DEAR READER
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
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Sade Olutola
#extradirty
$LAYYYTER
YOU ARE THE REASON
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pixel skylines
KIROKAZE
wallacepolsom
roma★
Jules of Nature
Peter Solarz
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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NASA
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
we're not kids anymore.
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@percivald3rolo
Warhammer 40,000 is of course, uh, not unproblematic. But patterning orks specifically and incredibly blatantly off English football hooligan culture was probably simultaneously the least bigoted and most creative thing literally anyone did with the concept of 'the orc' at any point in the 1980s
I hate the uk government for making me agree with Elon musk
David Cleary!
i'm in Ireland and the search for that bastards name is still blocked and hidden... the legnths the british go to defend and protect their instruments of colonialism and violence is beyond belief. no justice for the victims and yet every measure taken to protect David James Cleary and his fellow murderers.
Never a better time for the Streisand Effect than when it's a government covering up acts of brutality and evil.
if you complain about the Chinese government covering up Tianamen Square, then complain about this, too.
Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6
but only once.
Died(?) Century of the Fruitbat, born (???), welcome back Cohen the Barbarian
The inquiry spoke to thousands of young people and their parents, as well as hundreds of teachers.
Well this makes a change. Actually recognising harmful and oppressive systems from blaming the kids for being genetically inferior, the parents for being morally impure, and a lack of "hard work"
Part of the abandoning of these areas is the abandoning of hope. Hope went out the window with deindustrialisation and de-manufacturing. The future for many is dole, army or 15 hours a week at Asda
The middle classisation of working class institutions for change like unions, labour & left wing politics means there's little belief change is possible whether it be from movements or politics. These have abandoned WC people too.
And hard work is a capitalist myth. Hard work is not enough. Research says what matters more is postcodes, private schools, parents professions, access, property in London etc.
Hard work is not the answer to combatting oppressive systems. My school was chronically underfunded, understaffed and mismanaged. It was closed 3 times in 5 years causing massive disruption. No amount of hard work from me could change the fact I didn't have science, maths or geography teachers in order to get those GCSEs.
Oppressive systems and structural inequality are changed by violence, protest, organisation, community, time and effort. Anybody whose not down for this can fuck off. Anybody that repeats the myths is a cunt and fair game for a hiding.
I've had this stupid idea for months and I finally have an excuse to take a little time to put it into the world on this, Make A Terrible Comic Day 2026
And if I said Megamind is one of the few movies that understands Superman.
And if I said Megamind through its three subversions of Superman shows a deeper understanding that the point of Superman is that he was loved and taught to love by good, present parents, and because of that he is able to return that love to a world even if it doesn't always accept it, and he is not corrupted by his power, than many other films either subverting or playing the superman story straight.
Megamind has three Superman subversions. One is obviously Megamind himself. He was not raised loved by the world, but rather was loved by those hated by the world. Because he was still raised with love, he does care about other people, hence his character development. But because he didn't receive wider love growing up, his own is misplaced at first.
Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.
Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.
All three of these subversions, in their negative space, create the silhouette of the superhero that they are parodying. That silhouette is of a space child that came to earth and was cared for very deeply by the world, and taught love through his experience of love, and because of that holds fast to his duty to the world. Which is Superman.
I want this person and this person only writing and directing Superman movies for the rest of my life
Mafia boss smoking a cigar: Why’d you gotta squeal, Squealin’ Stephen? I trusted you. Now I gotta send my best goons to show you what happens when you cross the Big Boss…
Guy tied up in chair: uh…theres just one guy over there.
Mafia boss: Yeah. That’s Lil’ Tony. He’s got one of dem conditions where he’s got multiple mooks n’ his head. But when Big Tony fronts you’re gonna be in big trouble.
Lil’ Tony: We actually all agree we’re gonna kick your ass.
it's not frequent enough to be considered a meme or a trend, but I like how every so often this site gets a new "woke mafia boss" variation.
“Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain”
Please!!!!! I just cannot….no words.
