Confused Army Corp Of Engineers Trying To Find Out What Big Blue Cable Connected To Country Does https://t.co/eVAxo5Yw6X pic.twitter.com/7VMvhzGhcO
— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 5, 2020
• • • an aural noise • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Georgia’s Love-Hate Relationship With Joseph Stalin
The Soviet leader’s home country is a battleground for dueling interpretations of history.
Nazi Stepanishvili sits in the corner of her home museum, where she displays Stalin memorabilia from across the globe. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
IN THE CORNER OF HER house museum in Gori, Georgia, 77-year-old Nazi Stepanishvili sits at a meeting point of the religious and the revolutionary. To her right are images of the Georgian saints, crowned with golden haloes. To her left are portraits of Joseph Stalin, the Georgian-born autocrat who presided over the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. Where they meet above her head, an image of a young Stalin, dressed in white and depicted as an Orthodox saint, stares out.
“I’m a believer and a communist,” explains Stepanishvili. These images are part of a collection of Stalin memorabilia she has collected from around the globe over the past 30 years. “If I have money, I always invest in Stalin’s items,” she says. “I may not buy medicines or bread, but I’m going to buy Stalin’s things. I feel like the richest person because I have what I love. This is my wealth.”
More than 60 years after Stalin’s death, he is still venerated by many in Georgia, formerly known as the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Here in his hometown of Gori, four statues of the “man of steel” stand in public venues, his name graces the main avenue, and a centrally located museum—better described as a shrine—uncritically celebrates his legacy. The museum uses a collection of relics to depict him as a secular saint, and a small, easily overlooked corner is the only testament to the crimes he committed. The place is visited by hordes of tourists every year.
One of the four remaining publicly displayed Stalin statues in Gori stands outside the Stalin Museum.
Gori is a battleground for dueling interpretations of history. In 2010, under cover of night, the pro-Western government of Georgia removed the largest Stalin statue in the city, sparking local backlash. The following year, the Georgian legislature passed a “Liberty Charter” banning the public display of totalitarian symbols. Recently, however, Stalin effigies have returned to Georgian villages, such as Zemo Alvani and Telavi. In Gori, local citizens supported by the Communist Party have repeatedly tried to reinstall the large Stalin statue in the city center, and have even funded the construction of a new pedestal. In this small country caught between a Soviet past and a potential future in the European Union, Stalin has become a kind of Rorschach test, a canvas onto which different generations project their diagnoses of the country’s ailments and prescriptions for its success. …
‘This Must Be Your First’
Only one widely understood word captures what Donald Trump is trying to do, even though his acts do not meet its technical definition.
It goes somewhere.
ON THE EVENING of September 11, 1980, my mom was approached by a neighbor who held rank in the Turkish military. He told her to stock up on bread and rice. “Oh, another coup,” she immediately groaned. The neighbor was aghast—he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what was coming. But my mom, of course, had immediately understood what his advice must have meant. Turkey is the land of coups; this was neither the first nor the last coup it would face.
A little more than two decades later, I walked up to a counter in Antalya Airport to tell a disbelieving airline employee that our flight would shortly be canceled because the tanks being reported in the streets of Istanbul meant that a coup attempt was under way. It must be a military exercise, she shrugged. Some routine transport of troops, perhaps? If so, I asked her, where is the prime minister? Why isn’t he on TV to tell us that? Another woman approached the counter. “This must be your first,” she said to the young woman behind the counter, who was still shaking her head. “It’s my fourth.”
I told the airline employee that we were not getting on that plane, destined for the Istanbul airport, which I knew would be a primary target. The other woman and I nodded at each other, becoming an immediate coup pod. I went out to secure transportation for us—this airport was not going to be safe either—while she and my 7-year-old son went to retrieve our luggage. “His first too,” I said to her.
In political science, the term coup refers to the illegitimate overthrow of a sitting government—usually through violence or the threat of violence. The technical term for attempting to stay in power illegitimately—such as after losing an election—is self-coup or autocoup—sometimes autogolpe.
