#or maybe its because so many social medias are american owned

[gooenthusiast]

„Don‘t swear on my internet“ seems very consistent with American „this is America, speak American“ opinions.

You know what really fucking Annoys Me about internet censorship is stuff like swear words being heavily censored because that's entirely an American cultural hangup being forced on the rest of us. I don't know a single country where swearing is as taboo as it is in America. In fact most languages have swear words that would have the same effect on an American as giving a Victorian chimney sweep a pepsi max cherry.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

[centrally-unplanned]

How exactly was so just dumb about 2020?

Honestly its a book-worthy subject - Freddie deBoer wrote one for example - and I lack the spoons to do the topic justice. So just to quickly summarize my stance, in 2020 there was a massive wave of activism, originating in the George Floyd protests, that was both wrong-on-the-merits and actively harmful in what it did. Big activist groups wasted time on bad ideas like "police defunding" and carrying water for street violence & theft, bad-as-outlined and specifically against the interests of minority Americans (who want more policing not less because crime is awful and hurts them the most, just also accountable policing).

Many, many organizations got convinced that ~structural racism~ was Inside The House and organized large-scale inner-org ideological wars against their own staff, generally hunting ghosts since, no, progressive political organizations and liberal US universities are not the source of racial income inequality. People wasted millions of dollars, fired innocent people, made tens of thousands feel afraid to share their true opinions, and degraded organizational trust and effectiveness.

The scale of these things is, of course, small! Most people work in accounting firms or at State U and maybe had to put up with some dumb "racial reckoning" zoom calls. But A: individual lives are lived individually, for the people affected this was very bad. These organizations engaged is systematic discrimination against their racial & ideological opponents, in ways that were very hard to escape. And the results of these things stuck - political campaigning orgs and media outlets just got bad at their jobs because their staff was spending time on purity tests and building parasitic checkbox consulting orgs that are still around.

And most notably, it was awfully, ludicrously unpopular. It pushed all Americans who are not highly educated elite professionals (and generally white, generally women at that) to the right out of disgust. Which if your goals are like your own career or w/e I guess you don't care, but if you are an explicitly political movement I think own-goaling that badly is a demerit. This movement's contribution to the lasting appeal of Donald Trump is not zero by any means.

Hard to say what the counterfactual is because 2020 was uh quite a year. But imo if the social justice "racial reckoning" did not happen we would on net be better off.

(On top of all this, as deBoer mentions in that link, it is particularly annoying how many people in the SJ camp today pretend none of this ever really happened)

(And thank you for the question ofc!)

[domini-porter]

Quick reminder for Americans: even if you don’t like either presidential candidate, there are so many more things to vote for on your ballot.

If you think president is too big and amorphous or too corrupt and rigged, what about the elections in your town? Everything starts small and local. Where you’re one of a much more tangible number than 300,000,000. Even in big cities things are broken down into smaller chunks where your vote counts with greater weight.

Also, you’re not obligated to cast a vote for everything on the ballot! Just the ones you feel like!

Okay.

I’m trying to be kind about this but it’s difficult. Voting isn’t difficult. People are asking you to choose between options and you choose the option that seems best. That’s it. People fight and die even now for your right to do this. To read a pamphlet (optional!) and fill out a form. That’s it.

The other thing is this: someone on that form will win. No matter what. One of those names will be in charge. Not because it’s rigged, but because those are the people you get to pick from, and one of them will win. That is how every election for anything works.

Anyway. This next part is for my purity-test leftists specifically, but who knows, maybe it applies to you too!

Who do you think you’re helping by sitting out a vote that could determine if I, personally—a real human person and maybe your friend or acquaintance or loved one—am branded a deviant and an undesirable and a criminal and imprisoned or worse? People in Gaza who are certainly drinking in your social media posts like a healing elixir and thinking wow, I’m so grateful Westerners are using my suffering to buff up their own moral purity, I’m really glad they’re refusing to participate in a free and democratic election, that’s so cool and helpful to me, personally?

The fucking gall of you. The privilege and heartlessness of you. The laziness and cruelty and selfishness of you. Just say you’re too invested in looking like a galaxy-brain iconoclast to give ten minutes of your time to help me not live every second of my life—which is happening next door or down the street or a neighborhood over from you, right now, every day—in fear and despair. Get just so absolutely fucked.

For everyone else: check your voter registration if you’re unsure or live in a state prone to purging its voter rolls! If you can vote early, vote as early as you can!

If you’ve never voted before but have decided this year’s the year, that’s so amazing and I’m so excited and it’s super-easy and honestly at least kind of fun; I guarantee your voter guide will have some amazing weirdos in it, because it’s America and everyone can try for it. But if you don’t vote—you, in your much-smaller voting pool than you might realize—those weirdos running to outlaw ducks have a distressingly better shot. And once they’re on the city council, maybe they run for mayor. And then state rep. And so on.

Please don’t be one of those people who claims their voice isn’t heard and decides to self-fulfill that prophecy by refusing to use their voice at all. It has real, lasting, immediate consequences for people you see every day. It has real, lasting consequences for you, too; consequences that really make spending ten minutes filling out a scantron seem a lot less difficult in retrospect.

Vote like your life depends on it. And if it doesn’t, you have my explicit permission to vote like mine does.

[noxiatoxia]

What do you think about kokichis hat / whole design controversy ? You seem like a dangan expert so i want to know your 2 cents

So, this is going to be a bit of a history lesson.

Kokichi is very obviously supposed to be a Nazi reference. That's pretty undeniable. From the SS Officer Visor to the Grape Fanta parody (Fanta having been created by Nazi Germany) it is very much an intentional reference.

This is where culture shock comes into play.

Please note as you read I am not attempting to make a statement on if this is "okay" or "bad" - I am simply presenting the facts of the matter.

As you can imagine, WWII is taught differently depending on where you're from. America, Germany, Italy, Japan, etc. A country will typically focus on its own perspective of events. This not only influences the narrative, but what parts of history are most focused on. For example, in Germany, it is often cited that they focus very heavily on Nazism and Hitler, and reinforce the tragedies they were responsible for. American schools will focus on a more general overview, with a lesson maybe on the atomic bombings they committed (and condemning their actions).

So for Japan, it's obviously different, too.

You can read some personal accounts on threads like this one and this one. But it mostly boils down to this: because a country will mostly focus on their own personal experience when teaching about a historical event, in this case, Nazism is not covered nearly as much in a Japanese curriculum as it would be in an American or German one.

This article from 2015, titled "What is the Nazi Chic Fashion and why is it spreading in Asia?" has a good excerpt, which I'll translate (the article is in Japanese):

しかし、Kidd氏が、欧米のマーケットよりも遥かにナチ・シックが急速に広がっている、と話すアジアのファッション・マーケットでは、ナチのシンボルが繰り返し使われている背景にあるものは異なる。ヒトラーと結び付いた文化的ハードルは低く、かぎ十字を身につけてもショックは本質的に大きくない。

However, according to Kidd, "Nazi Chic" is spreading much, much more rapidly in the Asian fashion market compared to the Western fashion market. However, the context behind the repeated usage of Nazi symbols is different to that of the Western market. The cultural hurdles of wearing something associated with Hitler are much lower, and not intrinsically all that shocking.

This is evident in many pieces of media meant for children or teens. Please think to yourself if you've encountered a piece of Western media made for children or young teens that depicts Nazism or Hitler in a comedic or stylish fashion. Personally, I cannot think of any.

But that is not the same in Japan. For example, the 1995 movie Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn has a scene where the characters Goten and Trunks fight a caricature of Hitler.

Or Ouran High School Host Club, a 2002-2010 manga and 2006 anime, had not just a gag in the anime depicting an all-girl school as Nazis, but a piece of art drawn by the Mangaka herself of the main characters wearing Nazi Chic fashion.

Of course, this is not to say Japan is a-okay with Nazi imagery as a whole. Like any country, citizens have their own views and opinions. There are plenty of Japanese citizens who do not think this type of fashion style is okay. Much like how in America, there are people who think humorous depictions of Hitler are fine. I am just bringing these up to say, from a cultural standpoint, this subject is handled slightly differently.

That takes us back to Kokichi. Kokichi is definitely supposed to be reference to Nazi Germany. But I think it's much clearer now that it's not intended to be malicious. Making jokes or fashion statements out of this is more socially acceptable relative to the west. You still have the right to find it uncomfortable or not okay if it personally bothers you, but I am just explaining why this came to be, why it is not intended to be malicious, and why it was allowed.

