#and there definitely isn’t a RADICAL left

[samaspic31]

My irl social circle became so so trans dominated while dropping out i had forgor how bad it feels being in cis dominated institutions

#im not atuch with them they’re stuck with me but. had not missed it #i hadn’t forgotten public life or like #mostly cis familial circles #it has an additional layer of badness in school tho i feel. extra #exposed and restricted #and that’s in an art uni with mostly leftist students #just. far from left enough #not that anybody is leftist and anarchist enough for me- #i had done a short program to prepare health formation where i was surrounded by cis women always. but the teachers were #keeping less of an authoritative distance and those women were if not the most anti bogtry at least mature #the people in this dlass are mostly just out of high school and huh. have growth left to do #also there’s a bunch if gays but not really the radical kind and some people who definitely are somewhat trans but still battling their #internalized transphobia too much for what i would say to be well received #tired of being the most radical fucker in all the rooms i walk in it’s exhausting #making friends is hard also. in general #but i can’t help but feel looking genderweird and alt isn’t helping me (also i don’t do the first step lol that one’s on me)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Degrowth basics

"The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress."

What is Degrowth? | Caracol DSA

Why degrowth is the only responsible way forward | OpenDemocracy

Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment

We Need A Fair Way To End Infinite Growth | Current Affairs

Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance | Common Dreams

Can degrowth save us and the planet? | Nottingham Trent

Defending limits is not Malthusian | Undisciplined Environments

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? | New Yorker

The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy | The New Republic

Giving Up on Economic Growth Could Make Us Cooler and Happier | The New Republic

A guide to degrowth: The movement prioritizing wellbeing in a bid to avoid climate cataclysm | CNBC

What is ‘degrowth’ and how can it fight climate change? | Popular Science

Enough for Everyone | Yes! Magazine

Toward a Post-Capitalist Future: On the Growth of “Degrowth” | Lit Hub

All we are saying is give degrowth a chance | The RSA

A pathway out of environmental collapse | newsroom

On Technology and Degrowth | Monthly Review

What is degrowth (and more importantly, what is it not)? | META

Green growth

"There is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth."

Is Green Growth Possible? | Jason Hickel & Giorgos Kallis

The Myth of America’s Green Growth | Foreign Policy

The decoupling delusion: rethinking growth and sustainability | The Conversation

Is green growth happening? | Uneven Earth

Green Growth | Uneven Earth

The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth | Scientific American

Degrowth is not austerity – it is actually just the opposite | Al Jazeera

A response to Paul Krugman: Growth is not as green as you might think | Timothée Parrique

Deceitful Decoupling: Misconceptions of a Persistent Myth | Alevgul H. Sorman

Degrowth isn’t the same as a recession – it’s an alternative to growing the economy forever | The Conversation

Degrowth and the left

"In the middle of an ecological emergency, should we be producing sport utility vehicles and mansions? Should we be diverting energy to support the obscene consumption and accumulation of the ruling class?"

The Left should embrace degrowth | New Internationalist

Ecosocialism is the Horizon, Degrowth is the Way | The Trouble

Degrowth: Socialism without Growth | Brave New Europe

Toward an Ecosocialist Degrowth: From the Materially Inevitable to the Socially Desirable | Monthly Review

For an Ecosocialist Degrowth | Monthly Review

Degrowth and Revolutionary Organizing | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

The necessity of ecosocialist degrowth | Rupture

Degrowth is Anti-Capitalist | Protean Mag

Degrowth Communism | PPPR (Part one | Part two | Part three)

Economic Planning and Degrowth: How Socialism Survives the 21st Century | New Socialist

Degrowth and the South

"Southern countries should be free to organize their resources and labor around meeting human needs rather than around servicing Northern growth."

Who is afraid of degrowth? A Global South economic perspective | IBON Foundation

The anti-colonial politics of degrowth | Jason Hickel

Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonization | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth requires the Global South to default on its foreign debts | Resilience

Journals/Reports

Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance | Jason Hickel

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights

What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification | Jason Hickel

Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario | Global Environmental Change

Urgent need for post-growth climate mitigation scenarios | Nature Energy

Degrowth and critical agrarian studies | Julien-François Gerber

Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability | European Environmental Bureau

Incrementum ad Absurdum: Global Growth, Inequality and Poverty Eradication in a Carbon-Constrained World | David Woodward

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help | Nature

A New Political Economy for a Healthy Planet | Jason Hickel

Planning beyond growth. The case for economic democracy within limits

Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions | Cleaner Production Letters

Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries | The Lancet

Books

Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide | Pluto Press

A People's Green New Deal | Max Ajl

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World | Jason Hickel

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job | Verso Books

The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism | Verso Books

The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism | Verso Books

Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism | Kohei Saito

Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social-ecological transformation

27 Essays and Thoughts on Degrowth | Giorgos Kallis

Videos

Yes To Limits To Growth! | The Other School

How Degrowth Can Save the World | Andrewism

How We End Consumerism | Our Changing Climate

Demystifying Degrowth | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth is not Austerity | John the Duncan

Degrowth and Ecosocialism | Planet: Critical

Degrowth in 7 minutes: Fighting for climate by living better | Think That Through

The Future is Degrowth (w/ Aaron Vansintjan) || SRSLY WRONG

"Degrowth means power to the working class!"with Jason Hickel | GND Media

Others

degrowth.info

Degrowth Journal

Doughnut Economics

#degrowth #green growth #postgrowth #ecosocialism #solarpunk #i'll update this as i go

[pineapplerightsideupcake]

Radical feminism is a left wing ideology incompatible with all forms of colonialism and imperialism, including Zionism. If you’re going to quit pretending to be a fence sitter and go full mask off by reblogging straight up Zionist apologia, do the rest of us actual radicals a favour and stop associating yourself with the radfem label, thanks

Bestie, radical feminism is an academic framework for analysis developed by mostly American and other western scholars. Radical feminism in non western nations may be similar but it isn’t identical. The radical feminism on tumblr is definitely of the western variety and consequently has zero to say about a geo political conflict between two peoples in the Middle East; except to observe that when war comes, it is women that receive the worst of it.

All I’ve done is call out anti semitism and blatant misinformation. I’ve never defended the actions of the Israeli government or IDF. I’ve never called the suffering of Palestinians fake or exaggerated.

The people of Palestine are not aided by you uncritically reblogging everything you hear that supports your worldview. You are not immune to propaganda because you “picked the right side”.

Also this idea that every belief we have must come packaged together with 1000 other beliefs is so fucking AMERICAN.

There are only two sides according to the American imagination so if I espouse one belief labeled leftism I most agree with every “leftist” position. So when leftists turn on Jews I have to forsake my family and friends and community or else I can’t be a feminist.

You haven’t unlearned the TRA thinking that leftism is a unified hive mind where we’ve all agreed on the “right” thing to think.

Also fascinating that you care about Palestine, just not enough to attach your URL to your message.

#radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminist community #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radblr #radical feminists please interact #radical feminists please touch #feminism #antisemitism

[burningtheroots]

💜🤍💚 Introduction Post & Guide/Masterpost 💜🤍💚

IMPORTANT

After three months, I think it‘s time to introduce myself and clear this mess of a blog a bit 💀

So, I‘m 20 years old and have been learning about radical feminism for quite a while before joining in myself, and I‘m really grateful to be part of this community and even be mutuals with some of my favorite women on here. <3

I joined Tumblr (and Instagram) to share information, my own opinions and to connect with like-minded women. Before discovering radical feminism, I always felt left out from the discussions and didn’t know that there would be anyone who‘d understand me and accept me. I tried to fit in somewhere where I didn’t belong, and whilst it‘s not always easy to be here, I‘m happy that this community exists. :‘)

DMs & anons are always open, and I‘m always interested in having discussions and meeting new people.

I‘m rather shy and struggle a bit with my social skills, but it gets better eventually.

The only people who aren’t welcome on my blog are p0rn obsessed men and generally anyone who only wants to harass me or spread misogyny. I‘m all for respectful discussions and willing to share my viewpoints, but I‘m not a punching bag.

As there‘s a lot going on here, I collected the most important posts and reblogs (quite many, to be honest) and decided to link them here. Some are simply informative, some are very subjective and some are a mixture of both. The list will be updated over time.

Here you go:

(I‘d also heavily recommend to check out @/radfemfox5, @/woman-for-women, @/butch-reidentified, @/radsplain, @/meanevilandcruel … and many more — not actually tagging them because this post is long & I don’t want to annoy them) 💜🤍💚

if a link doesn’t work, please let me know

Sex-based violence 🔗 links

‼️ Self-protection in emergency situations

Pornography 🔗 links

Prostitution 🔗 links

Gender Critical 🔗 links

Surrogacy 🔗 links

Sexual assault 🔗 links

LGB & Pride 🔗 links

Women‘s health 🔗 links

Pro-choice 🔗 links

Questionable men 🔗 links

Women‘s rights movement // General stuff continued 🔗 links

Women‘s movement // General stuff

Donation Megathread

Stop the infighting

"Not like other girls"

"Not All Men" is a war propaganda tactic

Age and attraction

Key elements

Andrea Dworkin works

Why feminism should center women and women only

Statement

How men see us

Prioritize women

Radical feminism is intersectional

Radical feminism definition

Double standards in terms of "unconditional love"

Favorite quote

We‘re not Nazis

We don’t support Nazis & vice versa

Misogyny vs. misandry

Why I‘m a radfem

Actual radfeminism

No good men

Feminist book list

Libfem hypocrisy

Andrew Tate fans

"Withholding sex" is a misconception

Sexism against women in sports

Choice feminism

Men ☕️

Sex-based violence

Radfeminism is superior

On motherhood

On motherhood 2

Workplace sexism

Motivation

Men‘s mental health month

eXtRiMiSm

Women are not protected 1

Women are not protected 2

Oversexualization

Oppressor classes

Men who want children

Bodyshaming

Misandry

Men‘s sexual entitlement

Beauty Myth

A man‘s world

It‘s all men

Double standards

Women in fiction

No conservatism

Lies about emotions

The system isn’t broken

Resist, don‘t comply

Male hypocrisy

Woman arrested in Saudi Arabia

"Unconditional love"

Beauty ideals

Again, men ☕️

Parental alienation ‼️

Men & gossip

Men dislike their own daughters

Women aren’t objects

On religion

Sexism at school

Women‘s labor

Men‘s victim mentality

Arranged marriage

Women are an afterthought

Oppression in the US

Purity culture

American women & maternity leave

Body neutrality

Dangerous men are around us

Anti-natalism

Men don‘t actually "love" women

Socialization

Stereotyping men

Neha Wadekar in Baringo county, Kenya

Tomiekia Johnson

Child marriage in the US

Workplace sexism

UN report (alarming)

"You are a man-hater"

People with disabilities matter

Disability Pride Month

Girls‘ clothing

So you‘re partnered with a male

#radfem #radblr #radical feminism #women deserve better #womens rights #gender critical #personal

[atlafan]

Jordan, ik you probably don’t want to have a whole conversation about this but I recently watched Drew Gooden’s video on the live action atla series (it just affirmed that I definitely don’t want to watch it lol) but it did inspire me to do a rewatch of the original and ughhhhhh it’s so incredible😭😭 all the little characterization details are SO rewarding and so good. Zuko’s small acts of kindness, even early on in book 1, just show that he’s always been Ursa’s son and help set up his arc for the rest of the show. Going after the captured Iroh instead of tracking the Gaang in Winter Solstice. Saving his crew in The Storm. It just shows you that at his core he believes in doing the right thing, and that’s a huge part of why his overall arc pays off so well. It’s the same with all of them—seeing Sokka put on his war paint and his battle regalia (in ep 2 or 3 I think) to confront Zuko in the village…it shows you that he takes such pride in the responsibility of being a leader and a warrior, especially in his dad’s absence. Yet when he gets to Kyoshi, we see the humbled side of him, and that he’s devoted to learning and respectful of the masters in their craft (whether it’s the Kyoshi warriors or Piandao or even the mechanist) and wants to learn what they have to teach him. Even Jet, who is always a very complicated character for me, is so compelling and so real. He’s suffered horribly and unfortunately has let that radicalize him. Tbh it reminds me of when anti war groups in the 60s would bomb places and things like that…the mission is “peace” but you’ve let your mission turn you into a violent radical who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong anymore. I KNOW I don’t have to tell you lol but all the little details of this show, from design to writing to performances, are just incredibleeee and I’m so happy it exists.

GISICKAKAAK what a fun message to wake up to!

Yes I am simply pretending the new series doesn’t exist because I know it’ll just piss me off if I watch it. And I know myself well enough to know I am just not mature enough to separate the original from the new, so yeah I won’t be watching and I doubt I ever will. The one thing I am mature about is that I don’t “hate watch” things anymore lmao

I think this is why zuko is like my favorite character. I feel like he was the first character I was ever like “no, that’s actually my son” when I got older. He is so fucking complicated and so not at all what you think he’s going to be. He’s not just the antagonist, he’s Aang’s foil. They parallel each other in so many different ways. There’s a scene in book 3 where Aang literally says, “I need my honor back”, and it cross fades from one side of his face to the other side of zuko’s!!

All of the characters have incredible arcs. They all learn something about themselves, and they actually use that to grow and get better. Remember, these are literally children who were thrusted into adulthood, forced to grow up way too early. Katara is a nagging mother, but she also remembers how to be a kid and have fun and laugh. Sokka is a sexier idiot, but what teenage boy isn’t? He unlearns so much behavior, and even though he still feels like he’s the leader of the group, and in so many ways he is, he learns that it’s okay to let someone else take the lead, that he doesn’t always have to be right or in charge. Toph learns that she’s loveable for who she is, blindness and shoeless and a badass.