Much debate has ensued about what exactly to call whatever Trump is attempting right now, and about how worried we should be. It’s true, the whole thing seems ludicrous—the incoherent lawsuits, the late-night champagne given to official election canvassers in Trump hotels, the tweets riddled with grammatical errors and weird capitalization. Trump has been broadly acknowledged as “norm shattering” and some have argued that this is just more of his usual bluster, while others have pointed out terminological issues with calling his endeavors a coup. Coup may not quite capture what we’re witnessing in the United States right now, but there’s also a danger here: Punditry can tend to focus too much on decorum and terminology, like the overachieving students so many of us once were, conflating the ridiculous with the unserious. The incoherence and the incompetence of the attempt do not change its nature, however, nor do those traits allow us to dismiss it or ignore it until it finally fails on account of its incompetence. …
Ed. I’m thinking distraction, rather than coup. This steaming pile of shit is robbing the country blind (including his supporters); all the while refusing to go away.
AUTOGOLPE: I had to look it up, too. You’re welcome.
How to Build a Global Abolition Movement
The carceral state is on the rise around the world, and ending it will require a movement that recognizes the internationalism of policing, even if, as one activist put it, “My pigs are not your pigs.”
Earlier his year, as spring turned to summer, cities and towns across the United States burned with an idea, sparked by the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade and built on the deaths of others like Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and Kalief Browder. It was the idea of abolition.
Having spent the months prior huddled against a deadly pandemic, people took to the streets to mourn, rage, and demand a different kind of world. In Minneapolis, in the first days of the uprising, they burned down a police precinct known as a “playground for rogue cops” and began housing people living on the street in an empty hotel. In Seattle, they created a cop-free “autonomous” zone. In New York, where I live, the police attacked protestors indiscriminately; some ran, others fought back. Every night, more people came out—one could hardly step outside without stumbling into a march. The masses were on the move, looking for the way forward.
Much of what was built during the uprising has already proven fragile. The Minneapolis city council’s commitment to dismantle the police department has been reduced to piecemeal reforms. Armored police cleared out Seattle’s autonomous zone after it began to deteriorate amid infighting and several instances of gun violence. A similar encampment established adjacent to New York’s City Hall to demand dramatic redistribution of the NYPD’s funding resisted several police incursions, only to quickly evaporate after the city council passed a budget that barely registered its demands. This was not a revolutionary moment, even if for a fleeting instant it may have felt so. But neither was all of this activity for naught. It is in just such moments that a revolutionary idea can begin to take root. The idea, today, is: What would a world without police or prisons look like?
This is not a new idea; in fact, it is precisely its maturity that made its proliferation possible. In the United States, Black Marxist feminists like Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have been studying and developing the abolitionist framework for decades, drawing from the work of Quaker radicals like Fay Honey Knopp and Norwegian sociologists like Thomas Mathiesen. While today the abolitionist movement’s political demands often focus on defunding police departments and other law enforcement agencies or dismantling existing prisons and opposing the construction of new ones, the abolitionist framework is in fact much more expansive, examining the key function that repressive institutions like the police and prisons serve in the wider organization of society. Many U.S. abolitionists, for example, would argue that mass incarceration has played a crucial role in the rise of neoliberalism—the globalized economic order of austerity, privatization, and financialization that has taken hold since the 1970s. In this context, as Davis puts it, the prison has become “a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.” …
Back In The Day, Pinball Was Most Dangerous Game In America
The 1930s were a rough time for America. Hobo camps spread across the nation and the only remaining industry was clinging to a 9th-floor gargoyle on Wall Street, trying to mug investors on the way down. Every bank in the midwest got robbed at least three times by guys with insane names like Fancy Lad Donahue and Babydick Johnson. In New York, the Mafia was doing so well that it formed a board of directors, farmed murders out to a subsidiary, and generally seemed about a week away from incorporating on the actual stock exchange. Society was crumbling everywhere people looked. Naturally, honest Americans knew exactly who to blame for this disastrous state of affairs: gamers!
These days, video games get blamed for everything from mass shootings to unemployment to this article not being funny enough (look, those mines weren’t going to sweep themselves). But video games weren’t around at the time since everyone was too busy living in a real apocalyptic nightmare to invent The Last of Us. Fortunately, there was a new gaming craze sweeping the nation: pinball. It didn’t take long for civic leaders to declare pinball machines “a tool from the devil” responsible for luring America’s youth into lives of delinquency and degradation. America would remain at war with the “insidious nickel stealers” until 1976, when the nation’s greatest pinball player was summoned to the halls of power for a high-stakes challenge: Make a single shot so impressive it instantly made pinball legal again.
