#personally I fall into”reblog every poll I vote on category

[billboard-hotties-tourney]

FAQ

Decided to answer any questions/address any complaints all in one post as we move into the next round:

BILLBOARD HOTTIES TOURNEY/MISS BILLBOARD TOURNEY:

How am I meant to vote in the tourney? The vote is supposed to be for the best-looking/hottest musician/singer/composer/etc, not for whose music you think is better. Looks should be based on pre-1980 looks, not anything after that.

How can I submit propaganda? What can I submit? You can submit photos, videos of performances/interviews, and even songs. Between rounds, the best way to submit propaganda to be used for the next poll post is through the asks or submission box. DMs are also accepted but not preferred. Submit as much propaganda for the post as you like; if it's got a direct link or you have the direct image, it'll work. During rounds, asks and submissions are still welcome, but DMs are not. Instead, tag billboard-hotties-tourney in posts to get them reblogged here. Please do not spam this blog with propaganda. One submission per nominee per day per person, PLEASE. If you submit more than one per day, it will be ignored. You are still welcome to reblog poll posts and add unlimited propaganda there. Any negative propaganda submitted to the inbox will be ignored. If you want someone to lose, find positive propaganda about their opponent.

Why did you use the pictures you did? Why did you use the songs you did? Since this poll was supposed to be for musicians pre-1980, I'm only using pre-1980 images for the polls and pre-1980 songs for the propaganda. It's why you didn't see the classic Tony Levin look, or any modern-day Geddy Lee images, for instance. You can always reblog with post-1980 pictures, but as for the original poll posts, there will only be pre-1980 images. As for the song selections, I tried to pick songs that are either a popular song of theirs, or songs that may be lesser-known but still highlight their musical ability.

TANTALIZING TUNES TOURNEY:

How am I meant to vote in the tourney? Your choice should be based on what the hotter/sexier song is, not necessarily which song you prefer. Choices should NOT be based upon the artist or how the artist looks when they perform it. Choices should also be based upon the version of the song in the running, not a different version of the song.

ALL TOURNEYS:

Where is ____? If you don't see a person/song, they either weren't submitted and not considered by me, or they were eliminated in a previous round. If they were here at some point, they have a tag.

Is it too late to submit ____? Yes.

Why are these two frontrunners paired against each other already? Every pairing is random; it's all down to the luck (or lack thereof) of the draw.

Where is the propaganda I submitted? Either it definitely didn't fall into the pre-1980 category (although if you see any that slipped past me, feel free to correct me,) the image wouldn't attach to the post, or the person's face was obscured to the point where it wouldn't have made sense to keep it. Please also do not send NSFW pictures, I don't want butt naked people on my posts.

Can I submit propaganda for a person/a song no longer in the running? No.

What happens in the event of a tie? Due to the previous rigging of a tie, the rules for what happens in the event of a tie have changed. If there is a tie for a poll, the two will no longer advance together, but instead, there will be a second poll that lasts 24 hours to determine the winner. If there is another tie after the second poll, neither will advance.

Thank you for your understanding here! Please let me know if you have any questions not answered here, and enjoy the rest of the tournament.

[thetrashthatsmilesback]

I feel like a lot of us titans fans are either LGBT+, autistic, otherwise neurodivergent, or all of the above so it's poll time

For this poll, neurodivergent includes anything that could fall under that umbrella. This means learning disabilities, pervasive developmental disorders, personality disorders, dissociative disorders, other traumagenic disorders, mood disorders, psychotic spectrum disorders, and neurological disorders.

When it comes to LGBT+, I have talked to people who fall under the plus but do not consider themselves LGBT+, if this is you please use your best discretion when voting. As I am not intersex or polyamorous, I do not wish to impose a category you do not feel you identify with onto you, so vote how you personally identify. From my understanding those are often considered a part of the LGBT+ umbrella, but I am only bisexual and nonbinary so it is far from my place to tell you how to identify.

I wish I could tag every titans member ever but that's not possible due to the tag limit, so I'm sorry. Also, if you're a young justice animated only fan choose teen titans animated, and if you're a young justice comics fan choose either all media or teen titans comics due to the kids being the teen titans 2003 team. Have fun and don't take it too seriously, this is a Tumblr poll <3

Edit: I forgot to set the poll to one week, so I'll probably remake it in the reblogs after voting is over. I'm sorry.

[fapangel]

Since I first issued my dire predictions of civil violence in the not-so-distant future, I’ve been looking, exhaustively, for evidence I’m wrong. III Have you considered this angle: The traditional media's hyping that up? I mean, we know in the early/mid 60's the newspapers and cameras focused on the small number of violent protestors during anti-war protests and made them out to be the majority. If the media has no shred of integrity left, why are you looking at them for evidence of integrity?

