I’m going to get the really bad one out of the way…

Her Name Is Not Honey Boo Boo

Just shy of her 16th birthday, Alana Thompson, a public high schooler, is saving to buy her first car, has dreams of being a neonatal nurse, and is trying to get straight A’s. She works after school and on weekends, and spends time going to the pool and the mall with her sister and niece.

But the work she’s doing isn’t typical. She works as a reality television star, and has been doing so since she was just a toddler. And she’d like people, including her peers at school who exclaimed “Oh, it’s Honey Boo Boo!” when she started there, to understand the name she’s known for is not her name: “My mama did not name me Honey Boo Boo. My name is Alana.”

Sixteen is a stark split in teenagerdom, one that comes with the potential for driver’s licenses, the end of high school finally in sight, and what feels like a line between your childhood and young adulthood. But for Alana, whose birthday is August 28, the ties between the past and present are tighter, and more documented, than most. Amid discourse on how we talk about teenage girls, particularly those who have a level of cultural presence and celebrity power that renders it too easy to think of them as icons or examples rather than human beings, is Alana.

Have you noticed they love the word “icon?” Let the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon wash over you and you will see the word everywhere, being defined down to meaninglessness.

Honey-Boo-Boo is not an icon of anything except maybe Metabolic Syndrome X.

 

 

 

Biden’s Palin visits Palin’s Biden. Much presidential. So solemn. Wow.

 

Personal update: Last night, while throwing up, my obese cat clearly said the words HAL HOLBROOK.

 

These Witches Are Trying to Hex the Taliban

The digital coven is small, fewer than 50 members, but it’s earnestly working towards helping Afghans through a mixture of donations and spellwork. In the aftermath of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, a group of witches decided to gather online to fight against the group and help Afghans. Motherboard agreed to grant anonymity to several moderators in the group’s Discord because they feared targeted harassment campaigns.

It’s not just digital attacks the witches are worried about. A stickied post in a channel on the Discord acts as a kind of mission statement for the group. “As you are all aware, Afghanistan is in a very dire situation and many of us are preparing rituals and performing incantations to help alleviate the human suffering that is occuring there,” the post said. “The Taliban, as horribly as they’ve shown themselves to be, are very spiritually aware and they routinely take steps to dispel, ward off, and weaken magick. They have indications and rituals of their own which can at the very least neutralize us—at worst can cause damage to our spiritual selves.”

Their concerns against online harassment, at least, are warranted. The group initially formed on August 17 on the /r/BewitchTheTaliban subreddit. Within hours of the group starting, trolls and shitposters flooded the subreddit. A post from the user u/dumbest_bitch went viral. “Do NOT face Allah alone when Astral projecting,” the post began. “He is so fucking powerful. I’m not at a power level to do this alone. I barely escaped from my life and I’m spiritually injured to a great amount, but I think I’ll make it.”

People on Twitter and other social media platforms posted and reposted dumbest_bitch’s post, intimating that it was representative of naive magickal practitioners out of touch with reality. The moderators of /r/BetwitchTheTaliban banned dumbest_bitch and the poster apologized. “My post is not meant to be taken seriously. I’m not a witch. I have no involvement with any of it. I thought it was kind of obvious that it was a joke but I now realize that the original purpose of the sub was not satirical,” dumbest_bitch said on Reddit. “Anyways, I was really not expecting some obscure ass subreddit to get this much attention, let alone my post.”

 

I love upbeat pop songs about horrible things.