#cw: bigotry

[volixia669]

Hey you know that Wizarding game, that’s been called “Harry Potter and the Protocols of Zion” due to the whole plot where extremely antisemitic (like taken from nazi propaganda) caricatures kill a kid, and are rebelling because people keep stealing their stuff?

Yeah, uh...It gets worse. Way worse.

So this image has been going around social media. And hoo boy.

To run over:

-A horn used by goblins aka “totally not Jews” which would be a shofar. A shofar for those who don’t know is a special horn used during the High Holidays aka the weeks leading up to the new year in the Jewish Calender, to lead in the New Year, and on Yom Kippur. There are Jews who don’t get to synagogue all year EXCEPT for Yom Kippur. So. Holy item for holy days.

-”generally annoy witch and wizards” The shofar being an “irritant” to Christians is libel used against Jews to vilify us.

-So, fun history I got to learn today. 1612 was the year of horrifying pogroms aka genocidal slaughter of Jewish people in Germany. It’s called the Fettmilch Uprising. This date being used for Goblin rebellions is NOT a coincidence.

-Why DO these Goblins rebel so much btw? Could it be, that the WIzarding Kind teaches history in a way that acts like they are the good guys, and the Goblins constantly need to be put down? Seems that way.

-Hogs Mead Inn. It was fond in the pigs inn. Pigs or pork being the most well known non-kosher food.

-Oh but we’re not done. Gorgonzola is one of the few non-kosher cheeses. Stuffing it into the shofar is also not kosher, or in other words, makes it...I suppose not holy works? Not Jewish Law Approved essentially.

There are levels to the antisemitism here. “It’s just a horn” says some except the plot of the game is already riffing off of antisemitic tropes. JK Rowling’s goblins have been criticized as highly antisemitic for over two decades. To add in these highly specific dogwhistles is intentional.

Most people don’t even know what a shofar is, let alone which cheeses are kosher or non-kosher, or the dates of lesser known attempts to kill Jewish people. While I would never say the whole dev team was full of bigots, there were clearly some who were excited to throw in dogwhistle after dogwhistle.

That alone is a good enough reason to not support this stupid fucking game. Fuck Hogwarts Legacy. Go play something else.

#hogwarts legacy #cw: antisemitism #cw: bigotry #the transphobia is bad and so is this #this is insidious

[metamatar]

December 26, 1847: Jews. Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Demand its expulsion Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weill, and others are nothing but secret spies ; Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, wicked, bilious, envious, bitter, etc. etc. beings who hate us. The Jew must disappear by steel or by fusion or by expulsion. Tolerate the elderly who no longer have children. Work to be done – What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated instinctively I hate upon reflection and irrevocably. The hatred of the Jew like the hatred of the English should be our first article of political faith. Moreover, the abolition of Judaism will come with the abolition of other religions. Begin by not allocating funds to the clergy and leaving this to religious offerings. – And then, a short while later, abolish the religion.

Translator’s note: Though some twentieth century writers have maintained that Proudhon was not an anti-Semite, we find in his notebooks proof of the contrary. In this selection from his notebooks Proudhon’s anti-Semitism goes far beyond that of Marx at approximately the same time, calling not for the end of what Jews represent, i.e., capitalism, but of the Jews as a people. Proudhon’s privately expressed thoughts were elaborated on in the same year as this entry by his follower Alphonse Toussenel in his “Les Juifs, Rois de l'Epoque,” The Jews, Kings of the Era. After reading the passage translated here it can come as no surprise that the founder of the royalist group Action Française, the Jew-hater Charles Maurras, drew inspiration from Proudhon.

at Marxist Internet Archive

#antisemitism #cw: bigotry #sorry but it is so bonkers that this guy is not uniformly rejected like... excusing this guy bc he founded anarchism in your mind #worst kind of ideologue worship #pierre joseph proudhon #so many anarchist theorists worth respecting! not this one though

[redavexat]

#196 #r/196 #r196 #rule #shitpost #shitposting #cw: bigotry #I am not responsible for any brain damage taken from viewing this. Viewer's discretion advised

[vibrantchaozz]

AS SOON AS WE GET INTO REDDIT WE FIND OUT SOMEONE POSTED US ON ABLEIST SUBS LIKE R/FAKEDISORDERCRINGE AND R/SYSTEMSCRINGE

HELP-

op should be ashamed /srs

#tw: ableism #cw: ableism #tw: bigotry #cw: bigotry #tw: anti endo #tw anti endo #cw anti endo #ableism tw #cw: anti endo #cw ableism #tw bigotry #sysblr #tw ableism #cw bigotry #actually plural #osdd did #osddid #did osdd #osdd #osdd system #osdd 1b #actually did #plural community #plural #plurality #send help #pls help #need help #help #someone help

[littleapocalypsekitten]

I just want to say, after seeing some of it come across my dash again, because after all, people reblog and reblog and reblog... I feel that guilt-tripping readers is ineffective at best and gets them hostile at worst. I know that this is the time that we all scream into the void at the encroaching dark and holy shit the world's messed up and in the Information Age we all get to know a lot more than our ancestors did, but with apologies to the mutual I saw reblogging things he cares about (and I reblog the same subject matter from them and others), just... the way one post was worded just got me thinking on a long philosophical track. Some of us are doing what we can in light of the situation, which is not much, because we are not in power. All we have is our personal vote / no vote / I trusted you and you let me down lists in our heads. Some of us have written congresscritters whom we know aren't listening. Some who can give money and are sure they are giving to organisations that won't be intercepted and the money gobbled up have been giving. Some are afraid that's going to happen and are living paycheck to paycheck so all we have is our griping. (And some of us have disabilities physical, psychiatric and transportational that keep us from attending protests). So some of us might be doing what we can, but it's not enough and can't be. Anyway, the philosophical train of thought that my brain got onto:

I don't think it actually does much to tell people "What you're doing now is what you would have done during the Holocaust!" or "What you're doing now is what you'd be doing during slavery!" - this is used as a guilt trip, or perhaps a mirror to hold up to people who like to pretend that they are more heroic than they are. What about those of us who do not think we are particularly good? A friend of mine and I got to talking once about old books and how some people want to cancel or censor old literature, or who will look at you funny if you say you enjoyed old lit. The "Little House on the Prairie" books got brought up. I used to read those as a kid. I think I got up to the 4th or 5th book? And the last time I was reading them was when I was 8-9? My friend read them more recently and was talking about how one of the characters / protagonist's mother said "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," which is horrible, but honestly was a common sentiment among white settlers at the time and probably something that the author's mother had said. We agreed that censoring books isn't a good thing, instead, teaching children critical thinking skills and discernment is better. Kids ought to know the shit parts of history. My friend further went into the chilling conclusion that if we had lived in that time and place, we'd probably have the same sentiment, because a lot of your environment influences you. I agreed that it was a likely scenario, but maybe not - as some people are ahead of their time and I have put away a lot of bigotries I was raised in / encountered early on and used to have as I have grown and met people and have had life experiences. (Ex-Evangelical). Also, the above "guilt trip type of tumblr / twitter post" made me think to something I said on a blog commentary pretty soon after tRump was elected about how I'd expected that if shit really hit the fan, that I might just keep my head down. We all like to think that we would go down fighting the establishment, every one of us a Katniss Everdeen with a bow in our hand or something, but the reality is, most people just keep their heads down and survive. And I'm not a proud enough person to think that I am going to be doing anything else. "If I was a German during the Holocaust" - depending upon how much I knew and my living/financial situation, well, yeah, I expect I'd be doing what I am doing now: Writing a lot of fiction short stories with symbolism indicting horrible leaders and political and cultural situations that said leaders are too stupid to get the symbolism of (hopefully) and sadly, hardly anybody reads. Slavery days? Am I a Southerner or a Northerner? Most of my ancestry comes from Sweden, so I'd say I'd be there... but if American then... writing stuff with fantasy-ized slavery among varying castes of magical woodland animals or something in order to gentle the reader into seeing reality? And otherwise just kind of keeping my head down, surviving, not materially being able to do much?

