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#for one thing! SLAVERY! fucked up no matter if racism was part of it or not!!
magnoliamyrrh · 9 months
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Paul is a fucked up manchild who berates his mom the second he gets supernatural powers and sees himself as better than everyone. That’s only if you can get past herbert’s awful writing where his villains gotta be fat and gay and he repeats these facts every single time they switch povs as if the audience has somehow forgotten (seriously, highlight every time herbert mentions the villain is fat. It’s so common it’s just boring stale writing). Paul in dune is the worst kinda self insert fanfic. Dune is such a shitty book girl how do you enjoy it
ohh he definetely is a man child; i feel bad for him in like the first half of the first book mainly bc hes a teenager, hes 15, like, a teenager teenager not an almost adult 17-18. he may come from a powerful family but hes just thrust into very messed up circumstances, more or less tortured to prove hes human, has to grapple with being some sort of raised-to-be-exceptional genetic experiment and being used in some weird intergalactic lie and war, and incredible amount of historical pressure and other things. like, at 15, hes more kid than adult dealing w this. but also, while being 15, he is smart, and charming to others, and he quickly rises to great infleunce and is good at manipulation. and yea the moment he gets some more power he turns it even against his own mother, against himself, and against others and the longer they go on the more insufferbale he becomes; what ground of expeptionalism in him existed gets raised tenfold -hes an inherently flaued character by all means who even when he tries he fucked up badly many times. i mean like hell, among all the shit he ends up doing, even just that thing that he himself didnt have the power to put shit in order, so he ends up forcing it on his son, like how he was shoved into a bunch of things when he was younger
and yes lol i am well aware of the villan thing. i do get that in this context the "fat" thing and even the gay pedo thing is moreso an allegory for greed and the keeping of and hoarding of precious things (im Not saying fat ppl are like this mind u, im not saying its good either, but in many cultures fat has or is indeed revered as a sign of wealth; and this is used to contrast to those who dont have, and i reckon this is where it comes from in the story). but yes, i do think thats uhh i hate this word problamatic. the fat thing, the gay thing, the pedo thing. definetely part of an ongoing issue of attaching several of those characteristics to villans, and also of making villans generally ugly, thus associsting the two together. like yup, its definitely not good
idk tho, i think. dune was written in the 1960s by a white dude. like, it doesnt suprise me that that stuff is in there. ive read plenty of things that have parts of them that are problamatic or outdated or offensive and it just,, is what it is. like idk i can enjoy something while also being aware and critical of the parts of it that are fucked up - i think if i wasnt able to, i wouldnt be able to like,,,, explore a lot of the literature that exists out there, especially older literature, no matter from where its from in the world or if its written by men or women. most of it or most authors at least have written some weird shit or held some weird shit. idk just a stupid parallel off the top of my head i love the 1001 nights stories - i grew up with them - but theyre filled to the brim with weird shit and problamatic things and sexism and racism and slavery and whatever else, like absolutely filled - to an extend they reflect the times. i still, however, enjoy reading them tho
i also dont know how much paul is a self insert - maybe. ive never read the dude as sympathetic or a sympathetic anti-hero much. i did find the idea that out of this all-female order theyd have the idea that a male would be the one w the greatest power and some sort of prophesied force of power weird, sooo idk maybe. but idk, if its a self insert i rlyyy dont think its supoosed to be a flattering one much. the dude just gets worse and worse as the books progress, and he ends up after fucking up so much and being too weak to fix it, exiled, alone, spending his last yesrs wondering in loneliness and deep regret. so, i dont think its shown that his superiority complex or anything else brought him something good; it just lead to tragedy
mostly i like the series for the intricacy of its plot and the way its introduced, the messages it tries to send even if it at times fails or does so badly. like yea, its not perfect, but it is trying to ssy something about foreign meddeling and co-opting of religions and cultures and desperste situstions, or colonialism and capitalism, of exploitation, greed, power, etc. and also in very large part its lore, its scifi elements, its weird out there mysticism, and all the parts of it that are very, very weird. i am fascinsted by the world that this dude created. im a really big fan of magical realism and to an extent the books are like this - because they start more normal and over time become more and more mystical and fantastical and weird and less grounded as more concepts, creatures, and affects of the spice are introduced. i also do like that the main character isnt an actual hero. all this talk of prophecy and whatever, but its all bad, and it goes so fucking bad. its to an extent a subversion of classical fantasy tropes, combined with space scifi.... and yes. there are times when the writing isnt great, or when its outdated, or when it hammers things again and again (like the villan thing). i also think in many places the writing is intriguing, careful, and calls for attention and contemplation of what is happening
and idk apart from something like 1001 nights..... to an extend, i feel abt dune as i feel about game of thrones. i rly love those books. yes theyre writing by an old white man. yes there are parts of them (less than the show id say) which are problamatic and outdated and i could go on a whole list about that. but, i still enjoy them. i think the world grrm martin created is insanely insanelyyy complex, beautiful, fascinating, the lore is some of the deepest and most intriguing ive ever seen, and the character writing - the sheer complexity of the characters, the willingness to show how fucked up humans are and how often things are so stupidly complicated, the way he can get us to love even insufferable characters, the way there are no perfect good heros, the broader anti-war and even climate change message, the harsh and grounded realism of much of the series,,, the way theyre also kinda like magic realism, bc over the books magic keeps coming back more and more, the world becomes more full of mystic and mystery and prophecies which arent 100% true, the way the books are largely a subversion of fantasy tropes. like, yea. theyve got issues, grrm martins writings got issues. but i think theyre brilliant in many ways at the same time 🤷‍♀️
so i guess. yea. im definitely not saying the books dont have issues or theyre perfect or theyre the peak of literature. but im still able to enjoy parts of them
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subbyenbywitch · 1 year
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[tv review] ds9 4x04 "hippocratic oath" (1995)
i know that season 4 & beyond is the territory of the moral gray area and it’s been a while since i rewatched this part of the show so it’s going to be a bit of a process seeing what i think about a lot of it. my recollection is that characters mostly struggle to do the right thing in ways that are believable & easy to empathize with, but that ultimately the core values of the federation are argued for forcefully even when they’re challenged by the realities of war/etc, but again, i am interested to see how correct that recollection is.
the thing that makes this a good episode is that even though it’s entirely possible to understand where o’brien was coming from, it’s pretty clearly siding with bashir. without that context, i would not like this episode very much. and, to be honest, while i understand he was only worried about saving his friend’s life and i understand how powerful of a motivation that can be, the guy just condemned a race of people to brutal slavery because he wasn’t sure his friend would succeed in curing them from the drug addiction that their masters use to control them and he goes so far to suggest that even if julian had succeeded, maybe if they were freed from the founders’ control they would get too rowdy, and holy shit that is so completely antithetical to everything the federation stands for, and even divorced from that context just considering the ethical implications of it makes me want to puke.
i go back & forth on how i feel about o’brien because there are a few episodes where he is genuinely likable & relatable, but i’m sorry this single act is more racist than his entire history of racism towards the cardassians. i am just absolutely staggered that this is something we’re supposed to accept & move on from in a like “gosh, that really sucked but what can y’do?” kinda way? dude just condemned a race of people to fucking slavery. like, i’m glad julian is too disgusted with him to play darts that night but i’m not really sure that’s sufficient here?
you joined starfleet, man! we’ve seen a hundred times that part of being starfleet is being willing to die for what the federation stands for. it means putting the lives of those you can help ahead of your own. that also means that you’ve got to trust that your comrades on either side of you are also willing to die for those principles! i understand why this is a difficult position to be put in, but leaving everything else aside… chief o’brien failed as a starfleet officer. and the fact that no one says those words in this episode really bothers me.
again, only the fact that the episode is clearly on julian’s side & what miles does is treated as a tragedy that no one feels good about keeps me from hating this episode. the fact that goran’agar lets them go (after a fakeout where both miles & the audience are led to assume they’re about to be executed) and both goran’agar & julian are clearly crushed is the saving grace of the episode. goran’agar is more merciful than miles, and i wish the episode had made a little more of that, but the fact that it’s there does matter quite a bit to me.
over in b plot land, worf is mad at odo for not copping hard enough, it turns out odo was copping harder than worf realized & worf fucks up his investigation. we’re clearly meant to side with odo here, and you could be forgiven for thinking that i side with worf since i love him & don’t particularly care for odo, but frankly i don’t really care one way or another? like, i recognize that this was a well-written plot & it accomplishes an important bit of character development for worf in reinforcing that his role has changed and also that the realities of life aboard ds9 present much different challenges for him than serving on the enterprise. so like, i think this was a really good subplot, i’m just not emotionally invested in cop drama is all.
sisko kicks ass in this subplot, though. like, again, i don’t love the latitude he gives odo considering that odo is a fucking cryptofascist pig, but i do appreciate that when worf fucks up sisko is basically like, “hey man, welcome to an entirely different job in an entirely different environment. i expect you to fuck up. just learn from it and do better.” i told y’all i remembered him being a better mentor to worf than picard was, but i was thinking of stuff that happens a season or two from now, i forgot how early it starts.
a-rank
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wordsandrobots · 1 year
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At the risk of writing in the anger and despair (because gods know, ‘British Government to re-legalise slavery by default’ is the kind of thing I have very little coherent response to beyond ‘it tracks’) and knowing this is a point that probably doesn’t need making for most --
It doesn’t matter if it’s meant as a distraction.
Obviously it *is*. It’s coming from a government caught between its own ideological incapability of fixing the problems making people’s lives miserable and the very real consequences of said problems, desperately looking for an easy win. Obviously they expect further cruelty towards asylum seekers to be cheered by their political base, and would rather this gets the focus than LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE right now.
