#2010 non-race

[umseb]

sebastian vettel being mischievous in the garage during pre-season testing, jerez, spain - february 12, 2010 📷 daniel kalisz / motorsport images

#sebastian vettel #f1 #formula 1 #flashback fic ref #flashback fic ref 2010 #not a race #non-race #2010 not a race #2010 non-race #pre-season #pre-season 2010 #pre-season 10 #pre-season2010 #pre-season10 #testing #testing 2010 #jerez #jerez 2010 #spain

[umlewis]

lewis hamilton, jenson button, and the bbc f1 crew in an impromptu performance of wonderwall while making a guest appearance on the great british pub quiz, 2010

#lewis hamilton #jenson button #f1 #formula 1 #flashback fic ref #flashback fic ref 2010 #not a race #non-race #2010 not a race #2010 non-race

[medievalandfantasymelee]

COME ONE, COME ALL to the MOSTE ILLUSTRIOUS TOURNAMENT of the FINEST, the MOSTE PUISSANT and HOTTEST MEN MEDIEVAL MEDIA HAS TO ITS CREDIT.

Be it known that we shall accept submissions of the hottest men OF THE PEOPLES’ CHOOSING from any live-action* TV or movie media property set between the years AD 500 – 1550 (Tudors WELCOME!!), and any fantasy properties which emulate said period!

KNOW ALSO that we, by the grace of this fine hellsite and with the counsel of the moste honorable and illustrious @hotvintagepoll (many thanks), have made

THESE GUIDELINES here given:

ANY HOT GUY who appears in any movie or TV show released in ANY YEAR, from ANY COUNTRY, shall be deemed eligible for entry. Below are listed examples of eligible properties. If YE BE NOT CERTAIN whether your hot guy is eligible, submit him anyway!

Examples of Eligible Properties: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-03), Game of Thrones (2011-19) House of the Dragon (2022), Wolf Hall (2015-2024), The Tudors (2007-2010), Ladyhawke (1985), The Princess Bride (1987), The White Queen (2013), Rise of Empires: Ottoman (2020-2022), Vikings (2013-2020), The Last Kingdom (2015-2022), Diriliş: Ertuğrul (2014), A Knight’s Tale (2001), BBC’s Robin Hood (2006-3009), The Last Duel (2021), The Story of Minglan (2018), The Borgias (2013), Robin Hood (1939), Outlaw King (2018), Pilgrimage (2017), Legend (1985), Braveheart (1995), The Green Knight (2021), Excalibur (1981), Beowulf & Grendel (2005), The Lion in Winter (1968), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), The Black Adder (Blackadder Series 1, 1982), Rashomon (1950)

Remember: This is just a list of examples—WOW ME!

These following titles are examples of properties that do not fall within or emulate the stated time period and therefore DO NOT QUALIFY: The Three Musketeers (Any Version), Pirates of the Caribbean (2004), Barbarians (2020), Gladiator (2000), Ben Hur (1959), Shogun (2024), Elizabeth (1999), 300 (2006), Troy (2004), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), Disney's Robin Hood (1973)**, Yojimbo (1961), Shakespeare in Love (1998), King Arthur (2004)***

For the purposes of this tournament, "Man" and "Guy" are defined as any bi-pedal humanoid male character played by a man. As such, characters belonging to non-human races such as Hobbits, Orcs, Elves, Demons, Fauns, Werewolves etc. ARE admissible, and, indeed, encouraged.

If you have propaganda you forgot to include in your submission, just hold onto it and send it in an ask after the Tournament begins.

You may submit as many hot men as you like but please submit only ONE ENTRANT per submission.

Do not hesitate to submit ANY hot guy you think may qualify, no matter how popular he is. There is no such thing as a shoo-in with these tournaments. If you think "Someone MUST have submitted him already!" Everyone else is probably thinking that too and then he may well NEVER get submitted and we don't want that.

Do not worry about how many submissions your hot guy might have had already--I need to get a sense of who the strongest contenders are in order to fairly seed the draws, and the best way to do that is volume of submissions.

We are voting on the hotness of the characters. While the actors who portray them are of course a major factor in this, we are not voting on the actors themselves, therefore propaganda pertaining to the actors real lives (aside from anecdotes relating to their portrayal of the character) is not admissible.

By that same token, in the case of historical figures (e.g. Henry VIII) we are judging hotness based on the fictionalized portrayals of them in these properties, not on historical fact.

Regarding immortal/time-travelling/dimension-hopping/extremely long-lived characters, regardless of when the character was born, the main action**** of the story must take place within the Medieval Period (see dates listed at the top of this post) or Medieval-esque fantasy fantasy realm in order for them to be eligible for submission. As such, characters like the Pevensie brothers (The Chronicles of Narnia) and Ash Williams (Army of Darkness) are admissible, but Asgardians (the MCU Thor films) are not.

I, as the Administrator and Master of Revels of this tournament, am exercising discretion in the admittance of characters from works by Shakespeare, since many of them have no set date.

SUBMISSIONS SHALL REMAIN OPEN FOR ONE MONTH FROM THIS DATE (27 May, 2024)

The Tourney shall begin at a date yet to be determined with the Melee (Qualifying Rounds), wherein the entrants with the fewest submissions and least propaganda will duke it out in a free for all brawl to determine who will enter the Lists.

SUBMIT YOUR ENTRANTS HERE TODAY!!!

-- Master of Revels

*The "live-action" qualification does have a caveat: exception may be made for those CGI films which were all the rage in the mid-00's that used the motion-capture and likeness of the actors; for example characters from, Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (2007) are admissible.

** this one doesn't qualify, not because it isn't the right time period, but because it falls solidly under the "Animated" category.

***Yes, sadly we are deprived of the beautiful countenances of Clive Owen, Mads Mikkelsen, Ioan Gruffudd et al because the producers of this film in their infinite wisdom and in an attempt to seem "more historically accurate" chose to set it during the Roman withdrawal from Britain, which occurred in the 5th Century (About a CENTURY earlier than Authurian tradition) and is generally agreed to have ended by AD 410. It therefore does not fall under the Medieval umbrella and is not eligible for submission.

**** "Main Action" here defined as "More than half an hour of a movie and more than two episodes of a series"

#medieval fantasy #asoif/got #lord of the rings #a knight's tale #the last kingdom #vikings #the princess bride #house of the dragon #medieval films #tumblr polls #fantasyandmedievalmelee #tournament poll #game of thrones #got

[nekropsii]

Since yours are the only Homestuck takes ever I (a long-time fanon Gamzee lover) am doing what you recommended and branching out into other media. So I ask: what non-Homestuck character is the most like fanon Gamzee (specifically the interpretation where he's just a goofy silly cinnamon roll and nothing much more)?

I don’t really watch any media with characters that are “goofy silly cinnamon rolls and nothing more”, frankly. Just not really my thing.

