From The Archives: https://t.co/o3BY4wMaB9 pic.twitter.com/stxHxhttfT
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 20, 2021
From 2015…
• • • an aural noise • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Secrets From Tel Aviv’s ‘Eclectic’ Era Are Hiding All Over the City
Briefly popular in the 1920s, these beautifully patterned tiles have made a comeback.
Tel Aviv’s painted tiles had their heyday in the 1920s. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
SOME TIME DURING THE 1920S, POET HAYIM Nahman Bialik took an unauthorized shortcut through the grounds of Jacob Gluska’s construction factory. Gluska’s brother caught Bialik on the property and rebuked him. Bialik, an arrogant Tel-Avivian who was also Israel’s national poet, did not appreciate the remark, and they came to blows.
In 2009, almost a hundred years after the slap that stopped Bialik from taking any more factory shortcuts, Bialik’s home was restored to its former grandeur and opened to visitors as a museum and cultural center. Gluska’s son was the one who recreating its original patterned tiles.
Restored tiles at Bialik’s former home, now a museum and cultural center.
In the early 20th century, Tel Aviv had a distinguished industry of beautiful decorated tiles, which can still be seen in some private homes, apartments, stairwells, and public buildings. After peaking in the 1920s, the tiles have become more and more scarce over the decades. Now, there’s a renewed appreciation for them.
German Christians of the Temple Society sect, who immigrated to Palestine late in the 19th century, were the first to bring the painted tiles to Tel Aviv. But “[d]uring World War II, the British army deported the Templar families to Australia, and that was the end of their involvement in the local tile industry,” says Avi Levi, a landscape architect and hunter of derelict buildings and decorated tiles. …
RELATED: Lerwick, Scotland: Lerwick Public Sign Snail
The unexpected mascot of Shetland’s capital.
Lerwick Public Sign Snails. Embiggenable. Explore at home
CONSIDERING THAT BOTH THE SHETLAND pony and Shetland sheepdog are named their archipelago of origin, it makes perfect sense that they would somewhat be considered its animal symbols. The pony is even featured on Shetland’s coat of arms, while other domesticated animals, such as the Shetland sheep and Shetland duck, can represent the island’s culture.
The creature that appears sporadically across Shetland’s capital is a much more unlikely representative. It has no real cultural connection to the land, and in fact, is quite uncommon. That small animal is the snail.
While slugs and water snails are common across the nearly 100 islands of Shetland, their shelled, land-based gastropod relatives are much less so. In fact, Unst, the most northerly inhabited island of the archipelago, might have documented its first garden snails as early as 2008.
The Lerwick snails are a collection of stickers of land-based gastropods, which appear on public signs across town. There is very little information about their authorship or the reason behind an animal so uncommon to the islands being chosen for these signs. However, it does appear that they were first documented online in 2013 and have been either maintained or reapplied ever since. They have gained somewhat of a cult following and appreciation among Lerwick’s inhabitants. …
Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?
“The First White President,” revisited
I’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.
Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”
The chasm between professed ideal and actual practice is not surprising. No one wants to believe themselves to be the villain of history, and when you have enough power, you can hold reality at bay. Raw power transfigured an age of serfdom and warmongering into one of piety and courtly love.
This is not merely a problem of history. Twice now, Rudy Giuliani has incited a mob of authoritarians. In the interim, “America’s Mayor” was lauded locally for crime drops that manifested nationally. No matter. The image of Giuliani as a pioneering crime fighter gave cover to his more lamentable habits—arresting whistleblowers, defaming dead altar boys, and raiding homeless shelters in the dead of night. Giuliani was, by Jimmy Breslin’s lights, “blind, mean, and duplicitous,” a man prone to displays “of great nervousness if more than one black at a time entered City Hall.” And yet much chin-stroking has been dedicated to understanding how Giuliani, once the standard-bearer for moderate Republicanism, a man who was literally knighted, was reduced to inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol. The answer is that Giuliani wasn’t reduced at all. The inability to see what was right before us—that Giuliani was always, in Breslin’s words, “a small man in search of a balcony”—is less about Giuliani and more about what people would rather not see. …
RELATED: Aftermath: Surviving As A Nation After Donald J. Trump
Look down, look down that lonesome road,
Before you travel on.
–That Lonesome Road, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973)
This is America.
— Childish Gambino
1
I suppose it was inevitable that one day it would come to this, that racism would meet itself traveling down that lonesome road.