But treating this as a ploy, saying the racist rhetoric and xenophobic invasion narrative is all for the sake of clinging to power, overlooks the fact using a minority like this as a scapegoat is an act of racism. Never mind that the distinction between cynicism and heartfelt hatred matters not one jot to the people who’ll suffer from the results, the fact there are so many people willing to pin society’s woes on whichever tiny, marginalised group they think they can best get away with is an incredibly clear illustration of systemic prejudice.
Whether it’s refugees, travellers, or trans people -- designating acceptable targets, reducing them to ‘a problem’, that is the absolute core of the issue. Those behind this new bill and all the rest of Tory policy might be raving bigots, or they might just be rich chancers trying to get as wealthy as possible as fast as they can, or both. It doesn’t matter.
They are willing to treat human lives as disposable based on how they categorise them.
That is the letter of what they have promised. Didn’t come here by the routes deemed proper (that have been systematically destroying as viable options)? Tough shit. The protections of the law do not apply to you. Doesn’t matter if you get exploited or otherwise abused, you don’t count. To hell with international law. To hell with human rights. It’s OK if you suffer.
This right here? This is why we draw the line based on actions and results, not intention or target. Because it *isn’t OK* and it’s the first part -- “willing to treat human lives as disposable” -- that’s the issue. That’s the starting point of everyone involved in drafting this bill, whether they think of it that way or not. It’s the line the opposition buys into when their grand response to this act of barbarity is ‘yes, but it won’t solve the problem and we’d do it better’ (useless bunch of mendacious chocolate teapots).
As long as it is acceptable, nay encouraged, to stand up in the highest office in the land and say, “it’s OK to hurt these people because they do not count”, we are all fucked. That is the real issue. Do not get distracted from that.
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bacchilles · 3 years
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some people in my roommate’s class were apparently making fun of this guy who’s doing a gladiator story for his final writing project because the guy mentioned how Roman slavery wasn’t based on race and they were all like “noooo it TOTALLY was he probably just watched I, Claudius one time and called it a day lmao i took an ancient history class once i know im right” and im just like . ben affleck smoking.jpg
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whitehotharlots · 3 years
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The point is control
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Whenever we think or talk about censorship, we usually conceptualize it as certain types of speech being somehow disallowed: maybe (rarely) it's made formally illegal by the government, maybe it's banned in certain venues, maybe the FCC will fine you if you broadcast it, maybe your boss will fire you if she learns of it, maybe your friends will stop talking to you if they see what you've written, etc. etc. 
This understanding engenders a lot of mostly worthless discussion precisely because it's so broad. Pedants--usually arguing in favor of banning a certain work or idea--will often argue that speech protections only apply to direct, government bans. These bans, when they exist, are fairly narrow and apply only to those rare speech acts in which other people are put in danger by speech (yelling the N-word in a crowded theater, for example). This pedantry isn't correct even within its own terms, however, because plenty of people get in trouble for making threats. The FBI has an entire entrapment program dedicated to getting mentally ill muslims and rednecks to post stuff like "Death 2 the Super bowl!!" on twitter, arresting them, and the doing a press conference about how they heroically saved the world from terrorism. 
Another, more recent pedant's trend is claiming that, actually, you do have freedom of speech; you just don't have freedom from the consequences of speech. This logic is eerily dictatorial and ignores the entire purpose of speech protections. Like, even in the history's most repressive regimes, people still technically had freedom of speech but not from consequences. Those leftist kids who the nazis beheaded for speaking out against the war were, by this logic, merely being held accountable. 
The two conceptualizations of censorship I described above are, 99% of the time, deployed by people who are arguing in favor of a certain act of censorship but trying to exempt themselves from the moral implications of doing so. Censorship is rad when they get to do it, but they realize such a solipsism seems kinda icky so they need to explain how, actually, they're not censoring anybody, what they're doing is an act of righteous silencing that's a totally different matter. Maybe they associate censorship with groups they don't like, such as nazis or religious zealots. Maybe they have a vague dedication toward Enlightenment principles and don't want to be regarded as incurious dullards. Most typically, they're just afraid of the axe slicing both ways, and they want to make sure that the precedent they're establishing for others will not be applied to themselves.
Anyone who engages with this honestly for more than a few minutes will realize that censorship is much more complicated, especially in regards to its informal and social dimensions. We can all agree that society simply would not function if everyone said whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You might think your boss is a moron or your wife's dress doesn't look flattering, but you realize that such tidbits are probably best kept to yourself. 
Again, this is a two-way proposition that everyone is seeking to balance. Do you really want people to verbalize every time they dislike or disagree with you? I sure as hell don't. And so, as part of a social compact, we learn to self-censor. Sometimes this is to the detriment of ourselves and our communities. Most often, however, it's just a price we have to pay in order to keep things from collapsing. 
But as systems, large and small, grow increasingly more insane and untenable, so do the comportment standards of speech. The disconnect between America's reality and the image Americans have of themselves has never been more plainly obvious, and so striving for situational equanimity is no longer good enough. We can't just pretend cops aren't racist and the economy isn't run by venal retards or that the government places any value on the life of its citizens. There's too much evidence that contradicts all that, and the evidence is too omnipresent. There's too many damn internet videos, and only so many of them can be cast as Russian disinformation. So, sadly, we must abandon our old ways of communicating and embrace instead systems that are even more unstable, repressive, and insane than the ones that were previously in place.
Until very, very recently, nuance and big-picture, balanced thinking were considered signs of seriousness, if not intelligence. Such considerations were always exploited by shitheads to obfuscate things that otherwise would have seemed much less ambiguous, yes, but this fact alone does not mitigate the potential value of such an approach to understanding the world--especially since the stuff that's been offered up to replace it is, by every worthwhile metric, even worse.
So let's not pretend I'm Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to "both sides" a clearcut moral issue. Let's pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year... anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.
Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like "while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter." This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now--a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute--would they still defame you in "whisper networks," never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being? It is undeniably clear that last year's most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain't reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who's already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.
But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.
And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that's what has happened.
But... okay, let's take a step back. Let's focus on what I wanted to talk about when I started this.
I came across a post today from a young man who claimed that his high school English department head had been removed from his position and had his tenure revoked for refusing to remove three books from classrooms. This was, of course, fallout from the ongoing debate about Critical Race Theory. Two of those books were Marjane Satropi's Persepolis and, oh boy, The Diary of Anne Frank. Fuck. Jesus christ, fuck.
Now, here's the thing... When Persepolis was named, I assumed the bannors were anti-CRT. The graphic novel does not deal with racism all that much, at least not as its discussed contemporarily, but it centers an Iranian girl protagonist and maybe that upset Republican types. But Anne Frank? I'm sorry, but the most likely censors there are liberal identiarians who believe that teaching her diary amounts to centering the suffering of a white woman instead of talking about the One Real Racism, which must always be understood in an American context. The super woke cult group Black Hammer made waves recently with their #FuckAnneFrank campaign... you'd be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the GOP taking a firm stance against the diary since, oh, about 1975 or so.
So which side was it? That doesn't matter. What matters is, I cannot find out.
Now, pro-CRT people always accuse anti-CRT people of not knowing what CRT is, and then after making such accusations they always define CRT in a way that absolutely is not what CRT is. Pro-CRTers default to "they don't want  students to read about slavery or racism." This is absolutely not true, and absolutely not what actual CRT concerns itself with. Slavery and racism have been mainstays of American history curriucla since before I was born. Even people who barely paid attention in school would admit this, if there were any more desire for honesty in our discourse. 
My high school history teacher was a southern "lost causer" who took the south's side in the Civil War but nonetheless provided us with the most descriptive and unapologetic understandings of slavery's brutalities I had heard up until that point. He also unambiguously referred to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshmia and Nagasaki as "genocidal." Why? Because most people's politics are idiosyncratic, and because you cannot genuinely infer a person to believe one thing based on their opinion of another, tangentially related thing. The totality of human understanding used to be something open-minded people prided themselves on being aware of, believe it or not...
This is the problem with CRT. This is is the motivation behind the majority of people who wish to ban it. It’s not because they are necessarily racist themselves. It’s because they recognize, correctly, that the now-ascendant frames for understanding social issues boils everything down to a superficial patina that denies not only the realities of the systems they seek to upend but the very humanity of the people who exist within them. There is no humanity without depth and nuance and complexities and contradictions. When you argue otherwise, people will get mad and fight back. 
And this is the most bitter irony of this idiotic debate: it was never about not wanting to teach the sinful or embarrassing parts of our history. That was a different debate, one that was settled and won long ago. It is instead an immense, embarrassing overreach on behalf of people who have bullied their way to complete dominance of their spheres of influence within media and academe assuming they could do the same to everyone else. Some of its purveyors may have convinced themselves that getting students to admit complicity in privilege will prevent police shootings, sure. But I know these people. I’ve spoken to them at length. I’ve read their work. The vast, vast majority of them aren’t that stupid. The point is to exert control. The point is to make sure they stay in charge and that nothing changes. The point is failure. 
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monstersinthecosmos · 3 years
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Another white woman can’t shut up and let us speak for ourselves.
Oh man, Anon. You’re setting me up for failure here! This is a paradoxical message bc if I respond, I’m continuing to not shut up.
(Cut for length, apologies for the wall of text. More apologies & sources to Black opinion pieces beneath!)
I do wanna say I’m super sorry if any of the language in my posts about the casting was alienating or insensitive. I said several times that I wasn’t trying to speak over anyone. And I don’t want “I’m sorry if” to sound like an insincere apology—I do mean it, but I’m also saying that if I got anything wrong it was just me being ignorant and I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. And I want to say that, now that the dust has settled and there’s been such an overwhelming negative response to the news in general, I see why that feels discouraging and hurtful to fans of color, and that fucking sucks. So I also hesitate to bring it up again cause like, I feel like it would be more productive and healing for people to post positive stuff for a while so we can try to build a space that prioritizes inclusivity and lets this bullshit rest for a minute. And I’m really sorry for contributing to that, I really didn’t intend to hurt anybody.