Aang and Zuko obviously have the most difficult arcs. Aang has to come to terms with the fact that he ran away, and a mass genocide of his people ensued. But if he hadn’t left, he would have died along with the rest of them. Like it or not, it was fate that he froze himself. And most avatars get told who they are at 16 and are given all the time in the world to learn the other elements. Aang was 12…and then had to learn the other elements in less than a year. I would argue that he didn’t necessarily master all the elements in that year. I think he learned enough about each to get by, and I’d like to think he took some time afterwards to really master them. He still relied on his air bending a lot. Whereas if we look at Korra, she did a lot of fire bending even though water was her natural element.

And my baby zuko…I could go on for days about him. My tortured emo son. He overcame so much. He cried, he learned to laugh again, he learned how to be young again. He hated being in the slums of ba sing se, but he also went on dates and got closer with his uncle like he never had been. He was such a sweet little boy. The storm always makes me cry. Zuko alone always makes me cry.

I could go on! I always wanna talk about avatar so never be afraid to come to my inbox about it!

#atla #avatar #avatar the last airbender #zuko #katara #aang #sokka #toph #uncle iroh #the gaang #gaang #prince zuko #zutara

[edenfenixblogs]

The Jews who argue against the word “genocide” do not do so because they support what is happening; they do so because they are arguing that what is happening is better described by the term “ethnic cleansing,” which is also a horrifically bad and inexcusable thing. It just also doesn’t have the antisemitic connotation here.

Hey, need to point out using Ethnic Cleansing (which i only saw used by slightly less radical left) is just as bad and inaccurate to use as Genocide- Jews have experienced Ethnic Cleansing and to label this war as such disregards the actual ethnic cleansing Jews experienced for centuries- most recently SWANA Jews! And I would argue Ethiopian Jews too. Individuals willingly and temporarily leaving their home because it is a war zone (due to a war their leadership systems!) is not ethnic cleansing. We can look to what is happening to Armenians, and Afghans in Pakistan- that is ethnic cleansing.

I really need people to brush up not only on their dictionary terms but on the legal definitions that help determine something. Definitions and the correct usage of them matter! Languages matters- when we use definitions wrongly we water them down.

This is why we have people screaming genocide at something that isn’t one! Because their definition of genocide has been watered down- because every war is suddenly a genocide and every bad person I disagree with is a Nazi.. You get my drift. I’m very sensitive to correct usage of words and definitions.

I absolutely understand this perspective and I refrain from using either term personally with regard to this conflict.

I respect your sensitivity, which is one of many reasons I urge people to try to understand the impact of these words on the Jewish community.

That said, I am sensitive also to the fact that there are dictionary definitions of things and legal definitions of things and scholarly definitions of things. I try to keep in mind that everyone is approaching this conflict from their own cultural context so I am not as intense personally about correcting people's usage of these terms, simply because I'm not expert enough to determine which definition is "best." I think legal definitions should definitely always be used in the context of legal discussions, but I don't know if the legal definition is best in a sociological context.

I want to be clear: I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just respecting my own limitations on this subject matter.

Rest assured, we agree on the main point here: It is important to be specific and accurate in the usage of terms. We cannot allow emotions running high to justify the watering down of such serious terms.

People of all identities affected by this conflict should approach discussions of terms in the same way they approach everything else about this conflict: with good faith, an open heart, and a goal of peace.

I respect that you also disagree with the use of the term ethnic cleansing. However, I personally do not agree that it is "as bad." This is not me trying to tell you that you're wrong. I just think this particular discussion point has a lot of equally valid takes. Your take is absolutely valid. But allow me to explain my take on the situation, which I consider to be equally valid:

I think there is a lot more wiggle room in the term "ethnic cleansing" than there is in the term "genocide." When I use the term ethnic cleansing, I am referring to the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.

The key takeaways I have from the United Nations here is that ethnic cleansing is not actually a crime under international law. The two very loose definitions offered here are:

… rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.

a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”

I consider Palestinians to be a an ethnic group. I know some critics do not, but I disagree with those people. So if you do not agree with me on that, I doubt we will agree on the specifics that follow. I think recognizing Palestinian identity is vital to fostering a peaceful future for all currently residing in the Levant. However, I know that there are also politics and political realities in Israel between those who call themselves Arab-Israelies vs. Palestinians. I do my best to stay informed about topics, but this is too fraught for me to parse with any authority. I believe in Palestinian ethnic identity because of several reasons I won't elaborate on here, but can elaborate on upon request.

I am not particularly swayed by the first bullet point. I do not believe that Israel is trying to render Palestine as ethnically homogeneous, even though they are using force on the area.

The second bullet point has merit to me. I do not believe all Jews or all Israelis wish to eradicate and remove Palestinians from the Levant, so I do not consider Israelis in general or Jews in general responsible for the cleansing. Furthermore, even though I am personally a pacifist, I am also pragmatic. I believe there are much less violent ways to eradicate Hamas than the heavy bombing currently taking place. I also know Hamas has been firing rockets into Israeli civilian areas for quite a long time and Israel has every right to treat Hamas like the hostile, terrorist organization it is.

But I do hold Netanyahu and the Likud party responsible for their affect on Palestinian civilians. I was disgusted when Netanyahu justified his violent actions by invoking Amalek. And I believe that by invoking Amalek he did in fact cause all of his actions as commander of the military to be in support of ethnic cleansing. I do not deny the parallels between the Amalekites relationship to the ancient people of Israel and Palestine's relationship to the modern state of Israel: namely, repeated attempts to destroy Israel, repeated attacks on Israeli civilians (including the taking of hostages and the attack of women and children and the elderly as a terror tactic). However, what I cannot and will never endorse is the implication that we should treat Palestine the way ancient Israel treated the Amalekites.

G-d ordered the people of Israel to blot out the living memory of the Amalekites from the earth--to eliminate every living Amalekite as well as their city and livestock so that they would only be remembered for the horror they inflicted.

We cannot and must not treat modern Palestinians in this manner, and by invoking a religious precedent in this manner as justification for the modern assault on Gaza, I cannot really conceive of a way in which this is not a specific, religious directive to violently target a civilian population on the grounds of their ethnic identity.

Before anyone uses this as an excuse to demonize all Israelis or Jews, I want to explicitly shut that down as well. I know for a fact that not all Israelis or Jews support or agree with Netanyahu here. And while Netanyahu's horrific invocation of Amalek must be rejected, that rejection does not mean that there should be no consequences for Hamas terrorists and those who support their terror. What it does mean, is that as long as Netanyahu is directing the military response, he is, in my personal opinion, carrying out an ethnic cleansing. And we must be able to criticize him for that and respect Palestinian civilians enough to give them the grace to use the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to describe the horror they are experiencing. Criticizing this does not mean Israel has no justifiable military response. Hamas has been engaging in antisemitic terror and mass violence against Israelis and Jews for a long time, even prior to 10/7, in a way that must be stopped by force. However, the main goal for all people of good faith affected by this conflict should always remain peace, not retaliation or attacks on ANYONE (Jewish or Arab) based on their ethnic identity.

I fully respect that you may disagree with this. As there is no legally widespread accepted definition of ethnic cleansing, you may be operating under a different set of criteria to define the term "ethnic cleansing." That's OK, too. I would not call myself uninformed on the topic of the i/p conflict. I have been actively affected by it for over 25 years. That said, I'm also no scholar or international expert on the topic either. I would rate my knowledge and familiarity with the conflict and relevant terminology to be much higher than average and steeped in years of observation and personal experience. So, if I still view his as a matter up for a variety of interpretations, I cannot fault others for feeling the same way, even if that means they disagree with me. I hope this makes sense, and you are able to see my stance as legitimate, even if you disagree with it.

#ask me stuff #4everevolving #i/p #israel #palestine #jewish muslim solidarity #arab israeli solidarity #ethnic cleansing #terminology #amalek #amalekites #fuck netanyahu #hamas is a terrorist organization

[directdogman]

I needed to ask this because i couldnt sleep

is Norm conservative?

because on one side it would make sense due to his patriotism and his age. But on the other hand if he was i think he would have acted way diffrent and atleast after the thirdchapter it seems out of place.

So please answer the question so i can sleep

The detailed answer to this question is very long, so I'll put it behind a 'read more' line so this doesn't clog up anyone's timeline.

The shorter answer to this question is: Norm's political beliefs cannot be summarized using any single commonly understood word from our 21st century vocabularies because his stances, alongside what Norm considers political/apolitical topics, don't align entirely with 21st century definitions/standards as Norm is a time traveler from the mid 20th century.

He isn’t a 21st century conservative as much as perhaps an early 20th century one, with a few stances that were considered progressive/radical for that time. Many aspects of the character that we’d consider conservative weren’t in his time, and were only regularly politicized by one side of the political aisle years after he warped. If you want a longer answer where I point out where exactly this blurs the line, read more:

The problem with this question (and most political discussions) in general is that most people don't read up on political history for fun and so, they naturally associate words like 'conservative', 'liberal', 'socialist' with the rhetoric/stances of whoever is currently using those labels in their society. Most people reading this would look at, for instance, the modern Republican party in America and say "oh, that's a Conservative."

Now, here's the problem: Norm grew up largely in the 1930′s and warped in the 1960's, society as a whole was radically different. One big difference is, for example, religion. Norm believes in God, and this is something that’s considered old-fashioned by many. It's pretty unfashionable to be religious nowadays in many places, but in most of 20th century America, it was a far bigger deal not to be. Nowadays, religion is something that's associated with the right more than the left, but in the early to mid 20th century, both parties were extremely religious.

Democratic political machines were dominated by Catholics in the early 20th century. Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and JFK (the latter of whom was elected in the decade Norm came from) were Catholics, and it actually mattered to many voters. William Jennings Bryan (3 times Democratic nominee) was also immensely religious. Even the far-left fringe elements of the party had religious thought leaders, with Father Coughlin (a priest with a radio show) influencing far-left 30's Democrats. I could go on. Republican party also produced quite a few deeply religious presidents, with Garfield and Eisenhower coming to mind. A large portion of the population was deeply religious for most of the nation’s history, after all, and the religious beliefs of candidates mattered far more than today. So, for his time, Norm's religion is something that wasn't politically partisan, but rather, broadly essential, and as such, Norm would find it strange that anyone would assume that his religious beliefs correlate with his political beliefs at all.

Economically, America has changed so much in the 20th century that the issues at the start of the century are unrecognizable to us now. In 1900, the core economic issues were whether to back the dollar with just gold, or with gold and silver... oh, and the tariff. Exciting. No welfare net existed because income taxes largely didn't exist. The Federal Reserve didn't even exist yet! Tariffs (taxes on foreign goods) were the main source of federal income. What we consider to be normal governmental function was considered radical by many back then.

Similarly, it's important to note that the modern welfare state as we know it today was created in the 1940's with the advent of Social Security (AKA, in Norm’s lifetime) and only expanded to something resembling what we have today very incrementally, with many large developments happening under president Johnson in the mid 1960's... After Norm jumped.

Gun control (especially in sparsely populated states like Arizona) was basically a non-topic, and the only major federal gun control legislation that I know of being passed in the first half of the 20th century was a 30's crime bill that outlawed heavy machine guns + sawed offs, specifically related to organized crime tied to prohibition era organized crime. Norm loves guns, but he’d be profoundly disturbed to learn about how many mass shootings America has had in the last 20 years and wouldn’t just be able to hand-wave it away as normal, as our society has... because outside of the fucked up racist mass shootings of the 20′s (like Tulsa, but there were many also more smaller ones the same decade too), mass shooting weren’t a constant occurrence! NUTS, RIGHT??

Next, there’s Norm's patriotism, which your question implied pointed towards him being a conservative, but like his religion, this is an apolitical trait from Norm's time. Norm lived through World War II and the Red Scare, times when patriotism wasn't just popular, hell, not acting like Donald Duck in a 40's WWII propaganda cartoon meant you could go to PRISON. Media was also heavily controlled by governmental/anti-communist entities at this time, with the government financing pro-American/anti-communist films in the 50′s and Ronald Reagan serving as leader of the Actor’s Guild. Communists were rooted out systematically and to Norm, keeping a loaded firearm next to your bed in case a ‘communist’ breaks into your home is entirely normal and he refuses to cut it out. Poor guy’s scared shitless.

Norm does have a distaste for 'big government' and wasteful spending, partially explained by the time he came from, where taking taxes for public spending was still considered a more radical idea, but also, Norm's extras sheet gives even more essential context to this mentality with the explanation that he was raised in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by a single mother. Growing up, self-reliance was a necessity, not a virtue. His attitude towards governments basically amounts to "Leave me the FUCK alone." He values resilience, charity and discipline because these values are what enabled him to survive growing up.

Norm also grew up in the wilderness, so he enjoyed a lot of freedom growing up that is arguably impossible in urban areas, in his own time and especially today. Most of his stances come from the belief that the common person is inherently good (a belief that he temporarily abandoned after the warp, and Gingi managed to restore), and that political power structures solely exist so those who are already rich can stuff their pockets at the expense of taxpayers. Norm considered both of the two parties of his time to be corrupt and self-serving, and would say the same of them today, which is why Callum Crown’s third party populist rhetoric, and returning control of the US economy to working class people really resonated with Norm.

When asking why someone like Norm would support Crown’s movement, it’s important to note that Callum softened his socialist rhetoric as a national candidate. Norm also didn’t know all of Callum’s stances/beliefs (and realistically lied to himself slightly about some of them.) Norm also missed the end of Crown’s presidency, having to educate himself with revisionist sources after the warp. But, it would be dishonest not to mention in a complete answer to this question that Norm supported the single least conservative candidate in US history (in DT’s universe) for president because he felt it was the right thing to do.

