Fun fact about the early Catholic church is that, despite spending generations being persecuted by the Roman empire, it took less than 15 years under Theodosius I to go from “the empire is Catholic now” to “and also every other religion is banned.” You can literally read St. Augustine move from “state religious persecution is unacceptable” to “state religious persecution is cool actually” over his lifetime as Catholicism came to power. I’m sure there’s no broader lessons to be learned there
Just gonna keep pointing to the part in Asimov’s auto biography I Asimov, where he talks about antisemitism (cause it’s all really good stuff even all these years later), but I’m once again gonna just share the last 3 paragraphs cause… well you tell me they’re not relevant to this post and relevant all these years after he wrote them:
Even as I write, Jews are immigrating from the former Soviet Union into Israel. They are fleeing their country because they fear religious persecution. But the moment they set foot on Israeli soil, they become Zionist extremists who are merciless toward the Palestinians. They change from persecuted to persecutors in the blink of an eye.
That said, the Jews are not alone in this. If I’m sensitive to this particular problem, it’s because I’m Jewish myself. In fact, this phenomenon is universal. In Roman times, when the first Christians were persecuted, they pleaded for tolerance. But when Christianity prevailed, did tolerance reign? Not on your life. Instead, persecution was soon going on in the opposite direction. Or take the case of the Bulgarians, who demanded freedom from their dictatorial regime, but once they had it used it to aggress against their Turkish minority. Or the people of Azerbaijan, who demanded of the Soviet Union the freedom denied it by the central government, only to immediately attack the Armenian minority.
The Bible teaches that the victims of persecution must in no circumstances become persecutors in their turn: “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”(Exodus 22:21). But who follows this teaching? Personally, whenever I try to spread the word, I get hostile looks and make myself unpopular….
i’m sorry but this is the only submission to this trend that i’ll consider giving any thought to
i say this with 100% sincerity: if you want to know who monica lewkinsky is, she’s the person who deserves to be back in the white house more than any person alive and she should get full rights to execute any 1990s comedians of her choice by firing squad. she deserves to be on the $20 bill and have her own monument on the national mall, but instead she’s happy with reclaiming the narrative. she should have been america’s people’s princess instead of diana. we don’t deserve her.
Okay, so I did google her and the scandal you mentioned in the tags, and I have two things to say
1. Holy shit
2. Yeah, I think she has the best one for the trend
Somehow, it is one thing to know that people born after 9/11 are now adults, but it is another entirely to understand that there is a cohort of adults who don’t know who Monica Lewinsky is.
Please correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t she get famous for blowing the president? That’s about as much as I was ever told about her
Yup. She was perfectly willing and able to walk away. She chose to take part.
She’s been riding that train ever since.
… she was an intern at the White House. Imagine being an intern at the White House right out of college decades before the current wave of feminism. And the *president of the nation* asks you to blow him in the Oval Office. And you want to work in the white house as your full-time job. Do you deny him? Suppose you don’t want to do it. Can you deny him?
I’m thrilled by the modern-day attitudes about this. Genuinely, the way this would go in 2024 is that the intern could say no and tell the press what happened and half of America would support them. But when I was a kid? No way!
And Monica Lewinsky didn’t ride a train to fame from this situation. She was America’s laughingstock and punching bag for twenty years. She was the butt of every sex joke and the least respected person that everyone knew the name of. She couldn’t live any sort of remotely normal life or do the things that she wanted to do because every single person, including all members of the press and every comedian, was out to get her. Every “cancelled” celebrity nowadays pretends they’ve been treated the way Monica Lewinsky was and you know what, she’s right that they wouldn’t last an hour in her shoes.
I’m very happy about the cultural shift that has allowed her to come back into the public again. You have to understand how recent this shift was.
one minute you’re at work experiencing stress levels that would kill a full grown horse and the next you’re psychologically cold-cocked by someone in your tumblr DMs mistaking you for their 55-year old milf ex-girlfriend named joan and calling you a bitch but promising that he’s good for you because he fixed up the plumbing on the house and installed cabinets in the kitchen
in my head the star wars equivalent of tswift is some human woman named tay’lor spiff or something and her stans are losing their minds over theories that she’s secretly a jedi singing about the horrors of war, even though she’s from a neutral system that hasn’t seen so much as a moral panic in 50 years
the theories get even more egregious during the imperial era, with people straight up thinking she joined the rebellion in secret and is loading her songs with subliminal rebel propaganda. their main piece of evidence for this is if you play a certain song backwards, it sounds like she’s saying “freedom” in shyriiwook. the fans get really defensive if you point out she’s performed at the yearly empire day celebration thrice now and her family historically owned ewok slaves
i regret to inform both you beautiful people that this isn’t going to go how you think it will
ALT
spiff fans (also known as “spiffies”) insist that the two decommissioned venator-class destroyers spiff purchased, the bad blood and the reputation, are for diplomatic purposes that benefit the rebellion. jedi’lors have concocted theories that she served on both ships during the clone wars and was respectful of every clone that served there, despite her courtship of a gravball player that thrice advocated against the clone veterans being granted natural citizenship
christians say stuff like this when the thing they “debunked” six hundred years ago was actually not resolved with any satisfactory answer. there was always some sort of council that split into at least two opposed sides with answers that were a mixture of unclear and/or horrifying. and then they formed another sect of protestantism about it.
