If you live and vote in California, I hope by now you've heard that there is an election happening on September 14th. You may have even gotten your ballot in the mail already.

An election? In September? Yes. A stupid one.

You see, some Republicans got Big Mad at Governor Gavin Newsom when he made the decision to lockdown the state last year at the beginning of the pandemic. They decided to start a petition to remove (recall) him from office. California's state constitution allows voters to remove the governor via recall election if they get enough signatures.

How many signatures, you ask? 12% of the total votes cast in the previous election for the office of the person being recalled, or in this case, 1.5 million.

Yeah. That's all. Out of a state of nearly 40 million people. A state that is the 5th largest economy in the world.

Just 1.5 million people need to sign an official recall petition for a statewide vote to remove the governor from office.

(If you didn't know, a recall election is how California got Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor in 2003.)

If a simple majority (50% + 1 vote) of voters choose YES on their ballots, Gavin Newsom will be removed from office and whomever of the 46 candidates on the ballot gets more votes than anyone else (not even a majority vote, just more than the other candidates) will become California's new governor.

The current (as of today, August 20th) frontrunners are a very right-wing talk radio host named Larry Elder, and a real estate broker/YouTube personality named Kevin Paffrath. Neither have what you would call "political experience."

(Caitlin Jenner is also running. Just in case you were wondering.)

How do you get on a recall ballot in California? To replace the governor, the highest office in the state? Well, you need to complete the arduous task of forking over about $4000 and getting 7500 signatures of real Californians saying they back you as a candidate.

Yeah. That's all.

Oh, and just having this election is costing CA taxpayers over $250 million dollars.

So what's at stake if Newsom gets recalled?

Majority control of the US Senate.

You see, Senator Dianne Feinstein is 88 years old this year. She's been Senator since 1992. If she falls too ill to continue her duties, if she resigns, if she dies while in office, California does not hold a Senatorial election.

The governor appoints a replacement.

This is how we got our current junior Senator, Alex Padilla, after Kamala Harris was inaugurated as Vice President.

Let me say that again.

The governor appoints a replacement Senator if Dianne Feinstein cannot complete her term.

If enough people vote to recall Gavin Newsom, and a Republican, or Libertarian, or, let's be honest, any inexperienced wet sack that can be bought off by the highest bidder, takes his place, they will very possibly appoint a Republican Senator to replace Dianne Feinstein and put that fuckface Mitch McConnell back in control of the US Senate.

So please, please, if you're a Californian, make sure you're registered to vote, get your ballot, and vote NO on this stupid waste of money recall election.

More info:

www.sfgate.com/gavin-newsom-recall/amp/Gavin-Newsom-recall-poll-support-Elder-Paffrath-16390077.php

Voter guide:

https://www.kqed.org/recall

And more: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-18/vote-recall-election

"78 percent of registered Republicans said they were “very interested” in voting in the recall, while only 47 percent of registered Democrats said the same. And while Newsom could theoretically take comfort in that 57 percent approval rating in the CBS News poll, that figure won’t help him unless people vote who don’t seem particularly inclined to." https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/california-recall-election-newsom-ballot-mess.amp

i did two pieces for @baccano-zine and im ECSTATIC to finally share them!! i had such a blast drawing my favorite characters from one of my favorite anime– check out the full zine!

COVID is slowly becoming a "third world" disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can't get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.

Watch also when some first world countries finish vaccinating their populations, they will turn to third world countries and "donate" or sell surplus vaccines. People in these countries will go "Oh how sweet! The government is donating vaccines to the poorer countries <3" when it was their hoarding that led to many, many third world citizens dying before they could even get vaccinated in the first place.

african and latin american countries are also pushed by pfizer to give up sovereign assets as part of their vaccine agreement

Yo europeans, sign the fucking petition, get the european commission to lift the patents

This is not a bullshit useless change dot org petition by the way this is an actual thing with legal consequences. If this petition gets to a million signatures, the european commission HAS to examine it.

REBLOG

REBLOG

REBLOG

Just as a warning for people with tiktok. 

STAY OFF YOUR FORYOU PAGE.

