pa-hey

I do have to impress on anyone who wasn't around for it how batshit the reality boom of the 2000s could be. Especially on Fox.

Here are some 100% real 2000s reality shows:

At the time people focused on the likes of Fear Factor but looking back it's wild how many of the worst shows toyed with politics. So many of these shows have a premise that's like "what if we exposed these conservatives to these people they hate?" or hyping themselves up as Important Experiments. Then they'd freak out when they got the kind of viral bigoted freakout they were trying to construct the whole time.

There were also a bunch of horrible reality shows, thankfully this time mostly unpopular, in the 2010s that based themselves around economic themes as a response to the market crash, but that's a story for another time

NBC's priorities in 2006

i have become radicalized as a pawpaw agent, pollinate a flower or two on your local tree!

More isolated, further north = less likely to be self-pollinated. You need different genetics around and enough awake pollinators to make sure you get fall fruit, so lend a helping hand

thinking about how the romans regarded extremely muscular men as weak and effeminate because for whatever reason (demands of labor, eroticism of the flesh) they couldn't neglect their bodies enough to study learned tomes in cultivated leisure. We should bring that back

I'm joking ofc, but it deeply fascinates me that fascists like to gesture to marble busts of roman senators as the alpha male ideal because those romans would point at their gym bodies and call them a cinaedus. Same story for medievalist fash and their valorization of noble warrior knights, who were mostly doughy weirdos who lived to party and funded partying with the odd highway robbery or kidnapping

The American bourgeois masculine ideal revolves around self-investment in a way that would not make sense in most historical cultures or places. Indifferent to nature or beauty, hostile to both when they exceed his control. The ideal is a man who makes a million dollars a year and spends it all on a body he regards as weak, a house he regards as too small, a collection of utility-toys he never uses (guns, cars, etc). He has no emotional attachments to anything, and no one depends on him. He might fuck out a few kids but their job is to surpass and kill him. Bleak, dismal life. It's little wonder that the people whose ideological task is to defend this absurd ideal from its imagined enemies have to resort to bricolage from alien masculinities, barely understood and even less sincerely appreciated

Actually, I love coming into contact with cis people who have said trans people have taught them how to love who they are, and what their gender means to them. It's so heartwarming.

I love talking to cis men who say that trans men have taught them what being a man truly entails, that manhood isn't a predestined book written by the gods. That has taught me how to love being a man and, honestly, just seeing positive manhood being shared and celebrated has brought me closer to cis men I thought wouldn't ever accept me. It's taught me the opposite is often true.

As someone who is currently figuring out where they are between cis, nonbinary and trans I just want to thank all my beautiful trans siblings who make me feel so at ease on where I will end up. You are so beautiful and I love you all so much

— Alister MacQuarrie, Outlaw Kings and Rebellion Chic

So… how do we convince these big polluters to stop letting us buy all this plastic and gasoline from them?

Sincerely, every time you are about to reblog a post about the relatively small number of companies that are making the most damaging impact on our habitat remember that they’re not doing it just for shits and giggles. They’re doing it for profit and as long as we make doing harm profitable someone will do harm.

‘To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable parasite and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.“

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Every morning at 5 AM 

(Source)

Daycare teacher: We never use time-outs. But we have a designated "me-space" where the kids themselves can choose to go if they feel the need for some quiet time alone.

My kid, a few weeks later: That's the "me-space" (points). That's where the teachers put [name] when he is being too loud.

-Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed

my favorite block on the aids quilt

Georgia O’Keeffe in Twilight Canyon, New Mexico, 1964. Photos by Todd Webb.

be your own right hand arm. man. your own silly rabbit.

if you're russian and follow me i'm sorry that liberal and conservatives alike are incapable of separating the actions of a country's government from the beliefs or desires of the civilian population. i always hope that people become less brainwashed and nationalistic in their belief that living or being from a country automatically equals encouragement or condoning of whatever they do but i guess not

saw a thing about Ukrainian athletes not participating in the Olympics if Russian athletes were allowed to participate under the IOC flag, and it made me really sad

"It only tastes good if you ignore the fact that it has things in it that taste good"

“sensory savory gland” the tongue?

1983 © John McDavid

Maria Loboda General Electric Andrew Kreps, New York January 12 – February 16, 2013

oh,

oh this is absolutely beautiful

I saw some James Webb Telescope scientists give a talk and one of them said this was her favorite image because she had waited and worked 25 years to see this.

Patricia Ayres, Untitled, 2018

Elastic, metal hooks, women’s undergarment hardware, wood, foam rubber, coffee, dye, coconut oil, iodine, 92 × 48 × 36 inches, 

Copaganda does three main things.

First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.

For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.

But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.

The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.

The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.

The evidence shows otherwise.

— Alec Karakatsanis, “Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”” | Jacobin, July 2022