#hope you feel good. hope you feel like you won. that misinformed family thinks their cat was abducted by those creepy christians who | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mina-van1104 · 6 months ago

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IMPORTANT! Please Read all, or don't read at all because you won't know what I'm talking about & start assuming things. It's been a stressful week but less stressful than last week. Been feeling really emotional & sad eventhough these are pictures of me smiling.

I hope we all can remember that there is good & bad people in every race/ethnicity, & in every country but please remember not to hate on the wrong people like people of Israel because there are actual innocent families & children with no homes living in Israel who have no way out.

Please do not confuse the innocent ones as "Hamas Terrorists Group" I've met two Israelis before & they were the nicest people, so don't confuse everyone in Israel as a "Hamas Terrorist."

There is a lot of misinformation (Islamophobia/racism stereotyped) on the news & also one of our politicians in Nevada decided not to help Israel in the past because she thought everyone in Israel was a "Hamas terrorist" & that made me angry.

That lady named I voted for twice in the past & was happy for her because she won & that we're both Democrats, but I think I will never vote for her again even if she apologizes.

Politicians should know more than that especially Democrats because Democrats are usually the more known as the "smarter" group (no offense) but anyways I will not vote for her anymore for Nevada even though she is a Democrat. She made this comment with Marco Rubio who's a Republican... & the lady I used to like whom I'm talking about is Democrat.

The Democratic candidate in Nevada has changed & makes her looks so fake! We need a new Democrat to replace the particular candidate in Nevada & her initials are J.R. At least as a Democrat, I stay true to my words & never allow any form of racism to happen. People should think more thoroughly before they speak ESPECIALLY politicians.

Makes me emotional & angry because I know more hate crimes will happen in America to Israeli Americans & Middle Eastern people due to misinformation being spread around America on the news.

It was just like when September 11th happened. Actual terrorists did that to America not the INNOCENT people that looked like the terrorists & A LOT hated on Muslims or Middle Eastern People because there was a big misunderstanding. I've met a few Muslims before & they were some of the nicest people. So to everyone, please never judge.

Everyone needs to remember there are good & bad people of all races/ethnicities/& in different countries/different religions/etc.

Don't blame the innocent ones that look like them. Not everyone is the same. Teach your kids young that racism,Islamaphobia, Anti-Semitism, & Xenophobia is never okay because it's embarrassing to have some people much older than me not understanding the concept & they think it's "us versus them the enemy" instead of that, everyone should treat people of any different race/ethnicity with respect & think "good people versus people who are bad (& not be stereotyped by how they look)

Also we need to pray for Rafah,Gaza, Palestine,Egypt, Israel, always pray for everyone in need. Jesus Christ, God, Guan Yin, Mother Mary, whatever God you believe in, we come from the same one & God is our witness when you think no one is watching. Pray for all in need. I've just been crying about it & all the racism going on but distract myself with happy pictures to make me feel happier but I've been really sad lately. 😭Oh well... here's some cute pictures to brighten your day I guess. 🩵

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Always needing some prayers again.🙏 I, Mina Van 文风英 Woon Foong Yin (in Hakka Chinese).Nevada born & raised.Proud nurse, coach. Family living in Nevada for 45 (forty-five) years.Spread kindness.❤️

In the name of the Guan Yin, Ong Lee (meaning Buddha in Hakka Chinese langauge), Yay-Su (Jesus Christ), Ty-uh- ma (Mother Mary Virgin Mother Mary)

In the name of Jesus, Amen!🙏

Then my other successful blood-related family of doctors in my family,🇺🇸veterans,doctors,nurses,coaches,news reporter,lobbyist,good singers,dancers,good photographers, good writers,artists,a cop,a dentist,teachers, etc.Mixed family of Asians & white people.Spread Kindness.

Again, half of our family is Asian half our family is white. Even-though my parents look Asian we have some Chinese, Vietnamese, Native American, small portions of French, German descent, Ashkenazi Jewish descent DNA Ancestry

✞♡ # Selfie # Nurse # Coach # NativeNevadan # StopAsianHate # Biden2024💙 # JesusChrist 🦂 # Buddha # GuanYin # MotherMary # NevadaBornAndRaised # HakkaChineseRaised # ProChoice (though, in politics) # Equality # Justice # Healthcare # Running 🏃🏻‍♀️ # NevadaNative # athletic # HomeMeansNevada # Nevada # UNRnevadaAlumnaMay2016 # 3collegeDegrees # 3MedicalLicenses

•2019:OlderSisterCatherineVan&Adam Schwartz’sWedding&TheirWebsiteOn: https://www.theknot.com/us/catherine-van-and-adam-schwartz-aug-2019•ReminiscingMoreThan200PeopleCame.

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tea-with-evan-and-me · 1 year ago

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OK unpopular opinion time: I don't think Dahmer was good for evan. The negatives outweigh the positives imo. Yes, he got more recognition. Yes, he got more praise. Yes, he's gotten awards. But the weight of this show basically made him quit acting for over 2 years (Yes there's been a strike but that was only a couple months) and he essentially had to pass on a lot of the goodwill he got from Mare of Easttown. He had to drop out of the white lotus to recover from dahmer. God knows what else he dropped out of or declined. Also Yes he won a golden globe but he already had an emmy. And golden globes aren't taken as seriously anymore. And I haven't even talked about the amount of hate he got from being on that show. I know in the end it doesn't matter but people have spread so much misinformation about him essentially because they hate that he played dahmer. He gained more fans but him being essentially unemployed beside "Wish" means people lost interest. Now that the strike is over I hope he'll get more interesting projects but I do not have high hopes for tron. Like nobody cares about tron and everyone hates jared leto... its gonna flop. The strike delaying shooting means he probably has to pass on other projects now which is just... *sigh*

Sorry to be a negative Nelly but this is a discussion page and I wanted to say my opinion 🫠

i understand if you did not like him being in dahmer, and you’re allowed that.. but you’re taking a lot of liberties with what you are attributing to the fallout from dahmer. you don’t know what roles he turned down due to dahmer’s mental toll, if any, to include white lotus. he has said he took time to spend with family and mentally get back to a healthy place; that’s completely reasonable. if it came down to choosing between white lotus and dahmer, it’s obvious which was the better choice for evan’s career on an individual level. it seems like you’ve read a lot of those “DAHMER DESTROYED EVAN PETERS” articles and taken them as factual, and i caution everyone to view them with a high level of skepticism due to the clickbait nature of this story.

you’re speaking about dahmer like the only thing that came of it was awards/nominations that you don’t see as important. the series broke records in viewership for netflix. just because you don’t like that some people, who hate everyone and everything, got mad on twitter doesn’t mean that in his profession.. because acting is his career.. it isn’t a HUGE net win. are you a newer fan? because, i mean.. evan has never been someone frequently stacked with projects. i’m not sure why you’re associating him being in wish and making tron as being caused by dahmer? it isn’t. the tv and movie industry isn’t twitter. he didn’t “lose goodwill” by having an enormously popular netflix series. we really don’t know what other projects he has or may have coming before after wish and before tron. i think you’re just seeing everything super negatively because you feel a certain way about dahmer, not taking into consideration his career prior and what it looked like.

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jewishwarriorprincess · 4 years ago

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A Facebook friend shared this and with his permission I am copying and pasting it here.

H/T Jake Reznik

“I’ve had a few messages asking for my thoughts so below is my spiel.

TLDR: Ostracizing Jews is crappy and purgatory is also crappy. Not to sound hyperbolic, these past 1.5 weeks could’ve been described as a digital pogrom against Jews (not including the onslaught of pernicious rhetoric targeting, and outright attacks, against Jews across Canada, America, and Europe). The deluge of smears and untruths across the internet, and beyond, has been sickening to see manifest into violent vitriol against Jews (I’m not even counting the endless calls for another Holocaust). In a hyperreal way, it feels as if we’ve been tossed onto the street and bludgeoned over the head repeatedly, by strangers and neighbors alike (because in a different setting that’s what it would’ve been). Jews are barely 0.2% of the global population, practically nothing. There's few of us so vicious and villainous lies spread easily by those who are determined to scapegoat us. Antisemitism’s wickedness is its adaptability to embed itself into advantageous circumstances, which is what we’re seeing play out nowadays. Our enemies always cast themselves as a righteous vanguard against the sins of the Jew, and largely amass an audience by selling faux monicker of “speaking truth to power”. This is nothing new as acrimony towards Jews is created to be succinct with political expedience: to Christians, we murdered Jesus, poisoned wells and were bloodsucking Satanists, to communists we were bourgeois capitalists, class traitors and “nationalists”, to the Islamic world at worst we were infidels and at best dhimmis, to fascists we were race polluters, and nowadays in the pseudo-intellectual social justice zeitgeist we are vilified as “colonizers”, “white supremacists” “privileged” etc (... it's same game with different words). So when people, namely Hamas, profess explicitly to want to harm Jews globally, I’m very tempted to believe them whilst thanking them for their honesty. Given what I’ve seen and heard across social media, all I can do is laugh at people who spend their energy futilely plotting the downfall of Jews. If something about the Middle East (or anything really) is presented as simple, very high chance that it's disinformation, nothing is ever simple. Life is never simple. —— Hamas won this round of confrontations and Hamas will always win until the day that the ideology of Hamas is entirely vanquished. The fact that Hamas’ ideas live on, and even more so that the Israeli army can’t outright defeat Hamas, because we don’t want to sacrifice our family for a non-guaranteed victory means that Hamas holds Israel hostage. We have cornered ourselves into a reality wherein we can only continue the containment of Hamas which is firstly expensive, and secondly immoral to passively accept a genocidal outpost as a neighbor. We can continue to bomb Hamas’ terror infrastructure, and their top commanders, but that doesn’t matter since it can be replaced/rebuilt again, so the cycle continues. Regardless, with Hamas in the picture for the foreseeable future, even thinking about peace is quite laughable since there’s no possible negotiation or political recognition of Hamas. There’s no sugarcoating it, it’s sad that we have chosen to be stuck with Hamas, it’s sad that hateful misinformation of Jews is so widespread, and above all, it’s sad feeling the massive indifference that captures the minds of the masses. It feels like we’re in a corner but it’s better than not being at all. Regardless, we know who we are. We know what we represent. We know who our enemies are. It’s good to have a reminder of what our friends are. Still, it’s important to remember that this is pain and frustration but this is isn't the end, just a chapter in the story. We aren’t pawns nor pets, we aren’t going away, and our knees don’t tremble to our bullies. We’ll pray for a better future and hope that wider humanity won’t lose itself entirely to another witch-hunt of Jew. I'm surprised if you made it this far.

Am Yisrael Chai. And Shabbat Shalom”

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twiddlebirdlet · 5 years ago

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https://www.wired.com/story/chris-evans-starting-point-politics/

Chris Evans Goes to Washington

The actor's new project, A Starting Point, aims to give all Americans the TL;DR on WTF is going on in politics. It's harder than punching Nazis on the big screen.

It’s a languid October afternoon in Los Angeles, sunny and clear.

Chris Evans, back home after a grueling production schedule, relaxes into his couch, feet propped up on the coffee table. Over the past year and a half, the actor has tried on one identity after another: the shaggy-haired Israeli spy, the clean-shaven playboy, and, in his Broadway debut, the Manhattan beat cop with a Burt Reynolds ’stache. Now, though, he just looks like Chris Evans—trim beard, monster biceps, angelic complexion. So it’s a surprise when he brings up the nightmares. “I sleep, like, an hour a night,” he says. “I’m in a panic.”

The panic began, as panics so often do these days, in Washington, DC. Early last February, Evans visited the capital to pitch lawmakers on a new civic engagement project. He arrived just hours before Donald Trump would deliver his second State of the Union address, in which he called on Congress to “bridge old divisions” and “reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution.” (Earlier, at a private luncheon, Trump referred to Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, as a “nasty son of a bitch.”) Evans is no fan of the president, whom he has publicly called a “moron,” a “dunce,” and a “meatball.” But bridging divisions? Putting an end to the American body politic’s clammy night sweats? These were goals he could get behind.

Evans’ pitch went like this: He would build an online platform organized into tidy sections—immigration, health care, education, the economy—each with a series of questions of the kind most Americans can’t succinctly answer themselves. What, exactly, is a tariff? What’s the difference between Medicare and Medicaid? Evans would invite politicians to answer the questions in minute-long videos. He’d conduct the interviews himself, but always from behind the camera. The site would be a place to hear both sides of an issue, to get the TL;DR on WTF was happening in American politics. He called it A Starting Point—a name that sometimes rang with enthusiasm and sometimes sounded like an apology.

