little-desi-historian

[little-desi-historian]

"Members of the Teamsters union went on strike at Amazon early Thursday in a labor action at seven facilities in four states coast to coast just ahead of the holiday gift-giving rush.

Amazon said that its operations will not be affected by any of the union’s actions. Although the Teamsters claim to represent 7,000 Amazon workers nationwide, that accounts for less than 1% of the company’s US workforce."

"Amazon shows no indication it is willing to reach a deal with the Teamsters or even recognizes that the union speaks for any of its workers, despite the union declaring that employees at numerous Amazon facilities have signed cards asking to join."

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[little-desi-historian]

Fort York, Toronto, Ontario.

[little-desi-historian]

this website has a biphobia problem i really cannot stand. yall are truly reinventing the word bihet without actually saying it. like do you think maybe, possibly, there's some kind of systemic reason why bisexuals - esp bi women - seem to repeatedly end up in m/w relationships? do you think like maybe just maybe theres some kind of societal force or something that maybe violently discourages same gender relationships? and do you think like, maybe, that societal force is equally present both inside and outside LGBTQ communities? like maybe idk a non-negligible group of people who literally won't date bisexuals? some kind of bigotry, maybe? just a thought

[little-desi-historian]

that new a24 iraq movie looks so disgusting. can 9/11 3 happen to hollywood next time (i am thinking it can happen just a few minutes after 9/11 2)

[little-desi-historian]

https://twitter.com/mohammadhussain/status/1340439172687998981?s=21

[little-desi-historian]

[little-desi-historian]

i feel like the entire online queer community collectively forgot, or rather pretends that queer allies don't exist. like. we literally have a term and even a flag for queer allies. they exist. assuming every single perisex cishet person hates queer people isn't the way to go. allies are a very real and important part of our community. allies challenge the status quo by saying, i'm not queer, but i support what you're doing. they exist. they're out there- and yes, many of them are cishet men.

please don't forget this, or pretend that they don't exist: allies are an extremely important part of our history, community, and safety.

[little-desi-historian]

In my mind I have this notion that USAmerican barbecue is a fairly recent culinary development and emerged sometime around the late 19th/early 20th century but NO!!! it is from the 17th century!!!!! (Not counting the Indigenous foodways that contributed to it, which are even older).

It's like a Tiffany Problem to me. Thomas Jefferson was making mac and cheese? War of 1812 soldiers were eating barbecue? Barbecue was an established and familiar thing in the southern parts of the Early American republic??

[little-desi-historian]

Hi! I’m Pagan and worship the Greek Titan, Asteria. I saw the anon talking about which characters are Black to them, and it made me smile, not only because I saw the absolute LOVE for capital-B 🖤Black🤎 people in that post, but also because it reminded me of my experience with Asteria! In all of my dreams and visions, she has always appeared to me as a Black woman. To me, Her Afro expands into space itself, dark as night, Her shining curls twinkling like stars. Her deep skin, soft nose, smiling lips and dark, dark brown eyes were always welcoming me! I wanted to share this with you to show my experience. I want people to take away that ANY god can be Black, whether it’s in media, or within someone’s personal experience! xoxo thank you for your incredible work, btw!

Oh that's deep! 🥹 Thank you for sharing!

[little-desi-historian]

And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.

And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.

This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.

Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.

Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.

Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.

https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/

[little-desi-historian]

[little-desi-historian]

Happy Hanukkah!

[little-desi-historian]

If you call Hanukkah “Jewish Christmas,” the ghost of Judah Maccabee will physically manifest in your house and start waving a sword around

[little-desi-historian]

a hanukkiah bouquet . ݁₊᪥⋆. ݁

[little-desi-historian]

Ok yeah you’re a leftist but are you normal about Jews

[little-desi-historian]

'Tis the season to unpack some stuff about Christmas from a minority perspective:

Christmas is a Christian holiday. The fact that many celebrate it in an irreligious way (which is valid!) does not change its origins, connotations, symbolism, nor what it has historically meant for religious minorities.

The idea that Christmas is "secular" (read: neutral) is a product of Christian hegemony and the blindness of many in Christian countries to the permeation of Christianity as "default" culture.

When someone says they don't celebrate Christmas since it's a Christian holiday, it is not actually reassuring or helpful to say something along the lines of "oh well it's just a secular day of family & presents for everyone! So you can celebrate it too!"

Though the above statement is usually well-intentioned, it is often distressing to hear because it is untrue and is erasing our lived experiences. The reflexive effort to make Christmas universal is a cultural reverberation of the millennia-old evangelizing effort to make Christianity universal, and as such, can be very uncomfortable for religious minorities.

[little-desi-historian]

Just something to think about when you see Mari Lwyd around social media! I'm from North Wales, and it's been very nice to see a old customs become more popular, even more amusing to see people really taken with Mari Lwyd. There has been a lot of fantastic artwork which I love to see! But, I do notice people not looking into where she comes from, the culture, the history and so on. When I do try to explain on some posts and link to resources, it's largely ignored. Which is a bit of a blow. So let's not just use Mari Lwyd for clicks and likes, otherwise the Welsh'ness and culture is diluted.

(I was playing Among Us recently... and there is a Mari Lwyd costume in that o.o) Here's a little video to explain a bit about Mari Lwyd https://youtu.be/6ptel9C3Zhg?si=yN3O3X7nkw03byyQ

And here is the cultural folk traditions website teaching people about Welsh traditions (some of it is in Welsh!) Trac Cymru – Folk development for Wales / Datblygu traddodiadau Cymru