Unwalled City

So yes, this is a romance novel published by a Christian press, retelling the story of Esther, and featuring a love story between a Jewish woman in Terezin, (passing as a Gentile and doing paperwork in the camp office) and a high-ranking SS officer. Let me repeat that, this is not a dramatic novel that includes survival sex, this is a romance novel. Oh, and apparently ‘Hadassah’ and ‘Aric’ become Christians at the end.

they actually did a study on this

and ostriches repeatedly found humans more attractive than other ostriches

yes

ostrich farmers have trouble setting up their ostriches with each other because they’re just not interested, they want their farmers instead

10 Photos Of Norway’s Fairy Tale Architecture

Norway started out as a kingdom in 872 and has existed ever since. It has also saved quite a bit of its traditional architecture. Traditional Norwegian architecture makes it look like a land out of a fairytale. Stave churches – so named because of the Norse words for their load-bearing poles – were extremely popular back in the 12th century, and their unique shape matched with all-wooden construction make is simply spectacular.

Norvegian vernacular (as in, built to local requirements and using local materials) architecture is wonderful. Moss and even trees grow on the roofs of wooden or stone buildings, making Norway a sort of Norse Shire. Have a look, and plan your next holiday accordingly!

Excessive and abusive punishment of young teenagers over mistakes made in discourse they don’t completely understand by bloggers much older than they are

US-centrism

Reliance on fear of retribution for spread of information (contributes to rapid spread of misinformation)

Moral absolutism - the line between “perfect innocent angel” and “disgusting shit trash” can be as thin as one mistake

SELLING TANK TOPS WITH “1989” EMBLAZONED ON THEM

IN

CHINA

how do u fuck up that bad (its a rhetorical question we all know why)

ok woah there!

i think that people’s problems with her merchandise here might be problematic itself and comes from a western pov on the what happened at Tienanmen Square–and also probably bc people love to be out for her blood bc she’s a symbol of white feminism. i get it. i agree she’s very problematic. but i don’t think the spread of misinformation is helping any cause, and i think this particular piece of misinformation contributes to a very problematic eurocentric worldview.

first of all the issue with the TS part of it: afaik from the pov of a diasporic 2nd generation chinese person (so correct me if i am wrong and i apologise if i am because i haven’t lived in china myself) aside from its use as a language for business… english language and the english alphabet are not widely used in china aside from use as loanwords or for western names, or in business. people learn it in school because it’s necessary if you want to be a part of the westernised international conversation, but aside from that it’s not really used widely like it is in the western world.

what i’m getting at is that people in china wouldn’t immediately recognise TS in any association with Tienanmen Square because english is not the primary mode of communication there, especially not in the context of things pertaining to China it self–it’s mostly used in the context of thing pertaining to the western world. on its own, TS means nothing to most chinese citizens on its own because they have many different languages but english that they prefer to speak in, and use written chinese, not english to communicate when writing.

next: from what i can tell from doing some quick googling, her album cover for 1989 had “t.s. 1989″ on it… and no one had a problem with it at all. even in china, and the chinese gov’t didn’t censor it. nor did people use her album as a symbol of Tienanmen Square because 1989 itself has nothing to do with Tienanmen Square.

why is this? because 1989 itself has no meaning in china on its own and is just another year–the specific date june 4, 1989 is heavily censored because that is the date Tienanmen Square happened. taylor swift it born december 13 which is nowhere near the time of the massacre… and she was born in america and is white and has nothing to do with china anyway, so she has nothing to do with chinese politics and isn’t a symbol for government rebellion in china (or at least didn’t, until people started making a storm about this).

if she was born chinese in 1989 and made a hugely successful album named 1989 that criticised the chinese government, then the gov’t would raise some eyebrows. but that’s not the case (and honestly that would be a just cause, but again is not what is happening here).

the other issue i’m having here is that you all are treating china like an oppressive regime like that of north korea where people are brainwashed, and by disrupting the brainwashing with your dangerous western provocations you’re going to get a lot of people killed.. when it’s not. it’s a large country full of a diverse range of people in all sorts of living conditions, including lots of young people who simply enjoy pop music like taylor swift and are also unfortunately but blissfully unaware of political issues. the government heavily censors things and denies things and does a lot of awful shit behind people’s backs but that’s an issue that a lot of countries in the western world face too, and you know that.

Those previous posts before the last poster are so Western-centric indeed. There’s an entire internet culture in China where people get around government censorship using puns because of the inherent nature of Mandarin meaning that words with similar sounds can have drastically different meaning. ‘River crabs’ (he xie) is an euphemism for censorship because it sounds similar to ‘harmony’ (also he xie). And the government often cites protecting ‘national harmony’ as a justification for censorship. So the point is, how political subversion takes place and what the government clamps down on is very different due to language differences itself. Like, ‘TS for Tiananmen Square’ is an English transliteration. As far as I know, the incident isn’t widely referred to as ‘TS 1989′ in China. The shit that usually gets censored is the full date or the date plus the name of the square in Chinese characters.

Like I’m very critical of the CCP and I think people who idolise China’s economic growth are really glossing over the serious shit the govt does to people. But all the same I DO also feel similar to the last poster- the OP and the others later are projecting a Western-centric lens over modern China. That just discomfits me because it’s an analysis completely missing the complexity and subtly strips agency from people. 

A spoof news story on The Onion, headlined “US Soothes Upset Netanyahu With Shipment Of Ballistic Missiles”, appeared 24 hours before reports emerged that this had actually happened in real life.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted the similarity to its own story, published the following day, which carried the headline, “After Iran deal, Obama offers military upgrade to help Israel swallow bitter Iranian deal”.

The only difference between spoof and reality was that Mr Netanyahu (in reality) initially didn’t respond to the offer and later rejected it. – the second time he had turned down such a proposal – “believing that any kind of reciprocal deal would be construed as Israel having come to terms with the Iran nuclear deal”.

“We are such spoiled bigots that we are literally turning down new “toys” lest anyone get the impression that we don’t hate brown people so much anymore.”

What did the US supposedly offer? F-35 planes, troop carriers and a couple other similar things: not exactly ballistic missiles. 

Why did the US offer this? Because the coming treaty with Iran may not lead to a *nuclear* state that has wiping out Israel on its agenda(the jury is still out on this, and will be for the next several years), but it will give that same state a very large amount of money to empower its cats’-paws(Hamas and Hizbullah, among others) to fight against Israel. Conventional missiles and rockets can do a whole lot of damage, thanks - people who don’t believe me are welcome to looks at pictures of Faluja after the US Air Force was done.

Netanyahu is rejecting this because, essentially, he believes this will makes him indebted to Obama and be a tool used against him when he tries to object to the treaty to Congresspeople. He is doing this over the strenuous objections of the professional people at both the Israel Foreign Office and Security Office(what you would call Defense Office in the US)

Israel gets ~5% of US foreign aid as of 2015, this is directly as a result of the Camp-David treaties(it was what assured the treaties would be signed), and the fact Israel has been an ally of the US in a hostile environment for the last 40 years, not some candy given to a brat.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”