#and used ahistorical bullshit to justify their bullshit

[heydragonfly]

hm. just gonna say this cause a terf just followed me and I ain’t fucking with that: if you’re a terf you can suck my entire asshole, you vapid cunt! if your feminism doesn’t include trans women then you’re not a feminist at all!

[traegorn]

you are so ignorant. read “the lilith question” by JEWISH feminist aviva cantor zuckoff published in 1976 on LILITH the independent jewish and frankly feminist magazine. Lilith being a girl boss is not fringe and definitely not antisemitic an interpretation like you’ve claimed! Lilith is jewish and not exclusively so! Jewish people say Lilith is open

So you haven't listened to anything I've said, huh.

What I said is that Lilith is exclusively a figure that comes from Jewish folklore. I supported that with historical and academic evidence.

I have said that the "Babylonian Goddess Lilith" myth most non-Jewish people use to justify their use of her was bullshit and a 20th century invention. What I've argued for is debunking ahistorical fiction used to justify appropriation for decades.

And I said that Jewish people, as they are arguably a closed culture, get to decide who should and shouldn't be able to use aspects of their culture. And according to you, you found a Jewish person who in the 1970s said it was okay. I haven't read that particular book.

But great. Jewish people are not a monolith. You're going to find varying opinions.

And maybe some of those opinions have changed in the decades since the growth of the goddess movement. What I have actually been saying this whole time is just that non-Jewish people like you and me don't get to decide what is and isn't open for the taking from Jewish culture.

They do.

(And did you just unironically say "girl boss" in 2023? No sweaty, no...)

[hasufin]

You've probably seen clips from this. This is Sen. Josh Hawley's speech to the RNC, in which he directly calls for Christian Nationalism.

I watched the entire thing. It's... it's a ride.

The weird thing is, sandwiched in the middle of his ahistorical bullshit and his Christian Nationalism, is an economic proposal which would fit right in at the DNC. It's weird.

Anyway, below is my complete reaction to it:

So, against my better judgement, I did listen to the speech.

Now, I’ve been reluctant to do so. It has been my experience that American Rightwing Christians tend to speak in a sort of dialect; that they tend to say things which – to an outsider such as myself – seem terribly incendiary, aggressive, and deeply unpersuasive. I’ve had Christian friends explain to me, of preachers “Yes, I know that sounds horrible to you, but that’s just how they talk in the Church”. And thus, I did ask this question [on Quora] to among other things give those within that community an opportunity to explain his words. I have, I confess, been disappointed: what I’ve received instead has been dismissal; just refusal to acknowledge that the things being said would reasonably be interpreted as threatening to one not steeped in that culture. Dismissal, I will say, serves to affirm our concerns: it’s like how Kavanaugh claimed that Roe was “settled law”… until he voted to overturn it. We don’t trust dismissal, because it has been a lie in the past and we expect it to be a lie in the future.

Now, the first few minutes of Hawley’s speech present me with a conundrum.

You see, he gives a brief historical recount of the fall of the Roman Empire, and of the Puritans (whom I have never before heard referred to as Augustinians, but again, I’m just not fluent in this particular patois.)

And the problem here is, his narrative is simply false. I mean, he pinpoints the early 400s as the fall of the Western Roman Empire – fair enough – but that’s also when Christianity became the majority religion of that empire; characterizing them as pagans as that point, and “paganism” as the cause of the fall of the Empire is quite ridiculous. But I’ll come back to that later, and why it’s deeply disturbing to me.

And then the Puritans. Again, I’ve never really heard them called Augustinians but that’s reasonably an oversight on my part – I’m of the opinion that their influence on the American colonies is somewhat overstated, but that’s just my opinion. His characterization of them is I think somewhat lack in nuance and reality, but the how and why of that seems important.

So I’m left with a bit of a conundrum. Do I assume his actual knowledge of history is that of a disinterested high schooler? Do I assume he just plain doesn’t know what he is talking about? If that’s the case, I – and everyone else - really ought to disregard whatever he says of policy: he is a fool, and we oughtn’t be led by fools.