#politics #philosphy #I saw an excellent ad about american gun violence #using a drowning child as symbolsm #but it is directed at leaders although maybe at voters #although the posts coming across my dash are about the genocide in real time #that I see bits of every day on cnn #and I honestly don't think policies on that are going to change #until a certain generation withers away #and certain american religious sentiments also do #our foreign policy is messed up because of evangelical christian nationalists #and you can be christian without being one of them #if you're a progressive christian they hate you too trust me they hate me #and get to star in my snarky stories #it's about all I can do #cw: slurs #cw: anti-indigenous slur #cw: anti-indigenous slur from a very old biographical novel #cw: bigotry #cw: bigotry in old books

[soul-dwelling-not]

Rant from a cishet person about how fucking appalling and inhumane the "you being LGBTQA+ offends me" crowd has been and continues to be...

Just now, hearing some rightwing sack of shit talking head on TV...

Or reading about corporations pulling support from LGBTQA+ people because customers are attacking employees (you protect the employees by protecting the employees, not by abandoning LGBTQA+ people--who are some of your employees!)...

It's absolutely fucking tiresome to keep hearing this inane argument: "You're not doing gay right, you're turning people away, you're making other people feel uncomfortable."

I'm not LGBTQA+. But let's not pretend that this anti-LGBTQA+ bullshit isn't also gunning for anyone who doesn't quite match this rightwing fascist movement's desire for what they consider to be an ideal man or an ideal woman. When they are attacking LGBTQA+ people, they are attacking all of us, cis and straight included, for not matching their cisheteronormative standard.

It's the same shit that has has white people like me getting called traitors to my race (yes, that has happened more than once to me) for saying Black lives matter, or that this bigoted bullshit has to stop, or that you have to dismantle the Republican Party and make sure not one of them ever can run for office again. I can be as white as white can be, and it still would never be enough for these bigots. (That's not even getting into me being Polish and Irish and having relatives not that many generations removed who were born in Poland and Ireland--and how Polish and Irish identities were only considered "white" in recent history, not that long ago.)

So, I say this as a cishet person: let people be LGBTQA+, there is no right way for someone who is LGBTQA+ to be gay or trans or bi or queer, every individual person's experience is their own, it's none of your business, please fuck off and stay silent forever.

Asking them to be more "traditional" is not the flex you think it is: so, what, you want LGBTQA+ people to be like how earlier generations of LGBTQA+ people were? What the hell, you didn't accept LGBTQA+ people back in the 80s, 70s, 60s, and so on. Or, do you mean time periods where being LGBTQA+ was not a problem, or cultures where that isn't a problem, or nations where that isn't a problem--those traditions, then? That's not what you're asking for: acting like earlier generations of LGBTQA+ people were somehow more accepted is whitewashing history, and acting like what you mean by "tradition" now has some historical source is just a lie--there was no shared tradition, it varied by time and culture and location.

And it's ignoring the reality that nothing will ever be enough for these bigots: "Thank you for caving to our demands--but we're still not satisfied, so now we are making more demands."

I have been neutral on "no kink at Pride" / "kink at Pride" discussions. Now? Now, when just having any LGBTQA+ event risks getting you getting arrested or fined because "think of the children"? Now, when "you're making me uncomfortable being gay or trans in public"? Now, when they are literally telling people they can't use the fucking bathroom?! No, have kink at Pride, have no kink at Pride, do what is correct for you, if you don't like it, just don't go.

But don't compromise on your identity or how you express yourself just because someone gets offended: that's their problem, just do what keeps you safe and lets you be you (as much of a near impossibility that is in so many parts of the world and especially right now in the US, where being who you are can indeed make you unsafe--pay attention to those travel advisories about which states and cities are not LGBTQA+-accepting).

#cw: homophobia #cw: transphobia #cw: bigotry #cw: racism #cw: xenophobia

[dereksmcgrath]

Below is practically a written script that I am using as the basis for today’s livestream, Day 9 of the non-credit American Literature I survey course, going live at 11 AM EDT today. 

In today’s livestream,we begin Section 2 of this class, about the Puritans and community building in the pre-United States. We start with the legal, economic, and political ramifications inherent to the Puritan minister John Winthrop’s speech “A Model of Christian Charitie.” 

Feel free to read along with the script below, and leave a comment or email me to join the discussion!

Video Description 

Day 9 begins Section 2 of the class, looking at Puritanism and community. We kick off with a discussion about how John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charitie” persists in United States law, economics, and politics. 

Support this livestream at http://www.ko-fi.com/dereksmcgrath

Catch up on previous installments of this livestream with the American Literature I playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu0KxaVhLTK4-pkqfu7I8McDuJboqpBfl 

John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charitie": https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html 

Cotton Mather’s “Trial of Martha Carrier”: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Martha_Carrier_(Cotton_Mather) 

Phillis Wheatley at 250 registration link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/phillis-wheatley-peters-at-250-tickets-419005606047  

PBS Documentary on Harriet Tubman: https://harriettubmanvisionsoffreedom.org/watch 

PBS Documentary on Frederick Douglass: https://www.firelightfilms.tv/films/becoming-frederick-douglass 

“Ms.” interview with producer Nicole London: https://msmagazine.com/2022/10/04/black-feminist-film-nicole-london-harriet-tubman-freedom/ 

Reagan’s speech: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/election-eve-address-vision-for-america 

Kennedy’s speech: https://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/ 

Introduction 

Okay, let’s get started: it’s 11 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 11, 2022. This is a livestream for Day 9 of the American Literature I survey, a non-credit pseudo-class hosted on YouTube and Twitch that looks at United States literature from before 1865. 

I’m Derek S. McGrath, my pronouns are he/him/his. I’m not on camera right now–if I was, you would see a white man with glasses and brown hair. I’m opting to instead use a slideshow presentation–while most of what I have to say is already on the slide, there are some details from the slides that I will read aloud. 

