Today in existential dread:

Above: The guy impeached Bill Clinton over
an affair while at the same time cheating on his
wife. Who was dying of cancer. Because morals.

Can I just...I'm having feelings. Specifically a feeling of existential dread. Sure, unity and moving forward and whatever, that's all great but goddamn, we really did get the short end of that stick, didn't we? Huh? We who? We us. The we that are the reasonable people that have just watched from the outside as the Republican Party deteriorated from an already unbearable assemblage of heartless fiscal conservatives and social regressives who loved bludgeoning the rest of us with how morally superior they are (but weren't at all), to whatever it is they are now. Which, I think is some kind of weird Trump worshipping cult. 

These are the kind of people who thought
Thanos had a point. Which, I mean, just use
the Guantlet to make more resources, asshole.

And I mean, what exactly did he do for them? Conservatives, I mean. Other then cost them the White House, the Senate, whatever respect they may have had left, and, of course, America's credulity on the world stage? Is it some kind of weird Malthusian philosophy and maybe they see the catastrophic death toll from his handling of the COVID pandemic as some kind of shrewd maneuver to make it easier to park? Was it his dumb border wall? Do they maybe derive sexual pleasure seeing children separated from their families and locked in cages?

Who can say? Well, you know what? I can, because why not? Yes, Republicans are incapable of reaching orgasm without first drinking the tears of children who have been forcibly separated from their parents. 

Pictured: Mitch McConnell responding to reporters questions about
whether or not he derives sexual pleasure from human suffering.

Pictured: Dumbs. Dumbs so dumb that
they can't even see how they're being played like
the stupidest fiddles in the ignorance orchestra. 

Don't believe me? Well there are plenty of reputable studies out there that prove that what I'm saying is true. What's that? Can you see them? I'm not the one on trial here. I think a better question is why do you want to see America fail? Yeah, you see what I'm doing here? I'm constructing a super subtle analogy for how it feels when the political right makes up some transparent bullshit and then repeats it until the dumbs take up the cause and say, storm the Capitol building. Some of them go to jail sure, but the guy most responsible gets acquitted by the Senate. 

What I'm getting at is that thanks to the former president, we now live in a country with millions of radical nationalists willing to die for the former host of the Apprentice. I mean, did you see the statue (below) from the Conservative Political Action Conference that kicked off yesterday? I think it's kind of telling that the Republican Party's response to their electoral defeats last November is a two-fold strategy that involves building a golden statue of the shitty conman who led them to said defeats and then trying to pass legislation to make it harder for people of color to vote.

Um...is...is this how he looks to them? All broad shoulders and flat stomach?
Because to the rest of us he's a punchy, slouching, septuagenarian who incited a coup.

Hogwarts and all

Maybe...maybe just leave the whole thing alone. Harry Potter. As a thing I mean. Like, I enjoyed the books and I saw most of the movies, and they were fine, but did you see this about the new Harry Potter game?

"Hey, what if we made a video game based on some already
established, super-successful multi-media property?" 

-Some visionary

"Please! We're in this up to our necks.
We built theme parks for God's sake."

-Warner Bros.

Yeah, I know you didn't click on the link. It's fine. I've even come to expect it now. Here, I'll just explain. It's easier this way: Warner Bros. Studios owns the film and video game rights to the Harry Potter novels and they've got a game in development called Hogwarts Legacy. And no, there's no colon in the title. I checked and everything. Anyway, they've been very clear that noted author and transphobia enthusiast J. K. Rowling is "not involved and didn't write the story and please whatever you do, please buy our stuff, we paid a lot for the franchise before we know she was horrible." Actual quote.*  

But if we can throw a wrench in her next yacht
purchase or home reno, it will be worth it.

I don't understand the nuances of how licensing works, but whether or not Rowling was involved in the development, she surely profits from sales of this game. So the best move here would be to not give her any more money, right? Because all she's going to do is tape it together into a big sheet that she'll roll up and use as a crude megaphone though which she will shout her gross nonsense about how trans women aren't women. And I should probably clarify that mean that metaphorically. She usually shouts her transphobia over Twitter, which is free. 

