Quark Bee

Two competing Olympic shot putters secretly yearn for each other.

Yeeted Rivalry.

I have been arguing for 30 years that the entire concept of school uniforms needs to go into the bin. They're an instrument to enforce conformity, power hierarchies and obedience, nothing else.

None of the arguments in favour hold water if you examine them critically.

I was all for it until I read the bit about SUSHI and cinnamon rolls and... nope, combining raw fish with cinnamon and icing is heinous

cinnamon rolls and crisps I could get behind

So the jokes diminish the scale of the mess and distract from the systemic changes needed to prevent this shit from happening over, and over, and over...

Conspiracies on the scale of Pizzagate don't exist. But CRIMES on that scale absolutely DO.

And those crimes are not nearly as easy to stop as a conspiracy would be. You can't just "destroy" whoever is "leading" and be done with it.

read my next comment

These kinds of jokes are an understandable way of processing the horror, but I think they inadvertently cause more damage.

There's a lot about Epstein that *looks like* there's one big conspiracy, but it's not: there's no shared cause, no great leader.

Doesn't make the scale of the crimes or their cover-up any less horrifying.

Yeah but my point is that what happened in reality isn't a "conspiracy" but a messy tangle of powerful people with overlapping interests - several actors conspired with each other for different selfish purposes, but there's no single big overarching conspiracy with one leader or one big objective.

That's NOT THE SAME as a conspiracy involving a "global cabal" controlled by Epstein (if he had been "in control" he wouldn't be dead), or by any other single person, institution, nation, religion, or group.

Reality is a lot more messy.

Epstein was a fixer in a key position (for North America, at least) in a transnational tangled web of powerful, wealthy, amoral actors whose selfish interests align enough (at least temporarily) for them to encourage and support each other's crimes, with ZERO care for human life or the planet.

Conspiracy theories that blame innocent people for lurid made up crimes are vile, horrible, harmful ways employed by fascists to DEFLECT attention from ***actual*** crimes committed by networks of privileged and powerful people, and instead whip up hatred and violence towards marginalized groups.

For the love of everything holy, please read Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger".

She illuminates *exactly* what you're getting at, but without "handing it to" the nonsense peddlers.

If we dislike fascism, we do NOT "hand it to them" or joke about QAnon having been "kinda right all along". EVER.

It could be worse - see Back to the Future (which I also absolutely adore) where in the second movie the writers just straight up knock out Marty's girlfriend so she spends 90% of the film unconscious, because they could not figure out how to write a female character who talks and does things lmfao

Yes, this always bothered me - she's a prize object with no agency more than an actual person, just there to look pretty, get rescued, and be in love with Wesley... and there's virtually no other female characters at all.

I still adore the film.

España legalizó el matrimonio gay en 2005. Alemania no lo hizo hasta el 2017. Y la extrema derecha ya es la principal fuerza política en gran parte de Alemania.

Lo digo como Alemana: Cavernícolas tenemos de sobra. Simplemente tienden a ser más rubios. Y no saben cocinar bien el arroz.

(No olvidemos lo abierto y progresista que era Berlín durante los años de la República de Weimar.)

Queda mucho trabajo por delante en TODAS partes. España lleva mucho tiempo siendo un líder en ese trabajo.

Lo digo como Alemana.

Alemania NO es "más civilizado" que España. Tardamos DOCE AÑOS más que España en legalizar el matrimonio gay. Y la extrema derecha está a punto de tomar el poder. Esa escena es bonita e importante, pero ahí tb hay muchos silbatos y mucho odio que puede estallar de un día a otro.

uh...

what are you insinuating, Elizabeth

hello Robin Ince 👋

Rebecca istg your youtube channel keeps me sane and I really like your new hair and how you tear dickspittles like that Krauss guy a new butthole and I also like Robin Ince

You gotta tax *wealth*, not just income.

George Monbiot sums the underlying principle up as "private sufficiency, public luxury".

In a system where nobody has an incentive to charge anyone a million dollars for life saving care, or for a roof over your head, or four hundred dollars for a packet of eggs, nobody needs millions in private savings.

The idea is that capping personal wealth would free up billions in hoarded private wealth for public systems of care, while removing the incentive for greedy fuckers to siphon those resources back into private pockets.

So how do we give EVERY cancer patient free care? Well, one way would be to remove the incentive for anyone to charge a million dollars for chemo. If Brian Thompson hadn't been allowed to accumulate vast amounts of wealth, he couldn't have profited off bankrupting his clients.

The cancer isn't what bankrupts you. What bankrupts you is private for-profit healthcare. It's murderous capitalism.

(It doesn't have to be that way. Where I live, cancer treatment costs the cancer patient ... zero money. Zilch. Nada.)

absolute max - I'd be inclined to put it at 5 million

Documentary proof doesn't change jack shit.

Ask ANY climate scientist.

Anyone who has functioning eyeballs and watches the BBC knows this, surely.

she's absolutely gorgeous, too