A post shared to Facebook claims that a video shows former President Jimmy Carter at early voting. Verdict: False The clip shows Carter at a birthday gathering, not early voting in Georgia. Fact Check: On Oct. 1, Jimmy Carter became the first president in American history to turn 100, per NBC News. Two weeks later, […]

'The people who are pissed off at that, fuck you'

'Everyone who possesses a firearm has a responsibility to do it responsibly'

'McDonald’s may have increased its menu prices'

An image shared on X claims to show the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, Lebanon. Israel ?? Air Force is attacking Iran-affiliated banks and financial institutions in Beirut right now ? Literally billions of dollars of Iran’s money up in flames tonight ?? pic.twitter.com/ycWoZnAliA — Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) October 20, 2024 Verdict: False The image […]

'National security threat'

'There has been a thought that maybe Michigan or Wisconsin will fall off'

Blog Dissecting The Dark Descent Caught in a Landslide, No Escape From Reality: “Three Days” by Tanith Lee A gothic tale with all romanticism stripped away. By Sam Reader | Published on October 22, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. Tanith Lee should be synonymous with the modern gothic. Through her prolific career, Lee’s stories of love, death, rebirth, and reincarnation reshaped the boundaries of both fantasy and horror—sometimes both at the same time in works like The Secret Books of Paradys and her Flat Earth stories. “Three Days” at first seems somewhat anomalous to her work, a dark gothic story that goes against convention through the debunking of its more supernatural elements and crushing the romanticism of its central cast. Within that debunking lies not a deconstruction of the romantic and gothic but in fact a reconstruction, depicting both the perils of ungrounded fantasy and the need for a little romanticism to give one’s life hope and substance.   On the anniversary of his mother’s death, Charles Laurent invites the unnamed narrator to the home of his grotesque, controlling father to meet his family. In attendance are his artist brother Semery and his sister Honorine. Honorine is a plain but innocent young woman with a taste for the occult, one that leads her to seek a past life reading from a cadre of witches who declare the young woman to be the reincarnation of an infamous bisexual pirate and libertine who died on the day of Honorine’s birth. The idea that Honorine is a reincarnated Lucie Belmains gives her a newfound swell of confidence and spirit in the face of her abusive father and dismal living situation, but Monsieur Laurent is nothing if not vindictive, and his retaliation against his daughter-cum-prisoner drives Honorine to a single, horrifying, and destructive act. There’s often a notable romanticism paired with the gothic, and it’s an element Lee is no stranger to in her own work. The presence of the supernatural lends things an ethereal quality, the innocent is often beautiful, the narrator is often worldly, and there’s a sense of divine order to the proceedings—the innocent will be tested, the guilty will be punished, and those who are good and moral will survive. What makes “Three Days” so disturbing is that there is no such romanticism here. The conventions of the gothic are subverted at every point, from the aggressive plainness of its innocent central character (to counterpoint the beautiful ingenues found in more traditional works) to the clear lack of any supernatural elements. While the witches’ proclamation that Honorine is Lucie reincarnated drives much of the plot, there’s very little evidence to support the claim in the story itself. Even the “three days” mentioned in the title is a reference to a simple and pedantic argument about a small flaw in Honorine’s logic. The horror in this story comes from the reassertion of the mundane—the bohemian protagonists and their influence on Honorine are fanciful things, shattered by Laurent’s final blow to the “house of glass” shoring up his daughter’s newfound confidence: Lucie Belmains’ death was three days after Honorine’s birth and thus she couldn’t be Lucie reincarnated. The detail that the witches got wrong (supposedly—we’ll get to that) throws aside all influence of the supernatural on the text, and Honorine’s hope is crushed by the brutal and mundane pragmatism Laurent employs when her defiance places her beyond his control. Even Honorine’s death—a dose of rat poison taken in a dusty attic—is meant to both mirror the gothic (the attic being a place of isolation where troublesome women are shut away in gothic stories, self-poisoning being a more romanticized form of suicide) and strip it of romanticism (the image of her curled up in a dirty corner taking a fatal dose of something meant to kill vermin and pests). It’s a death that matches the tragedy and plainness of Honorine’s life, with no fanciful elements at all. It’s horrifying in how plain and sad it is.    