Sometimes I treat Tumblr like an opinion space and I can be kinda lazy about citing sources and I’m super sorry about that, honestly. I should’ve. Some of my opinions are kinda baked in at this point from conversations I have pretty often IRL, and I listen to several podcasts with Black perspectives on media, and I’m sorry for paraphrasing some of that instead of linking. My fault, my bad!!! 🙏 Here’s a few of the sources I consulted that shaped my opinion:
Twitter thread by cheryllynneaton about specific elements of the story that might look bad in a race-swap
Twitter thread by endlessyarning about the importance of diverse crews and also the broader picture of racism in the industry as a whole
Twitter thread by AfronautGriot about how casting Black actors in white stories isn't good representation
Here's some YouTubes I watched:
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This one talks about the history of slavery in Louisiana and the Free People of Color, as well as how problematic the brothel angle is.
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This one is about how this change is tokenizing.
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These final three also address the idea of not wanting "hand-me-downs" and how it's pandering.
(I just checked again and so far these are the only YouTube videos I can find from Black creators who have spoken on it, so far no one supports it. idk. Let me know if I missed somebody! I'm really trying to challenge my confirmation bias and understand the full spectrum of opinions but I'm having a hard time finding anyone in favor of it.)
I looked up some other sources, too, that are memorable to me and that I could think of off the top of my head -
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This particular episode is actually about Hamilton and the complications of race swapping a historical story and what that means to the erasure or belittlement of slavery, while also taking on the challenge of creating a meta experience for a white audience who doesn't actually understand it for what it is, along with calling out the idea of using Black culture and POC to entertain the elite theatre audience while making the show prohibitively expensive to regular people.
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Afro Horror - The Skeleton Key
This episode of Afro Horror about The Skeleton Key I think is relevant, too, I love this podcast and this one sticks out because I think it has a lot of similar themes to IWTV and the idea of where to draw the line when it becomes gratuitous Black suffering for the sake of the director’s white guilt or the sake of the white audience. (I think their episode about The Craft is relevant to this conversation too and the issue of creating Black characters whose arcs revolve around racism instead of having a fuller personality, which I think has come up in some of the IWTV convos as far as like, would it be good to create a more accurate picture of slavery in the show and acknowledge it fully instead of dancing around it, or would that be contributing to representation only being about trauma?)
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Attack of the Queerwolf! - A Pity Party is my Favorite Party
And this episode of Attack of the Queerwolf! reviews IWTV and got into the plotholes of writing Louis as a sympathetic slave owner, which!, while not exactly the topic we’re on right now, I thought really did sum up why this is a problem in the text, and it really influenced my opinion lately as I’ve daydreamed about how they might navigate it on the show.
I also re-listened to a few epsiodes of Fansplaining today to refresh on what lessons we can learn about racism in fandom spaces. I generally suggest this podcast to everyone who fandoms as a hobby because it gets into really incredible conversations about navigating this space in a way that takes it seriously as a hobby, creative outlet, and social forum. And these conversations were a great reminder to be careful how we talk about race, even when we're well meaning. I think going forward as the show comes out and the fandom gets louder these will be really great reminders about how to conduct ourselves and call out shitty behavior when we see it.
https://www.fansplaining.com/episodes/135a-race-and-fandom-revisited-part-1
https://www.fansplaining.com/episodes/135b-race-and-fandom-revisited-part-2
I’ve been following the news about this show pretty closely so my initial unhappiness was not “Oh my gosh I don’t want a Black actor” but more along the lines of “omg these white people are going to make this show so fucking racist.” And I tried to convey that in my posts. I hope that was clear. Anyone who caught my post out in the wild might not have had that context. I know that my intention doesn’t matter if it landed wrong, that it still might have hurt people, but I just want to say that for the sake of clearing the air. And the ironic thing is that I was actually more open to Black Louis a few months ago when the leak came out, until Black fans on Discord told me I was being an obnoxious white person and we started having the conversations about getting meaningful and respectful representation. (As a couple of those videos above called it, original characters instead of “hand-me-downs.”) It really got me thinking about some of the angles that hadn't occurred to me and that I'd taken for granted, and I defer to those conversations. I mentioned in my posts that I know all Black fans are not a monolith and of course there isn't going to be a consensus here, like some people are going to disagree with the sources I shared, I totally understand that, but combining all of this with the overlapping lessons in queer representation and disability representation (which I feel more qualified to speak about and spend a lot of time with in other fandoms) definitely influenced my opinion.
I really didn't intend to speak over anyone, so while I repeated a lot of the ideas I heard from Black fans, I'm sorry for not linking them!
I’m excited to see how Jacob does and I think he’s gonna be handsome af in the period costume and I’m going to watch and I’m cheering for him, but I am also critical of even more racist storytelling in this fucking universe, like I really thought that was something the show could improve upon since it’s already rampant in the books. So I’m curious to see and I hope they get their shit together and do it right lol. I think everyone who likes VC is kinda like, in the fucking trash fire together and we all know that the books are fucked up, and it would be really nice to enjoy the show without making everyone feel even worse about our bad taste. Anyway anyone feel free to share these links independently in their own posts! Feel free to reblog as well bc I'm not afraid to get dunked on by this anon and I'll take the heat LMAO but it would be nice to give them their own space where it's not framed by a white person gabbing about it. =) That's counter-productive.
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renardtrickster · 3 years
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Now, something I wanted to acknowledge concerning the stupid-as-shit move from Republican Texas Senators trying to eradicate Civil Rights from the history books. That being, that the Democrat Texas Senators all exeunted from the state, thus basically putting a lock on the bill’s passing. Specifically, people call attention to the fact that Republicans in Oregon apparently pulled a similar stunt and were called traitors by many people online, that this is the Democrat Senators basically choosing not to do their jobs, and that this is an overturning of democracy. I wanted to say a few things on this matter.
First, I don't know the circumstances behind the Oregon Republicans apparently doing the same. As such, I officially don't give a shit. I will as a matter of principle say, most likely cringe. However, also according to my principles, I think that the Texas Democrats are pretty Based, at least in this circumstance.
The reason why they all fucked off from Texas was to prevent this bill from even being voted on, thus shooting it dead in the water. And I've made my opinions on this bill, as well as my prediction on the ramifications of it, known. But not all of them because I think this is part of a wider plan to basically instill outright white supremacy in American society by way doing nothing to approach or even address systemic racism, then eradicating the very concept of racial inequality while spreading the myth of meritocracy, thus leading people to come to the only possible solution they can come to given their (purposefully engineering) limited understanding of the situation, “maybe black people are just kind of dumb and their being disproportionately represented in prisons and poor neighborhoods is their own fault I guess”. But we don't have time for that.
Now, you can make a point that their job is to vote on bills, and that by doing this stunt, they should lose their jobs. Or that this might be illegal. I will instead say that legality, the rules, whatever, and morality are not one and the same. By merely allowing this bill to enter play, you allow the possibility for this bill to pass. Thus, preventing the bill from entering play is a moral choice. The correct moral choice. Because “we should remove the entire history of civil rights and slavery from textbooks” is an insane position to take, and any institution worthy of respect wouldn’t even entertain the idea. Letting it be entertained is risky because it opens up the potential for it being passed, and if letting it be entertained leads to it passing, then you were responsible for that. Responsibility and consequence are tricky like that.
Now, on democracy. I believe in the saying that democracy is, hands-down, the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried. In other words, it is good and based. And what the Texas Democrats are doing is basically not letting this bill be democratically decided upon. And if I were a believer in democracy, I would say that allowing civil rights to be obliterated from existence in a democratic manner is all fair and good.
However, as I said before, morality and legality. I believe that breaking the rules if the rules dictate you take immoral actions is an action that should be taken, if the need arises. The obvious counter-argument is that "well republicans can just do the same and they would also be breaking the rules for their morals", to which I say, you're a fucking idiot. Riddle me this Batman. One priest lives in a state where gay marriage is illegal. He marries a gay couple anyway. Another priest lives in a state where gay marriage is legal. He refuses to marry a gay couple anyway. Both broke the rules, and both did it out of the belief that this was the morally correct action. But are they of the same moral weight? Is one good and one bad? Or is this all equal and everything is the same?
Now, this is a subjective question. I acknowledge that. But this was a dual-ended question. I was not only asking you which you think was moral or immoral, but I was also testing to see if you were capable of recognizing that this is subjective. As far as answers go, "this is subjective but the first one is morally in the right" is the best possible one. And I think that issue is basically central to "were the Texas Democrats in the right".
Because one perspective, the virgin perspective, is that the Republicans were following the rules and the annals of democracy, the Democrats weren't following those rules, therefore the Republicans are in the right and the Democrats in the wrong. But the other perspective, the Chad perspective, is that this bill is fucking evil, the Democrats prevented this bill from even breathing, therefore the Republicans are in the wrong for trying to destroy basic awareness of civil rights and the Democrats are in the right for Not Letting That Happen. The third possible position is that the Republicans are bad for trying to destroy basic awareness of civil rights but the Democrats are also bad for not letting it be fairly tried, in which case I am stuck between saying "I disagree but I see your point" and wanting to club you with a chair’s leg. I don't know if this is Virgin but it definitely isn't Chad.
My final thought is, if you truly believe that the Democrats were in the wrong and the Republicans in the right, why. Substantiate your argument. You must acknowledge and take into account the fact that the goal of the Republicans here was to remove Civil Rights and MLK from the history textbooks, and then you have to tell me why you think that the Democrats were in the wrong for not letting this be decided upon, and/or why you think this bill is good. To leave out the nature of this bill while discussing actions taken around the bill is inherently dishonest, and is akin to saying “they removed this man’s post just because he spoke his mind” when the post was actually just holocaust denialism.
