#purity test

[manders1984]

The Staredown

Oh, it has never been more over for those two Flop!Lairds. And they know it.

Outlander: Blood of My Blood, 1x08

[victusinveritas]

Comment on Facebook on a thread that is dumping on Corey Booker for being a Liberal rather than supporting Every Damn Cause the Farther Left Wants (most of which are good causes, but have trouble gaining traction politically). Can we not just ride the resistance train and not stop at every station to perform a purity test or we will NEVER prevail! Obviously he’s far from the best. But he did SOMETHING, which is better than most in power have done. It’s a start. We can praise these actions without putting him on a pedestal. When the opposition is destroying the country in record time, we cannot stop to make sure everyone that’s furthering the cause is a saint. As long as they’re contributing, they’re moving us forward.

-- This is the thing of it: Purity tests will always lead to more division. Yeah, Liberals suck, liberals suck, they're center right at best...but they're also who we have to work with until we can get effective Lefties in government. And we can't do that because we can't even agree on a candidate--not Bernie (great but just not listened to outside of Vermont--has basically achieved Old Man Yells at Cloud status), certainly not Jill Stein (a Russian asset clear as day who only pops up at election time as a Green/Libertarian spoiler supported by the Worst People you'll hang out with anyway because their beer is decent, they have a grill, and they hate Trump) and not AOC (inexperienced, yada yada). Once we get a Liberal/liberal majority, we can worry about slowly bending the arc of progress towards where we want it to point. In the meantime, if you're not out there doing things, all the talk online is just a fart in a windstorm--I'm sure you feel better having let it out, but it doesn't move shit. Every single fucking actually active in meatspace leftie I've talked to (and I've talked to a fuckload of them thanks to volunteering, showing up, doing what I can, really broadened the fuck out of my narrow, purity testing horizons) has said the same thing: we have to work with the Democrats and FUCKING vote. So many goddamn Instagram-Anarchists I saw before the election urging people not to vote for Kopmala have vanished post-election, and the ones that remain are going off the deep end (Nyx Erinyes on Facebook, for instance). Conclusion: either they were well-done Russian bots pushing folks to stay home or they were useful idiots. And a lot of the left fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and are still in that 'voting does nothing' mentality. Voting does nothing if you don't do it at all. Like, we might have to get behind a centrist candidate who can get something done, Gretchen Whitmer and Pete Buttigieg would do the numbers in a lot of places (probably not enough to win anything but at least they can fucking talk and get some of the people in the middle as well as the reasonably left, which was Kamala's problem aside from [all the other stuff, she should have been a non-starter, but she started, she failed, here we are with full fascism], etc. And don't get me started on Tankies (seriously, I've got a laundry list of issues with them, they're not as bad as Kissinger but they're not bloodless and most of them are under 25 so I kind of discount their opinions anyway: hell, I was a Trotskyist until 25, when I realized how awesome anarchism was, but small scale anarchy, communalism, that sorta shit, not big A Anarchy, which, again, has purity tests. But that's a different, longer, crazier rant. If you've read this far and haven't vomited from vertigo and jerkiness, I'm impressed. If you've read this far and want to argue, go ahead but I'll probably just shrug because (this includes my thoughts and opinions too) I honestly don't care what ya think, the internet is just wires, and unless you are in my community, your thoughts don't really carry that much water. Listening to: Toxicity by System of a Down

Reading: The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton and Toll the Hounds (Malazan Book of the Fallen Book 8) by Steven Erikson. Just finished: Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen and Victor Serge's later notebooks (NYRB edition).

[eretzyisrael]

Radiohead and the Gaza Thought Police

Members of the band Radiohead recently sat for a fascinating interview with the Times of London that, at one point, resembled a kind of grou

by Seth Mandel

Members of the band Radiohead recently sat for a fascinating interview with the Times of London that, at one point, resembled a kind of group therapy session centered on the stress of the anti-Semitic BDS movement’s hounding of the band.

Guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s wife is Israeli and he has collaborated with Israeli musicians, further enraging the band’s progressive critics and subjecting them to threats and cancellations. Greenwood noted in the interview the irony of such people calling themselves “progressive” when they are protesting against his willingness to play with a diverse array of Middle Eastern musicians. “[T]hat feels progressive to me — booing at a concert does not strike me as brave or progressive.”

What really grabs the reader about the discussion, though, is how healthy it is. Band members disagree with each other on the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict and yet they do not hate each other. Of the BDS-nik harassment, lead singer Thom Yorke says: “It’s a purity test, low-level Arthur Miller witch-hunt. I utterly respect the dismay but it’s very odd to be on the receiving end.”

And Yorke really does “respect the dismay.” Though he has played Israel in the past, he expresses his frustration with how difficult it has become to avoid getting pulled—sometimes against one’s will—into the conflict’s sectarianism. Greenwood grants him the point: “It’s the embodiment of the left. The left look for traitors, the right for converts and it’s depressing that we are the closest they can get.”

But Greenwood pushes back on Yorke’s readiness to avoid playing in the country: “I would argue that the government is more likely to use a boycott and say, ‘Everyone hates us — we should do exactly what we want.’ Which is far more dangerous.”

Yorke notes Greenwood’s “roots” there and says he understands where his bandmate is coming from.

It’s all so civil. Yorke shares certain critiques of the Israeli government with the protesters, but he is far more bothered by their attempt to police his—everybody’s, really—art: “This wakes me up at night. They’re telling me what it is that I’ve done with my life, and what I should do next, and that what I think is meaningless. People want to take what I’ve done that means so much to millions of people and wipe me out. But this is not theirs to take from me.”

[quinloki]

What's a little purity between friends?

Thanks to a friend, I find I'm curious

https://ricepuritytest.com/

It's a long list of 100 things to click - I'm willing to bet I've got the "high" score of my followers, but I'm curious to see if that's the case.

Feel free to send your score, your OC's score, or the score you head canon for your favorite character.

I'll post my score Friday ^_^

[totesmccoats]

Be Like Sensei

I’m a little disappointed, but not completely surprised, that I’ve seen and read so many opinions about One Battle After Another, from people who proudly brag about reading theory and being media literate and all of that, that have missed the forest for the trees. To be clear, I’m not writing about the discussions of race or gender or where they overlap – that’s not a conversation I feel my…

Be Like Sensei

[thoughtportal]

[biteable-pink-pixie]

Would love to know where you lost marks on the purity test 😘

💜

Group sex, fucked more than 5 people, amphetamines, incest, beastiality and fucked two different people in the same day.

I think they were the only ones?

[thezekezeal]

I heard people like to see these silly things???