hai!!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/idiocracy-is-elitist-porn/

right, but since representing Jewish people as lizards is an anti-Semitic trope, representing Zionists as lizards in this meme is an obvious blunder, assuming it wasn’t intentionally trying to be anti-Semitic

My point is that your baseline for legitimacy and moral acceptability is based on the attitudes taken by the colonizers, then and now. It can feel pragmatic and reasonable, but I think it only seems like a defensible position because the “ex”-colonizers (I mean, the U.S. hasn’t been decolonized, has it?) broadly agree that “colonialism is bad”, though it does seem like strong support for Zionist Israel by colonial countries like the U.S. and UK is a clear counter-example to this.

Ultimately if you look closely and found Zionist occupation illegitimate, you will certainly think so of other occupations. The reasons you give for ignoring the illegitimacy of other occupations don’t feel that different than those given for ignoring the illegitimacy of the Israeli occupation.

colonialism was the norm and in no way internationally frowned upon

When you mention colonialism wasn’t frowned upon, who were the people that did not frown upon it then?

yes exactly - don’t use an anti-Semitic trope when criticizing Zionism, lest you be confused for an anti-Semite; this weakens the meme significantly and for no good reason (other than maybe to pick up support from conspiracy nuts and right-wingers by using a dog-whistle while still being palatable to people who don’t see the dog-whistle, but this is a bug rather than a feature in my book)

lol, this is just a great sentence is a great post

Did she say “you people are next” in reference to the putting down of another insurance company CEO? Of course.

Right, so not what you said originally, which is that she meant something else and the sheriff who ordered her arrest was just jumping to conclusions, a conclusion you now agree with.

Anyway, I agree with you that it is an injustice that she was jailed, and I think we are all empathizing with her right now. We would all like the police to take more seriously dangerous stalkers and protecting people, and not serving as the militant arm of the 1%. Unfortunately, the police are an institution that historically have been put in place by the 1% to protect their interests, and there is a long-standing legal ruling that the police are not there to “protect and serve” (the common citizen).

that’s true for everyone in jail :-) but it’s also not the most proximate cause, it’s more like a background requirement, a necessary but not sufficient condition

police jail people for even less than that, they will lie and frame innocent people to put them in jail

She repeated the phrase written on the bullet casings used in the killing of an insurance CEO and then said “you people are next” on a phone call with her insurance - it’s clearly a threat given the context of the phrase and the killing. Denying that context is one of the less defensible positions here. What is more defensible is that her threat is clearly empty and the law has stricter requirements about what constitutes a crime.

yes, of course

Agreed, and I never said otherwise.

“Delay, Deny, Depose. You people are next,” she allegedly said near the end of the call.

Let’s be real, the “You people are next” is probably the reason for jail.

on principle I don’t use apps, their website seems to work fine though! Maybe this is showing my age, but I feel like researching restaurants is a task for being on a real computer 😄

For vegetarians & vegans: Happy Cow

It’s surreal to me that there are people who don’t know what life before Wikipedia was like, lol.

Maybe it’s relevant to understand that the increased access to information hasn’t always translated to people being more informed. There are many people in my life who don’t actively look things up and who don’t have the curiosity or willingness to even check Wikipedia.

So it is still now a bit like what it was like pre-Wikipedia - people mostly relied on other people for knowledge, and knowledge was thus local and socially shared, not necessarily that factual or based in books. I still think this is the dominant way people live, but now social media is an extension of that “local” socially-mediated knowledge. TV and radio were sorta like social media before, it was the way things became “viral”.

I think now like then, looking something up on Wikipedia sets you apart from a lot of people, it makes you bookish, nerdy, or pedantic - as if the folk knowledge wasn’t good enough for you and you have become a traitor to your people by seeking something more from the stacks.

The meme uses the “man checking oven” template to mark Trump supporters as stereotypically “gay” and contrasts this with a picture of the assassin in which there are no stereotypical signs of sexuality, which of course implies straightness in our heteronormative society.

Sure it is entirely possible the assassin could be gay IRL by coincidence, but this isn’t a helpful for understanding or interpreting the meme, since contrast between gay and straight is clearly created and this contrast is used to make a normative claim, i.e. Trump supporters are gay (i.e. bad) for being hypocritical, while the CEO killer is based by living up to the Punisher anti-hero vigilante ethos and thus not gay (i.e. straight, normal, good).

Maybe the meme uses homophobia because it will upset homophobic Trump supporters more, since they don’t want to be associated with being “gay”. Still, it appeals to and uses homophobic logic by associating the marked-as-gay traits with something villainous and the “unmarked” (which is the heteronormative default of “normal” straightness) with a hero.

I read it as straightforwardly homophobic, it’s not a top vs bottom as much as gay = bad, cowardly, weak, inauthentic while straight / “normal” = good, heroic, principled.

At first I read the title as “I’m sick of my teen son waking up early to make me a multiple course meal for breakfast” and I reflected on how bizarre your relationship with your son is.

Anyway, that’s a lot of delicious food 😍

Meanwhile here is the U.S. I destroyed my ankle falling down a flight of stairs and I never had x-rays or any treatments and couldn’t afford to lose hours at work (where I made $8 / hour), so I bought a cane at Walmart and went to work on my foot. I had a permanent bursa as a result and I never found out what happened.

Years later when I finally had access to healthcare through insurance partially subsidized by my employer, I was getting another x-ray on the same ankle (because one injury makes future injuries more likely) they found out that tendons had ripped bone off during the original injury. :-(