If you want a comedic relief character with ADHD in a story capable of taking them very powerfully seriously at times, Beast Boy from Teen Titans (2003). If you’re not into superhero media or don’t want to cope with the severe psychological fuckery TT2003 pulls, especially with it’s honestly really fucking good handling of CSA, but still want a pretty similar character concept, then… Sokka, from Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005).

If you want a chaotic little dude from a kids show specifically but also to keep the “media with deep issues in its handling of race” aspect, then Discord from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010).

If you want to keep the murder, Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986). TCM 2 will especially appeal to the craving for goofy, it’s a really solid Horror/Comedy. Leatherface in general will appeal to any cravings for a sympathetic villain.

If you want a lovable shithead who is goofy and silly but can still wreck your shit and is aggressively Kind Of Gay, and from an anime that also happens to be kind of dogshit at handling race, Goku from Dragon Ball Z Kai (2009).

Not sure if this will do anything for you, but it’s the best I can think of at the moment.

Thanks, btw!

#sorry that this post is deranged 💔 #homestuck #nekro.sms

[centrally-unplanned]

I saw this slightly-old post making the rounds recently by former alt-right memelord Walt Bismark, on how the alt-right "won" in the late 2010's - positing that as the cause of why it generally vanished. I agree overall with the vanishing part, its not gone-gone ofc but it waned as a cohesive movement. But I saw a lot of people (and generally not alt-right figures) agreeing with its conclusion and I am a bit more skeptical of those.

Its largely a personal essay so I wont address most of it, but it has a summary of five main points that outline essentially "the agenda of the Alt Right at the beginning" to evaluate success upon. Bismark thinks they won on all five, but overall I think this is playing a trick of inventing an enemy to claim you defeated. Anyway, the points:

1: Shift the “Overton Window” of acceptable public discourse to make it politically viable to openly discuss the interests of white people in mainstream politics, in the same way black people or Jewish people discuss their collective interests. 

This one I will grant a partial victory - there was a legitimate intensification of "white as identity" in politics, a making explicit what was implicit in the 2010's. Now ofc I consider this to be a classic horseshoe moment; the hard left at the time was also extremely interested in abandoning race neutrality and valorizing racial identity as an organizing principle, and did it in a very ham-fisted way that the right capitalized on, so it was an easy battle to win - but that is what it is, ofc the wider environment defined the goals & strategy. I mention it however because I do think this is only partial, and the gap between implicit and explicit isn't that relevant. He mentions as an example of this success:

Affirmative action was of course squashed by SCOTUS and the necessary legal infrastructure is being deployed to burn it down. Mainstream conservatives are mobilizing a lot of resources and energy to this end.

But conservatives have been fighting affirmative action for 20+ years, easily. Here is a 1999 article on precisely such a campaign, I literally just googled "conservatives affirmative action [year]" and I get results each time, 2003 had big cases (the Bollinger cases) on AA, etc. I remember "affirmative action bake sale" memes from like 2006 at my uni! What changed between Bollinger and 2023's Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is that conservatives had just had enough time to stack courts, and wait for Supreme Court justices to die. That just...takes time to do! The strategy hadn't changed between 2003 and 2023. And meanwhile, did they win? They won that court case, sure. What do you...think the ethic makeup of the next Harvard class is gonna be? Wanna take some bets?

His other listed victories are things like:

"Vivek defended the Great Replacement Theory on national television and remained a major Trump surrogate. The SPLC would have marginalized him for that 10 years ago. Today because of polarization and MAGA closing ranks they can’t do shit."

And like, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have successfully marginalized a Republican politician in idk 2003 are you completely high right now? Strom Fucking Thurmond was an active Senator in 2003! This is the repeated tactic here, the imagined enemies - there was never a time where liberal institutions could consistently force conservative politicians to kowtow, so you can't claim it as a change.

This is why I mention the social justice horseshoe, because he has this point here:

These days you can complain about quotas etc. being unfair to you as a white man and it’s not inflammatory or low status among centrists and conservatives. Even non-woke liberals won’t really hate you for it, just quietly think you’re a bit of a chud. This was not the case in 2015. 

And this is partially correct, I agree there was some norm shift. But that is because in ~2010 there really weren't any quotas against white men, it wasn't a thing almost anywhere outside of university applications, so the complaint would make no sense. What happened was that starting in ~2012 a huge left cultural movement started that just openly supported active discrimination against whites, Asians and men. They were a small minority of course, and never had much power, but they got enough power in certain institutions like non-profits and universities that there was a string of just very obvious cases of clear racial discrimination against in particular whites & asians (both men and women, white women often got it very bad in this wave). And the large majority of people just saw that and went "uh yeah racism is still bad?" and so now you can say that because its actually relevant to say. From that lens, is this a successful cultural victory on the part of the alt-right? In some sense sure, but really its more a cultural failure of the hard left. The status quo just kept on chugging along.

Ugh that point went long, the others repeat so we will go through them quicker.

2: Elevate identity issues like anti-immigration and the promotion of traditional gender norms to the center of Republican politics. 

A fake enemy here - anti-immigration was already a huge issue for Republicans in the 2000's. It had a huge wave under Obama actually, it goes in cycles like that. And it responds to material conditions; it's a big issue again right now because the immigration numbers spiked massively under Biden, its just way worse of a problem now (primarily due to the booming economy of course). Again a partial victory for the first part, I agree its more salient due to Trump platforming it, but I'm skeptical that it is a big shift - people are memory-holing the Tea Party movement really badly here for example.

And the second point is just obviously false, Republicans always cared about that, and they care about it less now, giving up the ghost on gay marriage for example. The Alt-Right coincided with a decline of the influence of the Religious Right, and it shows on this issue, 0 points.

3: Make it socially acceptable to discuss HBD and the resulting moral implications for leveling mechanisms like affirmative action. 

Peak "log off" moment, it was always acceptable to discuss this outside of liberal/professional circles and there it still isn't acceptable to discuss it. Charles Murray wrote the Bell Curve in 1994 and his been an American Enterprise Institute Scholar for this entire span of time. This is confusing churn for change - the mid-2010's had a bunch of big, mainly online fights about HBD, and then everyone just sort of moved on with the status quo pretty much unchanged. Nothing like education policy, even in Republican circles, has shifted over this.

4: Convince conservatives to stop ceding moral authority to liberals and allowing them to determine who on the Right is verboten or beyond the pale. Make it unacceptable among conservatives to “punch Right” or purge people for wrongthink. 

Sigh, again when have Republicans ever ceded moral authority to liberals? Harvard University could not condemn Newt Gingrich in ~2009 and make him change his mind about anything. And "Republicans don't self-criticize while Liberals eat themselves alive" has been a complaint for literally decades, you would hear that as far back as say Clinton and things like the 1999 WTO protests. Its both true and exaggerated - the Tea Party primaried Republican candidates for wrongthink in 2010, and Trump did the same thing! With disastrous results for the Republicans in 2022. I really, really don't think you can look at Trump's Republican party and say they solved the Wrongthink problem.

