With love and patience, I need folks to please set aside some time to get better at recognizing antisemitic dogwhistles.
I’m using the following as an example, but intentionally not singling out the person who put this on my dash, cause I’m talking about a broader issue, and I want everybody to self examine.
Okay. this ended up on my dash, a comment in a thread.
ALT
“noticing” is a dogwhistle for an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
let’s look at the profile:
ALT
^ “queen of white.” gonna say that’s a pretty big red flag for white supremacy.
we haven’t even started looking through the blog yet, this is just the post & blog title.
if you go looking on the blog, pretty quickly you find this user is also reblogging from other white supremacists
if you scroll for about ~2 minutes you start seeing her use extremely loaded incendiary and derogatory language about trans women
finally, if you search “white” you see blatant nazi posting.
if you spend a little time familiarizing yourself with antisemitic dogwhistles, you will save time because you won’t need to look through blogs to check, you will see “noticing” in that context and you will already know this is a nazi.
antisemitism is often one of the easiest ways for fascists to get their messaging to spread widely because very few people take the time to learn these dogwhistles, and a lot of people respond to Jewish people patiently pointing them out over and over again with some level of disbelief/resentment/hostility.
it is to everyone’s benefit, for everyone’s collective safety, for you to familiarize yourself with antisemitic dogwhistles.
The curse of modern fandom is that it has allowed fans to get even closer to artists, but they won’t view the artists as people.
Human limits, human mistakes, human feelings, human needs, are never ascribed to artists, and when other fans rightfully point out, “hey, humans are making this, maybe don’t harass them or demand they cater to your personal tastes,” it gets shut down under, “uh, people who make popular mainstream things are automatically Public Figures who are also probably rich, so eat the rich and destroy artists over every perceived minor fault. <3”
Even though there’s, y'know, a really big strike currently going on because those artists are very much not rich or influential or in control of the bullshit.
The more friends I make in the various facets of the entertainment industry, and the more widely my own art gets shared, the more I realize that a lot of y'all genuinely don’t see artists as human beings if they meet some arbitrary standard of Being Known Online.
There is no amount of online fame that makes someone subhuman and a valid target for blatant disrespect and harassment.
Contrary to popular belief, you do not actually own and control a piece of art just because you like it a lot. The artists are not subject to your personal whims and tastes. They owe you nothing.
This post is not about people who only make fanart and fanfic. This post is about the working class artists making your favorite blorbos.
You know, the ones who are on strike right now? Because they’re treated like shit by the executives? And recently an anonymous executive literally issued a threat saying that they want the writers of Hollywood to go homeless?
You don’t stop being a human being deserving of respect just because your art gets famous.
Fan content is cool and all, but this is about the working class artists who do this shit to make a living and get abused by both the executives and the fandoms that spring up around their work.
I guarantee you the studios are going through every outspoken actor’s files looking for something, anything to discredit them. Ron Perlman is probably undergoing the deepest background check of his life right now, thanks to Bob Iger.
So brace yourself to hear some unsavory shit about your favorite actors in the next few weeks. Some of it might even be true. But that doesn’t change the righteousness of the cause or the truths they speak.
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
ALT
If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I’m not hearing about that, so… Tree law!
big fan of characters with abandonment + attachment issues so profound that they leave claw marks in everything they touch but would sooner gnaw off their own leg than admit they just want someone to stay for once. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course.
big fan of characters who are always leaving. who constantly have a suitcase in their hand. characters who start planning their exit the moment they arrive and get nervous when the people in their lives start to Know them. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course
If I can recommend you do 1 low-effort thing for the love of God it is this:
Keep 5 cards in your pocket. One will say “yes”, the second will say “no.”
If you lose your voice, or lose speech, or want to make a dramatic embellishment at the right time, it is an elegant and efficient solution that is right there at hand.
But what if people question you from there? “Why do you have that card? Why would you do this? How long have you had that in your pocket?” For this, or whatever else they say, the third card: “I don’t have a card for that.”
“What the fuck,” they ask. They laugh. They are bemused. You bring the energy back down with the fourth card: “I have laryngitis. I’ve lost speech. My throat hurts”. Whatever you expect to occur.
The joke is over. Rule of threes. Now they are curious. YThey wonder about logistics. “How did you know I would say that? Is everyone so predictable?”
As a three-part bit, nobody ever sees the fifth card coming.
Can’t believe in the year 2023 we have to say: do not consume borax. It will not provide a “parasite cleanse”, it does not combat the “evil fluoride” in your water, and it is not a super mineral. It will damage your organs. Also, it’s not rated for human consumption so frankly, who knows what it’s cross-contaminated with (my personal bet would be arsenic).
Absolutely love when I Google something I’ve never heard of and find the reason I’ve never heard of it is because it’s been banned in the EU for safety concerns
You love to see it. (Not the destruction of trees, obvs, but shitheads meeting their oncoming comeuppance at the hands of trees.)
Okay, as someone with their doctorate in plant health (specifically trees and landscape plants), I’m frothing at the mouth livid.
Pollarding is a type of pruning done where you remove the upper branches of a tree with the intent of forcing it to grow more branches. Historically, it was used to produce fodder for livestock and wood for fencing, crafting, etc. but now is more of an aesthetic choice - it creates dense shade and reduces the risk of heavy branches becoming safety concerns later.
However, that pruning is something that occurs in January - March, when the tree is dormant. Not in the peak of summer, when there’s a heat wave expected. By doing it during dormancy, the tree has already stored all of the nutrients and sugars the leaves held in the roots and trunk, ready for use in spring.
By pruning these trees now, they’ve severely damaged them, if not outright sentenced them to death. Leaves provide a tremendous amount of shade to the trunk, actively cool the area through respiration (pulling water through the tree and into the air around it), and provide sugars and nutrients necessary for growth through photosynthesis. These trees now have to work overtime to compensate and re-grow and entire canopy of leaves with reduced resources.
These trees are in what are sometimes affectionately known as “hell strips” - there’s a concrete sidewalk on one side, asphalt on the other, and they get hot. Not just upwardly hot, but they heat the soil underneath them as well. The root zone of these trees don’t get a lot of water to begin with (concrete and asphalt don’t let water in well) and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of soil around the tree to begin with.
Trees in hell strips already have the heat and restricted root zones working against them - you can’t have healthy trees if you don’t have room for roots. Now these have to compensate and draw resources to push out new growth.
In addition, all of those pruning cuts are open wounds - places where infections and insects can enter into the tree. Usually mature trees can manage minor infections or infestations with no issue. But these trees are now extra susceptible because their immune response is weakened - all the extra energy available is going to new growth, not fighting off infections.
So there’s a bunch of factors here that have put these trees at a disadvantage: the removal of most photosynthetic plant material, an increase in surrounding temperature, a restricted root zone, the potential for increased infection, and a heat wave expected in the next week. These trees are going to struggle the rest of their lives because of the decision to prune these trees like this now - all over a desire to break a strike so the studios don’t have to pay their actors and writers and editors fairly.
I hope they get the book thrown at them with tree law. And then some.
why is explaining a villains sad backstory always taken as an effort toward excusing their actions. why does the conversation need to involve the question of excusing anything rather than just making their present behavior way more interesting by complicating their feelings or their motivations. why is acknowledging complicated feelings or motivations taken as apologism in and of itself. why is everyone so incredibly boring