Witnessing it has been both ugly and delicious, new — yet hauntingly familiar. Lindsey Graham gets off a plane and walks through an airport in Virginia after recently acknowledging on the Senate floor that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. He is greeted by a mob of enraged Trump supporters who yell “traitor” and record him on their cell phones while he is escorted through the crowd by a detail of police. A woman screams above the others, “You know [the election] was rigged, you garbage human being. Piece of shit. It’s going to be like this, wherever you go for the rest of your life.” A man beside her shouts, “Welcome to the new America, Lindsey.”
I watch him move through the crowd and recall the iconic image of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford as she desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the photo, taken by photographer Will Counts in 1957, Eckford maintains her composure behind dark sunglasses while clutching her notebook to her chest. She is followed by a mob of chanting whites, as one woman stands directly behind Eckford, taunting her, her face distorted with rage. She could be an ancestor of the woman shouting at Graham in the airport. A man who only a few weeks before had allegedly attempted to disenfranchise Black voters by privately calling an election official, now faces a mob of angry whites himself. The irony is spectacular.
Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, who remained steadfast in insisting that there hadn’t been voter fraud in his state despite Donald Trump’s imploring and eventual condemnation, requires 24-hour security these days. I assume his children must be escorted everywhere, his house carefully watched. He too faces a white mob and death threats. I imagine him and his wife, peeking through the curtains of their living room, fearing that while they are watching television a brick might be hurled through their window, or a cross burned on their lawn.
Brian Kemp, probably not the most sympathetic civil-rights figure the world has ever known, fears, like many Republican officials who have defied Donald Trump, that if he walks out of his house he could be harmed by Trump’s supporters, perhaps fatally and in front of his family, as Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in Mississippi in 1963. Brian Kemp may have lived in the South all his life, but I suspect this is a South he cannot recognize, cannot fully own. And yet, here we are.
White people, please allow me to introduce you to white people. Not the friendly neighbor who waves from across the street when you pick up the morning paper, nor the caring Mom who drops your teenage daughter off at soccer practice, but the white people you rarely see. When the dream of whiteness in which many Americans have invested is shattered, there is another layer to be found, and it’s a nightmare. This is the whiteness Black Americans know. A whiteness that can’t be negotiated or reasoned with, that refuses to see another’s humanity, that feeds on violence, despises difference of any kind, and blew like a tornado through the corridors of our nation’s Capitol, leaving destruction and murder in its wake on January 6, 2021. A whiteness that can shoot an unarmed Jacob Blake in the back seven times in front of his children or kill Breonna Taylor in her home, walking the streets uncharged, roaming the earth without consequence. …
Correction: President Trump Pardoned Steve Bannon After All
Ahh, Steve Bannon. Former Breitbart executive chair, ex-Trump aide, SNL grim reaper, and now, the recipient of a highly coveted-presidential pardon? Despite Tuesday’s reports alleging that the soon-to-be-ex President would exclude Bannon from the list of the approximately 100 people receiving pardons and commutations on his last day in office, it seems POTUS had a literal 11th-hour change of heart, including his former advisor after all.
“President Trump granted a full pardon to Stephen Bannon. Prosecutors pursued Mr. Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project,” wrote White House Press Secretary, BoJack Horseman‘s Vincent Adultma- sorry, Kayleigh McEnany in a statement. “Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen.”
I guess “political acumen” is one way to put it. Anyways, last year, Bannon and two other associates found themselves in hot water after being arrested and charged with defrauding donors out of “hundreds of thousands” of dollars with the “We Build the Wall” fundraising initiative, which they claim was aimed at helping support build a border wall between Mexico and the United States, according to The Department of Justice. His trial date was set for May 2021, which will now potentially be canceled, alongside this Taurus writer’s big quarantine birthday plans of reading about Bannon floundering in court alongside a big glass of wine.
The decision to pardon Steve Bannon (or as my autocorrect loves to call his surname, Steve Banana) was apparently not an easy one, filled with “frantic debate” over whether the political strategist deserved this type of presidential legal pass, CNN reported. As you may recall, because it was literally all anyone could talk about for a good chunk of time in the early days of 45’s tenure, he and Trump had a highly-publicized falling out a few years back, after the former Boiosphere 2 exec was quoted in a book slamming his kids, calling Donald Trump Jr. “treasonous” for convening with a Russian lawyer and alleging that Ivanka was “dumb as a brick.” The president, in turn, issued a statement alleging Bannon had lost his mind, according to the outlet. Remember, kids, don’t shit talk your political allies — but if you’re going to, maybe, oh, I don’t know, refrain from doing so in a book? …
Ed. How’s that about a really nice parting gift to the utter morons people who donated to Trump’s Stop the Steal money grab?
