to be fair les misérables IS a teen & young adult book if it is somewhere around 2012-2014 and you are fifteen years old, gay, and most importantly really really weird
They don’t even make us read that book in school in France, I can’t fathom why foreigners are so obsessed with this piece of work by Victor Hugo, which - honestly I don’t really like Victor Hugo, but that’s like his 6th best…
At least Hernani started riots ! Iiked Hernani, could people show the play, wouldn’t that be fun?
Why was this not a phase… I’ve written I’m a les Mis hater in my bio since I saw that shitty movie that cut Gavroche, the only song French people know. It’s been so many years…
Americans who plan on voting for Kamala thinking the lesser of two evils is a solution need to take a serious look at France.
Macron was the “lesser of two evils” the first time. By the second time we knew the solution was to kick him out because he was NOT the lesser of two evils but too many white people kept believing in his lesser of two evils bullshit.
You know what’s happening now? The left won the election in the beginning of July. Macron chose to ignore it.
Macron chose a prime minister from the party that got the 4th place at the election. That party is a far right party labeled just right wing. Yesterday we got the new government chosen by that prime minister.
The Home Secretary believes that colonialism had great positive aspects (on the indigenous population) and that “Africans want for France to not repent and to accept that there was positive aspects and to take back its leadership in Africa”. He is also against making “forced conversion therapy” illegal against LGBT+ people.
The Higher education and Research Secretary, believes that “Islamoleftism” is a problem and a threat in higher education and that it must be fought against (Judeo-Bolshevism is so 1917-1945 so France switched things up a couple years ago). He also voted against putting abortion right in the French constitution and against gay marriage.
The Secretary of State against Discrimination was going to change its name to include the protection of secularism (which in France means the protection of Islamophobia and even supporting and being an islamophobe) after a pushback it looks like it wasn’t included in the name BUT it will still be one of his jobs. So the guy chosen supported Stanislas a private catholic schools who was involved in a scandal about favoring students but also about encouraging homophobia, Islamophobia and sexism in the school. He also believes that racism and homophobia exist in France like everywhere else but that very few people are racists or homophobes and that the real problem for minorities is the left who accuses people of being racists and/or homophobes. He thinks that there’s a problem with immigrants and immigration in France and that mass immigration must be stopped (for the record if you respect the Tumblr rules every single one of you was born before he got his French citizenship). But hey he is Moroccan so apparently it automatically means he ain’t racist and anti immigrants. (Say whatever you want about France but this country is hella good at finding the sell outs in each community)
I could go on and on about these three and about the rest of the government. Some of them want to go back on the legalization of gay marriage, how some of them want to make the access to universities and any public space to women with a hijab which will quickly turn into a ban for Arab and Black women to wear baggy clothes as a whole in public spaces…. But I will stop here.
All I have to say is that voting for the lesser of two evils even when people were saying that the lesser of two evils was still a danger for People of color and LGBT+ people turned France into Germany before WW2 except the targets are Muslims and people indentified as Muslims instead of Jews. But go on and vote for Kamala if you want but don’t say that nobody warned you and don’t pretend to be all righteous.
Small thoughts on the Netflix Three Body Problem adaptation
1) We are making it international" they said. They replaced all the international collaboration, the counsel of world leaders that we see throughout the books with… two British dudes deciding everything by themselves, not accountable to anyone. They managed to make it less international than the book. But more than that, they perverted the very themes Liu Cixin wove into his books, the very ideas the books revolve on: group mentality & collaboration versus the individual, banal or exceptional. The Netflix show removed the very notion of collective, of group mentality, without which there is nothing to contrast individuality against.
2) They made Ye Wenjie an unrecognizable shell of herself. Her back is not held up straight. An old Ye Wenjie, cursing, sloushing, moving to England. Is it really Ye Wenjie? It bothers me so much that they could get away with saying this is Ye Wenjie. This is not her.
