#Historical Materialism!

[familyabolisher]

me on here

[tamamita]

Make no mistake

Tamamita

[grimmborg-in-the-bog]

Am i a 10th century baddie yet?

After four years of having my viking clothes mostly done, i've finally been made to finish them. My basics were all done back then, but this is more of a fancy summery fit that took a lot more work (especially the weaving)

Dress is based on the Vangsnes pleated dress, it's a super thin wool dyed with madder (the colour is a little uneven sadly)

Woven band is from a similar grave to vangsnes, but in Køstrup, because the vangsnes band is all swastikas

My brooches are NOT historical but just what i have rn :(

Half the beads are made by me, the other half were bought. it might be a bit much ngl but i felt very fancy

[eliounora]

my pet peeve is those "historians thought they were very good friends" jokes, like obviously for sure there are homophobic historians, but the study of same-sex desire and relationships of the past is also quite complex and you can't often go and simply label people's relationships or identities of time gone by, and sometimes it's more complicated and elusive than "they were a couple" or even "they were in love"

[themuseumlady]

tape, cardboard, and newspaper!!!

to go a bit more into detail on this - from what I understand, this was on display* in a house for a number of years. This particular piece comes from the home of the harbormaster (a lovely man), and was exposed to light and about 50+ years of cigarette smoke. The boat in the photo is an early ferry in my area, and the cardboard it is mounted on seems to be some sort of church(??) yard sign(???)

we are still deciding the best course of action for this piece, but in all honestly, as a smallish museum/historical society with a laundry list of pieces with urgent conservation needs, we don't have the manpower to do anything other than keep it in a dark and temperature controlled space.

There are a lot of things that make me sad when I see pieces like this, because its so easy to see how important it was to its former owner, and it hurts me that we can't pour all of our time and resources into every piece that needs help. There are pieces even in this intake (which I cannot show because they contain identifying information about my location) that will be prioritized as they demand more immediate conservation efforts. Time can be a cruel opponent - and all we can do is our best.

anywho!!! all this is to say Support your local historical society!!! they are trying their darndest to preserve your local history and can't do so without community support! (and support does not always mean money!!! genuinely just interacting with your local historical societies can mean so much)

*I am unsure the specifics of where/how long it was on display for

[elbiotipo]

Just stop fucking thinking about "evil" countries and "good" countries. I do not hate the USA because it's "bad", I do not hate Usamericans, period. There are no "evil" or "good" nations, that is fascist thinking. I see the United States as a powerful country that enforces its imperialist interests because of historical conditions, and as such it must be resisted, challenged, and eventually changed or dissolved, and this to the benefit of the oppressed people all over the world and in the United States itself. This is not a fucking fantasy novel with good and evil kingdoms.

I was born in the Third World and in Latin America, and so I understand the position I'm in and struggle to change it. Usamericans should also understand the position they're also in and also work to change it. This is basic stuff.

[cuddlytogas]

maybe it's just the Radical Rediker talking, but there's something pointed in the way that, say, popular pirate media like Pirates of the Caribbean dilutes the pirate's freedom to "bring me that horizon" as opposed to, say, "plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power" (Bartholomew Roberts).

broadly speaking, most pirates chose the life in order to escape and revenge the hard labour, corporal punishment, overworking, and unequal pay of merchant/navy/privateer ships; or the privations of their sudden unemployment once a war was over, ignored as soon as their ability to die for the state was unneeded. yes, many were thugs, but, consciously political or not, they were responding to a particular, material reality.

the pirate's desired freedom was from the effects of exploitative modes of statehood and capital production. but popular media usually shifts this into a general desire for freedom: freedom to roam, freedom to love (usually merely a cross-class white, heterosexual union), or freedom from the personal pressures of social norms. it's a vague, ahistorical, post-Enlightenment, libertarian ideal rather than a response to a real social and economic situation.

to be clear, this only really applies to specifically the late golden age of piracy, in the first quarter of the 18th century. earlier generations of pirates/buccaneers often displayed nationalist/religious motives, and were lauded, tolerated, or even encouraged by the French and English states for aiding their fights against the Spanish and Portuguese. only the last gasp of age of sail pirates had a truly anti-national energy, and both figured themselves, and were figured by the imperial powers, as the enemies of all nations.

but if we are to valourise the late golden age pirate, at his best, his ideals were for true democracy, and the abolition of nation, hierarchy, and labour exploitation; not "the horizon". he was striking out in response to specific political, social, and economic oppressions, rather than a general individual restlessness, and that reality - and its similarities to our own - are important.

I dunno, I just... have a lot of thoughts about the defanging of piracy in modern media. obviously there were a lot of things bad about them, too, and the level of egalitarianism varied between individual people and ships. but again, if we're going to be valourising them anyway... there were idealists. and they weren't subtle about they wanted.

"I shan't own myself guilty of any murder", said William Fly in 1726. "Our captain and his mate used us barbarously. We poor men can't have justice done us. There is nothing said to our commanders, let them never so much abuse us, and use us like dogs. But the poor sailors --"

[gringolet]

notes on hair and uniforms on the hms camelot in 1811!

i have a lot of thoughts on the matter

[unnounblr]

Posting this as its own post now, because I thought it was a banger, but to me, the thing that always makes me think that the idea that having a Jewish state would make things safer or better for the Jewish people is a really stupid one is that that isn't really true even in our own scripture.

