IKEA Monkeylord what the fuck
When I think of debutantes I think mainly of Blair Waldorf, a character from the very important teen drama Gossip Girl, who existed in the world of rich upper-class white people who for some reason want to present their 16-year-old daughters to the masses to, I assume, begin the mating process. But now when I think of…
IKEA MonkeyYeah how dare they ask the president what he plans to do AS PRESIDENT
IKEA MonkeyFox News is radicalizing people and needs to be declared a hate group
IKEA MonkeyGood, keep taking deep breaths
Donald Trump Jr doesn’t appear to be all that worried about the ever-looming covid-19 threat. Page Six reports that President Trump’s eldest and most obnoxious son was spotted at a swanky Hamptons event on Saturday with his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and dozens of other miscellaneous rich white people.
IKEA MonkeyI have cut "friends" from my life who haven't taken this pandemic seriously. It has revealed depths of their selfishness I couldn't handle. I haven't left my home but for a handful of must-do times (taking Mickey to the vet, for example) and wore a mask every time, despite it being hot and humid. I'll turn 40 during this pandemic and my milestone bday plans have all been pushed way out, which is sad but fine with me - as long as I live to 40 I will be happy.
I know what it feels like to live through a crisis, through a difficult time that feels like it will never end. But it does end. This too will end with a vaccine, a cure, better treatment, whatever. And I plan to not give up until then.
It would feel so good to give up. To hug our friends, to visit our grandparents. To eat one meal, just one, at a restaurant table instead of on the couch, maybe even without the kids in tow. Even a mundane day of running errands—shopping, getting a haircut, going to the gym—would be glorious.
There’s no reward for abstaining from these things—just, hopefully, the absence of consequences. And lately, fewer rules are left to stop anyone, even as coronavirus case numbers in the United States surge. That means it’s on each of us to stop ourselves from doing unnecessary things that we know will put others at risk, even if those things are technically allowed. The fight to contain the coronavirus is far from over; it’s just entering a new phase in which individual choice matters more than ever.
The U.S. is in the swing of “reopening,” a word that can mean any number of things depending on where you live. Many states have allowed retail stores, restaurants, gyms, and salons to reopen for in-person service (many at reduced capacity), or are considering allowing them to do so in the near future. In some places, movie theaters and pools reopened to the public too.
In the pandemic’s early days in the U.S., health experts proclaimed the importance of social distancing, but individuals were largely on their own in figuring out how to apply that advice to their daily life. Then lawmakers began taking responsibility for shaping Americans’ behavior. The orders that many state and local governments started issuing in March and April—to just stay home, as much as you possibly could—may have been burdensome to follow, but at least they were simple.
[Read: Two errors our minds make when trying to grasp the pandemic]
Now knowing what’s allowed in your area requires looking up your state’s policies, and also your city’s or county’s policies. For example, Texas currently prohibits outdoor gatherings of more than 100 people, whereas the city of Austin has banned socializing in groups of more than 10 (with the exception of those who share a home). And because many places have divided their reopening plans into phases, those policies will shift over time. Some policies have dangerous wiggle room—for instance, Eater has reported that social-distancing measures are “recommended but not enforced” for dine-in service at restaurants in both South Carolina and South Dakota. Other states, such as Tennessee and Wisconsin, “strongly encourage” patrons to wear masks in businesses, but don’t require it.
Although what we can do has changed rapidly, what we should do hasn’t changed much. Public-health experts had warned that states were likely reopening too soon for safety. When my colleague Joe Pinsker asked experts in May what they deemed safe to do as economies reopen, they stressed the risks of indoor gatherings of any kind; meanwhile, some states had already allowed retail stores and restaurants to reopen at limited capacity. Now some of the states that are hardest hit, such as Arizona and Texas, are states that lifted restrictions early. Both Arizona and Texas, along with other states, have now paused or rolled back aspects of their reopening plans as a result of the new surge in cases.
Throughout the pandemic, many political leaders in the U.S. have made decisions and delivered messages that run contrary to what public-health experts say needs to be done to stop the virus. “This is an extraordinary failure of leadership in the United States,” Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School who studies crisis leadership, told me. “At the national level, there’s been a complete abdication by the government to help people make choices and adopt behaviors.”
Some state and local governments, along with their public-health officials, have shouldered the responsibility themselves. Koehn cited New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings as the kind of clear explanation, “brutal honesty,” and “credible hope” that leaders should provide in a crisis such as this. But in other places, residents aren’t getting reliable guidance, and that can have deadly results. Koehn sees the rise of COVID-19 cases in the Sun Belt as “all about a lack of leadership or inconsistent leadership.” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, for example, banned local authorities from enacting rules requiring masks, only to later walk the ban back. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott recently said that his ban on mask ordinances does allow local governments to mandate that businesses require their patrons and employees to wear masks, a loophole that wasn’t apparent at first.
