#aryan hospital

[burned-lariat]

I love the longer hair they have Cameron sporting now. It gives him a more mature look, as opposed to the shorter hair cuts they gave him that made him look like a 14 year old.

I love it too!

[deliciouskeys]

Only hope now is a big thick dick up his lilly white ass because that's the most oppositest thing to a mommy ;))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

[nudityandnerdery]

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when German Nazis coordinated a nationwide attack on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The attack was inspired by the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris. When Hitler heard the news, he got the idea to stage a mass uprising in response. He and Joseph Goebbels contacted storm troopers around the country and told them to attack Jewish buildings, but to make the attacks look like spontaneous demonstrations. The police were told not to interfere with the demonstrators, but instead to arrest the Jewish victims. Firefighters were told only to put out fires in any adjacent Aryan properties. Everyone cooperated. In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Many of the attackers were neighbors of the victims. The Nazis confiscated any compensation claims that insurance companies paid to Jews. They also imposed a huge collective fine on the Jewish community for having supposedly incited the violence. The event was used to justify barring Jews from schools and most public places, and forcing them to adhere to new curfews. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. The event was called Kristallnacht, which means, "Night of Broken Glass." It's generally considered the official beginning of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis had killed people secretly and individually. After Kristallnacht, the Nazis felt free to persecute the Jews openly, because they knew no one would stop them.

[otherbrains]

It's very possible Luigi Mangione isn't the assassin. The eyebrows, fingerprints despite wearing gloves, and suddenly recovered backpack raise suspicion.

The idolization of him is weird. Other than a manifesto, we don't know what he's done to help others, let alone in a class consciousness way. He's just a guy.

For that matter, the killing isn't a cause for celebration since Thompson (who I have no sympathy for) still had kids, CEOs can be easily replaced and can be worse, and shareholders are a less glamorous but more dangerous threat.

The best thing to come out of this is the conversation over insurance companies and income inequality but even that's slipping away. We need community and interconnectedness to create and maintain long term change.

I hate the hero worship over Mangione (and of the actual killer) but as of now he has been unfairly labeled as a villain and terrorist (which I wouldn't be surprised if it's a smoke show to distract from Adams and the NYPD being corrupt) where there's no legal justification. I don't see law enforcement going after the Klan and Aryan Brotherhood with this much fervor.

It reminds me of how the momentum behind George Floyd dissipated in following months and even earlier with Occupy Wall Street. We have to keep pressuring for trust busts, single payer insurance, progressive taxes and marginal rates (preferably 90% like we had in the past), and making travel like public transportation and high speed rail accessible for lower income and isolated people who risk having health and hospital issues.

[uncanny-tranny]

could you elaborate / give links on the transphobia = antisemitism thing? ive never heard of this before and cant find much on it on google except for one kinda surface level article :(

Some tropes of antisemitic transphobia:

Jews are funding trans surgery or surgeons/Jewish hospitals are specifically targeting people (especially those seen as girls) to manipulate into getting hormones surgery

Jewish people are influencing media in order to be "leftist" or "woke." Acceptance of transnes in media, in their eyes, will manipulate people to identify as trans

Jewish people are in "upper echelons" of congress, the senate, and so forth. They will lobby for pro-trans laws to pass for their own interests

Jewish people are "degenerate", believe in "deneracy," and as such, promote transness because it is also "degenerate."

If you want a direct, historical fact, remember Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish-German physician and sexologist whose work was done in the rise of Nazism, who founded Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. He was an advocate for sexual minorities including trans people, and was gay himself. His research included sexuality and transgender topics, and the institute even preformed SRS and conducted research on trans topics, which was almost unheard of, officially. His institute was raided by the nazi party, and his citizenship was revoked. His Jewishness was capitalized upon by the nazi party in order to spread conspiracy that the jew was a "social degenerate" who preyed upon the innocent aryan youth and society.

Here is an article outlining a bit of what I've already laid out here.

Here is a video about antisemitism and antisemitic tropes, which you might recognize in modern times applied to other groups

Here is an article from Atlantia, Georgia about antisemitic, transphobic flyers delivered to Atlantic residence, which play in antisemitic tropes

I am begging gentile trans people to learn about antisemitism. I will minority correct you, anon, because I didn't say all transphobia has to be, in turn, antisemitic but that conspiracy about transgenderism is almost always based in antisemitic beliefs about Jews. When you learn more about antisemitism, you can spot it when an antisemite uses it for their transphobic agenda. Learn your history. Trans history has not been separated completely from Jewish history.

