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theculturedmarxist · 9 months

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Migrant workers are struggling to get a nibble as they fish for labourious work. Photo: Henry Wong

This is the second story in a three-part series about China’s employment environment, from migrant workers and fresh graduates to new job sources and the private sector.

For less than a cup of coffee at most major chains, a migrant worker in a major Chinese city can rent a bed for the night. But oftentimes, that is contingent on finding work and getting paid that day.

In the southeastern outskirts of Beijing, amid a record-breaking heatwave scorching the capital, migrant workers starved of both food and jobs still venture out to make a living in the sweltering sun.

Wang Ke, 36, is among those who haven’t had a full stomach in a while. He and his band of fellow job-hunters never pass up a chance to ask people, “Do you need workers?”

But the group too often returns in disappointment, wondering again when they might get their next meal, and if they will even have a roof over their head that night. Beds generally cost between 25 yuan (US$3.45) and 30 yuan a night.

“A job comes by only every few days, and a group of people rush to seize it,” Wang, originally from the central province of Henan, said from Majuqiao, once the capital city’s largest labour service market, where employment agencies and recruiters shout out menial job offerings on the street, paying usually about 100 yuan (US$13.80) or so a day.

“I am willing to work any kind of odd job, but I haven’t had any luck in four days. Ninety per cent of the people here are like me. No one can make money here; being able to fill my stomach would be the most beautiful thing ever.”

People like Wang can only wander the streets at night, finding vacant places to sleep wherever they can, changing locations several times a night to areas without people – safer areas with less chance of unwanted interactions.

The current need for migrant workers may serve as a barometer for the recovery of China’s economic activities, which has gradually lost steam amid a property slump, dwindling export demand holding back China’s manufacturing sector, and dampened confidence among consumers and investors.

China’s factory activities contracted for a third straight month in June, further putting pressure on the world’s largest exporter of goods.

“The most direct reason is there aren’t jobs that suit them, as Beijing is relieved of functions non-essential to its role as China’s capital, many labour-intensive industries have moved out of Beijing, and the labour opportunities have left with them,” said Yuan Xin, a demography professor at Nankai University in Tianjin.

Beijing has been pushing for the removal of “non-essential institutions” from China’s capital to the Xiongan New Area in neighbouring Hebei province. And many lower-end manufacturing businesses have taken the brunt, slashing the need for migrant workers without technical skills.

“We are even worse off than beggars,” Wang added. “Beggars can ask for help, while we are too ashamed, and many resort to rummaging through garbage bins to survive.”

China had around 296 million migrant workers at the end of 2022, and in the first quarter of this year, their average monthly income dropped to 4,504 yuan, from a monthly average of 4,615 yuan last year, according to official statistics.

In quantifiable terms, that lost income could represent three more nights that a migrant worker spends on the streets every month, in situations comparable to Wang’s.

But the data can hardly depict the bleakness of work prospects for the older generations of migrants, who are often too old to be office-building security guards, electronics factory workers, or perhaps amusement park staff. And they’re often rejected outright for jobs that necessitate fast learning, or when a company wants staff to appear younger.

And for many migrant workers, almost exclusively rural residents, there is no end in sight to their work, as they will not be able to retire, due to a lack of savings and limited pension coverage.

No one wants to go home without having made money. Who wouldn’t want to return home with glory and triumph? Wang Ke, migrant jobseeker

Despite bleak economic growth and sluggish factory activities last year due to China’s draconian zero-Covid measures, the conditions gave rise to a surge in demand for temporary workers, including security guards, workers for Covid testing booths, and delivery workers – all of which paid relatively well, sometimes more than 10,000 yuan a month, enabling migrant workers to cash in.

“As soon as the pandemic [control measures] ended, it became difficult to find jobs,” said another migrant worker, in his forties, who declined to be identified. It had been two weeks since he found work.

“Loading work pays 150 yuan for 12 hours, and you have to bring your own meals. Even some big enterprises pay less than Beijing’s minimum wage,” which is just over 25 yuan an hour.

Before the pandemic, Wang worked in Zhejiang province and owned his own business, was a sales manager at China Mobile, and led a large team of security guards.

After nationwide restrictions were lifted, Wang decided to test his luck in Beijing. And he’s not ready to throw in the towel yet.

“No one wants to go home without having made money. Who wouldn’t want to return home with glory and triumph? ‘Until one arrives in Beijing, one does not realise the insignificance of their position,’ I want to check it out,” he said.

Meanwhile, younger temporary workers – mostly students working summer holidays – have more opportunities. But this year, as the number of youth seeking odd jobs has increased, the monthly wage has shrunk in Beijing.

“This year there are more students looking for jobs, as last year they were all locked down at home,” said a recruiting agent for youthful temporary workers, surnamed Li, whose company is near Majuqiao.

Because students can work for such short periods – often just a handful of weeks – they have less leverage to negotiate and are often paid less.

Li said the monthly compensation for stage construction workers is about 3,500 yuan this year, including bed and board, for 12 hours a day, 30 days a month, with no breaks. That’s down from the 3,800 yuan monthly average last year.

That sort of difference could equate to not sleeping in a bed nine times a month.

Further illustrating the rising struggle among jobseekers, particularly young adults, is the youth unemployment rate, which has lately been setting record highs on a monthly basis.

The jobless rate in the 16-24 age group has been on an upward trajectory since 2020 and is expected to rise further in July and August, as a record 11.58 million university graduates are set to leave campus and flood the job market this year, posing a challenge to Beijing’s post-coronavirus recovery efforts.

Factories offer about 15 to 17 yuan per hour for [temporary workers this year], down from last year’s 18 to 20 yuan Recruitment agent, Guangdong province

In May, the jobless rate among that younger demographic hit a record of 20.8 per cent, up from the previous high of 20.4 per cent in April.

The overall urban surveyed jobless rate in May, however, remained unchanged from April at 5.2 per cent. June’s figures should be released in a couple of weeks.

In the manufacturing hubs of southern China, demand for such young workers also remains ample, but incomes have declined compared with last year, due to a reduction in the overtime working hours at small and medium-sized enterprises.

“Factories offer about 15 to 17 yuan per hour for [temporary workers this year], down from last year’s 18 to 20 yuan,” according to a recruitment agent in Guangdong surnamed Li, who declined to give her full name.

While exporting manufacturers cut full-time workers and hire more temporary workers instead, to save operating costs, the cost of living expenses have barely changed, including food and accommodation.

“The main labour force in my factory is now mainly temporary workers. I pay them about 260 yuan a day for over 12 hours of work,” said Wang Jie, a manufacturer of parts for boots and shoes, in Guangdong’s Dongguan city.