5: Expose and dismantle the hypocritical attitude that allows neocons to militantly support Israeli ethnonationalism while brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically.

This one is just a lolwut moment, "brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically", like what does that even mean? Name the concrete policy proposals George Bush implemented in 2007 than Donald Trump didn't in 2018 around this topic. Again a fake enemy, they were never repressed by the right, and ofc are still hated by liberal institutions like universities.

Moving on from any specific point, I think its very telling that very little about free trade vs protectionism or isolationism/support of autocracy abroad enters this list. Because beyond immigration those are the big shifts the Trump movement (which is the mechanism the alt-right has to claim for making its impact) has ushered into the party. They didn't change its stance on sexual politics or "race & IQ" or anything, those haven't changed, but meanwhile the party has completely flipped on things like tariffs or opposition to Russian military expansion. But of course those don't align neatly at all with the issues the Alt-Right fought about in 2015.

The reality the Alt-Right can't escape is that they used Trump as their mechanism for change, and Trump never really cared about any of their goals beyond immigration. He used them and then pursued either bog-standard Republican policy or his own mercurial, autocratic whims, eventually channeling all of this energy into election denialism. I really don't think if you pulled aside frikkin Ryan Faulk in 2014, asked him to put down his graphs about Raven's Progressive Matrices of black Caribbean students, and said "Hey 10 years from now all of this energy is being channeled into pretending that a failed real estate mogul didn't lose the 2020 presidential election", that he would look at that outcome and think Mission Accomplished.

I don't want to fully oversell, there are for example wins Bismark doesn't mention (School choice comes to mind, the biggest conservative win of the past decade besides the protectionist swing). The Alt Right was an influential movement, it earned its place in history. But I do not think it is an example of being a "victim of its own success". I think instead it should be understood as part of the "radical froth" of the 2010's, that bubbled over and then evaporated like its more intense leftwing peers did. It made some mark and then got left in the dust.

Net ranking of the 5 points: 0.5 for Point 1, 0.25 for Point 2, 0 for the rest, 1.25/5.

#Sociological History of the 2010's #Alt-right discourse

[ausetkmt]

Where It’s Most Dangerous to Be Black in America

Black Americans made up 13.6% of the US population in 2022 and 54.1% of the victims of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, aka homicide. That works out, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, to a homicide rate of 29.8 per 100,000 Black Americans and four per 100,000 of everybody else.(1)

A homicide rate of four per 100,000 is still quite high by wealthy-nation standards. The most up-to-date statistics available from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show a homicide of rate one per 100,000 in Canada as of 2019, 0.8 in Australia (2021), 0.4 in France (2017) and Germany (2020), 0.3 in the UK (2020) and 0.2 in Japan (2020).

But 29.8 per 100,000 is appalling, similar to or higher than the homicide rates of notoriously dangerous Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. It also represents a sharp increase from the early and mid-2010s, when the Black homicide rate in the US hit new (post-1968) lows and so did the gap between it and the rate for everybody else. When the homicide rate goes up, Black Americans suffer disproportionately. When it falls, as it did last year and appears to be doing again this year, it is mostly Black lives that are saved.

As hinted in the chart, racial definitions have changed a bit lately; the US Census Bureau and other government statistics agencies have become more open to classifying Americans as multiracial. The statistics cited in the first paragraph of this column are for those counted as Black or African American only. An additional 1.4% of the US population was Black and one or more other race in 2022, according to the Census Bureau, but the CDC Wonder (for “Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research”) databases from which most of the statistics in this column are drawn don’t provide population estimates or calculate mortality rates for this group. My estimate is that its homicide rate in 2022 was about six per 100,000.

A more detailed breakdown by race, ethnicity and gender reveals that Asian Americans had by far the lowest homicide rate in 2022, 1.6, which didn’t rise during the pandemic, that Hispanic Americans had similar homicide rates to the nation as a whole and that men were more than four times likelier than women to die by homicide in 2022. The biggest standout remained the homicide rate for Black Americans. 

Black people are also more likely to be victims of other violent crime, although the differential is smaller than with homicides. In the 2021 National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (the 2022 edition will be out soon), the rate of violent crime victimization was 18.5 per 1,000 Black Americans, 16.1 for Whites, 15.9 for Hispanics and 9.9 for Asians, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. Understandably, Black Americans are more concerned about crime than others, with 81% telling Pew Research Center pollsters before the 2022 midterm elections that violent crime was a “very important” issue, compared with 65% of Hispanics and 56% of Whites.

These disparities mainly involve communities caught in cycles of violence, not external predators. Of the killers of Black Americans in 2020 whose race was known, 89.4% were Black, according to the FBI. That doesn’t make those deaths any less of a tragedy or public health emergency. Homicide is seventh on the CDC’s list of the 15 leading causes of death among Black Americans, while for other Americans it’s nowhere near the top 15. For Black men ages 15 to 39, the highest-risk group, it’s usually No. 1, although in 2022 the rise in accidental drug overdoses appears to have pushed accidents just past it. For other young men, it’s a distant third behind accidents and suicides.

To be clear, I do not have a solution for this awful problem, or even much of an explanation. But the CDC statistics make clear that sky-high Black homicide rates are not inevitable. They were much lower just a few years ago, for one thing, and they’re far lower in some parts of the US than in others. Here are the overall 2022 homicide rates for the country’s 30 most populous metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan areas are agglomerations of counties by which economic and demographic data are frequently reported, but seldom crime statistics because the patchwork of different law enforcement agencies in each metro area makes it so hard. Even the CDC, which gets its mortality data from state health departments, doesn’t make it easy, which is why I stopped at 30 metro areas.(2)

Sorting the data this way does obscure one key fact about homicide rates: They tend to be much higher in the main city of a metro area than in the surrounding suburbs.

But looking at homicides by metro area allows for more informative comparisons across regions than city crime statistics do, given that cities vary in how much territory they cover and how well they reflect an area’s demographic makeup. Because the CDC suppresses mortality data for privacy reasons whenever there are fewer than 10 deaths to report, large metro areas are good vehicles for looking at racial disparities. Here are the 30 largest metro areas, ranked by the gap between the homicide rates for Black residents and for everybody else.

The biggest gap by far is in metropolitan St. Louis, which also has the highest overall homicide rate. The smallest gaps are in metropolitan San Diego, New York and Boston, which have the lowest homicide rates. Homicide rates are higher for everybody in metro St. Louis than in metro New York, but for Black residents they’re six times higher while for everyone else they’re just less than twice as high.

