Tell me an inside joke between you and a friend, without context.
I beg of everyone to read the tags to this post, as they are all random and hilarious and read kind of like a poem, if the poem was written by someone who was on a lot of drugs.
This is amazing as a two time survivor it’s fucking time to hear this shit debunked! Hate has no place!
Can not not reblog.
If I here someone say any of the sentences above…
I can’t believe some people need to hear this but RAPE IS RAPE. How can anyone excuse it? Survivors have to hear this bullshit smh. I feel so horrible for the people who have to hear this from people. I feel so horrible for the people who have had traumatizing experiences like getting raped and people don’t see how serious and scarring it can be.
^^ if any of you don’t agree please unfollow me thank u -.-
[100/10: TRULY A MASTERPIECE. I THINK THIS MIGHT BE THE BEST POST. IN GENERAL.]
If Mel Brooks made movies today he would be like the most hated man in America he got away with so much shit
is that the qanon anti semite actor or the guy who made blazing saddles i always get mixed up
Blazing Saddles guy
Ok I’m not going to say he isn’t problematic. But!
Blazing saddles destroyed a genre by being such a scathing satire.
There were more things that did it, but pre blazing saddles tv was like 80% cowboy stuff. Post Blazing Saddles the genre practically disappeared.
To make a fictional comparison: Imagine that at the hight of ACAB thoughts and awareness, (like late 2020 vibes I think?) A movie came out that ripped cop procedural shows so bad that by the next year almost all of them are off the air and less than 10 new ones come out and they all are dropped by the end of the next year.
Like, that’s how hard Blazing Saddles went. People did hate it. He ruined the image of the idealistic picture of cowboys and westerns being perfect pillars of American morality.
Blazing Saddles didn’t just say that the average Western character was racist, he called them idiots. Straight to the camera in the most loveable moment of the show.
This isn’t to excuse anything in it. Just to let you know that this shot was a head shot to an American revisionist giant.
And that counts for something.
Fair warning if you are vaguely intrigued and try to watch - it uses the N-word a LOT
Mel Brooks was a Jewish actor-director who made films that made fun of just about everything, especially nazis and racism in general
(the racist mitzo is thinking of is probably Mel Gibson)
Brooks also made Young Frankenstein, my fave Frankenstein movie
Blazing Saddles makes the idea of racism into a joke - as in “the people who believe this are dumb as hell” . The joke is that racism is nonsensical and stupid, and so are the people who believe in it. That’s the joke. (One of the many, many jokes.) It was also written in part by Richard Pryor who was originally supposed to also star in the movie, but the studio wouldn’t insure him. Later on in 1980, Richard Pryor said he swore off saying the N-word altogether- six years after the movie was released. By then, it was already in there forever. Regarding the language, and many of the jokes used in the film, its relationship to the audience was very different in 1974. As one reviewer stated in relation to how Blazing Saddles’ relationship to popular culture has changed since it’s release in 1974, “I don’t know that we ought to make studying evolution of Richard Pryor a prerequisite to the viewing of Blazing Saddles, but we might all take notice of the fact that works of art are always products of the time in which they are produced. One of the great things about Blazing Saddles is its implicit critique of American racial attitudes and Hollywood’s whitewashing of history via Western mythologies…. The racial critique of Blazing Saddles mightn’t be the most remarkable thing about it – it’s a postmodern film with a Borscht Belt sensibility that marries the silly to the sublime.” (The article does contain use of the N-word, in its use of direct quotes.)
When I think of Mel Brooks and his satires on racism (among other topics), I can’t help but also think of Taika Waititi and how he wrote Nazis in Jo Jo Rabbit. Nazis beliefs are shown to be utterly ridiculous and the Nazis in turn don’t become cool heroes or something to be admired like they often do when gentile directors make movies about Nazis. It’s like how Mel Brooks made The Producers. He turns them into a laughing stock. There’s a really, really good video essay about this by a queer Jewish YouTuber you should absolutely watch, talking about the differences in how Jewish filmmakers portray Nazis VS how gentiles tend to. I think there’s an ongoing conversation there in how filmmakers have conversations about race.
I don’t think you could make Blazing Saddles today. It’s undeniable that it had an impact on popular culture and the film industry, so much so that it’s still referenced, often without people knowing they’re referencing it. (Kind of like when people say “let’s turn it up to 11 - how many people do you know that have actually seen Spinal Tap?) When people talk about being offended by Blazing Saddles today, I’m always reminded that our relationship to the subject matter has fundamentally changed, and I think part of the reason is that movies like this brought the conversation into the mainstream.