[Read: We are living in a failed state]
Reopening is shifting the responsibility for public safety from leaders and policy makers back onto individuals. Unlike in February, when individuals and governments alike were scrambling to figure out how to combat the pandemic, we now know what to do to limit the spread of the virus. Some governments are simply choosing not to do it. In a recent Washington Post interview, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged the important role that citizens have to play under these circumstances. “What we do as individuals will have an impact on the success or not of getting this outbreak under control,” he said. In other words: Right now, every American has a duty to not take foolish risks.
Of course, people have little choice but to take some risks. Workers whose bosses require them to come in to work will come in. They may need to return their kids to day care to do so. People need to go to the doctor; they need to buy food. Everything else becomes a complex decision tree in which a person has to weigh the benefits of an activity, the state of the outbreak in her area, local regulations, and her own risk factors against—let’s be honest—what her peers think is okay, and what she really, really wants to do.
The longer businesses are open, and the more people see their loved ones partaking in activities that were forbidden a couple of months ago, the more normalized those things will become—even if public-health experts and the media emphasize the risks; even if people know, cognitively, that the risks of transmission haven’t changed much. Research has shown that our families and peers influence many of our health decisions; there’s no reason to think that this fundamental human tendency will change during a pandemic.
Most of the time, relying on information from authority figures and our peers is a pretty good way to make decisions. “It’s probably sensible most of the time to believe if the government says now is the time to open up, it might be safe,” says Robert H. Frank, the author of Under the Influence, a book about peer pressure, and a management professor at Cornell University. And peer pressure, he says, isn’t always a bad thing. Taking cues from those around you has cognitive advantages. “It’s a complicated world out there,” he told me. “Each one of us knows only a tiny fraction of what would be good to know. You don’t know much; I don’t know much. But together, people actually know quite a bit about the world.”
In the case of the pandemic, though, there’s a significant concern that people will emulate the risks they see their friends taking—risks that would be far harder to take if lawmakers kept restrictions in place. Koehn quoted David Foster Wallace’s definition of leadership to me: “A real leader is somebody who … can get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” But now, when good leadership is absent, we have to try to do the better, harder things anyway.
Saying no to the ones you love is hard. No, let’s not hang out inside your house. No, I won’t see you at church this week. No, I won’t come to your wedding. No, we’re not having the family reunion this year. It’s harder when there isn’t a policy to blame, when there’s nothing legally stopping you. When other people are doing it, and look how happy they seem! It hurts to see smiling faces inside a restaurant as you walk by alone, breathing in your own hot breath under your mask.
It is probably too much to ask that everyone say no to everything indefinitely. A vaccine is likely months—at least—away. Activities that carry small (but not zero) risk, such as going on walks with friends, at a safe distance, will be important for people’s mental health and sense of social connection as the crisis drags on. But it’s vital that even as our states and cities reopen, we continue to use great care and consideration for others in deciding where to go, whom to see, and how close to get.
[Read: There’s no going back to “normal” ]
Frank thinks that if we bear the power of peer pressure in mind, it’ll help us resist that influence. “Know that you’re going to feel conflict when you confront that set of mixed pressures,” he said. “If it’s a conflict between what the epidemiologists are telling you to do and what your friends are doing, the cost of getting [the disease] is high enough that you ought to summon your courage and stick with what the epidemiologists are telling you to do.”
These are difficult times to live in. It isn’t fair that so many Americans have to navigate this crisis without clear leadership, with no end in sight. Knowing that life and death hang in the balance of seemingly mundane choices is a heavy weight to bear. It would be easy to give up. It would feel so good to give up. There is no reward for not giving up.
Don’t give up.
For reasons that are fairly explicable—if not outright “fucking easy to comprehend”—there’s been an uptick in useful distractions in the pop culture ecosystem of late. Often, that takes the form of nostalgia, one of the most potent distracting forces on this planet, right up there with “horny” and “food.” And it’s to…
IKEA Monkeyugh
As confirmed covid-19 cases and hospitalizations continue to climb in parts of the United States that re-opened seemingly too early with too few precautions put in place, seven states appear to be most at risk: Arizona, Arkansas, California, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, according to The…
IKEA MonkeyI'm sorry, what
In today’s installment of fucked-up things that I never knew were possible, a woman in the UK has been told by doctors that she has two uteruses, two cervixes, and is pregnant with—you guessed it—two fetuses. According to the Guardian, Kelly Fairhurst went in for a 12-week check up on her current pregnancy and was…
IKEA MonkeyHERE FOR IT
IKEA MonkeyI lived in a bungalow court-style apartment in Whittier. The "bungalow" I was in had been converted to studio apartments but the courtyard setup was the same. I *loved* it. I only moved because they wouldn't allow dogs, but otherwise it was as charming and lovely as it looks here. I made friends with my neighbors and we had orange and fig trees we'd tend. It was super nice.
The 350 that remain in L.A. are some of the city’s most desirable housing.
Hollywood producer and writer Alison Bennett was intent on starting over when she moved into a 1920s bungalow court in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. At first, she was enamored with her floor-to-ceiling windows and clear view of the “Hollywood” sign, but she quickly learned that the true draw of the court was its residents.
