Kanye West is a piece of shit 🙂
➕ Making sense of Iran's call to "disband" the morality police, & I'm losing it over the poems Halsey used to write on tumblr about Matty Healy 💀
Happy Monday my angels!!! So nice to be back talking to you and I hope your weekend gave/is giving everything you needed it to. My weekend was full of… admin. But the good kind! On Saturday Flo and I picked up one of our mates’ vans and headed out to Hamilton to pick up some outdoor furniture for our whare (home!!) Honestly, a hilar sight to see me (who can barely see over the dash) hooning down the road in this thing with a whole bunch of furniture in the back, but for the most part it was smooth sailing (and when we got stuck in traffic we had Noah Kahan’s new album to keep us company.)
Then Hayden made us homemade pork bao buns for dinner & we invited our mate over to thank him for the van, and as the night went on, more and more of our besties showed up for a drink and a chat and it was unplanned but just very cute.
The next day I woke up (kinda hungover tbh) at 5am to go along as Flo’s support team for a half marathon she was running in Omaha!! I’d never been but I heard the beach was gorg, and wanted to cheer Flo on (I made her a sign that said Flomaha) so it felt like a great time to do it all. It was a STUNNING day, so after a pie and a Powerade (to cure the aforementioned hangover) I was really enjoying this view:
Once we got home I had a nap, and then actually did some work, which brings me to something I need to chat to you all about!!!
We’re in the process of moving all our current SYSCA supporters from Memberful to Substack (so we can have you all in one place and offer more goodies!) SO! If anything funky goes on with your payments over the next few weeks, just reach out and let me know, and I’ll fix it!!
PS: this feels like a good time to ask you to please, if you love the work we do, consider becoming a supporter. If you have the means to pay for the media you love, it keeps it free and accessible for everyone who can’t afford it - and it keeps me employed!
Kanye West had a big weekend of being a piece of shit
Iran to disband morality police amid ongoing protests, says attorney general
🏀Slam Dunc: On his fave piece of research (NERD ALERT)🏀
I need you to see the poems Halsey wrote for Matty Healy
Kanye West had a big weekend of being a piece of shit
Over the weekend Kanye West has continued to spew his vile antisemitic bullshit, in quite a huge way. He appeared on Alex Jones’s - the far-right conspiracy theorist who has just been in court for saying that the Sandy Hook shooting was a ‘hoax,’ and has since gone on to declare bankruptcy - show ‘Infowars’ where he praised Hitler, and said that people need to "stop dissing the Nazis all the time” (among MANY other things.)
This antisemitic rhetoric has become a huge part of Ye’s personality/ brand as of late, and this was a truly disgusting show of it (and yes, we know Kanye has bipolar disorder, but at this stage his actions are too dangerous to be explained away with a caveat.)
Some other updates:
After Kanye took to Twitter to post an image of a swastika blended with a star of David, he was once again suspended from the platform for ‘inciting violence’
Parler -the social media app that Ye was set to buy- are no longer selling to him, after they “mutually agreed” to part ways before closing the deal
The R/Kanye Subreddit has been turned into a Holocaust education centre AND Taylor swift fan page
And the literal President of The United States had to tweet, this in 2022:
Iran to “disband morality police” amid ongoing protests, says attorney general
Iran's morality police, which is tasked with enforcing the country's Islamic dress code, is being disbanded, the country's attorney general says. Mohammad Jafar Montazeri's comments, yet to be confirmed by other agencies, were made at an event on Sunday.
To be incredibly clear - this is a headline from the BBC - which implies that the regime is going to get rid of the morality police (the morality police are in charge of policing the rules on clothing/ head coverings in Iran and detained Mahsa Amini before she died in custody) “as a concession to the protest movement.” Here’s how The New York Times reported it:
The decision, reported by state news outlets late Saturday night, appeared to be a significant victory for feminists who have sought for years to dismantle the force and for the protest movement ignited by the death of the young woman, Mahsa Amini, 22, in September in the custody of the morality police. The unrest has amounted to one of the biggest challenges in decades to Iran’s system of authoritarian clerical rule and the decision to scrap the morality police was the government’s first major concession to the protesters.
