cflat-major:

louisthesixteenth:

its a national holiday

Celebrating someone’s death seems like a really macabre thing to do. Like I get that people don’t like him because of how his administration dealt with the AIDS epidemic, but promoting someone’s death as a good thing doesn’t sit well with me.

during his administration, we had a problem with abuse of patients in mental healthcare facilities (asylums, but don’t call them that), and his response to it was just to shut down the entire system. he closed all public mental healthcare facilities because a few of them were mistreating patients, and all those mentally ill people suddenly found themselves homeless without the skills necessary to survive in the general populous. he’s the reason why our healthcare system is so terrible, and he’s to blame for the homelessness epidemic (i’ll get into the next reason why he’s responsible for our high homeless population in a sec). millions of people lost everything because of reagan. thousands died.

he also completely restructured our economy. from 1776 until he became president, we had an economic system like no other (look up the American School), but he removed most of the rules and regulations we had to keep the system in place because our system at the time limited accumulation of wealth. we had a built-in buffer that kept most people middle class. when he restructured our economy so he and his friends could get richer, reagan removed the safeguards that kept us out of poverty (most of the time), so now the lower echelons of society were in freefall towards homelessness. people lost their homes and businesses because the rich could do basically whatever they wanted now. superstores like wal-mart rose to prominence and pushed out small businesses because of this. our government also greatly reduced its expenditure on infrastructure. ronald reagan’s greed is why we don’t have enough trains and all our roads are falling apart.

he also expanded our already bloated military while in power. one of his slogans was “peace in strength.” his goal for our country was to get an iron grip around the rest of the world and impose our own agendas on other countries at gunpoint.

One of the first things reagan did when he came to power was to ignore the supreme court’s earlier ruling, ignore the constitution, and try to enforce a mandatory daily christian prayer time in all schools. when government workers went on strike against him and his policies, he fired 11,345 people. he put 11,345 people out of a job because they didn’t like him.

he lowered taxes for the rich, but increased taxes on the poor, contributing to the aforementioned lack of infrastructure and homelessness crisis. he also began privatising the government, which put thousands of jobs at risk and made wealthy capitalists the men who run our country. reagan is responsible for trickle down economics.

after the great depression, our government put in social programs to help people stay afloat, like universal healthcare for the elderly and disabled, basic income (the government paid people to dig ditches if they couldn’t find any other jobs. the ditches didn’t serve any purpose, but those people needed money and the government was willing to give money to anyone who worked), and food stamps. ronald reagan slashed all these programs and more, like the EPA, which made sure we were a “green” country.

as a result of these slashes, people who had been secure on government assistance programs were now having to take out loans and get into debt, which jeopardised our economy. we had a stock market crash because people were becoming too poor to buy stocks, and our national debt increased by 3 times. we went from $997 billion in debt to $2.85 trillion in 1987.

he also pushed us further into the cold war. previously, our relations with russia were cooling down a bit, but during reagan’s second term, he began actively threatening russia again. ronald reagan brought us to the brink of a nuclear war that would have killed all humans on earth.

Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the most hated prime minister in UK history, were close friends. he was also personal friends with Donald Trump.

Under reagan, we resumed a history of violent military imperialism in foreign countries, most notably lebanon, afghanistan, and pakistan. In lebanon, we tried to stop a revolution against an oppressive regime, and in afghanistan and pakistan, reagan ordered the CIA to train civilians and create a military force to fight russia for us. Reagan created the taliban, a militant group that even today publicly dismembers people for playing games in public. they cut off children’s hands. He also began dealing weapons with China, betraying our longstanding ally, Taiwan, destabilising politics in the pacific. Under his orders, we secretly aided african and south american military dictatorships in crushing their opposition. He assisted Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran who started the 1979 revolution, in purging political opposition from the government. in 1988 our military shot down an iranian commercial flight, killing 290 civilians.

Reagan was a Nazi sympathiser and referred to slain SS officers as “victims” of the war. just to make sure you read that right: Ronald Reagan supported the Nazis.

He declared the war on drugs, a movement that has greatly increased the disproportionate incarceration rates of african american and latino men in this country.

