#bitchfest

[jaladwolf]

AGA B*CTHFEST! (Mostly Dreamer!Bonnie)

Ladies and gentlemen of the AGA community, I come to you with what I believe is the most insane yet needed event in history.

This, my dear members in the first ever AGA B*cthfest, hosted by the lovely @drechastory and me, your wonderful @jaladwolf! With special guests, Pete and Goldie! (Yes I invited Goldie.)

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind, this is just for fun!

Basically how this is gonna work, y’all are gonna come up with art pieces imitating or roasting a certain AGA character or an AU of that character. It can be either your sona or an OC! Oh, and outright hate art will not be accepted! This whole thing is just to poke fun at some of the characters. So to all you crazy b*cthes, put the pitchforks down!

Now that that’s out of the way…

Let the b*cthfest BEGIN!

(Reblog to sign up!)

[ajjordanphoto]

Saint Peewee performing at Bitchfest Week 4 at C'mon Everybody, April 2023

[doctorslippery]

Wah, you disagreed with me. How dare you. Get your own post. Wah.

Pile on douchebag.

Pile on douchenozzle.

Pile on know-nothing just piling on cause they're an ass.

... ...yeah, I had a bit of a block party this morning. Cause you know, you post something in the wild and other people see it and they, just like you, are free to have an opinion on it. If you intended it to exist in a vacuum, you should've disabled commenting.

Cause, your opinion is so wise and indefatigable that no one could DARE disagree with it, or, gasp, have an opinion of their own. And, double gasp, how dare they use their keyboard/phone/whatever and put their opinion out in the wild too. Gasp! The horror!

[centrally-unplanned]

Let's see if I have one more election take in me:

I am deeply sympathetic to Sam Kriss's rage against the Democratic corpo-political shibboleth, and not just because we are both deeply enmeshed in the grand tradition of dissident Oxbridge-style cantankerous internet rants. He is right that Kamala was a weak candidate, for one. But more importantly, I still feel what he feels deep down. I remember the starry idealism of my halcyon youth, of believing that conviction, that vision, that the zeal only a platform birthed from authentic principles, tempered by struggle and sweat, would carry the day over crass, paint-by-polling-numbers incrementalism. When he describes Harris thusly:

"She’s a machine politician. She wants power, but not for any particular reason. It’s just that life is a game, and the point is to reach the highest level."

I see my own reaction to her when she first stepped into the 2020 limelight, and low-key hating her for it. I feel his heart, for it is my heart.

But it is not my brain. Because I am not a teenager anymore, and his critique is fucking bullshit.

He says all this stuff like:

The reason Kamala Harris lost is the same as the reason she was the candidate to begin with: the Democratic Party is allergic to democracy.

And how the electorate is seen as but ants from inside the towers of the Machine, like the Dems just invented "not running a primary" this time as a lark. As opposed to neither party in America ever having primaries against incumbent presidents! Because they are normally popular, and it would be a waste of everyone's time to do that! Could you imagine, launching a real primary against Obama in 2012? And possibly sabotaging his brand a bit for absolutely nothing? It is a reasonable policy, particularly when incumbents used to have an advantage for being so. Now they clearly don't, Biden was unpopular and too old, and the Dems took too long to realize it. A costly mistake, but it is a purely strategic error. Big orgs have inertia, and the Dems fucked up. It has nothing to do with an "allergy to democracy".

And Kriss can go off summarizing how the Harris campaign was offering voters nothing:

But for some unaccountable reason, among the general public, ‘Kamala: You Already Like Her!’ was not the brilliant pitch it seemed to be. [...] Another option would be to actually offer something to the voters.

Which sounds neat, but he made it up! I remember Kamala's actual campaign speeches, ads, and platforms, which she repeated so monotonically in her tightly-scripted campaign appearances: protect abortion rights, expand the welfare state, provide better child care support, lower the cost of housing. And most importantly, she ran on Biden's record of a strong economy and promised to deliver more of it. What does even mean for this to not be a real platform? Beyond not having some synthesized, totalizing "Critique" of modernity that packages it all into a beautiful, systematizing little box.

Because I promise you, voters synthesize jack shit. None of this is why Harris lost - voters have made that pretty clear:

You can find other data ofc, this or that point varies, but the story is not opaque. They didn't like Biden! They didn't like his inflation. They didn't like immigration, or they didn't like his liberalism, and they thought Kamala was too similar. She had too much policy baggage. And she wasn't charismatic enough to dig herself out of that hole - no disagreement from me on that front.

