Welp found the Adolf Eichmann of the Trump Admin

You make sure those cattle cars run on time, buddy.

I cannot get over this. They have a fucking Adolf Eichmann.

For those of you who don't know his whole deal, Adolf Eichmann was the primary bureaucrat/administrator behind the Holocaust. Overseeing supply chains, ensuring rail infrastructure was in place, collecting lists of Jews, etc.

He fled to Argentina after the war and, after a complex series of events, was found in the late 50s. The Mossad carried out an illegal extradition (which the Argentine government was, by all accounts, aware of and cool with), brought him to Jerusalem, put him on trial (you know, Hannah Arendt's whole thing, and the setting of my profile pic of Zivia) and he was hanged on June 1, 1962.

Legitimate question, but if Argentina was OK with it, wouldn't that make it a legal extradition?

Or was there some plausible deniability stuff going on?

Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.

Reblog if you're okay with people coming into your DMs with the "you seem really odd and your blog intrigues me, do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters"

Why do all the dumbest most easily proven incorrect political posts get thousands of notes where I rarely see any with actual reason behind them reach over 100. I mean I know why but it’s frustrating. Anyway I guess go back to explaining how North Korea is no worse to live in than America and it’s racist to think otherwise. We can ignore reality here.

from @mysteriousgap

To all the people who said there was no difference between Trump and Biden/Harris.

No, I do not believe that under another Biden term or under Vice President Harris would we have the following right now:

- students who signed their names to op-ed pieces that ran in college papers getting snatched off the streets by plain-clothed ICE agents

- toddlers detained in warehouses because their legal resident mom made a wrong turn and accidentally ended up in a lane to go to Canada

- a stock market wobbling like a drunk uncle walking home from a wedding because the president can't decide if he wants to follow through on his threatened trade wars

- an internationally recognized news organization banned from the White House press room because they still call an international body of water the name that every country but one calls it

- thousands of people, including many veterans, who worked for national parks, federally funded health organizations, USAID, the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Pentagon to name just a few, illegally fired

- a frat boy who nearly ran a veterans nonprofit into the ground before becoming a weekend Fox News Host and who has been credibly accused of sexual assault in charge of the Pentagon

- said frat boy sending out information about American military plans over a commercial app in a group message that included the editor-in-chief of a widely read news magazine ... And then not getting fired for it

- longtime US allies questioning whether they can trust the US with intelligence afterward

- the annual meeting of public health officials to discuss next year's flu vaccine canceled because the person in charge of health is an anti-vaxxer

- tons and tons of American-grown agricultural products and American-manufactures medication that the US has already paid for rotting in warehouses because the USAID employees who in any other year would be responsible for delivering them to international aid organizations have all been fired or put on leave

- grants for everything from farmers to university programs to crisis helplines in jeopardy because of unprecedented funding cuts

- no US aid going to Myanmar after a massive earthquake that has killed over 2000 people that we know of so far

- Canada and Greenland worried they have to prepare for a fucking military invasion from the United States of America because their governments and people are not willing to roll over and be the 51st/52nd state just because Trump wants to engage in petty land grabs like his bff Putin

- a bill introduced in Congress to amend the constitution and allow Trump to run for president again (which will never happen because it's significantly harder to amend the constitution than pass a bill but the bill's very existence is a chilling look into how deep in Trump's pockets the Republican party is right now)

- Trump teasing that he can get around the Constitution's third term limit

So no. The parties are not the same and neither are the candidates.

100 year old Galapagos tortoise with a few weeks old Galapagos baby posing for a new family photo, and its own baby photo from 100 years ago.

love that for 100 years people have looked at these beasts and thought “heehee what if the big one wore the little one like a hat”

Far longer

Some things are truly timeless and universal about humanity.

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

GNU Terry Pratchett

The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it's Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

And to Terry Pratchett's credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to "come out" as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.

Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett's work

The overwhelming theme of Pratchett's work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett's stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined "Good old days" that they prefer.

While we're talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there's also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don't actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.

Feet of Clay came out in 1996. I cannot overstate how pronoun discourse wasn't anywhere on the radar then. I'm fairly terminally online, active in fandom, and the first I can remember is some timid discussion of neopronouns in the mid-2000s, where "how could you tell other people to use them for you" was a major puzzle. (I still love neopronouns - zie/hir appeals to me in a way they distinctly doesn't, genderfluid though I am.)

ALSO also also

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

2) Pterry had the best goyische take I've ever seen on golems, and I will die on that hill. It's not perfect, but it is really well-done, and it was done with respect, and to me that might be even more important than perfection.

