#I HAVE A DOCTORATE. I CITE SOME OF THESE TEXTS.

[the-everqueen]

VERY funny when i have a panic spiral about whether or not i "know" anything about something integral to my field (i have a phd) and start frantically looking up syllabi and required reading lists (i have a phd) and then i realize i've read a solid number of the texts recommended (i have a phd) and the ones i haven't i'm at least familiar with in a "someone else cited them bc it's an older critique" way or they're outside my specific interests (I HAVE A PHD)

[sparrowlucero]

Even if a creator is a bad person it's still okay to like their work. People need to mind their own business.

Honestly it's not really that sort of situation. I'll actively defend Steven Moffat here.

There was a huge hate movement for him back in the early 2010s - which, in retrospect, formed largely because he was running 2 of the superwholock shows at once, one of which went through extremely long hiatuses* and the other of which was functionally an adaptation of an already well regarded show**, making him subject to a sort of double ire in the eyes of a lot of fandom people. Notably, his co-showrunner, Mark Gatiss, is rarely mentioned and much of his work is still attributed to Moffat (and yes, this includes that Hbomberguy video. Several of "Steven Moffat's bad writing choices" were not actually written by him, they were Gatiss.)

People caricatured the dude into a sort of malicious, arrogant figure who hated women and was deliberately mismanaging these shows to spite fans, to the point where people who never watched them believe this via cultural osmosis. It became very common to take quotes from him out of context to make them look bad***, to cite him as an example of a showrunner who hated his fans, someone who sabotaged his own work just to get at said fans, someone who was too arrogant to take criticism, despite all of this being basically a collective "headcanon" about the guy formed on tumblr. Some if it got especially terrible, like lying about sexual assault (I don't mean people accused him of sexual assault and I think they're making it up, I mean people would say things like "many of his actresses have accused him of sexual assault on set" when no such accusations exist in the first place. This gets passed around en masse and is, in my opinion, absolutely rancid.)

On top of that a ton of the criticism directed at the shows themselves is, personally, just terrible media criticism. So much of it came from assuming a very hostile intent from the writer and just refusing to engage with the text at all past that.

Like some really common threads you see with critique of this writer's work, especially in regards to Doctor Who since that's the one I'm most familiar with:

A general belief that his lead characters were meant to be ever perfect self inserts, and so therefore when they act shitty or arrogant or flawed in any way, that's both reflective of the author and something the show wants you to view as positive or aspirational.

An overarching thesis that his characters are "too important" in the narrative due to the writer's arrogance and self obsession (even though this is a very deliberate theme that's stated several times)

A lot of focus on the writer personally "attacking" the fans or making choices primarily out of spite.

A tendency to treat the show being different to what it's adapting as inherently bad and hostile towards the original.

Just generally very little consideration and engagement with the themes, intent, etc. of the shows

This one's a little more nebulous and doesn't apply to all critique but a lot of it, especially recently, is clearly by people who haven't seen the show in like 10 years and their opinion is largely formed secondhand through like, "discourse nostalgia". Which. you know. bad.

I think these are just weird and nonsensical ways to engage with a work of fiction. I also think it's really sad to see the show boiled down to this because that era of who is, in my opinion, very thematically rich and unique among similar shows, and I'm disappointed that it's often dismissed in such a paltry way.

This isn't to say people aren't allowed to critique Steven Moffat or anything, but the context in which he basically became The Devil™ to a large portion of fandom and is still remembered in a poor light is very tied to this perfect storm of fan culture and I just don't agree with a ton of it.

* I'm sure most people have seen the way long running shows and hiatuses will cause people to fall out with a show, with some former fans turning around and joining a sort of "anti fandom" for it while it's still airing. That happened with both these shows. ** Doctor Who will change it's entire writing staff, crew, and cast every few years, and with that comes a change in style, tone, theme - the old show basically ends and is replaced by a new show under the same title. As Steven Moffat's era was the first of these handovers for the majority of audiences, you can imagine this wasn't a well loved move for many fans. *** I know for a fact most people have not sought out the sources for a lot of these quotes to check that they read the same in context because 1) most of them were deleted years ago and are very difficult to find now and 2) many of them do actually make sense in the context of their respective interviews

[transmutationisms]

hi! was wondering if you have any recs for some good critiques of Foucault’s historical method (or lack thereof)?

I enjoy reading his theory but I know his methodology can be lacking and would love to learn specifically how. ty <3

i don't have a text off the top of my head that is solely dedicated to making this critique of foucault (usually it's scattered into various historical literature) but i can just tell you:

foucault the historian has the consistent problem of relying on too few primary sources, almost all of which are french or english, meaning his claims are often only applicable to limited local cases (even the differences between the highly centralised, bureaucratised french state and the british situation tend to get flattened). his sources also tend to be authority figures like doctors and government officials, and he frequently makes the assumption that the powers they claim to have (or claim they SHOULD have) are powers they actually do have, which leads to a 'top-down' history that presents authorities and institutions as almost infallible in their efforts to repression, with virtually no attention paid to how people actually received any such mandates, and whether they were actionable, or subverted, or both. he also has a real problem conceiving of liberty in any terms but individual; politics for him is frequently characterised by a group vs individual struggle, which is a problem if what you are trying to understand is, say, the history of class struggle.

as a philosopher foucault articulated some general methodological guiding principles that remain useful in history: genealogical and archaeological methods, the call to historicise (meaning, to problematise; to contextualise) institutions and ideas presented as timeless or transcendent. there are also concepts in his historical narratives that other people have since fleshed out further, nuanced, and grounded in better evidence and 'bottom-up' histories, like biopolitics. so it's not unusual to see his name pop up in historical footnotes, especially in an introduction or conclusion where he may form part of a conceptual framework the author is using to interpret their evidence and turn it into a viable argument. but even these usages are certainly subject to critique (eg, the emphasis on individual liberty that suffuses his conceptual work; the extent to which his arguments can apply beyond the specific early modern metropolitan french contexts about which he was writing) and he should pretty much never be cited as a historian because his methodology in that respect was at best lacking.

[marzipanandminutiae]

many people know about the 1950s doctor who was obsessed with lobotomies (Dr. Walter Freeman)

fewer people know about the 1860s doctor who was obsessed with clitoridectomies, Isaac Baker Brown

he claimed the operation could cure pretty much all forms of mental illness in women- and then-undesirable behaviors that weren't mental illness at all, like masturbation. it's not known how many women and girls he mutilated, but some were teenagers on whom the procedure was performed without their (or their parents') knowledge or consent

Baker Brown cited a text by Hippocrates as support for this practice- a text which in fact concerned surgical removal of genital warts

he was kicked out of the Obstetrical Society of London in 1867 because of his lax approach to consent, but clitoridectomies remained in sporadic use as a mental health treatment in the US and UK until the mid-20th century. thank heaven they don't seem to have ever been commonplace exactly, but...one person subjected to this is one too many

(note: I use language exclusively referring to women here because, as far as we know, his victims were all what we'd now call cis women and girls. obviously not everyone with a clitoris is a woman, and not every woman has a clitoris)

[lxvvie]

NOOOOO HOW CAN YOU PUT THE GIRL DAD!SIMON IDEA IN MY HEAD LIKE THAT :,,((( THE CRY I CRODE

excuse my word vomit but if i may......

eldest girl is a worrywart and openly affectionate but has the tendency to be a scaredy-cat sometimes (she still has to conquer her nerves with the family dog, the retired military K9) while the youngest girl is a spitfire and plays rough (even with the dog, bless it), big emotions in a small girl and Junie for Junior???? You. Have. Gutted. Me...

also, they are very eloquent and articulate in communication and can effectively carry conversations at the young age of 4 and 3 because the parents (mostly, if not all the time simon) talk to them like they're 30 year-olds. they can say stuff "Saskatchewan" and "irrevocably" without breaking a sweat. the eldest catches papa's accent from time to time while Junie speaks without/has mum's.

there was one time papa simon came home with some new booboos: one on his shoulder (just right above the tattoo of his girls' names) and on his jaw (from shrapnels, let's say). eldest girl was playing up the doctor role, citing some random stuff from her little book and putting pink bandaids on it while junie was, well, scared of papa being all hurt. i imagine simon had to have a one on one with her before bed time, just him and her on the bedroom floor whilst the missus is explaining the sitch to their eldest in the master bathroom. all is a resolved with a big hug and a "y'know that papa's a big toughie, don't you june?"