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kitkatopinions · 3 years
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of their actions and fighting against them self defense is one thing but terrorism is whole nother sienna and adam were both shortsighted compared to ghira imagine leaving the empire for their violent actions or isis or nazis and then helping go against them ( white fang were a hate group faunus are discriminated against is true but an explanation isnt a justification 2/2
Hi, so I never got a part one of this, but I’m going to answer this anyway and tbh, I feel like you don’t have to send me a part one if you’re just going to argue that there isn’t anything wrong with the way the RWBY writers wrote the WF arc. I hate to go off on you, Anon, but tbh, I’m a bit at the end of my rope on this subject.
Please stop. Telling people what the White Fang was written to be. To defend the writers who wrote them that way. I can’t stress this enough, ask yourself why things were written the way they were and listen to people of color who say the writers severely mishandled an allegory to the racism they face. I don’t care if you saw the arc as fine, listen to people of color who have real problems with these narratives and believe them. You’re comparing the only civil rights group in the whole fucking show to fucking N*zis and you don’t get why maybe the writers wrote it that way because of their own internalized bias or white comfort?
“The White Fang was a terrorist group, so Blake fighting them isn’t wrong,” maybe ask why the only Pro-Faunus rights group was written to be an extremely violent terrorist group that wants to destroy humans (who are in the place of white people) who no one in their right mind would agree with. The only Pro Faunus rights group, the only group fighting for the rights of the Faunus, the only group standing up against literal slavery, is written to be so extreme that only the cruelest of the cruel would join up. That’s bad. That’s a badly handled allegory to racism. There’s no ‘what was Blake supposed to do’ in this conversation, there’s ‘Why did the writers make an ‘allegory of racism that people of color face’ and make it about stopping violent people of color who are too angry?’ There’s no ‘Fighting the White Fang isn’t bad, they were trying to kill innocents,’ there’s ‘why does this entire thing feel like anti Black Lives Matter propaganda disguised as a feel good narrative? Why is the message ‘people of color need to stop being violent towards each other and stand up for white people if they want equality?’
The world of RWBY isn’t real, Adam doesn’t exist, the RWBY writers weren’t just penning a story that was already written that they... Heard from God or something, they made these writing choices! They made this up themselves! Adam wouldn’t be a violent murderous abuser if the writers didn’t make him that way. The White Fang wouldn’t be trying to murder all humans if the writers didn’t write it that way. Instead of saying ‘idk why these people are mad that violent murderer’s are presented as violent murderer’s’ the real question is ‘why did the writers go out of their way to write the allegory in such a harmful way?’ They literally are pushing the same sort of narratives that are hurtful to people of color. “I’m all for equal rights, but I can’t get behind a movement that involves breaking property” is literally something I’ve heard in real life. “People of color want to lecture us, but they’re hurting themselves,” is something I’ve heard in real life. “My family didn’t deserve to have our business hurt by these violent extremists.”
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Whether the writers meant to or not, they wrote a narrative that perpetrates harmful stereotypes and feeds harmful viewpoints. Maybe this wouldn’t be a problem if the Faunus weren’t meant to be an allegory to people of color. You’re right, Adam needed to be taken out in the show, the White Fang needed to be taken out in the show. But ask why they were written that way, what white comfort or bias or internalized racism might’ve leaked into even well intentioned writings, whether or not this helps or hurts people of color in the long run.
But most importantly, listen to people of color and believe them about the arc and the allegory that was supposedly written for them, whether or not you realized it yourself, whether or not you see the problem, whether or not you agree. I don’t care if you don’t agree with me and don’t believe me, I’m not a person of color, I’m just trying to speak about these issues. But it’s not hard to find opinions of people of color on this show and their Faunus arcs and plotlines. Look into it, stop trying to invalidate, and leave me alone about it.
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mariaiscrafting · 3 years
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Let’s talk about the old Techno tweets
For a week now, I’ve been sitting on this ask that linked me to a Twitter callout thread on SBI. Although I have many thoughts about the entire thread, I’ve since only had the time and will to respond to the Techno part, and I figured instead of keeping it in my drafts and waiting to gather the energy to write the rest, I’d just post what I have.
Here is the thread, for reference: https://twitter.com/burner0321/status/1379103348364865536?s=21 Trigger Warnings: anti-semitism, mentions of genocide, racism, n* slur, r* slur, ableism, lesbophobia, racism Please prioritize your health and safety, and do not engage with this thread or this post if you will get triggered by any of the aforementioned. I love you, please take care of yourself, first.
So, let’s talk Technoblade’s history of making “edgy” jokes. When CCs tend to use edginess as a cover for offensive humor, they tend to do so to cover up the fact that their humor involves taking shots at minorities or employs harmful stereotypes, without addressing why people get offended by such jokes. However, when I call Technoblade’s old humor edgy, this is not what I mean. The reason I do not think people are justified in demanding an apology or addressing of the jokes in the Twitter thread is because they do not use the minorities or horrible things they address as the punchline. A joke can be in bad taste, without being malicious. This is edgy humor. In explaining my point, I want to address as many of the specific things in the thread as possible.
1) I don’t fully understand the “was Hitler a lesbian?” tweet or the title of that video, so I won’t address that. If someone has something to say about it, feel free to reply to this post, I’d love to see what you think of it.
2) Next, we have the, “titling my next video ‘mvp++ is worse than nazi germany’” tweet. What is the joke in this tweet? The joke is that the comparison between a Minecraft game and a fascist regime that caused genocide is ridiculous, and as such, would be effective clickbait, and draw people into the video. The joke is not that Nazi Germany should be taken lightly; it is actually the complete opposite.
3) Next, “#askpewds do you have any constructive criticism for Nazi Germany.” Frankly, without the context of timeframe or what the hell was going on within the Twittersphere at the time, I can only make a reach as to what this joke meant. I assume it’s in reference to the time period during which Pewdiepie was being framed as a fascist by several media outlets, and could either be a joke on the fact that people believe Pewdiepie to be a neo-Nazi, or a shot at Pewdiepie himself, by playing on the fact that he actually does espouse neo-Nazi beliefs. Again, the punchline is far from, “Nazi Germany was good,” or anything along those lines. Edgy, not anti-semitic.
4) The vampireZ tweet. The joke here is, “why did vampireZ think this was a good idea,” not, “haha get it, black people kill people.” As with many of these kinds of jokes, the existence of the word, “black” in the joke makes people think he is insulting black people. In reality, the tweet points out that the game is fitting into the history of media portraying black people as the more aggressive, violent, and/or murderous characters, and is like, “hey, isn’t this kinda fucked?”
5) This tweet actually does make an offensive joke that is malicious in its intent. Congratulations, we are five tweets in, and we finally found a joke that makes minorities the punchline. I completely understand people’s criticisms of this one. The punchline here is, “haha, I’m one of those entitled people who claims that racial profiling is the reason I was wronged,” and this minimizes the fact that racial profiling is an real, serious, and widespread problem. This tweet makes it seem like people claim that racial profiling is the reason they are excluded from spaces or that punitive actions that were enacted upon them are doing so unjustly. This can be extrapolated from the fact that it’s ridiculous to think that a) a Minecraft server would racially profile someone, and b) that a white person would be racially profiled.
6) This tweet literally just seems like a sarcastic response to someone who was accused of being a white supremacist and/or racist. Presumably, SealPlays was defending himself of not being racist, and Technoblade responded sarcastically that he was "totally” trying to recruit him to the KKK. I literally see no reason someone thought this was malicious? This does not make light of the KKK, and it doesn’t make black people or any other group or individual victimized by the KKK the punchline.
7) The slavery jokes. Presumably, the slavery jokes are in reference to the times on his Skyblock, SMP Earth, and/or Dream SMP streams and videos, during which Technoblade has done bits about making some of his friends slaves for him, so he has to do less work. Again, slavery jokes might be in bad taste, but there was literally no racial context to this, given that he wasn’t make jokes about any black CCs being his slaves. This is not to mention that he always played up the role of the one telling the people what to do, making it out to be a very negative role that only an arrogant, selfish, and/or callous person would fill. Think, Alec Baldwin playing Trump. This part of the thread is, however, so vague, that it’s hard to know exactly what instances the OP is even talking about.
There are several reasons I am personally angered by this section of the thread, but in an effort to make this post shorter, I’ll only discuss two: One, there are genuinely things that CCs, including Technoblade, have said, that carry ignorant and malicious connotations. The racial profiling joke is just one example. To create a thread where most of the examples are absolute bullshit, lack context, and/or were misinterpreted on your part is a disservice to minorities who want to have productive conversations about genuinely harmful things. I want to talk about this idea that minorities who talk about their experiences with microaggressions, such as racial profiling, are seeking attention/using an excuse/lying. But that one tweet is so buried under this mountain of bullshit that has everyone talking over each other and screaming, that the one conversation we should be having cannot be had. Two, I am utterly exhausted at watching people misinterpet jokes. As I have already said again and again, just because a joke mentions something horrible, does not mean it is malicious, or that it even harms anyone. A joke needs to make light of something horrible and/or make minorities the punchline to cross the line from “edgy” to “explicitly offensive.”
I would like to make a disclaimer: there is always two sides to a CC doing something wrong. There is the CC, who may or may not have had malicious intent, and there is the audience, who may or may not take offense to what was done or said. Both of these are separate, and I will treat them as such. What I am examining in this post is mostly the first thing - were the things said or jokes made meant with racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, etc., intent, or are people unjustified in stating that they were? That being said, and this is important: anyone is allowed to take offense to and not forgive a CC for making a joke or saying something, no matter what. Even if a joke was meant satirically or does not actually offend minorities, if you, as an individual, take offense to it and were deeply hurt by it, that is fucking valid. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. A CC can apologize for something, and that can mean that objectively, they are not a bad person and/or have grown, but that does not mean you have to forgive them. There are two sides to this coin, and they are not inherently dependent upon each other.