I hope you find it informative. :]

[old-school-butch]

What do they think Hamas wants? What do they think Israel is supposed to do? Do they seriously think Israel is supposed to be like sure here you go we are all going to leave Israel and you can have everything? Do they think that would bring about peace? I’m serious. Like really do they think there is anything Israel could do that would stop any of this? Do they think Israel should’ve done nothing and this situation would’ve just disappeared? Americans are the dumbest fucking people on the planet. Hamas wants compliance or death, that’s how terrorism works, that’s war.

Whoever is running the information warfare at Hamas is truly brilliant. The ideology of Islamists has been run through some kind of autotuner so it sounds like it came from a chapter in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Western liberals are eating it up. While liberals are still catching up on which river and which sea the chant refers to, they still don't grasp that the end goal here is the elimination of the state of Israel entirely. And while 20% of Israelis are Arab Muslims, there are zero Jews in Gaza. The PR people are saying Zionist these days instead of Jews, so maybe it doesn't sound too bad when they say Kill All Zionists but that's just the English translation. Zionism is the creation of a Jewish state. Hamas will call it the 'Zionist entity' because they don't recognize it as a state. They don't recognize it because all states should be Muslim. Israel is occupying territory that should be Muslim. When they say 'end the occupation' it sounds like a call for liberation of an oppressed people, instead of the desire to destroy Israel, kill or expel the Jews and create a Muslim state in its place.

Yemen's Houthi rebels (who are currently attacking Israel) have a slogan "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam" and I think it says a lot that they take the time to double down on how much they hate Jews/Israel instead of a single 'Houthis are great!' thrown into their own slogan.

The Islamists have noted the 'anti-colonial' rhetoric in Western universities and capitalized on it by positioning Israel as a proxy for the West and thus a scapegoat for the West's sins of imperialism. It does rely on some very old anti-Semitic tricks - because Jews assimilate fairly well (because they don't have an evangelical aspect to the faith) they are both within a culture and othered from the culture - the perfect scapegoat. Many liberals shrugged when the Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanted "Jews will not replace us" but the suspicion that Jews control the media, capitalism, also socialism, Hollywood (and any other center of power you can imagine) runs very deep in Western cultural anxiety. Imagining Israel as a prowerful villian is all too easy when you're primed to believe that.

A wild example of this is how Westerners view Israel as a colonialist power rather than a gathering point for religious refugees. The reality that Jews originated from the land of JUDEA should not be hard to grasp, but is conveniently ignored. The fact that they've negotiated with colonial powers like Britain and the UN is viewed as a sign of political power, even though the main goal of those colonial powers was to prevent Jewish refugees from flooding their own countries. And the memory that the post WW2 boost in political heft came at the price of the Holocaust in Europe, seems to have been lost. The reality that most Israelis are Jewish refugees expelled from Muslim countries, is conveniently ignored. There are enough white faces and dual citizens in Israel for guilty Westerners to find a convenient scapegoat to do all that decolonizing and let themselves be destroyed for our sins. Not that anyone is thinking that hard about it, it just feels right, because it's safe and convenient to accept blame and then shift it to someone else - no matter how many land acknowledgements they crank out.

I guess Westerners think colonizing is something only white people do, and they are blissfully unaware of the size and scope of the Arab Islamic Empires of the past. And also apparently unaware that Islamists explicitly say they want to recreate that empire. Zionists want a single state - and I have a lot of issues with the idea of a religious state at all, but no one can accuse Jews of ever having or wanting to create an Empire. Israel might be criticized for not having a more liberal democractic state, but Hamas isn't even trying to create one. It wants a single Muslim state occupying their entire region, where Jews are killed or expelled and Islamists can consolidate regional power - that's their goal. But the slogan is 'end the occupation' which sounds way nicer than 'end the occupation of land of Israel by Jews so we can make an Islamic state in its place and kill all the Jews who don't run away fast enough.'

Maybe it's that most Westerners don't live in a theocracy, and have no sense of just how controlling and energetic theocratic societies can be, that they can't grasp the idea of global jihad and what that really means. "The Caliphate is the answer" is written in Arabic on protest signs, flying under the radar of English-speakers and certainly not seen as hate speech, but when people tell you they want to establish a global world order under Islamic rule, and are actively coordinating their efforts between states and regions - you should believe them. Moderation is apostasy, punishable by death. Anyone negotiating with Israel faces opposition from more radical Islamists ready to take their place. This is why Islamists spend most of their time attacking more moderate Islamic states and leaders. And by 'moderate' I mean the Taliban, which can barely set up a state in Afghanistan - because it means diverting resources from expanding and conquering other areas. A group called ISIS-K is trying to overturn the Taliban to bring back the glory days of the Khorason, an entity so sprawling it would involve invading China, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, which would undoubtedly spark a global conflict. That doesn't phase them. Hamas can barely control the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which rejects any peace accords with Israel including the Oslo accord. Dying as a martyr is the highest achivement - eternal war is not a problem. The Islamic world is failing to contain radical movements it created and supported for its own interests.

The Palestinians are a good microcosm of this. When Israel declared independence in 1948, the region was invaded by its neighbors. The war ended with Jordan occupying the West Bank and Egypt occupying Gaza and normally the people living there would have been absorbed into these countries, or created a self-governed state. Instead Palestinians, as a group, were created as a stateless people. They didn't want to form a state within the boundaries determined by the war, but instead remain as refugees from a war and promised the 'right of return' i.e. that Israel would be returned to them. Importantly, the war didn't have a declared end. It's still happening, which is how they are still refugees 75 years later. And they live in 'refugee camps', otherwise known as buildings and towns, but it's all temporary in this narrative. Does no one wonder why the pro-Palestinian rallies call for a ceasefire and not for peace? Peace is not desired, just a pause in fighting until they can regroup and try again.

A separate reality was created where the 1948 war is still happening, Israel is not real, it's a 'Zionist entity' occupying the land and that refugees includes everyone displaced by the 'ongoing' war, and all their descendants are refugees too because they have nowhere to live - because where they are living is just temporary. And ‘all they want is to go home’ (but not their current home for 3 generations, the home back in Israel ofc). In this world, they all have to right to live in the region that the zionist entity is occupying, where their duty is to establish a Muslim state. The purpose of this fiction is to create a perpetual problem for Israel, a stateless population whose entire existence is focused on them eventually overthrowing Israel. But it's had unexpected effects.

Palestinian refugees have been more than willing to bring violence to any country that has taken them in as immigrants. Their nationalists have a long list of assassinations of anyone who supports a peace treaty with Israel, including the King of Jordan, the former prime minister of Lebanon, Robert F Kennedy and more. They've also started a civil war in Jordan until they were expelled to Lebanon, where they hijacked a series of international flights and started a civil war there that lasted for 15 years. Palestinians living as refugees in Kuwait aided Saddam Hussein's invading army until they were expelled when his regime fell. These are the reasons none of Israel's neighbor's will accept any more Palestinian refugees, but the Islamist problem remains for any country in its path. What I have found most disturbing among feminists on Tumblr, however, is the complete wilful ignorance about Islamist ideology and its relationship to women. You think you’re ok with the Quran? Read it. There aren't many religions founded by a conqueror who wanted to rule the world. Read what it says about conquest, murder, torture, raping and enslaving non-Muslim women. Arab slave traders castrated men and bred female slaves who were kept as captive wives. Using sexual violence as a tool of war and as a reward for Islamic fighters is long documented and continues today. The birth rate in Gaza is about 5 children per woman and frequently exhorted to be higher. Why? Arafat said it most clearly ‘the womb of the Palestinian woman is the weapon that will defeat Israel.' Population and fertility are part of the political landscape and Islamist strategy. It's how Lebanon went from being a Christian majority country to a Muslim majority country today. There is no reason whatsoever that feminists - who have not shied away from criticizing the sexism of Christianity or Judaism - should mince words when it comes to criticizing Islam in the strongest possible terms. Islamists - who combine Islam with a goal for global dominance - should ring every alarm bell we have.

[herrlindemann]

Musik Express - September 1997, Interview with Till and Richard

Thanks to Ramjohn for the scans!

Opinions are divided on this band - demonized by some, loved by many as passionately as the fire on their stage. An interview by Peter von Stahl.

In the press, adjectives such as 'controversial', 'fascistoid' or 'glorifying violence' can still be read in Rammstein stories. Is life good with this image?

Richard: We only depict violence in our shows and address it in our lyrics. We strictly reject using or propagating violence. Every kind of music serves a cliché in the mind of a journalist. Rammstein has this heaviness, these metal guitars. The right clichés immediately pop up in your head: long hair, short pants, American metal. And then comes a band that doesn't serve all of that anymore, that has a completely different, very own appearance - and then they need a new drawer. And it probably says 'controversial' on it.

