#but its the same for all those american (i think its american

[khorneschosen]

I don't consider ethnicity to be a valid reason for conquest. Because that's what we're discussing here not their struggle against a state that planned from the start to kill every last one of them but a state that saw them side with those who tried to exterminate them and I do mean exterminate with every man woman and child.

Estate when given the choice between living peacefully with its own independent state or conquest it chose conquest and genocide.

Even now you see it.

Hamas's military strategy was not to be able to win militarily. They folded within a few days and had to keep retreating and retreating and retreating. They didn't even have the ability to sufficiently provide anti-air and no ability to protect its own citizens.

What's more, they could have picked a military target for their offensive on October 7th. They chose civilian targets. And they chose to start a war with a war crime, actually no, a crime against humanity. Rape serves nothing militarily.

But not being able to provide anti-air was the goal. They had a different kind of anti-air. The kind of anti-air that most dictatorships use. See a dictatorship will just put their supply depots right next to things like hospitals schools mosques you know things that shouldn't be targeted militarily. Or hamas's case they'll put it directly in these places or under them. Typically Americans and Israelis care about whether what is being targeted is this civilian target.

So what were the counting on?

They were counting on people like you. They were counting on creating a humanitarian crisis in which people like you would have only ever seen the fact that Israel was winning militarily and causing the same level of civilian casualties as any wartime operation in the Middle East. Though how you calculate that against a force that is already disobeying the rules of war I don't know. But you'd see it without any standards involved.

They started the war, they created the humanitarian crisis, and they used both to try an create the scenario in which you would have only seen in care about the Palestinians, in order to internationally isolate Israel like South Africa was previously or Rhodesia.

They were willing to throw away their lives and be martyred and die in order to achieve this. I simply just refused to give them a double standard on my behalf.

I don't think it's moral or rational to support evil of that kind. I don't think it's moral or rational to try and allow them to exploit the fact I do care about these people. More than they care about themselves. I don't think it's just that I should have to see their choice to choose death and fight against that choice on their own behalf.

They were given a choice between life and death and chose death. All I'm doing is honoring their choice without the double standard of mine.

If you're suddenly worried about antisemitism because of elon musk but you spent the last year and a half harassing Jews and "Zionists" and excusing antisemitism in your own movement, you don't care about antisemitism

I don't trust you. The Jewish community doesn't trust you. You never cared about us, still don't, and you made it very clear

[3liza]

in the same way that I think the "people shouldn't cheat on coursework with AI because they will be bad at their jobs" argument is invalidated by the "if coursework is possible or necessary to cheat with AI it's not an effective indicator of expertise or teaching methods in the first place" retort, it is also true that "the economy is good actually it doesn't matter that there are more homeless people every year and no one you know can afford to have children or eat at restaurants anymore" argument is nonsense against the assertion that "if your definition of 'the economy' excludes the subjective financial realities of the majority of the country it doesn't actually describe The Economy and you should call what you're talking about something else"

constructing an actually informative model of consumer prices, cost of living, debt and buying power is simultaneously extremely complex in the granular sense (TVs cost less now than in 1990 because TVs are now subsidized by selling consumer data and serving ads, for example) and extremely simple (are you able to pay for a better life now than in 1990). the simple view is something like, are you happier now than you were in 2010. is doing things, in general, easier or harder. can you afford to buy things you need, or are you having to put up with broken things instead of fixing or replacing them. the average guy on the street has his own personal understanding of line go up or down, which is why vibes based polling should be taken extremely seriously in economics discussions.

economics discussions about "the economy" are currently stuck in the same place 20th medicine got stuck in, describing an objective underlying illness that's disconnected from the subjective experience of the patient, even though the patient themselves will tell you, and it should be obvious btw, that whether they have pain or find things harder to do or will die sooner is actually the only thing that matters.

i am absolutely not interested in hearing arguments about why the economy actually rocks now and Gen Z is rich when we have unambiguous numbers about homelessness increasing sharply every single year. you pay for housing and all the things that you need in order to get and keep housing with your own personal access to resources. access to those resources has decreased for almost everyone. therefore the economy, the shared delusion we all have to participate in to survive and operate in extractive capitalism, is bad. any other definition of "the economy" is irrelevant in the context of discussing the national and international Normal Guy.

i simply don't care about anything else. i don't own property. i don't even own any money, I'm just a hole that money passes through on its way to debt and expenses. 71% of Americans are living this way according to Forbes as of 2024.

[labelleizzy]

The Judges Say No

February 11, 2025

By Connie Willis

The big news today was all in court, from different federal judges, and all good:

--A judge ordered Trump to reinstate all the websites scrubbed from the public health web pages and slapped a restraining order on him to make sure he did it.

--A federal judge said that Trump violated his order halting federal funding and ordered the government to immediately restore the frozen funding. The judge said Trump had defied a court order. He threatened contempt proceedings if Trump did not comply.

--A federal judge reinstated the fired head of the whistleblower protection agency.

--A federal judge cancelled the deadline for "deferral resignations," put a halt to them, and put a restraining order on the project.

--A federal judge ordered the FBI to release documents related to the mishandling of classified documents. (This is in response to a FOIA case.)

--A federal judge issued an injunction halting Trump’s executive order cancelling birthright citizenship. (This is the third time and the third judge.)

--The judges are really angry that Trump’s lawyers and Musk and his young punks have been lying to the court.

--For those who are worried about who’s going to enforce these judicial rulings, federal judges can deputize other state level law enforcement to carry out their orders, and cabinet officials don’t have the same protections as Trump does.

Meanwhile, the coup-ing continued:

--Trump pardoned New York Mayor Eric Adams (to spite Letitia James) and Rod Blagoevich (because he’s a fellow criminal), dropped the charges against his co-conspirators Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliviera in the classified documents case, and had his DOJ make a plea deal with Steve Bannon in his multi-million dollar "build the wall" scam so that Bannon pleads guilty but serves no jail time. Legal experts called it "corruption in plain sight." (It’s just like one of those Marvel Comics where the Joker frees all the criminals to help him in his dastardly plan.)