“Most of the people living in the bungalow court were insanely good-looking couples in their late 20s,” Bennett recalls. Her tight-knit neighbors would hang out in the party-light-strung parking lot of the Spanish Revival–style court at all hours of the day and night. “It was like a sitcom … I was only a few years older than them, but I felt like the resident divorcée crone. It was like being stuck in Friends when you didn’t want to be in Friends. I loved every second of it. My girlfriends would come over and see all the hot people walking around and be like, ‘What is your life?’”
Today, roughly only 350 bungalow courts survive in L.A., but the sense of community and camaraderie among residents has made them one of the city’s most beloved and desirable styles of housing—one that some argue should be revived as a solution to L.A.’s shortage of affordable housing.
The communal experience was exactly what Kathleen McInnis was looking for when she moved into an early-20th-century bungalow court, surrounded by greenery and across from Paramount Studios, in 2004. (Some of them are thought to have once been cottages for contract writers at the studio.) She’s been there ever since. “Most of us have been here for a long time—we all know each other, and most of us do things together,” she says. “It definitely feels like family here: We watch out for each other; take in mail and water plants when others are away; have shared holidays, cocktail hours, and an open-door policy for each other.”
“It was like a sitcom … I was only a few years older than them, but I felt like the resident divorcée crone. It was like being stuck in Friends when you didn’t want to be in Friends. I loved every second of it.”
The bungalow court—tiny private homes sharing a common yard and amenities—evolved on two separate tracks in the early-20th century, according to housing-policy expert Mark Vallianatos. In working-class neighborhoods in South and East Los Angeles, courts were a way to house several families on one plot of land without incurring the high cost of constructing an apartment building. These neighborhoods were often crowded owing to racially restrictive covenants that forced minorities into certain neighborhoods, but bungalow courts offered both privacy and fresh air.
According to historian and urban designer Todd Gish, in 1908, the city unveiled a new government-funded court on Navarro Street in the East L.A. neighborhood of El Sereno—one of the first model courts that was not considered “slum” housing. Featuring 18 two-room lodgings, shared latrines, and a common public space, each tiny home was rented to families, predominantly people of color, at $5 a month. Similar courts, both privately and publicly funded, soon sprang up in working- and middle-class neighborhoods across Los Angeles, and a few from the 1920s still survive on 81st and 82nd Streets in South Los Angeles.
More well known are the early tourist courts of nearby Pasadena—an upscale seasonal resort that brought wealthy Edwardian Midwesterners to Southern California in droves. Perhaps borrowing from the idea of the summer cabin, the presumed first Pasadena bungalow court was commissioned by developer Frank G. Hogan in 1909. Named St. Francis Court, and designed by architect Sylvanus Marston, the development boasted 11 small Arts and Crafts–style mini-bungalows, each with its own front yard.
Soon bungalow courts, many of them rentals for seasonal tourists, were springing up all over Pasadena. This proliferation (around 100 bungalow courts still survive in the City of Pasadena) coincided with popular Arts and Crafts and Revival movements, and the courts followed suit. Bungalows—usually one- to three-bedroom units—were built in architectural styles embraced and refined by SoCal architects, ranging from Mediterranean to Swiss chalet to mock English Tudor to Spanish Revival.
Major architects even got in on the act. Bowen Court, one of the most charming courts still standing in Pasadena, was designed in 1911 by Arts and Crafts dynamos Alfred and Arthur Heineman.
As the population of the Los Angeles area boomed during the 1910s and ’20s, thousands of bungalow courts were built to house newcomers to California. The courts were often placed close to streetcar stops and business districts with working- and middle-class residents in mind. “It was a very lucrative building type,” says Sue N. Mossman, executive director of Pasadena Heritage. “If you had a single lot, or two lots, in a residential area, rather than building one house or two houses, you could actually build six housing units or ten housing units and either rent them or sell them … It was really a pretty good business proposition.”
So lucrative and practical was the style bungalow courts were soon being adopted everywhere from Phoenix to Des Moines. “The idea of having your own private home was very much part of the American experience—the American Dream—in the early 1900s, and the bungalow court gave you that,” Mossman says. “And yet you could walk outside and have a bigger garden, a bigger open space, and a shared neighborhood feeling instantaneously.”
“Living here has given me the sense of security I believe one might have when living in a small town.”
By 1924, the communal experience of living in a bungalow court was so pervasive that the Los Angeles Times printed a poem about it:
Did you ever live in a bungalow court, and have neighbors a plenty, of every sort? With each little cot filled to its doors, so that some of them surely most sleep on the floors. Some from the north and some from the south. Such a lot all so different and yet so alike, doing their best their landlord to fight ...
Some find life easy in this land of the sun and take things as they find them, and have lots of fun. There is a phonography playing in each little cot, and on Sunday mornings of noise there’s a lot. The motors buzz in and the motors buzz out. Everyone going a different route.
The bungalow court would become emblematic of the Southern California lifestyle. “You often see bungalow courts depicted in classic movies,” says Hollywood tour guide and bungalow-court resident Karie Bible. “They feel very Southern California and often tend to be the homes of working-class characters (Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves), show people (The Day of the Locust), criminals (He Walked by Night), or suspicious characters like Ida Sessions in Chinatown.”