But, perhaps he does know better? Yet, that’s worse. If he knows that the Roman empire did not fall due to “Paganism”; that the Puritans were a particularly intolerant sect of Reformationists who found freedom overly threatening and ultimately declined largely due to the infighting which is characteristic of rightwing authoritarian groups. If he knows this, and offers an ahistorical alternative instead, then he is a liar, and should be directly opposed.

One can slice that Gordian knot by realizing he offers these not as history, but as mythology. It’s not whether they’re true, but what they’re meant to communicate. However, as a non-Christian, that’s… that’s actually worse.

His decision, then, to attribute the downfall of Rome to corruption, to loving pleasure and self-indulgence, is important. Now, I think we all know that Rome did not fail because their soldiers were just too busy drinking and having sex. But that claim appeals to a disgust-based morality: it indulges in a visceral hatred of those excesses. And that same disgust-based morality can be used to justify any number of horrors. It’s a disgust-based morality which ties a gay man to a fence and leaves him to die; that beats a transwoman to death; that decides Jews are baby eaters and condemns them to ghettoes and them to death.

His ahistorical account ignores the entire history of Christian internal warfare. It pretends that the Puritans were an inclusive society – rather than one which executed their own on the mere allegation of them being people like me.

And I’m hearing him proceed further, to claim all things good… indeed, the utter ridiculousness of claiming specifically secular achievements as Christian. This is a fact-free speech, which is intended to appeal to a particular audience of which I – and any other non-Christian – is not a member. He proclaims that as a non-Christian I should embrace Christianity… after having lied and said many of distinctly non-Christian things are Christian. I mean, if you define Christian as “the stuff I want to claim” and non-Christian as “everything else” then sure… but that’s not what those things mean, and we’re back to that conundrum: is he a liar or a fool?

And then he gets back to his disgust-based morality, his appeal to hatred, his lies about his opposition, and just outright about what is going on right now.

Ah, and here we are: “the left” is evil, “the left” wants to destroy. And… wait, did he just claim that liberals like Ayn Rand? What??? And Milton Friedman? How… how does anyone buy this? I’m sorry, what the hell is this?

He is literally saying that the left is against god. This speech very literally demonizes his opposition. He lies about people, and and paints them as simply being against good. I wonder how anyone considers this as acceptable at all. This is Blood Libel.

Now, wait, he’s deriding other republicans? And saying that it was republicans who spearheaded DEI? I’m just confused here. Basically, it seems like he’s saying literally anyone who opposes him is evil, and he will make up Any Damned Thing to paint them that way.

Being honest, I’m not sure I am all that interested in the second half of this. Hist first half, in which he very literally calls everyone who isn’t on his side evil; in which he says the left is against love and god. I recognize that he doesn’t directly say “let’s put all the liberals in camps and kill them”, but this is the rhetoric which is used to justify these things. The policies he puts forth afterwards are less incendiary – and it’s kind of weird that he had to open a policy proposal which matches rather well with the liberal platform, with demonization of liberals, and I don’t know how anyone can reconcile that. But, y’know, he also claimed that liberals like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, so there’s a lot of contradiction there.

Oh, wait now he’s directly speaking against religious liberty. He’s saying directly that religious liberty is only valuable because it lets us all practice the same religion, and that Christianity is our national religion. So we’re back to Deeply Disturbing here. “More civil religion, not less”. Atheists are evil, they hate Christianity, this other not-religious thing is religion, trans people are evil… yeah. And he wants direct endorsement of Christianity. Now, I don’t think that taking down a pride flag is directly oppression, but I definitely see it as a first step: establishing that not-Christianity is a religion, and should be supplanted with Christianity by the state. So, having listened to this… I would dismiss him as a madman if he weren’t giving a speech at the RNC. But he is. And I see what he’s saying as setting the foundation for much worse. There’s nothing good to come of defining Everyone Else as being evil.

[brick-van-dyke]

Okay so sort of a vent about history and Christianity, and yeah I'm gonna get personal with this and maybe emotionally hating religion at the moment, but more as a reaction than what I genuinely think of it

// TW slight mention of various genocides throughout history, and religious trauma. And abuse mention.