Every artist says that in an interview — no one wants to fit into a drawer. Your music isn't that revolutionary.

Richard: But bands like Krupps or Front 242 are different. Rammstein is just unique. There is no band that sounds like Rammstein.

Till: I just have to listen to our neighboring rehearsal rooms: on the left it sounds like Pearl Jam, on the right like something else that you've known for a long time. You try to make it easy for yourself.

Richard: Maybe they just never got the hang of it because they only ever wanted to serve one market. Even more extreme in the West than here in the East. There was no market to serve.

Till: After the reunification, I drove over to the west and used my mountain greeting money to stuff my stomach with rubber animals, yoghurt and all that stuff. But that's about it. It was the same with music: there was so much. But soon it was noticed that the water is not boiled any hotter there than it is here. We used to look forward to a concert for weeks, today you can see 30 to 40 things in Berlin every evening.

The German media have a hard time with hard, German-sounding music. Record buyers and concert goers don't seem to have a problem with you.

Till: The media's problem with us also has something to do with a lack of musical tradition and history, because we don't want anything to do with understandable German history either. After the war, Americans and the English brought rock, and apart from German hits, there was never anything that had its roots here.

This is also a question of phonetics. Till rolls the 'R' deeply and evocatively - and everyone thinks of the sound of an original shellac with Göbbels speeches.

Till: The rolling 'R' didn't even come about on purpose. It came naturally because in that low pitch you sing like that automatically. I'm not actually a musician. I have absolutely no knowledge of the instruments. But I can give good support to our music with my voice and the lyrics. It's a matter of illustration, tone color, phonetics. We didn't want to create a fascist attitude, for God's sake. Only later, when we were asked about it in interviews, did we have to deal with it.

And yet it is certainly no coincidence that you provide music for David Lynch and not for Walt Disney. Because of his preference for the narrow bridge between 'reason and instinct' (from the Rammstein song 'Du riechst so gut'), Lynch films were basically never anything other than filmed Rammstein subjects - only he just makes films and no music.

Richard: First of all, he's an American. We couldn't have a Lynch. The only one I can think of is Werner Herzog — I sometimes see Rammstein pictures there.

Till: The Germans only have a problem with things in Germany. As soon as a thing finds international recognition, it also becomes socially acceptable here in Germany. We noticed that through the David Lynch film: German cars, German soccer, German tennis, Formula One — no problem at all. But as long as it stays in the country, there will be unlikely friction.

'Bravo' has no problems with you - there you operate as a 'heavy band with Feuerteufel as a singer'.

Till: That was great for me. My daughter is only twelve years old and she has never understood why I travel so often, drive away so often. Now she can finally read the reason why in her newspaper.

Does your daughter listen to Rammstein or rather boy bands?

Till: No, she listen to something else. She doesn't like boy bands that much, she prefers electronic stuff with a melody.

As a single father, how do you balance work and family?

Till: It wasn't that bad before, I played drums in a punk band and we practically had our rehearsal room in the house where I lived. I had them alone for seven years, but now I share parenthood with my daughter's mother again, because I'm on the road with the band half the year.

How does your daughter actually react to the hard Rammstein texts?

Till: She always giggles. She doesn't understand the extreme things yet.

Children watch movies and TV news on these topics without understanding them. The younger fans will feel the same about your lyrics.

Till: We never intended to make music for 13 or 14 year olds. This has only recently developed through 'Bravo', 'Viva' and so on. But when I see what's on the afternoon TV program, in the news, what's in the newspaper - they have to deal with that too. With their idols Tic Tac Toe they have to deal with prostitution, with drugs. Or with tampon ads on TV, where they see small, hidden gestures at dinner - how are we supposed to leave children disturbed?

After all, the menstrual fluid is kept in a friendly light blue in the advertising. With you, blood is still blood—deep red.

Till: First and foremost we make our music for ourselves. And the images it projects in people are very different. For some, the lyrics are totally incomprehensible, but they might like the music and just let it flow. On the other hand, a girl recently told me that she walked in a performance as the hooker that appears in our song 'Seemann' — the hooker who stands by the lantern.

Which of course is never mentioned in the text...

Till: Shall I explain that it's not about a whore, but about this and that? It's her picture, her story about the song.

When you sing about SM phenomena in songs like 'Bück dich' or 'Betraf mich' on the new record, the images are more clearly defined.

Richard: Just yesterday we were with some friends and discussed Rammstein. There was also a young evangelical pastor who was terribly upset about Rammstein and especially about the text of 'Bück dich'. He complained that more and more people in his youth community were listening to Rammstein and were therefore taking the wrong path. The evening grew longer and longer, they drank more and more - and at some point it turned out that the pastor himself was the only one in the group who really lived this 'bend over' sex and that he had a different woman almost every night drives in this way.

The church, especially the Catholic one, has enough internal institutions that deal intensively with Rammstein topics: incest, sin and punishment, the devil. In contrast, the anti-authoritarian educational models of the post-1968ers, the evangelical discussion groups, seem to have failed, also because of the denial of the existence of evil. How do you feel about raising your own children?

Till: One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. I try to separate Rammstein and my private life as much as possible. That's exactly how it is with the fire effects on our stage. I'm not a pyromaniac. I never light a cigarette privately. Just as Richard procures state-of-the-art musical equipment, it's my job to take care of the pyro effects for the show. We're a band that just does its job. Anyone who knows us privately cannot believe that we are so nice. We are quite normal, we do our job like fishermen who leave their hut in the morning, kiss their children, go out to sea, fetch the fish with the nets from the depths and return to the hut in the evening. Their children go out with them from time to time, and our children sometimes go to concerts too. But when they watch their father kill fish and gut them, they quickly realize that this is father's job. If they grow up with that, they're fine with that because they keep the two things separate.

In any case better than hiding from the child that the schnitzel on the plate was once a live pig that was slaughtered.

Richard: Just like the child of a sex performer or actress might at some point see their mother in a sex scene on TV and wonder where dad is. You will learn how to deal with that.

If every artist would live their madness of whatever kind in private, then there would almost certainly only be sick people in the charts. But: Do your lyrics at least help in your private fight against your very own, hidden demons?

Till: That happens. For me, solitude always gives me a creative boost — you have another glass of wine and you feel even more shitty. Art cannot do without suffering. Art is also there to compensate for suffering.

As one of the most successful metal acts in Germany, you will probably soon suffer too little to be able to continue to nurture your art.

Richard: Above all, we have no time to suffer. Except in the lonely hours after the concerts.

Till: It makes you feel like shit. You play a concert in Berlin in front of 16,000 people, then you cycle home from the rehearsal room because the after-show parties might not be the real thing either, you sit alone in your booth and have to come down again. It's like a hangover.

At this moment, your single father support group seems to be failing you.

Richard: If you sit on each other constantly for two years, you know the whole whining by heart.

Hartmut Engler from Pur says he still wants to put the whole feeling into his lyrics at the 67th gig.

Till: Sure — he always cries. Nonsense! Everybody is saying it! Maybe at the beginning, at the first two concerts. At some point it will become operational blindness. When 'Seemann' was still very fresh, I often felt a shiver. Later on, you tend to make sure that the intonation is right.

In many of your songs you can hear borrowings from the soundtracks of old spaghetti westerns. Who is actually the inveterate Ennio Morricone fan with you?

Richard: That's me.

Till: He's a fan of old cowboy music and movies.

In this sense, Rammstein is like Karl May - you don't have to murder, desecrate and humiliate yourself to be able to write lyrics about mauling, child abuse and incest.

Till: But that's exactly the point: you're talking about 'tearing, child abuse and incest'. I wish people would approach such topics much more sensitively. My daughter is at an age when something like this could really happen to her — maybe the day after tomorrow. And so I take it upon myself to imagine what that would be like. If it were about my daughter, I would probably want to cut off an egg from a perpetrator like that, shoot him or something. On the other hand, I can also sit in a dark corner and think about what drives him to do it. And about what drives me to be able to understand such a drive. Those are the two sides of this thing: On the one hand, reason, morality, my completely normal life — for me there's no question about that. But then I sit down, close my eyes and think about how, for example, the day before yesterday I felt such a longing for this grown woman — why shouldn't someone have such a longing too, who can't even help it, because he may have been abused himself in the past. And maybe he can't appreciate what it means to transfer that desire to a child. Where do you put the value, how do you want to judge?