But the city would unintentionally ban the style in 1934. That year, Los Angeles made one parking spot per unit a requirement in all new residential buildings, according to Vallianatos. The city also passed an ordinance requiring a front, side, and back yard for every new residence. “Those two things together basically eliminate them, without I think anyone wanting to, which is really sort of the tragedy and the irony,” Vallianatos says.
With construction of bungalow courts halted in favor of apartments, condos, and single-family residences, the remaining examples became desirable—and, for decades, relatively affordable—L.A. real estate.
“It combines the best of private and public, because you have your own unit, and then you have a small amount of semi-private outdoor space, like a stoop,” Vallianatos says. “But then there’s also the public shared space in the interior courtyard, which provides the option of a green space to people who either can’t afford to purchase a place that has that, or they don’t want to do the maintenance, and now the maintenance is being taken care of collectively by some gardening company or something. You can also talk to your neighbors when you want to and go inside when you want to.”
In 1980, a young Pamela Perrine moved into a dilapidated bungalow court in West Hollywood. “When you’re young, you want to be around young people and feel safe. Bungalows courts were affordable back in the day, so you almost always had young people renting them,” she says. “We all became very close.”
Perrine remembers a community filled with Sunday barbecues, lawn concerts, and the occasional bad mushroom trip. Her neighbors were a collection of L.A. tropes—an up-and-coming photographer, a kind old man, a waitress-actress. She remembers one handsome neighbor named Rick whose “bungalow was filled with books, books everywhere from floor to ceiling. He would knock on my door and ask me to help him tear the sleeves off his tee shirts to make them into muscle shirts.”
As rents and mortgages have become astronomical in Los Angeles, and old housing has been torn down, bungalow-court units have become increasingly scarce and coveted. “It was soon made clear that most people who lived here had been here for a long period of time and I was lucky that my place had opened up,” says freelance art-department coordinator Rosy Nolan, who moved into a one-bedroom bungalow in Silver Lake in 2013.
Over the past few years, housing-policy experts, including Vallianatos, have argued that bungalow courts should be built again—an affordable, quality solution for L.A’.s chronic housing shortage. “It’s a good win-win in terms of addressing the housing crisis,” he says.
The space and community of the bungalow court has made staying at home during COVID-19 easier for many residents. “We can still talk to each other, sit on our porches across from each other, and share with each other every day,” McInnis says. “It’s easy to stay six feet away, and we all wear masks anyway. But it’s just nice to know someone is right there and could help if needed.”
Nolan agrees. “Living here has given me the sense of security I believe one might have when living in a small town. We respect each other’s privacy but maintain a comforting sense of connection,” she says. This has made her feel safe, with neighbors checking up on her much more frequently than if she lived in a traditional apartment. Bible asked her landlord for permission to garden outside her home as a way to cope with the pandemic. “My tiny porch must look like a Rose Bowl parade float at this point.”
Gardens and gatherings, relatively affordable rent, and the combination of private spaces and college-dorm closeness are rarities in the anonymous city. Alison Bennett, now remarried with two children and a house in Eagle Rock, still harbors dreams of one day overseeing the drama at her very own court. “All I want to do is someday buy a bungalow court, restore it, and fill it with hot people, divorcees, and small dogs.”
IKEA MonkeyI wish I had money
Wayne Capili of Interface Visual
With views of Point Lobos State Natural Reserve.
Perched above a sandy stretch of Carmel Bay on the Monterey Peninsula, 2645 Ribera Road sits on one of the winding blocks that make up this small oceanfront neighborhood. The property is just a few steps down a hill to Ribera Beach and the Carmel Meadows trail. Leaving the neighborhood, a ten-minute drive north takes you to the fairy-tale-like Carmel-by-the-Sea downtown, packed with art galleries, wine tasting rooms, and European-inspired bistros like La Bicyclette. Heading south, the nearby Point Lobos State Natural Reserve (where you can spy seals, seal lions, birds, and tide pools) is a gateway to Big Sur’s dramatic coastline and endless outdoor recreation.
At first glance, this home, designed by architect Daniel Piechota, looks like a sleek but discreet bunker, with long horizontal lines running across a three-car garage covered by a sod roof. Made from poured concrete and built into the hillside in 2000, it’s one of Piechota’s many residential designs that seek to blend unobtrusively into the landscape. But once inside, everything feels lighter and a lot more dramatic, starting with a two-story concrete entry staircase and a great room with double-height windows framing panoramic ocean views of Point Lobos. The open-concept living and dining areas both have gas fireplaces and sliding doors to a patio, and the kitchen features double black granite islands. The master bedroom, with sliding screen doors for privacy, is located just off the main living spaces, while the lower level offers another family room, theater, laundry, and three guest suites with bathrooms and access to a lower patio.
There are five barrel-vaulted ceilings in the home, all made from vertical-grain Alaska yellow cedar, drawing your eyes up to the clerestory windows. These striking slatted-wood ceilings, flanked by glass, are reminiscent of the sculptural ceilings found in ocean-view stunners by famed Big Sur architect Mickey Muennig, whom Piechota apprenticed under not long after college.
