I think the story of the US election is that a supreme court decision allowed states with a history of totalitarianism to arbitrarily change voting law in ways that made it disproportionately difficult for people likely to vote Democrat to vote while a foreign country was running an intelligence campaign to discourage voting on the left and, real time, prod right wing voters in important districts to vote during the election in a race with massive question marks about the security of voting infrastructure, with a widely unpopular Democratic presidential candidate–

And Trump still lost. By roughly three million votes.

That’s six times the loss George W Bush had when he won the electoral college without winning the popular vote in 2000.

Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by a larger margin than Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon or John Kennedy; she just won it in the wrong places.

Trump is now president because the electoral college assigns more weight to rural states, which are also states with more discriminatory voter laws and more disenfranchisement and therefore states in which it is harder to vote for people likely to vote Democrat.

Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame has become a honeypot for vandals, MAGA-hat cretins, and all sorts of shenanigans, so the West Hollywood City Council unanimously voted to remove it permanently.

Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.

You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.

(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )

It’s nationalist to state facts now?

How is this toxic?

x

human freedom

x

quality of life

x

social progress 

x

income equality (america was among the worst)

x

healthcare

x x

gender equality

x

PLUS!!:

This all was perfectly okay and my heart wasn’t torn out of my chest at all. That Pearl’s big fantasy, her wild dream, her very personal little thought-rebellion, is that she got to run away for real and came to Earth and met a lovely Rose Quartz, who was never her owner or a diamond or anything of the sort (you know, all that stuff I was and am horrified ASPR went and foisted on these two and everything between them, that Pearl is so painfully aware of here all along), and she got to have and explore this Very Not Allowed relationship on her terms. How she tries to grasp and talk about feelings and relationships that she has no context or reference or terminology for because they run from discouraged or unacknowledged to actively forbidden in her awful society, and struggles to express herself using terms that don’t really fit but she doesn’t have any better ones, not yet. That she is terrified and expects - suggests! - to be “replaced” for daring any of this.

Rose is the person she [Pink] wants to be so badly… and she’s not really good at it. She’s very ambitious about being this person that really cares about people, but it’s really difficult for her. She’s trying, she’s always really trying. But it’s hard for somebody with that much power to, you know, get that.

And “there’s a big piece that people don’t have yet about why she’s like this, which I can’t talk about yet”. Then an, uh, interesting half-joking way of explaining the PD identity matter:

Well, Rose is Batman. Pearl is Alfred if Alfred were in love with Batman, but not Bruce Wayne! That’s an important distinction. She loves Batman.

My brain on Eurovision, instantly:

I was actually fairly convinced after ASPR, based on stuff like what seemed to be very deliberately different body language before and after Rose shapeshifted in the reveal scene, that they were going to go for some shade of “Pearl was in love with Rose Quartz but not Pink Diamond”. But I hadn’t anticipated this whole… Rose Quartz as a fairytale and completely constructed narratives being played to the hilt to this extent, and not the way NWOFA explicitly brought it up and had Pearl talk about it (in hindsight though it plays right into episodes like Your Mother and Mine - “Don’t be silly, Rose Quartz isn’t real” indeed).

They go on to say how a lot of Pearl’s neurotic nature is because she knew and had to keep this deep secret. How ASPR communicates via visual metaphor how much Pearl has been repressing. And then, more about Rose, and I want to mention @meskime here because she was right about so, so many things (and I have to bring this post back since I’m talking about these two again):

This is very much in the margins, but it’s all there, because when you hear Garnet tell the story, that’s the story that Rose told. And when Garnet, this is in Your Mother and Mine - the story that Rose would tell was about this cowardly horrible monster, this manipulative cackling evil, but Garnet isn’t making that up, Garnet never saw that person. And I mean you see Pink and she’s like… a dork. But this is what Rose was telling everyone. And this is very subtle, but I kind of want people to be aware that this is a character that put herself in a situation where everyone around her was saying “destroy yourself”. And she made that reality for herself. And tried to! Tried to leave that behind as much as possible. I’m trying not to colour this with any right or wrong here, I’m just trying to say this is what this character did.

Even Pearl, the embodiment of loyalty and devotion and concerningly self-effacing love, the one person who knew the truth about who she was, didn’t actually love her - and really, how could she have, what kind of love can there possibly be when there is no choice? - but her alter ego (that Pearl had come up with in the first place!) in that great big fairytale they were constructing on Earth. In which their “status and purpose” and the deeply fucked up power dynamics between them never needed to actually be addressed and properly dealt with because of course they didn’t actually exist, right? If they wished and pretended hard enough it would just… go away? And we know Rose, notoriously bad at actually confronting things. Just, the way she so obliviously says “We’ll both finally be free!” as if they were ever in the same position and the burden was the same on both of them never fails to get me.

And maybe some kind of “power of imagination” thing, “believe something into becoming real”, could have happened there in kinder circumstances, I don’t know. But at the supposed point of no return to their old lives, this big act that was going to “change everything”, when it was going to be “just Rose” forever after… Rose drops the ball in a very lasting way by forcing Pearl to keep the secret and using the power over her that “Rose Quartz” could and should never have had (by Pearl’s very deliberate design, remember, I’m not yours). In doing this Rose also isolates herself further and ensures that nobody can ever really help her with becoming that person she so wants to be, when getting that help is absolutely necessary, especially if you don’t have any acceptable frame of reference for anything, like she doesn’t.