The gist of the argument is that regardless of what Mueller’s probe ultimately uncovers, we already know enough to know that Buttercup is owned by Putin. In fact, I would say, we’ve actually known that since before the election. Hillary Clinton certainly knew it. Here’s the infamous “no puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet” exchange from the debates:
Every single thing she says in this clip is true now and it was true then. Putin’s ownership of Buttercup hasn’t become any more true or less true between that moment and this one. What’s happened is that the mounting evidence that Buttercup is Putin’s puppet has simply become harder and harder to explain away. Clinton mentions that Buttercup is willing to break up NATO. Well, since this exchange, we’ve seen Buttercup go off on these apparently unmotivated attacks on NATO and our European allies. What Clinton is saying here, before we went through any of this heartbreak, is that Buttercup if elected will go after NATO because that’s what Putin wants and he does what Putin wants him to do.
Of course, not enough people believed her. This is frustrating. But this is what always happens. When you have a piece of unwelcome news–like, say, that the planet is being cooked by greenhouse gases, or that the case for the war in Iraq was built on lies–nobody wants to believe you. Hillary Clinton really did her best in these debates, but she couldn’t break Cassandra’s curse.
Cassandra was cursed with the ability to foretell the future–without ever being believed. It’s a very frustrating position to be in, and it is a position that the American ‘left’ often finds itself in. We don’t have enough media exposure or cultural power to make people believe the inconvenient truths we’re trying to tell. But here is one thing I learned from the George W. Bush era: eventually, when enough actual evidence piles up, that curse gets broken. In 2003 you couldn’t find a single mainstream politician or pundit who would say that the Iraq war was unjustified and unnecessary (and a super bad idea). By 2008, the fact that Obama had not voted for the Iraq war resolution (because he wasn’t in Congress at the time) was partly responsible for his primary victory over Clinton and his victory in the general election. Public opinion had turned. The reports from the UN inspections of Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction program had exposed the central lie on which the case for war had been based. It became clear that we were accomplishing nothing and committing atrocities to do it. Eventually people realized what a disaster the war was and eventually it was ended. After a tragic and completely avoidable waste of human life.
It’s frustrating how bad things have to get before people start to accept the bad news. But we may be seeing, in the media response to the Helsinki press conference, the first cracks in Cassandra’s curse. The idea that our current president is controlled by Moscow is no longer unthinkable or unspeakable even for mainstream media outlets. It is on its way to becoming common knowledge.
The problem, Klein’s piece argues, is that there’s no obvious remedy for this: the Republicans won’t go after Buttercup and the Democrats can’t. But as I was explaining to PJ this morning: most politicians do what they think is best for them. If it gets to the point where the Congressional Republicans think that sticking with Buttercup is worse politically than turning on him, turn they will. And that all has to do with where public opinion is.
I don’t know. There have been so many points in this administration where you think, surely, surely this is the end. And then things go on. But I think we may be starting to see a kind of cumulative effect. For instance: having determined that Comey is not a loyalist, and therefore likely to pursue ‘the Russia thing’ to its limits, he fires him. To buy time, basically, the Congressional Republicans agree to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Russian interference. That’s where the Mueller investigation came from. Buttercup has since then been trying to discredit everyone associated with it, even the FBI itself. That’s appalling; it’s appalling that it has worked as long as it has; but the Stzrok hearing, circus that it was, has exposed the absurdity of Buttercup’s claims about this. Mueller’s Friday indictments laid the ground for the Monday evening questions which elicited the most shameless performance so far of Buttercup’s beholdenness to Putin. We’re all thinking, this is insane, nothing ever sticks to him, why not…but it does stick to him. It does, over time, slow him down.
Take this thing about separating families applying for asylum. So much about that situation is still awful; but there is also the fact that Buttercup reversed his position in response to public disapproval. I had just assumed that would never happen with this president; but it has. (Perhaps because Putin doesn’t actually care too much about US border politics.) And that shows you something I never thought I would see: he’s worried. Regardless of what he projects, he’s afraid that if he pushes too far, it’s all going to collapse.
Why would this matter when the last thing didn’t matter? Because this is an additive process. Last thing + current thing matters more. Last thing + current thing + future thing + (however many future things it takes) will eventually matter.
Last night there was an impromptu protest outside the White House over Helsinki. According to The Hill, there’s another one planned for tonight. There’s some talk about keeping it going until Buttercup resigns. Monday night’s group was small, but maybe tonight’s will be bigger. Maybe the answer to the question “why aren’t Americans in the streets?” is about to become “we are.”