He said that to save costs, he had cut most of his full-time workers to less than 20, down about two-thirds from last year,

“Before the epidemic, we used to be paid 7,000 yuan [a month] or more in peak seasons [for at least 60 hours per week], but now we make about 5,000 yuan, including a free meal,” said a worker at a listed electrical company in Guangzhou.

She also talked about how factories in migrant workers’ hinterland hometowns are seeing longer off-season stretches, making them hard to rely on for a living, which drives workers elsewhere, with wide-reaching economic implications.

“We all cherish the stable employment, especially when we hear that more and more SMEs nearby are cutting jobs,” she said.

Elsewhere, in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, sources say factories are finding it much easier to recruit temporary workers this year – even in the last couple of months as the year has gone on, and workers are generally more reluctant to leave a job midyear.

Lu Zhou, an operations director at an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) factory in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, expressed a similar assessment in his province.

In May or June of previous years, most labourers worked for fixed factories in Jiangsu, and it was very difficult to recruit workers at this time, but this year it’s been easy, he said.

“The labour cost … is about 8,000 yuan per worker. Workers can get about 5,000 yuan a month, working at least 60 hours a week, after the social security contribution,” Lu said. “One obvious change is that this year’s social security contributions [such as social insurance and taxes] have risen again.

“Many workers are reluctant to pay [into social security], and that feeling is stronger now than in previous years. Many workers probably expect that social welfare will become inadequate in a future ageing society.”

#china #economics #labor

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useless-englandfacts · 2 years

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Are you saying Rwanda is a bad country? I like Rwanda

okay we've been through this already, but i guess you might not have seen it so i will say it again: no we are not saying rwanda is a bad country. this isn't about rwanda specifically, it's about the government shirking its responsibility towards refugees and treating them like unwanted cattle who can just be fobbed off onto other countries just to appease racists who are baselessly scared of foreign people invading the population. note that aside from ukraine, most refugees will be coming from non-white countries.

we could be offloading migrants on belgium, on turkey, on vietnam, on south africa, on peru, on estonia, etc. etc. and it would still be bad because the issue isn't the country, it's the principle.

that being said, 5000 miles is ridiculously far away (imagine if you had come to the uk to join your family and you're sent 5000 miles away!) - not rwanda's fault, it just happens to be where they are on the globe in relation to the uk.

however, i will also point out that the uk home office openly admitted that lgb refugees who are deported there could be persecuted on the basis of their sexual orientation (they deliberately left out trans people because they're evil lol but i don't imagine the situation for them being much better).

lgbt+ persecution isn't something that's unique to rwanda obviously (i mean trans people are treated like shit in the uk atm so) but. like i said it's not about the country, it's about the principle.

#i really really really need some of u guys to engage ur critical thinking brains sometimes i say this with love #asks #anonymous #rwanda #Admin Dominique

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dwellordream · 1 month

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“When war broke out, women rapidly entered jobs in war-related industries. Many of these women had been employed before the war, mostly in low-paying, nonunion jobs in laundries, department stores, restaurants, and hotels, where they earned an average of $24.50 a week, compared to $40.35 a week for wartime manufacturing jobs. During the war, 300,000 women worked in the aircraft industry alone. Many assembled B-29 bombers, the mainstay of the U.S. air force.

Others--welders, draftswomen, and machinists--built tanks and warships and made ammunition. Women also worked in nondefense industries such as machine shops, steel mills, oil refineries, railroad roundhouses, and lumber mills, as replacements for the men who had gone overseas. In all, women comprised half of this work force. The office of War Information noted that war production work had “disproved the old bugaboo that women have no mechanical ability and that they are a distracting influence in industry.”

…In spite of the harassment, teasing, and unwanted sexual advances women war workers faced, they enjoyed their new jobs, and most wanted to keep them after the war. Unlike the depression, the war emergency opened the way for a new labor force that would no longer be divided into “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs,” but would instead bring men and women into the same jobs, working side by side. In addition, because so many men went into the armed forces, and so many women went to work, young Americans might have postponed marriage and childbearing, just as they had in the depression. But that did not happen. Instead, ironically, wartime encouraged family formation. The return of prosperity made it easier for young men and women to marry and have children.

Young married women, those most likely to have children at home, made the smallest gains in the labor force. Young mothers were encouraged to stay home. Although the Federal Works Agency invested nearly $50 million in day care centers to accommodate employed mothers during the war, such centers were generally considered harmful to a child’s development. In all, only three thousand day care centers were established by the federal government, and even these were not filled to capacity. Older married women who did not have young children at home were the fastest growing group in the paid labor force. By the end of the war fully 25 percent of all married women were employed--a huge gain from 15 percent at the end of the 1930s. But they worked for low wages. In 1939, the median annual income for women was $568, compared to $962 by men--and for black women it was a mere $246.

…New opportunities emerged for African-American women not only in the factories, but in the growing black communities as well. In Richmond, California, for example, black migration contributed to the transformation of a small town into a bustling metropolis. Before the war, there were only 270 blacks in Richmond. But when the city became a war production center, African Americans from the South came there to work in the shipyards. By 1943 the black population had increased by 5,000 percent. Slightly more than half of the southern black migrants to Richmond during the war were women.

The presence of blacks was apparent not only in the factories, but in the social and cultural life of the city, most notably in the blues clubs that began to proliferate. Many of these clubs were owned and operated by African-American women who had migrated to Richmond from Arkansas. One such female entrepreneur was Margaret Starks, manager of Tappers Inn, the most popular club in North Richmond. Starks also served as a talent booking agent for a number of local clubs and published the city’s first black newspaper on the premises of the Tappers Inn.

…Throughout the war, although the boundaries continued to shift as new definitions of “women’s work” were required, the automobile industry maintained women in certain jobs and men in others. Despite the dramatic upswing in women’s participation in the workforce, unions had not developed strategies that included a place for women’s concerns in their negotiations with the companies, nor had a strong feminist movement come together to assert women’s needs, such as such child care and equal access to good jobs. As a result, gender division of labor survived the war. In spite of women’s dramatic contributions to the war effort, they were not able to achieve equal pay or working conditions. Their unequal treatment led to a campaign for equal rights.

The Republicans in 1940 and the Democrats in 1944 supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), but the two major union federations, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), opposed it. Even Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, and Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady--two activists on behalf of women’s rights--refused to support the legislation because they feared that women workers would lose legal protections against long hours and health hazards. In 1945, Congress considered a bill that would have required equal pay for women. But even with a fair amount of bipartisan support, and some union backing, that measure failed.”