RELATED: ‘Wandavision’ Inadvertently Anticipated How We Watch TV Today
A lot has been written about how Marvel’s Wandavision takes the MCU in a new direction, dropping us into a mysterious old-timey sitcom universe instead of one in which spandex-clad heroes beat the crap out of killer robots and evil purple musclemen. Perhaps the most surprising part of the show is just how faithfully Wandavision recreates classic shows, specifically The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched.
Clearly, one of the show’s biggest influences is the 1998 comedy Pleasantville (they even share a prop designer), which found Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire trapped in a Leave it to Beaver-like hellscape. But Pleasantville very unsubtly compared the squeaky clean racism and misogyny of classic TV to straight-up Nazism, ultimately telling a story about bigotry and civil rights with an all-white cast — which seems kind of weird in retrospect.
Wandavision, on the other hand, is earnestly paying tribute to the artistry of these shows, not writing them off as pure evil. The folks behind Wandavision went to great lengths to earn its authentic vibes; the director met with Dick Van Dyke before filming, episodes were shot in front of a live studio audience (who all had to sign NDAs), and the crew even dressed in period clothing while using vintage lenses and lighting.
All of which reinforces the feeling that, for whatever reason, this TV universe is comforting Wanda. While we don’t know exactly what’s going on yet, the internet’s rampant theorizing division is in full swing, and a lot of fans think that the Nick at Nite-verse Wanda is stuck inside is one of her own creation following Vision’s death (possibly inspired by a famous comic storyline). And although Wandavision began filming back in 2019, the show seems to have stumbled into a prescient commentary on how we’re all watching TV right now. …
Ed. The president should not have been televised.
How to Recognize Right-wing Dog Whistles and Symbols, From Viking Hats to Flags
The public is finally realizing what antifascists have warned for years: these symbols are rooted in American culture. Amid increased threats of violence, we need to get better at detecting them.
A Gadsen flag flying above the crowd at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
How did a mob of angry Trump supporters come so close to harming members of Congress on January 6, 2021? Capitol police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), two government agencies adept at suppressing dissent, have been conspicuously lenient compared to their interventions in leftist movements. Feigning ignorance to what the US really represents, politicians and mainstream media outlets still fail to connect QAnon with white supremacy and convey the ubiquity of racist hate groups, whose ideology is prevalent even in the federal government. Their slogans and symbols are out in the open, and we need to get better at detecting them.
From Proud Boys and neo-Nazis to anti-government militias, a broad fascist coalition has consolidated around Trump’s claims of election fraud and deep-seated white fragility. Fascism has no clear-cut definition, but it does have concrete symptoms: simultaneous claims of victory and victimhood, diligent beliefs in nativism, and what Umberto Eco called the “cult of tradition.” This last component covers the far-right ideological spectrum, which is why Confederate and “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flags appear alongside Ku Klux Klan (KKK) signs and posters of 4chan memes. Five years of neoliberal class reductionism created an illusion about Trump supporters: that they live in “flyover” states, work in increasingly obsolete industries, and struggle financially. While this rhetoric swayed swing voters in 2016, reports from Capitol Hill showed many insurrectionists were affluent business owners and off-duty police officers associated with these hate groups.
Multiple Gadsen flags can be seen in the crowd of the pro-Trump mob at the Capitol on January 6.
Left-wing organizations have documented far-right dog whistles for years — perhaps most comprehensively by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League’s Hate on Display database. The Proud Boys are known for using anti-Semitic acronyms like 6MWE (Six Million Wasn’t Enough), a reference to the Holocaust, and one insurrectionist’s Camp Auschwitz shirt led to bizarre Twitter speculations that he was a potential Holocaust survivor.
Cops and troops are frequently investigated for associations with hate symbols, tattoos of Nazi regalia, and the use of “White Power” hand gestures. The military’s ties to the KKK date back to the Confederate army, while the Blue Lives Matter movement has renewed discussions around the police’s origins as slave patrols. This might explain why the issue is frequently swept under the rug or dismissed as innocent misunderstanding. Meanwhile, Odinist symbols like Thor’s Hammer, the Life Rune, and the Valknot — all of which are tattooed on Arizona “QAnon Shaman” Jake Angeli — appear with prominent neo-Confederate, Nazi, and nationalist symbols.