Interesting to me is that when my dad, a teenager at the time, saw Blazing Saddles in theaters with his brother and dad, people didn’t walk out on account of the racism or sexism or anything like that. The part people did walk out on was a scene where some cowboys are eating beans around a fire and farting and burping a lot. Seriously, he said that was the scene that did it. (At least at the showing he went to.)
Anyway Blazing Saddles does have a place in pop culture history and I don’t think it could be made today. Also if you do choose to watch this, I’m not saying it doesn’t have problems, but I think you also have to consider who wrote it and the audience that received it, and its contribution to the greater conversation about racism that’s being had through the medium of satire.
Always remember that the people who made it made it knowing they were trying to make a POINT ON PURPOSE through humor that pointed out the absolute horrible ridiculousness of racists & racism. It did so as bluntly as possible to DRIVE THE POINT HOME.
We are Offended by it now, I suspect he hoped we would be someday. But it was absolutely NECESSARY and I’m grateful to Mr Brooks for doing it. Mr Brooks is still alive. I wonder what he’d say if we asked him if he’s happy we find the offensive bits offensive now, when most people did not bat an eye at the time.
In 1974, the same year of Blazing Saddles, a film came out with a similar concept but an entirely different tone. Black Sheriff making white people recognize him by being such a badass that they’re forced to respect him.
And I cannot, in this present era, write it’s original name. It’s presently just called ‘Boss’ because the second part of the title is verboten. It was a blaxploitation film, of course, and like films of that era, it was full into black culture of the period… Where there had been, for a time, an attempt to reclaim the N-word, one of those 'if I use it, you can’t use it against me’ kind of thing.
It’s a thing to remember that this was the period that produced such films, and ones like Dolemite.
A thing to really note is that while Blazing Saddles was mocking racism it was also mocking/exploring/conversation-starting about a lot of things; the stupidity and absurdism of racism, but also what Westerns had become at the time, general historical revisionism, the artificiality and hypocrisy of Hollywood, and many other things, as far down as the basic process of filmmaking itself. And it does it so well because Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor actually knew what the fuck they talking about. They were knowledgable in the subjects they were tackling.
Mel Brooks liked Westerns, mainly classic westerns from before the genre was sanitized and commodified by Hollywood and hijacked by revisionists. Compare and contrast stuff like “Shane” or “Good, Bad, and Ugly” — with all their violence and critique of the time period and tragic stories of outlaws scarring themselves for life and bigoted, power hungry men making the country suffer for their own gain and native people or minorities being victimized by settlers — to the fluffy stuff at the time leading up to Blazing Saddle, with whimsical singing cowboys in a fairy tale version of the Wild West shooting outlaws and Natives that act more like movie monsters then people, all while trying really really really hard to ignore or glamorize or cover up uncomfortable subjects like the rampant racism in parts of the US at the time or the Civil War or the ruthless oil and rail barons pumping land dry and hiring Pinkertons to brutalize unions.
So a huge theme of the movie is mocking that by throwing the truth in your face. That quite a few of the wholesome folksy towns you see in westerns would have been openly and violently racist to an unlivable and suicidal degree… when they weren’t suffering from lack of education and basic utilities, fighting to survive day to day because they’re out in the goddamned frontier with nobody around for miles. That a great many cowboys in the REAL old west were black. That real conflict in the old west didn’t involve Roy Rogers singing a fancy tune while harmlessly shooting guns out of bad guys hands, it involved people fucking fighting and shooting each other with intent to kill. That douchey, greedy robber-barons with good publicity were doing more harm then a thousand desperadoes combined. That real people in the Wild West didn’t act like they do in movies. That Hollywood and racists lied and sold a fake glamorized portrayal of a dark time in our national history for their own gain. The movie literally climaxes with the cowboys crashing through the walls around them, revealing the whole quaint western town to be nothing but a hollow, soulless model; a mockery of a real town surrounded by dumb, glitzy Hollywood sets and studios and restaurants and theaters run by people so far up their asses and secluded from the real world that they wouldn’t know the realities of life outside of Hollywood if it punched them in the face.
And it makes deep cuts to prove the point because, again, Brooks and Pryor knew their subject. For example, the Yiddish-speaking Natives? That’s making fun of how Hollywood at the time would rather hire Jewish actors in make-up to play Native Americans then just hire actual Natives.