Not to diss my upbringing as a Christian here (but also to totally diss my upbringing asa Christian here), but looking at the history of a lot of what's going on as far as Palestine and everything bad that has happened to Jewish people ever always seems to relate back to Christians and Europe being fuckwits and messing shit up, at some point, somehow, every single time and killing every other group and ethnicity to try and "cause" Jesus to come back or to just be prejudiced little shits to literally every other belief system that isn't theirs. Like every single damn point in history where Jews or Muslims suffer and I see either Romans (either Christian or the Roman Pantheon, usually the former) or Catholics with their crusade or Evangelicals mistaking capitalism for religion like come on guys, just don't cause mass bloodshed for five fucking seconds. And then there's literally just. Everything else ever to consider.

Look, I know Christianity can be good just like how Judaism and Islam can be used as excuses to do the same stuff but god damn, the more I delve I to history the more embarassed I am just to think about how I used to be a Christian or how my dad would justify said bloodshed and shit as a paster. Every day, I just become more and more cynical especially with the idea "oh god doesn't intervene because it would ruin the Plan™" as if that matters when the ones causing the problems are those inspired by said god and I'm just so angry and frustrated that I can be torn apart and wish I could do anything to help but no if there is some cosmic being, they are sitting back refusing to do anything when they can stop this by just, at least, revealing that this wasn't the original intention. And damn, if it was I'd be going to Lucifer's side because that's even more fucked up.

This is why the only gods I'd worship are pantheons like the Greek Gods or Roman or Norse or anything else because at least the gods ACKNOWLEDGE they do fucked up shit and don't hide behind "I'm perfect so if you feel empathy and sadness for people and justifiable anger at the injustices you see clearly YOU'RE the one in the wrong for not trusting me enough" and a nice little facade, they just threaten you and be done with it. Like, yeah, if my dad punched me in the face of stop trusting him that shit is EARNED. If a god demanded trust while allowing people in his care to die, why should I just. Pretend that isn't wrong? Act like somehow caring is wrong? If caring is a sin I'd rather be guilty of it.

And then there's the stuff in my own life that I feel guilty of feeling angry about because I was taught to feeling fucking guilty of being angry about. All because old men from forever ago decided No Actually God Told Me To Say This and then told people that being angry at god for the pain in their lives makes them weak and sinful and shit. Like come the fuck on as if that wouldn't give a child issues. And then when I didn't do that like a good little Christian child, aka internalizing everything and numbing myself repetitively, the one thing that did make me question god despite all the bullshit that already existed ever was literally the story of Moses because I felt like it was unfair and the kids in Egypt didn't deserve to be punished for the pharaoh. And somehow that is supposed to make me feel guilty? Like nah be it then or now, the fact that I'm angry and horrified? Distrustful? Absolutely abhorred with the idea of allowing injustice? That comes from love and that comes from kindness. Fuck shaming love, hypocritical ass doctrine.

And don't get me started on the ahistorical propaganda bullshit I was taught at church because, considering it mostly came from my dad who was the paster, I may actually just come to hate him for it. Not completely like cut off hate, but damn if I don't have a grudge. Literally took most of my young adult years unlearning so much bullshit and I'm only just starting to unravel it. If god was present, I'm pissed almost solely for the fact he didn't speak the fuck up and allow a kid to get mentally fucked.

Oh and we don't even want to go into the separate trauma, like the literal abuse that I decided to forgive to be The Better Person and believing genuinely that hating god for what happened made me a bad person like I already was dealing with undiagnosed C-PTSD I didn't need the religious trauma convincing me to feel ashamed of being traumatised.

Anyway yeah I'm feeling a lot of rage tonight and realising how traumatic Christianity was for me growing up actually. Like. Wow.

[the-antiapocalyptic-man]

this isn’t as coherent as I’d like, but it’s been A Day and I’m just gonna vent a little:

MCU stans calling Kirby’s original Eternals comics “ugly” and “nonsense that’s impossible to read” is one of the most damning indictments of a franchise plagued by problematic bullshit, and it does speak to the heart of stan culture and the defensive around these movies: no one actually gives a shit about the stories or the characters, it’s all about consolidating power and influence via the flattening and homogenization of culture

it happens again and again, even within comics fandom itself: there’s no love of history, no respect for the people making these things, and hey, I get it. Not everyone wants to have a fucking degree in this bullshit to sit through some popcorn action movies a few times a year, but it would be nice if the shitty impulse to chase down every new shiny thing wasn’t an ahistorical capitalist bloodbath

