#I mean the British have colonized everywhere else

[sunflowerscottie]

sarah jane: but doctor, how did you know I’d been hypnotized?

the doctor: you have literally never, not even once, questioned why no matter where we go everyone always sounds british

[adhdnojutsu]

The difference between people from the Arab peninsula colonizing and isreal, is that they aren't broadcasting their war crimes like the idf is. There's no racist ass TikToks that mock the people being genocided. isreal does that.

Not that I'm agreeing with what you insist arabs are doing, but plenty of fucked up shit happens in every country. isreal is uniquely fucked up and sick with its propaganda.

Besides, looking back at the area, the Indigenous people were Caaninates, who are both ancestors of Palestinians and Israelis.

Bloody Balfour was a british colonizer, and a treaty breaker. Herzl, and Jabotinsky even referred to the Arabs as natives and Jewish people from europe as colonizers. The founders of isreal said it themselves. They are colonizing the land.

Indigenous people with a true connection to the land wouldn't rip out Indigenous olive trees.

I'm opposed to all state hoods and hierarchies. What you call naive, I call forward thinking. I will not live to see a world without hierarchy, but I'll fight for one anyway.

This is in response to your question on twit

"They don't broadcast their crimes" did you miss all the videos and photos Hamas took? I mean, of course you did, they'd shake your worldview. Though you can't tell me you really missed the image of Shani Louk's abused body surrounded by grinning savages.

But just in case you did miss something, here's examples of "Arabs not broadcasting their war crimes".

And did you miss the part where Israel is fighting in Gaza in the digital age and the Arab world didn't have broadcasting services when they colonized the land?

And aside from ALL ARMIES having criminal cases like the IDF, who, unlike Hamas, investigates and regularly jails its soldiers rather than just saying "Yeah things kinda got out of hand", none of that invalidates Israel's right to exist. As long as the Kingdom of Israel predates Mandatory Palestine, Israel's right to exist trumps Palestine's.

Also, it's not a genocide. Genocide has the intention to eradicate a people, this is not the case here or else Israel wouldn't have 2 million thriving Palestinian citizens and be sending goods and money into the territories whenever it's safe to do so. Urban warfare has extremely high casualty counts. Everywhere, always. Gaza is densely populated and hard to flee, hence those numbers. It's horrible, but it's not genocide.

Since genocide is defined by intent, every missile Hamas fires at Jews is an act of genocide. I don't care about their charter. Actions over words. Likewise, what a few radical Israelis say is irrelevant as long as the Palestinian population is growing rather than shrinking.

Balfour, Jabotinsky etc. are also 100% irrelevant. As long as Jews, as a whole, are indigenous to Canaan, Judea, Israel, Palestine, whatchamacallit, Jews are entitled to calling that land their home, founders be damned. This whole argument of "your leaders were from such and such European country" is like saying "America had a Black president, so it's a Black, post-racism country". The vast majority of Israelis, some 61%, are of immediate Middle Eastern heritage, and since Jews in ME diaspora were persecuted, people weren't dumb enough to mass-convert to Judaism, so those Middle Eastern Jews mostly descend from exiled indigenous "Canaanite" Jews. And just because many got bleached in Euopean diaspora doesn't erase their roots, either. Even 500 generations later, if they can retrace their lineage to Israel, they get to call it theirs.

And no, Palestinians do not descend from Canaanites for the most part. The spike in population following the conquest of Gaza and the West Bank proves a significant portion of them is Jordanian, Egyptian, and as their own commander Zuheir Mohsen admits, from other surrounding countries.

And miss me with the olive trees, when the first thing Hamas did when they took power, was destroy greenhouses in the Gaza strip because "Jews built them". Also did you see the immense animal abuse at Gaza "zoo".

Measuring indigeneity by the treatment of nature is insane when Israel was the one to introduce drip irrigation to turn deserts into farmland and planted whole forests, and you're here talking about a specific bunch of hillbillies committing acts of vandalism. It's not about the trees, it's asshole zealots taking their hatred of Arabs out on their property, be that olive trees or cars or livestock. It's no deeper than that and the fact that you'd rather talk about that than about amply documented mass rapes by the people YOU want to be indigenous, speaks volumes.

[everything-is-crab]

Idk why some Hindu women fall for the lies of Hindu men.

I mean I get why because like I said I have been there and I was so far gone I literally believed in "love jihad".

What surprised me even more was that this lady is a radfem.

Radfems more than anyone should understand male dominance in all communities.

Just because you see radicalized Muslim men committing atrocities against Hindu women doesn't mean that Islam is the only shit religion but Hinduism somehow is not or that Hindu men don't do the same shit to Muslim women.

People here need to realize this issue is very complex due to our history and demographics (Muslim people are the minority but they literally ruled over us centuries ago).

This isn't an issue like racism in the US where white people are undeniably the oppressors.

This is a religious conflict that has been alive for a long long time and its condition hasn't remained constant but changed throughout history during all phases- when the Muslims ruled over us, when the British colonized us and post independence.

This is what happens when people become too involved in just Western politics. You assume things to look similar everywhere else.

Anyways, Hinduism isn't a great religion for women. Especially today it isn't. Look at the Hindu men around you. Look at these politicians. Do you think these men have their best interests in their hearts for you?

Men always consider women and children collateral damage. Even the ones with whose politics you agree with look like these. And men will show you only the atrocities committed by the "enemy" men on you.

Ms-hells-bells talked about it in a much better way than me.

When you ignore issues like these it ends up affecting women most.

You're convinced Muslim men are the problem and a threat. The government passed CAA. Are you happy about that?

Because this is gonna affect Muslim women more. According to Hindu nationalists, Islam is a horrible religion that is brutal to its own women. So they passed CAA. Now migrants from this religion won't be able to seek shelter because they aren't persecuted anywhere apparently (search up about Rohingya Muslims to know this is a lie). But who's it gonna affect? Muslim female migrants who suffer greatly under the patriarchy. From countries like Afghanistan.

But please insist on how much of a feminist you are while shitting on one religion but defending your own.

I wish people would know that "tradwives" don't involve just white Christian women but also women like these who may seem progressive if you don't know the politics of the place she comes from.

[tobergin]

Oh honey, you are proving my point. Those "officials making statements with genocidal intent" are going to be addressed in court. You are not going to care about it because spreading pictures of text is more efficient for you. Most of them are talking about Hamas but you people love to conflate a genocidal Islamic terrorist organization with Palestinian civilians because it fits your narrative.

I can't even begin to tell you how idiotic it is to claim the people making statements after facing the biggest massacre and slaughter since the Holocaust has anything to do with anything but your propaganda and libel when the actual reality and orders to protect the civilians is the opposite. I'm sure you're just an equivalent to Maga/Trump supporter and believe that level information but it's just embarrassing. There's of course people making those stamens and meaning them, there are bad people everywhere. Yet, if they were the intent of the attack in Gaza, there would be no Gaza or no civilians left for you to worry about now. It would have been over by the beginning of November. There's no question about it.

You could as well link to Israel offering aid and food to Gaza when the people there refuse to take care of the vulnerable but you don't and that tells a lot about your agenda.

Calling it Palestine native land ignores so much history of the land. Like the fact that there has never been a Palestine nation. The people you mean don't even have letters in their vocabulary to spell the name of "their indigenous land" which should tell you something about the history in the area. It's Jewish native land, colonized by empire after empire, from Greeks, Romans to Arabs and British and it was given the European/Colonial name mandatory Palestine to further colonize and force that control over the Jewish population. Still, I get your confusion. Arafat managed to install a national identity to the Arabs in the area (despite the fact that before Israel the people we call Palestinians would NOT have been happy being called that as it meant the Jewish people living there).

Obviously it doesn't change the fact that the displaced people called Palestinians have lived there a long time and deserve peace and security, which has been offered time and time again by Israel yet the two states solution (which would be giving even MORE land to the Arabs bc if you want to look at the Muslim part of mandatory Palestine, you can look at Jordania which was the part of the dying empire that was given to the Arab population) has not been enough.

That's where the problem lies, you people want to cleanse the area of the Jewish people. It has been stated time after time by the terrorists occupying Gaza.

Bombs have been raining in Israel for decades. The only difference is that the Israeli government protects the civilians, all of them: Jews, Arabs, Beduins and everyone else while the terrorist groups ruling Gaza force children on top of the buildings (that Israel has tried to clear of civilians) so they can die from the bombs & get those sexy photos and videos of children getting pulled from rubble for you to spread around in your indignation to spread the propaganda.

Complaining about civilian casualties when the civilian population could have been sheltered in bomb shelters is insane. Palestinian suffering might get you wet in your panties but it doesn't change the fact that there was no reason for it.

The hate for Jewish people was more important to the people committing atrocities on Oct7 than safety and well-being of their own civilians. That's where it boils down to.

The Palestinian civilians have the right to live free from the Hamas occupation. There is no peace in the area until the Islamic religious extremist groups are not in power, if you cared for the people suffering under that rule. Time after time, it's the Gazan terrorists shooting by accident or on purpose the civilians in Gaza and they blame Israel.

You blame Israel. Who takes responsibility when they do fuck up (and they do as the conditions are terrible and I don't think there has been anyone who hasn't made mistakes).

I'm sorry to disappoint you but I'm not going to eat shit. 😂 I'm going to hope Israel can succeed in eradicating Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, so the people in both Israel and Palestinian areas could live in peace.

Actual statement my father made today.

If I hear one more american talking about how we should ignore the literal fucking genocide happening (funded by OUR tax money)) bc it’s ‘bad for our mental health 🥺’ I’m goinh to blow my head off.

[vulnerary-prince]

Agreed that the monarchy is an outdated tradition that's largely been reduced to ceremonial role and source of tourism, but there are reasons why the Queen is respected and beloved:

- pushed for the transition from the British Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations, which replaced the old colonial power structure to a political union where members are self-governed and equal (not unlike the EU, ASEAN or the UN). It's been so successful that even countries that were never even part of the British Empire have voluntarily joined since it was created

- worked behind the scenes (using what limited power she had, and despite opposition from the British (and US) government) to push South Africa to end the Apartheid

- was a patron for over 600 charities and helped raised ~£1.5 billion for them over the course of her reign, and was hugely passionate about ending inequality of all kinds

- was the first British monarch to visit Ireland since their independence, and in her speech admitted the mistakes the British had made in the past and gave her condolences to the Irish for the atrocities commited, a highly unusual move which shocked the world and greatly improved the relationship between the two countries

- least significant, but the reason why she is so well adored, is because she was the one responsible for making the royals accessible to everyday people. Rather than sitting in a castle unseen by the common peasants, she was out on the street greeting people, making televised addresses to the public every Christmas, and just generally allowing the media to show the life of the Royal Family, something that was always kept secret previously

Is the Monarchy stupid and outdated in this day and age? Yeah, most definitely. But Americans don't seem to understand that the Monarchy hasn't actually been responsible for any political decisions for a large part of the last century, and the Queen isn't personally responsible for any of the bad shit that governments are doing - that's on the shoulders of old men and megacorporations, same as everywhere else. She's really nothing more than a kind grandma that loves her people, and THAT is why people love and respect her.

Funny that you would mention that horrid political decisions rests on the shoulders of old men and megacorporations since that’s precisely where the wealth of the royal family comes from, I mean of course aside from taxpayer dollars.

See the Sovereign Grant, collected via taxes and payed back to the royal family, amounted to around £82.2 million in 2019. Granted this grant is only afforded to the royal family should the surrender any profits made from the Crown Estate, but this is still £82.2 being shilled out for what equates to LARPing as an actual human being and not some financial leech and her little family of smaller more terrible leeches. This fund is only used to maintain upkeep on the royal families exorbitant estates, cover the entire families travel expenses, and pay for the royal employee payroll.

Expenses outside of that can be payed by the Duchy of Lancaster- a portfolio of lands and assets that is made up of residential, commercial, and agricultural properties. This brought in £20.7 in 2019 and is used to pay “expenses incurred by other members of the royal family.” This on top of personal assets of the Queen which make up for an unknown portion of wealth, but includes an expansive art collection (wonder who’s money paid for that art too), a couple of estates of her own, and assets passed down to her by previous monarchs (wonder how much of that is stolen from the lands Britain colonized).

Why yes I’m sure it’s very easy to donate and raise funds while sitting atop a pile of unearned generational wealth, much of which was inherited by a history of bloody colonialism, in your massive free palace courtesy of the people you love ever so much. All the while your shit stain of a royal family engage in so much bullshit that every few years you have to come out of your little hole and apologize for the abuse and ostracizing of another beloved spouse of one of your shitty shitty children while we all watch on in disbelief at our favorite government sponsored reality TV show. And sure I get it the royal family are millionaires not billionaires, they could be worse! They could be even more filthy rich for doing absolutely nothing!

