Leo

woke: midsommar is a horror movie about a manipulative cult

to preface—ari aster is a Jewish man. he’s writing this story from someone directly affected by white supremacy (and if one doubts this: feel free to look at the white supremacist response to the film! it wasn’t positive)

anyway, the hårga are canonically neo-pagan white supremacists. ari aster has pointed this out in interviews explicitly, but if one pays attention and is familiar with white supremacy, it becomes painfully obvious.

many of the runes used commonly used among white supremacists.

the odal especially is seen throughout the film, down to the tables they sit at being arranged in an odal. this rune is used constantly by white supremacists to denote a love of White Heritage. what’s especially interesting about the use of the Odal is this—the particular way it’s drawn on many tapestries has the inclusion of “wings” or lines on the ends. The odal is most commonly drawn without these wings in modern usage....except, of course, used in the context of white supremacy. the odal with wings was the insignia of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, and is still commonly used by neo Nazi groups today.

their leader, an old white woman who snarls about The Black One, wears the ansuz, despite them not seeming to worship Odin—this is, of course, another symbol used by white supremacists (hell, there’s a hate group that has a prominent presence in Sweden but exists worldwide calls the Soldiers of Odin). the inclusion of The Secret Nazi Language of the Uthark in the set at the beginning of the movie makes it clear this was intentional

also, there’s not a lot of evidence for the “age old rituals” they use (the ättestupa and blood eagle) actually existing—the idea of them though? absolutely relished by many white supremacists.

just getting into the rest of the movie—the colors are blindingly white, bright, and the characters of color stand out clearly against it. josh, who is the more obviously respectful and dedicated academic, is deliberately passed over in favor of Christian by the harga for information for their dissertations, and Christian outright rips off his topic. they kill the white characters for disrespecting the cult’s heritage—but kill the characters of color to show their devotion.

the movie is a MASTERFUL commentary on how white supremacists grow their numbers—they don’t start out with swastikas and genocide. they start out with a kind word, with a promise of understanding, of community.

“i lost my parents too” pele tells dani. he draws for her, he wishes her a happy birthday. the women dance with Dani, dress her up, comfort her. the cult makes her the may queen. she feels safe with them. she feels comforted, wanted. has an emotional bond with them, even as they slowly isolate her, and prime her to believe what they do.

as a Jewish person myself—this was all intentional. the horror for me isn’t just the cult. it’s that this happens every day, and more often than people would think. the horror is in the knowledge that this is how people are radicalized to scream “Jews will not replace us”, or shoot up a synagogue.

Where do I fucking start?

So, Thatcher was the bane of the working classes, and much of what she did still has repercussions to this day. So, in no particular order, just in the order I remember them, here are some things she did that pissed us off - 

•In 1989 she introduced this thing called the “Community Charge” but which everyone calls the “Poll Tax” which replaced an older system in which your tax payment was based on the rental value of your home. This new tax meant that people living in one bedroom flats would pay the same as a billionaire living in a mansion. Obviously, the rich loved it, everyone else… not so much. So there were riots (video of news about the riots) - There were lots of riots in the Thatcher years, and they were all notable for the extreme levels of police brutality.

(photo, poll tax protest in Trafalgar Square, 1990)

•Then there was her war on industry. There was a lot of inflation when she came to power, so she instituted anti-inflationary measures. All well and good… except not the way she did it. She closed many government controlled industries, most famously steel and coal. The amount spent on public industries dropped by 38% under Thatcher. The coal miners went on strike, for almost a year, but in the end, the pits were still closed, and 64,000 people lost their jobs. Unemployment rates soared in industrial areas, and inequality between these (generally northern or welsh) areas and the rest of the UK is still there. During the strike there were numerous violent clashes with the police at picket lines which were widely televised. As a memoir from one miner attests: “I saw a police officer with a fire extinguisher in his hand, bashing a lad in the back. I tried to get closer to note down the officer’s number but they were wearing black boilersuits with no numbers. The next thing I knew, a police officer struck me from behind. I was coming in and out of consciousness as I was dragged across the road into an alleyway. They blocked off the alley and beat another lad and me with sticks until I was unconscious.” (I can’t post the whole thing it’s too long, but read it in the Guardian) Images such as this swept the country, turning many people against Thatcher -

And after it was all over people felt Thatcher had lied, saying she wanted to close only 20 pits, when in the end, 75 were closed down.

• Inequality soared whilst she was prime minister. There is a thing called the gini coefficient, it is the most common method of measuring inequality. Under gini, a score of one would be a completely unequal society; zero would be completely equal. Britain’s gini score went up from 0.253 to 0.339 by the time Thatcher resigned.

•During her time as prime minister the notorious ‘Section 28′ was published. It stated: A local authority shall not (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. - Section 28 wasn’t repealed until 2003.

• She introduced the Right To Buy scheme, which allowed people to buy their council houses for a very low price, which, at first glance, seems like a great idea, allowing people who normally wouldn’t be able to afford their own home to have one - however, loads of people have entered the scheme and now we have far too little social housing, meaning there has been a sharp rise in homelessness.

• The Battle of the Beanfield was a clash between hippies and police near Stonehenge in 1985. 1300 police officers converged on a convoy of 600 new age travellers who were heading to Stonehenge to set up a free festival in violation of a high court order. Again, there was an insane amount of police brutality, and 16 travellers were hospitalised, 573 people were arrested (one of the biggest mass arrests in UK history) - “Pregnant women were clubbed with truncheons, as were those holding babies. The journalist Nick Davies, then working for The Observer, saw the violence. ‘They were like flies around rotten meat,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no question of trying to make a lawful arrest. They crawled all over, truncheons flailing, hitting anybody they could reach. It was extremely violent and very sickening.’” (source) - Once everyone was arrested, the empty vehicles, which were in many cases the only homes the travellers had “were then systematically smashed to pieces and several were set on fire. Seven healthy dogs belonging to the Travellers were put down by officers from the RSPCA.” (source same as above)

Most of the charges were dismissed in court after Lord Cardigan, who had tagged along with them to see what would happen, testified on behalf of the travellers against the police. 