Evans doesn’t have much in the way of political capital, but he does have a reputation, perhaps unearned, for patriotism. Since 2011 he has appeared in no fewer than 10 Marvel movies as Captain America, the Nazi-slaying, homeland-defending superhero wrapped in bipartisan red, white, and blue. It’s hard to imagine a better time to cash in on the character’s symbolism. Partisan animosity is at an all-time high; a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found that 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would oppose their child marrying someone from the other party. (In 1960, only 4 percent of respondents felt this way.) At the same time, there’s a real crisis of faith in the country’s leaders. According to the Pew Research Center, 81 percent of Americans believe that members of Congress behave unethically at least some of the time. In Pew’s estimation, that makes them even less trusted than journalists and tech CEOs.

If Evans got it right, he believed, this wouldn’t be some small-fry website. He’d be helping “create informed, responsible, and empathetic citizens.” He would “reduce partisanship and promote respectful discourse.” At the very least, he would “get more people involved” in politics. And if the site stank like a rotten tomato? If Evans became a national laughingstock? Well, that’s where the nightmares began.

It took a special serum and a flash broil in a Vita-Ray chamber to transform Steve Rogers, a sickly kid from Brooklyn, into Captain America. For Chris Evans, savior of American democracy, the origin story is rather less Marvelous.

One day a few years ago, around the time he was filming Avengers: Infinity War, Evans was watching the news. The on-air discussion turned to an unfamiliar acronym—it might have been NAFTA, he says, but he thinks it was DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era immigration policy that granted amnesty to people who had been brought into the United States illegally as children. The Trump administration had just announced plans to phase out DACA, leaving more than half a million young immigrants in the lurch. (The Supreme Court will likely rule this year on whether terminating the program was lawful.)

On the other side of the television, Evans squinted. Wait a minute, he thought. What did that acronym stand for again? And was it a good thing or a bad thing? “It was just something I didn’t understand,” he says.

Evans considers himself a politico. Now 38, he grew up in a civic-minded family, the kind that revels in shouting about the news over dinner. His uncle Michael Capuano served 10 terms in Congress as a Democrat from Massachusetts, beginning right around the time Evans graduated from high school and moved to New York to pursue acting. During the 2016 presidential election, Evans campaigned for Hillary Clinton. In 2017 he became an outspoken critic of Trump—even after he was advised to zip it, for risk of alienating moviegoers. Evans could be a truck driver, Capuano says, and he’d still be involved in politics.

But watching TV that day, Evans was totally lost. He Googled the acronym and tripped over all the warring headlines. Then he tried Wikipedia, but, well, the entry was thousands of words long. “It’s this never-ending thing, and you’re just like, who is going to read 12 pages on something?” Evans says. “I just wanted a basic understanding, a basic history, and a basic grasp on what the two parties think.” He decided to build the resource he wanted for himself.

Evans brought the idea to his close friend Mark Kassen, an actor and director he’d met working on the 2011 indie film Puncture. Kassen signed on and recruited a third partner, Joe Kiani, the founder and CEO of a medical technology company called Masimo. The three met for lobster rolls in Boston. What the country needed, they decided, was a kind of Schoolhouse Rock for adults—a simple, memorable way to learn the ins and outs of civic life. Evans suggested working with politicians directly. Kiani, who had made some friends on Capitol Hill over the years, thought they’d go for it. Each partner agreed to put up money to get the thing off the ground. (They wouldn’t say how much.) They spent some time Googling similar outlets and figuring out where they fit in, Kassen says.

They began by establishing a few rules. First, A Starting Point would give politicians free rein to answer questions as they pleased—no editing, no moderation, no interjections. Second, they would hire fact-checkers to make sure they weren’t promoting misinformation. Third, they would design a site that privileged diversity of opinion, where you could watch a dozen different people answering the same question in different ways. Here, though, imbibing the information would feel more like watching YouTube than skimming Wikipedia—more like entertainment than homework.

The trio mocked up a list of questions to bring to Capitol Hill, starting with the ones that most baffled them. (Is the electoral college still necessary?) They talked, admiringly, about the way presidential debate moderators manage to make their language sound neutral. (Should the questions refer to a “climate crisis” or a “climate situation,” “illegal immigrants” or “undocumented immigrants”?) Then Evans recorded a video on his couch in LA. “Hi, I’m Chris Evans,” he began. “If you’re watching this, I hope you’ll consider contributing to my new civics engagement project called A Starting Point.” He emailed the file to every senator and representative in Congress.

Only a few replied.

In hindsight, Evans realizes, the video “looked so cheap” and either got caught in spam filters or was consciously deleted by congressional staffers. “The majority of people, on both sides of the aisle, dismissed it,” Evans says. Many “thought it was a joke.” Yet there are few doors in American life that a square jaw can’t open, particularly when it belongs to a man with many millions of dollars and nearly as many swooning Twitter fans. Soon enough, a handful of politicians had agreed to meet with the group.

On the morning of his first visit to Capitol Hill, as he donned a slick gray windowpane suit and a black polka-dot tie and combed his perfect hair back from his perfect forehead, Evans felt a wave of doubt. “This isn’t my lane,” he recalls thinking as he walked through the maze of the Russell Senate Office Building. Here, people were making real change, affecting the lives of millions of Americans. “And shit,” Evans said to himself, “I didn’t even go to college.”

“This isn’t my lane,” Evans thought as he walked through the maze of the Russell Senate Office Building.

The trio’s first stop was the office of Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. “Which one is the senator?” Evans asked.

Coons, having never watched any of the Avengers movies, didn’t know who Evans was, either. But in short order, he says, he was won over by the actor’s charm and “very slight but still noticeable” Boston accent. The thing that got Coons the most, though—the thing that would lead him to pass out pocket cards on the Senate floor to recruit others, especially Republicans, to take part in the project—was how refreshing it was to be asked simple questions: Why should we support the United Nations? Why does foreign aid matter? Coons saw real value in trying to explain these things, simply and plainly, to his constituents.

“Look, I’m not naive,” Coons says. He is the first to admit that one-minute videos won’t fix what’s wrong with American politics. “But it’s important for there to be attempts at civic education and outreach,” he adds. “And, you know, his fictional character fought for our nation in a time of great difficulty.”

Evans stiffens slightly when people mention Captain America. The superhero comparison is, admittedly, a little obvious. But again and again on Capitol Hill, the shtick proved useful: Sometimes it’s better to be Captain America than a Hollywood liberal elite who defends Roe v. Wade and wants to ban assault weapons. When Evans met Jim Risch, the Republican senator from Idaho joked about catching him up on NATO, “since he missed the 70 years after World War II.” When he met Representative Dan Crenshaw, a hard-line Texas Republican and former Navy SEAL who lost his right eye in Afghanistan, Crenshaw lifted up his eye patch to reveal a glass prosthetic painted to look like Captain America’s shield.

Eventually, Evans loosened up—at least he lost the tie. Since that first round of visits, he and Kassen have returned to Washington every six weeks or so, collecting more than 1,000 videos from more than 100 members of Congress, along with about half of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls. Evans has conducted every interview himself. Kassen, meanwhile, managed the acquisition of a video compression startup in Montreal. About a dozen of the company’s engineers are building a custom content management system for A Starting Point, which is slated to go live in February. They’re running bandwidth tests too—just in case, as Kassen worries, “everyone in Chris’ audience logs on that first day.”

“We have to do this now,” Evans says. “It’s out there. We have to finish this. Shit.”

Back in LA, Evans pulls up the site on his iPhone. He hesitates for a moment and covers the screen with his hand. It’s still a demo, he explains, in the same bashful tone he uses to tell me the guest bathroom is out of toilet paper.

On the homepage, there’s a clip of Evans explaining how to use the site and a carousel of “trending topics” (energy, charter schools, Hong Kong). You can enter your address to call up a list of your representatives and find their videos; you can also contact them directly through the site. The rest is organized by topic and question, with a matrix of one-minute videos for each—Democrats in the left-hand column, Republicans on the right.

Early on in the development of the site, Evans and Kassen fought over fact-checking. Kassen, arguing against, was concerned about the optics: Who were they to arbitrate truth? Evans insisted that A Starting Point would only seem objective if visitors knew the answers had been vetted somehow. Ultimately he prevailed, and they agreed to hire a third-party fact-checker. They have yet to put their thousand-plus videos through the wringer, so for now I’m seeing first drafts. If they’re found to contain falsehoods, Evans says, they won’t appear on the site at all.

Kassen showed me a sampling of some of this raw material. Under “What is DACA?” I found dozens of videos, offering dozens of different starting points.

One representative, a Republican whose district lies near the Mexican border, describes the program’s recipients as “1.2 million men and women who have only known the United States as their home.” They go to school, he explains; they serve in the military; they’ve all passed background checks.

Sometimes it’s better to be Captain America than a Hollywood liberal elite who defends Roe v. Wade and wants to ban assault weapons.

Another Republican representative says, “So, DACA is a result of a really bad immigration system … We’re seeing record numbers of families crossing the border because a kid equals a token for presence in the US. All right? We have all of these people come over, we can’t process them, they’re claiming asylum. I just heard from the secretary of Homeland Security this week, about nine in 10 don’t have valid claims of asylum. Meaning they’re not political—there’s no political persecution going on. OK?”

These two responses (from politicians on the same side of the aisle, no less) illustrate some of the quandaries that Evans, Kassen, and their fact-checkers are likely to encounter. The first representative, for instance, says there are 1.2 million DACA recipients, when in fact only 660,000 immigrants are currently enrolled in the program. The higher number is based on an estimate of those who could be eligible published by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The “nine in 10” statistic, meanwhile, is a loose interpretation of data from 2018, which shows that only about 16 percent of immigrants who filed a “credible fear” claim were granted asylum. But this does not mean, as the representative implies, that the other claims weren’t “valid”—merely that they weren’t successful. Nearly half of all asylum claims from this time were dismissed for undisclosed reasons. These are fairly hair-splitting examples, but even the basic, definitional questions are drenched in opinion. What is Citizens United? “Horrible decision,” says a Democratic senator in his video response.

Evans doesn’t want to spend time refereeing politicians. To him, A Starting Point should act more like a database than a platform—rhetoric that rhymes with that of Facebook and Twitter, which have mostly sidestepped responsibility for their content. He’s just hosting the videos, he says; it’s up to politicians to decide how they answer the questions. There’s no comment section and no algorithmically generated list of recommended videos. “You need to decide what you need to watch next,” Kassen says.

One of the assumptions underlying Evans’ project—and it’s a very big assumption—is that the force of his fame will be enough to attract people who otherwise would have zero interest in watching a carousel of videos from their elected officials. This, by all accounts, is most people: Only a third of Americans can name their representatives in Congress, and those who can aren’t binge-watching C-Span. “Celebrities bring an extraordinary ability to get attention,” says Lauren Wright, a political researcher at Princeton and author of Star Power: American Democracy in the Age of the Celebrity Candidate. But Evans, she says, is “not taking the route that a lot of celebrities have, which is: The solution to American politics is me.” It would be one thing if Evans were guiding you through the inner workings of Congress like a chiseled Virgil. But why would someone watch a senator dryly explain NAFTA when they could watch, say, a YouTube video of Chris Evans on Jimmy Kimmel?

Without its leading man in the frame, A Starting Point begins to look uncomfortably similar to the many other platforms that have sought to fight partisanship online. A site called AllSides labels news sources as left, center, or right and encourages readers to create a balanced media diet with a little from each. A browser plug-in called Read Across the Aisle (“A Fitbit for your filter bubble”) measures the amount of time you spend on left-leaning, right-leaning, or centrist websites. The Flip Side bills itself as a “one-stop shop for smart, concise summaries of political analysis from both conservative and liberal media.”

The underlying idea—that there would be a new birth of civic engagement if only we could wrest control of the information economy from the hands of self-serving ideologues and deliver the news to citizens unbiased and uncut—is an old one. In 1993, when the modern internet was just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, Michael Crichton wrote in this magazine’s pages that he was sick and tired of the “polarized, junk-food journalism” propagated by traditional media outlets. (This was three years before Fox News and MSNBC came into being; he was talking about The New York Times.) What society needed, he argued, was something more like C-Span, something that encouraged people to draw their own conclusions.