- Elaine Tyler May, “World War II: The Chance for Change.” in Pushing the Limits: American Women, 1940-1961

#elaine tyler may #1940s #pushing the limits #world war ii #american #gender #history #20th century

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cubeghost · 6 months

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While Palestine Action US is targeting Elbit systems to protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Elbit’s tools of occupation are also being deployed in the US. As Antony Loewenstein documents in his book, The Palestine Laboratory, Israeli defense contractors test their wares on Palestinians and then export their tools of surveillance and warfare around the world. Loewenstein highlights the connection between so-called border security in the US and the oppression of Palestinians, writing, “Israeli technology was sold as the solution to unwanted populations at the US–Mexico border where the Israeli company Elbit was a major player in repelling migrants.” In her book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Harsha Walia describes how US Customs Enforcement officials impose the violence of bordering on Tohono O’odham lands, along the US Southern border. Walia wrote, “US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has contracted Israel’s largest private arms company, Elbit Systems, to construct ten surveillance towers, making Tohono O’odham one of the most militarized communities in the US.” In 2017, members of the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network (TOHRN), went to Palestine on a visit organized by the Palestinian group Stop the Wall. TOHRN member Amy Jaun told Antony Loewenstein that it was a relief to talk “with people who understand our fears … who are dealing with militarization and technology.” In 2022, after years of resistance from Tohono O’odham organizers, the construction of the contested surveillance towers was completed. As Will Parrish reported in The Intercept in 2019, each tower is outfitted with thermal sensors, high-definition cameras with night vision, and ground-sweeping radar. As Parrish noted, “The system will store an archive with the ability to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time — an ability known as ‘wide-area persistent surveillance.’” The Tohono O’odham’s struggle against the construction of Elbit’s towers is just one example of how the company is exporting Israel’s tools of bordering and occupation. In The Palestine Laboratory, Loewenstein describes an event at the Paris Air Show in 2009, where Elbit screened drone footage for “an elite audience of global buyers.” The footage showcased the assassination of a Palestinian. A subsequent investigation by Andrew Feinstein, a global expert on the arms industry, who observed the sales video pitch in Paris, revealed that innocent Palestinians, including women and children, were killed during the drone attack that Elbit showcased at the Paris Air Show. Feinstein told Loewenstein, “This was my introduction to the Israeli arms industry and the way it markets itself. No other arms-producing country would dare show actual footage like that.” As evidenced by the construction of surveillance towers in Tohono O’odham lands, Elbit’s work extends beyond the bounds of war, but the lines between war-making, surveillance and what governments call “security” are murky, at best. When tools of war and subjugation are tested on a captive population, and marketed on the basis of how effectively those people are killed, how do we expect those tools to be deployed globally?

#palestine action #palestine #elbit systems

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dippyface · 6 months

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Lira, who lives in Tijuana, in northern Mexico, is one among dozens of Mexican “acompañantes” — volunteers who support women wanting to terminate a pregnancy. Located all over the country, most acompañantes offer virtual guidance through an abortion protocol in which no clinics or prescriptions are needed. Developed by activists after decades of facing abortion bans and restrictions in most of Mexico’s 32 states, the protocol encourages women to trust self-managed medication abortions following guidelines established by the World Health Organization.

“Accompaniment means that we facilitate information, medications and everything a woman needs to get a safe abortion at home,” Lira said. “But we also provide emotional support and support to fight stigma, religious and cultural barriers.”

••••

For now, 20 Mexican states still criminalize abortion. In Baja California, where Tijuana is located, abortion was decriminalized in 2021. By then, Lira had already gained five years’ experience as an acompañante. “Ahead of starting an abortion network, I questioned myself: How did I get to this point? Why did I live what I lived, and what could have been different?” she said. In 2012, Lira faced an unwanted pregnancy. “I didn’t know what to do, where to look for help,” she said. On the recommendation of a friend, and due to her hometown’s proximity to the U.S. border, Lira made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic in San Diego. She traveled back home with pills and a debt of $600 that she paid for her abortion.

Three years later, deeply conflicted by the inequality in abortion access, she became an activist and received training to become an acompañante. “The easiest part was learning the abortion protocol,” she said. “The toughest was acquiring a political perspective, understanding how abortions are based on rights and freedom.”

••••

It’s no coincidence that Lira’s views are influenced by migration. The surge of migrants approaching the U.S. border, traveling from Colombia through the Darién jungle and moving up through Central America into Mexico, could approach 500,000 this year. Venezuelans, Salvadorans, Haitians and Mexicans — internally displaced by violence — are among those who migrate by trains, buses and on foot. Along the way, thousands are victims of robbery, human trafficking and sexual abuse. “We’ve been seeing women who suffer a lot of violence on their way to the United States,” Lira said. Some migrants who wish to terminate their pregnancies contact them directly and others are channeled through shelters or midwives. “We have realized the need to support these women. … They experience violence, especially sexual, and need abortions,” said Minerva, another member of Colectiva Bloodys y Projects. For security reasons, she spoke on condition she be identified only by her first name. Access to medication and a private space to get a self-managed abortion are particularly difficult for migrants, who can spend several months in shelters on the border. “We want to accompany them,” Lira said. “But abortion access is just the tip of the iceberg. We expect to share key information for their physical and mental health.”

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republicansaredomesticterrorists · 2 years

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Reminiscent of the reverse freedom rides of 1962 when the racist southern governors sent unwanted black folk. DeSatan is an evil little man.

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beardedmrbean · 4 months

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France's President Macron wants to reform immigration law with stricter deportation measures. Migrants and refugees protesting against the reform say its severity is unprecedented.Thousands of people were marching in the streets near Montparnasse train station in southern Paris on a recent Sunday afternoon. They were holding signs proclaiming their opposition to the "Darmanin law," named after France's interior minister. Other placards said "Immigration is not a problem ― racism is."

Right at the front of the group, a megaphone in hand, was Ahmada Siby.

The 33-year-old Malian arrived in France almost five years ago. Benefiting from a legal loophole, he has been using other people's papers to work as a cleaner, a chambermaid and, lately, a dishwasher.

'We are doing all the dirty work'

"Most of us undocumented immigrants are using this method, but it means we are paying social insurance fees and taxes without benefitting from services such as regular public healthcare like French citizens," he told DW.

"President Emmanuel Macron's government treats us as if we were nothing, although we're doing all the dirty work ― at construction sites, including the ones for the Paris Olympics next summer, in restaurants and as cleaners," he added.

That's why Siby and others have banded together to protest the bill, which France's government said is a compromise including left-wing and right-wing measures.

Deportations easier, family reunifications harder

The draft law is set to be discussed in the National Assembly, France's lower house of parliament, starting on Monday, December 11, 2023, and could enter into force early next year.

The final version of the immigration bill still needs to be pinned down, but some details are already known.