Last Time

On Thursday, we finished our first section of this class–yay!--defining the core question that will guide the rest of this class: “Who Reads American Literature?” We will be returning to Smith, Irving, Melville, and Poe the rest of this semester–in order to see how the authors we are now reading set the stage so that their literature could emerge and ask those questions about the goals and styles of American literature. 

Today

Today, we begin Section 2 of this class, about the Puritans and community building in the pre-United States. This is not a section to be read as _the_ beginning of the United States–we’ll get to that more in Section 3 of this class, when we discuss who has been excluded from the United States literary canon. Rather, I want you to use these texts by these Puritans to see this mythology constructed in the United States to trace back to the Puritans, and see what it was that so many later speakers and authors saw and heard in these Puritans’ writings that they saw as useful. 

And that is why we will be looking at the legal, economic, and political ramifications inherent to the Puritan minister John Winthrop’s speech A Model of Christian Charitie. 

Content warnings for a lot of political discussions, including my personal animus towards the inhumanity of the Republican Party, and all that is associated with that, including homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and misogyny, as well as a discussion about the AIDS pandemic and its number of deaths. Plus, content warning for racialized terms that were outdated even when used in the 1980s and are definitely outdated coming out of my white mouth and out of Ronald Reagan’s dead white mouth. 

Update: Discord Now Available

Before we get to that, I have a personal update: there is now a Discord associated with this livestream! If you are interested in seeing progress made on these livestreams, recommended resources, and I hope study guides in the future, please consider a $1 or more contribution to my Ko-fi account, ko-fi.com/dereksmcgrath. If you already paid a dollar and haven’t received the Discord link via Ko-fi, please email me, [email protected]. And money is tight for a lot of people, so if you can’t pay a dollar, send me an email–[email protected]–and I’ll email you the Discord link. 

Promotions

And there is some related content I would like to promote. 

Today at 3 PM EDT: Phillis Wheatley at 250

Later today at 3 PM EDT, Cal Poly Pomona and other organizations will sponsor an online roundtable, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Phillis Wheatley’s book Poems on Various Subjects. We will be discussing Phillis Wheatley soon, so I hope watching this roundtable helps with addressing topics about Wheatley in this livestream. You can register for this roundtable on EventBrite for free; the registration link is in the video description.

PBS Documentaries: Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass

PBS has two new documentaries that tie into the time period this class covers: Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom, and Becoming Frederick Douglass. The Harriet Tubman documentary already aired on October 4, although I anticipate it will air again on PBS, and the Frederick Douglass documentary airs today, October 11 (and looks to be re-airing a lot in the following days). You can learn more about the Harriet Tubman documentary, as Ms. has interviewed the documentary’s producer, Nicole London. Links are in the video description. 

Today’s Questions

With updates and promotions out of the way, let’s jump into John Winthrop. 

Last time, I left you with three questions to consider for today:

How does Winthrop define a “public good,” and does he see any sense of privacy within the community he and the Puritans were trying to create? 

What terms does Winthrop use that sound more like an economics or legal lesson than a Christian religious one?

Finally, where else have you heard Winthrop’s words and ideas repeat in later United States history? 

Cautionary Tale: Which Edition Should I Use? 

But before we get into those questions, I have an apology to make. 

I regret using this version from Bartleby.com. I actually was pulling out my textbooks to review footnotes for today’s talk–and noticed way too late that the Bartleby edition does not include explicit references to the Bible made by Winthrop, where he names the passage: “Ezekiel 16 17,” and so on. The Bartleby version, for some reason, skips the mention of Ezekiel.  

I found another version of Winthrop’s “Model,” available from Hanover College’s Department of History, that retains just about all of the original text, as far as I can tell–so, please read that version instead. It is available at the link in the video description.

Three Quotations

While we have those three questions to answer today, I’m going to alter today’s lesson plan, to focus on three quotations, to help me focus on what should be discussed, with as few diatribes as I can manage given the topics of discussion. This will be Question 3, where else have you heard Winthrop’s words and ideas. 

Ronald Reagan

So, let’s look at these three quotations. I’ll go backwards in chronology, starting with these remarks by White House occupant Ronald Reagan (and it’s a lengthy quotation I’m reading, so bear with me–I kept just the key bits on the slide on screen): 

“I know I have told before of the moment in 1630 when the tiny ship Arabella bearing settlers to the New World lay off the Massachusetts coast. To the little bank of settlers gathered on the deck John Winthrop said: ‘we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.’

“Well, America became more than ‘a story,’ or a ‘byword’—more than a sterile footnote in history. I have quoted John Winthrop's words more than once on the campaign trail this year—for I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining ‘city on a hill,’ as were those long ago settlers.

“These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still…a shining city on a hill.

“At this very moment, some young American, coming up along the Virginia or Maryland shores of the Potomac is seeing for the first time the lights that glow on the great halls of our government and the monuments to the memory of our great men.

“Let us resolve tonight that young Americans will always see those Potomac lights; that they will always find there a city of hope in a country that is free. And let us resolve they will say of our day and our generation that we did keep faith with our God, that we did act ‘worthy of ourselves;’ that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill.”

John F. Kennedy

Now, let’s listen to another quotation, this one from John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States: 

“I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. ‘We must always consider,’ he said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.’ Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required.” 

John Winthrop Himself

Finally, let’s go to where this started, with the ending to John Winthrop’s reading for today, A Model for Christian Charitie: 

“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other's necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make other's conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways. So that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "the Lord make it likely that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a going.”

Those three quotations will guide much of our discussion. Think about those quotations as I explain what led people like Kennedy and Reagan to draw from Winthrop, who, while a governor of Massachusetts, was also a preacher, and a lawyer, and was thinking in terms of economics. 

History Lesson

One of the questions I asked was, “What terms does Winthrop use that sound more like an economics or legal lesson than a Christian religious one?” The other question I asked was, “How does Winthrop define a ‘public good,’ and does he see any sense of privacy within the community he and the Puritans were trying to create?” As we work our way through those three quotations, let’s try to answer these questions. To do so, we need to know a bit about the people involved in this text.

Who was Winthrop? 

John Winthrop was from England, not North America. He lived in the late 16th century up to the mid 17th century. He was a lawyer. He was a minister. He was one of the founders of what would become the state of Massachusetts. He was a Puritan.

Who were the Puritans? 

Okay, so what was a Puritan? 

The Puritans were Protestants–so, not Catholics–who were living in England. And at the time of Winthrop, England was Catholic. And the Puritans wanted to reform Catholicism in England. They were opposed to much of the English monarchy, and I won’t get to all of it, so let’s skip ahead a bit and over-simplify this: Puritans wanted England to be less Catholic; Puritans wanted to engage in trade; the English monarchy didn’t want to change the Catholic Church; so the Puritans decided to leave and form their own settlement, still within the English empire, but just not physically on the English island and instead get some physical distance all the way in North America. 

It was an abrupt departure from England: the Puritans expressed their goals to physically leave England in a document, the Cambridge Agreement of 1629. This agreement was a charter: it gave Winthrop and his colleagues the right to form a company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, that would be permitted by the English monarchy to colonize land in North America. This land is now called New England. 

