The amount of people who gaslight on bills like this are staggering. Saying you “cannot be jailed” for pronouns while immediately turning around and saying repeatedly not abiding by someone’s pronouns is “hate speech” and you can be jailed for it. The semantics are blaring and obvious, but the people who support this idiocy are blind to its problems. As with everything in American politics nowadays (blm, women’s rights, immigration, etc).
Israel Killed 31 of My Family Members in Gaza. The Pro-Palestine Movement Isn’t Helping.
I remain very pro-Palestine. I’m also in favor of peace and pragmatism. I’m vehemently opposed to everything Hamas represents and all of their vile acts against the Israeli people. I also think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal, responsible for killing my family members along with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. He has blood on his hands and will not be easily forgiven. Balancing these multiple truths is not something many activists seem capable of doing. They’re genuinely unwilling to acknowledge that the goal should be coexistence. To achieve true peace and anything approaching a realistic solution, we need to talk to each other as equals.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘I never thought ideas were about signalling allegiance’
“I think we’re in a hinge moment where it’s on us — it’s unclear, and I think that we’re in danger of making very big mistakes. We’re giving up things that we consider indisputable, inalienable liberal values. We’re giving those up for cheap, short-term Pyrrhic victories,” he says, gravely.
They’re Voting for Trump to ‘Save Democracy’
Like during the eclipse a few years ago, the experts said, ‘Don’t look at the sun and if you look at the sun, you’ll go blind.’ And he just looked at it anyway. And they showed pictures, and of course, he’s not blind. That’s what we need. We need an idiot that looks at the sun when the experts say not to. Not forever. Right now. For the next four years. That’s what we need.”
Your Laughter Is My Trauma: Hannah Gadsby and the Comedic Art of Emotional Manipulation
But trauma is increasingly becoming the mark of honor in today’s vomitous culture of constant revelation. Hannah Gadsby and other high-profile confessors will be fine, with access to the kind of counselling and other services that exist to ease victims of trauma back into everyday life. But texts like Nanettecreate dramas of revelation and exposure that serve as templates for everyone else, and reinforce an already widespread cultural prerequisite that women in particular continually define themselves by their traumatized selves. Attend any social justice event on matters like prison abolition and you will find panels of mostly women, mostly women of color, often LGBTQ-identified, beginning their presentations with their tales of trauma. People who do this have spoken (usually privately, and only in trusted circles) that they are often explicitly told, by funders and “allies,” that they must present their tales of woe if they want to be taken seriously.
The Great Awokening What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?
An artist can be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she makes machines precision engineered to flatter contemporary taste. An artist can also be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she sees what’s unsaid and so says something new. The first category is disposable; the second is not. The work of a critic — alert to ideals, alert to ambition — is to tell the difference.
Tems’ ‘Born in the Wild’ is a Searing Spiritual for a Tortured Generation
The album’s greatest success, though, is in the way its metaphysical themes eclipse any particular religion. This is especially resonant with the way recent generations have come to engage with spirituality. So many of us are amateur astrologers, yogis and meditators, we channel our moral compases into activism and music. We’re the generations that social media tried to destroy, living in an era where mental health crises proliferate and long-lauded institutions crumble along with their facades of integrity. All this has pushed many of us into often untraditional psychological and spiritual practices – some of us are the first in our families to go to therapy, some of us do tarot. Tems has her God and skillfully manages to make that unique relationship ubiquitous.
Afrobeats To The World: Nigerian History Is Repeating Itself
Afrobeats to the world is hanging by a thread. Without the local numbers to back our claim, we are at risk of being exposed and abandoned when pop music inevitably shifts its focus to another emerging sound. It’s another shiny thing. Look towards global music interaction with dancehall and the Caribbean creative class of the early 2000s for a lesson on capital flight, and how that can crush an entire industry.
Afrobeats To The World Gets Its Biggest Challenge
2023 gave Afrobeats to the world its most stark realization. We don’t mint enough stars for the capital we attract. We either solve for that or plateau. And you know what happens when a culture hits the stationary phase. To stand still is to fall behind.
Camille Paglia: Elite Trolling
Yet beyond the gross simplifications that have transformed certain philosophers into bogeymen for rightwing agitators, criticisms of poststructuralism’s legacy cannot so easily be dismissed. We have become extremely adept at describing what must be dismantled, unlearned and problematised, yet almost completely useless when it comes to creating compelling visions of a better society.
Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World
The New Criticism desperately needed supplementation, but that opaque hash (so divorced from genuine art appreciation) was certainly not it. I was disgusted at the rapid spread of deconstruction and post-structuralism throughout elite U.S. universities in the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. The reason it happened is really quite prosaic: a recession hit in the 1970s, and the job market in academe collapsed. Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start. It is doubtful that much if any of their work will have long-term traction.