This paragraph is kind of buried at the end, but let me say one or two things about it:
“While Mr. Trump’s insistence on granting Mr. Putin that status was misguided, it paled beside his betrayal of the FBI and his own senior intelligence officials. Incredibly, Mr. Trump appeared to endorse a cynical suggestion by Mr. Putin that Mr. Mueller’s investigators be granted interviews with a dozen Russian intelligence officers indicted in the DNC hack in exchange for Russian access to associates of William Browder, a financier whose exposure of high-level corruption and human rights crimes in Moscow led to the adoption by Congress of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on those responsible. Mr. Putin’s citation of bogus Russian charges against Mr. Browder was matched by Mr. Trump’s garbled reference to “the Pakistani gentleman” who was falsely alleged by right-wing conspiracy theorists to be behind the leak of DNC emails.”
All right now.
Putin is as obsessed with the Magnitsky Act as Buttercup is with his electoral college victory. You remember that meeting between Russian operatives and Don Jr. et al. at Trump Tower that was so shocking to everyone back in the day? Don Jr. made some noise about it having reference to “adoptions,” but it was really about the Magnitsky Act.
There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” That would be Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican representative from California, and our own Buttercup. Here’s a nice long piece on Rohrabacher from The Atlantic, which basically does everything *but* just come out and say that Rohrabacher is a Russian asset. Anyway, Rohrabacher’s most embarrassing manuevers have also been around the Magnitsky Act. He was responsible for getting a Russian-made anti-Magnistky Act propaganda film screened at the Newseum in Rosslyn–he wanted to show it to Congress, but his colleagues wouldn’t let him–and has been lobbying for years to either eliminate or gut the Magnitsky Act.
Why does Putin care about the Magnitsky Act? Because it costs him money. The Magnitsky Act enables the US government to freeze the US assets of Russian oligarchs who are responsible for major human rights violations. Since many of these oligarchs launder a lot of their money in the US, this is a serious inconvenience not just for Putin but for many of the oligarchs who might one day band together to take Putin out if they got pissed off enough and thought he was vulnerable enough.
“[William] Browder is one of a few sources I’ve seen recently trying to make the argument that none of this is really about destabilizing democracy around the globe or sowing chaos in the US; that we are giving Putin too much credit for caring about things other than himself, his money, and his continued political survival. If that’s true, it would explain why, despite having installed his puppet, he’s still responding in draconian style to the passage of this new Congressional act that makes it more difficult for said puppet to do what Putin obviously wants him to do–which is to return all the assets that were frozen when Obama imposed the sanctions. It is also worth noting that a lot of Russian money has already been laundered through Buttercup’s properties, and so in a lot of ways, Putin already owned him even before 2016.”
Why am I going over all this? Because I’m flabbergasted that Putin is now trying to leverage Buttercup into letting Putin start harassing the people who were responsible for the passage of the Magnitsky Act. It shows you that Putin, whatever else you may say about him, is capable of remaining on task even when interacting with Buttercup; it’s kind of mindboggling to reflect that just as Buttercup may have run for President purely to get back at Barack Obama, Putin may have helped Buttercup become president purely to get rid of the Magnitsky act; and that Buttercup is at this moment and probably for the rest of his presidency a tool of Vladimir Putin. Or, as the good people of the Washington Post editorial staff put it:
“In Helsinki, Mr. Trump again insisted “there was no collusion” with Russia. Yet in refusing to acknowledge the plain facts about Russia’s behavior, while trashing his own country’s justice system, Mr. Trump in fact was openly colluding with the criminal leader of a hostile power.”
Every single fucking Reagan Republican should be in the streets demanding impeachment right now. All that “soft on Communism” bullshit for all the 1980s when YOUR PARTY would turn out to be the one that delivered up the US government to a Russian dictator.
I really hope most people are aware of why Amok Time was made in the first place
I should start off by saying that Star Trek was made with a female audience in mind. It’s why Captain Kirk’s shirt rips and why he’s shirtless a lot, since the makers of the show were expecting to draw in a female audience with the good looks of William Shatner. Star Trek was even considered fake sci fi for girls by most male sci fi fans.
