#just pay them and fund the fucking nhs like i literally can’t

[44prop]

i’m so sick of this government, pay the nurses, junior doctors and paramedics whatever they ask for like how is this even up for debate

[oatmilkovich]

Hi there,

I remember seeing your post about Sondheim's comment about Cats and then saw your tag about ALW. So now I'm curious about why all the hate because it's definitely not the first time I've heard this. I mean, I know very little of theatre but thought why not just ask. Good to learn something new everyday. 🙂

Also, sorry for your loss 😕

hey!

so there’s a couple things about ALW. i’ve personally never been a fan of his work — i think the majority is pretty mediocre, he’s had many more misses than hits. plus, he’s really leant towards commercial blockbusters - like his reimagining of cinderella that’s currently in the west end right now.

even more so he’s been known for being awful to work with — recently he was reported screaming at the cinderella cast because of a bad review from the new york post (i cannot for the life of me find the article now so someone’s team has done some scrubbing off the internet) and told them that young performers are just members of the service industry and no one deserves to be on stage. you can’t create genuine, heart filled original work with the mindset that you’re working in the service industry — that’s why his work is always so mediocre. he’s here to sell tickets and have his own name up in lights.

the biggest thing for me is that ALW is a life long member of the conservative party here in the UK — the only reason he’s now decided to denounce his loyalty to the party is because of the way they handled the arts in during the covid pandemic. not because of the fact they hate the poor or are happy to starve children and leave them homeless or get away with people burning in their own houses (and block measures to stop it again) or selling off the NHS to their friends and causing a health care crisis or being perfectly happy for the ‘bodies to pile up’ because it was easier than covid measures or cutting funding for arts and education for state education or wanting people to die in the channel rather then helping them seek asylum after escaping danger in their home countries or handed out rounds of applause for NHS workers instead of raising their pay during a fucking pandemic. i could go on but you get the picture — tories are genuine pure evil and inhumane bastards that are happy to watch the poor die as the rich get richer.

no, the only reason he “stopped” being a tory is because of his bloody musical cinderella being pushed back because of lockdown measures. this isn’t even mentioning the fact he was a member of the house of lords which is group of unelected (!!!) officials who are allowed to criticise, vote on and impact laws and bills that are passed through the british parliament. so he was a genuine member of the british parliament — despite not being voted in by anyone (he was appointed by the queen, which is a whole other layer of archaic) — and yet he voted only in 2% of votes passed through the house. though in one example, he flew back home to vote for a tax cut — so you know, we can see where his priorities lie.

so that’s what people mean when they say we won’t have this same reaction to ALW passing as we have had with sondheim. sondheim changed the game of musical theatre and revolutionised it, mentoring new talent and literally paving the way for the future of the genre. ALW has just been… here — he’s had an impact, sure, but we won’t miss his place in the industry. hell, i’ve even met the guy and i think he sucks.

but anyways, if you like ALW musicals — go for it. i’m never gonna tell someone that they can’t but supporting him and his politics however… yeah. not for me.

anyways - have a lovely day, i hope this clears things up for you. sorry it took me a few days to get to ❤️❤️

[thessalian]

Thess vs Promises to Keep

So I have what I fear may be stomach flu. Everything hurts and I am afraid to eat anything lest it come back up again or be generally miserable while digesting etc. In summary: BLEGH.

However, I surmise that some of it is stress. Why? Once again, fucking Brexit. Or rather, in this case, the Conservative party leadership bullshit.

I feel like there are issues where politicians are being allowed to get away with literal murder. In this case, at least, the murder is largely figurative ... for now. Thing is, there are all these promises being made and no one seems to be asking the big questions about said promises. Actually, there’s really only one question, when you boil it down to its essentials: “And how do you plan to do that?”

Johnson keeps saying so many things. I mean, the scary one at the moment is the thing about dealing with “the crime wave sweeping the nation”. Mostly this seems to be an excuse to broaden the scope of stop-and-search, saying that it’s “ridiculous” to label the practice as discriminatory. Having the 20k police officers that were peeled out of the budget since May took over back would probably be good, but I want to know how he can guarantee that the stop-and-search thing wouldn’t end up discriminating unduly against POC (spoiler: he can’t, doesn’t want to, and won’t) ... and most of all, I want to know where the money is going to come from.

