Jabroni Baloney

Newsmax is a far-right conservative network. These are supposed to be bad things. I feel like I'm watching a Simpsons episode. This season of America was written by The Onion.

It's absolutely bonkers that the average right wing voter, who will benefit tremendously from every single one of these policies, whose quality of life will go up literally overnight, will fight to the death to prevent them from happening.

And you know why? Because these same policies will also improve life for all Americans, including ... Those People. (insert scary music)

Racism is a hell of a thing, y'all.

We are witnessing the grotesque reality of the martyred Palestinians and thousands of their massacred children being written off as mere afterthoughts. The way western media outlets steadfastly refuse to call the Israeli aggression and onslaught for what it is, which is genocide and ethnic cleansing, is just another way of dehumanizing Palestinians. 

hold on i havent heard abt this movie wdym by "ignoring and denying reality"?

biiiiiiiig oofbaboof

first: 65 is an upcoming movie in which people get lost in space butt hey end up on earth 65 million years ago, aka "right before the asteroid". the movie's dinosaurs are worse than those of jurassic world in terms of accuracy - significantly worse.

second:

we're touching on "Meig's Theory of Everything" which, a) all theories of everything are oversimplifications and b) I am not important enough to have a theory of everything, I'm just a schmuck who reads too many books and thinks too much for too long of the day. so that's the disclaimer, here you go:

We currently have a situation in much of the world - not only the United States, but I am from the states and as such my perspective is very biased to here - where people are ignoring things that cannot be changed or avoided, mainly so they can turn a profit

the classic example is climate change, right? climate change is happening. that is the reality. that is what has been shown in paper after paper and study after study. And we've known about it for a while. But rather than acknowledge and face that reality - that we have to do something about it - oil and gas companies actively worked to suppress that reality, and even now, we careen towards a point of no return. Climate change isn't going anywhere, no matter how much you just hope real hard it will so you can dig up more oil.

but there's more than that. There's the fact that covid-19 is horrifying, has significant long-term repercussions, and hasn't gone anywhere - and yet we don't have mask mandates. It's like if people just stopped using condoms just a few years after the peak of HIV. No one wants to stop raw dogging the air. And as such, the disease keeps mutating, people keep getting sick, and repeated infections repeatedly cause long term disability. But no one acknowledges this, because masks are unpopular, and, well, everyone just wants power and profit at the expense of people.

there's the fact that there are very very very few differences between biosex-males and biosex-females in humans (insert all the asterisks that sex is a made up concept, gender is based in personal experience and thus should be prioritized, etc) and those differences are decreasing with each generation, and yet, swathes of people believe that biosex-males are naturally smarter and stronger just because they had to for some made up pseudoscientific reason.

And these things just feed into bigotry, right? Fox News actively lies week to week and misrepresents information to keep their viewers scared and, thus, willing to vote against their own self-interest - mainly, by keeping them scared of minorities. The reality is that the uber-rich - billionaires, oil ceos, most politicians - continue to take away our rights and safety in order to consolidate their own power, creating a techno-feudalist society. But they lie and they lie and they lie in order to prevent people from realizing this, so they can keep their power.

But reality doesn't go away just because you want it to. You can scream and scream and scream but blaming everything on minorities isn't actually fixing anything, everything's getting worse, and that's why you can't base policy on lies. Fiction doesn't become real because you want it to. The problems I listed above keep getting worse because we keep not fixing them, because the terrible want power and the mediocre hate change.

And the media is an arm of all of this. All of it is connected. Billionaires also have the power in what we see in our stories and our art - we know this, we know that's why AO3 and fanwork exists. Indie things that prioritize reality and equity don't get far, more often than not. Those that do almost always have some sort of caveat that renders the message within hollow (here's how in Andor). Of course this applies to dinosaur media.

The old narrative, the one that suits the powers that be, is that dinosaurs were a failed group of behemoth monsters that were stupid and lucky that they got the megafaunal spot before mammals could take their rightful place. This points to humans being the ultimate heirs and owners of nature, of the world. The rightful rulers, the divinely righted kings. We are at the top of nature's hierarchy - the mammals, better than the dinosaurs, took over because of their superiority, and then we were the most superior of them all.

But truth is, that's not the truth. Science shows over and over again that nature is non hierarchical, that every facet of the food web is important to every other, that we all have our part to play to keep nature balanced. We are many and we are one. A carnivore eating prey is not enmity or war or competition, but a necessary flow of energy. humans don't rule nature, but we also aren't separate from it - we are nature, we are a part of it. And the evidence shows that nonavian dinosaurs would not have disappeared if it wasn't for a freak accident from space. And, with the knowledge that it is not who is at the top - since there is no top - there is an argument to be made that dinosaurs are doing better than mammals today: birds are more speciose and more numerous than mammals by far.

But that goes against our narrative

The one that helps the powers that be keep their power

So we can't have it. We can't have the nuanced picture of the well adapted, birdlike dinosaurs that actually were hit the screens. We can't have them portrayed seriously and realistically. If we do, it has to be in educational media, because people rarely watch that stuff anyway, and those that do already know.

this leads us to 65. Despite being a new dinosaur related fictional piece with absolutely no ties to jurassic park, it didn't actually go for depicting the past correctly. The damn TITLE isn't right! We now know the extinction happened 66 million years ago! 65 mya was in the Paleocene! Never mind the unrealistic abominations that are the dinosaurs and the portrayal of nature (ie, no herbivores because they aren't scary, even though herbivorous animals are almost always more violent and dangerous than carnivorous ones) - the title is itself a falsehood.

Even if not intentional, it reflects the lack of education and knowledge about our collective past in society, which is not good. Only by understanding where we've been can we know how to go forward. Imagine making a movie about, I don't know, going to space, and your title is about how the earth is flat, but you sincerely think the world is flat. That's ridiculous, right? Well, this is just as ridiculous, but we're okay with it, because we aren't properly educated on it because learning the nuance of nature breaks down society's foundational myths.

Like, yeah, not every bit of inaccurate dinosaur art is bad. Individuals should not be held uniquely responsible for the ills of society, and ffs, obviously people with power and money have more reach and are more responsible. But like, don't act like your choices exist in a vacuum either - we have to commit to reality when it is necessary which, for now, with dinosaurs? It is. They aren't monsters. They aren't fictional. Draw dragons and fictitious creatures if you want, but dinosaurs ARE real animals and deserve to be treated with respect.

And that is why 65 is very much related to our rapidly decaying society.

Thanks for humoring me.

Know a distraction when you see one.

This is so much

reporters have Had Enough 😂

FINALLY News 12 Long Island has their day

I am literally begging, BEGGING modern media to portray healthy relationships. enough cheating. enough infidelity. enough disrespect. show me people who love each other, proper communication, and a strong mental as well as physical connection. I want plots about people who are madly in love with each other and STAY madly in love with each other. please. I am losing my mind.

I keep seeing that image make the rounds, and in case anyone's curious, it comes from this awesome graphic novel based on a true story about the lower east side of New York in the late 80's.

"War in the Neighborhood" by Seth Tobocmam

Cornel West said anarchists saved his life in two separate interviews and all of the headlines about these quotes conveniently remove the word anarchists

Natural Born Killers (1994)

How to deal with the media