Norm’s beliefs largely boil down to believing that individuals know best how to live their own lives and that as long as you aren’t hurting yourself or others, it’s none of his business. It’s his core tenet, really. He gets very modest when intimate subjects are brought up around him and the last thing he wants is to know what anyone does in the bedroom. Norm isn’t a homophobe or against gay marriage because... well, why would he be? There’s plenty of modern behaviour that is prohibited in the bible and the idea of legislating based on selectively chosen religious beliefs is abhorrent to Norm because he was raised in a secular America and values personal freedom. Norm would be profoundly disturbed that the conservative party of today considers this an issue at all. Christian or not, the guy hates any and all unnecessary governmental restrictions. All references to God were only added to the pledge of allegiance/onto money when he was an adult, a move that was done for exclusively political reasons, since it was the height of the cold war, and Marxism opposes organized religion.

Norm is also vehemently opposed to any form of elitism, never forgetting where he came from. His main desire is for others to just coexist and be understanding, without cheating/wronging each other. Norm downplays it, but a trait many forget is that Norm is very well educated. He was in NASA and has a background with mathematics and physics. Occasionally, big words slip out when Norm speaks. Norm was bullied somewhat in academia for how he speaks, fostering a deep distaste for the environment. Norm enjoys debate, discussion of topics. He would broadly support the causes of social movements today that aim to secure rights for minority groups, believing everyone has a right to be free/happy, but would have fundamental issues with the lack of accountability of most of them due to their lack of organization. His distaste for academia would absolutely foster hatred for activists who overuse ideological language.

When I was building Norm’s political profile in my head, I actually looked to Mark Twain for inspiration, who was quoted as saying: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.“ This sums up Norm’s patriotism, really. He, too, believed in the wisdom of the common man. Twain is also someone you can’t really put into a political box, describing himself as both ‘conservative’ (by the definition he had at the time) but also ‘radical’. Twain was racially progressive for his time and tended to support the Republican party (the racially progressive party of the two in his time), but split with the party in 1884 over the political corruption of their candidate that year, and outspokenly spoke out against McKinley + Roosevelt’s imperialist foreign policy.

So, with all of that context out of the way, here’s the final answer to your question: Norm would’ve broadly been considered a conservative by the definition/standards of his own time for his economic views (which are more conservative now), progressive for his social views (which are just kinda normal now), and has fundamental enough differences with the beliefs/aims of the conservative movement in America today that he would not want to be lumped in with modern day conservatives. If he was in politics today, he’d be trying to start a populist grassroots movement and support breaking down the two party system. Hope this was informative! I know a lot of people like Norm, so the last thing I’d want is people thinking Norm was something he wasn’t.

#dialtown

[invisibleicewands]

Michael Sheen is tremendous as NHS founder Aneurin Bevan, even if the play’s fear of bio-drama cliches gets a bit much

The British, in case you hadn’t noticed, tend to get a little sentimental about the NHS. 

So it’s understandable that playwright Tim Price and director Rufus Norris are wary of dewy-eyed hagiography when approaching ‘Nye’, a new biographical drama about Aneurin Bevan, the firebrand Labour health minister who founded the service. With the title role played by the great Michael Sheen, there is a danger of going OTT in having the nation’s favourite current Welshman star as the nation’s favourite historical Welshman. And so Norris’s production has a determinedly trippy quality intended to counter the cliches.

Billed as an ‘epic Welsh fantasia’, ‘Nye’ is largely presented as the stream-of-consciousness of an older Bevan, who is a patient in one of his own hospitals. There for an ulcer operation, he drifts in and out of the present and into recollections of his past, unaware he is dying of stomach cancer – something his MP wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) has determinedly kept from him.

Crowned by a truly uncanny wig, Sheen is a delight as the fiery but unassuming Bevan. He never at any point changes out of his red striped pyjamas, a pleasingly absurdist touch at the heart of Norris’s stylish production, in which the green hospital ward repeatedly dissolves into the past to the sound of wheezing lungs. 

It’s otherworldly in places, especially the scene where Tony Jayawardena’s overbearing Churchill collars Bevan in the Commons and groups of teacup-clutching MPs try to eavesdrop, moving like insectoid predators under Stephen Hoggett and Jess WIlliams’s unsettling choreography.

Really, though, once you get past all the cool stuff, you’re left with a fairly conventional drama, jumbled up. Bevan’s memories of the past come at us in roughly chronological order. There’s a definite artistic licence at work as we see schoolboy Nye - still played by Sheen - overcome a bullying teacher and absorb his local library, hungry to find synonyms for words that trigger his stammer, setting himself on the path to becoming a great orator. But the meat of ‘Nye’ does lie with relatively factual accounts of incidents from Bevan’s life - his scenes in Parliament are particularly riveting, as he is doggedly determined to criticise Churchill’s wartime government, to the chagrin of his boss Clement Atlee (Stephanie Jacob).

I understand the logic in, say, not having Sheen simply parrot Bevan’s big speeches to rabble-rousing effect. But all the hopping around leaves ‘Nye’ somewhat lacking in connective material. It’s never especially clear, for instance, why Bevan is so much more radical and uncompromising than his Labour colleagues. It sometimes feels like we’re seeing his life on shuffle, when a straight playthrough might have said all the same things, but more clearly.

Don’t get me wrong, if it had been a balls-trippingly weird avant-garde odyssey I’d have doubtless been all over it. There’s a big mid-show song and dance number that hints at a much weirder production. Unfortunately, this production never emerges. It feels like ‘Nye’ desperately wants to avoid looking like an Inspirational Drama About The Founder Of Our NHS, but doesn’t have a clear formal plan beyond that.

However, if the whole isn’t quite there, most of the individual scenes are scintillating. And there’s no sense of embarrassment from Sheen, who is magnetic as Bevan - a decent, even slightly bewildered man, who nonetheless feels pathologically drawn to doing the right thing, no matter the odds.

#Michael Sheen #Nye #theatre #National Theatre #NHS #Aneurin Bevan #review

[starberrywander]

This might be a controversial opinion but I think most of my fellow progressives need to hear this:

You NEED to stop attacking conservatives, because all of your hostility only feeds into their “The left is full of prideful/hypocritical/irrational/etc assholes” rhetoric and is a major tool used by far-right propagandists to manipulate good people into hateful and dangerous ideas. Your hostility is contributing to far-right radicalization just as much, if not more, than the content put out by hate campaigns and extremists. 

I have seen it plenty of times both in my own life and online. Conservatives frequently talk about how hostile “the left” behaves and it forms a basis for a lot of their unsavory ideals. 

As someone who lives in a very conservative region of one of the most red states in the US, most of the people I know in person are conservative or at least conservative-leaning, especially in my family. But, you would be surprised just how many of them express agreement with progressive ideals either without realizing or while refusing to better understand them simply because they see progressives as hostile and unwelcoming. Like, I have no doubt in my mind that many of these people would happily and enthusiastically join even some of the most progressive social movements if they hadn’t had such a horrible impression of progressives painted to them. Many have experiences with being attacked, harassed, and called names for trying to express their concerns and opinions in progressive spaces. Many more have also seen that same scenario play out many times to other people who they respect or care for. If you don’t believe me, let me give you a prominent example from my life:

My grandmother is very conservative. Like, watches (or at least used to watch) fox news on a regular basis and refers to herself as “Super MAGA.” However, despite very explicitly aligning herself with the right-leaning conservative crowd and often making comments (mostly out of ignorance not maliciousness, I’ve learned) that would probably set a good number of y’all into rage mode, when individual issues are discussed in good faith she often takes a more progressive position. Of course there are exceptions, especially because she has been exposing herself to a lot of right-wing propaganda and definitely has been influenced by some hate campaigns, but she certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype and would absolutely be aligning herself with the left in a different situation. She is very supportive of LGBT people and, though she is a bit skeptical of things like gender reassignment surgery because of the things she gets told on facebook, she isn’t hateful toward trans people like many would probably assume. In fact all it took was a simple, calm explanation of my perspective for her to easily accept nonbinary identities (including, I think, neopronouns and xenogenders, though I haven’t heard anything from her specifically on those topics). She has even expressed that sentiment to other family members since then and I think it was well received.

Of course, there are certainly people who are too stubborn and prejudiced to even consider changing their mind, but they are a minority. Many of these people that get clocked as “bigots” are actually very kind-hearted people who were only ever able to have their genuine concerns heard or validated by people on the conservative right. They are the way they are because they were harassed or made to feel unwelcome in progressive spaces so they looked elsewhere for support and community. 

If you need more examples, here is just one of the many videos of people expressing this type of experience (this is also the video that made me realize that I should probably make a post to express this): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3r01BruBok 

My point is that we need to be more compassionate. I don’t mean this in a moral purity way, you are absolutely justified in being upset at the types of prejudice and misinformation being spread around. I mean it in the way that your hostile and angry actions are only making the situation worse and you need to find a better outlet if we want to make progress toward convincing people to side with more progressive positions and stop voting in the kinds of people who are gonna push these discriminatory policies we’ve been seeing.

As much as we want to believe that we are rational and that enough statistics will change someone’s mind if they just listened, that is not the case. Humans are emotional beings. As much as we see ourselves as objective, we think emotionally. Even if we don’t realize it. If you attack people, even passive aggressively, you make them shut down. They stop listening. Because we are much more likely to listen to and care about the words of people who we have a positive impression of. People remember emotions far more than any words, and it doesn’t matter how correct you are or how much proof you have, if you come at people with hostility and anger that attack and the emotions associated with it are the only things that are going to stick. They aren’t going to remember your statistics. They aren’t going to remember your facts. They’re going to remember how you harassed them and called them names. They’re going to remember how you demanded they adopt your beliefs without listening to theirs.

I don’t care how much you wanna scream, its not going to help anything. All people will remember is how you made them feel. We only care about statistics and facts when we care about the subject, because that’s just how humans are. You may find some exceptions, but they are few and far between and you shouldn’t rely on their existence. You need to be kind. You need to be compassionate. 

If you need to say something to vent say it privately. Write it down then make a wish and delete it like you’re blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Keep a journal of all your rants and frustrations. Just keep them out of public spaces, for fucks sake. They are not helpful. You can edit them to be kinder, but please stop with the hostile posts. You are making it worse and the only benefit it serves is an ego boost from “dunking on the dummy conservatives.” You don’t need to say everything that comes to your mind. I know I’ve done this before too so I can sympathize but its really time we all start being more intentional with the ways we react to people.

Stop calling people names. Stop accusing people of things (even if they are. It achieves nothing.) Stop telling people to shut up. If they something particularly nasty just report and block them. If its real life just try to go somewhere else or ask them to stop or something. Like, you can absolutely attempt to explain why there is an issue with it, why you are uncomfortable with it, and why you will not accept it. But for goodness sake please do it respectfully. Even if you don’t think the person deserves respect, being hostile only makes things worse. Find a different way to express your anger. 

Yes, there will be people who won’t listen. Yes, there will still be people who paint you as irrational for being concerned or for caring about certain issues (that’s gaslighting, don’t let it get to you. Call it out if you need to.) You can’t change that. You can’t force people to change their minds. What you can do is control yourself and practice some patience. 

It is extremely important that we promote acceptance and fight against far right extremist radicalization. Especially now, when people are getting more extreme in their views and feeling emboldened to discriminate more openly. We need to get more people away from the conservative rabbit hole and we cannot do that if your immediate reaction is to attack them for disagreeing with you. People are the products of their experiences and their communities. People join communities that make them feel accepted and validated. If you harass people, its just going to make them want to join the other “enemy” community who will show them sympathy for the hurt you caused. I don’t care how much you don’t think they deserve it. I don’t care how much you feel justified. I don’t care how nasty they are being. You need to treat people with respect and compassion if you want them to agree with you on any level.

 I will probably be talking about this more in the future so I’m gonna make a hashtag to keep it all in the same place. 

“Progressives please chill and find a more productive approach for fucks sake”

#ppcafampaffs

#long post #ppcafampaffs #Controversial #politics #liberal #conservative #left #progressive #leftist #making progress #chill #mogai #LGBTQIA #gay #transgender #pro-choice #equality #kyriarchy

[kingstylesdaily]

How Harry Styles Became the World’s Most Wanted Man

The global pop icon makes it all look easy — even when it definitely isn't. opens up about his huge year, his two new films, his fans' relationship with Olivia Wilde, activism, sexuality, therapy, and much more

BY BRITTANY SPANOS

ON A FRIDAY night in New York, Harry Styles put on a show. It wasn’t just any show; it was the first time he performed his third and soon-to-be-biggest album, Harry’s House, in its entirety. The crowd that May night covered Long Island’s UBS Arena in feathers and glitter and tears — a ritualistic skin shedding of sorts whenever Styles comes to town.

Fans noticed something different about the encore: Styles didn’t end with his usual closer, “Kiwi”; instead, he opted to finish the night with a second performance of his new single “As It Was,” his dance-through-the-tears pandemic reflection on isolation and change. When he played it, the crowd exploded in a way even Styles had never experienced. It left him a bit shaken.

“We came offstage, and I went into my dressing room and just wanted to sit by myself for a minute,” he tells me, two months later. “After One Direction, I didn’t expect to ever experience anything new. I kind of felt like, ‘All right, I’ve seen how crazy it can get.’ And I think there was something about it where I was … not terrified, but I just needed a minute. Because I wasn’t sure what it was. Just that the energy felt insane.”

At 28, Styles has unlocked a new level of stardom for himself. Years ago, he regularly filled stadiums as a member of One Direction, his former boy band. This spring and summer, he’s playing them on his own. “As It Was” has become his hugest song yet, setting streaming records and topping the charts in more than two dozen countries, including 10 weeks straight in the U.S. Because he’s a star with a largely young, female fan base, many have refused to engage with him as much more than a pretty teen idol. (I don’t need to lay out decades of music history to show how wrong of a take that is.) But he can feel the tides change in curious ways. “ ‘As It Was’ is definitely the highest volume of men that I would get stopping me to say something about it,” he notes. “That feels like a weird comment because it’s not like men was the goal. It’s just something I noticed.”