There do seem to be some regional patterns to this mayhem. The metro areas with the biggest racial gaps are (with the glaring exception of Portland, Oregon) mostly in the Rust Belt, those with the smallest are mostly (with the glaring exceptions of Boston and New York) in the Sun Belt. Look at a map of Black homicide rates by state, and the highest are clustered along the Mississippi River and its major tributaries. Southern states outside of that zone and Western states occupy roughly the same middle ground, while the Northeast and a few middle-of-the-country states with small Black populations are the safest for their Black inhabitants.(3)

Metropolitan areas in the Rust Belt and parts of the South stand out for the isolation of their Black residents, according to a 2021 study of Census data from Brown University’s Diversity and Disparities Project, with the average Black person living in a neighborhood that is 60% or more Black in the Detroit; Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis; Chicago; Cleveland and Milwaukee metro areas in 2020 (in metro St. Louis the percentage was 57.6%). Then again, metro New York and Boston score near the top on another of the project’s measures of residential segregation, which tracks the percentage of a minority group’s members who live in neighborhoods where they are over-concentrated compared with White residents, so segregation clearly doesn’t explain everything.

Looking at changes over time in homicide rates may explain more. Here’s the long view for Black residents of the three biggest metro areas. Again, racial definitions have changed recently. This time I’ve used the new, narrower definition of Black or African American for 2018 onward, and given estimates in a footnote of how much it biases the rates upward compared with the old definition.

All three metro areas had very high Black homicide rates in the 1970s and 1980s, and all three experienced big declines in the 1990s and 2000s. But metro Chicago’s stayed relatively high in the early 2010s then began a rebound in mid-decade that as of 2021 had brought the homicide rate for its Black residents to a record high, even factoring in the boost to the rate from the definitional change.

What happened in Chicago? One answer may lie in the growing body of research documenting what some have called the “Ferguson effect,” in which incidents of police violence that go viral and beget widespread protests are followed by local increases in violent crime, most likely because police pull back on enforcement. Ferguson is the St. Louis suburb where a 2014 killing by police that local prosecutors and the US Justice Department later deemed to have been in self-defense led to widespread protests that were followed by big increases in St. Louis-area homicide rates. Baltimore had a similar viral death in police custody and homicide-rate increase in 2015. In Chicago, it was the October 2014 shooting death of a teenager, and more specifically the release a year later of a video that contradicted police accounts of the incident, leading eventually to the conviction of a police officer for second-degree murder.

It’s not that police killings themselves are a leading cause of death among Black Americans. The Mapping Police Violence database lists 285 killings of Black victims by police in 2022, and the CDC reports 209 Black victims of “legal intervention,” compared with 13,435 Black homicide victims. And while Black Americans are killed by police at a higher rate relative to population than White Americans, this disparity — 2.9 to 1 since 2013, according to Mapping Police Violence — is much less than the 7.5-to-1 ratio for homicides overall in 2022. It’s the loss of trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve that seems to be disproportionately deadly for Black residents of those communities.

The May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was the most viral such incident yet, leading to protests nationwide and even abroad, as well as an abortive local attempt to disband and replace the police department. The Minneapolis area subsequently experienced large increases in homicides and especially homicides of Black residents. But nine other large metro areas experienced even bigger increases in the Black homicide rate from 2019 to 2022.

A lot of other things happened between 2019 and 2022 besides the Floyd protests, of course, and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe all or most of the pandemic homicide-rate increase to the Ferguson effect. It is interesting, though, that the St. Louis area experienced one of the smallest percentage increases in the Black homicide rate during this period, and it decreased in metro Baltimore.

Also interesting is that the metro areas experiencing the biggest percentage increases in Black residents’ homicide rates were all in the West (if your definition of West is expansive enough to include San Antonio). If this were confined to affluent areas such as Portland, Seattle, San Diego and San Francisco, I could probably spin a plausible-sounding story about it being linked to especially stringent pandemic policies and high work-from-home rates, but that doesn’t fit Phoenix, San Antonio or Las Vegas, so I think I should just admit that I’m stumped.

The standout in a bad way has been the Portland area, which had some of the longest-running and most contentious protests over policing, along with many other sources of dysfunction. The area’s homicide rate for Black residents has more than tripled since 2019 and is now second highest among the 30 biggest metro areas after St. Louis. Again, I don’t have any real solutions to offer here, but whatever the Portland area has been doing since 2019 isn’t working.

(1) The CDC data for 2022 are provisional, with a few revisions still being made in the causes assigned to deaths (was it a homicide or an accident, for example), but I’ve been watching for weeks now, and the changes have been minimal. The CDC is still using 2021 population numbers to calculate 2022 mortality rates, and when it updates those, the homicide rates will change again, but again only slightly. The metropolitan-area numbers also don’t reflect a recent update by the White House Office of Management and Budget to its list of metro areas and the counties that belong to them, which when incorporated will bring yet more small mortality-rate changes. To get these statistics from the CDC mortality databases, I clicked on “Injury Intent and Mechanism” and then on “Homicide”; in some past columns I instead chose “ICD-10 Codes” and then “Assault,” which delivered slightly different numbers.

(2) It’s easy to download mortality statistics by metro area for the years 1999 to 2016, but the databases covering earlier and later years do not offer this option, and one instead has to select all the counties in a metro area to get area-wide statistics, which takes a while.

(3) The map covers the years 2018-2022 to maximize the number of states for which CDC Wonder will cough up data, although as you can see it wouldn’t divulge any numbers for Idaho, Maine, Vermont and Wyoming (meaning there were fewer than 10 homicides of Black residents in each state over that period) and given the small numbers involved, I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in the rates for the Dakotas, Hawaii, Maine and Montana.

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/14/where-it-s-most-dangerous-to-be-black-in-america/cdea7922-52f0-11ee-accf-88c266213aac_story.html)

#Where It’s Most Dangerous to Be Black in America #Black in america #Black Lives Matter

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

some preliminary statistics

(based on the first 102 polls)

general

we’ve had 10 majority-YES results so far

the highest result by far is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (76.5% YES), followed by Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys (60.4% YES) and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (59.5% YES). this mirrors the pattern of overall results by age demographic.

publisher

there is a clear and dramatic divide between books published in English by Big 5 imprints, which have an average YES rate of 21.3%, and books published by independent publishers, academic publishers, self-published books, or books not published in English (average YES rate 3.1%). this is unsurprising, considering the market dominance of Big 5 publishers, especially in fantasy and science fiction.

age demographic

adult books

there have been 70 adult book polls so far, of which 4 have had YES results (5.7%). the average YES rate for adult books is 13.6%, the lowest for any age demographic — unsurprising, I think, for a number of reasons.

teen/YA

there have been 14 teen/YA book polls so far, of which 2 have had YES results (14.3%). the average YES rate for teen/YA books is 20.4%, ahead of adult and behind children’s. this makes sense to me, since tumblr users mainly came of age during the YA boom of the 2010s.

children’s

there have been 17 children’s book polls so far, of which 4 have had YES results (23.5%). the average YES rate for children’s books is 24.5%, and it’s being dragged down by a) Frances Hardinge’s books, which were mostly published a little late for the tumblr userbase, and b) a bunch of non-anglophone children’s books that either haven’t been published in English or were published in English a little late for the tumblr userbase. if we exclude non-anglophone children’s books the average jumps up to 31.4% (even with the loss of Tintenherz / Inkheart), and if we exclude Hardinge it jumps to 41%. I expect this trend will continue at least for anglophone children’s books published before ~2010.