I had the book to hand because I reread it recently. The quote goes:

If Star Trek ever does a show that's post-DS9 and the Ferengi Women's Lib movement, they need to make a regular character a Ferengi woman. I gotta know what things are like there now with gender politics. Ferengi women frustrated that their men keep saying they want subservient wives only for so many of them to go out and score alien women. What happens when Ferengi women go score some hot alien men? There's probably some Ferengi feminist screed pointing out that there's volumes and volumes about oo-mox but they probably don't know where the Ferengi clitoris is.

@astra-the-dragon

Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.

You must imagine the character I’ve created here wearing a suit and a monocle, by the way.

During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.

The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors. The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general! Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.

Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later

if he was still alive I know in my heart that Terry Pratchett would have done a bit about Igors and Igorinas doing gender confirmation surgery by now. going into a lab full of bubbling vials and picking out a penis from a tank the way you pick a lobster. that one, please. you gotta be careful though because they'll really try to upsell you into getting two or three installed. people going to the clinic as pairs and just having parts swapped out for a discounted rate. maybe you actually just trade brains, that's even easier. Igorth have already been doing that thurgery for thenturieth.

#one day an igor forgets the lock the cage and a pack of penises escapes into ankh-morpork#the watch spends the next three weeks rounding them up

how DARE you leave this in the tags (affectionate)

Everyone knew it was best not to look too closely at Igor's jars.

Vimes was beginning to wish he had looked more closely at the most recent additions before Igor came lurching up the stairs to inform him:

"They have ethcaped, thir."

"Escaped. What has escaped, Igor."

"Thome of my.. appendageth, thir."

"Appendages."

"Yeth, thir. Of the... intimate variety."

"Of the intimate..." Vimes trailed off as the dawning horror overwhelmed his vocal cords.

He rallied. "Igor. HOW have they escaped? They are not known for their... perambulatory abilities."

"Really, thir? I've alwayth found them to have a mind of their own at timeth."

Vimes was staying calm. Yes. That was it. He was staying very calm. Definitely NOT thinking AT ALL about how Vetinari and... Good lord, The Times, would react to marauding pack of penises. Would it be a pack? Or would they go off on their own?

"I wath exthperimenting with cuthtom grown oneth, you know. For thothe who cannot grow their own."

"Err... what? Of course you were. I mean. Very good."

Pictured: An Igor harvesting appendages

#[a loud crash is heard from the lab] #[another igor runs past with a giant butterfly net. stopping briefly at the door to shriek 'THE VULVATHS''] (via @the-wave-finally-broke)

It turns out to be a brilliant feat of advertisement, as the people too shy or uncertain to go visit Igor rightaway effectively get a chance to discretely window-shop in public.

An unfortunate side effect being that a small girl, denied of her rightful need to be a Horse Girl by the limitations of being a native Ankh-Morpork child[1], would have adopted one of the larger Appendages of the pack and named it Free Willy. Her insistence that she could understand her pet through a bond of mutual sympathy was both touching and troubling, as was her announcement that Free Willy did not want to be attached to a governing body and forced into service, saddled with clothing, or made to perform tricks for audiences. With no Igor having the heart [2] to take it from her, the child was allowed to keep Free Willy, who lived for five healthy years in her family’s pigeon loft and eventually passed away from natural causes after a battle with another fighting cock. The child went on to write a well-acclaimed children’s book, The Willy that Would Be Free, which was, necessarily, a pop-up book.

[1] where an ordinary working class child CAN form a magical bond with a horse, in the form of a pie, labeled as beef.

[2] ha

Look, it got longer.

So did Free Willy.

they were still late

this one is so dumb I had to screencap it I’m sorry

Me and my fellow Harris-voting shitlibs chilling with the pagans and pre-Jesus people in Limbo, while leftists are tortured in the second region of the Ninth Circle of Hell for being traitors.

Love is not pie. You won’t run out. Love is Pi. Real, irrational, and never-ending. Happy Pi Day, Love Rebels!

loverevised.org Skilled alternative relationship coaching.

don’t miss your oppietunity to reblog this today!!

This is how I learned that it’s the 14th today, not the 15th, as I had thought it was all day 🤣

You can only reblog this today.

I missed my chance last year. Not gonna let it happen again

Wahoo!

concept: nudes that capture evidence of paranormal phenomenon in the background by accident

Source

Please note: this was a midterm ballot question. This only passed because people showed up to vote for something other than president. Please don't ignore local races.

Reminder of the importance of midterms.

And if your reps aren't putting these measures on the ballot? The importance of primaries and locals.

effective resistance starts small. and local. target the politicians and policy-makers who live closest and make them Hear You.

Every election is important, no matter how small.

Twice. Tommy made this mistake twice.

Isn't Trigon the name of a comicbook character?