Before his headlining set at Coachella in April, I caught Harry backstage, surrounded by James Corden, Styles’ onstage guest Shania Twain, and his girlfriend, Olivia Wilde. Later, I took in sold-out shows in New York and at London’s Wembley Stadium. The immense love showering Styles was impossible to ignore — you see it in the faces of every fan, whether they’ve been supporting him for “one year, two years, five years, 12 years,” as he says in nearly every end-of-show thank-you speech. Along the way I heard him everywhere, even when I wasn’t trying. “As It Was” played in every cab. “Watermelon Sugar” soundtracked breakfast. “Golden” lurked quietly at a London drugstore. “Late Night Talking” blasted at a Brooklyn bar, leading one man to proclaim, “I like Harry Styles. I can admit it,” like it was a radical act of self-acceptance.

And while he may be everywhere in 2022, Styles is, at the moment, literally right in front of me, sitting in an armchair of a hotel business suite in Hamburg, Germany, on a sweaty June afternoon. After a dip in the Irish Sea this morning, he flew into town and is now enjoying a day off in the middle of his first European tour since 2018.

In person, Styles looks more like your best friend’s cute, sporty older brother than the gender-bending style icon he’s become. He’s left the boas and sequin jumpsuits in the dressing room, opting instead for a blue Adidas track jacket, gym shorts, and Gucci sneakers. His hair, often described as “tousled,” like he’s a renegade prince in a romance novel, is clipped back with a hair claw, a signature day-off accessory.

Styles is a kind of millennial anomaly: He plugs his phone in across the room, never once sneaking a glance for a rogue notification. He maintains eye contact as his thoughts unfurl in his often slow, British drawl. He’s a bit more Zen, even stoic, than he once was; that goofy, class-clown energy he exuded when the world first fell in love with him in One Direction 12 years ago has naturally diminished. But he’s still as affable and charming as ever, remembering details from small talk we had in all the other cities where I had been (professionally) stalking him, and proving earnestly curious about how I was going to spend my time in Hamburg and how magazine deadlines work. (Back in New York, after surprising fans at a Spotify event for his new album, he asked me my thoughts on David Crosby’s most recent album, which he loved.)

“My great uncle lives here,” Styles says of Hamburg. “He married a German lady, so I have a German cousin. They always used to come and visit when I was a kid, and the only word in English [the cousin] knew was ‘lemonade.’ I didn’t know if she actually wanted lemonade or was trying to say ‘Give me some water please!’ ”

Of course it wasn’t meant to take him this long to get back to places like Hamburg, where he’ll play for more than 50,000 fans tomorrow night at Volksparkstadion, a local football stadium. Love on Tour, the name for his current trek, was supposed to launch in the spring of 2020, a few months after Styles released his second album, Fine Line. We all know what happened next.

Styles didn’t get to play live again until last fall, but something funny happened in the interim. While we were bound to our homes, Styles experienced his first Number One hit in Fine Line’s “Watermelon Sugar,” a tune so sweet it may take a moment to realize he’s singing about cunnilingus. Less than a year later, he won his first Grammy for it.

As the pandemic deepened, Styles ended up back in Los Angeles, where he keeps a home, and moved in with three friends. They’d “go for walks, cook dinner, wash the lettuce, all that kind of stuff,” he says, until he decided to use his downtime productively and began writing new material. Rick Rubin’s Malibu studio, Shangri-La, was available, so Styles moved in with longtime producers and co-writers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. “We didn’t really know what we were going in for,” he says. “It just felt like sitting at home doing nothing might feel better if we all move in together and try to make some music.” Before they knew it, they were making Harry’s House, a revelatory statement that happens to be his most radio-friendly album to date. He took inspiration from Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 LP, Hosono House, which he first heard when he lived in Japan years ago, and treated the songs like they were an internal monologue, traversing a day in his life.

When flying became an option, Styles came home to London. Later, he drove down to Italy in his late stepdad’s car with a friend, listening to the jazz CDs left behind. He visited the Trevi Fountain one day, likely wearing his short-lived pandemic mustache, and was greeted with just four other people instead of the usual throngs that surround the historic site: “I felt like every day you’d say, ‘Weird time, isn’t it?’ Then go, ‘Yeah, it’s fucking insane!’ ”

He credits his stream of roommates — friends, collaborators — with keeping him together during this time. “I really would’ve struggled if I’d done the whole thing by myself,” he says, mirroring the “Harry, you’re no good alone” lyric from “As It Was.” After Italy, Styles visited friends in France, then returned to work, eventually posting up at Real World Studios near Bath, England. By the time he set off across the U.S. to finally tour behind Fine Line last fall, Harry’s House was secretly finished.

Now, besides the unavoidable singles and the victory-lap world tour, there are other indicators of next-level stardom: his skin-care, nail-polish, and clothing line called Pleasing and a fashion collection with Gucci, not to mention his flourishing movie career. He’s starring in the psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling and in the intimate drama My Policeman, and he’s nabbed a deal with Marvel Studios to play Eros in at least one of the Eternals films. “Everything in my life has felt like a bonus since X-Factor,” he says, referring to the singing competition that led directly to One Direction. “Get on TV and sing. I never expected and never thought that would happen.”

But today, in a Hamburg hotel, Styles is still trying to make sense of it all. He thinks hard about love, shame, honesty, and the importance of kindness and therapy. And he worries. He worries about how he can be one of the biggest pop stars in the world, the kind who can be everything for his fans while also being a great son, brother, friend, and partner to the people standing beside him.. As everything gets bigger, Styles imagines a life that is smaller. How does the world’s most wanted man save the best parts for himself?

WHEN STYLES PLAYED two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium in June, the first thing he did after stepping offstage each night was take a shower. The post-show shower has become a ritual: a hygienic necessity, sure, but also a crucial moment of clarity and reflection. He washes away the screams full of love and desire to just be in his presence. Anyone would be overwhelmed by that. “It’s really unnatural to stand in front of that many people and have that experience,” he says. “Washing it off, you’re just a naked person, in your most vulnerable, human form. Just like a naked baby, basically.”

Those post-Wembley showers were especially gratifying. When One Direction, which Styles casually refers to as “the band,” played the stadium in 2014, he ended up with tonsillitis on the day of the show. “I was miserable,” he recalls. “We played the first one, and I remember I came off, got in the car, and just started crying because I was so disappointed.”

Styles’ solo shows at Wembley were a reunion of sorts: He had friends and family from all parts of his life and career in the audience on both nights. His mom, Anne Twist, sister Gemma, friends, and his team all danced in the stands next to Wilde and her two young children. Even former bandmate Niall Horan swung by, smiling through “What Makes You Beautiful.”

As he’s become one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Styles’ need for privacy — for keeping that “naked baby” self out of the public eye — seems to have grown. Secrecy has helped to fend off constant questions about his sex life, the kind that were tossed his way as soon as he was of legal age.

In the past couple of years, he started to go to therapy more routinely. “I committed to doing it once a week,” he explains. “I felt like I exercise every day and take care of my body, so why wouldn’t I do that with my mind?”

Through it, he started to process parts of himself he hadn’t figured out before. “So many of your emotions are so foreign before you start analyzing them properly. I like to really lean into [an emotion] and look at it in the face. Not like, ‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ but more like, ‘What is it that makes me feel this way?’ ”

One feeling he needed to shed was shame, the kind of shame that comes from having your sex life scrutinized while you’re still just trying to make sense of it. Over the years, he learned to stop apologizing for it. He learned he could be vulnerable in private while still protecting it from the public.

Sometimes, though, he worried he was a “hypocrite” for being so closed off. His shows have become empowering safe spaces for his fans, so many of whom want to share who they are with him. Onstage, he’s helped people come out to their parents and facilitated everything from marriage proposals to gender reveals. Separating his personal life from his public one hasn’t been a choice he takes lightly. “When I’m working, I work really hard, and I think I’m really professional,” he says. “Then when I’m not, I’m not. I’d like to think I’m open, and probably quite stubborn, too, and willing to be vulnerable. I can be selfish sometimes, but I’d like to think that I’m a caring person.”

He’s found a vague balance through compartmentalization. “I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively,” he explains, perhaps preemptively. “There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.”

Drawing the curtain over his life has only made everyone who’s not behind it more curious. His sexuality, for example, has been a topic of near-obsession for years. He has embraced gender fluidity in his fashion, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie before him, and has repeatedly pointed out how backward it feels to require labels and boxes for everyone’s identity. Critics of his approach have accused him of “queerbaiting,” or profiting off queer aesthetics without explicitly claiming the community. Defenders feel it’s unfair to force anyone to label themselves as one thing in order to validate their gender or creative expression.

Styles, without prompting, points out how silly he finds some of the arguments about how he may identify to be: “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone. If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship or something.”

Of late, this can be contested. While he is everywhere, so is Olivia Wilde. The pair met on the set of Don’t Worry Darling, which she directed (more on that in a moment), then made a splash when paparazzi snapped them holding hands at his manager and close friend Jeffrey Azoff’s wedding in January 2021.

Wilde and Styles have said little about the relationship, and rumors have filled the space. Anonymous tweeters acted appalled at their age difference (as if a 28-year-old man dating a 38-year-old woman isn’t completely normal) and criticized the director-actor dating dynamic (as if there isn’t a long history of beloved Hollywood couples meeting the same way).

More intense and jarring was a corner of Styles’ fandom that has made fun of Wilde’s dancing or made lengthy Twitter threads and TikTok videos canceling her for bad or insensitive jokes made a decade ago. If Styles is already held up to a high standard, his potential partners are held to an unreachable one for some of his fans.

Styles is not the most online person — he uses Instagram to look at plants and architecture posts, has never had the TikTok app, and calls Twitter “a shitstorm of people trying to be awful to people” — but he’s still aware of how those small, toxic corners of the internet are treating the people closest to him. “That obviously doesn’t make me feel good,” he says, carefully. It’s a tightrope he’s treading in discussing this. He wants to — and does! — see the good in his fans, but there’s no denying that like every large online community, this one has a faction that runs on hate and anonymity.

Even with the boundaries he’s set between his public and private lives, sometimes “other people blur the lines for you,” he says. There’s a conversation he has to have early in a relationship, no matter how weird or premature it may feel. “Can you imagine,” he says, “going on a second date with someone and being like, ‘OK, there’s this corner of the thing, and they’re going to say this, and it’s going to be really crazy, and they’re going to be really mean, and it’s not real.… But anyway, what do you want to eat?’ ”

While Styles takes comfort in knowing his whole fandom is not like that, he still wonders about how to respond when the noise gets too loud. “It’s obviously a difficult feeling to feel like being close to me means you’re at the ransom of a corner of Twitter or something,” he says. “I just wanted to sing. I didn’t want to get into it if I was going to hurt people like that.”

When asked about her experience with his fans, Wilde is diplomatic. Like Styles, she believes in what they stand for as a collective, calling them “deeply loving people” who have fostered an accepting community. “What I don’t understand about the cruelty you’re referencing is that that kind of toxic negativity is the antithesis of Harry, and everything he puts out there,” she tells me. “I don’t personally believe the hateful energy defines his fan base at all. The majority of them are true champions of kindness.”

STYLES BECAME A leading man when he was four years old, starring in a play called Barney the Church Man. Later, he transformed into Buzz Lightyear in a production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang “because Buzz Lightyear was in the toy shop for some reason.” His other early theater credits include: Razamatazz in Bugsy Malone (“the band leader”) and the Elvis-inspired Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (He would later audition for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, but was deemed too iconic by the director.)

Other than that, acting wasn’t really part of his life plan. He liked it, but he found a new rush when he started performing with his band White Eskimo. When they debuted at — and won — a Battle of the Bands competition, it was the first time he felt “the switch”: his teachers looking up at him, instead of vice versa. “I think I was just a showoff,” he says, with a hint of cheekiness. “I say that like it’s past tense.”

But as Styles was preparing the release of his solo debut in 2017, he took his first foray back into acting, with a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk. (The director said he had no idea how famous Styles was when he cast him.) By the time Marvel recruited him to become Eros, director Chloé Zhao had no one else but Styles in mind for the role. Thanos’ more heroic brother is portrayed in the comics as an intergalactic playboy of sorts, with superhuman strength and the ability to control people’s emotions (a fitting role for the planet’s hottest pop star). MCU boss Kevin Feige recently teased more from Styles, though so far, his only appearance has been the Eternals’ post-credits scene, alongside the Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip. “It’d be funny if that was it, wouldn’t it?” he jokes of his cameo.

Styles’ role in Dunkirk grabbed Wilde’s attention as she was beginning to map out Don’t Worry Darling. He was an early contender for the role of Jack, a charming but secretive husband to Florence Pugh’s increasingly troubled Alice. And Styles had plenty of reasons to be interested in Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde’s second feature film as a director reportedly started a bidding war among 18 studios, following the success of her directorial debut, Booksmart.

Pre-pandemic talks between Styles and the Darling team didn’t make it far; he was, after all, due on a global tour for most of 2020. Instead, Shia LaBeouf won the role, but by the end of that summer, Wilde had reportedly booted the actor for poor on-set behavior.

“I’d wanted to act again,” Styles says. He spent a lot of the pandemic watching movies with his quarantine set of friends and collaborators: He rescreened favorites like the 2012 Belgian drama The Broken Circle Breakdown. Some nights, he and his friends would put a bunch of titles in a hat and choose. (“There was a couple different tastes in the house, so it was between, like, Parasite and Coyote Ugly.”)

Styles was announced as LaBeouf’s replacement a month before filming began. He proved perfect for the role of Jack, who’s brought Alice to the remote, fictional American town of Victory to work on a secret project the men at the company won’t tell their wives about. Jack’s become a star employee and is desperate for his boss’s approval. “We were looking for someone with innate warmth and palpable charm,” Wilde says. “The entire story depended on the audience believing in Jack.”