It’s Pablo-matic” is clearly filling the same function for the more recent era of superficial hyper-moralism in art— “a time when nuance and all the confused intentions, desires, and beliefs that go along with it are considered less a way of understanding human frailty than a failure of ‘accountability,’” as Hilton Als already put it in a sharply critical essay about Douglas, Gadsby’s follow-up to Nanette.
The solution is not to smash your idols but to recognize that they are not idols at all. For Dederer, this insight came with the confessional rituals of the 12-step movement. The humility required to stand before the group and describe “what is worst about me, what is most monstrous,” and the realization that most human beings have a monstrous aspect, allowed her to see “the humanity of monsters.” This amounts to a more dramatic enactment of a pretty common experience: As children, we adore our parents, and growing up is a process of realizing how flawed they are—often with a period of extravagant adolescent rejection—before we come to understand that we love them despite those flaws, as we hope to be loved despite our own. The obdurate truth remains that some of the most beautiful and profound things humanity has created are the work of terrible people. We can decide, in a fury of righteousness, to cast those works aside. Or we can choose to view them as a kind of grace, the miraculous salvage from the inevitable wreck of our lives.
Hannah Gadsby’s Song of the Self
Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.
Coleman Hughes on the Separation of Race and State.
The same kinds of people who say that speech is violence, who say that they were actually hurt or felt unsafe because of my TED talk, are the same kinds of people right now that see Hamas slaughtering children in front of their mothers and say, “That’s not violence. That’s resistance.”
I watched ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’ so you don’t have to.
Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra. – The New York Times
For all its diversity, Egyptian society often prizes light skin and looks down on darker-skinned Egyptians. But many Egyptians and historians say the racist slurs hurled online at Ms. James, while abhorrent, distract from the real issue. The show is dragging an ancient queen into the middle of contemporary Western debates in which she has no real place, they argue.
Slavoj Žižek: The difference between ‘woke’ and a true awakening — RT Op-ed
While criticizing the PC canceling culture, we should thus always bear in mind that we share their goals (for feminism, against racism, etc.), and that we criticize their inefficiency in reaching these goals.
Fela: The Beatification of an Embattled Saint: Taking a Glance at “Fela: This Bitch of a Life”
His charismatic charm drew in many, but charisma would never be enough to promote solid ideologies except it is backed by intelligent, well-researched, objective ideas. In Nigeria, this is however not the case. Since there are, and have been, very few people who stand up to defend our rights, many Nigerians love the outspoken, and more so, those who speak for them. However warped their ideologies, these speakers usually gain cult followings. In Nigeria, when a man’s name is said too often, he becomes a god. Odumegwu Ojukwu, Nnamdi Kanu, Naira Marley, Sunday Adeyemo, Omoyele Sowore, Hush Puppi, etc, all rose to prominence because they had the loudest voices or raised the most dust. Fela falls somewhat into this category, too. His ideology was humane and even strangely prophetic but stifled by the very miseducation he sought to correct.
Mo’Nique Reveals Why She Still Wants a Public Apology From Oprah Winfrey.
When you are good on the inside, I believe it shows up on the outside. It’s a new chapter, but not because of Hollywood,” she says. “It’s a new chapter because my babies are graduating high school. It’s a new chapter because my grandson will be going to kindergarten next year, and my granddaughter to the fifth grade. Those things, for me, are the priority.” When you are good on the inside, I believe it shows up on the outside. It’s a new chapter, but not because of Hollywood,” she says. “It’s a new chapter because my babies are graduating high school. It’s a new chapter because my grandson will be going to kindergarten next year, and my granddaughter to the fifth grade. Those things, for me, are the priority.”
Tibetans Say the Dalai Lama’s ‘Suck My Tongue’ Viral Video Is Being Misinterpreted
“I’m sure that the Dalai Lama had no bad or evil intentions, and that it came, to some extent, from the naivete of how such gestures might be interpreted in our modern, hyper-sexualised society,” he said.
“I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.”
Gwyneth Paltrow verdict: Why she divides, and fascinates.
Her avatar of privileged white womanhood – inconceivably wealthy, hyper-fixated on things that most have never thought about (vaginal steamers, anyone?) – is a curious mixture of generational influence.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Trial Is Her Best Role in Years.
But, at a time when so many mainstream figures seem obsessed with appearing of-the-people despite being anything but, there is something admittedly refreshing about Paltrow’s cards-on-the-table approach. (As the hosts of the culture podcast “How Long Gone” have noted, she’s taking us back to “a different era of celebrity,” when stars didn’t bother acting as if they were just like us.)
Onyeama, who was banned from returning to the school after writing the book Nigger at Eton in 1972, which detailed the abuse he suffered, said he was surprised by the attention his story had received, and by Eton’s apology. “My attitude is that it is not necessary. It was neither solicited nor expected, it was not fought for. There’s no obligation on the part of Eton college to apologise for anything. So really, to me, it is a non-issue.