If someone is offended by any of the jokes Techno made, that is perfectly valid and understandable. Even if I or anyone else comes to the objective conclusion that any given joke doesn’t have malicious intent, that doesn’t erase minorities’ very real feelings about such.
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schleierkauz · 3 years
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Q&A Highlights
Ok so bad news first: My questions were ignored. Cornelia did not clarify any of our death-related theories. Maybe next time.
There was A Lot of other stuff, though so... Enjoy!
- The stream starts with everyone wishing us a happy women’s day! Usually women in Erfurt (where the bookstore people are) get flowers but not today because... you know. Cornelia says America is starting to go back to normal, meanwhile Germany... :| Anyway. Don’t look over here.
- Cornelia says she probably won’t get the vaccine anytime soon because she’s just chilling on her farm anyway and people who have to be out in public/are vulnerable should get it first
- Question: When will Cornelia visit Germany again? In response to this, she gives us some exclusive news, not official yet, heard it here first: She’s gonna move to Italy! Apparently she bought an olive farm there which is cheaper, better for the environment (her current farm will be sold to some people who want to turn it into an organic farm) and obviously closer to Germany so she’ll be here more often. :)
- The 4th Reckless book will be released in English at some point this autumn
- There’s no definite release date for TCoR because she’s busy with Dragonrider but she hopes she’ll have finished writing it by the end of this year
- If she’s still alive after all that to work on Reckless 5, it’ll be the last book of the series... probably. She’s also working on a bunch of smaller projects with her artists in residence
- Question: What are Cornelia’s favorite stories by Jane Austen, the Brontë sister and Shakespeare? She’s not a huge fan of Austen or Brontë because she finds all those repressed emotions too exhausting to read about. With Shakespeare on the other hand she struggles to name a favorite because there’s so much greatness to choose from (she does name MacBeth and Romeo and Juliet though)
- The Black Prince’s legacy in the Reckless timeline may play a role in the next Reckless book or it might evolve into a whole other story. Either way, she’s thinking about it  👀
- Someone asks about Reckless characters and Cornelia says that Kami’en and the Dark Fairy felt very familiar to her from the start in that she always knew who they were as people. She’s not sure why that is. She thinks the Dark Fairy represents many aspects of womanhood, like the ancient forgotten Goddess. Same with Fox, who embodies different sides of that.
- If Cornelia had to date a man from the Mirrorworld, Kami’en would interest her
- Rainer Strecker randomly joins the chat to say hi and everyone is delighted
- Cornelia’s favorite book series is still Lord of the Rings
- Question: Why has the Black Prince never found his true love? Cornelia says she’s not sure that’s true - maybe he did found true love at some point and then lost it again? ‘...and they lived happily ever after’ isn’t a guaranteed outcome after all. Since he’s such a passionate man, she’s pretty sure he’s had at least one big lovestory at this point. She hasn’t asked him about that yet but hopes she’ll find out when she continues writing his story.
- Jumping off that question, Cornelia says she respects her characters’ privacy and lets them keep their secrets until the time comes to ask about them, just as she would with real people.
- Someone asks if Cornelia has ever written herself into a story and she says a part of her is in all her characters. Except the villains because she hates them. She feels closest to Fox because she also always wished she could shapeshift
- The bookstore lady jumps in and asks about Meggie, is she similar to how Cornelia was as a child? Cornelia says yes, especially because she also had a very close relationship with her father and they would bond over books. However, she always envisioned Meggie with dark hair and as a different kind of girl than she was. (Ok sidenote from me on that, I wonder what she means by ‘dark hair’? Because Meggie is explicitly blond, so like... dark blond? Or did we just unlock brunette Meggie in 2021? Cornelia-)
- Continuing the conversation, Cornelia says she doesn’t consider herself the creator of any of the characters in her stories, she feels like she met them and wrote about him but she would never say something like ‘I invented Dustfinger’ because that’s absurd. How would that even work. That’s disrespectful. No.
- Some characters pretty much demand to be written about and are very impatient (like Jacob), others are more shy and elusive and take effort to understand (like Will or Dustfinger)
- There probably won’t be another book like The Labyrinth of the Faun because it was created under such unbelievable circumstances. Cornelia does enjoy writing film scripts, though, like she did for the Wild Chicks recently
- Question: How does Cornelia come up with character names? She has a bunch of encyclopedias and when she knows where a story takes place she checks if there are any artists from there whose names she can steal. She always wants names to have meaning and to paint a picture of whatever character it belongs to. However, she says that sometimes the vibe of a name is a tricky thing: When she wrote The Thief Lord (which takes place in Italy), she thought ‘Mosca’ was the perfect name for a big strong boy. However when the time came to translate the story into Italian, the Italians told her that ‘Mosca’ sounds like the name of a tiny little fly. Oh well.
- Cornelia says a lot of readers have written to her about The Thief Lord because at one point Victor (the detective) calls Mosca (who is black) a “Mohrenkopf”. Context: ‘Mohrenkopf’ is a German slur towards black people and also an outdated name for this goddamn marshmallow cookie:
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Fuck this cookie.
- Cornelia says yeah, Victor is being racist in that moment but that doesn’t mean that she, the author, is racist. Similarly, she used the term ‘Indians’ in Reckless and a lot of readers were upset which she did not anticipate. To her it’s a positive word since she admires ‘Indians’ so deeply and finds terms like ‘Native/Indigenous Americans’ very complicated. She wonders how much longer she’ll be allowed to say ‘Black Prince’
- She thinks it’s right to be vigilant about bigotry but simply searching for problematic words is dangerous because context matters
- Bookstore lady brings up Pippi Longstocking and how the N-word has been removed from modern copies (think Pippi’s father). She think’s it’s wrong because the original text is part of the cultural heritage and shouldn’t be hidden from children but instead explained. 
- Cornelia says that in America she sees the hurt that’s connected to that word but she doesn’t think it’s right to simply remove the slur and expect everything to be fine. After all, the text in which it was used is still the same so any harmful ideas would still be in there and that needs to be discussed. Simply whitewashing things doesn’t make them any less racist.
- Cornelia brings up a visual example: The Asterix comics. She always liked them but the fact that the only black character is drawn as a racist caricature is harmful and wrong. It’s time to listen when black people express how hurtful depictions like that can be. Many white people never noticed racism growing up because it never affected them and that’s why it’s important to learn
- The ‘from rags to riches’ American dream was usually reserved for white people and Cornelia thinks a lot of (white) people are waking up to that fact. The way black people are still being criminalized and the way prisons use inmates for cheap labor is horrible and like a modern kind of slavery
- The bookstore people try to say something but Cornelia is not done: We Europeans are not off the hook either because the sins and wounds of colonialism are still felt around the world, not to mention the way other countries are still exploited today. Our wealth rests on the shoulders of poorer nations. Many doors are opening and it’s difficult to step through but we have to do it and admit to the things we may have been blind to due to privilege.
- The three of them agree on that and go back to reading questions
- Question: What are Cornelia’s tips for young authors? She advises to never start writing a story on a computer, always get a notebook and collect ideas & pictures for your story. Don’t rush things. If you have more than one story, give each story its own book and feed whichever one is hungry. It’s important to follow the idea where it leads, if you use cliches your readers will recognize them. And then it just takes time and passion. And trust in your own unique voice. She paraphrases a quote by Robert Louis Stevenson who once said no one cares about stories or characters or whatever, people read books to see the world through the goggles the author puts on them. I’m sure he said it prettier, I’m paraphrasing the paraphrase.
- That said, Cornelia thinks authors who say things like “I’m writing to express my innermost turbulences” are kinda dumb. She thinks it’s important to write about the things that happen everywhere else and around yourself and to try to find voices for others, not just yourself. Just like how carpenters build furniture for everyone else, a writer should use words to build things for others, whether it’s a window or door or a hiding place.
- Speaking of notebooks, as most of us probably know Cornelia has a lot of those and occasionally publishes them on her website. She says she’d love to let people look through them in person, maybe at the new farm in Germany (Cornelia sure does love farms)
- Speaking of writing things on paper, all three of them stress that everyone should write more letters because one day they’ll be old letters and curious people will want to read them, just as we like to read old documents now.
- Last question: How come both the Inkworld and the Mirrorworld feature a character called Bastard? Cornelia thinks that’s a good question and she should probably think about that. (Am I stupid? Are they talking about Basta? I’m confused)
...And with that, the livestream ends. They’ll get back together to do this again two months from now, until then: I’m going tf to sleep
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oodlenoodleroodle · 3 years
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Museality
A lot of people say - in a sort of compromisey way - that confederate statues shouldn't be just removed during protests, but that they should be put in museums instead. Most of the people expressing this idea don't work in museums. So I want to open up the behind-the-scenes work of museums a little to explain why I don't think confederate statues belong in museums.
The first thing is the concept of museality. Why does an object belong in a museum? It has nothing to do with age, and except in the case of archeological finds (stuff that has been in the ground 100+ years), it has very little to do with the object itself. What matters with a museum object is the data that is attached to the object. Who owned or used it and when, what happened to it after that, how is it exemplary of life in the past, stuff like that. Like what can the object say. Objects are material witnesses of life. A confederate statue's data is most likely "was erected X decades after the civil war and then stood there X decades after it. Birds have pooped on it." That is not interesting and the object is not a witness of the civil war because it wasn't there during it.
Now you can extrapolate a bit about the people who erected the statue, but by doing that you get into use of power re: what kind of language you use ("the statue was erected by people who are proud of their heritage of having tried and failed secession" or "the statue was erected by various white racists who were real keen on making sure black people don't get uppity" etc...) This stuff depends on the point of view, and the selection the point of view is a use of power. There is no "neutral" point of view.