As an American I can agree with you that I truly do not understand the monarchy or the role it plays in the lives of the British people. But as an American I can also spot a filthy governmental leech from a lightyear away. Generationally wealthy, holder of dozens of properties, and never truly working to hard for anything a day in her little life. Sounds like every single one of the men I hate most in this world.

With the monarchy Elizabeth and her rotted little family are England’s biggest celebrity spectacle of incest freaks including good ole king tampon. The Kardashians if they were less entertaining to watch be horrible people and funded by the American Government. Without the monarchy good ole Lizzie and her dear family are just every other generationally wealthy millionaire alive in the world today generating wealth that they put a pittance of back into their community, hoard the rest, and call it a day then head out to the golf course. And yes she has done some good, but whether she was actively leeching off the British people intentionally or not she was still complicit in profiting off the British people and inherited (from you know the gross colonial regime) generational wealth that let’s be honest was probably stolen in the first place.

It’s very cute that the parasite tried to pretend it wasn’t a parasite and did such a good job of it, but no matter how you slice it or however many christmases it’s there for a leech is still a leech. And now we’re left with king tampon and his gross little Vienna sausage fingers to continue the legacy of mooching off the government. People who love and respect this woman have been misguided into believing she’s one of the people in the same way Americans are tricked into believing a guy like Bezos ever pulled himself up by his bootstraps to do shit, and that’s that.

Tl;dr Queen Elizabeth is shit and you are not immune to propaganda

[glompcat]

I was thinking about the Thirteenth Doctor’s era and The Timeless Child, as you do, and I was once again struck by how brilliantly it addresses one of the largest elephants in the room with Doctor Who, which is of course The White Man’s Burden.

Doctor Who has for the vast majority of its run been about how much better everything would be if a White British Man showed up and sorted out everyone else’s problems for them. To further this discomfort, throughout both the modern and classic shows we see the Doctor interact with all manner of deeply problematic figures and moments in British history and treat them with defference and respect. The Doctor is an Anglophile, the show merrily jokes to explain away the Doctor’s strange obsession and love for England even during some of the country’s darkest chapters (I recently watched it so Season 2′s The Crusade is particuarly standing out in my mind at the moment as an example of this, but it really is everywhere).

I’ve posted about it before, but I truly and deeply believe that Series 11 is where we first start to see a real questioning of the British Imperial narrative that was left unquestioned in Doctor Who for so long. The end of Series 12 on the other hand begins the vital process of recontextualizing the Doctor’s character inorder to decouple them from The White Man’s Burden.

The encounters with racism stop being ~ The Doctor punches a rich lord in the Victorian Era when he says something overtly racist that every modern audience member would comfortably be able to identify as racist without having to do any sort of self examination on their own part ~ and start instead to focus on questions of when it is and is not appropriate for outside forces to act. 

In Rosa, the very first episode of Doctor Who written by a person of color since the show began in 1963, we are told that the Doctor can not and should not do anything in Alabama during the 1960s because it is not their place to coopt that momement. They may admire the courage of activists like Rosa Parks, but their role is confined to confrontations with fellow time travelers. Rather than interfere with a situation they have no buisness getting involved in they stay in their lane.

Demons of the Punjab, the second ever episode of Doctor Who to be written by a person of color, is perhaps my all time favorite episode of the show. The more I think about it, the more I love it. This unfortunately means it is hard for me to sum up in a few sentances just why I find it so endlessly brilliant. I am going to push myself to try though. This is the first episode of Doctor Who focused on issues of immigration that felt, to me as the child of an immigrant (granted my father came to the United States, not the United Kindom), recognizable as a narrative I could connect to. We’re just two seasons removed from The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion, and we’ve gone from “refugees who are not comfortable with fully assimilating into a dominent culture are terrorists” to a stunning ode to how colonization ruins lives and shatters families, as well as how inter-generational knowlege and cultural transmission are sacred things that connect us (us in this case being the descendants of immigrants) to a past we can never fully know or understand.

Series 12′s The Timeless Children takes these ideas and disrupts our assumptions of the Doctor’s identity, forever changing some of the core framings of the narrative.

It reframes the Doctor’s travels through time and space, so that rather than keep them as the journeys of a priviliged member of the most priviliged race who would rather spend their time dealing with other people’s problems than face any of their own (eternally shrugging their shoulders and claiming Gallifrey’s fuckery is not their responsibility, so much so that they disown the one incarnation who Got Involved) we are told that the Doctor was an immigrant to Gallifrey, one who faced hardship and abuse upon arriving there stemming from that which made them different. Their first adopted mother literally changes them, altering their DNA just as much as they alter their own species’ so that in the end there no longer is any genetic difference between the Doctor and any other Time Lord. After all, we know that the Doctor’s biodata is very much that of a Time Lord’s. This, for me viewing as the child of an immigrant and as a member of a minority religion, is recognizable as the violence of assimilation (and despite what The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion might tell you, assimilation is VIOLENCE and is not actually anything close to an acceptable trade off for a safe place to live). Then as time progresses, the Doctor’s memory of their true origin is wiped, leaving them fully unaware of who they really are or where they came from. 

This immediatly called to mind for me both Ryan’s total lack of knowlege of any kind of Black history in Rosa, and Yaz’s viseral pain when presented with the fact that her grandmother’s life before coming to England was totally unlike anything she could have ever imagined in Demons of the Punjab. Those marked as “the other” (and lol at how that term already exists in Doctor Who lore and applies to the Doctor in ways that call to mind this arc) in the West are constantly asked to disenfranchize themselves from their identity. Silmultaniously Western actors regularly claim aspects of other cultures as their own, and then demand others recognize those things as hallmarks of their own society totally seperate from their original context (a very prominent example of this would be the way British people understand and interact with tea). 

Since the Time Lords are more than anything else a massive joke about the British nobility, it makes sense that within their extreamly xenophobic society an immigrant who had a major impact on the course of their devopment is subjected to a process of alienization, literally becoming alien to their original state, and upon fulfilling their use for their new home their presence is erased and that which was taken from them is claimed as inheriet to the dominent society. 

One is then adopted by a family that by all accounts did love them, did not mistreat them and whose affection was returned by the Doctor. This second adoption takes place after the assimilation process has been completed, long after the Doctor’s usefullness as an other has been exploited in full and the Time Lords no longer see any reason to treat them in a manner unlike any other member of their people. We know that the Doctor still had trouble fully fitting into the society around them, but this discomfort gets attributed to everything and anything other than the truth of their violent assimilation. It all can play out exactly as every text written before The Timeless Children describes (but not all of them at once, of course, because quite a few of them are entirely incompatable with one another) but with the addition of the most recent season we can read the trauma of assimilation into the Doctor’s behavior. I also want to be clear that in this new context the Doctor is just as much a Time Lord as I am an American. My father may not have been born here, nor was my mother’s father or her mother’s parents, but at the end of the day that is inconsiquential. The Doctor is still a Time Lord, however what that means has shifted.

There are of course all kinds of other implications these new elements lend to the text. Personally I find myself constantly returning to the knowlege that the Doctor was twice adopted (something I admit gives me a personal thrill since my father was also adopted multiple times, but I digress) and how it makes the Doctor’s habit of forming found family units and adopting children all the more meaningful for me. Their interations with their companions, from their (most likely probably) biological family member Susan all the way to the Fam can be understood through a new lens, and since the ways old texts gain new contexts and meanings making them feel like new stories all over again is for me personally one of the greatest joys of big box franchise fiction, I’m increadibly pleased by this new addition to the lore. 

The Doctor’s perspective post The Timeless Children is suddenly accesable to audience members who were initally left out of that story of a priviliged kid who didn’t like/want responsiblity so they stole a junked up old vehicle and ran away. So many of the show’s behind the scenes materials like to say that there is something innately British about Doctor Who, and now immigrant perspectives are being welcomed into that umbrella of Britishness.

Further (returning to my original point about the show’s uncomfortable relationship to The White Man’s Burden) it takes the previous framing of the Doctor and their journeys and turns them on their head, transforming the Doctor’s travels into those of someone looking for a sense of belonging they have never been able to claim, while also attempting to make sense of the violence that had been enacted against them they were denied any knowlege of by the same forces that committed that violence - something you can see play out over and over and over again in Earth History, and British History in particular, thus explaining the Doctor’s fixation. Even if the Doctor is unaware of it, there is a Reason they do not feel as if solving Gallifrey’s problems is in any way their responsibility. They already gave Gallifrey so much more than has ever been demanded of any other Time Lord. 

I don’t really have a conclusion to write here because my thoughts on this story (like all of Doctor Who) are still evolving and of course are very much just my own personal reflections on this silly franchise that happens to be my horrible ADHD fueled special interest of the moment. Plus Series 13 may shock me by going in a radically different direction, who knows. So I am just going to say that I very much appreciate the ways the Thirteenth Doctor era so far has been challenging the British established view of history and is very much making good on its promise of creating a more inclusive show for its viewers, not just in its casting choices but in the messaging of the narrative itself.

[sparky-sparky-boom-man]

So obviously jk Rowling’s interpretation of magical society in America is absolutely shit. It’s fucking awful, no way around it, she did the least amount of research she could, she absolutely didn’t care about the casual racism of how she treated Native Americans and it shows. But, ignoring all that for a second, I really fucking hate Ilvermorny. I do. I really do.

So first off, instead of devising some sort of cool, ancient magic school or system of learning that belonged to indigenous tribes, she just fucking slapped another pasty Irish lady with the task of making another hogwarts in America and bringing wands and introducing “proper” magic to America(which has an uncomfortably colonizing vibe to it).

Second, it’s in a castle. A castle. An ancient castle. In America. So I get that they have magic but not only is that stupid as fuck considering it was early America and ye old lady Isolde or whatever the fuck definitely had better things to do than building a fucking castle, where in the goddamn world would she have gotten time to build it? In the midst of fighting off dysentery because this uncivilized land has no magic cures and she never went to school? Did she get hell from her good Puritan neighbor Jeremiah with the 12 kids and pneumonia who’s constantly on the hunt for witches to burn?

Third, jk originally meant for it to be another boarding school, and only changed in on Pottermore after everyone pointed out how fucking stupid it was when America has no boarding school culture.

And lastly why the fuck is it the only magic school in America???? That doesn’t even make the slightest sense. Not only is America fucking ginormous compared to the UK and it’s very doubtful that parents would just let their kids travel across the fucking country twice a day, if you calculate the population of all the magical, school-age children in America(I’m including the territories because fuck you) you wil almost always get a number upwards of 25,000. 25,000 is the size of a small city, not the ideal population of a single school. Continuing on that, ilvermorny apparently accepts students from all over North America. So that number gets infinitely bigger once you include students from Canada, Greenland, and Iceland. Which means you end up with a single school housing tens of thousands of teenagers everyday.

No matter how you try to reason it, maybe it’s like a college, maybe they have giant classrooms, maybe they have thousands of teachers, this is just the most horribly designed school ever. And it was really fucking dumb of jkr to assume that A) the only school that would work in America is a second hogwarts. B) that we wanted a second hogwarts instead of something unique to us. C) that any part of hogwarts could be ported over to America and just work. And D) that she thought she could get away with this.

So, in defiance of the endless problems and mindless stupidity that Ilvermorny presents, I have a headcanon that helps me survive its presence in canon. It doesn’t exist.

No, I’m not pretending that it literally doesn’t exist like we all do to the disgrace that I the Cursed Child. I mean it’s like a continent-wide inside joke. So maybe a young witch had a conversation like this one day.

British wizard: Yeah mate, everyone goes the Hogwarts, where else would we go? What’s your school called?

American witch: my... school? Are you asking for my school name or all the names? Because I don’t know all of them

BW: Doesn’t everyone in North America go to the same school?

AW: *narrows eyes, thinks about the fundamental differences between Britain and the Americas and wonders how someone could come up with that conclusion* no, we all go to local schools

BW: *flabbergasted* you mean you don’t go and live at your school with everyone else?

AW: buddy, we don’t have the same culture, a single school for all America is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard

BW: this is ridiculous! That’s what we do at Hogwarts and Hogwarts is the best wizarding school in the world!

AW: *annoyed sigh*

Maybe this conversation happens a few times with varying people, AW meets others who’ve also had conversations like this with British people, eventually this happens

Different British Wizard: Yeah so I went to Hogwarts like everyone else back home, does everyone in America go to the same school?

AW: ...... yes

BW: What’s it called?

AW: uh... uh... illllvermoorny. Yeah, that’s it, Ilvermorny. Best real school ever. Love it.

BW: Cool! Does it have houses?

AW: ahhhh.... yes? *searches head for American creatures that this asshole can’t call her bullshit on* there’s four... the uh... thunderbird... the... pudwudgie..... uh, the horned serpent, and the uh, uh.. wampus. Yep, those four.