What was so important about this Cambridge Agreement of 1629? I’m going to read from the Second Edition of The Heath Anthology: “The charter [...] is unique in that no provision was made for a designated meeting place for the administration of the [Massachusetts Bay] Company.” In other words, Winthrop and his colleagues now had the power “to establish [its own] government” (224). You can see how Americans like to craft this mythology that so much of its governance goes back to this creation. 

In 1630, less than a year after Winthrop and others gained the Cambridge Agreement, about 400 Puritans left England on the ship the Arbella, bound for what would become New England. 

It was on this ship that Winthrop delivered the speech we are reading, his A Modell of Christian Charitie. 

Law and Economics

Let’s turn back to those two questions–which legal and economic terms Winthrop uses, and how Winthrop views the public and private split within this community that he and the Puritans are trying to make. 

Winthrop was a lawyer. He was a justice of the peace in England at age 18. He became Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and served for twelve years. This text is about establishing a settlement–and making sure you don’t have people revolting. He had already referred to England as a powder keg of inequity ready to explode. In that regard, we get why this text is not just preaching about the religious details for these Puritans–it was to establish to his shipmates, “Hey, we are going to make our settlement, this is not just meeting in church, we really need an idea about which laws we will pass, which trade we will engage in to keep this settlement in financial security and to get materials we need, so I’m going to be drawing from my background as a lawyer to tell all of that to you.”

Socratic Questions, Rhetorical Questions, and Catechism

And you can hear that in Winthrop’s speech practices: he’s using that lawyer technique, the Socratic method. It’s what teachers use: you ask a question, you get students to answer, that prompts a new question from you–you are teaching students how to think, how to pursue one question after another. And it’s how lawyers act: ask a question with the answer predicted, get that witness to give that answer, have the next question built off of that evidence presented in that question to further make the point you want to make. 

But Winthrop isn’t quite acting like a teacher, is he? He’s answering his own question–like I just did. He’s asking these questions rhetorically. This is as much the practice of catechism–teaching Christianity by practically pulling the student along, feeding them the answers. 

Let’s look at one example of such a question-and-answer practice by Winthrop. Quoting from our group reading today: 

“There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles times. There is a time also when Christians (though they give not all yet) must give beyond their ability, as they of Macedonia, Cor. 2, 6. Likewise community of perils calls for extraordinary liberality, and so doth community in some special service for the church. Lastly, when there is no other means whereby our Christian brother may be relieved in his distress, we must help him beyond our ability rather than tempt God in putting him upon help by miraculous or extraordinary means.

“This duty of mercy is exercised in the kinds, giving, lending and forgiving.--

“Question. What rule shall a man observe in giving in respect of the measure?

“Answer. If the time and occasion be ordinary he is to giue out of his abundance. Let him lay aside as God hath blessed him. If the time and occasion be extraordinary, he must be ruled by them; taking this withall, that then a man cannot likely do too much, especially if he may leave himself and his family under probable means of comfortable subsistence.

“Objection. A man must lay up for posterity, the fathers lay up for posterity and children, and he is worse than an infidel that provideth not for his owne.

“Ans. For the first, it is plain that it being spoken by way of comparison, it must be meant of the ordinary and usual course of fathers, and cannot extend to times and occasions extraordinary. For the other place the Apostle speaks against such as walked inordinately, and it is without question, that he is worse than an infidel who through his own sloth and voluptuousness shall neglect to provide for his family.--

“Objection. The wise man's Eyes are in his head, saith Solomon, and foreseeth the plague; therefore he must forecast and lay up against evil times when he or his may stand in need of all he can gather.

“Answer. This very Argument Solomon used to persuade to liberality, Eccle.: Cast thy bread upon the waters, and for thou knowest not what evil may come upon the land. Luke 26–”

And so on, as he keeps pulling more from the Bible to support his claims. 

Look back at this. What is Winthrop trying to say? He is saying, if you have much, you should be using it, for your own care and that of your family. But what about other people? Winthrop seems a bit vague here, doesn’t he? He starts by saying this community–which he will go on to say is so close knit, like one body with each person in this community one organ or one tissue of that body–but then he transitions to say, “Well, you have to take care of your family first, or else you would be an infidel for not providing for your own.” You have here what can just as easily be a duty of Christian charity–that we can see as the value of giving to others in your community, whether you call that charity, socialist practices, or what have you–or just as easily hear a focus on just yourself and your family alone…No wonder this text was popular with Reagan. 

And yet, within this text is that sense of the public good, still–if this settlement fails, we are all screwed. I didn’t delve into the public-private split as much as I wanted to, so perhaps we can touch on it in the Section 2 review later in November. But…well, we’ll say a bit more about any perceived privacy, when you wrap up your sermon preaching about being a city upon a hill and everyone can see you, so, so much for privacy. 

Economics

While we’re on the topic of economics, let’s look a bit more about Winthrop’s biography and more from this text. 

Before he left England, Winthrop was one of that nation’s few thousand wealthy men. Yes, in 1622, Winthrop complained about poverty and inequitable taxation in England. But we can see the problems of trade in Puritan New England, and how that trade was inevitably going to lead to inequality, where some make more money than others. This creeps up in later authors–if you are teaching Winthrop, consider pairing him with far later works, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. 

Before we wrap up this discussion about economics, read the very first sentence of Winthrop’s text: 

“God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.” 

This is how he _starts_ this text. Holy crap. He is making it clear, the equivalent of saying, “Yes, this is just a fact of life: the poor will be with us–so, we have to deal with that as best we can.” 

I want to add some more context. I will read from the second edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume 1, edited by Paul Lauter in 1994: 

“In 1645, responding to charges that he had exceeded the powers of his office [as governor of Massachusetts], Winthrop delivered a speech in his defense which epitomizes this struggle in Puritan religious and political thought. In it, he deftly distinguished between natural and civil liberties, designating the former as the ability to do evil as well as good–a trait which he felt the colonists had in common with ‘the beasts’--and the latter as the liberty to do what is ‘good, just, and honest.’ He argued that this second form of liberty cannot exist without authority. Having chosen to live under this authority (of either Christ or the magistrates in the Colony), the colonists must obey” (224). 

In other words, Winthrop is saying that, if you want people to stay good, they need the firm hand of religion or government to keep them in line. Is it any wonder why a separation of church and state is vital, to not see people in government as gods?

“City Upon a Hill,” Utopia Is Fiction, and So Is American Exceptionalism

Let’s wrap this up with where we started: those three quotations. There is the major phrase to take from this speech that Winthrop gave: “a city upon a hill.” 

Quoting Winthrop, near the end of his speech: 

“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of MIcah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man.”

Skipping ahead: 

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.” 