It's shocking how many people were abused in their childhood. On the other hand, you are accused of the fact that your texts deal less with illness and morality than with the problem of overcoming the conflict between reason and instinct.

Till: No, no. Sick is sick, there is no discussion. And if it wasn't sick by normal standards, we wouldn't need mental hospitals anymore. But more important is the question of why and how it happens. Otherwise, this is only of interest to the lawyers who dig into their clients' childhood so that they can plead insanity. I've lived in the country for quite a long time and saw a horse molester almost lynched on the village street - I really felt sorry for him.

The line between everyday life and madness is known to be fluid. After all, the worst things happen every day in most cities behind every fifth window.

Till: If that's enough. Probably behind every third. And that's why I find it sad that lyrics about things that actually happen every day can kick up so much dust. For example, we had a listening session in Malta with Petra Husemann and Tim Renner from our record company. And when he heard the line 'Couple with your own flesh and blood' from the song 'Tier', Renner immediately dismissed it - a case for the index, which in Germany includes everything about sex with animals, incest, sibling love and so on acts. I don't understand that — you can even read about the relevant extras in the 'Bild' newspaper. And yet some act as if none of this exists.

And then? What have you done? Did you soften the text at the end?

Till: Nope. We aim for it.

I was never really interested in Rammstein myself until my wife put your record on again and again. On the other hand, feminists accuse you of the worst sexism.

Richard: We keep hearing that it was women who brought their men to Rammstein. Petra Husemann, the wife of Timm Renner (Rammstein's record boss/ed.), the girlfriend of our manager Emu, many wives and girlfriends of journalists. Men seem to have more of a problem with us than women.

Maybe that's because you're a lot better looking and have a lot more muscles than most media men.

Richard: It has more to do with head and gut. Rammstein frightens many men because they recognize qualities or character traits in our texts that they carry within themselves, but which they have suppressed.

So you mean you hold something like a mirror in front of the men's faces. A mirror in which they can suddenly and suddenly see the animal in them?

Richard: The animal, sure. A lot of things. A kind of machoness when we sing about the 'Wilder im Revier'.

Till: For us, the sexism that we are accused of is more about protecting women.

I'm really sorry, but now I can't follow. I do not understand that.

Till: For us, it's about understanding the woman's feelings and then showing them as extreme as they actually are. Yesterday a journalist asked us why we don't write love songs. Love, this is just this one brief moment. But after that, that's when the work begins. The constant misery: finding each other, falling in love, sticking it out for a while, then sticking it out, and then it all starts all over again.

Do you think you know more about women than men?

Till: No, not at all.

Perhaps for this reason you cannot imagine that husband and wife can be happy together in the long term.

Till: I don't know of any intact relationships. One or two maybe, but the circumstances aren't normal there — they don't see each other very often. I'm talking about this thing: getting out of the house in the morning and putting the kids to bed at night. Where are the theater visits, who still brings flowers? Being in love, bringing flowers to your loved ones — eventually it always ends.

That's why the resolute 'no' to the female marriage wish on your new single 'Du hast'?

Till: 'until death do you part...' — that's just as unnatural as a tattoo on your arm. It won't go out for the rest of my life. At some point, as a pensioner, I’ll sit with my grandson on my lap and he’ll ask what kind of silly thing I have on my upper arm.

However, Rammstein does not seem to want to live entirely without women. After all, you've now recorded a hymn to the primary female sex organ. What do you say in the rehearsal room when you want to play this song?

Till: Sometimes we say, 'Now let's play cunt!' Isn't that what you wanted to hear?

The song title 'Kiss me, Fellfrosch' sounds a lot more tender.

Till: Fellfrosch — the word alone is a homage to this part of the body. That's a nice, childish way of looking at things: fur stands for small, furry little animals. Hamsters, guinea pigs and such. And frog or snail takes care of the second part. Fascination and disgust, both play a role.

Perhaps the disgust at the bitter aftertaste is really just a problem of overly careless personal hygiene?

Richard: Tastes change too. Much of what seemed too bitter to us in childhood tastes good to us today. On the other hand, we usually find the sweets from the past too sweet. Every fur frog tastes different. Pure question of taste. There is no judgment in the text. We're not saying it stinks.

Feminists will not see the 'fur frog' in such a differentiated way. This will cause trouble.

Till: Hopefully! That's the same topic as before: It's about something that is completely self-evident and that everyone knows. That's the most normal thing in the world. Exaggerated feminism, on the other hand, is an indictment. And when they get upset about it, that's ultimately just proof to me that they don't have a sense of humor. Just the other day someone told me a joke about a forty-centimetre cock. It was a woman.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 3, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 04, 2024

The fallout from the New York jury’s conviction of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts last Thursday, May 30, continues. Trump’s team continues to insist that the guilty verdict will help him, but that’s nonsensical on its face: if guilty verdicts are so helpful, why has he moved heaven and earth to keep the many other cases against him from going to trial? And why are he and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) calling for the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions? 

As political consultant Stuart Stevens put it: “I worked in five presidential races and helped elect Republican governors or Senators in over half the country. I have never heard anything more transparently desperate than a party trying to spin that there is some non-MAGA pool of voters who can't wait to vote for a convicted felon.”

On Friday, Morning Consult conducted a poll to gauge how voters were reacting to the guilty verdict. It showed that 54% of registered voters approved of it, while only 34% disapproved. Perhaps worse for Trump was that 49% of Independents and 15% of Republicans thought he should end his campaign. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 10% of registered Republican voters and 25% of Independents said that his conviction made it less likely that they would vote for him for president. 

Then, on Saturday, there was what Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times called a plot twist. It turns out the state of Washington has a law on the books that prevents felons from running for office. But because a candidate has to be certified to be on a ballot before they can be challenged, the issue can’t be resolved until Trump officially becomes the Republican Party’s presidential nominee at the July convention. Westneat asked, “Republicans: You sure you want to go down this road?”

On Sunday, Trump appeared on Fox and Friends for his first interview since his conviction. The interview was heavily edited, suggesting his comments were problematic in some way, but what was there was still bad enough. He repeated his plans to fire generals who refuse to do his bidding and to deport immigrants by using local police to round them up. Notably, considering his own looming sentencing, he claimed he never said “lock her up” about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a claim that reporters on social media promptly shredded with video clips of him doing exactly that. 

Media figures are puncturing Trump’s image. The verdict buried a story by The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt, who is now free of a nondisclosure agreement, explaining how he and others created an illusion that Trump was a successful businessman and alleging that Trump used the n-word on set. On Saturday, an image circulated on social media of Trump leaving Trump Tower and waving as if to a crowd, but there was no one there.

Also on Saturday, top sports talk host Colin Cowherd pushed back on the idea that the trial was rigged, telling his listeners: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you.” “Donald Trump is now a felon,” Cowherd said. “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Cowherd went on: “[Trump’s] trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist.” “Stop trying to sell me on ‘everything’s rigged, the country’s falling into the sea, the economy’s terrible,’” he continued. “The America that I live in is imperfect. But compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.”

This morning, Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that Trump’s businesses and campaign committees have funneled significant financial benefits to at least nine witnesses in the criminal campaigns against Trump, often at crucial moments in the legal proceedings. The pay of one campaign aide doubled; another got a $2 million severance package that barred him from cooperating with law enforcement. The daughter of one of the campaign’s top officials was hired onto the staff and is now the fourth-highest-paid employee, with a salary of $222,000. Payments to the companies of certain witnesses dramatically increased.

Faturechi, Elliott, and Mierjeski note that it is not uncommon for bosses to find themselves defendants, complicating their relationship with employees who might have witnessed alleged crimes. In such cases, lawyers advise the defendant not to provide any unusual benefits or penalties, to avoid the appearance of witness tampering.

Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, sent ProPublica a cease-and-desist letter saying that if the outlet and its reporters “continue their reckless campaign of defamation, President Trump will evaluate all legal remedies.” He demanded that ProPublica kill the article, keeping it from publication.

And then, this afternoon, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams, along with the U.S. Department of Labor and the State Department, unsealed an indictment charging Weidong Guan, also known as Bill Guan, the chief financial officer of the global news outlet The Epoch Times, with using the outlet to launder at least $67 million. The Epoch Times is affiliated with the ultraconservative Chinese anticommunist religious group Falun Gong and supports Donald Trump and other right-wing U.S. politicians with both press and cash. It was a major promoter of Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules that claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen. A voter depicted in that film sued for defamation, and just last week the distributor settled with the plaintiff, issued an apology, and stopped distributing the film.

