#Trans-Atlantic

[vox-anglosphere]

Titanic's 1st class staterooms were the ultimate in ocean-going luxury

[septembergold]

Chaise Lounge à l'Impératrice Joséphine

[blackstarlineage]

Rest in paradise to the ancestors who resisted the chains of slavery and chose the sea over bondage. Your bravery and defiance in the face of unimaginable cruelty will never be forgotten. The honorable Marcus Garvey taught us to honour the sacrifices of our ancestors, and your decision to reclaim freedom—even in the depths of the ocean—was a profound act of resistance. You chose dignity over despair, freedom over fear, and in doing so, you became eternal. Your courage fuels our fight for liberation, and your legacy continues to guide us as we strive to achieve the unity and freedom you were denied. We honour you, we remember you, and we rise because of you.

Rise in Power 🔴⚫️🟢✊🏿

[nomilkinmyteaplease]

Endurance in a new 3d scan by the Falkland Maritime Heritage Trust

[vox-anglosphere]

As grand as Titanic, Olympic outlasted her sister ships by many years

The Old Reliable, RMS  Olympic at the end of her service

[windybluebelles]

All of Fawcett has a trans-Atlantic accent, cause they’re all weird magical freaks.

‘Oooo that’s not a real accent’ how bout you stfu? It’s fawcett, I’m shocked they even speak any Earth common language

Am I saying this just because I’m English and it’s easier for me to write them talking like this than standard American-English?

…Maybeeee

Consider that it also sounds old fashioned and funky.

Also how funny it is for street kids to be talking like that. Hilarious

[zigraves]

Iiiiiit's TAFF voting time!

(what's TAFF?)

TAFF is the Trans Atlantic Fan Fund, a fan-run fund that every year helps cover the costs to send someone from Europe to North America to attend the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), or vice versa.

It's been running for 70 years now, with many TAFF delegates writing trip reports so you can read about intercontinental fannish friendships across the decades right here.

Anyone can be a candidate for the funds of TAFF, as long as they've been active in fandom for at least a couple of years and can find five people who'll support their nomination (sorry lurkers), and similarly anyone can vote in the TAFF race as long as they're an active member of the fannish community and donate a small amount to support the fan fund. (sorry again, lurkers). Fannish activity can include going to traditional sci fi conventions, but it also includes vidding, and fanfic writing, and doing podcasts and reviews about the fannish stuff you care about, and running community events like exchanges, and putting out zines.

(why are you telling me this?)

Well, partly, because it's very cool and I think you should know about it, and I think you should have the opportunity to run in future years. I think it's important to keep these cultural ties, and to have a chance to meet new people and go places you might never otherwise have gone. I think this kind of intergenerational friendship support across the decades is an important part of our history as fan communities. I think you should run, and I might even be able to nominate and support you.

...

but also because I'm a candidate this year, and would like you to spend the cost of a small coffee to support the fan fund and vote for me.

You can also vote for one of my competitors if you like, but don't you want to upend my whole summer and send me to Seattle? Sure you do!

[papertowness]

genuinely love that columbo has this thick ass bronx accent in the middle of california

[el3venthcommandment]

saw a comparison of the two "that i was... a homosexual" scenes (one from Naked Lunch, one from Queer) and seeing them side by side makes me realize that Daniel Craig does a better midwestern accent than Peter Weller. Weller's just going for an impression... like the way he says "horror". No one here says "horror" like that (in full seriousness, if they're joking maybe). Craig really dug in.

[cultivating-wildflowers]

Recently learned about the practice of "careening" ships, a way of cleaning marine growth and performing repairs on the keel without the aid of a dry dock. The usual method required a beach, but the beach had to fit several specifications to be suitable. Alternately, a second ship could be employed for the damaged ship to lean against.

While the subject is fascinating, the image that keeps coming to mind is when a girl leans on a friend's shoulder for balance while she puts on her shoes.

[blackstarlineage]

Rest in Paradise and blessings to the Ancestors 🔴⚫️🟢✊🏿

[rabbitcruiser]

The 12.9 km (8 miles) Confederation Bridge, joining Borden-Carleton, Prince Edward Island and Cape Jourimain, New-Brunswick was completed on November 19, 1996 and became the longest bridge over ice covered waters in the world.  