3) They “simplified” the science to a point where nothing is explained, nothing can survive through any kind of analysis of the logic of the things shown & the actions taken. Just one example, because I’ve seen the headset being praised for looking “cool”. It’s not cool if it’s at the expense of a logical plot. The futurist headsets we are shown imply that either 1° the Trisolarians are able to send sizable physical objects [which they physically can’t, the limit to what they could send through space is clearly explained, it is the two protons they did send Earth] or 2° the Trisolarians shared schematics of advanced technology with the ETO, letting them to develop the headsets. But that is the one thing the Trisolarians would never do, as their entire plan rely on humans’ technology not being able to develop any further than it already has.
4) I thought it was gonna be lesser than the Tencent show. I didn’t expect it to be so utterly lacking on all front. If there was one point of worthy comparison, one point where I expected Netflix to do a good job, if only to show they had a bigger budget, it was “the” boat scene. Tencent spent 25% of their budget on that scene, so I expected Netflix would try to make their boat scene more spectacular, better on a technical level, to show that the US special effects are undefeated or something. I would have never expected that they wouldn’t even try to compete. That scene happened in the episode 5 of the Netflix show & it’s underwhelming. It has no gravitas, but of course it can’t have any gravitas, it’s not the culmination of the collaboration of humans across the globe, demonstrating that they can fight back & achieve greatness when they are united, of course it can’t be the same when it’s just 10 British people working in isolation. They didn’t just do something underwhelming on a technical level, they did something underwhelming on a narrative level. Just like the scene with the insects, the culmination of the Tencent show had no weigh & no impact when done by Netflix.
5) The misguided belief that somehow an American show could show Chinese history (the cultural revolution) to an international audience better & with more accuracy than a Chinese show to a Chinese audience because of the censorship in China is laughable. An international audience would need more context to understand a historical time that they or their parents didn’t live through, but that’s not what Netflix did. What they showed was mildly violent & shocking to be sure, but not very accurate to the content of the book. They cut out a lot of plot, but they could have done that, simplified it without stripping it of context or changing the story so much it resonates wrong. I’ll just give small examples:
on the stage when they condemn Ye Wenjie’s father (with microphones in front of a huge audience???) they keep saying “lies”, which makes no sense, that’s not the logic, the charge is propagating western propaganda, upholding western values & a capitalist way of thinking, not lying (see the end of page note on that point).
they call Ye Wenjie comrade during her time at the Red Coast (in the book [& in the Tencent show] her status as a political dissident & therefore NOT a comrade is emphasized, stated explicitly. If you don’t understand the social implication, let’s simplify & say that being a comrade is like being a citizen, not a comrade, not part of the group, not trusted).
Netflix Ye Wenjie unironically says: “how awesome would it be if China was the first [country to make contact with aliens]”. She says it, mind you, not in front of the political commissioner because she is asking for something & need to butter him up, no, she is just enthusiastically patriotic? She is shown to be enthousiastically patriotic toward China & LATER she sells out the planets to the Trisolarians.
The inconsistencies are not only baffling deviations from the source materials that display a complete lack of comprehension of Ye Wenjie as a character, as well as an astonishing disregard for the accuracy of the ideology of (Mao-area) communism & the history of Maoist China. They didn’t show a lot of content, so they could have easily avoided making such basis mistakes.
What really pisses me off is that I keep seeing press pieces saying that the Netflix version “doesn’t shy away from showing”, “won’t censor” the part of the story taking place during the Cultural Revolution, sometimes outright saying it as a reason to watch the Netflix version over the Tencent one, implying to the readers the Tencent version is heavily censored, when in reality the Tencent version spend a lot more time than on it than the Netflix one, showing how bad it was, in an accurate way, very close to the content of the book. The political rhetoric fallacies, the bureaucracy, the hypocrisy, how miserable everything is, is shown very well.
