mohandasgandhi:

fearandwar:

To anyone who doesn’t see how The Dictator is part of a long history of Hollywood slandering Arabs and Muslims, read this book. Until then, I really don’t give two shits about how “it’s just comedy, dude! Stop being so serious!”

One of the saddest things this book revealed to me was not just how bad the stereotypes. It’s the way even movies that have nothing at all to do with the Middle East or anything like that throw in Arab/Muslim (because in Hollywood, the two are always the same) as asides. For instance, Father of the Bride Part 2. It’s a movie about a father upset about his daughter’s pregnancy. Midway through, though, they throw in a horrible Arab/Persian stereotype of a dictatorial Middle Eastern male who is greedy, oppresses his wife, and screws over an honest white guy.

That’s how Hollywood works.

The Dictator is hardly alone in its racist portrayal of Arabs. Arabs are the new token villains in Hollywood films, similar to the way Russians were during the Cold War only, it’s a lot more racist.

And thus we have the Timeline of International Villainy. To create drama, especially in action and war movies, Hollywood needs bad guys, and in their time, the Japanese and Germans, and later the Koreans and Vietnamese, served that role. For a long while, commies were useful foils (with their taste for world domination, nukes and vodka), but with the end of the Cold War, the Soviets became the Russians, and the Russians only worked if they were gangsters, and Hollywood already had the Italians to do that job. Colombian drug traffickers were employed as handy replacements, but then coke just felt … dated. Transnational corporate evildoers are okay, if not that sexy. But there just has been something about those Arabs. They’ve got legs.

In an interview before the premiere, Shaheen says that the OPEC oil embargo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis all conspired to cast the Arab as film villain beginning in the 1970s. “We pray and we kill,” Shaheen says of the depiction. Like other stereotypes on film — of blacks, Jews, gays, Latinos, Native Americans — Arabs are now in the crosshairs.

“The Arab serves as the ultimate outsider, the other, who doesn’t pray to the same God, and who can be made to be less human,” says Shaheen, who argues that movies and TV shows do matter — that they shape public opinion at home and abroad. “Do you have any idea what it must be like to be a young person watching this stuff over in the Middle East?” he says. And if you ask Shaheen who even cares about an old Chuck Norris film, he answers, “Have you ever looked through a TV Guide? These movies are on television constantly. The images last forever. They never go away.” [Source]

(via depressingfacts)

doe-eyed-girly-evil:

Honestly, though. Can we talk about how truly appalling everything about this scene is? After everything he’s done to her, after all the shit he’s put her through, after the years of emotional (and physical) abuse, we actually have to be subjected to this? We have to be subjected to more emotional abuse? We have to be subjected to her groveling to get him back even in the face of the poison he’s throwing at her? Like he’s the one who is owed something? Like he’s the one who always put her first (L o fucking l to that one) to his own detriment? Like she wasn’t the one who constantly sacrificed her self-worth and dignity for him? And he does this again. Degrades her again. Questions her worth again and instead of kneeing him in the crotch, Blair actually wants to be with this asshole? She actually buys into his bullshit about betting on him and enables it? Fuck this shit. It is sad that this show is aimed at young women.

(via annelli0t)

velocipedestrienne:

See, she smiles when things are hilarious.

(Source: absofreakinlutely, via obsessionfull)

(via annelli0t)

I’m literally going to be the last senior to commit to a school.　

(Source: freecocaine, via insynchlikeharmony)

“When I did a photoshoot for Abercrombie & Fitch none of my pictures ended up getting used, and when my dad called to ask why, they sent over the negatives — like, here’s why! All the other girls are looking cute, modeling while playing football, and my face is bright red, my nostrils are flared, and I’m mid-leap, about to tackle this girl, like, ‘Rahhrrr!’ I’m not even looking at the camera. The other girls were like, ‘Get her away from me!”

-Jennifer Lawrence

(Source: ofpanem, via boardwalkk)

0rdinaryy:

Congressman Bobby Rush dons a hoodie in support of Treyvon Martin, violating House dress code. 

(Source: politicsgifs)

booklover:

I Carry it Well: “Being born a woman is an awful tragedy… Yes, my consuming desire to…

cinematicvisions:

“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy… Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”

—Sylvia Plath 

We’re taught by popular culture to think of Sylvia Plath as a maudlin hysteric, a  death-obsessed suicide with her head permanently wedged in the oven, and this is what I thought of her, too. Then I actually read her poetry.

I found a kindred spirit, a woman whose dreams were too grand for the little body given her, whose only defense against the great forces inside her was a dark sense of humor about her cage and her jailers. It’s seemed to me sometimes that we are compelled to love a world that both expects it, and feels no obligation to love us back.

#it makes me so angry that she’s ‘hysterical’ and yet any male artist that died of suicide is ‘brilliant’#it is ALWAYS the case that if a woman kills herself she’s ‘crazy’ but if i man does it just adds to his cult of brilliancy

#madmen get to be savants and visionaries#madwomen get locked in attics#there are no madwomen heroes#just tragic sad ophelias and crazy wicked berthas#it’s unbelievably lonely to live in a world in which you are preemptively a narrative casualty

(Source: raccoonwounds)

theoceanswide:

i pressed alt + reblog button

(via psychobritta)

wehavethemunchies:

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownies

Tbh I don’t really have much feels about the rest, but I could see Ron and Luna hit it off. As for Ginny, I always felt her and Neville were compatible…Draco’s canon is fine.

In Chic-ah-go

stfuwhiteliberals (via thetart)

People ask me all the time if I’m “asking them to be guilty about being white.” NO! This explains it. -Jess

(via stfuconservatives)

(via demarches)

bitchitoldyouigottaste:

heckyeahpresidents:

President Obama reading “Where the Wild Things Are” at the White House Easter Egg Roll.

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

HAHAHHAHAHA

(via demarches)