But does any of it work? Not according to Wright. “We have many years of research on these questions, and the consensus among scholars is that the proliferation of media choices—including sites like Evans’—has not increased political knowledge or participation,” she says. “The problem isn’t the lack of information. It’s the lack of interest.” Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, agrees. “All of these fact-checking initiatives, all of this work that goes into trying to disambiguate issues or trying to reduce noise—people have no time,” he says. “Some people care about politics, but those are not the people you need to reach.”

Naturally, this sort of talk makes Evans a little nervous. But he takes refuge in what he sees as the core strengths of the concept. For one thing, he argues, snack-size videos are more accessible than text. Also, those other sites rely on a translator to interpret the issues, while A Starting Point goes straight to the source. It’s not for policy wonks. It’s for average Americans, centrists, extremists, swing voters—everyone!—who want to hear about policy straight from the horse’s mouth. (Never mind that most people hold horses in higher regard.)

Evans has all kinds of ideas for how to keep people coming back. He might add a section of the website where representatives can upload weekly videos for their constituents, or a place where policymakers from different parties can discuss bipartisan compromise. He talks about these ideas with an enthusiasm so pure and so believable that you almost forget he’s an actor. The whole point, he says, is giving Americans a cheap seat on the kinds of conversations that are happening on Capitol Hill. That’s a show that Evans is betting people actually want to see.

The worst thing that could happen isn’t that nobody watches the videos. That would suck, but Evans could deal with it. What gets him riled up most is thinking about what he might have failed to consider. What if the site ends up promoting some bizarre agenda that he never intended? What if people use the videos for some kind of twisted purpose? “One miscalculation,” he says, “and you may not get back on track.” (See: Facebook.)

Evans knows his idea to save democracy can come off a little Pollyannaish, and if it flops, it’ll be his reputation on the line. But he really, really believes in it. OK, so maybe it won’t save America, but it might piece together some of what’s been broken. A fresh start. A starting point.

“This does feel to me like everybody wins here. I don’t see how this becomes a problem,” he says, before a look of panic crosses his face, the anxiety setting in again.

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imagitory · 5 years ago

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*exhales heavily*

Okay...I don’t usually go off the deep end in political essays that often. If it’s a quick thing like “f**k Neo-Nazis,” then sure, fine, that’s easy. I don’t have to explain why Neo-Nazis -- especially the cowardly ones that try to label themselves as the “alt-right” in a vain attempt to seem more acceptable to modern society -- can go screw themselves. Everyone already knows they’re awful -- or at least, everyone should already know they’re awful. If you’re the sort of person that wants to try to “teach” me about how the alt-right are not Neo-Nazis, then this post isn’t for you, so kindly don’t interact and keep scrolling.

This post is instead for my Democratic followers, whether you support Bernie, Biden, Warren, whatever. Please feel free to skip over it, though, my dear followers -- I know this whole political season has been very draining, and I have a lot more positive posts on my blog that you can consult instead. If you do want to read my thoughts, though, here’s a cut.

Hi, guys. How’s it going? We really dodged a bullet with Bloomberg dropping out of the race, didn’t we? At least now no one should be able to say Democrats and Republicans are alike, right? The Democrats kicked their racist, sexist, obnoxious, out-of-touch billionaire accused of multiple sexual assaults to the curb, while the Republicans made theirs president.

On that note, though...we still have the Republican version of Michael Bloomberg -- the one and only Donald Trump -- in office. We all remember how he got there...Hillary won the popular vote, but thanks to the ridiculously outdated electoral college rules and Russian interference, the electoral votes went Trump’s way. We could conjure up multiple reasons for Hillary’s loss, but at least in my opinion, I would say we learned a few lessons from the 2016 election that I think we should keep in mind. (Alongside making sure Russians butt the hell out of our elections and fact-checking all the rampant misinformation from our media outlets.)

1) We Democrats have more things in common than we might think, sometimes.

Clinton was infinitely closer to Bernie, politics-wise, than Bernie was to Trump or Gary Johnson. Yet there were those who were so upset about Hillary’s nomination and the role Democratic Party officials had in coaxing delegates to support her that they protest-voted against Hillary, even if that vote wasn’t in their best interest. We don’t have a system that lets us rank who we want for office from most to least, so sometimes we have to accept a bird in the hand rather than reach for two in the bush. You might feel good about voting your conscience in the short term, but you probably won’t when it results in your vote being a drop in the bucket that doesn’t prevent someone like Donald Trump from winning. We’ve already seen this happen not just in the Trump-Clinton election of 2016, but in the Bush-Gore election of 2000.

2) Despite that first point, if we want unity, our Democratic candidate must be aware of how diverse our party is.

Even if we do end up having to settle for a less liberal candidate in order to win an election, that candidate MUST acknowledge that we are not like the Republican Party. We will not march lock-step with people we don’t agree with just because they’re in our party or we agree with some things, and we will certainly not be satisfied with simple pacifism. The Republican Party has been tilting farther and farther to the right over the last three decades, to the point that their policies now involve mass internment of Mexican immigrants and family separation, directly paralleling plans carried out by the THIRD EFFIN’ REICH. We cannot keep begging for civility and peace and trying to reach a compromise -- you cannot compromise with this kind of extremism without sacrificing all of your principles, because those kinds of people do not make concessions.

I remain convinced even after four years that Hillary should’ve chosen Bernie to be her running mate -- if she had, the rift between the centrist and more liberal branches of the Democratic Party might have been healed enough that we could’ve looked at our ticket with excitement and hope, as we had for Obama and Biden back in 2008. Instead Hillary chose Tim Kaine, an inoffensive centrist Democrat who added absolutely nothing to her presidential bid. He couldn’t even help Hillary out by boosting the campaign with youthful energy or natural charm -- Bernie would’ve both boosted morale among younger and/or more liberal voters and lit a fire under those who were anxious about what a Trump presidency could lead to. The same could’ve been true if Bernie had been chosen to be president -- if he’d chosen Hillary, she could’ve better appealed to moderate voters intimidated by the thought of voting for a Democratic Socialist and run on her international experience as Secretary of State.

3) In order to make any difference at all, we must vote, and we must win.

I’m the first person to acknowledge that I hate voting against my convictions. If the Democrats had chosen Michael Bloomberg, I would’ve probably been ready for whole-scale revolution, right then and there. But let’s be frank here -- in 2016, we got complacent. We assumed that Trump would lose. We assumed that America wouldn’t choose racism, or Islamaphobia, or sexism, or Nazism. BUT WE DID. In the end, our country -- like many other countries before us were -- is more afraid of the promise of social change than we are of the threat of fascism. Yes, I called Trump’s vision of the country fascism, and I stand by it. Fascism is defined as far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial authority, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy and often supplemented with government-sanctioned racism -- and yeah, given that Trump clearly wants to do whatever he wants whenever he wants without facing any consequences for his actions, persecute any so-called “enemies,” make money for himself while in office (even using his office and political power to achieve that end), and scapegoat minorities, I think my point is made. And so I will state it again -- America is more afraid of the future and the progress that could come with it than it is of the cruelty, bigotry, and tyranny of our past. It’s an absolute tragedy, but it’s true. Americans were absolutely terrified of Obamacare until it actually became law and people saw how cool it was, not to be booted off your care for preexisting conditions and stuff. Once that happened, Americans were ready to bite off the hand of any Republican who made any move toward repealing it. If it’s something we’ve never done before, it’s beaten back like the plague, but once it’s something we’ve become accustomed to, you can tear it from our cold, dead hands.

In the 1930′s, Germany had a choice between three political parties -- the Communists, the Democratic Socialists, and the Nazis -- and in the end, the reason the Nazis got power was because the Communists and the Socialists could not band together to stop that greater threat. The Nazis were able to paint a pretty picture to the German people of returning their country to its supposedly long lost, mythic greatness, and they won power, even if they were still not the majority when Hitler got into office. And as soon as the Nazis got power, they never let it go and went out of their way to destroy both Communists and Socialists, just like they did with Jewish people, the Romani, and the rest. We are at such a crossroads now. I am deathly afraid that the Republicans will try to find some way to keep power even if Trump were to lose, but we cannot let that happen. We must stand together, strong and united.

The more liberal of us must acknowledge that radical change cannot be put into place quickly. Our system is broken and falling apart thanks to the Republicans’ on-going sabotage, and we cannot hope to remodel our house until our foundation is secure. Even the Republicans were not able to destroy our country in so many ways these last four years without dismantling a lot of other things first -- corrupting our elections with money thanks to the Citizens United ruling -- sparking two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that drained us of money and added to the backlog of veterans that have yet to receive their deserved financial support -- intimidating political officials away from substantive gun control legislation -- chipping away at abortion rights nation-wide -- stacking the courts, both local and Supreme, with unqualified, strongly right-leaning candidates -- gerrymandering districts like crazy so as to split Democratic-leaning areas and puff up Republican-leaning ones -- even spreading misinformation through shows on their own private so-called “News” network. It will take time to repair all of the damage the Republicans have wrought, but we must first win if we are even to have the chance to try.

On the flip side, the more centrist of us must acknowledge that we cannot go back to the way we were because the way we were was WRONG. We might have nostalgic visions of it being more civil and peaceful, but the tremors of war were still rippling under our feet. The Neo-Nazi rats that elected Trump were gathering under us, and we let them. We let them gain enough confidence to come out into the light in large numbers and we stood by, assuming that they wouldn’t succeed in their goals. We ignored the rampant spread of anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamaphobia -- we downplayed the racism, the homophobia, and the sexism. Sometimes it was due to arrogance, and sometimes it was due to flat-out indifference, because those things didn’t directly affect us. We should know by now that that rosy view of our past was not how things were -- just as many of our Founding Fathers were still slave owners, and America interned our own citizens in camps during World War II, and the supposedly great Ronald Reagan turned a blind eye while thousands of Americans died of AIDS, our country saw the signs of racism, xenophobia, and ultranationalism coming out in full again and didn’t fight back. And now that racist, xenophobic ultranationalism is in control of the Oval Office. If we have any chance of stopping them, we can’t simply go backwards -- we must charge ahead. We can’t simply pretend like everything can go back to normal -- we must accept responsibility for what we’ve done and pursue justice in making things right. We must fight back against these far-right, tyrannical policies and we must pay restitution to those our country has hurt. I do not want the Mexican families we have destroyed to be treated the way our Japanese American brethren were after they were released from the internment camps in the 40′s -- dismissed and forgotten, with our flag figuratively slapping them in the face every time some stupid guy crowed his head off about America being the greatest country on earth. I may have hated Trump’s immigration policy -- I might not have voted for him -- but he still represents my country, and therefore me, to the rest of the world, and even if he’ll never apologize for a single damn thing that he’s done, I want my country to make things right.

Maybe once a Democrat -- even if it’s a centrist like Biden -- is in the White House again, we’ll have the chance for real change -- good change. We certainly won’t get it as long as we’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Now of course, even when this whole presidential thing is done, we can’t rest on our laurels. We must get out in force for local elections too -- we must take back the Senate and keep control of the House. We must pressure our lawmakers to get the money out of politics, and fix gerrymandering, and restore environmental protections, and hold corporations accountable, and tax the rich, and abolish the Electoral College, and put term limits on Congresspeople, and impeach Brett Kavanaugh, and fund dismantling the backlog on VA benefits, and cancel student loan debt, and implement universal health care, and pass gun control legislation, and do all the other things we need done.

I really hope that whichever candidate we end up with -- whether it’s Biden (*sighs begrudgingly*), Bernie (*smiles*), or Warren (*wiggles in glee*) -- that candidate will strongly consider choosing a Vice President who is either more centrist (if they’re more liberal) or more liberal (if they’re more centrist) and filling their Cabinet with those other ex-presidential hopefuls who still have something to offer. Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California -- why not have her become Attorney General of the United States next? How about Tom Steyer as Head of the EPA, or Cory Booker as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

Here’s the thing about us being more diverse in thought than the Republicans -- it means we have a great swath of very different members with very different skill sets, as well as the ability to learn, critique, rationalize, change, and improve. And if we are to defeat an institution like Trump’s that demands lock-step, mindless obedience and praise, it seems to me that’s something we should use to our advantage.