[kewpiedome]

Me too i only bought 100 we need to use the Elderly for Our Entertainment

those who Know 💀💀💀

[wawamouse]

Oz Rewatch 3: S6E07: Junkyard Dawgs

Storylines

The Homeboys are frozen out of the tits trade; Stanley Bukowski crime flashback; Stanley starts dealing weed brownies out of the cafeteria; Stanley its steamed to death in the boiler room; the Homeboys go back into telemarketing to steal credit card numbers

Stella gets her lumpectomy; Pablo shanks an Aryan and gets send to the Hole; all is well with Stella; the TV crowd makes fun of Busmalis; Norma is late to the wedding but shows up in the end;

Idzik is impatient for Omar to kill him; McManus doesn’t believe Omar; Idzik describes his existential crisis; Idzik kills Omar when he refuses to kill Idzik;

Robson has HIV;

Ryan is in denial about Cyril not being in the clear yet; Gloria ???; Ryan wants to work at the hospital; Seamus O’Reily crime flashback;

Schillinger auditions for the play; Beecher gets MacDuff; Beecher confronts Schillinger and Keller in the library; Keller tells Schillinger he’ll kill Beecher; Keller tells Beecher he’s playing Schillinger;

McManus asks Ruiz to see Miguel; Miguel visits with Cathy Jo again; Schillinger pressures Miguel about signing the papers

Alonzo Torquemada crime flashback; he arrives at Oz with plans to take things over;

Yood warns Glynn to drop the Loewen investigation; Eleanor and Glynn romance is discovered by Tim;

Correctional Officer’s association; McManus goes to retrieve Glynn who is nowhere to be found; Glynn has already been stabbed, dying in the gym;

Sister: You think no one’s going to notice? …You think no one’s going to notice? …You think no one’s going to notice? …You think no one’s going to notice?

Me: Why is he still here?! Sister: What do they stay so late for?

Sister: When has [Omar] ever schemed? Why would he be scheming right now? No, he does things spur of the moment.

Sister: Does he have some kind of life insurance policy out where he can’t kill himself and needs someone else to do it? Me: I have a new theory that his family died or his wife left him and took the kids or something, because he said he had a family. Which means something must have happened to them. Sister: Yeah, and he wants to leave them the life insurance money to make up for being a loser.

Sister: How he treats his special projects, haha.

Sister: They’re still doing this damn play? What, is the season finale gonna be the doing this play? And someone gets shot?

Sister: She came alone? Me: Yeah, you’d expect her to show up with guards. Sister: Yeah, especially because there was the whole realization with McManus. It seemed like they were all going to come running, but it's just her.

Sister: Why are they still introducing new characters?! Aren’t they supposed to be ending the show?

Sister: …Why would Miguel be the man to know? He’s not even in the drug trade. Me: I ask this myself.

Sister: He has a backdoor? In his bathroom?

Sister: The turn out for this party is not great.

Stray Thoughts

Bukowski getting arrested while shoveling weed brownies in his mouth is so fucking funny

What was McManus’s 40th bday party that they (according to Murphy) were wearing tuxedos?

Torquemada in the background of the episode before he's even arrived:

They must've filmed his bits first because Bukowski's still alive in the background of his arrival, too.

Sister’s Final Thoughts

“Why did they have a back door into the bathroom of the warden’s office?”

“They didn’t need to add the weed guy. They could’ve just foiled them a different way.”

Sister thought Miguel looking around the visiting room and hearing the baby crying was supposed to be spooky and signaled that he would back away from Cathy Jo

New Predictions by Sister

Someone will die during the play

O’Reily’s dad will either die or get incapacitated

Stella will come back next episode to finish her story with Bob

They’re not going to find Leo’s killer (the investigators will be as incompetent as he is)

Nobody else is getting out of prison

Something will happen to Cathy Jo, depending on how much the writers want him to go with Chico… (Me: The writers don’t want that… That’s just me). Oh, okay, then she’ll live and the baby crying wasn’t an evil omen but an angelic chord of inspiration. So Miguel will get with that lady and become the new leader of the Aryan Brotherhood. And that will be how the Latinos win. (Me: Be serious…)

Maybe the new gay guy will take over Em City like he wanted to and that’s how the Gays will end up winning.

Do they have a spinoff show? Because if they do, they're going to introduce like five more characters.

[gryficowa]

Every time I hear about a ceasefire between Israel and any country/state, I know that Israel will do everything to break the ceasefire and then blame those who attacked, making up excuses like secret tunnels under hospitals and other shit

You know what actually worked? If Israel ceased to exist, then 99% of the problems in the Middle East would disappear

Israel mocks the law and principles, and uses naive and corrupt politicians from other countries to survive (In addition, the ideology of Zionism serves them as creating anti-Semitism and blaming those who fight for Palestine, so when they see a Jew who is not susceptible to this shit, harass him and wish him like liberals did after Harris' loss to every marginalized group)

Israel is the Third Reich of its time, and Zionism is Nazism under a different name, don't deny it, compare it to the actions of the Nazis and it wasn't "Disagreeing with the Jews" it was many years of dehumanization and genocide, that's what Israel is doing now to the Palestinians ( And even worse, I would never say that it could be worse than the Holocaust, but it literally has a greater toll than World War II and all the victims of the Holocaust who were murdered by the Third Reich because they destroyed the patriachia and the "Vision of the Aryan race")