[Disclaimer, I’m not Chinese, it’s not my culture, it’s not the country I live in. But in France there are Maoists, so I’ve learned just enough about the history of Mao & the Cultural Revolution to hold very negative views about it. In reverse, in a very racist, sinophobic way, many Westerners think Chinese people can’t think for themselves if they don’t hate every single thing about China & they lump in the country, the people & the Xi Jinping administration. It’s absurd to ask other people to hate their country, to have no pride in anything from their country. What hypocrisy, in every country, nationalism is taught to us from the time we first attend school. Patriotism is a requirement, it’s ingrained, internalized in all of us. We can be critical of our country’s history, of our government, or many things & still find pride & love for some things. I know that’s the way I feel about France.]
Censorship does exist in China, it’s exist materially in a way that differs from the Hays Code in the US in both the scope of its autority & its function. It is enacted by a governement agency called the NRTA & everything that airs on tv has to be clear by the NRTA first. A clear guideline is not provided, we know what passed it, creators know what didn’t, so to a lesser extent we know what doesn’t passes NRTA censorship: graphic violence, nudity, sex, ghosts (or BL since 2021…) et caetera. It would be dishonest to pretend that the topic of Cultural Revolution is a taboo that cannot be spoken about, as if the current administration has a positive view on it & would therefore not allow it to be criticized. What is censored (as far as we know, what is different from the book) in the Tencent show is the opening scene, a very graphic violent scene. That’s it. It’s censored, probably more for the violence than anything else. Some people find it disappointing, but the symbolic meaning of that violence in not hidden in the narrative & the event are instead visually & auditory implied in a short flashback at the end of one episode.
NB) In the opening scene of the Netflix show (the same one that was cut on Tencent), the political tribunal has someone accusing: “Lies, all lies!”. But lying is not a political charge. It sounds ridiculous. They just had to follow the book, they didn’t have to understand communism, but no, they had to come up with things themselves… My best guess it that the creators didn’t realized that “lying is bad” is a cultural value that is not universal.
I don’t know if “lying” is a big deal in China, but I know it’s not a big deal in my culture & in a Marxist/communist political context, lying is just not “a thing”. They are a lot of charges you can get in a political tribunal:
-individualist behavior,
-liberalism/imperialistic thinking,
- lack of self-criticism (Maoism famously has the three principles, one of which being the practice of self-criticism so you/we can do better).
-deceiving the masses with xx propaganda [so they don’t revolt when they would if they knew the truth], that’s as close to lying is a political charge can get,
-aspiring to bourgeois comfort [that can mean profiting of other people’s labor, not doing enough or not wanting to sacrifice your life for the cause],
- treason & of course
- being counterrevolutionary / working against the revolution, are the two big ones !
Can you see what is not on that list ? Lying is not on that list.
dni unless you have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, all the modern languages, all while possessing a certain something in your air and manner of walking, the tone of your voice, your address and expressions-
In 2012, a legendary rap feud occured in France, between the rappers Booba, Rohff & La Fouine (Morsay tried to get involved). I thought it could be interesting for Americans to hear about it, if you want.
If we had to make comparaison, Booba would be French Drake, he had big mainstream success (melodic stuff too, went on the radio) pretty much apolitical music (he is also half white), Rohff would be Kendrick Lamar though the parallels doesn’t work as well (Médine or Kery James would fit better, if you want to listen to any French rap, listen to them) Rohff’s rap is more political & more culturally relevant, rooted in the neighborhood.
The similarities end here, because unlike J. Cole, Drake or Kendrick, La Fouine went to prison several times adding up to a couple of years (but mostly before his rapping carrier), he served time at the same prison at around the same time as
Booba, who was already a rapper when he went to prison for a year and a half. After that he went into detention for a few months two more times over the years.
Rohff did some prison after he became a rapper, but most notably, because of the rap feud I’m gonna talk about with Booba. There was a fight in 2014 that led to someone being in a coma & a five year prison sentence for Rohff (he served a few months).
