i had a discussion today with a friend who was genuinely trying to understand why people are working so hard to ID the charlottesville nazis and contact their employers. “but won’t that just make them more desperate and violent?” they asked. “if they get fired from their jobs or kicked out of school? if they think they have nothing to lose?”
and i said, “i don’t know. maybe. but right now, these motherfuckers think they can be nazis on the weekend.”
like, i somewhat understood my friend’s hesitance re: doxxing, because doxxing is so often a tool of evil. but these motherfuckers think they can show up to a white supremacist rally on saturday where people got fucking murdered by white supremacists, and then on monday they can go back to the IT desk and log into outlook and answer their fucking office phone. they think they can show up to a rally on saturday with a shield and a helmet and beat black teenagers with fucking sticks in a parking garage, and on monday they can be back on campus, taking notes in accounting. these putrid pieces of human garbage think they can be nazis all weekend, and then on thursday they can go to the professional development workshop with the department and enjoy those brownies that diane brought in.
no. no, they fucking cannot.
if you want to be a goddamned weekend nazi, you have to be a nazi every goddamned day. you want to be a weekend nazi? then you face the fucking music on monday, you cowardly piece of shit. you go ahead and live in a world where your hatred of other people means nobody wants to hire you, work with you, live with you, break bread with you; you hateful fuck. you get to suffer the natural consequences of your belief in the lesser humanity of others. you get to live the outcome of your violence, your acts of bigotry. you get to live your ugly truth, alone.
This is a picture of the heroic students from the University of Virginia that stood up to hundreds of white supremacists in Charlottesville tonight. They were completely surrounded. They were beaten. They were maced. The police stood by and watched it all happen. But they stood firm, yelling “Black Lives Matter!” and “No Racists! No KKK! No Fascist USA!” until the Nazis left. They were then forcefully removed by the police, who called them an “unlawful assembly.”
These college kids bravely stood up in the face of evil tonight. And they are a shining light on what was otherwise an extremely dark thing. Fuck fascism. Fuck white supremacy. Celebrate these fucking heroes.
I’m not even the biggest fan of Taylor Swift but the woman is taking someone to court because he sexually assaulted her to make sure women know that it’s okay to speak out when stuff like this happened.
And you guys are STILL insulting her and making jokes about her.
Taylor Swift is problematic. Correct. But here’s a wild concept that half of you can’t seem to grasp: We ALL are.
Regardless of your opinion of Taylor Swift, now is not the time to point out something problematic she did 6 years ago.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, shut the fuck up. Being a survivor is horrible and she’s very brave to report it. I didn’t report my attack, because I was scared that people like you would laugh at me. You know, like how you’re all laughing at Taylor Swift right now.
When you laugh at her for reporting this, it’s not just her you’re laughing at – it’s every person that has tried to report sexual assault.
But your feminism doesn’t count right now because it’s Taylor Swift, right?
Also, she’s counter-suing. For 1$. The dude initially sued her for $3 million, because he was left without a job after she reported the harassment.
For 1$.
Literally all she is trying to get out of it is the court acknowledging that he did something wrong.
You do not fucking serve any kind of activism that actually makes the world a fucking better place by doing this. What you are doing is using a tissue of justification to do something shitty. Stop it. Stop looking for excuses to be shitty to other human beings. It’s a fucking awful thing to do.
I don’t really understand getting mad at people for mixing up korean, chinese, and japanese
Like, look at them together
見る한국어中国死ね我要吃你マンコ형사我有大鸡巴
and tell me they don’t look similar lol
they don’t look similar
This post’s notes are made of:
• Tumblr People™ trying to prove they’re not racists by explaining why and how these alphabets don’t look similar at all even if they don’t understand shit of it; • People with historical and linguistic knowledge arguing that while korean is indeed a different looking alphabet, China and Japan have a history of borrowed symbols and trade enough that some of it’s alphabets are indeed similar to an untrained eye – after all, not everyone has the same education and access to information to know how to differentiate it, aaaannd, best of all:
• Actual chinese, korean and japanese speakers pointing out that OP just wrote “i have a big dick” and variations.
The gist is this: ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the international consensus has been that nobody would benefit from a nuclear war and therefore we should all find ways to do our geopolitical business that won’t result in Armageddon. The point of the “cold war” was that it allowed the US and the USSR to play their dominance games without confronting each other directly in a conflict that would inevitably go nuclear. This was, of course, not good for the regions of the world in which they fought their proxy wars (the major ones being Korea, Vietnam, and, eventually, Afghanistan). But to the extent that this was about avoiding global thermonuclear war, we can say it achieved its goal. As part of this strategy, public chest-thumping about how big your nuclear arsenal is was kept to a minimum, on the theory that irresponsible rhetoric might lead one of the Great Powers to believe it had “no choice” but to push the button.
Farrell points out that whether or not Buttercup actually intends to push the Button, the “fire and fury” speech is a problem, because even what we would all see as the ‘good’ outcome–that is, nobody drops a nuclear bomb on anyone–strengthens North Korea and weakens the US, because the POTUS has now clearly established that he can’t make good on his threats. Which means the next time he tries to get another world leader to do what he wants, they won’t take him seriously. To be fair, I think that’s pretty much what’s already happened; this will just make it official.
