thinking about Wonder Woman again today while I was listening to the soundtrack and how much I love the fact that Steve Trevor was a spy – not just a soldier, but specifically a spy – and how much his role, throughout the movie, was to play the cynic to Diana’s optimist.
and so easily that could have been “the silly, optimistic woman learns that the cynical, rational man’s view of the world is the best one” – because that’s often what we’re supposed to learn. “rationalist man” is the ideal.
but Wonder Woman as a movie and Diana as a hero explicitly rejects that. her faith, her optimism, is not weakness, and rather than her closing herself off, she draws Steve out.
Diana steps into the world and cries “that’s not fair” – the answer she’s given, from Steve and others, is “life isn’t fair.” that’s the lesson we’re supposed to learn.
but Diana’s response is “so we must make it fair,” and that’s the ethos of the movie.
“it’s not about deserve. it’s about what you believe.” she rejects cynicism and resignation, and the movie says that she’s right to do so.
We naturally put millionaires and billionaires in the same general class of person, but the only reason to do that is because the words are similar. Since these aren’t numbers we can actually visualize, it’s important to understand what a billion of something is. To travel a million inches, you’d have to travel from the Southern-most tip of Manhattan and go to the Bronx. To travel a billion inches, you’d have to fly from New York to Shanghai twice. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years. A million ounces is about the weight of a train car. A billion ounces is 4.5 Eiffel Towers. Use these to conceptualize what the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is, and the absurd amount of wealth we’re talking about.
Millionaire: I can buy a fancy sports car, and a huge house!
anyway jeff bezos could eradicate homelessness. he could literally give each homeless person 100k and it would only take less than .5% of his entire wealth. what the actual god giving fuck
Why do you think they deserve it
Well shelter is a basic need, and would at the very least allow them a place where they can get back on their feet. Food water and shelter are necessary for a healthy body and psychology. There’s also the fact that they’re people too, and a little help goes a long way in making a decent community. There’s plenty of reasons
Yeah they need stuff, but why does every homeless person deserve 0.5% of someone’s income
You have five hundred apples, and just one day to eat them all.
You pass by a small crowd of hungry children, and decide you’d rather 455 apples go rotten than give them to some snotty brat who isn’t your problem.
It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked for your 500 apples, or that you aren’t the parent of any of those kids. in the moment you decide to walk away, it doesn’t matter why they’re hungry, or who owes who what.
You had the opportunity to help people, you had the ability to help people, you had the resources to help people. You had everything you needed to make a small, tiny little difference in someone’s life, and you decided not to.
What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity?
What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity
Reblogging for the very, very important lesson
Sometimes I wish there were a Hell if only for the visuals of a bunch of rich shit heads wandering around on fire asking “Where’s my money?!”
Marvel didn’t want the Clint farm storyline, but Whedon insisted they leave it in the movie. In exchange, he cut much of Thor’s vision subplot, which made very little sense as a result.
Whedon really wanted a BruceNat relationship after writing the Hut scene in the Avengers. You know, the scene where she’s terrified of Bruce.
Whedon fought against a Clint/Natasha relationship, even thought it was planned, for no fucking reason.
Whedon wrote a scene where Natasha is rejected by Banner after offering to run away with him, and originally planned the bedroom moment to be a scene where her flirting turns him into the Hulk?
And then he laments the fact he didn’t have enough time so the plot seemed rushed. Even though he spent like 30+ minutes at the farm, and building up BruceNat, and everything the executives wanted to cut for the movie to run smoothly and make sense.
I just… what the fuck, Whedon??? The film could have had a completely different vibe.
Because to Whedon characters like Black Widow must be tethered to a man as close to himself as possible and it’s only gotten worse and more predictable as his career goes on.
It’s one of the reasons it drives me crazy that we’re so hard on women writers that use ‘Mary Sues’. Half of Whedon’s body of work is his masturbatory fantasy that a small yet physically strong woman who is smart and good wants nothing more than to hang out with him and give him her full attention.
natalie portman radiates such a terrifying energy i can’t describe it….. it’s not exactly evil but it’s not warm either…. i feel like she could unhinge her jaw and drag me into the ocean like a kraken but she wouldn’t bc it’s undignified
Wanna know why?
“Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman told the crowd at Saturday’s Women’s March in downtown Los Angeles that she experienced what she calls “sexual terrorism” as a 13-year-old after the release of the film The Professional.