For this reason & others (like the fact that all the French rappers I mentioned, all stand with Palestine), the Drake / Kendrick Lamar feud makes me laugh with indulgence.
You can listen to the tracks if you want to witness this glorious, very sexist & homophobic history (you can try to google translate the lyrics but most of it is slang they probably won’t translate well), but I offer a summary of the feud, with some very short explanations of the events, lyrics & a few translated lines :
Responding to Rohff calling him a “zoulette” (an offhand on tv in August 2012, source) Booba dropped “Wesh Morray” (Yo couz’), in september 2012. There is not much there, in the song he said he is on top (money, cars, friends, rap game), talks about being a thug (“I come home from the street, I never came home from work”), it’s really not his best imo.
The response came 5 days later, using the same music sample. Rohff attacks Booba on his race (Booba is half white) & on his credentials:
“you use our codes, our words, our methods” “neither arab nor black, the biggest liar of this age”
(paraphrasing) “Diams (woman rapper) had better sales than you, that’s why you came after her”
“stop your "thug life” [bullshit], Tupac is turning in his grave", “Kery [James] didn’t mention your name, what are you talking about”, [that means he is not a real one]
“nothing glorious about showing off your little criminal record, real ones don’t need to prove anything, you didn’t grow up in the ‘hood, you’ll never be like us, don’t make it a whole thing”
(Rohff destroyed him basically).
Two months later, La Fouine came into play, mentioning it in a song “I hear the clash about you on the radio, but like the call to the mosque you can’t respond” (which is a bad burn, almost two months & Booba hadn’t fought back, also Booba not attending mosque, is not a good Muslim, very easy jab to make). He also released a 20 min video talking shit about Booba, which he can because of the common past with the Fresnes prison which is apparently were La Fouine started disliking Booba.
After that, Booba avoided Rohff (he cancelled a birthday party to avoid him :) ) & he fired back two months later (early 2013, things didn’t move as fast back then), his song barely mentioning Rohff, it heavily focused on La Fouine having a sexual assault on a minor on his criminal record (there is audio evidence in the track of someone he said is a cop saying it, on a phone call that was a setup)
Four days later, La Fouine fired back (choosing in very poor taste imo to use as the hook “besides Booba I didn’t rape anyone”), mostly mocking him for his cowardness “you refuse to meet-up & you piss yourself” & bragging about his wealth: “Fouiny [himself] is a homeowner”.
This is one line I still remember this song for, though “you have tatoos, we have scars” Ten years later I still love that line.
La Fouine pushed back further on the sexual assault on a minor allegation, saying Booba is irrelevant in the rap game so he has to ressort to making up lies, that the woman “cop” on the phone call said he had done sexual assault on a minor in 1997, when he himself was 15 (he really should have stopped there, but then he said “I don’t know, in junior high, I probably put my hand on a girl’s ass for a second… Oups, sorry! But I swear, Booba besides you I didn’t rape anyone”).
Booba fight back a week later, calling La Fouine “Emile” refering to the famous rapist & murderer of disabled minors (Emile Louis). He provided further audio evidence of La Fouine having committed sexual assault, at some point in the song he says (doing a voice as if he were La Fouine) “send to minors up [to my Miami appartement], I’m worse than R. Kelly” (this is from february 2013 btw). He also accused La Fouine of just doing business (so not making a lot of money from selling records) & not being relevant to the rap game.
A month after that, La Fouine & Booba had a fight in the Miami hotel they were both staying at.
The fight that led to an unrelated party ending up in a coma happened a year later.
From what I can tell, the hatchet hasn’t been buried & the only reason things didn’t get worse is that Booba actually is a coward, who actively avoid them (or he is wise not to engage in meaningless physical conflict, but why he has to talk so loud then?)
Anyway, no way the Kendrick Lamar / Drake feud goes as far as this, but still, pretty entertaining. Less criminal record, better music, you win some, you lose some.
This song, written in 1941, became the hymn of the French Resistance (which was not a unified group at all, they were communists, socialists, republicans, nationalists & all sorts of people who couldn’t stand each other but united for a common goal).