What does Winthrop mean? He is citing Matthew 5:14-15: 

“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” 

In other words, Winthrop is citing the Bible to lend some weight to what he is about to say, which is this: to avoid this endeavor in New England being a failure, like as if our ship were to be in a shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity–to have posterity, to have a generation after us–then we must be knit together–we must be knitted together, like yarn knitted together into one whole cloth, we must be united and as one–as if we are one person, one man. As such, we will be a city on a hill–in other words, a city that everyone can see regardless what side of the hill they stand on. We are in this obvious spot that everyone can see us, watching us at all times. And if we fail, they’ll see it. But if we succeed, they’ll see that too. Matthew 5:14-15 says to be a city on a hill, something that can’t be hidden–just as you would not light a candle and put it under a bushel, hide it, because that defeats the purpose. You don’t do something this important like create a settlement in New England, and not use that to show off. Winthrop is saying, we Puritans must be an example to all others trying to reform the Catholic Church, because if we succeed, more will be inspired by our example–but if we screw this up, then we signal to the rest of the world that this doesn’t work. 

Would we even remember Winthrop if not for that phrase “a city upon a hill”? But here’s the thing: that phrase is not something that has been with us forever throughout the United States. Do you remember giving the Pledge of Allegiance in school? You know how that pledge has you say “Under God”? That wasn’t always there. It wasn’t even there at the founding of the United States, whether by the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. The Pledge of Allegiance began in 1892. It was revised numerous times until 1954 to add that this was “one Nation under God.” Why that change? Red Scare, mostly: it was done to act like the Soviet nations were godless while the good old US of A, with its separation of church and state, was…actually godly? How the heck does that work…

Quoting Kennedy 

This anti-Communist bent, this Red Scare bent, is one reason we get stuck with “a city upon a hill” in our US discourse. My ignorance, though: I thought it started with Reagan. Nope. It started in 1961 with John F. Kennedy, before he got inaugurated, during a speech. Maybe you could squint and say, “Well, Kennedy was a Massachusetts boy, of course he would tie in his election to Winthrop, a founder of Massachusetts.” 

Quoting Kennedy: 

“I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government ona  perilous frontier.” 

I’ll pause there and say, gee, no wonder Kennedy also ended up coining the phrase “new frontier” as well. 

Continuing to quote Kennedy: 

“Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us–and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill.” 

Now, while Kennedy may have been the first president to use it, I think the phrase is more commonly associated with Reagan–or, maybe it’s just the age group of my classmates and teachers that thought of Reagan first before Kennedy. 

Quoting Reagan

Quoting Reagan from November 3, 1980, in his speech the night before that year’s presidential election, he said the following: 

“I have quoted John Winthrop’s words more than once on the campaign trail this year–for I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining city on a hill, as were those long ago settlers.” I’m going to pause here: you know, at least Kennedy put you there in the time period. Reagan, here, I think, over-estimates whatever people remember of his supposed repeated quoting of Winthrop more than once on the campaign trail. This was before Internet, before cable TV really took off, before having content so easily available on record to the general public. That repetition is key–but repetition with context to be honest, not some yammering stooge repeating the same three phrases in his rightwing rants. But there I go being political again. We’ll circle back to Reagan’s quotations in a moment. 

But let’s get back to Reagan’s speech. Continuing: 

“These visitors to that city on the Potomac–”

…For crying out loud, he moves from Massachusetts to the Potomac–for crying out loud, Ronny, do you not know geography, you annoying dink…

“These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow–”

… … …HE SAID RED OR YELLOW. GOOD GOD. 

Continuing to quote Reagan…

“[T]hey are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still…a shining city on a hill.” 

Notice who is not mentioned here. What if you are a woman? What if you are gay? Trans? 

But, you know, maybe we should just focus on those people that Reagan mentioned: people who are white, Black, Native American, Asian, Jewish, Christian, conservative, liberal, Democratic, or Republican. 

I will not be able to address how Reagan screwed all of those people over, but here are some highlights. 

Reagan said “white or black.” Reagan campaigned for Barry Goldwater. Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Don’t tell me you give a shit about Americans when you don’t give a shit about Americans. 

Reagan perpetuated a rightwing party that now today celebrates antisemetic candidates, so-called Christians who would rather slap their neighbor than turn the other cheek, would prefer a man who fails to embody Christianity in Georgia over a literal reverend in Georgia, demonize anyone for not being conservative enough and for being to the left of Hitler, would just as easily lead an armed insurrection against Democrats as they would shout to hang a Republican on January 6. 

If it is not clear, I am not a fan of Reagan, and I am not a fan of having someone use American iconography and Christian imagery to pull the wool over my eyes. 

Oh, and Reagan’s inaction AIDS killed almost 90,000 people. Regan’s communications director, that sack of shit Pat Buchanan, referred to AIDS as “nature’s revenge on gay men.” Nature, huh? Didn’t want to call it God’s wrath, Pat? You’ll forgive me, as Reagan pretends to speak to our common humanity, and pretends to speak to a model of charity we should represent to the rest of the world, that Reagan did not give a shit about who died of AIDS, especially anyone who didn’t look like him and wasn’t the same sexuality as him. If I am not putting too fine a point on it, allow me to be more emphatic: fuck Ronald Reagan. 

Utopia Is Fiction

But what is the real point to all of this? This is a utopia. This is Winthrop imagining an ideal community–and as an ideal, certainly a lofty goal that I wouldn’t say not to keep reaching for, but as an ideal, is a fiction. It’s not going to happen. You never get to perfection. There is no perfect society. Almost all utopian fiction is about how we fail to get to that point–or, how the people within that story think they are a utopia, only to realize how much further they have to go to reach their goals, or, how reaching that very goal unleashes horrible forces, be they fascism or environmental devastation or the collapse of society. 

This is likewise why, while Reagan and, yeah, have to admit it, Kennedy, are grabbing for another fiction: American exceptionalism. I’m going to take the lazy approach and just quote Wikipedia for this one: 

“American exceptionalism is the idea that the United States is inherently different from other nations. Proponents of it argue that the values, political system, and historical development of the U.S. are unique in human history, often with the implication that it is both destined and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage.”

This is also built on fiction. I don’t ignore that the history of the United States is its own. I don’t ignore that Winthrop had an exception from so many other colonies, to be so self-governing–up to a point, as we can see that the settlement was still part of the English empire, that Massachusetts was part of the North American colonies run by England, that even in being self-governing, that exception was up to a point and not forever lasting. 

Hell, the US maintained slavery long after many of its European predecessors eliminated it–how is that a shining beacon on a hill to be admired by other nations? 

What makes the US destined to be a positive example on the world stage, if the United States doesn’t also look to what Winthrop gets at, that we are to be a knitted people, united in causes despite our differences of class, if we don’t keep trying to be more willing to embrace all who are within that nation? How can the US be a positive example when it is behind in education, transportation, and economic development? It is not that there is not much to admire, appreciate, and enjoy about the United States. 

But this idea that the US is destined is something that emerges, I think, in part from Winthrop’s application of the Bible to suggest that is fated for his Massachusetts, that later politicians thought was destined for the US–and there is no destination, there is a goal and there is what you do to get to that goal, and how you will fail at steps in that goal but can keep going and keep improving. And to suggest that the US is unique, an exception, ignores what happens when there comes to be another nation that one day can embody all that is good about the US–and shows what the US could do better. 