--Musk shut down the Institute of Education Sciences, canceling $900 million dollars in contracts.

--Musk froze the funds at the USDA. This means farmers who signed contracts and paid up front for fending, new crops, renewable energy systems, etc., are now on the hook for all that money.

--There are reports that Musk may have created a secret IT contracting vehicle at OPM.

--Russell Vought said that veterans' disability benefits need to be means tested.

As all this progresses, their plan is coming into focus:

--Speaker of the House Mike Johnson: "All options are on the table for spending cuts to every government program."

--Hakeem Jeffries: "Their plan is to destroy Social Security, destroy Medicare, destroy Medicaid."

--Marissa Kilaas: "If you think of Musk, Vought, the DOGE group, etc. as hired mercenaries, the picture becomes much clearer. This administration isn’t trying to change our government. They want it dead. They want it so thoroughly gutted that no American has a shred of faith left in its ability to protect them. They’re creating despair to then step in as saviors with faux solutions."

--Maxine Waters put it much more bluntly: (about Musk) "We know you’re the co-President now. He’s a thief. He’s a gangster."

--Orval Osborne, one of the lawyers fighting Musk in court, came out today with a list of "How to Defeat Autocratic Regimes:" 1. Defend the rule of law. 2. Fight corruption. 3. Pluralistic government. 4. Defend elections. 5. Fight disinformation. 6. Protect media. 7. Explain that democracy delivers better than dictatorships."

Even though there’s lots going on, I feel I have to keep reporting on the underlying madness that is driving it. Otherwise, it’s like reporting on all Caligula’s or George III’s doings and not mentioning that they were batshit crazy:

--I didn’t realize this, but Trump in his pre-Super Bowl interview not only said a bunch of crazy stuff, but declared February 9th Gulf of America Day and said people should celebrate it with "ceremonies, programs, and activities." He said his proclamation would be "bigger than the Super Bowl." (Note: Somehow I don’t see Gulf of America Day becoming as popular as, say, the Super Bowl or the Fourth of July, especially since only 25% approve of the name change. P.S. Delusions of grandeur is one of the symptoms of dementia.)

--Trump declared this while sitting at the mini-Resolute Desk which he has on Air Force One.

--Trump also said during the interview: "All hell is going to break out on Saturday at noon if Hamas doesn’t release its remaining hostages."

--Trump said "I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza...the remainder will be demolished."

--Now Trump is meeting with foreign leaders. When he met with Jordan’s king, the king asked him where he would find the money to buy Gaza. Trump: "We’re not going to buy anything. We’re going to have it. We’re going to keep it, and we’re going to make sure tht there’s going to be peace, and there’s not going to be any problem, and nobody’s going to question it." (Translation: Mine, mine, all mine.)

--In response, Hamas suspended the release of the rest of the hostages.

--Trump said he wants to stop the Ukraine war because "Young handsome soldiers are being killed."

--Trump said, "If they (Canada) become our 51st state, it would be the greatest thing they could ever do. And think of how beautiful the country would be without that artificial line running right through it. Somebody drew it many years ago with a ruler. Just a line." When asked if he was serious about annexing Canada, Trump said, "When the U.S. was founded, how many states did we have? And how many do we have noe? And so, is it outlandish?" (Yes, yes, it is.)

--When asked why he wanted to be chairman of the Kennedy Center, he said, "Some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace." Reporter: "Have you seen any shows there?" Trump: "No."

And Trump’s not the only one who’s crazy:

--Elon Musk has changed his name on Twitter to "Harry Bolz" (no, I am not making this up) and has been posting things like "Circumcisions at a discount, only 50% off," and "Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in." He had previously changed his name to Kekius Maximus. (Meanwhile, the Republicans are all over TV trying to convince everyone Elon is responsible, serious, and trustworthy.)

--Musk also continues to obsess about accusations against him of cheating on video games (which he’s been proven to do) tweeting, "Video game journalism is garbage."

--Republican Representative Buddy Carter introduced a bill to rename Greenland Red White and Blue Land. The internet was appalled. The comments read stuff like "This is embarrassing and cringe," and "Clown. Show."

--Dinesh D’Souza said "It would be fun to rename all the forts after Confederate generals, not because we like Confederate generals, but just to piss off the left."

--Fox News said (with a straight face) that Trump’s White House is putting out so much accurate information there is no need for investigative reporting any more. "All you have to do, legacy media, is simply repoeat, retweet, repost, and that is the news, and that is the facts."

In good news:

--The Democratic group Indivisible has been holding meetings all over the country to overflow crowds.

--Ditto the town halls that Democrats are holding all over the place.

--The Senate Democrats set up a whistleblower portal so federal workers can report what’s going on in their agencies as Musk and his punks maraud through them.

--The board of the Kennedy Center, which Trump wants to fire, includes all the living past First Ladies, including Dr. Jill Biden, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush (the librarian), and Hillary Clinton, any of whom are tougher than Trump. And smarter.

--Since the Winter Solstice, we’ve been steadily getting longer days, and Denver now has an additional hour of sunlight every day. It may not be noticeable yet, bur ir will be soon. Yay!

I posted the other day about the unreliability (to say the least) of AI and quoted an AI entry about how water is liquid at 27 degrees F because it doesn’t freeze till it reaches 32 degrees F. Well, I have since had a couple of encounters with AI of my own in the course of my work. While I was doing my taxes and looking up the mileage from Greeley to Brush, Colorado (where my husband goes to do an annual Science Fair), I found this: "Brush is 34 miles from Greeley, and the distance between the two towns is 152 miles." (Note: Neither is correct. Brush is 64 miles from Greeley.) Then, while researching which Romantic poets visited Tintern Abbey, I asked the question, "Did Byron visit Tintern Abbey?" The answer from AI was, "Yes, and he painted a romantic picture of it, "Visitor to a Moonlit Churchyard." The picture shows a young man holding a skull and contemplating death." (There is such a picture, but it’s not by Byron, who, to my knowledge, didn’t paint. It’s by the French artist, Philip James de Loutherbourg. And Byron didn’t visit Tintern Abbey, either.) So I definitely think we should let Musk and his young punks turn the whole government over to AI.)