The allegation that The Epoch Times is a money-laundering operation comes on top of yesterday’s story by Joseph Menn in the Washington Post, reporting that the editor of another media site that pushes disinformation from both the far right and the far left, The Grayzone, has worked for Russia’s Sputnik as well as taken money from Iranian government-owned media. One of the people who retweets Grayzone stories is Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).

In the middle of all this bad news for MAGA Republicans, it felt like desperation today when the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic tried to resurrect Covid conspiracy theories against Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, serving under seven presidents. President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the U.S., for his work on combating the global AIDS epidemic. 

Fauci’s position as NIAID director put him at the center of U.S. attempts to grapple with Covid-19, and for his work on developing a vaccine, Trump awarded him a presidential commendation. But first QAnon and then MAGA Republicans centered him as a villain who either started or covered up the pandemic, or forced people to mask or to get vaccines they told their supporters were unnecessary or even dangerous. QAnon conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin and convicted January 6 rioter Brandon Fellows were seated behind Fauci today; Fellows made pouty faces when Fauci was describing the death threats he, his wife, and his daughters have endured. 

Video creator and political commentator Michael McWhorter noted that Raiklin has made dramatic threats of violence against those he considers members of “the Deep State” and that he should have been nowhere near Fauci. McWhorter also noted that the two men were likely invited to the hearing and that it would be useful to know who invited them.  

Committee member Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has skipped seven of the last ten hearings and who has expressed sympathy for QAnon in the past, attacked Fauci by saying he should be prosecuted: “You know what this committee should be doing? We should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity,” she said. “You belong in prison, Dr. Fauci.” For all the nastiness, the hearing turned up nothing.

Later, Greene told Manu Raju of CNN that Speaker Johnson should shut down the government over the Trump verdict and prosecutions. “We're literally a banana republic. So what does it matter funding the government? The American people don't give a sh*t.” 

While MAGA Republicans are insisting that a Manhattan jury’s conviction of Trump means that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice and that they must take revenge, the trial of Biden’s son Hunter on federal gun charges, brought by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney whom Biden kept on, started today. Former top Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann noted that Biden is “living the rule of law…in the most personal way. He is not telling DOJ to stand down…. He is not pardoning his son…. He is living what it means to have a rule of law in this country…. If you want to know if he believes it, you can actually see what is happening with his own son.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[faithfromanewperspective]

was just thinking about how easy it is to compare the current president of Israel (whose name I don’t even remember) to hitler. it fits the way we think, doesn’t it, foreign people do bad things, what we see as familiar is good. but then the more I think about it, about how this whole thing has been set up and the extent (which I have to learn more about exactly still) to which usamerica is driving a literal genocide then the person I’ve gotta do that comparing to is actually… joe biden??? like that’s such a curveball in our brains we never expected but if you trace the power structures, yes there’s a fair deal of being a puppet going on but only because he never stands up against it. because he doesn’t actually care to stop it. and actually how fucked up is it that we’re literally talking about how the best thing is to continue voting for him for president because the other guy is worse like ??? none of us expected it of usamerica. we respected that country. we still respect its people and hang out with them every day

but like. let that sink in for a second. the guy encouraging and allowing a genocide is the better of two options?? if that’s the case I’m sorry but the civilians really don’t have any power. I’m sorry but if that’s the standards we have we have to start imagining better. this is like when your parent asks you if you want to wear a red shirt or a blue shirt but you never got the option to wear a dress instead or simply no shirt at all. it’s the illusion of choice. and as a world how do we turn a blind eye to this?? how do we not call out our dear cousin usamerica who is clearly in a bad state right now? whose leadership desperately needs to do better especially if they’re going to be in a position of leadership in the world as the power structures would have that they are?

because people live and breathe economy I was thinking, what if the rest of us simply boycott usamerica like we boycott Israel?? that would send the global economy to shambles. and I know it’s not gonna happen all of a sudden (so no need to hurriedly account for all the people that would get hurt) but what if we did? simply stop buying and consuming things that come out of America?

now I’m probably one of the biggest and most long-standing swifties you’ll meet (tumblr doesn’t count it’s an echo chamber) but could I? could I simply hold off listening to the tortured poets department when it comes out and stick to her older stuff I already own on cd’s and the like? Taylor doesn’t need my money or my numbers next to her songs and I’m going to be missing a lot if I do this but when this is over, her music will still be there. My favourite author is American. that one might be harder since I really want to read the second sword catcher book (I’m not worried about twp since it’s not coming out til 2026). I know a bunch of technology comes out of usamerica but I don’t need to update any of my devices and if I do there’s probably other brands I can buy from. I think because my iTunes is Australian I might be okay with it?? but I’m trying to transition away from it and buy more cds anyway. And I don’t watch tv, I rarely watch movies now so I could probably forgo that too.

I was actually just thinking about how there are so many songs out there I probably won’t get to listen to. what if, in boycotting some this is my chance to broaden my horizons? and I will preface with the fact that I know many non American artists do live and record in LA: im not gonna boycott them for that. In fact I’ll support their music because I want them to come home. and I might make an exception for green day and good charlotte for generally protesting much about usamerica?? but tell me guys, what do you think?? is this feasible? I might actually do it. I’ll make an exception for tumblr probably and use meta social media to the minimum (maybe I should for tumblr too and google). but also. is this racist?? is it going to do any harm?? because damn it I want to support the people. I want to support marginalised groups and native americans but I also want to be part of a boycott that’s meaningful rather than a token gesture. and I know the usamericans of us can’t do this, but please if I do it see it as me supporting your rights to having your opinions heard on a political level because I come from a country that isn’t great colonialism wise but at least we have that and I can’t imagine not having it

[its-tortle]

it wasn't a hate speech, I wrote about it, I'm sorry that something offended you.

ok, I'm bad at writing. try again. short version - why of all social things its a transgender people? you write (I wrote same) you have no self-interest other than equality. You write about Ukraine one time, you write about Israel one time. You know what I mean?

I mean, you like Taylor - you post about Taylor a lot. You post cute gay couple a lot - because you love it. And from social - you post a lot about trans. Only trans you post a lot.. More than about women rights or bisexual people. Why? :-) You are a woman, you are young, you have your own life, friends. Why you dont speak about this.

I'm asking this because I don't know any trans people in real life (like you as I know) other than tiktok, yt. but I know people of all orientations. my governem doesnt have enough money for education and medicine. I mean that everyone simply has problems. but you write about them. I don't have a problem with them, and neither do you.

I just don’t understand why so many posts on tumblr about trans rights, especially from people who are not in the trans community at all. So yeah, the short question - why trans?

(you don't have to reblog at all about anything, but you reglog about trans. and yeah, if its a post about hp you only write on tags jkr on negative part)

hi! sorry it took me a moment to get to this, and sorry that i misunderstood your ask in the first place. it's a valid question, truly, though i'm not sure i alone am able to give you a full answer for it.

there's definitely a number of reasons as to why trans issues seem to be disproportionately represented on my blog and many others, some of those reasons are personal and some of them sociopolitical.

the first and maybe most obvious personal reason is the simple one of queer solidarity. i'm bi, i've dated women, and that makes me part of a larger group that is as diverse and colorful as it is littered with a history of prosecution. trans people are very much a part of that collective, and i want them to feel as supported as they have made me feel when i've met them at gsas and pride events and fandom spaces. while i don't relate to their issues exactly, their overall struggle against the cis heterosexual matrix still connects with me. we're all under one umbrella.

also (and maybe this is where a bit of the sociopolitics comes in) trans people are one of the most immediately and publicly threatened groups within the lgbtq+. while so many other sexualities and identities are obviously affected by current events and politics, the queer hate spread in right-wing politics these days is specifically anti-trans. i'm half american and have grown up in western europe, and the impact of this hate mongering is felt in my own communities. while i know most about us and some uk anti-trans politics, i know the sentiment is more widespread than just those places. it feels like one of the most urgent queer issues right now.

and because i am queer and because i am western, the algorithm and the news and the people i follow on social media are posting about this anti-trans rhetoric. i don't think i ever deliberately seek out trans supportive content, but it's what i see on my feed/dash, so that's what i reblog. if i saw as much disability support or ukraine support, etc., i would reblog that too.

sure, there are things that i don't reblog that i maybe should, but again, i'm not here to be an activist and i don't like reblogging content about issues i'm not fully sure/educated about. the palestine/israel issue, for instance, is so much more complex than 'trans people deserve to exist', so i'm not as comfortable hitting a quick reblog. not because i don't care about it or because it's not on my mind, but because it's not as black and white and i don't feel like a worthy informant. i talk to my friends and my parents about it, but i don't need my incomplete opinions to be posted publicly online.

and i know i keep saying this, but i'll say it again: i am not here to be an activist. there is a definitely a conversation to be had here, and maybe i should be doing more, but i also resent being made to feel like i have to weigh in on every world issue because my silly little blog about queer tv shows and taylor swift has 1k followers. i reblog what resonates with me, i reblog what i understand. i want this blog to be a happy place.