Movies don’t drive people to comics and they don’t make people love comics. They don’t even make people love fucking movies. I’m not under any illusion that these things are the height of human culture, but they have to have substance, call to some impulse to understand the ways in which the pieces of our world interact with and enliven each other

idk man, I went to see Venom 2 yesterday and it was fine, it was a big dumb action movie with some queer metaphor sprinkled in. I have an acquaintance who absolutely hated it. I like to think the ways we engage with culture are deeply personal and between Eternals and Venom and so on, they are personal, but god I hate thinking about what the engagement I see says about the people engaging with it.

But for me, the thing is: that Eternals movie is the version I’m engaging with in spite of itself. it’s full of ugly, uninspired costumes and a-list actors dropping another dozen dead-eyed performances for a massive corporation’s fiction machine. It refuses to engage with the material in and of itself and instead forces Eternals-as-a-story (itself an ad hoc addition frankensteined into the MU after Kirby had been forced to once again abandon his own creations by economic forces) to justify existing within the MCU. “Why didn’t you stop Thanos?” “Should we join the Avengers?”

I hope the film’s good. I still haven’t seen Shang-Chi, but I hope that’s good too. I look at the world and hope to see people making good art despite the forces all around us making that harder than ever. I’m glad to have works like Black Panther or Thor Ragnarok that push away from the blueprint, even as the blueprint remains alive and well in plenty of other Marvel/Disney productions I don’t even have to name.

I’m not even gonna tag this with anything, I don’t want to argue with these people, I’m not even mad at the film itself really. Fuck, Eternals isn’t even my favorite Kirby concept. Jack Kirby deserves more respect than anyone for building the universe that modern pop culture vultures rely on for their whole shitty identity and the least they could do is show it.

[rabbitindisguise]

My issue with binary trans people saying exorsexism is watered down transphobia is encapsulated in my feelings about some post I saw where basically a binary trans person corrected a nb person and told them all nb people are trans

This is a timeline of the the bullshit I've seen as a nb trans person:

Binary trans people harass non-binary people out of the trans community, and sometimes out of the LGBTQ+ community itself, due to respectability politics (see: "you need dysphoria to be trans," "neopronouns are cringey," mogai becoming an insult, and "microidentities aren't real" discourses)

Some non-binary people choose not to use trans because of this, and some non-binary people use trans and endure harassment and exorsexism for years about it

Ace exclusionists happen and decide that aces aren't "LGBT" as a justification for their exclusion, and ahistorically retroactively justify this by forcibly grouping all m-spec identities under bi and all non-binary people under trans

To back that bullshit up, ace exclusionists decide to consult binary trans people who say we're "allowed" to be trans ("the white stripe stands for non-binary people" for example)

Non-binary people, rightfully miffed, say "not all non-binary people are trans" (because they've been harassed for years for identifying as such)

Binary trans people take to calling these non-binaries, get this, exorsexist for pointing out the problem that binary trans people created

If exorsexism isn't real, if it's just transphobia, if all non-binary people are trans, then binary trans people wouldn't get to talk over nb people to nb people about nb people. Especially not to use as a talking point to exclude asexuals, a group with higher rates of non-binary people than any other sexuality.

[joanofrad]

As a history student (and hopefully future historian), I find it deeply unsetteling how easily people nowadays believe things, because they read about it on the internet. It’s Pride Month and ~*~of course~*~ I once again have to see dozens of posts saying that transwomen of colour started the gay rights movement and that they were responsible for Stonewall and I’m just amazed by how many people parrot this bullshit. You say you’re a member of the LGBT community (or an ally), but you don’t even know ANYTHING about the history of this movement. Not only is your viewpoint extremely American-centered, it’s also a downright LIE! Gay people started the gay rights movement (duh! Show me the social justice movement, that wasn’t started by the people, who were being oppressed!) long before Stonewall and a black butch lesbian - Storme Delarverie - threw the first brick at Stonewall. Stonewall happened not even a hundred years ago; there are still people alive today, who can tell you how it really was (and who have done so in countless books and documentaries), even Storme Delarverie only died in 2014 (!!!), but these people don’t even want to know. They don’t care. They don’t like the facts, so they make up new facts!

