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That’s What This Open Thread Is For

Guise, srsly. Srsly guise. I have been overwhelmed with the love and support I have received in the last two weeks from Internet friends and real life friends alike. Not only that, I have been overwhelmed with the love and support I have seen my friends give other people and each other. For most of us, I think it’s safe to say we don’t know what we would do without our friends.So for my OT I want to celebrate that in the cheesiest way possible, with s schmaltzy song set to Fox and the Hound pictures. The Fox and the Hound!  But really, I love all of you! Have fun in this open thread and celebrate that it’s Wednesday!

By Luci Furious

There are no bad times, only good stories.

127 replies on “That’s What This Open Thread Is For”

I don’t want to go to my class at 4. I’m really fucking tired, and the reading assignment was a piece by Rousseau, and half the time it was a racist piece of shit. I am SO done with reading white European philosophers who lived during a colonial era commenting on the state of humans “before society,” calling that savage, so on and so forth.

But Rousseau was the fucking worst. Blaaarg!

I realise this isn’t a ‘liking’ kind of place but it sure would be helpful.  I drew attention to myself again on the train laughing out loud at a few of the snarkier comments.  My personal favorite:  “go lactate tabasco”.  I remember from childhood people saying “go play in traffic” but, lactating tabasco is so good… :D

I had a similar experience when taking a creative writing class in college (we exchanged assignments for group review). The foreign exchange student in my class was easily one of my favorite writers to read. And her mastry of English was quite humbling.

I want to learn a second language, I just can’t decide which one interests me most.

Right! I know I should do Spanish. But I’ve messed around with it for so long…high school, college, a refresher class a while back…without really learning it that I almost want to start fresh! Haha. I would probably choose French, if not Spanish. But some less expected second languages seem really appealing, too…

Because I’m housesitting, my father made a fresh pizza yesterday which I can live on the next two days. Damn, it’s good to be the cook’s daughter.

And earlier I told myself to really get into the mall for the first time in five months. I came out with three bras (quite necessary, ashamed to admit) and a new hair cut. The curls are back.

Ugh, my new nerd friend is EDL-fodder (English Defence League, TEY DUNT LIKE DE MUSLIMZ TAKIN OVA THE UK except that the UK is still 90% white British and Muslims make up like 3-5% of the population)

This is so sad. She’s the only person I can talk to about internet stuff, she’s trans which seems weird because I still make the assumption that liberal = liberal, SO WRONG. She’s also the only friend I’ve made since being properly ill. NORMAL PEOPLE Y U BE ACTUALLY FUCKED UP

During last years elections up here in bonny Scotland, the BNP tried to use those tactics in their election material, in particular, one of their leaflets stated there were more Muslims in the UK than Scots (which to be fair, isn’t hard, if the statistic is true) by means of enraging the natives. Instead it caused an awful lot of WTF and everyone voted SNP (note to others, the British National Party and Scottish National Party may have similar names but they don’t have the same politics).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to soothe my soul and listen to Woman’s Hour while making apple pie with Juniper Junior.

Yeah Rudy was a bit too…bland for me. Jekyll and Hyde has been done much better. But I really hope they get a gay character in because Alex on Skins (creepy but I can ignore it because he’s hot) makes me very happy, so now I want a well-written version.

One of the cable channels that is vaguely for science programming dedicates a week each year to programs about sharks, usually during ratting sweeps. Adds for this usually run something like “SHARKS! OMG THERE’S SOME MOTHA’ FUCKIN’ SHARKS!”

it has since been co-opted to mean period for obvious reasons.

“The pissed-off she-beast rebuffs her mate with a stern rebuke. The living room is firmly the majestic female’s domain. Here we see her girth spread comfortably over the sofa while the soft patina of tears forms the ending to a chocolate-fuelled rampage through the timber highlights of her home stretch. In the reaches of suburbia, life is seldom as peaceful…as the tasteful decor might indicate.”

Mostly I agree with you, but I think Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom could hold it’s own running in that pack. Listening to Marlin Perkins explain about how, “I’ll wait here in the boat while Jim goes and pokes the irate crocodile with a stick,” has got to be nature documentary gold.

Interesting article (haven’t been able to watch the video): “Hymenoplasty doesn’t work” http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/hymen-reconstruction-doesnt-work

(when ‘work’ means ‘bleed when penetrated’ – which I suppose is expected, really, because surgeons don’t generally reconstruct skin to enable it to break).

[Trigger warning: extreme stupidity, violence, extreme sarcasm as self-defense.]