[rosielav]

My favorite genre of media is This Absurd Thing Is Real and No One Questions it in Any Way

Here are some of my favorite examples of this:

Dimension 20: A Court of Candy (I watched one episode and was enamored by the food stuff, like yum yum yum I'm eating it up thank you chefs)

The Amelia Project (a delightfully morbid interview style podcast, where the absurdity ramps up more and more each season, and although there is a Straight Man or two, the whimsy never dies down)

Monstrous Agonies (a write-in advice show style podcast, where monsters are as commonplace as pens in an office supply store. Monsters write in needing advice, and that advice is of course monster related, but coded in many different ways: queer, bipoc, abused, privelidged [some people need a wakeup call] , etc like if you've ever felt like a monster or had someone call you a monster this podcast is for you)

Victoriocity (steam punk meets the 1890s meets modern day meets detective audio drama, really can't explain it but the whimsy and the silliness and the seriousness is all there, really recommend this one for the voice acting)

Wooden Overcoats (imagine if Victoriocity, which I just described, wasn't steam punk at all, but Ambiguous Time, and instead of a detective drama, it's more like an interpersonal drama, with the very same energy, and that absolutely incredible level of detail in the voice acting; simply tremendous and I'm only on the second season)

If anyone has their own favorite whimsical, weird, 'yes and' type of podcast/webcomic/novel(like Hitchhiker's Guide!!!!) , please please please recommend it to me!! And if you like any of the aforementioned podcasts, please yell at me about them!! I love podcasts! I love audio drama! I love to consume content!!!

[jinxed-sinner]

The funniest thing about Alastor having a trans-Atlantic accent to me is that people apparently don’t know the historical context behind trans-Atlantic accents. Alastor probably has a Louisiana accent too (or at the very least did at some point), because trans-Atlantic accents are (usually) completely learned by being part of the media industry as a mix of a generic higher-class American accent and a higher-class British accent (so it’s actually not unheard of for someone to develop a trans-Atlantic accent naturally if their parents are American and British).

Historically, trans-Atlantic accents have been used in radio, film, and television to make American radio, film, and television stars more relatable to a general audience, as well as make them easier to understand (because if Alastor did speak with his normal accent, depending on how thick it is, he might be harder to understand through a carbon microphone, the standard microphone of his time period). In fact, because of the historical context, it’s entirely possible that Vox also used a trans-Atlantic accent at some point whether that be in life, death, or both, and eventually abandoned it after he died.

Anyway begging people to research trans-Atlantic accents before criticizing Alastor’s for “not sounding Louisiana enough” lmao

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: Jan 6, 2022

Imagine a Native American history curriculum that focused entirely on four massacres of Natives by whites — beginning with the first encounter between Spanish conquistadores and the Inca emperor Atahualpa and culminating with Wounded Knee — and never touched on American Indian life before 1491, the many Native military victories, or the roughly 5.2 million Natives alive in the U.S. today. Would anyone see this as truly representative, or useful to students of any race, or worth teaching in the schools?

The 1619 Project, from the New York Times, must face the same questions. The project focuses on casting the era of historical slavery as an alternative founding for the United States, with its authors arguing that slavery was responsible for nearly everything that “truly made America exceptional.” Slavery, they write, was the primary reason for the Revolu­tionary War and was responsible for much or most of early American wealth, building “vast fortunes for white people North and South” and making “New York City the financial capital of the world.” Multiple 1619 essays, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others, attribute to historical slavery and racism everything from the competitive capitalism of the U.S. to contemporary patterns of traffic. Slavery, in this narrative, is both the American original sin and the source of all our baraka — everything that makes this a unique and desirable country.

Honorable, non-racist centrists and conservatives face a serious question as we confront this material. How would a nuanced but thorough telling of American history, one that did not seek to minimize slavery, differ from 1619’s? Aren’t these journalists and radical academics — progressive friends often ask, in something approaching anguish — just telling hard truths? The short answer is a clear no.

The 1619 essays almost universally ignore or minimize four critical pieces of context that any unbiased school curriculum would include. These are the truly global prevalence of slavery and similar barbaric practices until quite recently; the detrimental economic impact of the Peculiar Institution on the South and on the American national economy; the nuanced but deeply patriotic perspectives on the United States expressed by the black and white leaders of the victorious anti-slavery movement that existed alongside slavery; and the reality that much of American history in fact had nothing to do with this particular issue. Not teaching about slavery or Jim Crow segregation in schools would be a deeply immoral act of omission, but it is almost equally bizarre to define these decades-past regional sins as the main through-line of American history.

Each of these themes merits more discussion. The first is the simplest to lay out: Bluntly, while often treated as some kind of unique American foundational curse, chattel slavery — and such similar abuses as the brutal mistreatment of battle captives — was almost universal on earth until the past few centuries, as Dan McLaughlin explains in detail elsewhere in this issue. The practice was commonplace across ancient societies, including Greece and Rome, with Aristotle defending “natural slavery,” and social scientists describing it as the step of human development after people had stopped simply killing and eating their defeated foes.

Slavery was also well known in the allegedly Edenic New World. The anthropologist Marvin Harris has argued that the Aztecs waged war to acquire captives not merely as laborers or sacrifice victims but as food, since their diet lacked protein otherwise: Aztec slaves were seen as “marching meat.” Even nations that did not officially have slaves, such as Russia and some other Orthodox Christian states, often squeaked around the designation by calling oppressed peons who could not freely leave their land something less harsh, such as “chattel serfs.” In Russia’s case, they were not freed until 1861.