Next Time

I’ll wrap up there for today. Thank you for listening to today’s review of John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charitie. What other questions come to mind about Winthrop? Which other US politicians have cited Winthrop, or incorporated ideas similar to this supposed American exceptionalism? I would love to know–drop your questions in the comments section or email them to [email protected]. I will address questions before or during the Section 2 review about the Puritan authors, which will be here on YouTube and Twitch on Tuesday, November 8 (time to be determined: I’m considering whether to stick to 11 AM EST or, for international viewers, go with 10 AM EDT–your thoughts in the comments are appreciated). 

And next time we continue discussion about Puritans in early America. We will be reading Cotton Mather’s “The Trial of Martha Carrier.” You can read it online at Wikisource; link is in the video description. 

As you read Mather, please consider these three questions: 

Where do you see legal acumen in Mather’s text? Or, where do you see him acting more like a forensic scientist?

How should we regard gender as pertains to this text, in which a man such as Mather is writing about a woman such as Carrier?

Finally, what is in this text that you have seen played forward in time? In other words, all this talk about witches and witch hunts and witchcraft–where do you see it continue to appear in our current discourse and popular culture? 

Thanks again for joining this livestream. If you enjoyed this livestream, please consider a monetary contribution at ko-fi.com/dereksmcgrath–your financial support helps keep me working in education. 

Until Thursday at 11 AM EDT, I’ve been Derek S. McGrath. You have a good afternoon. Bye.

#american literature i #livestream #john winthrop #economics #politics #law #cw: bigotry #cw: aids mention #Youtube

[battlegay]

So. It took me exactly eight days for my family to say what I had been terrified of the entire time:

"you'll never be a woman because you'll never menstruate or have a child"

"I can call you auntie or sister but woman is a step too far"

The only apology I received was for how it was said. Not the content of the message.

Let me be clear. I am a woman. I am not roleplaying. I am not a dude dressing up. It took me years to finally feel comfortable within my own skin and I'm not about to invalidate my experience so that people can either shoehorn me into their concept of transness or defend the character of people who say that. If you don't like it, may your fields burn and your home rot from within.

#transphobes #trans things #cw: bigotry #spilled ink #hurtful

[palipunk]

Casual reminder that I have absolutely zero tolerance towards Israel apologists/centrists/Zionists etc. Palestinians are done with coddling and we’re done with being patient - it’s a genocide by a settler colonial state that wants to wipe the indigenous peoples of Palestine off the map. It is 2023 (75 years since the start of the Nakba) and the genocide is ongoing.

#palestine #free palestine #i remember seeing Palestinians with their heads blown apart bc of bombings and somehow #i still get treated like I’m overacting when talking about bigotry 🤷🏽‍♀️ #cw genocide #cw settler violence #revolution until victory

[racefortheironthrone]

I was reading your yeomen tag and saw the term knave refering to someone bellow a yeoman. But what is a knave?

As I’ve discussed in the past, a lot of our insulting terms for people started out as class signifiers:

a villain was originally a villein (another term for serf).

a knave was a servant (often the "knave" and the "knight" were opposing pairs) but also a low-status and thus dishonorable person.

likewise, "flunky," "minion," "lickspittle" and similar terms all originally were different (mostly insulting) terms for servants.

"vagrants," "vagabonds," and "sturdy beggars" were all descriptions of homeless people, either who were seen as inherently criminal and dangerous because they were disconnected from the feudal system. There is a strong crossover to anti-Romani/anti-Zigany slurs, as well as the "rootless cosmopolitan" variant of anti-semitism, in this category.

similarly, "bumpkins," "yokels," "rubes," "hicks," "rednecks," etc. were all insulting terms for people from rural areas, usually denoting their lack of education, sophistication, and their working in outdoor manual labor.

for some gendered versions, "sluts" and "slatterns" originally had connotations of being dirty, unkempt, and being a low-ranked servant like a scullery or kitchen maid (i.e, they're dirty because they're doing "the dirty work").

upper-class Brits still use "pleb" (plebian) as an insult today.

#feudalism #knaves #cultural history #cw bigotry

[bonefall]

Hey Bones! Sorry if this is a bit random to ask you, but-

Is it ok if you elaborate and/or explain how Millie is ableist towards Briarlight please?

I haven’t really heard much people within the fandom talk about Millie’s treatment of Briarlight and her disability as negative and/or bad compared to Millie not really paying attention to Blossomfall within the books.

So I’m interested what you know and/or have to say about it.

OH boy, I feel like this one is REALLY easy to see if you just pop the book open. It will make your skin crawl once you see these quotes. Millie is an AWFUL mother and SHOCKING in how nasty she is to her disabled child.

I run in some pretty good circles and curate my Tumblr experience well, so I see plenty of people just mentioning it as a fucked up thing the series did casually, but I'll make a compilation of the worst of it.

(CW for some serious ableism, Millie is terrible.)

She's injured in Chapter 11 of OotS Book 2: Fading Echoes, and Millie is obsessive over her until Chapter 9 of OotS Book 3: Night Whispers. She's interfering with Jayfeather's treatments, constantly in the den, shouting at him when he tries to be honest about Briarlight's condition.

But that would be understandable. She's concerned and the prognosis isn't great. Her very young, athletic daughter (basically 17-ish) has suddenly received a life-altering injury that will drastically affect her life. Until Night Whispers Chapter 9, she's just worrying about her daughter.

And then we get this.

(Please note this is happening in front of the entire Clan. The entire social group is watching this.)

Though Briarlight expressed frustration with her exercises and how painful and difficult recovery was in Fading Echoes, that is not the case in Night Whispers. At this point, it's difficult but Briarlight is recovering well. MILLIE decides that her daughter being alive with a disability is suffering.

Note how in this exchange, Jayfeather is being forced to comfort Briarlight's MOTHER. Not BRIARLIGHT herself, the one with the injury who is looking at a massive upheaval to her life. Though superficially it seems like this is coming from a place of love, Millie is making Briarlight's recovery about herself by doing this, and this exchange is ableist.

Millie: "I want her to do all of these able-bodied things."

Jay: "That will not happen, but life has inherent value."

Millie: "No it doesn't, if you cannot do those able-bodied things, you are suffering."

But it gets worse because it's not even that she's only expressing this in private. Her daughter is within earshot. The newly disabled person is listening to their own fucking mother call her medical treatment "dragging out her suffering."

BURN this passage into your mind. Having heard her OWN FUCKING MOTHER cry to a crowd of cats that maybe it would be better if she was DEAD, watching several cats drop everything to comfort HER for having a disabled daughter, Briarlight has to drag herself out and act like a cute baby to get her to stop making a public spectacle.