That’s actually the really big question I want to keep asking every time these people talk about the big changes they’ll make, the big investments they’ll make into the NHS, education, etc - once we’re out of the EU and everything is unicorns and rainbows, obviously. It’s the only question: “WITH WHAT MONEY?” We have a £39 billion ‘divorce bill’ coming, and after that, what’s going to happen to our economy, exactly? We have no idea what our trade deals are going to look like at this juncture; we’re operating on the assumption that all our deals will be better, and not taking into account any new tariffs (and there will be SO MANY new tariffs) or the hit the economy’s going to take with the rich and powerful who want this shit so badly sitting on all the money and making the average person pay the brunt of the cost of their hubris. I want to know where the money is going to come from when so much of it will end up going to disaster planning when this all goes to hell.

Johnson keeps saying that he’ll borrow it - that he will entertain massive loans to pay for all his promises. Two issues with that: the first one being, “From whom?” I don’t know how loans of that size actually work, but that’s got to be national level shit. Most of the countries I can think of that might be happy to take that burden on ... I wouldn’t want them involved in our financial affairs. I am, of course, speaking of the US. I am not happy with US involvement in our financial affairs specifically because they want a foothold into turning our National Health Service, which is doing its best and keeping people alive despite being massively underfunded (or, more to the point, the funding it gets being spent on middle management assholes who are sent in to assess the service and set unrealistic targets that they then have to stay and help us meet, just so they can keep their high-paying jobs while the administrative end gets underpaid, overworked and chained to the coalface by red tape) into that single-payer health insurance nightmare the US runs, which has killed so many and made so many more miserable and unhealthy.

Most of all, though ... if we borrow that amount, how the fuck are we going to pay it back? We are not the trade powerhouse some people would like to believe we are. We’ve screwed our exports to the wall, most of the companies who moved here or even started here moved the bulk of their interests out of the UK when this Brexit shit went down, and on the whole, we don’t have a whole lot of any actual substance to offer the rest of the world. We make good intermediaries, but we lack for natural resources. Our steel industry has more or less karked it, and when Brexit happens, all the financial companies who happily made their homes here are going to move elsewhere. So where, exactly, are we going to get the money to repay loans when we’re looking at a continuation and in fact deepening of the austerity that’s been plaguing us for years? Particularly when interest is involved - I mean, interest is no joke on a loan that size.

Everything I hear, everything I see ... it all just worries me more. And it doesn’t bloody help when I’m a temp with stomach flu. Thank the gods I’d just been doing busywork for this week - see, they signed me on way early so I could see how the office works as a whole before setting me as cover for each of the ladies in Cardiology in turn as they take their (thankfully staggered) holidays. Good long-term assignment, but I hate missing time in the first week. I blame the change in weather and the fucking stress.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: June 2018

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of June 2018 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

It somehow didn’t occur to Isabel Oakeshott that, when she has seen evidence of collusion between Arron Banks of Leave.EU and the Kremlin, the correct course of action is to report this to the relevant bodies immediately - not withhold the information for a year thinking it would make her look really, really important when she reveals this information in her next book - a book which may well have been released after the after the Electoral Commission’s investigations into Banks’ activities - which also happens to obliterate her defence of not knowing how important the information was if she was holding it off for her next book, so her haranguing of Carole Cadwalladr when Cadwalladr suggested these links now looks a whole lot more unpleasant as Oakeshott knew Cadwalladr was correct but had to maintain her pro-Leave psychosis anyway

Satan’s personal cheerleader Ann Coulter outdid everyone on the right not named Alex Jones by claiming, on national television no less, that every single child see crying as they were torn away from their parents to be locked in cages were actors and their tears weren’t real - which not only comes across as sociopathic with her smears, but the fact she’s cribbing InfoWars’ usual gamibit means she’s not even being original

Architect of Britain’s economy tanking Boris Johnson responded to legitimate worries of British businesses that Britait will hit them hard with the comforting response of “fuck business” - which shows that Johnson is still doing a fine job of justifying how we send £141k a year to pay his salary when it could literally be spent on anything else, let alone taking responsibility for him being the person responsible for this complete mess