("yes..." junie would reply, still catching her breath from all her crying earlier. "but none of this next time.")

when all is well and the rowdiness of the riley household has died down for the day, the missus can reward the big papa with some sweet lovin'

(the additional scar on his jaw is getting to her pussy :((( its making him all the more rugged under that blond stubble... perhaps baby no. 3 is in the making)

Anon, this is beautiful.

Doc and Junie have a tendency to call their peers knobheads when they get irritated and the missus bans Simon from using that word around them. It is ineffective.

Also, baby number 3 is conceived that very night that Simon gets back, and while he's away on assignment sometime later, his girls tell him that mum's been a little under the weather and kinda cranky when he does his daily check-in.

"She said the word today, papa!"

"...Oh? What word, June?" and she'll whisper, "Knobhead," all conspiratorial and shit 'cause who knows if Mum's around listening lmao.

He and the Missus talk later on and she rants about that one knobhead at the store and how the produce section really smelled something fierce today and then she stops mid-sentence like... "Oh... oh, bloody hell."

M'hm. 👀

Sometime later Simon gets a picture of multiple positive pregnancy tests and a text that reads, "This is all your fault. 🙃"

He'll happily take the blame for it. Junie and Doc have been asking for a little brother for some time now.

[phoenixyfriend]

Calls for Action, Call Your Reps: 2/13/24

This is USA-specific, as that is the place I live and know.

Find your elected officials.

Today, much of my information is coming from Democracy Now!, which I generally listen to as a podcast (functionally, it is a radio news broadcast, like NPR or BBC), and I am quoting from the text versions on their website.

The Senate passed a $95 billion military funding package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan in the pre-dawn hours this morning. But the bill’s fate remains unclear after House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the measure over its failure to include hard-line immigration restrictions. This comes after Johnson and other Republicans rejected an earlier version of the bill which did contain the border crackdown they had demanded. Johnson has told Republican congressmembers he will call a House vote on a stand-alone funding bill for Israel.

From the same page, we are hearing that President Biden is urging Israel to refrain from invading Rafah, where a million or so Palestinians are currently sheltering, but is not actually threatening any kind of repercussions for said invasion. Reports from both official sources (e.g. the Hamas-run health ministry) and less official (e.g. American doctors returning from relief services in Palestine) indicate that over half of the deaths in Palestine are children.

I am not going to pretend that I know what is going through Biden's head.

Both House and Senate:

Reinstate funding for UNRWA. While the claims made by Israel that employees of the relief agency were involved in Oct. 7th are troubling, THEY are not well supported, and western officials did not do their duty in investigating the claims before cutting funding. This arm of the UN is currently providing food, water, shelter, and medical care to the 2.3 million displaced peoples of Gaza. It is especially disturbing and concerning that the many children of Gaza, who are already suffering due to this conflict, are now having this support revoked. Many sources are also claiming that the evidence is flimsy at best.

Urge both Senate and House to refrain from funding Israel, or to at least put some strings on it. The IDF cannot be given funding without some regulations on what they can do with it. They have proven that they are unwilling to take steps to protect civilians.

FOR THE SENATE: Urge your senator to put their support behind Bernie Sanders and his motion to restrict funding to Israel until a humanitarian review of the IDF’s actions in Gaza has been completed. Cite it as Senate Resolution 504 if your Senator is right-wing enough to react negatively to the mention of Sanders by name. NOTE: This resolution was TABLED by the Senate on 1/16, but it is being brought back in as conditions continue to escalate.

FOR THE HOUSE: Urge your representative to put their support behind Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s petition for the US government to recognize the IDF’s actions in Gaza as ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, and put a stop to it. ALTERNATELY: recommend that they support House Resolution 786, introduced by Rep. Cori Bush, Calling for an immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.

On the House Floor this week, to call your rep about:

H.Res. 994: Married persons tax break. Vote nay. Loses billions in tax revenue and explicitly targets green energy.

H.R. 2766 and H.R. 4039: Condemnation of China's actions against the Uyghurs. Can't tell you which way to talk on this. Seems good on the surface, but given who's presenting it, I worry there's something worse tucked into the text. Hopefully someone can provide a better take.

H.R. 3016: IGO Anti-Boycott Act. Vote Nay. This appears to be intended to force US companies to do business with US allies instead of participating in boycotts. This appears, to me, to be an attack on movements like BDS. To Dem Reps, argue that this refuses the right of peaceful protest to US citizens. To Republican Reps, argue that this is a dangerous government overreach and that it is not the right of the government to force US citizens to purchase products and materials from specific foreign partners.

H.Res. 966: Condemnation of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas against Israel on Oct. 7. Vote Nay. We know sexual violence is bad. Hamas has already been condemned for their actions. This is, at best, lip service. It is a waste of time. There are much bigger, more impactful things to work on, and this is going to waste time and resources in the Senate if it passes.

If you wish to support my political blogging, I am accepting donations on ko-fi.

[grainjew]

On Gallifreyan Vestigial Gender

[this is the revised and expanded version of some rambling i initially did in my cowriter's discord DMs. i tried cite sources where i could, but a lot of this has been marinating in my brain since half-absorbing posts twenty pages deep into peoples' dw tags 3 years ago, and also i spend way too much time on the wiki, so please excuse anything i can't quite source, which is most of it. huge thanks to @oriigami for being my original conversation partner and contributing extremely to the concepts here, and to @bird-of-paradox and @waywren, neither of whom I am being allowed to @, for bothering me into not leaving it as unreadable discord screenshots]

-

There's this tendency among queer Doctor Who fans to look at Time Lord society, with its alienness and regeneration, and ask, frustrated, "Why do they even have gender?"

I sympathize with this extremely. I've been the one asking this question plenty in the past, and I do think it's a bit silly, and even sillier that the genders are "man" and "woman" and there are apparently two of them. But I also think that the section of canon most insistent about the Gallifreyan gender binary, the 7th Doctor novels from the 90s, also has the potential to be the most interesting about it.

Now, this is not to say that the text of those novels isn't weird about gender in a flawed, written by (as far as I know) cis people in the 90s way. But I think that you can extrapolate and queer what's there in very interesting ways, often because it's so flawed in the first place: Gallifrey, too, is an extremely flawed society. Decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core, as the show put it.

So, VNAs Gallifrey: living Houses and their female Housekeepers, cultural and literal planet-wide sterility, Loom birth, rigid overcomplicated bureaucracy, the enduring legacy of the pre-Rassilon Pythian regime. The gender binary as presented here goes something like

women: chaos/magic/psychic powers/superstition/the house (scary)/biological childbirth/fertility men: cold rationality/order/science/bureaucracy/loom-birth/sterility

The Pythia and the Lord President. Magic and science. The House and the Web of Time.

Obviously a lot of this is classic gender binary stuff. But let's put the exasperated question of "Why must we do the gender binary like this?" aside for a moment and think about Gallifreyan society instead.