Styles shot Don’t Worry Darling between September 2020 and February 2021 in L.A. and Palm Springs. Those months were the longest Styles had lived in one place in 11 years. He thought about going completely off the grid while making it: maybe get a flip phone, stop making music. “The reality is you get there on the first day and wait around for 75 percent of it,” he says. “And it’s like, ‘Actually I’m going to text my mate.’ ”

At the start, he was understandably anxious about taking on such a large role alongside stars like Pugh, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, and Nick Kroll. “In music, there’s such an immediate response to what you do. You finish a song and people clap,” he says. “When you’re filming and they say ‘cut,’ there’s maybe part of you that expects everyone to start clapping, [but] they don’t. Everyone, obviously, goes back to doing their jobs, and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, was it that bad?’ ” (Being an actor reminded him of session musicians: “You get called in to do your bit, and then someone else puts it all together and makes it.”)

The risk may pay off: He and Pugh are already getting awards-season buzz. Wilde says one moment “left us all in tears” — Jack’s promotion scene during a big company gala. “It’s a strange scene, full of fascist references, and a disturbing amount of male rage,” Wilde says. “The scene called for him to stand onstage with Frank (Chris Pine) and chant their creepy slogan, ‘Who’s world is it? Ours!’ over and over again. Dark as hell. But Harry took it to another level. He was so fully in the moment, he began screaming the lines to the crowd, in this primal roar, that was way more intense than anything we expected from the scene.”

According to Wilde, Pine backed away, understanding this was Harry’s moment. “The camera operator followed him as he paced around the stage like a kind of wild animal,” Wilde remembers. “We were all gobsmacked at the monitor. I think even Harry was surprised by it. Those are the best moments for an actor — when you’re completely outside your body.”

Within weeks, Styles went from the set of Darling to shooting the more intimate My Policeman. He had read the script the year prior, moved by the story enough to have contacted director Michael Grandage and request a meeting. Styles showed up with every line memorized.

Styles plays Tom, a policeman who develops feelings for a museum curator named Patrick (David Dawson). Set in the Fifties, when it was still illegal to be in a same-sex relationship in the U.K., the pair move in secret while Tom pursues a marriage with a schoolteacher named Marion (Emma Corrin). The film shifts between the past and the present, when the three reunite under dire circumstances. “It’s obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be gay. That was illegal,’ ” Styles says. “I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it.” To him, My Policeman is a very human story. “It’s not like ‘This is a gay story about these guys being gay.’ It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”

According to Styles, Grandage wanted to highlight what sex is really like between two men in the scenes between Tom and Patrick. “So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” Styles continues. “There will be, I would imagine, some people who watch it who were very much alive during this time when it was illegal to be gay, and [Michael] wanted to show that it’s tender and loving and sensitive.”

Darling and Policeman make their big premieres at prestigious film festivals in Venice and Toronto late this summer, but Styles isn’t sure his pivot to the silver screen will be permanent. “I don’t imagine I’d do a movie for a while,” he says. There are rumors about how many Marvel movies he’s signed on for and other franchises he might be secretly in talks to do. (In response to a rumor he’ll be starring in a future Star Wars series, he says, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I’d imagine … false.”)

He doesn’t rule out taking on new roles. “I think there’ll be a time again when I’ll crave it,” he says. “But when you’re making music, something’s happening. It feels really creative, and it feeds stuff. A large part of acting is the doing-nothing, waiting thing. Which if that’s the worst part, then it’s a pretty good job. But I don’t find that section of it to be that fulfilling. I like doing it in the moment, but I don’t think I’ll do it a lot.”

LIKE A TRUE tousled-haired prince, Styles invites me to attend a concert with him by the philharmonic in Hamburg, eight hours before his own show.

On past tours, he says, “I was getting to a lot of cities and feeling like ‘I’ve been here six times and I’ve never seen any of it.’ ” This tour, he’s been taking in a lot of architecture. “It’s something I can do on my own, just sit somewhere and look at stuff,” he says.

Studying the finer points of buildings fits the regimented, disciplined, and distinctly grown-up tour life he’s created. Styles has found himself enamored with routine on the road: 10 hours of sleep a night, IV injections pumping him with nutrients and vitamins, a strict acid-reflux-conscious diet that cuts out coffee, alcohol, and certain foods that affect the throat 50,000 fans are depending on. Last night, he slept with two humidifiers that apparently made it look like he was stepping out of a steam room when he opened his hotel-room door.

The Elbphilharmonie Hamburg — “Elphi” for short — is a striking structure, looking something like a gorgeous sail. Styles is wearing the same outfit as when I met him in the hotel the day before, only with shorts swapped out for pinstripe pants and a surgical mask covering his face. He and I are both late and can’t be let into the show until intermission, so instead we comb through the backstage hallways and elevators to see rooms built for incredible acoustics and sweeping views of Hamburg. He marvels at all of it. In a temperature-controlled room full of pianos, he asks our tour guide which is the best (“Is there a shining star?”) before sitting down at one and playing for a couple of dreamy, Beatlesque minutes. (He’d mentioned earlier that he spent last summer playing piano every day with his morning coffee.) He has questions about paneling. And like a true tourist, he takes pictures of everything.

The first time I ever met Styles was a lot like this. On his first headlining tour, in San Francisco in 2017, I went backstage to interview Kid Harpoon. Styles stumbled into the room where I was waiting, strolling around less like a headliner with fans lined up around the block and more like the lighting guy. Here was someone who is inexplicably difficult to casually enjoy (you watch one video of One Direction’s funniest interview moments on YouTube and suddenly you’re contemplating how many of their cardboard cutouts you can fit in your dorm) acting so casually. He greeted me then like an old friend, not someone who was still refusing to let go of a One Direction keychain at the time. He asked me how I had been, what I was up to in San Francisco, and if I was excited for the show. Of course I remember every second of it.

Styles has a gift for making those in his presence feel seen. Just ask fans who bump into him on walks through Central Park or Hampstead Heath, then detail those moments as if they had met the pope (granted, the pope could never pull off a hair claw).

Before the second half of the concert at the Elphi, the crowd mingles and grabs drinks. As we walk through, Styles goes unnoticed. (The mask helps.) It’s funny to watch one of the world’s biggest pop stars move through space with such ease, as if he’s blissfully unaware of how well-known he is.

“If you make your life about the fact that you can’t go anywhere and everything has to be a big deal, then that’s what your life becomes,” he says. “Now, in London, I walk everywhere. It’s hard to stumble across things and restaurants and places and stuff if you’re just driving everywhere, and it’s just not that fun.”

Styles outlines his upcoming months for me: In August, after he wraps his European tour in Lisbon, he’ll go on vacation with some friends, maybe catch up on the Love Island season he was “gutted” to miss, or see if The Bear is as good as everyone tells him it is. The next leg of his tour includes stops in L.A., New York, Austin, and Chicago as extended residencies, a decision that meets his personal need for a less strenuous touring schedule and a professional need to be able to attend film festivals and rent studios to write and record music for his fourth album. “I’m always writing,” he says. He and his collaborators are already throwing around ideas. “I think all of us are so excited to get back to it, which feels insane because we’ve just put an album out.”

More than ever, he is thinking about the future. He wants to take meaningful time off at some point — from touring at least, he’s always writing — and ensure he’s a more present figure for his family and friends. In turn, he’s learned to define what real love looks like to him. “The fantasy, or the vision, or the version of you that people can build you up to be feels like a person that isn’t flawed,” he explains. “What I value the most from my friends is I feel like I’m constantly reminded that it’s OK to be flawed. I think I’m pretty messy and make mistakes sometimes. I think that’s the most loving thing: You can see someone’s imperfections, and it’s not [that you] love them in spite of that, but it’s [that you] love them with that.”

He’s thinking about what it would be like if he had children one day: “Well, if I have kids at some point, I will encourage them to be themselves and be vulnerable and share.”

He’s thinking about what he wants to say, too. Styles admits he was uninterested in politics as a teenager, oblivious to things that didn’t personally affect him. But as he grew more famous, he worried about that, too. “I took a massive look at myself,” he says, “and was like, ‘Oh, I don’t do enough . . . or anything.” When conversations around anti-Blackness and inaction reached a fever pitch in 2020, Styles marched in the streets and read books like How to Be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi, and The Will to Change, by bell hooks. He started thinking about racial and gender equity, especially as someone who employs many people on the road. “Pretending as a white person you don’t get a head start just isn’t true,” he says.

We were hanging out right after Roe v. Wade had been overturned in America. “I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying it is to be a woman in America at the moment,” he says. He’ll grab a fan’s sign that reads “My Body, My Choice” at the Hamburg show, displaying it proudly onstage. There’s an energy in the crowds that fills him with careful optimism. “I feel lucky to see a group of people, even just on this tour, who come together in a way,” he says. “I think that group of people is so much less afraid of opening the wound, talking about it, and doing the work, than the generation before us.”

As we wait for the philharmonic’s packed show to restart, I notice a few young girls with their families in the audience and ask Styles what he thinks the crossover between this crowd and his show tonight will be. He looks around at the mostly older faces and goes, “Less than one percent … I know I’ll be at both.”

Styles watches the orchestra studiously. When the conductor leaves and then returns to a standing ovation, Styles whispers, “He’s about to play his big hit.” Even when he’s not peacocking in front of 50,000, he’s still trying to entertain the one person he’s with.

We walk out before the crowd fully disperses. Styles lingers a second to take some photos of the room before he heads out to get ready for his concert, where he’ll bounce around the stage, lifted by the wails of young fans who have been waiting years for this moment.

His fans will linger tonight, too, crowding in the hundreds outside Volksparkstadion. They’ll take photos of their outfits, their tear- and sweat-stained glittery faces, the piles of abandoned boa feathers. They’ll play his big hits back to him, holding a phone-light vigil as they sing One Direction’s “Night Changes” or the Fine Line ballad “Falling.” As the city echoes as much of him as it can take, he’ll probably be washing it all away.

#kingstylesdaily #Harry Styles #hs: rolling stone 2022

[mcx7demonbros]

Le Traître [The Traitor]

Ft. Catholic!MC, the Demon Brothers

C/W. Kidnapping, torture, mention of religion, mention of Ku Klux Klan, slight mention of sex, swearing.

Note. Finally returning with Catholic!MC.

No proofread.

“I promise it will only be a modest party where the people just hanging out. Definitely no kissing, no immodest dancing, no temptation.” Your best friend said as they grabbed your gloved hand. You yanked your hand back immediately. Ever since you and Lucifer made a pact, his blue mark was engraved to your dominant hand. Living in a religious region, you knew better than to let the pact marks be exposed and always wearing extremely modest attires, which covered most of your body. For you hands, you covered them with gloves.

When the hot season came, everybody put on more casual clothes, you being the odd one out wearing uptight outfits. While everybody enjoying pool parties, you excused yourself by saying you had something to do. To not make the excuse a lie, you even left the town to visit Solomon multiple times. If you couldn’t excuse yourself by saying you were busy, you told them parties were temptations and refused to go.

It wasn’t like you weren’t religious. In fact, you are a devout Catholic, assist at Mass every Sunday and whenever you can, pray the Rosary daily, practice abstinence on days prescribed by the Church, go to Confession every week, donate 1/10 of your earning to the Church, etc. You didn’t fall into any serious sin, except, well, that time when you shared the bed with the Lucifer on the night before you returned to the human world from the exchange program in Devildom.

You used every mean you could to hide the secret of what had transpired during the one year you disappeared. If the secret was revealed, you honestly don’t know what you would do, your whole life would be completely ruined. The only one who knew the secret was your confessor, a priest of good reputation, who, by his oath, prohibited from revealing the secrets he heard inside the confessional.

“MC…MC…”. Hearing the call, you finally returned to your senses.

“Are you going or not?” Your friend put their hands on their hips, waiting for an answer from you. Apparently, they were extremely tired to continue the conversation.

“I…well…I mean the party is in another town, right? I heard most people there are Protestants and they can be quite radicals even for Protestantism.”

“It’s alright. Even if they were radicals, they couldn’t go against the laws without alerting the authorities in this day and age.” You friend reasoned.

“Oh, ok, I will go then.”

Little did you know you would come to regret that decision later.

“Open your fucking eyes, Popish scum.” You heard a voice shouted at you. You tried to open your eyes, but you felt too drowsy. In your memory, you remembered vaguely coming to the modest gathering in a garden and your best friend brought you some drink and then…and then…

Splash

The cold water made you open your eyes immediately. You looked around. This isn’t the garden…I can’t move. You looked at yourself, your arms and legs were tied to a large black chair. You spotted two persons in white hoods looking at you. At first, you didn’t realize who they were, but you soon recognized their symbol, the Ku Klux Klan, the infamous racist and anti-Catholic terrorist organization.

“Ku Klux Klan.” You shouted.

“Ah, your brain finally function normally, Popish scum.” One of the KKK members chuckled, it was like they were enjoying your suffering.

“I was at the gathering. How come I am here?” You yelled your question at them.

“Let me explain.” Another KKK members entered the room. They then took off the hood.

“You!!!” you couldn’t believe in what you had just seen. Your best friend was standing in front of you. So it was them who betrayed you.

“Well, you see, a few years ago, our leader devised a plan to destroy all Popish scum in the region. He sent us out to Catholic towns as spies. Our mission was to infiltrate the Catholic towns, and if possible, bring some naive Popish scums back to our base and put them to death.”

“Love thy neighbor as thyself. What you are doing is against the fifth commandment, thou shalt not kill, and Jesus’s commandment to love as a whole.”

They were silence for a minute. Just when you thought your words, by mentioning Jesus, had reached them, they laughed out loud like they had just heard the funniest joke ever.

“Nah, the commandments don’t apply to you Popish scum who dared to elevate a normal woman and that old geezer in Rome to the same status as God.” Your best friend scoffed at you.

“Those who mock the Mother of God and the Vicar of Christ never have a happy ending.” Your words only made them harden their hearts.

“Thank you for giving us such good laughs. The reactions from your Popish scums are the best.”

So this is not the first time they did this. I’m such a fool. I’m such a bad judge of character. You blamed yourself.

