If martin wants to show us what an awful person is tywin , why stannis says tywin had the look of a king ?

I think that’s the very point of the scene, in fact.

As “Davos V” ASOS begins, we see Stannis grappling with the political situation in the aftermath of the Red Wedding. The contrast between pragmatic, pessimistic Stannis and the jubilant, supernaturally driven party of Melisandre and her supporters is deliberate and dramatic, and the author underlines the tug of war between the two. While Stannis resigns himself to pursuing pardons and conciliation toward the former partisans of Robb Stark and Balon Greyjoy, Melisandre and her party urge him to up the supernatural stakes - and the only way to do that, they assure him, is by sacrificing Edric Storm to get himself a dragon. Through Davos’ eyes, we can watch Stannis push back and back against the suggestion - refusing to believe in the power of Melisandre’s visions, refusing to consider sacrificing the innocent Edric. Eventually, however, he comes to this anecdote:

Melisandre put her hand on the king’s arm. “The Lord of Light cherishes the innocent. There is no sacrifice more precious. From his king’s blood and his untainted fire, a dragon shall be born.”

Stannis did not pull away from Melisandre’s touch as he had from his queen’s. The red woman was all Selyse was not; young, full-bodied, and strangely beautiful, with her heart-shaped face, coppery hair, and unearthly red eyes. “It would be a wondrous thing to see stone come to life,” he admitted, grudging. “And to mount a dragon … I remember the first time my father took me to court, Robert had to hold my hand. I could not have been older than four, which would have made him five or six. We agreed afterward that the king had been as noble as the dragons were fearsome.” Stannis snorted. “Years later, our father told us that Aerys had cut himself on the throne that morning, so his Hand had taken his place. It was Tywin Lannister who’d so impressed us.” His fingers touched the surface of the table, tracing a path lightly across the varnished hills. “Robert took the skulls down when he donned the crown, but he could not bear to have them destroyed. Dragon wings over Westeros … there would be such a …”

Stannis is being guided, nudged, indeed outright pushed toward the abyss by Melisandre, Selyse, Axell Florent, and the rest of their cronies. For the power of a dragon - that ultimate superweapon of the Targaryen kings, the trump card that could well give Stannis the upper hand against any remaining usurpers or foes - all Stannis has to do is kill one child. Tywin wouldn’t even blink at that situation: for a man who dispatched his pet monsters to brutally murder the children of Prince Rhaegar (and Princess Elia in the bargain), for a man who casually accepted the massacre and incredible social crime of the Red Wedding by claiming that it was better to kill “a dozen” men at dinner than 12,000 on a battlefield, the sacrifice of a bastard boy of no great dynastic importance in exchange for a dragon would probably seem a ludicrously easy choice. In this moment where he’s coming dangerously close to allowing his nephew, his daughter’s friend, a 12-year-old boy to be burned alive for the supposed magic contained in his royal blood, Stannis reaches to Tywin, a man who has built his political career in no small part on his willingness to use ruthless methods, even towards innocents, to achieve his political ends. It’s a potent and tempting point of comparison.

Yet as the anecdote underlines, it’s a falsehood. The dragons might have seemed fearsome to the little Baratheon boys, but they were skulls, the last of them no less than a century dead; stripped of flesh and life, the dragon skulls represented only a past glory, and could pose no threat to Robert or his younger brother. Robert and Stannis automatically assumed that the golden young man on the Iron Throne must have been the king, and that because he appeared so impressive, he must have been a noble person. What neither Robert nor Stannis could have known at that moment, though, was who Tywin really was - the same man who had drowned dozens upon dozens of Reyne noncombatants and wounded to end a rebellion, who a decade and a half later would release his troops in an orgy of bloodshed in the capital of the very king he was then serving. Tywin was and is indeed as noble as the dragons were fearsome - which is to say, not at all.

What this anecdote does, then, is bring Stannis right to the brink, before Davos intervenes to pull him back (at least a little, for now). The choice for Stannis in this moment is not simply the life of Edric Storm against the would-be stone dragon, but the turn toward a more Tywin-like approach to the war, his reign, and his very person or the determination to be the man Tywin would and will not be. Davos alone in this scene emphasizes that the Red Wedding was a grievous crime, an unnatural act which will haunt its perpetrators; he alone tries to show Stannis the falsehood of this approach. Tywin might have looked like a king to the toddler Stannis, but his power was and is based on crossing any line and authorizing any crime he can to further his own power and the glory of House Lannister. Stannis can look like the man he thought as a child was a king - or he can be the king Westeros deserves.

