A reminder not to watch eurovision and not to vote - even if you're scared israel will win. this is not about who wins and who loses, this is about the Palestinian BDS movement asking us to enact cultural and material boycott of a TV show that's plaforming a genocidal ethnostate. don't give them your money.
Israel doing well in Eurovision is a completely predictable result of the boycott. The people who are watching & voting in Eurovision are now at best willfully ignorant and apathetic and at worst actively pro-Israel, meaning there will be a disproportionate amount of people willing to vote for Israel and even people voting for them because of the boycott.
But saying that means that boycotting Eurovision was the wrong call completely misses the point of the boycott. The point is not "Israel should not win Eurovision", it is "Israel should not be allowed to compete in the first place". The point of the boycott is not to give the EBU views or money, so if you've been boycotting... don't give them money or legitimacy by voting for someone tomorrow to prevent Israel from winning. If Israel does win, that does not mean boycotting failed; it only further delegitimizes the competition and confirms we should burn the whole thing down.
If Israel ends up winning, that's the EBU's problem, not ours.
Don't watch, don't vote.
message which appeared on belgian eurovision broadcast
"This is a union action. We condemn the human rights violations committed by the State of Israel. Israel violates media freedom. We are stopping the broadcast for a moment. #ceasefirenow, #stopgenocide," the message said. For a moment it seemed as if there had been a kidnapping, but it seems that the action was coordinated with the managers of VRT. As reported by De Standaard, the VRT spokeswoman claims that they were aware of the union action on public television. "Trade unions have the right to take action. We have taken note of it, but we will not react to it," said Yasmine Van der Borght. Several thousand people peacefully paraded through the streets of Swedish Malmo today as a sign of protest against Israel's participation in Eurovision, a few hours before the performance of 20-year-old singer Eden Golan with the song "Hurricane" in the second semi-final.
Palestine tried to join Eurovision in 2007 but weren't allowed because they weren't recognised as a state by Europe. How different would the last few decades have been if we had watched Palestine participate every year? How different would Eurovision 2024 be?
Russia was banned from Eurovision after the invasion of Ukraine. What would've happened to Israel this year if Palestine had been allowed to join? Well, that's the whole point. If Europe keeps Palestine invisible, then we can ignore Israel's politicisation of the contest and the genocide they're committing against Palestinians. This week the "real villains" are those spoiling the song competition by calling for peace.
This year when Bashar Murad competed to represent Iceland in Eurovision, samples of Murad's parents being interviewed in 2007 were included in the song "Wild West".
I think while Eurovision is airing everyone should flood the Eurovision hashtags with Gaza news, images and fundraisers
The folks who refuse to boycott because they think they can do more good watching and promoting the show...they especially ought to do this, I think.
[waking up in a cold sweat] In the Temeraire universe, ABBA never won Eurovision
Eurovision is now lying about Israel and Russia. The Eurovision organiser EBU is suggesting Russia wasn’t banned due to invading Ukraine, a lie that even their own website disproves.
The EBU says the Israel situation is “fundamentally different” from Russia in 2022. They suggest they didn’t kick Russia out of Eurovision because they invaded Ukraine, they kicked Russia out of the EBU for unrelated reasons.
Except… that’s not what happened! In 2022, the EBU had announced Russia would be kicked out of Eurovision “in light of the unprecedented crisis in Ukraine”.
The Russian broadcasters responded to being booted from Eurovision by announcing their intention to withdraw from the EBU, which the EBU reported via their website.
So why are they now saying something else happened? It’s a lie. The EBU kicked Russia out of Eurovision before the Russian broadcasters left the EBU. This is clearly an attempt to distance themselves from their (quite right) decision to remove a country from Eurovision.
But the fact is, the EBU created a precedent for themselves of removing a country due to war and now they want to pretend that never happened so they don’t have to take action against Israel.
iceland is threatening to pull out of eurovision unless israel is removed... please g-d let them blacklist israel that would be so huge
finnish broadcaster yle is now also considering dropping out pending the removal of israel & is reportedly discussing options with other nordic countries - including sweden who is literally hosting
eurovision is huge. it's the biggest non-sport competition in the world and got significantly higher viewership than the superbowl. the ebu sanctioning israel - thus implicitly condemning their actions and denying them a platform for propaganda - could have a giant impact on its perception by the public, and possibly encourage other international events to follow
fun fact: if you pirated six full length albums from your favourite band, listened to them all back to back 5 times, and then sent them $20 on ko-fi or whatever, on average they would have earned slightly more money per play than they'd get from you streaming the same shit with ads on spotify.
invariably when I talk about media piracy people are like "but what!!! about creators!!! they need to make a living!!!" my homey in romey if you're that worried about it send your favourite artist $5 right now. do it. shut the fuck up.
I want to support artists but I can ONLY do it if I'm being drip fed shittier and shittier versions of the content a tech executive thinks I want. I have no choice in the matter because uhhhhhh other people won't pay for things if they're free. yeah that's right. other people are the problem.
here's the piracy secret big media don't want you to know: you can always give artists money if you want to.
ADDENDUM: woke up this morning and realised my math was off (I missed a decimal place). your favourite band would actually earn about 10x more per play from your $20 than they would from spotify.
That means you could pirate six albums and listen to them 50 times each, and you would only owe around $20 in spotify equivalent fees. Figures below the cut since people keep disputing them in various directions in my inbox:
There was a great Eurovision song this year about this:
0.003 in the song is a reference to the $0.003 number mentioned above.
