spoken sharply

@septemberlikestea / septemberlikestea.tumblr.com

hello i am sept. short for september. he/they.
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taylor swift’s work wouldn’t be nearly as insufferable if she wasn’t constantly trying to present herself as some sort of tortured underdog. like, okay, she has endured hardships, and a lot of people, especially white men, are shitty towards her for purely misogynistic reasons. that sucks, i agree. but she’s never been an underdog before. she was born to well-off parents who did everything they could to start her music career when she was barely even a teenager, an opportunity that lots of people would kill for. now she’s extremely famous and wealthy, and everything she releases is destined to sell millions of copies and receive glowing reviews in nearly every publication. she is not an underdog, and i have trouble believing she’s particularly “tortured.” she’s not even an alcoholic, despite claiming to be one on the opening track of her new album! people like to defend her lyrics by saying she’s just playing a character, which i don’t believe for a second, but even if she was, i don’t think i want to listen to someone like swift play the character of a tortured underdog, not when there’s so many musicians out there who are actually tortured underdogs. it comes across as hollow. “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” sung by one of the wealthiest, most famous, most critically acclaimed musicians in the world, who was born to loving parents who personally helped her start her career, who once said she’d never been to therapy because she “just feels very sane.” if you’re going to play a character, maybe pick one who we’re not supposed to pity.

She’s talking directly to her crazy investment banker dad who bulldozed her path to fame with these quotes, if she’s revealing anything about herself of substance at all like that. But I don’t know that she is.

It feels to me like she's been trying to square the circle of having a virtually frictionless path to the pinnacle of white suburban femininity in a society ruled by the protestant work ethic that insists that power and wealth are a marker of hard work, so being a billionaire means she *must* have worked and grinded and suffered, "right"? Except she didn't, and has very little if any in the way of life experience relatable to anyone who's ever faced genuine adversity, so the whole "tortured poet" thing comes off as insincere and unrelatable to most people.

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Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

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FINALLY

🧑🏿‍🔬🧪

A POST-TRUTH

CRIME DOCUMENTARY

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no-passaran

This is horrible and reminds us once again that there is no legislation for how truthful a documentary has to be. Other jobs like journalists have colleges where you have to face consequences if you lie or manipulate information, but documentaries don't. That's how we get fake documents being used like this AI-generated images of a real person, and also all the liars on Discovery Max and the History channel spewing anti-science stupidity and pretending like it has any basis.

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Inmates being put to work does NOT SAVE ANYONE TAX DOLLARS you are still paying exorbitant amounts of taxes to the prison industrial complex, almost all of which goes into these corporations pockets, btw—-not spent on prisoners.

I don’t know about any of y’all, but I would so much rather my tax money go to actually rehabilitating people and finding ways to keep them out of incarceration, rather than an entire industry set up around getting people to recidivate and return to prison time and time again, just so that prison industrial complex can pocket even MORE of my tax money.

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Ahmad Abdel Rahman says if bakeries had not re-opened their doors, many Palestinians would have been on the verge of losing their families to hunger. “We lived through difficult days, and no one looked at us. We were dying every day from starvation, from bombing, and from running behind the aid parachutes that the planes dropped over us. Aid was dropped from the aircraft into the sea,” he explained. “If we wanted to get food for our families, we had to go to the mouth of death, to the sea, to pick up the aid that fell there.”
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“I hid from my children because of their constant insistence and requests for food. I used to tell them that I was going out to bring them food, but I would go to the house of one of my brothers and spend hours there until I was sure that my wife was able to force the children to go to sleep hungry and when they slept, my wife would send for me to come home. I slept beside them, hungry like them, trying to swallow my tears,” Ahmad recalled.
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