The new bill is likely to fast-track asylum procedures and shorten delays for appeals, make family reunifications more complicated and restrict the possibility to come to France for medical treatment. Changes also include the option of deporting people who were younger than 13 when they came to France, and deporting foreign parents whose children have French citizenship.

Paris was planning to create a one-year green card for people working in sectors with a labor shortage. But as it stands now, the decisions on these one-year permits are left up to local authorities.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin brought the immigration reform bill into the Senate. But France's upper house of parliament, which has a center-right majority, recently considerably toughened the draft. And the government is expected to keep some of these changes to get the bill through the National Assembly. Macron's Renaissance party and its allies don't have an absolute majority there and need the conservative Republicans' support.

Since a recent terror attack by a Russian immigrant on French teacher Dominique Bernard in the northern town of Arras, the government presents the law mostly as a safeguard against unwanted immigration and terrorism. Migrants, refugees and aid organizations are worried the new rules could lead to more stigmatization and discrimination.

France 'passing a new threshold of toughness'

Lisa Faron from Paris-based Cimade, an NGO providing support for refugees and migrants, is one of those who is deeply concerned.

"The government had promised a balanced bill, and yet, the new rules will almost exclusively restrict immigrants' rights and make it more complicated for them to get legalized, which will result in even more undocumented migrants," she told DW.

"France has voted through many immigration bills, but it feels like we are passing a new threshold of toughness with this one ― for example by making it easier to expel foreign parents of French children, which was beforehand only possible if they had committed serious crimes," Faron added.

For Vincent Tiberj, professor for political sociology at University Sciences Po Bordeaux, the draft law is reflecting a general shift to the right in the political debate.

"Most French politicians are depicting immigrants as a burden and a threat. They completely forget that many migrants, also of later generations, are contributing a whole lot to our society," he told DW.

The sociologist thinks mainstream politicians are out to grab right-wing votes. Far-right party Rassemblement National is predicted to come first in next June's European Parliament elections according to polls.

"And yet, parties such as Renaissance should know this strategy doesn't work ― it only legitimizes far-right movements and helps them gain even more ground," Tiberj said.

Will new immigration rules have an impact?

Alexis Izard, Renaissance parliamentarian for the department of Essonne just south of Paris, says the final bill will still be balanced.

"Every year, we need to expel about 4,000 illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, and that will be possible with this new law," he told DW, adding that deportation procedures would take one instead of two years after the changes.

"At the same time, we want to attract those who come here and work. This will be a highly efficient law," Izard said.

Herve Le Bras, historian and demographer at the Paris-based School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences EHESS, begs to differ on that last point.

He says none of the more than 100 other immigration laws since 1945 have been effective.

"The bill is completely useless and will have practically no impact on the number of migrants coming in per year. It only gives politicians, from the far-right to the far-left, a platform to express their stance," he stated in an interview with DW.

"If you look at the immigration figures under past governments, you'll see that they are uncorrelated to politics," he said.

Alain Fontaine, owner of the restaurant Le Mesturet in central Paris and head of France's Association of Restaurant Owners, is still hoping the initially planned one-year green card will be put back in and even extended.

"Bars and restaurants won't be able to function without foreign workers who represent about a quarter of our work force," he told DW.

Some 12 out of his own 27 employees are foreigners.

"We need immigrants ― also since our own youth prefer to work in the digital sector or jobs linked to the protection of the environment," he said. "They no longer want to do the tough jobs."

Fight for a better future continues

Malian immigrant Ahmada Siby doesn't think the automatic one-year green card, even if prolonged, would be the right way forward.

"It would enshrine modern slavery into law, as we would need to work in that one sector to keep it. You'd still be at the boss's mercy," he said, sitting on his bed in a 15 square meter (161 square feet) room in the suburb of Montreuil east of Paris, a studio flat he's sharing with an uncle and a cousin.

"We want the government to legalize all of us, so that we can choose the job we'd like to do," he added.

Then, Siby looked at pictures of himself five years ago, after he had reached Spain from Morocco on a small inflatable boat.

He thinks of the crossing, which took almost a whole day, as "the most difficult moment in my life."

Everyone on board almost died.

"Once you've survived this, you don't just give up," Siby said. "I'm determined to fight for a better future."

#nunyas news

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luckyfiona · 1 year

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☘ Lucky 𝔉𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔞. ☘

☘ MAIN. ☘ PINTEREST. ☘ WANTED CONNECTIONS. ☘

During the Great Famine of 1879, Fiona's parents stowed her away from Silgo, Ireland to a city in America, where she would work as an indentured servant to a wealthy, pious migrant ship captain. When she wasn’t tasked with the housekeeping and cooking, she was put to work in his wife’s boutique, tailoring beautiful dresses for women living the lives she wanted. She resented going back to work for a man she loathed, particularly when he insisted that she should feel fortunate to get the opportunities (and subsequent unwanted attention) the noble sailor would give her.

She found solace in her friendship with a young boy who was born into a similar lot in life. She would sneak out to meet him on the streets every night, to laugh and play, and commiserate and comfort each other, and feel rare moments of peace and harmony in their tumultuous lives. One night, he told her he had been approached with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, from magical boy who would pluck miserable children like them out of their sad little world and bring them to enchanted land where they could live free and prosper. Fiona’s friend told her that she needed to meet the boys at the end of the piers at midnight the next day so they could leave their sad, scary city and never look back.

Unfortunately, Fiona wouldn’t make it to the pier. After finding out that she had been sneaking out every night to frolic with local paupers, her employer had new lockdown measures put in place to stop her from making herself drowsy on the job the next day. She was left behind, never to see her friend again. Unsure of any other way to contact a mysterious floating boy, she developed a fixation on occultism and pursued any information on The Mystical Floating Devil-Boy, smuggling books on esotericism and alchemy into her master’s manor to read by candlelight while she was locked up at night. After nearly three years of fervently digging deeper and deeper into old magics and experimenting with rituals, her raw willpower was strong enough to make contact with Neverland. Peter, amused and impressed by her enthusiasm, took her in as a promising potential mother for the Lost Boys.

The Lost Boys were baffled to see the stars align in such a way that she stumbled upon the tomes she needed to reach Peter, at a time where he was in a good enough mood to bring her in, or perhaps desperate enough to find his new Wendy that he would take in someone who came across as meek and priggishly as she did. They dubbed her Lucky, and she was too happy to be there to even find the name patronizing. She thrived there for as long as she could, acting as a homemaker and a cheerful playmate to the boys, and a doting, loving devotee to Peter, the boy who became her religion. But as a girl who always wanted a life of elegance and serenity, she was a complete prude about the violence. Peter, in denial that he had picked another failure to replace Wendy, insisted that she was not, in fact, a killjoy, and would prove it by killing a pirate during their next raid. She’s haunted by what she felt pressured to do the next time she was on the Jolly Roger, but not as haunted as she still is by the look Peter gave her during his declaration that she would do it. It was the moment that made her realize that her messiah wasn’t as benevolent as she believed.

