almost home
Sade Olutola

Kiana Khansmith
One Nice Bug Per Day
Peter Solarz
DEAR READER
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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Monterey Bay Aquarium

oozey mess
d e v o n
will byers stan first human second
wallacepolsom

Discoholic 🪩
NASA
Three Goblin Art

titsay
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@sumpsimus
The Wichita Daily Eagle, Kansas, January 3, 1921
The reason women’s clothes don’t have pockets is so they can sell you a purse. The reason so many women’s clothes are sheer is so they can sell you something to go underneath.
Women’s clothes are made to be bought; men’s clothes are made to be worn.
Annnnnnnd there it is
don’t ever let a man talk down to you
Matt Stone and Trey Parker have done more to make our generation crueler than nearly anyone else, because they can get away with it under the guise of “this is satire, duh”, not realizing that poorly-done satire only reinforces the cultural forces it is meant to mock. When 13 year-old-kids are watching South Park, they aren’t tuning in to the little infinitesimally small lessons supposedly being taught, they’re laughing at Timmy being severely disabled, they’re laughing at sexual harassment, they’re laughing at child abuse, they’re laughing at anti-semitism, they’re laughing at people who have had sex reassignment surgery.
And the “satire” is so often pathetically weak. There isn’t a single nativist in this entire country who can’t laugh at a “der takin er jerbs” joke, because those jokes don’t actually rebut or mock the arguments made by people opposed to immigration. It’s just saying a common political phrase in a funny voice. Is that how low the bar for “satire” has been set? There’s occasionally more effective satire on the show, but not nearly enough for it to be defended on the basis of its value as satire.
But if you try to explain any of this to die-hard South Park fans, they’ll completely blow it off. They think that the fact the show upsets me simply means that the show has accomplished its purpose, never actually questioning whether or not that purpose is a worthy one. That’s why the show is so insidious: it wraps itself in this cynical layer of self-containment that prevents it from ever being pointed out for what it is: a detriment to the type of society that any decent person wants to see. South Park is far more dangerous than the Westboro Baptist Church, because South Park is something that people accept and defend.
I worked with a guy who would yell “derka derka jihad!” out of his truck at Middle Eastern people. Or refer to them as “derka-derkas.”
“Derka derka jihad” is a joke from Stone & Parker’s Team America: World Police, and it’s (in a generous interpretation) a satire on “this is what narrow-minded Americans think Arabic sounds like, silly Americans!”
But about 95% of the audience thought the joke was “Arabic sounds ridiculous, it’s not even a real language!” The movie does extremely little to discourage this. [click here if you are prepared to experience a full-body cringe] The level of satire is somewhere between “extremely subtle” and “alibi.”
I know satire is subjective and the public is hard to predict and all that, but I think an easy way to tell that the thing you’re participating in isn’t satire is when you’re inventing new racial slurs and they’re catching on.
South Park is the opposite of satire.
Here’s how South Park fans think Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal happened. Swift wondered, “what’s the most offensive, politically incorrect thing I could write about? I know! Eating babies!” He wrote an essay saying everyone should eat babies. People were very offended by this essay, which makes it funny. People thought Swift was serious but he wasn’t, kek, he was just being satirical! He fooled them!
Here’s how Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal actually happened. Swift lived in Ireland, a colonial property of England. He was enraged by the ways the English government, Irish puppet government, and Irish wealthy oppressed the poor of Ireland, causing poverty and famine. He wrote a bitterly sarcastic screed carrying their callous dehumanization to its logical extreme–with your cruelty, you might as well just eat their babies! Swift sarcastically included a long paragraph of his actual policy proposals in the essay: “Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients,” strengthening his accusation that to pretend it was impossible to help the poor was viciousness at the level of baby-eating.
The cruel English politicians Swift was satirizing didn’t misread the satire as agreeing with them, because he didn’t just say the same things as them in a snotty voice, because that’s not what satire means. Nobody said, “Yeah, Swift, that’s a great idea, let’s go eat us some babies!” The targets of satire aren’t supposed to agree with it.
The late great Terry Pratchet was a master satirist. His works are fucking hillarious. His friend and co-writer Neil Gaiman explains what made him such a great satirist: “There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld.” And “anger is the engine that drives him.” Anger at what? “ Against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness.” That is satire: a white-hot righteous fury at injustice, channeled into humor. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman
Nihilistic apathy and opposition to any and all political opinions and “waaahhh, those buzzkills are telling me not to call people retarded, but that’s hard and I like calling people retarded” is not a basis for satire. If you were to take every distinguishing characteristic true satire has and do exactly the opposite, you’d wind up with something like the genre South Park popularized.
“THE TARGETS OF SATIRE AREN’T SUPPOSED TO AGREE WITH IT.”
this is so important
just being “satire” doesn’t give your work value, it’s gotta be good satire
Index of First Lines | Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems
And this is the Black women they don’t want you to see. Look at us.
@staff
@staff
@staff
@staff
Gay culture is reblogging Gay Culture Is posts knowing full well that’s not gay culture but rather mental illness and social alienation
Gay culture is mental illness and social alienation
A blueprint for white folks wondering what we want from “allies” (comrades) in the struggle.
i also want to talk about how dysphoria can fuel eating disorders to the point that thinness maintained by a restrictive eating disorder can feel like an integral part of gender expression for trans people & how the demonization of fatness in our culture can hugely hinder the recovery even of people whose eating disorders always revolved more around dysphoria than the fear of being fat
i want to talk about how the culturally enforced ideas of thinness as the epitome of androgyny, thinness as the epitome of femininity, & “maybe not thinness but definitely a lack of curves that can sometimes only be obtained by thinness” as the epitome of masculinity poison our thinking as trans people & contribute to an overwhelming epidemic of eating disorders in our community disproportionate to even the epidemic in wider sociey
