Thank you! At an event last night I said "If the word hope doesn't work for you try, 'Never fucking surrender.'" The word hope seems too sunny to a lot of people, but the heart of it as I'm interested in it is: we make the future in the present, if we show up, and that never surrender part.
Does he know that, even in a war, you're supposed to want to finish up with most of the people of the nation you're fighting still alive? Fighting Iran and fighting Iranians should be two really clearly different things...
Three to four back when the kids were at home.
Not the main thing that's wrong here, but: Justice? American?
Wiliam Wallace - Revenge/Liberty, Scottish
Maximus - Revenge, Roman
Superman - Justice, alien
Beerus- Destruction/Snacks, alien
Yu-gi-oh - Heart of the Cards, Japanese / Egyptian
Reactionaries convinced us for decades that something like gender studies has no practical use in society, and I know many reasonable people also believe(d?) this. It was the butt of the joke for as log as I can remember.
But OMG does this video drive home the point they were wrong.
I mean, with the exception of Superman, they have described their own perpetually adolescent edgelord vibes pretty well. Like, I watched the clip expecting Goku from DBZ, or maybe Vegeta. But they picked Beerus - the lazy god of destruction who sees the multiverse as his plaything. Tracks.
It's the fault of the whole structure of patriarchal masculinity in late stage capitalism - where everything is a competition, other people are barely real, and all that matters is your personal will to power. And art is part of how we (imperfectly) learn to think beyond that.
When your dropout twenty- something cousin ends in hospital because he and his buddies beat the shit out of ea h other in a parking lot. That's not the fault of Fincher, Pitt or Fight Club.
A Few Good Men isn't retrospectively bad because Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem want to cosplay as Nathan Jessop.
I'd agree with the pernicious effects these texts have had on the culture - but I don't think that's necessarily a problem with the texts. I don't love Breaking Bad, but anyone who finished it and aligned themselves with Walt is telling on themselves, not the show.
You're doing God's work there!
Did they think we thought America was incapable of imposing death and destruction at will? No - we knew they could and thought they should avoid doing it because of, you know, society... All they're proving is that every bit of speculative criticism about what they might do was flatly correct.
this is not an amount of money any individual or household should be able to have and we have to abolish both billionaires as a group and the economic system that makes them possible
Anyone asking how X got Trump, the most transparently manipulable person in public life, to do anything is just not really paying attention.
I kind of enjoyed going around the gallery precisely because no specific piece of art in it really got me. Just enjoyed the act of gallery-going and people watching. Like living in a Larkin poem.
My wee home town's long-running parking fight has made the national news!
North Berwick faces 'unprecedented' hostility over parking meters - BBC News share.google/QHY3rnHMuzbQ...
I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to
Definitely cute and retro. Like a slightly more grown up version of classic kids trainers.
I don't know if it's particularly emblematic of the series as a whole, but I found Three Houses really accessible and repayable.
The cover image from a reprint of an Early issue of The Fantastic Four. The Human Torch leaps acrobatically from the Fantasti-car while Mr Fantastic, Invisible Girl and The Thing gesture at him in excitement. In the background the people of the city wave to the team.
'Don't talk about the FF as if they did nothing!'
Where would be without the Fantasti-car?
Loved this series - especially Taran Wanderer - as a kid. Doing three full novels with a chosen one vibe and then making the hero sit down and do a full book training montage before he's actually worthy of becoming a leader is such an effective deconstruction of that myth.
And even if it could, reading a little review someone else compiled doesn't teach you what putting one together yourself teaches you. Synthesising a bunch of knowledge creates new knowledge and understanding which just reading a synthesis doesn't.
“Great Man” theories of history may have been wrong but “That F*ing Guy” theory looks increasingly plausible.
As an American who's lived in the UK for 25+ years, not wholly thrilled by the prospect of tit-for-tat of immigration crackdowns. But I'd love to see countries like the UK hitting the Trump regime where it hurts with trade policy.
Horrified by the US here, but also amazed that the first item on any trade negotiations with the UK wasn't the unconditional release of hostages and the immediate cessation of this kind of practice.
By rein them in, do you mean: Prosecutions for the leaders and the murderers. Truth and Reconcilliation commission for the wider health of society. An end to ICE. Reparations for their victims?
Ugh... real Maha vibes coming off that quote. Do better, Guardian.
I'm typically frustrated by the British habit of covering political U-turns as if refusing to change your mind is a virtue, but it does seem like the Starmer government spills a lot of political capital because they constantly announce dumb policies only to have to roll them back.
Loved the good natured rug-pull of, 'Mayor, you've got to do something about the mutants... throw them a big appreciation day!' Great to see X-Men comics imagining a better world and not just allegorizing the one we've got.