Oh, and I have a movie to recommend. We watched "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" in honor of the anniversary of the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964, and then last night we watched "Yesterday," an absolutely lovely movie about a world in which nobody’s ever heard of the Beatles except for one guy--maybe. It’s a great movie--plus you get to listen to all the Beatles songs again.

—-

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[bayoubashsims]

it seems your plantation lot has caused some controversy😵 I know your username has bayou in it but I'm still curious why you made a playable plantation for the game

Background

Hi anon and everyone, I wanted to address some comments regarding my post about creating a plantation in The Sims 2. This construction was based on the Felicity Plantation which was featured in The Skeleton Key, and I posted about this months ago--it's the same building, but in a different hood.

I was cautious about how it would be perceived as I only know two other people who recently made plantation-themed builds: BourgeoisBanana who was criticized for making the one from Django Unchained and there was also luvsimskaos who made historical depictions of a plantation to talk about history and life as enslaved people.

I am also not ignorant of plantations and their history with racism. I am Indonesian and it was only 80 years ago my own country was independent from being colonized by the Dutch and we too had plantations, indentured servitude, and enslaved people (though clearly not in the same extent as the Atlantic Slave Trade). American history is no stranger to us in the third world as everything that is American affects us culturally and politically.

If you see from some of my Indonesian builds, many of them are buildings from the colonial times in Indonesia and it was not to glorify their imperialism over the socioeconomic structures of Indonesia or to romanticize them in any way, but to recognize its part in history as well as the architecture of the structures that remain today. Many of them today are museums and galleries that remind us of what those structures were built on.

My re-creation of a plantation that was historically used to profit off the labor and wellbeing of enslaved people was not to glorify that or to even fantasize slavery to exist within The Sims. My intention was to appreciate American culture and history, specifically on the architectural aspect.

In The Sims

I am well aware that the estate of the real Felicity Plantation still have the residential quarters of the enslaved people, which is why I did not choose to recreate those structures as Sims history, despite its many similarities with American culture and history, does not share that part of history. Nor do I wish to recreate slavery in my game.

I’m a strong proponent of not forgetting histories by whitewashing them and I am mindful that, by choosing to exclude them in my game that the real basis had quarters for enslaved people, that, it would be the best option. Or perhaps, it could be whitewashing it, but the alternative is certainly not ideal. I don’t know, I’m open to how others view and think of it.

There was this Reddit thread that discussed about the word ‘plantation’ and I’ll post some screenshots on what other Simmers have said about it.

Though I know I took the basis of the structure from American history, there are plantations all over the world that did not use slavery or exploitation for them to run (well, capitalism still exists, but that’s another can of worms), and that’s applied here. Though I didn’t elaborate on it, historically, the building that I created does not share the same history. It just happens to be inspired based on the period architecture.

My construction of the building was only to show my appreciation of the architecture, my fascination with American culture and history, and my love for The Sims and horror films like The Skeleton Key. I also recreate many structures from Louisiana, like the shotgun houses and the French Quarter townhouses, all of which are also part of that history.

My neighborhood itself is a re-creation and tribute to the culture of Louisiana and New Orleans and I just wanted to be as accurate as possible. I didn’t set out nor did I intend to ‘fantasize slavery in The Sims.

My Context

The structures of such plantations also mirror many colonial Indonesian houses (which explains my interest), and today we Indonesians appreciate these 'heritage' houses while also being mindful of their histories and how they were built on the sweat and blood of colonized peoples. That is all I thought I was doing and I am coming from that point of perspective.

Many colonized nations of the third world would say the same regarding similar structures in their own countries; appreciate them as works of art and preserve them as a part of history, but no need to romanticize or glorify them as parts of darker aspects of history.

However, I am also aware that plantations are a sensitive issue in the US. I know people who are criticized for having weddings in plantation estates, because though they think they only show appreciation for history by throwing events there, for many other people especially African-Americans (some of whom could be guests or workers at that wedding), that history meant actual horror, on grounds and structure that subjected real people to unimaginable things.

So I understand how some people might feel about such a structure in The Sims, but I don't, to my knowledge, feel that these two things are the same. Willow Creek in TS4 as well as Old Town in TS1 all pay tribute to the rich history of Louisiana in their own ways; how appropriately and accurately they paid that tribute is another matter, but I was just , as a foreigner, playing along with that theme with no ill intent.

Though it is not comparable, Indonesians were subjected to similar horrors and I live in a society where, like Americans, many still remember what the past was like and are still affected by it. However, I thought that by re-creating the building on The Sims 2 merely on the basis of appreciating American architecture and history and a horror movie that I liked, in a game that only I’d play, that I wouldn’t be really doing anything materially harmful.

I’m open to listening and learning more on this issue, especially from Americans (considering how I took a part of American history by creating this), but…I would venture so far as to say not everything has to be from an American-centric view. And I say that, again, while still being mindful of how actual Americans who are affected by this part of history think of a plantation structure being reproduced in a game.

If anybody re-created a colonial Indonesian structure, most Indonesians would appreciate that they paid attention to the architecture and history of such buildings, and I wouldn’t say anything else unless there was explicit glorification or recreation of the more problematic parts of history.

This is my view of the issue. I apologize that I’ve created and shared something that is offensive, it’s the last thing I want to do here (genuinely surprised because I’ve always been kind of laying low and chill on this platform 😅), though I think the criticism is valid and I understand where it’s coming from. I am the last person to have malicious intent and neither am I ignorant of the context--but I could be better informed.

References

Below are my references regarding the portrayal of plantation houses in historic and aesthetic terms as well as the reactions to portayals such as that:

Dahm, K. (2013). " To Preserve, Protect, and Pass On:" Shirley Plantation as a Historic House Museum, 1894–2013.

de la Torre, O. (2022). The well that wept blood: Ghostlore, haunted waterscapes, and the politics of Quilombo blackness in Amazonia (Brazil). The American Historical Review, 127(4), 1635-1658.

