry it out. This had been duly reported to Washington, and other intelligence placed D’Aubuisson “at the center” of death-squad activity, as a senior diplomat in El Salvador put it at the time. In this period, El Salvador was the top foreign-policy issue, and Abrams was a senior State Department official.

The evidence that D’Aubuisson had been complicit in the murder of Archbishop Romero, that there had been a meeting to draw straws, was “credible,” the CIA later concluded. “While any number of rightwing death squads could have planned and carried out what was a relatively simple execution … there probably were few so fanatical and daring as D’Aubuisson to do it.”

Inadvertently, Omar revealed that Trump may have picked the right man to implement his policy in Venezuela. As his record in El Salvador suggests, Abrams will say whatever is necessary to accomplish the administration’s will.

[arcticdementor]

I was raised Christian.

When I was a teenager, I regularly attended church youth group. We did generic Christian things. We sat around and read milquetoast bible verses and then talked about how to be good people. We occasionally volunteered at charities. We played a bunch of party games. Generic fun things.

Then one day a new youth pastor started. This was a source of consternation for our church, as our church was an ethnic church and this pastor was not a member of our ethnicity. Still, we want to be openminded and she came highly recommended, so we let her start.

She turned some heads when she gave some sermons in church that pretty directly contracted our particular denomination's theology. I forget what the points were, but I mean these distinctions are just shibboleths and don't really matter. She was an outsider, so of course she wouldn't understand these things. It's not a big deal.

But then... our youth group started getting a bit more... radical.

First, she stopped teaching us Bible stories and started teaching us about history. Specifically, the history of activism. Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King. I should mention at this point that I am Canadian, and so all references to US race relations were completely foreign to us.

She started dropping these breadcrumbs, pointing out how all of these activists and movements only succeeded because of the power of the youth. About how we are the people with real power in the world to change things, if only we wanted to. You kids want real power, don't you?

I should mention now as well that my particular denomination of Christianity put an extremely high value on pacifism. Both pacifism as in a disavowal of violence, and pacifism as in a disavowal of activism. They believed in a very strict separation of church and state/politics, out of a fear that politics would taint the church.

Then, she started doing this weird new prayer technique. Previously, we would engage in silent, private prayers, as the church believed that each person's relationship with God was their own personal, private relationship, and it's none of anybody elses business. But now, what she had us doing, was that we would sit in a circle, she would turn off the lights, light some candles, put on some emotional ambient music, and encourage us to pray publicly. Prayers were encouraged to involve bearing our souls to God, talking about our sins and our fears.

In hindsight, I recognize this dynamic as being extremely similar to a Marxist struggle session. And, for the record, my referent for "Marxist struggle session" comes from a 60 year old friend who grew up in the Soviet Union, who was too smart and autistic for his own good, and who was on the receiving end of many such sessions. Told to me over beers straight from his mouth.

Finally, she started staging full on activist training in youth group. She taught us chants and we would practice protest chants while watching video of youth protests. She taught us techniques for engaging in 'non-violent protest' which included things like teaching us how to lie in front of stuff to block things off while making our bodies into deadweight, and getting into peoples face while shouting passive-aggressive things that were intimidating while being plausibly deniable.

It was at about this time that I had a mini freakout and stopped attending youth group. Not over any of the above, but rather because i was an aspergic kid with an overly literal understanding of the Bible and couldn't reconcile some dumb random doctrinal thing she said with my understanding of things.

A few weeks (months?) after I stopped attending, she was fired. Nobody ever talked about why.

In hindsight this is obvious: an honest to god Marxist activist tried to infiltrate our church and subvert the youth. She slowly turned our youth group from a glorified daycare/chaperoned hangout (which, despite being a church youth group, I would not characterize as 'indoctrination' at all; insofar as there was any religious content at all, most of the youth thought it was stupid, and to my knowledge every single person who attended those meetups are atheists now), to an activist indoctrination session. It happened slowly, so that it took a while for people to notice what was happening, and she did it to children (ages 12-16), who were not world-wise enough to understand what was going on. To be honest, to us it felt like she was rescuing us from the same boring old basic bitch party games and giving us some actual excitement.

Ever since realizing what happened there and reflecting on it, I've used this as my main point of reference regarding radicalization and indoctrination. This gives me a decent framework to compare generic 'teaching' of values (which I am ok with, regardless of what those values are) vs 'indoctrination', which causes knee-jerk horror for me. It's given me a reference to differentiate teaching vs indoctrination even between churches (there are definitely some scary churches out there engaging in indoctrination). It's also given me the ability to be able to look at non-religious groups, such as progressive youth clubs, to identify which of these are engaging in frightening indoctrination, and to be confident in my judgement calls.

—“GPoaS”

[helshades]

idk if you watch rupaul's drag race or have any interest in drag queens in general at all but opinions on this dress+the censoring of it on the show for ~bad taste~ reasons? (i find it gorgeous and smartly funny esp when the theme was "padded for the gods" i mean, you can't get more padded than that lmao. almost a feminist look/statement imo) instagram. com/p /BsUaPvenYcj/

I can appreciate the tongue-in-cheek literal-mindedness of the dress and the model makes an interesting comment about intent:

Nevertheless, such statement may be a pad, sorry, a tad misplaced considering the fact that exactly none of the participants in that reality show happens to be someone who could menstruate, and that there is more than one argument that could be weighed against drag-queens, of all artists, trying to make feminist statements, of all things…

In passing, I really wish people would retire from using the term ‘empowerment’ every five minutes about things that have nothing to do with this concept, which was coined to refer to marginalised people, usually in the Third World, chiefly women, gaining self-determination through economic and political means, aiming to become self-sufficient. Empowerment is a sociological concept rooted in Marxist theory, intertwined in the very basis of democracy—peoples’ right to govern themselves. In other words, we are rather far remote from putting on extravagant gowns to wriggle one’s equally padded arse in the face of people meant to elect one individual the best performer in a group of individuals obsessed with being gazed at admiringly for their looks.

One comment I found on Instagram about this post:

‘You’re absolutely fantastic. I would have loved to see this on the runway. This is not distasteful at all, it’s beautiful couture and art that normalizes an unfortunately shamed experience that many folks go through regularly. It is so important to honor and celebrate the bodies that inspire drag. It warms my heart the respect you bring for female-organed folk.’

‘Female-organed folk’. It is more than a little disheartening (though it doesn’t exactly surprise) to see ‘woman’ become a forbidden word amongst people who supposedly are all about celebrating the luxurious aspects of womanhood, and usually appear to crave femaleness—and not in the way a straight man would, longing for the otherness of femininity that complete his half of the heterosexual union… but, rather, here, femaleness as a template, woman as the typical object of man’s desires.