Portman described her pride and excitement in releasing the film, only to encounter sexually explicit messages both directed toward her and made about her.
”I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me,” she recalled. “A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews.”
The experience, she said, changed the way she expressed herself publicly, in order to limit the ways she could be objectified by others.
”I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe,” she said. “And that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a kissing scene and talked about that choice deliberately in interviews. I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was. And I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious, in an attempt to feel that my body was safe and that my voice would be listened to.”
That’s really fucked up. This women’s entire life is dedicated to doing everything possible to avoid being objectified by men because at THIRTEEN she was shown they have no boundaries. This is what we be talking about.
Donald Trump is exactly the kind of person that Jesus would have thrown out of the temple and beaten with a stick, and the fact that so many self-identified Christians want to put him in office tells you pretty everything wrong with white American Christianity.
Because Jesus had authority at temples and beat people.
I 100% can’t tell if you’re joking here but he actually did chase people out of a temple at least once for using religion for their own selfish gains, complete with literal table flipping and improvised whips
So really it’s not that he would have trump thrown out as much as he would storm in and accuse him of turning his father’s house into a den of thieves before upending a table on his head
Dude, Jesus not only chased them out, he broke stuff they were selling, let loose all of their animals, and fucking flipped all the money-changing tables.
Jesus 100% would have been chasing Trump out with a table leg.
Canon Jesus 10000% better than fanon Jesus
Canon Jesus did some very weird shit. Like, just before throwing the market out of the temple, he stole a donkey, then cursed a fig tree because it didn’t have any fruit on it. The next day, or possibly immediately, everyone was amazed that the fig tree he had cursed was withered. He must’ve been in a fuckin weird mood. Going through a Dark Period. The Chaotic Mage of Light losing his shit just a little bit.
“So, what the fuck was that, Jesus?” someone asked as they’re all looking at the horribly withered corpse of the poor cursed tree.
“The power of prayer,” Jesus said absently.
“… wait, is cursing literally a form of prayer? Because some Wiccans are going to be really upset about that, like, they have a whole threefold law thing, is this… okay?”
“Listen,” said Jesus, “If I tell a mountain to get back in the sea? The mountain will get in the fucking sea. Do you want me to tell you to get in the sea?”
And they were all like, “Good demo, Jesus. Good lesson.”
Meanwhile, he was having the aforementioned public brawl in the temple.
Just keep that in mind during this election cycle – viable answers for What Would Jesus Do include flipping tables, stealing animals and striking down shrubbery with magic, all in one week.
I’m not christian, but some of the Jesus stories are really entertaining and showed him as a pretty cool guy. Mind, he was a teenager at this point, as were his followers, according to the fact that only two of them would have to pay temple fees, since the rest were underaged. Dunno why everyone shows them all as old white men when they were apparently angry unruly Middle-Eastern teens.
And honestly I respect him more for it. I would follow a man who throws the moneychangers out of the temple and gets mad when foiled in his desire for fruit! And as OP says, there are currents of American Christianity that deliberately created an absolutely different character, a mirror Jesus who would WELCOME the moneychangers into the temple and GIVE donkeys to the rich.
In 1989, George Bush gave a speech about crack. During the speech he pulled out a bag of crack and said “this bag was seized right across the street from the White House in Lafayette park.”
Turns out, his speech writers had the idea to pull out a prop during his speech and in order to make it believable they had the DEA plant crack on this random 18 year old black kid. They lured him there. He didn’t even know where the White House or Lafayette park was. When he got there, they arrested them.
The plot was discovered by a journalist.
What journalist
Gary Webb
And then Gary Webb killed himself after he revealed that the CIA let crack infiltrate black communities through drug cartels making deals with the CIA. His wife left him and his career was ruined for exposing the drug war as a war against people of color.
There’s a really well done movie called Kill the Messenger (x) I suggest everyone should watch. It was done in partnership with his family and details the events from beginning to end.
Do we know the name of the “random 18 year old black kid” who was framed by the United States Government for a crime he didn’t commit?
Update: His name is Keith Jackson. He has a wife and family now, and lives in the Baltimore/DC area. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t want anything to do with what happened to him. The charges against him for the Lafayette case were dropped, but he received a 121 month sentence for distributing drugs near a school. Keith Jackson was a senior in high school when he was arrested. He was released from prison in 1998, 10 years later. We have to remember all of the time that was taken from him. We have to remember that he wasn’t just “some random 18 year old black kid.” The government chose him to become a caricature of who they wanted the “enemy” to be in the War on Drugs because he is Black. Remember Webb’s thesis. Remember Keith Jackson’s name. Remember his story.
