I’m belowdesire over there, if you’d like to follow me.

The domestic Villaneve we all need

KATY O'BRIAN as Jackie LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024) dir. Rose Glass

[ID: a tweet from Yara Eid reading "I keep writing and deleting cause I can't find the words to describe the level of loss we Gazans are feeling right now. Can you imagine your whole world being wiped out? Everything. The level of destruction we're seeing is beyond any words. Our homes, our landmarks, our schools, our universities, our restaurants, literally everything. Israel's intent was to always remove Gaza from the map. They destroyed our city intentionally. They bombed our ancient landmarks to remove any proof of Palestinian history… I just can't explain what I feel when l'm seeing all of my favourite places flattened. My whole city flattened. Everything I grew up with flattened." //End ID]

“The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of. It is a fear of being seen as slothful, gluttonous, greedy, unambitious, unwanted, and, worst of all, unlovable. Fat has largely been weaponized by straight-size people — the very people it seems to hurt most deeply. And ultimately, thin people are terrified of being treated the way they have so often seen fat people treated or even the way they’ve treated fat people themselves. In that way, thinness isn’t just a matter of health or beauty or happiness. It is a cultural structure of power and dominance.”

Happy International Lesbian Day! Here's some super brief book recs to celebrate

Books dealing with love, loss, longing and abandonment

Body horror galore

Flawed character studies

Fantastical wlw books

Translated novels

Extract from Refaat Alareer's course on English poetry in 2019:

credits to @/protosemite on X for the transcription.

Prof Refaat Alareer was killed by an israeli airstrike that targeted his house 2 days ago.

nothing in the world makes me more evil than just being kind of annoyed

me when i'm in genuine agonising distress: i'm so sorry if i'm bothering you with my childish histrionics :/

me when i'm just in a bit of a bad mood: i hope hydrogen bombs fall on every living thing in the universe

Adding to no. 4; Palestinian citizens of Isr@el are not equal citizens by any means. They can’t really buy land outside of their ancestral villages/cities that remain standing, and many villages that were destroyed in ‘48 are still there as rubble, they can’t go back and rebuild it. The Palestinians from Tiberias who were displaced to Nazareth and are now citizens, can’t actually go back to their homes in Tiberias, they can rent a house but can’t buy land that is theirs in the first place. Same thing for a Palestinian from Safad who was displayed to Akka.

They are also discriminated against and there are a lot of crimes against them that are ignored by the police, they’re also discriminated against in places of education and even the workplace. Moreover, their cities do not have much funding and so run into a lot of problems, economic snd urban, etc.

There’s also the fact that Palestinians with these four different IDs can’t really get married in peace, even if they’re in love and want to. For example, a Palestinian from Jerusalem and Ramallah can’t get married and live peacefully together in a stable future, because the Palestinian from Ramallah who holds card 2 such as I and roxstar can’t move to Jerusalem as a resident, and if the Jerusalemite were to secure work in Ramallah, as well as a house, their status is reduced to become lower, like that of their spouse. It’s a really long humiliating process to acquire Jerusalem residency for the Ramallah Pali, and it doesn’t work most of the time.

A Palestinian from the West Bank can marry a Gazan but the Gazan can’t live in the West Bank; the Palestinian from Hebron for example needs to move to Gaza. So their status is demoted, you can only move down, never up. A Palestinian with citizenship, say from Lydda, can get married and move to Jerusalem with their spouse but if their spouse doesn’t become naturalised they’re doomed and bound to live in Jerusalem, where Palestinians are treated horrendously, with constant raids, hate crimes and marches, homes being stolen, constant displacement and ethnic cleansing (if any of you remember Sheikh Jarrah from two years ago…yeah), etc.

This also applies to Palestinian citizens of the entity and west bankers. They’ll get legally married but can’t live together in peace, for example if a Palestinian from Haifa and a Palestinian from Jenin were to get married, the one from Jenin will 99% of the time not be able to acquire permanent residency or citizenship to move in with their spouse in Haifa, the one from Haifa will be able to visit them in Jenin and…that’s about it. They’ll struggle to move there if they can due to very low income, switching cities and becoming occupied/treated the same as their spouse, their children will have parents who are effectively separated and it won’t be a healthy dynamic in that household. The mum from Jenin for example will always be lower in status to both the father and her children. She’ll always be stateless and can’t have freedom of movement. A lot of these sorts of couples are forced to live abroad to live and love in peace, which is what Israel wants, less Palestinians in Palestine.

This system is created to sow discord and cause a rift between the different ‘classes’ of Palestinians, and yet it has never worked, Palestinians remain as united as ever. They still love each other and get married, they still fight for their families and their futures.

Unwilling wunk

Bruh you got fuckin grabbed

One of the key things that I was encountering in popular discourse, as well as in official discourse, as well as in some scholarly discourse on caste, was what I would say is a liberal understanding of caste from an anti-caste position, which interestingly, and very dangerously in some way, coincided with the right-wing understanding of caste, with right-wing too thinking of themselves as anti-caste.

So I captured this as the five tropes [...] And the first one is that caste has modernized, and it's even in some way democratized because of the political ways in which previously historically marginalized castes have come in a big way into Indian politics. And so we really need not worry much about caste today, it's a thing of the past. It's also got its economic equivalent, which plays out in some kind of an argument that says, well, for an underdeveloped economy like India, caste is actually good for the growth of capitalism because you have trust when you actually make transactions and you save transactional costs. So there's a literature arguing that.