I am perhaps a divergent feminist—not like other girls!—inasmuch as I tend to regard femininity and masculinity as indissociable from womanhood and manhood, and necessary things, to a certain extent. On the other hand, I am not enough of a deviant yet that I might deem drag queen shows feminist. Drag attire, for all intents and purposes, is a caricature of femininity, whose ambivalence has often verged on the schizophrenic: at once an interesting parody of sexist beauty standards and… well, an uninhibited exploitation of the exact same thing, which, as it is being performed by the one sex that precisely isn’t subjected to such standards in civilian life, makes one wish dearly that men would find a more personal way to subvert canonical virility.

I have no doubt men can be feminists. Of this, a stellar example comes to mind with Doctor Denis Mukwege, the famous Congolese gynaecologist who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2018 for his remarkable work on healing women who were victims of genital mutilations. This is feminism—and it is noteworthy indeed that Dr. Mukwege’s help is not only surgical, but economic and judicial as well. This is feminism. A million-dollar reality show about men performing as images of exaggerated femininity? I don’t think so.

On the other hand… on the other hand, I do not happen to believe that not being feminist per se would be drag’s original sin. In fact, I happen to find it a very, very interesting play on masculinity, as no one, deep down, actually doubts the presence of a man, a male, under all that outrageous make-up, getup and beneath the exhilarating wigs. Only, on top of that default maleness, there is an exceptionally loud mask, like one of the painted personae of ancient theatre, never meant to hide oneself, but to show, on the contrary, the truth of the character behind. In more ways than one, drag costuming is a support for the expression of all emotions and sentiments that men are traditionally expected to reign in and dissimulate in order to perform virility.

Sharon Needles:

‘It can be perceived as misogynistic, and I can understand why, but I don’t think there’s any drag queen who intends it to be. Most drag queens dress up as super women, as an over exaggeration of the female form, because we like women, usually powerful women. I think that’s why we are so over exaggerated; we are an amplification of the women who empowered us in our youth. The most powerful woman I know is my mother, and she doesn’t wear any make up at all. We’re exaggerating the western consumerist culture that happens to plague women more than men; and thank god, because it’s so much prettier.’

Alaska Thunderfuck 5000:

‘Since I was a kid, I’ve always been skinny and frail framed. I felt powerless as a child, but I always saw so much power in femininity and female sexuality. I was always drawn to beautiful women. We don’t mock anything innate about femininity, but some of the trappings that come alongside.’

Sharon Needles:

‘Look at her, over there, look who you see in the mirror. When I’m fully done and look in there, the real you inside is pushed way back.’

(x)

At the end of the day, this is only a reality televised show where vulnerable people with self-esteem issues go to masquerade and parade because our society confuses personal success with fame and a controlled appearance of self-satisfaction. All it says is not said wittingly—but it never does mean that there is nothing to be said, I suppose.

[massielandnetwork]

Thriving in an Economic Bubble during Anarchy

25. The Christian Succession –Thankful in the midst of a Maelstrom

At a circus, clowns are intended for comic relief. When the clowns are in real-world leadership positions, the resulting laughter originates from stress, embarrassment, and as an alternative to crying. Clowns in leadership is a serious problem, not a joke. The question that begs to be asked… “What do you call a troupe of clowns led by a senile old man surrounded by a collection of incompetents who do not understand the real-world effects of their goal - Marxism? The answer – formerly called the Democratic Party, I refer to them as Demented Marxists (DMs).

Only clowns would be happy demonstrating to the entire world that they are a collection of … well the nicest word is clowns. Confirmation of this situation occurred last week when:

1. Biden announced he was going to order an investigation to determine why the cost of gasoline had risen so much this year. All he needs is a mirror.

2. Not only did Biden make us dependent again on OPEC, but there are reports he is selling our Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to “Asia”. Does that mean China is buying our SPR assets? Are he and Hunter getting a fee on the sale?

3. Not to be outdone, in order to sell the Build Back Better boondoggle (BBB), Pelosi actually stood in front of a tripod with a board advertising the four key benefits of the BBB (Good paying jobs, Cut taxes, Lower costs, Wealthy and Corporations pay their fair share) which were all totally false! One has to admire that she did it with a straight face.

4. The usual DMs led the expected protests in the DM controlled cities while their minions looted various stores in DM cities which will lead to those cities becoming retail deserts.

5. Apparently, Pelosi has bought a $25 MILLION ocean front retirement home in Jupiter Beach, Florida. She joins Obama as buying ocean front homes demonstrating their concerns on climate change are ….bogus. Why is she leaving San Francisco?

The good news is if we achieve honest elections, we can remove the DM clowns from power. As our country experiences a cultural war/race between the DM minority and the Capitalist/Christian majority, it is easy to become discouraged. But in the last week there were several “green shoots” that sprouted through the ashes of Biden’s Amerika.

1. The new owner of CNN publicly stated that CNN “does not have any real journalists” and he felt there is a need for a “real” news organization in the media world. Capitalism is at work! Hallelujah, thank you Lord. Pray this starts a trend of cleaning up the media.

2. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times modified their past published stories to reveal that the Steele Dossier and Russian Collusion were false. No big announcements or public apologies, that would require class. But important steps.

3. The Northeast Climate Pact (the Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts Green New Deal) collapsed when one of the Governors acknowledge that he could not get it approved by his Democratic Party controlled legislature because consumers do not want higher energy costs. Governor Lamont of Connecticut said he could not get the Pact approved when gas prices were low (under Trump) much less when gas prices are high (under Biden). Did the November 2021 elections bring some clarity?

4. The jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin showed that the American system of justice still works and exposed to that community the need to replace their Prosecuting Attorneys.

5. Virginia’s Lt. Governor Elect Winsome Sears demonstrated her abilities on the national stage in several interviews. I love watching Lt. Governor Sears expose talking heads as empty shirts and blouses, not journalists. More please.

6. The list of states pursuing forensic audits of 2020 and the number of states suing the Biden Administration both keep growing. Both are positive signs for the future.

The cultural war being waged across America is and will continue to have an impact on our economy until it is resolved. In turn, that turmoil will continue to impact the land market. Looking elsewhere in the world you can readily see the impact of having clowns in leadership. One example is that Turkey’s Lira has collapsed losing more than 50 % of its value this year as Erdogan pursues Marxist policies which have always failed. Inflation in Turkey is 20% but headed higher and economic turmoil will worsen.

As courage begets courage, Patriots here in the USA are defying the DM controlled federal government and its agencies which gives me reason for hope. They are expressing their rightful, God given, American independence. This is what our brilliant Founding Fathers meant with their statement about “… the consent of the governed”. Pray the Patriots prevail.

