Of all the questions about monetization, advertising, and scale that have surfaced since Yahoo announced its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, one giant point is getting buried: what to do with Tumblr’s porn?
Not just the fact that it’s there—11.4% of Tumblr’s 200,000 most visited domains are adult; 16.6 percent of Tumblr traffic happens on adult blogs; and 22.37% of referral traffic from external sites comes from adult websites, according to a studyby the SimilarGroup.
As American commentators gradually get more and more bored with Iraq, there’s this false sense being built that the situation in Iraq is somehow “over” or cooling or something like that. As this perception grows, it gets more and more shocking every time one actually investigates recent events there and breaks the illusion. In the past week, over 200 hundred Iraqis have died in bombings around the country—tribal leaders are saying that the country needs to be broken into a federation or run the risk of full-scale civil war. All this clashes resoundingly with the Western relegation of Iraq to the fringes of political consciousness—the movement of the centre of focus to other regions (North Korea, recently), and the accompanying implication that Iraq is no longer a place where relevant events are taking place. And yet, all the wheels set in motion by the US invasion a decade ago are still turning. The situation is as violent and unresolved and horrifying as it ever was, but we in the countries responsible for it have moved on. Hundreds of thousands have died, and we’re managing to ignore our complicity in it with incredible adeptness.
It’s not even over and we’ve already forgotten.
Hundreds of Iraqis are still dying violent deaths every week, and the men responsible for tearing the country apart are chilling in mansions painting pictures of dogs and shit. In our preparations to destroy the next country on the imperialist kill list, we’ve cultivated a self-serving and fast-acting amnesia, allowing us to simultaneously disregard the catastrophe of Iraq and to approach imperialist foreign policy with the same naïveté that will allow the situation to be repeated again and again and again.
With reports of Iraqi Shia’s fighting for the regime in Syria, and Al-Nusra Front and The Islamic State of Iraq acting as one hand events in Iraq are of incredible importance. I have suspected for some time now that as the regime in Syria weakens the situation will increasingly become one sectarian battle ignoring the border between Iraq and Syria.
Who is the dialectician, who dialectizes the relationship? It is the slave, the slave’s perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave’s perspective. The famous dialectical aspect of the master-slave relationship depends on the fact that power is conceived not as a will to power but as a representation of power, representation of superiority, recognition by “the one” of the superiority of “the other”. What the wills in Hegel want is to have their power recognized, to represent their power.
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Underneath the Hegelian image of the master we always find the slave.
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| — | Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ (via doesnotequal) |
Today is a national holiday in Canada known as Victoria Day. Officially, it commemorates the birthday of Queen Victoria, who was the British monarch at the time of Canada’s ascension to the status of a self-governing dominion of the British Empire.
The holiday and the long weekend surrounding it is colloquially referred to as “May 2-4 weekend”, (2-4 being a Canadian term for a case of 24 beer bottles) because in practice it functions as a time for Canadians to get drunk enough to temporarily forget the immeasurably embarrassing fact that we’re still a fucking monarchy.
If you are part of a privileged group and have to constantly demand that somebody in an oppressed group say “not all (insert privileged group here) are like that”
what you are really demanding is that they reassure you that you’re not like that and you’re not being held accountable
which is a cowardly thing to do and also shows the great lengths you will go to in order to avoid examining your role in a toxic system
The nine circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno recreated in Lego by Mihai Mihu
I. LIMBO: A place of monotony, here the souls are punished to wander in restless existence while they moan helplessly in echoes between the ruins of a temple.
II. LUST: Surrounded by erotic representations, those overcome by lust are forced to watch and experience disgusting things, ultimately being condemned to drown in the menstrual river.
III. GLUTTONY: The circle itself is a living abomination, a hellish digestive system revealing horrific faces with mouths ready to devour the gluttons over and over for eternity.
IV. GREED: This pompous place is reserved for the punishment of the greedy ones.
V. ANGER: In this depressing place the souls are trapped in the swamp, they can’t move and they cannot manifest their frustration which is making them even more angry.
VI. HERESY: The giant demon watches closely over his fire pit, dwarfing the damned that are dragging the new arrivals in the boiling lava. Those who committed the greatest sins against God are getting a special treatment inside the temple where they are doomed to burn for eternity in the scorching flames.
VII. VIOLENCE: A place of intense torture where the horrific screams of the damned are eternally accompanied by the hellish beats of drums.
VIII. FRAUD: In Fraud the Demons enjoy altering the shape of souls, this is how they feed.
IX. TREACHERY: Lucifer lies here chained by the Angelic Seal which keeps him captive in the frozen environment.
