Elon is recruiting randos from Twitter to compete for the chance to work themselves to death figuring out how to take away your welfare.
Nothing says efficiency like creating a whole ass new department with two co-chairs.
Nothing says efficency like creating a new "department" to do the job already being done by an existing office.
Sexual themes
Got off a video call with my grandma. Asked her what sort of American foods she was enjoying (my dad flew her in from Korea and she's staying with him in Phoenix rn). She said most of the food isn't too impressive but she's addicted to a specific candy, and when she held up a bag of Werther's Originals I started howling
let me talk abt this for the first and last time because i still see people repeating this everywhere and i think people miss a really significant aspect of what happened this past year
arab votes didn't actually swing to trump in any notable way despite trump openly appealing to and campaigning for the arab and muslim community. most people understood this was a cynical move, and the "leaders" he paraded around are people who would have voted for him anyway and he simply did not give them a reason not to. some people also wanted to curry favor with him because they would need favorable connections in the event that he did win (this is called the arab despot approach).
but i think people who aren't arab or muslim don't understand what the democratic party actually did here
kamala and her staff rejected repeated offers from arab leaders to campaign for the dems. they sidelined rashida tlaib, their only palestinian rep, who still held GOTV campaigns and encouraged people to vote dem without explicitly endorsing harris because the entire biden admin iced her out once her people started being genocided. they also refused to appear with arab leaders and even elected officials who did endorse harris. they simply did not want their campaign to be perceived as a campaign arab or palestinian voters would endorse.
this is because the democratic party understood that they were campaigning on murdering muslims and arabs, and being associated with them might give the impression to the neocons they were courting that they were soft. this wasn't an accident, this was a calculation they made. they wanted to spurn those communities in order to win the votes of those who hate them and those who profit from their deaths.
there's a reason they didn't let a palestinian onstage at the DNC, there's a reason they sent bill clinton and ritchie torres to michigan, and there's a reason kamala could not express sympathy for palestinians without being careful to say "the greatest tragedy was october 7th" first. all the charades about the ceasefire and the two-state solution are for israel's benefit before they were for electoral benefit, because from the outset the democrats had made the decision not just to ignore muslim and arab voters, but to campaign on their suppression.
this is what people scolding arab and muslim voters miss: the dems were hoping to gain votes by spurning these communities both domestically (when it came to crushing and defaming pro-palestine supporters, michigan arabs, americans killed in palestine, lebanese americans they left stranded in lebanon) and abroad (they were campaigning on a more lethal military and launched a regional war in the middle east). biden's decision to support israel's insane escalation was not just incidental and ideological, it was part of a cold calculation made by the biden admin after 2022 to tie american economy and political power to interventionism regardless of global consequences, even as the atrocities mounted.
this wasn't something kamala could've (or was willing) to stop once the ball was rolling. this is a bipartisan consensus that underwrites the logic of the US as a world power. trump probably can stop it because he has the kind of mandate that allows him to make unilateral decisions like that, but he won't because he's not interested in it, hates iran, and he's well-paid by zionist and arab leaders who both have an interest in "reshaping" the middle east, as jake sullivan put it.
in the most cynical view, kamala didn't need to campaign on it the way she did. the US war machine remains unchanged and is usually not championed by democrats in such stark neocon terms. but kamala, as a woman of color facing accusations of "woke" wanted to double down on it so people understood she meant it. in other words, she was vice-signalling. kamala campaigned on the strength of this war machine, and demonstrated that by not giving an inch to the ideological enemies of this war machine—arabs, muslims, palestinians and their allies. her campaign in and of itself was designed to target these communities, from the cynical "what has palestine done for black people?" khive campaigns to "i'm speaking" to "if you don't like it, go vote for trump and see how you like the muslim ban." and you know it worked because even when she lost her supporters continue to vilify them and are openly calling for further violence against them and identifying them as traitors, backstabbers, and enemies.
islamophobia in the west is openly accepted, even hegemonic, and it's not potentially going to result in hate crimes, lynchings and deportations: it's already reached and passed that point long ago. but it also resulted in much worse. the US and the west have killed millions of muslims and arabs across the years. the US is currently carrying out a genocide of indigenous palestinians as we speak. i'm not speaking speculatively about the warnings of fascism, i'm speaking historically about the atrocities already committed against whole nations. hrw released the report of ethnic cleansing in gaza today and ohcr finally admitted israel's actions in gaza are consistent with genocide. this means the genocide has already been carried out for a while, which genocide conventions, US law, international humanitarian law, all the protestors since last october, and the international court of justice were supposed to prevent from happening ever again—but joe biden and his admin prevented any of that from stopping israel.
in this campaign in particular, kamala was running not only on the strength and triumph of the crimes previously committed against those people, but on the promise of crimes to be committed against those people, and the assurance that the domestic objection to those crimes will be thoroughly ignored. and she demonstrated that by ignoring that voting base. if they had tried to court them, it would have undermined her whole campaign. on the other hand, it undermined nothing for trump, who (for all of his flaws and open support for it) was not the one personally carrying out a genocide the past year.
