Yaz and Ryan’s utter amazement at meeting Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. respectively was the best part of this episode, and I loved Graham saying he was Steve Jobs and was trying to market a smart phone, LOL. XD Jodie continues to hit it out of the park as well. I loved her channeling 12 by writing on the wall. I also love how they all work as a team to make sure history stays on course. The only bad thing is that the villian Krasko was really flat, but at least the other guest characters were top-notch, especially Rosa herself.
The villain wasn’t the point though. There’s plenty of people just like him in everyday life. He was recognizable enough as it were. So why waste time going more in depth on him?
^^^ Exactly. As @lilbasthet so aptly said, “racism is the monster of the week”. Not just Krasko, but the whole social and political milieu of Alabama 1955. The ex-con space racist was just an excuse for the Doctor and her friends to be there and bear witness.
Jesus Christ was a brown Jew in the Middle East, conceived out of wedlock in an arguably interracial if not interspecies (deity and human) relationship, raised by his mother and stepfather in place of his absent father. He may not have had a Y chromosome. He spent his early youth as a refugee in Egypt, where his family no doubt survived initially on handouts from the wealthy (You think they kept that gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the wise men? Hell no, they sold that stuff for food and lodging). He later returned with his parents to their occupied homeland and lived in poverty.
Trump and his administration are xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, fear-mongering, warmongering, tax-dodging, anti-Semitic, anti-choice, anti-welfare, anti-equal pay, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, support tax cuts for the rich, support Citizen’s United, want to keep refugees out of this country, want to limit our ability to speak against the government, plan to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and they wrap all of that up behind a banner of “Christian family values.” If you support them, you have no right to call yourself a follower of Christ.
it’s so rare, yet so fulfilling, to see the J-man on my dash
One of my friends is literally the most religious Christian I have ever met. What does that mean in regards to her lifestyle and outlook? She loves everyone. EVERYONE. Unconditionally. And she supports healthcare and education and birth control and everything that’s necessary to have a healthy, stable society.
Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé – well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time – more than nine times out of ten – CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
Also, the custard pie has gravity on its side. Something falling from six feet up plus the height of the person dropping it (assuming they’re at the top of the stepladder), has a hell of a lot more force behind it than one that just sits there and does nothing.
“There is a certain irony here, because many of the first werewolves to be outed in society from the 16th through the 18th centuries were actually women. Just as our American ancestors had their Salem Witch Trials, Europe had its Werewolf Trials, and a large number of the so-called “werewolves” tortured and burned at the stake were female. […]
In the 17th-century werewolf trials of Estonia, women were about 150 percent more likely to be accused of lycanthropy; however, they were about 100 percent less likely to be remembered for it.”
“Here’s also a pronounced lack of female werewolves in popular culture. Their near absence in literature and film is explained away by various fancies: they’re sterile, an aberration, or—most galling of all—they don’t even exist.Their omission from popular culture does one thing very effectively: It prevents us, and men especially, from being confronted by hairy, ugly, uncontrollable women. Shapeshifting women in fantasy stories tend to transform into animals that we consider feminine, such as cats or birds, which are pretty and dainty, and occasionally slick and wicked serpents. But because the werewolf represents traits that are accepted as masculine—strength, large size, violence, and hirsutism—we tend to think of the werewolf as being naturally male. The female werewolf is disturbing because she entirely breaks the rules of femininity.”
— Julia Oldham, Why Are There No Great Female Werewolves?
I always thought this was wild, because the idea of a person who goes through a change once a month, like the moon and its tides, with the spilling of blood, was such an obvious metaphor.
That all werewolves aren’t ‘AFAB’ feels like a man in history did what we always do and went ‘Hey you know what these cool stories could do without? Women.’ And no-one’s done a popular enough take on it ever since.