Locke, H. J., & Mackay, T. A. (2021). “You Are a True Progressive”: Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Depiction and Reception of Progressive Era Politics. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 20(1), 174-193.

Phillips, A. (2022). Fixing the Past: Memory Tourism, Multiraciality, and White Innocence in Video Games. ROMchip, 4(1).

Smith, M. P. (2018). " Ridiculous Extremes": Historical Accuracy, Gone With the Wind, and the Role of Beauty in Plantation Tourism. The Southern Quarterly, 55(2), 171-190.

Walcott-Wilson, E. J. (2020). Cultivating Memoryscapes: The Politics of Language at Plantation House Museums in the American South. Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, 901-913.

[grecoromanyaoi]

The whole "are jews white" thing drives me crazy bc whiteness is not an innate state of being it is a position of power in relation to other people and therefore it is more complicated than "russian ashkie = white and sephardi = brown" but everyone wants to make race into a biological fact so we're stuck unable to acknowledge that in the same way that jews are seen as both capitalists and communists for the purposes of antisemitism, we can also be seen as both white and poc for the purposes of antisemitism AND some jews do access, use, weaponise white privilege. it's not hard

As a side note I happen to think using a "white israeli vs brown palestinian" is functionally inaccurate. while zionism obviously emerges from european nationalism and therefore includes those strains of racism, it is a nationalism aka it is about jews and not white people. ANYWAY.

right right!!! like. u cant rly "separate" jewish ppl into a white/nonwhite binary in terms of oppression bc a. whiteness is a construct, n often applies differently in different situation n b. this may break some of u all's brains but white sephardim also suffer race based discrimination. white ashkenazim n white sephardim have different experiences w race, judaism n antisemitism. there r different ppl from the same city even w wildly different relationships to ethnic identity n race. there r 5 separate synagogues in the venetian ghetto belonging to 5 different ethnic groups. theyre all italian. theyre all venetian even.

ashkenazi/sephardic/mizrahi trinary doesnt work either - many ppl r mixed, white western ashkenazim, asian ashkenazim n ashkenazim of color have different experiences w race, judaism, antisemitism, identity, culture, etc. n so do european sephardim n noneuropean sephardim (even different european sephardim between themselves, ntm how different noneuro sephardic identities r from each other), many ppl identify as both sephardic n mizrahi, etc.

n to the last point at the end of the day its still trying to erase the diversity of palestinians. like while theyre all equally palestinians n their identity is, for the lack of a better word, valid, n palestinian is also obv a cultural identity, there r plenty different ethnic, religious n racial groups within the palestinian identity. i think it connects to how many ppl, esp westerners n esp americans, refuse to analyze any global situation, usually indigenous struggles, outside their specific dichotomy of xyz oppressor n xyz oppressed. they cant fathom that brown n black israelis can b relatively privileged based on their ethnicity, so they decide to just ignore their existence alltogether. like how they refuse to comprehend that americans of color can also b privileged - both globally n as settlers on stolen land, but instead of saying that any and all criticisms of american r racist n targeting poc n usamerican is a racist dogwhistle, they go the in opposite direction n treat all israelis as white, n israel as a white country (dont tell them abt the demographic statistics in both countries). thats also why ppl refuse to b normal abt russian or ottoman imperialism - they cant rly neatly fit it into their idea of what racially/ethnic based oppression looks like.

"are jews white" are christians white? sorry for the long answer/rant, but at the end of the day, this remains unbeated

[bnuuyclub]

Let's Talk About Playboy Rabbits!

Yes, they really did exist. Back in the 1980s, when Playboy Clubs were starting to lose business, Christie Hefner had the bright idea to introduce what would come to be known as the male equivalent of Playboy Bunnies—Playboy Rabbits—in order to attract female keyholders. They made their debut at the Empire Club, and they fit right in with the rest of the themed character costumes designed by Bunny June De Young.

Top: Rabbit photo taken by Andy Warhol on the Empire Club's opening night. Bottom: photo clipping from a Newsweek Article.

In October 1985, The New York Times published a story to drum up interest a few weeks before the club had its grand opening. The following was said about Playboy's shiny new Rabbits:

"Rabbit Uniforms are still under wraps, but Richard Melman, who as acting director of the club division of Playboy Enterprises is opening the new club, said that the seats of the uniforms would be padded (for some reason), that Rabbits would almost certainly not wear ears and that the uniforms would be all-American, but sexy, don't worry."

Clearly, Melman had changed his mind by the time the club opened, opting to include one Rabbit costume with ears and a tail. He later described the uniform as "cute" when interviewed by the Chicago Tribune. "I mean, when you get the right guy, it works."

Otherwise, the standard costume for Rabbits consisted of a shirtless tuxedo and white cuffs with Playboy cufflinks to match the Bunny uniforms.

Left: a Statue of Liberty Bunny, two Rabbits, and an Olympian Bodybuilder Bunny surrounding Richard Melman at the center. Right: photo clipping from a New York Post article.

But what did the Rabbits think of it all? To start off, a few of them were interviewed by the same news outlets for their thoughts on this new job opportunity. Their impressions were mostly positive:

"I always wanted to be first. I came to realize that I would not be the first astronaut or the first to hit 62 home runs. This is an honor." - Louis Affenito (first Rabbit hired) for The New York Times.

"A Rabbit projects an image of someone you would like your daughter to date. We don't want hardcore sex appeal but something more subtle. Like when you walk in, you look again." - Benjamin Lucas for Chicago Tribune.

"I wouldn't really classify myself as a sex object. Well, the more I think about it, I guess I would." - Greg Gunsch for United Press International.

I was surprised I was able to find some of the Rabbits' names. Not very many, considering there were roughly 35 of them working at this club, but eventually I came across more information after finding this image in my search:

Hugh Hefner with Bunnies and Rabbits at the Empire Club. Note the variety in uniforms!

You see those guys on the far right in the first picture wearing vests? That would be Jeff Rector and his twin brother, Jerry. If they sound familiar, it's because they both made guest appearances on Star Trek. If they don't sound familiar, it's because they were buried under a bunch of chunky sci-fi prosthetics.