Pythia-ruled and Time Lord-ruled Gallifrey have a lot of the same problems in the end, just wearing different faces: they're both very much totalitarian states that believe themselves to be above everyone else. But while the Time Lords observe and micromanage the Web of Time from their Panopticon, maintaining its integrity to their standards, the Pythians didn't have time travel, so this preoccupation with control manifested--as far as I know; this is the bit in the meta where I admit I haven't actually read Time's Crucible yet--as keeping the entirety of society in one psychic hivemind, leaving nobody any privacy, plus a lot of future-reading and prophecy and whatnot.

The main relics of that societal layout into post-Rassilon Gallifreyan society are the Matrix, which has every single dead Time Lord's brain in it and does their prophecies for them, just couched in a little bit more science than Pythian magic, the Houses, which are alive all around you and in which you're constantly being watched by the Housekeeper through her mirrors, and, of course, the gender binary.

The Pythia was always a woman. Women were the ones with vast psychic powers, with magic; women were the ones in charge. Pythian Gallifrey was a heavily gendered society. This is because Gallifreyans are a kind of bug /shot with the "irrelevant to the point at hand" gun.

And so, when Rassilon rebelled, he was very much playing the part of "opposite gender with opposite worldview." The Pythia had female magic and superstition; he had male science and technology. His most trusted Founders were either all or mostly men, depending on the version of events you prefer. (Personally I have my doubts about the Other.) Rassilon built his new society as a man, among men, in opposition to the matriarchs before him.

Gallifrey, despite the invention (or theft, depending on the story) of regeneration allowing people to trans their gender randomly and sometimes unintentionally, never left the gender binary behind.

The whole point of modern Gallifreyan society is that they're still stuck in that exact same moment Rassilon took over (and the Pythia cursed them to sterility, if thats the version you're going with). You could easily make an argument for this being some cycle of abuse type situation; Rassilon and co overthrew the Pythia and immediately did exactly what she was doing to them to the wider universe. I tend to read it as a regeneration: it's the same society, really. It just died and was reborn, and now it looks and sounds different.

-

The downside of trying to translate a discord conversation into a proper meta post is that sometimes making a coherent transition between thoughts is impossible. So to introduce the next bit of this post, I'm going to hand you off for a moment to this post about the 8th Doctor's "I'm not sure I've ever even been a man" quote from Interference. As op of that post says, the Doctor is genderqueer even by Gallifreyan standards- he's being questioned in that scene by another Gallifreyan, who doesn't understand his experience of gender.

The EDAs are full of "Eight is nonbinary" quotes, of course. Every queer fan who's ever engaged with them has a collection (and if anyone knows where that one google doc compilation that was going around awhile back went I'd be in your debt, because I'd love to know if my collection is missing any), but almost all those quotes refer to his genderqueerness in human terms, as observed by human companions, or in response to human assumptions. Except that one. Not only is Gallifrey's gender binary alive and well in a society where people can literally change their gender when they die, but the Doctor doesn't fit inside it.

All this to say that being a renegade Time Lord is a nonbinary thing to do. Especially the Doctor, with all sorts of weird Other Timeless nonsense in their biodata. Women stay on Gallifrey (or Karn!) and do magic and watch you. Men stay on Gallifrey and do science and watch other people. Renegades go out and do whatever they please. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

-

So. Gallifrey has a gender binary. It's vestigial, a remnant of an earlier iteration of society with a much sharper male-female divide, and it doesn't make logical sense for it to exist. So: How does it manifest? And what function does its continued existence serve in the interests of the status quo and ruling class?

Let's take a look at 7th Doctor novel Lungbarrow.

Lungbarrow introduces us to (among many other things) the living Houses of the Time Lord Families, and to the family structures within: the patriarchal figure of the Kithriarch, the always-female Housekeeper, bound in her ritual marriage to the House itself, and hordes of petty squabbling Cousins.

Kithriarch is already an interesting title. It's obviously a gender neutral version of matriarch or patriarch, but the role itself seems to be almost entirely a male sort of thing in opposition to the feminine Housekeeper.

The Housekeeper, meanwhile, seems to be in a direct conceptual and societal line of descent from the Pythian priestesses: she can see anything within her domain, she has a psychic connection to the House, from whom she cannot hide anything, she can command the wooden Drudge servants and other House subsystems, she prioritizes the House above all where the Kithriarch is supposed to prioritize the Family. Women are frightening and powerful psychics. They know everything you want to keep secret, and prioritize the collective.

(There's also something here about how Lungbarrow presents duelling dualities--the Doctor and the Master, the CIA head and the Lord President, the Kithriarch and the Housekeeper, the masculine and the feminine--but I haven't quite tied it into the rest of this yet.) (Although while we're mentioning the Master. He's girlcoded by Gallifreyan standards and the Rani is boycoded by the same. I will not be expanding on this at this time just trust me.)

I think Housekeepers and women who want to be Housekeepers try to keep their self-image as women strong enough that they never regenerate into a male body (whatever a '"male body" means, of course, but I'm not sure Time Lords have gotten that far in their queer theory yet). I also think that there are more female Kithriarchs than male Housekeepers, because Housekeeper is much more heavily ritualized role in keeping with the Pythia's more ritualized general vibe, but I do think female Kithriarchs are still few and far between.

I also think that these are probably the most explicitly gendered occupations on Gallifrey, although of course you'll see some drift. Most women are out there getting the same scientific, military, and bureaucratic positions as men. But there's this lingering specter of gender roles, a Pythia-shaped hole that exists around the concept of womanhood. As my cowriter put it when we were talking about this, an "ideal of womanhood. not ‘ideal’ as in desirable, [but] ‘ideal’ as in the quintessential image of the thing."

This is further amplified by the continued existence of the Pythians in the form of the Sisterhood of Karn, living in their perfectly functional all-women magic society just out of sight. Their presence at the edge of the Gallifreyan consciousness must haunt the Time Lords, as any imperialist power is haunted by its own past and its own ultimate impotence.

Because that's the other thing. Gender roles are, to quote my cowriter again, "stupid and antiquated and historically potent tools of authoritarianism." Of course the Time Lords have them. Have you seen them?

They're tools of control, of conformity, of idealizing the past. Of conservatism. Consider, to once more quote my cowriter, "the weird traditionalist psychosis of having gender roles in a society that can’t bear children."

The ideal woman on Gallifrey is still the Pythia, millenia or even billenia on. And the ideal man is still the Lord President Rassilon.

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[thank you for your time! if you liked this please consider checking out my fic Something Old, which is about lungbarrow, the adventuress of henrietta street, and the gallifreyan concept of marriage, and in the writing of which i initially articulated most of the thoughts in this post. i've previously characterized it as a fic that's actually a meta post. and please don't be too mean to me for anything i got wrong in here! i'm just a little guy]

[jessicalprice]

adventures in christian opinions about judaism

(reposted from Twitter)

So a while back I started writing a thing on the trio of parables that ends with the prodigal son (which I still need to finish) and like MAN OH MAN do Christian commentators insist that Jews hate shepherds.

Like, I can't even count the number of commentaries that insist that shepherds were "despised figures" for first-century Jews and the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin were designed to insult the Pharisees by comparing them first to a shepherd and then to a woman.

So, as is my wont whenever Christian commentators make a claim about what was normal for first-century Judaism, I decided to try to hunt down their source on this.

As I've said many times, when it comes to Christian parable interpreters' claims about what attitudes/beliefs/etc. were normal for first-century Jews, get used to the phrase "no sources are cited."

I mean, first off, as a 21st-century Jew, the insistence that 1st-century Jews hated shepherds rings odd, given that <checks notes> Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rachel, all of Jacob's kids (the founders of the tribes), David, etc. were all sheep-tenders. The image of God as a shepherd is pretty consistent throughout the Tanakh. That image reappears in the Qumran texts, which as far as I know, are one of the few Jewish sources we have from 1st-century Judaea.

The term "despised" gets used a lot, so I decided to dig into that one.