It just snowballed from there with this poor American witch lying out of her ass and she made up a whole creation story that, if you look close enough, was definitely not well thought through. But it seemed to get the guy off her back and so she spread the word, told all her friends that ‘hey if anybody not from North America asks us about our school system tell them this’ and her friends told their friends and so on and so forth until every magical person in North America knew it.

They keep up the pretense to this day, everybody just bullshits about Ilvermorny to every European person they meet. Europe is the only place that still believes Ilvermorny is real, everywhere else has at least something similar, their own version of multiple schools, there’s just too many people to only have. Except in Europe.

Every now and then some honest fellow tries to tell the truth, about the hundreds of schools, the focus on ancient Magics that the native tribes used, their history program that tells the stories of witches and wizards in slavery and internment camps, and how the wars the English had with the goblins were so very inconsequential when it came to the underground factions and resistance against slavery and native ethnic genocide. They laugh, they say that doesn’t make sense, it couldn’t possibly be true. They say that there was no way wizard and muggle society could be that intertwined, don’t try to get one over on me you silly yank. So the Americans tell the Europeans what they want to hear, after all they won’t listen to anything else, everyone’s tried.

Tldr: Ilvermorny is a fake school that Americans pretend is real so they don’t have to try and explain the differences in schooling to Europeans

[jenroses]