It is sung, every year, in every town & village, during WWII memorials, with elected officials present, fist on their heart. Because the time of French occupation by the Nazis, of bombing & starvations, of random imprisonment of the men, of so many deaths, is a time impossible to forget. I’ve put a youtube video with the music, you don’t need to listen to it, but people read the lyrics below.
My friend, do you hear the crows’ dark flight over our plains? My friend, do you hear the muffled cries of the country being shackled? Ahoy! Partisans, workers and farmers, the alarm has sounded! Tonight the enemy shall know the price of blood and tears.
Climb out of the mine, come down from the hills, comrades, Take the guns, the munitions and the grenades from under the straw; Ahoy killers, with bullets and knives kill swiftly! Ahoy “saboteur”, be careful with your burden of dynamite!
We’re the ones who smash the bars of jails, for our brothers, Hate chasing us, it’s hunger that drives us, dire poverty. There are countries where people sleep in their beds and dream. Here, you see, us we walk and us we kill, us we die.
Here, each one of us knows what he wants, what he does when he passes by; Friend, if you fall, a friend comes from the shadows in your place. Tomorrow, black blood will dry in the sun on the roads Whistle, companions, in the night, Freedom listens to us.
————————-
In the town some of my familly lived (Figeac), some resistants managed to assassinate a few SS officiers. As a retaliation, the German took all men from 18 to (I can’t remember the exact age, but all men able to wok) & sent them the work camps, including my great uncle, who cam back after the war, emaciated, but at least alive. The resistants were never blamed for what the Germans did in retaliation to their attempts.
The cowards & the traitors were those who collaborated. The Regime de Vichy, which Maréchal Pétain instated during French occupation, fully collaborated with the Nazis, sometimes going out of their way to do what they thought the Nazis would like (including finding Jewish people in hiding & delivering them to their death).
History doesn’t look kindly on those traitors, whilst the Resistants, who killed with knifes, guns & bombs, are celebrated. Ironic that 80 years later, French elected officials can find glory in our history of Resistance, claim again & again we are the country of “Human Rights”, whilst condemning the Palestinian people to their death by refusing to do the right thing & stand in support of them, be it of their resistance or their inalienable right to life & equal rights.
1) We are making it international" they said. They replaced all the international collaboration, the counsel of world leaders that we see throughout the books with… two British dudes deciding everything by themselves, not accountable to anyone. They managed to make it less international than the book. But more than that, they perverted the very themes Liu Cixin wove into his books, the very ideas the books revolve on: group mentality & collaboration versus the individual, banal or exceptional. The Netflix show removed the very notion of collective, of group mentality, without which there is nothing to contrast individuality against.
2) They made Ye Wenjie an unrecognizable shell of herself. Her back is not held up straight. An old Ye Wenjie, cursing, sloushing, moving to England. Is it really Ye Wenjie? It bothers me so much that they could get away with saying this is Ye Wenjie. This is not her.
3) They “simplified” the science to a point where nothing is explained, nothing can survive through any kind of analysis of the logic of the things shown & the actions taken. Just one example, because I’ve seen the headset being praised for looking “cool”. It’s not cool if it’s at the expense of a logical plot. The futurist headsets we are shown imply that either 1° the Trisolarians are able to send sizable physical objects [which they physically can’t, the limit to what they could send through space is clearly explained, it is the two protons they did send Earth] or 2° the Trisolarians shared schematics of advanced technology with the ETO, letting them to develop the headsets. But that is the one thing the Trisolarians would never do, as their entire plan rely on humans’ technology not being able to develop any further than it already has.
