#anglo supremacy

[hussyknee]

[coquelicoq]

started on the french dictionary and so far i've only read the front matter and three pages of the A's and i'm already having so much fun. highlights:

the irony of the preface, which basically says, "this is an abridged edition. isn't that neat?", being at least three times longer than necessary

the list of 16 different symbols and their uses in distinguishing senses and introducing distinct usages within the same definition. because that seems like a large number of symbols, i have given myself permission not to comprehend the differences between any of them and just vibe

from the list of abbreviations:

"abusivt: abusivement (emploi très critiquable, parfois faux sens ou solécisme)" 😒 @ french lexicographers: have you heard the good news (of linguistic descriptivism)?

"recomm.: recommandation (dans recomm. off. « recommandation officielle » ; terme conforme à la loi française de 1994 sur la langue)" okay actually @ all of france: get well soon

"abdomen [-ɛn]" do you mean to tell me this vowel isn't nasalized??? sick. twisted. rebellious. can't believe la loi française de 1994 sur la langue has nothing to say about this !

"aber [abɛʀ]" this dictionary tells me when to pronounce the r in words ending in -er. my holy grail. crying and kissing its feet in gratitude

every time the definition includes a word i don't know i can just look that word up elsewhere in the same book i am currently holding!!!!

"abortif, ive adj. Qui fait avorter." told you b and v were related

"abreuver v. tr. 1. Faire boire abondamment (un animal)." this makes it sound like you're force-feeding animals water...on the previous page abondance is defined as "Grande quantité (supérieure aux besoins)" so like i'm getting the sense that you're leading a horse to water and not only making it drink but not letting it leave until it's drunk every last drop in the trough lol

"abribus [-bys] n. m. (nom déposé) Arrêt d'autobus équipé d'un abri" ok cute.

the example it gives for abruti is "Espèce d'abruti !" folks it don't get any frencher than that.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"FEARS HE WOULD GO TO JAIL IN QUEBEC," Toronto Star. May 21, 1934. Page 2. --- Orange Speaker Trusts Ontario Still Safe to Preach Protestantism ---- Speaking at the annual church service of the Western District Orange Lodge, in Christ church, Shaw St., on Sunday afternoon, Rev. Bro. C. H. Way, in criticizing the Roman Catholic church, declared: "In Quebec I would perhaps be dragged off to jail for saying so, but I trust that it is still safe to preach Protestantism and to expose the false doctrines of the Roman Catholic church in Ontario and other Protestant provinces.

Mr. Way claimed the right to declare that the Roman Catholic doctrines of "transubstantiation, apostolic succession, prayers to the Virgin, saints and angels, the terrible doctrine of purgatory and many others that could be mentioned are contrary to the word of God."

British people won civil and religious freedom in the revolution of 1688-90, in the relief of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, he said. Roman Catholicism failed in Britain, as it has since failed in France, Italy, Austria, Spain and Mexico, as well as other countries, claimed Mr. Way.

"Romanism never makes any head-way, except as a result of compromising on the part of Protestants. There has been too much compromise in Canada's public life and it should be stopped," he declared.

All of the thirty Orange lodges in the western district, besides many visitors, were represented in the parade and the church was filled to capacity.

[immaculatasknight]

Writing a happy ending

[whats-in-a-sentence]

'Finally! The dating site for those wishing to preserve their heritage.'

"Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists" - Julia Ebner

[apas-95]

When someone from europe or a peripheral capitalist state does the whole 'oh police violence and repression aren't a problem here that's just a USA thing' song and dance, it's obviously bullshit - the oppositional nature between the enforcers of the ruling class and the classes they rule over is fairly fundamental to the existence of any state - but it would be a lot easier to countermand if usamericans weren't so utterly provincial.

The character of the bourgeois police in, for example, Kazakhstan, is genuinely different than that of the US police, and cannot be neatly understood through just seeing it as a variation on the latter. A more broad, theoretical understanding of policing in general applies to both, but an empiricist understanding of a federal security apparatus descended from British-imperial slave patrols just plainly will not transfer to a unitary state's police force made to replace a workers' militia.