The doubt in her heart came to a head during a game of Battle. As her old friend was chosen to fight to the death with one of their own, she was fully confronted with what Peter and the island had done to his humanity. The boy who used to be her only comfort in the world was turned into a cold-blooded savage, and she couldn’t bear to watch him mangle the other child. When she cried out for them to stop, Peter was red in the face with frustration and embarrassment, forced to finally accept in front of all of his Lost Boys that he’d chosen yet another disappointment. In response to her protests, he changed the rules of the Battle to be Boys vs. Girls, and Lucky ran for her life. Under the full moon, she was chased to the lagoon and left to the mercy of the merfolk, where Peter called for the mermaids to dispose of her. In a stroke of insane serendipity, a band of pirates happened to be passing through in time to witness the disaster unfolding, and they saved her from her sharp, watery grave. The captain and two of his oldest pirates, familiar with the way children can be manipulated to do horrible things and then thrown aside by their cruel leader, took pity on her and helped her board the ship.

Now, Fiona is the newest refugee on the Jolly Roger, with a large target on her head courtesy of the merfolk who feel they have unfinished business with her, the small folk who have a vendetta against all pirates, the pirates who are still struggling to trust her after what she has recently done to one of their crewmates in her time as a Lost Boy, and the Lost Boys themselves, who see her as a no-good traitor.

Just her luck.

HEADCANONS

MORE ABOUT FIONA (stuff that got cut from the bio because it’s already way too long).

Fiona isn’t much of a fighter. She carries her weight the best she can, though. Utilizing her thriftiness to gather supplies and ingredients to cook relatively nutritious and tasteful meals, repairing garments and sails with the skills she gained from her work as a seamstress, and attempting to keep the quarters of gruff pirates tidy - or even pretty, when she can find some flowers to decorate with. There’s a cruel irony in the way she’ll never fully escape the duties she had as an indentured servant working as a tailor and keeping the master’s house tidy and his stomach full, but at least her experience makes her useful, and she’s doing the work on her own terms these days.

She resents the nickname “Lucky,” but it’s the only name the Lost Boys and their allies know her by. Most of them refuse to acknowledge that she’s using her boring old name from The Other Place, these days.

She doesn’t like wearing trousers. She came to Neverland with the dream that she could leave her life as a shlubby workhorse behind, and she hasn’t given up on that. Since her days as a Lost Boy, she’s braided flowers into her hair and made jewelry out of anything she could get her hands on. She fashions her pirate garb into skirts and bows to feel more like a fair lady, and she tries to adorn her drab leather gear and work rags with ribbons and pretty objects she’s found on the beaches. She’s determined to feel lavish and willing to trip and fall and die trying.

Fiona doesn’t remember her family name, or much of her family at all. She was so quick to give Peter her heart and soul upon arrival, her memories from The Other Place faded away faster than most. The only reason she remembered her first name was because her old friend would sometimes call her by her real name when they were talking in private. (Maybe he was the more reluctant of the two to buy into Peter’s world in their first year or two in Neverland, but now the roles have, obviously, reversed.) She’s grateful that she was able to give the Jolly Roger her more human name when she joined their ranks, to separate herself from that terrible changeling Lucky who wreaked havoc on their crew.

Though her loyalty is currently with the pirates, she doesn’t plan to be a permanent member of their crew. Her current goal is to shake her old friend out of Peter’s control and leave Neverland forever. She doesn’t know where they’re going to run off to, but she knows that anywhere would be safer than this island.

She originally grew up in Silgo, Ireland, and her parents sent her away to America during the Great Famine of 1879 to make a better life for herself (and have one less mouth to feed). She remembers very little about this, but it comes back to her during the harsh food shortages on the island.

ON THE JOLLY ROGER.

She still compiles books on occultism from visiting pirate ships, who are usually happy to be rid of them, as well as any other cursed objects that may have brought them to an ungodly hell like Neverland. Could her research really give her any power in Neverland? Uncertain. She should probably just grow up and learn how to shoot a gun. But sharpshooting and swordsmanship haven’t done much to give the pirates any control over their situation, only a way to survive it. Frantic to find any kind of an edge, she’s keeping her nose in her books, probing veterans like Hook, Nod, and Charlie about the island’s lore to become a Neverlandian historian, sampling and experimenting with local flora, and trying to make sense of the small folk’s blood magic. She’s really pushing her luck with Bill Jukes, though. It’s one thing to be a little lass on a pirates ship, but to practice witchcraft on the ship? While being a redhead? She may have another pirate’s blood on her hands after giving Ol’ Jukesy a stroke.

She’s developed a sisterly bond with Anna. They have opposite lives, where Fiona left her grimy servant life behind to become the princess of a fantasy land, and Anna gave away a world of privilege to live as a rugged pirate. Anna may be annoyed by Fiona’s tendency to be a pretentious and materialistic wanna-be social climber, but she still sees a relatable humanity in her. Anna was quick to register the parallels between Fiona’s relationship with Peter and the relationship Anna had with Bowen the Bloody, and she’s doing her best to help Fiona through the aftermath of her affair with him. She empathizes enough to even indulge Fiona when she begs her to help to fulfill her dreams of learning how to dance. She’s constantly bothering Anna to watch her balance ratty, waterlogged books on her head, and asking for constructive feedback on her dainty, regal wave and curtsy.

I think she would have similar relationship options with Isadora, who would be kindred with her as a former Lost Boy, but may see her as much weaker. I think Fiona wasn’t as good at meshing with the savagery of the Lost Boys as Isa was. If I had to guess, I feel like her relationship with Anna might be more amiable and her relationship with Isadora would be more strained. She definitely needs to earn both of their respect, but I suspect Isadora would be less open to her, especially if she picks up on the fact that a part of Fiona is still devoted to Peter.

She tries to be as close to Canary Robb as she can, because she’s constantly trying to drag him along with her to forage for food and get a better understanding on what she can string together into meals for the crew (and maybe ask if this specific ornamental plant is poisonous in some way or carrying microscopic bugs she wouldn’t want to crawl on her head because she may or may not want to make the odd flower crown).

WITH PETER & THE LOST BOYS.