In a blatant attempt to pull the wool over the license fee payers’ eyes, the BBC reported how the proposed £20bn funding increase for the NHS would be paid for by a tax increase - pretending that they didn’t report just 48 hours previously that the cost would be comfortably paid by this mythical “Brexit dividend” that they were banging on about at the time in spite of the fact people with the most basic understanding of economics or mathematics (as well as MPs on both sides of the aisle) calling this a complete fabrication used to try and dupe the taxpayer

Unofficial spokesman for the FBPE mob Eddie Marsan decided the best response to somebody having the temerity to suggest that acting as if Britait is the only notable thing to happen in British politics since 2010 and that nothing else matters at the voting booth by calling the person with such foolish ideas a “stupid, over privileged, hipster socialist” - and that’s a direct quote

Lover of all the creatures on God’s green earth (except women, homosexuals, the poor, the elderly, and animals at the receiving end of bloodsports) Christopher Chote proved himself to be a master of the political world by blocking a debate into making upskirt photography illegal - which would have at least won him a few friends with The Sun, given their habit of publishing upskirt photos taken of random female celebrities without their knowledge or consent

Having dragged himself back into the limelight by paying the dessicated husk of UKIP’s £30, Milo Yiannopoulos rapidly reminded everyone what an irresponsible dickhead when telling a journalist “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight” - and two days later, after somebody did just that in Maryland, the best he could come up with to defend what he said were how his words were something something twisted by the leftist agenda - rather than sounding remarkably like the threats that Brandon Griesemer sent to CNN back in January, the only difference being that Griesemer didn’t attempt a pathetic backtrack of “B-b-b-but I didn’t mean it, you leftist scum” when called out on it

So either Melania Trump is so brainless that it doesn’t occur to her that wearing a jacket bearing the slogan “I don’t really care” when going to visit one of her husband’s concentration camps for Mexican children could be seen as either grossly insensitive or outright antagonistic, or she knew exactly what she was doing which means that Ivanka isn’t the only one of the Trump women who the phrase “feckless cunt” applies to 

Tommy Robinson fanboy Jason Collins attempted to raise support for his boneheaded messiah by tweeting a photo purportedly showing the massive turnout for the Free Tommy protest in London - only for anyone capable of noticing landmarks to point out it was a photo from Liverpool taken in 2005 for their Champions League winners parade.  But apart from being the wrong city, the wrong decade and completely out of contest it proves...oh what’s the fucking point?

In response to the Argentine football team cancelling a friendly against Jerusalem in protest of Israel’s actions in Gaza, Israeli defence minister Avigdor Lieberman harrumphed about how "We will not yield before a pack of anti-Semitic terrorist supporters" - which is less a statement and more a high-scoring game of Zionist bingo

Britain’s answer to Ted Nugent Morrissey claimed that he was cancelling his entire tour because something something left-wing agenda, as opposed to the more commonly-accepted reason for him cancelling his tour (which is hardly unique, as he;s cancelled over 100 concerts since 2012) being related to lack of ticket sales due to tickets being priced at £75, which is double what several bands playing the same venues are charging

In response to Jimmy Durmaz conceding a last minute free kick that led to Germany winning the match in the last second, Sweden fans responded by racially abusing Durmaz on social media while sending death threats to him and his family

On a similar note, Columbia fans sent Carlos Sanchez’s death threats after his handball led to Columbia conceding a penalty and him being red carded - which, considering what happened to Andres Escobar after his own goal in the 1994 World Cup, is the sort of thing that shouldn’t be thrown around lightly

Completing the trifecta of football fans, fans from various African countries were quick to accuse the VAR system used in the World Cup of racism after Senegal failed to win a penalty after VAR rightly adjudged that the tackle from Columbia’s Davinson Sanchez (who also happens to be black, but that’s not important right now...) was fair.  Among the conspiratorial nonsense was a damning indictment of both these vocal idiots’ knowledge of geography or their memory spans