#excuse me politics coming through #personal #hopefully I won't get too many of my followers upset with this #feel free to ignore this if you're not in the mood for politics I get it #democrats #republicans #i just republiCAN’T #donald trump #joe biden #elizabeth warren #bernie sanders #opinion #oh boy here i go

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chmerkovskiyvalentin · 6 years ago

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Q&A With Valentin Chmerkovskiy

BOOK: I'LL NEVER CHANGE MY NAME AUTHOR: VALENTIN CHMERKOVSKIY

1. In your opinion, what were some advantages you had being an immigrant and what were some disadvantages you faced in America?

I guess being an immigrant at a young age gave me an opportunity to be challenged in ways most kids my age didn’t get challenged. Learning another language different from the one I have been speaking since birth, trying to fit in while not being able to afford certain things that had social status, from clothing to vacations, whatever gave you the license to be cool I didn’t possess when I was young.

But what I realized is work-ethic and talent are the coolest things you can have at any age, and immediately the things I didn’t have became my most valuable assets teaching me some of my most valuable lessons.

2. What inspired the title of your book, “I’ll Never Change My Name” and did you always have pride in your name or was it something you had to grow to love?

I always had immense pride in my name, because my name was given to me in memory of my grandfather who passed away a few years before I was born. He was an extraordinary man whose name I wear and it’s always held me accountable, as did my last name.

Both were subject to a lot of conversation throughout my life some good and some a little more hurtful, but never did I feel less than for having a foreign name in a place I called home. It always empowered me. Being different and having challenges because of it always inspired me to be greater!

3. Have you been back to Ukraine in your adulthood? Do you feel that the American views of Ukraine as a whole are misinformed? If so, why?

I have. It’s a beautiful country with some really beautiful people. I can’t speak on American views of Ukraine because I think it’s impossible to make that assumption based on what we see on TV. I would just suggest anyone that hasn’t been, to go and visit. Having said that, to me America is home. America is where I truly grew up. And America is the country I’m most grateful for. Along with France, God knows I love croissants and Rousseau.

4. You talk a lot about your family and culture, what elements of your family changed when you arrived in the States and what elements stayed the same?

My family has always been my foundation. It's what drives me, holds me accountable, keeps me moving and pushing. When we first arrived there was tremendous uncertainty for all of us. All of the family members had their own individual challenges they faced but it was family that was the constant. We didn't know where the next dollar was coming from but we all knew that when we got home we had each other.

My parents were truly magicians, especially my mom who with very little was always able to provide the family with a warm cooked meal and had us all congregate around the dinner table daily. I do feel that was the piece of our culture we brought to the States and haven't abandoned it still. Gathering daily as a family to check in and push one another built a very strong bond and with folks like mine, I was able to be surrounded by love and support even if outside our home there was very little of it. In terms of what changed... well everything changed.

We become what we surround ourselves with. As we moved neighborhoods and as our circumstances changed, so did our lives and our outlook on it. But no matter what, we always kept our language (speaking only Russian at the dinner table) and our family traditions.

5. How easy or difficult was it for you to find your voice as a writer? And do you feel the “authentic you” was able to come out?

I've had this voice for a long time. I always loved storytelling I just had never been able to put it all down on paper before, not in this capacity at least. The most important thing for me throughout this entire process was to do justice to the reader for spending their money and most importantly time reading my book. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just me venting or gossiping, but that I was being respectful and accurate, and also entertaining and inspiring all at the same time.

Now, I don't think anyone should seek to inspire others but rather seek to be themselves the best way they can be and hopefully, by sharing their story others can relate and be inspired. I feel like with this book I got to be myself and share what I find important with the world. Hopefully, someone out there drew a little happiness from the read. That’s all I can ever ask for from my work.

6. What was your writing process like for this book?

I looked back at my life at a glance and just started listing moments that shaped my perspective and my experiences. I tried to then draw parallels between my past and my present, and just make some sense of it all. As the process went on, I was able to discover so many connections, so many fun moments, so many moments that made me say, "Aha that all makes sense now." Without reflection, it's hard to be mindful, and as I try to live a mindful life, I reflect a lot on the moments that brought me here. I wrote about it. This is who I am, and here's why.

7. You have such a unique life story, during your writing process did you ever stop and pinch yourself, realizing where you are now?

That "unique life" is exactly why I wanted to write this book. I wanted to share how dynamic life can be, for it's the thing that will make you look back one day and want to pinch yourself too. I’m so grateful for all the hands I was dealt in my life, the losing ones and the winning ones. I'm just grateful I got to play them all.

8. What have you learned most about yourself through working on “Dancing With The Stars”?

Patience haha. I learned how much I love to perform, how much I love to help people. To some degree, I always knew that, but 'Dancing With The Stars' showed me how rewarding it can be when you're doing what you love and sharing it with millions of people.

9. Who was someone that you danced with on the show that completely surprised you because of their dancing talents?

Rumer Willis, cause she was not a dancer. She was not someone that had danced before at all. To see her transform into a dancer was really amazing. It was actually the first time I ever won DWTS was with Rumer. It was one of the most rewarding seasons not because we won, but because I got to help this young woman find her inner strength and beauty. I was able to be a small part of her journey and contribute to her growth, all while watching her family and the world celebrate her. That was very special for me.

10. Can you talk a little bit about the dance studio you opened in Buckhead (an uptown district in Atlanta) and what you hope students get from your studio?

Like with every Dance With Me location around the country, I want it to be a place for people to feel welcome, in what can be one of the most terrifying environments for people... a Dance Studio. That is most important to me, that people are proud to be part of our little community of positivity, inclusion, self-improvement, and fun. Dance is just a vehicle for the bigger picture, living a fulfilling life. That’s all we are. Dance With Me is a place where I want people to find a little help, a little motivation, and a little joy on their path to living a complete and fulfilling life.

11. What’s the best book you have read in 2019 thus far?

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck. Don't let the title fool you, it’s a book about how to care even more... about the things that truly matter. "The Subtle Art of Caring Responsibly" just didn't have the same ring to it.

12. What’s your best advice for getting over writer’s block?

Just like getting over procrastination and anxiety... JUST DO IT. So insensitive and so simple I know, but sometimes we complicate things into non-existence. Relax. Breathe. And GO. Action is the best remedy for all the blocks in our life.

Force yourself to just take the first step, write the first paragraph and you will see that just one word turns into two and then ten and then you got yourself a story. I like to see the bigger picture in everything I do. What’s the message? What’s the point? What’s the bigger message? How is this different? I mean sure it’s all important but... breathe, relax, and START!

It’s ok if its garbage at first, genius sometimes can come out of garbage, and sometimes not, sometimes it just stays garbage. But, in this short time, we have on earth creating something is better than creating nothing, so create don't worry about the end in the beginning. One step at a time. One word at a time. One breath at a time. Not in that order, of course, make sure you breathe throughout. :)

13. What’s the best advice you have ever received on happiness?

I didn't. It's a constant search. Happiness is earned with action and adventure and movement and ups and downs in life! Happiness is in constant motion, you gotta chase it, find it, and foster it. If you're unhappy, just remember that happiness is just around the corner. But, don't take anyone's word for it, go and see it for yourself. And if you don't find it still, then go to your nearest Dance With Me. I promise you will find happiness there. Nothing like the human touch shared on the dance floor.

14. Do you plan on writing more books in the future?

I do when I have the spark. When I get this dying desire that I can’t breathe without writing it. I couldn't breathe with all of these stories in my head, I had to put them in a book. I had to share. I don't have that now. I'm actually in a state of reclusion to some degree, where the combination of spending the last 7 years on television along with 7 national tours and then writing this book, I feel like I need to step back.

I need to be a human again and live, and in living find inspiration for the thoughts that will turn into words I want to share with the world. I think the next book I write will be fiction.

#great interview #and i'm sooooo here for him writing a fiction one day #val chmerkovskiy #interviews

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nirah10 · 6 years ago

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From mostlydave,

My husband is actually HIV positive. He is on a combination of three different medications: efavirenz, emtricitabine, and tenofovir disoproxil. They give him headaches sometimes and in the mornings he gets really nauseous, but it is the only combination that works for him, everything else he has tried either didn’t work for him or had way worse side effects.

He found out he was HIV in his late teens, before we had met, after one of his ex boyfriend’s contracted him telling him he had collapsed, been taken to hospital and ruled HIV positive- he was ringing all his exes to get them to test for it. And so he went and got a test, not really believing he could have it, and tested positive.

He told me on our first date, he was very upfront and honest about it. I was terrified at first. My homophobic dad at home use to rant about the “gay plauge” and how it was “nature trying to wipe out the queers.” My dad telling me that all gay men get AIDS and die was the first experience I had ever had with HIV, and to be honest, I didn’t know much more about HIV than what I heard from home until I began dating a HIV positive man.

……

…….

(The next bit is a bit too much information for some people probably, so feel free to skip over it or remove it from this post, you can delete this part of you want:

Despite my reservation about dating someone with HIV at first, I really, really liked this guy. He was funny, handsome, kind, gentle, smart and the attraction was instant. So despite my fears about HIV, we started dating.

We pretty versatile in the bedroom, and once when he was ‘on top’ the condom broke, and we didn’t realise until after. He pulled out and completly freaked out.

I was oddly calm about it, I think I was a bit in a haze. He later confided in me that one of his biggest fears was getting me sick. He was pretty much hyperventilating and pretty much tried to pull me, half naked, into the car, to rush me up to the chemist to get PEP (Post-exposure prophylaxis) PEP is an emergency HIV treatment, a short course of antiretroviral drugs that stops exposure to HIV from becoming a life-long infection. If you take it within 72 hours of coming into contact with HIV, it is generally effective. I was willing to wait until morning, but my partner dragged me to a 24/hour place in the middle of the night.

That is the only time we have ever had a condom broke, but if we ever go away to a place that doesn’t have a doctor’s or a chemist within easy reach, especially internationally, my husband refuses to top. At home it is fine, he just gets really funny about it when we go away.)

Too much information part done, sorry. You can delete that part if you want to. I just thought it might be interesting to some of your readers how a couple in 2018 deal with some person being postive and one person being negative in a relationship.

……

Our daughter actually has HIV as well. We didn’t apopt her until she was nearly a toddler, but after our case worker told us about her, we knew we definitely had a place for her in our family. She was born with HIV, passed down from her mum during childbirth, who was a recovering drug addict who had gotten clean for the sake of her daughter, but who was unaware of her own illness until it was so late. (We never met our daughter’s mother, but her story kills me. The fact she was trying to get clean for her daughter. We want to take our girl to visit her mum’s grave on her mum’s birthday this year- we not sure how to go about it though, as it is a very sensitive subject that you have to get right.)

Her mum died when our girl was only a year old, and the had no other family (not sure who the dad was) and she was bounced around in foster care for a year, even today their can stigma around HIV, a fear about exposure around other kids or a struggle to cope of the medication stops working, or even having to ‘deal’ with a sick child in general, so even though she was so young, the foster system wasn’t working for her.

She had been bounced around for a while, but as soon as our case worker told us about her, we knew she was meant to be our daughter. It can be hard, with one HIV-postive child and one negative, especially at such a young age where explaining the difference to our children is very hard, just because they are so young. But you can’t ignore it, early treatment and making sure out daughter is psychologically prepared is so important. My husband pretty much had to face the early years of his illness alone, and we don’t want our daughter feeling alone, bitter or helpless, education and support is key, even when she is still so, so young, only just starting school.

So yeah, even in 2018, HIV is still a scary, difficult thing. But my family is happy, healthy, and the doctors are happy with both how our daughter and my husband are doing, they are both doing really, really well.

HIV may not be the same death sentence in was in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but is still serious and important to not brush over.

But I still can’t watch the movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and not feel numb. A very good film. I struggle to watch it these days, but it is definitely one worth watching. I am pretty sure Hanks actually won an Oscar for it.

Sorry, I know you have already had a lot of posts of HIV, and I know I am only new on this blog- so it may be weird me sharing all this info. But I do think it is important not to forget about HIV, and all the people we lost because of this virus over the last 40 years. I also agree that homophobia had a bit part in why the disease took so long to be addressed (even in the media) and why the death toll was so high before the media and the government started caring. Gay men are more likely to catch it (although, people like our little girl shouldn’t be forgotten either) and so I do agree with the idea 'HIV is a gay disease. Own it.’ I don’t get offended when people talk about AIDS and the gay community, because education is so important for prevention, and it seems like a disservice to ignore the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of queer men who died because of HIV because it doesn’t fit the Disney narrative of trying to pretend their is no difference between being gay or straight. There are differences. The high sucide rate of LGTB+ teens proves it. Pretending differences don’t exist isn’t going to solve anything, I actually find it quite harmful.