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IKEA MonkeyGOALS
Chen San-yuan, a Taiwanese man who has been nicknamed Pokémon Grandpa, has affixed an array of 64 phones to his bike in order to play dozens of simultaneous games of Pokémon Go.
When I first posted about Chen back in Nov 2018, his mere 15-phone setup looked like this:
How much bigger can he go? He’s averaging adding ~2.5 phones per month to the array (assuming linear growth, which I’m not sure we can, but let’s start there) so he could reach 100 phones by August 2021. Stay tuned!
Tags: Chen San-yuan Pokemon telephony video gamesIKEA MonkeyHe's so orange
IKEA Monkey"Daddy, love me daddy, daddy why don't you love me"
IKEA Monkeyhahaha aaahhhhhh
CHICAGO—Calling it the next “hot, up-and-coming spot” for young professionals, local real estate agent Angela Kirkman stated Tuesday that she believed a flourishing neighborhood full of middle-class Latino families with deep roots in the area had great turnaround potential. “Look, I’ve been in this business a while,…
IKEA MonkeyI tried to read this but it was so fucking impossible because its just SO WEIRD
It was nearly four years ago that we raised our eyebrows at Tumple, a self-described “cult” that was born from Facebook shit-posting groups, communicated using a mangled form of English, and charged $2,000 a month to learn about their “mystic sex practices.” Now, after a year-and-a-half of reporting, OneZero’s Emilie…
IKEA MonkeyNow THIS is news I can use
IKEA MonkeySeems sort of like regular practice for anyone who is that rich and/or powerful??
IKEA MonkeyWhoa.
Danny Masterson, known largely for his starring roles in That 70's Show and Netflix’s The Ranch, has been charged with three counts of rape by force or fear. Per a developing report for KTLA 5, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office made the announcement on Wednesday afternoon. The charges stem from alleged…
IKEA MonkeyI regret to inform you that they are at it again
The uniquely American myth that the police are here to protect and to serve the public is disintegrating rapidly. Protests around the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder have underscored that the American police system is broken and needs to be dismantled; police brutality is a part of this country’s bloody…
IKEA MonkeyFox News is a totally different universe
If there is any way, I suppose, in which the Left has a certain amount of privilege, it is that when we wish to cite examples of right-wing terrorism, we do not have to go back 50 years in order to do so. We have all the material we need right in, unfortunately, very recent history. We've got 106 bodies just in the 20 years since September 11.
We've also got piles of current right-wing extremist groups to reference: the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, various militias, III%'s, American Identity Movement/Identity Evropa, Atomwaffen Division, Patriot Front, and, of course, classics like the KKK and the League of the South. There are many more than that. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center lists 940 right-wing hate groups operating in the United States right now. That is so many hate groups!
Not to mention the many, many people murdered by the "pro-life" movement.
Alas, when people on the Right want to talk about left-wing terrorism, they either have to totally make shit up about "antifa" or they have to literally go back 50 years. Or 110 years, to the Los Angeles Times bombing, if they want to come up with the last time anyone was purposely killed in an act of left-wing terrorism.
This could be why on her show last night, Laura Ingraham invited author and former FBI agent (and current nut) Terry Turchie to discuss The Weather Underground and their enduring influence. Yes. The Weather Underground. A group that disbanded in 1976, and which Turchie claims was responsible for over 2,000 bombings. They were not, for what it is worth, responsible for over 2,000 bombings. That is ridiculous.
Unfortunately, the only video I can find of this interview was uploaded to YouTube by Jim Hoft, the Stupidest Man On The Internet, who actually thinks this whole thing was really great. Forgive me.
Author Turchie: Democrat Party Using Weather Underground Strategy for Revolution in Party Platform youtu.be
The gist of this interview was to establish that the Weather Underground also opposed police brutality, which means that basically anyone who thinks police brutality is bad is a member of the Weather Underground and loves bombing things. Also dethroning God. Apparently both they and us want to dethrone God, and everything that is happening right now is a long con set in motion by the Weather Underground back before many of us were born.
Turchie's first big clue here is that the Weather Underground talked about "resistance," and do you know what liberals talked about after Donald Trump was elected? That's right, resistance. It's almost as if it were a super common word used all of the time in protest movements, but that is just what "they" (the Weather Underground) wants you to think.
What was their strategy? Their strategy was resistance. Not too long, maybe 5 minutes after President Trump won the election in 2016, Democrat Party leaders came out and said we're going to resist. We're going to embark upon a strategy of resistance of the President. But that's not, that's only the beginning.
The document, the Prairie Fire document, actually contained 6 points that the Weather Underground felt very important about. These were the planning points that would bring about this revolution.
Turchie then brings up the six goals of the Weather Underground.
Police racism then and police racism now is a phony issue. It has always been a phony issue. It's the issue that Communist societies use to literally tear apart America and be divisive.