once you understand this, you understand it wasn't a matter of "kamala promised a ceasefire and trump wanted to finish the job" or "vote blue no matter who." if you are not part of this community or the region that kamala was campaigning on destroying, you missed the point of her campaign. she wasn't trying to win their votes despite biden's genocide, she wasn't doing her best with things out of her control, and she wasn't making promises she wouldn't keep like trump. she was campaigning against us. for many other demographics, this was a campaign of faux joy and vague promises of protecting democracy. for the arab and muslim communities, this was a campaign where "protecting democracy" necessitated their families being slaughtered live on everyone's timelines and smearing the voters who had the audacity to ask for it to stop.
but to their credit, most of them still didn't vote for trump. they didn't believe him. they just sat it out. what else can you do? not only is the person running part of the admin killing your cousins, but they're also campaigning on excluding and vilifying you even if you want to vote for them.
i've said this before but a great majority of the people organizing for palestine were previous dem canvassers and local organizers. they arrested their own campaign infrastructure over the year and smeared them as hateful antisemites. they pretended they had only targeted arabs and muslims and 'hamas supporters' and kept the fact that most of those protestors were antizionist jews, students of color and regular kids out of mainstream media. their youth vote tanked but they still continue to pretend the genocide was not a factor in their loss.
despite that they make sure to stress that muslim and arab voters "voted for trump to punish harris" even though exit polls and election data show otherwise. this simply wasn't true, and she lost in all seven swing states. this is because she ran a campaign that vilified arabs and muslims, and the narrative now demands it. liberals want them perceived as having "punished" the american populace so the american populace punishes them while the US continues to massacre our region.
she lost, but her hateful campaign lingers. i think a lot of people find comfort in saying "you'll get what's coming to you" or "trump is gonna turn gaza into a parking lot" because violence against these communities is the status quo. they're scared of the uncertainty of what trump will do to america, but they're comfortable with what he might do to us. because that's some semblance of normality in an unstable time. america will change and trump will put your institutions to the test, but at least killing arabs will stay the same. and that was, in short, kamala harris's campaign pitch.
I’m obsessed with Dropout.
"No, because Robin-Man sounds stupid." BABY DICK GRAYSON IS A NATIONAL TREASURE.
80s movies seriously had the best weird girls like these woman who have everything mismatched and were so kitschy
Genre of woman
Downtown Julie Brown
Iona (Pretty in Pink)
Jess Browning from Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II
Lulu/Audrey in Something Wild
Fun fact about Tobi: I have a blistering personal hatred for Alex Jones. Mostly because he was my mentally ill, brain damaged mother's (I'm not being cruel she literally has a hole in her brain from cancer) introduction to the world of conspiracy theories and alt right bullshit.
So for years, every now and then, I put a curse on him. Curses are fun because they let you feel like you're hurting someone without ever actually doing anything illegal that could conceivably harm them. My curse was in the form of a drawing- Anubis, the Egyptian god of death and judgment, as a jackal, eating the heart out of Jones' chest.
Today I wake up to the news that Jones' stupid fucking Infowars channel was bought by the Onion, who intends to gut it out and use its corpse as a puppet to mock the ignorance the channel once espoused as truth.
I'm not saying there is or is not a god. But I have a sneaking suspicion there might be an Anubis.
Drew another one to celebrate why not. Suffer and die you stupid motherfucker.
I will never NEVER forget how the entire Community cast had a groupchat with each other except for Donald Glover and when it was revealed during the reunion zoom Donald was like, 'damn I was gonna suggest we make a gc after this but you've already got one? 🥺😢' and everyone else was like 'we just thought you were too famous to wanna hang with us anymore 🥺👉👈'
Literally never, i think about it everyday
i read the cutest reddit thread today where this 19 yo boy was “babysitting” his 15 yo little sister while his parents were away on vacation and she got this horrific period and needed to be taken to the ER.
and this sweet 19 yo boy was doing all he could to take care of her, giving her meds and water and then packing stuff up to go to the hospital once reddit was like “yeah if she’s soaking two tampons in an hour you should go” - but being only a little older than a child himself, he didn’t know what to pack, so he brought like three things, and one of them was SUNSCREEN.
lmao everyone on reddit was like “you’re a really good brother but sunscreen?? for the hospital??” lmao they are roasting him. also op’s sister changed his name in her phone to “spf” and their dad calls him “bananaboat” now. this guy is never living this down
(also his sister is ok and it turns out their family has some kind of genetic blood disorder)
the brother kind of reminds me of that post that’s been going around abt that abandoned five-week-old kitten that was taking care of a few two-week-old kittens that were somehow with him and he was just trying his best but he was so small
Alex Jones is livestreaming rn and for the first and only time in my life it's appointment viewing. He got evicted from his studio mid-stream and they had to cover for him when he popped up in his "satellite studio" (a room in his house I assume) devoid of the Infowars branding. He's talking about how "tens of millions" of people have watched his final broadcast & you can literally see he has far less than a million viewers in the bottom corner (and this is on Twitter, which inflates views of videos ever since Elon had to convince people anyway gives a shit about Tucker Carlson's livestreams). He's currently whining that they chose not to sell his site back to him at auction, so he could keep doing the crimes that are why he was selling his website.