publication date

average YES percentages are on something of a bell curve centered on the 2000s (’m excluding everything before the ’70s because there’s only 1 book for each of the earlier decades):

1970s: 8.5%

1980s: 12.2%

1990s: 18.5%

2000s: 21.2%

2010s: 15.4%

2020s: 10.7%

this also makes conceptual sense to me but I can’t explain why.

race

sadly but unsurprisingly, books by white authors have an average YES rate of 19.7%, versus 4.8% for non-white authors. I expect this trend will continue — if N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, one of the most highly acclaimed books of the last decade, can’t get a majority YES result (which it’s currently not on track to), I doubt anything else will be able to. the one other thing that seems possible to me might be Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s webnovels, which have been submitted but aren’t yet queued. we’ll find out eventually!

gender

books by men (17.9% YES average) are slightly more likely to have been read than books by women (15.9% YES average). there are two few data points for nonbinary writers for that average to be meaningful as yet.

geography

books from the Europe (read: almost exclusively the UK) are slightly more likely to be read than books from North America (read: almost exclusively the US) — average YES percentage 20.5% for Europe vs. 16.1% for North America. the average for the rest of the world is 5.6% — no other single continent has enough data yet to really be meaningful.

this attests perhaps to the relative prestige of British fantasy — the percentages are being skewed upwards by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Diana Wynne Jones.

language

books originally published in English have an average YES percentage of 17.9%; books originally published in other languages average 6.5% (2.2% excluding Tintenherz / Inkheart)

#not a poll #statistics

[victimsofyaoipoll]

Round 2

Propaganda Under Cut

Allura

Lots of people (myself included tbh) ship klance (Keith and Lance). In s8 the creators made Allura/Lance canon (but then they killed her off and left the ending ambiguous it was weird). Anyway the fandom treats her like she's the most terrible bitchy woman ever but all she wants to do is end the war and avenge her destroyed home planet. Yeah she wasn't always the nicest or always the best, but you could argue some other characters in the show aren't either and they aren't treated near as bad as allura. people really just hate her bc Lance liked her. I don't think allura/lance are good together, but I still liked her as a character and thought she was interesting and had a lot of growth during the show. she DEF is not evil like some people portray her as in fic or talk about her in captions on posts. I've seen people say that they HATE her and that she's the worst and I'm like ??? let her live (well sort of ig she is dead now). lots of fic writers use her as the villain which is so interesting to me bc the show literally has villains like use them. anyway allura so perfectly fits the bracket description she deserves better.

I hate to acknowledge my time in this fandom but I hate the way the fandom treated her more. Allura was treated like shit no matter what side of the Great Ship War you were on because she was always a threat to the biggest ships (klance and sheith). At best she got put into Background Lesbian or Consolation Prize Shallura (Space Mom-zoned) (She was not a motherly figure btw. She was just Black). At worst she was violently demonized for being ~racist~ (kinda not cool with the alien race that blew up her planet for a few episodes), complete with misogynistic language hurled at her (she got called a bitch sooo much). Allura was a good and cool character and the show did her dirty but the fandom was somehow worse.

i apologise for speaking the dark magicks, but amidst the voltron fandoms many, many transgressions, there were a particular subset of people who just hated this girl. the infamous klance wars of the 2010s kept this perfectly fine childrens cartoon character in the sights of shippers everywhere, and she (and her voice actress im sure) were subjected to years of petty squabble blown up to global perportions. ive seen hate, ive seen rants, ive seen fanfics that made her homophobic. girls been through the ringer, and even though voltron was never the show its fandom wanted it to be, i believe allura deserved better

Mary Morstan

a controversial one i know, but it’s tumblr. how could i not? anyway shoutout to the writers for CANONICALLY killing her off for the non-canon ship. she was so cool honestly poor girl

Oh god where do I start? Constantly being turned abusive? Killed off (in canon!)? Constantly being removed from fic? I cannot stand the way she's treated, but it's 100% impossible to find Johnlock fic without the "umsympathetic Mary Morstan" angle. It's infuriating!

The fandom insulted Mary at every conceivable turn, refused to acknowledge her narrative importance or impact on the other characters, called for her death repeatedly, and even SENT DEATH THREATS TO HER ACTRESS because she had the AUDACITY to be a morally gray female character who was married to John (they did not care about the moral grayness of the male characters, but she was irredeemable, apparently-presumably because she was a "threat" to the main fandom ship). And though she was definitely sacrificed on a SPECIFIC mlm ship altar, she was still tangentially victimized by OTHER mlm ships too! For example, this fandom was willing to make up a character WHO LITERALLY DID NOT ACTUALLY EXIST to ship with different male character (who was morally...way worse than she ever was), as well as create swathes of content about two men who had maybe one canon interaction in the whole show, before even thinking about the possibility of making content for this character or even just talking about her in a way that wasn't overtly misogynistic and degrading. When Mary died in-story (in what, in my opinion, was an unnecessary, bullshit way), her death was, to this fanbase, not actually about her and was just seen as "proof" that the two male leads would now get together (they didn't). And this STILL continues to this day. People reduce her to "selfish bitch," completely ignoring any of her complexity by claiming that she's incapable of caring about anyone (despite helping to save lives on more than one occasion, as well as dying in an act of sacrifice) and insisting that any of her positive qualities MUST be completely fabricated. I've seen a lot of female characters get mistreated by fandom for a mlm ship's sake, but I don't think I've EVER encountered an example as bad as this one.

#poll #round 2 #vld #voltron legendary defender #voltron #princess allura #allura vld #bbc sherlock #sherlock #mary morstan #mary watson

[mask131]

The thing that I always found abominably fascinating and insanely mind-blowing with the Earthsea series is that it breaks all the worn-out, over-used, “seen everywhere” cliches of fantasy people complain about today and try to avoid. 

Tired of your typical Europe-setting? Here is a world of islands influenced by a lot of various non-European civilizations!

Tired of having a white-predominant cast? Here is a series where people of color are the dominant ethnicities and the white are the minority and bizarre barbarian foreigners from far away!

Tired of having the heroes go on grand and perilous monster-slaying quest to fight some dark overlord or fetch a magical item? Here are books where the villains are elusive, abstract and philosophical threats, where the quests to defeat them are very down-to-earth, solitary and rely more on self-search and the understanding of human nature rather than great exploits. 

Tired of seeing the same old-worn out fantasy races tropes? None of this here! 

This book series was created with the intention of subverting, avoiding or breaking the new tropes and stereotypes that were rising up with the success of Tolkien’s work. It was made to be different and ground-breaking and stereotype-crushing, and it worked extremely well, becoming a classic of fantasy literature and influencing the genre massively... And yet, people only rediscover it today, and know about it today somehow. (Well a “large” today including the dozen of last years of so).