Economic Forecast:

Last week I read a fascinating analysis that explained the decrease in 10 Year Treasury rates last summer despite the massive federal government deficit spending which is causing increased inflation. Apparently, the U. S. Treasury (UST) withdrew $1.5 Trillion from its “savings account” at The Fed and used that money to fund the deficit spending of the federal government. As a result, the UST needed to sell less debt to fund the deficit spending. With its Quantitative Easing (QE) The Fed bought $1.2 Trillion in Treasuries last year. That combination meant that demand for 10 Year Treasuries was greater than supply and interest rates declined.

The UST “savings account” is now empty and The Fed is now tapering its QE. Combined with the continued rampant boondoggle spending by the DMs, there is only one way for interest rates to move going forward … UP. Formerly, the U. S. bond market acted as vigilantes on deficit spending because inflation has such a negative impact on bond values. Since 2010 The Fed has silenced private bond investors because it is impossible to fight The Fed and not lose money. We are about to find out if the bond vigilantes being silenced was temporary and they return.

On Monday morning the stock market cheered Biden reappointing Fed Chairman Powell but the enthusiasm waned. However, the real action going forward will be in the bond market and that will drive the economy. Higher rates mean a slower economy. The first four recessions in my career (out of the seven recession I have seen) were caused by interest rates moving higher, with a time lag that was determined by the abruptness of the increase in rates. Comparing the rate of inflation with the 10 Year Treasury, the current real interest rate is a negative 4.7%. That is second only to 1974 when the 10 Year Treasury “real” interest rate was a negative 4.9%. In 1974 a serious recession resulted with the S&P declining 37% due the combination of the Arab Oil Embargo raising the cost of gas, Nixon being impeached, and increased interest rates. Does geopolitical turmoil and national turmoil, sound familiar?

China’s residential market apparently continues to implode and the Chinese Communist Party continues to tout their ability to control the situation by increasing the funding of their bad debt manager, the China Huarong Asset Management Company, by $6.5 Billion. One of us is seriously wrong if they think that amount of funding is anywhere near enough. The ripple effects of the residential market implosion will cause a THUD heard around the world.

You may be tired of reading this, but truth must be repeated. Capitalism is the economic formula that works - slash taxes, reduce the size of government, and provide tax incentives to re-build the American manufacturing economy to increase the size of the American economic pie. That provides the tax revenue to increase assistance to those who need it. Marxism ALWAYS fails because it is self-destructive and decreases the size of the economic pie. America in the past prospered under the hand of God because our country enjoyed the combination of Christianity, capitalism, and democracy.

Please pray:

1. That our Lord and Savior surrounds the Patriots across this country with angels to keep them safe in the cultural war and prosper their efforts so future Americans can enjoy freedom.

2. For the 600 American being held as political prisoners by Biden and the DMs in hell hole conditions in DC similar to what one would expect under Marxism.

3. For honest elections because they are the fulcrum of our American experiment. It is not vengeance to demand honest elections and that everyone play by the same laws.

Men make plans, but God ALWAYS wins. Every portfolio should contain some cash and a great piece of land remains The Best investment long term.

Let’s Go Brandon!

“Only live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, and are in no way intimidated by your opponents. For them this is evidence of their destruction, but of your salvation.”

(Philippians 1:27-28) New Revised Standard Version, Oxford University Press)

Stay healthy,

Ned

November 14, 2021

Copyright Massie Land Network. All rights Reserved.

[mikhalsarah]

We could easily re-title this as, “6 Things Entitled Black Activists Need to Do to Completely Discredit Their Own Movements and Drive Even Other Black People Away From Them”

Afterward can just throw this on the general pile marked “Things Entitled Leftists Have Done since the Civil Rights Era to Completely Discredit Their Own Movements and Drive Even Other Leftists and Liberals Away From Them”

But with a two year hiatus to consider it, let’s unpack this, cause unfortunately covid hasn’t shut the stupid down, and now we’re trying to make Jesus black instead of Levantine, and all kinds of crazy....

1. Well, the thing about white privilege is…

Yeah, the thing about it is that most white people don’t actually get it. To them a “privilege” is something you get that nobody else gets AND nobody else is entitled to. It’s an extra, not something everyone should be getting. So mostly this whole notion and change in the meaning of the word confuses the fuck out of them.

When blacks get their human and civil rights violated just for being black, the fact that white people aren’t experiencing that (except on college campuses) is not a privilege, it’s a BASIC FUCKING HUMAN/CIVIL RIGHT which is being violated. When blacks get held to an unfair double standard, the fact that whites aren’t being held to that standard is not a privilege. It is a basic ideology (though not well-lived) of all modern western liberal thought that people should be treated with the same dignity, respect and rules, and black people are still not being uniformly afforded that. When you call that shit “privileges” you sound like a kid who’s mad cause their sibling gets to stay up and watch tv and they don’t. You completely belittle it with that word.

I happen to get the concept of Privilege just fine. I studied it way back when it was part of the Cultural Backback Theory, before a bunch of cultural Marxists subjected it to their half-baked Sokal-esque  hermaneutics. My objections to what’s been done with it lately have nothing to do with “not caring” (about black people being the subtext there) but about really fucking caring about the integrity and relevance of the original theory and how it’s being denigrated by extremism and stupidity.

2. As a white woman, Rebecca, you have to understand that…

No I don’t, you’re right. I don’t need to understand anything “as a white women”.I simply need to understand it. If I understand the concept, then I will inherently understand my place or part in it. But that presumes that the concept at hand is logical, sensible, and works in practice, not just in theoretical cultural Marxist hermeneutics.

We already know that enjoying entertainments created by black people has SFA to do with whether a person is racist or not. We also know that a white person having sex with a black person does not mean they are not a racist. We’ve known this since the slavery period, so we have an area of agreement. Marrying them though? Historically we don’t find many people who marry people they think are inferior and beneath them. Strictly speaking you can have racialism and racism without the supremacy and denigration (Asians are all good at math!) but we don’t normally bother to run around decrying them as racist.

Could dear Rebecca have stray beliefs about black people that are incorrect? Yes. Everyone has incorrect ideas about other groups of people. Know what else, they even have incorrect beliefs about their own people and culture. I just had a liberal Jew tell me all the ultra-Orthodox Jews are married to their cousins and was very annoyed when I showed them the demographic data on which Jews actually do marry their cousins at high rates, cause really they just wanted to hate on the ultra-Orthodox and not be informed. Things like truth and respect only matter to most people when it’s their own group and interests they’re protecting, not when it’s somebody else’s. Since I’m self-evidently not ultra-Orthodox with all the swearing, and some of those u-O people would whip bottles and dirty diapers at my head in Israel, you can clearly see that I value the truth even about someone who views me as a dangerous moral pollutant to be expunged violently. I got the suspicion though that you’re not in that category with me

Could some of Rebecca’s incorrect beliefs have filtered down from the racist and eugenicist beliefs of yore? You betcha! She probably doesn’t know, for the same reason my best friend called herself “Hymie” in front of me because she didn’t want to spend money on something. It was something picked up from her parents, who picked it up from their parents, who picked it up from...well somewhere along the line they picked that up from when dyed-in-the-wool antisemites said shit like that. When I politely told her it comes from the Jewish name “Chaim” and was meant as an insult about being cheap like a Jew, she was horrified, as were her parents when she told them. 