Sorry for my little rant, I know my stance is a bit controversial, and a lot of LGTB+ activist have worked tirelessly to remove the link between homosexuality and HIV, because of the stigma that goes with it. And I have nothing against them or their work, I might be in the minority really, but I don’t see it as a 'harmful stereotype’ like others do and don’t get outraged when I see a HIV character on television happen to be gay.

[Added in second message]

Also, at the fear of spreading misinformation, I realised I may have made it sound like you can only contract HIV from ‘bottoming’, while discussing my husband’s fears. But we are both very aware that HIV can always be spread from a negvpartner 'topping’ a pos partner. It can definitely be spread both ways, although one is more likely than the other. I just hoped this could be addded to the bottom of my other post, as you one hundred percent need protection ALL the time no matter what your role in the bedroom is, still a risk.

Even 'pure tops’ (although I have never met a pure top, lol) can catch HIV if they are not careful, statistically it is very much possible (I think it might actually be a higher risk than vaginal sex between a postive male and a neg female, although don’t quote me on that, I ready a study but can’t remember the details, so definitely don’t quote me on that).

Both topping and bottoming can transmit HIV, definitely use protection for both guys. I just meant one is slightly more risky than the other, when talking about my husband’s fears of topping when we are overseas.

I definitely do not want to encourage any risky behaviour that can pass on HIV.

Just thought my post needed some clarification for the young ones. 😂

Dear mostlydave,

Thanks for sharing your story. I think it is really important for this kind of information to get out. It’s a tad weird for me to be “hosting” it, just because I really don’t know anything about it myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want it out there–it just means that I’m hesitant to speak on the subject myself.

I’m glad your kids have such a loving home. Thank you so much for sharing with us.

#hello friend #submission

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everlarkingjoshifer · 6 years ago

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Trump signed an executive order to abolish what he did....

I don’t normally come in here to post long political pieces. However, after the disgusting comments that I’ve read on social media as Democrats held a press conference to speak about children being ripped apart from their parents at the border, is more than I can take. So, because I am pretty fucking annoyed with all the baseless accusations, and major misinformation I would like to dispel erroneous conclusions along with the comments I have been seeing on social media.

Immigrants are taking our jobs!

No Becky, they’re not. Immigrants are bringing in jobs and taking the low wage, often dangerous and non-union jobs that YOU don’t want to take. How about you go pick those strawberries in the blazing heat for as little as 6$ an hour, doesn’t sound very appealing right? So if it’s not good enough for you because you want a cushy job, what makes you think Immigrants want to do it too? They don’t, but they’re so desperate to make a living that they’re willing to do anything so long as they can provide a better future for their own families, something you can easily understand. As a matter of fact, while you enjoy your burrito know that none of it would be possible if it wasn’t for an immigrant who brought in their culture and food to enrich our country. Yeah, that big old Mexican franchised fast food joint? Would not have existed for your high school kids to work at, so while your sitting on your ass enjoying someone else’s culture, know that none of it

would be possible without an immigrant.

Immigrants are taking our resources and our taxes pay for them to live here!

Noooo, Immigrant individuals cannot ever receive federal based help such as SSI. They can’t even get health insurance. Some states do hand out some help to aid immigrants but it would only be something as small as being able to use the WIC program which is very limited. (I’ve used it when I had just given birth). As a matter of fact, white citizens are amongst the highest percentage who receive federal assistance and immigrant people pay INTO our social security and taxes without hope of ever getting that money back. If you want to talk about needlessly spending your money on immigrants then you should definitely be against the barbaric procedures that are happening right the hell now. There are companies profiting from your taxpayer money in order to house children that didn’t need to be housed in the first place. It’s all a big scam and those 1 % who don’t really need the money are making millions that you’re paying into JUST because you want to be a paranoid idiot. It’s a pretty simple concept actually, it’s called security theater. Except this theater is of the Third Reich.

They’re bringing in disease!

See, now you just sound like a Nazi, and come on, we’re not exactly one to speak about diseases when you’re refusing to vaccinate your fucking kid because of “big pharma, unfounded conspiracies, and autism”. Cry me a fucking river, Shania. The whole notion of disease comes out of fear of the unknown but we cannot throw a stone at someone else knowing we do the same. We won’t vaccinate and now measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, and many other diseases are on the rise because you’d rather let your kid die than have autism, which by the way has been dispelled at every turn by various scientists.

Obama/ Bush administration were the ones who implemented the law of child separation.

Oh Brandon, you xenophobic dick. First of all the Obama and Bush administration NEVER placed an order of removal between the parents and their children. What is true is that there is no law saying these current atrocities have to be carried out. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor that can get you jailed for up to 20 days or so and then you’re automatically sent to your country of origin. The immigrant parents who are caught with their children are never separated from them and there are no real lasting repercussions. If I was to take your reasoning into account then that would mean people who have had a DUI, or those who have been arrested for public disturbance should have their children taken away as well? Secondly, when the Obama administration implemented certain facilities to house kids it was due to an immense influx of unaccompanied minors who were immigrating to the USA by their damn selves. Most, of these children, were from Central America and were not deemed a threat to the nation after very careful vetting. These kids ranged between the ages of 12-17 years old and they were TEMPORARILY housed or often placed in foster homes with other immigrant adults till the Government could get a hold of their parent. Of course, everything wasn’t always handled perfectly as there were a ton of problems because sometimes the foster parents would refuse to answer their phones to various federally appointed counselors or even gave the Government the wrong information. Some of the facilities in which the children were housed were not as top notch as we expected and there were abuses happening at the time. But by that point, the children were really alone. They didn’t come in with their parents to protect them and sadly things didn’t always go the right way. The few kids who were separated from the adult were either trafficked here or were in deep danger of those adults that surrounded them

They should come here legally if they want to enter the country!

Kathy, you sad simpleton. Looking for Asylum is not against the law. Actually, the ports of entry for refugees are being blocked by ICE agents to deter them from reaching the United States legally. Usually, when an immigrant came to the port of entry looking for asylum they would have to bring proof which then they would be taken to a holding facility where their case was carefully reviewed and then after about a month or so they would either be allowed to stay or leave depending on the severity of their situation. Now, Looking for a way to come to the united states legally especially in countries that are extremely corrupt is very difficult. I myself applied for a visa in order to come to the united states twice and both times it was denied even though I was a 4-year-old child who was about to die of a severe heart condition. If it hadn’t been for a charitable company that had put their name behind me and petitioned for me to travel I would never have even set a foot in the United States and I would never be able to write this because I’d be dead by now. That’s how difficult everything is. The immigration system is so broken and instead of looking for a solution you shining citizens can only proclaim your distaste for a president that hasn’t been in office for over 2 years. Obama, Bush, or Clinton are no longer running the country. Take responsibility for the mistakes YOUR amoral president is making.

But MS-13!

Ms-13 is a Mexican terrorist group that has been used as a cop out to paint innocent people who are Latino and Hispanic in an unflattering light. Gang members don’t really want to come here, their profit is not here. They are already immensely powerful in Mexico, why leave if things are good for them? It makes no sense and if again I were to take your reasoning into consideration I would say that other countries should never allow an American entry because they could be from the KKK. What makes sense is to have a racist, xenophobic, sexist president using something like gang violence in order to disenfranchise a group of people who don’t match his ideas for the perfect immigrant. Case in point, he very clearly said he would like Europeans (meaning Caucasians) to immigrate here (They wouldn’t. Europe is not perfect but at least it has universal health care among other things.) Mexicans, meaning all Latino because that how you all like to categorize us not realizing that Latinos are very diverse but those of us who are brown in complexion are rapists, killers, we’re infesting the country, we’re bringing disease, we’re animals among other ludicrous things Trump has said about the Latino community and for the record, not all immigrants are Mexican. Most at this point are from Central America. It's the same as not all Asians are Chinese, not all black people are thugs and not all white men who wear penny loafers are entitled pricks who call on their daddies to fix their problems. You see how stereotypes work? Those of you who applaud him while desecrating the flag by wearing it as a shirt or bandana and eating off of flag emblazoned paper plates like to think you’re somehow better and patriotic because you won the lottery by being born here. It’s as simple as that and if you want the immigrants to fix their problems back home maybe tell your government not to meddle in their democratic systems. It’s a cop-out to make yourselves feel better about the atrocities that are happening.

Build the WALL!

Yes Brayden, because a wall is gonna stop a bunch of plane riding immigrants to come to the United States. Newsflash, most people who end up here illegally came here legally through a visa but overstayed their welcome. Most of the people who came here otherwise, seek asylum, which is not illegal. There are actually very few people who cross the border illegally and stay here. No one wants to leave their life, culture, and language behind unless it’s absolutely necessary. The wall will stop nothing. Separating kids and now babies from their parents have not deterred the parents from continuing their long arduous trips to the United States. The wall only serves as a trophy for the GOP to pat themselves on the back and say what good little legislators they are. It’s a sign of oppression and a sign of unwelcoming. It’s as if I had a picture of Jesus in my living room but a satanic altar in the next room. It’s counterproductive and we’re the ones who are gonna pay for it. Mexico will pay for nothing even if Trump is holding these children hostages. The procedures are very eerily being carried out in much the same way the Nazi's carried out their atrocities. First, they block all potential legal ways for the marginalized group to carry out their mission legally. Then, they used false rhetoric and fear monger civilians so that the marginalized group can be dehumanized and therefore easier for the government to carry out whatever it is they are planning without dissent. Then they sanitize the living conditions in which the immigrant group are living in. Finally, they discredit or all accounts that are cited by reputable resources in order to keep the masses confused and ignorant. It's exactly what happened when the Japanese were placed in internment camps.

Immigrants will never assimilate to our way of life!

Say the people whose grandpappy’s and Nanas never learned English and continued to live their lives the way they did in Poland. English is not a designated American language. No language has been designated to the USA, you morons.

Immigrants should look for a way to legalize their situation.

Ok, how about you fork over $20,000 while working a minimum wage job that you can’t quit from no matter how bad it is because if you do there’s nowhere else for you to work at without breaking the Law. Immigration lawyers are some of the worst wolves in sheep’s clothing I have ever met. I spend about $10,000 just to get a green card while having nowhere else to live but at my Mother in law’s tiny ass house in the middle of the ghetto while pregnant. I slept on the floor with my husband because the place was so small we couldn’t even put a bed in there, much less afford one. When I was about to apply for citizenship my Lawyer up and left after I had paid her the money to file in the citizenship paperwork. She disappeared and I have no way of recuperating my paperwork from her. Thankfully no everything was lost but I am not an isolated incident, there are countless stories of people who have been duped by lawyers and there are more fast food joint in the USA than immigration courthouses. So you guys do the fucking math. It takes so much of you and so long for you to even reach the tip of what American citizens expect from you.

They broke the law, therefore they should pay the consequences.

We break the law every single day Khayyley, it's not an exaggeration or even something that I'm making up. I live in Connecticut and lord do we have some ridiculous laws like, husbands who cannot kiss their wives on any Sunday. If a cyclist goes above 65 MPH they have be stopped by a police officer and we're not allowed to educate dogs. (lol, what?) Anyway, the point is we don't get citations, incarcerated or even have enforcement carried out for the most menial lawlessness so why should we punish these kids who have done nothing wrong? This used to be the country that was known for checks and balances, the country of separation of church and state. Somewhere along the way, we've lost ourselves and we've become the country of checks and cherry picking. The country that puts babies in cages and we don't allow the staff to offer any comfort. These are not "summer camps" and we shouldn't find a way to sanitize the word cage but we have gone so far off the deep end and our expectations for our leaders are so low that we may as well be licking the ground. These are kids who are screaming for their mothers and fathers who may never see them again just for committing the sin of being born brown, something that they obviously have no control over. It's a harrowing reality but their voices are falling on deaf ears as politicians use the bible to excuse their horrid laws as they smile because they're the ones all cozy with big fat paychecks provided by their citizens. We're duped into thinking that these current politicians have our best interest at heart when in actuality they don't. Just because an abusive parent says they care about you doesn't mean they actually do. The GOP is a cesspool of corrupt, self-serving, amoral group of people with Trump at the head.

Our Lawmakers are making due with what they were handed.