This series is the perfect example of the “new” fantasy that rises up in the modern era, as an attempt to “break off” from the “traditional” or “cliche” fantasy... And the first book has been sitting there since the END OF THE 60s!!! 

There are more examples I could point out of books that present to us a completely out-there, trope reinventing, stereotype breaking form of fantasy - and that yet have been there since the 70s or the 80s, or even before! As I went back in time to see several of the “classics” of fantasy literature, I came to understand something - a lot of the “cliches” and “stereotypes” and “over-used tropes” of fantasy people complain about today were not at all dominant for a very long time. If you believe the words of many people out there, you imagine fantasy never had black characters or queer characters or non-European settings or non-Tolkienesque plotlines until the 2010s or something... Which is not true. Fantasy was such a varied, bizarre, diverse genre in its literary form all throughout the 20th century, and many “old” works of the first generations of the post-Tolkien fantasy are basically what people want to see today as “pattern-breaking and fresh new fantasy”. 

The Tolkienesque-fantasy and all of its cliches and stereotypes were not so much dominant as just present in a handful of massively popular and widespread works - the case of the Shannara series can be pointed out, as its first book was PRAISED at the time for being able to recreate a Tolkien story in the 70s, and it was because it was mostly a copy of the Lord of the Rings that it got so popular (and why it is not well-liked today). And then the 80s rolled and early D&D reignited the flame of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy. By the 90s, it seemed Tolkien had been used and over-used to death, and people didn’t trust it all anymore... Which is why David Eddings’ Belgariad series was created. Its key point was to take back all the elements of the traditional epic fantasy story, but reassemble them, freshen them up, twist them slightly, all of that to re-create a by-the-book BUT fresh, new and interesting series. It was an attempt at prooving that, with innovation and some twists and modernization, the Tolkienesque fantasy would not die - and it worked massively well. And then in the 2000s, the Lord of the Rings movie sealed the deal. 

All these works make it look like fantasy had always been copying or taking inspiration from Tolkien. But it is false. It is true that most of the classics are tied to Tolkien, but not always in imitation or re-creation - in the case of “Earthsea”, there was a willing attempt at getting away and inverting the Tolkienesque fantasy to create a fantasy that went the very opposite direction. Same thing with the Elric Saga, also designed to be the reverse or opposite of The Lord of the Rings, and which in turn became the classic of another new genre of fantasy: dark fantasy. And Conan in all that? People forget that the Conan the Barbarian series were just as influential for fantasy works as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was. The Elric Saga, again, was created to completely reverse and avoid the Conan-like fantasy. A similar thing was done with Leiber for his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series, which was designed to break away from the Conan “heroic fantasy” style and reinvent the genre in a new direction. 

There are so many “old” and “classic” works of literary fantasy that actually do not feel like a “classic” at all because they have all the vibes, elements and expectations one has from a non-classic, non-traditional fantasy... BUT THEY ARE THE FOUNDATIONS, they are the basis and classics and inspirations of fantasy. And it all shows this huge gap between what people think fantasy is, and what fantasy really was - it is a fascinating case study of how one specific trend somehow got over the entire genre. Imagine a world where people think Gothic novels can only have a vampire or the ghost of a judge, and must be Bram Stokers-inspired, and that everybody points out they are tired to see Dracula-expies everywhere... Only to discover the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and be baffled by them and their “inventivity” and “breaking of patterns”. I’m sorry, that’s the fastest comparison I can make, but this feels just like that. There is this strangely specific idea of what fantasy is today forged on a few items... I think, beyond the massive success of Tolkien and imitators, D&D probably is also to “blame” for how people see fantasy today.

But even then, D&D took inspiration from so many non-conventional works of fantasy... Yes many became “classics” now, though often ignored by the masses - The Elric Saga, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were big influences. But take the Jack Vance series “The Dying Earth”, another big inspiration on early D&D. Take that. This series is from the 50s - FROM THE 50S - and yet it is a unique genre of sci-fi fantasy that I haven’t seen much being done around, and it creates such a weird, whimsical, bizarre, surrealistic fantasy world, it feels completely unique. And again, it is a classic of the 50s and 60s. 

I don’t really know where I try to go with this but the important thing is: when someone wants to read “non-traditional” or “non-Tolkienesque” fantasy, or “non-stereotyped” fantasy, it is possible, instead of searching for every new author nowadays (not a bad thing to do that though), it is possible to just go back in time, look back at the books of the 70s, 60s and 50s, and find there a novelty, a freshness and an inventivity that is lacking in a mass production of modern day fantasy. And that such a thing is possible is truly crazy for me. I don’t know if such a thing happened with other literary genres, but it is insane that sometimes in fantasy, to see “new” things you just have to look back into the past. 

#fantasy #fantasy literature #tolkien #tolkienesque literature #earthsea #ursula le guin #the dying earth #the elric saga #i don't know if I should tag them all #this is really just a random shot here #fantasy stereotypes #fantasy cliches #fantasy tropes

[plinkodiskhorse]

on labels

The back and forth over the use of the word “queer” baffles and frustrates me. I think the arguments, and the term itself, are illustrative of a dialectic. Queer is simultaneously collective and individual, affiliation-group and self-identity, over-arching and specific, degrading and embracing. Until a time comes that all variations and expressions of gender and sexuality (and combinations thereof) are free from social and institutional stigma, queer will never mean just one thing.

Queer, as an over-arching term for anyone who is NOT cisgender, heterosexual, or perisex, acknowledges the overlap and interplay of gender assigned at birth, identified gender, gender expression, sexual attraction. A cisgender, butch dyke (a person assigned female at birth who aligns with that identity and is attracted to other women, while expressing her gender in a “masculine” manner) and a faggy, transgender man (a person assigned female at birth who “rejects” womanhood while dating men and expressing an “effeminate” masculinity) may seem very different from one another but can have MANY shared experiences of “queerness.” Both may be targets of transphobia and misogyny — even when one of them isn’t trans and one of them isn’t a woman — and both may be targets of homophobia. “Queer” (can, should) holds space for all of these aspects of self, even when they seem to contradict one another.

(How can a transgender man experience misogyny? When he is not perceived/treated as a man, but as a “failed woman.” How can a cisgender woman experience transphobia? When she is perceived/treated as a “non-passing” transgender woman encroaching upon “women’s spaces.”)

When this hypothetical cis dyke and transfag both claim the word “queer,” there is (or should be, in this umbrella interpretation of queer) an understanding that “your fight is my fight.” We may not be the exact same flavor of queer, but our liberation is interconnected. My freedom, as a transgender man, cannot be won at the expense of women’s freedom. I don’t mean that just in the sense that I would be morally opposed to that situation; I mean it in the sense that the oppression of women WILL impact my own freedom.

