#End Jim Crow Laws

[ivygorgon]

Support the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 (H.R.6643 / S. 3423)

An open letter to the U.S. Congress

576 so far! Help us get to 1,000 signers!

Despite his 34 felony convictions, Donald Trump has the wealth, connections, and privilege to ensure he doesn’t have to worry about his eligibility to vote this fall. But the millions of ordinary Americans currently disenfranchised by felony convictions aren’t so lucky. That's why, as your constituent, I urge you to co-sponsor and support the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 (H.R.6643 / S. 3423) to guarantee voting rights to ALL Americans. Right now, Jim Crow-style felony disenfranchisement laws deny voting rights to over 4.4 million Americans. The Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 comprises a series of transformative measures that would end the broken system of felony disenfranchisement and empower marginalized communities: - Guaranteeing the right to vote in federal elections to all Americans who have criminal convictions. - Eliminating state-level barriers that prevent individuals with criminal convictions, whether they are incarcerated or have been released, from exercising their right to vote in federal elections. - Ensuring citizens in carceral settings have access to information about elections and candidates 29 Members of Congress have signed on as sponsors or co-sponsors of the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023. If you haven’t already, please join your colleagues and add your name to that list. And if you’re already a co-sponsor – thank you, and please do everything you can to help pass this groundbreaking legislation into law.

▶ Created on October 14 by Jess Craven · 575 signers in the past 7 days

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[nando161mando]

Just because it's legal doesn't mean anything

[wowbright]

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., March 25, 1965, Selma to Montgomery March, State Capitol steps, Montgomery, Alabama (x)

[qqueenofhades]

I suddenly thought of an interesting question. What is the purpose of democracy? Is it democracy for democracy's sake? democracy exists to protect human rights. Voting is one of the most typical expressions of democracy, but if, due to the tyranny of the majority—the so-called ‘will of the people’—the human rights of the country’s citizens are actually severely harmed (as in the case of this U.S. election), what then? Does democracy, at this stage, still have any meaning to uphold?I mean, suppose, at this moment, one party were to take power through undemocratic means, such as election manipulation, a coup, or assassination, but this party’s policies were, comparatively, more protective of human rights than the opposing party’s. From an objective standpoint of justice, should it be supported at this stage?🤔

I think this is indeed an interesting question and I'll try to answer it in two parts.

First, the idea that "democracy exists to protect human rights" is a considerably recent idea, and doesn't actually figure much into classical expressions/conceptions of democracy. As it was originally practiced in Athens, it had nothing to do with safeguarding the rights of marginalized groups (indeed, if anything, the opposite). It was just a system where groups of people, i.e. property-owning citizen men, were allowed to make decisions collectively, but it was still able to be adjourned at any time for a despot (in the classical sense) to resume autocratic authority. It just means a system in which the people (demos) have authority (kratia). That means, therefore, who constitutes as a "person" under the law is one of the longest-running questions (and struggles) in the entire history of the concept.

As it was then thought about in the Enlightenment and the 18th-century context in which the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, "democracy" was very much the same idea of a small group of "worthy" but ordinary men making decisions in a quasi-elected framework, rather than as a single inherited monarchy. There was still no particular idea that "human rights" was a goal, and would have been foreign to most political theorists. There was an emerging idea of "natural rights" wherein man (and definitely man) was a specially rational creature who had a right to have a say in his government, but yet again, that depended on who was viewed as qualified to have that say. (The answer being, again, white property-owning Christian men.) There have been many constitutional law papers written on how much the founding fathers trusted the American electorate (not very) and how the American government was deliberately designed to work inefficiently in order to slow down the implementation of possibly-stupid decisions (but therefore also potentially-helpful ones). The Electoral College, aside from being an attempt to finesse the slavery question (did slaves count as people for purposes of allotting House representatives? James Madison famously decided they counted as three-fifths of a person), was a further system of indirect republicanism. Likewise, US Senators were not popularly elected on a secret ballot, the same as the president, until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

Of course at the same time in the 19th-early 20th century, the Civil War, Reconstruction and its end, Jim Crow, women's suffrage movements, were all ongoing, and represented further challenge and revision of what "democracy" meant in the American context, and who counted as a legally recognized person who was thus entitled to have their say in government. It was not until Black people and women began insisting that they did in fact count as people that there was any universal idea of "human rights" as expressed in popular democratic systems. This further developed in the 20th century in the world war context, and then in the decolonization waves in the 1950s and 1960s that dismantled European imperialism and gave rise to a flood of new nation-states. Etc. etc., the Civil Rights movement in America, the gay rights movement starting with Stonewall, and further expansion of who was seen as a person not just in the physical but the legal and actionable sense.

That's why we have political philosophy concepts of "electoral" and "liberal" democracies, and why they're not quite the same. In an electoral democracy, people have the right to vote on and elect their leaders, but there may be less protection of associated "liberal" rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression and assembly, and other characteristics that we think of in terms of protected groups and individual rights. Liberal democracies make a further commitment to protect those rights in addition to the basic principle of voting on your leaders, but as noted, democracy does not inherently protect them and if you have a system where a simple majority vote of 49% can remove rights from the other 48%, you have a problem. Technically, it's still democracy -- the people have voted on it, and one side voted more than the other -- but it's not compatible with justice, which is a secondary question and a whole other debate.

In the modern world, autocrats have often been popularly elected, which is technically a democratic process, but the problem is that once they get there, they start dismantling all the civic processes and safeguards that make the country a democracy, and make it much harder for the opposition to win an election and for power to meaningfully change hands. See for example India (Narendra Modi/BJP), Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan/AKP), Poland (Jarosław Kaczyński/PiS), Hungary (Viktor Orbán/Fidesz), Russia (Vladimir Putin/United Russia) and America (Donald Trump/GOP). Some of these countries were more democratic than others to start with, but all of them have engaged in either significant democratic erosion or full authoritarian reversion. The US is not -- yet -- at the latter stage, as I have written about the features of the system that make it different from other countries on that list, but it's in the danger zone.