When I was able to find citations, I traced them back to an 1882 commentary by a guy named Frederic Farrar.

Farrar cites Heinrich Meyer as a source for this, but when I looked up THAT citation, it's Meyer saying that shepherds were a "lowly but patriarchally consecrated class" -- in other words, poor, but with a distinguished history and status.

So that's why everyone's tossing the term "despised" around--because Farrar just made it up. But what about primary sources? I went back on the hunt.

Surprisingly, in a number of reference works, like glossaries and Jeffers's "Greco-Roman World of the New Testament," I found similar assertions about the common attitude toward shepherds, for which they cited...

<drum roll>

Aristotle. You know, the Greek guy who lived 300 years before Jesus? Definitely a reliable source for Jewish attitudes of the time.

Some people cited Philo's On Agriculture. Okay, Philo was at least Jewish and lived when Jesus would have, although he was a wealthy Hellenized Jew living in Alexandria rather than a Pharisee living in the Galilee. But okay, at least it's the right culture and time period. (The reference in Philo turns out to be talking about the section of Genesis in which Joseph's brothers come visit him in Egypt. It talks about how they were proud to be shepherds, and criticizes (gentile) kings who look down on shepherds.)

Then we've got Mishnah Kiddushin, in which a bunch of rabbis are having a debate about which professions make you trustworthy vs untrustworthy, and one rabbi lists everyone from camel-drivers to herders to barbers to shopkeepers as untrustworthy. Another rabbi comes back and is like, nah, all those people are fine upstanding folks; it's doctors and butchers you've gotta watch out for. So they're citing one cranky dude with a LONG list of people he doesn't like, who immediately gets shot down, as evidence of the normative attitude for Jews about a century earlier.

Oh, and we've got a citation of Midrash Tehillim which says that God-as-shepherd doesn't have any of the failings of humans-as-shepherds, which... sure. Also, it was codified in the 1300s?

The most compelling citation is from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 25b), in which the rabbis discuss who's qualified to be a legal witness. They exclude shepherds, because shepherds graze their animals on other people's land, which some of the rabbis see as a type of theft.

The Talmud is a record of debates, but this passage definitely makes it sound like this is a majority opinion. (It should be noted that the passage disqualifies all KINDS of people, from those who lend with interest to those who fly pigeons, as having conflicts of interest.)

But the important thing here is that the Talmud includes records of debates from as late as the 4th or 5th centuries CE (300-400 years after Jesus's time), and the passage makes a point of noting that the disqualification of shepherds as witnesses is a later development.

So in other words, the idea that the Pharisees hated shepherds and would have been insulted by Jesus telling a story in which the protagonist was a shepherd is based either on Greek attitudes that are 300 years too early or Jewish ones that are 300-400 years too late.

But people will twist themselves into citation knots (or just not bother citing a source at all) to insist that this was a common attitude so they can position the Pharisees as hating those charming humble shepherds and their fuzzy little lambs.

As to WHY this idea seems to be so important to them, well, you cannot read about Luke 15 without encountering the word "outcast" roughly 90 times per page.

The framing is Jesus was friend to The Outcasts while the Pharisees despised The Outcasts and the Lost Sheep, Coin, and Sons are all parables about accepting The Outcast.

Never mind that neither the sheep, the coin, nor either of the sons got kicked out of their communities. The sheep wandered off, as sheep are wont to do, the coin was lost by its owner, and the younger son decided to leave to go on a spending spree while the older son declined to attend the welcome back party for him after his dad managed to hire a band and caterers but never thought to let his own son know what was going on and he had to find out from a hired hand.

Moreover, the term "outcasts" gets used as a synonym for "tax collectors and sinners." Tax collectors were usually pretty well-off because they ran a protection racket for the Romans. Outcasts? I mean, I guess? But hardly in the "marginalized and powerless" sense.

As far as "sinners," the NT doesn't usually bother telling us what, exactly, they did to "sin," but on the rare occasions when it does offer that context, it's almost always wealthy people.

But why talk about that when they can present the objection the Pharisees had to Jesus's dining with "tax collectors and sinners" as the Pharisees despising lowly outcasts, and insist that the Pharisees hated the idea of such people repenting and returning, and so Jesus was tweaking their noses by comparing them to shepherds and women.

As if, you know, teshuvah wasn't something the Pharisees were ALL ABOUT. If you want to actually understand, consider that the iconic tax collector in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector shows no inclination to STOP being a tax collector.

The objection wasn't you're having a friendly dinner with poor lowly outcasts for whom we have contempt. It was you're having a friendly dinner with people who are extorting their neighbors on behalf of the invaders who kill us for looking at them funny and have expressed no intention to stop doing that.

Now, there's a good discussion to be had about whether shunning Trump lawyers and Marjorie Taylor-Greene donors or inviting them to dinner and trying to win them over with compassion is more effective, more ethical, more compassionate (to whom?), etc.

But presumably we can see why people of intelligence and goodwill might disagree on which of those approaches is the right thing to do, and why such people might might object to the strategy they don't agree with.

But what really gets me is that Christians have the utter fucking NERVE to paint the Pharisees as inhumanly awful for not wanting to have dinner with tax collectors while viewing Corinthians as Holy Writ:

I mean, Paul's all YOU MUST SHUN ALCOHOLICS AND PEOPLE WHO ARE GREEDY and Christians are like yes, that makes sense, but if the Pharisees are like, no, I don't want to have dinner with that guy who narced on my cousin and got him crucified, Christians are like, they're monsters.

Cool, cool.

Anyway, this has been your weekly edition of Christians Need To Stop Just Making Shit Up About Jews And Then Citing Each Other Like It's Fact.

And there were a lot of "I've never heard anyone say Jews of Jesus's time hated shepherds..." responses: Maybe you haven't, but that doesn't make it uncommon.

Sources in which I've found it:

Craig Blomberg (Denver Seminary, Society of Biblical Literature, Tyndale House, NIV translation committee)

Jared Wilson (professor at multiple Baptist seminaries)

Stephen Wright (Spurgeon College (British evangelical college))

Arland Hultgren (Luther Seminary (ELCA))

Kenneth Bailey (Presbyterian/Episcopalian)

Joachim Jeremias (Lutheran, cited EVERYWHERE)

Bernard Brandon Scott (Disciples of Christ, the Jesus Seminar)

Klyne Snodgrass (Evangelical Covenant Church)

Barbara Reid (Catholic Biblical Association)

That particular trope spans denominations, decades, etc. It's not a fringe viewpoint.

[theromaboo]

The Ninth Day of Julius Caesar

As a person who enjoys looking at retrospective diagnoses maybe a little bit too much, I have read quite a significant amount of works regarding Julius Caesar. He is traditionally said to have had epilepsy (though we don't know for sure if it's true or not) and so many people have done medical speculation over him over the years.

However, no one's perfect!

My favourite source on this topic will always be Julius Caesar's Disease by Francesco Galassi and Hutan Ashrafian. It's a very neat book about the history of this topic and it looks at bunch of other people's theories, but mainly it argues that Caesar did not have epilepsy but transient ischemic attack. I don't like it because I hate the epilepsy theory and really like this new theory (I consider myself to be neutral in this topic because we can never know), I like it because it is the first thing I've read on this topic that actually had some common sense and wasn't making mistakes all over the place!

However, it's pretty recent, from 2015, and people writing between 2004 and 2015 couldn't use it, so they all went and used a source I don't really like.

Enter "Dictator Perpetuus: Julius Caesar—Did he have seizures? If so, what was the etiology?" by John R. Hughes.

A hint about what I dislike about this source is that it was published in a medical journal. If a retrospective diagnosis work is published in a medical journal, prepare for good medical information but bad historical information. And if it is published in a history journal, vice versa. Context matters! Everyone publishing stuff about this are either doctors or historians and usually it's easy to tell which one the writer is.