Never looking at mountains same way again.
OK I have to say right now that this is practically my family’s anthem. We would drive around listening to this song, I am not even kidding. We would drive down the road, windows down, with “Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain” blaring.
🖖🏻Spock is the mountain ⛰
It’s a metaphor
To make love to the mountain❤
i haaate when ppl are talking abt mammal colouration and they bring up mandrills but not vervet monkeys.... fake fans
put some respect on his name
I love that this joke works in English even though it's not written in English.
having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."
if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
#'coerced or forced' is a little too unnuanced for me you are accountable for your actions#but yes everyone needs to have an opportunity to get better#even if that person wasn't coerced or forced in any way actually. yes even then.
to explain what i mean by "coerced":
i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.
this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.
now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?
and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.
does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.
the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.
i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.
this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.
*to be clear, this is what people often feel when they are told they did smth racist; that is itself a racist reaction, but one that people do have & i try to think about how practically to get people to get over that reaction & focus on the actual issue at hand
i 100% agree with all of this. to be clear, my tags weren't meant to deny anything about how society is coercive and systematically pushes people into doing bad things. only that i still think the choice to get better needs to be accessible even to people who could have chosen better, for one reason or another. (whether someone is allowed to be accepted should not be predicated on whether they were 'enough of a victim,' whatever that means.) and we shouldn't conclude that no one is responsible for their actions--they are. but society as a whole is responsible for the coercion and violence done against them, and the solution to that responsibility is not punishment, but restoration.
So the big pool thing. Did they not chlorinate it or what? Did they not know you have to chlorinate it? I'm really baffled about what the fuck even happened there. SURELY they chlorinated it.
#Algae in the pipes#This isn’t the first time this has happened it’s become victim to new pond syndrome every time it’s been refilled in recent years#And they are treating the water#(Hydrogen peroxide not chlorine)#It shouldn’t have chlorine in it it’s massive and would fuck with the wildlife#The project itself is incredibly obnoxious but the pool turning green isn’t really an orange specific problem
Oh okay good. I was terrified that their level of incompetence, which is already comical, had jumped to truly incomprehensible. I am so relieved to learn that this makes sense and it's only their twitterposting that makes them seem unhinged about it.
See, you also don't want hydrogen peroxide in the water, either.
The administration either got rid of or didn't listen to people who could explain the algae problem, and decided that the problem was because other administrations were just stupid and didn't know how to take care of the pool, and also saw an opportunity for grifting some money.
So they painted the bottom of the pool dark blue, which absorbed more heat from the sun and made the algae bloom faster than ever. So they dumped hydrogen peroxide in it, which only killed the algae around the edges and also made the new paint job peel.
So folks were taking pieces of the bottom as souvenirs so now we have National Guard and deputies from several states who are just arresting people for as little as putting their hands in the pool.
Oh HEY so like, the Obama administration renovated the reflecting pool to draw from the Potomac rather than municipal water, and installed an extensive filtration system, and APPARENTLY at some point in the last 10 years Trump ripped it out or stopped maintaining it, and look, algae.
Everything stupid that they do is such a great metaphor for everything else stupid that they've done
It's very likely that the paint was not appropriate for the usage to start with, and that that was on purpose. It's a standard shady really-the-mob contractor thing to guarantee more work, I'm told. It's quite possible that himself agreed to it, even, because he gives no fucks about national monuments, but does like handing out favors to friends, like this no-bid indefinite contract.
McDonalds ice cream machine arse groundskeeping
I saw this TikTok saying this whole thing is a microcosm of the Trump administration
Waste tax money on vanity projects
Ignore experts saying the project will cause numerous problems
Said project fucks up shit that was working perfectly fine beforehand
Claim the problems caused by the project dont exist
Switch to saying none of this was a big deal in the first place despite costing millions of dollars
Rinse and repeat
Worth noting is that problems with the pool date back to its construction. It was sited on land not really suited to the purpose, and over time the pool became unstable and leaky. Did they know this would happen when it was built? I don't know (I suspect not, and that at least part of this is due to infrastructure and population change--it was opened in 1922, and DC looked very different then), but it is a longstanding problem.