It's hard to describe to someone who hasn't been in the situation before, but if your parent is making a scene like that, it'll end up falling onto you to "appeal" to their sense of... parental valor, is the best way I can put it. "See? Aren't I getting better? I promise I'll work hard. I'm not hurt it's okay! Everything is fine!" You give them a chance to affirm how good of a parent they are, for helping you, or 'putting up' with you. You have to assure them that your existence isn't so bad.

In essence, it falls onto the child to comfort their parent.

This is specifically a form of a toxic family dynamic called emotional parentification, on top of it being obviously ableist. She is being shoved into a position where she needs to sacrifice her OWN need for support and comfort to coddle her parent, to STOP her from making a scene, while that parent screams that her disabled life is worth less than her siblings' abled ones to a crowd of cats.

Naturally, this affects Briarlight's sense of self-worth. She stops eating.

Thankfully, Jayfeather is here to have an exchange about how her life has value. For all my issues with Jayf in later arcs, he has some of his best moments here in OotS.

In later books, Briarlight's struggles with self-worth continue. It's all shit that Millie implied about her being less useful because she is unable to do what her siblings can.

It's every other cat who has to come in and assure Briarlight that she isn't worthless. Not Millie. Millie comes on screen and she's either making Briarlight feel like garbage or barking at Jayfeather for not doctoring hard enough.

She desperately craves independence. This above scene is happening because she wanted to come out into the woods for the first time in forever, and she's being suffocated and bossed around in the camp constantly. It was up to her brother, Bumblestripe, to do anything to help her.

Not her dad. Not her mom. Bumblestripe. (Rare Bumblestripe W)

I also want to take a brief moment to point out a detail that the fandom often forgets, about Blossomfall. She actually knows full well that her feelings are unreasonable here, and she believes that the fact she isn't feeling "what she is supposed to" is proof that she is a bad person who deserves hell.

Millie's actions are crushing ALL of her children under its weight. Briarlight is obviously getting the worst of it, but these are YOUNG adults, just out of apprenticeship, and Blossomfall is being told that her sister is in a constant state of "suffering." This means she's not allowed to be frustrated about how Millie is behaving, because hating THAT means you hate your sister, and that makes her an awful person.

What Blossomfall is describing here is the feelings associated with being a glass child.

But no it's not JUST that she's being neglectful to Blossomfall, who yes, is a young adult and can take responsibility for her own actions. Millie is being nasty to Bloss too, directly comparing her to Briarlight and unironically doing the "You should be GRATEFUL you can walk when BRIARLIGHT WOULD DO ANYTHING TO LEGS AROUND."

Again. I'll state the very obvious from the passage.

"Hey Millie, your other daughter looks kinda upset right now!" = "PERFECT TIME TO SNAP AT HER"

Blossomfall = Wasted her morning when she should be Useful

Useful = Can hunt

"YOUR SISTER wouldn't act like this"

Proper warrior = spends every waking minute in service of the clan

Once again, Millie does this in public, with several people watching her rip into her child. She even gets ANGRY at Brackenfur gently trying to soften the blow. It's freakjob shit to hear, "h-hey, at least they're safe!" and SNARL back "IS IT?"

Millie continues to hover over Briarlight well into Bramblestar's Storm. The closure for these intense, insulting comments, public embarrassments, snapping at and neglecting one child while telling the other one that her life was "suffering" because she can't walk is.....

millie watches her do some pull-ups and is so impressed by them she isn't bigoted anymore :o)

"my daughter's membership at British Planet Fitness paid off. Look at how big her biceps are now. I guess I was wrong to tell her that her life is inherently suffering because she can't hunt, just look at her gooooo"

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

So, basically, Millie's a terrible parent. She never gets properly called out for this manipulative, toxic behavior. She says that her own daughter might have been better off dead in public. She makes Briarlight feel like half of a cat because she can't do all the things her siblings do, while her siblings are told that they should be grateful they're not disabled like Briarlight.

And just to end off, because it's relevant, the BRAND NEW writing team then killed off Briarlight in an incredibly stupid, insulting way. She catches fucking Greencough in AVoS so that they can have a very sad funeral for a couple of chapters, before moving on to Jayfeather being a shithead to Alderheart for being friends with Velvet.

Then they wrote a line in Squirrelflight's Hope where Squilf's mother begs her to stay dead in heaven, because if she goes back to life, she might be disabled like Briarlight and her mate Bramblestar won't want her anymore. The line was so bad the authors promised that it wouldn't be there in reprints; the reprint still has not come.

normal series.

#warrior cats analysis #Briarlight #CW Ableism #Cw bigotry #CW jesus christ I feel like this needs more tags because it's SO bad

[xxlovelynovaxx]

The whole point is you don't know if they're fem cis men. You don't know if they're trans men. You don't know if they're trans women deeply closeted for their safety. You don't know if they're trans women whom misgendering will drive them further AWAY from their egg cracking and harm them. You. Don't. Know.

Misgendering is bad. "Clocking" someone is bad. Making assumptions about someone's identity and then turning it into a "joke" is bad. What's funny about misgendering someone?

Also, this discourse is literally in the context of the queer community. It's literally in the context of the queer community having an antimasculinity and gender essentialism problem. It's also in the context of gender stereotypes and the fact that smelling like flowers or painting your nails making you a girl doesn't become less of a harmless stereotype because it's a trans woman saying it. Like oh wow we went full circle from "girls play with dolls and like pink" to "trans girls play with dolls and like pink". Congrats on alienating every non-femme trans woman and femme trans non-woman.

It's not fucking transmisogyny to tell you not to misgender people or assume liking frilly things makes someone a girl. It's not fucking transmisogyny to tell you that the QUEER and especially TRANS communities have an issue with valorizing femininity while demonizing masculinity. It's not fucking transmisogyny to acknowledge this while acknowledging that actual transmisogyny demonizes transfemininity while infantilizing and erasing transmasculinity.

I'm putting the word transmisogyny on a high shelf until the rest of y'all learn what it actually fucking means. Transmisogyny isn't when an entitled white trans woman gets called out for doing actual harm. Like "joking" about misgendering someone. Or "joking" about being racist and going through a "nazi phase". Or "joking" about "raping cuntboys". It might be affirming that some queer people take your white woman's tears at face value, but here's the thing:

You're lovely women who deserve to have every access to transition, to resources, to be treated equally to cis people. You're just really fucking shitty people. You're bigots, you're cruel, you're cliquey, and you're like every boring high school mean girl who never grew out of pettily bullying other vulnerable people to get over the pathetic inadequacies of your own life circumstances.

People like that deserve community and kindness too. They also deserve not to have their behavior tolerated and to have to deal with compassionate rehabilitative justice. Those things can both be true, especially when the people they are hurting explain until our throats are raw how they're hurting us and they just keep doing it. Because the thing is, it's not actually about any "societal pressure to transition", and the fact you think it is shows you haven't listened to a single actual criticism anyone has had of the whole "egg discourse".

Other people have already explained more patiently and eloquently than me what exactly the problem with calling someone an egg is. I'd think you'd be concerned minimally with how it hurts actual transfem eggs more than anything, even if you don't care about how it very much does hurt transmascs and GNC cis men and the movement of transfeminism as a damn whole to insist "haha liking fem things=woman".