When I was thinking about how Fiona made contact with Neverland, I was thinking that it had less to do with her fully mastering mysticism in three years, and more to do with sheer willpower. I don’t think she would be able to clearly spell out SOS with a jetty in Neverland, but I think she may poured enough of her heart and soul into her rituals to set out a little distress signal to be decoded. I had the idea that she may have a long history of really loving ladybugs all of her life, maybe always making wishes on them and wishing she could fly away and live in lush meadows like them. Maybe her efforts to contact Neverland manifested in an infestation of ladybugs progressively swarming the island, until Fiona’s friend voiced that he used to know a person who was obsessed with ladybugs, and that might be a sign that someone from the Other Place is trying to reach them.

Though she would never voice it, Fiona is struggling with lingering feelings of gratitude and idol worship towards Peter. No matter how much she’s seen of his true nature, she can’t just let go of her years spent seeing him as her savior, her ticket out of a horrible life, and her noble leader who gave her so much freedom and prosperity.

Honestly, she got attached to all of the Lost Boys, and is really struggling with the rejection, even if she knew towards the end of her tenure that there was tension between herself and most of them. She was happy to have an entire family to laugh and play with. She used to make clothes and accessories for them based on their personalities and stitch and embroider secret messages and symbols into the seams.

She used to be very friendly and inquisitive to the Small Folk, akin to Nod’s relationship with the mermaids. She grew very close to a couple of them, and would questions about their magic and culture. She liked to spend time with them simply searching around the island for anything they could use to craft with. After being a compassionate person to the plight of the small folk, it’s a huge slap in the face to them that she turned around and sided with their mortal enemies.

CONNECTIONS: ✘ Lost Boys: former allies, freshly betrayed. ✘ Wendy: worries for her, relates ; secretly & shamefully envies. ✘ Peter: ex-lover, deity and savior ; fears, loathes, worships. ✘ Anna Cortes: fascination, target of extreme nosiness and endless questions. ✘ (WANTED): the old friend she followed to Neverland.

MISC

PINTEREST!

FULL WRITE-UP FOR THE WANTED CONNECTION. (I have a friend who may be taking this up!! So I won’t put it on the full WC page yet.)

Fiona’s old friend from her home city in late 19th century America (left the city itself up for discussion with whoever takes this WC!). I left his background as just “Ambiguously Poor Boy.” Theoretically, you could probably fit him into one of the skeletons with vague backstories like Bones or Rufio. He could have been an indentured servant like Fiona (potentially working under the same sailor), a street urchin, an orphan, or anything else that would make him downtrodden and hanging out in alleyways at night to chat with other plucky poor kids. The long story short is that their little evening meetups were kind of a carefree, peaceful escape from their stressful lives and the only thing that kept Fiona going during grueling work hours was just looking forward to the next time she got to commiserate and laugh and dance and play with her one and only buddy. We can plot the details and really develop their pre-Neverland friendship to make their current status extra heartbreaking <3

He is the reason she came to Neverland, and the reason she’s still here. The circumstances of how Peter took him away are mostly up to you. He could have come from a little band of teenage thieves or something like that, who were told by Peter to gather up their ranks meet him at the pier the following night, or he could have been approached personally by Peter, and asked Peter to wait one night so he could get his friend in on the trip to Neverland too, promising that this friend would be a great fit, too. Whatever route you go with, the boy told Fiona about the magical flying boy who would save them from their plights and bring them to a fantastical world called Neverland, and told her to meet him somewhere the next night. Fiona would know that he left through magical means, but she wouldn’t be able to make it to the rendezvous point because of a complication with her employer: new lockdown measures in the manor were put in place after he found out she’d been sneaking out at night to frolic with local paupers and would be drowsy on the job the next day. She would become obsessed with reuniting with him in Neverland, to the point of getting invested in late 19th-century occultism and smuggling forbidden books into the house for the next couple of years to find a way to contact him and Peter to come take her with them.

The boy would have been in Neverland for two or three years before Fiona Lucky was brought aboard to be the newest contestant on Neverland’s Next Top Wendy. Over the course of her joining the ranks as a Lost Boy, she would watch as her kind, compassionate friend became less and less recognizable. He may have been slightly reluctant to embrace Neverland’s savagery until after his final desire of having his best friend there was fulfilled? Up to you. Either way, she tried to play along and keep up with the brutality for as long as she could, maiming pirates and setting fires to their camps. The point that broke Fiona was when she was pressured to killed a pirate to prove that she was truly one of Peter’s boys. Fiona doesn’t have a lot of meat on her bones or the fighting chops to hold her own against one of Hook’s men, so I’m wondering if maybe she needed her friend’s help to do this. 👀 I never went into details on how she did it, only that she did it (or at least, got credit for doing it). If he helped her, it would be a moment where she realized just how cold-blooded he had become, but it would also be proof to her that he still had enough humanity to help her keep her place on the island.

The only reason Fiona hasn’t taken the chance to hop onto a passing pirate ship and escape Neverland forever is because she’s determined to break him out of Peter’s influence and take him with her so they can get a fresh start somewhere else. So the only things I would say you really need to maintain is that he’s ferocious and cruel enough that Fiona was shocked by his lack of humanity, and not interested in Fiona trying to snap him out of it.

A fun long-term plot would be if he does eventually become disillusioned with Peter and come around to the idea of fleeing Neverland with Fiona, but as he’s having his redemption arc, Fiona devolves back into her infatuation with Peter and doesn’t want to leave, and suddenly he’s the one that has to bring her to her senses so they can leave. We can discuss more though.

FC Suggestions could include: Dylan Arnold, Brandon Larracuente, Nick Robinson, Toby Regbo, Archie Renaux, Tom Holland, Mark McKenna, Owen Teague, Owen Campbell, Felix Mallard, Hunter Doohan, Justice Smith, Jonathan Daviss, Alex Hogh Anderssen, Marco Ilso, Xolo Mariduena, Joe Keery, Austin Abrams, Chay Suede, Charlie Gillespie, Charlie Tahan, Jannis Niewohner, Ashton Sanders, Henry Zaga, Bjorn Mosten, Will Poulter, Dominic Fike, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Tanner Buchanan, Niko Terho, Bright Vachirawit, Benjamin Wadsworth, Thomas Doherty, Rory Culkin, Charlie Plummer, Froy Gutierrez. Literally anybody. I’m just naming every male FC that I can think of that is vaguely in Anya Taylor-Joy’s age range.

I coded this character as masc just because I thought it would make more sense that Pan recruited him and not Fiona at the time. If you wanted to make the character femme, we could say that this character was another potential Wendy replacement who lasted long enough to become a Lost Boy, I just wasn’t sure if that makes for too many girls with the same background (Isadora, Echo, Lucy, Fiona, etc).

#nrpgintro #WC page is a HUGE wip but I will revise it and add more when I get home :)

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hyperdemona · 1 year

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I'm glad advancements in medical technology are making having babies easier and more attainable for people like Priyanka Chopra and her boytoy, as well as gay male couples everywhere.