Ew...I'm not clicking on these. Look,
I'm not a journalist and I don't have to do
my due diligence. This is just a blog.

But people are going to buy it anyway, let's face it, despite everything, Harry Potter is basically a money printing machine. Or galleon printing machine, I guess. Or whatever. Doesn't matter, the point is that even without J. K. Rowling, buying the game is still tainted with the dilemma of supporting someone who's super-vocal about their gross opinions. It's come out that the game's lead designer, Troy Levitt, is a right-wing nutter who enjoys posting dumb YouTube videos about the injustice of social justice (no, really) and how awesome Gamergate was. 

Yup, between J. K. Rowlings transphobia--which she insists is somehow also feminist? And Levitt's red-state poppycock and misogyny, there's just no way for fans to pick up the new Harry Potter game without supporting someone with a shitty worldview. Which is a shame, because everyone involved suffers because of these two asshats. Are the kids stills saying asshat? Because they are. Asshats, I mean.

Oh, right, piracy. I suppose you could pirate
the game, but please don't pirate the game.

*no it's not. 

Tweets and hashtags of outrageous fortune

Ok, settle down everybody, no one is canceling Shakespeare. I mention this because of an opinion piece on The Washington Post from a columnist who saw some tweets from #DisruptTexts and is now leaping to the defense of all literature everywhere against left-wing "busybodies" (the columnist's word, not mine) and their famously anti-literary agenda. 

Above: the exact opposite of that.

Meanwhile, at the
Hall of Literary Justice...

Columnist Kathleen Parker starts her piece off with a none-to subtle suggestion of left wing conspiracy:

"Just when you thought our so-called cancel culture couldn't get any more ridiculous, the calibrators of literary justice surpassed themselves recently by targeting the Bard himself as just another racist, genders, homophobic fellow."

-Parker, on so-called cancel 

culture and the calibrators of 

liter-wow, paranoid much?

Ok, so, couple of things. First, can it be so-called? Like, that kind of suggests it isn't a real thing, which kind of undercuts the point. Secondly, she knows there isn't a cancel culture headquarters, right? There's isn't a smokey boardroom somewhere where a secret cancel council decides who to cancel next. 

"Excellent, operation Carano is proceeding nicely...
Now, who's career shall we ruin next for no reason at all!"

-The Cancel Council

Pictured: Shakespeare's grave,
wherein his headless corpse just
lies, not reevaluating anything.

And can you even cancel a dead person? My admittedly inexpert understanding of the phenomenon of "cancelling" someone, is that it's a sort of social media based ostracization where the cancelee--usually a famous person--is called out for shitty things they've said or done in hopes that they might stop and that it might help others examine their own bad choices. It's a technicality, I know, but Shakespeare died in 1616, so cancelling him now-which is not what anyone's trying to do, but we'll get to that--isn't going to change his behavior. 

And not for nothing, but he also
believed in actual witchcraft, so... 

Also, I kind of feel like people who refer to Shakespeare unironically as the capital "B" Bard, are already not looking at his work critically. Look, I love Shakespeare, but yeah, the guy was a white male in Elizabethan England, so by our standards his plays absolutely contain racism and genderism. Sexism and anti-semitism as well. And while I can't think of an example of homophobia, and I'm not sure gay as an identity even existed back then, I'd buy that there's homophobia in there too. So anyone suggesting that his work might be problematic to twenty-first century audience would be correct. 

Above: a picture of a straw man
someone left here. Wasn't me.

But canceling him? No one's canceling him. The organization Parker takes issue with in her piece is called #DisruptTexts and it's run by a group of four women, all of them people of color and all of them educators. Their mission statement makes it clear that they don't support censorship or banning books, but instead that they're just out "to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum..." So what even is Parker talking about when she says they're "targeting the Bard himself"?

"Called on account of plague" would
have been familiar to Shakespeare.