How, exactly how have we been improving the country? The rich are getting richer while the poor still have to rely on governmental help that is slowly dwindling while those very same poor people have to deal with being called moochers. Our children are dying off at alarming rates because our government wants to continue catering to the NRA's demands as they go about spreading baseless lies and flimsy excuses for mass shootings. Our healthcare system is a fucking joke and we sit idly by as Men in power oppress our women because they don't want to bring a child into a world full of problems that cannot be easily fixed. We cater to our very own terrorists who use the bible in order to justify themselves and call it "freedom of speech" yet we call people color sons of bitches for simply daring to protest peacefully for the flagrant disenfranchisement of his fellow people. We slap the, what about isms and point fingers to others without realizing we're the ones putting them in those positions while simultaneously squashing the education system in order to keep future voters ignorant. Republicans can't be voted in if we have intellectuals willing to question their agendas. It's much easier to have dumb, compliant, narrow-minded morons in order for them to make that money. Can't you see what it is they're doing? They are dehumanizing these people and saying that they're all criminals and or will become criminals in the future so that the white elitists can feel alleviated of all culpability in order for them to be able to sell their soul to the administration that is quietly pocketing civilian's money. Money, that they say will go to charities but never do. It doesn't matter if these kids have television, air conditioners, or even a meal because they have been so traumatized by being ripped apart from their parents that even if they were being housed at the Ritz Carlton the practices would still be inhumane.

But Trump signed the executive order, stop complaining already.

Wow Tammy, first of all, he didn't need to. Separating children from their parents is not a law, never has been. The separation of children who were accompanied by an adult usually happened if the child was found to have been a product of human trafficking, which by the way, has a very low percentage. Instead, the manner in which these kids are being handled now is more cause for worry because they can fall prey to actual human traffickers. Case in point, the over 1,000 children that were mysteriously lost and haven't been found yet and no one has any clue where or how they might have disappeared. It's insane for you to think that just because these kids are in these prison camps they're somehow being treated correctly. These children only see the light of day for 2 hours and the rest they spend it inside and security measures have been implemented to keep the child from escaping as if they were high-security inmates. They're being treated like prisoners and now they're being forcefully injected with psychiatric drugs in order to keep them from crying. I don't think I need to tell you about the long-term repercussions these drugs can have but I will anyway. It can cause obesity, adult onset diabetes, dizziness, listlessness, and are left incapacitated. Easy prey for any trafficker. it's callously barbaric. These kids are set up for a plethora of mental health problem that will never go away. This new executive order was unnecessary and Trump just needed to feel like a dictator because that's what he truly wants. He doesn't believe in a democracy. He values people like Stalin and Kim Jung Un and insults our allies (sorry Canada!). The paper he signed keeps families together yes, but at the cost of their freedom because they are to be kept in what I would guess to be newly built facilities that will most definitely be paid by us for an indefinite period of time as opposed to deporting them back to their countries after about 20 days. It'll be a real concentration camp and I wouldn't be surprised if gas chambers and fire pits begin to appear all over the United States and all Latino immigrants are rounded up regardless of whether they are legally here or not.

We should worry about our own citizens instead of immigrants who are only a distraction to our own problems.

You're right up to a point. We should definitely worry about our citizens and maybe worry about our very own problems that plague our nation, yet we don't. We should be working towards implementing Gun control and worrying about human rights abuses towards people of color, but we don't. Instead, we blame those very people that are being needlessly maligned because we'd rather think it's their fault as opposed to us saying that we fucked up, that we cannot do enough to help our own people. Immigrants aren't looking to distract us from our own problems but the GOP sure is using that scapegoat in order to confuse us and turn us into megalomaniacs who claim to care for this country while rationalizing the heinous laws that this administration is implementing. Understand that just because I sympathize with the plight of immigration it doesn't negate my love or even my worries for the problems that are in my country. I love this country and I'm thankful to this country for all its wonderful opportunities. I believe we can be better and I don't think we're perfect but we're definitely capable of being great indeed. It was before and I'm sure we can be now and in the future.

Listen, all I’m trying to really say is that the things that are happening are beyond horrible and at such an alarming speed that I am scared for the future of my country. This president is giving a pathway for all the fascists to wave their flag and complain about how they suffer at the cost of people they refuse to understand or even get to know. It's giving way for racists to be open about their disgusting assumptions by calling it honesty, and "well I'm just telling it like it is, and everyone else was thinking it, anyway".

Just like President Snow from the Hunger Games, Trump is using children to shield himself and get what he wants. This is no longer a, “I wonder what a dystopian future would be like.” situation we are there already. This is the Handmaid’s Tale. This the Hunger Games. This is Nazi Germany, and the trail of tears coming to fruition all over again and we’re allowing it. So, come November if you do not vote blue and later regret not doing so then it will be entirely your fault that this once great country will crumble and burn to the ground with only the ashes to left as a reminder of what it once was. Our founding fathers would ashamed of us and we should too. Have a little humanity and compassion but if you're not capable of that, at least know that your stance will follow not just you but your entire lineage till the end of time just like the Nazi regime was because you are most definitely on the wrong side of history.

#Trump #child separation #concentration camps #immigration

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andrewdrobins · 7 years ago

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The Bledsoe Show w/ Kevin Gillotti: Carrying the Fire #64

Falling in love with obstacle course racing, Specificity training, Why CrossFit is not so functional, Sterilized training, The power of belief, and more.

[0:00] Falling in love with obstacle course racing [9:30] Specificity training [15:30] Why CrossFit is not so functional [35:30] Sterilized training

[41:15] The power of belief [48:00] Do you carry the fire? 🔥 [59:00] Living his true self

Guest: Kevin Gillotti

Kevin Gillotti is an insanely fit 48 year old with an unmatched mindset. An elite racer for almost 30 years in both duathlons (running and biking) and obstacle course racing (OCR).

Kevin was introduced to duathlons in college and almost won his first race. He then went on to become a 8 time confirmed All-American with USAT (duathlon), has been on numerous USAT Duathlon World Championship teams, and has won most of the North County-based duathlon races for the past 20 years.

Kevin now focuses on OCRs in the Spartan Race series and is already ranked 12th overall in the Elite NBC Series, second overall in the USA Elite Division and the West Region Division for his age, and fourth overall in the world Elite division for his age.

In this episode, we learn about Kevin’s unshakable self-belief, which helped him overcome a rough accident, why he doesn’t believe in lifting heavy and how he approaches his training, why being brutally honest has hurt his past relationships, and much more.

Enjoy!

-Mike

Connect on Social: Instagram, Vimeo

Resources: Kevin Gillotti

0:00

Falling in love with obstacle course racing

Kevin Gillotti discovered his passion for racing at his first duathlon race almost 30 years ago. A friend invited him to a race and he ended up almost winning it without much intention or training. On that day, Gillotti decided he’s going to be racing for the rest of his life and moved against all odds from Iowa to San Diego, CA.

Besides becoming an elite duathlon racer, Kevin doesn’t like to be a one trick pony and does many things, including archery, competitive shooting, graphic design, and more. He even came up with a hashtag to show his intentions: #BeSkilledAtManyThings.

Today, Kevin is very involved with Spartan Race, which he was introduced to by a friend in 2011. His friend called it a mud run then, and even though it was nothing like a mud run, Kevin fell in love again.

“It was nothing like a mud run… It was the Joe De Sena Effect. It really was like chaos. It wasn’t well organized, but you could see the picture he was going for. So it was easy for me to jump on board and see that kind of future he was looking at, but just knowing it was a rough raw stage at that point, but at least I could see what his plan was.” — Kevin Gillotti

A post shared by KEVIN GILLOTTI™ (@kevingillotti) on Nov 13, 2017 at 11:15am PST

9:30

Specificity training

When Kevin was studying for his Master’s degree in Sports Psychology at San Diego State University, he learned about a concept called Specificity. For him, it essentially meant ‘train how you are going to race.’

Once Kevin learned about specificity, he realized he has been doing it his entire career. He has always trained solely for races. When he trains, he’s always moving like he would in a race. He doesn’t do squats, pressing, or anything statically, he does everything to help OCR.

Kevin’s training usually incorporates light to medium weight weightlifting exercises sandwiched between runs and sprints. Even though he likes CrossFit and trains at a crossfit gym, he doesn’t believe in heavy weights, else in strength to weight ratio. He strives to be as light as he can and as strong as can be.

A post shared by KEVIN GILLOTTI™ (@kevingillotti) on Mar 16, 2018 at 12:05pm PDT

15:30

Why CrossFit is not so functional

When Greg Glassman originally created CrossFit he did it with intention to focus on 10 general physical skills: Strength. Stamina. Endurance. Flexibility. Power. Speed. Coordination. Agility. Balance. Accuracy. These ten words describe the predominant characteristics of almost any activity you are likely to encounter, and therefore your capability in each describes your fitness.

Today, the expression of Crossfit today over emphasizes a few principles out of 10 neglecting specifically balance, coordination and accuracy work in favor of lifting heavy weights all the time.

Kevin doesn’t believe in the value of lifting 400–500 lb. It doesn’t really happen in real life. He trains for realistic life scenarios, like lifting 50 lb. overhead on a ladder, as he might want to place something heavy on a high shelf in the future.

Pro tip: Avoid injuries by training a variety of stuff and avoiding heavy repetition of the same movement .

35:30

Sterilized training

The typical gym environment today is very sterilized. People train on flat floors, using straight bars, and everything is even. Real life scenarios though don’t offer though, which is why you need to diversify your training by adding unevenness and misbalance for example.

If you’re competing at Olympic Weightlifting, Powerlifting, or CrossFit, then those squats, presses, etc. are the movements you want to train. But otherwise, you want to diversify your training as much as possible. In the future we will have more asymmetrical training.

Your core strength is your resilience.

When you see people lifting heavy ass deadlifts on Instagram with rounded backs, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have bad, misinformed form. On the contrary, their core strength is so dialed in that they can do a rounded back deadlift and all kinds of things that look funny.

“I don’t believe there is bad movement. My only concern is… People have been sitting for a long time and their breathing gets fucked up, and so their diaphragm doesn’t expand very well, and not only that, but they use their breath to stabilize their spine during movement. So they’re holding their breath and they’re moving and that’s problematic because they don’t know how to stabilize their spine without creating abdominal pressure… It doesn’t matter how weight they’re doing. I can watch someone walking and I go: ‘Hmm their diaphragm in the right side is a little tight’… No movement is wrong if you can stabilize your spine.” — Mike Bledsoe

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41:15

The power of belief

In 2001, Kevin was hit by a truck that was going 70 MPH while riding a bicycle. The truck threw him 60 feet, he broke his back in two places, his left arm and his left leg. He had two blood transfusions to help him survive and spent three weeks in the hospital, two of which in the ICU (24 hour care).

After his accident, doctors told him Kevin he’d never be racing again. However, Kevin never approached life thinking he’s in the median group, he always believed he’s an outlier. He even told his doctors they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

He Spent a year in rehab and had his back fused, but he still does all kinds of physical things. He fights discomfort everyday, but he feels blessed to be alive. His mindset allowed him to the fittest he’s ever been post accident.

Belief is a huge part of recovery.

Today, it’s common practice for doctors to tell patients they won’t be able to fully recover from many incidents because they want to cover their ass. Unfortunately, it’s a huge disservice to people, as it sucks out hope, which literally handicaps people. Belief is something we need to fully maximize our recovery capabilities and general life capabilities.

vimeo

48:00

Do you carry the fire?

As a kid, Kevin was very influenced by the movie “The Road”. One sentence in particular spoke to him and was imprinted in his mind:

“Do you carry the fire? The fire to survive. The fire to be a good person. The fire to keep moving forward no matter what happens to you.” — The Road

Kevin was raised in a typical, old school American-Italian family. He was put through hard work, planning, suffering, etc. Even though he didn’t appreciate it when he was young, that path made him resilient and today he’s grateful for the parenting he received.

His father made him work at his construction business and as the boss’s son he got no breaks. He did the lowest jobs, shoveling out dirt and cleaned poop out of the sewer. His family didn’t give him a leg in this world, else work ethic. In high school, he was waking at 4am and worked 10 hour workdays in construction while his friends were partying.

“Most people don’t know what they’re made of they don’t believe in themselves… You need to fail, you have to fail, and failing is a good thing. But unfortunately, now people don’t want to fail and people don’t want to let other people fail. Everybody is supposed to win, everybody is supposed to get a medal.” — Kevin Gillotti

59:00

Living his true self

Everything that Kevin does in life, he does with the same intensity as racing. He gives his 100% every time and doesn’t half-ass anything. The only thing he keeps failing in at life is relationships.