Lastly, the idea of "we're morally better and protect human rights but are willing to launch a coup/assassination/etc of the current government" has been claimed many, many times throughout history. It has never been the case. Not least since if a party in a democratic system, however flawed, is willing to throw aside the core feature of that system, they simply don't respect human rights in any meaningful sense. That's why we kept having "the people's revolutions," especially in the 20th century, that promised to uphold and liberate the working class and all ended up as repressive communist dictatorships functionally indistinguishable from the autocracies or even quasi-democracies they had replaced. In this day and age, does anyone want Online Leftists, who will cancel and viciously attack fellow leftists for tiny disagreements on the internet, deciding that they're going to overthrow the government and announce themselves the great protector of human rights? Aside from the fact that they couldn't do it even if they ever tried and stopped being insane keyboard warriors, I don't think anyone would believe them, and nor should they, because violent antidemocratic groups are bad. This is the sixth-grade level explanation, but it's true.

If you're so drastically committed to your ideology that you're willing to destroy everyone else for not agreeing (and even then, post-revolution, the revolutionaries always start eating each other), then you're not special or enlightened. You're the exact same kind of ideological zealot who has been responsible for most of the worst atrocities throughout history. When "I need to kill for my beliefs but I'll clearly only kill the right people" is your guiding philosophy, the "right people to be killed" quickly expand past any controls or laws. Why not, especially when you've just declared the law to be invalid? Pretty soon you're into death-squads and extrajudicial-assassinations territory, and no matter how soaringly noble your aims were to start with, you've become much worse than what you replaced.

This does not mean "we all have an obligation to obey oppressive governments because the alternative is worse," which has been likewise used by the oppressive governments who benefit from it. It just means that if a democracy is violently overthrown, what emerges from it -- no matter how nice their rhetoric might initially sound -- will invariably be much worse. Winston Churchill famously remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the alternatives, and in this, I tend to agree with him. It sucks, but there's nothing that has yet been invented that can take its place or that has any interest in protecting human rights in the way that 21st-century liberal democracy has generally accepted it has an obligation to do, however partial, flawed, and regressive it can often be. Indeed right now, in this particular historical moment, the only feasible alternative is quite clearly far-right populist fascist theocratic authoritarianism, and that -- for you fortunate Americans who have never lived under anything like that -- is much, much worse. So yeah.

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

We will never know the internal strength needed by Vice President Kamala Harris to preside over the official certification of her own electoral defeat. On the anniversary of a Capitol rampage perpetrated by fans of the 45th and now 47th president, Harris fulfilled her duties with grace and with dignity. 

Difficult as it is, the Democrats in Congress have all acknowledged the results of the 2024 election. Many of the Republicans, on the other hand, who stood in the congressional chamber and applauded Harris’ quick and seamless certification never publicly accepted the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s win. 

...

But it is not lost on me that Harris presided over the certification ceremony just two days after voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously at the White House.

Hamer’s image is seared into national history as a Black female civil rights warrior who boldly challenged the status quo by demanding that she and other activists be recognized at the 1964 Democratic National Convention as members of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

...

In June 1963 Hamer was brutally beaten in jail by law enforcement officers in Winona, Mississippi. Law enforcement officers forced Black prisoners in the jail to participate in Hamer’s assault. She almost died. 

The violence was grotesquely harsh even by Jim Crow standards. Hamer was alternately battered by two Black prisoners, Roosevelt Knox and Sol Poe, who were reportedly ordered to strike Hamer or face a beating themselves. She was forced to lie face down as the two prisoners pummeled her with loaded blackjacks — police clubs filled at the ends with sand or metal pellets.

As Hamer drifted back into consciousness, she overheard the officers discussing the possibility of throwing her into the river.

Hamer never fully recovered. She partially lost sight in one eye, walked with a limp and suffered permanent and debilitating kidney damage that may have contributed to her death at age 59 in 1977.  [...]

[baiheyurisolidarity]

Honestly the way many white people on this site think and act, you'd think the most anti-racist thing you can do is enact/re-enact apartheid so that it's easier to not accidently do a cultural appropriation or some bullshit. These white people internally think the fall of usamerica for white people was the end of jim crow laws.

[viktoriaashleyyx]

Tw: violence against women and children mentioned.

I have been an Anti-Facist Norse pagan for almost 15 years (a pretty lonely life ngl) and the best thing to come of this is my skill to sniff out alt right, facist propaganda before anyone else. Everyone tells me "it's not that deep" until they realize, yep it is that deep.

The ACOTAR books have now been added to my list of Alt Right pipelines and I am convinced that SJM herself is either currently a facist or will be spiraling towards it soon.

If any criticism of the main characters, inner circle, Night court values draws you into a frenzy where you need to use a 1300 word straw man argument to lower your heart rate and pat yourself on the back, you need to do some self reflecting.

Like who you like, I don't honestly care, I'm not here for friends, but if you justify literal Jim Crowe laws because "those people will ruin our beautiful perfect city" I am going to side eye you. That is not something a healthy, non racist, Pro humanity person fantasizes about. There is not a single, natural born illyran woman who can use her own wings under the 500 year rule of "the most powerful high lord." Fantasizing about a lazy sex crazed leader who still allows the breaking of children's bones for misbehaving, is not normal. I am not going to trust you if you justify and praise violence toward children, even fictional children.

The fact that you will go to war to defend the abhorrent policies and actions of the NC when people try to have critical discussions about the texts is shocking to say the least.

Every single character in these books are subject to criticism. SJM herself is subject to criticism for the way in which she portrays these communities and glosses over the unjust policies. The way the Jim Crow laws in Velaris were introduced is a common manipulative tactic to desensitize the reader to the policy itself, paving a way for it to, once again, exist in our world. "It just a fantasy book calm down" no. Media has always been a large method to distribute propaganda.

