millennial-review

i-say-spooky-you-say-scary

stardust-rain

today in ‘i wasn’t actually expecting this, but i really should have expected this’: i do a lot of visa application invites for people for work, and the passport first page for just about every country i’ve seen has clear, black text printed on light/white background with maybe some simple pastel-coloured designs. and for the first almost-three-decades of my life, i was happy in the naive belief that all passports around the world were similar; that one day all countries of the world gathered in Geneva or wherever and formed a Passport Design Committee where they all agreed on the general aesthetics for passports worldwide.

then, about two weeks back, i saw an american passport for the first time, and it straight up has a giant-ass flag, an eagle, a fucking ear of corn, and the first line of the constitution on it, the text is on glaring multicoloured backdrop, and while i was caught off-guard by it, it is also completely in line with its country of origin, and also i feel like this tells me everything i need to know about america as a nation.

awordwasthebeginning

@languagecrazy @misacoh

homicidal-barber

for anyone wondering if it’s really that bad

osheamobile

…American here and I really shouldn’t be surprised to find out that nobody else in the world does this and yet every single fucking time

Source: stardust-rain

gaypeopletwitter

fullof4nswers

cyborg-sevalle

floatingstirnerhead replied to your post “I also like how that one reblog failed to address the conclusion of…”

Liberals love Harry Potter and The Hunger Games so much because it lets them live vicariously through resistance against a thoroughly evil bad guy that looks evil and doesn’t have any complexity so they don’t have to challenge the villains in our own world who often hide behind smiles and nice clothing.

Exactly, like, my first forays into theory stuff, particularly semiotics, were through narratology, and it always drove me up the fucking wall how, like, historically, stories/myths/fairy tails functioned as a way to talk about the world in a sort of realm of pure morality, like, demonstrating what either the individual or the society that produced them believes is right/wrong, good/evil, etc.

But then I found myself confronted by a particular paradox. If that is indeed still the case, why would, for example, a corporation pour millions of dollars into producing a film where a corporation is blatantly the villain? Like, yes, some such films have this sort of idea that the evil corporation is an outlier that must be brought down, but far more, what I’ve encountered kinda blatantly function to indict corporations and, to an extent, capitalism as a whole, and so for the longest time I was just like, the fuck?

When it hit me. It’s the fucking hyperreal. Like, in a largely secular world, mythology has become this sort of realm apart from “reality”, something that’s part of this, like, framework I’ve come to refer to as “Elsewhere”. Like, a film about an evil corporation is of course positing the potential existence of evil corporations, but then when people are confronted with that same concept in reality, we are told “that’s the sort of thing that only happens in movies/books/TV etc.” things which frequently depict our world, but facets of it that always exist “Elsewhere”.

Yes, evil corporations exist, but not here, only elsewhere. Yes, people band together to fight (like, actually fight) such evils, struggling to bring them down, but not here, only elsewhere. Yes, through that struggle, these people can win and create a better, more just world, but not here, only elsewhere. Thus, such narratives can harness people’s negative emotions towards what’s wrong with the world, and then make sure it all gets sublimated into buying movie tickets and merchandise.

Because in the “real world”, we need to accept that things like politics are a banal affair, something which can only ever be engaged in indirectly, via voting, phoning senators, etc, but never a realm wherein people are empowered to engage in direct action because that sort of thing only happens in the movies, in the realm of fantasy, elsewhere.

And the reason I call it “elsewhere” is that it’s part of a bigger social phenomenon where people in the first world have been groomed for decades to mostly act as passive observers. We hear about riots, civil war, revolution in the news, but it’s always “Elsewhere”. I was alive to see both the LA riots while living in California, and to hear about what was going on in Bosnia around that time, and even as a kid, I thought it was really fucking weird that news agencies had made a city I lived about an hour from seem just as distant as a country thousands of miles away. It’s like how Baudrillard said that the Gulf War never happened because we all bought into the idea that the press covering the entire thing on TV was a more authentic and “real” way to be experiencing the war when news media was presenting a very particular, Pro-US narrative about the war that distorted the reality of it to the point that it essentially didn’t happen because its place in history was erased and replaced by the media narrative.

The way we approach mythology today, as something mostly mediated through commercial products, forms what I would consider one of the core preservative factors of capitalism, by making myth less about didacticism (though it still is very much about that, though it tends to engage with it in more subtle and nefarious ways, like “300″ and all the films set in antiquity that came after it that glorified war over diplomacy as the second war in Iraq was getting fully underway) and more about escapism, about depicting a world where moral and ethical struggle aren’t meant to be a mirror on the “real” world, but a window into a separate one, a better one, a simpler one, one that we pay out the ass to catch glimpses of while our own world plummets further into darkness because we’ve been raised to believe that standing boldly against it is just the stuff of fairy tales.

floatingstirnerhead

This makes me think of Liberals trying to convince people that “voting is punk” and all that nonsense.

I love the idea of “Elsewhere”. It’s why you gotta confront power as a peaceful protestor creating these spectacular media protests, but knocking over a trash can is a mortal sin.

Their Resistance™ has more in common with a film set than a riot.

deepseametro

OP leave hunger games out of this!! hunger games had actual really good commentary on the nature of fascism, revolution, etc… people interpreted it poorly but its not the fault of the source material.

harry potter bad though lol

cyborg-sevalle

It’s not about whether these stories are “good” or “bad” or how well they function as critiques though, nor is it about the structure or quality of these narratives, but how people receive them.