I was half ready for him to start claiming that Fred Hampton never even existed in the first place, but it seems he refrained.
But basically, what they think is going on is that the Left tells people who are not victims that they are victims, and then those people just go along with them, even though they have never been victimized and everyone, especially in the 1960s, is treated equally and fairly by everyone else, most certainly by police. And the reason they do that is because ... communism? Is it communism? Or the dethroning of God? Or just general evil, like we're fucking Skelator or some shit? Personally, I'm very curious.
Frankly, this is a terrible strategy. We are not very good supervillains. If we were really smart and were really dedicated to enacting all of our nefarious dethroning plans, we'd go after people with the most power. Yeah! We'd convince rich people, white people, Christian people, men, and most specifically rich, white, Christian men that they are the real victims here. Get them riled up, scared, tell them that immigrants are coming to replace them, that gay people were gonna make their marriages less special, that women were gonna falsely accuse them of rape, that Muslims were gonna force them to follow Sharia Law, that some rich foreign Jewish person was going around paying people to not like them, that scientists made up a whole pandemic just to take away their freedom for a few months and, probably, that black people are making up racism and police brutality just to hurt them and ruin their lives.
That's what we'd do if we were really trying to fuck shit up.
I, for one, am very much looking forward to Ingraham going after the real menaces to our society, next. Like the Symbionese Liberation Army and jazz.
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IKEA MonkeyTiger King seems like it was 8 years ago
IKEA Monkeyomg stop flushing wipes!! They aren't meant to be flushed! Even if it says "flushable" our cities sewer systems can't handle it!
WASHINGTON—In response to continued unrest in the devastated region, Republican leaders reportedly claimed Thursday that New Yorkers would greet the United States military as liberators. “We have every reason to believe that the people of New York will welcome the American military as saviors,” said senator Tom Cotton…
IKEA MonkeyWall-E was the first movie Corey and I went to see together. We went to a weekday matinee when he came to visit me in CA, and were two of the only people in the theater. We saw in the middle of the theater watching the movie on a gigantic screen and that is really the best way to watch Wall-E. It is a magical, beautiful, incredible film. The "space dance" scene with Wall-E and E-V made me cry. I love Wall-E so much.
With the world teetering on the brink of sci-fi dystopia, it’s perhaps a good time to revisit our imaginary post-apocalyptic futures. The 29th-century Earth of WALL-E presents one of the more memorable images of planetary decline. Mountains of neatly cubed trash rise higher that the decaying skyscrapers. Closer to…
IKEA MonkeyI love him
The murder of 46-year-old George Floyd, a black man who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis on Monday, has sparked protests across the country calling for justice for Floyd’s death. The news of the killing—in which a white police officer kneeled on Floyd’s neck as he told officers repeatedly he could not…
IKEA MonkeyI never got into SatC but this sounds INSANE
"Time is a funny thing. A decade can flash by in an uneventful second," Carrie Bradshaw says in the narrated introduction of Sex and the City 2, the 2010 feature film follow-up from the HBO series which takes the four dating-obsessed New Yorkers and drops them into the deserts of Abu Dhabi. And Carrie is right: Just like that, it has been a full decade since the release of one of the worst movies I've ever seen—or maybe even one of the worst movies ever made.
The series itself has had plenty of problematic elements since it premiered in 1998: Carrie manifests her own relationship problems; the characters' luxurious lifestyles don't make sense with their finances; and, despite its focus on sex, the show is quite regressive in many respects, such as one episode that shames a man for being uncircumcised. But everything bad about Sex and the City is cranked up to the max in Sex and the City 2, and then covered with an icky layer of Orientalism. At the time of its release, n+1's A.S. Hamrah called it "a low point in the history of American pop culture," and 10 years later, that remains true.
Sex and the City 2 is two hours and 27 minutes of straight cringe, and though I've rewatched it a masochistic number of times over the past year (because hey, it's on Netflix), I can't help but wonder every time: How did this god-awful movie get made?
Because I've watched it so frequently, I've catalogued the definite summary of Sex and the City 2's worst offenses—the scenes that make me ask myself if I, like Carrie and Big's on-and-off romance, feel some unexplained pull to fill my life with needless toxicity by continuing to watch this franchise. So, pack your bags, and let's take a trip with Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte to Abu Dhabi.
A relatively minor offense, this scene sets the tone for this mess of a movie. With Charlotte's suggestion, you remember that Sex and the City's premise is rich white women whispering their real thoughts at the brunch table, though those racist, homophobic, and otherwise problematic ideas would get them canceled if they said them out loud anywhere else. Moving on!
Despite being set in New York City, Sex and the City is really, really bad about race: The characters date a total of three (three!!!) people of color over the show's six seasons (out of 95 to 108 different partners, according to VICE's Sara David), and as Vulture's Hunter Harris noted, the few characters of color are either stereotypes or punchlines (there's Samantha's angry Latina girlfriend, and the Asian maid who kicks Samantha out of a man's bed). Take that troubled background and set Sex and the City 2 in the United Arab Emirates, and you've got a white gaze fantasy of people of color as jokes and accessories.