This applies to everything, really - the racial and ethnic dynamics of a given place outside the USA are going to be fundamentally and qualitatively different than those of the USA, and the refusal, of usamericans who have learned, empirically, about the nature of anglo settler-colonial white supremacy, to then develop a deeper and broader theoretical understanding of how systems of racial and ethnic oppression are developed - rather than saying 'its crazy that serbs and croats could hate each other when they're both White, shrimp racism lol' and the like - makes it more difficult, not less, to meaningfully oppose it when someone says 'racism isn't a problem in my country, just the USA', especially when the only response given is regarding supposed oppression of racial categories that may well not exist in that context.

This is, incidentally, why the whole 'I don't need theory, I have lived experience' tripe is wholly insufficient for the real world. You do not have enough experience, and you are going to encounter novel scenarios where mindlessly applying learned dynamics by rote will lead to entirely confident wrong answers. It's not good enough. The world is a lot bigger than you.

[headspace-hotel]

I hope I can express this properly and sensitively, but I think oftentimes people need to have Categories and Identities and to be healthily exploratory and playful and elastic about them, else they can get vulnerable to some negative things, sometimes really awful things

I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was something that wrote about whiteness in America as an abyss.

Whiteness is something that sheltered white Americans' ancestors, and at the same time devoured them. They used to have a distinct medley of heritages: Irish, German, Scottish, Italian. "Whiteness" ate it up, the languages, the cultures. There were privileges if you destroyed it, and punishments if you held onto anything that was "Other." In a white supremacist society, white people wanted to be "white" first before any other possible identity or connection they could have.

Yay! You're white. You're on top. You win...what? Turns out the prize for "winning" is just that you get to perpetrate the violence of the game instead of being on the receiving end of it.

And that's the nasty twist—there is no prize. The deeply embedded vice of "Southern pride" is not just what the Confederate flag stands for, but also why they've got to cling so hard to that symbol of traitors and losers: they need to be on top of something so bad that even a pile of shit will do. My ancestors were ultimately dirt poor, loads of them ending up in prison or breaking their bodies down doing hard labor, but they were white. Their reward, and their pride, was being stepped on by the violence of poverty only, instead of also by the violence of white supremacy.

"White pride" is all about hate because white supremacy didn't give these folks anything to be proud of. It stripped away the culture and heritage their ancestors had in favor of "whiteness." All those jokes about how white people have no culture, well, it's true isn't it? This shit is how we ended up a primarily monolingual nation. And what looks like happened is that white Americans wound up just...scavenging most of their culture from those they oppressed. Food, music, all of that stuff. Our white ancestors didn't GIVE us anything that was their own to start with.

And this is something that really strikes me about the white supremacist and fascist movements nowadays: the starvation and hollowness behind them. These folks are empty inside. They were given nothing by white supremacy except a very vague sense that they deserve something, and they see people of all different cultures celebrating and flourishing in their unique heritages and identities, and they feel like...they've been cheated.

Equality is so threatening when you're in this situation because it feels like you've got less than everyone else at the end of the day. Not just because of comparison to previous privileges, but because your whole identity was "person that gets to step on everybody else" and your whole inheritance was "shit stolen from everybody else" and in a world where all is set right, you have no identity and nothing. You are nothing.

Anyway I was looking just now at a blog that seemed really white-supremacist-leaning and it was 99% about like, Norse and Proto-Indo-European paganism and "traditionalism" and that's what got me thinking about this again.

This person had apparently done DNA tests on themselves or something, and were really fixated on figuring out their Norse and Germanic ancestors and separating out their genetic and racial identity at a level of precision that seems really pointless that far back in time. And honestly all the paganism stuff seemed like totally arbitrary speculation as well.

And how to become satisfied as a person like this? I am just as much Germanic or Norse as they are, but I don't believe that distant ancestors determine who you are to such an extent that I have some sort of innate cultural tie to Vikings or Visigoths or what have you. I know what percentage Celtic or Anglo Saxon or Norse I am—zero. I learned about those things in books the exact same way I learned about all the cultures and past kingdoms of the world that I presumably don't have ancestors from.

I feel like the experience of being a baby ally and obsessing about apologizing for being white is the same kind of thing in another direction, or another outcome of the same process. Some people seem to get really twisted up for a time over how to stop being guilty about being white.