JUSTICE DEMOCRATS [LINK HERE]

JUSTICE DEMOCRATS [LINK HERE]

I love peter and shuri’s friendship that we all just made up

You might struggle with auditory processing if…

- Your catchphrase is “what?”

- You ask someone to repeat their question then finish processing and respond halfway through they’re finished repeating it.

- You somewhat processed what someone said but your brain won’t take it.

- You mishear what people say wildly wrong. Like, wildly wrong. Then you process it and it makes wayyyy more sense than whatever you thought someone originally said.

- “Wait, what?”

- Default face is a perplexed, confused look.

- You have to deal with rude people who refuse to repeat themselves and act exasperated at the suggestion, than proceed to get angry when you won’t respond to them and/or remember what they just said.

- You can hear a car door open down the street but you can’t hear someone talking to you in the same room.

- Talking is weird.

- You’re constantly seen as a bad listener (which, maybe isn’t that far from the truth- but they assume you’re not trying), unfocused (which I tend to be, but it’s unrelated), and so on. Nobody stops to consider that maybe you have processing issues.

- You were tested for hearing issues as a kid because you didn’t respond to people or talk much, but every test came back negative and your parents were told you have perfect hearing.

- The idea of talking to two people at once is terrifying beyond imagining.

- Responding to something someone said ages ago, even with a different conversation still going, the topic has moved on, and everyone forgot about it.

- “Huh?!”

A Second American Civil War?

Imagine that an impeachment resolution against Trump passes the House. Trump claims it’s the work of the “deep state.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity demands every honest patriot take to the streets. Rightwing social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Trump commands the armed forces to side with the “patriots.”

Or it’s November 2020 and Trump has lost the election. He charges voter fraud, claiming that the “deep state” organized tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote against him, and says he has an obligation not to step down. Demonstrations and riots ensue. Trump commands the armed forces to put them down.

If these sound far-fetched, consider Trump’s torrent of lies, his admiration for foreign dictators, his off-hand jokes about being “president for life” (Xi Xinping “was able to do that,” he told admirers in March. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot some day.’), and his increasing invocation of a “deep state” plot against him.  

The United States is premised on an agreement about how to deal with our disagreements. It’s called the Constitution. We trust our system of government enough that we abide by its outcomes even though we may disagree with them. Only once in our history – in 1861 – did enough of us distrust the system so much we succumbed to civil war.  

But what happens if a president claims our system is no longer trustworthy?

Last week Trump accused the “deep state” of embedding a spy in his campaign for political purposes. “Spygate” soon unraveled after Republican House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy dismissed it, but truth has never silenced Trump for long.

Trump’s immediate goal is to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. But his strategy appears to go beyond that. In tweets and on Fox News, Trump’s overall mission is repeatedly described as a “war on the deep state.”

In his 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré describes the “deep state” as a moneyed élite — “non-governmental insiders from banking, industry, and commerce” who rule in secret.  

America already may be close to that sort of deep state. As Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University found after analyzing 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, Gilens and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests.

Gilens’ and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” decision. It’s likely to be far worse now.

So when Trump says the political system is “rigged,” he’s not far off the mark. Bernie Sanders said the same thing.

A Monmouth Poll released in March found that a bipartisan majority of Americans already believes that an unelected “deep state” is manipulating national policy.

But here’s the crucial distinction. Trump’s “deep state” isn’t the moneyed interests. It’s a supposed cabal of government workers, intelligence personnel, researchers, experts, scientists, professors, and journalists – the people who make, advise about, analyze, or report on public policy.

In the real world, they’re supposed to be truth-tellers. In Trump’s conspiracy fantasy they’re out to get him – in cahoots with former members of the Obama administration, liberals, and Democrats.

Trump has never behaved as if he thought he was president of all Americans, anyway. He’s acted as if he’s only the president of the 63 million who voted for him – certainly not the 66 million who voted for Hillary or anyone who supported Obama.  

Nor has he shown any interest in unifying the nation, or speaking to the nation as a whole. Instead, he periodically throws red meat to his overwhelmingly white, rural, and older base.

And he has repeatedly shown he couldn’t care less about the Constitution.

So what happens if Trump is about to be removed – by impeachment or even an election? 

In early April, Sean Hannity predicted that if impeachment began, “there’s going to be two sides of this that are fighting and dividing this country at a level we’ve never seen” – “those that stand for truth and those that literally buy into the corrupt deep state attacks against a duly elected president.”

Last summer, Trump consigliore Roger Stone warned of “an insurrection like you’ve never seen,” and claimed any politician who voted to oust Trump “would be endangering their own life.”

A second civil war? Probably not. But the way Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest. That’s how low he’s taken us.

