a show which is slowly sucking my life energy, a vampire-show, a dark night-creature show which feeds on our souls
Emily goes for a job in the jardin du Luxembourg. She is still within the safe circle of episode 1.
The joke about the 4th floor being the 5th, which was never funny, is flogged again: Emily gets hit on by her hot neighbour.
Emily does not know what flirting is because flirting does not exist in America. Emily does not know how to fuck because the French have invented fucking. She has so much to learn
At work, Emily has a dramatic moment:
She says, unlike these cool French people,
'I'm from the outside looking in'
We believe this! Emily has suffered! Not only is she rich, white, dripping in Swarovski cristals of privilege, but also: she has not struggled onscreen once!
Emily goes to a party wearing a big black dress. The Eiffel Tower is in the background DRINK
yet another man flirts with Emily and by this point I must say we have to pull over for a second and let me rant:
By this point, a half-dozen men have flirted with Emily in Paris. Why? Why do they find her irresistible? Because she is wise, confident, or sexy?
NO Emily is a vehicle of boredom. Emily in Paris is not a bad show about Paris, it's a bad show about American women
Emily lives in an imaginary world where a 24 year old has never taken nudes or heard of cheating, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is 80% of contemporary American culture.
Emily gets unwarranted attention despite being non-sexual, and as a gay man, I resent this.
Ok let's proceed. Back at work, Emily types wistfully into a laptop while words pop up in the screen. This is a bold visual technique we have never seen before.
Emily finds grammatical gender confusing in French: vagina is a masculine word! (fun fact: 'dick' is feminine).
She tweets: THE VAGINA IS NOT MASCULINE this is an unlikely social media hit (Emily is young, her pussy is tight and she's good at social media!). Brigitte Macron RT!
FACTCHECK: this is not only unrealistic, it makes no sense. Languages have unique features. Those are not funny to the speakers of this language because that is how they communicate. Emily would not understand a joke about English because she cannot name a single tense in English
There is nothing particularly weird in French about the word 'vagin' being masculine: it just is. That doesn't make the word sound like a man. It's just grammar.
But Emily is not here to learn, she continues on her single-handed mission to evangelise the gospel of True Capital
Emily breaks up with her boyfriend. I feel nothing.
She screams into the phone:
'This city is filled with romance and light and passion and sex'
It's not. It's just a city. Just a place. Quite boring at times. Full of people.
Goodnight y'all
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So I was in the archives minding my business, when I found the most insane box:
a STASH of LOVE LETTERS between Spanish women and Moroccan men from the 1940s seized by colonial authorities for having ILLEGAL RELATIONSHIPS
follow me!! 🇪🇸🇲🇦💄💃
María was a tango dancer in cabarets in Seville. She wrote passionate letters to her lover in Tetuán, the capital of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. But the letters he wrote back were all seized, and their plans to get married, foiled by authorities
Sp authorities in Morocco kept an extremely meticulous surveillance of these relationships: there are hundreds of files lying in the Spanish state archives.
Like most women in her situation, María was banned from entering Morocco, and her lover was banned from entering Spain
All day I've felt nauseous thinking about the attack against the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba.
Every time we're murdered, while we're shopping for food or praying, I think we've reached the lowest point.
Every time I'm proved wrong: nobody wants North African Jews to live /
We are blamed for leaving, we are blamed for staying. We get killed in Paris, we get killed in Djerba. We get blamed for selling ourselves to the West and assimilating, we get called stupid for trying to keep our communities and traditions. /
Nobody loves us alive. Zionism kills us, nationalism kills us, and a pack of vultures circle around our dead bodies to make us symbols of a long-gone happy time of coexistence that can only be celebrated because we are dead. /
A thread on the EU’s only South American border 🇧🇷🇫🇷 🧵
Guyane is one of the overseas départements of France - it’s a full part of French Republic and EU. But it is the only such département that is not on an island and thus has a substantial land border with Brazil and Suriname.
Most of this border (730km) runs through the thick Amazonian forest. Guyane has very low population density and so do the neighbouring regions of Brazil, though the state of Amapá is nearly twice as populated as Guyane
Headlines in France have been dominated by events in Mayotte, a small island in the Indian Ocean, where a huge police operation is taking place.
Why is Mayotte so important for Fr politics? Why is it part of the EU? & why do most migrant deportations in France occur there? 🧵👇🏼
Let’s start off with a brief summary of what’s going on, which isn’t much covered in English:
the French minister of interior, Gérald Darmanin has announced a police operation called “Wuambushu” (‘taking back’ in shimaoré) on the island 2/
Large amounts of police forces (1800 people!) have been sent from Metropolitan France in order to bulldoze shantytowns and deport mass number of immigrants so as to ‘reestablish’ law and order on the island 3/
(Photo: Le Monde)
going back further, @BentIfriqiya looks at the legacy of Bourguiba and the immediate post-independence years of the 1950s-80s in shaping racism in Tunisia
I want to tell you a story of how radio can change people’s lives. It’s about a show in Gibraltar run by this woman, Norma Delgado
(photo credit: Gerry Martinez)
From 1969 to 1982, Gibraltar’s border with Spain was closed for political reasons. There was no way out of the territory by land, and many people had family stuck on the other side.
Franco even shut down the phone lines! So you could not hear your loved one’s voices. Except…
… except if you tuned into Radio Gibraltar, and to Norma’s program, “Recordándote: un programa de discos dedicados”.
Norma would read out messages from family members who dedicated songs to those on the other side, serving as a vital emotional link across the border