The plainness of Honorine’s death makes it no less wrenching. Her brothers and even the narrator are all left devastated by her suicide. Rather than romanticize the death, any illusion of romantic tragedy is stripped away—Honorine dies pathetically in the attic from eating rat poison and her vile father can barely contain his glee at her passing. In absolutely wrenching detail, Lee describes how Honorine’s death tears a hole in the world around her, and in depicting the ripples from that tragic event, reveals that Honorine was in fact more remarkable than she seemed. The devastation shows the true weight and lasting impact of Honorine’s passing—her death functions as a shock to the system, waking the men in her life up to the realities of the mundane world. Semery gives up his painting and settles down to a prosiac life as a father. Charles gives up on both writing and law and becomes a hermit. While the narrator does set out to win over his lady love Annette, he does so by accepting that they are going to eke out a mundane existence far from the glamourous future he imagined for them. Honorine’s death cures each of the men of the idea that the world is a place where magic can exist. While the romanticism is drained from the story and juxtaposed against the mundane world where monsters like Monsieur Laurent never get their comeuppance and are allowed to gleefully drive people to their death, “Three Days” is a reconstruction, not a deconstruction or subversion. Laurent is a traditional gothic villain through and through, from his unnerving presence and ability to terrorize his abused children even into adulthood to his schemes to dominate or destroy Honorine to keep her from living a life beyond his clutches. Honorine might not be an ethereal beauty, but the significance of her life and death cannot be overstated, casting her as a tragic heroine. While her death is horrifying and the story (rightfully) doesn’t portray Honorine’s suicide as romantic, it fits with the ending of a gothic tragedy, with the twisted villain winning and the heroine chooses to end her life out of despair. Lee even incorporates the three witches, who in the story’s most telling moment bring the reconstructive elements to the fore when the narrator discovers (far too late) that they were correct about Lucie’s death and possible reincarnation.   There might be very little romance to “Three Days,” but in its absence, Lee rewrites the rules of gothic horror and tragedy. She allows the reader and the narrator to focus on Honorine’s interior life rather than any kind of rare or ethereal beauty. The literal battle for Honorine’s soul between the ruthless pragmatism of Laurent and the romanticized fantasy of the witches’ prophecy rams a lance of pure existential horror through the heart of the more fanciful and romantic elements, adding a grounded and disturbing sense of reality back into the gothic work. More important than any of those, “Three Days” ultimately underlines the importance of imagination and flights of fancy, both in the disturbing lack of romanticism the work depicts and indeed in the final passages detailing how romanticism saved the narrator and might have saved Honorine from her father. We’re left with the sense that it’s important to cling to what little light one has, no matter how fanciful—that the dream you crush might be someone’s load-bearing fantasy. And now to turn it over to you. Is Honorine’s struggle between the mundane and the fantastic, or something more? What was the load-bearing fantasy that helped you through your own dark night? And what was your first brush with Tanith Lee (the house recommends The Secret Books of Paradys, which I accidentally stole)? And please join us in two weeks for “Good Country People” with the doyenne of southern grotesque herself, Flannery O’Connor.[end-mark] The post Caught in a Landslide, No Escape From Reality: “Three Days” by Tanith Lee appeared first on Reactor.