And why the fuck are white women being singled out here like they’re the only people still holding wrong beliefs about black people? Asian people have some of the most openly horrible racist beliefs about black people and I have yet to hear, “As an Asian woman, Wei-yi (or Sundeep, or Aisha), you have to understand...”  (or change all that to man and male names). Why don’t I hear that? Because A) Some of them really don’t give a shit, and you know it, and B) Most of the Asian people immigrated relatively recently so they don’t feel guilty about slavery, and  C) many came from the middle and upper classes back home and they will not put up with that illogical racist crap toward them, and have not yet been brainwashed that they should. Most white women who are liberal are so concerned with not being perceived as racist that they will tie themselves into any ridiculous intellectual knot and bend over willingly to be fucked up the ass rather than be called a racist. They are an easy target for your kind of victimized-entitlement bullying. I’m not, because your “radical” kind have so watered down the word racist now that it basically means “existing while white.” If everyone is racist, as you claim, then being called “racist” is about as meaningful as being called “human’. There’s a law of diminishing returns at work here.

Way too many ignorant “liberals”, who don’t even understand the principle’s of liberalism, think that the most radical voice is the most correct now, and bow down before the most abusive little bullies. That’s an example of, how did you put it? Ah yes, “the nuances of privilege and how Black people and other oppressed groups can wield it as well”. In any part of North America and Europe where these pernicious ideologies have been allowed to take root there are pockets of society, where white people, especially women, are now scuttling about with their tails between their legs terrified of being called a racist,outed as a “Karen”, twitter-mobbed and fired, while everyone else is engaged in a pissing-contest over who is less privileged than whom. Liberal people of other races, again especially women, are not far behind them. Why? Because in the world of cultural Marxism that has filtered down into everyday liberal thought, the least privileged person is the person who gets to define reality and no one else gets to contradict them. Victimhood = Power, and the power to define everyone else’s reality is absolute power. 

The problem with ultimate power is it corrupts absolutely. Take it from a Jew. Don’t want to? Well according to your worldview, you’ve been oppressed for 400 odd years by colonialism and slavery and their legacies. Jews have been oppressed for nearly 2000 years in the West (and that’s not including all the pre-Christian invaders and mass population transfers) and someone tried to wipe us off the face of the Earth to the tune of 6 million dead within living memory. I’m also not straight, so that’s like 3000 years of oppression and death. I’m also disabled, wow, don’t even know how long for that. I win the oppression olympics, ergo what I say is reality. Don’t like the sound of that? I wonder why....

We Jews have currently got the market cornered on entitled victimhood. So much so that we’ve convinced entire governments to make criticism of Israel a form of anti-semitism. Guess who that will silence? The entire Palestinian Rights Movement and all its supporters including BLM. WHAAAAT? Yeah, black people who want to support Palestinians could get kicked out of schools, BLM chapters could get kicked off campuses, fined or sanctioned. Finding that situation a little unfair, are we? Well too bad. According to cultural Marxism, black non-Jews need to sit down and shut up with the rest of the non-Jews because you’re all part of the problem. 

As a non-Jew, what you really need to understand is that you were raised in an antisemitic system and your entire thinking is tainted by it. Even if you are not a Farrakhan, and don’t support anyone like him, and would never dream of erasing Jewish identity by calling them Khazars. Even if you liked Mad Magazine and Seinfeld, even if you were to remove yourselves from all organizations influenced by antisemitism (like BLM)...you are still an antisemite and complicit in the system that continues to oppress me by making me work on Shabbat. Why just last year someone tried to erase me by telling me that Jews should “integrate” into Canada by giving up Judaism and Jewishness. Even though they were white, you’re complicit in that just because you’re a non-Jew, living in an antisemitic system. Also you appropriate our culture by putting “mazel tov” in your pop songs about sucking dick, which religious Jews find offensive. And as you know, if ANY member of a minority, not matter how crack--potted, tells you your use of something is appropriation, not appreciation, then it’s appropriation. End of story.

So, it only took us 70 years of “anti-colonialist liberation movement” to become some of the most right-wing, racist, violent assholes on the planet. How long ‘til you go from “not moving out of the way on the sidewalk”, to “pushing people off it into traffic”, hmmm? Cause you already had a Yusra Khogali...a young woman who has NO connection to American slavery or the Civil Rights struggles, and in fact arrived fairly recently in Canada from Somalia, screaming that white people are recessive genetic defectives who should be killed. God forbid reading the comments on that because out comes every dumb-ass white racist to prove that they’re better than black people at everything, including making as ass of themselves. The difference being that liberal white people don’t celebrate those people and make them the leaders of our movements. (Instead we celebrate racist white people who hate other white people, which is not really better).

You have black geneticists trying to tell everyone to stop mis-using genetic discoveries to make broad sweeping statements about race, and do you celebrate those people, your best and brightest? No. You call them Oreos. Instead you celebrate an idiot girl barely out of her teens who has as much understanding of genetics as Mendel’s pea plants. Red hair is recessive (having two of the same mutation at the same locus, that would otherwise be eclipsed by a more dominant mutation). Blue eyes are also recessive. Skin colour is NOT recessive, it’s the cumulative outcome of differences at 378 different loci...most of which happened before humans left Africa and are also present in African populations. Congratulations. You’re genetically defective, too. Welcome to the club.

3. There’s a great article out by…

How about all the great articles out on Malcolm X, particularly his disillusionment with NOI, his Hajj, his change of heart on the ability of whites and blacks to interact as equals, his embrace of working with mainline civil rights groups, and about how some of y’all are wearing his face on t-shirts one day, but fawning all over the organization that killed him and people who said he deserved to die the next? 

Yeah, some of us do read articles by black authors pretty routinely. Whole books and histories even. If I’m not reading the “great article” you want me to read it’s probably because I’ve read the kind of bullshit you write and that has turned me off before I could turn the page.

4. No, you can’t even sing the word because the history…

Once upon a time “the Word” just meant “black”. You can see the etymological relationship to less “Wordy” words like negro, negra, nigra (as in substantia nigra), and vinegar. But you’re right, at some point the word was totally ruined by association.

So why hasn’t it fallen out of use? Because YOU are now the people keeping it from being consigned to the rubbish heap of history, with all that bullshit about reclaiming it. If the word is so god-damned awful and painful that white people can’t even sing a song that black people wrote that contains it, then maybe you should stop writing songs that fucking contain it. I guarantee you, if you do that, you will not hear it come out the mouth of any white person who isn’t on David Duke’s mailing list.