A man killed himself live on tiktok. People are embedding the video into other videos and sharing it around. Stay off tiktok, go watch some compilations on youtube or something. 

People are actually turning this guys death into a meme fucking hell.

This is the first image of the TikTok so you know to scroll past it if you come across the video:

Y'all i got a text about my friend breaking down becuase of this just a few minutes ago. Its real and its terrible. They’re also hiding it in stuff like cat videos and other seemingly harmless things so stay alert and stay safe.

Oh Jesus I don’t have TikTok but please be aware darlings!!!! This sounds terrifying!!!

stay safe pls guys

Ignoring the fact that if you have tiktok you really shouldn’t, stay safe!!

Holy fuck, stay safe everyone!

People have been sharing it in the replies on Twitter too, so if you see posts talking about this video, be very careful.

Can you believe the twins are 21 now? Happy birthday Dipper and Mabel!

Go a little fart

be ded

Happy Out of Touch Thursday 

WTF??!!

Life!?!?!? For stealing hedge trimmers!?!?!?

NPR article for more information

I was able to find a few email addresses and phone numbers on the official Louisiana Supreme website

Clerk of Court Hon. John Tarlton Olivier

400 Royal Street, New Orleans, LA 70130

P: (504) 310-2300

Email: [email protected]

Judicial Administrator’s Office Sandra A. Vujnovich

400 Royal Street, Suite 1190, New Orleans, LA 70130

P: (504) 310-2550

Court Public Information Coordinator Trina S. Vincent

400 Royal Street, Suite 1190, New Orleans, LA 70130

P: (504) 310-2590

Email: [email protected]

Names of the Judges that voted against the appeal: 

William J. Crain

Scott J. Crichton

James T. Genovese

Jefferson D. Hughes III 

John L. Weimer  

Just wanted to give you all a friendly reminder to #BeYou. Love you guys!

Something quick, tried to keep from rendering too much lol

Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

It’s called: antisemitic caricature.

I don’t understand what’s Jewish about mother gothel… she has a typical Disney face doesn’t she? Is it the curly hair..? I mean her nose and everything else seem normal?

I’m sorry, I’m just trying to figure it out, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.

dark curly hair - long hooked nose - darker complexion than the blond blue eyed heroine 9and really the rest of the cast - portrayed as greedy and evil.

Lisa Edelstein is Jewish.  As are Idina Menzel and Amy Winehouse, both of whom I have seen compared in looks to Gothel.  Gothel’s design is a pretty clear caricature of ethnically Jewish women.  

This is a pretty good contrast between Rapunzel and Gothel.  Rapunzel has the “typical Disney face”:

Here’s a more close up look at her features.

The hooked nose becomes even more pronounced as she becomes “eviler.”

If you wanted to claim that there was noting out of the ordinary for Disney animation when it came to Gothel’s features, you would have to find at least one Disney princess or heroine with similar characteristics (long hooked nose and dark curly hair, etc).

But here is what we have is -

small noses that turn up at the end:

wide, flatter noses (though cheers to Disney for not putting button noses on their characters of color, although Esmerelda’s clothing design deserves another essay on Rromani stereotypes and there are some major issues with Pocahontas as well)

And then a few misc noses (again, props for Jasmine’s nose not being a button):

Apart from just the design of Gothel, there’s also the whole: “obviously ‘other’ (read Jewish) woman kidnaps the pretty blonde (read: gentile) kid to use her for ritualistic/magical purposes”

Like that right there on top of the aesthetic Jewish-coding is what pushed the antisemitic caricature over the top for me.  It harkens back to antisemitic blood libel that claimed that Jews stole gentile children for all manner of nefarious reasons. Even when Gothel is in “mother” role to Rapunzel, she’s is shown as nagging and passive aggressive, both antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish women.

There is no one thing that makes her an antisemitic caricature, but the design, plus the storyline she plays out, plus her characterization cement the overall character as antisemitic.  

Jew-coding a villain is not in itself always antisemitic when there are also Jewish coded heroes. Rapunzel does not have that.

