Masks And Helmets That Hides Someone's Face In Such A Way That They Become The Face Themselves My Beloved

i think the key difference between george lucas’s star wars and disney’s star wars is that lucas is a man with an ideology. someone with a point of view, and all that entails. which comes with ideas of revolution, anti-imperialism, challenging the status quo, cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes. complex and contradictory ideas because that’s how artists are: complex and complicated people. disney is not. disney is a corporation. a corporation can’t have ideology, because ideology defeats the purpose of profit. and when the only thing you do is to turn on the movie manufacturing machine before you sit down and plan what ideas are you trying to convey to the audience, then your results are going to be washed out corporate garbage. and because when you’re a giant corporation who only cares about selling to the widest audience possible, you can’t take sides. you can’t decide on an idea. because you want to sell your product to people who are on the entire political spectrum. which results in movies without ideology, without purpose, without soul.

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

What does does it mean to be a citizen of a nation built on genocide? America is made of conquerors and refugees, killers and survivors. Can the US absolve itself? I can't say we were ever great, don't know if I can say we were ever good. But I think the best we've ever been is when we've held a welcoming hand to the world's refugees. At this point it feels like the least we can do.

The age of machines sneaked up on us. Steadily over the past century, the world has been increasingly shaped to the needs of machines. Farmland is designed for the tractor, millions of miles of road and acres of parking lots designed for cars, plus airports, shipping ports, distribution centers, factories, server farms... Everywhere we find spaces hostile to humans but welcoming to machines. Human beings relegate themselves mostly to apartment buildings, offices, and houses. We spend large amounts of time and energy powering and operating machinery. Meanwhile all over the planet the land, ocean, and sky is dominated by billions of metal and plastic amalgamations animated and set loose by human beings.

Our age of machines is not the classic Terminator apocalypse scenario, where an AI script gets out of control and destroys humanity. These machines are still physically operated by people, who are taking orders from other people. But it's pretty clear that the world is more welcoming to a person in a machine than one walking free on their own feet.

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, then, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that middle-class home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies”’ dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz. 2016 edition.

meanwhile on Twitter

you could make the argument that it’s foolish that everyone in the world should know what the Odyssey is but if you’re from a western country that literally has Greek history stolen away in your museum then well, really a child left behind.

#childrensrights

I think one of the most damaging ideologies towards children is the conviction that having children isn’t a calling but a moral obligation.

Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear adopted by the Polish II Corps during World War II. He was officially enlisted as a soldier to ensure he could travel with the unit and was given the rank of private. He became famous for helping carry artillery shells during the Battle of Monte Cassino. Wojtek was also known for drinking beer, eating cigarettes, and wrestling with soldiers.

After the war, he was taken to Scotland, where he lived at the Edinburgh Zoo until his passing in 1963.