Reading 🌈

Taylor the Machine Swift.

She’s just like Dolly. Nobody will see them without the wig. Nobody knew Dolly. Same for Taylor. She paints her lip and sways her hip…don’t fucking let the fans know anything actually intimate. Dangerous.

Dolly was a big gay, so is Tay.

Don’t care, just saying 🤡🤷🏻‍♀️

Hostages tortured to death. Parents executed in front of their children. Doctors beaten. Babies murdered. Sexual assault weaponised. No, not Hamas crimes. This is part of an ever-growing list of documented atrocities committed by Israel in the five months since 7 October – quite separate from the carpet bombing of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and a famine induced by Israel’s obstruction of aid. And yet while the western establishment media has been chock full of the most lurid allegations of savagery directed against Hamas, sometimes with little or no supporting evidence, Israeli atrocities are excused or quickly forgotten. Accusations against Hamas are endlessly reheated to paint a picture of a supremely dangerous and bestial militant group, in turn rationalising the slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s population to “eradicate” it as a terrorist organisation. But equally barbarous atrocities committed by Israel – not in the heat of battle, but in cold blood – are treated as unfortunate, isolated incidents that cannot be connected, that paint no picture, that reveal nothing of import about the military that carried them out. If Hamas’ crimes were so savage and sadistic they still need to be reported months after they took place, why does the establishment media never feel the need to express equal horror and indignation at equivalent or worse acts of cruelty and sadism being inflicted by Israel on Gaza – not five months ago, but right now? Israel's torture of doctors, its sexual assaults of Palestinian women, it's leaving premature babies to die after its forces stormed a hospital. Where is the outrage? This is part of a pattern of behaviour by the western media that leads to only one possible deduction: Israel’s five-month-long attack on Gaza is not being reported. Rather, it is being selectively narrated – and for the most obscene of purposes. Through consistent and glaring failures in their coverage, establishment media – including supposedly liberal outlets, from the BBC and CNN to the Guardian and New York Times – have smoothed the way for Israel to carry out mass slaughter in Gaza, what the World Court has assessed as plausibly a genocide. The role of the media has not been to keep us, their audiences, informed about one of the greatest crimes in living memory. It has been to buy time for US President Joe Biden to keep arming his most useful of client states in the oil-rich Middle East, and to do so without damaging his prospects for re-election in November’s US presidential vote. If Russian President Vladimir Putin was a madman and a barbarous war criminal for invading Ukraine, as every western media outlet agrees, what does that make Israeli officials, when every one of them supports far worse atrocities in Gaza, directed overwhelmingly at civilians? And more to the point, what does that make Biden and the US political class for materially backing Israel to the hilt: sending bombs, vetoing demands for a ceasefire at the United Nations, and freezing desperately needed aid? Worrying about the optics, the president expresses his discomfort, but he carries on helping Israel regardless. While western politicians and commentators worry about some imaginary existential threat those brief events of five months ago pose to the nuclear-armed state of Israel, Israel is quite literally wiping Gaza off the map day by day, quite undisturbed.

Middle East Eye

Torture, executions, babies left to die, sexual abuse… These are Israel’s crimes

Why is the same western media obsessively reheating five-month-old allegations against Hamas so reluctant to focus on Israel’s current, horr

taylor swift, artist of the decade

Let’s go girls🌈👏🏼🌈👏🏼

Taylor Swift Accepts Woman of the Decade Award at Billboard's Women In Music: Read Her Full Speech

Taylor Swift was the first-ever recipient of Billboard's Woman of the Decade Award. You can read her full acceptance speech here.

Lately there’s been a new shift that has affected me personally and that I feel is a potentially harmful force in our industry, and as your resident loud person, I feel the need to bring it up. And that is the unregulated world of private equity coming in and buying up our music as if it is real estate. As if it’s an app or a shoe line. This just happened to me without my approval, consultation, or consent. 

After I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalog was sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in a deal that I’m told was funded by the Soros Family, 23 Capital, and the Carlyle Group. Yet to this day none of these investors have ever bothered to contact me or my team directly. To perform their due diligence on their investment. On their investment in me. To ask how I might feel about the new owner of my art. The music I wrote. The videos I created. Photos of me, my handwriting, my album designs. And of course, Scooter never contacted me or my team to discuss it prior to the sale or even when it was announced.

I’m fairly certain he knew exactly how I would feel about it though. And let me just say that the definition of the toxic male privilege in our industry is people saying, ‘But he’s always been nice to me,’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists and their rights to own their music. And of course he’s nice to you. If you’re in this room, you have something he needs.

The fact is that private equity is what enabled this man to think, according to his own social media post, that he could buy me. But I’m obviously not going willingly. Yet the most amazing thing was to discover that it would be the women in our industry who would have my back and show me the most vocal support at one of the most difficult times, and I will never, ever forget it. Like, ever.

hmmm in Miss Americana and the heartbreak prince these lines really pop out to me:

they whisper in the hallway she’s a bad bad girl (okay!) 

miss American and the heartbreak prince (okay!) 

To me, it sounds like she's agreeing with what they’re saying, even though she thinks it’s stupid...Even the tone she sings these phrases sounds super sarcastic to me, emphasized with the “okay!” I almost wonder if she’s singing as if Miss Americana iw Karlie and heartbreak prince is jerk. Tay’s singing  about the flaws in society with our standards of relationships and gender roles and how we give labels to everything...

She’s telling Karlie to come home, that she doesn’t want to go up against the forces that hold them apart because it’ll be painful and messy but she knows the struggle is going to be worth it. It would be so tempting to run away together, but they have too much riding on it all and they have to hold out and fight the good fight! 

maybe :-)