born bad

that being said, if you think third parties the reason why hillary lost out in florida, or michigan, or north carolina, and willingly refuse to accept that there are factors at play here that have been problems for decades that resulted in tonight’s disaster, and you blatantly refuse to address those topics or attempt to bring them to any sort of light (so as to encourage progress) in favor of mob mentality & shouting down the puny minority that voted for a third party this election, then you really need to do your research and re-evaluate your priorities. you’re wasting your breath. you’re yelling at a problem that didn’t lose us this election and you’re refusing to acknowledge the exceptional problems that did.

the racists were always there. no one was swayed by racist rhetoric or became more racist (or if they did, it’s hard to gauge. id have to wait for future studies to know for sure) so much as they ended up becoming strange bed fellows. They are proud that the conditions were perfect to push alot of people to the right either out of frustration or desperation.

heres 2012

here’s 2016

I was prepared for a hillary victory, honestly, and apparently EVERYONE ELSE besides the most diehard trump supporters.

When i saw the results from the rust belt start pouring in, i knew immediately Trump would win. it was the same pattern of upset victory I saw in Britain during brexit.

In britain, BREXIT had an upset victory from labour voting working class people in the north, who, like the rust belt, were fucked by conservatives in the 80s and ignored and left to rot until the current day by the right and a left that gave them empty gestures of solidarity, which is why they voted in their respective elections as a referendum against the elite.

And the fact that, rather dramatically, much of union households in Ohio were switching to Trump, which are traditionally guaranteed democrat votes (these are households that previously handed obama two victories, so the racism argument falls flat) considering the hostility the republican establishment holds for unions.

Ah ha, but a difference, Trump isn’t from the establishment (the political establishment, i mean, he is still a millionaire socialite media mogule) or at least he isnt perceived to be by the white working class. Espeically in the rust belt, the former heart ofmanufacturing and industry for the american empire, that drove the formation of the American middle class, where those same families and whole cities TODAY struggle day to day with the effects of globalization and trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP.

Hillary embodied the very class of politician that delivered them ruin or threatens to do so as she supports the TPP. Trump is decidedly anti-TPP, and what’s more, he enraptured the rust belt with a platform that protects american industry. So these typically inclusive, well meaning people are voting trump, not because they hate minorities, necessarily, but to revolt against a political status quo that has forgotten them and just continues to screw them. The TPP is a big deal on this. Michael Moore states it best:

It was the traditional and reliably consistent democrat union voters and working class in the rust belt that pushed the rest of the vote into a trump victory.

Often the plight of the working class is forgotten by people in the blue states. when they jeer at the non-college degree holding white vote, they are jeering at the 77k earning family struggling to make ends meet with a blue collar job while a trade deal that would benefit the liberals on thecoast threatens to tear apart towns in the midwest. its just dressed up, functioning classism.

They have voted trump because the leadership and the followers of the mainstream left decided to take a fat shit on the working class backbone of their party support.

truly, it is matteusz’s story and if you commit to that then there is no attempt to ~empathize~ with his family, there is no excusing what they did or showing it to create some voyeuristic angst because ultimately, it isn’t about him leaving, it’s about his new life, his new family and the writers understood that perfectly.

honestly, what they choose to tell and not to tell onscreen is so important and respectful like we didn’t have to witness him being thrown out we didn’t see the hateful words and the anger.

like i really worry that our culture is commodifying trauma? a band i really like, led by a young woman about my age, they released a song in early 2015 that was quite clearly about sexual assault. and it was a great song, and it earned a very deserved warm reception, but interviewers would persistently ask the lead singer if it was “a personal account,” and she would always say that it was an observation on rape culture and leave it at that. and then about a year later she released a personal essay saying that, yes, it was about her own experience of sexual assault, and then there was another wave of secondary clickbait-y thinkpieces congratulating her for being so brave and so open.

so we have a great song addressing sexual assault, which can more than stand on its own as a piece of art. and we have a young woman who, after a year of getting the same question from reporters, says, “i was raped; the song is about me.” and then we have another wave of reporters coming in to write identical stories repeating her words, calling her brave, and collecting ad revenue.

and that’s what i mean: for every act of personal disclosure of trauma, there is this weird media apparatus that feeds on publicizing that trauma and collecting fat stacks of ad money. publications are taking what might be an empowering process for some people and they’re incentivizing and monetizing public trauma disclosure. it’s deeply fucked up.

As unbelievable as it sounds this blog has reached another milestone - that of 11 000 followers. And as is tradition over here, I would like to thank you all for sticking around with a small book giveaway. The book in question this time is  Former People : the Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith. You merely need to read my short review of it to know this is a book to have if you are even bit interested in Russia, history or nobility.

The rules are same as always:

1) You need to be following me.

2) Reblog this post. The deadline to do so is midnight of 20th September 2016!

3) You must be OK with sharing your postal information with me (privately of course). You have to live in a country where Bookdepository.com delivers to.

4) If I cannot reach the winner, another one will be chosen.

LGBT fans have every right to be disappointed in JKR. She does not have our backs. She has failed to represent us at every opportunity.

I don’t care what you heard, she has never said anything about considering making Dean and Seamus a canon couple. That is a persistent internet rumour with no basis in fact.

She signed off on an entire play about the close, openly affectionate relationship between Albus and Scorpius. If one of them had been a girl, it definitely would have been framed as a romance, and they would have ended up together. But instead we got a “no homo” at the end with Scorpius crushing on a girl who is consistently terrible to him, and ditches her own cousin for four years for being friends with him.

And I don’t want to hear any BS about how they are “just kids”. If Scorpius is old enough to know he has feelings for a girl, he’s old enough to know he has feelings for his BFF.

Dumbledore was in love with Grindelwald. That much was hinted at between the lines of DH with nods and winks, but it was never explicitly confirmed in canon, in spite of there being dozens of ways it could have been accomplished with a passing reference. We only got verbal confirmation of it months after the fact.

And honestly? Having the only (sort of) canonically queer character fall in love with a violent fascist and suffer for it is not good representation no matter how you look at it.

You can dig through canon for all the “evidence” you like that this or that character is queer, but I assure you, none of that was JKR’s intention.

It is arguable that Remus Lupin was queer-coded (most explicitly in the POA movie), with lycanthropy being treated as analogous to HIV/AIDS, and him being treated as a danger to children because of it. HIV/AIDS was certainly considered to be primarily a “gay” disease at the time of writing, and gay men are often viewed by homophobes as predatory towards children. But slapping a queer metaphor on a character who is only shown having a heterosexual relationship in canon is not representation either.

The only explicit mention of the existence of queer people in canon is a single line where Dudley Dursley asks if Cedric was Harry’s boyfriend. Yeah, that’s right, a bully using homosexuality as an insult is all the on-page representation JKR ever gives us. Thanks a lot.