She sites some tweets, but they're from 2018, so if #DisruptTexts' goal was to bring the Big Shakespeare lobby to its knees, then they've failed. But it wasn't, so they didn't. People still produce Shakespeare's plays or, at least will when it's safe for a couple hundred people to be in a room and breathe all over each other for the two-hours traffic of the stage or whatever. And I think most productions now use the problematic content as a starting point for discussion. I've worked on a few and that's what we always did. That's all #DisruptTexts is trying to do. 

Despite Parker's weird and unnecessary defensiveness, I don't think #DisruptTexts are saying no more Shakespeare, I think they're saying not just Shakespeare. And that maybe it's not just straight, white, European, mostly male artists who have something to say.

Pictured: the Western Literary Canon which, I mean,
 a NASCAR race in Nebraska with free admission
for Republicans would have more diversity.

Today in unsubstantiated rumors:

Something something lens flare joke.

Hey, remember that time Rian Johnson directed Star Wars: The Last Jedi? It was objectively the best Star Wars sequel, but was so super-divisive among fans that J. J. Abrams stepped in and threw together some nonsense about Rey being Palpatine's grand-clone or something. The result was terrible, but for some reason everyone blamed Johnson and Kathlene Kennedy, while Abrams got a pass. Anyway, then Disney canceled Johnson's new trilogy of Star Wars movies and decided to give Star Wars a rest.

And then, they announced like forty new TV series and a movie based on Rogue Squadron? Remember all that? Cool, because now Rian Johnson's movies are back on.

Above: basically Disney.*

How do I know she's a fan and thought
SW: TROS was bunk? This Funko pop
on Wilson's instagram is tagged with 
 #bensolodeservedbetter, that's how.

This according to a contest winner. No, really, a writer called Sariah Wilson won a charity auction for an audience with the producer/director/folk singer (thanks Wikipedia!), and she evidently asked Johnson about Star Wars. She tweeted:

"Yes, Rian's SW trilogy is still on. No dates or timelines because he has other projects going on, but it is happening. That is all I know about it. Smiley emoji, smiley emoji, smiley emoji."

-Sariah Wilson, author, and Star Wars fan 

who correctly hated Rise of Skywalker

Note: Do not order anything, least of all
books, from Amazon. Go to a real bookstore.
Amazon is the literal worst thing.

So couple of things. One, Ben Solo absolutely deserved better, no argument there. Secondly, is this what we're reduced to now? As fans of a thing? Seizing on scraps and rumors relaid to us via contest winning fans' social media? Contest winning fans who, as luck would have it, are authors of "funny, flirty, feel-good romance" fiction and who-coincidentally I'm sure--also just happen to have new a book coming out? Order yours today on Amazon.com (but really, don't).

"Ach, who needs artistic integrity when
you can have literal mountains of cash?"

-some Disney spokesduck

Look, I loved Last Jedi and am down for another Rian Johnson Star Wars movie or three and I totally want to believe that Sariah Wilson's tweet is real. But I'm trying to be realistic here. I mean, giant corporations aren't exactly famous for taking creative risks. When movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars, like these do, they're going to go for the safest bet. And I'm just not sure that after the backlash from fans (the ones who hate things that are great), that I totally buy that Disney's going to be handing Rian Johnson the keys ever again, no matter how much better his movie was than J. J. Abrams' (it was way better, for the record).

Which is a shame, but I suppose you have to you know, let the past die, kill it if you have to, or whatever. And besides, they've got Patty Jenkins directing the next one, so it's not like fans are going without.

Pictured: Patty Jenkins seen here donning
her official director's helmet. 

*And yes, I realize that that's a Scarlet Witch reference, and that Disney owns Marvel as well, but it was only a matter of time before Disney owned so much of pop culture that it begins to eat itself in some kind of ouroboros of corporate synergy. 

Unimpeachable!

Phew...that was close, for a minute there it almost looked like Donald Trump would be held accountable for something. 

"Not on my watch..."

-Ted Cruz, Senator 

and impartial juror

I'm sorry, is it his charm? His eloquence? Did he
take their families hostage? Seriously, I'm asking.