Anyway, this one... it could be worse. It's certainly not the most diabolical thing you could read in the whole retrospective diagnoses of Caesar topic (that would go to "Searching for Neurological Diseases in the Julio-Claudian Dynasty"!) but there are a few parts of it that are very poorly done. And for some reason, the only parts that had any influence at all are the poorly done parts!

In the abstract, there is one silly sentence that is the bane of my existence: "His son, Caesarion, by Queen Cleopatra, likely had seizures as a child, but the evidence is only suggestive."

The evidence is only suggestive? I didn't know that was a euphemism for "I cited a modern historical fiction novel," because that's where the evidence came from. Historical fiction!

At least Hughes is pretty honest about where his information comes from and he does say that the only source for that is historical fiction and not ancient sources. But, why put it in?

Anyway, probably from the vague wording in the abstract, it's become a common misconception that Caesarion had epilepsy. People keep saying that and citing this work but if they had actually read it, I don't think they would've been impressed or convinced. Because in the text itself, it's clear that the source is historical fiction! It's only ambiguous in the abstract.

Maybe Caesarion did have epilepsy, we don't know much about him, but there is no evidence at all because historical fiction doesn't count as evidence.

This is actually mentioned in Julius Caesar's Disease! Unfortunately I cannot find the book right now, but I remember that it basically said "I like Masters of Rome, but I don't cite it!"

The author of one of the historical fiction novels actually said in the author's note "This detail about Caesarion I made up and there is no ancient sources that support it. It's not completely impossible, but don't cite this," and guess what happened? I feel so bad for her. If I was unwillingly the cause of a misconception, either my ego would balloon or I'd run away and become a hermit.

(Did you know that once an AI plagiarized me? I was talking to a chatbot about ancient Rome and I was really agreeing with it. I was like "wow this is literally exactly what I would write about this" and then I realised that it was literally exactly what I wrote about it because the AI had stole my words! Seeing my idea somewhere else certainly made my ego ten times bigger so maybe if I start a misconception it'll have the same effect?)

What's funny is that if I had a nickle for everytime this happened (someone citing a historical fiction book in which a male teenager who had a famous father and could've been heir to him and who is a part of Roman history during the first century BC to the first century AD had a medical condition in the historical fiction novel that is not supported by any ancient source and then a bunch of people citing the person who originally cited the historical fiction book until that detail becomes a misconception), I'd have two nickles. How does this happen twice? And how it that the two historical figures are so similar too? This misconception (not the Caesarion one) made its way onto Wikipedia so that's fun!

I know this misconception isn't actually about Caesar, but Caesarion. It's somewhat relevant to Caesar so it's fine! Alright guys remember, historical fiction is not a good source. This theory about Caesarion doesn't have "suggestive" evidence, but no evidence at all.

I'm sorry that I've really been slacking with my series. And I'm sorry that today's post is probably completely unreadable (I was really struggling to make words make sense). I promise I'll finish eventually, because once I finish this series, I'll finally be free.

[civilgroupie-gvf]

The Boy in The Band

Chapter 9: Your song 

Josh Kiszka X Reader 

Summary: Josh’s mom throws you a baby shower, Sam wears a diaper, and the boys give you really thoughtful gifts. 

*Fluff the house down boots mama*

Being eight months pregnant is not for the faint of heart. You tried to get a glimpse of your swollen, throbbing feet but only saw the horizontal curvature of your enormous stomach. A large yellow button shimmered near your left shoulder that said “MOM”. Josh had disappeared a suspiciously long time into the house while you waited in the center of Karen and Kelly’s back yard. It was full of spectators, all wearing buttons that either said XX or XY in reference to what they hoped the sex of the baby would be. Sam, however, refused to partake in the gender binary and placed a sticky note with the word “baby” where the button was supposed to go. Karen had chosen yellow as the main color with decorations loosely based on Winnie the Pooh. Karen shared with everyone she chose yellow, not only because it’s the traditional gender-neutral color but because Elton John had told her it was his favorite color at the party the boys had recently performed at. “Who knows! Maybe there’s yet another rock star in the family.” Karen said followed by a soft chuckle. Tiny jars of honey sat at the table near the sliding door with labels that said, “Y/N and Josh’s Baby shower” with the date. A fancy (and frankly oversized) chocolate fountain sat at the center of the pastry table surrounded by fresh fruit and pretzels for dipping. The rest of the table was patterned with cupcakes, made graciously by Jita and Ronnie who were finishing up frosting the last batch in the kitchen. Finally, you heard a familiar rhythm of steps.

“I brought you a snack!” Josh said catching his breath. “And your vitamins.”

“Did you run all the way home for them?” You joked.

“Basically.” Josh admitted in a bashful tone. “You forgot them on the bedside table.”

“So you drove all the way home for them?” You asked in shock. 

“That’s so cute.” Danny said with his usual sincere and warm smile.

“What? What did he do?” Sam looked up from his phone demanding to be filled in.

“Maybe you should stop texting all your girlfriends and pay attention.” Danny told Sam. 

“Ever since my OBGYN told us I need to increase my prenatal vitamins, Josh has been on me. I’m so grateful too because baby brain is no joke. I have the memory of a goldfish lately.” You explained.

“She also said if you eat raw almonds as a snack right before, your body will absorb more of the vitamins.” Josh repeated the doctor’s orders verbatim.  

“I think Josh is practicing his daddy skills with Y/N!” Kelly shouted and all the guests began to laugh.

Everyone was present from the twins’ and Danny’s family to Charlotte, Beverly, and some other people from the GVF team. Your mom had made the drive for the shower and was seemingly hitting it off with everyone quite nicely.

“Oh leave him alone.” Karen waved her hand at Kelly in a gentle attempt to get the festivities started once and for all. After you ate your almonds and took your vitamins, you were asked to judge a variety of games. One of the games required partners of two to race in dressing one of the partners in a baby costume. The costume being comically large diapers Karen found at Party City, a baby bonnet, a bib and a pacifier. The only catch being they had to run across the yard and grab one item at a time and put it on before running back for the next one. 

The teams were naturally split into existing couples such as Jake and Jita, Danny and Beverly, Karen and Kelly. However Ronnie and Sam wanted to play and decided to pair up. The race began. Kelly and Karen took turns running back and forth, adding an item of baby clothes onto Kelly as they went. Jake and Jita went with a similar approach except Jita was the one wearing the costume. Danny had decided to run back and forth citing his incredible endurance, bringing Beverly each item of clothing, and helping her into them. You knew very well Danny was just being a gentleman so Beverly wouldn’t have to get all sweaty. For Sam and Ronnie’s team, Ronnie declared seniority and told Sam he had to bite the bullet and wear a diaper. While every team started with the diaper, Sam and Ronnie started with the easiest item, being the pacifier, and worked their way up. The diaper had proved to be difficult to get into, for the other teams, but having it out of the way allowed them to zoom through the remainder of the race. Sam and Ronnie were dead last. At the final countdown, Ronnie and Sam scrambled to get him into the diaper except Sam’s scrawny legs couldn’t hold it up. In a hilarious attempt to get the diaper adjusted to his waist, Sam laid on the ground while Ronnie pulled at the Velcro of each side bringing the diaper in before securing it again. Jake and Jita exclaimed in excitement when they had managed to beat everyone. Sam groaned, still laying on the ground like a giant toddler.

“What did we win?” Jake asked in a hurry.

“Isn’t bragging rights enough?” Jita playfully elbowed Jake.

“No.” Jake answered laughing.

Karen pulled out a box of roman candles and handed them to the winning couple with as much ceremony as if it was a golden Oscar.

“Aw man! That’s such a cool prize!” Sam whined after pulling the pacifier out of his mouth and getting up from the ground.

“You are so baby.” Josh teased.