So this is some backstory I wrote a few years back about the apocalypse. Four years later, I think I may have been overly optimistic about how long it would take for things to fall apart. 

~~~  The apocalypse wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy. Parts were dramatic and rapid, say, when the United States dissolved into chaos in 2020 and six new nations emerged from the rubble. The Pacific States of America became the progressive destination of choice, between California’s wealth and the Pacific Northwest’s natural bubbles of relative safety between the mountain ranges. Canada followed a few years later into disaster, with French Canada going its own way and British Columbia joining the Pacific States. The continent was re-shaped again by rising sea levels and sinking earth falling into the empty aquifers and the remains of fracking operations. 

The biggest issues early on were in the Confederacy, The Republic of Texas, and the Great Plains Republic. Rampant deregulation combined with widespread corruption resulted in the complete loss of vast areas to poisons both visible and invisible. 

Chaos in North America bred chaos elsewhere. A brief nuclear exchange in 2038 left vast parts of the Middle East, East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent uninhabitable. Washington DC and Moscow were hit, but as neither were particularly politically powerful by that point, the political fallout was less than the actual nuclear fallout of the 8 bombs. The EMPs from strikes in Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China and Tripoli took out communications and governments alike. In the resulting chaos, many nuclear materials were “liberated” and attacks with “dirty” bombs became common in many areas of the world. 

Texas did not fall to bombs or to the poisons or to war, but to the increasingly tight focus of the sun through God’s magnifying glass, with temperatures soaring beyond the capacity of failing machines to compensate. Between the floods, hurricanes, and summer temperatures upwards of 150° F, without a larger federal infrastructure, civilization in the Lone Star quickly stopped working, and those who relied on the grid were forced to flee ever-climbing temperatures. California, being a large and wealthy state and later the cornerstone of the new Pacific Union, managed fairly well at first. Two dams were built to try to protect the Bay and the Sacramento Valley from rising seas, but the Golden Wall fell to sabotage before it could be completed, and Vay-deo dam, as the locals called it, cracked in the Big One, causing one of the largest, most rapid floods in history in what was already a time of great floods. Los Angeles didn’t fall into the Pacific, the Pacific fell into Los Angeles in creeping, inexorable inches, but the heat and drought and weather sent people north long before a large section of the metropolitan area was submerged. A dirty bomb in Hollywood in 2045 sent anyone who was still in the area, north.

The Northeast crumbled under the weight of too many people and not enough resources. The flooding of New York was an afterthought compared to the bombing of Washington, which didn’t do anywhere near as much damage as the civil uprisings of the 2020s. Pockets of well-armed wealth remained, tiny Corporation States which promised survival in exchange for freedom once it was obvious that the federal government was not coming back.

Refugees were everywhere, fleeing the food shortages, the fallout, the rising waters. In 2048, rampant use of greenhouse gasses, combined with ever rising ocean temperatures and acidity combined to cause massive slips of land ice into the ocean in both hemispheres. The seas had already risen more than predicted, but the catastrophic shift of ice from land to sea brought sea level an average of 33 inches higher worldwide. In some places, the net effect was closer to 40 inches. The impact on water circulation was severe, and Europe plunged into an ice age. The surge stopped, even subsided a bit as storms dropped record amounts of moisture into the mountains in a winter that would not quit, but the damage was done, and the lowlands were abandoned. The death toll was unimaginable. 

It was 2050 before things were stable enough for the PSA to do more than triage the daily catastrophes. New technologies had been developed on the fly to deal with immediate problems. Domes and filters to protect from fallout. Desalination to give the mountains near the Bay Area water, and then water reclamation everywhere as people stopped trusting anything that came from the sky. Mechanical pollinators helped keep people fed. Every home had a garden, indoors or out, on a wall if need be where space was limited, shelving systems with tiny twinkling LEDs and recirculating water. 

By then, the birth rate in what had once been the United States had declined from around four million babies per year to four thousand, and of those four thousand children, eighty percent were born early. Fully half of those births were within the PSA.

It was when they realized that the pregnancy rate across the continent was likely close to two million that it became clear that something was fundamentally wrong with humanity’s ability to sustain pregnancy. Individual tragedies became a countrywide fear and then a worldwide terror.

The bees were mostly gone by then, the few remaining hives living in research facilities in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. 

Animal births faltered and stopped, but by that point the science of meat meant the vast majority of animal protein in the PSA was vat grown, indoors, no brain, no bones, no ethical backlash. Refugees came looking for food, but fewer and fewer children accompanied them. 

Concerted efforts sprang up at universities around the world, but as each fell, their best and brightest converged on the last functioning, tech-capable democracy in the world. 

The internet was no longer reliable enough for worldwide communication due to lack of maintenance of infrastructure and widespread sabotage, but the tech corridor of I5 and the data centers survived, and the PSA sent out drones with food, communication equipment and emergency supplies. Carbohydrates, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals, harvested and reassembled from dumps and compressed into shelf-stable bricks, accompanied durable, simple water purifiers, basic survival supplies, and informational pamphlets - pictorial as fewer and fewer people in the rest of the world knew how to read. 

The earliest iteration was called Project Dove, and the mission was to get as much information about humanity in other parts of the world as possible. Some of the drones were shot down. Some made contact and returned. A few simply vanished without a trace. The birth data that did come back was terrifying. Starvation in many areas was too widespread and rapid for the drops of supplies to make even a dent, but in the places closest to the PSA, they were a lifeline, and not always happily received. They had included information on birth control in the drops, because of the high rate of maternal death in unsuccessful pregnancies. What they did not do was put contraceptives in the food. But despite their adamant statements to the contrary, they could not shake the rumor.

Food Not Bombs, the second iteration of the humanitarian project, became not a nice pacifist organization but the only foreign policy that worked. Nutrient drops from the PSA, sent by drone, happened regularly across all territories that might be able to still threaten the PSA with terrorist attacks, and irregularly anywhere the PSA wanted information.The rhetoric against the PSA across the rest of North America was fierce, and fueled splintered and uncoordinated attacks by civilians, but after the Independent State of Exxon-Mobil was cut off completely from these drops for 12 weeks following their last incursion, no established government made any official attempt to wage war on the PSA.

The last year babies survived past infancy, anywhere in the world that the researchers could contact, was in 2059. 200 children were born within the domes of the PSA and nowhere else, where early doming and fanatic attention to clean food supplies kept the novel endocrine disruptors out longer than in most places. Their parents came from all over the world. However, a terrorist attack by religious zealots caused widespread contamination in the middle of 2059, and no more babies were born after that; though many pregnancies were documented, most failed in the first 30 days, and none survived past 15 weeks. Families with children banded together in several clusters, so that their children could take advantage of the wealth of expertise at the universities. But as the population of young people dwindled, first daycares shut down, then elementary schools, and families tightened their clustering so that the remaining children could be educated together. The Last Generation grew up with the knowledge that either they would figure out how to fix humanity’s problems, or that humanity would end with them.

Rapid transit built in the ‘30s still functioned from Eugene to Vancouver, and Seattle’s industry persisted even when families with children fled south to higher ground and less upheaval. Half of Portland was underwater, but the larger metropolitan area survived with varying levels of liveability. 

The University of Oregon ended up being the last fully functioning school by default, with enough agriculture and infrastructure to make it livable and just enough isolation to make it hard to get to for those without means. It was one of the oldest system of domes on the West Coast. 

It wasn’t invulnerable. The Jefferson Dissent, which began half an hour south of Eugene and ended in the mountains of Northern California, sent occasional raids until wildfires obliterated much of the area in the Great Draught. 

Parts of the school lay in disuse and disrepair, but groups of research scientists had colonized parts of campus that would otherwise have fallen by the wayside. A large team of scientists worked on nanotech and microtech in conjunction with the biology department, modeling tiny machines after viruses, bacteria and insects. 

In Portland and Seattle, competing teams of fertility specialists worked on the problem of the crashing population rate, but it was not until the agricultural specialists in Corvallis pitched in that they started making real progress at extrauterine gestation.

They found the problem quickly, once they understood the magnitude of the issue. Without the political chaos of the 2020s, they might have picked up on it ten or fifteen years earlier, when it was still fixable. But by the time it was determined that complex endocrine disruptors, wind- and water-borne, had spread worldwide in storms and floods and in the food supply, their epigenetic and generational effects were beyond easy remedies. Pregnancies might happen, but more things went wrong. In the war between placenta and endometrium, the endometrium had found a potent ally. Autoimmune disorders were endemic. And the last straw was a new disruptor, one which managed to interfere with the shift to placental support. 

Anyone who became pregnant died where medical support and birth control were inadequate. The resulting demographic shift did not help the political situation. The PSA became a refuge for people with uteruses. More conservative nearby nations screamed about the Godless heathens stealing their women. Within the PSA, gender was seen broadly as a social construct, though there were enough different religious and cultural groups with different ideas that the notions of binary gender were not completely obliterated.  

“God’s punishment,” the religious called the deaths during pregnancy. Science was blamed. Scientists were blamed. The last green places were blamed. In the transformed labs and classrooms of the last universities, frantic efforts were made to counteract the toxins in the environment, to find some way, any way for the human race to survive past the last generation. 

The population aged.

Suicide rates skyrocketed early, and surged even further when the fertility collapse was made known.

Animals started to be born that had been gestated from stored cells in vats, restoring extinct species from scratch, but the human puzzle was a tougher nut to crack. Fetuses could be grown, to a point. A few even made it to scrawny, translucent viability, but the children did not survive long, even with the highest tech support. 

Some changes were made to the tanks, with a regular program of stimulation, vibration, and auditory recordings. And a small cohort of infants were born, to cautious but joyful researchers. But the children did not adapt well, once born, and while they lived, the behavior issues and profoundly antisocial behavior they exhibited pointed to some deep flaw in the underlying gestational program. Babies screamed when held, preferring mechanical soothers. Language development was minimal, with babies averse to unfamiliar voices. Development was stunted and consistently unusual from child to child. They did not form attachments to the people who desperately wanted them.

At first, the researchers thought it was autism, but when autistic adults who specialized in the care of autistic children were brought in, it became clear that something different was going on. 

Brain scans were done which found profound abnormalities in many parts of the brain, abnormalities which were uniform across the cohort. 

As the children got bigger, slowly, they began to lash out, and it became obvious that the extrauterine gestational process was not going to be the answer as it stood.

The resulting scandal was huge, and an ethical oversight committee that had been bypassed on the grounds of emergency was reinstated. Meanwhile, The Babylon Cooperative worked frantically to salvage the human race, as the planet deteriorated around them. 

It became clear that cleaning the Earth would be a much longer-scale process than humanity could survive. The rest of the planets in the solar system were even worse. There was a Mars colony, a desperate, abandoned group of settlers too old to reproduce, the planned resupply missions scrapped when the world fell apart. 

No one wanted to say it, but there was a strong possibility that by the time the fertility problem was solved, there would be no one left to raise the resulting children.

Computing progressed, even in the chaos, in part due to breakthroughs in biosynth. DNA was a compact and complex data storage medium, and its structure could be used and mimicked to create self-replicating devices that stored their complete process in tiny spaces, scavenging what they needed from the materials around them. When the problem of controlling growth was solved, a research team made an excursion to an old dump, dropped a gluey ball of nano- and microtech on top of the trash, pointed a strong light source at the area to be salvaged, and waited.

Nanobugs were developed which could selectively break down molecular bonds. Microbugs were created to analyze, sort, inventory and group raw materials, and when that process was finished, they could then assemble into larger devices that continued the process of refinement and reconstruction. The self-replicating technology meant that a properly programmed bug could be placed on, for example, an old office building, or a pile of rubble, climb to the highest point, and digest it into a thousand more of itself, then consume the spawned bugs and create larger, more complex machines out of the result, eventually creating new structures in place of the old, from materials on site.

The end result was a pile of sugarplastic bubbles filled with raw materials and isolated waste products, which were set aside for more study, and along the edges, new gluey balls for other dumps. The remaining machines waited for further instructions.  

Someone asked if they had to be so sticky, and if they needed to have an artificial light source. “Not in an undomed dump,” the lead scientist said. “Plenty of bright light out there.”

The “genetic” programming was altered, and the next generation looked more like large pillbugs than badly drawn jellyfish. When the researchers built in the ability to power themselves from the waste heat of the molecular breakdown process, they could even work underground.

The raw material distribution included so many rare elements and complex hydrocarbons that as soon as word got out, and a few of the “pilebugs,” as they came to be called, were stolen, whole new resource battles broke out where there was not tight social control.

Control tightened everywhere. 

Biological interfaces with microscopic sensors and transmitters allowed many researchers to streamline their efforts with direct neural-computer wireless interfaces. Gone was the larger worldwide web, but enough had been saved, and the PSA had dedicated much of its resources to maintaining connectivity up and down the coast. Seattle was the hub, with redundant data backup of much of the cloud everywhere they had enough locals and infrastructure to support it. Redundant archives became a cultural obsession of a dying world. A hardcopy repository was started, in case civilization collapsed beyond help and humanity somehow survived.

The pilebug programming was a closely held secret, because of the potential for harm.  Backwards engineering was impossible for those without the Co-op’s resources. 

Within the PSA, the Babylon Cooperative became a dominant power. There were only a few people who truly understood how the bugs worked at a core level. It was clear that the potential applications were huge, but there just weren’t enough people who comprehended them well enough to make use of the tools to their best effect in the available time. Training the remaining young people became the driving goal of the Pacific States. 

As the PSA stabilized, it became clear that the entire population was suffering widespread psychological trauma. Efforts were made to train people to cope with the resulting stresses in productive ways, with varying success. Community beautification efforts were promoted as therapeutic.

Within the research clusters, neurodiversity was seen as an asset. New ways of thinking were prized, quirks and coping mechanisms supported, special interests encouraged. “Think outside the box” became “There is no box. The survival of humanity depends on new ideas.”

Skin-based links to the net abounded, traceries of gold at the temples and key points on the head for those who used it the most, headsets for more casual users. With the development of ever smaller and more powerful transmitters, it became clear that mental states could be influenced, if not controlled, and those without links grew increasingly suspicious of those with. Thus, “old-fashioned” data inputs did not die out, but the speed gains of working with a direct connection were obvious to those in the Co-op.