Ironically, the war on pinball was originally enabled by another dramatic pinball showdown. Back in 1935, a New York candy store owner named Jacob Mirowsky was arrested over his pinball machine, which offered small prizes for high scores. The cops said that pinball was a game of chance, making this illegal gambling. Mirowsky countered that pinball was a game of skill, no different from golf or topless cribbage. To prove it, he offered to scour the city to assemble a crack team of New York’s greatest pinball players, who would demonstrate their skill before the court. The judge, who could recognize some incredibly cool shit when he heard it, agreed.
Sadly, we have almost no information about the team of three Mirowsky assembled, aside from the New York Times report that they were all youths “considered successful shooters of the little ball.” So we’re forced to completely make it up. From Hell’s Kitchen came Kid Parabola, who could put a pinball between a man’s eyes from 100 yards, and sometimes did. From Queens came Cyrus “Two Hands” McTiltawhurl, who won 50,000 francs from the King of Egypt in a high-stakes pinball shootout, then lost it all gambling on albatross races on the zeppelin home. And from The Bronx came Kid “The Kid” Kiddington, who was born on a trash barge in the East River, and died there too.
Whatever their real names, the three pinball sharpshooters assembled in the courtroom that summer — and lost in the most humiliating circumstances imaginable. …
RELATED: The Outlaw Whose Corpse Got Lost In A Haunted House
Haunted houses are a fine spectacle of simulated spookiness. No matter how frightening, you’re safe in the knowledge that the only thing truly macabre are the lives of the out-of-work actors trying to jump-scare you. But wouldn’t it be a shock to find that one of the unconvincing mannequins hanging from the ceiling is, in fact, the real corpse of a malevolent man hidden behind a waxy facade?
No, this isn’t some half-assed Goosebumps reveal. It’s the (after)life and story of Elmer McCurdy, a Wild West bandit whose body traveled the carnival circuit for over half a century. Not that his exploits as a gunslinger merited such postmortem fascination. In life, McCurdy was an underwhelming Oklahoma outlaw responsible for a string of incompetent bank and train robberies. After melting thousands of dollars in silver (by misjudging his explosives) and accidentally robbing the wrong train, McCurdy’s string of bad luck finally caught up to him in 1911 when he was gunned down in a barnyard shootout. And there, the tale of Butterfingers McCurdy should have ended.
But whatever glorious infamy he chased in life, the robber would find in death. With no one bothering to claim his corpse, the undertaker in charge of his body turned him into a necromantic peep show. Visitors to the mortuary could insert a nickel into McCurdy’s lifeless mouth for a chance to gaze upon one of the last so-called Wild West outlaws. He became such a popular attraction that local traveling carnivals would enter bidding wars to get their mitts on his corpse. Eventually, posing as McCurdy’s long lost brothers, the owners of Patterson’s traveling carnival managed to pry his cold dead hands from the undertaker.
This was the beginning of McCurdy’s Weekend At Bernie’s style career as a traveling dead outlaw. And every time he was sold off to another carnival, parade, or movie premiere, his undeserved cowboy legend grew. First billed as “The Embalmed Bandit,” he soon became “The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive,” “The Famous Oklahoma Outlaw,” and eventually “The Thousand-Year-Old Man.” By this time, in the mid-20th century, McCurdy’s embalmed body had lost a lot of its luster. Missing fingers, toes, and ears, his waxy skin bore little resemblence the man (or any man) he once was. Then one day, the body slipped into total obscurity, shuffled away in the backroom of carny history as just another cheap wax curio.
Until, after a decade, he was rediscovered by accident by the TV crew of The Six Million Dollar Man, the least inflation-proof superhero in American history. …
RELATED: The Historical Figure Who Invented A Country (And Got Away With It)
Gregor MacGregor has gone by many names throughout his life: El General MacGregor, the Prince of Poyais, the Cazique, His Serene Highness Gregor. But we prefer to refer to him as the luckiest and most ambitious conman in history, mainly because he claimed that he was the sovereign of a Central American paradise nation and somehow hundreds of people straight-up believed him.
Settle in, as we’re about to meet one of history’s all-time griftlords …
Not So Humble Origins
Gregor MacGregor was born in 1786 but his life doesn’t start getting interesting until the 1800s. Besides being lucky, MacGregor was just unbelievably Scottish. His name makes him sound like a parody character who constantly plays bagpipes made from haggis. MacGregor was the grandson of Gregor the Beautiful, a Scottish lord and clansman of renown. His father was an East India Company sea captain. His great-great-uncle was Rob Roy, the famous outlaw folk hero.