I didn't see this personally but he's apparently read out the Onion's announcement, which is a fake article by a fake corporation, out loud several times as if it was real. Anyway it should be noted how screwed he is, bc...
...while he can livestream under his own name, they own his warehouses of dubious supplements. He has nothing to sell but t-shirts protesting that his show is going down. Since Infowars was, first and foremost, a lifestyle brand, this leaves him, scientifically speaking, "totally fucked". He doesn't have ads, that's the only way he makes money
He just promised that he will "win the information war" which. You were sued into oblivion for lying about the parents of murdered children & lost your platform so hard you don't even have a studio anymore & your brand was seized by a rival to make fun of you. I didn't think the Infowar was a real thing you could lose, but I'm not sure there's a more definitive way to lose the information war. Anyway he's now ranting about fluoride
Worth noting that many of the Sandy Hooks families waived significant portions of what they were owed if the Onion was purchaser and not Roger Stone (who would have kept Jones and elevated the platform into an arm of the incoming Presidential administration). That let the Onion undercut Jones bid with less money. They sacrificed a larger pay day to make sure the machinery to hurt someone else like he did them was taken from Jones.
now that my post about breaking down one's idea of what a woman looks like has circulated for a while (thank you all), i'm now going to make this post, as i do not want people to derail that specific conversation, nor this one.
we also must break down our idea of what a man looks, acts, sounds, behaves, and presents like.
men are not cis, het, allosexual or highly sexual beings, tall, muscular, strong, hairy, deep voiced, broad chested/shouldered, emotionless, mean, aggressive, unemotional, uncaring, distant, cold, stoic, heartless, standoffish, bread winners, bad/absent fathers, macho, obligated to work despite disabilities, or obligated to be "the man of the house."
men are people. first and foremost.
men are allowed to express just like anyone else. men do not have to be pillars of their communities. no obligation. men are allowed to be disabled, tired, weak, emotional, caring, compassionate, asexual, aromantic, friendly, warm, in need of support, neurodivergent, mentally ill, chronically ill,and have personality disorders. men have their own struggles and we have to stop telling them to "suck it up" and "move on" and "pull yourself up by your boot straps".
we are forcing men to do this: this is a cage of our own design.
once we dismantle this idea of how a man "should" be, once more: we will move past radfeminism, patriarchy, trans/androphobia, and fostering a culture where this is an acceptable way to treat men. it's not. we must allow men to be diverse. we must allow men to be who they are on the inside
On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.
On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can't read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.
And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn't efficient enough for today's world to put up with.
Like... if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what's going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?
Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you're a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting
Reading cursive is one of my most valuable skills as a historical professional.
But it's also not a one and done thing! Scripts came in and out of fashion as they were taught in schools, and each one has a learning curve as you get used to it, along with nuances of the individual writer.
I don't think you necessarily need to know how to write in cursive in order to read it, but it certainly helps. My advice if you find yourself in a situation where you're struggling to read something is not to give up, which is often the impulse when you encounter a barrier to something that usually comes easily.
Depending on the document, you might find your eyes feeling strained or getting a headache (the ink in the one above was so faded my brain was mush after a couple of hours sitting with it) but there will be a threshold after which the pieces come together. Don't give up.
And just to add to this - as someone who has to read a lot of old handwriting for my job and who has developed this skill, it is SO frustrating to see transcription jobs only advertised as “volunteer”. I get the appeal of it to give retirees something to do (like with the National Archives), but once that generation dies off we’re going to have next to no one who can read and transcribe old documents written in cursive. If we don’t give younger people an incentive to learn the skill, it will die out. So maybe actually pay people who are trained or learning this skill instead of relying on volunteers, because I promise you we’ll pay for it in the long run otherwise 😢
Alex Jones is livestreaming rn and for the first and only time in my life it's appointment viewing. He got evicted from his studio mid-stream and they had to cover for him when he popped up in his "satellite studio" (a room in his house I assume) devoid of the Infowars branding. He's talking about how "tens of millions" of people have watched his final broadcast & you can literally see he has far less than a million viewers in the bottom corner (and this is on Twitter, which inflates views of videos ever since Elon had to convince people anyway gives a shit about Tucker Carlson's livestreams). He's currently whining that they chose not to sell his site back to him at auction, so he could keep doing the crimes that are why he was selling his website.
I didn't see this personally but he's apparently read out the Onion's announcement, which is a fake article by a fake corporation, out loud several times as if it was real. Anyway it should be noted how screwed he is, bc...
...while he can livestream under his own name, they own his warehouses of dubious supplements. He has nothing to sell but t-shirts protesting that his show is going down. Since Infowars was, first and foremost, a lifestyle brand, this leaves him, scientifically speaking, "totally fucked". He doesn't have ads, that's the only way he makes money
He just promised that he will "win the information war" which. You were sued into oblivion for lying about the parents of murdered children & lost your platform so hard you don't even have a studio anymore & your brand was seized by a rival to make fun of you. I didn't think the Infowar was a real thing you could lose, but I'm not sure there's a more definitive way to lose the information war. Anyway he's now ranting about fluoride