The global slave trade was in large part ended by the modern West. The United States banned any importation of slaves in 1808, and the British Empire passed laws restricting the Arab slave trade that same year. It is no exaggeration to say that, from that date forward, the navies of the United Kingdom and America were the primary force on earth working to check the slave trade. In this, they were largely successful — meaning that the unique contribution of English-speaking Westerners to the worldwide slave economy was the near elimination of the trade.

It is also simply not true that slavery made the United States rich. Slavery made many slave masters rich indeed, and some of them invested their brutally gotten gains in American business and industry. One such profiteer, quite arguably, funded Yale University. But the real question for any quantitative social scientist must be: Did slavery — feudal peon agriculture centered on brutalized captive workers — generate more capital than any alternative use of the same area of land and the same number of workers? Here, the answer (again) is a clear-cut no.

The slaveholding South was, frankly, a backwater. As I noted in my Quillette article “Sorry, New York Times, but America Began in 1776,” the region contained more than 25 percent of America’s free population but only about 10 percent of the nation’s capital. Versus the South, the North had ten times as many trained factory workers and five times as many factories. Writers such as the historian Marc Schulman have pointed out that something like 90 percent of the skilled tradesmen in the U.S. were based in the North prior to 1861. And even analyses like these tend to ignore the horrific costs to the United States of the Civil War — which killed 360,000 Union boys in blue (one for every ten slaves freed) and 258,000 Confederates, as well as putting the country billions of dollars into debt for the first time.

Perhaps the negative reality of what slavery actually was explains why so many Americans fought so damned hard to end it. Another point often minimized by “woke,” “critical” narratives of American history and race relations is that an integrated movement opposed to racism has existed in the United States almost since the Founding. And this movement has generally won our major battles against bigotry — in 1865, in 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education), in 1964 (the Civil Rights Act), and, for good or ill, in 1967 (affirmative action).

As early as the 1790s, following a letter- and petition-writing campaign by black New England veterans of the Revolutionary War, ten states and territories that already contained well over half the population of the new nation — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana (territory), and the Northwest Territory — had banned slavery and were free land. As noted above, any importation of slaves into any of the U.S. states was banned by law in 1808. And, although viciously opposed, the abolitionist movement continued until the Civil War, which the good guys won. When Union soldiers marched south to free their countrymen, they did so, no matter how complex the motivations of some of them, singing the famous words of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”

Many early leaders of the American abolitionist and anti-racist movement were black men and women, and they did not hate the country. Frederick Douglass, of course, once famously asked, “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?” But in the same speech, the great man referred to the core ideas of the Declaration of Independence as “saving principles,” called the Founding Fathers “brave men,” and contrasted their “solid manhood” with what he saw as his own more decadent era.

While noting that “the point from which I am compelled to view” the fathers of the republic “is not, certainly, the most favorable,” Douglass also said, “It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men.” Such quotations abound, and it is always refreshing to contrast the nuanced but real patriotism of such black leaders as Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr. — or Robert Woodson and Thomas Sowell today — with the trendy pablum spewed out by the current academic Marxists. The New York Times’ first draft of the 1619 Project, notably, apparently did not mention Douglass at all.

The project’s rhetoric also lacks the veracity of Douglass’s. Objectively speaking, the most bizarre and nonempirical of the four “context needed” problems I identified with the 1619 Project is the argument that everything “exceptional” — unique and positive — about the United States emerged out of pre-1865 slavery. While writing this piece, I repeated that claim in passing to a scholarly friend of mine, and she said, “Like . . . modern East Asian immigration? I mean, that’s totally nuts.”

She’s right. Black folks contributed massively to the United States, but many of the great triumphs of American history — the full sweep of the NASA missions, the development of the post–World War II California economy, Chinese and Irish migration, the mass production of automobiles — had very little to do with historical black slavery. Bluntly stated, this fact illustrates an important point: In recent years, the focus of discourse on the race and gender obsessions of the academic Left has threatened to overshadow the rest of American history. Almost certainly, far more high-school students could identify Malcolm X than Martin Van Buren or the Wright Brothers.

That’s bad. It is doubtful that an eyes-open minority immigrant to the United States of 2021 would see contemporary, or even historical, racial conflict as one of the five or ten most notable things about the country — compared with democracy, or hyper-robust capitalism, or diversity itself, or the constant flickering of cellphone cameras and social-media posts, or, for that matter, the weather — unless he had been very specifically taught to do so. And we who already live here would be foolish to see racial conflict as the defining characteristic of our country, although a surprising and increasing number of Amer­icans seem obsessively interested in seeing exactly that.

Let’s see something else: the truth. The 1619 Project makes claims about slavery that are sweeping, interesting, and sometimes accurate. But in taking the singular focus that it does, the project minimizes the global universality of slavery, its negative economic impact, the reaction of contemporaneous black leaders to it and to the country overall, and the far larger sweep of all the rest of American history. Parents and others opposed to 1619 aren’t “scared” and don’t want a warts-free telling of American history. But they don’t want an ideologically driven, all-warts narrative either. They want honest history, warts and all, and we should accommodate them.

[ Via: https://archive.today/PCRfV ]