By the time Obama rocked up and it became his issue, the initial issues had compounded with "it's old as balls" and "this was never designed to have this many visitors." Obama undertook a massive renovation that included stabilizing the pool structurally and rerouting the water source, as noted above. He was aware that this was only a partial fix to the problem--there's only so much you can do with a megastructure that was built improperly when cars were still a novelty and that sits in the middle of one of the busiest metro areas in the US--but he did what he could. Perfect is the enemy of "mostly right."
Now if you wanted to fix the pool properly, the way to do it would be to tear the whole thing out, go back to the original blueprints, and have a modern architect look at what needs to exist as substructure to make the superstructure viable. That is, understandably, not a cost we can really afford right now. And replacing it with a different form of monument somewhat less problematic, like a garden, would be extremely politically fraught. So "we're going to deal with problems as best we can when they crop up" is the name of the game.
TRUMP TRIED TO REMOVE OBAMA'S RENOVATION. Like. The thing that meant he had a pool to paint in the first place.
This fucker really rolled in and went "this is flawed but hanging in there. Destroy it."
Maybe if he breaks it enough they will have to start again and make something more stable. So... victory???
THIS IS NOT THE END OF STOPKILLINGGAMES
THERE'S A WAY TO BYPASS THE COMMISSION AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY WORKING ON IT
Tldw; there is majority support in the European Parliament for a bill that would cover most of SKG's issues, and if passed this would bypass the decision of the Commission. There are also ongoing lawsuits in France and other places that would likely lead to some legislation. There is also a bill being worked on in California that wouldn't stop current games from being killed, but would stop future games from being killed
I’m suddenly laughing at the idea of a cliche noir detective story written in the brutally concise style of Hemingway.
A woman walked into my office. She had legs. I noticed her legs. “I have a problem. I need your help,” she said. They always said that. I knew her legs weren’t the problem. I hoped she might want my help with them anyhow.
“Can you pay?” I asked. Of course she could. Her shoes were worth more than my rent. She could pay. “I can pay,” she said. Her eyes were wet. I wondered if anything else was wet. Probably not. I am not handsome. Not since the war. She was looking at my scar. Lots of people do. Most look away. Not her. She did not look away. She looked at my scar and I looked at her legs. There were two of them. I liked that about her. I liked that a whole lot. “Will there be danger?” I asked. There always is. This city bleeds danger, then drinks it right back up again.
“I’m afraid there might be danger,” she said. She had the voice of a beautiful woman. She also had the face and body of a beautiful woman. She was beautiful.
The light from the window was striped. It made stripes on my cigarette smoke. The end of my cigarette crumbled into ash. My marriage had also crumbled into ash.
“I can handle danger,” I said. I patted the butt of my gun. My gun was a Colt. My gun and my scar were all that was left from my time as a soldier. My gun, my scar, and the nightmares. I looked her up and down. “I am good at handling things.”
“It’s about my husband. He’s gone missing.”
She was not wearing a ring. It means something when a woman does not wear a wedding ring. Usually, it means that she is not married. “Seems your ring has also gone missing,” I said. I hoped her dress would join it.
Her red mouth curved upwards. She was smiling a little. “I don’t wear it outside. A diamond that large would only invite trouble.”
“In my experience, trouble doesn’t wait for an invitation.” I looked at her legs again. They were both still there. “When did you last see your husband?”
I have been enjoying seeing people experience food this World Cup
The author of Cultish, describing why the US is so vulnerable to MLMs/pyramid schemes (paraphrased): ... Americans tend to take on all the blame for their failures no matter the circumstances because of the Protestant Work Ethic, which comes from Reformation philosopher —
Me: don't fucking say it DON'T FUCKING SAY IT
author: — John Calvin
Me:
