#racial rhetorical criticism

[irithnova]

....about that post going around again saying "hetalia isn't real sweaty :))" yeah dipshit anyone with a fucking brain cell knows that hetalia is not real but this take is one dimensional and incredibly tone deaf considering the nature of this fandom.

Having the liberty to participate in a fandom and create content does not absolve you from criticism; Freedom to be creative within a fandom is not freedom from tactfulness or good judgement. Especially within a country personification fandom.

You can cry "hetalia isn't real" all you want in order to deflect and belittle people who have to deal with discrimination by people in the fandom but it's very telling that these sort of posts usually come from people who's nations aren't targeted when it comes to this sort of crap.

Hetalia isn't real, so you can draw racist caricatures and write racist fanfics? Hetalia isn't real, so you can romanticise colonisation? Hetalia isn't real, so you can participate in historical revisionism? Hetalia isn't real, so you can excuse imperialism?

Maybe you can aim your "hetalia isn't real :))" garbage at people who blorbify the likes of Japan and Russia and America so much that they excuse actual Japanese, Russian, and American imperialism. Maybe you can aim your "hetalia isn't real" horseshit at people who use hetalia to showcase their prejudiced biases at certain groups.

If you think I'm joking, I've seen a certified Russia blorbifier post something saying "Go Ivan!" in regards to a news article about the invasion of Ukraine. I've seen people say that Japanese imperialism wasn't that bad because they blorbify Japan so much (Filipino here, if you think that please go fuck yourself!) I've seen people who criticise American imperialism get called vatniks/Russian agents by people who blorbify hetalia America.

Instead of telling people who are tired of dealing with this shit that they should get over it because hetalia isn't real, maybe go and tell the historical revisionists, imperialism apologists and downright racists to keep their trash out of the fandom, because you know. Hetalia isn't real.

#Sorry this is worded strongly and I'm sure a majority of the people who reblogged that post didn't mean it in a malicious way #So yeah this isn't aimed at you if you obviously if you didn't mean it like that #But I have a hard time stomaching how people carelessly throw around this rhetoric #Considering the nature of the fandom #This post was also triggered by someone making a racial science joke about a hetalia character so yeah I'm pissed off #hetalia #hetalia world stars #hetalia world series #hetalia world twinkle #Hetalia fandom #hetalia discourse #Hetalia critical #Hetalia racism

[ofbreathandflame]

With the rise of booktok/booktwt, there's been this weird movement against literary criticism. It's a bizarre phenomenon, but this uptick in condemnation of criticism is so stifling. I understand that with the rise of these platforms, many people are being reintroduced into the habit of reading, which is why at the base level, I understand why many 'popular' books on booktok tend to be cozier.

The argument always falls into the 'this book means too much to me' or 'let people enjoy things,' which is rhetoric I understand -- at least fundamentally. But reading and writing have always been conduits for criticism, healthy natural criticism. We grow as writers and readers because of criticism. It's just so frustrating to see arguments like "how could you not like this character they've been the x trauma," or "why read this book if you're not going to come out liking it," and it's like...why not. That has always been the point of reading. Having a character go through copious amounts of trauma does not always translate to a character that's well-crafted. Good worldbuilding doesn't always translate to having a good story, or having beautiful prose doesn't always translate into a good plot.

There is just so much that goes into writing a story other than being able to formulate tropable (is that a word lol) characters. Good ideas don't always translate into good stories. And engaging critically with the text you read is how we figure that out, how we make sure authors are giving us a good craft. Writing is a form of entertainment too, and just like we'd do a poorly crafted show, we should always be questioning the things we read, even if we enjoy those things.

It's just werd to see people argue that we shouldn't read literature unless we know for certain we are going to like it. Or seeing people not be able to stand honest criticism of the world they've fallen in love with. I love ASOIAF -- but boy oh boy are there a lot of problems in the story: racial undertones, questionable writing decisions, weird ness overall. I also think engaging critically helps us understand how an author's biases can inform what they write. Like, HP Lovecraft wrote eerie stories, he was also a raging racist. But we can argue that his fear of PoC, his antisemitism, and all of his weird fears informed a lot of what he was writing. His writing is so eerie because a lot of that fear comes from very real, nasty places. It's not to say we have to censor his works, but he influences a lot of horror today and those fears, that racial undertone, it is still very prevalent in horror movies today. That fear of the 'unknown,'

Gone with the Wind is an incredibly racist book. It's also a well-written book. I think a lot of people also like confine criticism to just a syntax/prose/technical level -- when in reality criticism should also be applied on an ideological level. Books that are well-written, well-plotted, etc., are also -- and should also -- be up for criticism. A book can be very well-written and also propagate harmful ideologies. I often read books that I know that (on an ideological level), I might not agree with. We can learn a lot from the books we read, even the ones we hate.

I just feel like we're getting to the point where people are just telling people to 'shut up and read' and making spaces for conversation a uniform experience. I don't want to be in a space where everyone agrees with the same point. Either people won't accept criticism of their favorite book, or they think criticism shouldn't be applied to books they think are well written. Reading invokes natural criticism -- so does writing. That's literally what writing is; asking questions, interrogating the world around you. It's why we have literary devices, techniques, and elements. It's never just taking the words being printed at face value.

You can identify with a character's trauma and still understand that their badly written. You can read a story, hate everything about it, and still like a character. As I stated a while back, I'm reading Fourth Wing; the book is terrible, but I like the main character. The worldbuilding is also terrible, but the author writes her PoC characters with respect. It's not hard to acknowledge one thing about the text, and still find enough to enjoy the book. And authors grow when we're honest about what worked and what didn't work. Shadow and Bone was very formulaic and derivative at points, but Six of Crows is much more inventive and inclusive. Veronica Roth's Carve the Mark had some weird racial problems, but Chosen Ones was a much better book in terms of representation. Percy Jackson is the same way. These writers grow, not just by virtue of time, but because they were critiqued and listened to that critique. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien always publically criticized each other's work. Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes had a legendary friendship and back and forth with one another's works which provides so much insight into the conversations black authors and creatives were having.

Writing has always been about asking questions; prodding here and there, critiquing. It has always been a conversation, a dialogue. I urge people to love what they read, and read what they love, but always ask questions, always understand different perspectives, and always keep your mind open. Please stop stifling and controlling the conversations about your favorite literature, and please understand that everyone will not come out with the same reading experience as you. It doesn't make their experience any less valid than yours.