Explain what's funny about that. I'll wait.

Anyway, this was reblogged from someone I long ago considered a friend, someone I thought was better than this. I really thought most trans people were better than this when I first entered the community. I still hope some are. You deserve to be told that this is wrong, because you deserve to be reminded that you're better people than this kind of bullshit.

-your utterly over it neighborhood intersex transneufemmasc

#I AM a fucking trans woman and you'll never fucking convince me that joking about misgendering people is okay #regardless of their actual identity #or that joking about clocking people is okay #or the harm this does to actual eggs is okay #or the harm this does to transmascs and GNC folks is okay #or the ways this sets both cisfeminism and transfeminism back to the fucking 90s at least is okay #y'all are as bad as bigoted comedians clinging to the same unfunny jokes and crying bigotry just bc people tell you it's bigoted #like seriously y'all fucking get over yourselves #discourse cw

[victoriadallonfan]

Sometimes I can’t insult anyone because their stupidity does the work for me

#jk rowling #JKR #fuck jkr #anti jkr #screw jkr #cw jkr #bigotry #lgtbqia+ #holocaust denial #cw bigotry #cw transphobes

[spider-xan]

Who knows what Stoker's actual intentions were, especially given his own biases and bigotry, but between Mina being excluded out of misogyny, and Renfield not being taken seriously out of ableism - with dire, potentially deadly consequences - it's almost as if the moral lesson of today's entries is that not listening to the marginalized, dismissing them as being incapable of mental strength, and denying their agency may, in fact, be terrible for both the less privileged first and foremost, but also everyone else around them.

#dracula #dracula daily #mina harker #mina murray #rm renfield #renfield #stoker is all over the damn place with his bigotry #yet sometimes manages to be surprisingly progressive at times #ableism cw

[nekropsii]

One of the weakest Homestuck criticisms I see pop up every now and then is that the Hemoloyalty system is bad because “it’s not a clear-cut metaphor for any one specific real-world bigotry.” Acting as if it is a poorly made example of Sci-Fi/Fantasy Racism since it’s used to cover and express Racism, Classism, Xenophobia, Misogyny, etc.

It always makes me wonder if they’re new to fiction that contains Fantasy Racism, because Fantasy Racism systems covering multiple bigotries is entirely normal. It’s the standard, even.

You know.

Because that’s how actual real world bigotry operates?

For example… Racism does not stop at a judgment of skin color. It never just affects how your race is perceived and then stops before it dips into any other bigotry. Racism is almost never “Oh, ew, you’re brown,” with no other follow up. It’s a long series of assumptions and judgments made on your (perceived) race. Racism is deeply entangled with- you guessed it!- Classism, Xenophobia, Misogyny, all kinds of things.

Classic examples of Racism include:

Having your expressions of femininity and womanhood denied or fetishized based on your race, which happens quite regularly to Black and East Asian women in particular,

Suspicions towards Black people in middle class-rich suburban neighborhoods/gated communities, based on the assumption that “they could never legitimately afford to live there” so they “must be trespassing and/or a criminal”,

… And nutjobs screaming at people who are Latino or Arabic, or they perceive as Latino or Arabic, to “go back to their country” whether or not they were actually born there.

Are these all derived from Racism? Yes! But are they also combining forces with a different bigotry to help strengthen that racism? Yes! This is how it works! Fantasy Racism often has their fictional bigotry cast a wide net of judgments and assumptions that wind up making it all look very messy and unclear and containing multiple bigotries because that’s how it works in real life! You cannot in earnest say that a fictionalized bigotry system is bad because it “isn’t one clear cut thing” without looking like a moron. Are you sheltered? Have you only put one lone dying brain cell into this? Have you never experienced bigotry before, or thought about how it operates? I fear that you may need to do some reflecting!

#homestuck #homestuck meta #homestuck analysis #hemospectrum #hemoloyalty #fantasy racism #fantasy bigotry #cw racism #nekro.txt #nekro.pdf

[enbycrip]

I am pro-kid because I am pro-human, and kids are people. No matter how much social bullshit tries to say they are not.

No one asked to be here. Everyone deserves a loving, gentle, safe childhood; and the world is actively a much worse place because that idea is somehow controversial.

Active hostility towards kids also *massively* entrenches the inequality birthing and feeding parents experience. If you really hate kids but you don’t hate women and people read as women, sell treating kids like people to yourself on fighting misogyny. And consider that hating any group of marginalised people for their marginalisation is bigotry.

You don’t have to like kids en masse. You *certainly* don’t need to have them if you don’t want to, or to babysit kids if you don’t feel comfortable doing so.

But you *do* have a responsibility to treat kids like people, including accommodating their needs. Don’t be a dick to kids you meet in the wild, and don’t be a dick to parents because their kids are acting like kids.

And be aware of the intersections of privilege when you are considering kids in public. Kids who are getting in your way in public spaces are likely to be doing that because of poverty, frankly. Very few parents *want* to take their young kids on a long ride on public transport, especially if said kids are clearly either tired and cranky or full of energy that public transport is a shitty environment to release it on. If they are doing this, it is likely because they have no other options.

And please don’t make the disingenuous “they chose to have kids” argument; horribly, bodily autonomy is not a given for birthing parents. About a third of births in “western countries” are unplanned. There is lack of access to birth control and reproductive healthcare and there are controlling partners (manipulation through sex and reproduction is a favoured tactic for far too many abusers).

A 3 year old having a meltdown is doing it because of their developmental stage and because their basic needs aren’t being met. It’s not deliberate and it’s not under their control. Being a dick about that as exactly as bigoted as behaving that way towards a disabled person who isn’t being accommodated either.

I’m physically disabled and neurodivergent. My adult brother is neurodivergent and learning disabled. I’ve seen a lifetime of people who hate kids hating disabled people too. Including too many privileged disabled people, frankly. There is absolutely such a thing as a clash of accessibility needs, but vocal hatred of other marginalised people, or being a dick to them, because their needs clash with yours is Not Okay.

I am also pro-old people for the exact same reasons I am pro-kid. Because they are all people, and marginalised people at that.

Childhood and old age are the times people living in economically-exploited classes experience the most poverty, because age, and the lack of capacity for economic exploitation that accompanies both old age and childhood, is a characteristic that people are marginalised for.

We live in a society here. We are communal creatures. We have a basic responsibility to be decent to other people, including people who are marginalised and dehumanised, and that includes kids and old people.

If you are organising, including kids and providing childcare is as essential as accessibility. If you don’t, you are literally entrenching the same power dynamics you claim to be organising against. This is a huge fucking problem on the left, and it’s one thing the second wave feminists got entirely right, despite all their other issues.

#pro-child #pro-old people #pro choice #marginalised people #marginalised groups #hating kids isn’t a personality ffs people #people who hate kids hate disabled people too #bigotry #cw dv reference #reproductive rights #reproductive justice