Blazing Saddles is an amazing film that makes such a potent, wonderful message that’s still pretty relevant today (given Hollywood has arguably only gotten even worse about revisionism, hypocrisy, bigotry, and being up it’s own ass to a delusional degree), and I hate how it tends to be talked about as if it’s “something from a different time with different standards” instead of a powerful yet hilarious condemnation of some really bad shit that succeeded masterfully.
about to drop literally the sickest insider knowledge you will ever receive pls use it responsibly:
are you a teenager? do you wish you had the space & resources & organization to do a thing, whether that’s an anime club or a movie night or a big craft workshop or creative writing group or literally whatever? would you like to do your thing totally for free? yes?
okay, then bring it up to a librarian
seriously, teenagers are the absolute hardest group to engage at most libraries & we’ll often organize programs that absolutely no one will show up to & it sucks. if you go up to a public librarian & say “hey, some friends & i want to do this thing. does that sound like a feasible teen program for the library?” most people will move heaven & earth to pull it off for you because we know there’s an interest in our community. we will go balls to the freaking wall to make it happen
do you want a cosplay contest? a video game tournament? a free escape room? bring it up to the library. it’s not a burden or an annoyance at all. it’ll be like christmas came early for us
“The best thing we can do with power is give it away” - On the leftist critique of superhero narratives as authoritarian power fantasies:
The ongoing “Jason Todd is a cop” debate has reminded me of a brilliant brief image essay by Joey deVilla. So here it is, images first and the full essay text below:
“A common leftist critique of superhero comics is that they are inherently anti-collectivist, being about small groups of individuals who hold all the power, and the wisdom to wield that power.
I don’t disagree with this reading. I don’t think it’s inaccurate. Superheroes are their own ruling class, the concept of the übermensch writ large.
But it’s a sterile reading. It examines superhero comics as a cold text, and ignores something that I believe in fundamental, especially to superhero storytelling: the way people engage with text. Not what it says, but how it is read.
The average comic reader doesn’t fantasize about being a civilian in a world of superheroes, they fantasize about being a superhero. One could charitably chalk this up to a lust for power, except for one fact…
The fantasy is almost always the act of helping people. Helping the vulnerable, with no reward promised in return.
Being a century into the genre, we’ve seen countless subversions and deconstructions of the story.
But at its core, the superhero myth is about using the gifts you’ve been given to enrich the people around you, never asking for payment, never advancing an ulterior motive.
We should (and do) spend time nitpicking these fantasies, examining their unintended consequences, their hypocrisies.
But it’s worth acknowledging that the most eduring childhood fantasy of the last hundred years hasn’t been to become rich. Superheroes come from every class (don’t let the MCU fool you).
The most enduring fantasy is to become powerful enough to take the weak under your own wing. To give, without needing to take.
So yes, the superhero myth, as a text, isn’t collectivist. But that’s not why we keep coming back to it. That’s not why children read it. We keep coming back to it to learn one simple lesson…
The best thing we can do with power IS GIVE IT AWAY.”
I’ve been asked a lot about this, so here is a clean version of my “EAT THE RICH” poem for those of you who want it (mad respect to @asterosian who made a post that inspired this monster):
The poor cried,
“We are starving. There is no more bread, and we have nothing to eat.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t work for your bread,”
as if he did not snatch away the grain by his own greedy hands and create filling bread for his own overflowing mouth.
The poor cried,
“We are dying. There is no more medicine, and we’re all ill.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t take care of yourselves,”
as if he did not buy all the medicine and raise prices so high
All people have a tendency to be unconsciously biased toward seeing trans women as untrustworthy, unsafe, lacking vulnerability, the problem to be solved rather than a person to be taken care of. And this is not less true in trans and queer and feminist communities. It’s just more unconscious, and more propped up with social justice, feminism, queer lib, leftist, and anti-oppression beliefs. This book is talking about this in context to a physical public situation of harassment, but this is true of social conflicts too, including on social media, in friend groups, in all kinds of situations. The unconscious bias also gets taken advantage of by people who know what they’re doing and hide behind that bias to make their mistreatment of transfems seem reasonable—again, often supported with social justice and anti-oppression rhetoric. TERFs aren’t the only people who do this! It felt so incredible to see this spelled out in print, plain as day, an actual book calling out a real thing I’ve experience more times than I can count, that all transfems I know go through, and that I still feel crazy for seeing because there’s so much gaslighting about it. You know how when you KNOW something is real, but you feel defensive about that knowledge, like you have to be ready to hold onto it, and then you see something confirming that knowledge for you in no uncertain terms and it feels like “wow maybe I wasn’t crazy all this time!” That’s how I felt seeing this.