#long post #literary critique #literary criticism #booktok #books & libraries #booktwitter #but yeah it’s really hard for me to embrace booktube #and BookTok when the conversations that are most prevalent #are the ones telling people to not be critical of what they’re reading #esp the ones who desparately don’t want to understand differing opinions #‘how could you not like this’ or ‘how could you hate this character’ #easily #because I can #a traumatic backstory isn’t gonna erase a bad story #it isn’t going to make a character or book compelling #more trauma doesn’t make the story more complex #see: with fourth wing. #thank you for reading this long rant #congrats if you make it to the tags💀😭

[lesbiansforboromir]

Categorically the most galling part of this universal perception that Boromir is a 'poor out-of-his-depth himbo whose completely ignorant of politics' is how it is blindingly canonically apparent that he put massive effort into being a political entity, to the point that his political opinions follow him even into the Council of Elrond.

Without the Council of Elrond, one could interpret his narrative positioning as a more 'Middle Man' and less 'high' as something forced upon him, a (narratively framed) negative aspect of his character that Faramir is critisising and lamenting as just 'part of his nature'. He is being associated with the Rohirrim and other 'lesser' men because he is also a 'lesser' man inspite of his heritage, due to his 'flawed' and 'weak-willed' personality.

Although that is still a bit of a stilted and awkward interpretation in my opinion, Eomer explicitely differentiates Boromir's treatment and manner around the Rohirrim from other men of Gondor he has known. He is 'less grim' etc etc, Eomer felt more at ease in his company, which implies to me more that Boromir interacted with the Rohirrim as equals, unlike most of this kin. Which seems more likely to be an active effort on his part.

But interpretations based off of that are entirely unnecessary, because the Council of Elrond exists! Where Boromir, when confronted with Aragorn's mistrust of the Rohirrim and Gwaihir's accusation that they pay a tribute of horses to Sauron, immediately and comfortably comes to their staunch defense. 'It is a lie that comes from the Enemy' he declares, literally pointing out propeganda that all these elves and dunadain are primed to believe given their own investment in the racial divide between them and these 'middle men'. A primer that also belongs to Boromir, whose place amongst the 'high men' is a right bestowed on him from birth, yet one he is actively discarding here in favour of defending the Rohir perspective.

And not only that! He even goes so far as to place the rohirrim's ethnic and cultural heritage as a reason for their trustworthiness, inspite of the fact that they cannot claim any relation to any so called 'blessed' lineage. They come from 'the free days of old', a statement that is similar to one of Faramir's but that, tellingly, Faramir uses as a method of infantilising the rohirrim 'they remind us of the youth of Men'.

These are all inherently and radically political statements for the heir of the Stewardship, the man next in line to be chieftain of the southern dunadain, to declare, especially when acting as emissary as he is now.

So now, all those moments when Boromir is linked directly with middle men, when his right to his 'high' heritage is questioned, when he is critisised with the same racially charged language as the rohirrim are (too warlike, "we are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things" [-] "So even was my brother, Boromir") - all of that is now on purpose, on Boromir's part. He is the one distancing himself from the title of 'high' and questioning it's validity in the process, something Faramir clearly disapproved of and was a part of the breakdown in his respect for him. (Understandable, considering Faramir's equal and opposite effort to reclaim the title of 'high' for himself and his people.) Boromir is, essentially, engaging in some kind of racial-hierarchy criticism/abolishionism and activism.

That is not to say that his political opinions all entirely pass muster, he does still engage in racist rhetoric at least once, calling Gondor's eastern enemies 'the wild folk of the east'. But within the context of his own country and it's ethnic diversity, his position is maverick in comparison to pretty much everyone else.

And before anyone says it, let me head off comments like 'Boromir was just being himself, he didn't even know it was political he was just that stupid but I love him for it' No. Boromir's reputation in Gondor was complex and multifacetted but a great many people loved and supported him, clearly we see that there was a divide in political opinion between the two brother's stances on war and society. What you are essentially saying here is that Faramir is such a dull-witted statesman that he was incapable of swaying opinion his way against someone who didn't even know he was a part of the discussion, who wasnt even involved in the debates, against a high society that based their cultural identity on being descended from racially superior Numenoreans. The historical perspective is heavily weighted in Faramir's favour.

The much more likely state of affairs is that Boromir and Faramir have both been working towards their own social change and against each other, causing an opinion divide within the country. And apparently Boromir has not been losing that fight, even if he hasn't been definitively winning it either. Some people call him reckless where Faramir is measured, others say Faramir is not bold enough, Denethor himself claims Faramir is placing his desire for nobility and 'high-ness' over the safety of himself and his people. Culturally Gondor is going in for more pursuits of war-sports (wrestling perhaps) and the adulation of the soldiers that defend them, above the men of lore if Faramir is to be believed.

Society is changing around this debate and Boromir is actively, purposefully and directly involved in that debate! Hells bells, he even describes a part of how he works in the political sphere to Frodo! 'Where there are so many, all speech becomes a debate without end. But two together may perhaps find wisdom.' Boromir is!!! A politician!! On purpose!!

The neutral political position of 'Heir to the Stewardship' given to him by his birth is so ludicrously weighted towards faithful that the effort it must have taken to push the needle and associate with the middle men as such a divisive yet loved figure is MASSIVE. Boromir believed the Rohirrim and middle men of Gondor were his social equals and counted them amongst his people and that was a stance he upheld in PARLIMENT! Stop!! Acting like he's just a blockheaded soldier who cares about nothing else- he cares!! He cares a lot!! Professionally in fact!!

#text post #boromir #erran vs tolkien #tolkien meta #gondor #faramir #gondor meta

[skyeventide]

there's like, things about Dragon Age and the ancient elven empire there that I don't believe can quite be grasped unless you have a cursory understanding of either Tolkien or the Tolkien-generated trope of elves as an advanced civilisation of superior beings with magic/technology/knowledge/lore that is now lost and/or that largely influenced the remnants of the human empire, which substituted the elven one as the leading force in the continent. fantasy worlds like Dragon Age are deeply in conversation with that (and I guess like the Witcher or smth but I never read or played that, and didn't finish season 1, so my knowledge is second-hand; but either way).

the thing in Tolkien and Tolkien-generated tropes is that these elves are good. they're superior, they teach things to the second-coming races, they're narratively exalted, they're borderline divine, any kind of more or less violent colonialism (it happens) and feudalism (also happens) they instate is good, narratively obfuscated, or even justified. Tolkien has criticism of colonialism in his work, but rarely if ever goes all the way when it comes to elves. criticism of elven hierarchies based on clan and level of holiness and greatness are often narratively undermined (e.g. Eol, a character whose criticism of Turgon and the Noldor is diluted by the fact that he's awful as a person)(you can go into detail about Galadriel and Nimrodel but this post is technically a Dragon Age post lmao).

there's a Tolkien paper called "The Wretched of Middle Earth: An Orcish Manifesto" by Charles Mills, which goes into scathing detail about how the narrative sets up the elves as a superior race and consistently characterises the other groups, orcs, humans, dwarves, as racial inferiors. it's not afraid to call out "aryan" comparisons, without trying to argue that Tolkien actively believed in that ideology. the racial herarchy is there, in the text.

tl dr elves have all the rhetorical trappings of an empire... without ever being one. they're good, they're paternally helpful towards the humans they educate (who are therefore the superior humans), and they're good also and particularly in the sense that they never "fell" in a religious sense, no matter their individual actions (fastidious details and contradictions notwithstanding). they didn't abandon the true god.

what's happening in Dragon Age is that these elves, who are narratively presented as the "true" elves, the lost ideal, the immortals before modern elves turned from their ways and lost that immortality, the great advanced civilisation that probably taught humans before humans feasted on their remnants, these elves... are an empire. they conquer, enslave, pillage from the dwarves (another trope turned on its head; don't tell me the dwarves-elves peaceful companionship where the dwarves keep digging to satisfy the demand of material but they're also best friends with elves, turned to explicit war of conquest for possession of raw material in Dragon Age, doesn't elicit mithril-lyrium comparisons), have pantheon wars. this is the sole logical conclusion of those tropes. it's the subtext, the unspoken, the unspeakable, brought straight to light. it's the rhetoric of empire that's been buried in stories about elves brought to its only possible sensible end: this is an actual empire. there's no way it could have been anything else.

(this goes deeper with the numenor-gondor-tevinter comparisons, which are absolutely blatant when you know that gondor's precursors, numenor, went full empire, and that their last action before the island sank was attack the elves' blessed realm. if ar-pharazon and numenor had won, we could have gotten something very similar to Tevinter in storyline. only the Tolkien racial hierarchy simply cannot be toppled like that, it's practically divinely mandated and protected. the maker-the allfather directly and personally intervenes. but without this extremely disruptive and literal deus ex machina, that too is turned on its head in Dragon Age: it's not god who sinks the capital of the human empire to prevent their violent conquest AND traps the fighting humans underground, after the elves have fled instead of choosing to fight; it's humans who arrive, the elves flee, and then humans presumably sink the capital city into the ground. once again, when the ontological hierarchy of races and the divine decree of goodness and favour is removed, the true logical conclusion comes to the fore. one empire substitutes the other.)

#Dragon Age #The Silmarillion #I honestly think the choice of the elvhenan empire #built on decades-long tropes of fantasy and elves #is sheer genius #Elvhenan #JRR Tolkien

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 12 July 1979, Olive Morris, feminist, squatter and activist in the Brixton Black Panthers, died aged just 27. Born in Jamaica, Morris moved to the UK aged 9 to be with her forklift operator father and factory shop steward mother. One of her earliest political actions was at 17 when she intervened when police in Brixton, south London, were arresting a Black man for an alleged parking offence. She was racially abused and physically attacked by officers, then arrested, fined and given a three month suspended sentence for two years. In her short life Morris played a leading role in radical movements in Britain, getting involved with and helping found numerous groups and projects like the Black Women's Mutual Aid Group. She also was critical of the white left and union movement, which spouted rhetoric about "unity". But in reality, at employers like Standard Telephones and Cables, they defended practices like lower pay for Black workers, and scabbed on Black workers' strikes. About single issue anti-fascist groups, Morris said: “Not a single problem associated with racialism, unemployment, police violence and homelessness can be settled by ‘rocking’ against the fascists, the police or the army… The fight against racism and fascism is completely bound up with the fight to overthrow capitalism, the system that breeds both.” In 1978, she became unwell, and was then diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She succumbed the following year. You can learn more about racism in the British workers' movement, and how it was fought against and radically altered by the Grunwick strike in our podcast episodes 67-68: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/grunwick-strike-1976/ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=660349202804965&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[communistkenobi]

I’m reading Late Fascism by Alberto Toscano. I’m still on the first chapter, where he discusses various definitions of fascism and their usefulness for highlighting specific components of fascist rhetoric and organising. And I particularly like this section where he critiques and dismisses the “white-working-class” argument, ie, that the modern bases of fascism can be found in the white working class, who express this fascist consciousness through voting for right-wing politicians (and he is of course talking about the US, addressing this formation re: the Trump base):

This is why it is incumbent on a critical (or indeed anti-fascist) left to stop indulging in the ambient rhetoric of the white working-class voter as the subject-supposed-to-have-voted for the fascist-populist option. This is not only because of the sociological dubiousness of the electoral argument, or the enormous pass it gives to the middle and upper classes, or because of the tawdry forms of self-satisfied condescension it allows a certain academic or journalistic commentator or reader, or even the way it leads a certain left to indulge the fantasies 'if only we could mobilise them' and 'if only we had the right slogan'. Politically speaking, the working class as a collective body, rather than as a manipulated seriality, does not (yet) exist. To impute the subjectivity of a historical agency to a false political totality is not only to unwittingly repeat the unity trick of fascistic propaganda but also to suppose that emancipatory political forms and energies lie latent in social life. By way of provocation, we could adapt Adorno's statement, quoted earlier, to read: 'We may at least venture the hypothesis that the class identity of the contemporary Trump voter in a way presupposes the end of class itself.' A sign of this is the stickiness of the racial qualifier white in white working class. Alain Badiou once noted about the phraseology of ‘Islamic terrorism’ that when a predicate is attributed to a formal substance… it has no other consistency than that of giving an ostensible content to that form. In ‘Islamic terrorism’, the predicate ‘Islamic’ has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word ‘terrorism’ which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political). Here whiteness is - not just at the level of discourse, but, I would argue, at the level of political experience - the supplement to a politically void or spectral notion of the working class; it is what allows a pseudo-collective agency to be imbued with a (toxic) psychosocial content. This is all the more patent if we note how, in both public debate and psephological [electoral] 'expertise', whiteness seems to be indispensable in order to belong to this ‘working class’, while any determinate relation to the means of production is optional at best. (pp 19-20)

His critique of the white-working-class argument, that ‘The Left’ has insufficiently persuaded this group and left them to be duped by ‘The Right’, is that in order to conceptualise the white working class as a coherent political group that has become aware of itself as a political group through right-wing (fascist) consciousness-raising, is to argue that fascist consciousness is a form of proletarian class consciousness. As he says, it’s not only incorrect in practical and factual terms, but makes an analytical error in assuming that fascists are primarily mobilising people with regard to their class position. This argument accepts the validity of the “populist” label as a horseshoe catch-all, that left-wing articulations of proletarian class consciousness are equivalent to right-wing articulations of a national/racial pseudo-consciousness.

And as he says, this is also not an argument about class at all - working class means nothing in this formulation, its primary function is to ground ‘white’ and give it apparent meaning. This is how he arrives at Adorno’s adapted formulation of ‘presupposing the end of class itself,’ as class holds no explanatory power and makes little reference to reality (it is only a ‘spectral notion’). In effect, it collapses ‘white’ into ‘working class’, making whiteness a prerequisite of belonging to the working class. This is a hilarious trick given that the white qualifier is at least partially meant to save the journalist or academic from accusations of assuming all working class people are white, but by emphasising whiteness with no regard to the class position that the white-working-class supposedly occupies, race is flattened into working class, reducing class to (the white) race.  

Of course, this conclusion is not derived from any serious analysis of racial histories and economic processes such as colonialism, where this race/class intertwining helps to explain and understand the lineage of race itself. I’m pulling now from Aníbal Quijano’s Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America, who argues that race functions as the organisational system of class in settler-colonial contexts; race refers to and gives shape to the class position in the means of production in settler-colonial societies, where positions such as “slave” and “slaveowner” as classes are enforced and systematised on the basis of race, naturalising class to the supposed “biological reality” of race.

Through this analysis of colonialism and race we see how even more absurd this white-working-class argument becomes, that it concludes that whiteness is a racial barrier of entry to the proletariat; in effect, very roughly inverting the racial logic of colonial capitalism in order to argue that poor whites are the base of fascism. Noticeably, this accepts the basic fascist argument that whites are an underclass being oppressed by a non-white ‘misfit’ bourgeoisie, who achieved their position through social manipulation, trickery, and liberal social justice programs like affirmative action. Where liberals depart from this formulation is merely to argue that a diverse ruling class is the result of meritocracy as opposed to social engineering.

This is a liberal articulation of fascism: an adoption of the fascist logic that races can be activated as a class, that race is a dormant social energy that can be activated in the minds of a white class, but this argument is used as a means of obscuring white supremacy as a tool of right-wing reaction and mobilisation by tacking on the qualifier of ‘working class’ at the end. In this way, working class becomes the qualifier to white, not the other way around, positioning fascism as a purely lower class phenomenon, something that afflicts only the poor whites, the stupid whites, the uneducated whites. This allows for the obfuscation of the bourgeois character of fascism, and provides fuel for “the tawdry forms of self-satisfied condescension it allows a certain academic or journalistic commentator,” many of whom are themselves white.

#book club #late fascism

[dostoyevsky-official]

Trump’s rhetoric is nothing like Milošević‘s and Karadžić’s dolorous protests over centuries of unrelieved Serb victimization at the hands of Yugoslavia’s other ethnic groups. Their particular version of nationalism is obviously more like wokeness, which awards moral status to claims of group oppression. Indeed, Serb nationalists and their defenders regularly appealed to woke-style sentiments and imagery to plead their case. [...] Former Naval War College professor John Schindler wrote that Alija Izetbegović, the first president of Bosnia and a practicing Muslim, had written passages about Ottoman rule that were “tantamount to a white Southern politician who publicly extolled his slave-owning ancestors.” [...] Coincidentally or not, American Marxist academics began championing the racial branch of wokeness known as critical race theory in the late 1980s, at the same moment when Milošević was using Serb nationalism and a series of well-timed angry mobs to stage a hostile takeover of Yugoslavia’s political institutions. Perhaps word travels fast in Marxist circles. (x)

america is such a beautiful, beautiful country, full of such bright minds

#dobro jutro balkan followers i really hope you see this

[tanadrin]

[epistemic status: a bunch of semi-related thoughts I am trying to work out aloud] It has been noted countless times that reactionary politics rely on a feeling of threat: our enemies are strong and we are weak (but we are virtuous and they are not, which is why they’re our enemies!); we must defend ourselves, we must not be afraid of doing what needs to be done; we must not shie away from power generally, and violence specifically.

And there are lots of contexts--like when talking about the appeal of reactionary politics in the US before and at the beginning of Trump’s rise to prominence, or when talking about hard-on-crime policies that are a springboard to police militarization, or (the central example of all this in the 21st century) the post 9/11 PATRIOT-act terrorism paranoia that was a boon to authoritarians everywhere, and spurred a massive expansion of both control and surveillance in everyday life--where critics of reactionary rhetoric are chastised for their failure to appeal to the other side, because they come off as callous towards their concerns and their real fears and anxieties.

And while this might not be strategically correct, frankly, I think there’s a sense in which it is justified to be callous towards those concerns. Because those concerns are lies. They may be lies borne out of a seed of real experience (9/11 did happen, of course), but the way that seed is cultivated by focused paranoia, by contempt toward cultivating any sense of proportionality or any honest comparison of risk, the way it is dragooned into the service of completely orthogonal political goals (”the CIA/NSA/FBI must be able to monitor all private communications everywhere in the world, just in case it might prevent another 9/11″) chokes off any possible sympathy I might otherwise feel. American paranoia about another couple thousand lives being lost in a 9/11 like event resulted in a number of deaths literally multiple orders of magnitude larger in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the former, some years Iraq was suffering the equivalent of six or seven 9/11s a year.

So, any fear-driven policy must not (for example) say “to prevent disaster X happening again, we’re going to make it happen 270 times over to someone else.” That’s not reasonable. And “fear is a bad basis for crafting policy” is not exactly a revolutionary observation. There’s that probably-apocryphal story of a Chinese professor responding to Blackstone’s Ratio--you know, “better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer”--with “better for whom?” Which is supposed to be this trenchant and penetrating question that makes you reexamine your assumptions. But it’s always struck me as idiotic. Better for society! For everyone! Because the law only functions well if it is seen as a source of order and justice, not as an authoritarian cudgel; because a society in which anxiety drives policymaking and legal responses to social ills is one that is in the process of actively devouring itself; because flooding the public discourse with language that dehumanizes criminals and makes it easy to separate the individual from universal principles like civil rights is an acid that destroys the social fabric.

Fear as a germ of reactionary politics manifests itself in lots of ways outside of both historical examples, like fascism, or more recent examples, like US foreign policy during the war on terror. Fear and its link to purity-attitudes, with a low level of scientific literacy in general, drives stuff like the organized anti-vaccine movement. In the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram of political tendencies, I’d argue it’s a big factor in the wellness-to-Qanon track. It’s a big part of tough-on-crime rhetoric, which in the American instance in particular also draws on an especially racialized form (cf. the “Willie Horton” ad). Fear and purity and anti-contamination anxieties are even big in opposition to nuclear power, because most of the public just has a really bad sense of what the comparative dangers of nuclear vs fossil fuel are; and because the former has been culturally salient since 1945 in a way the latter hasn’t, nuclear contamination feels much more threatening than fossil fuel waste, despite by any measurable harm the latter causing far worse problems, even before you factor in any risks from climate change.

I would like to argue in particular that true crime as an entertainment genre, and wellness culture, and fears about child abuse all contribute to reactionary politics--they are in themselves major reactionary political currents--in a way that cuts across the political spectrum because they are not strongly marked for political factionalism. A lot of the rhetoric both from and around true crime entertainment promotes the idea that violent crime exists, or at least can flourish, because of an insufficiently punitive attitude toward crime; one that can only be fixed by centering victims’ desire (or putative desire) for retribution in the legal process, by eroding the civil rights of the accused, and by giving the police and prosecutors more power. Obviously, this is just 80s and 90s tough on crime rhetoric repackaged for millennials; it centers individual experience a bit more and deemphasizes the racial component that made the “Willie Horton” ad so successful, but it posits that there is only one cause for crime, a spontaneous choice by criminals that has no causal relationship with the rest of the world, and only one solution, which is authoritarianism.

Wellness culture leverages purity concerns and scientific illiteracy in ways which are so grifty and so transparently stupid that it’s by far the least interesting thing on this list to me; its most direct harm is in giving an environment for the anti-vaccine movement to flourish, and I’m always incredibly annoyed when people talk about how the medical establishment needs to do more to reassure the public about vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Again, strategically, this may be correct; people dying of preventable disease is really bad. But doctors as a body didn’t promote Andrew Wakefield’s nonsense; doctors as a body didn’t run breathless article after breathless article about vaccines maybe causing autism; doctors as a body didn’t scare the bejezus out of folks in the 90s and then act all surprised when preventable childhood diseases started breaking out all over the place.

Although outside the whole anti-vax thing, I think there are lots of other harms that wellness culture creates. It tends to be fairly antiscientific; in order to sell people nonsense (because as a subculture it exists almost exclusively to sell people things) it has to discredit anything that might point out that it is selling nonsense. Whether the anti-intellectualism that flourishes in these quarters is a result of intentional deceit or just a kind of natural rhetorical evolution probably varies. But it is an important component of wellness culture to be able to play a shell game between “big pharma doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” “you don’t need your anti-depressants,” and “laetrile cures cancer.”

The way in which fears of child abuse are turned into a reactionary political cudgel probably actually annoys me the most; whether it’s Wayfair conspiracy theories, conservatives trying to turn “groomer” into an anti-queer slur, or just antis on tumblr, the portrayal of sadistic sexual threat aimed at children from an outside malevolent force is compelling only because the vast majority of child abuse and CSA comes from within families and within culturally privileged structures of authority like churches, and this fact makes everyone really uncomfortable, and no one wants to talk about it. I remember getting really annoyed during the Obama years when the White House wanted to talk about bullying and anti-LGBT bullying in particular, while studiously avoiding blaming parents and teachers in any way for it, despite the fact that all the coming out horror stories I know are from people’s parents turning on them.

Now, very conservative politics have always opposed dilution of a kind of privilege for the family structure; they envision a family structure which is patriarchal, and so dilution of this privilege is dilution of the status of patriarch. Very insular communities which cannot survive their members having many options or alternative viewpoints available to them, including controlling religions but also just abusive parents who want to retain control over their kids, also bristle at the idea of any kind of general society-wide capacity for people to notice how parents treat their children. But beyond that, I think our society still treats parents as having a right of possession over their children and their children’s identities, especially when they’re young, and bolsters that idea with an idea that the purity of children is constantly under threat from the outside world, and it is the parents’ job to safeguard that purity. The result is the nuclear family as a kind of sacred structure which the rest of society has no right to observe or pry open; and this is a massive engine of enabling the abuse of children. To no other relationship in our society do we apply this idea, that it should be free from “interference” (read: basic accountability) from the rest of society.

Moreover, the idea of childhood as a time of purity and innocence, which not only must be protected from but during which children must be actively lied to about major aspects of how the world works, is one of the last ways remaining to an increasingly secular culture to justify censorious and puritanical Victorian morality. It is hard to advocate for censorship to protect the Morals of the Christian Public, when nobody believes in the Morals of the Christian Public anymore; but “think of the children!” still works as a rallying cry, because of this nagging sense we have that age-appropriate conversations with children about adult topics will cause them to melt or explode.

In many ways, these anxieties on behalf of theoretical children are the ones I am most contemptuous of. Not because child abuse isn’t a serious problem--it is--but because the vector imagined for it is almost entirely opposite the one it actually tends to occur along. People who pretend that the primary danger to children is from strangers are usually woefully misinformed; people who pretend it is from media are either idiots or liars seeking a cover for their craving for censorship.

In conclusion: while it’s not possible to exorcise all our neuroses from our politics, anymore than we will ever exercise all our neuroses from our aesthetics, there are some we should be especially on guard against. A sense of threat, and anxieties which tie into concerns about purity and fears of contamination, are two big ones. These produce policies that are not only badly correlated with the outcomes they ostensibly want, but actually and severely destructive to them, in the same way that invading Iraq was actively destructive to any notion of preventing terrorism, saving American or Iraqi lives, or promoting political stability in the Middle East. And we should hold in healthy suspicion anybody whose politics seem to be driven by similar neuroses. Some merely believe very harmful things. Some are actually actively deceptive. None will achieve any of the higher aims they claim as justification for their beliefs.

#i'm not saying we *must* radically reshape society to destroy the nuclear family #but i am saying i think it would be good for child welfare

[communist-ojou-sama]

I think there's a thing that has gone unarticulated about rationalists and why they draw the particular ire of nonwhite leftists, so as someone who knows very well this kind of person and what makes them tick from personal experience, let me explain:

The thing about these rationalists, right, is that they see themselves as "balancing" left-wing "instincts" against "the facts" here's the thing. The main "fact" that rationalists are balancing left-wing rhetoric against is their iron-clad belief that white people are superior in every way to non-white people, something they're convinced that everyone "knows" deep down.