Kevin is a no bullshit kind of man, but in relationships, it doesn’t always work. He says things in very uncoated ways that don’t resonate with people very well. He’s very honest and upfront about who he is, and sometimes people can accept it in the beginning, but stuff usually goes south after a while.

When things go south, Kevin always looks for ways to improve. He has married before and been in a 10 year relationship. He isn’t bitter or angry about his ex and will never say anything bad about her, he only focuses on the what can he improve and is grateful for how it made him a 10x better person.

A post shared by KEVIN GILLOTTI™ (@kevingillotti) on Sep 4, 2017 at 7:35am PDT

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Flow Stated — May 26, 2018

The post The Bledsoe Show w/ Kevin Gillotti: Carrying the Fire #64 appeared first on Shrugged Collective.

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dreamerwriternstargazer · 3 years ago

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^^ this

Unfortunately I have anti-vax relatives and while I’m pro-vax it’s…I really don’t agree with degrading and dismissing the opposition as means of “winning the argument.”

Because that doesn’t work, and worse it puts them in a position where they feel bad for caring and worrying, it’s really misguided and absolutely founded upon misinformation and ignorance but I usually think about how I’d like to be told I’m wrong and advised as such… I’d like to be treated with patience and care and have my worries validated, that doesn’t mean approving, endorsing or allowing the poor behaviour as a result of a harmful political view, to pass. I’m also in a family that’s very much pro-life and while I will spend my days arguing and persuading patiently and compassionately (because even the pro-life/pro-choice debate is steeped in good intentions but deeply misguided views and values based on misinformation as well as prejudices) I won’t let it pass if that view were to affect or harm another, I wouldn’t APPROVE of said view (obviously I’m pro-choice) or encourage that view and (hopefully) nor would I allow it to affect me Insha’Allah if I ever found myself in the position of requiring an abortion.

I… the thing is with the method of dismissing and degrading is that from an etiquette perspective it’s debasing behaviour, it lowers respect for you from others and lowers your argument’s value as a result, people aren’t going to be receptive to someone who puts them down and nor will credence be given to you because you aren’t staying on your argument, you aren’t strengthening it, you aren’t even using it, you’re focusing on ridiculing the opposition. Not even dismantling the opposition might I add, but ridiculing it.

What this does is alienate others from adding to your numbers, alienating those who are “too far gone” because they’re stupid or crazy, etc etc. That’s not how you win a war, you don’t win a war by laughing at and angering your enemy, you don’t win a war condemning them, yeah sure blood is shed but again that equates to fighting an argument not ridiculing it, and even that is not how you win a war.

War is won when you fight hard enough to prompt everybody to do what they were always going to do from the start; sit down and talk and THINK.

“Because thinking is just a fancy word for changing your mind.” ~ 12th Doctor, Doctor Who, The Zygon Inversion

Human nature and humanity is good, it’s why one of the most common and kind of the most depressing however weirdly uplifting phrases, “he meant well” exists. People mean well which is good, but they do not always do well and this phrase indicates the ubiquity of people having good intentions but the wrong actions, and often great harm comes from people and their wrong actions. The root intention of care and worry and hope in making a morally correct choice is there, however, and that is how you win, you win in appealing to that.

Let’s face it; it’s easy to condemn anti-vaxxers, pro-lifers and pro-gun owners, it’s way harder when it becomes someone closer to you, because you know them and you know this person is at their heart holding this view with the best of intentions. It’s harder when it’s your mother or your sister or your grandfather and you see the worry spread across their face over the vaccine because they worry you might suffer from the side effects of a vaccine or in my case they see you suffer from the side effects. That doesn’t make any less frustrating, especially when they then use that as proof for their argument.

But I’d rather deal with my mother throwing my pain and suffering in my face as the bullets of her opposition, than not be there at all and someday her gun explodes in her hand. I’d rather deflect that bullet back, defences up and take her guns down one by one, rather show the sheer strength of my cavalry, than condemn my opposer. I’d rather fight hoping to spare enemies, spare people who change their mind and change their side by CHANGING their mind, than cut them off at the knees.

That’s what it really means to ‘love thy enemy’ or whatever the Bible says, that’s what it really means to “treat your brother how you’d like to be treated” as stated in Islam, that’s what it really means when religions ask us to be better and not HATE enemies and not degrade them. Anyone whom there is a chance for then the sheer strength of your argument, your battalion, will evoke surrender, will evoke concession. Ayone who is bent on their argument, bent on their path not from good but bad intentions, from arrogance, will be cut down by your fire, by their own.

Everyone thinks they’re the good guys. Prove you are by checking yourself.

Ok I'm very my much pro all vaccines but can we talk for a second about how much people love to pick a group of people to look down on, bully, and harass for having a "Bad" opinion?

Cos like Tumblr sure does love to talk about how fucked up US medical care is and how much the government doesn't give a shit about its people and every time someone makes a joke about Europe you always find that one Wise Guy who says "lol at least we have free healthcare (: " like

Can we think about that for a minute? And after that, can we think about how maybe, just maybe, American antivaxxers being suspicious of the COVID vaccine doesn't sound completely unfounded?

They may be in the wrong but what does harassing, ridicule, and bullying ever do but make a person dig in their heels to defend their opinion? Sometimes it feels a lot more like people wanting to feel smug about being right about something and less about genuinely caring about other people.

As someone who has experienced loss due to COVID, I'm just saying, maybe we should consider more compassion and less high-horsing.

#op is provax btw #tw antivax #tw covid #healthcare #tw abortion #pro-choice #tw pro-life #star reblogs #star speaks

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secretkingdomjellyfish · 4 years ago

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who are we?

A few nights ago I was reflecting on the world, the way things are and the way things appear to be going. I’ve watched as the two extremes throw a lot of insults around and there is a particular one upmanship going around that’s difficult to ignore. I stated in my last blog that both sides are continually trying to throw shit the other way to distract from what they, themselves are doing and I tried to work out why?

I mean, the answer is pretty simple really. We are no longer able to have healthy debates about the rights and wrongs of our actions and we are slowly devolving back into a sort of tribal mindset, acting like toddlers who would rather throw the ol’ ad hominem attacks rather than actually have to think about the valid point someone may have made.

The internet is full of echo chambers where people’s views are not being challenged (right or wrong) and are simply being strenghened by others around them. They are narrowing their view point so much that they are now refusing to even hear any, even slightly different, view point and because they are being pushed along and cheered by the many internet strangers who share this view, it’s easy to get very caught up and commit horrendous crimes in the name of what they feel is right. I pity people with this mindset because it’s so incredibly cloying and restrictive. By allowing yourself to be open to others viewpoints means that you can and will grow as a person. I know I sound preachy as fuck but try it. Just give it a go on something small, something insignificant.

The mob mentality, confirmation bias and mental regression are all massive problems right now. We see society falling apart around us and rather than admitting that we may be playing a part in this, we simply blame the ‘other side’. It’s their fault, I done nothing wrong, but did you see what they did?! See, my internet friend whom I’ve never met but have found completely agrees with my shaky world view agrees with me so I must be right.

Currently I’m watching the events of the world with a mix of horror, humour and sense of unreality. We have an ongoing pandemic which is still killing people, it hasn’t just decided to stop and, personally, I feel this is mother nature’s way of firing off her warning shot before unleashing a real horror that will wipe out humanity. I’m watching several countries use this pandemic as a screen in which they can continue committing atrocities without the world watching them and we are so busy fighting with each other we don’t see that insidious danger slowly creeping in and getting ready to move when the time is right.

We are currently pulling down statues of various international figures around the world. Many of whom were involved in various neferious activities which we don’t like to talk about. Now, this is, in it’s very basic form, a noble and understandable thing to do. Why should we celebrate the lives of known slave traders, dictators and generally unpleasant people, right? No one wants to talk about the fact that history is always written and rewritten by the victors. We all want to believe that the people who won these wars and battles were absolute angels and didn’t commit any serious crimes themselves. Time has a bad habit of smoothing the very sharp edges of history. Making it smooth and pretty to look at - we tend to forget that war makes monsters of even the kindest of men if given enough motivation. Furthermore, these very activities that we find so abhorrent now was perfectly normal at the time and we are constantly trying to place the views we have now (with several hundred years to ‘evolve’) on the past - something that is always going to end in disappointment.

The thing is this (now bear with me with this) led me to think about the events that led to WW2 and, to be fair, several other massive wars that no-one really talks about and the rise of dictators in general and I do see similiarities to the events that led up to both world wars but in particular WW2.

Scapegoats? Check. A strong ‘nationalistic’ movement? Check. Disinfranchised and exhausted population who are sick of their current situation? Check. Low level of racism that has always been present but has stuck to the shadows because it was socially unacceptable (and rightly so) to display any kind of racist tendancies? Double and triple check.

Something else to think about. We all like to think that once we defeated Hitler that we defeated his horrendous regime. But, and here’s the big point, there were many MANY people who shared his view and actively committed atrocious crimes thinking they were right.

These people didn’t just decide that their viewpoint was wrong when Hitler was defeated and, like when you stomp on a mummy spider, they scattered all around the world much like the little baby spiders scatter when you squish their mummy. These people didn’t just change, they went into hiding, worked in the shadows, spreading their regime and finding each other - creating networks.

All we are seeing now is those people (well their kids and grandkids) finally coming out of hiding because their leaders are telling them that the viewpoint they have held all their lives is now right and it’s the time to act. They never went away, they just hid in the shadows.

At times of crisis, we look to our leaders for the right way to act and we like to think we are fairly evolved and socialised but we are only really one maybe two paychecks from complete anarchy and it’s happening right in front of our eyes.

We are also great at just ignoring what we don’t like to see because if I close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears, it will go away...eventually. We are great at avoiding unpleasant or uncomfortable truths and if we can lie to ourselves, how easy is it to lie to others? The current leaders are openly telling their countries that racism is absolutely ok, that it’s ok to only care about yourself because that’s how they got there and they are SUPER successful. They are telling their nations hat narcissism is cool - it’s totally ok to love yourself. A lot. The uncomfortable truth is that it’s always been there, we just pretended like it wasn’t and simply swept all that shit under the world’s carpet hoping that if we ignored it for long enough, it would just go away.

It’s now highlighted a massive problem within our societies. We ARE broken but no one wants to admit this and even less so do we want to attempt to fix it because that would take hard work and admitting that we went in the wrong direction somewhere along the way to creating our mighty empires. We haven’t really evolved much past the 15th century when the kings and queens ruled with an iron fist and the odd bit of torture to keep things spicy.

Now, as a society, we aren’t very good at self regulating our behaviour. We generally need the fear of punishment if we do wrong. Whether that’s being thrown in jail, fined or ostracised from the group we call family, it doesn’t matter, we will tend to toe the line if we are scared of being punished for bad behaviour.

However, what we deem as bad behaviour is up to our leaders and the society we live in. We also need to believe that the people who are meant to uphold these laws are infallible. that they are capable of self regulating but I want you to look back on the first sentence of that paragraph. Humans really aren’t very good at it and here lies the problem. This is the lie we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night but the lie is simple; that our leaders are looking out for us and not themselves and their own little tribes.

Now I can already imagine several of you shifting in your chair uncomfortably and others dreaming of rebellions and bloody revolutions. Standing on a pile of bodies with your tits hanging out, the wind in your hair as you hold your tattered flag proudly but it doesn’t have to be this way at all.

and this brings us on to democracy. I can hear people screaming that democracy works. I mean, we get a say in who looks after us, who makes our laws, who ensures these laws are upheld. That works on paper but no one accounts for how complex society really is. We live in a fast world where everything is pretty much instant. Instant coffee, instagram, instant meals. We are now so incapable of concentrating for more than five seconds without being bored and we are absolutely BOMBARDED by continually impossible standards via TV, internet and radio. Buy this and you too can look fifty years younger.

We worship superficial beauty and treat people who are ‘naturally’ beautiful like Gods and Godesses and then wonder why they mutilate themselves in order to continue looking young when that worship starts to fade. It’s like a drug and we become hooked on that worship.

We are a throwaway society - we throw away everything, including the very same celebrities who we worshipped five minutes before and, unfortunately here is where the problem lies.