Agreeing to the crimes that Israel commits is no different from what the world did during the Third Reich… France, the USA (Again), all other countries agreed to it… The USA only reacted AFTER THREE YEARS OF THE THIRD REICH'S ATTACK ON POLAND BECAUSE THE USA DID NOT BELIEVE IN THE HOLOCAUST, they could have saved so many victims over the years, but they chose inaction… Now the US is making an even worse choice, additional complicity (Because yes, silence is complicity, but that's a different dimension) by supplying weapons to a country that is committing genocide

The USA, as usual, is on the wrong side of history, and you know what will suck? Knowing life, the USA will get away with it and they will defend it, and then we will go back to romanticizing the USA as a hero and other shit…

This is always the case, the USA will show itself as a paradise, when in practice it has millions of corpses in the closet, and how do you criticize the USA? The nationalists want to burn you at the stake, especially if you are not an American (Then you have no right to voice, because freedom only works when the nationalists speak…)

So yes, the Middle East will be free when Israel disappears, but that will probably require World War III…

[amielbjacobs]

Shield and Sword Liveblog

Still kind of shocked that this plot point was allowed. A chekist having someone shot under false accusations? I guess the Party line allowed for the idea that Stalin was fucked up in the 60s. But now, somehow, if you say that then Putin and his guys are like "What, you can't even torture several hundred thousand innocent people to death in a mass moral panic? Political correctness has gone too far."

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I love how Johann's entire approach to spying is just that

whenever anyone doesn't want to do some menial task, Johann is like I CAN DO THAT

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The British translator seems to struggle with the translation of the word "chekist" - in some places he turns it into "intelligence officer" or "secret service" or "NKVD" - but then later on there's a weird bit where he just starts saying "the Cheka." (Even though he's still talking about the 1940s.) Which like, if you were going to start saying "The Cheka" with no explanation to the Western reader wtf that means, why not just say "chekist" from the beginning? You can put a footnote and then you won't have to worry about it ever again. This translation is so sloppy.

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Johann is in a German military hospital now cozying up to the Gestapo informants and doing their report-writing for them

and a Prussian corporal just came in who, it's implied, shot himself in the foot to get out of the military

anyway, he's being a jackass and bossing everyone around and hitting on all the women

and one of the Gestapo informants tried to come up to him and ask more questions about how he got shot

and he just

started feeling the Gestapo man's face up and asked him "How did you get past the racial board with ears and a nose like that?'

and the Gestapo man just slunk off

This character is going to turn out to be another Russian spy undercover as a German. Seems like Nazi Germany was 50% Russians by population!

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Everyone is admiring how he is "the perfect Aryan" and he has taken to pointing out that Johann is also the perfect Aryan

(both are Slavs)

How come no one's ever Jewish in these books

The backstory of our second Russian-pretending-to-be-a-German

I love him but also

this is a guy who is 100% getting sent to the gulag after the war is over

he got trapped behind enemy lines and just stole a uniform and papers and started acting as a German, then started like

serial killing German officers basically

and recruited a whole communist cell to support him in that

and then they all got killed and only he survived

and now he's in the hospital as a German officer

and somehow, miraculously, wound up in the same hospital as the other fake German

"I'm a solo act, no chorus" is such a badass line.

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There's a really detailed explanation here, breaking from Johann's point of view, about how Beria/the NKVD command received all these reports from Soviet agents about how Nazi Germany was going to invade, and instead of listening they persecuted the agents for being the bearers of bad news. In this book, Johann almost got purged himself, and was only saved by the protection of his patron.

I'm really surprised all of this was allowed.

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them, but

but also u kinda do, I like it when it's big Fuck Stalin hours

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the censors were going over this book . . .

I absolutely thought Lansdorf was going to be the canon gay character in this book. The way Johann does all of these physically intimate services for this able-bodied older man, who then rewards him with promotions and, in the TV show, constantly calls him "dear" - it does really seem as if Lansdorf is gay and Johann is seducing him in order to further his goals.

Original russian, via google translate:

In the morning, Landsdorf asked to massage his sore leg. And Weiss did it with amazing skill. He had solid theoretical and practical training in the field of massage. Trainers claimed that massage was not only a universal remedy for all diseases, but also a healing balm for the nervous system. Weiss had once attended lectures by a massage therapist, and after training at the Dynamo stadium, athletes often massaged each other. So Johann had sufficient experience.

Johann is the best at everything. I bet he gives great blowjobs too

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This is the point in the show where I realized the Nazis were trying to recruit Soviet POWs out of the concentration camps, which as it turns out is most of the plot of this story. I've sort of gotten used to it over the course of re-experiencing this story three times, but it's still kind of a wild plot point. These are people who are barely alive.