A wider culture of inclusion—motto, “We need everyone”—made for eclectic neighborhoods around the University, but farther from the research clusters, old tendencies for humans to sort themselves into distrustful subcultures persisted. As the years passed and no children played in the streets, nihilism and social unrest grew. As it became easier to rebuild and more people returned to school to learn about the newest technologies, the University grew, and changed, and became more isolated. Most people who came into the University were there to join the research projects, and only those trained for specific purposes in the larger nation ever left. 

In 2077, the last freshman class, about 80 students, gathered at the University of Oregon. The classes ahead of them were still attending, but what had, in its heyday, been a campus with 20,000 students was now a campus with 1500 researchers, 2000 educators and about 4000 students.

The speed of the population crash showed nowhere more than here. 2% of the student body were freshmen. 6% sophomores. 10% were juniors and 15% were seniors. The rest were grad and community education students of varying ages. There was no tuition. There was also no real salary, but the University, as the seat of power for the Babylon Cooperative, was already self-sufficient enough and powerful enough in the region to trade for whatever was needed. A monetary system still existed, of sorts—the robust local and regional networks also allowed for sophisticated tracking of barter of resources, skills and labor, but the social support networks that had come out of the Fall had matured well where they were allowed to thrive. 

Where the science was tolerated, housing could be grown, and with greenhouses built into the designs, food grown within the housing. Even computing resources could be grown. 

The science was not tolerated widely. Even within the PSA, dissent came and went in waves. Never monolithic, when crisis gave way to chronic, old divides resurfaced. As the population aged and skepticism about possible scientific solutions grew, rumors and rivalries brought political change.  

[star-anise]

i was hoping my last ask would get me a free rant without having to make a dreaded choice uhhhhhhh do maybe washcloths or fake smile?

Hahaha no you have to specify what white person thing you want a rant about, or else I’m paralyzed by too many choices. And nb. by “white” I generally mean white Anglo-Saxon Protestant; WASPs have traditionally been held up as the cultural standard everyone else n North America or other British colonies should follow, and the “whiteness” of different European ethnicities in those colonies is generally judged by how assimilated they are to the WASP ideal. So my observations will not apply very well to, for example, other European ethnicities, or people from areas colonized by those other European groups.

WASHCLOTHS. Related to another trap, Guest Towels Guests Must Never Use. Which are usually distinguished by their elaborateness and a thin layer of dust. As a certified White Person (Anglo Canadian) I can say: This is a real actual literal thing my family does. If I stay at an aunt’s house, I don’t use her guest towels; I walk past the guest towels on the towel rack and ask my hostess, “What towel do you want me to use?” and she fetches me a new, less nice, towel out of the linen closet. 

The actual washcloth meant to be used is hung somewhere separate. When I was about 13, I rebelled against sharing a washcloth with my brothers, bought my own washcloth from a department store, embroidered my name on it, and zealously defended it against all comers. These days, my older brother has four children. When we go to his house to eat dinner, his children all wash their hands before they eat… and then wipe them dry on a single towel hung in the downstairs bathroom, which his guests also use. So we all wash our hands and then share germs. I… think? There might be a bar on the opposite wall with guest towels hanging on it?  But my eyes have been trained to skate right over guest towels. They’re decor, not things we actually use.

Why White People Do This:

1. Washing and cleanliness… have not traditionally held a central place in European life the way, say, wudu does in Islam. Although priests ritually wash their hands before performing the consecration of Mass, nobody else in the congregation has to. This is partly because in Christian Scripture, Jesus says that if something is ritually pure but spiritually suspect, it should be treated as impure, which Christians kind of took to mean “ritual purity and cleanliness rituals are things non-Christians do.” 

So in the 19th century, a German doctor discovered that you could reduce the rate of infection dramatically when doctors washed their hands and instruments between dissecting dead bodies and attending in childbirth. Doctors were OFFENDED and APPALLED by this–partly because the guy pointing it out was an asshole, yes, but partly because there was a feeling that “a gentleman’s hands are always clean”, so it was offensive to say their hands were dirty because it impugned their class and education.

Cleanliness is hugely related to class and status–I could go on a LOT more here about how in the 19th century, British and American attempts to “educate” and “civilize” poor white people and people of colour included imposing standards of hygiene on them that felt cruel and punitive–scrubbing skin raw, using caustic soap, delousing with kerosene–partly because white people didn’t have a very advanced idea of what chemicals made good cosmetics, and there wasn’t much awareness of the need for oils or moisturizers. (For a long time very few sources of natural oil, like canola, olives, or sunflowers, or even petroleum products, were available in Britain, so until somewhat recently they only really had pine tar and animal fat, which they used for everything from making soap to lighting lamps to greasing cart axels.) And the 19th century cleanliness movement did not have a good opinion of traditional bathing methods like the sauna, banya, or steam room, where sweat was scraped off the skin. So people who HAD hygiene rituals that worked for them, when they emigrated to western Europe or North America, got shamed and discouraged from using them. It was just expected that part of “civilizing” a child who hadn’t been “well brought up” was forcefully ducking them in a bath and scrubbing them while they screamed and fought you.

So for white people from everything but the highest classes, if you go a few generations back, there’s this feeling that cleanliness is something unnatural and unpleasant, something imposed by a punitive authoritarian force, and not something intrinsically desirable. Old men used to talk about “taking a bath once a year, whether I need it or not,” and fear of losing their “protective coating of dirt.” Which makes sense when you realize how awful old cosmetics used to feel.

I mean, as I type this, I’m applying Vaseline to the hangnails on my fingers, because when I use soap in the bath or do the dishes or wash my hands after going to the bathroom, the soap strips oil from my skin and dries it out, leading it to crack and bleed. This is a really common problem but the current solution seems to be “women carry tiny bottles of moisturizer everywhere in their purses, and men… suffer if they want to seem manly, and then post memes to facebook about how rough and terrible their hands look to emphasize their heterosexual masculinity.”

This also relates to why white people say racist things about people of colour being “dirty” when they use natural methods of keeping their hair or skin clean. The white conception of cleanliness is honestly really fucked up.

2. Cloth holds an especially weird place in white society. I mean, lots of cultures everywhere like their cloth to look nice! But in Europe and American colonies in the 1600s there was an extra special movement to restrict women economically and bar them from business and public life–so while a rich woman could run a business outside the home and buy and sell in 1400, that freedom was disappearing in 1600. Only women of the ~lower classes~ did real actual work. And the religious sentiment at the time really emphasized Purity, Hard Work, Productiveness, and No Fun. So women were supposed to stay inside all the time and not participate in industry! But they were always supposed to be busy. The saying was literally “Idle hands are the devil’s tools”. 

That turned embroidery from an aesthetic, decorative art into a moral act. You didn’t embroider to make something pretty; you embroidered for the good of your soul. Fancy embroidered pieces displayed in a home were meant to demonstrate a) that the house was rich enough to have idle women, and b) the moral purity and obedience to gender norms of the women of the house. (This also extends to things like quilts, lace doilies, hooked rugs, etc.)

So towels used to be made of linen, a plain flat cloth, and then embroidered and otherwise embellished. My mom, in the 1960s, learned how to do embroidery where you painstakingly pull a few threads out of a piece of linen, and then embellish the place where the threads have been taken out.

Linen, incidentally, is a strange and amazing fabric. When new, freshly starched and ironed, it is flat and crisp. But pressure and moisture can change it really easily. When I sew with linen, I just have to lick my fingers and fold it over, and it stays like that–something most fabrics don’t do. So if you actually use a linen towel to dry your hands, you will crumple it in a way that is very hard to reverse.

Therefore: Fancy linens were displayed prominently in the home as a status symbol, but a guest who wanted to stay on his hostess’s good side did not use them. There are a lot of ettiquettes around using linens when you absolutely have to, like just gently wiping your fingers on a towel, that diminished the damage the fabric would take.

So, I mean, actually rich people used their good towels, because if they ruin them, they can just get new ones. Fancy linens were intended for high-class guests who knew how to keep from damaging them. So using someone’s guest towels sent the message, “I am so high-status that I’m WORTH potentially ruining something that took a ton of work to make and maintain.” Or, if you obviously weren’t that high status, “I don’t know about the work that goes into making nice things, or don’t value the work you did and don’t care how much effort you’ll have to go to because I wanted to wipe my face.”

But that was in the days of linen. Guest towels are going out of fashion, partly because modern terrycloth towels are almost impossible to crease or ruin, so it doesn’t really matter if guests use them. But even with terrycloth towels, homeowners sometimes like to create really elaborate towel displays. I don’t know how those people feel when guests use them, but as a white girl I feel really uncomfortable taking a towel display in somebody else’s house apart, and try to wipe my hands while causing the least disturbance possible.

Oh, I guess I should mention that invisible tests no one will ever mention if you fail are absolutely a white person thing. Like, if you watch costumed period drama movies, there’s often a scene where someone is really unbearable and rude, and everyone is super polite and awkward and just sits there and says nothing. That’s not consciously an exclusive practice; from the perspective of white people it’s just an ingrained reflex, “Freeze and smile when something awkward happens and then later cut them out of your life.” 

That reflex comes because the Industrial Revolution and colonization (1600s-1800s) led to a lot of class mobility. Ordinary men could get involved in business and become wealthier than the hereditary landowners! Which the hereditary landowners felt super threatened by, so they went out of their way to cultivate manners and standards that were very unlike those used by the common people. Upperclass accents became more marked and exaggerated; dictionaries decided to make English spelling and grammar especially hard to learn; manners got super weird and unintuitive. They wanted to make it as hard as possible for common people to fit into high society.

Therefore, to enable that system, the rule became: Never tell someone when they’re fucking up. If they know what they’re doing wrong, they’ll FIX it, and then they’ll fit in better! And that would lead to the absolute downfall of Western civilization! Which would of course be a bad thing! And that got codified as The Right And Desirable Way To Do Things. A low-class person might say “Hey, you just insulted me, I’m upset,” but someone with aspirations of rising higher in life learned to freeze and say nothing. That was how you defined “polite”.

So like I said, if I, as a white person, point out to other liberal white people that the freeze-and-smile-awkwardly response is really exclusionary to people from different backgrounds, they go, “Oh my gosh, you’re right!” and we can talk about changing it. It’s why white people invented assertiveness training. It’s a thing white people have to unpack and decolonize. But it’s not commonly a conscious attempt to exclude someone by not letting them know they’re breaking the rules.

ANYWAY. Towels.

So IF someone has guest towels taking up their towel rack in their bathroom, there’s very little room left for the actual towels. (Unless they’re like my aunt, whose bathroom literally has a second towel rack to accommodate her guest towel arrangement) Therefore: The entire fucking family sharing a single washcloth because that’s all they have room for, and it doesn’t feel that important not to share.

WHITE CULTURE IS WEIRD AS HELL.

And if you come to my house? You’re allowed to use my guest towels. It’s what they’re there for.

[mst3kproject]

111: Moon Zero-Two

 In his review of Serenity, the late Roger Ebert defined ‘space opera’ as being like horse opera, but with space instead of horses.  I can think of no better description of Moon Zero-Two.

Captain Bill Kemp and his co-pilot Kaminsky were once heroes, the first men on Mars, but now that a proper colonization of the solar system is underway, they’re reduced to running a salvage operation.  The opportunity to do something more profitable knocks when Evil Businessman Mr. Hubbard asks them to help him crash an asteroid on the far side of the moon – an asteroid made of almost pure blue sapphire!  Meanwhile, Kemp is also trying to help a woman named Clementine Taplan, who’s supposed to be meeting her brother Wally, but nobody’s seen him since he sent her the invitation four months ago.  And isn’t it interesting that Wally’s lunar mining claim is exactly where Hubbard’s asteroid is going to hit?

I actually really like this movie.  The visuals are often silly, but it’s quite well-made and the ‘space western’ feel is fun. The actors are decent, the effects aren’t bad, and when you think about it, it’s surprisingly hard science fiction. The only overtly unrealistic things in it are the artificial gravity and the characters’ bad habit of going for spacewalks without a tether.

Moon Zero-Two’s overall aesthetic probably made more sense when the movie was new than it does now.  It is, indeed, rather painfully late-60’s, but nothing about it is just gratuitously weird – everything has a purpose.  The music, for example.  Tom Servo complains about the ‘free-form jazz’ but it’s as effective at suggesting the free-floating emptiness of space as the Jaws theme is at saying ‘shark!’.  Indoor scenes have a more grounded soundtrack and even the low-gravity barfight is not scored the way the parts that take place in vacuum are.

Likewise, the odd outfits and plasticky wigs serve to emphasize the artificiality of the environment.  The ‘natural’ late-60’s-early-70’s look, with loose clothing and long hair, would have been entirely out of place here.  This is a world humans have had to build from the ground up – nothing else is natural here, so why should the people be?  The moon colonists try to jazz up their world a little with their fanciful outfits and theme nights at the bar, but they can��t even make a dent in the relentless desolation of the landscape.  They barely even make one in the self-consciously futuristic white of their cities.  Kemp says ‘we will always be foreigners here’, and the sets and costumes reinforce his point.

In Clementine’s case, what she wears also serves to show how comfortable she is in this environment and in Bill’s company.  When she first arrives on the moon she is covered from head to toe. As she adjusts, she trades her weird headpiece for a wig.  Finally, we see her with her own hair hanging down.

On another level, clothing in this movie is about vulnerability. Bill and Clem come closest to being humans in the natural state (nude), when they are near death from over-heating in the un-insulated moon bug.  Bill’s two topless scenes are supposed to be about his dislike of vulnerability turning into a willingness to show vulnerability around Clem, but they don’t work very well because both of them are such clichés: she catches him coming out of the shower in what’s supposed to be a joke, and then there’s the ‘couple who won’t admit they’re falling in love have to undress because of the heat’. I can see what they were going for, but I wish they’d found a better way to do it.  Both scenes get some very powerful eyerolls.

(ETA: I probably should have said something about how Bill is in love with Clem like twenty minutes after his previous girlfriend died, but I only just dealt with something like that in the EtNW review for It’s Alive and I decided not to bother.)

The idea of vulnerability brings us to the movie’s main theme, which is that while space is a place of limitless potential, full of things like rich nickel veins and sapphire asteroids and other opportunities for science and profit, living there is always going to suck.  In the future of Moon Zero-Two, there is a large population of humans on the moon, but anything above and beyond a very basic lifestyle is rare and expensive. There’s the tiny hut we see that Wally Taplan was living in, Kemp’s complaints about the cost of drinks, and the difficulty of getting anywhere that’s not a tourist center.  Danger is everywhere – as one character observes, ‘nobody dies slowly on the moon.’

These dangers are mostly hidden from casual travelers so as not to frighten them (witness the monument, around a corner where only residents will see it), but vacuum, heat, cold, and radiation are ever-present.  It’s much like modern air travel, which is perfectly safe as long as everything works and everybody does their jobs, but all it takes is one mistake, one faulty component, and everything goes down in flames. This makes Moon Zero-Two stand out from other sci-fi movies that rely on alien monsters to scare the audience, forgetting that space itself is really far more frightening than any number of extraterrestrial teeth.