And then there's a third trope, which is what I actually focused on, which is that caste is now no longer just the hierarchy, in fact, it is not the hierarchy. It has become from a vertical into a horizontal structure, and it's just a benign difference. And this I call as the culturalization, which I'll say a little bit more about, but there are to these three political, economic and cultural tropes, I see two bookends. One is that admittedly caste exists, but it is existing in a benign, normal way. It is defined, so it exists in those cute matrimonial columns where people ask for the same caste. And so it just exists in these privatized spaces, and that really doesn't have a whole deal to dictate in terms of monopolization of wealth or inequality. It's just there.

And then on the other hand there's another bookend, which I call the brutal abnormal to the benign normal. You have the brutal abnormal, which has to admit that there are some incredible violent things that erupt from time to time, and it's only from time to time. And therefore the even more, pretty troubling word is the Atrocities Act, atrocity in some way connoting exceptional or extraordinary, whereas caste violence is ordinary violence, everyday violence. So when those things happen, it always happens in some backward part of India, not in the rest of India.

[...] And that we have to pose the question and ask the question, how does caste persist and what is the durability of caste, which then helps us understand how caste legitimizes itself. And I think in the legitimization aspect, that is where I unwrap some of the things on culturalization. So -- what indeed is culturalization?

The book is largely written against a scholarly trend that I saw, and still see, of asking us to think about the transformations in caste as an ethnicization of caste. That is, instead of a vertical hierarchy, which is what we think of when we think about caste, we are invited to consider that caste is now just about difference, it's on the horizontal plane. And so we can devote ourselves to thinking about how caste has ethnicized. Now, that to me is not at all what is happening on the ground [...] there is hierarchy, there are all kinds of inequalities, and there are appeals to fairly traditional forms of belonging, such as blood and purity and things like that. [...]

So culturalization then is really caste repackaging itself as culture. Caste in some way taking up the grammar of culture in order to present itself as benign horizontal difference/identity. And in doing that, what culturalization is is a depoliticization of caste. It is, in fact, I have even called it a counterrevolution of caste. It is the most recent form of the legitimation of caste.

Balamurli Natarajan on Recall This Book Podcast

Corncrake Nights - Tom Hammick , 2023.

British, b. 1963 -

Oil on panel , 9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in.

I visited the palestinian children’s relief fund (PCRF) website today to make a donation, and they’ve got a secondary donation pool being sent specifically to target humanitarian aid and support for long-term recovery in gaza. If you have the funds and want to donate, the PCRF is one of the recommended charities to donate to if you want to help.

other people could word things better than I did here, but I just wanted to make sure word gets out about the ability to directly financially support the people trying to help gaza right now.

In case you’re worried about where your donation money is going, charity navigator gives PCRF a 97% reliability rating (link to the page here).

(Tangent, but while pulling up that page I found a warning about a scammer claiming to be the PCRF, keep an eye out for any potential emails like the one on this page (linked here) prompting you to donate to a bitcoin wallet)

star

i hate the phrase 'none of these words are in the bible' because it's either true for Every word in the english language (the bible wasn't originally in english) or for None of them (i could translate the bible badly enough to contain any word at all)

i hate the phrase 'none of these words are in the bible' because it's either true for Every word in the english language (the bible wasn't originally in english) or for None of them (i could translate the bible badly enough to contain any word at all)

✝️ Thirty-six of these words are in the Bible! ✝️

what translation

King James Version 👍

do you not consider the word 'bible' on the cover and title pages to be in the bible?

The swiftness and brutality of Hbomberguy’s complete evisceration of James Somerton’s career cannot be overstated.

Can somebody give a tldr of what happened? I've only seen reactions.

James Somerton is a white gay business major who built a 337k subscriber, ~3,500patron career as a content creator (derogatory) on youtube by serially plagiarizing the work of other queer theorists.

The image you see of a lot of text on screen highlighted in a bunch of different colors is the script of one of his earliest and most important videos color coded by who a particular passage was plagiarizing as he read their words out loud as if they were his own without credit.

Hbomberguy and Kat together identified 18 distinct victims of somerton's creditmongering in this one video alone, as well as plagiarism of equal measure in at least half of his catalogue of videos with the rest of the catalogue still being highly suspicious but not yet identified as plagiarized.

In addition to the plagiarism, he's also being called out for misogynistic beliefs which tend toward being the only thing of his own which he injects inbetwixt the words of others, his use of identity as a shield from criticism, his darvo-ian tactics of denying a plagiarism occured (using the following he built to SLAPP in the court of public opinion), and his 'film studio' Talos has over the course of several years and $64K dollars donated to it expecting it to make indie films has produced NOTHING but movie posters created using stock image assets packs and more empty promises.

Hbomberguy decided to use his 1.3m subscriber base worth of clout to destroy the man's career with two hours of non-stop evidence and receipts (with a two hour preamble on the details of other plagiarists's activities to establish a baseline).

zwoelffarben's summary is supremely good. I would like to add a few bullet points about the details that make this just so unbelievable to watch.

And maybe you're wondering "He copied so much verbatim. How did no one catch him?" They did. People did catch him. And he got them bullied into silence by claiming the people who noticed the plagiarism were sending death threats, were doxxing him, were anti-queer trolls, and were lying. The main person who caught him asked HBomb to keep her name out of the video and talk about her as little as possible due to the enormous harassment she'd been through.

He preached so much about being a voice for queer people, about how people needed to support him since he was doing this kind of work for queers no one else was... while stealing from, silencing, and squashing every small-time queer author doing the ACTUAL work that he lifted in order to fund his massively lucrative internet career.