Jeff and Jerry Rector as Tennis Rabbits. It was easier to find work if they played up the twin act. Also, probably the clearest photo of Playboy Rabbits available on the free web...

According to Jeff's autobiography that is currently available on Audible, numerous dancers from the nearby male strip club Chippendales applied for the job, but none were accepted. Playboy was looking for classy, attractive, "boy-next-door" types — about the same as the Bunny standard. He considered it an honor to be working as a Playboy Rabbit.

Jeff Rector's headshot on the cover of his autobiography.

Because the club was waning in popularity and themed nights at other bars were trendy at the time, Jeff was allowed to suggest a handful of new ideas to renew interest. This included a "historical explorer" theme in which he wore an Indiana Jones costume and the Bunnies dressed up as jungle girls! Unfortunately, despite his efforts to liven up the scene, novelty clubs didn't have very long lifespans to begin with. Boys at the Empire Club were only able to enjoy their cottontailed fame for a little over a year before it ended.

During this time, the Bunnies and Rabbits ended up growing very close with one another. In Jeff's own words:

"We had become a family and the family was about to be split up. Where would we go? What would we do? How do you follow up a gig with Playboy?"

After a week of crazy goodbye parties, the Rector twins moved back to LA to resume acting work.

This marked the beginning of the end for Playboy Clubs. The Empire Club officially shut down in 1986, and other locations remained open for a few years, but the last U.S. Playboy Club in Lansing closed its doors by 1988. What a shame!

[peanuts-fan]

How “Peanuts” Created a Space for Thinking

Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip invited readers to contemplate the big picture on a small scale.

By Nicole Rudick      August 6, 2019

Illustration Courtesy Peanuts Worldwide

In “The Storyteller,” an essay from 1936, the German-Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin describes what he sees as the beginning of the end of the oral tradition in the West. The collective trauma of the First World War and its aftereffects were making the communication of shared experiences through the telling of tales a thing of the past. He writes, “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” At the heart of this historical process is a grim efflorescence of experience: the sense that one is adrift in an unfamiliar landscape, a feeling that would endure as a defining condition of the twentieth century, when the world was expanding and becoming delimited at the same time. A few decades after Benjamin published his essay, the writer Luc Sante and his parents immigrated to the United States from Belgium. Sante’s mother and father spoke very little English, and, “tinged with a certain bitter realism,” they observed the foreign culture that surrounded them from an intimidating distance, as Sante explains in his introduction to “Peanuts Every Sunday: 1961-1965.” “It wasn’t surprising, then,” Sante continues, “that my father, an intelligent, capable man who had been dealt a series of bad hands by life—poverty, war, a truncated education—should see himself reflected in Charlie Brown.” Though he would come to be domesticated and beloved by Americans of all stripes, Charles Schulz’s comic-strip boy spoke to the émigré’s sense of dislocation, tough luck, and calamity.

There may be no more tiny, fragile body than Charlie Brown’s—the abbreviated torso, economized limbs, and naked, vulnerable head. That head: with a modicum of lines, Schulz produced an untouched, capacious orb on which a world of expression could play. In the Sunday strip for October 15, 1961, the title panel shows Charlie Brown’s head as a table globe, imprinted with a grid of latitude and longitude. The strip spins out the joke: to illustrate to Linus the distance between two locations (the absurd pairing of Texas and Singapore), Lucy plots the points over the top of Charlie Brown’s bare, impassive pate.

Surrounding this vulnerable human form is a wider world: hostile, exhausting, potent in its occasions for failure. Untethered from the historical moment, Benjamin’s agents of change, those “torrents and explosions” (like Hamlet’s enduring “whips and scorns of time,” which extend even to include the intimate “pangs of despised love”) are here as perennial humiliations played out in a fathomably unfathomable universe. “Peanuts,” Schulz once said, “deals in defeat.” At its core, the comic parses existential angst, strip by strip—not Cold War anxiety, a cloud under which “Peanuts” developed and flourished, but the garden-variety anxieties found in everyday life. Charlie Brown is the comic’s everyman (“Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you’re the Charlie Browniest,” Linus complains in a 1965 “Peanuts” TV film), adept at losing one day and still rising the next to see things through. And yet, as grounded in real life as it seems to be, “Peanuts” shows very little of the actual world. The comic is striking for its spare visual details, its generic, repetitious settings, and its constrained action. Although the early strips were busy with detail, Schulz soon developed a style that was formally minimal. There is little in the way of depth perspective—and the action in each panel moves right and left, as if on a stage.

Illustration Courtesy Peanuts Worldwide

I remember noticing, as a child, this circumscribed world in which Charlie Brown and the gang air their problems. It was so markedly different from that of another deeply felt, philosophical comic of my youth, “Calvin and Hobbes,” which visually and imaginatively bursts at the seams. In the “Peanuts” strip from Sunday, June 9, 1963, Charlie Brown and Sally admire the night sky as he explains the future movement of the stars that make up the Big Dipper. All eight panels depict the same scene: Charlie Brown and Sally atop a patch of earth, the dark sky engulfing their bodies. Nothingness surrounds them—both formally, on the page, and literally, in the black yawn of space. Nothing much happens here, yet, in its openness and conversation, the strip is alive with wonder, possibility, and humanity. Schulz does a lot with nothingness. In another Sunday strip, from November 19, 1961, the title panel sets Charlie Brown���s round head alongside the great round face of a clock (his anxious expression and bird’s nest of hair make his features a counterpoint to the clock’s uniformity). We are invited to consider the solitude of the school lunch hour, when Charlie Brown must sit with his thoughts, literally: each of the panels below the top row features the lone figure and a speech bubble giving voice to his interior monologue. The spareness of each frame rivals that of the stage set for Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”: only a bench and a paper-bag lunch. It’s no accident that the evenly distributed, postage-stamp-size panels number twelve, like the hours on a clock. Each movement of Charlie Brown’s head—he looks out and down, then up and right—is activated by the reader’s eye moving in rhythm from panel to panel to panel, like the ticking of a second hand.