During Reagan’s second term, 115,000 people were diagnosed with AIDS and 70,000 died of it. Reagan did nothing to curb the spread, despite knowing that the AIDS epidemic almost exclusively affected black people and the LGBT community. when he learned how many people were dying and who they were, he laughed. he laughed at our suffering while we were dropping dead.

In short, Ronald Reagan was a wealthy, selfish, greedy, capitalistic, imperialist, racist, ableist, homophobic, genocidal, antisemitic, warmongering, backstabbing murderer. Ronald Reagan was a monster.

This long text post brought (BACK) to you by yet more antisemitic bullshit flooding my dash and inbox.

thebibliosphere:

thebibliosphere:

Story time.

In the year 1905 my paternal great-grandmother, a Jewess from Austria-Hungary, left her homeland–although perhaps “fled” would be a better word–with nothing but a suitcase, the clothes on her back, and the potential promise of finding work with a distant cousin who had been living in the slums of Victorian Glasgow in Scotland since the 1890s.

During that time she married my great-grandfather, an Irish Catholic immigrant who lived in the notorious “Rat Pits”–so called because the Irish (and therefore inherently Catholic) residents “bred like rats”–and worked as a boat smuggler (meaning he smuggled people and other commodities into Scotland from Ireland on a boat, he was not in fact a smuggler of boats), a shoe maker, a wood carver and general jack of all trades master of none, with a stereotypical love of drink and a violent temper to go with it. But he provided for her and didn’t force her into sex work like so many girls her age were, so she forgave a great many things that would no longer be forgiven and had lots of children, many of whom died.

Dad tells me he remembers her “singing” their names and lighting candles at specific times, but only when his grandfather was “out” (smuggling, or visiting another woman, he never elaborated on this) because she sang her prayers in Yiddish and they’d spent many years trying to hide her Jewishness.

Being a Catholic in the turbulent streets of Glasgow where Protestant faith is still practiced militantly in some areas, was troublesome, but it was infinitely less trouble than being Jewish during the years that would lead up to two world wars. So she hid behind his Catholicism and his large family, and watched as the world turned against her and her people once more. And despite her pale skin and bright eyes and her passing status as an equal among the Irish matriarchs of the slums, they still woke to blood smeared over their front door more than once, or were spat on in the streets. She told my father, jokingly, it was her nose, though to look at photos you’d never notice she was different from anyone else. That was the joke.

After her husband died she became unapologetic about her Jewishness. She spoke Yiddish at home and made sure my father, who had been living with her from the age of seven, knew some words too. He was fourteen years old when he heard her “sing” his mother’s name and
watched her tear the clothes she was wearing, having now outlived all of
her children. She outlived many of her grandchildren too. And when no one was left to make the meal of condolence, my mother–a gentile girl from the neighboring street–found out, she tried her best to make one.

Dad tells me it was largely inedible, not least of all because it wasn’t kosher, but for his Maw (Scots slang for mother) it was one of her first memories of someone not of the faith acknowledging her Jewishness with kindness. She was sixty years old and had been living in Glasgow for forty five years.

And she spent the majority of that time forced to move from slum to slum by her faith, until eventually in post World War Two Glasgow, the local authorities either had to dig mass graves or deal with the conditions of the poor and chose to be merciful and built better housing instead. She was eventually moved to a housing estate where she could look out and see a garden rather than squalor and degradation and no one charged her extra rent because everyone knows people like her have secret stashes of money and will pay anything not have their windows broken or pigs blood slashed over the door. The history books never tell you that sort of thing. They only tell you about the selective moments in history when tyrants had the audacity to threaten other tyrants, and only then does mass discrimination, abject poverty and genocide through the former become an unpalatable evil that needs to be stopped.

Nothing much has changed.

She lived long enough to hear about Holocaust deniers and my father tells me, spat
their names with all the vitriol of an ancient curse held dormant in the fires of the earth. And when she was buried, the man who cut her tombstone informed my father it probably wasn’t a good idea to put a Star of David on the stone, because those were the stones that were the most often attacked, the graves desecrated and the grass salted so nothing would grow.