Eton College: Nigerian author recalls racist abuse
“My grandfather had no rudiments of any form of education at all and he knew nothing beyond the ‘kill or be killed’ way of life in those days,” Onyeama said. “It wasn’t done as a means of oppression. It was a means of livelihood and a demonstration of power and might. It was the way of life in the old Africa before the white man brought civilisation, so to speak,”
Harry and Meghan: Seven takeaways from their Netflix series.
Meanwhile Harry and Meghan, if they have any sense, will put it behind them and move on to the next chapter of their lives
If in doubt, be a victim, that’s the mantra of the modern world. Your parents, your employer, your siblings, some poor old biddy who got the wrong end of the stick…
Resilience, fortitude, loyalty and common sense: they belong to another era. The revolution is here, and you had better get with the programme – or face a long and harrowing march to your newfound ‘freedom’.
Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue was clever, but insidious
Dave Chappelle is, undoubtedly, a comic genius. But he’s not the only comic genius, and he’s one who, unlike many of his colleagues, hasn’t recognized that a different generation expects comedians to abide by certain rules. The first is: Don’t punch down. Chappelle can’t obey this dictum, because he embraces what scholars sometimes call a “standpoint epistemology.” Not without warrant, he regards his identity as an African American male as the most disparaged and degraded of identities. Hence, by definition, he is always punching up.
Four Uncomfortable Truths About Dave Chappelle and The Jews – U.S. News
There is a tacit dogma today that if something is funny it must also be morally good, while if something is morally bad it cannot therefore be funny. A whole lay taxonomy of comedy has arisen that insists jokes are good and funny only when they “punch up” — i.e., aim their barbs at the powerful — but bad and unfunny when they “punch down,” mocking the powerless.
But this just isn’t true. What makes something funny has nothing to do with what makes something good. In fact, it’s often the contrary. Humor is anarchic and impious. It draws its power from ridiculing whatever a society holds sacred, by saying whatever a society insists must not be said.
Netflix’s ‘Harry & Meg’ is beautiful propaganda
One can’t help but be moved in moments and it helps draw the viewer into a David and Goliath narrative. So much so, one almost forgets that any strife within the royal family is in fact, a Goliath and Goliath narrative
Uju Anya and the dangers of deliberate half-education, By ‘Tope Fasua.
The history of the world could as well be written as the history of plunders, from one society to another. Every nation on earth was formed by a group of oppressors, plunderers, enslavers, conquerors, whether from within or without. The history of Europe could be considered to be particularly bloody – perhaps simply because it was documented and made available for all to see and read.
Is it time to gatekeep Afrobeats?
“I feel gatekeeping is ridiculous, and it’s people outside the game that usually make statements like that because, at the end of the day, music is a business”, says Ini Baderinwa, an entertainment consultant and co-founder of TXT Mag.
Having children is “an amazing experience” for some, but added that “for a lot of people it isn’t, and the idea that we can’t talk openly about why that might be is a problem.”
JK Rowling sees through her enemies.
The critics rail away about her narcissism, her ignorance, her refusal to listen. But this book makes it clear that they’re badly mistaken: she has always been listening. Not with the empty-headed deference of the obsequious ally, but in the way that all good storytellers do, as a fly on the wall of the discourse, a keen observer of human affairs. And it is this — not her fame, not her money, but her ability to imagine an internet troll in all his sharp-edged human complexity — that ultimately makes Rowling uncancellable.
10 habits to stay grounded in life, according to Iyanla Vanzant
“Vanzant said during difficult stages of life, she reminds herself who she is, of her past triumphs and of her village who unconditionally support her. She said there’s one metaphor in particular that always encourages her during a rough patch.”
An open letter: why I’m leaving the cult of wokeness by Africa Brooke
If there’s one thing I’m NOT afraid of, it’s being ‘cancelled’.
‘If being cancelled means me living in integrity as a human being who thinks for themselves, CANCEL ME TODAY!
She believes that exaggerated complaints about the toxicity of men—their mansplaining and manspreading and so forth—have become a kind of tribal habit among women. In addition to eliminating much of the pleasure and charm of everyday male-female interactions, the constant demonizing of men has led us to lose sight of what is valuable and generative in male and female difference.
As a celebrity on the internet, Merchant admits that he’s “quite dull”, a result of being skittish about causing offence. He remembers once being about to tweet about New Zealand, but then being unsure if the term “Kiwi” is problematic. “When you’re policing yourself in that way, because you don’t want the headache of it [if it goes wrong], it’s absurd to me.” Writing television, he adds, you have numerous people figuring things out behind closed doors and having the space to be thoughtful. The speed and brevity of Twitter, meanwhile, leaves no such room.
“I’ve become more and more cautious because I don’t want to get into a debate,” he says. “I don’t want to have to defend a tweet from 10 years ago. It’s not interesting to me to spend time defending a point of view or a glib joke that I made at 2am.”