Having a villain steal a baby for magical/ritualistic reasons is not always antisemitic as long as the villain is not Jew-coded.  Rapunzel fails this as well.

Having a nagging and passive aggressive mother character is not antisemitic provided that she is not, again, coded as Jewish.  Rapunzel fails once again.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: @ariminak pointed out that some of my wording made it sound like Gothel’s features only stereotypically caricatured Ashkenazi women when in fact that is not the case.  I changed the language to remove that phrasing and make it clear that any ethnically Jewish women can be affected by this type of aesthetic trope. If you reblogged the old version, could you please delete it and reblog this one instead.

Spread this version so people recognize that this stuff harms all Jewish women.

omfg can y’all chill the fuck out, any race can be portrayed as hero or villain, it’s a fucking kids movie not a political statement

So I’m guessing you’re white and a gentile. As such, you’ve more than likely grown up looking at tv and movies and fairytales and seeing your face in those of the heroes.

Jewish people don’t get that.  When we are portrayed in live action, our characters are more often than not whitewashed and in other media, our features are used and caricaturized to create “evil looking” villains.

You don’t see it because you’ve been ingrained with the idea that “ethnic” features are just “how you make a character look evil.”  You don’t look at Gothel and see your mother.  You don’t see yourself and your people.  You don’t see decades of propaganda aimed at fostering hate against you and ultimately seeking to destroy you.  

But seeing how you also seem to think that saying you’re not attracted to an entire race of people ISN’T racist, you really don’t get any say on any of this.

So really, you need to chill the fuck out and stop telling marginalized people to stop talking about the tools of our own marginalization.

Let’s play a game I like to call: Movie Villain or Antisemitic Propaganda:

Many “evil witch” tropes were built on European antisemitic stereotypes, not just in appearance but in the storylines they play out as well. Greediness, stealing children, killing children, hunger for power, etc.  Every time a movie villain design uses stereotyped Jewish features to communicate “evilness” to an audience, they perpetuate the marginalization of the people they are using. 

One big issue I have is that Gothel’s didn’t start out as the antisemitic caricature that made it to screen.  Much of the early concept art has a more dark romanticism feel.  

They changed the original design. Presumably to make Gothel more “other” from the good characters in the movie.  At some point, a decision was made that dark curly hair and a hooked nose wound better convey their villain.

It really doesn’t matter if any of this was intentional, I’d actually bet that it wasn’t.  However, antisemitic tropes are so engrained in our societies that people like you, even when confronted with a step by step break down of what it is, feel comfortable thinking that there’s nothing wrong with it and mocking those calling it out as if we are overreacting.

You seem to have completely ignored the majority of my post.  It is the character design, plus the characterization, plus the story line that mirrors blood libel that makes Gothel an antisemitic character.  It’s not just about someone of a certain race or ethnicity being a villain.  It’s about how stereotypes of a certain ethnic group are understood as “villainous” due to villains being repeatedly coded as Jewish over decades of film and tv.

And contrary to your naive belief, all media is political to some extent. Every time a historically present minority is not included in film (ex: lily-white Harlem in Fantastical Beasts) or when a minority character is whitewashed, or when the “ethnic” features of a minority are used almost universally to portray bad guys, it is a political and social issue.  When you never see yourselves as the people who play the hero or even see your people existing in a portrayal of a place where they should be, it is not benign.

Reblogging again for these additions.

My friend from Lebanon wrote up a really good thread on Twitter I thought I should share here, just to clear up some of the inaccuracies floating around:

And here are some of the links they provided:

https://www.supportlrc.app/

https://www.gofundme.com/f/prevent-suicides-due-to-poverty-and-unemployment

https://www.gofundme.com/f/medical-relief-to-lebanon

https://www.gofundme.com/f/hope-for-lebanon

https://www.gofundme.com/f/lebanonneedsorg

http://www.caritas.org.lb/get_involved/donate

https://beitelbaraka.net/donation/pay/

https://gogetfunding.com/beirut-emergency-relief/

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/lebanon-relief

https://www.givingloop.org/offrejoie

https://www.gofundme.com/f/beirut-explosion-emergency-disaster-relief