To the rationalist, perhaps repelled by the disgusting personal affect of open white-supremacists, the participation of the "farce" of racial equality is a stimulating thought-experiment and a fun piece of theater, and their intellectual engagement with this notion of racial equality makes them better than their boorish ideological cousins in the white nationalist movement.

What makes them deeply uncomfortable, then, is when nonwhite leftists "lose the plot" by beginning to actually believe that our humanity is equal to theirs, and that we have the right to criticize them, overthrow the white-led world order, or imagine a different future for the world than the Davos crowd is pushing for.

They're frustrated that we're committing too hard to the bit, that we've lost sight of the Facts, that white people are just Better than us and it really pisses them off that we won't learn our place and be ideologically subservient to them

[mmmmalo]

this might be a stupid question, sorry in advance. when you perform analysis on a work like homestuck and excavate these levels of, like, racial and social meaning from it, how does it affect your opinion of the work? do you come to like or dislike it more, or have your feelings toward it grown past that over the years into more nebulous things?

i love your blog and your posts, even though i only started homestuck last year and never made it past act 4; when i read your stuff i always learn new things about how one can interact with texts. just got curious about the above after reading your post on caliborn and disability and such. hope you have a good day.

I continue to like the work, in new ways. The feelings evade summary, so here's a few examples:

I lost my initial fervor for classpect ages ago, when it became clear to me that the categories weren't mutually exclusive (depriving the system of majestic power) and that they were not the ultimate key to Homestuck (meaning a new paradigm would be needed to solve the story's remaining mysteries). But I still admire how classpect induces the audience to engage in symbolic reading, proposing this object or that color has an associated abstract significance.

The manifestation system started out just giving me digestible bits of characterization like Egbert being scared of heights, but within a few months it began giving me weirder shit like racist sex dreams. That was difficult to integrate into my impression of what exactly Homestuck was -- for the time, I was satisfied to conclude that Equius was not as much of an anomaly as he was made out to be, and that the comic might be in some measure a commentary on racism. That the racist thoughts seemed to emanate from particular characters, in a game whose modus operandi is making thoughts real, struck me as a distancing maneuver of sufficient strength to rebuff gentle (and not so gentle) suggestions that maybe this all just meant Hussie was racist. Thus when the ARG got posted, instead of joining the outcry against the abundant bigotry I was laser focused on how the alternate-dimension Obama was a surrealist confirmation of racist birther conspiracies. The psychological framing of Sburb had persuaded me to accept the story as a scare quote around "racism" that could be observed at a remove.

I was excited that the manifestation system meant more characterization for Jade, then shocked when it implied she had been raped, then apprehensive of the apparent perpetrator Grandpa's every move, then supremely confused by the revelation that Homestuck's deployment of pejorative tropes meant that all the above had coaxed me into a simulation of satanic panic. Reconciling my sympathy for Jade's suffering with the knowledge that Jake is by some measure an effigy sending out de-fused signals of DANGEROUS HOMOSEXUAL THREATENS THE CHILDREN, it all gives me a headache. The story's ironic scaremongering demands your disengagement, to view the story as artifice, but the suffering of the victim within the bad-faith narrative is nonetheless visceral. Conflicting demands like that make up much of the story for me now: pathos that I once felt and continue to feel, side by side with the need to question the foundations of the sympathy.

It is very rare that anything holds my attention as long as Homestuck has and that in itself is something I'm grateful for. Trying to get a rhetorical foothold on its weird ass games has been my primary motivation for reading new things -- psychoanalytic film criticism, existential philosophy, and academic theorization of assorted bigotries are probably not things I would have delved into were they not connected to the puzzle box. It became my lesson plan for self-study, and it has (slash I have) made me into a better reader in general... or something, idk.

I like the story. That's it for feelings for now

#the undersells the dynamic of laughing at new jokes and being exasperated by new jokes #and the experience of becoming a more guarded speaker under the dual pressures of reader scrutiny and an epistemic humility that comes wit #h knowing your mode of reading will eventually reach its limit #but for now for now #meta meta

[beardedmrbean]

After a report implied many voters of color in swing states are souring on President Biden, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, sparked outrage for implying they are only doing so because they are uninformed and blinded by their feelings.

CNN's "State of the Union" host Dana Bash spoke to a panel on her show about a recent report from The New York Times, "Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds." The report included polling that claimed, "Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times."

Bash addressed Crockett and read an excerpt from the report, "In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the farther Mr. Biden was behind, and he led only in the Whitest of the six."

"It’s really scary for me," Crockett replied, before going on to explain why she thinks this shift appears to be happening.

"Here’s the deal, perception is reality, and so when you look at the data that was provided in this poll, it talks about how people feel… it is all about how you feel in that moment," she said. "While the facts may not align with their feelings, their feelings are dictating their reality and their reality is that they feel better or they felt better when Trump was in office."

Crockett added that Democrats have been "trying to push back" against this, even as "some very popular African American artists out here saying things like ‘Oh I got checks when Trump was in office. I want those checks again,’ not understanding that really came from Congress."

"So we have got a couple of things, the perception issue and then we also have an issue as it relates to civics in this country and people not understanding exactly how any of this works," she concluded.

As footage of Crockett’s statement shot across the internet, commentators condemned her rhetoric on social media.

"’Voters are too stupid and they don't understand their betters’ is probably not a great campaign message for Democrats," The Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway wrote.

"The utter disdain these elitist lawmakers have for their own constituents is really mind-blowing," commentator Joe Concha wrote.

"Where did she get such a sense of superiority?" journalist Miranda Devine wrote.

"Pre Obama the Democrat’s stock response to dropping numbers in a demographic was, ‘we’ll go and listen, and try hard to earn that support,’" columnist David Marcus wrote. "Today it is, ‘they are wrong, and somewhat ignorant, we’ll show them why we are smart and right.’"

"Imagine being this dismissive of your voters? Democrats seem to think the people who they need to elect them are all stupid and incapable of understanding what’s actually happening," radio personality Mike Opelka wrote.

"Oh really," Fox News host Lawrence Jones III wrote.

Many commentators, especially Black conservatives, scorched Crockett for appearing to underestimate Black voters' ability to grasp politics.

"In other words, according to Democrat @RepJasmine Crockett, Blacks are too stupid to understand how much better they are under Biden," conservative commentator and former 2024 presidential hopeful Larry Elder wrote. "Not too bigoted! If Trump said this, Democrats would be drawing up another article of impeachment."

