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i have a phd in ironbullogy

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🪷

There seems to be a lotus blooming in my askbox. Let's all fold our hands behind our backs maturelike and view it for a moment

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Hate doesn’t describe it. I’ve seen painted, masked lords beat an old farmer to death with riding crops. To this day, I don’t know why. Is that hate? I saw good, sensible men fighting armoured chevaliers with nothing—no weapons, no armies, not even hope of success—to see the occupation end. Is that hate?

for @marictheirin.

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god i love making animatics in my head i wish drawing was real

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my family wasn't this strict, but in some sects of buddhism you're not allowed to eat the "five pungent vegetables", onions garlic shallots leeks and umm chives i think, really any of those kind of vegetables. probably some monk ages ago was tired of onion farts stinking up the temple. anyways, one time my brother made a soup using all five of them. he said, "one sip of this, and you'll be reincarnated as a flea."

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she res on my urrection till i come. (back. (from the dead))

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I've been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, "Eugenics" is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it's not nearly dirty enough.

Here's a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn't about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren't leading with, "My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People."

The reason that's important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) "uncomfortably similar to eugenics"--- ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.

There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.

Here is an Internet Archive link to "Heredity in relation to eugenics," a work by Charles Benedict Davenport, an early eugenicist. Please read at least the first four pages.

I'm afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport's word choices may provide a "red flag" to the reader: he refers to human babies as a "valuable crop," to marriage between people as "mating." The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport's perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain---they are things.

Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: "...forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation." However, relatively few people are "fully effective" at this purpose, because a proportion of society is "non-productive"---either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.

After you read the introduction of Davenport's book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.

Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people---who were, as Davenport puts it, a "burden" on society.

Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.

But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of "public health." Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don't recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.

"Sexual deviance" is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that "normal" people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.

For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.

If you read more of Davenport's book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements---he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren't. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.

Eugenics isn't just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.

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Love that one of Merrill's battle taunts is "are you afraid to fight a little girl?"

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hey. can i convince all of you of my one true belief of advisor!vivienne. take my hand let me show you my world 🖐

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hey g- [was about to say “girlboss” reflexively but then realizes you’re transgender and i don’t wanna misgender you]boyboss- [remembers the patriarchy] boss- [remembers i hate capitalism] king- [remembers i hate the monarchy] friend. how’s it going?

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The Vein of Truth

Characters: Valta, Paragon Aeducan, Original Dwarven Character(s) Fandom: Dragon Age Rating: G Other Tags: Codex Entry, Dwarven History, Orzammar, House Saelac, House Aeducan Summary: A review of three differing, contemporary accounts of Paragon Aeducan. Read here on AO3.

From the research notes of Shaper Valta.

I was a girl when my father first took me to the Hall of Heroes. He told me the stories of our honoured ancestors: of Paragon Caridin and his noble inventions; of Paragon Lynchcar and his venerated poems; and of Paragon Aeducan. However, the deeds of our most noteworthy Paragon, the sire of kings and warriors, are too great to be summed up in a few pithy words. My father asked that I lift my eyes to our vaulted ceilings, to gaze upon Orzammar’s people, and to contemplate his name. He told me that I owed him my life.

At the time, I could not fully appreciate the enormity of what he did. Death is closer for those of us who dwell with the Stone than most; its armies wage an unending assault upon our kingdom, but it was still a faraway threat to me at that age.

I know better, now. It is because of the decisions made by Paragon Aeducan ages ago that I am here to challenge him and his legacy.

Here is my work for @dragonageannual 2025! Thank you so much for allowing me to participate and lend my voice to this project. As always, the art and writing are stunning!

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question for the culture

rb for reach if youre niceys.

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99.9% certain that this is going to be the Spider Anansi, the West African folklore character associated with storytelling and trickery

here, the Doctor is wearing African clothes, in a place that seems like it’s somewhere in Africa

same episode; the man is saying to the Doctor “you need to tell a story”

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On November 7, 2024, Denmark used a racist, culturally biased "parenting competency" test to remove a 2 hour old baby, Zammi, from her loving indigenous Greenlandic Inuit mother, Keira, because her native language, which uses minute facial expressions to communicate, will not be able to "[prepare] the child for the social expectations and codes that are necessary to navigate in Danish society." This test had been recommended not to be used at the federal level before this happened but certain municipalities, including the one this happened in, chose to continue to use it regardless. Not only is this blatantly racist but also violates multiple declarations and conventions that Denmark has signed that protect the rights of indigenous people.

Please sign this petition to help Keira to get her baby back.

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Kiang Equus kiang

Observed by stanzin, CC BY-NC

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so last year during a period of intense suicidal depression i made this necklace that i always wear, right, and the thing is it's genuinely brought me a lot of comfort and relief and i've developed a strong sentimental attachment to it, to the point that i can inarguably state that it's had a net positive effect on my mental wellbeing. however i did now just have to stop to almost throw up laughing because i realised that i've succumbed to the amulet.

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what with the anchor induced premature graying i gave her, vata kind of is just turning into her mom as time goes on