I have to mention that first because the show was banking on the female audience to fawn over Captain Kirk, and many of the women watching did, but they soon realized that even more women were fawning over Spock. When the show got renewed for a second season, they wanted to make sure they could retain the same female audience, most importantly the Spock fangirls, so they decided to treat their female audience with Amok Time.
Every single decision involved in the plot of the episode was made with “how do we give these ladies what they want without hurting his likability?”. Pon Farr was made up so Spock would have a reason to act super horny while still being the same alien everyone knew and love, T’Pring leaving Spock while Spock was planning on being loyal to her to show off how loyal he is to romantic partners, and his Pon Farr being cured without actually having sex was to keep him single.
TL;DR Amok Time was made for straight girl wank bank but instead they created the K/S community
I don’t think it was inadvertent at all – Theodore Sturgeon, the writer of Amok Time, was openly gay and was known for constantly trying to slip gay shit past the censors. He also wrote the backrub scene and lots of other k/s moments. Lgbt people in the 60s wanted to see themselves represented in media just as much as we do, but because of censorship laws it all had to be subtextual.
I’d like to look at this from another angle, because I think there’s more to it than Sturgeon was gay, therefore the gay subtext.
At the time Trek was airing, CBS thought of it as a kids’ show and boys were assumed to be the primary audience of Sci-Fi. In 1967 – 1969 girls were not thought of as being interested in Sci-Fi for its own sake (no matter how wrong media producers were about that). Girls were the half of the demographic that had to be brought in by “girl things”, e.g., fashion and romance and cute (non-threateningly good looking) male characters. An example would be the inclusion of Chekov with his Monkees haircut during the second season.
So yes, when it was discovered that there was actually a female demographic gravitating to the show on its own, for its own reasons (e.g., Spock, the dynamic between Spock & Kirk), then Roddenberry, a very clever man, decided to exploit these things for all they were worth.
One of the best and most time-honored ways of doing this is through the “Are They Or Aren’t They (Lovers)?” question (aka the Bromance), primarily of interest (so it is assumed) to the female audience. What makes the question work is that it’s always hinted at but never, ever answered. If you answer the question, you resolve the undercurrent of sexual tension and you kill the show (or it must become another kind of show).
It is also something that Theodore Sturgeon, a well-established science fiction writer at the time “Amok Time” was written, would have known. He would also have known where to look for a story idea that would really grab the audience, not with fistfights, rubber monsters or planet-devouring robots, but with the question: What do I (and the rest of the audience) most want to see? The answer is always the forbidden, the thing held back, kept under wraps.
“Amok Time” and Pon Farr is one of the best examples of “Are They Or Aren’t They?” because the engine that drives the story is that strong undercurrent of unresolved sexual tension (aka gay subtext). At the time the show aired, few in the audience would have spotted that subtext, which was how they got away with it, but the female and gay contingent would certainly have felt its effects. When a show brushes close to your half-conscious fantasies, it is absolutely electrifying, though you may not be able to explain exactly why.
Sturgeon headed straight for the forbidden: to strip Spock emotionally naked. Pon Farr was the vehicle with which to do it. Show after show (and Nimoy himself, as he developed the character) gave the female audience teasing little hints at the inner Spock, the smouldering interior landscape, the potentially barbaric sexual and emotional inner being he was keeping hold of with an iron fist. “Amok Time” is an emotional striptease that pays off by symbolically answering Are They Or Aren’t They?
In writing, and this includes television writing, when you have written a fight scene, particularly one that is cathartic, you should examine it with the same critical eye as you would a sex scene. This is because in terms of character development, fight scenes and sex scenes do the same thing: they strip the character bare by showing you their “inner animal”, their deepest needs, desires and fears. This is something else Sturgeon would have known. It is the reason Pon Farr is structured to only have two possible resolutions: sex or a fight (or denied either, death). So when Spock finally does explode, how does it happen? A fight to the death not with Stonn, his actual rival for T’Pring, but with Kirk (with the acknowledgment that Spock didn’t choose Kirk for this purpose, but Sturgeon, the writer did).
On an emotional and symbolic level, the answer to Are They Or Aren’t They is a resounding YES, THEY ARE. On a conscious, visual level, the answer remains ambiguous, a hint, subtext, thus keeping the unresolved sexual tension intact. However physical the fight, the consummation remains emotional only, and thus the show, and the chemistry between Kirk & Spock, goes on. It’s an elegant solution to a big problem: How can you give the audience what it wants, without really giving them what they want and destroying the show (as it would have been at that time)?