Which gets to the matter of power. Museums are societal institutions that wield institutional power. The museum is often called society's memory, and that which the people who work in museums decide to be worthy of remembering is what gets remembered. This is a huge societal power to have. And that's why this work is (or should be) done by people who are (or should be) educated and highly trained to take this power seriously and to think about the ethical questions that come with museum work. (The International Commission Of Museums, ICOM, has ethical guidelines that all museums must adhere to.)
A museum is not a dump for any old junk. The museum professionals have to make decisions on what is accepted into the museum collection, and they are responsible for those decisions. What is selected into a museum is a matter of power, and museum professionals have to be careful to not continue to reinforce systemic power imbalances such as racism stemming from slavery. Is a confederate statue important because it stood in a place for a long time, when the reason it got to existing in the first place is because racist white people have held all the societal power since the beginning of the country? Do we have to store all the stuff that racist white people of the past thought was important, or should we make our own decisions of what we think is important to pass on to the coming centuries, and let the monuments that white racist people erected to themselves fall to the dustbin of history and use other ways (photos, text) to remember that there was a time when racist white people erected statues of slavers to remind black people in their communities to stay in their place?
The other matter of responsibility has to do with the museum's resources. When an object is in the museum collection, the museum is responsible for taking care of it according to the best practices of the field. That takes money, it takes storage space which also costs money. When you take in an object into the collection, you are at the same time saying no to other objects, because literally everything will not fit. You have to make choices. When you take in an earring, you don't say no to very many other objects, because earrings are small. But when you take in a huge statue, that will be taking up a lot of space, as well as be much more work in using (one person can carry several earrings in one go but you need a ton of people and equipment to even move a statue from one corner of storage to another, let alone to the exhibition space).
Removing objects from collections is a whole process. It is ethically unacceptable for museums to just get rid of things in their collections without a good reason, there is a lot of paperwork attached to it, and it again is a decision that the person making it will be responsible for.
And lastly, practically, museums' main jobs include doing exhibitions and giving access to collections to researchers. We don't want objects that will be impossible to put in an exhibition and that isn't interesting to researchers. And there are very few exhibitions that could use a confederate statue, and in most of those the statue could be replaced with a large photo of it. And there aren't a whole lot of researchers who are very interested in confederate statues, and of those even fewer who would need access to the statue itself and wouldn't be able to just use photos.
(Ironically, a confederate statue that was vandalised and ripped off its pedestal and tipped into the sea during anti-racist protests has as a result much more interesting data attached to it as evidence of anti-racist protesting in the early 2020s, and might be interesting for a museum now. But only if the museum professionals say they want it and are willing to put the resources into keeping it.)
To conclude: monuments and statues are not vessels that store history or memory of things. They are symbols of things we as a society think are valuable and admirable, they are expressions of societal power, and therefore we as a society should not be having statues of slavers, rapists, murderers, and genociders on fucking pedestals. They are for most part also not very valuable for museums as their museality tends to be weak, and they take a whole lot of resources to store, with very little exhibition or research benefit to be gained.
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dhaaruni · 2 years
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(same anon) so on the broad issue of strategy vs agitation i think we somewhat agree and somewhat don’t and that’s fine because we are both adults, lol.
however! i gotta add a note about civil war historiography. *at the time the civil war was fought,* the south, particularly those in positions of power in the confederacy, was very clear on the fact that they were fighting a war about slavery. this was not controversial in 1860, and it is not the case that southerners refused to admit it. the false (as you know) idea that the civil war was fought for “states’ rights” did not originate during the war. it is a product of the post-war south, part of the “lost cause” ideology/mythos that retroactively rebranded the confederacy as freedom loving americans instead of traitors who not only were racist but saw racism as central to their entire political worldview. it was the north that initially did not see the war as a war about slavery (which remained legal in four union states) but rather one to preserve the union, although by the end it was definitely about slavery (largely because enslaved people saw a chance to free themselves and started taking it in huge numbers, forcing the union’s hand on the slavery question, leading eventually to the emancipation proclamation - it super matters that lincoln was around for that, but when he issued it he was reacting in part to material & political conditions set in motion by the recently enslaved.)
anyway. the reason i care about the kind of finicky point that “states’ rights” is not only a false narrative (as, again, you already knew) but a false narrative created not by the wartime confederacy itself but by the south after the war was lost, is simply because: fuck the confederacy, and fuck their postbellum propagandists, and fuck the fact that their self-mythologizing has been so effective that even very smart informed people who know that states’ rights is bullshit don’t know the specific origins of that bullshit, namely that it was a total fucking lie made up after they got their asses handed to them to make themselves seem less embarrassing and terrible. like, it’s not denial, it’s full on after the fact lying that managed to gain a foothold in the national discourse, and i feel passionately about spreading awareness of how these racist traitors were also wholesale liars who lied. lol. i hope robert e lee is enjoying hell.
Yes to all of this, I didn't realize that the whole "states' rights" bullshit didn't start until after the Civil War so thank you for telling me!
One small good thing though! The Pentagon has 3 years to change the names of military bases named after Confederates thanks to last year's NDAA, which is of course the bare minimum, but I'm still glad they're doing it.
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thegeminisage · 3 years
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Wait hold up… would you be willing to deposit some of the tlou 2 shit talking onto the blog? Apologies if you’ve already posted about this before and I just missed it
this will inevitably show up in the tlou2 tag where i do not want it to so strangers please know i do NNNOT want to debate about it with tlou2 defenders i am simply answering an ask if you try to argue with me or engage me on my post i'm just gonna block you and delete your reply if you send me an ask that gets deleted too. don't waste your time or mine thank you <3
ok i have posts here here and here that i made as i went thru the game but to add to those (cut for length + spoilers + discussion of upsetting content - racism, violence, etc):
i think the bait and switch they were going for (that initially you side with ellie and feels what she does is justified and halfway through the game you flip and side with abby and begin to see ellie as a monster) was DOOMED to fail because of three reasons: primarily, that people love joel and ellie so much that some of them were never going to side with abby; secondly, that abby took a long time to grow on most of the audience because most of the empathy for her comes from her scenes with lev and the rest of her group is kind of flat and boring; thirdly, because based on Values different people are going to have very different reactions to ellie torturing and executing a black woman and getting lovingly comforted afterwards by her brown girlfriend in a game and i cannot stress this enough that was released on juneteenth - and i don't even think they released it on juneteenth on purpose, i think that happened to be the friday before father's day and that they weren't thinking about black people or black issues at all, which is pretty par for the course as far as these games go
i think druckmann thought people would kind of eagerly execute nora the first go round because they hated her for her part in joel's death and then later realize that was monstrous and ellie is a monster and Oh God I Executed Her Too I'm Complicit! but like because of the protests happening around that time it just comes off as...extremely tone deaf. and the game literally doesn't give you a choice, other than to turn it off and quit. to get to the end of this thing you paid $60 for you have to do it. so like ??? who's the one who's complicit here? i didn't write that game, druckmann did
I also think the game could have had ellie learn the lesson it was trying to teach maybe ten hours sooner??? like, she let abby go in the end, but the ending of her coming home to nothing would have almost been more powerful if she had killed her. like congratulations you shithead you got what you wanted how does it feel! i think maybe they didn't have ellie kill abby because they didn't want her to be completely irredeemable but the way it's written invariably huge swathes of the audience will have already found her to be a monster a third of the way thru the game or will never decide she's a monster no matter what. they could have had that same fight in seattle on day 3 but instead we have to have abby and lev kept as slaves first and then beaten and starved and literally left for the crows to eat. if the game had ended with the shocking horror of that leading to either ellie either killing abby (partially out of mercy) or saving her and letting her go i could have dealt with it - it might have been especially effective if that was your only real choice in the game - but it just would not stop and would not end. and like lol of course we're gonna include slavery in this game and release it on again juneteenth like...buddy...
i could have even dealt with like, abby meets up with lev and they attempt to rescue abby from the slavers together but they find her like that and lev begs for her life, putting abby in the position that joel was in at the beginning of the game, and putting ellie in the position that abby was, and lev in the position that ellie was. like and THEN she chooses to do it different, you know?
but instead it's 75% misery porn, it's not very well paced, and almost all of the character interactions fall flat, and the ones that DON'T we don't see nearly enough of. tlou1 was one of the best games ever written, it was perfectly paced, and even for all the bleak misery and hopelessness the setting offered there was always something to fight for and some joy in the characters being there together. tlou2 was almost completely joyless, and it just feels like druckmann got all that money and manpower to work through something* he could have done with an essay or some therapy sessions or whatever
* reportedly this game was partially inspired by druckmann's reaction to a lynching and the extremely normal justifiable and appropriate reaction he had to it, which was that he wanted to hurt the people doing the lynching. instead of being like "yeah lynching is bad fuck those guys i hope they die" he became uncomfortable with that feeling of wishing violence on someone and made tlou2 to tell us about why wishing violence on people is bad, even if they appear to be bad people. which like. ok. you took all those years to waste all that goodwill and untold manpower and money with one of the worst and most miserable development periods to tell us that? really??
anyway, it was always going to be a polarizing experience because he chose to kill joel and the audience's feelings on joel were polarized by the end of tlou1 but from what i can tell "polarizing" here means half the people who hate it hate it for one reason and half the people who hate it hate it for the other reason - and unfortunately not as many folks fall in the middle, but somehow it still won awards? god ok i'm done now i'm literally never talking about tlou on this blog again if anybody else asks i can link them to this post
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canchewread · 3 years
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Editor’s note: this post is part of the Recommended Reading series here on Can’t You Read; an ongoing and evolving feature that combines an easy to swipe info-graphic, a short journal, and a link to an important related discussion I’d like to share with readers.
