A Midwest Whoop-Ass Extravaganza

"if you see someone shoplifting, no you didn't" no but like. i really didn't. i have never in my life seen someone shoplifting because i'm not watching anyone else in the grocery store..? how are y'all noticing things like that. my only goals are enter the store, survive, exit the store

i'm sorry but this is the only submission to this trend that i'll consider giving any thought to

i say this with 100% sincerity: if you want to know who monica lewkinsky is, she's the person who deserves to be back in the white house more than any person alive and she should get full rights to execute any 1990s comedians of her choice by firing squad. she deserves to be on the $20 bill and have her own monument on the national mall, but instead she's happy with reclaiming the narrative. she should have been america's people's princess instead of diana. we don't deserve her.

Okay, so I did google her and the scandal you mentioned in the tags, and I have two things to say

1. Holy shit

2. Yeah, I think she has the best one for the trend

Somehow, it is one thing to know that people born after 9/11 are now adults, but it is another entirely to understand that there is a cohort of adults who don’t know who Monica Lewinsky is.

Yeaaaaah.

I've seen fake Monica tweets before so I double checked this one and I'm delighted to report that it's real

Please correct me if I'm wrong but didn't she get famous for blowing the president? That's about as much as I was ever told about her

Yup. She was perfectly willing and able to walk away. She chose to take part. She's been riding that train ever since.

… she was an intern at the White House. Imagine being an intern at the White House right out of college decades before the current wave of feminism. And the *president of the nation* asks you to blow him in the Oval Office. And you want to work in the white house as your full-time job. Do you deny him? Suppose you don’t want to do it. Can you deny him?

I’m thrilled by the modern-day attitudes about this. Genuinely, the way this would go in 2024 is that the intern could say no and tell the press what happened and half of America would support them. But when I was a kid? No way!

And Monica Lewinsky didn’t ride a train to fame from this situation. She was America’s laughingstock and punching bag for twenty years. She was the butt of every sex joke and the least respected person that everyone knew the name of. She couldn’t live any sort of remotely normal life or do the things that she wanted to do because every single person, including all members of the press and every comedian, was out to get her. Every “cancelled” celebrity nowadays pretends they’ve been treated the way Monica Lewinsky was and you know what, she’s right that they wouldn’t last an hour in her shoes.

I’m very happy about the cultural shift that has allowed her to come back into the public again. You have to understand how recent this shift was.

I've Endured, Now What?

Blue Iris - Mary Oliver / So This Is All I Will Ever Be? - Fatima Aamer Bilal / Vive, Vive - Traci Brimhall

Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.

In a “disabled people live comfortably even and especially if they can’t work” type of way.

In a “I would have the option to not work but I think I’d like to without a gun to my head” type of way

you can only reblog this today

i’ve been saying it for years:

government considers you able to work if you can give anything more than 0%

employers consider you unhireable if you give anything less than 100%

The culprits (i would die for them)

C // Amythestsparkles • Hal Brindley

Yep, I’m on the side of these superb piggies. This is play stupid games, win stupid prizes territory.

Native wild animals engaging in natural animal behaviors?!?! I'm shocked!

Image by http://wryote.bsky.social

Iomega Zip Drive PC/Computing - June 1997

That is a big jump between 2 and 10 hours. I'd put it at 5. 2 hours is just a trip to one of the next "big" cities or a trip to my parents if there's traffic or construction. 5 hours might actually get me out of Illinois.

I love how on Tumblr, "media literacy" has become "Um, just because someone writes about this doesn't mean they're endorsing this. I hate all these media puritans ruining everything."

I'm sad to inform you that knowing when and whether an author is endorsing something, implying something, saying something, is also part of media literacy. Knowing when they are doing this and when they're not is part of media literacy. Assuming that no author has ever endorsed a bad thing is how you fall for proper gander. It's not media literacy to always assume that nobody ever has agreed with the morally reprehensible ideas in their work.

Sometimes, authors are endorsing something, and you need to be aware when that happens, and you also need to be aware when you're doing it as an author. All media isn't horny dubcon fanfic where you and the author know it's problematic IRL but you get off to it in the privacy of your brain. Sometimes very smart people can convince you of something that'll hurt others in the real world. Sometimes very dumb people will romanticize something without realizing they're doing it and you'll be caught up in it without realizing that you are.

Being aware of this is also media literacy. Being aware of the narrative tools used to affect your thinking is media literacy. Deciding on your own whether you agree with an author or not is media literacy. Enjoying characters doing bad things and allowing authors to create flawed or cruel characters for the sake of a story is perfectly fine, but it is not the same as being media literate. Being smug about how you never think an author has bad intentions tells me you're edgy, not that you're media literate. You can't use one rule to apply to all media. That's not how media literacy works. Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Aheem heem. Anyway.