So IMO, Pon Farr was not quite so deliberately created to give Trek a hefty dose of gay subtext, nor is that subtext just an accidental byproduct. It’s a great writer weaving all of that together to make a very compelling story.
damn….
Just one last thing, Sturgeon won a “Gaylactic Spectrum Award” (given to LGBT+ science fiction/fantasy novels and short stories) for a piece he wrote called The World Well Lost. It’s about humans who discover a pair of male aliens who are deeply, intrinsically in love, kinda like Spock and Jim ☺️
(Also, I don’t believe Sturgeon was gay, I believe he was actually bisexual or sexually fluid, but I’ll have to check because I don’t know for sure.)
Reblogging for the excellent commentary AND this line which I want to be engraved on my headstone:
“…
Show after show (and Nimoy himself, as he developed the character) gave the female audience teasing little hints at the inner Spock,
the smouldering interior landscape, the potentially barbaric sexual and emotional inner being he was keeping hold of with an iron fist. “Amok Time” is an emotional striptease that pays off by symbolically answering Are They Or Aren’t They?”
tumblr is massively wrong about the Amazon strike and there are a few key people trying to get the right information out and y’all are too focused on sticking it to Amazon to bother getting it right. @brainstatic started noticing yesterday that the dates people were posting were funky and @janothar started posting that even the Spanish strike isn’t starting on the 10th and yet y’all are still spreading this like it’s fact. I honestly have not seen a damn thing about the strike literally ANYWHERE but tumbr so I decided to use our good friend google and here’s what I’ve found.
There are a handful of other sites reporting that the strike started on the 10th and that other EU countries are participating; however, as @brainstatic pointed out already, these all link back to the same .info site that is not reliable and is not backed by reliable news sources (unlike Reuters, which is a reliable news source). The Observer article that links to the .info site above also literally uses tumblr’s “the boycott starts on the 10th” as a source for the boycott starting on the 10th… meaning that TUMBLR started those rumors, not the Observer article, and there is no reliable source for the boycott starting on the 10th other than the fact that y’all made that shit up and some online news source picked it up and ran with it. You can’t use an article that sites you as the source as a source for your bullshit. Got it?
If you want to support the striking workers, know when they are striking and what they want from you. Know what the actual activists involved are calling for. Know when and where the strike is taking place. As of right now, the strike is ONLY in Spain, it is 3 days long starting on the 16th, and it is ONLY focused around Prime Day. It did not start yesterday on the 10th. It is primarily about raising wages and other similar issues in Spanish factories, which are unionized already. It is not about people dying in American Amazon factories. Having half-assed, half-researched boycotts here and there that do not correspond to the strikes and are not well coordinated is not going to make a point. Having an organized, well-informed, large movement is what gets your point across. So stop what you’ve been doing and do this right. Boycott Prime Day and stop spreading misinformation.
‘The retailer, which last year made more than £6bn of revenues in
Britain, has a disciplinary system under which points are accrued for
illness. Workers are issued a penalty point for each episode of
sickness.
Workers are told that more than one point will result
in a “series of counselling and disciplinary meetings” and between four
and six points can result in dismissal.
In one case, a woman who spent three days in hospital with a kidney
infection was docked two points, reduced to one on appeal, despite
providing a hospital note.
The system has been revealed in an investigation by The Sunday Times at Amazon’s sorting depot in Dunfermline, Scotland.
The
undercover reporter was paid £7.35 per hour by an agency that supplies
workers to Amazon, but was left with less than the minimum wage after
paying £10 for the agency’s bus which took her to the site 40 miles from
her home in Glasgow.
It emerged this weekend that some low-paid
workers are camping out in woodland near the sorting depot to avoid
paying the bus costs and ensure they are left with more than the minimum
wage…
The reporter obtained a job with PMP Recruitment, one of the two main
agencies that hires and supervises workers at the Dunfermline depot.
The investigation found:
Workers being threatened with dismissal
if they accrued too many points for illness, late attendance or
absence, or for making too many errors or failing to hit productivity
targets.
A claim from a worker in Amazon’s on-site first-aid
clinic that workers were under pressure to hit targets and were
suffering injuries in the rush to collect products
Workers were
expected to cover more than 10 miles a day in the warehouse collecting
items, but water dispensers to ensure they avoided dehydration were
regularly empty
The reporter was told she had to sign an
opt-out of the working time directive, which limits weekly hours to 48,
in order to get a job.