4) I thought it was gonna be lesser than the Tencent show. I didn’t expect it to be so utterly lacking on all front. If there was one point of worthy comparison, one point where I expected Netflix to do a good job, if only to show they had a bigger budget, it was “the” boat scene. Tencent spent 25% of their budget on that scene, so I expected Netflix would try to make their boat scene more spectacular, better on a technical level, to show that the US special effects are undefeated or something. I would have never expected that they wouldn’t even try to compete. That scene happened in the episode 5 of the Netflix show & it’s underwhelming. It has no gravitas, but of course it can’t have any gravitas, it’s not the culmination of the collaboration of humans across the globe, demonstrating that they can fight back & achieve greatness when they are united, of course it can’t be the same when it’s just 10 British people working in isolation. They didn’t just do something underwhelming on a technical level, they did something underwhelming on a narrative level. Just like the scene with the insects, the culmination of the Tencent show had no weigh & no impact when done by Netflix.
5) The misguided belief that somehow an American show could show Chinese history (the cultural revolution) to an international audience better & with more accuracy than a Chinese show to a Chinese audience because of the censorship in China is laughable. An international audience would need more context to understand a historical time that they or their parents didn’t live through, but that’s not what Netflix did. What they showed was mildly violent & shocking to be sure, but not very accurate to the content of the book. They cut out a lot of plot, but they could have done that, simplified it without stripping it of context or changing the story so much it resonates wrong. I’ll just give small examples:
on the stage when they condemn Ye Wenjie’s father (with microphones in front of a huge audience???) they keep saying “lies”, which makes no sense, that’s not the logic, the charge is propagating western propaganda, upholding western values & a capitalist way of thinking, not lying (see the end of page note on that point).
they call Ye Wenjie comrade during her time at the Red Coast (in the book [& in the Tencent show] her status as a political dissident & therefore NOT a comrade is emphasized, stated explicitly. If you don’t understand the social implication, let’s simplify & say that being a comrade is like being a citizen, not a comrade, not part of the group, not trusted).
Netflix Ye Wenjie unironically says: “how awesome would it be if China was the first [country to make contact with aliens]”. She says it, mind you, not in front of the political commissioner because she is asking for something & need to butter him up, no, she is just enthusiastically patriotic? She is shown to be enthousiastically patriotic toward China & LATER she sells out the planets to the Trisolarians.
The inconsistencies are not only baffling deviations from the source materials that display a complete lack of comprehension of Ye Wenjie as a character, as well as an astonishing disregard for the accuracy of the ideology of (Mao-area) communism & the history of Maoist China. They didn’t show a lot of content, so they could have easily avoided making such basis mistakes.
What really pisses me off is that I keep seeing press pieces saying that the Netflix version “doesn’t shy away from showing”, “won’t censor” the part of the story taking place during the Cultural Revolution, sometimes outright saying it as a reason to watch the Netflix version over the Tencent one, implying to the readers the Tencent version is heavily censored, when in reality the Tencent version spend a lot more time than on it than the Netflix one, showing how bad it was, in an accurate way, very close to the content of the book. The political rhetoric fallacies, the bureaucracy, the hypocrisy, how miserable everything is, is shown very well.
[Disclaimer, I’m not Chinese, it’s not my culture, it’s not the country I live in. But in France there are Maoists, so I’ve learned just enough about the history of Mao & the Cultural Revolution to hold very negative views about it. In reverse, in a very racist, sinophobic way, many Westerners think Chinese people can’t think for themselves if they don’t hate every single thing about China & they lump in the country, the people & the Xi Jinping administration. It’s absurd to ask other people to hate their country, to have no pride in anything from their country. What hypocrisy, in every country, nationalism is taught to us from the time we first attend school. Patriotism is a requirement, it’s ingrained, internalized in all of us. We can be critical of our country’s history, of our government, or many things & still find pride & love for some things. I know that’s the way I feel about France.]
