JaiLand

Republicans take a break from passing laws to hurt as many people as possible, to pass laws about imaginary things. Republicans suck.

They are one in the same. #ACAB

Hey, unrelated question: I wonder why Superman is never seen punching Clark Kent?

Comic by Andy Singer

Streaming services are ruining the one feature people loved: no ads.

#BoringDystopia #LateStageCapitalism

Enshittification is not a consequence of Capitalism; it is one of Capitalism's fundamental principles:

not that either is a good thing but there is a small cosmic sort of irony to appreciate in the way that the russian invasion of ukraine and the most recent nakba happened so close together and how they through comparison made it undeniably clear how much the definition of war crime and genocide and atrocity &etc depends on the geopolitical interests of the imperial core

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Source

by nyeusi_waasi on x.com / twitter

Unrestrained winter fun

@todaysbird

While the Super Bowl happened, and Israel paid to run an ad, they also bombed Rafah. Rafah is the southernmost part of Gaza to where over one million people were displaced.

I know the US government acts like a corporation but it’s not.

Not voting isn’t the same as a boycott. Because you can’t bankrupt a government by not voting. All you get by not voting is less control over what the money is doing.

The money comes from taxes, not voting. Abstaining from voting does nothing to reduce the governments ability to get money and spend it on shit.

So yes, sometimes you vote to reduce harm because not voting WILL NOT REDUCE HARM.

It’s not a boycot. Abstaining doesn’t take power from the government. It just reduces the number of people they feel answerable to.

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Wil Wheaton condemns Larry David for his Elmo-based violence

This story is a week old, and has blown up today. The right wing smoothbrains are out in force, doing their usual thing, until they get distracted by the existence of a successful woman somewhere in the world and have to go rage against that.

I don’t know why this is happening today. I don’t know why right wing clout chasing incels have decided to make this their Thing today. It’s all very confusing, especially a week after the fact.

But I want to put something here that I added to my post on Facebook, that those dudes (it’s always dudes whose entire personality is “MONSTER ENERGY DRINKS!”) need to hear but won’t understand:

Larry David put his hands on another performer, without consent, in a segment he was not part of. That, alone, is not okay. It is not EVER okay. The fact that so many people don’t get that, or are deliberately choosing NOT to get that, is telling.

But as I said, Elmo is a child, and he is a friend to children, so all the kids whose parents were watching the Today Show with them, because Elmo was on to talk about sharing big feelings and caring for your mental health, got to watch this man storm into a set, and angrily attack Elmo.

That’s indefensible behavior, and calling me names doesn’t change that.

After reading what you wrote here, I think I can put my finger on why these kinds of dudes made Elmo a target.

The clarifying sentence:

Reduce the whole thing to a puppet and a joke– that’s what they like to see. The video comments snarkily that Elmo is actually “someone’s hand.” This stance isn’t something they adopt to dismiss their behaviour. It’s the REASON FOR their behaviour.

This sort of dude (I have met women like this, but they have always turned out to work in a hyper-masculine environment such as tech or construction, where they likely have to assimilate such an attitude to get along) has a really big problem with engaging in collective social fiction, in part because they haven’t gotten over feeling like they need to prove to their peers that they aren’t a gullilble child who believes in Santa Claus. Their personal walls of self defense are spun around the sort of materialistic realism that also diminishes the importance of invisible, immaterial effects such as feelings. Which, of course, is what Elmo is all about.

These guys are raging that something invisible, immeasurable and unprovable– feelings– is being given an important place in media, and worse yet, the spokesperson for it is the most whimsical possible kind of fiction. This goes against a lot of what they’ve developed their mindsets around– that only tangible assets are worth anything, that immaterial truths can be faked or dispensed with.

It’s not new to have nonfiction media play along with Muppets as if they were real. But unlike Miss Piggy the material girl, or Kermit the observer and reporter, Elmo is primarily associated with immaterial values like imagination and love. Elmo is here to talk about mental health. Elmo is an icon of all of the things that were not given an place in the public view of “wellbeing” until the past couple decades because they are not material assets, while these dudes were raised to specifically reject anything fuzzy, indistinct, personal, and immeasurable like feelings as being “worthless” compared to hard, objective data. Elmo represents the epitome of everything that some dudes were taught to mock and reject, and that they express their identity by spurning. And here it is on the Today Show being given a place as serious as their own.

I suppose the actor who attacked Elmo legit thought that his act was funny, at least to people who shared his sense of humour. These guys and their humour depends heavily on their own shared mutual agreement that anything they can’t back up with a material W is a big L, so hitting Elmo in the face is a “hilarious” reminder that the puppet character isn’t real, that no real material harm is being caused, and– implicitly– a big flex that dudes like them possess physical power and therefore can trample both Elmo’s fictional existence, and anything Elmo is there to stand up for.

But a normal, well-adjusted person, who doesn’t find it intrinsically funny to knock down the fourth wall with a display of inescapable material power, isn’t going to “get the joke”. At best they’re just going to be like, wtf why did you do that, you’re ruining the segment, you’re wrecking the entertainment that the show planned. And, if you are at all sensitive to the idea of seeing an adult hit a child, you may take it as if it’s supposed to be hitting Elmo in-character, at which point it just looks like the narrative is that he hit a child for no reason. Which is distinctly not funny, and can be very understandably distressing.

tl;dr these guys are threatened by the social request that we all play along with Muppets, because they never got over being told only losers play along with Santa. And they are especially threatened by Elmo because they might have to acknowledge that feelings matter, and they’ve spent their whole lifetime posturing in rejection of that.