#and because of politics of course

[beastsovrevelation]

Now that I started writing Hellfire, this gifset makes me think of Cordelia and Lucy...

Lucy's nature is the same as her father's (though, she wouldn't be referred to as the Antichrist until Michael retires or dies). Her powers are dark, destructive and hardly measurable. Even as a young adult, they may be difficult to control, especially in a rage, or some other emotional outburst.

I can easily imagine Cordelia cradling her in a sea of bodies.

"I don't know what happened... Mommy, I didn't mean to-..."

"Shhh, it's okay. It's okay."

She has always been hard on Lucy, knowing her violent tendencies must be curbed. The world might not survive otherwise... But, in the end, no matter how much blood she spills, nor what she renders to ash, Cordelia will always protect her daughter.

Question is, whether Lucy's wrath was deserved or not.

[aestariiwilderness]

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

Throughout my schooling up through undergrad every time we talked about a Red Scare or the Cold War's anticommunism it was invariably framed as a time when the United States lost its collective head and went about unjustly persecuting people for completely made up crimes and loyalties. Like when The Feminine Mystique came up they'd be like "and they even accused Betty Friedan of being a communist! Imagine!"

Thing is though, as I learned later, Friedan had been a member of the communist party. As is often the case. The two people named as members of the Hollywood Ten in this textbook--Ring Lardner Jr. and Dalton Trumbo--were members of the communist party, or at least had been at one time.

And listen, if the argument is that you shouldn't persecute communists, then you should say it. But to frame it like it was insane to think these people were communists in the first place is dishonest.

[raikirikiri]

love the idea of obito living after the war and he’s assigned to kakashi’s guard as a type of “community service” and people will pass them in a store and obito is grumbling about how he should’ve killed kakashi, the hokage, when he had a chance and kakashi blithely points out that obito’s has had SEVERAL opportunities to kill him over the last several years. but all the villagers hear is the crazy mass murderer war criminal telling their hokage he wants to kill him and kakashi just :3 *shrugs* because if obito wanted to kill him, he would have.

[sky--phantom]

You weren't even an option dude???!!??

[bbyclnrbnsn]

[so-sick-of-17]

If this election goes badly, I will never forgive people who put their personal morals over the good of America. The system is flawed and we should criticize Kamala Harris, but we also need to prevent as much harm as we can. Not if, WHEN, Kamala Harris wins the election, we are allowed to breath a sigh of relief and get rid of the knot in our stomachs. We will not stop fighting but taking a minute to celebrate the little victories is the only way a lot of us can get through everything. We will continue to fight for Palestine and demand Kamala Harris do more, but we can appreciate that things aren’t going to get worse and that doesn’t make us selfish.

[modwyr]

i love when game companions don't have a positive relationship and they aren't 'found family' (whatever that term means nowadays). to me it feels like it really emphasises the idea of this being a group of characters gathered together by the protagonist for a common goal, and therefore have clashing ideologies, and it makes everything more natural, from big game moments to companion banter, to have them argue or act awkward and stilted with each other because that's how people are

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Same thing with "remember the days when hating Nazis wasn't controversial?"

No not really! It was MAINSTREAM (mainly because WWII was really deadly and for a while most of the aging white men demographic had fought them in it) but there were plenty of politicians still shaking Nazi hands behind our backs and plenty of people even during WWII who sympathized with the Nazi cause!

So instead of harkening to the glory days (like Nazis do!) let's MAKE a future where hating Nazis isn't controversial

That last sentence deserves to be in bold, anon:

...Instead of harkening to the glory days (like Nazis do!) let's MAKE a future where hating Nazis isn't controversial

[dreamerdrop]

You know that RnM episode where Morty is ominously threatening his sisters ex boyfriend for fucking with her self esteem before dumping her?

"Hey, it's okay. Sit down. You made my sister cry, Ethan. You messed with her body image. Shh, shh, shh. Careful, Ethan. Your s'more is burning." <- That whole thing?

That's how I picture Garak meeting Bashir’s parents.

[fusionfanatic]

Research for an au fic I’m working on: how would Azula act and behave in a modern setting? And I don’t mean re-imagine her character within a modern context and stories. This isn’t Azula, but she’s an overachieving American high schooler with strict and overbearing parents, or Azula, but she’s the soon-to-be CEO of her father’s multinational conglomerate based in Japan or something. No, I mean how would Azula as she is in canon, Fire nation princess and all, act and behave if you simply just took her from her world and plopped her into [insert current year you’re reading this]?

[aspiringnexu]

Star Trek but Starfleet HQ has portraits of every Admiral and/or historically important person and they act like the portraits in Harry Potter.

Jim is forever leaving his portrait and snuggling up in Spock’s. They're most often seen napping together in a frame nearest one of the windows (because Vulcans are basically cats) but, due to their fame, they have many portraits around the Academy campus so really it's a toss up where exactly they'll be. They're always together, though.

[whippersnappersbookworm]

Bhai the meltdown of the "hindublr" is so funny 😂. Now they are suddenly realising that casteism is huge issue in India. Just few months ago , they were screaming at the top of their voice going on and on about how Casteism was a very practical practice and it doesn't exist in India or the realm of Hinduism. I am loving this 180 degree palat . I mean this is so ironic , iconic and funny 😂😂.

[scribbling-waffle]

Had a dream that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris publicly admitted to marrying Shane on her Stardew Valley save. That was a weird one to wake up from.

[aliusfrater]

a fan in this panel i'm watching asked about the cas and collette paralells so i got curious and went looking through s10 for castiel and collette mirroring but i didn't find any so now, genuinely wondering what's being paralleled between the two in a way that also mirrors dean and cas to cain and collette, i just straight up looked it up on here and the num1 reason just seems to be sam omission