That rhythmic deliberateness—specifically its leisurely meter—is essential to the way that “Peanuts” functions as a space for thought. A “Peanuts” strip, even one seemingly packed with goings-on, unfolds patiently. The strip from Sunday, April 18, 1965, depicts a disagreement (sparked by Lucy, of course) on the pitcher’s mound. Lucy wants Charlie Brown, who’s pitching, to “brush this guy back,” but Charlie Brown refuses, and an argument about morality ensues. Charlie Brown’s qualms about throwing a beanball make him a world-historical hypocrite, according to the others. “What about the way the early settlers treated the Indians? Was that moral? How about the Children’s Crusade? Was that moral?” Each new panel brings a fresh participant and perspective to the mound, and accusations become colloquy. By the penultimate panel, ten players stand on or around Charlie Brown’s perch (a pulpit overrun by parishioners), and five speech balloons, thick with philosophical reasoning (“Define morality!”), fill the sky over their heads. But Schulz makes order out of this chaos, arraying his characters in a single line (the panel is unambiguously “Last Supper”–ish, with characters, except for Charlie Brown, grouped in threes). One reads the scene from left to right, both together with and independent of the dialogue—a tidy progression that can be taken in with a serene sweep of the eye. (The thoughtful pacing in “Peanuts” is reminiscent of that of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The two also share a rejection of the violence and manic energy that characterize other children’s media of the time.) The rhythm of the larger Sunday strips is particularly effective, as they have more space in which to work. But the same effect plays out on a smaller scale in the dailies. In a four-panel baseball strip from August 5, 1972, Lucy harangues Charlie Brown from left field. The entire top half of the second panel is tightly packed with her rant, rendered in a thicket of bold type and punctuated at the end with an eye-catching, electrifying “BOOOOOOO!!” Her energy is palpable, but it cannot last. In the next panel, she sits on the ground, alone and silent, like a calm ocean, and the reader’s eye rests on her form and the open white space surrounding it for a surprisingly long time before moving on to the last, bitterly self-reflective panel.

Few comic strips feel more like a series of vignettes than “Peanuts,” especially when the already minimal scenery disappears in favor of empty white or monochrome backdrops, as though a thick curtain has descended to pull a character further out of time and into some more concentrated realm of feeling. The generous allotment of white space in the daily strips originated not from design but from necessity. As David Michaelis details in “Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography,” the comic strip was first sold as a potential space filler to be used in any section of a newspaper, even the classifieds. To draw the reader’s eye, Schulz opted for the less-is-more approach, aiming to “fight back” with white space to echo what he once called the strip’s “very slight incidents.” The usefulness of that simplicity became clear as Schulz’s writing deepened. “The more they developed complex powers and appetites while staying faithful to their cut-out, shadow-play simplicity,” Michaelis writes of the strip’s characters, “the easier it would be for Schulz to declare the hard things he was set on saying.” Had Schulz filled his panels with visual distractions, the business of examining interior problems might have proved less successful.

The formal qualities of “Peanuts” made it an outlier. As a boy, Schulz read comics that incorporated tight cross-hatching, deep vanishing points, and threadlike lines, and also the masterly modernism of Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley.” But such visual enrichment didn’t appeal to him as a practicing cartoonist—he was, by his own admission, “a great believer in the mild in cartooning.” What of his comic’s contemporaries? Mort Walker’s “Beetle Bailey” and Hank Ketcham’s “Dennis the Menace” began around the same time as “Peanuts.” “Beetle Bailey” is an uncomplicated gag-dependent strip drawn with what Michaelis calls “elastic visual exaggerations,” and “Dennis the Menace” relies on a wealth of visual details to deliver its absurdist situational humor. Both grew faster than “Peanuts” in readership and recognition, but neither has attained its broad cultural impact.

One can easily forget how unlikely this cultural ascendency might have seemed when “Peanuts” débuted. Schulz created an oddly shaped boy, an anthropomorphized dog, and a host of children who don’t behave or speak as children do, and he placed them in an efficient, nondescript setting—only on the surface of reality, you might say. The reader should be skeptical of this setup. And yet Charlie Brown’s emotional struggle is familiar, and the reader is roused by it. Bertolt Brecht would have approved of “Peanuts.” He sought the same “partial” illusion for the theatre, he said, “in order that it may always be recognized as an illusion.” Too complete an impression of naturalness and one forgets that this isn’t reality but art. Brecht would have us read not literally but critically and interpretively. Though “Peanuts” does not have all the same aims as a piece of didactic political theatre like Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” it, too, is meant to be engaged with, not skimmed over. The strip “deals in intelligent things,” Schulz once said, “things that people have been afraid of.” He did not consider “Peanuts” a children’s comic; even in Snoopy, his most kid-friendly character, Schulz created a self-willed, occasionally anxious fantasist.

I wonder if Brecht would have loved Lucy best, as I do. Born into “Peanuts” as a “fussbudget,” she soon became a prime mover behind the strip’s conflict and Charlie Brown’s feelings of disillusionment. Lucy is assertive, nervy, confident, stubborn, and manipulative; she can moon over a beau and still excoriate him for his inattentiveness. And, despite her near-constant bluster, she is a person who feels profound pain. In the Sunday strip for June 30, 1963, she feels low and rages, “I’ve never had anything, and I never will have anything!” Linus patiently replies, “Well, for one thing, you have a little brother who loves you.” And Lucy, her reserves spent, cries in his arms. Her modernity is on display best in her psychiatrist’s booth, which offers a kind of glimpse behind the scenes—that break with illusion that Brecht insisted on. A parody of the semiseriousness of a kid’s lemonade stand, Lucy’s booth calls itself a psychiatrist’s practice but offers none of the customary trappings other than its desk—but this pared-down presentation (along with, perhaps, Lucy’s confident authority) allows Charlie Brown to recognize the setup’s purpose. The reader recognizes it, too, but sees what Charlie Brown does not (or chooses not to): the booth is a façade, in construction and intent. Unlike the naïve young analysand, we won’t be beguiled by Lucy’s blunt advice. Still, we turn it over in our minds as we read, struck by some bigger truth in counsel that we know to be ill-advised.