A Culture of Predation Can’t Stop Fascist Pig Violence
In the wake of the frankly surprising (but extremely welcome) guilty verdicts in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, I’ve tried very hard to reign in my cynicism. After all, the conviction of a cop for murder “in the line of duty,” let alone a white cop who murdered an African American man with an impoverished background, is about as common as a goddamn unicorn fart, and on that account alone the verdict is worth commemorating, if not necessarily celebrating. 
While it would be unspeakably obtuse to suggest that the verdict represented some sort of positive justice, it’s also undeniable that many feel this moment may indeed be a starting point; a chance to at least begin to imagine what a positive justice for African Americans might look like. In particular numerous observers have pointed to the very public crumbling of the proverbial “blue wall” of silence, the fact that Chauvin’s fellow police officers passionately testified against him with the whole world watching, as a positive omen for the future of police reform.
Unfortunately I (and many other observers) have doubts about this position. I don’t mean to be a downer, but the truth is that nobody, not even immunized murderpigs and their commanders, can justify the horrifying video of Chauvin mindlessly executing George Floyd over the course of nine and a half minutes. Faced with the choice of openly embracing their own “little Eichmanns” in front of an outraged public, the Blue Meanies decided that ultimately it wasn’t worth protecting a fuck up like Derek Chauvin. The cost, both to his fellow thug cops, and the profession of policing as a whole, would simply have been too damn high to justify the reward. 
The sad and horrifying truth here is that if Derek Chauvin had simply shot George Floyd, instead of casually kneeling on his neck for almost ten minutes, he’d probably be a free man today; just like so many cracker murderpigs before him. Furthermore, even this smallest of concessions probably wouldn’t have happened without months of nationwide protests conducted under a state of constant assault by violent, openly rioting police officers. That last reality is certainly not lost on fascists and neoliberal authoritarians; why else do you think reactionary lawmakers are rushing to pass legislation that criminalizes mass protest against racialized police violence? 
Still, you can’t blame folks for hoping; hope can be a good thing if it gives you the strength and courage to continue a seemingly impossible fight for actual justice. Perhaps some long day from now we will look back on this moment and say “and the conviction of Derek Chauvin was the point when the wave ultimately broke, and the tide of cracker police violence finally rolled back” - even if it’s clear that these convictions, by themselves, do not have the power to enact the change we so desperately need. 
Where I can and will find fault however, is with those deluded and disingenuous souls who have used this moment to once again champion the doomed cause of police reform; blithely ignorant or willfully oblivious to the fact that police reforms already failed to prevent the murder of George Floyd, and so many others like him. The bald truth is that the current establishment movement towards police reform is about maintaining the power and funding of the very same violent uniformed thugs who’re murdering poor people on behalf of the capitalist state in the first place; that’s why nobody is talking about removing qualified immunity for police officers, and that’s why even some cops themselves are coming around to the idea of reform at this late a date. In many ways, the real importance of the movement to “Defund the Police” is that the mere threat of taking away the sweet filthy ducats that pay murderpig salaries has already shifted the carceral establishment’s position towards bargaining; albeit, in bad faith.
The road to neofeudalist hell is paved with dark intentions however, and what establishment reformers, even and perhaps especially those who’re prepared to acknowledge the fundamentally racialized aspects of police violence, aren’t prepared to discuss in the open is the nature and purpose of policing itself in a capitalist society. There is no public examination of why it is that we keep hiring folks who turn out to be violent white supremacists to be police; and there certainly will be no discussion about the ways class relationships intersect with race through the designed function of racialized policing.
Despite the pro-police propaganda you’ve been fed all your life to suggest otherwise, the vast majority of what police actually do in America is to protect the wealth, property, and feelings of affluent white people and the corporations they own. Far from solving major crimes and preventing violence, modern policing in the Pig Empire revolves around nuisance violations, so-called broken windows policing, and other methods of harassing poor people for minor infractions of the law; remember, the police encounter that lead to the murder of George Floyd started over the purchase of cigarettes and a dodgy twenty dollar bill. The reason murderpigs can get away with violently assaulting protestors and journalists who threaten the established order is because that is precisely what they’re being paid to do, and indeed what their predecessors before them have always been paid to do.
On the surface, this class and capitalism analysis may appear to create a tension with the narrative that white supremacy and racism are also driving the crisis of police violence, but that’s really just about the same old establishment spin. As I’ve discussed in numerous prior essays, you simply cannot separate capitalism from white supremacy, or even racism, because bigoted ideas are propagated and spread for the specific purpose of marking out certain marginalized groups for exploitation and highly-lucrative (for some) repression.
Do you want to know what systemic racism in policing really looks like? It looks like hiring murderpigs to repress the poor, knowing full well that due to centuries of slavery and exploitation, the nonwhite and particularly African American population will be vastly overrepresented in the targeted communities. It looks like a supposedly colorblind war on drugs, the ongoing use of demonstratively racist stop and frisk practices, and expanded powers for your community’s “gang squad” in pretty much any neighborhood that just happens to be predominantly Black. It looks like literally profiting from these practices in ways that are sometimes extremely brazen and obvious, but sometimes hidden from everyday sight; even if they’re hardly much of a secret. The fact that the police are ultimately enforcers for the capitalist ruling class, also makes them enforcers of the white supremacist order that capitalism is so dependent upon in our society; there is no contradiction involved here.
Look; you don’t get rid of fascist murderpigs and white supremacists in law enforcement by throwing more money at nazi cops. Joe Biden can summon up all the pretty words he likes, but you can’t address the racialized nature of police violence without fundamentally altering either the racialized nature of inequality in American life, or the very purpose of policing in our society; and he’s sure as shit not talking about doing any of that at all. Thus, no matter how surprised and hopeful I am after the Chauvin guilty verdicts, that sense of positivity is ultimately tempered by the realization that “nothing will fundamentally change” - and that includes cracker thug pigs executing unarmed Black men on camera.
Although they might finally be better than openly fascist Republicans, the Democrats still don’t have answers to the problem of racialized police violence because ultimately, they don’t have answers to the crisis of capitalism itself. It’s not a question of reform or changing the law; murder is already illegal, even if you’re a white cop. Inequality, and the security force violence necessary to maintain it, is a festering sore inside the American body politic, and there are indeed consequences for essentially ignoring a crisis now so obvious and enraging to the public at large. 
What kind of consequences? Well, let’s ask researcher and professor Temitope Oriola who provides one terrifying answer in the public journal, The Conversation:
“The United States is at Risk of an Armed Anti-Police Insurgency“ by  Temitope Oriola
Or, you know, we could just abolish the murderpigs first; your call really - but don’t expect Palooka Joe to be much help, either way.
- nina illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”
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whitehotharlots · 3 years
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CRT and the sad state of educational politics
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If our culture is studied 100 years from now, the predominant theme of the research will be a sense of perplexed revulsion toward how we did nothing to address the climate crisis in spite of having decades of forewarning. If there is a second theme, it will be a profound confusion regarding our immense and unearned sense of self-certainty. A retrospective of the early twenty first century would be titled something like Who the Fuck Did These People Think They Were? 
The latter theme is illustrated in the debacle surrounding a recent slew of municipal and statewide bills that seek to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. For the record, I am strongly against these bans. But I’m also self-aware enough to know my opinion matters very little, and therefore realize that an analysis of the discussion surrounding the bills will yield much more worthwhile observations than a simple delimitation of their pros and cons. Regardless of your personal opinion, I hope you’ll humor me.
I am, in some regards, a moral absolutist. But I also realize that abstract morality has very little bearing on material and political realities. In my ideal world, classrooms are free from political meddling. Teachers teach to the best of their ability, presenting students with truths that are confidently unvarnished due to the thorough amount of work that was required to reach them. I don’t cotton any of that socratic bullshit. Students are there to learn, not to engage in weird Gotchas with some perverted elder. The teacher’s job is to teach. The material they teach needs to be subjected to some graspable and standardized mechanism of truth adjudication before it is worthy of being taught. Teaching is not therapy. Teaching is not poetry. Teaching is not love, nor is it religion, nor is it a means of social or political indoctrination. There are plenty of other avenues available to accomplish all of those other things. Teaching is teaching. 
That’s the ideal. But ideals are just ideals. They never come true. The art of teaching, regardless of setting--from overpacked classrooms to face-to-face instruction to curricular design to nationwide pedagogical initiatives--boils down to a teacher’s ability to reconcile the need to convey truths with social and political pressures that are heavily invested in the suppression of truth. 
I have formally studied and practiced education for nearly two decades. In that time, the prevailing political thrust toward education has been a desire to casualize the practice of teaching, to render educators as cheap and fungible as iphones. The thrust takes different shapes depending on the political affiliation of whomever happens to be in charge of the state and federal governments that fund education, but the ultimate desire is always the same. The goal is always to attempt to make teaching rote and algorithmic, something akin to running a google search for How to do math? or What is morality?. The framing is always just windowdressing, empty culture war bullshit. 
Maybe it’s the inescapability of this thrust that’s rendered so many educators so blind to it? We only have nominal political choice, after all. The discourse gets more blinkered and vicious as the stakes decrease. At any rate, this is the undeniable reality, and anyone who doesn’t see that isn’t worth listening to. 
Non-administrative per-pupil spending as been on a steady decline since George W. Bush was president. Administrative bloat and meddling are becoming as common in k-12 as they are in higher education. The will of parasitic NGOs are implemented as common sense pedagogy without anyone even bothering to ask for any proof that they work. The so-called Education Reform movement is sputtering out due both to its manifest failures and rare, bipartisan backlash. But it will be replaced with something just as idiotic and pernicious. The thrust of causalization will not abate. 
And so what do we decide to do? What’s the next big thing on the education policy horizon? Critical Race Theory. 