"Once again telling the Black community that we are not intelligent enough to see what’s going on and understand it," former Republican congressional nominee Jeffrey A. Dove wrote. 

"Democrats: Blacks are too emotional to think clearly. Smart pitch," HotAir associate editor David Strom wrote sarcastically.

#nunyas news #the 'don't question your betters' attitude #coming from so many members of the political left #is wild

[samwisethewitch]

TW: This post contains explicit discussions of white supremacy and the alt-right, including mentions of racism and antisemitism.

One of my most impactful recent library reads was Sisters In Hate by Seyward Darby, and I want to take a moment to encourage other white Americans to check it out as we prepare for next years' presidential election and all the shit it's going to kick up.

Sisters In Hate is a book about the role of women in American white supremacist movements and specifically in the alt-right. Darby does a really excellent job of showing just how critical white women are to these hate movements. The book also gives us a detailed look at what radicalization looks like and how that process can be different for different genders.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which follows a real woman through her radicalization into the alt-right. I especially want to draw Tumblr's attention to the story of Ayla, a self-proclaimed "polyamorous, raw foodist-vegan, feminist, pagan" whose radicalization started in college with natural living and homebirth and ended with her running a popular tradwife blog and speaking at the Unite the Right rally.

I think a lot of leftists and liberals feel that we're too smart, or too educated, or too savvy to fall for white supremacist recruitment schemes. We are not. Intelligent, college-educated, left-leaning people are radicalized every day. Some of them are less overtly hateful, like your college friend who starts voting Republican in their 30s. Some of them are like Ayla, and their radicalization takes them all the way to the other end of the political spectrum until they're openly and genuinely calling for a white ethnostate with the same passion they once used to advocate for feminism, racial equity, and queer rights. And we need to remember that any one of us intelligent, college-educated, left-leaning white folks could be in her position, which is why it's so important to learn about radicalization tactics so we can recognize and resist them.

I'm not gonna lie -- this book is hard to read. The text contains racial slurs, white supremacist rhetoric, antisemitism, and anti-Black racism. All of this is condemned by the author, but Darby doesn't shy away from showing just how vile this movement is. I had to take a lot of breaks from this book and read it over several weeks, but I'm very glad I did because I feel like I needed this information.

White supremacist recruitment efforts are going to pick up in the next year, especially if Tr*mp is the Republican nominee for president. Stay informed and stay ready.

#racism tw #white supremacy tw #antisemitism tw #antiblack racism tw #cults tw #antiracism #antifascist #anti nazi #us politics #us presidential election #us presidential race #politics #racial equity #racial justice #feminism #alt right pipeline #pagan #paganism #paganblr #yes the book explicitly discusses paganism as a WS recruitment tactic #the tags are on topic #heathenry #inclusive heathenry #antiracist heathenry #cottagecore #anti tradwife #not a tradwife #simple life #simple living #slow living

[magnetothemagnificent]

Given your evident love of magneto what are your thoughts on the man who arguably began his more modern interpretations Chris Claremont? I’ve hard a decent amount of criticism on how often he used kitty pride to say the N word.

I think Claremont was wrong for having Kitty say the N-word outright and I think as a non-Black man his decisions to have the word be used and make a direct comparison between the oppression Black people face and the oppression the fictionalized mutants face were misguided.

It's one thing to make an allegory, it's another to make a one-on-one comparison when Claremont himself is not Black. Claremont is Jewish, and therefore his explicit comparison of the oppression mutants face in his universe to antisemitism is something he is at liberty to explore. He does also makes many explicit comparisons to the Holocaust in his runs, and as a Jew I don't really have an issue because he is a Jewish man and the comparisons were made my Magneto, a Jewish character.

This is one of the incidents of Kitty saying the N-word, in Claremont's hit story "God Loves, Man Kills":

The context of this is that Kitty got into a fight with some other teens because they were espousing anti-mutant rhetoric. Stevie Hunter, her ballet teacher, tells her to calm down. Kitty, being a teenager, got fired up at Stevie's passivity, and tries to make a point.

Of course, we as readers know that as a Black woman, Stevie knows from experience to keep her head down, but to Kitty Pryde, a white-passing person who had only discovered her powers (and new marginalized status) mere years before, is not used to this new marginalization. I say "new marginalization" because Kitty has always been a marginalized character even before her mutation, being Jewish. Kitty, especially in the runs under Claremont, is drawn as not just openly Jewish with her Star of David necklace and numerous references to her Jewishness, but also racialized as Jewish with her thick, dark curly hair (a stereotype of Ashkenazi Jews). But as a light-skinned generally white-passing Jew from the suburbs of Chicago, it's likely she didn't experience as much antisemitism as much as Stevie faced antiblackness.

I think the real issue is less of Kitty saying the word but rather in the next panel Stevie saying that she was right to make that comparison. In the X Men universe, the mutants are a marginalized class, but so are Black people. I think Claremont was trying to shift the themes of the X Men narrative as being not just an allegory for the Holocaust, but also for Civil Rights (Indeed, the opening scene of God Loves, Man Kills, is of two Black children being lynched by a religious extremist mob), but he did so rather clumsily by our standards.

The time Kitty did say the N-word intentionally as an insult was in Uncanny X-Men #196:

This exchange occurs after Kitty overhears Phil and his friends plotting against other mutants. She barges in, and they turn on her (they end up knocking her out and kidnapping her). I do not think it was appropriate for Kitty to use the N-word in this way, and I don't think Claremont should have written her as saying such, but in the context it is one marginalized person calling another person a targeted slur, and the other person responding in turn. Not appropriate, but in the scene it is an emotionally charged moment where both sides of the exchange are in the wrong.

The final instance I can think of where Kitty uses the N-word is in conjunction with a bunch of other slurs to give an example. She is giving a speech at a school where one of the students committed suicide because of the anti-mutant bullying he faced. While I did censor the instances of the N-word in the previous two images, I'm not going to do so for this one because it's in conjunction with a bunch of other slurs, and if I censored each one, the context would be lost.

Kitty calls herself a series of slurs and insults (notably, an antisemitic slur. Remember, Kitty is a proud Jew). She then lists off other slurs, which includes the N-word, but also an anti-Latino slur, an anti-Italian slur, an anti-Asian slur, and the F-slur. She also uses "Mutie" again, which is an anti-mutant slur in the Marvel universe. To our modern ears (or rather, eyes), this is inappropriate, but this was published in 1983 and the ideas we have today about not saying slurs even in non-targeted ways weren't the same.