Censorship does exist in China, it’s exist materially in a way that differs from the Hays Code in the US in both the scope of its autority & its function. It is enacted by a governement agency called the NRTA & everything that airs on tv has to be clear by the NRTA first. A clear guideline is not provided, we know what passed it, creators know what didn’t, so to a lesser extent we know what doesn’t passes NRTA censorship: graphic violence, nudity, sex, ghosts (or BL since 2021…) et caetera. It would be dishonest to pretend that the topic of Cultural Revolution is a taboo that cannot be spoken about, as if the current administration has a positive view on it & would therefore not allow it to be criticized. What is censored (as far as we know, what is different from the book) in the Tencent show is the opening scene, a very graphic violent scene. That’s it. It’s censored, probably more for the violence than anything else. Some people find it disappointing, but the symbolic meaning of that violence in not hidden in the narrative & the event are instead visually & auditory implied in a short flashback at the end of one episode.
NB) In the opening scene of the Netflix show (the same one that was cut on Tencent), the political tribunal has someone accusing: “Lies, all lies!”. But lying is not a political charge. It sounds ridiculous. They just had to follow the book, they didn’t have to understand communism, but no, they had to come up with things themselves… My best guess it that the creators didn’t realized that “lying is bad” is a cultural value that is not universal.
I don’t know if “lying” is a big deal in China, but I know it’s not a big deal in my culture & in a Marxist/communist political context, lying is just not “a thing”. They are a lot of charges you can get in a political tribunal:
-individualist behavior,
-liberalism/imperialistic thinking,
- lack of self-criticism (Maoism famously has the three principles, one of which being the practice of self-criticism so you/we can do better).
-deceiving the masses with xx propaganda [so they don’t revolt when they would if they knew the truth], that’s as close to lying is a political charge can get,
-aspiring to bourgeois comfort [that can mean profiting of other people’s labor, not doing enough or not wanting to sacrifice your life for the cause],
- treason & of course
- being counterrevolutionary / working against the revolution, are the two big ones !
Can you see what is not on that list ? Lying is not on that list.
If *I* established a kingdom I would simply put an end to the cycle of the rise and fall of empires by governing wisely and being really good at fending off invasions and proving I earned the Mandate of Heaven and not letting my defining character traits end up being my downfall
Guy reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms on the train but shaking his head with every page to show everyone he disapproves of the misuse of imperial authority
Since November I’ve been listening/watching Democracy Now!, it runs 1 hour, 5 times a week from Monday to Friday. There are usually 10 minutes of headlines & 3 or 4 pieces 10 to 15 minutes long dedicated to a specific subject, usually with interviews of experts & people on the ground.
They interview many many Palestinians, healthcare workers, human rights workers, academics & activists, many Jewish activists calling for a cease-fire. They have been featuring the war in Gaza heavily, but they also cover other news subjects.
Having this to listen to (or watch, it’s a radio broadcast that can be watched with the images on youtube) is a small blessing in this. I can watch 10 minutes, watch some stories based on the titles if I want to, it’s concise, there is no long winded speculations, the time is limited so it’s never wasted.
I had never heard of it before, so I thought I would share this with people just in case. This is a story from today, Monday 29th of January 2024:
I am glad the Riverdale show is over. To the people gushing about how the show was nonsensical, special & amazing, I would like to remind (or tell) that Jughead is canonically asexual aromantic.
ALT
There was initial enthousiasm in the aroace community at the annoncement of this show in 2016 & early 2017, especially because the actor Cole Sprouse was initiallyxsupportive of an asexual Jughead, had read the comics & claimed to have respect for the decades-long original material indicating that Jughead was aroace (even before it was official confirmed in 2016 in the Chip Zdarsky comics). After those initial statements of support, Cole Sprouse never mentioned it again, as far as I know (& I looked) after 2017.
ALT
In 2017, there was a months-long campaign, with the hashtag #AroAceJugheadOrBust. We kept up hope, especially because at the time, it would have been the biggest piece of aroace representation ever seen on television, in a mainstream show no less. And we weren’t hoping for something out of reach, they were adapting a comic where the best friend of the lead was consistently depicted as aroace, for decades. And we were told we would get a fair portrayal of the character.