[theotherwesley]

this isn't new information and i'm not saying anything that hasn't already been said. this is just a catalogue of my anger and despair and grief and frustration.

there are something like 3 million people who all need tens of thousands of dollars/euros to get their families across the only open border into Egypt, which is demanding astronomical fees of each individual person to enter the country. i assume most do not want to go to Egypt, they want to go home, but home is gone and if they stay where they are they will die. international aid is being severely bottle-necked, on purpose. the limited and incredibly poor-quality resources available to them while they wait crowded around the only door out are hot-spots for being murdered. they barely have internet access, most of them have lost everything that ever belonged to them. and the only recourse left to them is to desperately parade their personal agony online to total strangers in a horrible sort of popularity contest to try and convince people on social fucking media to add 20 bucks here and there to their gofundme accounts. --And gofundme having become the defacto way for people to crowdfund their debilitating medical bills and living costs is already one of the most depressing phenomena of the era, but this is a new kind of absurdist hell. millions of people, all equally deserving of life and dignity and justice, crowdfunding their survival while they are actively starving and being murdered (and competing against innumerable spam accounts, because of course they are), fighting for internet access so they can check and see if the rest of the world still remembers them, leaving caveats in their gfm profiles that if everyone in their family dies before their goal is met, the funds will be distributed to other refugees. If I emptied my bank accounts today and sold all my worldly possessions I'd have enough to maybe pay for one person's way to freedom. So why don't I just do that? I want to! How could you possibly compare the value of some electronics or a month's rent to a person's life? But most of what I own is unsellable trash that would take months and months to try and hock. And it's millions of people. All of them need it. Any of them could be killed tomorrow. Who do I give it to? Do I break it up into uselessly small increments? Do I buy into the popularity contest and pick someone based on their Suffering Resume? I'd rather pull out my own intestines. And meanwhile, my own fucking tax dollars are being funneled into the side that's shooting kids through hospital windows.

This is tumblr right now-- doing your daily scroll through fandom memes and self-help tips, regularly interspersed with the most profound human suffering imaginable-- all you can do is try and amplify the number of people who see that suffering in the hope that they, too, can put 15 to 100 dollars towards someone's escape from hell-- all while knowing that seeing too many posts begging for help will (inevitably, unavoidably, regardless of good intentions of viewers or posters) have the opposite effect. And no one on the fucking impoverished-disabled-queers website has any money. We don't have any liquid fucking assets. Even if we did, if we were all sponsored instagram influencers, it is, again, millions of people. who need $5,000 or more per person. per family member's life. it is bailing out a sinking ship with thimbles, while someone else just behind you is gleefully dumping sand in with a truck. obviously it is not enough. obviously there is a vast machine at work grinding up people on one end and millions of operators trying to slowly halt its progress. but you can't NOT DO IT. I'm jewish and i'm american and my identities are being used doubly to justify to this fucking horror, this shame before god and humanity.If I have not weighed in before now it it because I did not feel at all qualified to do so, and that my opinion was a thoroughly unnecessary addition to the noise. But i have to believe that if nothing else, the PR game matters; changing one's awareness of the reality of this situation and not looking away matters because it informs how you respond. It seems like nothing until you meet the people who are NOT looking, who write the whole thing off as "too complicated", and have never updated their fully propaganda-based idea of israel as a nation of victims, and how easily dispelled their justifications really are. It is worse for everyone when you don't look and do not allow yourself to care.

[sparklecinnamonbunny]

Send as many as I like? Okay, I need AT LEAST 267 answers for Sunday— (not really. Just give me 3. For her, Ava, and Envy. 3 each? 3 total? Idk. YOU🫵 decide.)

For my good buddy Hot Potato? Schmabsolutely. This answer's gonna be a mile long, so please enjoy this complementary Keep Reading squiggle.

Sunday: 7. Do they believe in soulmates? Oh yeah. Big time. Show up in a few dreams, and Sunday's convinced you're fated to be in her life. She doesn't just believe in romantic soulmates, either; she's considered Dick Knubbler a platonic soulmate for years (although it took many wine nights before she'd admit it to him).

23. What would it take to break their trust? Sunday's trust of most people is so fragile that it only takes one solid mistake to break it. If someone agrees to complete a task for her and they fail to deliver, they're going to the bottom of the list. American Voice Showdown is the show requested to work on the least by MBC's interns, despite its high ratings and frequent celebrity appearances, because of Sunday (and Dick)'s standards. Once you've earned Sunday's trust, she's more forgiving. It would take a serious act of emotional treason to break her faith in someone once she's built it. We're talking betrayal to the media, attempts to grievously harm other friends, longboat arson...

31. What's stopping them from functioning to the best of their abilities? Sunday is stopping Sunday from functioning to the best of her ability. If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: Sunday makes her own problems. With the exception of a certain individual meddling with her magic, she's her greatest obstacle. She limits herself romantically because she thinks she curses all her lovers to die. She limits herself professionally because she thinks she couldn't be as good as she once was.

Ava: 14. Are they where they thought they'd be five years ago? Not exactly. Five years ago, she was establishing her cover as Ava Sunbeam, building her career and social network. While she knew she'd have observation targets to get close to, Sunday Mourning and Toki Wartooth weren't who she had in mind. She'd much prefer Rebecca Nightrod and Pickles.

26. Do they want to be remembered when they're gone? What would they like to be remembered as? Ava's been deeply conditioned to put the cause (The Prophecy) before the individual, so she'd only want to be remembered as a loyal acolyte of Salacia— maybe one of his paladins, if she's given the opportunity to fight for him. The point of being an infiltrator is not to be noticed, after all. If she reaches her career goal of taking over for Vater Orlaag, she might have bigger dreams of recognition.

30. How do they self-soothe when they're upset? Vivid fantasies of murder and destruction. And also a LOT of drugs. It's not the healthiest way to cope, but it gets her through. Much like her other co-hosts on American Voice Showdown, Ava is usually high at work. The only difference is the flavor of intoxication. Everyone on set knows Tyler Stevens carries a flask and Dick and Sunday hotbox a car on their union break; but Ava surreptitiously pops pills all day.

Envy: 2. Do they give second chances? Second chances? Yes. Much more than that? No. Envy doesn't like to let people play with her time or her money, and if you can't get your act together after a warning, she's not gonna find time for you. That said, she has a fairly lenient call out system for her employees, and is far more understanding with them than other people in her life.

11. What would it take to break them? I picked this one because I had a hard time thinking of an answer. Envy's thick-skinned, so there's not much you could say that would do more than stumble. Ditto to blackmail: As a member of Club Hedonism's board, she keeps everything she does as legal as she can. She's got a high pain tolerance and an intimate understanding of torture, albeit in the BDSM scene, so it'd take some truly crazy shit to wear her down that way. I think the quickest way to break Envy down would be to target her friends and loved ones. It worked well for a mobster once. Fortunately for her, her family's on the other side of the country, and most of her friends are harder to get at than she is.

33. What words do they desperately need to hear, even if they don't realize it? "You can take a break. You've done enough."

Back to list

[wernher-von-brawny]

Bocci the Rock Reaction Videos

One of my favorite uses of YouTube is watching a big batch of different essayists spit about a single topic or piece of media.

Today's hyperfixation has been wallowing in vids about Best Anime of 2022 contender, Bocci the Rock.

I would have said Best Show of 2022 contender, but I'm aware that, aside from CGI fantasy, American tastes trend towards that gay murder club show, that troubled children having sex show, that MAGA-friendly western show, and that MAGA-friendly rich family fighting over money show (or is it shows?), so... safest call is to segregate it off into its own garden.

For the uninitiated, Bocci the Rock is a brilliantly and lovingly animated 2022 "slice of life" -- meaning a character-driven show rather than action-, plot-, or quest-driven -- comedy anime about a talented but catastrophically awkward and introverted young guitarist who joins an all-girl band. Hilarity, personal growth and rocking out ensue.

It's not at all like the old Monkees TV show, but it does share some of that same energetic and experimental love of humor, music, friendship and fun.

While searching YT for my usual topics of interest will return maybe a few vids, it seems that a lot of 'tubers (are they called that?) share my love for Bocci.