I don't give half a fuck who Elain ends up with but please, please, please criticize the Night court and recognize it's atrocities or it will affect how you vote and how you see the world around you.

[stackslip]

the thing about octavia butler is that her works are intimately tied with race/gender and power dynamics, through the lense of deeply horny and freaky dubcon. and she does this so well! her work is a really good example of why i don't think you can neatly separate "horny" as a tone/tool from an artist's works and themes. butler frequently writes about characters who find themselves tied to/dependent on another party who has immense power every aspect of their life, who even at their kindest could hurt and destroy them easily. who will provide the main character with comfort, and genuine love, and often very satisfying sex or immense chemical pleasure through mind orgasms or whatever. and no matter the good will of the other party and how comfortable and pleasurable your current life by their side is, there is a price; there is a leash around your neck that you never truly consented to have put around your neck (or the consent came under duress/coercion or mind altering chemicals). many of these characters end up having to compromise their values and lives in order to survive because they know that life outside of this relationship, even if freely ended, will be much much harder as the world changes for the worst. anyhow, it's fascinating to see her explore these kind of dynamics, the resentment/agony and the urge to survive and all the ways it tied into being a black woman who grew up under jim crow laws (the way she writes interracial/age gap relationships in her settings too!)

[dotthings]

The maga-packed US Supreme Court decided this week

* to protect bigotry under the guise of religious beliefs

* ended Affirmative Action

* struck down Biden’s plan to extend studen loan forgiveness

This is codified bigotry. If your beliefs require you to be a bigot, it’s time to question your beliefs. Bigotry being legally protected is pushing the US back to the Jim Crow era. The decisions regarding Affirmative Action and student loan forgiveness is part of the deliberate, systemized goal of maintaining oppression perpetrated by powerful, rich white people. Making it even more difficult for anyone but privileged, powerful white people to get an education and opportunities, to be able to afford college. It’s an attempt to keep the deck stacked against everyone but themselves. It’s anti-egalitarian. The far right goes to war daily against LGBTQ people, against PoC, against women. In supreme court decisions, in the vile bigoted laws they try to enact locally. In their public statements. In their tweets

Seeing the first amendment being waved around as an excuse to allow protected bigotry makes me sick to my stomach.

Call it what it is. FASCISM. BIGOTRY. DISCRIMINATION. CLASS WAR.

Please vote. It matters who is in office, on the national and local level.

[horizon-verizon]

Setting aside that economies aren’t like CD’s and you can’t just exchange them overnight, how would Daenerys have abolished slavery and immediately “replaced the economy” ?

It took the United States decades of abolitionism and an entire civil war to end slavery; it took another 100 years to take on post Reconstruction racism. The consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, and discriminatory policies didn’t vanish overnight because the laws that sustained segregation were repealed, they created generational wealth gaps, entrenched segregation, and systemic barriers. Redlining wasn’t officially outlawed until the late 1960s, yet its impact still defines housing, education, and economic inequality. Pretending these lasting effects don’t exist is either ignorant or willfully blind.

From 1789 to 1871, France have experienced a succession of short-lived regimes and witnessed a tumultuous eight decades that saw the initial constitutional monarchy replaced by a republic in 1792, only for the republic to succumb to terror to see off internal and external enemies and lose all legitimacy in a mere seven years to be toppled by its most popular general, Napoleon Bonaparte. To sum things up, in 82 years, France went through three monarchies, two empires, and two republics, the French people witnessing the fall of seven different political regimes, with a eighth, the Third Republic, being in place since the fall of Napoleon III.

History does not know just one direction, but many setbacks and cyclical motions. Leadership often works the same way. Major successes and breakthroughs rarely happen overnight. Instead, they emerge from countless small actions — strategic decisions, cultural shifts, and unglamorous (sometimes even boring) persistence — that compound over time. It makes Daenerys’ struggle to change things for the better feel a lot more realistic.

Honestly, I've wondered and I don't know. I don't want to think that it could turn out to be disappointing, how it's handled, but....

[readyforevolution]

IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW THIS YESTERDAY THEN TODAY WOULD BE A GOOD DAY TO LEARN THIS.... "All stories don't have a happy ending"

In 1866, one year after the 13 Amendment was ratified (the amendment that ended slavery), Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina began to lease out convicts for labor (peonage). This made the business of arresting Blacks very lucrative, which is why hundreds of White men were hired by these states as police officers. Their primary responsibility was to search out and arrest Blacks who were in violation of Black Codes. Once arrested, these men, women and children would be leased to plantations where they would harvest cotton, tobacco, sugar cane. Or they would be leased to work at coal mines, or railroad companies. The owners of these businesses would pay the state for every prisoner who worked for them; prison labor.

It is believed that after the passing of the 13th Amendment, more than 800,000 Blacks were part of the system of peonage, or re-enslavement through the prison system. Peonage didn’t end until after World War II began, around 1940.

This is how it happened.

The 13th Amendment declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Ratified in 1865)

Did you catch that? It says, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude could occur except as a punishment for a crime". Lawmakers used this phrase to make petty offenses crimes. When Blacks were found guilty of committing these crimes, they were imprisoned and then leased out to the same businesses that lost slaves after the passing of the 13th Amendment. This system of convict labor is called peonage.

The majority of White Southern farmers and business owners hated the 13th Amendment because it took away slave labor. As a way to appease them, the federal government turned a blind eye when southern states used this clause in the 13th Amendment to establish laws called Black Codes. Here are some examples of Black Codes:

In Louisiana, it was illegal for a Black man to preach to Black congregations without special permission in writing from the president of the police. If caught, he could be arrested and fined. If he could not pay the fines, which were unbelievably high, he would be forced to work for an individual, or go to jail or prison where he would work until his debt was paid off.