We want continualy entertainment. We can’t stand being bored - we want the next big meme, gif or fad to take us away from the misery that is the day to day living. We don’t want to believe that we are being duped by the very leaders that WE placed there. That we were wrong in our choices because they promised the impossible - a simple fix to an incredibly complex and difficult problem. There is no easy fix for this and there, unfortunately, may be an entire collapse before we finally admit there is a problem rather than continually doubling down on the choice we secretly know is wrong.

Democracy and (here’s a really naughty word) socialism can and does work if done properly, however, misinformation is the biggest problem right now and as the very people who are leading us got there through misinformation, why the hell are they going to tackle that problem? As a society we really need to do a bit of soul searching - admitting the faults and the crimes committed against various groups and accepting it happened. This isn’t going to go away and if we don’t at least attempt to try and make amends, it will eventually blow up.

I can only hope I’m wrong and that we start waking up before it’s too late...

#democracy #life

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markgottliebliteraryagent · 5 years ago

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Journalist, Editor & Author of Historical Fiction James Wade

James Wade is a seasoned journalist, editor and the author of the novel All Things Left Wild. Set during the turn of the 20th century, when a botched robbery leaves a young boy dead and sets two men on conflicting journeys across untamed landscape—All Things Left Wide is a coming of age for one, a mid-life odyssey for the other, and an illustration of the violence and corruption prevalent in our fast-expanding country. All Things Left Wild is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing.

Your novel, All Things Left Wild, is set during the turn of the 20th century in the American southwest. What is it about that particular time period and place that fascinates you?

Folks tend to consider America as settled and civilized by that time, but much of the Southwest was still divided into territories rather than states, and the lack of transportation infrastructure coupled with the rugged landscape served to essentially cut these people off from the rest of the country. Small-time criminals found it easier to thrive, while many a shady “businessman” found fortune in these areas by simply bullying their competition into submission.

The country was only one generation removed from the Civil War, and yet it was also at the beginning of what would be the most remarkable century of progress in human history. We were essentially trying to find our footing as a nation, while also seeing the world around us modernize at an unprecedented pace. That’s something we’ve dealt with ever since, and are still dealing with today.

I’m also drawn to the Southwest, no matter the time period, because of its remarkably diverse landscape and population. The blending of cultures has created such unique traditions, food, music, and literature.

Do you feel that the type of violence and corruption that was prevalent in our fast-expanding country of that day and age is somewhat present today but in other forms?

Absolutely. Any time there is expansion, something growing more quickly than the regulations surrounding it, then it becomes an attractive breeding ground for greed and corruption. Any new industry gaining momentum, or disruptive technology we see come to market, creates uncertainty. The corrupt thrive on that uncertainty, using it to their advantage however they can. In 1910 it was swindling settlers out of land rights or mineral claims. Today it’s fraudulent investing or predatory lending or even the spread of misinformation on social media. There’s always someone willing to excuse morals in favor of money or power.

Also, the disconnect between rich and poor was growing rapidly during this time, much like it has in recent years. From the post-Civil War 1870s through the Great Depression, the country saw a massive income inequality, and you began to have similar economic anxieties to what we’re seeing now.

“...at some point you just have to pull yourself back from that fascination or you risk losing the pace of the story.”

What is the research process like for you when constructing the backdrop for a historical novel? Did you uncover any hidden gems along the way?

The fun part is getting to read about history, watch Ken Burns documentaries, and travel to these awe-inspiring landscapes, all while calling it "work." My wife and spent more than a year traveling the country in a small trailer, and it was seeing these places in person that really helped me understand the history.

The process could also be frustrating, primarily because you uncover so many hidden gems and you want to work them all into the novel, which is usually impossible. For example, there’s a small town called Mesilla near Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s only a few blocks, mainly geared toward tourists, but it’s so rich in history. In the early 1900s it was the hub for stagecoaches, travelers, vendors, merchants, parties, you name it. It played such a central role in shaping that part of the world. After we visited the area, I knew I needed to include this town in the novel; but the more I read about it, and talked to the locals who’d been there for generations, the more space I wanted to give to Mesilla. But that wasn’t really conducive to the narrative, so at some point you just have to pull yourself back from that fascination or you risk losing the pace of the story.

“In drawing that human connection to the past, it brings historical events to life.”

Does writing historical fiction present its own set of challenges and limitations, or do you find writing historical fiction to be liberating?

There are certainly challenges, like wanting to do justice to the people and places of the time. But even though All Things Left Wild has historical elements, it’s a work of fiction first and foremost. I wouldn’t want anyone reading this as a history lesson, so I tried not to put any limitations on where the story might go. There are real names and events which are mentioned, but all of the characters and situations are entirely created.

There is a certain liberation in writing a character who is from our past, yet has the same motivations, same internal struggles, etc. as we deal with today. In the novel, we see characters who are conflicted about their family, their faith, their own measure of “goodness.” Those are things a lot of us have questioned in our own lives. In drawing that human connection to the past, you can help bring it to life.

Are there any authors or books that were of influence to your writing, or those you might enjoy reading for pleasure? For instance, Cormac McCarthy seems to come to mind...

Yes, I am a Cormac McCarthy fanatic. I consider his Border Trilogy the finest collection of prose I’ve ever read. I would hope just by having read books that well-written I could somehow draw inspiration. McCarthy was a close study of Faulkner and I think it shows immensely in his writing.

Yes, certainly McCarthy is a huge influence. In my humble opinion he is the best living writer in the world, and his prose is both inspiring and motivating.

Flannery O’Connor is another author who I continually turn to for motivation, along with John Irving. I find O’Connor is best for voice, Irving for pacing. I also can’t stop re-reading Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By. It’s his debut novel (I believe he was 25 when he wrote it), and it’s far too good for anyone’s first try.

I read a lot of non-fiction, be it history or philosophy or outdoor guidebooks. I read political biographies, sports writing, and anything my wife tells me is good (most recently it was Dispatches from Pluto by Richard Grant). I just finished The Liberal Redneck Manifesto, a political comedy book by Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan, and Corey Ryan Forrester. It was a wonderfully honest take on Southern politics and culture.

For fiction I tend to read mostly older novels, only because there are so many I haven’t read yet. But there are supremely talented writers who are in their prime right now, and I try to support them as much as I can. Sometimes I’ll buy a book by an author I like, knowing I won’t be able to read it for another several months. Authors who have impressed me in the past few years include: Sarah Bird, Colson Whitehead, May Cobb, Owen Egerton, David Joy, Joe Lansdale, Ta-Nahisi Coates, and Benjamin Saenz, just to name a few. I may be biased, but I truly believe we are coming into a special era of American literature, with so many talented writers young and old.

How did you find your literary agent and go on to get published? What was that moment like when you heard that your major debut novel would be published?

I first heard you (the incomparable Mark Gottlieb) speak on a panel in 2016 at the Writers’ League of Texas Agents & Editors Conference just down the street from my home in Austin, Texas. I was struck by your professionalism, and your sincerity when speaking about your clients. You were the first person I queried when I finished the manuscript. So, naturally, when you approached me to talk about representation I was completely on-board. I remember being camped in the Black Hills in South Dakota and not having enough cell signal to call you, so I hiked up to the top of a ridgeline holding my phone up like one of those cell service commercials.

The pedigree spoke for itself, but it was your passion for the work that stuck out to me. You were able to have an in-depth conversation about the manuscript just a few days after I sent it to you. I always try to find the smartest person in the room and learn from them, and you fit that bill perfectly. You made the “finding an agent” part so seamless and stress-free, I assumed finding a publisher would be when the real panic set in. But I think within eight days of agreeing to work together, you sent me our first offer.

“Trident Media Group is essentially the movie-version of what an author dreams their literary agency will look like.”

What was it like coming to New York City to see the Trident Media Group offices in-person...did things start to feel more real then?

Let’s state the obvious, first: New York is the publishing kingdom and the Trident Media Group has as impressive a castle as you’ll find. The location across from Madison Square Park, the towering building, the immaculate views—Trident Media Group is essentially the movie-version of what an author dreams their literary agency will look like. Then, you see the actual books from Trident Media Group clients: best-selling fiction, award-winning non-fiction, critically acclaimed authors, celebrity biographies. For a new writer, it was overwhelming in the best way.

For myself, as well as other authors I’ve spoken with, things may never feel entirely "real." There’s a certain imposter syndrome that permeates the creative community. It reminds you that no matter how many short stories you publish, you’ve never written a novel. Or no matter how many novels you publish, you haven’t sold X number, or appeared on X list. I asked Owen Egerton, who won the 2018 PEN Southwest Award, if he felt that recognition made him a "real" writer. His answer? “I just started thinking, well, it’s not a Pulitzer.”

I think that sort of doubt is actually great for writers. It pushes us to keep improving our craft. All that being said, did touring the best literary agency in the world cause me to feel somewhat legitimized as an author? Hell yes, it did.

Does the prospect of working with Blackstone Publishing excite you? They are very nimble and are also a leading publisher of audiobooks. I'm betting the audio version of All Things Left Wild will have amazing production value.

I think it’s always exciting to work with someone who wants to work with you. It’s also humbling, to have such a well-respected publisher be willing to make you an offer. Not to mention, the trust Blackstone has shown in me as a debut author.

I love the idea that Blackstone is a well-entrenched publisher of audiobooks, while also being a relatively new print publisher. It provides the stability of experience, but also gives us a chance to grow together. And make no mistake, Blackstone is growing like crazy.

Under the leadership of Josh Stanton, Rick Bleiweiss, and the entire team in both New York and Oregon, Blackstone is emerging as a powerhouse in the publishing world. They’re signing big name authors from other major houses, while still focusing on the promotion of new writers and new ideas.

Not to mention, the folks who make up the Blackstone Publishing family are as good a group as I could have hoped to work with. Jeff Yamaguchi, Megan Wahrenbrock, Greg Boguslawski, and Mandy Earles have really nailed the independent bookstore market, which I believe is the lifeblood of the modern publishing industry. Lauren Maturo was just named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree for her exceptional publicity work at Blackstone. And I can’t imagine anyone in the business has someone as sharp as Blackstone’s Josie Woodbridge captaining the day-to-day.

As for the audio version of the novel, I mean, what better position could we be in? Blackstone created an audiobook empire known for its professionalism and production value. I can’t imagine how cool it will be to have them putting together All Things Left Wild.

“Literary agents...are not out to get you. They want to help. In reality, they don’t get paid until you do, so they have a vested interest in your career.”

Any advice for struggling writers desperate to become published authors?

Oh, man, I don’t know. Just write. Write every damn day. Write when you don’t feel like it. Especially when you don’t feel like it. There will be inspired times, no doubt. But the difference between a writer and "someone who writes" is forcing yourself to sit down and face the story even when you’d rather do almost anything else.

Read everything, and read it often.

Learn to write a decent query letter. Make sure you put your best foot forward when seeking literary agents. And once you find an agent, listen to him/her. Literary agents, for the most part, are not out to get you. They want to help. In reality, they don’t get paid until you do, so they have a vested interest in your career.

Also, don’t get discouraged. I know it’s easy to do. I let my shoulders slump a good deal more than I’d care to admit. For me, it takes hiking, or a cold beer(s), or a pep-talk from my brilliant wife, before I can get back in the saddle. You have to find what works for you.

Most importantly, cut yourself some slack. Do you know how hard writing is? It’s hard, folks. You’re writing something, creating something from scratch that belongs solely to you, and you’re doing it while knowing it will be rejected. Whether it’s by a magazine, an agent, a publisher, a critic, a one-star review on Amazon or Goodreads, etc., your work is going to be rejected at some point by someone. And yet, you have to be excited enough and motivated enough to continue on despite that fact.

What can we expect next from the writings of James Wade?

I’m excited and anxious about All Things Left Wild making its debut. It will be my first time going through the process of releasing a novel, so there are a lot of unknowns there. But continuing to write has kept me grounded. While the first novel was in post-production, I was able to write a second manuscript, which was also accepted by Blackstone. That novel, River, Sing Out, is set in modern day East Texas, and deals with the vicious cycle of poverty and drug abuse in rural areas.

I’m currently working on a third manuscript which flips back to Southwest Texas and follows the son of a ranchhand during World War II. I don’t know how any of this will turn out, but I do know I’ll keep writing. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. If you enjoy the process, everything else is just a bonus.

#jameswade #allthingsleftwide #blackstonepublishing #rickbleiwiess #blackstoneaudio #cormacmccarthy #markgottliebagent #tridentmediagroup

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