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This is much grimier than Seventeen Moments Stierlitz never went to a death camp, even tho he is literally SS I mean, there are pictures of dead bodies in the Holocaust in Seventeen Moments, on screen but that's always sort of seperate from the actual plot

Johann is visiting a death camp and chatting with a low-level SS man who is dumb as bricks

SS man is bored of the death camp and wants to go out on a date with Johann

his dad was a missionary in Africa who shot at black people "if they didn't behave themselves"

and wanted him to be a priest too

There's a lot of anti-religious stuff in this book

which is a sharp contrast to Seventeen Moments of Spring where we only ever see the Nazis as oppressors of Christianity

which is one of the things that made me wonder if the Nazi regime in Seventeen Moments of Spring is a metaphor for the USSR rather than being the literal Nazi regime

Johann has been assigned to select Russian POWs from the death camps to do Abwehr work and he's looking for people he can use to secretly work against the Nazi regime for him

but this is also such a horrifying task, because like, anyone he doesn't choose will be gassed, right?

I have doubts about the tastefulness of allowing this thriller novel to go to a death camp.

But I won't lie and say that fake torture isn't my favorite trope

👀

In the full scene in Russian Johann says he can't bear to hit the prisoner and the prisoner calls him a pussy

which is also 👀

“I can’t,” Johann repeated. "A weakling," the miner said contemptuously. He thought for a moment and added, "A neurasthenic."

Von Dietrichs manners are queer coded so Johann adopting them is funny

the Nazis have an informant among the Soviet POWs

and Johann questioned him in his guise as abwehr, and then told the Nazi guards to slap him across the face before they release him back into the prison population "to make it look more natural"

which is funny, but I also find it kind of disturbing. Like, I do agree that you shouldn't inform on your fellow prisoners to the SS, but I also don't really feel comfortable judging the decisions of a guy who's starving to death in a death camp, you know? I feel like I, as a guy who has never starved to death in a death camp, don't have the right to judge those people. And it feels especially icky for Johann to judge them when he is currently enjoying the privileges of a Nazi officer. You know? Like, I think we're supposed to think he's sticking it to those traitors by having the informant beaten. But functionally he is a guy using the power accorded by the Nazi state to have a concentration camp prisoner beaten, and he's still our hero and this isn't depicted as a moment of moral failing for him. It's really uncomfortable.

I think I would be more likely to give this scene a pass if it didn't take place in a propaganda story. Like, it's okay for characters in difficult situations to do bad things and for the narrative not to have to spell out for us "this is bad." But the fact is that this is Soviet propaganda; the rules of this book are that bad things will be delineated for the reader. The fact that it's not delineated here is because the creators didn't think about it.

The story is going to explore the moral complexities of Johann's relationship to the concentration camp prisoners more later on, but even at its most ambiguous, it still sits in a place where it's saying that some people starving to death in a Nazi death camp deserve it because they didn't try harder to resist the Nazis.

But I mean. I guess I knew what I expected when I picked up the authoritarian propaganda novel. Did I mention this is Putin's favorite TV show? He credits it with getting him to join the KGB. So that's another crime we can lay at this show's feet, apparently.

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I was beginning to wonder if the subtitles on the show were really as bad as I remembered, or if it was just the cuts from cramming a thousand pages of long-winded literature into a TV show, but in my liveblog I found this:

And you know what? That still doesn't make any fucking sense to me.

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Johann (as an abwehr officer talking to a bunch of Soviet POWs they're trying to evaluate for use as penetration agents): You must give a political evaluation of the Soviet system. Prisoner (sounding depressed): What for? Johann: If you try to go back to the USSR after we parachute you in, the Soviets'll hang you from the first lamppost [for writing this denunciation of the system.] Prisoner: (hollowly) They will anyway.

This is so dark. I feel like this story is not as willing to admit to the mistreatment of Soviet POWs postwar as it is to call out Beria, but it's definitely not ignoring it entirely either. But it makes me wish that we could see Johann try to grapple with the fact that these prisoners are being trapped into an inhuman situation not only by the Nazis but also by the USSR, and that Johann is simultaneously a representative of both of those evils. He is playing both sides of the board, and both sides of the board are ruining these people's lives.

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Another scene from the show:

Nazi officer, about a Soviet POW: "An interesting young man, smart, from a family of intellectuals. He may be useful for long-term work, if we can thoroughly install our values in him."

HOW IS THAT GOING TO WORK. Your values are that he is subhuman and needs to be killed! I mean, is he not a Slav?

I think it was actually Dietrichs who said that, but when I was watching the TV show I wasn't really aware of Dietrichs as a distinct character.

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Johann, who as you'll recall is a chekist posting as Abwehr, is coaching the prisoners on how to survive a chekist interrogation so the prisoners are split into pairs, one interrogator and one interrogatee, and they're mock-interrogating each other

and the protagonist is lecturing them on what a real chekist would say

lmao

this plot has so many people pretending to be other people that it makes following with subs pretty hard

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[reasoningdaily]

Idaho manhunt subjects tied to prison gang. Who are the Aryan Knights?