Thread: A Crash Course in Far-Right Symbols
(Updated Version) pic.twitter.com/GnP6Paa6Xz— American Iron Front (@IronFrontUSA) May 13, 2019
Since the 1960s, American white supremacists have promoted racial purity and overlooked white cultural dominance by co-opting a perceived indigenous identity through an amalgamation of pre-Christian polytheistic religions like heathenry and paganism. Followers of Ásatrú, the neo-pagan religious movement associated with Odinism, lay claim to white indigeneity based on the “Vinland,” a segment of North America explored by Vikings before Christopher Columbus. This paradoxical belief instills a dual sense of victory and victimhood, with hypermasculine Nordics arriving first without receiving any credit. Odinists create faulty comparisons with Indigenous tribes to restrict their religious practices to only those of Northern European descent and, as researcher Shannon Weber writes, to “tap into the idea of Indigenous belonging while conveniently glossing over their status as settlers on stolen land.” …
RELATED: The Racial Symbolism of the Topsy-Turvy Doll
The uncertain meaning behind a half-black, half-white, two-headed toy: http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/An Object Lesson.
The doll is two-headed and two-bodied—one black body and one white, conjoined at the lower waist where the hips and legs would ordinarily be. The lining of one’s dress is the outside of the other’s, so that the skirt flips over to conceal one body when the other is upright. Two dolls in one, yet only one can be played with at a time.
The topsy-turvy doll, as it’s known, most likely originated in American plantation nurseries of the early 19th century. By the mid-20th century, they’d grown so popular that they were mass-manufactured and widely available in department stores across the country, but today, they’re found mostly in museums, private collections, and contemporary art. In recent years, the dolls have seen a renewed interest from collectors and scholars alike, largely motivated by the ongoing question that surrounds their use: What were they supposed to symbolize?
It’s unclear whether topsy-turvy dolls were first created to reinforce racial and sexual power dynamics or if they were something more subversive. Either way, the dolls have since the beginning been reinterpreted and appropriated to suit the use of their makers, the children who played with them, and the people who felt they were worth preserving—their purpose was always context-dependent, a moving mirror of racial womanhood.
The dolls, like most toys, were much more than neutral props for make-believe; they were instructional, too. As the game designer and “fun theorist” Bernie DeKoven wrote in his book Interplay, “Every game that a child plays is somehow connected with learning about people.” This process can be incidental or deliberate, but it’s usually a bit of both. A child’s sense of fairness, and of his or her place in society, is often shaped by the playtime lessons of who makes the rules and who follows them. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
A look at new info coming out of the Capitol riot, at the major figures who waited for a catastrophe to take a stand against Trump, and at the hypocrisy of Republican calls for “unity” in the aftermath.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
The man who kept us on the edge of our seats for four weird and painful years leaves office on Wednesday as the least popular president in American history. Not that we’ve been counting down the days in our theater’s dome or anything.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at Donald Trump spending his last full day as president of the United States stewing in private, mulling pardons for well-connected allies and releasing a meaningless, lie-filled farewell message.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on the fourth episode of human being nice. Keep being legends! Cheers!
箱をめぐる熱き戦い。Maru & Miri’s box battle.
FINALLY . . .
Does ‘deplatforming’ work to curb hate speech and calls for violence? 3 experts in online communications weigh in
Twitter’s suspension of Donald Trump’s account took away his preferred means of communicating with millions of his followers.
IN THE WAKE OF the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s personal account, and Google, Apple and Amazon shunned Parler, which at least temporarily shut down the social media platform favored by the far right.
Dubbed “deplatforming,” these actions restrict the ability of individuals and communities to communicate with each other and the public. Deplatforming raises ethical and legal questions, but foremost is the question of whether it’s an effective strategy to reduce hate speech and calls for violence on social media.
The Conversation U.S. asked three experts in online communications whether deplatforming works and what happens when technology companies attempt it.
Sort of, but it’s not a long-term solution
Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor of computer science, Binghamton University
The question of how effective deplatforming is can be looked at from two different angles: Does it work from a technical standpoint, and does it have an effect on worrisome communities themselves?
Does deplatforming work from a technical perspective?
Gab was the first “major” platform subject to deplatforming efforts, first with removal from app stores and, after the Tree of Life shooting, the withdrawal of cloud infrastructure providers, domain name providers and other Web-related services. Before the shooting, my colleagues and I showed in a study that Gab was an alt-right echo chamber with worrisome trends of hateful content. Although Gab was deplatformed, it managed to survive by shifting to decentralized technologies and has shown a degree of innovation – for example, developing the moderation-circumventing Dissenter browser.
From a technical perspective, deplatforming just makes things a bit harder. Amazon’s cloud services make it easy to manage computing infrastructure but are ultimately built on open source technologies available to anyone. A deplatformed company or people sympathetic to it could build their own hosting infrastructure. The research community has also built censorship-resistant tools that, if all else fails, harmful online communities can use to persist. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
Revisit our front page from Election Day. https://t.co/ZkA5qKxGkP #InaugurationDay pic.twitter.com/BQVfqBIypd
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 20, 2021