Farrell’s poker metaphor puts me in mind of the classic Star Trek TOS episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.” In general, a lot of those classic Star Trek episodes bear rewatching right now, because Buttercup has made the world as crude and cartoonish and unsubtle as the world of ST:TOS often was. Buttercup’s White House operation reminds me every day of the Mirror Enterprise command ‘system’ in “Mirror, Mirror.” I’ve already talked about how Buttercup himself affects the country the way the alien creature from “Day of the Dove” affects the crews of both the Enterprise and the Klingon warship. I think “The Cloud-Minders,” in both its depiction of a class-stratified world and Kirk’s battle to convince the Stratos dwellers of the harmful effects of “xenite gas,” gets more relevant every day. But I digress.
My point was: “Corbomite Maneuver” will give you some idea of what it felt like when two world powers armed with planet-annihilating weapons were constantly playing each other at high-stakes poker. Kirk is faced with an alien spaceship whose capabilities are so beyond anything the Enterprise has got that there is basically no way to engage it tactically. In that sense, the Enterprise is not so much an allegory of the US state as an allegory of the American people, trapped inside this system of mutually assured destruction with no real way to affect the outcome. He gets out of it by using a bluff. Spock has been viewing the situation in terms of strategy, as a chess game. He points out that they have reached the point where, in a chess game, they are basically fucked. At which point, Kirk realizes: they’re not playing chess, they’re playing poker.
We can debate whether poker is really that interesting (I’ve never liked it) or whether it’s a good thing that we talk about potentially planet-annihilating geopolitical maneuvering as if it were a game people play for fun and profit. But what’s not debatable is that Buttercup sucks at poker. The whole point of having a “poker face” is that it’s unreadable; people don’t know when you’re bluffing and when you’re not because you never give anything away no matter what kind of hand you have. You don’t play poker by yelling, “I have all the cards! I have the BEST cards! I have a hand of FIRE AND FURY AND UNIMAGINABLE POWER!” Cause that doesn’t say “maybe this guy really does have a royal flush,” that says, “this dude is looking at a pair of deuces.”
Kirk’s bluff, on the other hand, is not about producing the appearance of omnipotence, but about getting to a solution. The Corbomite Maneuver requires Kirk to admit defeat–something which is more credible, in this situation, than pretending you can emerge victorious–in order to secure his real objective, which is the survival of the ship and the crew. It is not something Buttercup could ever pull off, because the only goal he ever has is his own aggrandizement.
So yeah, I figure the most likely outcome is that Buttercup basically just loses this game of poker. It won’t lead to our actual annihilation, just the diminishment of our geopolitical influence. And the boat has already sailed on that; it’s just getting further out to sea.
To be honest, I am pretty much ready for the US not to be a world power any more. It’s exhausting, and expensive, and it leads us to routinely inflict horrific violence in ways that are profoundly unjust and essentially immoral. What is kind of terrifying about this situation is that Buttercup, for all the America Firstism of his backers, is absolutely NOT ready not to be King of the World. Everything’s personal for him. Our nuclear arsenal, to Buttercup, is just another kind of prosthetic masculinity, like his money and his beauty pageants and his neo-fascism and the presidency itself–like the fantasmatic hugeness of everything he touches, from his electoral college victory to the size of his rally crowds. He keeps searching for things that will give him the all-powerful masculinity that he clearly fears he doesn’t really have. Unfortunately, unlike a lot of these prosthetics, our nuclear arsenal is actually real and actually within his grasp and actually capable of doing unimaginable damage.
For those of you who are in the tags worrying about an actual nuclear war: I wouldn’t call this reassuring exactly, but it does support the theory that Buttercup does not actually intend to start a nuclear war:
Honestly, if you can put aside your anxiety for a few minutes, this story is pretty damn funny. His entire administration, basically is out there telling everyone, don’t worry, he’s not really going to nuke anyone. Apparently the “fire and fury” speech was extemporaneous, though they’re trying to spin it as if they knew it was coming. But here’s my favorite part:
A senior White House official voiced frustration that Trump’s use of the phrase “fire and fury” had been interpreted as a depiction of nuclear strikes. This official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive matter, said Trump’s words should not necessarily be taken literally.
[JFC. How many times have we been told we shouldn’t worry about anything that comes out of Buttercup’s lie-hole because of course he doesn’t really mean it? Tell me then why the House voted 1.6 billion to build the border wall y’all said he didn’t LITERALLY want? Of course he means it literally, he DOES NOT UNDERSTAND METAPHOR.]
“People on TV who know nothing about North Korea are claiming this is nuclear escalation,” this official said. “ ‘Fire and fury’ doesn’t always mean nuclear. It can mean any number of things. It is as if people see him [Trump] as an unhinged madman.”
[WE DO. WE ALL DO. WE ALWAYS HAVE. Someone find me a GIF of Moriarty going, “YOU’RE JUST GETTING THAT *NOW*?”]
Asked whether Trump came up with the phrase “fire and fury” on his own, this official replied, “Absolutely.”
[AND THIS IS WHY.]
I bet the “official” was Kelly.
If you’re worried about nuclear war, one actual thing you can do to prevent it is to call your representatives and ask them to cosponsor the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act. It would require Trump (and any future president) to get congressional approval to use nuclear weapons as a first strike (as opposed to retaliation after someone uses them first). It was proposed back in January and seems really, really relevant these days.
If they’re not a cosponsor, call and ask them to become one.
If they’re already a cosponsor, call them and thank them, and ask them to release a press release reaffirming their support. The more news there is about this, the more likely the GOP leadership will feel pressured to actually deal with this.
Sage advice from delurkingdetective.
I enjoy that this entire article replaced T’s name with Buttercup.
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