Many Such Takes: Vance on Bluesky, Khamenei the Poster, Baddie Mayoral Wife, Abolish Hospitals
The most unhinged discourse of the week
Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Substack message and I will happily remove, no matter who you are or what you said.
CHH Podcast Update
As many of you know, I launched my podcast two weeks ago. You can also find it on Spotify. Most of the comments I’ve gotten on my two episodes so far have been really positive, but I’ve noticed I lost a decent amount of paid subscribers as a direct result of sending out the podcast episodes via email the way I normally send out my articles. The podcast is not replacing my writing, but I think a decent amount of paid subscribers subscribed for my writing, saw the podcast and thought, “Oh, she’s doing this now?!”
Rest assured, this is first and foremost a writing endeavor and will remain that way, but the podcast will be a fun add-on that won’t detract from anything else. However, I may experiment with doing fewer episodes to begin with (maybe one every two weeks?) and not email-blasting them but instead giving you all a heads up that a new episode has launched, before I get into my article of the day. Sound off in the comments and let me know what you’d prefer! You can also just subscribe on Spotify if you’re into podcasts, so that you can see my new episodes that way. And of course, I’ll be sharing the episodes on the Substack app if you follow me here.
Vance on Bluesky
Officially, at least for five minutes, Will Stancil was not the most right-wing person on Bluesky (I kid, I kid.) No, but really. JD Vance joined Bluesky this week and was banned almost immediately—not for breaking any rules, per se, but just for…being himself.
Obviously, he was trolling here because Bluesky has a reputation for being extremely unwelcoming to anyone even close to the Republican party (to put things into perspective, I’m on a “conservative sympathizers” block list for following Ben Dreyfuss , who is also a liberal.) So perhaps he just wanted to tease Bluesky to see how quickly they could let their “tolerant left” mask slip. Only one problem: they don’t care.
While right-wing Twitter applauded Vance’s masterful trolling, some on the left took matters into their own hands and created their own JD Vance parody accounts:
Khamenei Poster Arc
Say what you will about Ali Khamenei, the 86-year-old Supreme Leader of Iran, but I bet you didn’t think he posted like this, did you?
This tweet was from 2013, by the way. His latest stuff is much more focused on, you know, current affairs.
Anyway, as a result of those current affairs, Twitter has been doing what Twitter does best: digging into old tweets and pulling out the old “This you?” Except in the case of Khamenei, his old tweets make him more likable, not less. Or at the very least, more…intriguing.
He even had a Lib arc in 2015:
And finally, his Feminist Arc:
Anyway, I’m not sure what he was doing in the 2010s, but it sounds like he was doing what many of us would consider “going woke.” And now the Middle East is in chaos. Coincidence???
Anyway, it’s not all fun and games. Apparently Khamenei has made a new enemy: the American right wing.
Baddie Mayoral Wife
In the midst of the hotly-debated NYC mayoral election, candidate Zohran Mamdani is under intense scrutiny for several things (to be honest, I’m not keeping up with the political side of this so much, but people seem to hate both candidates a lot? What else is new?) Anyway, he’s getting a lot of attention for something apolitical: having a hot wife.
I feel like this gets to the heart of Online Hotness debates. Obviously, his wife is very pretty, but we just came off a week-long bender of men everywhere insisting Sabrina Carpenter turned them asexual, and who could forget the “Margot Robbie is mid” discourse of 2023? I think what’s happening is that there is a very different set of standards for politicians or politicans’ wives—kind of like “office hot” rules, and people are much more likely to go bananas over someone who is natural-hot (people still horny-post about AOC, for example.) Alternatively, maybe Zohran’s wife really is significantly hotter than pop stars and models, because she looks naturally pretty and doesn’t seem to have had any crazy work done, or stage makeup on. She looks like the prettiest woman at a party in Brooklyn.
There were some odd takes for sure:
And some wife-guy-by-proxy takes:
Looks like she may be a fashion girl too?? I know this isn’t the point, but I’m obsessed with the handbag! (That’s the female gaze for ya.)
But seriously, I have another take—I’m not surprised? Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, hot! Assortative mating at its finest.
Abolish Hospitals
Is there anything the anarchists don’t want to abolish? From the people who brought you “teachers are cops” come “hospitals are institutions of social control.” Abolish them!
This person (who identifies as a “time abolitionist”) is dreaming big. We’re not stopping at hospitals!
*Oprah voice* YOU get abolition, YOU get abolition!
Commenters (including fellow anarchists) were split as to whether or not this was a real person, with some people accusing them of being a fed:
Evergreen:
Funny Tweets/Other Happenings
This woman’s child’s portrait of her that looks suspiciously like Your Favorite President:
Wonderful things happening in the world of literature:
This perplexing “respectful MAGA” man at the No Kings protest:
The worst horse name in the world:
The Supreme Leader of Iran won't see your mean tweets about him, but your friends who are leaders of fascistic theocratic states will.
Think before you post!
I don’t know what’s so perplexing about “MAGA son.” We could use more people like him, who have big political disagreements with relatives but are still vocal about their love for them.