BOISE, Idaho (NewsNation) — The brazen ambush at an Idaho hospital that injured three corrections officers, led to a manhunt and spawned two homicide investigations has thrust the white supremacist gang at the center of the case into the spotlight.

Nicholas Umphenour, 28, and accomplice Skylar Meade, 31, were arrested near the Twin Falls area Thursday after 36 hours on the run.

Now, Idaho State Police claims it can connect the pair of white supremacist prison gang members to two killings that happened hundreds of miles away from where they were arrested. Both victims were adult men and an active investigation is ongoing, police said.

Who are the Aryan Knights?

Meade and Umphenour were both members of The Aryan Knights, a gang formed in the mid-1990s in the Idaho prison system to organize criminal activity for a select group of white people in custody, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in the district of Idaho.

In 2021, Harlan Hale, described as a leader in the group, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in a plot to traffic drugs behind bars and use violence to collect unpaid debts. In a court document, federal prosecutors described the Aryan Knights as a “scourge” within the state’s prison system.

“The hate-fueled gang engages in many types of criminal activity and casts shadows of intimidation, addiction, and violence over prison life,” prosecutors wrote.

In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League counted 75 different white supremacist prison gangs in federal or local facilities in at least 38 states. The ADL said two of the largest such groups, the Aryan Circle and Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, had at least 1,500 members.

How many people are a part of the Aryan Knights?

Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow for the ADL’s Center on Extremism, estimates the Aryan Knights has approximately 150 members behind bars and roughly 100 more on the streets. He said the group operates in other states, including Washington and Oregon.

“With all white supremacist prison gangs, the ideology takes a backseat to the organized crime. That’s just a given,” he said. “They use that as a sort of a glue to help keep them together and help keep them loyal to the gang.”

Pitcavage said white supremacist prison gangs are a very different phenomenon from neo-Nazi groups like Aryan Nations, which had a compound in north Idaho at its peak in the 1980s and 1990s.

[ravennaortiz]

Right Thing?

Chapter 8 of Countdown. Jax starts to question his decisions

As always this is an 18+ only story. This story is AU based and not your typical Sons of Anarchy story. Some readers may find some plot lines and changes to some characters to be problematic please read at your discretion. This story also time jumps heavily so keep this in mind as you read!

Warnings: General themes of the show such as violence, drugs, swearing etc, minor age gap, minor smut in later chapters.

Tag List @fleureeee

Jax sat smoking in his backyard barely acknowledging Chibs as he sat in a chair next to him. Jax had so much on his mind and was drowning trying to keep everyone safe and happy. So far he seemed to be doing the safe thing but was helplessly failing at keeping everyone happy.

"You hear to tell me I suck too and you hate my guts?" inquired Jax as he finally looked over at Chibs. "No one hates you or thinks you suck. Things are rough right now and everyone's emotions are heightened." stated Chibs firmly. "You had no idea that Juice was going to get hurt like that" he added as he thought back on the incident a couple days prior where the kid had been jumped by members of the Aryan Brotherhood and left for dead on the side of the road. Thankfully they had gotten to him in time.

"Clay unpatched him and green lit him. I gotta get him out of here. Rocky would never forgive me if I don't....not that it matters since I'm still getting radio silence from her as it is." stated Jax as he tossed his cigarette butt before rubbing his face. "Jesus" muttered Chibs as he sat back in the chair. he knew Clay had called Jax earlier but hadn't expected this.

"Am I making any of the right choices? Like should I have sent her away? Should I be trying to take back the club? Should I have prospected Juice? Like is it really so bad for Rocky to be married off against her will?" Jax rambled on as he stood up pacing . "Laddie" stated Chibs as he watched Jax. "Nonsense is wat I call that. Ye know you have done the right thing. Don't beat yerself up" continued Chibs.

"Lets focus on one thing at a time. First thing is getting Juice out of Charming" stated Chibs as he caught Jax's arm stopping his wild pacing. Jax simply nodded as he collapsed back in his chair. "Maybe I can make two people a bit happier" he mumbled as he took his phone out and scrolled to Bishops name.

****

"Where are we going?" asked Juice as Jax turned the van out onto the highway instead of towards home after picking him up from the hospital. "I'm getting you somewhere safe for a bit" replied Jax.

Return to Chapter List

[eddieredmayneargentinablog]

Eddie Redmayne: ‘Until there’s a levelling, there are certain parts I wouldn’t play’

New Interview.

The Oscar winner on learning from his mistakes, his latest role as a serial killer nurse – and why he’s not wearing a wedding ring.

By Ryan Gilbey, Fri 27 Jan 2023.