It's part of the same thing as this guy who is trying to genetically identify his ancestors from like 3,000 years ago. It's the emptiness and meaninglessness of "white" identity apart from white supremacy.

I talk about deradicalization sometimes and I've had the notion a few times that fascism appeals to people who are hollow and starving in terms of identity, and if it wasn't for the sense of emptiness and hunger, they would be less easily radicalized. But it's also a little bit awkward to talk about the deeply unsatisfying nature of white supremacy, because...well, that is pretty low on the list of things bad about white supremacy.

I think this concept is worth talking about in general, though: People want to feel like they come from or are part of something meaningful. They are drawn toward Identities and Categories and Belonging to groups. This is something I think is commonly true about humans, I think it is normal and not a bad thing, and I think we could stand to be a little more upfront about its reality.

I think this means that wanting, and seeking, a sense of cultural identity as a white person (particularly an American) needs to have some kind of non-horrible outlet for it. Because right now, it's nothing but a way to get radicalized, and the dominant other option people take (becoming the Guilty White Person) is liked by no one and helps nothing.

And maybe it doesn't need to have anything to do with race or culture or your ancestors or any of these things that can lead a person down such terrible paths. Maybe more of us should be furries!

As just another thing to consider, I'm reading the book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and the author of the book uses the word "cracker" not like, with the gravity of reclaiming a "slur" or something like that, but seemingly because that is just the word she most strongly identifies with, the word that best articulates who "her people" are. This feels very solid and levelheaded to me, something that comes from someone with a good sense of themselves.

Personally I've thought a long time that more people should reclaim "redneck." Not in the sense of reclaiming a slur exactly, but in the sense of putting it in neutral usage among the folks it always referred to, instead of letting it increasingly be associated with any Southerner (regardless of working class background) that is the sort to wave a Confederate flag around. The very idea of gatekeeping "redneck" away from racists is just absolutely hilarious to me, I won't lie.

[log6]

I think it's weird how people on here seem determined to argue about how american black people are better off somehow for living in the imperial core because you are fundamentally making an argument on "privilege" whether you use those words or not and at this point we can acknowledge that is an awful system for analysing anything. Not only that but you're using it to make an insane moralistic judgement on people living in America which is especially insane when it's about black people and on top of THAT is a deeply stupid and genuinely fascistic manner of "third worldism". Yes black americans earn comparatively higher wages and larger assets than most places in the world but literally no one would argue about that, what's weird is the people who insist on bringing that up neglect the other essential part of this discussion which is that even in African nations where the wages are vastly lower, those people still exist as full citizens of their nation-states, where black people in america are forced (FORCED) to live in the midst of anglo white supremacy that both fundamentally requires and deeply despises their very existence. I'm sorry but I don't even understand what you gain from nearly weaponizing the basic facts of economic imperialism against the most systematically exploited people of the imperial core especially if you claim to be a leftist. Black americans have always had and continue to have the most revolutionary potential within the american empire and instead of even pretending to care about international proletarianism you people will degenerate into radlibs just to make pointless and vaguely racist arguments at black people online.

[orangerosebush]

Recently, I did a re-read of the AF series, and I am working through some thoughts I have on the Fowls and what allowed them to maintain power -- especially in the sense of being landed -- in Ireland after arriving during the Norman conquest in the 12th century.

Colfer establishes that Hugo de Folé and Virgil Butler arrived in Ireland during the first Norman crusades in the 12th century (1169).

“The first record of this unusual arrangement [between the Fowls and Butlers] was when Virgil Butler had been contracted as servant, bodyguard, and cook to Lord Hugo de Folé for one of the first great Norman crusades.” From: Artemis Fowl. By Eoin Colfer.

At once, these origins of the Fowls would make them ambiguously part of the Old English, a term from the modern period (post-1600) used to describe the descendants of the first Anglo-Norman conquerors who largely inhabited the Pale (Dublin and surrounding areas) and surrounding towns. Hugo de Folé and Virgil Butler would have likely been Catholic.

However, the origins of Fowl Manor complicate this.