I’m used to conservatives engaging in ahistorical storytelling and denying of history and science, but nowadays a lot of liberals are just as bad and all so that they can justify their misogyny, lesbophobia/homophobia and racism. I’m really scared of where this will lead!

[laryna6]

There are things that I want to reblog, because something needs to be done, but they’re just vile. I feel dirty just reading them.

I’m reminded of seeing someone say ‘there was a lot more attention when Marvel made Captain America Hydra than when it made Magneto Hydra,’ and I think that’s because people considered making Captain America an ahistorical fuckup.

At the time, sure, Irish people were targeted along with black people by America’s eugenicists trying to eliminate their populations by keeping them from having children. Making Captain America Hydra at the time would have been racist as fuck.

These days, well, having a black president doesn’t mean racism against black people is over, but if we had another Irish Catholic president, this time only complete nutjobs would be going ‘America will be dragged into sin because the Pope rules the country now and he’s an agent of the devil’ rather than that being enough of a ‘valid concern’ to get discussed in official interviews. (It’s Muslims these days.) Racism against Irish people is really not a thing in modern America, so when someone made an Irish person in the WWII era Hydra, you could blame them not realizing that Steve Rogers was part of two groups targeted for genocide (Irish and disabled) on not doing the fucking research. People saw it as an error that should be corrected.

Everyone knows the Nazis and other eugenicists wanted to eliminate Jewish people. Making Magneto Hydra... you can’t blame that on ignorance. That’s a ‘fuck you this is deliberate.’ You stop engaging in dialogue and start engaging in boycott. 

The thing is that racism against the Irish is over in America. 

Finally.

For now.

Eugenicists considered Irish people monkeys, just like black people. Racial purity means purity. If we let them start rolling back progress? Organized racism against Irish people is within living memory. The KKK was founded to oppress the Irish. Racists want to roll back civil rights to an era when we did not have white privilege, and if you think they’ll take away everyone else’s rights and leave ours alone you’re effing delusional.

Using divide and conquer tactics on Celts and POCs, playing them against each other to keep them from allying to overthrow the white masters is American tradition going back to the very first (Celt) slaves brought to the colonies that became the US. 

If these bastards aren’t stopped, they’re going to try to use the Irish as a ‘model minority’ again. Well, it didn’t protect us from genocide last time. 

If you’re Irish-American, what’s going on now is your problem. If you let them swindle you, you have no right to call yourself Irish...

...but giving up your cultural identity still won’t make them consider you white.

‘The blacks of Europe’ were often used as overseers, cops, and other buffers between POCs and ‘real’ humans. 

 Ireland had been colonized for centuries and still hasn’t gotten its ancient cultural centers back. The big migration of Irish people to America was caused by a genocide: the English were taking food from Ireland for England while the Irish starved and depicting Irish as monkeys in newspapers. It was too easy to turn ‘we’re not monkeys’ into ‘you’re not like the other POC, right? You don’t want to be treated like them?’ Irish people were treated better in America than in their colonized homeland. They were used to seeing people treated as inferiors on racial grounds, that was how the world worked under British plantation owners. A lot of them failed to realize that no, it was not nice not to be at the bottom of the heap for once.

An Irish person who votes Republican is voting for the ideological descendants of the people who banned them from getting college educations on racial grounds. Who turned them into serfs (like slaves, but not worth money: more where they come from, they breed like the animals they are) in their own homeland and banned them from practicing their traditional culture? You’ve seen Riverdance? How they’re so stoic and barely moving from the waist up? That was so the overseers watching them over the hedges wouldn’t catch them preserving traditional dance. 

How do you think the English learned the native culture and religion elimination tactics they use on Native Americans? They had colonialism down to a science before they hit the Americas. There’s a reason the French and English treated Native Americans so differently, and it’s because the English already had a tradition of turning natives into slaves and taking away their land and justifying it on the basis of race. They were so good at running colonies because they’d been doing it for centuries. 

The idea that the fifties was a happy time is bullshit: there’s a reason the people who became adults in that era were called the Beat Generation: they were beaten down, even the white males. People were getting hauled in for fucking thought crimes. 