If a Black person did not have a job, he or she could be arrested and imprisoned on the charge of vagrancy or loitering.

This next Black Code will make you cringe. In South Carolina, if the parent of a Black child was considered vagrant, the judicial system allowed the police and/or other government agencies to “apprentice” the child to an "employer". Males could be held until the age of 21, and females could be held until they were 18. Their owner had the legal right to inflict punishment on the child for disobedience, and to recapture them if they ran away.

This (peonage) is an example of systemic racism - Racism established and perpetuated by government systems. Slavery was made legal by the U.S. Government. Segregation, Black Codes, Jim Crow and peonage were all made legal by the government, and upheld by the judicial system. These acts of racism were built into the system, which is where the term “Systemic Racism” is derived.

This is the part of "Black History" that most of us were never told about.

[helen-magpies]

On social media the USA population are asking anyone from outside countries to properly document what is happening to them right now as they can't or are not able to.

As of the 20th of January 2025 up to the 24th January 2025 the following has happened:

Trump has signed several executive orders including:

Ruling that the United states will only recognise two genders, woman and man, and ones gender is determined by the sex they were conceived as. (his words not mine. By the way, this makes everyone effectively female) despite his stupidity, we know what he means, if one is born female, they are a woman. This effectively erases non-binary folk and forcibly de-transitions trans folk. This order claims to be defending woman from harmful gender ideology. The misogyny and outright bigotry within this order is genuinely terrifying and frustrating.

Fact sheet: Trump protects civil rights and merit-based opportunities by ending illegal DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion)

The death penalty. Trump is pushing for capital punishment to be used as often as possible for a certain list of crimes. Murder being one of them. Abortion and miscarriage has been described as murder. Woman are going to be imprisoned and slaughtered because they had a miscarriage or an abortion. This would also put those born outside of the US at greater risk of murder as the laws will be stricter towards them. Reading through the official documents, if a foreigner commits a federal crime (from as little as speeding 50miles over the limit to committing murder) they will be sentanced to death.

An alarming amount of executive orders are related to foreigners and foreign affairs such as:

Guardenteeing the states protection against invasion.

Protecting the United states from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats.

Fact sheet: Trump protects the United states and American citizens by closing the borders to illegals via proclamation.

Trump has also stated in an executive order that there will be armed forces at the borders to prevent "aliens" from entering the country.

Source: WhiteHouse.com. (the constitution was replaced by Trumps executive orders and the White House Legislative Branch can not be found on the official website as it has been taken down.

____________________________________________

Books are continuing to be banned and religion is re-entering the schools, indoctrinating the children.

They want to take womens right to vote. They are starting with pregnant women and women on maturity leave. If they can't keep you pregnant (if you get an abortion) you would have your right to vote stripped from you as abortion is now classified as murder which is a felony. Felons can't vote.

Jim crow laws will be reinstated. The native children will be taken. You are the people, you don't work for the government, they work for you. Get the gelatine, take back your power as the people.

When Hitler first got control, he told the jews to leave germany. When Trump got control, he told the immigrants to leave the US.

When Hitler got control, he came for the Queers first. Trump went for the queers.

When Hitler got control, he came for the disabled. Trump went for the women.

There were people who came before the jews. There are going to be people who come before those of colour. Trump is a racist, a sexist and a rapist. There will be people who come before you. Stand up for them so they will stand for you, lest you stand alone.

"When they came for the Queers, i didn't say anything because i was not Queer. When they came for the jews, i didn't say anything because i was not a jew. When they came for the women, i didnt say anything because i was not a woman. When they came for the disabled, i didnt say anything because i am not disabled. But then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."

There is an Australian song about inclusively, and how when we are together we are stronger.

"We are one, but we are many. And from all acorss the lands we come, to share our dreams, and sing with one voice. I am, you are, we are Australian." Honestly, the US need this song right now.

[for-hunger]

The differences between Hannibal and Lestat have been bothering me ever since I binged Interview with the Vampire, and I got frustrated enough to scribble 3 pages in my notebook. My conclusions are:

Institutional power. First and foremost, Lestat is connected to institutional power. In the context of IWTV, Lestat and Louis do not begin as equals, and are not able to meet each other as equals until the end of S2. (Edit: I am literally talking about him being white in the Jim Crow South) Lestat is always associated with ultimate institutional/group authority, both in New Orleans and in Paris- whether Lestat came to Paris with the intention to see Claudia (and/or Louis) die or not, he is the literal co-founder of the coven, and Claudia and Louis are being persecuted for fighting back against him. He even invokes the "Great Laws" when defending Claudia's murder.

In contrast, in Hannibal, Will is the one associated with this institutional power, even being the mentee of our ultimate lawful authority, Jack. The only time he is without this power is the brief first period of S2. Hannibal and Will begin the show as equals, and for the most part, are playing their back and forth cat-and-mouse game as equals (at least post-S1).

Betrayal. Although Louis shuts down in the face of Lestat's abuse, he never really stops being hurt by Lestat's continued betrayals. Will is hurt by Hannibal's betrayal (especially end of S1), but he knows who Hannibal is. He expects and is, in many ways, satisfied by and interested in Hannibal's continued insanity.

Daughters. Louis is the driving force behind the adoption of Claudia, and Lestat resists emotional involvement with her, is cruel to her, and, arguably, wants her dead regardless of Louis. Hannibal gives Abigail to Will himself, and has his own relationship with her. His murder of Abigail is in revenge for Will's shattering of their relationship, not about anything he hates in Abigail.

God. Hannibal is more directly godlike in comparison to the others in his narrative. Other people are vampires, but no one else can kill like Hannibal does in his world (in his absurd Bugs Bunny way). He even breaks the fourth wall (in S3) to directly invite us into his narrative. The motivation for most of what he does is curiosity rather than any central seduction (sometimes to his dismay), and his attitude is always tongue in cheek. This is also why it's important that he's not associated with institutional power- he rivals the power of God, he doesn't hide from God, he's the Devil, he is smoke, he is not bound by gender, law, time, space, the limits of the body, etc.