The original Fowl castle had been built by Aodhán Fowl in the fifteenth century overlooking low-lying country on all sides. A tactic borrowed from the Normans. From: The Arctic Incident. By Eoin Colfer

In the 15th (c. 1401-1500) century, Aodhán Fowl acquired land for Fowl Manor in the Pale (Dublin and its surrounding areas); the estate has remained in the Fowls' possession ever since, which is important to note.

The Fowls' historical proximity to the Pale likely was what allowed them to maintain power over the centuries.

Between the 12th and 16th centuries, the Lordship of Ireland (1177-1542) placed swaths of Ireland under the control of Anglo-Norman lords loyal to the King of England.

However, by the 14th century (1300s), English rule of Ireland beyond the Pale (Dublin and its surrounding areas) was weakening. Beyond the Pale, (Catholic) Hiberno-Norman lords' fiefdoms had a degree of independence from the English, often adopting elements of Gaelic language and culture.

This changes around the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation and the Tudor conquest of Ireland. In 1536, Henry VIII of England decided to reconquer Ireland and bring it under crown control. Charles II, Henry VII's son, made the re-established Church of England even more explicitly Protestant.

Between the 16th and 17th centuries (c.1550s-1620s), Irish land was transferred to a new wave of (Protestant) settlers from Great Britain and Scotland to strengthen the Crown's weakening control over Ireland and Anglicize (and thus "civilize") the island; the land transfer was facilitated through the creation of plantations, such as the plantation of Ulster.

The Old English, which would have included descendants of de Folé and Virgil Butler, were supplanted by the New English, the Protestant landowners introduced by the Tudors in a number of ventures at plantations.

It is important to note the historical nuance that:

There was no equivalent in Ireland to the English Test Act of 1672, and there were plenty of precedents for exemptions to the Act of Supremacy. The legal position of Irish Catholics was, in many practical respects, better than that of English Catholics; many fines and penalties fell into abeyance under Charles [II], and the Catholic hierarchy co-operated openly with the Dublin administration. From James's [James VI and I] accession, the Church's position was obviously improved; priests emerged into the public eye and were allowed salaries, though they were not as yet endowed. Protestant superiority remained, in many areas, axiomatic; Catholics continued to occupy a curiously edgy position of formal inferiority combined with tacit toleration. But the ambiguities of their situation reflected the logic of local conditions just as much as the shifts in central policy. [...] But the 'Test clause in the 1704 [Popery] Act, obliging holders of public office to take sacraments according to the usage of the Church of Ireland, gradually excluded Presbyterians from town corporations even in Ulster. Despite the regium donum and the Toleration Act, their equivocal relationship with the civil power remained, and would provide a key theme in the radicalization of the Irish political world after 1780, when the threat of Catholic disaffection apparently receded. [From: Modern Ireland, 1600–1972. By R.F. Foster]

Still, the Popery Act would have had consequences for the historical Fowls and Butlers as Old English families. Beyond the Test clause in the Popery Act, it also limited Catholics' ability to buy/lease land, as well as limited inheritance from a Catholic to be by gavelkind i.e., divided equally, and thus shrinking with each generation, the estate between all sons, rather than according to Primogeniture.

It begs the question of how Fowl Manor remained in the hands of the family, rather than becoming the estate of a member of the New English.

As anti-Catholic sentiment was largely grounded in the political context of loyalty to the Crown (as opposed to the Pope), certain members of the Old English gentry could have (and did!) find ways to join the wave of the Protestant Ascendancy.