But some idiots want to go back to that era. They want to recreate the social structure at the time, with whites at the top. Getting crapped on and hauled in by secret police yes, but less than everyone else.

And Irish people should be very afraid of this, because back then we weren’t white. 

There’s that quote about ‘first they came for the... then they came for me.’ Eventually, they will get around to the Irish. It’ll begin with the Irish having to ‘prove they’re white’ by ‘serving the country,’ as police, as military, as enforcers so good whites don’t have to deal with the dirty POC. 

By the time Irish people aren’t allowed to get college educations anymore, other non-whites aren’t going to like us very much. Why would they stand up for us if we were used to beat them down when they stood up for themselves, just like before? 

My dad votes Republican and it drives me crazy, because he was there for the racist objections to Kennedy seeming like ‘perfectly logical concerns,’ he was there for America’s first non-WASP president getting assassinated, he was able to get a college education and become a doctor because Irish Catholics were finally getting the ability to be upwardly mobile and it really wasn’t a coincidence that this happened in the Civil Rights Era.. 

Irish people have white privilege now. If/as racism intensifies, the concept of losing white privilege and getting treated like POC is going to get scarier and scarier. It might be too easy to fall into the trap of being treated better than POC provided we’re of use to the real whites, even if of course we’re not ‘real people’ to them. 

tl;dr Irish Celts in America from the Thirteen Colonies to the Civil Rights Era were in a position where we weren’t POC but we were not white either., and we should be very afraid of anyone who wants to ‘restore American traditions’ like using minorities against each other because becoming a ‘model minority’ did jack shit to protect us from genocide the first time.

Also, because of all that time when Irish people were being played against black people, most POC consider Irish rights as laughable as Men’s Rights. If we as a group hang them out to dry trying to get treated like citizens instead of serfs like in back in effing Jamestown, why the hell should they speak up when the eugenicists come for us once again?

[denimsnake]

glad ppl are finally pushing back against the casual homophobia bc months ago when i expressed my discomfort with it i almost immediately ran into a post that was like "it's ahistorical to not want strangers calling u slurs bc an older gay friend of mine calls me a dyke and i'm perfectly fine with it and he would stop if i asked him to" and everyone was using that to justify calling strangers fruits or whatever even though the situations are absolutely not the same.

like:

1) a friend 2) who you know is gay & trust they arent using the word derogatorily and 3) will stop if u ask

VS

1) a literal stranger 2) who you don't know -- because theyre a stranger -- so you don't know if they're using it derogatorily or not and 3) they make up bullshit excuses as to why it's not homophobic when people ask them to stop

[victorian-muff-daddy]

Any butch worth their salt would never joke about harming a woman. If you think that it is ok then you're a piece of shit.

LMAO wow. I’m guessing this is the OP of that ahistorical bullshit post, where she was trying to use queer theory vocab terms to justify an inc*st kink - AND USING BUTCH/FEM GENDER ROLES. 

Lesbians aren’t fucking immune to harmful ideas about gender roles and butch/fem dynamics, just because lesbians play with the performative nature of gender by imitating and mocking cishet gender roles. 

OP is clearly one of this brand, and I’m not about that life. As an academic I am perpetually willing to fight anyone who continues to put out these ridiculously bogus ideas. Look at that fucking essay that managed to get published in Third World Quarterly (an academic journal on colonialism and ethnic studies), titled “The Case for Colonialism,” written by Bruce Gilley, which was so bad that it DID NOT PASS PEER REVIEW. Mofo lied and snuck it in, where it literally reinforces every terrible thing about white people’s attitudes towards colonialism and racial subjugation. 

You think academics are immune from this? No, they’re not. We get this ahistorical tumblr bullshit OFF of tumblr all the time. Because there are too many people who fashion themselves as intellectuals when they DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT. 

So yeah, I will definitely fight anyone who keeps perpetuating racist, sexist, homophobic/lesbophobic shit under the guise of academic interest or integrity. That shit does not hold up, but academics have been trying to do this shit for decades, if not hundreds of years. 

So get the fuck out of here with your garbage after having the audacity to try and rationalize an inc*st kink with lesbian history and lesbian experience. OP can catch these fuckin’ hands