The baroque complexities of queerness become further entangled when considering race, religion, and disability. Can “queer” hold the history of racialized gender in America? That black people have been hypersexualized/virilized and subsequently fetishized and denigrated for this projection. That East Asian women have been seen as seductresses or naturally submissive, while East Asian men are desexualized or objectified as seeming young and effeminate. The stereotypes of the hot blooded Latina and the macho Latino. Can “queer” encompass the deliberate destruction of Native gender identities and the subsequent (current) obfuscating mythologizing by white queers? Can “queer” be a place for people who see their gender and/or sexuality as a manifestation of/connection to the Divine while also being a place for those deeply harmed by religion because of their gender/sexuality? Can “queer” accept people with disabilities as people capable of eroticism even if their bodies don’t allow for some forms of sex acts?

As a dialectic, rather than a static fact, queer can hold these things, and there are times that queer will be too broad for all these things and specificity is needed.

As a dialectic, queer is a slur and an academic term. Queer is an acceptable word in a peer-reviewed journal, and has the potential to be “fighting words” interpersonally. What matters is the context and the individual interpretation. And it’s HIGHLY personal.

I was born and raised in Texas from the 90s to the 2010s. I never heard queer used as an insult, except in media from (or set in) the past. If I had heard someone use queer as an insult, my initial reaction would have been confusion. Are you fucking old? Is this the 70s? But I did hear gay used as an insult all the time. And faggot and dyke, if there weren’t any teachers within hearing range. I didn’t really encounter queer until undergrad, as an academic term, an area of study, and then as how my friends self-identified. Because of this, my associations with queer are largely positive.

But I know people who also grew up in Texas, only a 30-45min drive away from where I grew up, who did experience queer as a slur. For them, they may feel more comfortable reclaiming fag or dyke, rather than queer. And that’s their decision to make. And yet, it would be reductive if they were to treat queer as only ever a slur, not as a word with decades of usage in academic and intracommunity contexts.

I like queer as a word that can veil meaning.

It can be a conversation stopper. You don’t get to know the specifics of my gender history, my sexual partners, the roles I take in sex, the acts I enjoy during sex.

It can be a conversation starter. I see you’re different in a way that is similar to how I’m different; let us now ask each other oblique and leading questions that the cis hets around us won’t understand.

I dislike how queer is increasingly absorbed into the corporate rainbow-washing of assimilationists. A company doesn’t get to sell me Pride merch with one hand and donate to anti-trans politicians with the other hand.

I cannot say that queer retains its edge, nor can I say that it has been defanged. I cannot force others to reclaim the word, nor can I gatekeep the word. In the first “queer studies” class I ever had, my professor explained “autonomy” literally means “self-naming.”

There is no right or wrong answer, there is only ever-increasing nuance.

#lgbtq #on labels

[umseb]

sebastian vettel during the all stars football match, monaco - may 11, 2010 📷 daniel kalisz / motorsport images

#sebastian vettel #f1 #formula 1 #flashback fic ref #flashback fic ref 2010 #not a race #non-race #2010 not a race #2010 non-race #(note to self: that'd have been between spain and monaco. tuesday.)

[umlewis]

lewis hamilton at the launch of the mp4-25 - january 29, 2010 📷 sutton images / motorsport images

#lewis hamilton #f1 #formula 1 #flashback fic ref #flashback fic ref 2010 #not a race #non-race #2010 not a race #2010 non-race #pre-season #pre-season 2010 #pre-season 10 #pre-season2010 #pre-season10 #(note to self: vodafone hq in newbury england)

[hungriestheidi]

ao3: holidayblues

i think we're kindred spirits (so don't you dare walk away) (4.1k) - sebchal. ambiguous relationship. pwp / porn with feelings.

never complain, never explain (on-going, 2/4 chapters out) - galex. royal au. seemingly unrequited love. pining.

of other people's love (1.9k) - lewis x sebastian x hanna. ambiguous relationship. set before Austin GP 2023.

the house by the sea (on-going) - sebchal. bodyguard x prince au.

kinktober 2023 - three complete works, each under 2k.

romance by the fractures (43k) - sebchal. established relationship, not racing drivers au.

in your car, i'm a star (and i'm burnin' through you) (5k) - sebchal. secret relationship. set after Miami GP 2023.

he chose me (as his burial ground) (8k) - oscarmark. dead dove do not eat. non-con/dub-con, prostitution, corruption.

died all the way back to the root (now i grow again) (6k) - sebchal. written for sebchal secret santa 2022. secret relatiionship, fluff and angst. set in the 2022 F1 season.

in beds of flame, how often was i tried (2k) - sebchal. unhealthy coping mechanisms. set in the 2022 season (between Singapore and Japan).

monachopsis (43k) - sebchal. teacher au, infidelity, age gap.

real gods require blood (3k) - sebmark/martian. cover up for a murder. set after the Turkish GP 2010.

stick by me, close by me (1.3k) - sewis. casual sex. set after the French GP 2022.

you could kill me (and you should) (1.6k) - sebmark/martian. mildly dubious consent. hate sex.

#hi this is for archival and easy linking access! #myfic

[arkipelagic]

a too-common misconception about the origins of filipinos is that we are all descended from the aeta. we are not. “aeta” refers to a specific ethnic group native to certain places in luzon such as zambales and pampanga, but is also commonly used as an umbrella term for several related ethnic groups across the philippine archipelago. they are identified by physical characteristics such as dark skin and very curly hair (leading to a false belief that they are descendants of black africans) as opposed to those of majority of the country who have lighter skin and hair that is either straight or of looser curl patterns (also falsely believed to be markers of the so-called malay race.)

the aeta are an ethnic minority; as of 2010, there were a documented <100,000 out of millions of filipino citizens identifying as such. it is clear majority of filipinos are not of aeta descent. so where does this myth that all filipinos “descend” from the aeta come from?

generations of miseducation has led the average filipino to believe that, out of the hundreds of ethnic groups native to the philippines, it is the aeta in particular who are the original people who came to the philippines prior to the advent of the austronesian expansion. in other words, filipinos view the aeta as a pure people who are remnants of the old world.

this is not true because:

DNA evidence from the luzon aeta, mamanwa ata, batak, & other similar peoples indicate ancestry from BOTH the earliest settlers of what is now the philippines (commonly referred to colloquially and in the literature as negritos but also sometimes as basal australasians and first sundaland peoples) and later migrants associated with the austronesian expansion.

all other native populations in the philippines save for igorot peoples also show admixture from both negrito/basal australasian/first sundaland peoples and later migrants, most significantly the austronesian speakers. what’s notable is the varying degrees of admixture among aetas and non-aetas.

two graphic charts showing the peopling of the philippines and genetic admixture in modern populations. taken from the study, “Multiple migrations to the Philippines during the last 50,000 years” (2021) by Maximillian Larena et al.

i think what has happened is that “aeta” has become synonymous with the earliest inhabitants of the philippines, the real name for these ancient peoples being unknown to us moderns. it is only the flawed tendency to view indigenous peoples as unchanging relics of the past that has led to the biggest mistake filipinos make when discussing our origins: that is, the constant misuse of the term “aeta” to mean “pureblooded original people” when in reality aeta peoples are also descended from later migrants. when people say filipinos are descended from the aeta, they really mean to say filipinos are descended from the first settlers.

aeta peoples are our contemporaries; they are not our living progenitors but their own people with their own languages, ancestral lands, cultures, and histories.