It's no wonder an anime about an online content creator with intense social anxiety has resonated with many in the the non-millionaire segment of that community.

And he fact that most of these reviews contain as much confessional therapy as critical analysis made me think of our beloved hellsite. It seems to me that one or two of my fellow Tumblr deplorables might also vibe with this show.

It inhabits the intersection of social anxiety and making art, made with incredibly craft and skill and -- reportedly -- a very high level of staff freedom, input, and personal expression.

Based on the content I see posted by the folks I follow on this site, and the six folks who follow me, I think it may resonate with many of them as well.

And since everyone is on vacation or phoning it in this week, and I'm bored, here's a roundup of all the commentary vids I watched today.

It was on Nuttflix, and then it suddenly wasn't. Whatevs, it's on Crunchyroll, and many of the best pirate sites.

Best to watch it before the commentaries, and then use these to satisfy your craving for more, but since it doesn't have a plot that can be spoiled, nothing anyone says in any of these vids steals anything from the enjoyment of watching the series.

Unlike, say, the last Star Wars or LOTR show, both of which are conveniently mooted by reading the recaps.

The Absurd Adaptation of Bocchi The Rock

What happens when you have a series whose identity is intrinsically tied to its production; the times when aesthetic and visuals and animation are so crucial and so integral to the series, that it becomes the primary thing that is elevating the content? Well that's when you get Bocci The Rock.

To call Bocci The Rock creative would be one of the largest understatements that I have ever uttered on this channel. This is a series that seemingly revels in any opportunity it gets to convey its comedy and convey its drama in the most unique, eye-opening ways that I guarantee you have never seen before in the medium of animation. And I can say that for a fact because there are gags in this series that don't even use animation.

Comedy is the lifeblood of this series and any chance Bocci has to surprise you or make you laugh through its excessively fun and creative uses of framing, timing, or just sheer animation power you better goddamn believe it's going to do it, to elevate the extensive commitment it has to its gags and to its character writing.

Why We Love Bocchi

Bocchi the Rock is a completely socially inept, lonely, loser; an asocial schizoid, cast out from society for being a fucking freak.

The only reason she started getting into guitar, was so that she could become rich and famous, and get over her fear of people.

And she seeks any and all validation from others.

She's... a.. honestly a bad person. Kind of. She's, she doesn't have that much conviction. She kind of just goes with whatever other people say. Um- she- she just- her only motivation is attention from other people.

So that begs the question: Why is she so fucking cool?

The Unique Genius of Bocchi the Rock!

Endlessly charming. Unquestionable an absolute gem. Always weird in the best possible way.

Bocchi Rocks Harder

Bocci the Rock was somehow able to get the attention of the anime community in a season with stacked entries, some of which have been building up towards this moment for years.

Looks like I can only link five videos in this post. If I’d known, I might have re-ordered this. In any case, the rest of these are links.

The Masterpiece That is Bocchi The Rock! - Honest Review

I think the best way for me to describe it is how the anime put it: "It might not connect with too many people, but those it does it'll hit deeply."

Explaining the Meaning Behind Guitar, Loneliness and Blue Planet (Bocchi the Rock Insert Song)

How Bocchi the Rock Captures Social Anxiety Perfectly

At first glance the show may seem like just another run-of-the-mill, "tee hee cute girls doing cute things" show, but there's so much love, passion and thought put into this anime that really gives it the extra push.

Bocchi the Rock is Anime of the Season

Bocci excels not only because it has absolutely stellar writing that dives down deep into an introvert's psyche, but because it also has a director that's willing to just let his staff go buck wild and do whatever the shit they want.

Bocchi The Rock is a Mirror into my SOUL 🎸

Making art -- whether it's drawing, music, video making -- is not the easiest thing to do and I feel like it's been a while since we've had an anime that attempted to showcase that without sugar coating it.

What I wasn't expecting was a critical hit to my current existence as a content creator and socially inept weirdo who doesn't like to talk to people and who isn't really comfortable without multiple layers of anonymity between myself and others.

If you want a currently airing anime about just how you can feel as an introvert watching a piece of media, Bocci the Rock has got you covered.

Bocchi The Rock is The Pinnacle of Slice of Life

...eight weeks of what has generally been some of the best anime I've seen for the better part of half a decade...

The Masterpiece You Just Missed | BOCCHI THE ROCK!

For the first time since 2020 I can finally say that I found another masterpiece within the Cute Girls Doing Cute Things genre.

A Better K-On (Bocchi the Rock!)

Narrative Therapist Reacts to Bocchi The Rock! - Episode 1

I have not yawned a single time during Bocci, an I won't! Yawn. Ever. Again! ...on stream.

The SURPRISE Anime of Fall 2022: Bocchi the Rock!

I Almost Skipped This Amazing Anime

Hidden Gem of the Season Bocci the Rock is a show about a girl who wants to be a rock star but instead gets hit by a truck and reincarnates as an actual rock.

Yeah, yeah, I was lying. I just kind of think that the English title reads funny, but you know in Japan it wouldn't surprise me if that ever became a show in the future.

And if you still want more, here's an extensive print interview with the production team:

Bocchi the Rock! Main Staff Interviews – Series Director Keiichiro Saito, Character Designer Kerorira, Animation Producer Shouta Umehara

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

🧵 again I agree with basically everything needle said about the Dior FW 23 collection, especially with how it jumped between high fashion and an almost working class aesthetic. That's why I called it originally an extremely Balmoral show, not only did it have a ton of highlands influences, it also felt like the ultra-wealthy play-acting at working class.

I prefer my high fashion to know what it is and where it stands.

Needle's comment about how commercialized fashion is nowadays feels like my perfect segue.

The creation of the luxury conglomerates has destroyed the high houses. I said it. LVMH is the one that seems to be talked about most in BTS adjacent spaces, but I guess this is mostly because of the LV brand deal (AND LV IS NOT THE SAME AS LVMH GOD IF I SEE ONE MORE TAKE THATS LIKE OH ITS OK HES AT CELINE THATS STILL A LVMH BRAND IM GOING TO SCREAM- ahem.)

But LVMH is not the only conglomerate. Kering is another big one. But this drive to have the houses as corporations with stocks and returns and eternal growth mean a significant stagnation in their actual creative direction. They want to sell what /sells/. You (BMT) touched on this in one of the posts, but I think it should be made clear that brands like Dior, despite being an old House with extremely revered bones, makes the vast majority of its money on things like makeup and small accessories. The marketing that they do using Idols or literally anyone is to entice people to buy the small luxury products, instead of the big ones. A $3k bag is a big ask for most people, a $50 lipstick feels like an easier pill to swallow. I can't believe how many people I've seen buying Dior after Jimin's brand announcement, explicitly for him.

But do I think that means that fashion is stagnant? This is such an interesting question to me because fashion is literally just the things that people put on their backs. I can talk forever about the high French houses or whatever, but the reality is that the world has changed. Fashion as both an art and a means of self-expression has never, EVER, been so accessible.

What I think actually happened is that the big houses (mostly these are euro houses, especially French, some Italian, a handful of British and American) have become over-commercialized. The immediate drive towards streetwear in 2015-2020 also didn't help (see: especially the absolute horror that has become the Balenciaga name). I also see a lot of weird takes about Couture as a concept, as if clothing can't be art for the sake of being art if I see one more twitter post about "I would never wear that" over some person walking a runway in a guo pei dress that weighs a thousand pounds, I'm gonna lose it.

But I also think that today, in early 2023, there are so many people designing and making clothes and putting their art out into the world. PFW just isn't the place to see that, mostly. I think if any of your readers are interested in fashion beyond the traditional houses, it's always good to check out the other major city's fashion weeks. And if PFW is what interests them- look at the brands that are maybe unfamiliar. That is where the art still lives, sorta.

I had no idea about Dior and making money mostly from small luxury goods. That's new to me. Given how it's in the lower price range, I saw it more as an entry which then leads the consumer (one who is just starting to get accustomed) to buying other, more expensive stuff. There's definitely a focus on that on social media and now with Jimin's Dior deal, a day doesn't go by in which I don't see clips on tiktok with Dior hauls and Jimin photo cards.

I actually thought about the hyper focus on streetwear for the previous ask about commercialization. I remember the time when it wasn't that big or at least it was somehow separate. Now it's sort of like a blend and trully the only thing that reaches out to the big internet audience with their IG accounts and how easy it is for anyone to curate their own fashion self. I also have issues with the sort of comments about Couture because they are unnecessary if one would have the courtesy to actually understand what it means. No one expects it to be street style and yet, they use that as a filter.

