Overcome with affliction // What's Good: Dec. 8, 2023
Taylor Swift, securities fraud, and mulch.
Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. Today the new Path of Exile league launched, and I will be playing and streaming it. I’m starting Subtractem’s SRS Guardian, because it sounds fun and easy. I do want to transition to a bow build eventually this league, but I’m hoping that streamers and top-end players will help the meta shake out first. Did you guys see that GTA VI trailer? Good stuff.
Taylor Alison Swift
She deserves this, sorry if you’re mad about it, I love her:
Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one is about a time she got her heart broken, although not in the way you might expect.
She was 17, she says, and she had booked the biggest opportunity of her life so far—a highly coveted slot opening for country superstar Kenny Chesney on tour. “This was going to change my career,” she remembers. “I was so excited.” But a couple weeks later, Swift arrived home to find her mother Andrea sitting on the front steps of their house. “She was weeping,” Swift says. “Her head was in her hands as if there had been a family emergency.” Through sobs, Andrea told her daughter that Chesney’s tour had been sponsored by a beer company. Taylor was too young to join. “I was devastated,” Swift says.
Justice for Palestine
Three pieces on the subject this week. First, about the journalists:
For weeks, Motaz Azaiza’s Instagram feed has exclusively borne witness to the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Since Oct. 7, the 24-year-old photojournalist has dedicated his days to capturing the scenes of death, destruction, and anguish that have come to be associated with the besieged enclave.
But as Israel’s punishing military campaign to root out Hamas from the Strip enters its third month, and as its ground invasion pushes further south to where millions of civilians are currently sheltering, Azaiza has warned that he may not be able to continue his work for much longer. “The phase of risking your life to show what is happening is now over,” he told his followers in a statement over the weekend, “and the phase of trying to survive has started.”
Second, about Hanukkah:
Each year, in the darkest days of winter, Hanukkah reliably arrives. We kindle lights and discuss the possibility of miracles. Each year is different. We return to Hanukkah a little older and altered by the changes within ourselves, our communities, and the world. This year is darker than any I’ve lived through. Like so many grieving both Palestinian and Israeli loved ones, these past two months have brought the deepest horror and heartbreak of my life.
Though Hanukkah is a festival that commemorates miracles “in days of old,” there are none for the 2.3 million Palestinians and over 100 Israeli hostages in Gaza as the Israeli government relentlessly bombards them. Israel’s brutal military siege has cut off electricity, clean water, medicine, fuel, food. As winter arrives, the darkness grows heavier. Millions have been displaced and pushed further and further south. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.
Third, about anti-war Jewish Americans:
Over the past two months, a progressive wing of American Judaism has gained prominence, one defined by mass mobilization against the Israeli government's unrelenting bombing in Gaza. That intergenerational community – nearly always youth-led, but with those old enough to be Holocaust survivors regularly involved – has faced police pepper spray at the DNC, sat on hunger-strike with Palestinian organizers outside the White House, interrupted politicians at dinner, and shut down transit centers across the country.
In November, more than 400 New Yorkers, most of them Jewish, covertly entered the Statue of Liberty to hold a sit-in on the pedestal of that monument calling for a ceasefire. Dressed as tourists, they boarded boats to the statue in small, disconnected groups among the thousands who visit the statue each day. Once they convened, they hung “CEASEFIRE NOW” banners from the statue’s pedestal and chanted for just under an hour before leaving the island on a tourist ferry.
A fucking unlicensed securities exchange
One attraction of Binance, as the company grew from its 2017 founding into the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, was the firm's freewheeling flouting of rules. As it amassed well over 100 million crypto-trading users globally, it openly told the United States government that, as an offshore operation, it didn't have to comply with the country's financial regulations and money-laundering laws.
Correlation is not causation
OF ALL THE STRANGE, conspiratorial, and potentially dangerous theories Donald Trump and his allies came up with in the days after the 2020 election, this was the strangest, the most conspiratorial, the most potentially dangerous. Millions of electronic ballots for Trump had been “deleted,” and hundreds of thousands more had been “switched” to Joe Biden, Trump and his cronies in media, political, and legal circles insisted — thanks to software designed at the behest of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to rig foreign elections. Never mind that Chavez had been dead since 2013. Never mind that even Fox News’ researchers said the claims about Dominion Voting Systems were “100 percent false.”
Fox ultimately paid Dominion $787 million after its hosts ignored the network’s research department and spread lies about the firm. But the consequences his allies have faced for pushing lies about the 2020 election have not diminished the former president’s appetite for conspiracy theories. If anything, they have only stoked it.
The Republican National Committee is pausing its participation in 2024 GOP primary debates, the organization decided Friday.
The RNC’s decision, made by a 16-member internal body, means that any forthcoming debates will be hosted by networks independently of the committee. Two outlets — ABC and CNN — have announced plans to host future debates in Iowa and New Hampshire ahead of early state voting. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis already said he will attend CNN’s planned Iowa debate before next month’s caucuses and ABC’s planned New Hampshire debate.
Huh, who can say what is going on.
Stand for the Queens
In 2020, it seemed that the biggest threat to drag shows in Texas was the pandemic. When venues shut down and drag brunches were cancelled, some performers got resourceful. An Austin woman named Kerry Lynn launched Extragrams, a drag-queen telegram service: Kerry Lynn would show up at your house with a boom box and a queen in a glittery costume, and you’d get a brief, socially distanced drag show in your driveway, a little sparkle to liven up the long pandemic days.
The other kind of queen
There are many kinds of drag queens. Some are aesthetes, devotees of beauty and fashion. Others, my favorites, are social commentators. They critique the status quo by embodying an exaggerated version of it. These people are clowns, jesters, fools in the medieval sense. Their job is to hold a mirror to our wicked world and expose its artifice, to mock what we accept as mundane, to remind us that we, too, are mere actors on a stage.
Goblin mode
I am haunted by mulch posts.
The most recent mulch video came to me in the middle of the night, when I was hours into scrolling through a particularly nasty bout of insomnia. The video was an edit of a tiny dog surrounded by a frame of glittering hearts, with an AI-generated voice narrating, “Today, I soilmaxxed to the highest potential. I am full of loam, asbestos and red 40.”
I need Hank Green to make a new TikTok where he tells people not to eat dirt.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1733313030253904066
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1733304543054548995
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1733300108039524548
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1733292027918361007
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1733243803593531492
https://twitter.com/weirdlilguys/status/1733233135620358423
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1733220304669868395
https://twitter.com/CapybaraCountry/status/1733212997055910367
https://twitter.com/GoldretrieverUS/status/1733179977544151346
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1733174582356349126
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1733173234525200506
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Everyone Relax—The Army’s Native American Helicopter Names Are Not Racist. Is Your Phone the Reason You Feel Broke? Shoplifting Trends: What You Need to Know. Is That Bono? Impersonator Charms And Fools Crowd At Twin Anchors. Off-duty Chicago cop strikes, kills pedestrian near House of Blues in River North. Verizon Gave Phone Data to Armed Stalker Who Posed as Cop Over Email.