Cassan

this isn't antivax shit (vaccines don't cause autism, and even if they did lowering deaths from preventable diseases is always better) this is something you can learn if you talk to non-chud vets for like 20 minutes. some vets I know joked that they knew the covid vaccine wouldn't have microchips because if that technology existed, the us military would've already been using it with all the vaccines they already required

Chloé Zhao, who just won an Oscar for best director, writes fanfiction.

[ID: Screenshots of a Facebook post from user Advocatus Peregrini, which reads:

I was conversing with a fully-grown adult a few days ago, born and educated in the USA, who let this little gem drop:

“Well, it’s like Shakespeare said, “Love conquers all!”“

I pointed out that Shakespeare never said that, Virgil did, (Eclogues X) and Chaucer after him (Canterbury Tales.)

She said, “Oh I’m sure Shakespeare said that. In Romeo and Juliet!”

I sighed. I’ve been in that play several times, in different roles, and even directed it. That text does not occur in it.

But the real grind-my-teeth moment here was that if Romeo and Juliet can be said to have a message, it is most certainly not “Love conquers all,” seeing as the lovers die by their own hands with a trail of their friends and relations’ corpses in their wake.

Neither this fact, nor the fact that I knew the play, nor my explanation that Virgil and Chaucer used the phrase long before Shakespeare’s birth dented her determination that “Love conquers all” came from Shakespeare.

“You don’t know ALL the versions!” she protested.

All the versions?

Alternative Bard?

With every instinct screaming at me to let the matter drop, warning me that some horror that will not soon be absent from my nightmares waited around the next corner of this conversation. I pressed on.

It was a decision I was soon to regret.

I asked when she had first read “Romeo and Juliet.” She said she had only read it once, when she was in Junior High. In the version she was taught, Romeo and Juliet survive, are reconciled with their parents, and are married in the church with their friends Mercutio and Tybalt arm in arm in the wedding party.

“Help me into some house, Benvolio, or I shall faint.”

It turned out that her school had their own “version” of Romeo and Juliet, with an “uplifting” ending. This was printed and distributed by a religious education publisher. And it was the only version of the story that she had ever read. Of course she had HEARD other people say that the story was a tragedy, but she just assumed they were wrong.

And she did not see why MY version of Shakespeare should be considered better than HER Shakespeare, which, after all, had a much more wholesome ending.

I explained, in vain, that “my” version is definitive because Shakespeare actually wrote it (quiet, you Oxfordians. Don’t make me stop this car) and the message of the play - that when adult stubbornness meets youthful impulsiveness tragedy ensues - is lost in the ersatz, happy-clappy ending.

She said the ending that had been Frankensteined onto Shakespeare’s play by the “Christian Education” publisher was better than the original ending, “if the ending is as sad as you say it is.”

At this point, I concluded that this was a person who deserved to go through the rest of her life “…safest in shame! being fool’d, by foolery thrive!” I bid her adieu.

After the conversation, I wondered, darkly, if that was to be the fate of Shakespeare, and all other literature if the happy-clappy people get their way - as harmless and “uplifiting” as a cheerleader’s chant.

I wondered what these bowdlerizers would do with “Hamlet?” or worse, “Titus Andronicus” or “MacB-” Nothing wholesome, I’m sure. Oh, that’s right, what they can’t appropriate, they ban. Or burn.

In trying to protect children, we leave them undefended from “…the slings and arrows” that life will no doubt throw their way. Shakespeare raises the issues of tragedy - the fatal flaw, the last turning, the role of fate, as well or better than any author before or since. He is a gentle tutor, much to be preferred over that stern and dangerous teacher, Experientia Inopinatum.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

here's the intro