Just a thought for the night, but remember in 2016 there were all these accounts that seemed really really telling you all the ways Hillary Clinton was some kind of demon woman, just the worst, and really Trump wouldn't be worse and maybe he'd even be better?
and then it turned out they got banned for being literally Russian agents and never came back because spoiler they were?
does it feel like that all over again? just a thought.
The anti-imperialist tankies dominated Finland from the late 1960's to the early 1990's. Now we laugh at them but they still think they were right and that deep down, Russia is our friend. We're just having a bit of a rough patch at the moment.
The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
I have read 24 of them. Almost a quarter of the list. Soon I will have read a quarter of the list because The Grapes of Wrath is next on my reading list.
The thing about Cottagecore is that is a fetishized aesthetic of country life, divorced from labor and idealized by a primarily urban audience with a backward looking ethos of tradition. They are not prepared for the stresses of a rural life: farming; harvesting; tapping pumpkins to ensure none of them have been replaced with flesh; losing out on income by having to use one of your pigs in a blood sacrifice to paint protective sigils over your doors and windows; checking cracks and chimneys for the flesh-vines of the Pumpkin Lord; having to decide, before the Growth is complete, whether that's really your tradwife or an amassment of vines, leaves, and blood in the shape of your tradwife; ignoring their desperate pleas that "I'm me! No! No!" as you burn them alive, realizing too late you picked wrong; and the exploitative corporate nature of commercial farming in 2024. All seen through a deeply colonial lens, of course
Seven years ago I was going through some major changes in my professional life, which made me help get into the place I am now.
I feel that the reason why this feels so long ago in regards to Riverdale, is that the show took such a drastic nose dive in quality towards the end, which made it go from pop culture buzz to complete oblivion.
I just watched the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for the first time. I hated it. It was aesthetically intolerable, rushed, dumbed down, and void of anything to make me interested.
What a disappointment.
the year is 2024. I am watching The X Files 1x08 with my blissfully offline boyfriend. We reach the scene where, in confinement, Mulder and Scully examine each other's backs for alien marks. My boyfriend, who has never seen the show before, makes an amused noise and utters a strong contender for understatement of the year:
Riverdale is the bully we all know who brushes all criticism off with "Can't you take a joke?".
I can take a joke, the problem is that they're just not very funny.
I rewatched Beverly Hills Cop yesterday, it was on TV. That movie still holds up. However, it is not possible that it is 40 years old because I AM NOT THAT OLD!
Hamas apologists are dangerous and must not be allowed to infect the righteous and just cause of the Palestinian people.
"When I was 18, I attended a rally in support of Gaza in San Francisco during one of the wars between Israel and Hamas. I was soon identified by a news reporter as someone from Gaza whose entire family is still there, who asked me what I thought of rockets being fired at Israeli towns and cities. I said that I oppose indiscriminate violence against civilians everywhere and do not support Hamas, its ideology, or its actions. Soon after, an activist pulled me aside and fiercely scolded me, saying that I should never talk about the rockets and instead immediately 'pivot' to the suffering of Gazans and Israel's role in what is happening.
This has historically been the way with Hamas apologists who disguise themselves as pro-Palestine activists. They have a pathological aversion to discussing the faults, problems, mistakes, and grave errors of Palestinian political groups, factions, and leadership that have plagued the Palestinian national project with countless setbacks. So the strategy was to pivot the conversation away from the group's actions and focus on Israel's reactions, the occupation, and the plight of civilians. They marginalized the significance of Hamas as a contributing factor in the overall degradation of Gazans' living conditions and erased how the group's choices and actions brought war, death, and destruction upon its people. A few explicitly told me not to 'air our people's dirty laundry' and that it would be better to maintain a 'veneer of unity' and keep the focus on Israel.
I was always troubled by such recommendations. Rife with inauthenticity, they also marginalized me, an actual Gazan, inexplicably demanding that I conform to the opinions and beliefs of privileged Western activists detached from what people in Gaza actually feel about Hamas and other Palestinian groups and leaders.
Yet Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, has bred a far more disturbing form of Hamas apologia. Instead of their usual distracting methods, this time you had people actually gleefully endorsing Oct. 7 as a form of legitimate armed resistance to occupation. Others attempted to 'contextualize' the attack by pointing out the conditions in Gaza and the overall injustices experienced by Palestinians. Still others tried to downplay the atrocities themselves—either their horrific nature or the numbers involved.
This Hamas apologia is new. Something has fundamentally changed. Many Hamas apologists have upgraded, becoming actual enthusiasts. They are now less interested in using verbal gymnastics and manipulation and have become eager to show affection, empathy, admiration, and reverence for the group's tactics, methods, and strategies.
Artistic and illustrative renderings of paragliders, bulldozers, and motorcycles made Hamas 'cool' and hip, a sexy 'symbol' of the underdog and underprivileged fighting back. These images were shared on social media, with thousands adding those pictures to their profiles, names, or bio lines.