This isn’t a horror movie, though – Moon Zero-Two bills itself as ‘the first moon western’.  I’m not sure if it’s actually the first, but it’s definitely a moon western!  I mean, we’ve got miners, tycoons, shootouts, and untold riches in a wild new frontier with dangers around every corner!  As a bonus, setting it on the moon avoids the troubling questions of who has a right to this land, and doesn’t allow the writers to use ‘angry natives’ as one of their generic dangers.  Western clichés pop up repeatedly, but unlike the cliché nudity, these are actually entertaining as each one comes with a sci-fi twist. There’s a saloon, but the barfight takes place in microgravity!  Bill and Clem may overheat and die in the desert, but that’s because their moon bug has broken down rather than because their horse stepped in a gopher hole! These fun little uses of the tropes are a running gag in themselves.

Moon Zero-Two is also another movie where it’s a load of fun to look at what the writers and production designers thought the future would be like versus what actually happened.  The film-makers probably thought they were being very forward-thinking, with their personal computers and satellite communications.  Of course now we scoff at the briefcase-sized computers with their single-colour displays and giant keypads, but at the time it must have seemed quite futuristic!  It makes me wonder what people fifty years from now (if there are any left) will think of the interactive hologram technology we depict in movies like Avatar and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For all these things to like about it, Moon Zero-Two is a long way from perfect.  Everybody on the moon seems to be white and there are far more men than women, although the women we see are portrayed as competent and intelligent (except for Hubbard’s collection of bimbos, barely able to sound out the words on their Community Chest cards… though when we consider Harry, I suppose we’re meant to assume that Hubbard just likes surrounding himself with stupid people).  We relate to Bill as he seems like just a guy trying to make a living, but he’s a bit too much of a bitter grouch to really be likeable.  I would have liked to see some more personality for Clem and Kaminsky, too.

The biggest thing that just feels like it’s missing from Moon Zero-Two is any idea of what’s going on down on Earth.  This is not, of course, essential to the story – it’s notable that we never see Earth, only what’s happening on the Moon and in space – but considering when the movie was made I was curious what it would predict for the outcome of the Cold War.  In the opening, we see an America and a Russian astronaut who are rivals until they are both swept up in the (extremely capitalist) race to colonize the solar system.   In the movie proper, the Russians vanish.  Somebody sneeringly asks where Kaminsky is from, but it’s not clear whether this is a cold war thing or just garden-variety xenophobia.  What happened?  Have the Russians left the moon as the British-American colonization project got going?  Do they have their own bases elsewhere on the surface?  We never find out, and it makes me wonder why the opening sequence brought it up.

Speaking of the opening sequence, I do love the theme song.  It’s so cheerful and catchy, and it makes exploring the solar system sound like a really good time!

Outside of the Russian movies, which had been badly-translated and mercilessly cut down, I think Moon Zero-Two might be the best film ever featured on MST3K.  It is very easy to make fun of, being so obviously a product of its time, but it doesn’t have any of the egregious errors of acting, pacing, or cheapness that ruined so many other good ideas in such movies.  For the most part it uses its clichés in an entertaining way and we don’t really hate any of the characters except the smug, cackling Hubbard, whom we’re supposed to hate.  Its visuals, audio, and story never bore us, and the story has only one major coincidence in Clem and Hubbard both going to Bill for help – but what we’re told about Bill’s past and present doesn’t make this seem too unlikely.  As I already mentioned, it doesn’t need a whole bunch of technobabble to get the story going, and still manages to be pretty good fun.

Perhaps the highest praise I can give to Moon Zero-Two is this: it’s probably the only MST3K episode where the riffing actually annoys me, because I’m trying to pay attention to the movie.

[fursasaida]

also like. what do you even mean by atheism. what kind of atheism, in relation to what. because there are many, many people in Arab countries who live their lives irreligiously, who do not involve themselves in hardly any religious observance, who are no more religious than a US atheist who still goes home for Christmas--who would still instantly answer “oh I’m Muslim/Orthodox/etc” if asked. because that piece of communal information is still made extremely salient by their governments and societies. (like, they need it for their government documents and to navigate most social interactions the same way I need an address to do anything at all, and the same way I get asked a lot of awkward questions in social situations by people who find me difficult to categorize racially.) by the same token: there are many people who are observant, but not what a Protestant would consider possessed of “faith,” who are counted as “religious” within the context of their own religions, because they practice regardless of what they think. and there are religions that consider unbelief or irreligion entirely acceptable within their own orthodoxy, to the extent that “orthodoxy” is the correct word to use for them. and so on.

a related issue is the assertion that the abstract category of “religion” is an invention of the modern and colonial “West,” which is often foundational in orientalizing claims like this one about atheism. the assumption is that, always and everywhere, what we now call “religion” was a totally organic part of social life not really thought of as a thing distinct from other domains and not conceived as separate or separable. (things have looked this way for some people in some places at some times, but it has not been true for everyone everywhere at all times. probably the most common situation is a mix falling on contextually specific lines of class, education, etc., but I digress.) therefore any one form of “religious” life and practice could not be compared to others, and certainly could not be categorically negated. thus, the argument goes, this abstracted concept comes about basically as a result of colonizing Christians encountering “other religions” and trying to make sense of them more or less on the basis of how much they were or weren’t “like” Christianity, and essentializing and codifying them in the process.

if you believe this, then of course it makes a lot of sense to say that atheism--the negation of “religion” as such, categorically--would have to be a Western invention and imposition. we might also note that this implies certain notions about who has been capable of producing what kinds of knowledge; it reinforces the exceptionalism of the modern West as producing certain kinds of universalism and abstraction. (you do not have to like universalism and abstraction to recognize, I hope, that 1) these modes of thinking are by no means limited to the modern West, cf. the history of mathematics, etc. etc. etc., and 2) holding onto such a limitation reinscribes the inequalities we all claim to want to get rid of.) it also, ironically, requires doing exactly the thing that people interested in religious studies who make this kind of claim want to undo. assuming that “atheism” means one specific form of negation requires that you assume the thing being negated (or negotiated) is basically always the same. so, it requires you to assume that all religions work like a specific idea of Christianity. oh dear! this is what I was getting at in the first paragraph.

 this story about “the invention of religion” is also not true. while certainly colonial processes of essentialization and codification happened (e.g., in British India and French North Africa; these were as much processes of racecraft as anything else), these do not actually require that nobody had any religious consciousness beforehand. “religion” in what we call the modern sense has a very long history in Islamic political theory and historiography, and probably was at least beginning to emerge with the institutionalization of Zoroastrianism under the Sasanians in Late Antiquity. (my source for this is Rushain Abbasi’s “Islam and the Invention of Religion,” 2021.) there are traces of an abstract notion of religion in the Qur’an, and already in the early second millennium you start to see “Mirrors for Princes” kinds of writing that treat religion entirely sociologically and instrumentally--as a means of governance--rather than as revealed truth. (nb: this does not mean the authors were themselves irreligious; theology and transcendence were simply irrelevant to the matters of state they were writing about.) aspects of this knowledge tradition very much did influence the Latin West in the medieval period as well.

now, i do not know that this categorical notion of religion did not also form in other contexts--it probably has happened several times that I don’t know about. I looked up “history of atheism in India” based on this post and clearly that is something to look into further, though it is not something I know much about. but at minimum, it seems quite clear that an abstract idea of religion came about at least once in the Late Antique mashreq and has had a long, robust life from there; that alone is enough to make it very clear that “religion” as such is not a modern or Western invention.

it is therefore not very surprising that a lot of dissident writings, spiritual movements, philosophical lineages, and so on from earlier and elsewhere--such as Sramana in India, thank you OP--sure look like atheism! because once someone learns to think “thing,” it is not very hard to think “not-thing.” and this kind of automatic, wholly organic, invisible notion of “premodern religion” did not in fact dominate the whole world until the last ~3 centuries on one peninsula.

so, tl; dr: a lot of things assumed to be “invented” with modernity in the West were not; “the modern concept of religion” is one of these things; if you let go of that assumption then it becomes a pretty incredible claim to assert that nobody thought “what if there’s no god/transcendental sphere/otherworld/spirit” until the colonizers showed up. and, moreover, to assume in advance that you know what “atheism” means in every context is just to reproduce the colonial knowledge structures you’re trying to rebut.

Anyway the other funny thing about the bizarre trend of crypto-conservative anti-atheist rhetoric you see in twitblr is the whole “atheism is very Western and White” idea bc the four countries with the highest populations of atheists are China, India, Japan and Vietnam so like maybe it’s the people that say those talking points are the ones stuck in an Orientalist viewpoint based off stereotypes

[jessjessjojess]

2018. A mixed bunch.

Settle in for quite a story children... 

So its pretty early in the year for one of these yearly roundups (I can guarantee I’ll be doing another one in like December) but I have the extra time on my hands, so why not. 

2018 can seriously get stuffed, but then also (after I’ve meditated and thought about it) have a little (actually minuscule) cuddle. Let me clarify, this year has been absolutely shite, but it’s given me a lot of time (many thousands of hours) to reflect on who I am, who I want to be, and what I should do. Sense a common theme, its I, of course it is because I’m a millennial (or the one that comes right after that one) so I’m very egotistical (I’m working on it, I bought a book). 

Let me give you a play by play, great January, did my usual tan, beach, sleep, repeat motto, with a splatter of sport in there for good measure. the problem came in February. It was my birthday (5th in case your wondering), and a girl came, we were pretty good friends, but we’d had a bit of an issue over a boy of course (I thought she was a snake, she thought I was pathetic, that fun stuff that girls do to each other because society tells us we are in competition with each other). Anyway she showed up to my dinner, (so did the boy because I suck) and she did not speak to me, which left me so pissed, at least have the decency to say happy birthday. So in response to this I said absolutely nothing (because I’m so freaking British), but I thought some awful things, (which of course left me with some really bad karma obviously displayed by the next weeks events). 

I have my birthday and my kids at school are cute and buy me presents and everything is great until the 8th February 2018, when I quite literally sat down and could stand up again. Skip to the 11th when I am in A&E with a broken ankle, FROM SITTING DOWN, 6 hours, a moon boot, and a pair of crutches later, I’m home not happy. So at this point I am just noticing what a joke my life is, when I realise I can’t drive, its my right foot, I can’t work, drive or walk, happy 23rd birthday Jess. I mean its not really that bad if it was a broken ankle but it wasn’t. One month later I still didn’t have a diagnosis, other than “it’s not broken, but the MRI is showing the joint is really not happy.” The rest of me wasn’t really jumping of the walls either. But let’s leave the ankle for now because 2018 had so much more instore for me.

You know the saying when it rains, it pours, weelllll I’d never really bought it until now, I mean it didn’t hail on me or anything but i was very freaking wet. We are into March now, I get a call from the hospital, I get excited thinking it’s about my ankle (note: it definitely wasn’t), which I still didn’t know what was happening with. I’ve been recommended for a Gastroscopy, (if you don’t what that is, its a camera on a tube that they put down your throat to look at your insides -sounds fun right? It’s not). They want me to have my gastroscopy next week, I have to explain I’m in a moon boot, they really don’t care, but I have something to take my mind of my ankle, this wild minor surgery that has appeared. All is sweet, I don’t really worry too much because its about my anaemia, which honestly is like the least of my health problems. Even the surgeon thinks its a joke that I’m there, quote “it’s weird your here, I probably won’t find anything, this seems extreme”. He was just filling me with confidence, which he promptly knocked down after surgery with “we found something, its not great, we need to run some further tests, you’ll hear from us this week. Oh and your have Coeliac Disease. CATCHYAAAAA.” Okay I embellished the end there, but that’s was it felt like. Upon a lot of googling the words on the piece of paper he handed me, Dr Google informed me I had 2 tumours in my stomach, and an auto-immune disease which meant that when i ate gluten (literally every meal), my body attacked itself. 

I had a week of absolute torture wondering what these tumours meant for my future (also had a breakdown in a supermarket when I realised that Cadbury chocolate may contain gluten!!), but then I got the call, yesssss they were all clear, but I was now booked in for a COLONOSCOPY in a months time. It was basically the same dealio as gastroscopy, but instead of the mouth they use your butthole. Now I’m no prude, people have seen my bum before, I mean I’ve had laser hair removal, but this felt so intrusive. Turned out the colonoscopy part is absolutely nothing, but the colon prep is a whole different ball game. I’m not going to get too gross, but I definitely felt VERY empty afterwards. ANYWAY colonoscopy is something I can check of the bucket list (not that it should ever be on there.) So they say bad things come in threes, I figure ankle, coeliac disease, and tumours, I’ve got to be clear right? NOPPPEEE they found another 2 tumours, I’ll cut to the chase quickly one was clear, one was pre-cancerous. Which means FUN I get to have colonoscopy every 3 years FOREVER, and if you missed it before I’m 23, so thats a whole lot of butt stuff! 

After March, I spent most of April moping, as I couldn’t work, or drive myself anywhere, in the self pity of my bedroom. In May though I finally got to see an ankle specialist, 10 weeks after going into the moon boot, who confirmed I would need ankle surgery. I was torn because I finally had a solution, but i knew I would still have to wait some time for the surgery, in fact almost 3 months. FINALLY on August 3rd I went under for my ankle arthroscopy and reconstruction, I was rapped. Lets be honest surgery and recovery are pretty shit, but at least I was in recovery now and I could get back to normal soon. 

That’s all the bad stuff out of the way now to talk about what made my 2018 a mixed bunch. I’m a high school maths and science teacher at the moment, and don’t get me wrong I love the teaching part of my job, I could spend everyday in the classroom, and never feel like I was working a day. However, I’m a bit like Australia, I’m not very good a politics. As a young woman, who is pretty driven, strong-willed, and kind of loud, I’d never had to deal with too much politics in the workplace. I’d been in hospitality at a theme park for the 5 years prior, as long as you weren’t obviously drunk when you showed up for your shift you were good. But in a school, especially one as big as mine there is a lot of people to please, and not all of those people have opinions and values that match yours, which can be a bit shit to be honest. As I mentioned before I’m not a shy girl, my entire life I’ve been called bossy, annoying and assertive, but I’m rude and I would never go out of my way to make someone else uncomfortable,  but that was not the opinion others had of me. This something we struggle with everywhere, women who are confident and driven are seen as arrogant, and “stuck-up”, and I was a bit sick of it. I started to look inwards towards the end of May, what did I want from life, who did I want to be, and what kind of legacy did I want to leave behind. The answer to most of these questions was not teaching, and I started to think back to high school and university, remembering my dream of becoming a surgeon, and as i did this i realised that was still something I was really passionate about. 

Goals and dreams are such difficult things to deal with, because once you starting thinking about it, it’s like giving away a part of you, you want it so bad you don’t know how you cope if you fail. But here’s the thing I’m learning it’s hard to reach for your dreams but if you don’t give it a crack then you’ll never know, it will always be playing on the back of your mind. I made the decision to start working towards getting into medical school, it’s not going to be easy it’s going to be a lot of work, and a long time coming, but when you feel something is right everything else is easier. 

We are definitely into the second half of the year now, and I’m definitely feeling more positive, I’m happier and lighter to be working towards something I’m passionate and excited about. My next focus is going to be on inner stillness, and finding myself in the present, focusing on living in the now, while creating a better and more exciting future. Moral of this story is you can deal with shit and come out better and stronger, sometimes the hard times are exactly what you needed to create a better you. Be your own role model, work hard, love hard, treat yo’self, and love yo’self. 