Still really funny that Marvel named a movie “Endgame” and sold it as the final culmination of the MCU where they killed off two main characters and retired a third and then were shocked when people started loosing interest in the MCU after that
Hannah Montana is fucked up because its entire POINT as a show is that children should be protected from fame and exploitation, but it stars a REAL little girl that’s being exploited. Nearly every episode carries the looming threat of Miley being outed as Hannah and losing her peaceful teenage life to the ravages of fame. Her father in the show (played by her own father in real life) wisely protected her from the trauma of fame by making her wear a disguise and live a rather quiet, interview-free life. Meanwhile the REAL Billy Ray Cyrus sold his daughter to Disney Channel when she was 11 and forced her to read dialogue about how terrible it would be to face the public eye. Like… Jesus, dude. The fictional Robby Ray is 10x the father, and it’s not even close. (It’s also IMMENSELY funny that her dad doesn’t use his real name in the show, while she does. Almost like he wanted a bit of a disconnect between his identity and his character. Something Miley didn’t get.)
Can we please make “I’m depressed” a valid reason to out-of-the-blue fall off the face of the earth?
I’m not busy.
I’m not tired.
My plate isn’t full.
I’m not swamped with work.
I don’t have a cold or flu.
I’m not laying awake at night. (But I am sleepy throughout the day.)
Nothing tragic or traumatic has happened.
I nor anyone I know or work with is going through anything.
You didn’t do or say anything wrong.
But I’m not sad, either. I’m not homesick or in mourning. I’m not angry at anyone or anything.
Nothing is wrong…
I just woke up and suddenly being alive sucked, eating became a dumb idea and nothing mattered. I canceled training for the next two weeks, making up a lie, saying I’d be out of town on business.
And I have no other explanation for that, but I don’t [can’t] say anything because the word “depression” might as well be “itchy” to some people.
“Here, have a mango. You like mangos, right? This should cheer you up!” But I’m not sad.
“Just think happy things!” But I’m not sad.
“Did something happen? You know you can always talk to me!” About what? I’m not sad.
It’ll go away just as it came: on its own.
How long it’ll stay in my system this time is anyone’s guess.
I hate hate HATE what the internet has done to mental health language. You don’t have intrusive thoughts about fucking McDonald’s for four hours Bethany, they’re about incest, rape, murder and all other kinds of disgusting things you don’t want. That’s why they’re called INTRUSIVE. They’re rapid and scary and horrible. You’re not “triggered” cause a moron on tiktok said something you don’t like, it’s when your PTSD recognised something that could be dangerous to you that’s similar to a traumatic event and shuts down to try and help you. It’s panic inducing and the worst feeling. Disassociation isn’t “zoning out.” For a bit in class, it’s walking around like an emotionless zombie because you can’t feel anything as a symptom of severe mental illness or trauma. Shut the fuck up!!!
When people seem to think there’s nothing in canon preventing their headcanon and you know for a fact that there’s a specific brief line in a little joke that completely disproves it but you have learned (sometimes) not to be the fun ruiner so once again you must fight the Urge for Complete Accuracy in favour of social harmony with people you like and respect and do not wish to upset
Keep in mind these things were advertised heavily as being able to drive through reasonably deep water as a standard feature.
It does this even in the wading mode if you attempt to do so.
So much water gets pooled into the frame you can hear it sloshing around.
Tesla “vehicles” are about as reliable as the machinations of a cartoon coyote.
I genuinely don’t understand how you fuck up the automobile so fucking bad. We’ve had close to a century of knowing that all of this “innovation” is stuff that doesn’t work.
Because they deliberately and specifically avoided all that stuff we learned the hard way because it was “old fashioned thinking.” Like steering wheel design. There were a lot of steering wheel designs before we settled on the ubiquitous one we all use, and quite a few of the designers of those earlier ones have biographies that end with “died during field testing.”
Musk ignored ALL of that accumulated knowledge, thinking he was very clever, and built a car-shaped object.
sometimes im like “wow holy shit im being really fucking annoying. i should stop talking” and then i pull out my magic 8 ball and it says “youve always been annoying and your friends chose to talk you anyways. youll be fine” and im like wow thanks magic 8 ball. and then the ogre attacks me
“My childhood was so awesome. Kids today don’t even know!”
Isn’t a flex.
It’s a lament.
More people should understand that.
Cereal boxes had toys inside.
Yes, it was a crass marketing for a sugar cereal made of chintzy plastic
Today you’re just expected to eat Capn Crunch because that’s what you do as a child, that’s what breakfast looks like. Which is… fine, I guess. Sugar still tastes good. That’s still a pleasure you’re otherwise asked to disavow by the protein shake nutribottles advertised on podcasts.
But it also means the idle minor joy of getting a random toy present, as a reward for nothing, just because you exist, is stripped. That random spark of joy is gone, replaced with nothing.
Where did the public pool go? the neighborhood park? the atrium food court public place to gather?
Same thing. All of them were just replaced with nothing.
Kids today have many good things. But it shouldn’t be a trade off. They should get to have instant messages with friends and go skating at the park. They should get to play amazing modern video games at home and go trick or treating for halloween. They should be able to have stickers and markers and macaroni art as well as youtube and streaming libraries and fortnite dances.
Poll: if your mom remarries when you’re 26 years old is that guy still your stepdad or is he just your mom’s husband.
The poll winner seems to be “depends on whether you like him” which is super valid.
Mine watches fox news so “mom’s husband” it is!
My family has a great way of distinguishing between a new spouse you like and new spouse you disdain!
Your mom/aunt/grandma/etc remarries and they are actually a cool person, you use their first name. So if you were to introduce them they would be: Aunt Jane and Bob.
If your mom/aunt/grandma/etc remarries and they are a fuckwad you introduce them as: this is Aunt Jane and her second husband. The implication being that they are very replaceable and that we’re all just waiting for her to wise up to the situation and serve you divorce papers, she did it once, she can do it again.
MAGNIFICENT
Alright, but what if my mom on her third marriage found a decent man, but my mother herself is shitty
ALT
ALT