The reporter was employed as a “temporary
warehouse operative” at Amazon’s vast plant in Fife. She worked in the
“picking” department, which involved retrieving items from across
several floors of the sprawling warehouse, according to orders displayed
on a handheld scanner she was given. She worked at least 10 hours a
day, with an unpaid 30-minute lunch break and two 15-minute paid breaks….
Under the system
set out in the Amazon temporary associate handbook, half a point is
issued to recruits who are late to work or late back from a break; one
point for “one period of sickness”; and three points for “no call, no
show”. The undercover reporter was told that anyone who was more than 30
seconds late in arriving at work or returning after a break would be
subject to the half-point penalty.
Workers were also told that if
they made more than one error a week in collecting items or failed to
hit productivity targets they could be subject to a disciplinary
process, which could result in dismissal.’
how the fuck are the unions allowing this???? disgusting
Support the Amazon general strike today, July 10th – do not buy from Amazon! Even if your intention is to make some kind of statement with your purchase – don’t, this is (as other bloggers before me have said) the equivalent of crossing a picket line and still handing them profit!
The strike is from today until the 18th a full week, stand in solidarity with the workers they deserve so much better than this
Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed
Pregnant women in immigration detention under the Trump administration say they have been denied medical care, shackled around the stomach, and abused.
Two weeks after arriving in the US seeking asylum, E, 23, found herself in a detention cell in San Luis, Arizona, bleeding profusely and begging for help from staff at the facility. She was four months pregnant and felt like she was losing her baby. She had come to the US from El Salvador after finding out she was pregnant, in the hopes of raising her son in a safer home.
“An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me,” she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. “I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.”
Stuck in detention and having lost her baby, E says she wouldn’t have come to the US seeking a safer life if she’d known what would happen. She asked that her full name not to be used out of fear of repercussions while in detention and for her family back home.
“My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them,” she said.
Protest the working conditions, not what the boss makes.
Getting paid more does nothing for the working conditions where it’s so stressful someone attempts suicide. Or do you really think that kind of work suddenly gets better because bigger paycheck?
Also, I just want to point out, a lot of this is illegal as fuck. If these claims are true and not just butthurt little kids because “wha whaaa whaaa! I want more money!” Then they should file a report and get that shit handled. Posting on social media isn’t going to do shit.
You’re only half right, and clearly not abreast of the issue, m8.
While you’re correct that the working conditions are shit and illegal af (my m8 worked there in their Kent WA facility) and the way they purposefully stretch your hours and call you 30 mins before they want you there for random shifts that they will fire you if you don’t take. The piss bottle thing is legit. If he didn’t run across the warehouse and sort quickly enough he got screamed at and told he had to do manual unpaid overtime or he was shitcanned, and they would blacklist him for any other company he would apply to.
Any time he got a phone call from work while off shift he would end up in tears due to stress.
Reporting the conditions didn’t help.
The other problem is they are being paid the absolute lowest wage that is legal to pay them, and of those 60 hr weeks? Obit 40 hrs of it gets paid. Rest is mandatory unpaid ot.
Jeff Bezos makes billions. Please tell me why he can’t afford to pay his workers fair wages and to fix working conditions? Why he refuses Seattles $15 minimum and the yearly taxes? I know it’s bc he can get away with it currently, but that’s why ppl are upset. That’s why they’re bringing up his wage. Bc this issue is a 2 parter m8. Just sayin.
That’s the thing. All of this people can legit sue for. I’m taking you at face value here. I’m coming at this like you are telling me the gospel truth. Reports need to be filed. Lawsuits filed. Because this shit is ILLEGAL. But people would rather bitch on social media.
Get me?
Galaxy brain tumblr user: Why don’t the completely broke, ununionized factory workers just sue Amazon, the multi billion dollar multinational corporation?
They have to run every time they move, they don’t even get pee breaks, they work 60 hours a week, where the fuck are they going to get the time and energy to organize or file a lawsuit? Where are they going to get the money? You fucking moron.
Also lol @ “if it’s illegal just report it and it’ll get fixed”. Mate this is America, when was the last time that worked for anybody?
And, not only that, but as of the Supreme Court’s ruling this May, workers can no longer band together and file a class action suit if their individual contracts include a mandatory arbitration clause. You can thank McConnell, Trump, and Gorsuch for that one.
Hearseeno 