"The Anglo-Ireland of the day in fact encompassed sizable middle and lower classes -- a heterogeneity that Foster finds "exemplified by that quintessential Ascendancy institution, Trinity College: defined by Anglicanism but containing sons of peers, of shoemakers, of distillers, of butchers, of surgeons, and of builders" (Foster 1989, 173). And not all the "Anglo-Irish" were, strictly speaking, "Anglo." Early in Bowen's Court, Bowen's historical account of her family's Cork home, we learn that "Bowen" derives from the Welsh "ab Owen" or "ap Owen" (Bowen 1942a, 33). Other Anglo-Irish men and women traced their ancestry to the Old English and to Catholics who converted to Protestantism in order to reap the accompanying social, political and material rewards. Violet Martin (better known as Martin Ross) descended from the Old English Martins of Ross, who had owned land in Galway and had converted to Protestantism in the eighteenth century (McMahon 1968, 123). As Thomas Flanagan concludes, "there were many ways of being Anglo-Irish" (Flanagan 1966, 59). So what, then, defined Anglo-Irishness? In [R.F. ] Foster's view, it was Anglicanism. Anglicanism "defined a social elite, professional as well as landed, whose descent could be Norman, Old English, Cromwellian or even (in a very few cases) ancient Gaelic. Anglicanism conferred exclusivity, in Ireland as in contemporary England; and exclusivity defined the [Protestant] Ascendancy, not ethnic origin" From: An Anarchy in the Mind And in the Heart: Narrating Anglo-Ireland. By Ellen M. Wolff

And what do we find out in the first book of Artemis Fowl?

"Beside [Angeline] was a facsimile of [Artemis'] father, constructed from the morning suit he'd worn on that glorious day in Christchurch Cathedral fourteen years ago." From: Artemis Fowl. By Eoin Colfer

Christchurch Cathedral (in Dublin) is Anglican in denomination!

I just think it is so cool that across a few sentences from Artemis Fowl and The Arctic Incident, it is possible to situate the Fowl family within a semi-realistic history of Ireland.

[transmutationisms]

could you talk more on eds and biopolitics?

sure, so this is broad strokes and it's also worth reiterating that the energy deficit characteristic of EDs can have a lot of different causes besides intentional food restriction—food insecurity is a huge and underrecognised factor here but there are many others. so when i talk about intentional restriction and the desire to be thin / lose weight, i'm not suggesting these are universal characteristics or causes of EDs.

anyway though, in the context of discussing these things, and particularly the relationship between 'diet culture' and EDs, a perennial frustration to me is that i often hear people fall back on the idea that the desire to be thin comes about as a result of the beauty standards perpetuated in mass media, fashion adverts, &c, without any subsequent interrogation of why it is that beauty itself is now so heavily dependent on thinness. after all, plenty of people have pointed out this is not a universal; beauty varies in different times and places, what is described or depicted as beautiful in historical records doesn't necessarily have much overlap with today's hegemonic standards, and so forth.

so when historicising this phenomenon it becomes very clear that the euro/anglo standard of thinness as beauty is, one, part of the ideological apparatus justifying colonialism thru the creation of race and white supremacy. sabrina strings and da'shaun harrison have written on this. two, the thin ideal is also inextricably tied up in medical discourses defining the ideal body as one that is economically productive, with the promise being that if the populace can be transformed into 'healthy',*** useful, hardworking citizens, the state benefits. control of bodyweight is therefore certainly a means of demonstrating one's supposed self-control, moral discipline, &c, but it is also a demand expressed in medical terms: these two discourses merge and overlap, and are both part of the capitalist state's transformation of its citizenry into a biological resource that can be controlled, managed, and exploited to bourgeois ends (profit): hence, biopolitics.

(***the story of how 'health' itself comes to be so dependent on thinness is obviously a critical piece of all this but this post is long as shit already so suffice it to say that this conflation is also not obvious, necessary, universal, &c &c)

medico-political discourses in the 19th century tended to talk about the dangers of both over- and under-weight more than what we hear now; similarly, if you think about something like wilbur atwater's calorie-value charts, these were explicitly intended to guide labourers to the most calorie-dense foods, because to atwater the central danger to be avoided was starvation among the workforce. these days in wealthy countries like the us, you are much more likely to hear about weight management in the context of demands to reduce; this is of course following moves like the WHO declaring an 'obesity epidemic' in 1997, and the rise in the usa of more explicitly nationalist, militaristic weight-loss rhetoric in the post-9/11 era.

however, my position is that these demands for thinness, and the beauty standard that follows and justifies them, are not a departure from earlier 19th- and 20th-century scientific nutrition advice, just an evolution that, for a multitude of reasons (politics, medical professional interests, insurance company practices, &c) has simply come to focus more on the ostensible economic and national threat posed by fatness. the underlying logic bears the biopolitical throughline: the state has, or ought to have, an interest in enforcing the health of its population, and as part of this demands that you the individual surveil and alter your weight according to the scientific guidelines du jour.