“And for wahhh…” Jake added. The image of Sam in a diaper tickled Kelly especially, evidenced by his inability to stop cackling, arms crossed over his belly in joyful pain.

As the baby shower came to an end, people began to go home. Karen began to bring over all the presents for you to open.

Sam’s gift was a gigantic box of newborn diapers, and a tiny newborn size T shirt that said, “Future bassist.” Jake scoffed audibly.

“Don’t start.” Karen said through a smile and gritted teeth.

Jake and Jita’s gift came in a huge box full of packing peanuts that confettied onto the floor as Josh helped you pull out a child-sized electric guitar and a small amp.

“This is precious.” You said admiring the cherry red varnish as it glistened in the golden patio light.

It wasn’t long before Sam and Danny took turns playing on the amusingly small guitar.

“I know it’ll be a while before they’re old enough to play but Jake wanted to be the first to buy them an instrument.” Jita whispered to you. Finally, it was time to open Danny’s gift. He had ordered a handmade, custom crib-mobile with all the GVF instruments in plushie form hanging from it. There was a seafoam bass, Jake’s red guitar, Danny’s drum set, and even Josh’s tambourine that rattled when it moved. You couldn’t help but squeal from the cuteness. 

You thought you had finished with the gifts when Jake suddenly asked everyone to go inside for a surprise. Everyone sat in the living room where the baby grand piano, that Sam learned to play on, lived.

“Sam and I wanted to do something special for our first niece or nephew.” Jake announced. Sam strolled over to the worn-down wooden bench and got into playing position.

You were confused about the lack of guitar in Jake’s arms until you realized he planned to sing. You weren’t sure if it was the hormones, but you instantly felt your eyes tear up as Sam carefully played the first notes of “Your Song”, by Elton John.

You couldn’t hold your tears back as Jake started singing in his raspy voice. When the chorus came Jake got closer and sang directly to the dome of a belly in front of you.

“I know it's not much, but it's the best I can do My gift is my song and this one's for you And you can tell everybody This is your song It may be quite simple, but now that it's done I hope you don't mind I hope you don't mind That I put down in the words How wonderful life is while you're in the world.”

You looked over at Josh who was wiping streams of hot tears off his red cheeks. Your chest swelled up with so much emotion at how much you loved this man. This sensitive, beautiful, kind man who was the father of your first child and his family that you so gratefully inherited.

The night ended in the driveway with laughter and smiles that flickered in the light of roman candles as they shot sparkly fire into the sky.

[mizandria]

Not a troll, genuine question: I thought Johnny Depp was good? Like all his wife's allegations against him were fake? Did he do other things?

no, no, he definitely is not... her allegations against him were that he's lying when he says she "defamed" him by writing an article in Washington Post about having been a victim of domestic & sexual assault. but she didn't even use his name ONCE in the article, plus she didn't say anything untrue and this is corroborated by an UK court who found Depp guilty of 12 out of 14 counts of abuse against Amber in 2020 when he sued The Sun for calling him a wifebeater. basically it was proven that he is one. some instances of this:

- in 2014 Amber was shooting a movie with James Franco, Depp got jealous, taunted and kicked her; proven by texts from his assistant to Amber he sent afterwards talking about how sorry Depp is for doing this to her

- in March 2015 they both were in Austrialia where Amber allegedly threw a bottle at Depp and the bottle sliced his finger off; but he also texted his doctor about slicing his own finger off later ("I cut the top of my middle finger off") + he admitted this in an audio

- in December 2015 he dragged her by her hair, slapped, head butted, punched; proven by the pictures of injuries she took + their marriage consuelor saw the pictures and the injuries in person (he admits to headbutting her in one audio)

- in 2016 he trashed their condo and again assaulted her, and there are pictures of the trashed condo, Isaac Baruch for one saw the condo and testified about it (even thought he was one of the pro-Depp witnesses)

- their neighbour (Raquel Pennington) testifies that she saw Amber cowering in fear before Depp during one of their fights and she covered Amber with her own body to protect her. when he attacked Amber, she was on the phone with her friend, causing the friend to call 911. Amber texted a nurse about that and a medical report confirms the injury. that's when she decided to file for the divorce.

there's more, but these are the ones there is evidence for. but based on what we know about Johnny as a person I believe Amber about all the counts of abuse she cited (including the rape allegation). he's a raging misogynist (for example he texted Paul Bettany that he wants to drown Amber, burn her corpse and then rape it, tried to submit Amber's nudes and proof of her working as a stripped for some reason, threw a bottle at his ex, Ellen Barkin), an addict, an alcoholic, he's pathologically jealous (confirmed by almost all his ex girlfriends/wives), prone to turning violent and throwing things or assaulting others.

he also lied about Amber abusing him, as in he tried to paint her as the perpetrator all while this is what you can find in the unsealed documents: "Depp’s team shielded him from undergoing a psychiatric evaluation on grounds that he “does not allege a specific cause of action for intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress; does not assert that Ms. Heard’s actions caused him a specific psychiatric injury; and does not claim that Ms. Heard’s actions caused him to experience unusually severe emotional distress.”". then he sat in the courtroom acting like he's traumatized by all the abuse he suffered from her, a not well known actress half his age back when they were dating. he was also so traumatized and scared of her that he started walking up to her as she was leaving the courtroom, causing her to take a step back out of fear and then he just turned around while laughing at her. demonic behavior!

for more I really recommend this timeline of their relationship and @justiceamberheard 's masterpost of the court proceedings summary (with links, so you can verify and see for yourself)!!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: Feb 29, 2024

The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University's medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university on Wednesday.

The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen's 163-page dissertation, "'UBUNTU' I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization," submitted to Iowa State University's School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia's entry on "Afrocentric education," which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation.

Other pages lift paragraphs from well-known African scholars, including the University of Rwanda's Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu, while making small tweaks to their prose, such as reordering certain clauses or changing a "were" to a "was."

Some of the scholars McKen allegedly plagiarized appear in the dissertation's bibliography but not in in-text citations. Others, like Ezeanya-Esiobu, an expert on "indigenous knowledge" who has worked with numerous international agencies, including the World Bank, aren't cited at all.

"The passages you shared can definitely be classified as plagiarism," Ezeanya-Esiobu told the Washington Free Beacon. McKen lifts pages worth of material from Ezeanya-Esiobu's 2019 chapter "A Faulty Foundation: Historical Origins of Formal Education Curriculum in Africa," published in the Frontiers in African Business Research book series.

Columbia's research integrity officer, Naomi Schrag, did not respond to a request for comment. Iowa State University did not respond to a request for comment.

McKen, who holds a certificate in diversity and inclusion from Cornell University, oversees all DEI programs for staff at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which includes Columbia's flagship medical school, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and is the largest campus of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The center's DEI initiatives include mandatory "antiracism" training for faculty and admissions officers, as well as an expedited hiring process for minority scholars.

McKen also works with the Columbia provost's office, according to a fall 2023 bulletin announcing his appointment. That office oversees tenure decisions for the entire university, including the medical school. Columbia did not respond to a request for comment about whether McKen has oversight of faculty and doctors.

Before arriving at the medical center, McKen was the assistant dean of recruitment, diversity, and inclusion for Columbia's graduate school of architecture. His current role was created in 2021 when the medical center hired Tonya Richards as its inaugural chief diversity officer. The new position came as the university was embarking on an ambitious plan to address "structural racism" in health care, guided by a 100-person task force drawn from Columbia's four medical schools: the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as the schools of nursing, dentistry, and public health.

"It is very clear that promotion of diversity or even the presence of diversity is insufficient to counter deeply embedded anti-Black racism," read the task force's 2020 report. "Our self-reflection and actions at this time must be focused on the elimination of racism in all aspects of our work."