Well, if anyone made it this far, thanks for reading my story, I would love any ideas, feedback or advice you guys may have, and I will update you again probably in December!  

[eclecticcreative]

Great White Myths about Race and Racism.

After years of being in these kinds of arguments I thought I would make a list of myths and how to quickly defeat them. Do not copy-paste, though without credit. Give it back to this blog--Eclectic Creative on tumblr. (I'm sick of my words being stolen as it is and then people making money off of it when I give this for free.) Also, don't go taking the whole thing wholesale to make money. That'll also piss me off.

Talking racism is racist.

I got taught this one. That's stupid. If you want to dismantle a system, you need to understand how and why it works, which means you need to talk about it. You need to know the history and impact of it. You need to be bold, be wrong, and get corrected about race. That's what Ethnic Studies is for.

But Race is a Social construct...so [racism] it’s not real

So is money, the need to wear clothes, birthdays, holidays, gender, divisions of sex, religion, government, language, and so on--sure some of them do have biological imperatives attached, but so does race. Just because it's a social construct doesn't mean it's not real. You can't go and parade in front of a police station butt naked scream that the government is not real because it's a social construct, steal someone's money and scream it's a social construct and expect there to be no consequences.

Anthropologists can tell about 80% of the time from bones what race a person is. (In European definition of race as supposed to Brazilian, etc).

It's more insulting to call someone out for their racism than it is for them to be racist.

It's more insulting to call someone out for their accidental hatred than it is to turn your back and ignore them while they spread that hatred. It’s more insulting to call someone a murderer than it is to point out the systems that allowed them to murder. It’s more insulting to call someone a murderer than it is to allow them to murder again.

You can't be accidentally racist.

White people can't get over this one fast, usually. It's called implicit bias. You were programmed by your society to think and act in a certain way, bombarded by those images over and over and then taught to hush up on race. Of course you have no choice but to uphold those ideals.

If the person has issues with this idea, have them go to any grocery store or book shop and count up the PoCs. Where are they? How are they represented?

The other test is to ask them to randomly list 5 favorite authors, actors, etc. How many of them are white straight, CIS male? You can be actively against an ideology and still have issues with it.

Ethnicism and racism are the same thing!

They aren't. Ethnicism can be same race to same race. Say someone Han hates on someone Zhuang. That's Ethnicism. The dynamics also change. Say someone black American is hating on someone white and say that all whites are gun loving... but that's a very different dynamic if they've seen white people killing their relatives and have a history of slavery and being followed.

It's also a different dynamic when it's PoC to PoC, because inherently, there usually is white framer language in there. Such as say, the greedy rich Asian stereotype which may have contributed to the LA riots. In that case it's internalization. Same for Koreans hating on blacks because they watched some American movies... it's a different dynamic because it's not direct history of oppression, as in racism.

Xenophobia is a kind of racism.

Racism can play a role, but not always. Xenophobia is a hatred of foreigners. So if someone hates on Canadians coming to the US, and sees a white Canadian and a white USian, that's plain xenophobia. Racism can play a role, where someone says Mexicans, for example, are "lazy" "take people's jobs" but Canadians are productive. It gets trickier then. It's a cross between the two.

Racism is only individual.

Nope. This is because of imperialism. The rape of native people had a real impact especially in Latin Americas. (plural intentional). The opium Wars had an impact. The fact that the British Museum is all taken from other countries (mostly), is a sign of that imperialism. The fact that the jikji resides in France is also a sign of that. Repatriotize those goods, give PoCs equal pay and opportunity for work, stop killing black and brown peoples in gun violence, stop sexualizing WoCs and desexualizing MoCs, and all of the other things that are built into our system, then we can talk about how it's individual.

White Privilege... but I'm poor and I'm white, what privilege do I have?

Being poor and brown and poor and black has different consequences often. There are other privileges involved. The original essay was by Peggy Mcintosh, a white woman. Privilege is the act of inheriting rights given to you. Everyone living has privileges they can exercise at a given moment, otherwise you'd be dead. You were given privileges as a white person, such as mirrors on television, being called the default, etc. What her work asks you to do is to pay attention and be able to give those privileges to other people who don't have them.

If I give my privileges to someone else, they will be taken away from me.

No, you'll have time and space to give them the same rights you have. Civil rights is not a pie. Like love is not a pie. It's not divided up like there is a limited amount.

Racism is only a US thing.

Nope, it's a UK, Australian, etc thing too. Happens everywhere because of colonization and imperialism. It's ubiquitous. You can see this in the given that English is a Lingua Franca.

You can, too, be racist against whites.

Definition of racism is, "Racism involves the subordination of people of color by white people." This is a definition made by Ethnic Studies and well documented. These particular words come from Paula Rothenberg, a white woman. So no, it's not racist.

But Japan Imperialized why can't we talk about them?

Japanese imperialism was mostly concentrated in the Pacific and Asia. It was horrific. But it didn't dominate the world and the time period was not 500+ years of domination, slavery, and cultural erasure. (Most of the horrors were located in Korea--and I say this as a Korean). You can't be racist against your own race. Racism defines an insider/outsider status.

But if I went to China I would get hate as a white person...

Opium Wars. The destruction of China through the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. White powers also didn't give a damn about Rape of Nanking... don't you think the hatred would be justified? And why are you using China anyway? Are you paranoid about China's economy? You know it's the US that exports the raw materials to China.

White fragility, white privilege, white woman's tears talking imperialism and colonialism is racist... against whites.

All terms invented by whites to describe the phenomena of racism. So nope, not racist. It's language and terms. If you refuse to use the terms invented by white people as a white person to describe social phenomena, then you are practicing what Robin DiAngelo would call White fragility--because it's easier to flinch.

I did this great thing yesterday for race, so I can't be racist.

Fighting in any social justice is an everyday process. You aren't allowed to quit until all people have equal rights and say so as that vast majority of PoCs. As that has not happened, you don't get a badge. Jay Smooth said this in a Ted Talk, (paraphrasing) People think fighting racism is like taking out an appendix... but it's more like brushing your teeth.

Please don't badge. Fighting racism is not a scout badge that magically appears.

A black president? Racism is "post racial".

And the percentage of black people killed by cops is higher than any other ethnic group, and that also ignores the other struggles with racism.

But I'm colorblind!

If you don't have achromatism, no you aren't. Racism is a system. As a system, it means it's real and racism is still happening around you no matter how much you try to ignore it. Also see implicit bias.

There is no such thing as cultural appropriation...

... because look brown and black people use English

This comes from 2 Empires (UK and US) of domination and often erasure on the rest of the world. It's called imperialism. And it wasn't pretty.

Whether it was the rape of Indigenious people of North, Central, Australians, NZ, and South America... the wars waged against Asia, including forcing Opium on a government that said no, or the total shaming of India's gender diversity, there is a lot to answer for. English is the language of imperialism. (As is Spanish, Portuguese and French, though less so.)

... because look, PoCs wear Western clothes.

Again, imperialism. Pretty much the second paragraph from above.

... But I'm doing cultural sharing/appreciation--how dare you as an insider say I'm appropriating!

You as an outsider might not know you are doing so. But you also don't know the deeper cultural significance, because often appropriation comes from the end of culture. What I mean is that in order to build a culture, and get cultural artifacts, you need things that you DON'T see. This includes belief systems, which may or may not be religious. You don't get taught the detailed history. You don't know the history of oppression if there is any. You don't know the political set up and may not even care. When someone is calling you out for appropriation, usually it's saying you're getting it wrong. And you should respect the culture you're taking from to correct yourself. To understand WHY it's wrong and stop saying things like, "Well, I'm only watching dramas not to learn anything." Or saying, "I'm just having fun." It's not fun to watch someone that means a lot to you, say your childhood toy, then toss it around and then watch someone say they are appreciating it--especially if that toy was from a relative and is very fragile because it's gotten beaten up so many times. Don't do that to culture.

BTW, Cultural Sharing is where you are INVITED IN and act HUMBLE when you are corrected, not double down. APPRECIATION is hands off--you do not use the cultural item at all, and you *look* at it, but don't touch. I used this analogy before--you appreciate by looking at art in a museum, you do not take it down from the wall take it home and say you painted it. That's theft. Once you don't take corrections about your behavior, you are stealing and often times compounding previous wounds that the culture experienced before, in which case it's rude. It's like knowing someone got stabbed and then deciding, yep, let's stab them again because your ego is more important than the people within that culture. And is your ego bigger than an entire culture, its history and everyone in it?

But my [fill in ethnicity/race] friend doesn't mind.

Sometimes people are afraid to correct you or don't think you care enough and if you double down and use them as a badge like this, without them present, then yeah, they probably won't feel this way. Why are you talking over a person present, who has the lived experience on what does or doesn't hurt to them. Does it matter to you at all that they feel hurt? Are you going to run away from that? You are also taking away agency from the other person. Let them talk for themselves and BE there to answer. It's called respect and respecting boundaries.

If you are white and doing this, it's double disrespect because you, as a white person shouldn't be talking for a PoC since there is a huge history of that. If you want to make that argument, then tag them into the conversation, or wait until they are there, or talk general facts where you can, or tell the people to go and ask that person directly and ask for an honest answer. Usually this is enough to shut them down.

But my white voice matters in PoC discussions about receiving racism.

If you are talking *for* what it is like to be say, an Asian woman who gets sexualized, then nope. What you need to do is sit, shut up and listen. If facts contradict, see if you can find a reason why in each of the stories. Ask respectful questions. Lived experience comes first. You wouldn't listen to a person who said they heard that this other person, might have this opinion. That's hearsay, so why are you doing it? You didn't live it.

Again, you as a white person don't receive racism. You don't have a right to talk over voices that have experienced it.

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

I visited Dominica in early August this year. Back then, it was still an emerald island. The shores rising out of the sea were, as ever, covered by impossibly green woods. On the slopes of the mountains, trees and plants jostled for space and stretched towards the sun, as though they were on the verge of leaving the ground and soaring into the sky, so that the whole place seemed to be bursting with green. But it was not monochrome: every peak and ravine, every valley and grove had its own shade, intersected by some nuance of blue or turquoise — Dominica claimed to have 365 rivers, one for each day of the year. It was the most densely forested country in the Caribbean. No other island in the region is so rugged and mountainous. From this base sprouted a history unlike that of any other Caribbean nation — all the way up to the night of September 18, when Hurricane Maria razed everything that stood on the island of Dominica to the ground.

Europe made landfall on Columbus’s second journey. The fleet couldn’t find a place to anchor on the jagged coast, but Columbus swiftly baptized the island after the weekday when he saw it — Dominica, “the day of the lord,” Sunday in Latin. Back home in Europe, the chronicler of the journey reported: “Dominica is remarkable for the beauty of its mountains and the amenity of its verdure and must be seen to be believed.” Columbus himself is said to have — ominously — crumpled up a piece of paper to convey the exceptional irregularity of the terrain.

Here, the Spaniards failed to dislodge the indigenous population. While the “Indians” were exterminated throughout the Caribbean, the so-called Caribs, more appropriately referred to as the Kalinago people — whose reputation the Spaniards succeeded in tarnishing with the false accusation of cannibalism — stayed safe in the luxuriant mountains. Settlers avoided the island for fear of poisoned arrows suddenly showered upon them.

For more than two centuries after Columbus arrived, the Kalinago ruled under the cover of the woods. They used the sanctuary to stage raids against European colonies encroaching on nearby islands and, not the least unnervingly, began to receive black slaves fleeing from plantations. Something had to be done about the free zone: in 1675, a group of London merchants called for the Empire to “destroy the barbarous savages,” while French planters declared it “necessary to wipe them out altogether.”

Massacres on the Kalinago ensued, the most famous of which gave name to a village; in August, there was still a small town called “Massacre” standing on the site. But unlike most everywhere else, the people could not be fully extinguished. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Kalinago had retreated to a particularly inhospitable corner on the northeast of Dominica, clinging to cliffs no one else could master. In August, it was possible to visit the territory of the only surviving Kalinago population, the remnants of a people once in charge of the Caribbean: some 3,000 individuals who still owned their land in common and eked out a precarious existence from traditional handicrafts based on what the forests gave.

Dominica was the last island to be colonized. Flat like the side of a coin, Barbados could be shaved clean of all natural vegetation and transformed into one great plantation for whipping profits out of black bodies and red-brown soil. The same fate was bestowed on island after island, but this one held out for long. As Lennox Honychurch, one of the country’s pre-eminent historians and intellectuals, writes, “[It] continued to stand green and defiant in the center of the chain of the Lesser Antilles,” until the British finally conquered it in 1761. Having exhausted much of the soil on Barbados and other old sugar islands, planters were by now clamoring for fresh land and immediately set about surveying, enclosing, auctioning, and buying plots.

For capital accumulation to get off the ground, however, one obstacle first had to be removed: the woods. In a tract from 1791, planter Thomas Atwood marveled at the beauty of the trees that “by far exceed in loftiness the tallest trees in England. In this island their tops seem to touch the clouds, which appear as if skimming swiftly over their upper branches,” proceeding to explain why they must be cut down. As he wrote, there could be no avoiding “the necessity, in order to render Dominica a good sugar country, of clearing the extensive forests of trees in the interior parts of it. When this is done, and not till then, will this island be distinguished for the number of its sugar plantations, and for the quantity of sugar it is absolutely capable of raising.”

This plan for the denudation of Dominica was never implemented. For as sure as the cat-o’-nine-tails and gibbets arrived with the Europeans, so a new people settled inside the woods: the maroons. From cimarrón, a Spanish word meaning “wild” or “feral,” the maroons — slaves running away to live in the wilderness — were the perpetual shadow of the plantation system, extending into its hinterland wherever it was established.

(Continue Reading)

[jkl-fff]

A reply I received: “Ok.. so yeah this is horrible nobody will deny that.. but isn’t the history of almost every single country ever going somewhere already inhabited, slaughtering everyone there, and claim it as your own? I mean as awful as this is people always point to America specifically when the whole world does the exact same thing. Not trying to disrespect how bad this was, but this is just something I wanted to bring up.”

I’m going to take this at face value (no malice, just lack of education) because the blogger in question is apparently 16? But first, I gotta get something out of my system:

Okay, I feel better.

In answer to the historic part of your question, the answer is NO; throughout history, nearly all territorial conquests were NOT genocidal--did not involve “slaughtering everyone there”-- but were rather about implementing either administrative control (put your people in power to rule them, and also tax them) or tributary vassal states (leave their people in power, but swearing fealty to you and paying you money not to fight them again).