ALT
Time passes, the show aired, Jughead initiated a kiss with Betty & Jughead got a girlfriend. At some point someeone involved in the show straight up said (I would cite the source but I don’t remember well & I didn’t bookmark it at the time, sorry) that the reason they gave the character a love interest was that otherwise it didn’t make for a compelling or interesting story (I don’t remember precisely, sorry).
I stewed in that a long time, thinking about how I’m one of the most interesting person I know, being aroace isn’t boring, if they can’t have a character being interesting without giving them a romance plot, that’s them being terrible at their job…
ALT
When all our hopes were dashed, other people, many queer people started to show up & then like that show. Rooting for it. I saw praise for queer representation for bi or gay characters, but I didn’t see any mention of the straight-washing of one of the main characters & how maybe some solidarity was warranted (how any potential good gay or bi rep in a minor character wouldn’t make up for the straight washing of a main character).
As an aroace person, I wanted the show to fail, for the widespread outrage of the queer community condamning straight-washing to underwhelm any positive review.
That didn’t happened this time. I hope the next time people try to erase aromantic or asexual identities of fictional characters in popular media, things are different & we do get that solidarity & support. I hope things get better.
Voyons, tout le monde sait que Malcolm X a grandement
contribué à établir le comité des panthères souabes noires, toujours célèbre de
nos jours pour son programme en douze articles. Rappelons que c’était l’époque
de Charles Quint, qui a œuvré sans répit pour défendre le St Empire catholique et
conservateur contre la menace communiste jusqu’à sa mort en 58.
Le souvenir des évènements de 14 à Francfort sur Maine a
sans nulle doute marqué à jamais son esprit. Les partisans de Fettmilch et de
leur persécution de la diaspora juive de la ville, un évènement qui a marqué
pour toujours les esprits de la communauté juive de par sa cruauté et son ampleur,
ont servi aux forces armées de justification pour réprimer tout mouvement populaire,
y compris de défense des droits civiques.
Ce n’est pas une surprise qu’après les évènements de 14,
lorsque Charles Quint a été élu quelques années plus tard en 20, il a choisi de
renforcer le pouvoir militaire du BOI, qui est devenu le FBI sous l’égide du célèbre
J. Edgar Hoover, qui l’a dirigé de 24 à 72, qui a mené une guerre aux
défenseurs des droits civiques, des gauchistes et des protestants.
La Diète de Worms, très rapidement après l’ascension au
pouvoir de Charles Quint, en 21, a servi de cadre pour la répression systématique
des protestants. La vie et la lutte de Martin
Luther King sont bien connues, il avait été sommé d’apparaître à la Diète 4 ans
seulement après la publication de ses 95 thèses et peu après son excommunication
par le Pape.
L’histoire se rappelle l’insurrection de Münster en 34, cet
épisode tragique est systématiquement évoqué pour justifier les pleins pouvoirs
et l’immunité accordée au FBI de J. Edgar Hoover dans la répression et la surveillance
des mouvements protestants. Mais nous devons ici rappeler à la rigueur, le groupe
Baader-Meinhof n’a aucune affiliation avec les mouvements de droits civiques.
Martin Luther King est mort l’année de la création de la fraction, il est déplacé
de lui attribuer une opinion ou un soutien à un groupe qui n’existait pas de
son vivant.
Il n’est pas possible d’assimiler tous les mouvements de protestation,
de protestants, gauchistes ou défenseurs des droits civiques, pour les réduire
à une vision simpliste d’un extrémisme armé et dont la rhétorique et les revendications
peuvent être balayées sans être entendues. Cette assimilation est un travail de
propagande du St Empire, insensée lorsque l’on connait la diversité de ses
mouvements et, souvent, leur absence totale de communication, de collaboration
ou d’entente et de soutien politique ou militaire. Nous pouvons prendre en
exemple l’inimité célèbre de Calvin et Luther, mais ce point ne mérite pas
davantage de justification.
