Hey Internauts,
For some reason my uncle wanted to see the Brad Pitt helmed WWII flick FURY.
My thoughts can be summed up with how they treated the only two actresses with lines: Main characters break into their house with guns. The "hero" is implied to sleep with the younger of the two, which in this case no matter how nice he is or cute they are, that's definitely rape. More soldiers come in and the older of the girls makes dinner for them as they harass their hosts and threaten them. Then three minutes later the house is bombed so I guess they outlive their usefulness for food, sex, and showing a more human side to the guys(?) so now they die...ugh.
With the amount of major violence and tragic valient sacrifice the movie was masturbatory patriarchy at its most conniving but then brad pitt and logan lerman may still get fucking nominated cause soldiers have feelings or some shit.
My dad says he hopes folks can learn from this, but maybe I'm a little jaded after my entire life of being presided over by war-mongering snake oil salesman. Gotta support the troops no matter what right? What about what's done to them to get them to that point? What about the horrors that could have been avoided if not for greedy fascist politicians years or decades before (oil, anti-communism, the treaty of Versailles) who never learn from History?
It's okay to be afraid of the future, but a fearful future should not be the goal of any society. Be proactive in preventing violence abroad and at home before it goes that far. After all, how many civilians must die before you're willing to question your damn jingoistic bullshit?
[in other news, I've been in New England this week getting something special cooked up for you lovely folks so feel free to get inappropriately excited]
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Yo No Home but Phones Though, So...
My oldschool little brick of a phone finally went kaput today after
over two years. Now, with my family's verizon contract, I can get an
upgrade free of charge for certain kinds of phones.
I've gone this long without a smart phone, but it looks like the only ones that are free or below thirty bucks are smart phones.
The cheap-looking flip phones? between 100 and 150 bucks easy. Now, I don't know the business reasons behind this and i don't really care too much.
However, the next time i hear or read someone goin off about "why all these homeless folks walkin round with iphones?" I can inform them based on actual first hand experience that a lot can change in one or two or however many years before your phone breaks.
Need a new phone and don't have much money for anything, well the contract you signed way back in the day says you can get this iphone 5c for free or this iphone 4s for 99cents or all this samsung for...well you get it.
Whether folks got a nice phone before their situations got as rough as you can see or they got it for free under a plan they've had for a long ass time (or whatever the situation because it's none of your business) it's not and has never been about some sort of irresponsible allocation of resources.
Those with affluence have always looked for ways to justify why others go without, and this tactic of pointing out the little that those on the bottom of society's food chain do have is purposefully distracting from real social ills.
If you have money, that does not mean that you are in any way better equipped to handle the responsibility of having money.
And speaking of smart phones, what kind of patronizing, hypocritical a-hole do you have to be to care more about a human being who is starving will do with your pocket change than what a multinational corporation will do with a huge chunk of your paycheck every month?
Do you really care more about how that guy might be lying to you—the one who politely asks if you can offer anything so he and his family might get some bread or water or tickets for a bus to a better town? Is that legitimately more important to you than the amount you hand over gratefully to corporations whose track records are well known to care so little for human life or worker's rights or the environment?
Because we know this isn't really about whether or not your quarter or your dollar bill goes to a sandwich or to booze.
It's a good excuse for a distracting tangential conversation about socially conscious macroeconomics and other bullshit we don't really care about while we sip our lattes. Maybe later we can smoke some pot and listen to covers of Pete Seeger and act like we give a damn about the world before Monday comes around and we head back to a job we hate but it pays the bills and for our xbox live gold membership.
Nah, what this is about is karma, plain and simple.
We still believe that we deserve the good stuff that happens to us while all the bad stuff is unjust.
We still believe that others most have done something to deserve the bad stuff that happens to them, while growing ever jealous of how all the good stuff happens to other people who don't really deserve it.
And on the off chance some real person could really use some real help, why bother, right? I mean, c'mon, some of "those people" have smartphones.
I've gone this long without a smart phone, but it looks like the only ones that are free or below thirty bucks are smart phones.
The cheap-looking flip phones? between 100 and 150 bucks easy. Now, I don't know the business reasons behind this and i don't really care too much.
However, the next time i hear or read someone goin off about "why all these homeless folks walkin round with iphones?" I can inform them based on actual first hand experience that a lot can change in one or two or however many years before your phone breaks.
Need a new phone and don't have much money for anything, well the contract you signed way back in the day says you can get this iphone 5c for free or this iphone 4s for 99cents or all this samsung for...well you get it.
Whether folks got a nice phone before their situations got as rough as you can see or they got it for free under a plan they've had for a long ass time (or whatever the situation because it's none of your business) it's not and has never been about some sort of irresponsible allocation of resources.
Those with affluence have always looked for ways to justify why others go without, and this tactic of pointing out the little that those on the bottom of society's food chain do have is purposefully distracting from real social ills.
If you have money, that does not mean that you are in any way better equipped to handle the responsibility of having money.
And speaking of smart phones, what kind of patronizing, hypocritical a-hole do you have to be to care more about a human being who is starving will do with your pocket change than what a multinational corporation will do with a huge chunk of your paycheck every month?
Do you really care more about how that guy might be lying to you—the one who politely asks if you can offer anything so he and his family might get some bread or water or tickets for a bus to a better town? Is that legitimately more important to you than the amount you hand over gratefully to corporations whose track records are well known to care so little for human life or worker's rights or the environment?
Because we know this isn't really about whether or not your quarter or your dollar bill goes to a sandwich or to booze.
It's a good excuse for a distracting tangential conversation about socially conscious macroeconomics and other bullshit we don't really care about while we sip our lattes. Maybe later we can smoke some pot and listen to covers of Pete Seeger and act like we give a damn about the world before Monday comes around and we head back to a job we hate but it pays the bills and for our xbox live gold membership.
Nah, what this is about is karma, plain and simple.
We still believe that we deserve the good stuff that happens to us while all the bad stuff is unjust.
We still believe that others most have done something to deserve the bad stuff that happens to them, while growing ever jealous of how all the good stuff happens to other people who don't really deserve it.
And on the off chance some real person could really use some real help, why bother, right? I mean, c'mon, some of "those people" have smartphones.
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