i want to talk about how controlling our food to control our bodies & to control our minds & to feel like we have some control over circumstances that are wildly out of our control is horrifyingly commonplace in the trans community & no one is talking about it
god if this aint me
http://archive.is/5VvI5
Huffpo, everybody.
Can someone tell me what high crime or misdemeanor Trump has committed that merits this? Or is the HuffPo just publishing outright fantasies?
God dammit, I’m now in the position of defending Huffington. I didn’t want to be here. Okay, @angrybell … actually, @ literally everyone who reblogged this uncritically as a tacit endorsement and agreement. Such as @the-critical-feminist that I reblog this from. My first question has to be: are you serious? Don’t read that with a tone, don’t read that as an attack. That’s my first question: Are you asking a serious question about what high crimes or misdemeanors Trump has perpetrated? Are you asking a sincere question or is this the sort of rhetoric that doesn’t translate well into text? And, if you are actually asking this question, are ou going to hear the answer or are you going to immediately start concocting your counter-argument because you just know in your heart that anyone who disagrees with you must be wrong, so you start formulating a plan to prove them wrong before you actually hear what they have to say? Next: did you read the article that was posted in the link you responded to? Because the author of that article does a reasonable job of explaining their thought process behind the headline. Or did you lash out before you read the article? Okay, presuming that you did read the article in good faith, evaluate its points, perform the follow-up research to understand context, and still disagree with the central tenets and simply believe that the author’s reasoning does not hold up for whatever reasons you have chosen not to state, and you believe their source information is falsified for whatever reason you have chosen not to state, I will move on. After I have given you and yours every conceivable benefit of the doubt and every charitable assumption. Because if the article itself doesn’t convince you, there’s the fact that Donald Trump has broken literally every federal law against corruption and conflict of interest. Not one or two, not most, not all but a few. Literally every single law we have against corruption, from the Constitution to the informal guidelines circulated as a memo from the White House ethics scholars. He’s broken literally every one of those rules. He’s openly traded favors for money and favors for months now. Hell, that Chinese influence-peddler that paid him off for sixteen million dollars should have been enough to get him convicted of treason. Sharing code-word level classified information with a government on the opposite side of an ongoing military conflict isn’t *necessarily* treason, unless the information was part of a share program with an allied nation and wasn’t his to distribute. That’s aiding a foreign aggressor at the expense of a military ally, and that’s treason. Giving aid and comfort to enemies of the nation. Obstruction of justice is pretty clear-cut, that’s an impeachment, except that the justice in question is also a matter of national security, so that’s treason. Again. Defaming the former president? Misdemeanor, impeachable. The way he drags his heels nominating posts in Justice and State could be prosecuted as dereliction of duty. If he has tapes of Comey, he’s on the hook for contempt, if he doesn’t then he’s on the hook for witness tampering. Hell, deleting the covfefe tweet is destroying federal records, which is a misdemeanor, and impeachable. The man doesn’t go a week without bringing on an impeachable offense. Strictly speaking, every time he goes to Mar-A-Lago he’s committing grand larceny by fraud, because he’s taking millions of dollars of American funds for his own benefit, after promising not to do that. There are dozens, hundreds maybe, of impeachable offenses already in this 140 days, “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Actual counts of treason, punishable by death by hanging, is probably only five or six counts. Only five or six counts of high treason by our sitting president. His job does not put him above reproach. His job is to *be* above reproach. And he’s failing that job.
Trump’s supporters probably believe he’s done nothing impeachable or treasonous because they spent eight years claiming on no grounds whatsoever that Obama was impeachable and treasonous, just because they didn’t like him. They now probably convince themselves that these facts about Trump are as fake as their Obama theories and they’ve ruined the gravity of these terms for themselves.
Donald Trump Announces Ban on Transgender Troops Including 15,000 Actively Serving
SHAMEFUL. This harms military readiness and puts lives at risk. There are more than 15,000 active serving transgender troops. Threatening 15,000 currently serving troops who put their lives at risk is unpatriotic and dangerous.
from Joshua Block (ACLU attorney):
and here’s the ACLU’s official statement:
This is an outrageous and desperate action. The thousands of transgender service members serving on the front lines for this country deserve better than a commander-in-chief who rejects their basic humanity.
Let us be clear. This has been studied extensively, and the consensus is clear: There are no cost or military readiness drawbacks associated with allowing trans people to fight for their country. The president is trying to score cheap political points on the backs of military personnel who have put their lives on the line for their country.
There is no basis for turning trans people away from our military and the ACLU is examining all of our options on how to fight this. For any trans service member affected by today’s announcement: Please get in touch with us, because we want to hear from you. [x]
if you want to support trans people serving in the military, please consider donating to the ACLU. as mentioned in their official statement, their examining all options on how to fight this ban.
also, to all the people on tumblr today that responded to this blatantly transphobic ban with some snarky edgy response about how denying trans people entry to the military is a ‘good thing’, because 'the military is bad anyways’: fuck you
my fiance has a degree in biotechnology and cytogenetics and worked at bed bath and beyond and older people would always ask him, “so did you go to college?” and when he said yes and told them his degree they would say, “wow!! then what the heck are you doing working here??” and if that doesn’t tell you how disillusioned and ignorant the older generations are to the situation many millennials are in right now i don’t know what will