She has #47 now. Who needs a pope?
Are their last words going to be "see? You were overreacting." right before someone pushes a button on their gas chamber?
Or have they already booked their tickets to some recently-confiscated house in the West Bank?
It has a delicious sort of passive aggressive vibe to it.
Did the alleged "slum lords" lose against the actual slum lords' smear campaign?
I wouldn't be surprised if they called developers "terrorists" at some point.
NIMBY property owners are so convinced of the righteousness of their assets -- and of the evil lurking within any effort to slightly slow down their appreciating value -- that I don't think there's a level of wickedness that exceeds a threat to those assets.
Like, I wouldn't be surprised if they thought: "these developers are worse than Bin Laden. At least Bin Laden didn't decrease the worth of MY property."
When the argument against an initiative says, "greedy developers" that is just a populist NIMBY smear spoken by even greedier, already-existing landlords.
I actually voted against a housing development one time because I got played by those words. I'm a little wiser now.
Oops. Sorry about that. I opened the Voyager app and found an unsent reply, and was like, "I thought I sent this."
And I hit send.
But apparently, if you've had the Voyager web app minimized... and come back to it after 30-40 minutes... AND hit send... it might just reply to a totally unrelated comment in the same post.
Maybe he killed his first enemy combatant and realized he wasn't a soldier?
I'm glad you got a good upvote:downvote ratio for that post. It's encouraging to know that people are at least willing to listen to a reasonable take on Taylor Swift.
People have been hating Swift for decades now. They were hating her for writing too many relationship-related songs even before the American left revived.
She's an easy target because her target demographic is teenage girls, and anything / anyone beloved by teenage girls MUST necessarily be gay and worthless.
See also: Justin Bieber, the Backstreet Boys, and the Jonas Brothers.
I highly suspect people joined the left and transferred their hatred from, "Taylor Swift the musician for stupid, hysterical girls, who I hate" to, "Taylor Swift, the billionaire," without once examining the lens through which they first started hating her. And now she gets more "anti-billionaire" hate than Jeff Bezos?
It bothers me.
Misogyny is a tool of capitalism, and to quote Lorde: the tools of the master will never dismantle the master's house. No one is destroying capitalism by weirdly fixating on Taylor Swift and her fans "because she's a billionaire" while criticizing her more than basically all other billionaires.
I look forward to the day I see a leftist meme reminding me "you can't love Bruce Springsteen (1.1b) or Jay-Z (2.5b) and still be a leftist."
Until then, I'm not taking lectures on leftism from people who haven't deconstructed their own feelings of hatred and superiority towards teenage girls.
Edit: I hope I didn't come across as angry at you in particular. You don't seem to be joining in the hypocritical, unnuanced hate.
To tell any other story in the Star Wars universe, you must first retcon the Original Trilogy.
See, the Original Trilogy established that the "dark side" was a temptation for every Jedi. Like cocaine or meth for modern humans: addictive poison that gives a temporary rush of power.
That's great for the whole spiritual, mystic, two-wolves-within-you conflict Luke went through. His victory was overcoming his shortcomings in the form of fear and anger.
But it's actually terrible for any story made afterwards.
On the one hand, you can't now make a story where, "maybe the Jedi were excessively stoic." without also inadvertently making the argument that Luke was maybe... wrong?... to conquer his emotions? It undermines Luke's conflict.
On the other hand, you also can't make the Dark Side totally evil without flattening Vader's character. When Luke loses himself to fear in Episode 5 and to anger in Episode 6, he proves that the Dark Side doesn't sink its teeth into you and control you permanently after a single moment of weakness. Even after losing yourself to the Dark Side, you can still observe how it is hurting your loved ones and then choose to pull yourself out of it, conquering your fear and anger in order to protect them. Exactly as Luke does for Vader, and exactly as Vader does immediately after for Luke.
Which means Anakin was just... one-dimensional up until that point. Weak. Too simple to be a protagonist. He wakes up to find he's killed Padme, and yet still doesn't turn his life around and learn to fight the temptation of the Dark Side? He hunts down and kills Jedi who had nothing to do with his fall, and yet never looks into their eyes to realize he's fallen?
No matter how you look at it, it just... doesn't work.
That's why the prequels retconned the Jedi into something morally ambiguous. And why the sequels retconned them into a past that needed killing. It's why the Clone Wars animated series turned the Jedi into a bureaucratically anti-emotion order. And why a lot of video games added lore where the Jedi actually committed genocide against the Sith. It's also why pretty much none of these other media talk about the Dark Side in the same tone as the OT.
The second the OT ended, the Dark Side could no be longer a "temptation". It had to became a faction. An unjustly vilified piece of humanity. An ethnic group.
Because you can't have a "dark side" and have complicated, nuanced characters and extensive world-building: either A) the world will fall apart, B) the characters will be woefully inconsistent, or C) all of the above.
So every, single time you want to make new Star Wars media, you have to retcon the "Dark Side" essentially out of existence.
image transcription: picture of a statue of the Hindu deity Durga. The statue has ten arms.
caption underneath the picture reads: in Hinduism, Durga is revered as the goddess of war, motherhood, and protection. But did you know she also wrote the default key bindings for Emacs?
Image Transcription:
An 8-panel Phoebe Teaching Joey meme.
The first panel is Phoebe from Friends saying "Russia".
The second panel is Joey from the same show replying with "Russia".
The third panel is Phoebe saying "has invaded".
The fourth panel is Joey repeating back "has invaded".
The fifth panel is Phoebe saying "Ukraine".
The sixth panel is Joey repeating back "Ukraine".
The seventh panel is Phoebe saying the completed phrase "Russia has invaded Ukraine".
The final panel shows Joey proudly proclaiming "NATO just started a proxy war".
From the article: When Marguerite Duras Got Kicked Out of the Communist Party
This was part of their justification.
Technically speaking, it was probably happening sooner than 1950, since Trotsky arrived in Turkey in 1929.
The man's cult extends far beyond America's borders. Just like the "anti-woke" culture war.