Former President Donald Trump’s criticism of CBS’ “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris has triggered the predictable legacy media meltdown. It’s unfortunate. Trump and Harris supporters should demand CBS come clean about why the network significantly altered Harris’ responses on the Biden-Harris administration’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  In ordinary times, all honest, professional journalists and specifically media critics would be dissecting the striking lapse in journalistic ethics at CBS. On the Oct. 6 broadcast of “Face the Nation,” the network played an excerpt of the full “60 Minutes” interview that would air on prime time the next day. In the preview, CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker first asks Harris whether the U.S. has any “sway” over Netanyahu, and the vice president responds by mentioning “the aid we have given to Israel,” the threat posed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and the “imperative to do what we can to allow Israel to defend itself.”  But when “60 Minutes” aired Harris’ answer, the network spliced together a substantially different response: “The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles.” The message was clear: No more aid to Israel. No more threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. And instead of the necessity of ensuring Israeli self-defense, viewers get a sound bite about the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic efforts.  It gets worse. In the prime time “60 Minutes” broadcast, CBS removed Harris’ second answer from the preview clip and swapped in a statement the vice president made in response to a different question.  In the substitute answer, Harris declares that the Gaza war must end: “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.” This tactical move is ethically bankrupt and journalistically indefensible. The network has disingenuously claimed that the editing was a standard exercise of its authority to trim interviews for time considerations. That rationale might work for the first answer, where CBS trimmed Harris’ four-paragraph answer down to a single sentence, but it completely ignores the second answer substitution, where “60 Minutes” egregiously swapped one single-sentence answer for another. Either way, CBS News would typically post the full interview on its website, as many of their news programs often do. But they didn’t do that here. Since CBS has declined to fully explain the editing controversy, viewers must speculate why the network substituted a different answer to the same prompt. An obvious possibility is that anti-Israel politics are the real driver here. As a result of its selective editing, CBS removed Harris’ statements about Israeli aid and self-defense and replaced another answer with a statement calling for a cease-fire, which Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders oppose. On the same day that CBS aired the edited “60 Minutes” interview, the network also rebuked host Tony Dokoupil for his fair, but sharp, questioning of author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who compared the treatment of Palestinians in Israel to the treatment of African Americans in the Jim Crow South during a recent “CBS Mornings” interview. To make matters more interesting, all of this is playing out amid CBS parent company Paramount Global’s pending sale to Skydance, a media production company run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is staunchly pro-Israel and has signaled he will implement massive cost cuts at Paramount.  Instead of searching for answers from CBS, our mainstream media has focused on blasting Trump, who has called for CBS to lose its broadcasting license. The Washington Post asserted that Trump’s push for CBS to lose its broadcasting rights “evokes government control of media, which is a hallmark of authoritarianism.” But as Nathan Simonton, one of the five members of the Federal Communications Commission, has pointed out, the FCC “acts on complaints about distortion, not complaints about editorial positions,” and the commissioners have already “contemplated the possibility of distortionary reporting taking place via splicing” in other cases. That’s another reason CBS must come clean and release the full transcript of Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview. Reversing its declining credibility relies on them finally doing the right thing. Originally published at RealClearPolitics.com We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post CBS’ Refusal to Release Full ‘60 Minutes’ Harris Transcript Is Journalistically Indefensible appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Since October 7, 2023, Twitch has reportedly been restricting the creation of new accounts in Israel and Palestine, raising concerns over censorship and the platform’s control over user access. According to a report from 404 Media, individuals in these regions have faced barriers when trying to sign up, with verification processes through both phone and email leading to error messages and blocking access to the platform. Twitch restored email sign-ups in Israel and Palestine after disabling them following the October 7 attacks. Twitch has since responded, explaining on social media that it had “temporarily disabled sign-ups with email verification in Israel and Palestine” following the violent attack on October 7. The company stated that the measure was intended to “prevent uploads of graphic material related to the attack and to protect the safety of users.” Despite this, the platform insisted that new registrations were never fully halted, claiming that sign-ups continued from both regions, although email verification remained an obstacle. Further clarifying its position, Twitch admitted that the feature meant to allow email verification was mistakenly not restored after its temporary suspension. “We deeply regret this unacceptable miss, and the confusion it has caused,” the company acknowledged, confirming that the issue has since been addressed, with email verification now functional for affected users. However, 404 Media’s report casts doubt on the platform’s narrative. The outlet reported its unsuccessful attempt to create a Twitch account from Israel using a VPN, with both phone and email verification methods remaining blocked, suggesting a more extensive and perhaps deliberate restriction than Twitch has admitted. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Twitch Sparks Outrage with Account Restrictions in Israel and Palestinian Regions appeared first on Reclaim The Net.