The complaint against McKen, which was filed anonymously, marks the third time in one month that a diversity administrator at an Ivy League school has been hit with charges of plagiarism. Other complaints have alleged that Harvard Extension School's Title IX coordinator, Shirley Greene, copied paragraphs and tables from other scholars without proper attribution and that Harvard University's chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, took credit for an entire study done by her husband. The allegations against both officials followed the downfall of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who resigned after nearly half her published work was implicated in a plagiarism scandal.

McKen's dissertation contains some of the most extreme examples of plagiarism thus far. The 50-page complaint, which was submitted to Iowa State University as well as Columbia, outlines nearly 60 cases in which McKen, who assumed his post at the medical center last year, borrows passages from Africanists, education scholars, and diversity consultants without attribution.

One of the plagiarized authors is Kwayera Archer-Cunningham, a "change agent" and "well-being coach" who offers courses on "decoloniality." McKen lifts over five paragraphs from Archer-Cunningham's 2007 journal article "Cultural Arts Education as Community Development: An Innovative Model of Healing and Transformation," in New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education.

As with Ezeanya-Esiobu, McKen makes scant changes to the plagiarized text. One passage simply switches the order of two items in a bulleted list while keeping their contents identical, and without citing Archer-Cunningham's paper in parentheses.

The passages appear to run afoul of Iowa State University's plagiarism policy, which state that "it is a violation for students to reproduce another person's paper, work or artistry, even with modifications."

McKen did not respond to a request for comment. Archer-Cunningham, who founded the Brooklyn-based arts academy on which McKen's dissertation research was based, did not respond to a request for comment.

McKen also lifts a jargon-filled passage from LaGarrett King, a scholar of black education at the University of Buffalo who urges the "dismantling" of "white epistemic logic." King is not cited anywhere in the dissertation and did not respond to a request for comment.

Another paragraph cribs from a 2002 paper by Michael Adeyemi and Augustus Adeyinka, "Some Key Issues In African Traditional Education," published in the McGill Journal of Education. McKen never cites the 2002 paper, though he does include a different article by Adeyemi and Adeyinka—both scholars at the University of Botswana—in his bibliography.

Adeyemi and Adeyinka did not respond to a request for comment.

The complaint alleges that McKen plagiarized over 30 authors total, not including Wikipedia. While the allegations only cover his dissertation, McKen has published multiple academic articles, according to his Google Scholar profile, with titles such as "Black Men in Engineering Graduate Education: Experiencing Racial Microaggressions Within the Advisor–Advisee Relationship" and "I Am Because We Are," which explores "how African cultural practices can direct learning toward liberation."

In September, McKen outlined his DEI priorities in a news bulletin for the medical center. "Everyone here," he said, "is committed to doing the work."

==

Since every single domain that underlies DEI - Feminist Theory, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Queer Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Intersectionality, Whiteness Studies - is academically fraudulent, it would be more surprising if every DEI commissar and apparatchik wasn't also a plagiarist and fraud.

[prolifeproliberty]

Hi! This article is making me angry and I thought you might be able to relate to my anger.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/11/15/1135882310/miscarriage-hemorrhage-abortion-law-ohio

Even if this woman wasn't treated because the doctors were afraid of Ohio's abortion law (which, in my opinion, the article does not definitively prove by any stretch of the imagination), that only proves that doctors are somehow woefully misinformed about abortion laws and how they work.

And articles like this certainly wouldn't be helping that problem.

UGH.

Incompetence or malice - either way this has got to stop.

Ohio's law doesn't ban abortion at 6 weeks - it bans abortion when a heartbeat can be detected. If the heartbeat has stopped because the baby has died, the law no longer applies.

And the law allows doctors to intervene when the mother's life is in danger. Such as, I don't know, when she is losing massive amounts of blood?

All of these stories have one thing in common - doctors who cite some imaginary, ambiguous standard for when the woman's life is in "enough danger" for them to act.

NONE of the current abortion bans have a specific standard - all of them rely on the physician's "reasonable medical judgment." That means any of these doctors who believe the woman will die without care can legally intervene. Any doctor who says otherwise either hasn't read the law or is lying.

If you live in a state where abortion is banned or significantly restricted, go right now and look up the actual text of your state's law.

Find the section where it says doctors can intervene if the woman is at risk of death. Find where it says the standard for this decision (it is almost always "the physician's reasonable medical judgment"). Also, find where it says the law doesn't apply if the baby has died. Save that link and the relevant paragraph numbers somewhere in your phone. Share this info with everyone you know who might need it.

[thepro-lifemovement]

Hi, I voted "to save the mother's life" in the poll, but I'm not sure if a procedure under such circumstances (Like, i guess an ectopic pregnancy) are really considered abortion. I know that a lot of places where abortion is criminalised do not consider it as such for an ectopic pregnancy. Do you care to share thoughts/sources on this?

Hope you're having a great weekend

Hello!

So ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage treatment are not considered elective abortions because the intention is not the same. Especially with ectopic pregnancy since the treatment is either medication (methotrexate, which is rarely ever used for elective abortions), laparoscopic surgery, or abdominal surgery. Most abortion ban laws make it clear that ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage treatments are not considered abortions, so there's no reason a doctor shouldn't treat a woman suffering a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, and the treatments for these conditions have not changed with abortion bans.

I have heard two different arguments, some doctors say abortion is medically necessary, while other doctors don't. For the side that argues that abortion is medically necessary I found HealthFeedback talk about it here:

Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at University of California, San Francisco, told Health Feedback that “If the pregnant woman develops a life-threatening condition at a gestational age when the fetus is likely to survive, it is true that in most cases, obstetricians would proceed with expedited delivery”.

“But,” he cautioned, “if the pregnant woman develops a serious condition at 20 weeks, such as ruptured membranes with signs of infection or heavy bleeding from a placenta previa, it is critical to terminate the pregnancy quickly to save her life. There is no chance that the fetus can survive, and an abortion would be the fastest and safest way to terminate the pregnancy”. To date, the most premature baby to survive was born in 2020, at about 21 weeks of gestation.

Luckily for us, the Lozier Institute has listed every single medical emergency a pregnant woman may face and the treatment guidance described by the ACOG, and also the abortion ban laws in every US state:

To assist healthcare providers and dispel the myths being spread by those more concerned with promoting abortion than women’s health, this document discusses miscarriage management, treatment for ectopic pregnancy, and medical conditions that could qualify as life-threatening, permitting abortion under pro-life laws. Specifically, we cite guidance from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a prominent professional organization that has provided comprehensive guidance for management of obstetric and gynecologic conditions. Further, the exact text of the laws, definitions, and exceptions are included below to further demonstrate that the laws in question do not inhibit appropriate and standard medical care.

The reason pro-lifers don't consider abortion medically necessary is because we believe doctors should always try to save both mother and baby, but if they can't do both then the mother should be the priority. There have been instances where the doctors could not save the mother, but could save the unborn child. I would recommend looking through the Lozier Institute article linked above since it contains so much information on the treatment for life-threatening situations for pregnant women.

If you would like more information, Why Prolife also discusses the "medically necessary" question here. It may be a pro-life source, but they include sources for everything.

Former abortionist, Dr. Anthony Levatino, explains why abortion is never medically necessary:

There's a lot to look at with both sides of the argument. Some doctors agree that it's medically necessary, while other doctors disagree. I think if the procedure's purpose is to save the life of the mother, but her unborn child is unintentionally killed as a result of that procedure, then it's not abortion.

I hope this answers your question.

-Sarah

[lightdragon789]

Other inserts backstory/facts Pt 8

Myles Sanchez

Next up we got the hallway dork of Dergasin (hope i spelled that right…) high school, Myles! He’s my silly awkward guy, who has to put up with Ray half the time. He can’t catch a break lol. But into his backstory!

Also TW slight homophobia.

