Nihilisteners, your attention please @sporetortle - Tumblr Blog

“Black cats are evil”

The cat:

Kind of going under the radar because of everything else going on (understandably), but the gun control measure Biden just signed has some pretty evil shit in it too. One of the worst things IMO is that it allows federally licensed firearms dealers to make NICS checks available to employers who want them, as part of a pre-employment screening.

If you don’t know, this is the “instant” background check that’s performed at gun stores when you go to purchase a weapon. It matches your name, address, and appearance against a national database of criminal and mental health records, and if it finds a match, your purchase can be denied. Reasons you can get a denial include (but are not limited to) having ever been convicted of a crime that could have come with a sentence of more than one year in prison (note: your actual sentence does not matter), being involuntarily committed, and being a drug user. Employers will now be able to ask FFLs to perform this check on you, and will be able to see if you pass. The NICS check does not report why you get denied, if you get denied. But employers will be able to see that you did.

Add on top of this that this gun control law also expands what juvenile records get included in the NICS system, and now there’s even more ways shit you might have done as a kid can stay with you for the rest of your life. Also, the law requires states to report to the federal government what records disqualifying a person from firearm ownership they have removed each year, so don’t think your criminal records will be absent from that national database just because your home state expunged your record. The feds will still have it on record!

In addition, because the NICS system bases the check on very high-level information, you can be denied if there’s someone in their database with the same name as you, or who lived in your apartment previously, and who may be a prohibited person. False positives are pretty common.

Oh and there’s more! A NICS check performed as part of an employment background check won’t be covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act!

So, that’s fun. More ways for employers to discriminate against you. Bipartisan! Safer Communities!

only-tiktoks

huffy-the-bicycle-slayer

No need to unmute, he sounds exactly how you'd expect a man of his disposition to

Basically, yeah.

Hi please dont hide these in the tags

northen-light

Reminder that Reagan’s politics haven’t only impacted the USA:

#r**g*n also screwed over other countries including mine so i think that gives me the right to also hunt him down when i go to hell (tags from @sevenbettys)

Images description under the cut bc it’s really long

rainstormdragon

btwxsixesandsevens

the Noir possibilities in this being your opening line are unmatched.

onlinebeast

There should be a specific fashion item for keeping your sleeves rolled up. Like big clasping arm bracelets. I think this would improve morale in the gay community somewhat.

nomadbones

There is though

They’re called Sleeve Garters, they started off in the 19th century and where popular with musicians, gamblers, gunslingers and the occasional Victorian gentleman. Nowadays you can see bartenders wearing them

so-many-miles-to-go-deactivated

Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

It’s called: antisemitic caricature.

bumblebee-error

I don’t understand what’s Jewish about mother gothel… she has a typical Disney face doesn’t she? Is it the curly hair..? I mean her nose and everything else seem normal?

I’m sorry, I’m just trying to figure it out, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.

so-many-miles-to-go-deactivated

dark curly hair - long hooked nose - darker complexion than the blond blue eyed heroine 9and really the rest of the cast - portrayed as greedy and evil.

Lisa Edelstein is Jewish. As are Idina Menzel and Amy Winehouse, both of whom I have seen compared in looks to Gothel. Gothel’s design is a pretty clear caricature of ethnically Jewish women.

This is a pretty good contrast between Rapunzel and Gothel. Rapunzel has the “typical Disney face”:

Here’s a more close up look at her features.

The hooked nose becomes even more pronounced as she becomes “eviler.”

If you wanted to claim that there was noting out of the ordinary for Disney animation when it came to Gothel’s features, you would have to find at least one Disney princess or heroine with similar characteristics (long hooked nose and dark curly hair, etc).

But here is what we have is -

small noses that turn up at the end:

wide, flatter noses (though cheers to Disney for not putting button noses on their characters of color, although Esmerelda’s clothing design deserves another essay on Rromani stereotypes and there are some major issues with Pocahontas as well)

And then a few misc noses (again, props for Jasmine’s nose not being a button):

Apart from just the design of Gothel, there’s also the whole: “obviously ‘other’ (read Jewish) woman kidnaps the pretty blonde (read: gentile) kid to use her for ritualistic/magical purposes”

Like that right there on top of the aesthetic Jewish-coding is what pushed the antisemitic caricature over the top for me. It harkens back to antisemitic blood libel that claimed that Jews stole gentile children for all manner of nefarious reasons. Even when Gothel is in “mother” role to Rapunzel, she’s is shown as nagging and passive aggressive, both antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish women.

