I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.

They are literally cutting off library access to minors.

If you are affected by this or other bans and restrictions in the United States, be aware that the Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to anyone age 13-21 nationwide as part of their Books UnBanned initiative:

BOOOOOST

Seattle has joined them:

this barbie likes other barbies

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everyone's got that one homie who zealously adheres to his inflexible code of honor even though it has long since become a burden to him

Our contestants are giving a wide variety of answers today folks

we all have that one homie who volunteers to take first watch that they might contemplate the heavens in solitude

Fool that he is, not realizing that it then falls to him to comfort the party member most troubled by their burdens when sleep eludes them.

Shoutout to that one random boy who agreed to switch clothes with Eponine. I hope he's having fun with his girl clothes. He may not exist but I think about him every day.

- It’s one of the most heartbreaking chapters. Poor little Éponine. Hugo goes on and on, describing her unhealthy appearance, ragged chemise and petticoat, and the premature aging that poverty forced upon her, almost robbing her of her innocence. Just when you think he is done, he comes up with new depressing details, like this: “She entered resolutely, staring, with a sort of assurance that made the heart bleed, at the whole room and the unmade bed.” The numerous hints that her father prostitutes her are just… unbearable. It’s difficult to comprehend how Hugo can simultaneously sympathize with her and dehumanize her in such a hideous way! Just look at this: “a species of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.”

- Even worse is the part where we learn that she is literate (she reads well and can even write - in Fantine's case, these would have been lifesaving skills), but literacy doesn't add anything to girl’s chances in life! It’s striking contrast to Marius, whose education allowed him to earn his living. I like that we are reminded that she is Gavroche’s sister, and he takes her to the theatre! It seems that this entire family (including their abominable father) has a soft spot for theatre and plays!

- Her speech about sleeping in the ditches, suicidal thoughts, and hallucinations due to hunger is so sincere and heart-wrenching. And it also evokes some vibes of Javert ("When I thought of drowning myself, I said to myself: ‘No, it’s too cold’" and “The stars are like the lamps in illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew them out” – but this last reference is more fitting for the musical version of Javert).

- As for Marius, he was not as bad when interacting with her. Although all the things Hugo said about Éponine (nice and ugly) are supposedly Marius’ observations, he was quite polite (calling her “Mademoiselle,” and not reprimanding her) and generous. And it’s also good to know that Marius figured out that his neighbour, “Jondrette,” is a swindler.

In the wake of the dual strike I would like to remind everyone that "hollywood elites" is an antisemitic dogwhistle and if you are referring to company executives call them executives

I would further like to add that “cabal” is an antisemitic dogwhistle a pretty decent chunk of the time. You’ll really only see it used in three contexts: people using it as a dogwhistle, people using it not knowing it’s a dogwhistle and thus making it easier to fly under the radar, and, rarely, in a joking way where they not only don’t know it’s a dogwhistle, they’re not even entirely sure how the word is supposed to be used.

It has its origins in the word “Kabbalah,” which is a Jewish learning pathway so closed that even most Jews can’t partake in it. (It’s Jewish mysticism, and at an absolute bare minimum to begin study you should be a Jewish adult extremely well-versed in Torah and Talmud; the stricter Orthodox practice states you must be a learned, male, married Torah scholar over the age of 40.) Because people enjoy shitting on closed practices, goyim were quick to go IT IS SECRET SINISTER WORLD-DOMINATION PLANS, and that is where the word cabal came from.

So: if you mean “monopoly,” as in “The Walt Disney Company has brought almost all modern major audiovisual properties under its control in a monopoly that controls well over 75% of wide-release and streaming media,” please say monopoly.

ID : a tweet from the Siecle history podcast that reads "Some of the most detailed historical research being done today about 19th Century France is done by a small community of fans trying to make their fanfiction historically accurate."

There's a new stage adaptation of Les Mis going on right now in Japan!