“Alright, before we began to play with you. Let’s me see all the secrets you have been hiding under those uptight clothes.” Your friend began by using a knife to tear apart your clothes.

*gasp* all three KKK members in the room couldn’t hide their shock discovering the marks on your body.

“Well, I didn’t expect that.” You fake best friend commented. “I was expecting some ugly scars from an accident. Who would have thought this Popish trash is secretly a devil worshipper?”

“No, I’m not.” You denied the accusation.

“Well, then explain, what are these?” Your fake friend pointed their finger at the pact marks on your body.

“Well, that…”

“Hah, cat got your tongue, MC?” You really couldn’t argue back. You had lost the war the moment they found out about your pact marks. Whatever you said to explain, it would sound to wrong to them. If you said the marks were tattoos, you would be seen as associated yourself with un-Christian symbols to a certain degree. If you said you were forced to make pacts with demons (you weren’t), it would be a sinful lie and it was a fact that no human could be forced to make a pact with a demon. If you said you made pacts deliberately, you would be labeled as listening to the devil’s tempting words and selling your soul.

“It’s demon pact marks, right?”

Your eyes widened in shock. They know?

“Don’t be surprised, I did some research on demonology, you know?” Your fake friend smirked. “Let’s see what do we have here.” They used the knife and began to tear apart all your clothes. “Mammon…Leviathan…Beelzebub…Asmodeus…Beelzebub…Belphegor…”. While your fake friends were checking the marks, the two other KKK members couldn’t help but getting shiver sent down their spine. All of the names were infamous names in Hell. How the hell did you manage to score pacts with them all.

“You know, I did look up to you. You were always such a devout person, never forgetting your prayers, always thanking God for graces you received. But now, seeing you in such a woeful state now with all your dirty secrets exposed gives me some satisfactory. I guess I always hate you for the holier-than-thou aura you gave.” Your fake friend’s eyes landed on your gloved hand. “Hm, I always wonder why you wear gloves, another devil mark, perhaps.” They took off the the glove on your dominant hand, only to reveal a blue mark giving off a powerful aura.

“L-U-C-I-F-E-R.”

“Im…impossible.” Their yell surprised you. You were expecting another series of mocking words and totally didn’t expect them to shout in shock like that.

“No…no person can make a pact with the fallen Morningstar. Y…you must be the prophesied Antichrist.”

Wait, what!?

Your “friend” ran out of the room, to the shock of not only you, but the two KKK members in the room. About five minutes later, they returned with a man in KKK uniform, but he was unhooded though. And you realized who the man was. You had seen him several times in the past when he visited your hometown. He was the mayor of the town you were visiting. That was it, everyone in the town was in this evil scheme.

The evil mayor took a look at your hand before laughing out loud.

“This is God’s will. He let the Antichrist fall into our hand.” The mayor then turned to one of the two KKK members who were always in the room. “You, go get me the ‘sanctifying’ tools.”

“Yes, Leader.” The member ran out and returned with many torture devices.

“Oh let’s start with this.” The mayor took out a branding iron.

Lucifer was playing the piano in the music room. Hearing the melodious music and looking at his fingers dancing on the keys are enough to make one forget their life difficulties.

“Argh.” Suddenly, Lucifer felt a painful sensation on his hand, painful enough for him to let out a cry.

“MC!!!” It didn’t take long for him to realize you were in pain.

“Ya all will have to admit ya loss in a few seconds.” Mammon prepared to show his brothers his cards.

“Quit talking and show us already.” Belphie demanded.

“Alright, prepare to-argh.” A painful sensation on Mammon’s hand made him dropped his cards to the ground.

“My beautiful hand!”

“My hamburger!”

“My book!”

“My pillow!”

“My D.D.D!”

“My cards!”

However, all soon realized their real priority - you. At the same time, they all heard large sound resonated from deep inside the house.

Sequel - Le Massacre

At first, I don’t intend it to be this long. In the end, I have to break the fic into 2 parts.

#obey me #obey me shall we date #omswd #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me one master to rule them all #obey me x reader #obey me catholic mc #lucifer x reader #mammon x reader #leviathan x reader #satan x reader #asmodeus x reader #beelzebub x reader #belphegor x reader #om! shall we date #omswd lucifer #omswd mammon #omswd leviathan #omswd satan #omswd asmodeus #omswd beelzebub #omswd belphegor

[hero-israel]

Never in my life did I expect Israel to have anything like the recent string of advances it has enjoyed.  Diplomatically, financially, and militarily, Israel is far more powerful than it was even 5 years ago, let alone 20.  We can expect even more once their natural gas really starts flowing to Europe in the winter.    

I wonder if that has some relation to the increasing levels of bitterness and radicalism around anti-Zionism now.  

In 2010, Human Rights Watch published a long and detailed report with every critique they could throw at Israel, dragging it up one wall and down the other.  Yet in that same report, they had a long aside about how it ISN’T apartheid and how accusations of apartheid are mistaken.  In 2021, they forgot or something, and now accused Israel of “apartheid” according to a new definition invented solely to apply to Israel and in the process watering the very concept of “apartheid” down to moral uselessness.  In 2022, Amnesty International followed, saying in their own report that Israel had been guilty of apartheid ever since its inception in 1948 - meaning Amnesty hadn’t been able to spot apartheid when they saw it throughout literally their entire existence.  Perhaps they too were confused, as they also had to insert a shifty clause about how “we’re not saying it’s analogous to South Africa, any differences from South Africa don’t matter, we still get to say the hate-word, neener neener no backsies.”     

Nothing has changed in I/P from 2010-2020 (or really 2005-2020) - except the Abraham Accords, the blaring reality of multiple Arab countries deprioritizing the Palestinian cause, letting go of that dream, and accepting a future of open partnership with Israel.  

Nothing had changed on the ground - but a lot of people suddenly stopped singing the old songs.  Those who were left behind had to sing louder.    

I think it is causing an ideological crisis, as so many activists really seem to have believed it was justice and fate that their chanted slogans would reverse the 20th century and unmake Israel.  We are in an anomalous - unprecedented? - situation where the stronger and more globally interwoven Israel gets, the louder its enemies demand no one associate with it.   

It’s tedious to have to keep pointing this out, but necessary since most people I’ve seen make the South Africa comparison were like negative-10 when apartheid fell, and are just as deluded as the Iraq War supporters - remember them? - who swore they would achieve the glory of their parents’ generation with a victory as clean and conclusive as WW2.  South Africa was globally isolated before any protests, because it didn’t make anything; importing raw bauxite ore or whatever from Mozambique instead was no hardship.  By 1985 it was 17% white.  Its worst enemy was Nelson Mandela.  There wasn’t a thousand-year history of black Africans oppressing and genociding whites.  If apartheid South Africa had ever faced the conditions of Israel - a richly connected global economy, a 76+% demographic advantage, and an explicit threat of total genocide by enemies with motive and experience - it would still be under apartheid today.  And that would be bad, because South Africa was racist.  

Using the wrong frame leads to imagining the wrong outcomes.  Unless the right outcome is blaming and hating Jews.  Then the frame is perfect.             

#israel #palestine #south africa #apartheid #history #antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #jumblr

[hldailyupdate]

Harry Styles: the world’s most wanted man

Harry Styles has become a global pop icon. Now, he has his sights set on Hollywood. How does he make all of it look so easy — even when it definitely isn’t?

On a Friday night in New York, Harry Styles put on a show.

It wasn’t just any show; it was the first time he performed his third and soon-to-be-biggest album, Harry’s House, in its entirety. The crowd that May night covered Long Island’s UBS Arena in feathers and glitter and tears — a ritualistic skin shedding of sorts whenever Styles comes to town.

Fans noticed something different about the encore: Styles didn’t end with his usual closer, ‘Kiwi’; instead, he opted to finish the night with a second performance of his new single ‘As It Was’, his dance-through-the-tears pandemic reflection on isolation and change. When he played it, the crowd exploded in a way even Styles had never experienced. It left him a bit shaken.

“We came offstage, and I went into my dressing room and just wanted to sit by myself for a minute,” he tells me, two months later. “After One Direction, I didn’t expect to ever experience anything new. I kind of felt like, ‘All right, I’ve seen how crazy it can get.’ And I think there was something about it where I was… not terrified, but I just needed a minute. Because I wasn’t sure what it was. Just that the energy felt insane.”

Before his headlining set at Coachella in April, I caught Harry backstage, surrounded by James Corden, Styles’s onstage guest Shania Twain, and his girlfriend, Olivia Wilde. Later, I took in sold-out shows in New York and at Wembley Stadium. The immense love showering Styles was impossible to ignore — you see it in the faces of every fan, whether they’ve been supporting him for “one year, two years, five years, 12 years”, as he says in nearly every end-of-show thank you speech. Along the way I heard him everywhere, even when I wasn’t trying. ‘As It Was’ played in every cab. ‘Watermelon Sugar’ soundtracked breakfast. ‘Golden’ lurked quietly at a London chemist’s. ‘Late Night Talking’ blasted at a Brooklyn bar, leading one man to proclaim, “I like Harry Styles. I can admit it,” like it was a radical act of self-acceptance.

And while he may be everywhere in 2022, Styles is, at the moment, literally right in front of me, sitting in an armchair of a hotel business suite in Hamburg, Germany, on a sweaty June afternoon. After a dip in the Irish Sea this morning, he flew into town and is now enjoying a day off in the middle of his first European tour since 2018.

In person, Styles looks more like your best friend’s cute, sporty older brother than the gender-bending style icon he’s become. He’s left the boas and sequin jumpsuits in the dressing room, opting instead for a blue Adidas track jacket, gym shorts, and Gucci trainers. His hair, often described as “tousled”, like he’s a renegade prince in a romance novel, is clipped back with a hair claw, a signature day-off accessory. 

Styles is a kind of millennial anomaly: he plugs his phone in across the room, never once sneaking a glance for a rogue notification. He maintains eye contact as his thoughts unfurl in his often slow drawl. He’s a bit more Zen, even stoic, than he once was; that goofy, class-clown energy he exuded when the world first fell in love with him in One Direction 12 years ago has naturally diminished. But he’s still as affable and charming as ever, remembering details from small talk we had in all the other cities where I had been (professionally) stalking him, and proving earnestly curious about how I was going to spend my time in Hamburg and how magazine deadlines work. (Back in New York, after surprising fans at a Spotify event for his new album, he asked me my thoughts on David Crosby’s most recent album, which he loved.)

“‘As It Was’ is definitely the highest volume of men that I would get stopping me to say something about it”

“My great uncle lives here,” Styles says of Hamburg. “He married a German lady, so I have a German cousin. They always used to come and visit when I was a kid, and the only word in English [the cousin] knew was ‘lemonade’. I didn’t know if she actually wanted lemonade or was trying to say ‘Give me some water, please!’” 

Of course it wasn’t meant to take him this long to get back to places like Hamburg, where he’ll play for more than 50,000 fans tomorrow night at Volksparkstadion, a local football stadium. Love on Tour, the name for his current trek, was supposed to launch in the spring of 2020, a few months after Styles released his second album, Fine Line. We all know what happened next. 

Styles didn’t get to play live again until last autumn, but something funny happened in the interim. While we were bound to our homes, Styles experienced his first number one hit in Fine Line’s ‘Watermelon Sugar’, a tune so sweet it may take a moment to realise he’s singing about cunnilingus. Less than a year later, he won his first Grammy for it. 

When flying became an option, Styles came home to London. Later, he drove down to Italy in his late stepdad’s car with a friend, listening to the jazz CDs left behind. He visited the Trevi Fountain one day, likely wearing his short-lived pandemic moustache, and was greeted with just four other people instead of the usual throngs that surround the historic site: “I felt like every day you’d say, ‘Weird time, isn’t it?’ Then go, ‘Yeah, it’s fucking insane!’”

He credits his stream of roommates — friends, collaborators — with keeping him together during this time. “I really would’ve struggled if I’d done the whole thing by myself,” he says, mirroring the “Harry, you’re no good alone” lyric from ‘As It Was’. After Italy, Styles visited friends in France, then returned to work, eventually posting up at Real World Studios near Bath. By the time he set off across the US to finally tour behind Fine Line last autumn, Harry’s House was secretly finished.

Now, besides the unavoidable singles and the victory-lap world tour, there are other indicators of next-level stardom: his skincare, nail polish and clothing line called Pleasing and a fashion collection with Gucci, not to mention his flourishing movie career. He’s starring in the psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling and in the intimate drama My Policeman, and he’s nabbed a deal with Marvel Studios to play Eros in at least one of the Eternals films. “Everything in my life has felt like a bonus since X-Factor,” he says, referring to the singing competition that led directly to One Direction. “Get on TV and sing. I never expected and never thought that would happen.”

When Styles played two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium in June, the first thing he did after stepping offstage each night was take a shower. The post-show shower has become a ritual: a hygienic necessity, sure, but also a crucial moment of clarity and reflection. He washes away the screams full of love and desire to just be in his presence. Anyone would be overwhelmed by that. “It’s really unnatural to stand in front of that many people and have that experience,” he says. “Washing it off, you’re just a naked person, in your most vulnerable, human form. Just like a naked baby, basically.”

Those post-Wembley showers were especially gratifying. When One Direction, which Styles casually refers to as “the band”, played the stadium in 2014, he ended up with tonsillitis on the day of the show. “I was miserable,” he recalls. “We played the first one, and I remember I came off, got in the car, and just started crying because I was so disappointed.”

Styles’s solo shows at Wembley were a reunion of sorts: he had friends and family from all parts of his life and career in the audience on both nights. His mum, Anne Twist, sister Gemma, friends and his team all danced in the stands next to Wilde and her two young children. Even former bandmate Niall Horan swung by, smiling through ‘What Makes You Beautiful’.

As he’s become one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Styles’s need for privacy — for keeping that “naked baby” self out of the public eye — seems to have grown. Secrecy has helped to fend off constant questions about his sex life, the kind that were tossed his way as soon as he was of legal age.

