Honestly I’m sick of giving things to the fascists. The bible is problematic but it’s also the book who inspired people like MLK and it does not belong to the evangelical fanatics. Greek and Roman history does not belong to the ultra-conservatives, Norse mythology does not belong to the white supremacists, and Tolkien definitely does not belong to the tech-bros that Treebeard would have punted back to Udûn. These are our stories, they can have their Howard Roark or Turner Diaries or whatever other putrescent crap they can come up with.
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This video is very timely;
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Looking into the article, it says that wood tar is used, not coal tar, which clears things up; I could not imagine eating coal tar. In North America, Canada anyway, when we refer to tar, our minds immediately go to coal tar.
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After getting whacked with branches?
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Yum!
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Yeah maybe use tar shampoo after that.
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The increasing instability of the US’s democratic norms has prompted these references to hypernormalization.
Donald Trump is dismantling government checks and balances in an apparent advance toward a “unitary executive” doctrine that would grant him near-unlimited authority, driving the US toward autocracy. Billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are helping the government consolidate power and aggressively reduce the federal workforce. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which help keep Americans healthy and informed, are being haphazardly diminished.
Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other.
For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.
Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.
It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”
In his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, the British film-maker Adam Curtis argued that Yurchak’s critique of late-Soviet life applies neatly to the west’s decades-long slide into authoritarianism, something more Americans are now confronting head-on.
“Donald Trump is not something new,” Curtis tells me, calling him “the final pantomime product” of the US government, where the powerful are abandoning any pretense of common, inclusive ideals and instead using their positions to settle scores, reward loyalty and hollow out institutions for personal or political gains.
Trump’s US is “just like Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s – promising a new kind of democracy, but in reality allowing the oligarchs to loot and distort the society”, says Curtis.
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T-Gel shampoo is made from coal tar and is pretty much the only thing that works on my dandruff, so thete is that.
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there are I think five different medicines used in dandruff shampoo that you can buy without a prescription. the stuff in Head and Shoulders is different than Selsun Blue etc.
I tried each one for about a month, they all worked better than regular shampoo. of course, the last one I tried – the tar shampoo – works best. for me , anyway. like, I only have to use it every-other week and it eradicates all my dandruff.
it smells like asphalt. but the smell doesn’t linger after you rinse it out.
edit: I just bought the cheapest one on Amazon, the ones at my supermarket were really expensive
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this is lovely…
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“UATX was the last place I expected to encounter ideological litmus tests”. Why? Are you actually fucking thick or what?
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Who wants to be taught by someone so wilfully thick?
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The sorts of young people who are either caught up in the mindset because they were raised in it, or at least their parents are.
Indeed, the seeming naivete of Avishai’s essay prompted a lot of online mocking and references to the popular joke that President Donald Trump’s backers voted for the Face-Eating Leopards Party, never expecting their own face would be eaten. But the story behind UATX, the billionaires and pseudo-intellectuals who back it, and its real, destructive mission highlights a crisis in today’s America that is no laughing matter.
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I read the piece. My point is that she is being disingenuous, or simply fucking thick, if she thinks far right universities don’t enforce rigid ideological purity is a reasonable assumption.
Her complaint of leopards eating her face carries less weight when she refused to read the writing saying “we are leopards who eat faces” on the gates of the school. Who would have thought indeed?
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