1. Let’s stop the bullshit.
Gary Webb didn’t kill himself he was murdered. No way in hell do I fucking believe that Gary Webb committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the head.
2. Rick Ross admitted that he believes Gary was murdered because they were still working on their documentary (American Drug War) while Ross was still in prison at the time. As Ross said, “The last time I talked to Gary, he still seemed adamant about continuing with his investigation.”
3. Then 10 years after his death the CIA admits they purposely destroyed Webb career and life and still target him until his death.
I don’t believe for a second that Gary Webb shot himself twice in the head.
He was murdered because he exposed how The CIA, the government, and Satan aka Ronald Reagan purposely flooded the black community with drugs.
Is all of this true?
Yes, I did a project about The War on Drugs and how conservatives tried to create another campaign for voters to get behind with The War on Gangster Rap.
That’s when I was introduce to Gary Webb work. You often see me speak on what he revealed about the Reagan Administration and how Ronald Reagan was the fucking devil that I am glad that he is rotting away in hell right now.
Gary Webb did not commit suicide by shooting himself twice in the head.
History has taught me that a story about a whistle blower committing suicide is a huge red flag.
When folks start spilling the tea on the government, the government’s first reaction is to silence them.
Killing them is one way. Smear campaigns are another.
My mom said that today in church her pastor said in the sermon that Jesus told us to help the poor, and taking money away from public schools to give to charter schools only widens the gap between the rich and the poor. She then added that Jesus spoke against adultery and lust and would not have approved of bragging about sexually assaulting women. According to my mom, people got up and walked out.
The pastor also started the sermon by noting that she’d heard of another minister who read the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount at the pulpit, to be told by the so-called Christian parishioners after the service that it was offensive and they didn’t agree.
The Sermon on the Mount is straight up the words of Jesus.
I recently read an article that said, hypocritical Christians in America don’t actually worship Jesus. They worship America, and even then, it’s a very specific, self-centered idea of America.
YES. EXACTLY.
My mom’s church talks almost every Sunday about how Christians are called to welcome strangers and foreigners and does tons of stuff to help refugees because HELLO, IT’S RIGHT THERE. IN THE RED TEXT, NO LESS.
I don’t believe everything they believe, but I REALLY like those people.
What a lot of these people are is idolators.
Not in terms of the realness or unrealness of who they worship, but in terms of how they’ve warped their focus away from the reality and turned it towards a fantasy of their own construction.
By definition, an idol is an image with no god behind it.
What they have done is taken the idea of Jesus and created a false image of him, nothing like the reality, to carry around in their back pocket, or to wave around on signs, and pull out and shove in people’s faces to justify all manner of unChristlike behavior.
It is a “worship” that is fundamentally self-centered rather than deity-centered, wherein the deity in question is more of a pocketbook get-out-of-jail-free card than directive to live by, and more of a status symbol than a guiding light.
That people will, without a shred of self-awareness, rest themselves assured that Jesus would want them to tip their waitress with a Jesus pamphlet made to look like folded-up money (to take only one example out of many) is the ultimate dismissal of everything the original stood for.
There is a line in the Bible about Jesus meeting his false worshipers and saying “I do not know you.” It seems like plenty of so-called Christians have beaten him to the punch with how quick they are to say they don’t know him.
A lot of churches and organizations in America that call themselves Christian churches are in fact Christianist cults. They no more represent Christianity than Daesh represents Islam. In addition to the usual nonsense of so-called Christians being pro-war, anti-immigrant, racist, and so forth, there are a lot of sects/movements that are just completely toxic and not Christian at all, even though they use that label. If you are Christian and want to have some fucking nightmares, google “christian dominionist,” or “prosperity gospel.”
Still think this is the most realistic diagram of the difference between the theological Jesus and the Comfortable Reinterpretation of Jesus.
American Christianity is, at this point, like the Cult of the Emperor in ancient Rome, which is simultaneously both ironic and appropriate given the history involved
This really is nothing new. Have been justifying nightmarish, ghoulish things in the name of Jesus that Jesus himself would abhor.
This took me a good few hours and a lot of effort to make and even though it was mainly for myself anyone can feel free to use it, for the note it is still under construction and I am undergoing fixes. So If anyone actually does use this other than myself and notices a broken link or something not quite right, could you please inform me about it? Thank you.
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