The morality police “was abolished by the same authorities who installed it,” Attorney General Mohammad Javad Montazeri said in remarks during a meeting on Saturday where officials were discussing the unrest, according to state media reports. But he went on to suggest that the judiciary would still enforce restrictions on “social behavior.”
On Thursday, the attorney general said that the authorities were reviewing the country’s head scarf regulations and would issue a decision within 15 days.
Since information about Iran has been hard to get (and hard to fact-check), I did some further reading to try and get a sense of how people in Iran feel about this. Naturally, the vibe was that this was merely something the authorities were ‘saying’ to make the protesters chill out, and that even if the morality police were disbanded, the laws that they were ‘checking’ were being abided by are still very much intact. Here’s what Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journo/ activist is saying:
Obviously, I don’t have the answers, but just wanted to give you a few ways this headline/ story could be interpreted!
🏀Slam Dunc: On his fave piece of research (NERD ALERT)🏀
This section is written by Dunc: my bestie, my mentor, a huge basketball fan (and DJ on the odd occasion.) Dunc has pretty hot takes on most things, and he’s also the founder of The Spinoff & host of The Fold, so when you’ve finished reading this, there’s plenty more of him out there for you xxx
So it’s been a huge week for me. Firstly I got elbowed in the face at basketball and now I have this cute Pete Wentz vibe on just the one eye – very delicate eye shadow, very chic for xmas party season. Very cool thing to be explaining to the CFO of NZ’s biggest bank this morning. Secondly, hours after my injury, my favourite piece of research fell out of a clear blue sky (I know having a favourite piece of research is objectively massively weird but I’m at peace with that).
It’s called Where Are The Youth Audiences?, and it’s a really detailed survey of what 700 Gen Z New Zealanders do with their attention. And honestly it’s not surprising at all in some ways – it’s YouTube, it’s Instagram, it’s not as much Tiktok as overseas which honestly shocked me. It’s really not TV and radio etc. But beyond the obvi headlines there’s all this detail which really makes you think. It’s commissioned by NZ on Air, which is a bit like NZ’s version of the BBC or ABC, so the whole point of it is to figure out whether the shows and music (yes, we publicly fund pop music in NZ, it’s cool) it pays for is actually being seen by young people.
It found that less than half of those surveyed could remember watching any NZ content in the past month. Which is quite confronting – one of the things people like NZ on Air worry about is how you tie a country together and know who you are as a people when you’re mostly seeing random content from all over the world (very post-monoculture, I know, I know).
It creates huge opportunities too – like SYSCA itself is the fever dream of three small-town wāhine which has created a global community, and that’s the beautiful upside. But that sense of your culture being lost in a hurricane of content is legit freaky too. The WATYA research does not for a minute pretend to know what the hell anyone is supposed to do about this. But in a world which still has a weird bias towards media made for older people and distributed through older platforms, just being aware of who you’re missing is the first step. AND, if you want more of the buzzy details, here’s the piece I wrote out the back of it)
Til next time!!!!!
I need you to see the poems Halsey wrote for Matty Healy
This is peak Tumblr (I remember seeing these floating around when I was a super user of this app and didn’t even know who Matty Healy was.) They’re hilariously intense and I just know we ate them UP in their heyday. For anyone interested, Halsey also wrote the song ‘Colors’ about Matty, and I think he was her ‘muse’ for most of her Room 93 EP (which I used to LOVE in my Tumblr days.)
Protests in China, & Gaslighting, Explained (The Shit Show Podcast)
What do we do with Chris Brown? (Culture Vulture Podcast)
Dwight Schrute Was A Warning (The Atlantic)
A Killer on the Loose Leaves an Idaho College Town Shaken (The New York Times)
San Francisco to allow police 'killer robots' (BBC)
 | A guest post by
|
And Kayne... there are no words. It’s amazing how “never again” is happening again.
Love the article on Dwight. The Office is my favorite but I didn’t realize just how much of an impact it really has on life and work itself between the characters and what happens. And, unfortunately, there are those Dwights and Michaels out there.