“Everything in my life has felt like a bonus since X-Factor. Get on TV and sing. I never expected and never thought that would happen”

In the past couple of years, he started to go to therapy more routinely. “I committed to doing it once a week,” he explains. “I felt like I exercise every day and take care of my body, so why wouldn’t I do that with my mind?”

Through it, he started to process parts of himself he hadn’t figured out before. “So many of your emotions are so foreign before you start analysing them properly. I like to really lean into [an emotion] and look at it in the face. Not like, ‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ but more like, ‘What is it that makes me feel this way?’”

One feeling he needed to shed was shame, the kind of shame that comes from having your sex life scrutinised while you’re still just trying to make sense of it. Over the years, he learned to stop apologising for it. He learned he could be vulnerable in private while still protecting it from the public.

He’s found a vague balance through compartmentalisation. “I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively,” he explains, perhaps preemptively. “There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.”

Drawing the curtain over his life has only made everyone who’s not behind it more curious. His sexuality, for example, has been a topic of near obsession for years. He has embraced gender fluidity in his fashion, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie before him, and has repeatedly pointed out how backward it feels to require labels and boxes for everyone’s identity. Critics of his approach have accused him of “queerbaiting” or profiting off queer aesthetics without explicitly claiming the community. Defenders feel it’s unfair to force anyone to label themselves as one thing in order to validate their gender or creative expression.

Styles, without prompting, points out how silly he finds some of the arguments about how he may identify to be: “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone. If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship or something.” 

Of late, this can be contested. While he is everywhere, so is Olivia Wilde. The pair met on the set of Don’t Worry Darling, which she directed (more on that in a moment), then made a splash when paparazzi snapped them holding hands at his manager and close friend Jeffrey Azoff’s wedding in January 2021.

Wilde and Styles have said little about the relationship, and rumours have filled the space. Anonymous tweeters acted appalled at their age difference (as if a 28-year-old man dating a 38-year-old woman isn’t completely normal) and criticised the director-actor dating dynamic (as if there isn’t a long history of beloved Hollywood couples meeting the same way).

More intense and jarring was a corner of Styles’s fandom that has made fun of Wilde’s dancing or made lengthy Twitter threads and TikTok videos cancelling her for bad or insensitive jokes made a decade ago. If Styles is already held up to a high standard, his potential partners are held to an unreachable one for some of his fans. 

Styles is not the most online person — he uses Instagram to look at plants and architecture posts, has never had the TikTok app, and calls Twitter “a shitstorm of people trying to be awful to people” — but he’s still aware of how those small, toxic corners of the internet are treating the people closest to him. “That obviously doesn’t make me feel good,” he says, carefully. It’s a tightrope he’s treading in discussing this. He wants to — and does! — see the good in his fans, but there’s no denying that like every large online community, this one has a faction that runs on hate and anonymity. 

Even with the boundaries he’s set between his public and private lives, sometimes “other people blur the lines for you”, he says. There’s a conversation he has to have early in a relationship, no matter how weird or premature it may feel. “Can you imagine,” he says, “going on a second date with someone and being like, ‘OK, there’s this corner of the thing, and they’re going to say this, and it’s going to be really crazy, and they’re going to be really mean, and it’s not real…. But anyway, what do you want to eat?’”

“Everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it”

While Styles takes comfort in knowing his whole fandom is not like that, he still wonders about how to respond when the noise gets too loud. “It’s obviously a difficult feeling to feel like being close to me means you’re at the ransom of a corner of Twitter or something,” he says. “I just wanted to sing. I didn’t want to get into it if I was going to hurt people like that.”

When asked about her experience with his fans, Wilde is diplomatic. Like Styles, she believes in what they stand for as a collective, calling them “deeply loving people” who have fostered an accepting community. “What I don’t understand about the cruelty you’re referencing is that that kind of toxic negativity is the antithesis of Harry, and everything he puts out there,” she tells me. “I don’t personally believe the hateful energy defines his fan base at all. The majority of them are true champions of kindness.”

Styles became a leading man when he was four years old, starring in a play called Barney the Church Man. Later, he transformed into Buzz Lightyear in a production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang “because Buzz Lightyear was in the toy shop for some reason”. His other early theatre credits include: Razamatazz in Bugsy Malone (“the band leader”) and the Elvis-inspired Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (He would later audition for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, but was deemed too iconic by the director.)

But as Styles was preparing the release of his solo debut in 2017, he took his first foray back into acting, with a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s war epic, Dunkirk. (The director said he had no idea how famous Styles was when he cast him.) By the time Marvel recruited him to become Eros, director Chloé Zhao had no one else but Styles in mind for the role. Thanos’s more heroic brother is portrayed in the comics as an intergalactic playboy of sorts, with superhuman strength and the ability to control people’s emotions (a fitting role for the planet’s hottest pop star). MCU boss Kevin Feige recently teased more from Styles, though so far, his only appearance has been the Eternals’ post-credits scene, alongside the Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip. “It’d be funny if that was it, wouldn’t it?” he jokes of his cameo.

Styles’s role in Dunkirk grabbed Wilde’s attention as she was beginning to map out Don’t Worry Darling. He was an early contender for the role of Jack, a charming but secretive husband to Florence Pugh’s increasingly troubled Alice. And Styles had plenty of reasons to be interested in Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde’s second feature film as a director reportedly started a bidding war among 18 studios, following the success of her directorial debut, Booksmart.

Pre-pandemic talks between Styles and the Darling team didn’t make it far; he was, after all, due on a global tour for most of 2020. Instead, Shia LaBeouf won the role, but by the end of that summer, Wilde had reportedly booted the actor for poor on-set behaviour. 

“I’d wanted to act again,” Styles says. He spent a lot of the pandemic watching movies with his quarantine set of friends and collaborators: he rescreened favourites like the 2012 Belgian drama The Broken Circle Breakdown. Some nights, he and his friends would put a bunch of titles in a hat and choose. (“There was a couple different tastes in the house, so it was between, like, Parasite and Coyote Ugly.”)

Styles was announced as LaBeouf’s replacement a month before filming began. He proved perfect for the role of Jack, who’s brought Alice to the remote, fictional American town of Victory to work on a secret project the men at the company won’t tell their wives about. Jack’s become a star employee and is desperate for his boss’s approval. “We were looking for someone with innate warmth and palpable charm,” Wilde says. “The entire story depended on the audience believing in Jack.”

At the start, he was understandably anxious about taking on such a large role alongside stars like Pugh, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan and Nick Kroll. “In music, there’s such an immediate response to what you do. You finish a song and people clap,” he says. “When you’re filming and they say ‘Cut,’ there’s maybe part of you that expects everyone to start clapping, [but] they don’t. Everyone, obviously, goes back to doing their jobs, and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, was it that bad?’” (Being an actor reminded him of session musicians: “You get called in to do your bit, and then someone else puts it all together and makes it.”)

The risk may pay off: he and Pugh are already getting awards season buzz. Wilde says one moment “left us all in tears” — Jack’s promotion scene during a big company gala. “It’s a strange scene, full of fascist references, and a disturbing amount of male rage,” Wilde says. “The scene called for him to stand onstage with Frank (Chris Pine) and chant their creepy slogan, ‘Whose world is it? Ours!’ over and over again. Dark as hell. But Harry took it to another level. He was so fully in the moment, he began screaming the lines to the crowd, in this primal roar, that was way more intense than anything we expected from the scene.”

According to Wilde, Pine backed away, understanding this was Harry’s moment. “The camera operator followed him as he paced around the stage like a kind of wild animal,” Wilde remembers. “We were all gobsmacked at the monitor. I think even Harry was surprised by it. Those are the best moments for an actor — when you’re completely outside your body.”

Within weeks, Styles went from the set of Darling to shooting the more intimate My Policeman. He had read the script the year prior, moved by the story enough to have contacted director Michael Grandage and request a meeting. Styles showed up with every line memorised.

Styles plays Tom, a policeman who develops feelings for a museum curator named Patrick (David Dawson). Set in the 50s, when it was still illegal to be in a same-sex relationship in the UK, the pair move in secret while Tom pursues a marriage with a schoolteacher named Marion (Emma Corrin). The film shifts between the past and the present, when the three reunite under dire circumstances. “It’s obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be gay. That was illegal,’” Styles says. “I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it.” To him, My Policeman is a very human story. “It’s not like, ‘This is a gay story about these guys being gay.’ It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”

According to Styles, Grandage wanted to highlight what sex is really like between two men in the scenes between Tom and Patrick. “So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” Styles continues. “There will be, I would imagine, some people who watch it who were very much alive during this time when it was illegal to be gay, and [Michael] wanted to show that it’s tender and loving and sensitive.”

Darling and Policeman make their big premieres at prestigious film festivals in Venice and Toronto late this summer, but Styles isn’t sure his pivot to the silver screen will be permanent. “I don’t imagine I’d do a movie for a while,” he says. There are rumours about how many Marvel movies he’s signed on for and other franchises he might be secretly in talks to do. (In response to a rumour he’ll be starring in a future Star Wars series, he says, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I’d imagine… false.”) 

Like a true tousled-haired prince, Styles invites me to attend a concert with him by the philharmonic in Hamburg, eight hours before his own show.

On past tours, he says, “I was getting to a lot of cities and feeling like ‘I’ve been here six times and I’ve never seen any of it.’” This tour, he’s been taking in a lot of architecture. “It’s something I can do on my own, just sit somewhere and look at stuff,” he says.

Studying the finer points of buildings fits the regimented, disciplined and distinctly grown-up tour life he’s created. Styles has found himself enamoured with routine on the road: 10 hours of sleep a night, IV injections pumping him with nutrients and vitamins, a strict acid-reflux-conscious diet that cuts out coffee, alcohol and certain foods that affect the throat 50,000 fans are depending on. Last night, he slept with two humidifiers that apparently made it look like he was stepping out of a steam room when he opened his hotel room door.

The Elbphilharmonie Hamburg — “Elphi” for short — is a striking structure, looking something like a gorgeous sail. Styles is wearing the same outfit as when I met him in the hotel the day before, only with shorts swapped out for pinstripe pants and a surgical mask covering his face. He and I are both late and can’t be let into the show until intermission, so instead we comb through the backstage hallways and elevators to see rooms built for incredible acoustics and sweeping views of Hamburg. He marvels at all of it. In a temperature controlled room full of pianos, he asks our tour guide which is the best (“Is there a shining star?”) before sitting down at one and playing for a couple of dreamy, Beatlesque minutes. (He’d mentioned earlier that he spent last summer playing piano every day with his morning coffee.) He has questions about panelling. And like a true tourist, he takes pictures of everything.

The first time I ever met Styles was a lot like this. On his first headlining tour, in San Francisco in 2017, I went backstage to interview Kid Harpoon. Styles stumbled into the room where I was waiting, strolling around less like a headliner with fans lined up around the block and more like the lighting guy. Here was someone who is inexplicably difficult to casually enjoy (you watch one video of One Direction’s funniest interview moments on YouTube and suddenly you’re contemplating how many of their cardboard cutouts you can fit in your dorm) acting so casually. He greeted me then like an old friend, not someone who was still refusing to let go of a One Direction keychain at the time. He asked me how I had been, what I was up to in San Francisco, and if I was excited for the show. Of course I remember every second of it. 

Styles has a gift for making those in his presence feel seen. Just ask fans who bump into him on walks through Central Park or Hampstead Heath, then detail those moments as if they had met the pope (granted, the pope could never pull off a hair claw). 

Before the second half of the concert at the Elphi, the crowd mingles and grabs drinks. As we walk through, Styles goes unnoticed. (The mask helps.) It’s funny to watch one of the world’s biggest pop stars move through space with such ease, as if he’s blissfully unaware of how well-known he is.

“If you make your life about the fact that you can’t go anywhere and everything has to be a big deal, then that’s what your life becomes,” he says. “Now, in London, I walk everywhere. It’s hard to stumble across things and restaurants and places and stuff if you’re just driving everywhere, and it’s just not that fun.”

Styles outlines his upcoming months for me: in August, after he wraps his European tour in Lisbon, he’ll go on holiday with some friends, maybe catch up on the Love Island season he was “gutted” to miss, or see if The Bear is as good as everyone tells him it is. The next leg of his tour includes stops in LA, New York, Austin and Chicago as extended residencies, a decision that meets his personal need for a less strenuous touring schedule and a professional need to be able to attend film festivals and rent studios to write and record music for his fourth album. “I’m always writing,” he says. He and his collaborators are already throwing around ideas. “I think all of us are so excited to get back to it, which feels insane because we’ve just put an album out.” 

“What I value the most from my friends is I’m reminded that it’s OK to be flawed. I’m pretty messy and make mistakes sometimes” 

More than ever, he is thinking about the future. He wants to take meaningful time off at some point — from touring at least, he’s always writing — and ensure he’s a more present figure for his family and friends. In turn, he’s learned to define what real love looks like to him. “The fantasy, or the vision, or the version of you that people can build you up to be feels like a person that isn’t flawed,” he explains. “What I value the most from my friends is I feel like I’m constantly reminded that it’s OK to be flawed. I think I’m pretty messy and make mistakes sometimes. I think that’s the most loving thing: you can see someone’s imperfections, and it’s not [that you] love them in spite of that, but it’s [that you] love them with that.”

He’s thinking about what he wants to say, too. Styles admits he was uninterested in politics as a teenager, oblivious to things that didn’t personally affect him. But as he grew more famous, he worried about that, too. “I took a massive look at myself,” he says, “and was like, ‘Oh, I don’t do enough… or anything.” When conversations around anti-Blackness and inaction reached a fever pitch in 2020, Styles marched in the streets and read books like How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, and The Will to Change, by bell hooks. He started thinking about racial and gender equity, especially as someone who employs many people on the road. “Pretending as a white person you don’t get a head start just isn’t true,” he says.