Jewish people don’t walk around calling ourselves “Kikes” (which by the way started as an inter-Jewish slur against Eastern European Jews). Pakistani people don’t call themselves “Pakis” The only people who’ve managed to “reclaim a word” successfully are the GLBT+ community with “Queer”, because they don’t scream at people who use the regular word queer (odd) in context (unlike Wendy Malik who nearly got fired for using the title of an unfortunately named 1970s book on Quebec Sovereignty while discussing the actual Quebec Sovereignty movement) and don’t even get mad when straight people refer to things as “Queer Rights” or “Queer support groups” or any other clearly non-derogatory use of Queer. 

Maybe it’s time for a decision...is the word so bad it should be banished, or should it be reclaimed totally, like Queer, even though you’d have to listen to some off-key white people singing it on TikTok? Because trying to eat your cake and keep it too doesn’t seem to be working out IRL.

5. Excuse me.

So I guess I don’t have to be polite to you anymore either, because some of you are fascist, black supremacist, antisemitic, homophobic scum?

Oh, and my 6 foot 180 lb trans daughter will now be blocking your use of sidewalks you transphobic cisscum. We’ve already taken Tai Chi (as a martial art) and Kung Fu but we were delayed in starting Krav Maga by covid. Future looks bright doesn’t it?

Got to get our reparations for 3000 years of Queerphobia and 2000 years of Jew-hatred/antisemitsm somehow, right?

Yeah, that’s right sad that you didn’t actually personally commit the queer hatred and antisemitism, but that’s how Identity Politics work: Even if you didn’t do the crime, if you fit in the same box you do the time. You’re guilty by association.

Up ‘til I read your piece I was broadly in favour of slavery reparations, because even though the people who did it are gone, the nations and governments who did it still exist, and it’s fair game to try to sue them. But now that you’re trying to take it out of my hide personally, I don’t feel so disposed to make a fuss on your behalf. See how this works yet? You want my support, that’s why you’re mad when you don’t get it, but you’re also saying, “Fuck you and your support, and I’m going to be a complete cunt to you even if I get it.” Not much incentive for me there.

Holding people individually responsible for things their country, culture, religion, or even direct ancestors did doesn’t make much sense. If you tell me your ancestor was raped by a white slaveowner and you descend from that, should you be placed on the Sexual Offender Registry?

And oh, isn’t that precious. You have direct ancestors who were slaveowners and, so far as I know, I don’t. The Norman side might have some somewhere, but yeah, my family didn’t get here until 1965. We get demerits for having been part of the British Empire, even though most of us didn’t want to be. But if you are going to blame a new immigrant from one of the more than 28 European countries that never had a colony, or any of the countries that never participated in the slave trade, save a finger to point back at yourself for having actual slaveholding ancestry. And wait, let’s go back to Miss Yusra Khogali, a Muslim Somali....unless there’s relatively recent reversion there, some of Miss Khogali’s ancestors were probably part of the Arab culture in Somalia that was trading in sub-Saharan Africans while Denis the Peasant was still wallowing in the English mud. Oh the joys of Arab slavery. Sure, you could eventually rise to great power, especially if you “reverted”, that is if you managed to survive having your genitals cut off. (2/3 eight year old boys tested didn’t). You’re very quiet on that, as you are on the plight of actual Africans actually being enslaved right around the time you wrote this in Libya....beaten, branded, auctioned for $400. What, you’ll raise 50 000 dollars for a dancing prostitute but you still can’t even mention Libyan slavery in 2020? Clearly not ALL black lives matter.

I suppose it’s just too much cognitive dissonance. The Libyans are Berber and Arab-Berber mix. They’d totally be identified as black in America. Blacks enslaving blacker blacks in this day and age? And you can’t even blame that black on black violence on American racism. Take a stab at blaming colonialism if you like, but we’ve already established that Arabs and other Africans were enslaving Africans long before Europe got back in the game (most of us enjoyed a nice long hiatus from slavery after Christianity arrived - not that serfdom was such a much but still). I imagine it’s all just too hard to look at head on, isn’t it pet? Getting a wee feel now for what it’s like to be confronted with every sin people who look like you have ever made for the last millenium? But I’m not the one saying you are to blame, or should be held responsible. You’re being indicted by your own belief system. I’m just pointing it out, sweetie.

6. I forgive you.

.And I’m not forgiving you for 2000 years of Christian Jew-hatred, 1400 odd years of Islamic Jew-hatred, 3000 years of Queer hatred, forever of sexism, etc.

I can’t “forgive you” for something you didn’t personally do.

I will sleep fine at night, knowing I, also, did not do any of the shit you don’t want to forgive me for.

[ultrablindouniverse]

5.2019 // J.P Sarte – Nausea

I’m not really sure how to explain what this book has done to me, so here’s a story. One morning I had a meeting with Wendy Cameron at No.1 Martin Place. I took Nausea to read in transit.  It was still in my hand when I sat down for my meeting. “Nausea” she said simply, without feeling the need to add any more. “I had a friend who read that whilst we were at college. I’m not sure if she was ever the same.” 

I guess it’s a common reaction.

The bipolar mania, the obsession, and the humanness. Somehow reality, his reality, is twisted so far into surrealism that it becomes again, reality. Antoine is our protagonist and he is troubled at his core. His increasing bouts of ‘the nausea’ proxies Sarte’s own experiences. Sarte was a Marxist and founder of French existentialism, a suffer of de-personalisation, a thinker, and wartime activist.

I can’t begin to touch on the finery of this book – and as brilliant of a construct as Antoine Roquentin is to lay the foundations of the existential movement – it’s the relentless, gnawing, psychotic episodes interacting with the absurd that took me.

It’s neither here nor there – it’s just how it is, what we make of it and it’s everywhere.

- - -

“the rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky is slowly rolling along beautiful black pictures… I wander along at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.”

“a woman with a waxy complexion was sitting opposite me and her hands were moving all the time, sometimes smoothing her blouse, sometimes straightening her black hat. She was with a tall fair-haired man who was eating a brioche without saying a word. The silence struck me as oppressive. I wanted to light my pipe, but I would have felt uncomfortable attracting their attention by striking a match. The telephone rang. The hands stopped: they remained pressed against the blouse… for the moment each of them discovers the significance of his life in the life of the other.  Soon the two of them will form just a single life, a slow, tepid life which will have no significance left at all – but they won’t notice that… Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.”