Yet another defining visual feature of “Peanuts” is a low wall at which the characters sometimes pause for conversation. Some daily strips take place entirely behind this wall, like the one from Tuesday, May 6, 1958, which has Charlie Brown and Lucy leaning on its even stonework, facing out at the reader, in all four panels. The wall strikes me as a decidedly theatrical element, as makeshift as any that could be wheeled out onto a stage. The panels’ lines make a neat proscenium arch. (It is so obvious a device that when I see it I think of Snout in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” who, playing the part of a wall in the play within a play, insists, “This loam, this roughcast, and this stone doth show / That I am that same wall. The truth is so.”) If Lucy’s booth divides characters, with one on each side of the desk, and gives her an air of dialogic authority, then the wall is more Socratic, a site that encourages coöperative deliberation and reflection. In the strip for Monday, March 17, 1969, Linus and Lucy are at the wall. “I have a lot of questions about life, and I’m not getting any answers!” she complains, adding, in the next two panels, “I want some real honest-to-goodness answers. . . . I don’t want a lot of opinions. . . . I want answers!” In the last panel, Linus offers an answer that isn’t an answer, one that is itself a question and can only elicit further questions: “Would true or false be all right?”

Illustration Courtesy Peanuts Worldwide

Through “Peanuts,” Schulz wanted to tell hard truths about, as he said, “intelligent things.” But the main truth he tells is that there are no answers to the big questions. In the long run, no one wins and no one loses; this isn’t drama—it’s life. The strip’s solace is that the reader isn’t alone in facing these fraught issues, and its gift is a space in which she is invited to think, to contemplate the big picture on a small scale, like soaking in the emotional ambience of a Rothko painting. It’s tempting, and desirable, perhaps, to think of “Peanuts” as a mirror in which the reader sees and is absorbed by her own reflection, but that view undermines the elegant simplicity of Schulz’s creation: powerfully complex characters who, together, represent the constituent parts of humanity and who operate in a shadow play, to borrow Michaelis’s term. Schulz created in Charlie Brown “a man who reflects about his part,” as Benjamin writes of the actor in Brecht’s concept of epic theatre. (And here, again, we are not so far from Hamlet.) The irony of the visual flatness and economy of “Peanuts” is that they engender a capacious space—room enough both for Charlie Brown’s reflection on Schulz’s hard truths and for the reader’s own consideration of these big ideas. The strip’s achievement, and a significant reason for its longevity, is its creation of a space of inquiry that is never closed off.

Very early in the comic’s history, Schulz didn’t fully know his characters, in the way that a novelist or playwright can invent a set of characters but then must follow those characters’ lead to understand where they are meant to go and what they are meant to do. One strip of “Peanuts” can be satisfying in the way a single, shining sentence of a novel can be satisfying; we pin it on the wall as a reminder of an idea or a feeling, and it can stand on its own in that way, but it is also always only a fragment of a more expansive tale. It isn’t enough to see Lucy pull the football out from under Charlie Brown once; the point is that she does it again and again and again. The repetition of the act, from strip to strip, autumn to autumn, produces the same question anew each time: Why does she do it, and how does he respond? And, each time, the answer is different. (Charlie Brown “loses in so many miserable ways,” Schulz observed in an interview with Al Roker on “Today,” in 1999.)

The thoughtfulness with which Schulz examines humanity does not expire and does not cease to provoke astonishment (much like Lucy’s ongoing charade with the football). In the Sunday strip from November 26, 1961, Snoopy spends a dozen wordless panels bounding through curtains of rain that slash vertically and violently through each scene. Schulz punctuates the beagle’s short bursts of speed, rendered on monochromatic backgrounds, with tenuous moments of peace, as he pauses in doorways and under umbrellas—small moments of reprieve amid a visual cacophony. The final panel finds him recumbent atop his doghouse: the rain still falls in brutal torrents, but he is able to cope with it, a tender body at rest in a familiar landscape at last.

This essay was drawn from the anthology “The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life,” edited by Andrew Blauner, which will be published this fall, by the Library of America.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jim Acosta at The Jim Acosta Show:

America, you’ve been had. Where to begin? The Gulf of America? Gaza, “The Riviera of the Middle East?” The Kennedy Center? Talk about “the weave.” Can somebody point me to the pivotal moments during the 2024 campaign when Donald Trump discussed his ideas for renaming the Gulf of Mexico or a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip? He had plenty of opportunities for laying out such proposals, considering his long, meandering rallies where he rambled about Hannibal Lecter, sharks and windmills. Trump found the time to peddle the outlandish lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs. Never did we consider the notion he would sit on the board that decides whether “Les Misérables” would make its triumphant return to the nation’s capital. In fact, “Les Mis” is coming back in June, well, at least for now. Tickets are available.

What about “The Village People?” Stay tuned. Add Kid Rock and Ted Nugent to the mix and you’ve got a Trumpapalooza in the making. Just think of all of the Trump products that could fill those merch tables (he must have a warehouse of this stuff somewhere), from faux gold sneakers to vintage Trump ties (not made in the USA natch).

Yes, Americans are now waking up to the reality that their downloads of Trump Version 2.0 have come with some serious malware. The pardons and commutations of all of the January 6th rioters and insurrectionists went way beyond what even his own Vice President, the mostly invisible J.D. Vance, contemplated when he suggested that Trump would opt against clemency for the criminals who beat up cops. No wonder 47 doesn’t really see Vance as much of a 48. Trump on Vance 48.

[...]