Ultimately, there are tons of similarities in these narratives: toxic ass murder husbands, dead daughters who are created and then sacrificed for the love of the husbands, consummation in blood, breakup in blood, European sojourn, temporary other marriages, murder as ascension, et al et al

and I'm certainly not saying that Hannibal is a good husband!!!

[fatehbaz]

"defending civilization against bugs"

lol the mosquito sculpture

see Pratik Chakrabarti's Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960 (2013) and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (2012)

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Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce [...]. [H]e argued that "in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope."

Text by: Rohan Deb Roy. "Decolonise science - time to end another imperial era." The Conversation. 5 April 2018.

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[A]s [...] Diane Nelson explains: The creation of transportation infrastructure such as canals and railroads, the deployment of armies, and the clearing of ground to plant tropical products all had to confront [...] microbial resistance. The French, British, and US raced to find a cure for malaria [...]. One French colonial official complained in 1908: “fever and dysentery are the ‘generals’ that defend hot countries against our incursions and prevent us from replacing the aborigines that we have to make use of.” [...] [T]ropical medicine was assigned the role of a “counterinsurgent field.” [...] [T]he discovery of mosquitoes as malaria and yellow fever carriers reawakened long-cherished plans such as the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) [...]. In 1916, the director of the US Bureau of Entomology and longtime general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejoiced at this success as “an object lesson for the sanitarians of the world” - it demonstrated “that it is possible for the white race to live healthfully in the tropics.” [...] The [...] measures to combat dangerous diseases always had the collateral benefit of social pacification. In 1918, [G.V.], president of the Rockefeller Foundation, candidly declared: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some decided advantages over machine guns." The construction of the Panama Canal [...] advanced the military expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. The US occupation of the Canal Zone had already brought racist Jim Crow laws [to Panama] [...]. Besides the [...] expansion of vice squads and prophylaxis stations, during the night women were picked up all over the city [by US authorities] and forcibly tested for [...] diseases [...] [and] they were detained in something between a prison and hospital for up to six months [...] [as] women in Panama were becoming objects of surveillance [...].

Text by: Fahim Amir. "Cloudy Swords." e-flux Journal Issue #115. February 2021.

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Richard P. Strong [had been] recently appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine [...]. In 1914 [the same year of the Panama Canal's completion], just one year after the creation of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine, Strong took on an additional assignment that cemented the ties between his department and American business interests abroad. As newly appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of United Fruit Company, he set sail in July 1914 to United Fruit plantations in Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. […] As a shareholder in two British rubber plantations, [...] Strong approached Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the tire and rubber-processing conglomerate that bore his name, in December 1925 with a proposal [...]. Firestone had negotiated tentative agreements in 1925 with the Liberian government for [...] a 99-year concession to optionally lease up to a million acres of Liberian land for rubber plantations. [...]

[I]nfluenced by the recommendations and financial backing of Harvard alumni such as Philippine governor Gen. William Cameron Forbes [the Philippines were under US military occupation] and patrons such as Edward Atkins, who were making their wealth in the banana and sugarcane industries, Harvard hired Strong, then head of the Philippine Bureau of Science’s Biological Laboratory [where he fatally infected unknowing test subject prisoners with bubonic plague], and personal physician to Forbes, to establish the second Department of Tropical Medicine in the United States [...]. Strong and Forbes both left Manila [Philippines] for Boston in 1913. [...] Forbes [US military governor of occupied Philippines] became an overseer to Harvard University and a director of United Fruit Company, the agricultural products marketing conglomerate best known for its extensive holdings of banana plantations throughout Central America. […] In 1912 United Fruit controlled over 300,000 acres of land in the tropics [...] and a ready supply of [...] samples taken from the company’s hospitals and surrounding plantations, Strong boasted that no “tropical school of medicine in the world … had such an asset. [...] It is something of a victory [...]. We could not for a million dollars procure such advantages.” Over the next two decades, he established a research funding model reliant on the medical and biological services the Harvard department could provide US-based multinational firms in enhancing their overseas production and trade in coffee, bananas, rubber, oil, and other tropical commodities [...] as they transformed landscapes across the globe.

Text by: Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.]

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[On] February 20, 1915, [...] [t]o signal the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), [...] [t]he fair did not officially commence [...] until President Wilson [...] pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower [...] whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, [...] swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. [...] [W]ith lavish festivities [...] nineteen million people has passed through the PPIE's turnstiles. [...] As one of the many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." [...] One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was [...] the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," [the construction of the Panama Canal] symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns [...]. [I]n the 1910s public health and eugenics crusaders alike moved with little or no friction between [...] [calls] for classification of human intelligence, for immigration restriction, for the promotion of the sterilization and segregation of the "unfit," [...]. It was during this [...] moment, [...] that California's burgeoning eugenicist movement coalesced [...]. At meetings convened during the PPIE, a heterogenous group of sanitary experts, [...] medical superintendents, psychologists, [...] and anthropologists established a social network that would influence eugenics on the national level in the years to come. [...]

In his address titled "The Physician as Pioneer," the president-elect of the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, credited the colonization of the Mississippi Valley to the discovery of quinine [...] and then told his audience that for progress to proceed apace in the current "age of the insect," the stringent sanitary regime imposed and perfected by Gorgas in the Canal Zone was the sine qua non. [...]

Blue also took part in the conference of the American Society for Tropical Medicine, which Gorgas had cofounded five years after the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Invoking the narrative of medico-military conquest [...], [t]he scientific skill of the United States was also touted at the Pan-American Medical Congress, where its president, Dr. Charles L. Reed, delivered a lengthy address praising the hemispheric security ensured by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and "the combined genius of American medical scientists [...]" in quelling tropical diseases, above all yellow fever, in the Canal Zone. [...] [A]s Reed's lecture ultimately disclosed, his understanding of Pan-American medical progress was based [...] on the enlightened effects of "Aryan blood" in American lands. [...] [T]he week after the PPIE ended, Pierce was ordered to Laredo, Texas, to investigate several incidents of typhus fever on the border [...]. Pierce was instrumental in fusing tropical medicine and race betterment [...] guided by more than a decade of experience in [...] sanitation in Panama [...]. [I]n August 1915, Stanford's chancellor, David Starr Jordan [...] and Pierce were the guests of honor at a luncheon hosted by the Race Betterment Foundation. [...] [At the PPIE] [t]he Race Betterment booth [...] exhibit [...] won a bronze medal for "illustrating evidences and causes of race degeneration and methods and agencies of race betterment," [and] made eugenics a daily feature of the PPIE. [...] [T]he American Genetics Association's Eugenics Section convened [...] [and] talks were delivered on the intersection of eugenics and sociology, [...] the need for broadened sterilization laws, and the medical inspection of immigrants [...]. Moreover, the PPIE fostered the cross-fertilization of tropical medicine and race betterment at a critical moment of transition in modern medicine in American society.

Text by: Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Second Edition. 2016.

[cryptidsmagick]

If you have the energy to answer, what's your opinion on Natlan? I'd imagine the feelings are complex

Oh dear victim, you have made some mistakes.

Where should I even fucking start.

Full Disclosure: I have kintypes consisting of yumkasaur and a natlan mythic, and after a very long internal debate that multiple people can confirm I shred myself over, choose to work with Wayob. This will be elaborated with the rest of the rant.

Why are they white?

I'm sure you know this has become Quite A Tag relating to Natlan, mainly because we have white passing Hispanics claiming that players of other ethnicities are over exaggerating the white washing.

And this isn't an over generalisation, people keep outright saying "I'm Hispanic and feel represented because [...]" or something similar, to which I respond: We Hispanics are racist shits.

I'm putting up no defense for my people—my mother actively tried to erase my black and indigenous heritage, despite the fact my (father's side) grandfather is literally visibly black and the stories & traditions of the taino people have been passed down on my mother's side.

Why? Because we're the exact same people who throw racial slurs at each other every other day and constantly try to justify it as "tradition" or "culture" or "harmless slang."

Look, between you and me, they really just want to see Americans be so naïve when they get called a gringo and follow up with the most vulgar phrases they can think of as..."compliments." I've seen it happen so many times it's just disgusting.

Cubans, Dominicans, Purto Ricans...I've seen so many Hispanics do it including my own parents. They would genuinely start calling people mulattos in disgust and still justify it as a "racial identifier" when it's the same racist bullshit of forcing people to put down exactly how black they are during Jim Crow laws in the US.

Anyhow, point being, I'm disgusted by how little my own people are putting an effort into defending the culture of the ancestors—the Inca, Aztecs, Taino, and other indigenous of South America/Carribean.

Just because modern day Hispanics have forgotten their culture, or are so Spanish they aren't even related to these tribes, doesn't mean we should replace them all with white-passing individuals. Modern day Hispanics are a diverse people with a wide range of skin tones, and characters based on our tribes should not be fucking white majority.

I'm not just "some mestizo," soy taino, and even if I'm on the cafe con leche end, I still want to see people properly represented.

On the non-hispanic indigenous side of thing, can we talk about the white washing of a Jamaican God? Some people have tried to defend Hoyo over the whole Ororon thing but not only is he one of the weakest characters in lore/meta, but he's paler than my very European friends. (In fact, most Genshin Characters are.) He's a complete disrespect to the deity he's named after.

It's not just white passing indigenous culture being used, but defined black heritage from Jamaica, Africa, Haiti, etc. No individual culture should have the right to say Hoyo isn't appropriating as they're taking from the peoples, not a people.

The darkest character we're going to get from Natlan is Iansan, to which we were expecting some darker characters but Hoyo proceeded to white wash their own characters. Xbalanque is black in all the in-game murals depicting him, but the only interaction we'll ever have of him is possessing a white child as filler text for Mavuika's fan service. Kinich is a light shade of tan in his art, then glows like the surface of the sun in-game.

They've tossed a few black NPCs our way, but there are more black enemies in game (inflated by Natlan) than black, interactable NPCs. A lot of them are vision bearers too.

Varka, for example, is a character from Mondstadt people hoped to be playable, who's been leaked to have a vision and dark shade of tan. But he's also been leaked to use the generic NPC model and will most likely never be playable.

Refusing to represent POCs, for the second time (Sumeru), was something that firmly put me against Natlan when it released.

TL;DR: Natlan whitewashed minority groups by choosing to actively integrate their language and cultures, but making minimal effort to include diverse characters. As of currently, 5 characters are white, 1 is so pale of a tan they're nearly white, 1 is the bare minimum of black and still unreleased.

What is going on with the tribes?

When it was mentioned that the Children of Echoes had dancing as a central part of it, I expected to see traditional dances with cultural meaning. Instead, I hear fucking hip hop. And what are they doing on the stage? Breakdancing.

A lot of people with indigenous ancestry found Hilichurls fascinating due to their obviously tribal dancing and wondered if they had defined social structure back in 2020-2021. Now, we know they're from Khenr'iah and their dances are related to abyss rituals.

These Hilichurls, a human-related enemy with a "true death" animation (instead of disappearing into sand/smoke), are given arguably more accurate tribal dynamics than the "proper tribes" of Natlan.