I think that, especially in this fandom space in the last few weeks and days, the interest and curiosity spiked, for better or worse. So, in the context of that, your advice is most welcome for anyone who wants to explore more.

[reallycolorfulruins]

Reviewing Two Movie's from this Era

Continuing from the overall topic of this blog, I will now be discussing two movies that had influence in this time period for horror movies. First I would like to share my own thoughts on the overall impact of the Japanese horror movies of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Through my research I came to the conclusion that these movies have had the impact that they had because of the specific time period that they revolved around. As I said from the first blog post, these movies started to spawn from the technological advancement of society and the Japanese paired that with the old folk stories to create these globally known films. From the article ”Why Were the Early 2000s Such a Great Time for Asian Horror?“ written by Samuel Williamson he put into words, ”These projects were usually being made on a low budget and preyed on the '90s boom in media technology, but often relied on simple ghost stories and curses for their premises. Home video, cell phone technology, and security surveillance footage were key to some of these movies' stories”(¶ 3). Maybe nowadays there are less and less of those graining home videos that families have that require a VHS player or even a DvD player, so that creepy feeling of watching these horror movies and seeing something scary come from those forms of media is lessening.

Moreover it is mentioned that these movies were made on a low budget but still have such an impact because of the stories behind them and how subtle they make their horror. The impact these movies had is how much they crossed over to a global stage so fast. Many of these movies were remade for American audiences and that is a significant aspect of these movies. Watching these movies now does not have the same effect that it would have if I were to watch it during the technological boom age. 

Now I will be analyzing two different reviews of two different movies. These are movies I have talked about before and those are Ringu and Ju-on:The Grudge. To begin with Ringu I am going to review Darren Tilby’s review from the UK Film Review website. In his review, it was more of how influential this movie was for its time and how many key aspects of this film created such an image. A quote from his writing reads, “Both Matsushima and Ôtaka are instantly likable in the lead roles and wholly believable as mother and son; sharing brilliant chemistry. And Sanada, when he finally comes into the film, adds plenty to the proceedings and never once feels like an afterthought”(¶ 3).

This film really does make you feel like nobody is an afterthought for characters. There is always a reason for them being there and how they bring tension to the film. It was a film that left no one amiss. The one character that is prominent is Sadako. Almost everyone knows about the girl dressed in all white with long black hair crawling out of the well. That is, for what I would say, is the staple for these old Japanese horror movies. It made an impression on many people globally and those impressions have stuck around today. This is due to the amount of sequels Ringu has and the American remake. A key aspect of this film that I did gloss over while watching is the theme of , “...it also boasts more contemporary threads of thought, one with a distinctly more feminist vibe. Predominantly, it’s an extended commentary on women surviving – or not – in a patriarchal society”(¶ 4). The main characters of this film are predominantly female. Even with Sadako and Sadako’s mother being taken advantage/killed by the men that are around them. It has something to say on that social commentary and makes a very strong female lead. 

The next film I will be talking about is Ju-on:The Grudge. This film review is coming from Jason Morehead, and the contents are something that relates to what I want to talk about for this post. Ju-on: The Grudge starts off with a staticy video of a father going insane and killing the whole family, but the son goes missing and is never found. We jump forward in time and see many different stories of different people living in the house where these murders happened. This is an episodic type movie that shows many different stories, but as you keep watching more and more starts to connect about the mystery of the house.

A snippet from this review goes as follows ,”entirely on the unbearable sense of dread that it creates and sustains right up until the very end.”(¶ 7). Not just with this film in specific, but many of these Japanese horror films contain an overarching sense of dread when watching them. They are not like ordinary horror movies that you would think about, with the jumpscares and in the face type horror, but make you feel like something bad will happen to them and mainly you know that something bad will happen to them. Another quote from this review, “Takashi Shimizu … always finds subtle ways to send shivers down your spine. It might be a creepy reflection, some unsettling photographs, or even just the gloomy music that always seem to playing in the background”(¶ 10). The music and tension that the director made intentionally is what I would say is something that is a hallmark of these movies. They play with the viewer and give them all the necessary hints that something is going to happen to the person you are watching and fills the viewer with that sense of dread for them. 

To summarize it all, these Japanese horror movies gave the viewers long lasting stories that will continue to be talked about today and something fun to look back on and watch. Their way of making this subtle but dreadful horror is not something that any of the American remakes created. I really recommend checking out some of the movies from this genre. The video below will be a list that has some of these horror movies that could be watched by you.

Citations

Tilby, D. (2020, May 14). Ringu (1998) throwback Thursday film review. UK Film Review. https://www.ukfilmreview.co.uk/post/ringu-1998-throwback-thursday-film-review

Morehead, J. (2022, October 24). “ju-on: The grudge” by Takashi Shimizu (review). Opus. https://opus.ing/reviews/ju-on-grudge-takashi-shimizu 

Williamson, S. (2023, September 30). Why were the early 2000s such a great time for Asian horror?. Collider. https://collider.com/asian-horror-early-2000s/ 

[nickgerlich]

Striking Up The Ban

I have many fond memories from the Summer of 2019. It was pre-COVID, and we were all blissfully unaware of how much our lives were about to change. It was when my employer, the Engler College of Business, was starting an MBA program in Beijing, and my Dean wanted me to go there to be the face of the program, and teach an introductory class session.

And since my daughters are both adopted from China, he encouraged me to take them along too. No arm twisting was needed on that one! So off we went to Beijing for 10 days, to teach, shake hands, wine and dine, and soak up a ton of culture.

But China is known for its “Chinese Firewall,” a government-imposed crackdown on western media. Turns out it is much more than that, as it also includes western social media, weather, sports…basically, anything American that we take for granted on our phones and computers.

Of course, when I read about this, I took it as a challenge, thinking that in the interests of international diplomacy and all that, the Chinese surely wouldn’t throw a friendly old professor in the slammer. So I downloaded a VPN service, shared it with my daughters, enabling us to post photos all day and night while we were there.

In retrospect, I bet the Chinese government actually wants western tourists to do just that, because we unwittingly became their marketing department, showcasing the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, and many other cultural attractions. They were good with us doing the things their own people can’t.

Which, unfortunately, may very well become a reality for us here in the States. Just this last week a House panel voted unanimously to enforce a nationwide ban on TikTok, an unprecedented action for a nation that prides itself on the First Amendment. The American Firewall may be coming soon to a phone near you.

Now I understand the concerns, which prompted 34 states already to ban it on state-owned devices. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company some fear is in cahoots with the Chinese government, and therefore the app presents a security threat. It’s the same kind of thinking that concerns some lawmakers about Chinese-made cars being similarly risky for our security. Maybe that’s why BYD is exploring potential sites in Mexico to build cars, because we have no problem allowing Mexican-made vehicles into the US.

But I digress.

The House panel’s recommendation, were it to be passed as national law, would give ByteDance 165 days to completely divest itself of TikTok. If it did not comply, then it would become illegal for app stores to list it.

This is a very late and reflexive response after 170 million people have already downloaded it here. As long as there are not updates to the app, the old one will work just fine. Oh, and never mind the fact that if our government would go so far as to completely block TikTok on the internet and not just app stores, we could just use a VPN to sidestep that thorny matter. Point it at Canada or any other country where TikTok is allowed to be used freely.

I am not sure what kind of information these lawmakers fear that TikTok might be extracting from us at the individual level. It would be no different from what Facebook, CNN, YouTube, et all., might be extracting from Chinese citizens, were they allowed to use our services. I know. The Chinese government more than likely simply does not want its citizens consuming western news, entertainment, and general information, lest it paint an ugly picture of their homeland. But if TikTok could be spying on us, it means we could just as easily be spying on them.

Remember this point. It always pays to put the shoe on the other foot to see if your conclusion fits.

I have grave concerns over the panel’s recommendations. I am not worried in the least what China might learn about me. Heck, the phone I am using—an old iPhone 12—was made in China. My Alexa devices were made in China. Heck, I am surrounded by Chinese made electronic devices, and so are you, and any one of them could be spying on us.

But I doubt it. They would have better luck eavesdropping on our country by sending over weather balloons.

I understand the political expedience of doing something that has bipartisan support. Imagine that…both parties actually agreeing on something. I also understand that tensions are high between the US and China, and fear runneth rampant. Any measure aimed at these fears is seen as a good thing, even if it necessarily limits our rights.

It’s a slippery slope at bare minimum, and I am not in favor of it.

Dr “Think Long And Hard On This” Gerlich

Audio Blog