Drinking coffee in the restaurant of a central London hotel as jazz burbles away in the background, Eddie Redmayne is wearing faded blue jeans, a white sweatshirt and a scarf. No wedding band, though. Uh-oh. “‘Spotted without his ring!’” he says, mock-horrified. He misplaced it while shooting The Danish Girl eight years ago, which is only one of the reasons to lament that film. We’ll get to the others in good time.

He bought a replacement ring then lost that, too, so he gave up. On jewellery, that is, not marriage. “I am incredibly happily married so I’m afraid there’s no scoop there,” he says apologetically. The tone fits with his demeanour, which is that of a Saturday boy at John Lewis: posh, affable, sincerely regretful that he doesn’t have the item in your size. He just turned 41 but could pass for mid-20s. His tousled hair is rust-coloured, his skin frantic with freckles, his lips so plump they look like crimson jellies.

A scarf stays knotted around his neck throughout our morning together; he picked up a nasty cold on his recent trip to the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, where he was in the running for best supporting actor for playing the serial killer Charles Cullen in The Good Nurse. When the sneezes come today, he whips out a comically large red handkerchief peppered with white dots, like a magician preparing to make the crockery vanish.

In fact, his party trick is quite the opposite: he makes awards appear. He got the big three (Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe) for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and an Olivier last year for his lizardly, mercurial Emcee in Cabaret, which also starred Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles. A soundtrack recording, taped during live performances for added wildness, has just been released. Redmayne’s approach to the character, he says, “is that he would shape-shift and emerge as this Aryan conductor who could drop his baton in one of the champagne bottles at the end, and then walk off into the night. Whatever else is going on, he’s fucking fine.”

He took home his first Olivier (as well as a Tony) in 2010 for playing Mark Rothko’s assistant in Red. Each night, he and his co-star Alfred Molina splashed paint around on stage as they mocked up giant imitation Rothkos. What a job for an art history graduate, even if Redmayne’s dissertation at Cambridge was on Yves Klein’s blue. And don’t forget the Golden Raspberry award he won for worst supporting actor in the Wachowski sisters’ incomprehensible fantasy Jupiter Ascending, where he was a rasping, pursed-lipped princeling in outfits worthy of a fetish night: stiff gold collars, stippled rubber vests, bare chest underneath. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “I still don’t. I honestly haven’t watched the whole movie. But I loved making choices that were …” He wrinkles his nose. “Well, ‘bold’ is probably too kind a word.”

Prizes are why we are here today. It’s encouraging that enough of Redmayne’s peers noticed his creepy but admirably level-headed work in The Good Nurse to vote for him in next month’s Screen Actors Guild awards. I wish him luck. “Ah cheers. Never gonna happen but it’ll be fun to go.” A few days after we meet, he also gets a Bafta nomination to add to the tally.

He plays Charlie Cullen, a seemingly compassionate, diligent nurse who is now serving 18 consecutive life sentences for the murder of 29 patients in his care at various New Jersey hospitals over the course of nearly two decades; the actual death toll could be in the hundreds. He contaminated IV bags with insulin, and injected patients with lethal doses of heart medication. His friend and colleague Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) was instrumental in bringing him to justice but The Good Nurse is less a story of heroes and villains than an indictment of the profit-centred healthcare system that enabled then concealed his actions.

“He’s basically giving his employers every opportunity to stop him,” says Redmayne. “It’s like: ‘Fucking do it. Go on.’ That’s what I found intriguing about the script. In some ways, yes, it’s a true crime story, but it felt more like a character study combined with a critique of the system.” With the NHS at its most imperilled, the film doubles as a warning to audiences in the UK. “Well, it’s more than a critique of US healthcare. It’s about systems in general in which the power of the individual is lost. That’s got to ring a gigantic alarm bell in relation to what we have here and what we take for granted. The NHS is going through an incredibly complex time.”

It’s admirable that the film resists trying to answer the question of why Cullen killed. But even the least prurient viewer might wonder whether he regarded those in his care as people or merely potential kills. “In those scenes with the patients, I was playing the truth of empathy and kindness, with the sense of the killer being a different person,” he says. “I believe he was, for all intents and purposes, an excellent nurse. But there were times when he was like an empty vessel that would become filled with arrogance and truculence. I spent time with the real Amy, and she described these moments when the Charlie she knew disappeared. That dissociative idea was a revelation for me. So that’s how I played him. It was about finding this vacuum, this different person.”

He illustrates the demarcation in a pair of chilling confrontation scenes: first in a diner, where Amy wears a wire as she tries to lure Cullen into making an incriminating statement; then after his arrest, when he is harangued by the interviewing officer. In both those moments, the actor turns away from the camera then swivels back round to face us, his features fixed in an impenetrable mask. Somewhere inside him, a switch has been flicked to “off”.

No one should be surprised that Redmayne is capable of that iciness. One of his first films was Savage Grace, another factually based psychological drama. He played a fraught, tormented heir involved in a semi-incestuous relationship with his socialite mother, played by Julianne Moore. Redmayne had fought hard to get the part. Coming in 2007, so close to the start of his screen career, it introduced him as a risk-taker, likeability be damned. He made good on that promise in little-seen oddball endeavours such as Hick, where he was a limping Texas paedophile pursuing a young Chloë Grace Moretz.