Backstory

Myles grew up with strict and wealthy parents, who always made sure Myles was doing his best. They always wanted to see perfect grades from him as it would also be a good example for his younger sisters Claudia and Chloe. It put a big strain on Myles who did the best he could in school. Trying to join in sports as well, let his father’s demand as it would help him gain muscles and experience. However, Myles wasn’t all too good at sports and found another hobby he was good at.

That being performing in the drama club once he got to middle school. He loves to perform and act on stage. Because he could be a different person and pretend to be that person. His parents disapproved calling it a useless hobby but Myles promised he’d do better in his sport (at the time being soccer) if he could still be in drama. They agreed, hoping he’d realize how pointless it was but Myles never did. He loved performing then playing. His parents never came to his plays, which he was upset about but his aunt and sisters made it and were there to support Myles.

His aunt would call them out on this and say how their viewpoints would only drive him away. He didn’t understand what she meant at the time.

Around the start of high school, Myles still did drama club but he was also getting picked on by a small group of classmates. Led by a guy named Ray, who’d always shove him in his locker and drag him away from drama club practice or during lunch to steal answer sheets. He just went along with it as Myles never really had a backbone and was a pushover due to his upbringing.

However, during sophomore year this reared its head when Myles started feeling flustered every time Ray pinned him or dragged him somewhere. It made him question if he likes guys more than girls as none of his girl friends made him feel this way. He went to his friend Emily and she shared some of her mangas and stories about love. (Only mentioning he might have a crush but doesn’t say on who.) He read those stories and was a bit weirded out but slightly intrigued when reading them.

Knowing he would get in trouble at home for reading the more 18+ content. He hid them in his locker and text books and only read them during breaks or in class. Eventually though, he realized that these stories of love were very twisted scenarios. So he stopped reading them and ended his relationship with Emily, especially after she said her crush for Ray and the mention that he might like Myles. It just made him uncomfortable as he didn’t even know what he liked and those books didn’t help at all. But he just wanted to stay close to Ray, as he did somewhat admire him. Always being confident in his actions and wanting to be close to continue that admiration. Even if it might get him in trouble.

Around senior year, his parents were getting fed up with Myles for not quitting drama club after all this time. Myles just stated that he loved performing more than playing sports. In hopes to one day become an actor, which really set his parents off and grounded him. Citing that jobs like that never pay well and he needed to work as either a sports player or a doctor. Which Myles didn’t want and it made him more conflicted.

Then one day, when Ray once again dragged him away from his drama club practice. The teacher set a trap and the two were caught. Both got detention and Myles was punished by his parents for his behavior greatly. Forcing him to quit drama club and be confined to his room to study. Myles was leaving the last day of detention with Ray and when tried to talk to, Myles just snapped. Stating how he was sick of Ray bullying and can’t wait to graduate just to get away from him. Hoping he never sees him again and walks off.

After a prank (that was rumored to have been started by Ray), that was setting fireworks off in the principal’s office. Myles never saw Ray again and was a bit relieved but also a bit sad. He didn’t understand why he got this way but kept his head up.

But when Myles graduated and turned 18, he was told by his to move out as they couldn’t support him. Myles was shocked at the sudden news and questioned what he did. They just insisted it was because he needed to learn how to make his own money. If he thought being an actor was the right career path, however, Myles didn’t believe it. He questioned again and his father let it slip that they had a feeling he likes guys more than girls due to his choices to pursue acting instead of sports. Stating he was the first son and should be ashamed for being like this as he won’t carry the family name.

Myles was devastated by this as he tried to explain he wasn’t gay and that he being an actor had nothing to do with that. However, they weren’t hearing it and they state that this will teach him how the real world works as he’s now an adult. Myles cried and called his aunt to help him out as he was very distraught. His sisters tried to console him but he still felt numb.

His aunt came quickly and started arguing with her brother and sister in law about this. Myles’ sisters helped him back his essentials and he hugged them both. Wishing them all the best and to stay strong. He left with his aunt and lived with her. He didn’t get a job or go to college for a long time as he was reeling from the fact his parents would kick him out for choices that made him happy. He helped with chores and his aunt’s volunteer work. Myles also started resenting himself if he was gay though and his aunt noticed it all. She soon got Myles into therapy as she noticed how bad his mental state was getting.

It helped him throughout the years, as he started working out, writing journals and started doing things his parents would never allow him to do. That being getting face piercings, growing out and dyeing his hair. It made him more confident in himself and soon he grew to accept his sexuality slowly. For the time Identifying as Bisexual as he was still unsure.

He then got into college to get his degree to become an actor. Now wanting to prove his parents wrong in that he could become successful in acting. Even performing in public theater (getting lead roles a few times and doing really good at them) to help his portfolio as well as make some money. But knowing it wouldn’t make much and wanting to pay his aunt back for helping him through everything. He tried to apply for high paying jobs but without much work experience and still being in college. He kept getting rejected.

He then commuted by bus to a city to go for another interview. He hoped he did well, but while waiting for the bus. He was looking through his emails, with many rejections with it. He was annoyed that he couldn’t get a decent job. Thinking his day couldn’t get worse, but luck wasn’t on his side. As a man ran under the bus stop, Myles and Ray reunited once again.

His day got worse lol!

Facts!

Myles is 25, 6’2 and is Homosexual and panromantic. Goes by He/Him pronouns.

Myles is Cuban and is fluent in Spanish as well as Portuguese and French.

Myles is an atheist, has been since the age of 15.

He loves to play the guitar and practices singing True colors as it’s easy and soothing for him.

He has a bit heterochromia as he has spots of blue in his green eyes.

He’s very awkward about certain topic and situations due his parents tight hold on him. He’s doing his best to learn though now that he’s away from them.

Myles is a heavy weight when it comes to alcohol. He enjoys red wine, pina coladas and margaritas. Anything sweet he loves.

Myles is willing to give Ray a second chance as he’s moved on from high school and sees Ray has changed a bit.

He doesn’t appreciate his teasing at his previous crush on him and does what he can to ignore him or make him stop.

Knowing he was a dumb kid back then and it makes Myles think Ray just sees him as who he was back then.

However, he shows he wasn’t who he was in the past when he goes to Midnight Red. Dressing the part and even making Ray stare at him.

He’s a bit of a hopeless romantic and has little ‘goals’. Like them taking his hoodies or them cooking/dancing in the kitchen.

He also has hoodies, T-shirts and baggy clothes as performing in theater makes him wear tight or layers of clothes.

He did poorly in gym due to doing drama club and playing soccer at the same time.

That’s all I have for Myles right now, next up is my level four cadet, Eva Morris and then my little shy Bug, Nash!

[cupcraft]

I think tumblr and twitter and social media posts in general could do well with citing sources for things esp science and esp things regarding other people. I realize some people intentionally spread misinformation but a lot of people may just do it by accident or type a post that has context to ppl they know but once breaching containment may lose vital context. Also I realize some sources are hard to cite due to pay walls as well, but overall it's important to sometimes give the vital context if you can. This isn't necessarily the case for personal experience which you yourself are the best source for.

What are ways one can cite the source?

Social media isn't academia (unless you are an academic posting things to be reached by other academics/scientists/experts) so you don't have to in text cite/apa/mla/etc kind of thing. Just linking the article is good. Or screenshotting the part you're referencing and explain the context about it and give an image ID of the text. Send a link to a public resource (ie you are citing the WHO for example).

Also be open to constructive criticism from people who are adding vital context/other information you may have missed. Example, a doctor adding more health science information to a public health announcement.

Because at the end of the day I believe majority of people don't intend to spread or post misinformation. Even myself, a grad student in science, may repost or reblog things that don't have context which later turns out to be false or corrected later. But adding some sort of source of the info could help ig is what I'm saying.

Feel free to add on/correct