And I just don't have words for how outright disappointing every other attempt of cultural integration was. The People of Springs (pacific islanders) having surfing but the "they're not lazy" thing being overemphasised to make them look lazy. The Scions of the Canopy and their...biblical references brings out some lovely generational trauma (can we talk about how the seelies went from fairies to fallen angels?). The Masters of Night Wind being a purely shaman/priest/spiritual tribe—that's not how it works, individuals worked as a community with multiple roles. The Flower-Feather Clan being so exaggeratedly warrior based that people are essentially useless as Wingless.

What I'm getting at here is that Hoyo failed to make them actual tribes, and their attempts at traditions were soulless. We partake in Turnfire Night, only for us to have to practice until the actual thing was soulless, and there was no real challenge (despite them repetitively stating there was). We're selected by Elder Tlapo (Claw) to help with weaving scrolls, but not only were half the voicelines barely audible, Hoyo skipped out on opportunities to explain the culture of the Masters of Night Wind, and literally cuts TWO people short as they try to tell us the different versions of the story. We partake in the flight test for the Flower-Feather clan, but the nature of the test itself has no real meaning. In fact, we're given the opportunity to advocate for abolishing it.

These soulless, unresearched attempts at culture incorporation wind up being more appropriation than anything, harming these minority groups the tribes are based on with misrepresentation.

Ancient names are also treated with less value than they're worth, with the Traveler being guaranteed the name before they have noteworthy accomplishments and being granted a high honor despite not earning it in the way dictated by tradition. They could've earned the honor themselves by partaking in the tournament, but were instead handed it. These obsidian slips are a critical part of their culture, and although IRL tribes might gift someone a tribal name, I did not enjoy how it was executed in-game, as the Traveler was only gifted the name for plot armor.

TL;DR: Natlan failed to properly incorporate tribal culture and wound up mostly appropriating it.

Sexualisation of tribal wear?

South American, Caribbean, and Pacific tribes all have minimal traditional wear due to the available materials and climate. So, something like what Mualani wears would be standard. However, proceeding to give every female enemy from every tribe a fucking cowboy hat, boots, and short-shorts is just out right sexualisation. Every's tribe clothing would and should be unique, not a copy/pasted wild west.

Chasca, isn't even an enemy and she's been subject to the same minimalistic cowboy outfit.

Mavuika is wearing a body suit, not tribal wear. To which, is incredibly sexualised for fan service, which they leant on like a crutch. (That bodysuit looks so uncomfortable.)

Male and child-like characters are covered, despite the fact if they were using minimal wear to be accurate, males would also use minimal wear. They're not using this clothing style to be accurate, they're using a "cultural thing" to excuse sexualisation.

They did the same thing with other nations, including those based on Asian culture. Most female Liyue characters wear incredibly sexualised Chinese wear, and in Inazuma, Raiden's kimono was so sexualised they actually had to lengthen her skirt in the cutscene to avoid her bare bottom being distracting to the player.

This has been a long standing problem in Genshin Impact, and after a (mostly) break from it in Fountaine, it's being thrown at players in full force in Natlan.

TL;DR: Hoyo keeps using cultural wear to excuse character sexualisation, and does so exaggeratedly in Natlan by taking advantage of southern indigenous' minimal wear.

The Wayob?

Honestly, the Wayob is perhaps the only thing they might've nailed. The integration of spirits of individual lands, existing as a grand deity, the Great Spirit of This Land. Their portrayal and integration into Natlan's culture was incredibly well done until...

...the Lord of the Night came into the picture. After being colonised and losing most of their culture, what an indigenous person DOES NOT want to hear in reference to their representation is: "joke's on you, angels created the entirety of your culture and the colonists were right."

It was completely unnecessary and, frankly, most lore videos out there fail to acknowledge the confusion of this sudden change of what Seelies are. In Mondstadt, the Seelies are mentioned in their books to be fairies (as their name literally means) who ruled over Teyvat since before Celestia. Then Celestia strode in as the tyrants they are and forced these god-like beings to submit to their authority (and were punished with their memory-less selves when they failed to follow Celestia's rules).

This was a progressive change of the lore, honestly, as in Sumeru, Fountaine, etc the dragon sovereign was introduced as the "true rulers," then we have this colonisation shit being introduced in Natlan (which honestly, Celestia was from the start but they're also canonly evil-ish so...?).

Point and case is, Natlan's separation from Celestia (aside from the Archons, who which, don't follow Celestia's traditions for it) was a distinct feature of it, and suddenly, these angels who predeceased Celestia are, plot twist, suddenly created by Celestia and integrated themselves in Natlan.

So what if they're "fallen angels"? That objectively makes it worse.

When I first interacted with the Wayob I felt connected to my ancestors in a way I hadn't before as I hadn't been lucky enough to be taught my cultural traditions by my mother. I was unfamiliar with most of Dominican traditions, nevertheless Taino ones. It had been incredibly difficult to get a grasp of the Zemi'no especially seeing how my people was nearly driven out of existence, and ironically, the Wayob, a figure from pop culture, was what finally made things click.

The Wayob was the only thing that was right in Natlan and Hoyo ruined it for us.

TL;DR: The complete disregard of the Great Spirit through the integration of christian references (i.e. a supreme god and their angels) takes away from the distinct, unrelated force.

So...

In general, Natlan's just a hot mess. And unfortunately, it's not Hoyo's first, and it won't be the last.

China has incredibly absurd beauty standards that require multiple surgeries and treatments due to how extreme it is to achieve and maintain, and this shows in the game's characters—whiter than white skin, thin waist, small shape for most female characters (the tall ones all wear heels).

These beauty standards don't translate well when portraying other ethnicities as Hoyo applies them to them—resulting in the white washing and colorism. And honestly, I would more accurately describe it as racism as there are multiple characters canonly discriminated by race, and the Traveler themselves does it at times (approaching individuals from Snezhnaya and Khenr'iah with hostility, to which they eventually stop doing with the latter...mostly).