King David was supposed to be the best, most morally good king, the most godly and holy, and he's the one who exercised state power to have one of his own soldiers killed so he could keep fucking the guy's wife.

So. That particular state of Israel, evidently wasn't a very safe place to live in if you either had, or were, a fuckable enough wife.

...God, thinking about this, and now part of me wants to do, like, a Marxist reading criticizing some of the kings of Israel and their uses and abuses of authority and power from a historical materialist perspective. Has somebody done that already? Here, I mean.

[marxist-lelouchist]

Short post this time:

Perhaps the single most misunderstood element of Marxism is the concept of abolition.

Marxism will not involve abolishing anything.

Things wither away as they become utterly incapable of competing with the newer form.

Nobody is going to sit down and declare market economics to be illegal.

They are going to become so incapable of competing with the new form of production that they will simply shut down.

The nuclear family will not be declared illegal.

It will simply cease to be the only way that people form romantic relationships.

And, of course, nobody will abolish the state.

As the structure of society develops and moves beyond any class structure, any state in the way any of us have experienced will cease to have a purpose.

As there is no other class to oppress and control, it would simply become a tool of managing the productive forces and dealing with any potential unexpected crises.

Abolishing things is really not how Communism works, it transcends them and they fade away in irrelevance.

[gooberscollage]

1950s McCall and Simplicity Pattern Illustrations taken from Blueprints of fashion : home sewing patterns of the 1950s by Wade Laboissonniere

[peonycats]

Look dude, I was once a preteen/teen who fancied myself a Hetalian who took history *seriously* and *accurately* and showed the real brutality and blood tm of what nations would actually be like, and don't get me wrong, it's still important to strive for accuracy and to consider the sensitive and dark nature of history, but like... at some point, we all need to stop making everyone 2014 edgy sarcastic greyscale scumbags who always have a witty remark to snark back with. We need some levity and whimsy in our scumbags and we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously

[nebula1734]

Nothing is better than trying to look for reference material for a project and finding something with every dimension you could dream of.

I’m working on a project where I digitally model and 3D print a bunch of the ammo from the game Hunt: Showdown. The game is set in the late 1800s/early 1900s, so the rounds used by a bunch of the guns are virtually extinct. As a result, I want to do my little part to help preserve these small bits of history and recreate these obscure cartridges.

Anyways, I was looking for reference material for my model of the .41 Swiss round, used by the Vetterli carbine, and I think I managed to find THE FUCKING PATENT because it has exact measurements in millimeters (what I use in CAD), as well as tolerances (max/min dimensions of sections allowed in production under the patent), and a pattern for the paper patch that would be wrapped around the bullet before being pressed into the cartridge.

What a fucking find.

[maemil]

Oh my god, they were right... the Soviets really are sending spies to fuck national secrets out of our soldiers 😭

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern (2023) Issue 4

[handweavers]

i've been reading some essays about the history of what is called 'modern sikh theology' and how the idea of sikhi having a theology - which is a specifically western phenomenon, a concept of 'theology' as a distinct idea - was created out of the singh sabha movement from the late 19th and early 20th century whose primary historical-material goals were to create an interpretation of sikhi that would allow sikhs to retain a special status under the british colonial rule, aligning ourselves with christian ideas and understandings of what a religion is, what a theology is, and to emphasize our difference and therefore superiority to both hindus and muslims in the eyes of the british empire. and how the ideas of the singh sabha movement have become the primary ways in which we understand sikhi, the language we use to talk about sikhi in english, the ways in which we choose to translate sikhi and the teachings of the gurus into english. prior to that the concept of 'gurmat' (the teachings of the gurus, the fundamental ideas of sikhi) did not have an english translation which it is now equated to 'theology'. like prior to this sikhi was not emphasized as a monotheistic religion, because those terms and concepts are english ones, and these ideas have penetrated our understanding of sikhi as sikhs even when reading the original punjabi text, within our communities. and i'm kind of interested in a way of conceptualizing sikhi that does not appeal to western understandings of religion or theology, that does not necessarily try to situate itself as inherently distinct from either islam or hinduism but part of a greater cultural continuum, while acknowledging (and reiterating, expanding) the doctrinal emphases on equality among all, and the explicit rejection of caste that gurmat takes. because we know that while casteism is rejected from a religious standpoint, within sangat and langar, it absolutely is still present outside of the gurdwara within our communities. my own understanding of sikhi is monist or pantheistic, and from what i have read prior to british rule in punjab that kind of understanding of sikhi was more common; it has been heavily compared with the vedanta school as well as sufism, and both are practices i feel a lot of intellectual fondness for. and i feel incredibly limited by my extremely rudimentary punjabi language abilities, and i feel that without gaining that specific language knowledge there really isn't a way for me to engage more deeply with this subject because it will always be filtered through english.

[elbiotipo]