Yet another Maximoff Monday. Don’t smoke, kids.
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Came to me in a dream (Do you know of any others of note? Not counting Sovereign-- speaking of which, what do you think about then?)
So true! Although, Angle Man doesn't get used nearly as much in recent times. Dr. Psycho is sort of their go-to non-god male villain.
As for the Sovereign, I like 'em so far. But I'm hoping the character isn't around for the entire run. It would be the First Born all over again, and nobody really wants that, do they?
I'm getting so sick of major female characters in historical media being incredibly feisty, outspoken and public defenders of women's rights with little to no realistic repercussions. Yes it feels like pandering, yes it's unrealistic and takes me out of the story, yes the dialogue almost always rings false - but beyond all that I think it does such a disservice to the women who lived during those periods. I'm not embarrassed of the women in history who didn't use every chance they had to Stick It To The Man. I'm not ashamed of women who were resigned to or enjoyed their lot in life. They weren't letting the side down by not having and representing modern gender ideals. It says a lot about how you view average ordinary women if the idea of one of your main characters behaving like one makes them seem lame and uninteresting to you.
It also almost always comes down to poor research.
Rather than research the ways subversive women really acted, what they really said, what they actually cared about, the very specific ways in which women used to be treated, dismissed, infantilised etc, we get books and TV shows in which modern words, modern concerns and modern ways of being “a strong woman” are awkwardly squeezed into eras in which they make no sense.
It’s a disservice to the real feminists of that time, to the real women who lived and survived in a system of continuous misogynistic oppression, and the real journey we have travelled to get to where we are, and the long long way we still have to go. Worse, it feeds into the ignorance that breeds that complacency which then leads to a lot of the gains we have made being taken away from us.
The whole Polybius thing is my favourite conspiracy theory because nearly every individual element of the story is absolutely true, but not for that reason.
Did some early arcade games cause people to suffer hallucinations, memory loss, and short-term personality changes? Yes, they did – because many folks who played them were experiencing close range exposure to bright, rapidly flashing lights for the first time in their lives, and – at the time – public awareness of photosensitive epilepsy was practically nonexistent. Most who had it were undiagnosed, and its symptoms often weren’t recognised when they arose – and if you have no idea what photosensitive epilepsy is, those symptoms might look a lot like alien mind control!
Were early video arcades frequented by serious-looking men in dark suits? Again, yes they were – because they were suspected of being money-laundering fronts for illegal gambling rings, and thus were routinely placed under federal surveillance. And those suspicions weren’t unfounded – it later transpired that many early video arcades were, in fact, money-laundering fronts for illegal gambling rings.
Did arcade cabinets with strange titles and indecipherable gameplay quietly pop up in out-of-the-way places, then vanish shortly thereafter, never to be seen again? Absolutely – because a thriving black market in off-brand bootlegs arose almost immediately. Quality control was nonexistent, so many such cabinets had operational lifespans measured in weeks, and you’d most often see them in arcades with poor locations simply because they were cheap.
It was a perfect storm of largely unrelated factors that added up to the convincing appearance of a shadowy conspiracy, even though each element by itself had a fairly boring explanation.
The thing I keep coming back to, with all the *gestures expansively* is that real life doesn't have peaceful epilogues.
Every single win has to be defended. Forever. I'm sorry. It sucks. The Nazis lost until they stopped losing. The US had abortion rights, and then 50 years later it didn't. Empires fall, and then they invade other countries again. Oppressive regimes are overthrown and replaced with other oppressive regimes. You will never finish the work etc etc etc. Which is why it's so fucking important to be able to acknowledge and celebrate progress, when it happens. The people who came before you didn't put in all that work for nothing, and you aren't, either. You can't save it all for the Ultimate Victory because there is never going to be an Ultimate Victory. There's no such thing as a time when everything is good, and ours shall not be the commune of Heaven.
BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones - i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note - all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a'ringin’ her bell”
country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country - how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state - especially from johnny cash and merle haggard - now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda; which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads; which paved the way for meaningless party anthems - attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.
that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem - “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn - sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” - has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so - understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands - the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon - almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
Johnny cash wrote an entire album about the destruction of Indigenous lands and of Indigenous people, Kris Kristofferson has been an activist most of his career working closely with the UFM, Woody Guthrie was a social justice advocate and union activist, Dolly Parton has tackled explicitly feminist issues even in the 60s and has been an avid supporter of her lgbt fans, Willie Nelson made Farm Aid to try and help farmers in danger of losing their farms due to mortgages keep them and is also an avid supporter of LGBT rights as well as marijuana legalization, Lorettea Lynn wrote about birth control in the 70s and had her song banned, i could go on!
When in the correct hands, country music is a powerful medium, but post 9/11 it’s been handed off to apathetic white men who have turned it into the most useless genre of music out there.
The Dixie Chicks were right.