Every man from Abu Dhabi is a servant who chases after the women at the airport to ferry their bags, drives them around in brand new Maybachs, or works as individual butlers in their lavish hotel suite. Meanwhile, every woman in Abu Dhabi—all of whom are dressed in niqabs or burkinis—is treated as something for the girls to gawk at.
While enjoying their hotel, the women are constantly shocked by the cultural norms around them, and at one point, Carrie stares and talks seemingly within earshot about a woman who lifts her veil to eat one French fry at a time, staring at her as though she's a tourist attraction.
Presumably, what we're supposed to gather is a reminder of just how "progressive" New York women like Carrie and Samantha are, and the implication of the entire movie is that women in the Middle East just want to be more like them. Not great!
Stereotypes? Sex and the City 2 is absolutely teeming with them.
Sex and the City's wordplay always skirted the line between clever and embarassing, and the movie is no different. Arriving in Abu Dhabi, Miranda says in a Scooby Doo tone, "We've got a lot of Abu Dhabi to do—Abu Dhabi do." At one point, Carrie uses the phrase "land of the free and home of the horny."
None of these are as bad as when Samantha sees a handsome European architect in the desert, says something about feeling things "down under," and then sing-songs the phrase "Lawrence of my labia," referring to the 1962 historical epic featuring blackface. This line will haunt me for the rest of my days.
I try not to make fun of anyone doing karaoke because in a karaoke bar, we're all just trying our best, but the movie's karaoke scene cannot go unscathed. At a club, Miranda signs the group up to sing, and they're called onstage for a rendition of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman."
With lines like "I am woman, hear me roar," the scene is clearly supposed to be some sort of feminist moment. But this sudden depiction of performative womanhood isn't very believable—Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte consistently have no problem undercutting every other woman they encounter. The anthem prompts women around the club, all pointedly women of color, to stand up and sing along, as though their feminism has been ignited by the tacky stylings of four white ladies from New York.
My boyfriend saw a few seconds of this scene and then said with a confused look, "Is this supposed to be cringey?" I still don't know the answer.
The central tension of Sex and the City 2 is the difference in norms between New York and the Middle East, and Samantha, who must prove to everyone just how hot and horny she is despite repeated reminders from her friends to please cover up, is unfortunately the best example.
On a date, after the handsome architect shows her how to smoke shisha, Samantha simulates oral sex on the pipe, saying seductively, "You put this pipe in your mouth… and suck?" This happens in front of the watchful eyes of a shocked local couple. Samantha ups the ante by grabbing the architect's crotch, and when Samantha and her date leave to carry on elsewhere, we see a side view of his erection in front of the scandalized couple's faces.
Aside from playing on stereotypes about the conservative Middle East, it's a middle finger to other culture's norms. That said, is sucking sexually on a hookah pipe and then grabbing dick in public really widely acceptable anywhere?
Forced out of their hotel after Samantha gets busted for having sex in public, the women take a last-minute trip to the souk. After the "forbidden experience" of getting roped into buying counterfeit merchandise, Samantha is chased by a man who rips her Birkin bag, causing her Magnum condoms to spill everywhere. With her boobs half out, Samantha yells in the middle of the crowd of men, "Condoms! Condoms, yes! I have sex!"
This angers everyone in the souk, and honestly, Samantha deserves it for not having learned from her previous missteps—all of which could have been avoided if she just respected other cultures. Self-centered behavior like this is probably why American tourists have such a bad reputation around the world, and Sex and the City 2 definitely doesn't help matters.
From there, they engage in bizarre niqab cosplay, and then the women head back to New York, where their messy behavior and off-putting personalities are inexplicably tolerated.
So, should you rewatch Sex and the City 2? Maybe… but only as a hatewatch.
IKEA Monkey*sigh*
Over Memorial Day weekend, a small North Carolina race track opened up for stock car races, drawing a capacity crowd of more than 4,000 spectators, and ignoring the state's public health rules because county officials gave the go-ahead. Raleigh News & Observer reporter Andrew Carter wrote a hell of a good feature story about the return to what a lot of the people there wanted to call "normal," as the racing season finally got underway at that Ace Speedway in Altamahaw, after a two-month delay. This isn't a big old NASCAR venue, just a little local track, a four-tenths of a mile oval. Most of the people Carter spoke to said they'd been cooped up for too long, and so it's time for everybody to get back to business, but safely. If "safely" means cramming close together and yelling loudly over all the engine noise, which is a super-efficient way for the virus to spread.
The people at the racetrack all seemed vaguely aware that the pandemic isn't over, but they're largely over the pandemic, and just don't want to think about it anymore. So they probably wouldn't have cared that in the week prior to the race, North Carolina's COVID-19 hospitalizations were actually increasing — from 481 on May 16, to 589 on Saturday, May 23, the day of the festivities. Since then, the number of current hospitalizations statewide is up to 702, as of yesterday.
To be honest, it's a difficult story to read, because it feels like an early chapter of And The Band Played On. There's a strong likelihood of a future story, profiling people who'll get sick or die after attending the race. Maybe not — viral outbreaks are a matter of risk, not certainty. But the odds are far higher than if all those folks had stayed home and held nice cookouts in their own backyards.