His path has been unorthodox, even if his background (he was in the same year as Prince William at Eton) is privilege incarnate. “I knew nothing about film or TV but I got into acting because I loved it at school,” he says. A former drama teacher suggested him for Mark Rylance’s all-male production of Twelfth Night at the Globe; Redmayne, 20 at the time, won the part of Viola. “I’d played so many women at school that it wasn’t a stretch,” he shrugs. Adela Quested from A Passage to India is one of his favourites. “‘I want to see the real India,’” he purrs, slipping briefly into character and gazing demurely across the restaurant.

His career goals were modest. “I thought if anything happened for me it would be Sunday night television, something English and Etonian. Maybe a bit part in Foyle’s War.” That wasn’t how it panned out. His breakthrough stage role, in 2004, was as a fragile young American whose father is in a sexual relationship with a farmyard animal, in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? “US casting directors came to see it. Very quickly, rather than doing English characters, I was cast as Americans.”

As well as Savage Grace, there was Robert De Niro’s espionage thriller The Good Shepherd, where those full lips came in handy playing Angelina Jolie’s son. And that Sunday night prediction was realised in the end. “Eventually I found my way back to tweed,” he smiles. He was Angel Clare opposite Gemma Arterton as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, then the lead in Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong. “Plus that whole weird period where I was in anything related even tangentially to Queen Elizabeth.” He’s muddling the chronology slightly – a role in the series Elizabeth I crops up right at the start of his CV – but it’s true that if there was a doublet and hose hanging around, the young Redmayne was either wearing it or standing next to someone who was (see The Other Boleyn Girl; Elizabeth: The Golden Age). He gallops on through his IMDb page: “Then Theory, and The Danish Girl, which I suppose both is and isn’t an English period drama …”

Ah, The Danish Girl. Redmayne’s publicists had politely asked me not to press him on an issue about which he has nothing more to add: the public statement in 2020 in which he diverged from his Fantastic Beasts creator JK Rowling on the matter of transgender identity. “I disagree with Jo’s comments,” he said at the time. “Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid.” But it is Redmayne who brings up The Danish Girl, a film he has said he would not feel comfortable making now. He believes the role of the painter Lili Elbe, one of the first known people to undergo gender-confirming surgery, should have gone to a trans performer. “I made that film with the best intentions, but I think it was a mistake,” he said in 2021.

I ask how that realisation has coloured his feelings toward the movie itself. Is it a failure? “Truth be told, I only see the flaws in the work I do anyway,” he says after a long pause. Then he stares into space for 10 seconds. “I worked really … I’m, um, I … I don’t know how to answer that question.” He turns to me, his eyes crinkled and sad. “I don’t know how to answer it. Sorry.” Can he not even say how he feels about the film? “The thing I find most complex is truth …” There follows an explanation of the genesis of the script before he finally reaches his conclusion: “The film feels like a fictionalised version. It doesn’t feel like Lili’s story.”

He won’t take parts now that should go to trans actors: that much is clear. But what can someone with his clout do to help his trans colleagues? “A few years ago, I did a workshop with trans actors at the Central School of Speech and Drama. A lot of them were quite rightly interrogating me about my choice to do The Danish Girl, and pointing out that many trans actors don’t go to drama school because they don’t see it as an opportunity. Unless there are parts that you think are possible for you to play, why would you?��

A sigh. “I believe everyone wants to be able to play everything. That’s what we dream of as actors, and should do. No one wants to be limited by their gender or sexuality but, historically, these communities haven’t had a seat at the table. Until there’s a levelling, there are certain parts I wouldn’t play.” Earlier on, reflecting on his lack of formal training, he had told me: “I can only learn from my mistakes.” At least no one can say he hasn’t put his money where his mouth is.

* The Good Nurse is on Netflix. Cabaret: London Cast Recording is released by Decca Records.

[oddlysweet]

meaning are you Iranian or Afghan because your bio has farsi

Afghanistan makes as much sense as Israel or Pakistan as far as cohesive nations go. All national identities are pretty silly imho. But if we’re splitting hairs, I come from the children of Aryans and Scythians, Mughals & Safavids, Tajiks & Pashtuns, Uzbeks & Turkmen, Pamiris & Hazaras. Sunnis, Shiites, Ishmaelites & Wahabists. Iksander, Mohammad (pbuh) and every people who chanced upon the most vibrant melting pot to grace the realm of hospitality & poetic practice. Qataghan, Khorasan & Aryana are what I would claim, but they’re being erased with each day. I prefer to think of the حزب as انارستان, though, “my birth certificate says Oakland.” My mother’s father was Mohammadzai but he never spoke Pashto with his children so Dari is all I know.