"And I know from your verse
You put America first
And all others you simply beat senseless"
always sounded like a direct response to that terrible song.
This isn't a funny tweet it's a threat
As I've said before. I write the story to kill it.
Here's to another 70 years
fun fact the purge of doctors was because of an actual literal state sponsored antisemitic campaign and conspiracy theory. and it is unfortunately one that ppl still try to perpetuate to this day.
“lol Arthur Conan Doyle clearly didn’t know anything about drugs. Sherlock Holmes did cocaine but it calmed him down. That’s not how cocaine works!”
There are two options: Arthur Conan Doyle had never met someone addicted to cocaine or he met some with ADHD who was addicted to cocaine
i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat
a plant's job is literally to just exist but the venus flytrap chose violence
what if i gently laid an uncooked steak on the soil for it to absorb
my tree biology teacher fed her calcium-deficient tree a whole-ass bbq rib bone - she stuck it in the ground near the base of the tree (after eating the meat off of it), and when she came back to collect it to show the tree biology class it was GONE
the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides
also there’s an old story about a man who was buried beneath a tree, and when they went to exhume the body it had been completely absorbed by the tree’s roots- you could see the shape of the body in the way the roots grew, splitting up for clearly defined arms and legs. trees will absolutely eat a steak if you bury it & they need the nutrients.
that’s horrifying! thank you
I mean yeah? Bone meal and blood meal are common fertilizers for plants.
And plants' roots actively forage, seeking out the areas of the most nutrients as they grow, so it makes sense
"What are corpses on the ground but uncooked steaks for some tree" is my new favorite quote
important psa
Awh, I always thought they were so pretty and had no idea they could be harmful
Can someone transcribe this? The water is really loud.
“Hey everybody! Here we are in the southern Appalachian mountains. We have a pristine Montane stream ecosystem, as you can see all around us here. I thought I’d make an educational video this morning. It involves this practice right here [gestures to rock pile]. As our national parks and national forests fall victim to human pressure, more than ever, this is something we’re seeing more and more of. Hopefully we can make this video go viral. This stream, as you can see around us right here, is a breeding ground for North America’s largest salamander, the Eastern hellbender. They can get up to 2.5-3 feet long. It’s part of our natural heritage in the eastern United States. When people do this right here - what they consider to be art - they’re actually destroying the breeding ground for the Eastern hellbender salamander. The Eastern hellbender will use flat rocks such as these to make nesting sites in these streams. So here’s what I would like everybody to do. If you care about our Montane stream freshwater ecosystems like this one around us here, when you see something like this, this is what I recommend doing: [kicks down rock pile]. Take the rocks, throw them back into the stream. The Eastern hellbender utilizes rocks like this. It actually feels pretty good to do this! [walks to other pile] This is not actually art, okay? This is destruction of our freshwater ecosystems. So I would like to encourage everyone: when you see this [gestures to second rock pile], do this! [kicks pile] I’d like to return our streams to their natural state for the organisms that live here. Thanks, and have a good day.”
PSA from a forest ranger who is instructed to knock these down:
Not only are they harmful for river/stream habits, they can cause hikers to get lost! Cairns are meant to represent the correct path for a trail. We’ve had hikers get lost by following incorrect paths marked by cairns people set up “for fun/art.” Not only do we want hikers to get lost, we want them to stay on the correct path for erosion control and ecosystem protection. Cairn-building “for fun/art” has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, so we keep finding more and more to knock over.
If you want to set up a cairn “for fun/art,” do it in a dry, very rocky area. Don’t take rocks from rivers or streams! But when it’s a bedrock site and there’s lots of rocks sitting around? Sure, fine, whatever. But please please PLEASE knock them down after! Don’t be the reason we have to deploy Search & Rescue for a lost hiker!
who is on the sex offender registry? pedophiles and rapists right? totally not the idiot 19 yo who pissed in the bushes at 2 in the morning. totally not the sex worker who slept with a client in a motel, not realizing that in some states that counts as 'in public'. sex workers in general, esp sw of color and transfem sex workers? totally not the teen who sent a nude to their partner not realizing that they just distributed child porn and their lover now had a copy of cp on their phone. totally not the trans person just existing too close to children in certain states. totally not the two men who had sex in the privacy of their own home in certain states. totally not the owner of the sex shop who didn't have their papers in order after having the cops called on them by a WASP. totally not black people, esp black sex workers, being accused of sexual deviancy for standing too close to a white person, because it's not like that died with jim crow. totally not queer people being affectionate in public in certain states. totally not the queer 18-year-old who had sex with their 17-year-old partner and had the cops called on them by the homophobic parent. nope. just pedos and rapists. this system totally isn't flawed and totally doesn't hurt innocent people, and if you critique it you totally love pedophiles. obviously
i get why people are saying reform the sex offender registry on this post but that's not the point. abolish it. it does nothing but hurt minorities and sex workers and the homeless, and that's by design. if the government can make a registry of sexual predators, all they need to do to punish the people they dont like is to define 'predator' in a way that benefits them.
if you decide to rb this post id prefer if you reblog it with the second addition. this was made in the context of abolition and i'd prefer it is spread around that way
I don't usually add stuff to stuff like this, I just reblog. But I have a story. And I'm going to try and be as confidential as possible because of the nature of my work. But here it goes.