Which women should governments "encourage" to be made brain-dead for this purpose so that all citizens can attain equality with regard to the human right to have biological offspring? If this solution is adopted, unwanted migrant women who are desperately seeking asylum in European countries could be made surrogates, if they meet with some sort of "accidents". This would honestly be a much better use of resources than letting them drown at sea or raped to death in civil wars. Perhaps Uyghur Muslim women could also be put to better use this way instead of being sent to concentration camps. There is also a huge availability of Indian women as well, seeing as how the population of India is booming. Plenty of unwanted daughters and wives to go around. Much better than female foeticide imo because we'd at least be allowing them to grow till adulthood.

#/s for the stupids who don't get satire #radfem discourse

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ladylilithprime · 1 year

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All Is Fair In Love And Paintball

Series: Fluff Is My Jamstiel

Fandom: Supernatural:

Pairing: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Proto-Sastimmy/Jamstiel (Jimmy Novak/Sam Winchester/Castiel)

Rating: General

Tags/Warnings: Witch Sam Winchester, Hunter Novak Brothers, Jimmy and Castiel Are Twins, Brief Allusions to Canon-Typical Violence, Protective Dean Winchester, Paintball

Summary: Contrary to Sam's assumption that he wouldn't be seeing the Novak brothers at all often, if he even saw them again at all, Palo Alto has seen a surprising uptick in visits from the hunter twins. Dean is suspicious, and determined to conduct his own testing of their mettle if they think they can just come courting his baby brother.

For: @fluffyfebruary challenge!

Prompt: Day 8: Callous (This was NOT easy to write fluff for!)

Read on AO3

SIX MONTHS. IT had been six months since the Novak brothers had first shown up in Palo Alto like a couple of bad pennies on the non-existent case of Tyson Brady's death and stayed for a week to put not only Brady to rest but also any attendant rumors vomited up by his overly religious harpy of a mother. They had come back two months later, contrary to what Sammy had believed about the likelihood of their return at all, because one of the twins had caught the flu and the other was symptomatic, and since they had known that Sam had a cure that was proven effective so long as you weren't allergic to any of the ingredients it just made sense for them to stop by in hopes of cutting down their recovery time. They had only stayed overnight that time, needing to get back on the road to a case further south in New Mexico that sounded like a chupacabra, but since then John Castiel and James Constantine Novak had been showing up more and more frequently with flimsier and flimsier excuses.

Dean Winchester was not impressed.

Unfortunately, Dean Smith could only do so much to head off potential heartbreakers when it came to Sam Wesson, at least without drawing even more irritating conclusions from the locals that he and Sam were more than just friends and neighbors. While a perfectly valid tactic for keeping away inconvenient or unwanted attention back in the days when he and Sam had been the migrant hunters hauled all around the country by their father, such a tactic had awkward long-term consequences when you actually had a couple of permanent addresses and didn't plan on skipping town at the end of the month. If Dean had ever planned on finding a local romance of his own, well, he'd rather thoroughly shot himself in the foot between the people who thought he was dating his brother and the people who thought he was dating his brother's familiar. Which, no on both counts, if for different reasons. Even without that, having a set address - being settled - carried some awkward connotations of being ready and willing to settle down, and that wasn't something Dean felt he could do anytime soon even if he was no longer taking off on the road for weeks to months at a time with only furtive phone calls in between to let Sam know that he was still alive.

That was probably the thing that bothered Dean the most about the Novak brothers, when you got right down to it. They were hunters, migrant ones at that, just like he and Sammy had been once upon a time, and they showed no signs of actually wanting to stop and get out of the life... but there they were, coming around and making excuses to chat up Dean's little brother, bringing him lunch or breakfast, and his brother remained almost painfully if somewhat endearingly oblivious to the fact that two annoyingly attractive young men clearly had the hots for him. It was both exasperating and hilarious, and Dean was pretty sure he wasn't going to know how to react when the shit inevitably met the slowly spinning fan blades.

But even he couldn't have predicted this.

"You what?"

"Gave my key to Jimmy and Cas so they could take Bones back to the house," Sam repeated impatiently, like he hadn't just admitted to handing over his house key and his familiar into the care of a couple of drifter hunters. "She needed to get home and I couldn't leave the store and you were still on shift for another two hours, so--"

"So you gave the key to your house to a couple of hunters you barely know to go off alone with your familiar?" Dean demanded, silently willing for Sam to grasp just why what he was saying was such a problem. From the bewildered look on his brother's face, it wasn't getting through.

"It's Jimmy and Cas," Sam said after a moment, as if that was supposed to explain everything. Sadly, when it came to Sam, it did. "And it's not like I'm going to just tell them to keep the key and move themselves into my spare room or anything!"

"It's exactly like that, because otherwise you wouldn't be asking me to make a copy of the key I have to your place to put back on your keyring instead of just getting your key back from them when you get home," Dean groaned, scrubbing a hand over his face. "Assuming they're even still there and haven't incapacitated Bones to keep her from warning you--"

"That they're currently stripped down to their shorts and are giving her a bath in the master bathroom?" Sam interrupted with a raised eyebrow. He tapped his temple lightly. "Calm the catastrophizing, Dean, Bones is keeping me vividly updated, don't worry."

"It's my job to worry," Dean grumbled. He sighed. "Fine, I'll make the key copy on one condition."

"And that is?" Sam asked, finally showing what Dean thought was an appropriate level of wariness for the situation.

"Paintball, Saturday," Dean answered. "You and me, versus the Novaks. We'll get Andy to finesse our way onto the range, you know he's been wanting to get his own crack at interrogating those two after they showed up while you were having your bi-monthly 'not an official coven' meeting."

"It's not--" Sam started, then sighed as he apparently realized that arguing about Andy Gallagher's intentions when his primary power was literally a mind whammy he used to make people tell the truth was not the road he wanted to go down again this time. "Saturday is still four days away, Dean. What if a hunt comes up between now and then, huh?"

"Then you get your key back from them and don't hand it out again until paintballing happens," Dean said, arms folded across his chest. "You wanna start handing out easy access to your home to a couple of rootless drifters like that, you'll just have to make it clear that they gotta pass the test first."

"Yeah, not doing that," Sam shook his head. "You don't tell someone you're testing them if you want an honest response from it."

Well, at least Sam wasn't slipping that much.

Andy came through beautifully with securing the paintball course for the day, something about a favor owed that was being cashed in and "the chance to see you two in action for once" that Dean wasn't sure how to feel about. Andy was one of the "rescue projects" who'd known him as a hunter first and had gotten a lot of secrets out of Dean before he realized mind-whammying his new teacher's brother was probably a bad idea. Dean didn't hold it against the kid - much - but it was just as well they didn't hang out that often.