Official website: http://www.lesmise-stage.com/

Official twitter: https://twitter.com/LesMise_stage

I'm not even going to try to translate cast names, because name kanji are HARD, but here's the character names in this cast rundown, left-to-right:

Top row: Jean Valjean, Cosette, Thenardier, Fantine, Enjolras, Government Soldier 2nd row: Eponine, Marius, Little Cosette, Mme Thenardier, Combeferre (with blue scarf), Courfeyrac, Grantaire, Bahorel, Feuilly, Lesgles, Joly, Jean[ne Prouvaire?] 3rd row: Government Soldier, Government Soldier, Gavroche, Gavroche's gang, Gavroche's gang, Gavroche's gang, Gavroche's gang, Gavroche's gang, Sister [Simplice?], Factory Manager, Magloire (yes she's a nun) 4th row: [Patron] Minette Boss, Montparnasse, Gueulemer, Babet, [five women in a row whose name is a slur for Romani people], Fairy (idek) big pics at bottom: Javert, Bishop Myriel

obsessed with the part in the les mis musical where javert kills himself and the audience claps

Correct.

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.

Nobody my age is voting republican. Let's be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We're all afraid of dying of thirst because there's no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they're trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.

This liberalism and party affiliation doesn't preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is... Well

No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic but they're still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn't have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can't avoid it you're a sex addict. That's a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist

If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can't understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it's because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent's nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don't know how to organize because we're raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.

They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than "young people vote republican and watch Fox news"

I've never seen anybody explain it so well

learning that the human stomach’s maximum volume is less than the amount of blood human’s can lose before needing transfusions has ruined vampire media for me. i know they’re supernatural creatures so real world logic shouldn’t apply but my brain CANNOT shut up and enjoy things anymore. i’ll read about a vampire draining multiple humans to death and i’ll go “ummmmm then why hasn’t their stomach EXPLODED” instead of being like wow. several dead humans. so sad.

So I’m a historian who works particularly on the relationship between trauma, national memory, and childhood.  The focus of my research is not the Holocaust, but it’s a subject upon which I’ve taught, mused, written, and examined.  A few years ago, I was a TA in a class on the Holocaust (cross listed in the History Department and the Department of Judaic Studies) at a US University (a pretty prestigious one). Most of the course focused on the realities of the Holocaust:  what happened?  how?  why? Now because of my areas of expertise/interest, I was invited to give a lecture to the entire class as opposed to teaching my particular subset of students each week.  The subject of the lecture?  The Holocaust in US education and children’s/YA literature. 

The thing that I found most distressing about this lecture?  The fact that only about nine state in the US require that students learn about the Holocaust in classrooms.  Among those only a few require it as a part of history or social studies classes, the rest require it as part of language arts.  And, the way that students actually learn about this subject is determined at the discretion of the school district, which means that, as long as students meet the general requirements of standardized tests, they don’t have to learn particular details.  So, let that sink in.  Even more distressing?  The states that “require” students to learn about the Holocaust, have only done so since (at the earliest) the 1980s, and far more likely the 1990s and 2000s.  This means that there is an entire generation whose knowledge of the Holocaust comes from popular media and triumphant narratives about US involvement in WWII:  these narratives are hugely false, and what I call the “Punching Hitler” story after the iconic image of Captain America socking Hitler in the jaw.  In the US the general shared narrative about WWII is that the US went over the Europe, lost a lot of boys, but killed Hitler, won the war, and saved the Jews.  o__O  That’s…not what happened.  

In a class of 200 students, only about 10 percent knew anything about how the Holocaust happened.  They didn’t know about the groups that were targeted, the way that anti-semitism and opportunistic nationalist politics helped make it happen, they didn’t know about complicity or bystandardism.  They knew nothing.  They didn’t know that US officials were aware of what was happening and refused to get involved in the war.  They didn’t understand that there was concurrent anti-semitism and racism in the US.  They were taught none of these things.  And that is actually terrifying, not only because it means that these kids have no idea about the past, but because they can’t see the giant flashing warning signs in our current socio-political world.  

Hast thou thy morning meds consumed?

Off with ye, then, and do so! (And also should’st thou some water imbibe.)

And thine evening medications, as well?

Hast thou taken them? If not, and if it be at or past the time for thy medicines, I urge thee to take them in a timely manner, as well.

CAN SOMEONE TELL ME WHY BRUJON, MONTPARNASSE, BABET, AND CLAQUESOUS ARE LISTED OFF AS “FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION”??????

Another one to add to the list