“I see my hand spread out on the table. It is alive – it is me. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat underbelly. It looks like an animal upside down. The fingers are the paws. I amuse myself by making them move about very quickly, like the claws of a crab which has fallen on its back. The crab is dead: the claws curl up and close over the belly of my hand. I see the nails – the only thing in me which isn’t alive. And even that isn’t sure. My hand turns over, spreads itself out on its belly, now it is showing me its back. A silvery, somewhat shiny back – you might think it was a fish, if it weren’t for the red hairs near the knuckles. I feel my hand. It is me, those two animals moving about at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of another paw; I can feel its weight on the table which isn’t me. Its long, long, this impression of weight, it doesn’t go. There’s no reason why it should go. In the long run, it’s unbearable… I withdraw my hand, I put in in my pocket. But straight away through the material, I feel the warmth of my thigh. I promptly make my hand jump out of my pocket; I let it hang against the back of the chair. Now I feel its weight at the end of my arm. It pulls a little not very much, gently, softly it exists. I don’t press the point: wherever I put it, it will go on existing; I can’t suppress it, nor can I supress the rest of my body, the damp warmth which soils my shirt, nor all this warm fat which tuns lazily as if someone was stirring it with a spoon… I jump to my feet: if only I could stop thinking, that would be something of an improvement… I don’t want to think… I think that I don’t want to think. I mustn’t think that I don’t want to think. Because it is still a thought. Will there ever be an end to it?”

“The Autodidact is asking me a question, I think.  I turn towards him and smile at him.  Well?  What's the matter with him?  Why is he shrinking back into his chair?  Do I frighten people now?  It was bound to end up like that.  I don't care anyway.  They aren't completely wrong to be frightened.  I feel that I could do anything.  For example, plunge this cheese-knife into the Autodidact's eye.  After that, all these people would trample on me and kick my teeth in.  But that isn't what stops me: the taste of blood in my mouth instead of the taste of cheese would make no difference.  Only, it would be necessary to make a gesture, to give birth to a superfluous event: the cry the Autodidact would give would be superfluous - and so would the blood flowing down his cheek and the jumping-up of all these people.  There are quite enough things existing already.     Everybody is looking at me; the two representatives of youth have interrupted their sweet conversation.  The woman has her mouth open in a pout.  Yet they ought to see that I am quite harmless.     I get up, everything spins about me.  The Autodidact stares at me with his big eyes which I shan't put out.     "You're leaving already?" he murmurs.     "I'm a little tired.  It was very nice of you to invite me.  Goodbye."     As I am leaving, I notice that I have kept the dessert-knife in my left hand.  I throw it on my plate which makes a clinking noise.  I cross the room in the midst of total silence.  They have stopped eating: they are looking at me, they have lost their appetite.  If I were to walk towards the young woman and say "Boo!" she would start screaming, that's certain.  It isn't worth it.     All the same, before going out, I turn round and I show them my face, so that they can engrave it in their memory.     "Messieurs dames."     They don't reply.  I go off.  Now the colour will come back into their cheeks, they will start chattering.”

“They did not want to exist, only they could not help it; that was the point. So they performed all their little functions, quietly, unenthusiastically. Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”

“They don’t know one another, but they look at one another with a conspiratorial air, because it’s such a fine day and they are people.”

[renaroo]

The Search (9/16)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: Language, Canon-typical violence, Psychological manipulation and trauma Rating: T Synopsis: [Canon Divergence - Alternate S15] The Reds and Blues saved Chorus, but it has been a year and they are still missing. A motley crew has been gathered with the common goal of finding the war heroes, though the road is more troubled than anyone seems to realize.

A/N: Well, while I’ve fallen more than a little behind when it comes to keeping up with the current season of RvB I’m pretty happy with continuing this story, especially since we’ve only got seven chapters left after this!! (oh my gosh, right?) It’s been a blast writing these characters all together and I hope you all enjoy it as well!

Special thanks to @theshadowlord, @analiarvb, @cobaltqueen, @secretlystephaniebrown, and Yin for the comments and feedback!

The Common Goal

Things were getting so redundant that Kaikaina could have just about screamed. Washington was arguing with FILSS, Carolina was arguing with Andrews, Junior was honking his little head off to the point that Kai wasn’t even sure who he was honking toward. It was the suckiest turn a road trip had ever taken in her life and she kind of was beginning to hate everyone.

Which was why Dex had always told her, growing up, that they didn’t travel when taking vacations. Because they’d end up hating each other on the way there.

“Fuck, I never thought Dexter would be right about anything in my life,” Kai groaned, throwing her arms in the air and rolling her eyes. “But here we are, six abortions later and fucking hating everybody on a tiny ship.”

“Grif, we don’t have time for whatever you’re complaining about!” Wash yelled over his shoulder almost reflexively.

“Fuck you! What’re you? The monologue police now?” Kai cried out in return. “I mean, fuck you, dude. I thought we had a whole moment or something back there on the prison planet! Where the fuck’s that, Wash? Or are you one of those Johns who only like a girl when she’s crying?”

Washington turned and stared at her. “We’re trying to save the Reds and Blues, do you have something productive to suggest?”

“Yeah, take it out of your ass already, jesus fuck,” Kai replied.

Before Washington replied, Carolina held up a hand as if to silence Kaikaina immediately. “We don’t have the time, Li’l Grif!”

“Dude, fuck all of you,” Kai snapped, finally getting out of her seat and marching past the arguing group. “And I’m not just saying that because yesterday I would have fucked you all. I mean like, I would absolutely push you off the fucking ship without helmets on right now.”

The reporter immediately stiffened. “Private Grif — Kaikaina — I’m not sure what’s the proper address for you… We need you flying the ship!”

Kai let out a long groan and looked up to the ceiling where the speakers for the cockpit were secreted away. “Sheila?”

“I am the Freelancer—“

“Yeah-yeah-yeah I don’t give a fuck!” Kai screeched in return. “Autopilot for now and tell me when these assholes figure out what direction we’re going in so that I can come and fly them without wanting to smash in any of their heads!”

“Understood, Private Kaikaina Grif,” the ship returned in a content tone.

“Fucking. Hell,” Kai snapped before going through the cockpit doors and heading toward the tight ship’s bunking area.

She had never needed stress relief like she did right then at that moment, and there were about five ways off the top of her head that she could think of relieving some of that pressure. And since being as pissed at Wash and Carolina as she was at the moment took threesome off the table, she was just going to go straight toward dildo.

Looking around the room, Kai was attempting to remember which mattress had been the last one she masturbated on when she realized that her running internal monologue wasn’t the only voice that she was hearing.

Rather, in low tones across the room, Doctor Grey was muttering.

Kai glanced over to that side of the room and noticed a bright light illuminating from something in Doctor Grey’s lap and was also making sound. Immediately Kai began to get defensive and absolutely shocked that someone else was using her glow in the dark electric vibrator without at least asking permission when she finally caught onto what Grey’s actual words were.

“I’m afraid that the only window I can give you is twenty-four hours, Doctor,” the device said in a voice that was even less familiar to Kaikaina than the reporter’s.