The Novaks looked a little uneasy as they geared up, though from what Dean could tell it wasn't any sort of concern over their own safety. To Dean's amusement, while they seemed to be regarding Dean himself as a potential formidable (if perhaps rusty) opponent, they seemed to be discounting Sam as a threat, especially after Dean made the ruling of "no powers" and Bones slunk off to sit with Andy.

"Are you sure you're okay with this?" one of them - Dean thought it might be Jimmy - asked Sam hesitantly.

"Paintballs hurt a lot less to get hit with than actual bullets," was Sam's nonchalant response, making Dean snort in agreement. The answer did not appear to reassure the twins if the look they exchanged was anything to go by, but they gamely headed into the course to take their positions. Sam and Dean, following behind them, exchanged a sly smirk and a covert fist-bump, much to Dean's pleasure. He could already feel his blood starting to sing with the promise of a hunt with his brother at his side, and from the anticipation in Sam's eyes he wasn't the only one looking forward to this.

The next fist-bumps they exchanged were not so covert, looking over the tally of their respective "kills" displayed in full brilliant color splotches all over the rather rumpled and dismayed Novak twins. The Winchesters, in contrast, had barely two marks between them, each one a shot taken for the other. So much for being rusty.

"So," Sam said as he turned a slightly sheepish smile on the still stunned active hunters who had just been thoroughly trounced by a retiree and a pacifist witch, "I guess now would be as good a time as any to admit that our surnames aren't actually Smith and Wesson."

#fluffyfebruary2023 #supernatural fic #sam winchester #dean winchester #jimmy novak #castiel #bones the dog #andy gallagher #paintball #sastimmy

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voyaging-too · 2 years

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The Good Place Nitpick

If you’re a Good Place fan, don’t read this. I don’t hate the Good Place, I respect it, it’s a well-made show, but there is one scene that keeps coming back to my dash in gifset after gifset, and it makes me see red every time. Not because it is particularly bad in itself, but because it exemplifies a certain approach towards history, a certain type of Hot Take that happens to be my major personal nemeses. Here’s the problem.

In 1534, Douglas Wynegarr of Hawkhurst, England gave his grandmother a dozen roses for her birthday. He picked them himself and walked them over to her. She was pleased. For this action Douglas was awarded 145 points by heaven and hell’s collaborative points system.

In 2009, Doug Ewing of Scaggsville, Maryland also gave his grandmother a dozen roses. He lost four points in the same system? Why? Because he ordered the roses from his cell phone that was made in a sweatshop. The flowers were grown with toxic pesticides and picked by exploited migrant workers and then delivered from thousands of miles away, creating a massive carbon footprint. The profits of said flower sale ended up in the pocket of a racist billionaire CEO who sends his female employees unwanted dick pics.

The point being that in the modern world, it is much harder to make correct moral choices than it once had been. And I completely agree that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, that there’s no way to predict the secondary and tertiary effects of our actions in a globally interconnected economy, that the climate catastrophe is already ongoing, and that the 21st century is in many, many ways terrible. But I think we should be able to criticise our present without glorifying the past or acting like badness as such was invented in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years.

The world has always been broken and ethics have never been simple. If it’s unethical to purchase something made in a sweatshop or picked by exploited migrant workers, what about all the products of slave labour, or serf labour, or technically free but impoverished and miserable work, throughout history? If it’s unethical to indirectly support a racist and sexist CEO, what about all the horrors royal taxes and church tithes supported throughout history? There was no simple pastoral golden age where your everyday choices were fully yours and not influenced by, and in turn affecting, a complex unequal exploitative and altogether horrible world around you. Even if we look at Europe in a simpler time, before it enriched itself via colonialism and trashed a large portion of the world in the process, we will see that everyone whose name we still remember, the artists, the composers, the kings and the saints all ate bread made from wheat harvested by unfree serfs or overtaxed peasants, and every little bit of leisure, beauty and wisdom was bought at the price of someone else’s misery.

Speaking of Douglas Wynegarr specifically, Douglas from 1534, hey, it must have been super easy and simple to make ethical choices in Henrician England, right? You know, an era where burning witches and heretics at the stake was normal, and was only becoming more common as the country descended into decades of religious strife with waves of condemnations and executions on both the Catholic and Protestant side. Douglas only had to choose between his loyalty to God and his loyalty to the King, he only had to decide whether to abandon his religious faith, like, three times over, he only had the choice to report his neighbours for heresy or to shelter them in the knowledge that it could thrust him into actual-literal Hell. (Seriously, they could have chosen an arbitrary year other than 1534, the date of Act of Supremacy, when Henry VIII appointed himself the head of the Church, and started a landslide of religious conflict lasting at least thirty years.)

To be fair, Douglas was probably fortunate enough to die before either the British imperial expansion or the Atlantic slave trade really took off, so he didn’t have to wonder if his loyalty to his monarch and/or his purchase of small luxuries supported the kidnapping and forced labour of many, many people. Let’s generously assume Douglas was also lucky enough to be born poor and landless, so he didn’t automatically exploit villages worth of labourers just by getting up in the morning and having a bowl of porridge. If Douglas was a penniless peasant living by the sweat of his brow, he only had to face poor people problems – like how young he should set his kids to work, and how hard he should work them. Or how he should divide scarce amounts of food and other resources within his family. Should he prioritise those who could still work, starving the invalid, or should he feed the old and sickly even though it weakened those who could still work the fields? Should he pay to light a candle in the church for the salvation of his dead loved ones, or should he buy new shoes for his kid? Should he give alms to the poor beggar, or send her away, and call her a witch? Maybe I sound a little harsh here, but I find it hard to sympathise with the idea that an abundance of resources (such as many of us have in the 21st century) makes ethical choices harder, instead of easier.

Remember, Douglas was still living in a world where child labour and wife-beating were a-okay. If Douglas chose to marry, he would be marrying a woman who couldn’t really say no if her father said yes, a woman he could legally rape or beat, a woman who couldn’t divorce him or leave, and a woman who had no access to reliable contraception and would face the pain and danger of childbirth a dozen times without the aid of modern technology. Douglas could choose to be decent to his wife, but his community wouldn’t judge him for choosing to treat her in ways that we in the 21th century would see as unforgivable. That stands for how Douglas’ father treated his mother, that stands for how his grandfather treated his grandmother. Even if Douglas was poor enough not to exploit the labour of other men, his very existence was almost certainly contingent on the ongoing exploitation of women.

But he got roses for his grandma so that’s fine.

#history hot takes

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