Okay, this makes sense. In 2021, a local paper can’t run a news story about a lost cat without explicitly mentioning the race of every human involved and possibly also nodding toward the implied cisnormativity of pet ownership. So it makes sense that this broad rhetorical mandate would come to dominate the transitional period between Bush-Obama Education Reform and whatever bleak future awaits us. The controversy is so perfectly inefficacious that its adoption was inevitable. Because, seriously, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of the outcome of this kerfuffle, no problems will be solved. The real shortcomings of public education will not be addressed. Larger social problems that are typically blamed on public education in spite of having little to do with public education will especially not be addressed. Maybe white kids will have to do struggle sessions in lieu of the Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe black kids will get full credit for drawing the Slayer logo in the part of the test where their geometric proof is supposed to go. Or maybe it won’t happen. Maybe instead these practices will be banned, and in turn liberals will begin to embrace homeschooling, the charter movement will be given new life as a refuge against the terrors of white supremacist behaviors such as, uhh, teaching kids to show their work. Whatever.
Within the context of public education, the outcome will not matter. It cannot matter. There will be broader social impacts, sure. It will continue to drive Democrats more rightward, providing their party’s newly woke corporate wing with progressive-sounding rationales for austerity. But so far as teachers and students are concerned, it won’t matter.
Why do I give a shit about this, then? To put it bluntly, I’m struck by the utter fucking inartfulness of CRT’s proponents. At no point has any advocate of CRT presented a case for their approach to education that was at all concerned with persuading people who aren’t already 100% in their camp. There’s been no demonstration of positive impacts, or even an explanation of how the impacts could hypothetically be positive. In fact, so much as asking for such a rationale is considered proof of racism. Advocates posit an image of existing educational policies that is absolutely fantastical, suggesting that kids never learn about slavery or racism or civil rights. But then... then they don’t even stick with the kayfabe. They’ll say “kids never learn about racism.” In response, people--mostly well-meaning--say “wait, umm, I’m pretty sure they do learn about racism.” The response is “we never said they don’t learn about racism.” You’ll see this shift from one paragraph to the next. It’s insane. Absolutely insane. 
Or take this talk from a pro-CRT workshop in Oregon. The speaker freely admits that proto-CRT leanings like anti-bias education, multiculturalism, and centering race in historical discussions have been the norm since the late 1980s. The speaker admits that these practices have been commonplace for 30+ years, as anyone my age or younger will attest. Then, seconds later, the speaker discusses the results of this shift: it failed. Unequivocally:
We had this huge, huge, huge focus on culturally relevant teaching and research. [ ... ] So you would think that with 40+ years of research and really focusing and a lot of lip service and a lot of policies and, you know, a lot of rhetoric about cultural relevancy and about equity and about anti-bias that we would see trends that are significantly different, [but] that’s not what we’re finding. What we’re finding that you see [is] that some cases, particularly black and brown [students] the results, the academic achievement has either stayed the same and gotten worse.
Translation: here’s this approach to teaching. It’s new and vital but also we’ve been doing it for 40 years. It doesn’t work. But we need to keep doing it. Anyone who is in any way confused by this is a dangerous racist. 
Even in the darkest days of the Bush-era culture war, I never saw such a complete and open disregard for honesty. This isn’t to say that Bush-era conservatives weren’t shit-eating liars. They were. But they had enough savvy to realize that self-righteousness alone is not an effective way of doing politics. You need to at least pretend to be engaging with issues in good faith. 
This is what happens when a movement has its head so far up its own ass that it cannot comprehend the notion of good-faith criticism. These people do not believe that there can exist anyone who shares their basic goals but has concerns that their methods might not work. Their self-certainty is so absolute and unshakeable that they can proffer data demonstrating the complete ineffectiveness of their methods as proof of the necessity of their methods.
For decades, the most effective inoculation against pernicious meddling in education has been to lean upon the ideal form of teaching I described earlier in this post. We claimed that teaching is apolitical and that no one is trying to indoctrinate anybody. Regardless of the abstract impossibility of this claim, it has immense and lasting appeal, and it was upheld by a system of pedagogical standards that allowed teachers to evoke a sense of neutrality. The prevailing thrust in liberal education is to explicitly reject any such notions, and no one--not a single goddamn person--has proffered a convincing replacement for it. We still say, laughably, that we’re eschewing indoctrination. But people aren’t that stupid. If you find it beneath yourself to make your lies digestible, people will be able to tell when you’re lying to them. 
This, my friends, bodes very poorly for the future of education, regardless of whatever happens in the coming months. A movement that cannot articulate its own worth is not one that is long for this world. Teachers themselves are the only force that can resit the slow press toward the eventual elimination of public education, and they have embraced a worldview and comportment style that renders them absolutely unable to mount any worthwhile resistance. 
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Is it just me that feel like the more people blew the term racism the more it gonna increase? i found that the best case scenario would be treat them like haters just dont respond to them, haters gonna hate. Because you cannot treat that kind of person and you wasted more time dealing w/ them, its better be focused on your own things, improving on yoself.
Theres always bad despicable people around and theyre attack you were it hurts and if they know youve triggered on that shit, theyre gonna attacked you on that.
I know asian people get racial abuse often but the way they deal with just dont care of them ffs they just leave away from that and live their life doing on their own things try to achieve their goals instead of wasting time with the haters
It my perspective i found that the best way to end racism is stop calling people racist stop talking about it, they just jerk that dont deserve your energy on
I’m sorry anon. I don’t think I can agree with you on this one. Racism should always be called out. It should always be acknowledged and it should always be punished. Staying silent and keeping your head down never helped anyone. It only makes things worst for the discriminated parties. It’s fucked up we still have to deal with racism in this day and age, but it makes me sick inside just thinking about a black person or any person of color having to keep their heads down and let people abuse them. I don’t know if you’re poc or black or anything, so I’m not gonna pretend to understand where your experience and feeling in this matter comes from.
But I’m going to say this. As a black person, I would never, ever not react to racism directed at me. I would never not call them out and believe me. If I saw anyone else being put through that kind of abuse, whether it is racism, homophobia, transphobia etc, I would do my best to stand up for those people. 
Shutting up and allowing racist to get away with their racism is not going to “end” racism. That has never happened. Taking the moral high ground has never stopped racism anon. If people did as you said, pretty sure slavery would be alive and kicking today. So no, just no.
And the reason why Asian people “don’t speak” up as you put it, isn’t because they don’t want to, or that they are willing to just accept the abuse and get on with their lives. It’s because small minded people don’t take racial abuse against Asian people seriously. They are made fun off, put aside and discriminated against. Asian people consistently face racial abuse (the whole covid situation coming to mind) but never are their grief and pain taken seriously. Which is fucked up. And that’s why so many keep their mouth shut. Not for some noble reasons you have thought of, No, it’s because shitty people keep silencing them and turning a blind eye to the daily abuse they face. Son heung min was racially abused by a Chelsea fan not too long ago. That fan was arrested. Which was fantastic, great, wonderful. 
Tell me, what would you have wanted Chelsea, the authorities, Tottenham and Son heung min to have done differently anon? Would you have wanted them to ignore it? For Son heung min to have just kept his head down and let it go? Do you think the racist abuse would have stopped all on it’s own? Or are you saying even as the abuse went on Son heung min should have just accepted that as a normal part of life?
I’m sorry for getting heated about this, but the fact that you’re even suggesting such a thing is making me, quite frankly, very angry. 
The only people who should keep their heads down, the only people who should keep their mouths shut and fear retribution are the racists.
And personally if I had the chance, if I heard what Alvaro had “allegedly” said, I would have punched him in the mouth. Because fuck racism. We have long since been bullied, belittled and told to just deal with it. And the fact that there are people still out there willing to dish out such disgusting abuse..... it’s sickening.
You know why Alvaro was smiling throughout the match? It’s because he knew he would get away with it. It’s because he knew it would hurt and that “no racism” policy of the league was all bark and no bite.
So no. You’re wrong. Shining the light on racism doesn’t suddenly increase it. Racism doesn’t just double in numbers just because you pay it some attention. The reason why you’re seeing more incidents of racism when people call it out is because the racism becomes more visible. It can’t hide in the shadows anymore. 
People recording police brutality against racial minorities, didn’t suddenly increase the violence, it shed light on it. Made people able to fight back. Focusing on yourself doesn’t stop racism. So what if they attack you were it hurts. That’s why there are laws that are supposed to protect you from that kind of things. And if those laws fail you, guess what? You have to defend yourself. 
Not talking about racism, doesn’t magically end it. It just gives racists free license to keep abusing people. And racists are not just haters. They are toxic, vile, narrow minded, disgusting people, who should and have to be called out for their abuse. No one should ever have to stay silent about it, ever. 
I disagree with you. I disagree with you so much it hurts. So if you are a poc who’ve faced racism and this is your way of dealing with it, I’m truly sorry about that. And I’m sorry this is the only solution you have. Because you deserve so much better. You deserve to feel safe, and protected. You deserve to not hear abuse and you deserve justice if you have been racially abused. You should never have to just accept racism and if that is what you do, I’m so so sorry about that. And I wish I could have been there for you and shut those assholes up.
If on the other hand you are not poc...... WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ANON! WHAT THE LEGIT FUCK! 
Are you serious? Do you know what you’re asking of minorities? You’re basically saying they should shut up and accommodate racists. ACCOMMODATE THEM! Like what? We’re back 100 years ago are we now. Where black people had to just content with the mercy of white men and women. Well fuck you. I can’t even comprehend the ridiculousness of these points you’ve made. If you’re not a minority, I am so damn pissed at you. Angry, and saddened. And the fact that you brought up Asian minorities just dealing with racism as if that was a good thing. As if they “chose” that option. As if they didn’t suffer under discrimination and just didn’t have the voice to be heard. If you really aren’t a minority anon. Hear this. 
From the bottom of my heart, fuck you. Fuck you and your racist apologetic beliefs. 
I can’t believe in this day and age there are people who still think like this. Yikes
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