And then there’s the absurd monstrosity that is Trump’s idea to have the U.S. occupy the Gaza Strip. Put aside his crass promise of turning the region into the “Riviera of the Middle East” or the grotesque notion that America would somehow be a part of the forced removal of the Palestinians from the area. I’m old enough to remember the then-reality TV star and real estate developer savaging President George W. Bush over his handling of the War in Iraq, something Trump once described as “the single worst decision ever made.” Trump on Bush/Iraq After ruling out the idea of putting U.S. military boots on the ground in Gaza, Trump has yet to explain how he would “take over” the area. It won’t be USAID. Were voters ever aware that Trump, upon returning to the White House, would utter this sentence: “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the US by Israel at the conclusion of fighting.” Take a moment and read that sentence. Read it again. Trump on Gaza The same Trump who ran on “no new wars” during in 2024 has been weaving like an old-fashioned 20th century expansionist, with talk of other takeovers. The Panama Canal? Mine! Greenland? Mine! Canada? Mine! Am I the only one thinking about that classic Daffy Duck cartoon? Daffy Duck: It's mine! [...] Still, in this not-so final analysis, the Trump 2024 campaign appears to have been the ultimate bait and switch. And it’s way worse than Trump’s lie that he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Voters were sold on Trump’s plans for inflation and immigration. But the gap between those proposals and what is being contemplated in the Oval Office these days is about the size of the Gulf of Mexico America.

This Jim Acosta column is a gem: Trump’s 2nd term has come with loads of malware infecting the USA that voters didn’t want.

[wheucto]

object show characters being named as their own objects might strike you as odd, but is it really that strange? with humans, differentiating each other using names is necessary. we're all "humans," so there's not much to name off of. physical features, maybe, but people can often share those...

however, with objects, there's a clear distinction to name someone after. and, why do names exist? to distinguish people from one another. why would you make a name, when there's already a perfectly good one right there? and sure, there's people who are the same object, but there's people with the same name too. they'd probably get nicknames/slightly different names... besides, that's why surnames exist.

[hybbat]

I do think a good chunk of the 'cringey atheist' stereotype did come from the fact that, especially americans, regardless of their actual religious status are just casually christian and refer to things through a religious filter and that isn't seen for how overwhelming/obnoxious/frustrating it is. Its absense, such as when writing a story and things like "oh god" or other casual references are remove or replaced, is seen as notable the same way people find the cast being all women or queer being 'abnormal'.

And I think more people, especially here on tumblr, should take a moment from ragging on some kid being "cringey" saying god doesn't exist or making atheist jump around like dancing monkeys to establish they're one of the good respectful ones before they ever even begin to talk about their own thoughts, and examine why so much content just inserts god into a conversation that had nothing to do with religion like it's the expected norm, the same way they examine the invasiveness of casual heteronormativity.

[naivety]

my sense of urgency for this election was all used up watching a genocide play out live on instagram while my mom continued to talk about which politician might make the housing market better and i tried not to genuinely lose my mind over the dissonance. in all honesty short of bombs dropping on americans' houses my adrenal glands are beyond checked out. i'll show up to the polls and do my part and try to plug into the bare bones direct action i can find in the middle of nowhere deep red county state but god. there are so many posts circulating trying to fear monger me into voting for one genocidal president of this genocidal nation over another and i may as well live on a different planet. i can fathom the urgency but i could not make myself feel it short of being held at gunpoint. which may even be on the ballot but that's how americans have been voting for decades now and each of them regardless of party has worried about the idea of being held at gunpoint while a right of theirs is taken away while there are people who are already being held at gunpoint and their rights have already been taken away by the very people being beamed into my eyeballs as the escape from this hypothetical violence that's already non-hypothetically happened to millions who aren't US liberals because of the america they're trying to save from trump the same america regardless of democrats or republicans or whigs or federalists and does anyone else feel like they're going crazy

[dogboytits]

i know its been said before but it truly is absolutely fucking crazy to me that saying that the genocide in palestine is bad is like.. a radical and controversial take. i cannot believe that more usamericans arent fucking furious that their tax money is being spent on committing genocide. why does no one give a shit. i feel like im losing it for real

[purgemarchlockdown]

The temptation to vague about something in the milgram-confessions blog because its something thats bothered me for Actual Years about certain fandoms vs letting it go because when it is brought up its actually done somewhat tastefully and reasonably which makes me happy and this anon probably didnt mean it in the incredibly bad faith way I keep on seeing it be repeated so really Im getting upset over nothing.

[guiltyonsundays]

Incredible sequence of posts on the dash just now

[entropyvoid]

There is a particular subgenre of post I keep seeing on this webbed site wherein people denigrate individualistic cultures but talk about collectivistic ones like they’re the absolute best thing to happen the world and have no flaws of any kind and I really have to wonder how many people making or reblogging those have actually had the opportunity to live in both

[st5lker]

can u elaborate on what u we’re talking about in that post on voting? like i think how ur describing but i would like to better know and understand the other side, like what do u mean abt definitions of worse?

answering this question sort of depends on what side you as the asker are coming from, but specifically in terms of the vote blue no matter who people, many of them define the “better outcome” as the democrats under the assumption (correct or otherwise) that voting for them will protect their own rights as minorities. therefore in their minds, the definition of “worse outcome” (republicans) is the one that is both largely the same for palestine/the rest of the world while also making things harder for people inside the country. that IS a valid way of thinking, but when these people get angry at those who choose to abstain from voting what they usually fail to consider is the possibility that 1) other minorities to have valid reason (again, whether they turn out to be correct or otherwise) to believe that voting blue wont actually improve their own lives, at least not in any significant kind of way and 2) that for many people, a genocide and the american imperialist complex in general is much more important and pressing in their sense of morality than anything that may come to them as a result of even the most far right republican policies. like, most democrat voters dismiss that as an exaggeration because they simply cannot comprehend that someone would have reasons to feel their own rights are a less important issue than anything else, if you yourself are a vote blue person you may be questioning it as well - perhaps thinking “do you not know just how bad it’ll be? theyll do x and x and x to you”. my point is that for many people, whatever happens to them is just truly not important, or at least not important enough to warrant endorsing anyone who furthers the cause of genocide for any reason.

to put it more simply, in a democrat voters eyes, the democrats are the lesser of two evils. they often fail to realize that in a non-voters eyes, they’re both only as evil as their worst traits - and all of the good things the democrats promise are not small steps in the right direction, but bribes; that they’re not truly a better option, they just have better things to exchange in return for the power to enact genocide. for those who view things those way, most are simply not willing to accept that bribe, no matter how much use theyd get out of it.