#philippines #indigenous peoples #pseudoscience #southeast asia #genetics #aeta peoples #sundaland #basal australasian #first sundaland peoples #austronesian #x

[thepotentialof2007]

But who made Lewis do it, to bet on a Ferrari that's been losing for almost two decades?

Leo Turrini interviews Aldo Costa about working with Hamilton and Schumacher

A vegan menu is already ready at [Ristorante] Montana. Guess for whom.

While waiting to enjoy it in the company of the person to whom it will be dedicated (the menu), I chatted with a gentleman who has known those two up close and personal. Aldo Costa, my dear friend.

Costa: "Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton have a lot in common. But there are also significant differences between them. However, it is beautiful that the two most successful drivers in F1 history have chosen to link their name to Ferrari."

Aldo Costa, now technical director of the wonderful Dallara ("From the Parma hills we deal with 17 automotive projects, from IndyCar to Formula E"), Aldo Costa, I said, is the only Top engineer to have worked with both Schumi and with Hamilton. At Maranello he was part of the Dream Team of Montezemolo and Todt. In Mercedes, he won everything and more with Lewis.

Engineer, who is better between the two?

Costa: "I refuse to answer, this is a provocation. I want to say right away that Michael and Lewis are less far apart than you might imagine. Both have always had a very analytical approach to things off track. They are meticulous, very professional. They know that at certain levels it's the details that shift the balance, that determine the outcome."

From the outside Schumi looked like a robot, an alien....

Costa: "Wrong impression! Michael was very human in the work. He would sit there with the engineers and calmly convey his feelings about the car he was driving. He was never obsessive, that's it."

In contrast, Hamilton?

Costa: "Same dough. Lewis I got to know better, because in Mercedes I had a role that put me in more direct contact with the driver. He and I were symbiotic. Hamilton, like Schumi, asks for trust and trusts you."

That must be why the two of them won 14 world titles.

Costa: "So. Then, of course, they are also distinct and distant from each other."

In what sense?

Costa: "You see, they belong to non-overlapping cultures. Can I give an example? Schumacher was the last driver of an era when cars were developed on the track, through continuous testing on the asphalt. And in this he was formidable, unique I dare say."

Hamilton was not.

Costa: "No. Lewis belongs to the time of the simulator.They changed the rules. In short: Michael was always behind the wheel, Hamilton almost never because he can't. Not surprisingly, Schumi when he returned to racing in 2010, with no more circuit testing, he had a bad time. He, the simulator, just really hated it."

But other than that, the substance, I mean as achievements and victories, has not changed.

Costa: "Indeed, because we are talking about two Phenomena! I will give you another example. Schumi determined tire development with his testing, because he could do it. In Hamilton's era, the tires are baptized first by the sole supplier, and the greatness of the driver lies in his ability to make the most out of tires right away that he does not know, that he did not have a hand in choosing beforehand. And in this he is an absolute master, as Michael was in his world."

But who made Lewis do it, to bet on a Ferrari that's been losing for almost two decades?

Costa: "Well, he is an instinctive one. He followed his heart. It's not a turn dictated by the God of money."

But what are the chances that...

Costa: "I won't answer here. In Maranello they know they have a lot of things to fix..."

Does he think Hamilton will pull in technicians he trusts from the Mercedes school?

Costa:"I don't know. When he came over to Mercedes in 2013, leaving McLaren, he presented just himself. They called him crazy, but you know how it went."

One last thing, dear Costa. Since everyone understood that in 2011 the Ferrari made an own goal by torpedoing you from the role of technical director, in short , yes, would you go back to Maranello with your friend Lewis?

Costa: "No. I am happily ... married to engineer Dallara, by the way we collaborate with the Cavallino on the Le Mans project."

Hamilton will win without Costa.

Costa: "For the good it brings him, I wish him well."

#lewis hamilton #michael schumacher #aldo costa #ferrari #f1 #red team signs lh #preseason #2024 #leo turrini #mercedes amg f1 #racecar design and engineering #translated from the italian via deepl

[olderthannetfic]

One person I saw in the "End OTW Racism" crowd was someone who I remembered solely for their interactions in my very fandom way back in 2010. They basically have a reputation for getting angry at you for writing a character with no canonically stated ethnicity as a different race than they pictured that character. To be clear, I agree with their take that this character is probably not white, given he is described as having black, coily hair and his surname is an Arabic language one.

But if you ever wrote this guy as mixed, any ethnicity that isn't black, or being from a MENA country, this person would always lose their shit at you. It was really irritating because their logic was always that you were the racist one, the anti-black one, the one upholding white supremacy, the person who was making fandom unsafe for BIPOC, all the while they were the one tearing down anyone who wrote him as non-white who didn't do it the "right" way.

I don't hold their involvement against End OTW Racism. I think End OTW Racism is correct that harassment in fandom spaces is a problem that BIPOC face disproportionately to our white counterparts, and that OTW should recruit more volunteers to look over reports. That would undoubtedly help harassment be dealt with more efficiently. But I also think that a lot of white cishet people like this person are using supporting End OTW Racism as a shield to hide their own harassment of BIPOC in fandom spaces.

Like a lot of Amazigh people, I saw this character as possibly reading as Amazigh. That doesn't mean I hate black people. That doesn't mean he can't be both; black Amazigh people have existed for centuries due to intermarriage, after all. That also doesn't mean I have the right to harass people who write him as black as having written him incorrectly. The idea that you must hate [insert group here] if you don't write a character as part of that group is ridiculous.

And I just want to note that no black person has ever given me shit for writing him as Amazigh. Actually, several black people have told me that they relate to having to make your own representation in fiction where there isn't any. So it's messed up for a white person to step in and say they're offended on behalf of black people when no black person has stated they're offended.

The good news is that this person has switched fandoms since 2010, probably because no amount of having meltdowns made people abandon their versions of the character. And without them throwing a fit, we've been able to see a lot of variations on him - Amazigh, Arab, black, mixed, Muslim, Jewish, follower of Indigenous North African spirituality, atheist - that the fandom has had a lot of fun with.

White people, I get that there are assholes who need telling off in fandom. Believe me, I've met them. But respectfully, please learn to listen to black people before you rush in to defend them. If none of them are offended, what are the odds that you know better about racism than they do? (The same goes for other races. Don't rush in to defend people who are not under attack on a whim.)

I know a lot of people are trying to be progressive but until white people learn not to do this, they are still contributing to a climate that's hostile for BIPOC fans.

--