After literally years of horror stories predicting Russian fans committing acts of hooliganism and drowning matches under a tsunami of racist chants at their World Cup, it has to be pointed out that the most notable act of racism in the first two weeks of the tournament is Alan Sugar’s tweet about the Senegal team

Obnoxious host of Singled Out (no, not Jenny McCarthy, the other one) Chris Hardwick responded to accusations of being an abusive and controlling boyfriend by saying that Chloe Dykstra cheated on him, which not only failed to dismiss the accusations but also imply that Dykstra cheating on him meant it was perfectly okay for him to be an abusive and controlling boyfriend

Z-Pack spokesperson Chris Amann very kindly allowed his own incompetence to become a part of the legal record with his nuisance lawsuit against CM Punk & Colt Cabana which saw him attempt to claim loss of earnings and damage to his reputation in spite his remaining in the employ of WWE to this day, failing to even prove that Punk named him in the podcast in reference to what he was suing for, and hiring a lawyer who managed to submit the wrong evidence to trial on several occasions.  Suffice it to say Amann did not win - but he did draw attention to the fact he had an affair with a WWE employee...

Somehow it occurred to neither Chris Grayling nor the BBC that the chaos inflicted by Govia Thameslink on people using their Northern franchise was not unique, as those using their Southern franchise have suffered the exact same problems on a much larger scale but somehow this minor detail continued to be overlooked again and again and again

According to Priti Patel it is not acceptable to see rogue behaviour from government ministers.  Just a reminder: last year Priti Patel was sacked from the government for claiming to be on holiday when she was actually holding covert meetings with several Israeli officials, meetings she had not informed the government nor the Foreign Office about

It’s interesting that left-wing blogs such as Squawkbox, The Canary, Evolve Politics and Another Angry Voice all received micro donations of between 1p and 10p due to members of the FBPE mob and the usual Tory and UKIP trolls operating under the belief that donating so little money would cost the blogs money, when all they were actually doing was giving PayPal free money while giving those blogs plenty of free material - not just the story of people deludedly thinking they could bankrupt them with donations of a few pennies, but also how the supposedly left-wing FPBE mob are just as keen to silence opposing viewpoints as followers of Farage and Rees-Mogg 

In a remarkable lack of awareness, Butch Hartman stated that he loves anime but suggested that all animators should practise other art styles - which not only came across as remarkably condescending to a vast number of animators, but seemed oblivious to the fact that every single show he created uses the exact same art style 

For some reason Real Madrid thought the best way to prepare for Spain’s World Cup campaign would be to announce they had signed Spain coach Julen Lopetegui as their new manager just three days before Spain’s opening match.  The RFEF agreed that it was such a good idea that they promptly sacked Lopetegui the day after Real Madrid announced his signing - which of course drew the usual conspiratorial bollocks from Florentino Perez, who decided to play the victim rather than consider the concept that maybe not announcing Lopetegui as their coach on the eve of the World Cup might be a bloody stupid thing to do

So having torpedoed her comeback with a bunch of racist tweets, what has Roseanne Barr done since?  Attempt to blame it on being under the effects of Ambien and, when that failed to convince anyone who checked her post history, came up with some mealy-mouthed waffling saying that her tweet that compared  Valerie Jarrett to an ape was actually about anti-semitism, convincing precisely nobody

While promoting the forgettable fluff that is Ocean’s 8 Sandra Bullock stated that any and all criticism from male film critics could be ignored as the film is not for them.  Let me put this into perspective: when noted misogynist crackpot Sam Peckinpah never tried that line to dismiss any negative reviews from female reviewers such as Pauline Kael, yet Sandra Bullock attempts such obvious gatekeeping, this is the sort of things that people who believe that GamerGate was their Woodstock will pounce on

Special mention to both Nike and Adidas for their kit designs for the World Cup, where the two companies appear to be in a competition to take what should be a series of straightforward kits to design and instead decide to be “creative” and create something ugly

And finally, because of course it is, there’s the the only person who ever took advice about prison reform from Kim Kardashian Donald Trump - although he amazingly didn’t flip-flop on that decision like a petulant child, as opposed to a child he ripped away from their parents and locked inside a cage