I missed a deadline for this thing I wanted to submit to. Why? I don’t know.

I think I need to admit to myself that I’m not a driven, ambitious person. I am a blob that needs to be made to do things, even things I like.

being as i am an idiot, and having been one my whole life, i just wanna say that i find it very easy to do nothing, and go nowhere. i eat chocolate late at night in the dark. i stand in the garden also. and i’m often waiting for something to happen. and i’m stupid.

Are y'all following the recent news about Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE)?

1. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced that ICE will separate children from their parents in detention, with no word on when they will be reunited (More here: http://time.com/5268572/jeff-sessions-illegal-border-separated/)

2. Of the 7,000+ children picked up by ICE and placed in homes in 2017, 1,475 children are currently missing and unaccounted for. (More here: http://time.com/5256734/government-missing-migrant-children/)

3. Documents obtained by the ACLU show massive horrific abuse of children in ICE custody, including kicking a child in the ribs, running over a 17 year old with a patrol car, sexually assaulting a 16 year old girl in a search, and detaining a 4 pound premature baby and her mother in an overcrowded and dirty cell full of sick people. (More here: https://www.aclusandiego.org/civil-rights-civil-liberties/)

4. ICE plans to destroy records of immigrant abuse, including sexual assault and deaths in custody (From an August 2017 report, more here: https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-patrol-abuses/ice-plans-start-destroying-records-immigrant)

ICE was only created in 2003, as part of the US’s post-9/11 hyper-militarized, xenophobic frenzy. We didn’t have this department 16 years ago, we do not need it, and we should abolish it immediately. I do not say this lightly: ICE is America’s gestapo and we should treat them with that level of serious resistance.

I’m fairly certain America hinges now on propaganda that everything is okay and we’re still a first world nation when actually, our country is slipping further and further, and we’re really just. The best third world country out here. Not even comparable to most first world countries, so we fucking aren’t one anymore

Sounds like we live in a police state where the rich tax the poor not to feed or protect them but to fund programs and legislature that defunds their resources and encourages them to die. The rich get richer and the middle class shrinks and suffocates while the entire country falls apart because corporate power greed refuses to see the consequences of their actions.

I wish I had the faith to believe what goes around comes around, but I think it’s time to understand that we’re the ones that need to come around and take action. The rich aren’t going to do jack shit for us anymore. Even the rich that care about people on the bottom don’t have the courage to help people en masse

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Eliza Taylor

http://celebdish.tumblr.com

Join us on the Podpocalypse Discord Chat Room (click here)

MARVEL 

link // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHUrAvKNF8s (collab w/ djcprod)

it’s kind of hilarious how some people actually do think mcu tony would feel offended by the superiority of shuri’s intellect like?? first of all he immediately hit it off with bruce, who’s technically smarter than him in a bunch of areas according to some marvel fan ratings. he acknowledges steve as the chief battle strategy voice while in the field. he literally made pepper his boss. helen cho talked about her regeneration craddle to tony like “this is the future, your clunky metal suits will be left to dust” and tony was all “great! that is EXACTLY the plan” he’s out there funding university research and enabling the superhero dreams of teens he saw on YouTube and whose coding abilities actually already beat his own like what on earth made people start thinking tony “futurist” stark is intimidated by human progress

In the world Republicans have constructed, a Democrat who wants to give you health care and a higher wage is disrespectful, while a Republican who opposes those things but engages in a vigorous round of campaign race-baiting is respectful. The person who’s holding you back isn’t the politician who just voted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the wealthy and corporations, it’s an East Coast college professor who said something condescending on Twitter.   So what are Democrats to do? The answer is simple: This is a game they cannot win, so they have to stop playing. Know at the outset that no matter what you say or do, Republicans will cry that you’re disrespecting good heartland voters. There is no bit of PR razzle-dazzle that will stop them. Remember that white Republicans are not going to vote for you anyway, and their votes are no more valuable or virtuous than the votes of any other American. Don’t try to come up with photo ops showing you genuflecting before the totems of the white working class, because that won’t work. Advocate for what you believe in, and explain why it actually helps people.   Finally — and this is critical — never stop telling voters how Republicans are screwing them over. The two successful Democratic presidents of recent years were both called liberal elitists, and they countered by relentlessly hammering the GOP over its advocacy for the wealthy. And it worked

Why Democrats can’t win the ‘respect’ of Trump voters

This should be sent to Donnelly, Heitcamp, Manchin, and McCaskil. They’re all going to vote to confirm torturer and war criminal Gina Haspel to run CIA, and when the election comes around, it won’t matter at all, as they fight to keep their seats in the Senate.

(via wilwheaton)