Though even then, by that we mean she lost an election by ~3-4% margins after getting subbed in at the 4th quarter while down by ~8% in the polls. That ain't bad!

None of the voters who matter share Kriss's sensibilities, and he cannot hide his disappointment in that. So he pretends that Donald Trump, the guy who promised 20% tariffs on everything to fight inflation, is giving them a real vision:

That’s what Trump did: he offered an enemy to blame and the prospect of doing violence to them

I don't know man, I think swing voters just don't like the last four years and think 2019 was better. I don't think the promises of orgastic violence against democrats are why Trump won! Actually a bit of an unforced error on his part.

But since Kriss presumes to value democracy, that thesis can't hold - so the lack of reality delivering on what his vision for democracy should be is displaced onto Harris's mistakes. The voters can never fail you. You can only fail to elevate them with the right candidate. Which, tactically? Sure, why not. But you can leave the moralism at the classroom door.

This ties into our dreaded media discourse debate, so it is time to bring in another explainer, by Michael Tomasky:

The line-by-line isn't interesting here; instead I want to focus on this quote:

Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president? The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

To which the immediate reply is: my dude, what are you talking about??

A 56 percent majority of Americans say Trump is probably guilty of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results through false claims of voter fraud, including 40 percent who believe he is “definitely guilty.” Republicans are less united than Democrats. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats believe Trump is guilty, while nearly 7 in 10 Republicans think he is innocent. Among independents, nearly twice as many think Trump is guilty as think he is innocent.

You know how when you ~13 years old, and you have that friend who is just old enough to start taking Dungeons & Dragons books filled with splash art of succubi into the bathroom with him, but not yet old enough to get that "talking to girls" is an acquired skill? And they are blatantly, openly salivating over the first chick in the 7th grade class who discovered what power the combination of a camisole and a push-up bra holds over the male gaze? And she just completely ignores his faltering attempts at ~casual conversation~, so his brain script-cycles through its backlog of tween sitcom plots until it lands on, "Hey, what if I confess to her? Then she will know about my feelings!"

And you have to pull him aside and gently explain that, bro. She knows. That is not your problem.

Kriss is too intelligent a thinker to not understand this, but our dear Tomasky - and so many like him - has stuck his 14-year-old head in the sand over this. Swing voters know Trump is a scumbag! They know he lost the election, they know he raped a few women in his day, they know he is a serial fraudster. Even a bunch of those Republicans who, in polls, go "oh it's all a Dem conspiracy"? They know too; they just have the decency to lie about it. How could they not? Every media outlet in the country has been repeating it for a fucking decade! I might think voters are morons but even I won't stoop this low; they have eyes and ears, they aren't illiterate.

They just don't care.

Not enough at least, not enough to make it the only thing they consider. And here is the rub, here is the grand mistake Kriss & Tomasky are making - they are at least somewhat right to not care. The height of the Democratic privilege is that they get to play this card because they don't have to deal with it being turned against them. Kamala is a political chameleon but she is a decent person. She would never take a bribe from a foreign government, she would never assault a coworker, she would never, ever, deny a free and fair election.

Which means you don't have to choose between voting for a rapist and voting for someone who is going to shove a bullshit interpretation of the 14th amendment down your throat via a stacked court to ban abortion nationwide, forever. Pro-life people think abortion is genocide against babies! Why are you surprised they aren't voting for the pro-baby-genocide person because she is nice? How sure are you that you would do the same when that is reversed? I guess those boycott-Harris-because-of-Gaza people got some cred, but I think we all agreed they were dumb, right?

This is the rub of why outsiders always have so much difficulty understanding how people like Berlusconi, Trump, Le Pen, etc, get so much vote share - they have no stake in the political struggle beyond the vague idea of democratic norms. It is easy to say "Italy, choose a non-crook!" when you don't have to live with the policy programme of the other guy. From the inside the price of those principles is far, far harder. It isn't shocking that most choose not to pay it.