I usually do not give a fuck about the Eurovision but this year is a bit special for me as it is my language and culture who will represent France, so I have some thoughts about it and need to get them out.
First if you don’t know anything about this, the “French” song that will be at Eurovision is called Fulenn and was made by Alvan & Ahez. Alvan is a Breton electro musician. Ahez is a band of three Breton women who met in Diwan, which are immersion schools teaching the Breton language, and learnt kan ha diskan, Brittany’s traditional way of singing, from Louise Ebrel, an absolute icon of traditional Breton music.
The song is entirely in Breton and inspired by a Breton legend, the legend of Katell Gollet.
By the way Breton is a Celtic language of the Brythonic branch (with Welsh and Cornish, the other branch being the Goidelic one, with Irish, Scottish and Manx). Stats say it’s spoken by about 200K people nowadays, it is considered endangered. It’s spoken in Brittany, a western region of France.
Now I kind of want to point out the irony of it all… Diwan schools, where the members of this band met, are technically illegal in France. They exist, but they are in a very precarious position following the Constitutional Council’s decision of two years ago that officially ruled immersion schools as “against the French constitution”. The 2nd article of the French constition states that The Language of the Republic is French. France has quite the history of being absolutely terrible to the non-French languages spoken on its territory, hell it’s pretty terrible even to any Romance/French language that isn’t the standard (as regularly shown by the rampant glottophobia in our medias).
So France is going to be represented by a song born of something France is constitutionally against. I’m kind of amazed by the audacity.
To be fair, it’s not the first time France sent a Breton song to the eurovision, the other time was in 1996 with trad artist Dan ar Braz (check him out!).
So that’s for the fun political bits.
If you’re curious about the legend of Katell Gollet, here it is: Katell Gollet was a beautiful young woman whose only love was dancing. Her uncle wanted her to marry so she said ok, I will marry any man who can keep up with me and dance with me for 12 hours straight.
Many men tried, they all died of exhaustion.
Katell’s uncle was horrified and locked her up in a tower but she escaped and went to another party to dance again. Her dance partner died of exhaustion too, then the musicians died of exhaustion too, but she still didn’t want to stop, so she invoked musicians from the depths of hell to keep playing for her, and the Devil himself came to dance with her. The Devil and her then went through the gates of hell still dancing.
Of course originally it’s supposed to mean “Be a good girl, settle down for a man and marry, if you like dancing and having fun too much you’ll go to hell” because Brittany was catholic as fuck for a long time (hello Irish cousins). Personally I see a woman who didn’t want to settle down for anyone who couldn’t keep up with her and I dig that energy.
I highly encourage you to go check the song out, there are many videos of it with English translations on youtube. I think it’s a bop, personally, it’s a fun mix of electro and traditional singing. The lyrics are beautiful too!
Fun little language fact: Fulenn is a very versatile word, in the song it means “spark”, as in a spark of fire (which sometimes is written “Fulenn tan”), but in other contexts like “Fulenn erc’h” it means snowflake, and “Fulenn aour” is a gold chunk.
Fulenn is also a collective noun, which means that its default form “Ful” is plural, and you have to add a suffix to it (-enn) to make it singular. Ful= sparks. Fulenn= spark. This is of course because you rarely talk about a single spark, a single snowflake, those usually come in groups. Other collective nouns are usually cattle related, but my favourite one has to be “Krampouezh/enn”. It means crepe, and it’s a collective noun because whomst the fuck would only eat one crepe, am I right?
Anyway, I’m super happy about this song, about the visibility, about the lovely singing of those Breton-speaking women. Nothing would make me happier than this song winning the eurovision, forcing France to organise the eurovision (and as we all know, no country actually wants that) next year.
Here’s the song! It’s a banger and I’ve had t on loop for a few days.
Never thought I’d be voting for France in Eurovision but defence of the Brythonic languages comes before wider national grudges!
Also this snaps!
I keep thinking about that post about the whole genre of movies about a white guy getting into an asian philosophy, matrial art etc and then proceeding to surpass his teacher and be the best ever at it, and I started thinking about the opposite of it.
I want a movie about a chinese dude who comes to Finland, downs an entire bottle of Koskenkorva, tries to fight a nearby cow and ends up lying face down in a ditch while sobbing about his ex wife and having like 5 finnish dudes staring at him in awe like
“That’s him. That’s the chosen one.”
The 5 finnish dudes bring him home with them. The next day, the chinese dude wakes up on the couch with a mighty hangover. He turns on the TV and for the first time in his life sees Moomintroll. Instant spiritual bonding experience. Overcome with emotion, he begins to sing an ode to Snufkin in a high clear tenor voice. The 5 finnish dudes hastily call their live-in wise old mentor. “Yes,” says the mentor after watching chinese dude for a few minutes. “The prophecy was true. This is the chosen one. This man…will be our 2020 Eurovision act.”
I would PAY to see this movie.
the thing that’s frustrating about finland is that they have so much to offer and they genuineley are the metal capital of europe but if they sent a genuinly good metal band to esc it would effectively kill their career
they’re what for what dressed as what
enjoy the actual metal band we should send for eurovision
Would Latveria compete in Eurovision?
Oh sweet criminy.
Latveria presents, the All-Doombot Revue with “All Hail Doom!”
Doom is the contestant every year.