There is no one thing that makes her an antisemitic caricature, but the design, plus the storyline she plays out, plus her characterization cement the overall character as antisemitic.

Jew-coding a villain is not in itself always antisemitic when there are also Jewish coded heroes. Rapunzel does not have that.

Having a villain steal a baby for magical/ritualistic reasons is not always antisemitic as long as the villain is not Jew-coded. Rapunzel fails this as well.

Having a nagging and passive aggressive mother character is not antisemitic provided that she is not, again, coded as Jewish. Rapunzel fails once again.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: @ariminak pointed out that some of my wording made it sound like Gothel’s features only stereotypically caricatured Ashkenazi women when in fact that is not the case. I changed the language to remove that phrasing and make it clear that any ethnically Jewish women can be affected by this type of aesthetic trope. If you reblogged the old version, could you please delete it and reblog this one instead.

chai-on-life-blog1

Spread this version so people recognize that this stuff harms all Jewish women.

aworldinneedofmagic

omfg can y’all chill the fuck out, any race can be portrayed as hero or villain, it’s a fucking kids movie not a political statement

so-many-miles-to-go-deactivated

So I’m guessing you’re white and a gentile. As such, you’ve more than likely grown up looking at tv and movies and fairytales and seeing your face in those of the heroes.

Jewish people don’t get that. When we are portrayed in live action, our characters are more often than not whitewashed and in other media, our features are used and caricaturized to create “evil looking” villains.

You don’t see it because you’ve been ingrained with the idea that “ethnic” features are just “how you make a character look evil.” You don’t look at Gothel and see your mother. You don’t see yourself and your people. You don’t see decades of propaganda aimed at fostering hate against you and ultimately seeking to destroy you.

But seeing how you also seem to think that saying you’re not attracted to an entire race of people ISN’T racist, you really don’t get any say on any of this.

So really, you need to chill the fuck out and stop telling marginalized people to stop talking about the tools of our own marginalization.

Let’s play a game I like to call: Movie Villain or Antisemitic Propaganda:

Many “evil witch” tropes were built on European antisemitic stereotypes, not just in appearance but in the storylines they play out as well. Greediness, stealing children, killing children, hunger for power, etc. Every time a movie villain design uses stereotyped Jewish features to communicate “evilness” to an audience, they perpetuate the marginalization of the people they are using.

One big issue I have is that Gothel’s didn’t start out as the antisemitic caricature that made it to screen. Much of the early concept art has a more dark romanticism feel.

They changed the original design. Presumably to make Gothel more “other” from the good characters in the movie. At some point, a decision was made that dark curly hair and a hooked nose wound better convey their villain.

It really doesn’t matter if any of this was intentional, I’d actually bet that it wasn’t. However, antisemitic tropes are so engrained in our societies that people like you, even when confronted with a step by step break down of what it is, feel comfortable thinking that there’s nothing wrong with it and mocking those calling it out as if we are overreacting.

You seem to have completely ignored the majority of my post. It is the character design, plus the characterization, plus the story line that mirrors blood libel that makes Gothel an antisemitic character. It’s not just about someone of a certain race or ethnicity being a villain. It’s about how stereotypes of a certain ethnic group are understood as “villainous” due to villains being repeatedly coded as Jewish over decades of film and tv.

And contrary to your naive belief, all media is political to some extent. Every time a historically present minority is not included in film (ex: lily-white Harlem in Fantastical Beasts) or when a minority character is whitewashed, or when the “ethnic” features of a minority are used almost universally to portray bad guys, it is a political and social issue. When you never see yourselves as the people who play the hero or even see your people existing in a portrayal of a place where they should be, it is not benign.

writingwithcolor

Reblogging again for these additions.

what-even-is-thiss

I reject the idea that kindness and gentleness and love needs to involve a bunch of gentle flowery language

what-even-is-thiss

I help you move, I bake you a pie, I sit next to you on purpose. How are you not getting the message yet? What do you want? A love poem? I don't know how to write those. Here, take this rock. It's your favorite color.

what-even-is-thiss

One of my dad's close friends reads online newspapers constantly and he always texts my dad articles that he thinks that he would enjoy. Where's the romanticization of that kind of behavior?