That’s just the thing - I’m not. I’m looking at people. at the “man on the street” and in both my personal life (as in actual meatspace, not online) and in actual journalism (some people still do it, outside and inside the mainstream establishment,) I’m seeing a decidedly worrisome tone. 

We all remember “literally shaking” on Twitter the night of the election, but there were other words going around quite a bit - sick, disgusted, afraid, scared, etc. Twitter - as it’s used by the majority - gives a quick insight into the personal emotions of the people using it. (This is why PR uses that bank on the presumed intimacy - like Trump’s twitter - tend to be more successful, and more careful, sterile treatments, like the Clinton campaign that took 12 staffers and 10 drafts to compose a single tweet, typically lack traction.) Sure, us seal-clubbin neocons and tree-hugging liberals had a good giggle at the triggered snowflakes breathlessly predicting the Right Wing Gestapo emerging from the woodwork to bash the gays - but then a friend of mine told me it’d actually happened, post-election, to a friend of his, and that’s when my laughter stopped. 

As was explained to me, the LGBTQ folks feared that Trump’s election would be seen as “permission” by all the knuckledraggers, and it seems it was. So it’s time to ask yourself the question - how did the knuckledraggers get that impression to begin with? Maybe - just maybe - it had something to do with the media screaming, 24/7, for months, that Trump was literally Hitler and that he was going to oppress all the gays and Jews and Muslims and fluffy bunnies. “Of course he’s Our Guy,” the Illinois Nazis said with glee, “the entire news media keeps screaming about it!” 

Also consider that the media’s reinforcing the left wing’s narrative, which makes people on the left wing much more likely to believe it since it’s validating their own beliefs. Vox.com has an excellent article on the Russian conspiracy blitz and why it’s playing so well with Democrats, and the author is neither a Trump fan or apologist (as is abundantly clear from the article itself.) It’s worth reading entire, but this quote stands out: 

“Misinformation is much more likely to stick when it conforms with people’s preexisting beliefs, especially those connected to social groups that they’re a part of,” says Arceneaux. “In politics, that plays out (usually) through partisanship: Republicans are much more likely to believe false information that confirms their worldview, and Democrats are likely to do the opposite.”

The article accurately compares the current phenomena to the entire “birther” movement on the right - it’s the exact same psychological phenomena, so unsurprisingly you see it manifesting with human beings on both sides of the spectrum. A lot of politics falls into that category, and it’s where most of that “political common ground” I keep talking about can be found. The difference is that the Left controls the lion’s share of the communication media and in turn, our culture. Hollywood - a cultural engine if there ever was one - is extremely left wing and has been since before McCarthy’s day. The modern telecommunications and internet media, which lives and breathes in Sillicon Valley, is likewise invested in the left wing; Erich Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet (Google’s parent company,) founded a PAC to give Hillary’s campaign IT support during the election, and we all remember how the CEO of Mozilla was hurled out of office because he dared to cast a private, anti-revolutionary vote. The next time you hear leftists talking about how “de-platforming” is legitimate, remember that the leftists literally own the fucking platforms. Nobody’s gonna find your conservative site if Google de-lists it. This is the problem - both sides have their lunatics willing to swallow any shit they’re being shoveled, but only one side has a massive megaphone that’s actively colluding - complete with sticky-handed twitter high-fives - to push the same narrative across the board, and cross-validate it. 

Hilariously, the Vox author (Kevin Drum) doesn’t see it, making the article a self-demonstrating one: 

Luckily for the Democratic Party, there isn’t really a pre-built media ecosystem for amplifying this like there was for Republicans. In the absence of left-wing Limbaughs and Breitbarts, media outlets totally unconcerned with factual rigor, it’s much harder for this stuff to become mainstream.

… except he does see it, because he goes on to name some examples (and some tweets) of people chugging the kool-aid… but all of them Democratic politicians or DNC staffers who should know better, not the media itself. He’s clearly intelligent and well-balanced, he’s standing in the middle of a bullshit cyclone he knows is bullshit, but he’s only just now starting to smell the rot and he hasn’t even noticed objective journalism’s decaying corpse yet, despite standing in its ribcage. If someone like him can be so stymied, how do you think That Guy - you know, [the bitter old man |the aging hippie creep] who always [ sits on his porch yelling at birds | shuffles around Trader Joe’s in grungy sandals comparing kale prices] and blames everything on [ dat gal-dern Mooslim Obongo | the military-industrial-jew-lizardman-complex] is going to react?

Some people do actually believe this shit and they are mostly Democrats - hell, here’s a Gallup poll with the numbers if you doubt my analysis. And to re-iterate, they’re inflaming extremists on both sides of the spectrum, because the more violence antifa commits, the more the Illinois Nazis will croon “see, we were right all along!” 