“I was only going to ask you for twelve, Vanessa,” Grey replied. “Chorus will need an immediate defense to these charges, and… Our people have suffered too much and come much too far to withstand further slander on this level. We’ll do what we can but…”

“You’re right,” the device said with a long sigh. “It’s just… I know your assessment of the situation must be right, but that only makes what we have to do that much harder. They saved us. All of us. I don’t want to repay that with a stab in the back.”

“Our decisions are sometimes made for us, President Kimball. You’ll have to come to accept that in your position now as much as you had while you were a general,” Grey replied almost coldly. “We move forward for Chorus.”

“For Chorus,” Kimball replied before the device turned off and the glow disappeared.

Doctor Grey sighed and closed her device, continuing to sit on the bunk in the corner with some kind of defeat visible in the way she held her shoulders.

A few solid seconds passed by as Kai just stood in the door of the bunk room with her eyebrow raised and hand on her hips. But when that was obviously not enough to catch attention, she shrugged and cried out “What the actual ever fucking hell?”

Surprised, Grey turned and looked at Kaikaina almost stunned. “Private Grif, I hadn’t… How long were you—“

“You’re about to get all back stabbing on us? What the fuck?” Kai demanded.

“I am not backstabbing you,” Grey said calmly, methodically getting to her feet and holding up her hands as if to calm Kai down.

“The hell you’re not! I just heard someone on your little computer say stab in the back and you’re fucking talking about us!” Kai glared at Grey. “Also all that shit like For Chorus? Are you… are you infiltrating us for some kind of Glee Club Cult? Because I swore off anymore cults after the last one wanted everyone to eat this bitch’s placenta. Like no fuck you if I’m not eating my own why the fuck would I eat yours?”

Doctor Grey stared at her in shock. “Wait, what?”

“You heard me!” Kai snapped. “You’re going to kill us for some kind of cult!”

“I am not in a cult!” Doctor Grey squeaked out so high pitched that Kai actually reached up and held her ears.

“Okay, ow,” Kai hissed in pain.

“I am not in a cult,” Grey repeated, lower. “Chorus is my planet, the one your brother and the other Reds and Blues saved. I was speaking to our planet’s president and briefing her on what’s going on so far. And about how the UNSC is framing this situation against us and them.”

Kai squinted at Grey. “You mean how my brother and friends said some bullshit no one on this ship believes?” she asked.

Grey hesitated, which Kai had absolutely no patience for.

“Oh my fucking god it is because of that! Don’t blame my bro and everyone for that bullshit! We don’t know what’s going on with them, so don’t be a fucking stupid bitch about it—“ Kaikaina went off scathingly.

“I don’t appreciate being called that,” Grey said quite temperamentally.

“Fucking tough,” Kai snapped, turning to leave the bunks. “It’s probably the nicest thing that’ll be said to you after I tell Officer Washington and Carolina what you’re doing!”

She was already one step out the door when Grey called out for her.

“Kaikaina! No, please… wait,” she said desperately, crossing the bunk room quickly to grab onto Kai’s shoulders.

Immediately, Kai spun around on her heels and slapped off Grey’s hands. “Don’t go in for the stab! Ugh! I fucking hate backstabbers! You always go for the back when people aren’t looking!”

“I’m not going to backstab you, metaphorically or else,” Grey assured her.

“Oh, going for the ol’ front stabby work, fine with me,” Kai snapped before pulling off her gauntlets to unleash her manicured nails. “You better watch it, Doc! I went to public school for fourteen whole years!”

“No stabbing at all! Just… I have a question for you, and I need it to be answered,” Grey said seriously. “Why are we here, Kaikaina?”

Kai got into brawling stance, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Now you’re trying to confuse me with metaphorical puzzles. Well fuck you, I’m a Marxist!”

“No, I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean why are we here on this mission?” Grey asked desperately.

Letting up some, Kai squinted suspiciously at the doctor. “To save my brother and friends. Duh.”

“No, Private Grif, that is why you’re here,” Grey answered somberly. “Tucker Junior is here because he is looking for his father and will hopefully be able to continue preventing further war between our races. Agent Carolina is here because she, as former leader, feels responsibility for her troops, and especially for the Epsilon AI. Agent Washington is probably most like you, here for all the Reds and Blues, but his primary motives will always rest with his own team — the Blues over the Reds. And Miss Andrews… well, she’s here for the truth, she says, but I believe she’s here for a story.”

“Right,” Kai replied, more than a little confused by the rhetoric. “We’re all here for the same thing.”

“No, we’re all here for different things that lead to the same goals,” Grey emphasized. “Kaikaina, your brother and friends… they’re also my friends, and I owe them not only for my life countless times over, but for the entire existence of my planet. Of my people.” She took a breath and folded her hands together. “And I have done terrible things for my people before. I don’t regret doing them. I just did them. Because they were things which needed to be done. And I will continue to do anything in the name of my people first before anyone else.” She finally met Kai’s eyes. “I want to save my friends. But I will save my planet at all costs.”

Taking a step back away from Grey, Kai couldn’t hide her disgust. “Including turning on my brother?”

“Just like deep down you know it’s true that you’d give up all the rest just to save your brother,” Grey assured her.

At first, Kaikaina opened her mouth to fight back, but there were no words to express how she felt. Or, at least, the words that were there did not entirely dispute Doctor Grey. She audibly snapped her mouth shut and just glared at the doctor instead.

“It’s fucking shitty,” Kai spat out.

“I agree,” Grey replied.

“And we’re not really a great team if we’re all thinking the same things but don’t agree who we want to save the most,” Kai continued.

“That… remains to be seen,” Grey assured her before stepping forward. “If you must tell Carolina and Washington, I can’t stop you. And I won’t apologize to them just like I’m not apologizing to you. But if there’s a chance — any chance at all — that we can all get everything we want, then having me with you in the upcoming battles and aftermath is going to be very useful. And the best way we can work together, is if none of us are fighting.”

Lowering her guard entirely Kai exhaled deeply. “You’re a sneaky bitch, y’know that?”

“Still don’t like that phrase,” Grey replied with a forced smile.

“Fine, but I’m not giving up suck my clit as a one-liner,” Kai warned her.

“I would never dream of taking it from you,” Grey assured her.

For as long as Junior had grown up around human languages, for as much as he understood when humans spoke, for the life of him he could not understand a single reason everything was so difficult between his father’s friends at the moment, leaving him to sit in his seat and watch the conversation bounce back and forth between everyone like an extremely long volley.

“Are you trying to tell me that you can’t narrow down UNSC outposts more than twenty locations?” Carolina demanded from Andrews. “I could google a list of UNSC outposts and get that as a lead. Other than telling our story how exactly are you helping us out?”