With this storied pedigree, MacGregor joined the British Army in 1803 and advanced/bought his way up the ranks until he became a major. He could afford it all by marrying the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral, which came with a massive dowry. Things could not have been looking better for MacGregor… until he apparently had a minor disagreement with a superior officer and asked to be discharged from the Army. …
The Children of Pornhub
Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?
This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.
Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.
That supposedly “wholesome Pornhub” attracts 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, Yahoo or Amazon. Pornhub rakes in money from almost three billion ad impressions a day. One ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th-most-visited website in the world.
Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.
After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.
Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal. …
RELATED: Mastercard to investigate allegations against Pornhub
Mastercard Inc said on Sunday it was investigating allegations against Pornhub.com following a newspaper column which said many videos posted on the adult website depicted child abuse.
The New York Times column, written by Nicholas Kristof, described videos on Pornhub that the author said were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls.
“The issue is not pornography but rape. Let’s agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable,” Kristof wrote in the column published on Friday. (nyti.ms/2JXiqSw)
Pornhub denied the allegations.
“Any assertion that we allow CSAM (child sexual abuse material) is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue,” it said in a statement emailed to Reuters.
Mastercard told Reuters in a statement that it was investigating the allegations with Pornhub’s parent MindGeek’s bank. “If the claims are substantiated, we will take immediate action,” Mastercard said. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
With the help of viewers at home, John tries to get to the bottom of an important mystery.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
子ねこが寝ている間は、大人時間。Maru&Hana enjoy adult time while the kitten Miri is sleeping.
FINALLY . . .
Everything You Already Forgot About 2020
Aliens, coronavirus porn, 5G conspiracies, “Imagine,” and other stuff you immediately wiped from your brain.
Embiggenable.
2020 HAS BEEN THE YEAR that everything and nothing happened.
As Coronavirus forcibly took the wheel, we put aside nearly all plans and instead steered straight into a pandemic that broke our spirits and our brains. Meanwhile, we experienced both a nation-wide reckoning with systemic anti-Blackness and an election season that felt ripped out of a dystopian fiction. With those things to process, there wasn’t much more that our anxiety-ridden, quarantine-melted minds could entertain.
But the world did, in fact, go on. The ice caps continued melting. Celebrities continued to make fools of themselves. And as news became increasingly difficult to follow, the internet felt more united than ever—clamoring around memes, pop culture controversies, and new Netflix content like campfires in an otherwise dark and terrifying new wilderness.
To aid in your annual reflection, here is a list of everything you likely already forgot happened, or didn’t even realize occurred, in 2020. These events may fall under any of the following categories: news you simply decided to reject for the time being (not today, aliens), dumb shit you probably enjoyed for one day and then immediately erased from your mind to make room for fresh horrors, and actually important stuff you probably just missed while you were obsessively washing your hands (read: crying). In other words, it’s—aptly—a chaotic mess.
January 2: The U.S. killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani via drone strike, bringing us to the brink of war. (Great start!)
January 2: Dr. Phil put his hideous mansion up for sale.
Dr. Phil’s mansion looks like it was decorated by a teenage energy drink tycoon. https://t.co/6EKZldcXpn
— Garrett Poorman (@GarrettPoorman) January 3, 2020
January 11: Goop released a $75 candle called “This Smells Like My Vagina.” (And premiered the Goop Lab show on Netflix about two weeks later.)
January 22: Planters killed off Mr. Peanut as part of a Super Bowl ad campaign.
January 27: Planters cancelled Mr. Peanut’s televised funeral out of respect for Kobe Bryant. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
‘Well, They’re Harmless And They Help With Pests,’ Says Man Deciding Against Squashing Cat https://t.co/w7EGqJRiRR pic.twitter.com/oRc1kxfT8h
— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 6, 2020
ONE MORE ONE MORE THING:
Google Announces Most Searched Term Of Year Is Once Again ‘Nervous Breakdown Hate Life Hate Job How To Get New Life’ https://t.co/xYwJKPnvMk pic.twitter.com/hcAA0IYzGb
— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 7, 2020
The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020