This isn't to give voters like a moral pass - Trump's conduct is truly disqualifying, I would vote Republican if the shoe was on the other foot in this case. My point instead is that they generally won't as a simple fact of life, and blaming them is futile. If you have wound up in a situation where the political system has taken its pool of hundreds of millions of potential candidates and narrowed it down to two for the voters, and one of them has "launched a coup but will say go to hell to the inflation guy" as a bundled package, someone fucked up and it isn't the voters.

You need political elites to do their part in the system - Republicans never should have let Trump be their candidate in 2016. Open primaries with no organizational thumbs on the scale are a mistake, actually, allowing arbitrary minorities to generate subpar candidates. The decision to let Biden run again was, fundamentally, born from the same impulse - the Democratic Party had no leadership capable of telling him no, because they outsourced that job to "primaries". The Dems are not "allergic" to democracy; democracy is allergic to too much of itself.

But the cat is out of the bag now! These changes happened for a reason after all. Which I won't dig into here - I will keep my point as focused as something as sprawling as this can be. Voters will not save you, and you should not be disappointed when they don't. It was never their job.

[lastsurvivor-a]

“Yeah, it would be,” Ripley countered with a stony stare, “but if something does happen, I can fix it. I’m competent, believe it or not. Are there any other lucky sendoffs you wanna give me, or do you doubt I need those, too?”

"Anything could go wrong up there," he added, nostrils flaring slightly. "Would be a terrible shame if it did."

@lastsurvivor ♡’d for a small papa alexei starter !

[tiny-planet-13]

I assume someone has made this comparison before but Neil josten and Richard papen sit at the same girly pop table together you can't tell me I'm wrong

[canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit]

I was pretty sure I liked my new boss before but today he casually went "anybody got a xannie?" obv wo really thinking and when I BUST OUT laughing, he kept going "JOKE! I SHOULDN'T SAY THAT! JUST A JOKE SORRY"

[jaladwolf]

Okay you know what, I’m hosting a b*cthfest. Who wants tickets?!

The Dreamer page seventy one: BEECH ALERT!!!

[world-of-wales]

YOU'RE SO GORGEOUS, IT ACTUALLY HURTS! HONEY IT HURTS!

The Prince of Wales at the UEFA Euro 2024 Quarter-final match between England and Switzerland at the Dusseldorf Arena, Germany || 6 JULY 2024

[jaladwolf]

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a round of applause for Rosey’s imitation of @drechastory’s Bonnie for AGA B*cthfest!

Event information here!

[ajjordanphoto]

Blue performing at Bitchfest Week 4 at C'mon Everybody, April 2023

[infinitelyweary]

🙂

Does anyone ever think about howwww

When Armand first shows up to the Divisadero apartment he already knows what Louis was saying in the interview. Before he listened to the tapes (all of them. twice). Meaning he was listening in on their whole conversation. I know the mind reading can extend a billion miles or whatever but he was close enough that he could barge in once the talking stopped and Louis attacked Daniel. So he was basically right outside the door/building just....listening.......

[sommerrev]

Fir the past two years ive started to develop migraines... Maybe? I sometimes get pain and sometimes i dont have any pain, and when i do get pain its not debilitating. But i notice that most of the time it comes with the weather, so i assume its a migraine.

Sometimes i just get randomly severely nauseous out of nowhere and take a dramamine without any other symptoms until the next day or two days later. And like i said, the symptoms i do get arent usually severe. Would this count as a silent migraine?? Because i dont often have pain, its super hard to track.

legit something i want to casually talk about: silent migraines. If you have them feel free to chime in.

[thetalee]

"I wonder where Doheny Park is supposed to be. This chick's GPS shows Lambourne Place, let's see where- Holy fucking shit."

I firmly stand by my assumption that either the LAFD have TARDIS-tech, or the space/time continuum is just fucked in this city, because there's no way they get from the Crestview/West Hollywood area (Buck says they were crossing Robertson) all the way to fucking Lambourne Place and not get there to a bunch of smoldering coprses.

[icelogged]

tagging hayden’s photos with ed tags is extremely irresponsible. stop it.

[dathen]

He was pale and dejected, stained with dust, and exhausted with hunger and fatigue. A cold supper was ready upon the table, and when his needs were satisfied and his pipe alight he was ready to take that half comic and wholly philosophic view which was natural to him when his affairs were going awry.

Holmes: I’ve had a bad day :( IT’S DRAMATIC BITCH TIME

Watson: *sneakily gets his pen ready*