 

So this is happening, and I couldn’t find it on NYTimes.com, the newspaper of record: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2108386/Blackest-lie-history-congressional-candidate-describes-Holocaust.html

I’d like to apologize on behalf of the 10-12 million people who committed mass suicide just to hurt Hitler’s feelings and standing in history. That was not cool, you guys.

Urge to kill…rising…

Oh, go sit on a cactus. Go jump in a lake. Go get fisted by a bear. Go jam your face into a blunt spork until it sticks. Go get STDs. Go shave your skin off. Go push yourself off a cliff. Go lactate tabasco. Go rental on a suicide machine. Go melon ball your testicles. Go and mould. Go flay yourself. Go to hell.

Go home.

You mind if I print that out and send it to him along with a campaign donation of a scan of my hand flipping the bird? Or just pump my fist at the screen and whisper-yell, “Fuck yeah!”?

Don’t fake any modesty on my account; you should strut after that. My favorite is “go rental on a suicide machine” because the place providing this glorious service would get a whole day’s fees for 10 minutes of work.

It’s a strange feeling to trust bigots who don’t care that the Holocaust happened more than those who lie to deny it happened. As Al Franken dryly remarked in one of his books, “I’d trust a guy who became a Nazi after 1945. You know he’s not a fair-weather friend.”

See, that makes me more suspicious. I know the British National Party and the English Defence League are dickheads, I’m still waiting to find out how the Conservative Party will do it this time. At least with the BNP and the EDL I know it’s going to be something ill thought-out and racist; the Conservatives have considerably more people, which statistically means some of them must be intelligent and therefore dangerous.

 

Alas, I am a provincial American and only know of the EDL what I gleaned last summer from a New Yorker write-up of one of the leaders. They’re like your Tea Party, except more skull-bashing? And the BNP is like your KKK, right? Trying to become more mainstream and talking a lot about “traditional [ ] values?” (To put between the brackets: American, English, British, Christian, European, native). Please excuse me asking you to frame them in terms I understand; the multi-party system is as strange as the metric system.

What you feel about the BNP and EDL is what I feel about those who embrace the Holocaust—they’re rigged dice. No matter what the roll, they will always come up as openly hateful. There’s no guess-work. The ones who put on suits and try to make academic-flavored arguments about it, or conflate the non-negotiable reality of the Holocaust with the very-fair-to-criticize state of Israel, are the ones who keep me up at night.

I don’t know how they account for the 4-6 million Holocaust victims who weren’t Jewish; what big conspiracy against Hitler were they a part of?

Pretty much, though to be frank, the BNP are better at it. They basically avoid directly engaging the major parties, instead engaging with the places they know they’ll get votes; poor white non-London-adjacent towns where globalisation and modernisation has fucked over the general populace, or the opposite; parts of London where racial tension is high. That’s why the BNP won a seat in Barking and Dagenham despite it being racially diverse.

Luckily for the UK, during the 2010 election the BNP lost all of their council seats there and absolutely failed across the board everywhere else. The UK has a really strong, equally virulent anti-fascist movement who stage counter protests wherever the BNP or the EDL wind up (usually racially diverse cities such as Leicester or Bradford).

We have a lot of issues with subtle racism in this country, but one of my favourite things about living here is that outright racism is basically treated like childish nonsense not worthy of anyone’s time. There’s a delightful “oh do shut up” mentality about mainstream politics whenever racists pipe up.

Oh, the EDL aren’t really Tea Party, they don’t have any economic plank to their argument; they just really oppose immigration and like being English (which is absurd, because nobody in the UK has been politically English for 400 years and there’s no such thing as being “English” genetically, not to mention how much they sideline Welsh people (I’m a total Cymruphile)). The EDL are more like 19th century American Nativists, to be honest.

I know enough about Handmaid’s Tale that I can keep up at dinner parties, but not enough to do more than nod at that comment. Sorry xD

I have a penis, though. So everything’s peachy in Republiania for me as long as I keep quiet about the whole “I prefer cock” thing.

Um. Woo.

We know a Holocaust survivor. She is in her late 80s and works as a tailor in our neighborhood. Mr. Donovan spent a long time getting her story down on paper for her family.

The Nazis took her to the camps when she was 14. She spent two years in 3 different camps. She lost her father, a dressmaker, and her brother, a violinist so talented that a former teacher gave him a Strativarius violin. She watched her mother dragged away to the furnace. When the Allies came, a Nazi soldier shot her in the chest, and her sister held her up in her arms so she could see the camp being liberated as she died. I don’t know how she survived.

I don’t even have words for this guy.

 

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