“You need to calm down and listen to what I’m saying, Agent Carolina,” Andrews said, hands up defensively. “We’ve been nothing but honest with each other thus far and there’s no reason to think that I’m going to undo the civility and respect we’ve maintained.”

“My patience wears thin even for my friends, Miss Andrews, and my trust of this situation has been cut nearly in half after realizing that your next big story is probably going to be on how you escaped the monsters of Project Freelancer!” Carolina shouted.

“That is not my next story, I report the truth, and until right this minute I have not seen anything monstrous from the two of you,” Andrews fought back viciously.

“Okay, I think that’s enough,” Washington said, literally getting between the two women.

“Bow chicka honk honk,” Junior hummed to himself boredly, knowing full well that no one else would hear or understand the context.

“Carolina, narrowing down to twenty outposts in the entire UNSC galactic territory is a big deal,” Wash reminded her steadily. “And we can have FILSS develop a route so that we can hit all of them as quickly as possible.”

“It would be my pleasure!” the ship-lady said, causing Junior to look up to the speakers. It didn’t matter how many times the ship talked to them, it still caught the young hybrid off guard.

“And, Miss Andrews, there’s no disregarding the fact that your career is based almost purely off brokering information as needed,” Wash continued, looking toward the reporter. “I can respect that. But I can also distrust it since we have no idea what information you’ve not given us that could seem like nothing to you at the moment but can be instrumental to finally finding and saving our friends from whatever is happening now.”

“I’m not trying to treat your concerns as invalid,” Andrews assured them both. “Believe me, I understand that… missteps in ethics by my profession have made a terse relationship between ourselves and the military just by default. But at the moment, neither of you are military. You’re wanted fugitives who need their names cleared as much as they need their friends helped. Hopefully fulfilling one will help you fulfill the other. Otherwise… this will get increasingly difficult for all of us.”

“In what way?” Carolina demanded.

“In that two wanted Freelancers, a Chorusian doctor, and a missing alien messiah hitting the specific UNSC bases that have been upgraded from FPCON Normal to FPCON Delta in just the last week without any known terroristic or military action in their area is not the easiest cover to keep under,” Andrews explained steadily.

“Then give us something to narrow it down with,” Wash begged.

“Like what exactly, Agent Washington?” Andrews demanded.

Wash sighed, running a hand through his hair and looking stressed beyond his years. “I… I don’t know. But there must be something which can be plugged into FILSS—“

“Bow chicka honk honk,” Junior yawned.

“—that can help her statistically better our chances,” Wash concluded before rounding on Junior. Judging by his expression, he had forgotten the young alien had even been in the cockpit with them. “What have I told you about doing that, Junior? You’re too young to even know what it means!”

In response, Junior stuck his tongue out and clicked his lower mandibles together for added effect.

“Then tell me something about Hargrove, something that only your experience with him and the UNSC Subcommittee would reveal,” Andrews answered sternly.

“I can’t believe you’re actually playing into the whole quid pro quo assholery,” Carolina snapped, arms crossed.

“Don’t take it personally,” Wash assured Andrews, turning from Junior again. “Carolina getting snappish and angry with someone without throwing them through a wall is usually a sign of affection.”

“Who’s side are you on?” Carolina demanded.

“The side of getting our friends back,” Wash reminded her firmly.

“This isn’t quid pro quo, per se,” Andrews assured them. “What this is, is those statistical variables you’re looking for, Agent Washington. The more we can get an idea of what exactly it is that Hargrove wants besides covering his own ass here, the more we can figure out which of these UNSC bases are likely to feed into his interests.” She glanced around the room. “The more likely it is that he and your friends would be there. He wants something more than he’s telling. But we need inside his head to know more.”

“Fine, we can do that,” Washington said quickly before looking toward Carolina. “What do we know about Hargrove’s motivations?”

Carolina folded her arms and stared at the floor for a moment before glancing back up to Wash. “He was interested in artifacts. In alien artifacts — that was why he was on Chorus, and that’s how he had Felix and Locus paid. Not to mention how all the weapons for the pirates were a combination technology that he was selling on the black market.”

“Would he be so bold faced as to use UNSC assets for his personal wealth on their own bases?” Wash asked critically.

“Why else would he give up so much of his corporate freedom in order to get a position within the government to begin with?” Carolina demanded. “My… The Director once said that the only inhibition to progress worse than government oversight was corporate oversight. Which is why he worked through the UNSC to begin with.”

“Oh, well then, if the Director’s words are what we’re going by now,” Wash muttered angrily.

“No, it makes perfect sense,” Andrews spoke up, walking toward the map FILSS provided on one of the cockpit’s scenes. She looked toward the markers. “If we could just narrow this down to alien artifact sights that would be available to Hargrove through UNSC bases… It could—“

Before Andrews could even finish, the twenty green pens highlighted on the galactic map flashed, half of them switching from blue to red, then the map enhanced so that only the remaining blues were left.

“Thank you, FILSS,” Carolina said, stepping up to the map. “This is a start.”

“We could begin by going to Orion-113, it’s the closest site, and the smallest so easiest to comb,” Washington offered.

Recognizing the name, Junior let out a long sputtering sigh and clicked his mandibles together. in a chatter. Been there, done that.

To the youth’s surprise, though, that seemed to catch his companions’ attention, having them turn to look his way — or at least, Carolina and Washington did. Andrews joined them belatedly.

“What do you mean? You’ve been to Orion-113?” Wash asked.

Junior nodded.

“That’s right,” Carolina said, snapping her fingers. “Tucker and Junior served in the Peace Corps after the war ended, right?”

“Specifically, they were working with Sangheilli representatives at various artifact and religious locations, overseeing peaceful division of assets,” Washington agreed.

“Blargh” Junior reminded them.

Wash stared at Junior. “What do you mean, turning them on? Your dad was turning them on?”

“Bow chicka honk honk—“

“Wash, it’s just like what Tucker did on Chorus,” Carolina reminded him. “Hargrove could be using his control over the Reds and Blues to switch on alien weapons just like Tucker did before.”

“Which would mean going to sites where Tucker and Junior hadn’t already done that,” Wash marveled. “Junior! Come up here — of these bases, tell us which ones you remember going to! It’ll narrow things down for us even more and mean we can find your father faster!”

Amazed, Junior got to his feet. I can help? he called out through honks.

“You can,” Washington assured him.

Junior’s chest filled with pride and hope like he hadn’t felt since the start of their long search.

The reporter looked around the room a few times and then put away her notepad. “You realize that I am fluent in Sangheilli in order to help my field reporting and nothing that comes out of the child’s mouth is Sangheilli, right? I have no idea how any of you know what he’s saying.”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” Wash hummed with satisfaction on his face like Junior had never seen. “Now come on, Junior, let’s find your dad.”

“Blargh!” Junior shouted excitedly.