Just kidding. At no point did anyone think that seventeen members of the GOP were going to suddenly develop a sense of loyalty to anything or anyone other than the narcissistic, rambling conman they for some reason let hijack their party. Seven did, and that's super, but I think we all know that the rest of them went in to this with absolutely no intention of listening to the evidence. At all. This was their way of saying to the world that a racist, two time popular vote losing, sexual assault enthusiast was more important to them than a functioning democracy.

The Republican party: 
"Fuck it, we're just going full fascist."

-The new GOP slogan

I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that acquitted isn't the same thing as innocent. Of course, we could just as easily allow ourselves to be consumed by the cold terror that today's acquittal is only going to embolden his supporters. A sitting President did, after all, incite an angry mob to try and overturn the election, and he's getting a pass. What's worse is that even now the GOP is introducing legislation in thirty-three states to make it harder to vote. It's part of their effort to stamp out the rampant voter participation that lost them 2020. Yup, they lost, so the plan is to make it as difficult as possible for people to vote. The party of Lincoln everybody...

Anyway, what I'm saying is that now would be a swell time to kill the filibuster, ram through some desperately needed voting rights protections, admit Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. as states, and pack the Supreme Court. 

Because for real, this is not how any of this is supposed to work.

Don't be like Biggs Darklighter.

Sorry to be like a dog with a bone about this, but the whole Gina Carano thing just keeps going. The MMA fighter, turned actor, turned vocal right-wing conspiracy Tweeter, turned unemployed actor has now turned movie star. 

Pictured: me, metaphorically. I'm not really a pet person.

Baio's most recent project was a
photo he tweeted of a Micheal's
craft store display he messed up.

Well, ok, I'm going to have to walk that back a bit. When I say movie star, I mean she'll be starring in a movie developed and produced by herself and fellow conservative with a persecution complex, Ben Shapiro, that tens of people will see...and then turn off when they realize they're watching a gross Republican thing. Yes, Carano will join the ranks of such right-wing film and television luminaries as Rob Schneider, Tim Allen and uh...who else have they got? Oh, Scott Baio. May his star never stop rising. 

Pictured: Joss Whedon, a victim of cancel
culture who is right now being brutally
held accountable for things he's said and
done to people who couldn't fight back.

Anyway, Carano and Sharpiro are presenting this as a response to or a clap back as the kids would say, at cancel culture. You know, the phenomenon of holding people accountable for their words and actions through social pressure? Usually this happens in cases where there is no other recourse, say, because the person being "canceled" is unlikely to face other consequences for their shitty behavior. Carano's shitty behavior started with a transphobic joke, but came to a head when a Tweet comparing conservatives to Holocaust victims surfaced. 

The cancelation took the form of not having her contract with Disney renewed, and a social media backlash which Carano and supporters view as a grave injustice while the rest of us see it as, you know, what happens when you post hateful bullshit on social media. 

Just desserts, if you will. Huh? No, I'm not sorry.

In an interview with Deadline, Carano said:

Gina Carano, champion of people
who want to make transphobic jokes...

"I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob. I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before, and I hope it inspires others to do the same. They can't cancel us if we don't let them."

-Gina Carano speaking to Deadli-

wait, now the filter's off? All those 

posts were her feeling stifled? 

But this is just the beginning tweeted Carano before characterizing her new career move as a rebellion...which I'm sure has nothing to do with her previous role in Star Wars:

See?

"Yeah, but it's not Trump's fault, I mean, what
was he supposed to do? Not incite a violent
 mob to overturn the election he lost?"

-Ted Cruz, evidently

I'm just...so usually the word rebellion suggests a group of disempowered people fighting against a powerful establishment, which is I think is interesting coming from a conservative. Like, wouldn't conservatives, by definition I mean, be those who support the establishment? I guess I just feel like casting oneself in the role of the oppressed rings a little disingenuous for the American political right when--despite being at a numerical disadvantage--they continue to exercise disproportionate control over government. I mean, they just had an insurrection over it.