The book linked is free to read and download. See the link above.
if you’re a transfem you should read this, and if you’re not you should reblog it for your transfem friends & followers, the advice in here is extremely good and the grips breaks are not hard to practice!!
I mean, I think that you could probably get a good think piece about how Man of Steel seemed to suggest that goodness was something that Superman (with prompting from his Space!Dad) needed to teach to humans, vs MAWS’ message that humanity is flawed but already has great capacity for good regardless.
Can’t imagine where the idea the DCEU version of Superman was referencing in that regard.
Not
A
Clue.
Urgh, they even have rebar in cross-shapes in the background, gross.
I mean, I know that criticising the DCEU at this point is redundant as it’s getting rebooted and all. But just how heavily Snyder stapled Jesus imagery onto Superman was… hacky.
I know it’s easy to make fun of Man of Steel
But
It’s fun too :D
This was a real scene in a real film
Not a straight to DVD Asylum movie
A real actor was paid folding money to stand in front of a horrible CGI tornado and dramatically extend his hand in a scene where his character tells his son who has superpowers to not use those to save him from dying an agonising death in one of the worst ways its possible for a human being to die, because the director has some bullshit freshman philosophy point to make
This whole thing is played as some horrible trageedy when this scene is literally a moron telling his son “Don’t rescue me, I really want to die in the stupidest fucking way I can” and his son going “OKAY” before displaying a level of acting thats truly on a par with Riverdale, One Tree Hill or even Dawsons Creek
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: “It takes a heart of stone to watch the death of Jonathan Kent without laughing”
It really seems like Zack Snyder is a genuinely good guy, who has an amazing sense of how to create striking images and sequences, but who really doesn’t approach storytelling on any level deeper than “would this look cool?”.
sometimes i stop and think about what an incredibly dumb villain thanos was. idk how you were supposed to take him seriously when his goal was that dumb
made it all the more galling to see people saying thanos “had a point”
In the comics, his goal was to fuck a skeleton.
see? considerably less dumb
On the one hand, yes, Thanos’ plan is dumb. But can you imagine the consequences if Thanos snapped half the universe out to impress the chick he’s into (Death) and she still turns him down?
A million incels screaming that Thanos was right and Death’s a bitch, and we’d still be hearing about it now in the year of our plague 2023.
That would be great, because it would also be totally accurate to the comics, where Death was completely unimpressed (and decided she’d rather bang Deadpool a couple of decades afterwards)
TLDR: A plague of AI-written foraging books, which means inaccuracies, which means danger. If you’re going to buy a foraging book, make sure it is written by a real person and referenced in more places than just Amazon.
Generative AI should not be trusted for factual information because it is fundamentally designed to provide aesthetically accurate output. Factual accuracy is a coincidental bonus.*
I’m sure my followers have heard this a thousand times before, but the thing that makes generative AI work is that it combines patterns into novel configurations via a random seed (super simplified).
It’s a fantastic, amazing new toy that can do some incredible things. Which is all the more frustrating that its developers, especially OpenAI, have spent so much time lying about what it can do.
They overstate its capabilities because while generative AI can do a lot, it’s limitations make it a tool instead of a miracle, and miracles really do wonders for the stock price. Your big companies pretend their new-gen Furby can replace thousands help-desk workers and coders, burying us under press releases and hand-picked goofballs screaming for Chat-GPT rights.
So your low-tier scammers are going to see that, assume the hype is real or close enough to it, and throw together a bunch of low-effort niche publications through Amazon’s sketchy marketplace. Same scam they’ve been pulling with vastly underpaid overseas writing farms for years.
Now, I’m not saying they wouldn’t have made a bunch of shitty books with Chat-GPT if Open-AI hadn’t represented it as a knows-everything supercomputer. I’m just saying it’s likely they’d have avoided topics that would bring “you killed my family member” type litigation to their doorstep if the Furby were unmasked for what it is.
The writing farms would at least just lift chunks from wikipedia or another published foraging book when writing about what plants are dangerous to eat or not, while Chat-GPT generates a next word based on what probability and some virtual dice rolling tell it to.
On a celebrity bio, that might mean the invention of a sibling that never existed. Funny, confusing to the record, but ultimately harmless. In a book on foraging, that error might be the wrong Latin name, or it may be saying its safe to eat when it’s packed to the spores with deadly toxins.
*Caveats about this and discussion of “AI guardrails” under the fold.
This case has been in the news for a week or so here is Australia, and if it turns out it wasn’t deliberate, they need to check if its related to the AI forager book thing.
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