I work at a DV organization. We had a client cone to our shelter who was on the sex offender registry because they were trafficked as a teen. There was a bust on the location they were "staying" (being kept hostage) and this client was 18 by the time the bust happened, but the other victims were not. This client was arrested as an accomplice and placed on the sex offender registry at 18. They were close to 40 by the time they came to the DV shelter. And legally, they could not stay there because of their proximity to children. So we had to find somewhere else for them to stay. And just lemme tell you - do you know how fucking hard it is to find somewhere that does not violate any of the restrictions imposed on registered sex offenders??? They could not stay at ANY motel/hotel with a pool because they can't be within so many yards of a "public" pool. Yes - even one that is on the private property of a hotel.
Couldn't be near a school. Or a church. Or at another shelter that allows children. And so much more.
And this client had just been fucked over by every system that supposed to "serve and protect" people. Can you imagine being groomed, held hostage, becoming a legal adult in this environment, and then YOU get arrested because you're 18 and the other victims aren't?? And now you're labeled a predator. And now the help and support you should also be getting for the trauma that you've gone through is being denied to you because you're now an accomplice in all of this??? Disgusting. A fucking tragedy. And yes - this client was a POC.
How differently would this clients life had been if they had gotten the help they needed? Who knows? But they never even had a chance. And now they're a sex offender. That's it. Don't need any more info about them. Because like OP said; this system totally isn't flawed and totally doesn't hurt innocent people.
So yeah. Abolish the registry sex offender registry.
We had a patient last night who was a textbook case of electrolytes imbalance as a result of nausea and vomiting. And I didn’t say this to the patient because I didn’t think they’d appreciate it, but it’s kinda great when the way you are so so sick is like exactly like the textbooks say it’ll be. Like not good that you’re having sudden new onset muscle weakness and tingling, but buddy this is gonna get sorted out with an efficiency you won’t believe. We fixed like 85% of the stuff wrong with this patient by midnight and we marveled the whole time about how this patient was seemingly concocted in a lab so I could walk my trainee through a highly manageable crisis
It also meant I got to share with my trainee what is my absolute favorite part of the job: when you take someone who is So Miserable and you make them feel So Much Better that they start once again having a personality beyond suffering and crying. It’s like seeing a plant perk up after finally getting watered. Suddenly they’re joking, they’re laughing, you’re talking about stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with puking or tingling or bleeding or burning. They’ve got a bag of potassium phosphate going into their arm, and we’re cackling like banshees because your friend at bedside who has been so worried just made a really stupid joke. There is no sillier place in the hospital than the room where someone is giggling with the giddy joy you get when you feel pretty okay after just one hour ago everything sucking so, so, so, so bad.
This was me a few years ago when I had my first major POTS event (like, stood up and blacked out, couldn't lift my own head up, could barely move my hands to call for help), and Urgent Care sent me to the ER in a panic because I was so disorientated and out of it and just kept asking, "Why can I feel my pulse in my stomach?" they thought I was potentially having an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
The ER were also a bit panicked until they ran some tests and went, "Oh Jesus, you have like no sodium in you," and proceeded to hook me up to multiple IV bags over the course of several hours while also giving me salty snacks to eat.
Turns out cutting out salt like my old doctor told me to hadn't been a good idea. Anyway. Can confirm, when you're dealing with an electrolyte imbalance it literally feels like you're gonna die but the minute you get that IV into you it's like being resurrected.
Your whole brain comes back online. Birds start singing again. You can remember the taste of strawberries and the way the sun kissed the green hills of the Shire.
You may or may not quote this line from LotR out loud on accident and momentarily render the nurse switching out your IV bag helpless with laughter because it's been a long day, and your loopy-ass is making up for it because they were able to fix you and any day you can help a patient so noticeably is a good one.
See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that's Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.
Everyone else in this photo is a trans person that Dr Hirschfeld worked with. This photo was taken at their christmas party.
It is important to note that this action was not an "oh, Nazis ALSO targetted other prople". They directly linked Hirschfeld's institute and research to claims of a Jewish plot to destroy German society.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the EXACT same rhetoric being rolled out by prominent TERFs for the last few years including, yes, The Wizard Lady.
Antisemitism, racism, and transphobia/homophobia are ALWAYS linked together.
this is the ritual to lead you on
"ADHD developed as an evolutionary advantage uwu" - something I would say as a cope if I lived 10,000 years ago and zoned out at a crucial moment and was in the process of being eaten by a smilodon