•Her removal of Irish dissidents right to be placed in a category that essentially made them political prisoners instead of merely criminals led to a hunger strike that ended in 10 deaths, including that of Bobby Sands, who was elected from his prison cell, reflecting the immense national, and international support for Irish nationalists. Thatchers lack of sympathy, or even empathy led to her becoming even more of a hate figure.

• She presided over a rapid deregulation of the banks, which ultimately led to much of the problems during britains 2007-2012 financial crash many years later.

• She took free milk from school children, which, though not as serious as anything else listed here, directly affected every child in the UK and was very unpopular, leading her to get the nickname “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”, which is still used today.

• Oh… and she supported Apartheid and called Mandela a terrorist.

A feminist? Pah! She actually said, “The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.” (and if for some reason you don’t trust that article, just google that quote). She also said that “the battle for women’s rights has largely been won. I owe nothing to women’s lib”, and whilst being PM for 11 years, she only ever appointed one woman, Baroness Young. As this article says, she basically “refused to accept that the majority of women do not have the privilege she had, in other words a rich partner, and lots of childcare provision.” In terms of feminism, she hated any woman who wasn’t financially well off, able-bodied, cishet, white, neurotypical (as you can see in this article), and basically, like her. Great feminism.

She also played a huge part in making Rupert Murdoch the hugely powerful man he is today (and consequently, making the British press so unreliable, ridiculous, and downright dangerous), and it seems she also used this connection to help giver herself more “sunshine headlines” (read: favourable).

I could go on but I feel like I’ve been at this for a while. OP has done a great job in summarising most of the main reasons she’s so hated. I’ve added a number of other important ones here too, but to be honest, just look at any reasonably credible article about her. If it seems positive, then google the topics at hand, and I guarantee there will be the flip side, often explained with a more socially conscious approach.

“The witch is dead but the spell remains.”

cis ppl who never have gender feelings, talking to them is like Introduction To Gender 101 shit. talking to trans people about gender is like PhD level classes. they literally just know more about it and how to think critically about it.

and yeah, today i bawled my eyes out about Abigail Thorn bc I’m so happy for her, to have yet another trans voice to listen to. because transfemme people make womanhood as a whole better, more rounded, more welcoming. just knowing the people who have dug deep into this and explored it, it lets me know that if I were fucking miserable about being a woman, I wouldn’t have to be one anymore! and that’s okay.

and that alone, having that option, having it pioneered already by others and being able to talk to and listen to them, that is the thing that made my own femininity palatable.

trans women are not women with an asterisk or “woman, but.” they are literally the people who make womanhood… fucking not a prison! and I can only imagine the same is true of trans men! and I know nonbinary people are like– like someone has passed me a key and whispered “yo, if you want, we can blow this joint.” and I don’t want to, personally, but fuck, having that option is everything.

when i say “fuck terfs” what I mean isn’t just “transphobes suck and everyone deserves to be treated kindly.” what I really mean is “this ideology is what makes gender toxic, and deplatforming and removing them from our spaces is paramount to my safety and yours.”

To get to these realities, they write a script in which they describe the details of the world (”desired reality” or “DR” they wish to enter), their own ideal physical appearance in their DR, and, most crucially, their friends, family, and backstory that meshes with their DR. They are able to create entire people, including themselves, easily in the script (this is an important point for later). They claim that this “scripting” process works because there are infinite realities, so the one they describe has to exist in the multiverse somewhere (a claim refuted by virtually all well-known scientists).

So here’s my experiment. I want a reality shifter to script and enter a universe where any of the unsolved Millenium Prize Problems–famous unsolved math problems with a solving award of one million dollars–have been solved. 

I want them to script that they meet the person who solved one of the problems, and that the person gives them an explanation of their methods along with the most succinct possible answer to the problem that was solved. 

I want to make an observation about dream communications as I experience them, though, to give you an idea of the results I expect. For one, my dreams convey things in symbols and riddles at times, so when I’m inspired about, IDK, nuclear science or past life theories by a dream’s message, how I get to that conclusion is sometimes very particular to my interpretation of my dreams. Dreams are typically the subconscious’s pantomime of whatever it is trying to convey to you, and pantomime is a weird art already when it’s not being made out of memory fluff and imagination particles shaped into symbols that you recognize in your waking reality. So, I don’t know that I can faithfully repeat exactly what I’m told by the person who solves the problem–usually my dreams have me shoulder-riding someone else and experiencing the world through their eyes, so I’d relay the experience of solving a problem, filtered through the lens of my subconscious psyche, interpreted the way I usually interpret dreams.

I think I’ll go for Yang-Mills and Mass Gap, since it’s something I’m slightly familiar with from recent research on particle physics. I’ll let you know where I get. One note–will be interesting how many readers will be familiar with the concepts. I wasn’t expecting to need to explain them for a general audience yet so I’m looking forward to the challenge of that.

As for “ They are able to create entire people, including themselves, easily in the script”–you know, if you remove the script part, and the picking an alternate universe part, Timothy Leary had this to say on the subject of human minds and their creation ability:

“Behind your forehead you carry around a 100 billion-cell bioelectric computer that creates realities.”

They've known since November that they lost the election. He had more than enough time to buy or rent something. The only reason he wouldn't have done so, with a very clear "eviction" date looming, is

If he expected something to change that.

He was expecting the election results to be subverted.

He probably intended to help with that right up until Tr*mp sent an angry mob of nazis his way