These Hamas enthusiasts have now been emboldened by widespread protests and an unprecedented global outcry against Israel's military operation in Gaza.
Of course, as someone whose family is dodging bombs and collapsing buildings, I detest the targeting of hospitals and schools, the systematic destruction of entire neighborhoods, and the ensuing mass deaths.
Yet Hamas enthusiasts cloak their immorality in 'intellectual' arguments for how international law grants the oppressed a blank check to commit any act they deem suitable to fight back and are entitled to use 'all means necessary' to liberate themselves. They have an inhumane disregard for the over 200 Israeli hostages and murdered civilians.
Hamas enthusiasts obfuscate the fact that no Gazans were being killed on Oct. 6 and that their beloved resistance group could have made different choices, which would have resulted in the loosening of the blockade and the unification of Gaza with the West Bank, improving the odds of obtaining a Palestinian state and ending the occupation.
Most dangerously, Hamas enthusiasts erode support for the just and urgent cause of the Palestinian people, who have endured the consequences of a decades-long Israeli occupation, an embarrassingly incompetent Palestinian political class and leadership, and a largely indifferent Arab and international community. They further entrench an unhelpful narrative that refuses to work with Jewish and Israeli perspectives and grievances, worsening the impasse that is so chronically characteristic of the Israel and Palestine conflict.
And those of us willing to tell the truth are branded a 'traitor to your own people,' a 'white wanna-be' sellout and an 'apologist to your oppressor,' as I experienced first hand thanks to the writing I've done since October explaining the destructive role of Hamas.
They shamelessly hurl these insults at me, whose 57-year-old uncle and 13-year-old niece were killed in Israeli bombings that destroyed my family's home and entire neighborhood. They didn't display an ounce of sympathy for the fact that most of my immediate and extended family are homeless and that half of them have been injured by IDF fire; my grandmother lost her home, and two cousins are paralyzed for life. They skip over the fact that I hold the Israeli government and IDF directly responsible for the senseless killings of my family and thousands of Gazans, who are paying the price for a massacre that they didn't commit.
It shouldn't be difficult to explicitly and unequivocally condemn the abduction of children and women, even if Israel imprisons Palestinian women and children, often through unjust processes and procedures. It isn't that hard to realize that Hamas paraded hostages as it released them, creating deceptively edited footage showing its supposed humanity, despite having violently captured these women and children and killed their loved ones on Oct. 7.
Praising terrorists who committed horrendous atrocities because they high fived their captives as they let them go is indicative of moral bankruptcy and decay.
There are millions of well-intentioned, sincere, humanitarian, ethical, considerate, tolerant, well-spoken, and peace-seeking pro-Palestine activists who are not Hamas enthusiasts or even apologists. But they need to distance themselves from the increasingly normalized fringe activists who are spreading throughout the pro-Palestine community like wildfire.
We should teach our youth how to exercise impulse control, restraint, and verbal and physical non-violence whenever they participate in protests. We should avoid incendiary rhetoric, slogans, and imagery that only serve as emotional outlets that deliberately or inadvertently cross the line from anti-Israel anti-Zionism to antisemitism.
We should accept that Palestinians' fate is inexorably linked with Israelis' and that millions of Jews will forever be part of the land—even as we oppose settler violence and colonialism, push back on anti-Arab bigotry by mainstream Israeli figures, and engage in non-violent efforts to unify Palestinians and work toward having a prosperous and sovereign state of their own.
Hamas has been an utter disaster for the Palestinian national project. It has set my people back by 30 years. I am pleading with all pro-Palestine activists and those who are horrified by the sheer death and destruction that the people of Gaza are experiencing: We are at an inflection point of no return. We must separate our peoples' legitimate struggle for life, freedom, liberty, and self-determination from the violent, corrupt, exclusionary, chauvinist, immoral, and detrimental ideology and practices of Hamas.
Hamas enthusiasts are dangerous and must not be allowed to infect the righteous and just cause of the Palestinian people."
You just know this won't get 1/100 of the notes blood libel and shit-for-brains tankie posts do.
I haven’t said much about this conflict. I don’t have much of a voice on this topic, but what I have found troubling is the sympathy for Hamas and the growing anti-semitism this conflict has generated.
I DO NOT support Hamas. I do not support the violence inflicted on BOTH Palestinian and Israelis. I think regular people should have a right to live and prosper where they are, and while I have opinions about how the Palestinians should be treated better where they reside, my thoughts on that situation does not, in any way, justify any kind of antisemitism, nor will it soften my stance of my absolute condemnation of Hamas and what they did.
Hamas is the enemy here and Israel is at the forefront of this fight. Be careful where you get your news. Don’t let yourself get sucked into antisemitism.
You should hate the violence inflicted on innocent Palestinians without perpetuating antisemitism. You should hate the violence inflicted on the Israelis without supporting Hamas.
Do not ride the wave of antisemitism. Do not think Hamas is equivalent to the Palestinian people.
Don’t let neonazis use this conflict as a means to perpetuate their lifelong dreams.
And folks. Why are we still having this conversation?
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