And this is no ancient history. This was in the UK, in 1979. This was less than forty years ago. And still whenever my father visits he will find some form of vandalism enacted on her tombstone. It’s her name you see, even in death it doesn’t sound right.

Margarethe Ingrid Fehrenbach Patton. Or “Maggie Patton” as she was known for most of her life, never hearing her own name save for the few times she went back to the degradation of the Gorbals, usually when someone had died and there were traditions to be kept. And forty years on some dull and depraved bastard still feels the need to paint a swastika on her grave in neon paint or tip it over and smash the urn of flowers, because not even death is free of persecution.

And this is not just my family history, it is many family histories told over and over again, and I get to recount it from the safety of 2015, with my gentile name and baptized gentile faith.

So yes, it matters that we are seeing a new wave of antisemitism, online and in the physical world. It matters that there are blogs being set up for the purpose of sending images of dead bodies and gore to Jewish people and their friends. It matters that those people are losing friends because it’s the only way to not also be harassed and retain their own freedom of communication the way they like it. It matters that people feel the need to ask what is wrong with Nazism in the same way one might ask what is wrong with a little rain. It matters that Jewish characters in popular media are stripped of their ethnicity and faith and made not only into Neo-Nazi sympathizers, but volunteers to a Neo-Nazi regime (if you can’t work out why this is horrifying, here). It matters that a family in Houston Texas found the mezuzah of their door violated with the symbol of a Nazi swastika. It matters so much because this is not the past, nor is it some distant land you can pretend you can neither see nor hear. We live in the age of constant communication, we are no longer blind, except to things we do not wish to see.

We cannot pretend that horrific acts of violence are not enacted against others on a daily basis, because if we do so then we are enabling these acts. You cannot stand silent against hatred, otherwise you enable things like this:

It’s happening in the way in which people insist on calling the black people being murdered by police “thugs” while white protesters are cited the rules of Baseball (three strikes and you’re benched with a fine or jail time, not murdered), it’s happening every time someone says “well maybe they shouldn’t name their children ghetto names" as a means to dehumanize another human being, it’s happening whenever someone cites free speech in the protection of hate crimes. It happens every time you think “well it’s not happening to me so it can’t be that bad” and close your eyes and make the horror of it all into a mere inconvenience interrupting your enjoyable browsing time between mainlining netflix and cat gifs.

It’s happening. And we don’t have the excuse of ignorance to hide behind, it’s there.

And I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can block and report all the live long day, but it doesn’t solve the issue of tumblr and other social media platforms being like “just ignore it, dont feed the trolls”, like sticking a band aid over a gaping sore in need of urgent surgery in the hope that it will somehow go away. You might think someone receiving gory images and threats is not the same as an act of physical violence, but it is undoubtedly violence. It’s people painting pigs blood over my Great Grandmas door and telling her she doesn’t belong in the country that she thought was safe and being told snidely to be thankful it wasn’t worse.

To you it might be petty and mildly distressing, but to another person it’s salted earth and the promise that not even death is safe.

And you are either complicit in this, or you are against it.

Decide.

I’d say sorry for reblogging this again, but I just had to read Nazi apologism with my own two eyeballs in the year 2017 and I’m this close to hauling off with an axe.

I reiterate my previous statement from two years ago: you are either against these atrocities, or you are complicit in them. Decide.

[edited to fix the use of language in original post, if you reblogged this earlier, please delete and reblog without the unintentional use of a slur word used to describe sex workers.]

jenroses:

scientia-rex:

sandovers:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.

Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.

no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –

it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.

we think the answer is polar bears.

no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.

of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?

and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.

you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR

every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken

This is just wild from start to finish.

dancinbutterfly:

aniseandspearmint:

moiracolleenodell:

@vaspider

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

I met a man at the Womens March in Atlanta who was in his 80s wearing one of the official shirts. Told me his age and I told him that I never bought that “it was a different time” bullshit and he said something to the effect of “none of this has ever been okay.” And this is a white man who was born in 1935. Decency is not a new trait, yall. It’s just that we refuse to accept cruelty anymore.