I have been saying this for years now. Whatever your stance toward multimillionaires / billionaires, for some reason every time criticism of "the rich" comes up, people whose finances deal in the hundreds of thousands reliably dive on the grenade. Meanwhile the truly obscenely wealthy stay silent, probably unaware the conversation is even happening.
But, critically, people in the bottom tax brackets will satisfy themselves devouring those "hundred thousandaires" while the truly obscenely wealthy retreat to their compounds, helicopters, yachts, and islands.
“Kissinger knew that few, if any, would believe his motives for the wiretapping of his aides and others were altruistic, including me, and so he sicced General Alexander Haig, his sometimes loyal deputy, on me. Haig called me a few times during the afternoon to inquire whether the story directly linking his boss to the wiretaps was going to be published the next morning.
Yes, I said. There was an astonishing final call at deadline, around 7:00 p.m. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Seymour?”
In all of our previous conversations, I’d been Sy. I again said yes. “Let me ask you one question then,” Haig said. “Do you honestly believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in such police-state tactics as wiretapping his own aides? If there is any doubt, you owe it to yourself, your beliefs, and your nation to give us one day to prove that your story is wrong.”
I remember staring at my phone in astonishment. The story ran and Kissinger did not resign.”
— investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, then a Washington reporter for the New York Times, in his memoir “Reporter”
i wish there was a way to say "you're right, but this is really ineffective and even counterproductive messaging to anyone who doesn't already agree with you" without sounding like an asshole
Implicit in these discussions is that it is not individuals, but peoples, who are the actors. Thus the discussion not of Holocaust survivors, but "populations"
people (and peoples) with ptsd either become incredibly kind or incredibly paranoid, and the latter easily convince themselves that it's okay to harm others because they have "a right to survive" when the others are not in any way threatening their survival
it's this whole "we can't be oppressors because we're the descendants of the oppressed" nonsense and it leads to so much harm
we grew up secular jewish in nw london around a lot of orthodox jewish holocaust survivors in the 60s and 70s, and this was exactly them: they were either incredibly kind people who never wanted to see anyone suffer - or they were appalling sexist racist xenophobes
and as we often hear these days, israel and some israelis treated holocaust survivors like shit, whilst at the same time using those people's past experiences as their excuse to be appalling sexist racist xenophobes
i realize this is more or less all happening on bluesky but holy fucking shit fuck hbomberguy and the leeches of breadtube that are trouncing around with him rn. jesus christ
hbomberguy and co are over on bluesky pedojacketing patricia taxxon because she called him out for underpaying her as a freelancer for several years (including when she was a fucking teenager)
(and their reasoning is "a tweet patricia taxxon made like 2 weeks ago")
I'll add that the initial post wasn't even calling Hbomb out for underpaying her, it was this vaguepost venting about being interpersonally poorly treated:
The posts about being underpaid came after Hbomb made his post, and after the dogpile was well underway. I think it deserves to be republished here, because it really is a dreadful instance of an artist being undercompensated:
Hbomb's post would be indefensible either way, but I think laying out the order of events illuminates things even further. Patricia Taxxon would be well within her right to call out being underpaid at any time, but as it stands she brought it up after Hbomberguy and his producer* contributed to the harrassment campaign against her. I would bet money that this is why Lily Alexandre deleted her post - because it validates Patricia's claim of underpayment that she posted in response to Hbomb pedojacketing her.
What we have here is a woman being piled on for the crime of venting that a man - who she did not even name - treated her poorly. "Lefttube" my ass.
[Also, while Patricia's account is currently deactivated, it is archived thoroughly on the Wayback Machine. I've seen people asking "posts, are deleted, what happened" and I'd direct them to Patricia's words on the matter.]
Hbomberguy's post was deleted quickly after being posted, but r/youtubedrama got hold of the situation and someone made a post there that's just a vile cesspit of lolcowing. Hbomb's producer, lingrush, intially requested that the Reddit post be taken down, saying that the Bluesky post was deleted to avoid "piling on a person with mental health issues," but went back on this and repeated the claim that Patricia is a "genuine safety threat."
ok hold on ONE HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS??? 30 MINUTES OF MUSIC??????? THAT IS FIVE. DOLLARS. PER MINUTE. OF MUSIC. EGREGIOUS BEHAVIOUR.
for some context i have a degree in music composition and you wanna know what a good starting rate for a composer is? 150/minute of finished music (AND she should have gotten a cut of the profit from that video). like he basically paid her an okay rate... for ONE minute of music. and got THIRTY.
“Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism. Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history, and on this law has based its perspectives on Jewish life.
In the forty years of its existence, it has always appeared lost and helpless in the presence of any victorious freedom movement. . . . The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second class- citizens.”