Carter notes that the people in the audience had come from all over the state, and that they seemed motivated as much by politics as by any desire to see cars scream around an oval track: "To many, it wasn't as much about racing as it was freedom." Again and again he talks to folks who are glad to be out on a holiday weekend, to show they're taking control over their own destiny, as they see it. That included two of the very few people he saw wearing face masks, a couple of fellows in their sixties who said sure, it was "a little scary, but we can't live under a rock forever," and also those darn liberals just don't give Donald Trump credit for anything.
Under "Phase Two" of Gov. Roy Cooper's reopening plan, which went into effect the day before the race, mass gatherings are still banned. That means no more than 10 people in indoor venues, or 25 outdoors, so nah, 4,000 packed into grandstands is not yet approved.
But the track's owners weren't about to wait, so they met earlier in the week with Alamance County officials, who gave the go-ahead. The county attorney, Clyde Albright, told a local paper that the governor "cannot constitutionally limit the number of people who can peaceably assemble," which is some dubious law-talking, but it was enough to inspire Ace Speedway co-owner Robert Turner, who praised the county officials:
I'm very thankful that we have people in Alamance County that are willing to stand up for our constitutional rights (to) peacefully assemble, to gather together and just be amongst ourselves as normal.
There's nobody here rioting. We're not speaking against any kind of thing. We're here just to have some fun and be Americans. And that's what we needed. But somebody, at some point in time, had to stand up for these people and for all of us, together.
Turner went on to explain that it was also about the flag, and freedom, and our great military, and being American in general, because he really believes America is "in jeopardy right now. Because of some of the things that are going on."
And if America isn't about the right to cram into grandstands and share respiratory droplets during a pandemic, then there may as well not even be an America. Turner said he'd gotten some "dirty phone calls" and "threats on my life" from people who said opening up was a dangerous idea, but he concluded most of the naysayers were "people who probably wouldn't come to Ace Speedway, anyways." Ergo, resuming racing was a good thing, and those people were clearly wrong, as proven by the full attendance:
"What this tells me is that nobody is really scared," he said. "... If you want to take a poll, here, nobody is scared."
Gov. Cooper, a freedom-hating Democrat, said Tuesday that his office was "considering all options" to make sure similar large gatherings won't happen until public health experts deem it safe. He called the crowded racetrack grandstands "a dangerous situation that ought to concern all the local officials and all the citizens surrounding that venue. [...] It is a completely reckless way to operate." But don't people go to car races to see recks anyway?
Cooper added,
It is dangerous and reckless to try and draw a crowd. [...] I hope and pray that no one gets sick or even dies from that gathering that occurred this weekend. We hope that that doesn't happen. But the way to prevent that kind of thing is not to do it. We are deeply concerned about that kind of activity.
For contrast, Cooper and Dr. Mandy Cohen, head of the state's Department of Health and Human Services, pointed to how the grownups at NASCAR ran the "Coca-Cola 600" race at Charlotte Motor Speedway Sunday: No spectators at the venue, social distancing in the pits, and limited media at the racetrack. Cohen said at Tuesday's presser that she'd prefer local track owners act like Gallant, not Goofus:
They took precautions seriously and had a great event that was enjoyed by millions. [...] Let's all take the precautions that NASCAR did.
Well sure, expert doctor lady, but a local racetrack can't show races or sell ads on national TV, and what about the beer revenue? Commie.
As for Mr. Turner's insistence that nobody at the racetrack was scared, Carter did talk to one race fan who had shown up and mistakenly thought the raceway would attempt some social distancing, Jewell Stewart, 70, who'd come with her boyfriend. Carter found Stewart sitting "alone at a picnic table behind the bleachers, between the concession stands," wearing a mask, reading a book and missing the races.
At the start of the night, she'd been sitting in the grandstand. Then the space around her became full, strangers sitting nearby. [...]
At first, she hadn't given much thought to attending a race here. But then she arrived and saw that hardly anyone was wearing a facial covering. And there were all those people sitting around her. It was enough to send Stewart to seek refuge.
She didn't even want to return to the stands for the biggest race of the night, featuring her favorite driver, because she worried that with her health, "If I were to get this, I wouldn't make it." Why weren't people even wearing masks, she wanted to know.
Well, because this is America and we don't let people tell us what to do, is why. As Carter notes, that was central to the script:
For the people there, the spectacle became something of a celebration. For as much joy as there might have been in the gathering, there was also a sense of shared pride in an act of defiance. Before the start of the final race, the public address announcer spoke of American freedom and people who'd died fighting for it.
He spoke of Memorial Day and how "tonight is a big display of our freedom."
And then the 4,000 fans went back to their cars and drove home, to locations all over the state, where absolutely nothing bad will happen, the economy will start booming again, we'll all be free and unafraid, and some percentage of the crowd, and the people they meet in the coming weeks, is just expendable.
[Charlotte News & Observer / NYT / Yahoo News]
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