God damn, people need to stop underestimating Biden.

How many times have we been through this? People rage that Biden isn't doing anything, even that he's complicit in such and such injustice, because he's not out there grandstanding using the specific language they want. Hell, I've been guilty of that myself.

And then it turns out that yet again, Biden has been quietly working away in the background, making deals and exploiting legal technicalities that most of his critics don't even know exist, to get results.

Every time people write Biden off, he comes back and surprises us. Because that age that everyone complains about? That is 80 years of experience. 80 years learning how the system works, who all the players are, how to come back from crushing defeat, and above all, how to get shit done.

Yeah see everyone was screaming and clutching their pearls and going on about how Biden wasn't doing anything so he must be supporting it. And all I could think was every time. Every. Damn. Time. It turns out Biden was working behind the scenes to arrange a fix that will actually do more than make platitudes. I've just been shrugging and going wait and see. I waited! Now we're seeing! The thing is Biden needs a CJ Cregg, it's the lack of PR on all the stuff he's gotten done that is causing problems.

this is so compelling and heartbreaking and important and i wanted to share it. this is the reality of getting an abortion even with roe v wade in place and it's about to get worse.

Nothing more punk than someone who is in pain all the fucking time and just continues to exist.

Edit: this isn't about random characters. This is about physically disabled people.

Don’t forget the AIDS episode.

If you weren’t around in the 80s or you haven’t studied queer culture of the 80s, you have NO IDEA how fucking insane it is that they made an episode with this scene:

“AIDS is not a bad person’s disease. It is not G-d punishing people for their sins.”

That was a statement so radical in the mid-1980s that calling it “radical” doesn’t feel extreme enough. Nor is this the only moment that hits so hard: Sophia expresses the then-common fear that she might contract HIV from sharing Rose’s coffee cup, and in a later moment of the episode where Rose is at her cracking point, Sophia takes one of the coffee cups she’s marked as having been used by Rose, and drinks from it. If you’re young enough to say “…..okay?” or “so?” to that sentence, I don’t begrudge you your ignorance of the fear—I feel glad you’re blessed to have never had to live in that world—but I do need you to understand:

This is Princess Diana and this photo caused an international uproar because the man she’s shaking hands with had AIDS.

Princess Diana touched HIV/AIDS+ people and had to reassure the entire world this didn’t make her a bad mother or mean she was dying, and this would have been about the same time as the GG episode. Remember the initial terror over Covid, before there was a vaccine but after the pandemic was announced, when nobody really knew exactly what it was, only that it was killing people? Imagine that. Multiply it by a hundred. Maybe a thousand. The hospital scenes we saw in Covid aren’t much different from the AIDS crisis.

And the Golden Girls explicitly chose to give an AIDS scare—and remember, at this time there was absolutely no treatment whatsoever, AZT had been discovered but not yet approved, so basically if you got AIDS your treatment was praying like hell—to its most straightlaced, beloved character. Rose is an integral part of the show. Rose is not a “very special episode” shoo-in. And while Blanche could have been a cautionary tale about sleeping around, no—they chose to go with something that was a very real concern at the time, the lack of effective blood screening for donated blood. There wasn’t a person in America who could judge Rose. She needed surgery. She needed a transfusion. She trusted her doctors. This is the most natural thing in the world. The storyline was carefully crafted so that at no moment could bigots find some way to justify Rose’s possible diagnosis.

And for thirty minutes, the show delivered hit after hit after hit of AIDS education (VERY GOOD AIDS education, actually, some of it is now outdated but most is still solid and for the mid-1980s it was choice), forcing middle America to actually reckon with what the the then-President was openly mocking as “fag disease.” And not just the disease part of it: when Rose says she’d have to give up her job and doesn’t know what she’d do, that the medical bills will pile up, Blanche says “that’s what [house] mortgages are for.” She’s the one who owns the house they all live in. She’s ready to put herself into tens of thousands of dollars of debt—no minor sum now, it would have been MASSIVE in 1985–going into her retirement years, to ensure Rose receives what little medical care is available, should it be necessary. This episode forced people to look, really LOOK, at what HIV did to people emotionally, the choices it forced them to make. Yes, it’s somewhat sanitized for prime time, but ask any gay man who survived that time what it meant to hear Blanche say “AIDS is not a bad person’s disease” or to see Dorothy fold Rose into a tight embrace as she faced the possibility of being told “I’m sorry. Get your affairs in order.” It was HUGE. It was AN EXTREMELY BIG DEAL.

The Golden Girls came out swinging hard for older women, and then said “fuck that, we’re doing it for everyone” and they DID.