I guess I'm baffled by people like Gina Carano who seem to think that facing public backlash for hateful things they say makes them the scrappy underdogs fighting against an oppressive establishment. Like, if the cause you're fighting for is the right to spread dangerous nonsense about wearing masks in a pandemic, or if you're railing against being asked to use someone's preferred pronoun, you're not one of the good guys.

"Luke! I can't believe we're going to blow up the Death Star!
 Just think: once we're free of the Empire's brutal, liberal totalitarianism,
we'll finally be free to tell everyone what we think of the Jews!"  

-Biggs Darklighter, making

Luke very uncomfortable

Today in things that aren't the same thing:

Did you know that Fox News is still a thing? Because it is, and unsurprisingly they're defending Gina Carano and taking issue with her firing. They're arguing that-huh? Yeah, Gina Carano got fired. Well, they're not renewing her contract because of her dumb gross Tweets comparing being conservative in America with being Jewish in Nazi Germany.

We talked about this like yesterday. Huh? No, I'm not going to link
 to it, just...just scroll down a little. You know what? Fine, here.

From the network not afraid to ask
why there isn't a white history month.

Anyway, I should probably walk back my previous statement. Fox isn't so much defending Gina Carano as they are making the "well liberals do the same thing" argument. The news site suggests that fans are baffled (we're not) by Carano's firing when co-star Pedro Pascal did the same thing back in 2018 (he didn't). Pascal purportedly posted a tweet comparing the Trump administration's policy of locking children in cages and separating them from their families to what happened to Jewish children in Germany. 

Pictured: known liberal Pedro Pascal,
seen here probably thinking about
universal health care or something.

Here's what they said:

"But, the liberal Pascal...used the hashtag #ThisisAmerica to caption side-by-side images. The top image was said to show children confined by barbed wire in Nazi Germany...while the bottom image was purported to be from the United States in 2018--although multiple reports indicated the photo actually shows Palestinian children years earlier."

-Fox News, equivalizing 

Um, so how do you have a top and bottom image when it's a side-by-nevermind. The point is that the Trump administration did lock kids in cages, and they did separate children from their parents. In hundreds of cases, they deported parents without their children. The Nazis one hundred percent locked children in cages and separated them--in many cases permanently--from their families. That's a thing that happened and not only is Pedro Pascal not the first person to draw the comparison, he's also not wrong to do so.

As for the photo Pascal posted possibly being from some other instance of kids being locked 
up in cages, he's a shot of a detention center in El Paso, Texas from 2019. So what else ya got?

Show of hands, which end of the political
spectrum is pro-white supremacist? Oh, right.

Carano's original post suggested that the German government turned the populace against Jews, which they did, and then asks how this is different from hating someone for their political views, which it is. I'm not like a political scientist or anything, but it's totally different. For one thing, the American political right has been either actively courting white nationalists or staying silent while Trump blew his dog-whistle. Literal Nazis. Does Brian Flood of Fox News not see the problem here? Hey, nazi the problem? See what I did there?

Pictured: noted conspiracy nut and 
transphobic jerk, Gina Carano.

For another thing, calling people out for their shitty worldview isn't the same thing as scapegoating an entire racial or religious group and then murdering millions of them. Carano is free to hop on Twitter and call COVID-19 a hoax and even spout her dumb beep/boop/bop jokes, just as everyone else is equally free to call her a conspiracy nut and transphobic jerk. And Lucasfilm is free to not renew Carano's contract. I just don't think it's unreasonable to take issue with a conservative using the Holocaust as cover to spout nonsense without consequence.

Anyway, so no, Pedro Pascal comparing the Trump administration's Nazi-like policy to the Nazi's Nazi-like policy isn't the same thing as booting Gina Carano off Star Wars. And look, I don't think I'm just speaking for me here, but I don't hate conservatives. I really don't. I'm often frustrated by them, and I just wish they'd stop being so horrible, and racist, and transphobic, and anti-science, and anti-poor and-look the point is I don't hate them.

Although maybe ask me how I feel in a few days when a handful of Republicans
crawl out of Donald Trump's ass long enough to acquit him for that coup attempt he incited.