Usually, this was because the conquering invaders did NOT  want to resettle; they already had a home, they just wanted more wealth to spend in their home (also glory). And you do NOT genocide people if you want them to give you money (or tell everyone how awesome and glorious you are). That’d be like butchering a cow when you want milk. This isn’t to say there wasn’t a lot of bloodshed or enslavement, but it was a far cry from killing or displacing everyone.

When resettlement *was* the conquering invaders’ intention, they still ALMOST NEVER committed wholesale genocide to do so. Sure, there were battles here and there, and raiding and such, but maintaining a constant state of defense and offense is physically, emotionally, and (most important) economically exhausting. Truces and treaties would almost always be established, and then people would get down to cohabitating the same region, invariably intermingling until--a few generations later-- they were the same people. 

Some examples I can think of off the top of my head are: the Egyptian, Babylonian, Roman, Han, Ottoman, Aztec, Inca,  Mogul, Mongol, Austro-Hungarian, and British Empires (mostly establishment of administrative and/or tributary control), the Frankish Conquest of Gaule, the Norman Conquest of Great Briton, the Viking settlements and integration throughout Europe (settlement and intermingling). There are TONS more, but I’m a linguist and a storyteller, not a historian, so I can’t recall any specific, extra-European examples.

In answer to the “people always point to America specifically when the whole world does the exact same thing” part, the answer is this: Firstly, I’m not so sure the whole world does.  Yes, there are examples in countries that have been majorly settled  by trans-oceanic colonizers in recent centuries (for example, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,  and everywhere throughout South and Central America-- places colonized post-Columbus by Europeans). This is the legacy of imperial colonization, incidentally, when you see it from the perspective of the Natives; at best, they were marginalized to second-class citizen status, at worst, they were cheated, robbed, forced away, even wiped out.

Secondly, keep in mind that your perception is skewed  by where you live; if you live in America, you’re probably NOT seeing the criticisms made about Australia’s treatment of the Aborigines or New Zealand’s treatment of the Maori. But rest assured, people there are pointing to their own countries, too.

Thirdly, and most importantly, America is both THE dominating sociocultural force in the world (it weighs on everyone else, so of course they talk about it), AND it likes to laud its own supposed greatness-- brag about being the fairest and the freest country ever,  the model and the example for the world, etc. Of course people are going to point out  its past and present injustices--its hypocrisies-- when it makes claims like that.

And they’re right to do so.  Most of its *own* citizens don’t know its full and true history-- it’s past and present injustices, its hypocrisies-- because it wasn’t taught to them … only the propaganda was. And pro-’merica fanatics refuse to believe it could be true,  denying or dismissing these dark sides entirely. Like you yourself did, in fact, by suggesting that it’s normal to “slaughter everyone”.

But to love your country (or anything),  you have to really know it; you have to acknowledge its faults  and weaknesses, you have to want better for it.

That’s why posts like this are so important.

Because if you can’t face truths like this,

you don’t *love* America;  you actually  just*worship* it.

Time Lapse of the Land Taken From Native Americans

via reddit

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

On Men of Letters, British exceptionalism, different British

The Kendricks school. It’s where the British Men of Letters train their operatives. It’s like our... Hogwarts? Exactly. Kendricks is the largest collection of occult lore in the world.

You know, monks like Martin Luther were among the earliest hunters. He even wrote parts of the book you’re holding. What? This lore dates back to the 16th century? Yeah. Well, in Europe everything’s old.

After the episode aired I wrote down some thoughts over the Men of Letters (the ones we know of are British, Irish, American - I wouldn’t be surprised if the chapterhouses in the rest of the world were founded by British/Anglo-Saxon colonizers and are not integrated with the lore/systems of dealing with the supernatural of the local cultures) being the heirs of a Germanic, Protestant tradition. Luther obviously can’t be one of the first people in Europe to deal with supernatural creatures, as the ancient world and the middle ages are obviously full of lore, which suggests that the modern concept of hunter/man of letters originated as a form of distancing from the traditional role of the clergy as the people who’d deal with the supernatural. I’ll copy and paste the things I wrote:

I went back to the scene and Mick says ‘monks like Martin Luther were among the earliest hunters’ and I think there are multiple ways to interpret that - I’m thinking that ‘hunters’ in a modern sense was a concept invented in the early modern era, which makes me think that before the 16th century or so there was no such thing as being a ‘hunter’ as a profession, but, at least in Christianity priests and clergy figures in general dealt with the supernatural as Christianity would saw everything ‘unnatural’ as caused by demons and the devil. We even had a mention of the “old-fashioned kind” of Catholic priests in this season, so I’m pretty sure in the middle ages dealing with the supernatural was the job of priests. I mean, even today every diocese or so has at least one exorcist, i.e. a priest specialized in… demonic stuff.

It would make sense that the monks that ‘broke up’ with the Catholic church would be the precursors of the ‘modern’ idea of a ‘hunter’ as a professional figure with no affiliation with the church.

I think that Mick is referring to a ‘modern’ concept, not that they don’t have lore pre-dating Luther - more like, people like Luther wrote ‘modern’ books about hunting, a kind of ‘secular’ hunting non strictly associated to the clergy.

I think that documents pre-dating early modernity are ‘sources’ (like, obviously there is info about sirens in ancient Greek poems, etc) but ever since Luther people have been writing ‘manuals’ for hunting in a modern sense. Of course someone like Aristotle would be writing manuals for hunting back in ancient Greece too, but modern British people would only consider stuff written in a post-middle ages, protestant setting as ‘academical’.

So now that I’m thinking about it, Luther being among the “earliest hunters” makes a lot of sense, if we want to accept a picture of the British Men of Letters being the ‘heirs’ of a growingly secularized, germanic, protestant tradition.

I can easily imagine the concepts of ‘hunter’, ‘man of letters’ etc to be strongly anglo-saxon/germanic and anti-catholic at least in origin. Fits with the whole ‘WASP’ vibe of the Men of Letters that we know of, anyway.

Reblogging myself because I forgot some things…

First of all, the idea of ‘old’, that Europe has a long history and tradition while America is *rolls eyes* young. The whole ‘in Europe everything is old’ idea - which implies that America doesn’t have a long history - makes sense in the mouth of a British character - the colonialism and imperialism in North America comes with the idea that North America was a blank slate that started being filled with civilization consistently since around the 17-18th centuries (there’s the idea that the oldest historical buildings in the US are the neoclassical ones, for instance). Obviously a British person would (even without realizing why exactly) have this stereotype of the ‘old world’ and the ‘new world’ (heck, people here still call Europe and America like that!). In Europe everything is old, in America everything starts when people from Europe brought them! Like there was nothing there before. But I’m kinda digressing with this.

I wanted to add that we know that the Campbells were on the Mayflower - which suggests that the idea of ‘hunters’ in the sense of the Campbells is something imported from Britain around the centuries of early modernity. I can see that the Men of Letters/hunters system as it is intended by the current British Men of Letters is a distinctly British and/or Western European+Protestant concept, and that around the 17th century or so the entire system (the Men of Letters seem to require hunters for their functioning, as they don’t do the field work but they delegate it to the hunters), developed in those times in the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic world was brought to the (sic) New World as it was colonized.

So I’d say it makes sense for the modern ideas on ‘hunters’ and ‘men of letters’ to have been developed through the 16th and 17th centuries in that kind of culture. Of course there have always been equivalents everywhere else - people hunting monsters, writing records about them, etc - but I’d say that what Mick has in mind when talking about hunters is a specific kind of hunters that has developed historically in the specific context of the Protestant world in early modernity, thus it makes sense for him to name Martin Luther as one of the earliest hunters in that sense.

I mean, we have met plenty of Pagan deities that lamented how people used to worship them before Christianity and then they had to hide - I’d say that before Christianity people had a radically different relationship with the supernatural, then Christianity came and turned everything ‘unnatural’ in the work of the devil and his demons. Then early modernity brought anti-catholic sentiment and progressive secularization, and the supernatural became an academical (non-religious) field of study (for men of letters) and a job (for hunters).

This said, I want to consider those quotes by Mick I reported at the beginning of this post. The feeling I get from his words is that he trusts that kind of Germanic-then-Anglo-Saxon protestant tradition to hold the Truth(TM). He calls the ‘founder’ of protestantism one of the earliest hunters, automatically demoting everything that came before Luther as ‘non hunter’. The fact that they’re using a manual written by Luther and his companions means that they embrace that kind of tradition as their own, they identify with it. The Truth(TM) about hunting, the supernatural, the occult has started with Luther and is continuing with the work of the Men of Letters in Britain and other countries (but the other countries are not as good as them - they have places like Kendricks that are the best! And they actually do a great job in Britain! Yay!).

You get where I’m going: these British people think they’re better than anyone who is not protestant and anglo-saxon (other protestant people are okay if they’re germanic I suppose). I guess that Americans are kind of a complicated case because in the eyes of people like the BMoL, Americans are weird, even the WASP ones :p so they can be treated as equals only if they accept all the terms of the BMoL...

Anyway. The conclusion we’ve come to is: the British Men of Letters think they are the best and they know everything and they are Right(TM). Southern Europeans/Catholics and, god forbid!, non Europeans? Nope.

Kendricks is the biggest collection of lore in the world! We get it. But... does it even have the important stuff?

I found this book. It's a lore book, “the Book of the Damned”. Sounds legit. It's in a library somewhere in Tuscany. It might be a dead end, but I figured... I’ll go check it out.

They’ve been after me since I dug up the Book of the Damned. You found it? Where? After some near misses and some broken into museums, I found historical documents that led to a monastery in Spain. It burned down years ago, left for dead, but, uh, I had this hunch about it. Turned out I was right.

Okay, here’s what I’ve learned so far. About 700 years ago, a nun locked herself away after having visions of darkness. After a few decades squirrelled away by herself, she emerged with this. Each page is made out of slices of her own skin written in her blood. I told you, it’s eekish. According to the notes I found, it’s been owned and used by cults, covens, and even the Vatican had it for a while. There’s a spell inside that thing for everything. Talking some black mass, dark magic, end-of-times nastiness.

The most important spell book in the world was in Spain. Before then, in Italy, apparently. And the Vatican had it at some point. Now, since we know a German family had it, I assume the Vatican had it before the Frankenstein, then the Frankenstein at some point got it for them (possibly one thousand something years ago, if according to Sam “one thousand years of nasty. They made a ton mopping up the black plague. They started the 100 years war” - the black plague started in 1346/7 and the 100 years war started in 1337 so it’s possible that the Frankenstein got the book in the early 14th century).

I assume the Vatican had it before the Stynes (with others in between or not, doesn’t matter). Then the Book went to the Stynes. But then they lost it, as at some point it was in Tuscany, and eventually in Spain. So the book went back to Southern Europe/Catholic territory.

And the Men of Letters? Cuthbert Sinclair knew some stuff - he had some knowledge of the Mark of Cain and the First Blade, he got Nadya’s codex - but we can’t say that if Magnus knew something/deemed something important, then the Men of Letters as a whole knew it/deemed it important.

Basically: the Men of Letters possibly never attempted to get the Book; I mean, if Charlie, a single person, fairly new at that kind of job, recovered it, then it would’ve been a joke for the organization to get it. So, either the Men of Letters didn’t know about the book, or didn’t think it was important, or couldn’t get it from the Frankenstein and gave up even if the Frankenstein did lose the book to someone that brought it to Southern Europe, or (possibly the worst scenario?) knew about the Frankenstein using it and just... let them do their thing.

Anyway, it’s meaningful that the Book of the Damned is associated, other than the Frankenstein and various covens throughout history, to the Vatican, Italy, and Spain. The opposite of the world of Martin Luther and his associates whose footsteps the British Men of Letter seem to be following.

And what about really old stuff? Written by someone, eh, kinda a little more important than Martin Luther?

What am I looking for? Well, for starters, uh, anything about archaeological dig sites. Like Indiana Jones stuff? All we know is that Dick has been digging all over the world, and we need to know what he's looking for.

We’re in 7x20 and Charlie is looking through Dick’s stuff. Later:

Here we go. Something in his suitcase left Iran last week. Spent the last 72 hours in armored cars and private planes. Whatever it is, it's coming here for Dick tonight. 

Now, Dick Roman just started looking around the world and found the Leviathan tablet in an archaeological site in Iran. He didn’t find it with special Leviathan powers - just looked around archaeological sites until he found what he needed.

So: the Leviathan tablet was in Iran, no one having dug it up and taken from there before. Would that be impossible for the Men of Letters to find, if the Leviathan (who’d been stuck in Purgatory throughout all of history) found it so fairly easily?

The demon tablet was retrieved by Crowley after he found out about the existence of the tablets. The angel tablet, inside of one of Lucifer’s crypts, is probably the only one that humans couldn’t find on their own, although again Crowley found a lot of Lucifer’s crypts. I am pretty sure that Crowley’s methods of finding things are not really different than the ones an organization with (supposed) knowledge and means like the Men of Letters would use - “human” research and a bit of magic, possibly.

Basically: do the Men of Letters even possess something of big value?

It’s possible that the things of most value they have are the recent inventions (something like the anti-possession egg, for instance, was needed by Rowena and Crowley to get Lucifer out of the vessel and make Rowena’s spell to send him to the cage possible), while the things they’re so proud of - their history, the oldness of their sources... - pale in comparison to the things Dean, Sam, Charlie, Crowley etc have acquired through the years. Heck, 12x12 was about a weapon that Crowley got his hands on in the first place and voluntarily gave Ramiel, and a weapon that an American hunter made and was used by a line of American hunters, then got to Crowley himself, then to the Winchesters... the British Men of Letters were after the second, but wouldn’t have gotten it without the entire Winchester team plus Crowley.

Now, Crowley’s name is popping up a lot, right? Now that I’m thinking about it, the British Men of Letters are proud of possessing ancient lore and fabricating cool technological-slash-magic tools. Now, magic is Rowena’s field, but tools and knowledge? That’s Crowley’s territory. What he does is acquiring knowledge and collecting useful tools.

The British Men of Letters are being framed as opposed to Rowena - in fact, they literally chased her out of her country, and she holds a personal grudge against them, in addition to witches’ general grudge against the Men of Letters in general - but also opposed to Crowley - in fact, “acquiring the Colt” is exactly the first thing we know of Crowley doing, and it’s the first major thing the British Men of Letters do in their American operation. (Have we ever talked about that kind of parallel?)

I wrote “different British” in the title of this post because, while I’ve been talking about the BMoL sense of “British exceptionalism”, we end up having a contrast between them and other British characters that are the opposite of them - in fact, underprivileged British people. Rowena and Crowley both came from utmost poverty, and, well, one’s a woman (abused by a wealthy powerful man, in fact), the other a queer man (both using those elements - womanhood and queerness - as weapons once they found themselves struggling to go up the social ladder).

Now, we’ve had several mentions of Crowley and Rowena in some kind of oppositions to the British Men of Letters. When Dean and Sam get arrested, Cas suggests they call Crowley and Rowena, but Mary refuses, so they call Mick and Ketch instead (first instance of Cas aligning with Crowley and Rowena, Mary with the BMoL). In 12x16, Mick tries to insult Dean by referring to his 'palling around with demons and witches’.

We’re going to see a situation that will put Crowley and Rowena directly against the British Men of Letters, and if 12x09 is foreshadowing, Cas will side with the former, Mary with the latter. Dean? No doubts. Sam? Mmm.

Rowena, Crowley, Cas and Dean together represent underclass status and queerness; they’re the freaks, each in different ways (but also very similar). The other side has middle/upper class status, privilege and normality. Sam is always tempted by those things, and is being tempted right now...