-Henryk Ehrlich, Bundist leader in interwar Poland
real talk i have become a problem recently. the hospital wanted my fingerprint and i said no. the receptionist was like: but its such a convenient way to check in! and i said ok i dont want you to have my biometric data. and she was so baffled. i said, can you not check me in using an id card?
well of course but dont you want to provide your biometric data for your convenience?
when james baldwin "you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read" & "love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up" & "it took many years of vomiting up all the filth i’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before i was able to walk on the earth as though i had a right to be here" & "you have to go the way your blood beats. if you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all" & &
fr tho im not really sure how you can believe gun control accomplishes anything productive in a world where the PDFs in Myanmar are making heavy use of improvised and 3d-printed weapons, western Europe is having a huge problem with 3d-printed weapons, and one of the most prominent political figures from Japan, a country proud of its strict gun control, got obliterated with a doohicky by a guy with a grudge and a hobby. Plus, anyone in the US who does sketchy shit with a gun for money now has an auto sear on their heater.
Literally all gun control accomplishes is giving police more reasons to send people to prison and strip their rights. That's the origins of gun control in the US. It was a method to strip free black people of their voting rights. It was introduced on a federal level to criminalize weapons associated with organized crime. It was used in the 60s and 70s to justify raids on dissidents; the assassination of Fred Hampton was executed under the pretense of a raid for illegal weapons, as one glaring example.
Unless you actually change the conditions which cause violence, gun control is, best case scenario, simply displacing the means of violence to an instrument you're more personally comfortable with.
You're a fucking moron if you think that's why cops execute civilians in droves. It has nothing to do with the number of guns in America. America has always had tons of guns. This is a nation whose culture is significantly defined by the presence of firearms, yet hypermilitarized police executing noncompliant civilians with impunity is a relatively recent phenomenon. The incredible rise in police violence is almost entirely the fault of one man; Dave Grossman. He made millions off nationally touring and giving seminars to cops telling them to think like an occupying soldier. How death awaits around every corner. To kill them before they can kill you. And, because of that, police officers in America now have looser rules of engagement than American soldiers who occupied one of the most heavily-armed countries in the world. The actual threat probability has nothing to do with it. Police live and operate in a separate, self-defined reality.
And, further on how this country has always had guns. There was a time where even machine guns were incredibly easy to get. Mass shootings have not always happened. In fact, mass shootings as a phenomenon only really morphed into some kind of trend pretty much precisely when news media began turning into what it is today, focusing on sensationalism to scare audiences into viewership. And the more promotion that's been given to shooters, the more attention they get, the more airtime their crimes get, the more frequently they've happened. They happen in states with very strict gun control. They happened under the Clinton assault weapon ban. They happen within the conditions that are supposed to stop them because it is a cultural sickness. It's something happening not because these people have access to guns, but because murdering a whole bunch of people, inflicting the worst cultural nightmare of America, seems gratifying to them.
The general consensus of the "queer community" has essentially become a gated community that allows only specific liberal ideologies, american values, and only surface level tolerance of trans women at best. In practice it essentially filters out the majority of brown people, trans women, global southerners, and so on. The queer community is more like a brand, and anyone who doesn't fit the American, white brand of queerness either gets rejected outright or we get filtered due to our politics and values.
By them declaring themselves the "queer community" they make it sound as though they are representative of queerness itself, rather than representative of just their own beliefs. So an attack on the "queer community" (the brand of queerness) is likened to genuine homophobia/transphobia. While they are allowed to engage in racism and transmisogyny as much as they like.
I won’t lie sometimes talking to people who are pro sex work is triggering to me. They just seem so victim blamey. they almost act as if sex is the same thing as like being forced to take a shower when you don’t feel like it. Rape is a crime for a reason. When they compare it to retail and a shitty customer it angers me. I’ve had some shitty customers and I’d take that over the multiple rapes I went through. They act as if women can just say “oh well didn’t want this to happen. Guess I’ll just accept it.” Like women can just choose when they want ptsd and when they don’t. Which again just seems like a victim blaming mentality. People can be banned from stores from being shitty customers, if prostitution was legal and the prostitutes had somewhere to report the rapists who ignore their rules doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be horrible males who still just straight up rape them. I guess as long as they can safely report, the trauma doesn’t exist right ?! Fuck these people I hate them. They talk about shit they don’t even fucking understand bc their entire world view is based online.
if the Hunger Games were real you know you'd have liberals saying things like "it's so cool how the Hunger Games allow anybody a chance to win, it's so democratic" and "it's great to have some District 12 representation amongst the winners of the Hunger Games" and "we need to make sure that young girls receive just as much Hunger Games combat training as young boys #feminism"