They have made a couple of changes (making it so the eremites disappear into sand rather than having the true death animation) but we are mostly going unheard in our feedback, as we're not their target audience. And to be frank, there are Chinese games with diverse skin tones that are just as successful as Genshin, so they have no real reason besides internalised racism/colourist (which isn't a valid reason).

[edwad]

a few weeks ago i saw a video on twitter thats of some guy talking about how amazing it is that all these people make a pencil and then you can buy it etc. is this the type of stuff you/cordelia mean when youre talking about how some people actually take domination to be a great thing (not only consciously but as an actual articulated value, i mean)

i assume the video was friedman's "i, pencil" riff, which does get at some of those points (and which other socialists have responded to on similar terrain, doing the thing i talk about of merely describing the same processes but with different moralizations), but also at a more general level in the sense that the impersonal mechanisms of capitalism are seen as nondiscriminatory, which for liberal theorists is a major advance over the more direct forms of coercion found in pre-capitalist societies. the benefit here is that markets don't really care about your background, your money is as good as anyone else's, and there's a certain universalizing tendency which comes out of the formal equality which is baked into this logic.

this is echoed in the writings of plenty of classical liberal thinkers like walter e williams that argued segregation would've dissolved on its own if free market forces had been left to run their course, unhindered by racist laws upholding the forced separation of people. eventually, certain business owners would've put their profits before their potential racism, and other firms would've been forced to similarly accommodate in order to stay competitive. williams (who was black) actually criticized some of his friends at the time for spending their money in white businesses that they'd been previously barred from, because in their attempt to stick it to the shop owners that the day before had refused to service them, they were unintentionally enriching racists instead of giving their business to firms that would've taken their money all along, had it been legal and easy to do so. this particular problem (and its market solution) are sometimes dealt with in the context of things like the sears catalog during the jim crow era, which was a big talking point a few years ago as an instance of this market anonymity/impersonality delivering a certain form of economic fairness.

for a lot of marxists, this nondiscriminatory element isn't acknowledged for the merits of not caring about your background, but in some sense for not caring about you at all. everything is reduced to the merely economic. marx pretty famously says as much in the manifesto when he writes:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

this is also what's at stake in the formal equality of the worker in marx's capital, who, as a newly emerged legal subject with all the rights that entails, discovers their double freedom -- free to work or free to starve. and as he says there in v1, "between equal rights force decides".

what i think is significant here is that these aren't really two different accounts of how the system works. for people like smith and hayek, this impersonal mechanism (the invisible hand, etc) is understood as a kind of coercive force which pushes firms toward particular ends which are independent of the wills of any singular capitalist (and in fact express the whole of human economic activity in the aggregate) and which result in the universal generalization of particular principles throughout society, increasingly undermining lingering prejudices (eg smiths capitalist arguments against slavery). marx's analysis is pretty much identical (and this is the point), except in its normative angling. the totalizing character of capitalist production which recreates the world in its own bourgeois image and strives to constantly overcome its own self-imposed limits is similarly impersonal and indiscriminate, but this is presented as a problem to be overcome. hayek, even moreso than smith, recognizes this aspect of the price system which gets at the exact issue which marx is trying to highlight with his analysis of value.

both are aware of the historical uniqueness of the social formation and have no illusions about it via cliche appeals to "human nature" etc, and as i've mentioned above, its not really a difference in analysis, or even really in results (as cordelia has said, the strong form of the marxian complaint isn't that capitalism is doing something poorly, but that these are the effects when it is working well/asserting itself fully). so the point im making and have made repeatedly is that what's at stake here is a set of underlying normative commitments which marx and marxists have basically left unjustified. the usual claim is that marx was too scientific for that sort of thing, but i don't think that's really a possible reading (and if it is, it's not a good/internally defensible one).

if anything, the immanence of his analysis to the liberal theory which constitutes his object sets the limit on his ability to express himself fully, but it also provides the only adequate place to ground his normative account. his notion of contradiction is supposed to do a lot of the heavy lifting here, but to the extent that these contradictions are located in liberal theory itself, they *necessarily* don't go unaccounted for by liberals. he's not saying or demonstrating anything which hasn't also been posed as a liberal political problem. if you don't like crises, then very well, you can be a keynesian (maybe even a radical one). you don't think that works? well, your argument probably sounds a lot like hayek's. what is marx able to contribute here that isn't already understood as a careful balancing act -- if not a definite limit -- in liberal theory? the potential salvation of communism, which is supposed to overcome the problems (whatever they are taken to be) of capitalism, necessarily stems from some set of normative commitments that can't be written off. if his critique is tightly immanent, as it arguably was, then what marxists need to justify isn't really the account of the system (you don't even have to be a marxist for that!) but the case for its abolition.

if your problem with it is "domination", you need to be able to demonstrate what's wrong with the mechanisms that word is intended to describe, and it can't just be that they're impersonal or coercive. liberals feel the same way about these things and all of us experience gravity that way. you have to be able to say something more than that, but contemporary marxist accounts tend to only go as far as calling it "domination" and getting away with it because the marxists nod along, knowing that domination is naughty, otherwise why would we call it domination?

so, although cordelia can surely speak for herself, this is part of the project that i think she and i have sorta been picking away at in different ways for a while, with me catching on a bit later (maybe too late tbh). when i expressed my frustrations on this point, directed at chambers, i was in some sense admitting that she'd won me over on this style (if not the specific line) of questioning.

all of this aside, this is of course not a defense of liberalism in the liberal sense, but it is a kind of "defense" of liberalism as a project which has to be taken seriously and can't be written off or dreamed away. in this sense, i am merely following in marx's footsteps, who i think felt very strongly about the need to grapple with liberalism on exactly this kind of terrain, but i am turning the ruthless criticism on the ruthless critic, because i don't think he or his contemporary disciples in the value-as-domination literature have done a good job of navigating this problem. probably though, like nearly everyone else, i'm simply left waiting for cordelia's book.