Like, yes, Hunger Games introduced some very good analysis of fascism, particularly how it can flourish under the conditions of late capitalism, but then how many people consumed those books and/or films and became aware of how vital armed resistance and rebellion is vs. how many people walked away with a deeper belief that, yes these things are bad, but confronting them directly is the stuff of fiction?

I remember in the wake of the Hunger Games craze, I started seeing/hearing the phrase “awaken your inner Katniss” start to pop up which was reduced to, like, signing petitions and learning archery? When the fictional Katniss Everdeen was an insurrectionist and revolutionary, a figure paralleling actual people who are alive or who have lived, whose goal was tearing down the government through armed struggle and resistance, things which are considered unreasonable or unrealistic by a majority of the same people who, at some level, have been exposed to media related to The Hunger Games, so even if the critiques it presents are good (and I agree, they really are), the way they are consumed (especially as blockbuster motion pictures) functions to do the exact opposite.

I’m reminded of a quote by Kurt Vonnegut,

“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

Art in and of itself is not resistance or rebellion, but this is not the fault of the artists, but of the way we’re taught to respond to/interact with the art. Art has the power to inspire action, but the actual action is up to the people who consume the art, and when we are made to believe that, though the spirit of Katniss’ war against her authoritarian government is just and good within its context, even if that context has clear parallels to our real life conditions, it is still merely the stuff of make-believe which in turn limits our imaginations as to what can/should/must be done in the face of our own versions of such situations.

So, like, to be perfectly clear, Hunger Games could have presented the most pristine, nuanced, and insightful critiques and still have had no effect because we are groomed into seeing a figure like Katniss as a symbol of, like, amorphous personal empowerment rather than a direct call to action, something which I would say is part of its central critique, the use of media as a way to control how we perceive the world. Like, there’s a reason the CIA and DoD have both poured immense resources into controlling various artistic movements in America since the beginning of the Cold War, because so long as things like “awakening your inner Katniss” means buying branded merchandise and maybe going out and protesting instead of, like, taking up arms against a corrupt and oppressive government in defense of the marginalized and oppressed, then art and mythology have been effectively neutralized as threats to the status quo, and again, that’s not a problem with any particular piece of art, it’s a problem with how we’ve been taught to respond to it.

Source: cyborg-sevalle

astromech-punk

Source: deviantart.com

ageofhysteria

blease

teachers assuming that there arent any gay, trans or mentally ill kids in their class get on my Nerves

Source: blease

queeretherealness

psychic-sara

Reblog for a miracle to happen tonight

iron-spideys

do it my dad bought me tickets to infinity war premiere :))

psychic-sara

I’m actually gonna try it myself now

stoicdaydreamer

I need a FULLTIME JOB

WITH BENEFITS

whateveriblogis

DO IT!! THE UNIVERSE IS LISTENING! 💫

sophisticantsophia

A new job & apartment would be awesome

fuckyousincerely

Please please please

auroracristaux

And it is so

tc-drivingmemad

Please let him properly talk to me today

historytclove

Pls let him talk to me or do something pls

she-is-my-sunshine

please let her think about me before she sleeps

Source: she-a-mystic

zarcake-writes

p0tbarbie

every single negative stereotype about women was dreamt up by men who were projecting. fight me about it.

p0tbarbie

“women can’t drive”

It is so well known that women are better and safer drivers than men that OUR CAR INSURANCE RATES ARE LOWER. Women get into fewer accidents, get fewer DUIs, and receive fewer speeding tickets than men.

“women never shut up”

Several scientific studies have shown that not only do men talk more than women, they also think that women have been talking for much longer than they actually have. Men interrupt and talk over women, dominate conversations, and still think women talk too much.

“women are shallow”

Lol next

“my wife is my ball and chain lmao”

Multiple studies have shown that marriage between men and women:
Increases male lifespan, decreases female lifespan
Decreases male depression rates, increases female depression rates
Decreases male stress levels, increases female stress levels
Increases male health and happiness, decreases female health and happiness
Increases a man’s chance of getting a raise or promotion, decreases a woman’s chances of getting a raise or promotion

“women are too emotional”

Men love to say this about women after hurting them, in order to shift the blame and dismiss their feelings in one go. In reality, women are taught to hold our tongues and control ourselves quite literally from birth. We’re taught to put men’s needs and wants ahead of our own emotions regardless of the personal cost. Men are taught to do more or less whatever the fuck they want to women. Men take their emotions out on women while women are expected to shove theirs down.

I could go on and on but I don’t really think I need to.

jackorino

“women can’t drive” (The Guardian) (CBS News) (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)
“women talk to much” (PBS, resources included)
“women are shallow” (just read the book, Dataclysm. by okcupid founder (?) that includes data about sex, gender, race, in finding online romantic partners)
“ball and chain” (University of London)

for all you pissbabies crying about sources

beachgirlnikita

“We’re taught to put men’s needs and wants ahead of our own emotions regardless of the personal cost.

Men are taught to do more or less whatever the fuck they want to women. Men take their emotions out on women while women are expected to shove theirs down.“

Source: p0tbarbie