I think Kitty's usage of the N-word (and other slurs) is used to make it obvious to the readers that the mutant narrative is an allegory for other narratives in our world, namely racism, antisemitism, and homophobia, but it isn't done perfectly. If it was a Black mutant character making these comparisons, just like Magneto is a Jewish mutant making direct comparisons to the Holocaust, it might read a bit better. I don't know for sure, and I'm not Black myself, but perhaps then it would be slightly more appropriate. Kitty was written to be a very outspoken character who says things as they are, but it wasn't her place as a non-Black person to make those direct comparisons, even if she herself is marginalized in other ways.

As for Claremont himself........I think he is a legend and despite his controversies, the X Men, and Magneto especially, wouldn't be the icons they are today. Claremont took the X Men from a run-of-the-mill superhero team and Magneto from a run-of-the-mill villain and made them inherently political and an explicit allegory for other issues present in our world. This tradition that Claremont started has only continued with other Marvel writers drawing parallels between queer issues and mutant issues, and fan speculation about parallels with disability rights (which I would love to see tackled in canon). Claremont's contributions to the X Men canon are invaluable, and I loved what he did with Magneto. Is he perfect? Of course not. You'd be hard pressed to find a writer who is. I think he tried to tell a story, and sometimes stumbled just by virtue of his own inexperience with the identities he was trying to depict, and suffered from trying to make too many explicit references to real world events and issues (Which many comic writers in his time struggled with). And, notably, he hasn't continued to make those mistakes in more recent publications, which I think is significant.

[id in alt text]

#marvel comics #chris claremont #racism #antiblackness #n-word mention #slurs #media analysis #critical thinking #media criticism #kitty pryde #x men comics #marvel #nuance #antisemitism

[gatheringbones]

[“Criticizing US scholars for their erasure of the Indian, Mahmood Mamdani writes:

“Engaging with the native question would require questioning the ethics and the politics of the very constitution of the United States of America. It would require rethinking and reconsidering the very political project called the U.S.A. Indeed, it would call into question the self-proclaimed anticolonial identity of the U.S. Highlighting the colonial nature of the American political project would require a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of America, one necessary to think through both America’s place in the world and the task of political reform for future generations.”

Furthermore, Mamdani argues, regarding the conflation of immigration and settlement: immigrants join existing polities whereas settlers create new ones. “If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.” The nation of immigrants rhetoric that avoids the dynamics of settler colonialism plays a role that “is essential to settler-colonial nation-state projects such as the United States and Israel. The political project of the settler—to create and fortify the colonial nation-state—becomes obscured by the nonpolitical project of the immigrant, who merely seeks to take advantage of what the state allows every citizen.”

Historian Lorenzo Veracini also distinguishes between settlers and immigrants, asserting that settlers are unique migrants made by conquest not by immigration. Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them, whereas immigrants face a political order that is already constituted. Immigrants can certainly be individually co-opted within settler-colonial societies, and often are, but they do not enjoy inherent rights and are characterized by a defining lack of sovereign entitlement.

Immigrants and refugees to the United States do have the option to resist becoming settlers, although in most cases they do not know the history of the United States or the political reality. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service policies based on exclusion make the new immigrant’s life precarious, particularly for immigrants of color entering a racial order that renders them suspect already, so they may not want to know the reality or that they have a choice and that by default they become settlers.”]

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, from not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion, 2021

#roxanne dunbar ortiz #lesbian literature #history stuff #cw racism #cw genocide #currently reading

[ball-of-catgirl]

I think the overwhelming narrative that the latest migration is "all of Reddit" coming to Tumblr is literally harming the people involved in this migration.

Reddit, as a generalization, is right-wing and fascist as all hell. The staff knowingly simps for fascist China. It takes them forever to actually action on homophobic/transphobic communities. They introduced a "follow" feature that is exclusively and solely used by reactionaries to flood trans users' notifications with transphobic messages.

LGBT+ positive posts or even gentle feminist rhetoric outside of our small communities get flagged, locked, bombarded with downvotes, silenced, and mocked. Any criticism of capitalism or bigotry is downvoted and hidden. Entire communities are dedicated to being critical of us.

Reddit, as a generalization, would absolutely fucking never consider Tumblr for a migration.

The entire fucking reason r/196 existed in the first place was because "normal" "popular" meme subs such as r/shitposting and r/memes and the like had utter fucking rageboners for anything slightly left of spamming racial slurs. We held a tight knit community of queer folks who just wanted to share funny stuff without constant threat of gross bad actors and Matt Walsh circlejerks.

Meanwhile, we come here after the voluntary shutdown of our community's space on Reddit and people keep saying shit like "oh they're all men" "reddit is Tumblr for men" "it's just leftist 4chan" and man is it hurtful and wildly incorrect. Secondary meanwhile, in about two days' time, literally the entire majority of Reddit is just going to return to Reddit after the temporary blackouts are over.

Reddit. Is not. Migrating. To Tumblr.

It's just us.

Also, you know, for the other trans ruleposters here, don't forget... we're not really any more safe here than on Reddit. We're just trading literal Nazis and reactionaries for stuffy argumentative gender criticals who also wish us harm.

#196 #tumblr migration #reddit migration #not that anyone who is hateful enough to spread rhetoric like that is gonna read all that #just gonna be “im happy for you or sorry that happened” #transfems please stay safe

[saud4des]

just to make things clear on where i stand as a human being...z.ionism is antisemitic, isreal as a state and illegally occupying government is harmful to both the jewish populations and arab populations of the entire world. g.enocide is happening as i type this, an apartheid has been ongoing since 1948. i.sreal and its actions are the antitheses of judasim, period. if you can justify what is happening, you are not a person i want in my life because there is no justification for it.

judaism does not equate zionism. HOWEVER, claiming it is antisemitic to be in open opposition with fair criticism of an occupying state committing war crimes for decades is the textbook definition of z.ionist rhetoric.

if you want jewish voices on this matter, i highly recommend organizations such as jewish voice for peace, jews for racial and economic justice, and rabbis for ceasefire. if it's individual voices, norman finkelstein and gabor mate have always been a source of truth.

if you want to read palestinian literature; ghassan kanafani, atef abu seif, hala alyan, suheir hammad.... are just some of the authors whose work i have consumed.

link post for palestine 🇵🇸

muslim breakfast club // frigga's fave sweatshirt

islamic relief canada

#OOC. 「» frigga-isms.」 #psa