The traditional mass media engaging in this shit is much, much worse than the right-wing “alternative news ecosystem,” the blogs, the talk radio hosts, infogiggles, etc. They’re all personality-based and those personalities differ and disagree (if they didn’t, how would they offer content distinct from what the others offer?) This is natural, because conservatives argue. They argue a lot. It might surprise some of you given how often the media portrays the NRA as triple Satan, but there’s gun rights groups that exist specifically because some conservatives think the NRA is too wussy. You’ve got social conservatives, business/free market conservatives, REEE TAXES conservatives, etc., and they rarely see eye to eye. Ann Coulter - the Screeching Enchantress herself - once wrote that “Republicans can’t put together a two-car funeral without writing six books denouncing each other.” 

You don’t see this on the left - not in the media, at any rate. There’s more to this than just the obvious mainstream media collusion; the back-slapping and twitterwank, although their deliberate and conscious effort plays a huge part. There’s also how the left wing thinks. 

If you’re old enough to remember the Bush years, you’ll remember how often the left would attack Rush Limbaugh - even though an entire ecosystem of conservative, national talk-radio had sprung up by then, so he was no longer The One And Only Conservative Voice In Mass Media. Liberals treated - and attacked - him as the de facto leader of the right wing, and this puzzled conservatives no end, because a pundit, however clever, is not a goddamn politician or leader. 

The left wing, however, thinks differently. Unlike classical liberalism, which is mostly concerned with balancing the inherent rights of individuals with the rights of every other individual in a social contract, the leftists (communism/socialism/etc.) focus on the  collective as the central, essential point, and move from there. This is why “virtue signalling” exists; leftists care very much about what others think of them. Emmet Rensin’s essay on smugness in liberalism, which I’ve mentioned many times, showcases it well; while describing his subject, he also illustrated the mechanisms by which it manifests - left-wing culture. Everything he described - the virtue-signalling to others that you know the correct facts, the knowing, even the “Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns,“ exemplifies it. This Mother Jones writer’s reaction to his piece has a telling line: 

“I’ve long since gotten tired of the endless reposting of John Oliver’s "amazing,” “perfect,” “mic drop” destruction of whatever topic he takes on this week.”

They key here is John Oliver. When leftists look at Rush Limbaugh, they see a conservative John Oliver - in short, a demagogue. Demagogues and cults of personality have always been of prime importance with the left wing - remember how Obama was lionized by the left during his first campaign? To say nothing of the Kennedy’s being immortalized as “Camelot.” Yes, conservatives liked Reagan a whole lot, but we don’t vote in entire fucking royal dynasties, which is why Low-Energy Jeb is cooling his heels right now. And these demagogues, you’ll note, are all on the same page when it comes to ripping into conservatives… and their epic, wicked put-downs then become The Big Joke that the left wing retweets and reblogs and parrots to each other ad nauseum. Remember Tina Fey’s mockery of the only working mother leftists have ever despised? I’ve seen people on facebook quote “I can see Russia from my house” fully believing that Sarah Palin herself said it - the Tina Fey skit is the reality, for them. Truth is lost around the twentieth re-tweet, or so. 

And these “comedians” - in truth, pundits and opinion columnists - base their jokes on whatever quote-unquote “revelations” aired in the mainstream media’s news broadcasts that morning. 

If you’ve ever noticed how quickly a new catchphrase or word gets onto every leftist’s lips - like “fake news” - this is how it’s done. It’s not just the mass media moving in lockstep co-ordination to get the message out; it’s how the phrases become the newest “in-thing” with the entire leftist culture, that then get bandied about in the social sphere, on and off-line. After the cruise missile strike on Syria, I watched, on /pol/ alone, about thirty different varying interpretations, everything from “Assad and Putin are unironically heroes shove omfg I love facism Trump why u blow them up” to “I HOPE HE DROPS A MOAB ON RUSSIA NEXT FUCK THE REDS NUCLEAR WAR NOW” to a bunch of “he’s really playing 64 dimensional chess check this shit just you wait” that covered everything in-between. And that’s just on /pol/, which is so full of bullshit and jokes they literally made a fucking containment board for the containment board - called /bantz/. You don’t see this in the leftist blogosphere - the opinions all align the same way and vary only in magnitude of gibbering lunacy. And the John Oliver quotes don’t just define the conversation, they define the fucking language - for instance, “Drumpf.” 

Do not, for one second, think that the media doesn’t know how all this shit works. They may be delusional, but they don’t control and run vast media empires because they’re stupid. And a lot of them have been at this for a long, long time.