[troybeecham]

Today the Church remembers St. Edith Stein, Martyr.

Ora pro nobis.

St. Edith (12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a brilliant philosopher who stopped believing in God when she was 14. Even so, she became so captivated by reading the autobiography of Teresa of Avila that she began a spiritual journey that led to her baptism in 1922. Twelve years later she imitated Saint Teresa by becoming a Carmelite, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Born into a prominent, religious Jewish family in Breslau, Germany—now Wrocław, Poland—Edith abandoned Judaism in her teens. Moved by the tragedies of World War I, in 1915, she took lessons to become a nursing assistant and worked in an infectious diseases hospital. As a student at the University of Freiburg, she became fascinated by phenomenology–an approach to philosophy. Excelling as a protégé of Edmund Husserl, one of the leading phenomenologists, Edith earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1916. She continued as a university teacher until 1922, when she moved to a Dominican school in Speyer; her appointment as lecturer at the Educational Institute of Munich ended under pressure from the Nazis.

She was baptized on 1 January 1922 in the Roman Catholic Church. At that point, she wanted to become a Discalced Carmelite nun but was dissuaded by her spiritual mentor, the abbot of Beuron Archabbey. She then taught at a Catholic school of education in Speyer. As a result of the requirement of an "Aryan certificate" for civil servants promulgated by the Nazi government in April 1933 as part of its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she had to quit her teaching position.

She was finally admitted as a postulant to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne on 14 October, on the first vespers of the feast of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and received the religious habit as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresia in remembrance of Teresa of Ávila, Benedicta in honour of Benedict of Nursia). She made her temporary vows on 21 April 1935, and her perpetual vows on 21 April 1938.

The same year, Teresa Benedicta a Cruce and her biological sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern (tertiary of the Order, who would handle the community's needs outside the monastery), were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, for their safety. Ultimately, she would not be safe in the Netherlands. The Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement read in all churches across the nation on 20 July 1942 condemning the genocidal racism of National Socialism. In a retaliatory response, on 26 July 1942, the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts who had previously been spared. Along with two hundred and forty-two baptized Jews living in the Netherlands, Stein and her sister Tosa were arrested by the SS on 2 August 1942. Stein and her sister Rosa were imprisoned at the concentration camps of Amersfoort and Westerbork before being moved to Auschwitz. A Dutch official at Westerbork was so impressed by her sense of faith and calm that he offered her an escape plan. Stein vehemently refused his assistance, stating: "If somebody intervened at this point and took away my chance to share in the fate of my brothers and sisters, that would be utter annihilation."

On 7 August 1942, early in the morning, 987 Jews were moved to the Auschwitz concentration camp. They, along with Teresa Benedicta and her sister Rosa, were murdered by the National Socialists in a gas chamber in Auschwitz on 9 August 1942.

Pope St. John Paul II beatified Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in 1987 and canonized her 12 years later, and named her one of the six patron saints of Europe.

The miracle that was the basis for her canonization is the cure of Benedicta McCarthy, a little girl who had swallowed a large amount of paracetamol (acetaminophen), which causes hepatic necrosis. The young girl's father, Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a priest of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, immediately called together relatives and prayed for Teresa's intercession. Shortly thereafter, the nurses in the intensive care unit saw her sit up, completely healthy. Ronald Kleinman, a pediatric specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who treated the girl, testified about her recovery to church tribunals, stating: "I was willing to say that it was miraculous." McCarthy would later attend Sr. Teresa Benedicta's canonization.

The writings of Edith Stein fill 17 volumes, many of which have been translated into English. A woman of integrity, she followed the truth wherever it led her. One of the more profound things that she wrote was,

“Do not accept anything as truth that lacks Love. Do not accept anything as love which lacks truth. One without the other is a destructive lie.”

Almighty God, by whose grace and power your holy martyr Edith triumphed over suffering and was faithful even to death: Grant us, who now remember her in thanksgiving, to be so faithful in our witness to you in this world, that we may receive with her the crown of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

[002aryans]

Discover the Best Family-Friendly Restaurant in Gurgaon

Dining out in Gurgaon can prove quite a challenge since everyone wants to have his or her own preference shown, but in Aryan's Ristorante, a gouty family can be lost in: from romantic dinners to meals for the family. A date night, a budget-friendly restaurant in Gurgaon for outing with the family, or the best veg restaurant in Gurgaon for a family dinner? It's all there in Aryan's Ristorante.

The Most Recommended Place to It's even more attractive for the sat-day family dinner. Aryan's Ristorante just might be the place where families could come along and be free enough to have dinner doing something relaxing together. It is beautiful enough to meet warm memories while balanced, highly equipped-well with most things an ideal kind of home.

The delightful children from the kiddies are proposed to them as a children's menu: deliciously easy and yet nutritious choices to make happy little mouths. Its spacious arrangement and warm welcoming hospitality will surely make it a great place to form beautiful family memories together.