We were hanging out right after Roe v. Wade had been overturned in America. “I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying it is to be a woman in America at the moment,” he says. He’ll grab a fan’s sign that reads “My Body, My Choice” at the Hamburg show, displaying it proudly onstage. There’s an energy in the crowds that fills him with careful optimism. “I feel lucky to see a group of people, even just on this tour, who come together in a way,” he says. “I think that group of people is so much less afraid of opening the wound, talking about it, and doing the work, than the generation before us.”

As we wait for the philharmonic’s packed show to restart, I notice a few young girls with their families in the audience and ask Styles what he thinks the crossover between this crowd and his show tonight will be. He looks around at the mostly older faces and goes, “Less than one per cent… I know I’ll be at both.”

Styles watches the orchestra studiously. When the conductor leaves and then returns to a standing ovation, Styles whispers, “He’s about to play his big hit.” Even when he’s not peacocking in front of 50,000, he’s still trying to entertain the one person he’s with.

We walk out before the crowd fully disperses. Styles lingers a second to take some photos of the room before he heads out to get ready for his concert, where he’ll bounce around the stage, lifted by the wails of young fans who have been waiting years for this moment.

His fans will linger tonight, too, crowding in the hundreds outside Volksparkstadion. They’ll take photos of their outfits, their tear- and sweat-stained glittery faces, the piles of abandoned boa feathers. They’ll play his big hits back to him, holding a phone light vigil as they sing One Direction’s ‘Night Changes’ or the Fine Line ballad ‘Falling’. As the city echoes as much of him as it can take, he’ll probably be washing it all away.

#harry styles #harry update #rolling stone #article #august 2022

[mariacallous]

I have found myself thinking about Michael Gove more and more recently. Not just because of his profile this week over the new definition of extremism, but because I think he - in his own way - is the author of a lot of what has become the extremism of the Tory Party.

That sentence won’t go down well in many quarters. Gove does not come across as a radical at all. By all accounts (I have never met him and the only thing we have in common is our ability to perform all the words of 80s banger Wham Rap) he is incredibly charming. Some say smarmy, but most say charming - and by most I mean people across the political and media spectrum. His reputation for politeness is pretty legendary.

He is also a fantastic media performer. Partly that is to do with the above charm. He’s self-deprecating and also seems thoughtful. When asked a question, his body language makes you think he’s considering the answer, and the right thing to do, very carefully. His head cocks slightly, his lips purse (more) and his shoulders open up as if to indicate he has nothing to hide or defend. Whatever answer he gives, that impression is at the core of his presentation.

He also has a reputation for competence in government that is rare among still-active Conservatives. When he was at Defra, many environmentalists found him more open and easier to work with than pretty much anyone else who has had that brief. He hasn’t got a lot through that housing campaigners would like, but it isn’t for the lack of visibly trying.

He also instituted a revolution in education that is underestimated by most in the impact it will continue to have on this country long after he has left office. For example, I still hear a great deal of wrangling about the National Curriculum. Many Labour education pledges reference it. But, here’s the thing: Gove’s reforms have quietly and without telling anyone basically abolished the National Curriculum in all but name. Because Academies don’t have to follow the National Curriculum and at present around three-quarters of schools are academies. Even though the plan to force all schools to academies by 2030 has been dropped, this trajectory is likely to continue (and unlikely to be reversed at least in the first term of a Labour government). Anything that does not affect over 70 per cent of schools does not deserve the title “national” anything.

Two notable things happened during Gove’s time as Education Secretary beyond the policy that, I think, illustrate the point I am trying to make here. Firstly, he hired Dominic Cummings as his special advisor and secondly, he was described by David Cameron (somewhat fondly at the time, though I would be fascinated to know if post-2016 thought it quite so amusing) as a “Maoist” who like Cummings “believes that the world makes progress through the process of creative destruction”.

Now look again at the record of this mild-mannered, Wham-rapping, Aberdeen-dancing politician.

Gove publicly and loudly backed Brexit breaking a long friendship with Cameron to do so. He then agreed to head up Johnson’s campaign team for the leadership in 2016 only to run himself at the last minute torpedoing Boris’s chances. He was in May’s cabinet at the end, but also on telly calling her planned Brexit vote offering a temporary Customs Union and a vote on a referendum unworkable (to be fair, it was). He again served in Johnson’s cabinet - having apparently changed his mind about his unsuitability for the post (and to be fair, Johnson certainly delivered his fair share of creative destruction) - and as all around him were resigning, Gove was, hilariously, sacked by Johnson. Then who can forget the Laura Kuenssberg interview with Liz Truss and Gove responding where he - just feet away from the then PM called her plans profoundly concerning and unconservative. She didn’t last much longer.

Gove does serve in government now, but whenever plotting is mentioned - evil or otherwise - his name is never very far from the frame. Of course, plotting in politics is as natural as breathing. But plotting for the sake of it is a different matter. I think Gove enjoys the chaos of the game more than the outcomes.

Michael Gove gives off all the vibes of the Cameron-era type of Tory politician. And let’s be fair, that was when he made his most destructive changes to the education system as he abolished things that might have come in handy, such as a massive school repairs programme.

And maybe that’s fair. Because that government was slick and went on a media charm offensive that vastly belied its destructive instincts. The behaviour of Johnson and the insanity of Truss may lead us to forget that the underlying reasons why the country is in the mess we are is down to the economic policies of the Cameron and Osborne government.

Michael Gove has been the great survivor of the Tory years. At the heart of so many plots one loses count, yet endlessly returning to serve semi-loyally at the heart of government. He may charm the press. He may come across as a decent bloke. But his record of destruction and chaos is one we all suffer from. We may enjoy it when his dagger is turned towards his colleagues, but don’t forget for one minute that his destructive instinct is one that could take us all down if we let ourselves be charmed into thinking of him as the acceptable and moderate face of the Tory party. He is anything but.

[msclaritea]

JK Rowling is right: a trans woman is not a woman, and it’s not wrong to say so

It is absolutely extraordinary that transgender activist India Willoughby reported J K Rowling to the police for a hate crime. The Harry Potter author this week referred to the newsreader and Loose Women host as a man in an argument on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

Northumbria Police has now confirmed that it is dropping the investigation. Why did it take so long? It should never have been given the time of day.

Quick law refresher: “misgendering” is not a crime.

The researcher Maya Forstater successfully brought a case to the employment appeal tribunal in 2021 to establish that gender-critical views are a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.

So while hostility to someone based on gender identity can be an aggravating factor if a separate crime is committed, misgendering is not in itself an offence. Moreover, Rowling and those who agree with her are completely within their rights to refuse to believe the fiction that you can change biological sex.

As Rowling herself put it: “No law compels anyone to pretend to believe that India is a woman.” Quite.

Now, I’ve got no objection to using people’s preferred pronouns so I’m happy to refer to Willoughby as “she”. But “a woman”? No. It is a simple fact that she is biologically male, regardless of any gender reassignment surgery. She’s a trans woman but she’s not a woman and never will be. 

Trans activists have tried their hardest to turn a feeling into fact when they insist: “A trans woman is a woman.” But the truth of the matter is that a trans woman is a man who identifies as a woman. 

Willoughby and her supporters might dislike her being described as a man. They might find it at best impolite and at worst deeply offensive. But it is not “hateful” to believe that men are men and women are women. You cannot change biological sex and under the Forstater ruling, it isn’t “illegal” to say so. 

This is what happens when a vocal minority creates such an environment of fear that the police think they can’t immediately call out an attention-seeking time-waster when they see one.

J K Rowling is not a “transphobe”, either – as inconvenient as that might be to those seeking to label any woman who thinks biological sex is immutable as a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (Terf). 

It’s far from “radical” to believe in just the two sexes. Nor is it “exclusionary”, since Rowling has never denied the existence of trans people nor their rightful place in society – alongside men and women.

She’s simply a gender-critical feminist, who is justifiably concerned for the corresponding rights of women, which she believes are being eroded. I and many other women (and men … and even some trans people) agree with her. 

This is what the gender fanatics continually refuse to acknowledge: that there are competing rights here. It’s not all about them, whatever the likes of Willoughby seem to think. 

Rowling has been a heroine in all this, because she’s not only refused to be cancelled, but has emboldened many others who feel the same way as her to bravely speak out.

But let’s look at what is really “hateful” about this debate. There is no doubt that Rowling and others like her continue to be the victims of terrible misogyny. Just look at the appalling comments made about her on social media by people who purport to be defined by kindness and progressive values. 

Indeed, it is really quite striking that, on International Women’s Day yesterday, when we should have been celebrating female advancement, there was little public celebration of gender-critical feminists like Rowling. The Left hypocritically talks up the importance of “diversity” and “inclusion” while at the same time actively seeking to shame those who have an opposing point of view. 

The definition of bigotry is being “obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group”. So radical trans activists are guilty of exactly what they accuse gender-critical feminists of. Yet still they arrogantly assume they can occupy the moral high ground, while carrying out these modern-day witch trials.

If stories of gender-critical women being hounded out of their jobs, their universities, and in the recent case of Newcastle United fan Linzi Smith, their football club, aren’t already disturbing enough, we now hear word of a Canadian proposal to impose house arrest on someone who is believed likely to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not done so already. 

The proposed clause in the country’s new Online Safety Bill would see suspected “hate criminals” forced to wear an electronic tag and banned from going outside. In Willoughby’s world, that would include anyone who thinks she’s a bloke. 

But this former Big Brother contestant has got her own form when it comes to sharp remarks on social media. 

I had to block her myself when she responded to one of my posts highlighting a pretty innocuous story I’d written about Prince Harry with the words: “Garbage. Harry has your metaphorical number – while the grubby British Media had his ACTUAL number, and hacked it.”

Referencing my role as royal editor of an ITV daytime show, she added: “Someone else you keep platforming @ThisMorning. Have a clear out.” Nice.

If this is supposed to be what the “sisterhood” is supposed to look like in Willoughby’s eyes, then I’d genuinely rather be a “Terf”. %n

#JK Rowling is right: a trans woman is not a woman #and it’s not wrong to say so #The Only Dishonest Thing About All Of This Is Treating The Fight For Women's Rights As Coming From The Right #It Was The Right That Fomented The Transgender Movement

[cedarandstories]

The Embrace

James:

It’s nights like these that find me missing you and everyone the most. The soft, cool air brushes softly against my skin, the little breeze creeping in through the open sliver of my kitchen window. At first, it is abrasive, the goosebumps on my arm stand up firm at attention from the sudden temperature change. However, over time, I find it much more acceptable, and even grow to love it. 

I apply this thinking to how I have begun to see embrace. A past me would not have ever tolerated it. Touch was appalling. Just another chance for someone to note your imperfections, or find disgust in you. I used to assume this would always be the case, and I shielded myself by shielding myself from touch. 

Over time, this view radically shifted. I started by accepting the slight touches. The little nods of affection that show that in a sea of chaos our friends love us. The arms around shoulders. The fist bumps. The sideways hugs that make sure you don’t hug like a couple does because of societal expectations. 

Then, it became a genuine sign of affection. The full embrace of a hug, because fuck society. The slight ruffling (or full on messing up) of hair. The soft touch of a hand to a cheek, caressing and holding it, almost holding up the entire person - the entire spirit - in that one action. Those were the actions I began to see and seek out, as well as reciprocate because of the beauty of them. 

While embracing and loving my friends, my absolute favorite part of the journey has been discovering the unbridled beauty of bodies. I don’t mean beauty in some feminine descriptor, but in the literal definition of it: “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.” This is how I see those bodies. Their skin, the smooth crevices caused by wear and tear, the hair styles, the color of eyes I can get lost in, the soft touch of their hands, their arms wrapped around me. I can get lost in it. I am lost in it. 

The more time I spend with my friends, the more I see this beauty in everything about them. And it isn’t in the imperfections like some silly cliche (I am silly in many ways, but I’ll be damned if I am a cliche while writing on old parchment with a pen and ink). I want to describe them below to you, to remind you of what we miss and cannot have right now. 

1. I can sink into his arms all the time. The tiny peck of a forehead kiss makes me swoon in bliss. I’ll never be able to fully articulate the joy of their hands running through my hair. It sparks something inside of me, a childlike joy that makes me crane my neck in the direction of his hand, hoping for more intimacy and care. His stomach is absolutely lovely, and the stretch marks tell a story of a body that is learning to accept being cared for. I hope they continue to care for it regardless of what others say, because he is so amazing. I would lay on his chest and shoulders for a millenia. 

2. His skin is soft and sublime. Holding him feels like a supine comfort I wish everyone knew. The failed stick and poke is etched above his left arm, near his shoulder, dots and covers a small section of the upper arm. It almost looks like a lost symbol, some great literary idea that was lost to the ages. Lost to the Gods of old. His hair flails around when you run your hands through it, unsure of what to do. His hand on my cheek is an ultimate comfort, and holding him from behind while I run my hands across his stomach warms my soul and causes a flicker to light up in me. I’d kiss his soft lips for a good, long while. 

3. Their arms around me have never caused apprehension, more than I can say for the family of old who wanted the same. They held me through that first night of panic, that unsure, scared boy, was not yet ready to accept the help. But he tried to accept it, and they offered wholeheartedly and beautifully. I do not think there are enough words in our silly language to describe how they mean so much to me. Playing with their hair never ceases to amaze me, and I will never not stare in awe when they play with my hand. 

Perhaps we can reunite soon and rediscover these lost joys. The joys of intimacy. The embrace of another human exposing themselves as much as you do yourself. Opening up the embrace of skin on skin, the idea of laying eyes on a person with just as many perfections as you do. I wish more people saw this. Saw the beauty in one another. I wasted far too many years afraid to embrace and afraid to let others lay eyes on me. Now, the journey of discovering this love and the embrace has been second to none. I hope I never stop this journey in life through friendship and love. 

Yours,

Daniel

#writing #short story #short stories #fiction writing #writblr #writerslife