this is fertile ground for the development of what, in extreme form, we regard as ED pathology. first, because even the most purely 'health'-motivated individual engaging in the required degree of bodily monitoring and caloric restriction is liable to respond to energy deficit in ways that can become diagnosably distressing. second, because the morals of 'health' are never far from standards of beauty; thinness is sold in overtly profitable ways (the diet and weight-loss industries) and furthermore, our idea of beauty is often a kind of post hoc justification for the thinness already being demanded by state and medical authorities. which is really just to say, beauty is part of the ideological superstructure both resulting from and invoked as a justification for the material conditions of capitalist biopolitics. again this is very broad strokes, but imo it is a much more useful framework to understand EDs than simply presenting them as a result of desiring thinness because it is glorified in The Media, because... reasons (essentially the rené girard model, lol).

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Tumblr, We Need To Talk

So multiple times now, posts that I have written, completely free of any sense of anger at all, have been interpreted by folks here - not just as angry - but as malicious. It has now happened enough times that we need to address the biases at hand here.

I am three things that are relevant for this discussion: I am Jewish. I am Italian. And I am Scottish.

These are three cultures that feature "loudness" as a positive trait. What do I mean by that?

I mean arguing, debate, discussion at my home growing up was louder than a kindergarten field trip to the zoo. Louder than a metal concert's mosh pit. Louder than the conure room at a bird shelter.

I am a loud, boisterous person. That's just who I am. With those three cultural backgrounds, I can't even help it. On more than one occasion, someone has interpreted my tendency for the dramatic, my eagerness, and my enthusiasm as being "too much". In fact, it is quite a point of trauma for me, the number of times that specific rejection has occurred.

But to me, I wasn't doing anything wrong! I was acting as my family acted, as people from my culture acted, as those around me in other situations acted. In Judaism, arguing is even seen as emotion-free, because interpersonal debate is how we learn and grow. Even the most stringent and austere Jewish groups will feature a loudly arguing table of scholars in the Beit Midrash. Italian dinners are filled with singing and shouting for joy. Being Scottish means yelling at everything and then yelling at it again. This was, and is, my life. It was loud. It was emotional. It was excitement.

Online, tone indicators are even worse, with many people easily being misunderstood in a given situation. Hell, there are probably those of you reading this now who are reading a higher level of emotion and anger into my words than is actually there. That added complication has now lead to multiple occurrences of this misunderstanding.

This isn't limited to the cultures I come from, of course! The anger and excitement and enthusiasm found in Black culture has been weaponized against it for as long as racism has existed (y'all can ask @ladyraekingmaker more about that). In fact, lower class Black Women in the United States were often perceived negatively for being loud and having their private lives carried out in public (because they did not have access to private spaces). Same for different cultural norms in other places, from Persia/Iran to parts of Latin America and more.

Indeed, loudness, anger, and tone are heavily tied to how different cultures are perceived. Calmness, stoicism, and a lack of "emotionalness" is a highlight of WASPy cultures, famously - "white anglo-saxon protestant" if you're not familiar. Being more "low key" and less expressive was considered high class, being less so was low class. And that still continues today - from the snide comments of tumblr anon's and ex friends, to the literal policing of impoverished communites of color for their celebrations and community gatherings.

The perception of emotion and passion as a "bad" thing is 100% tied to white supremacy. Full stop. In fact, policing people for being "angry" at certain things was a great way to shut down discussion of many important issues, that deserved anger - things like racism, sexism, and homophobia. Anger is a good, important, and necessary emotion - and being emotional in general is a way many people use to emphasize their own points and indicate how much they care about a subject. It's necessary, and it's good. Anger, emotion, excitement, these are good things.

It is better for someone to be angry and up front with you, allowing you to learn and grow as a person, than to bullshit you and mollycoddle you into a state of complacency.

So, that means that for many people reading this, you probably never really thought of how your reaction to loud, or emotional, or dramatic, or excitable people was related to upholding social norms. That's okay! It's not a big deal! We are all born with blind spots and things we are ignorant of that we have to understand and tackle. Growing up is something we never stop doing.

But I'm not magically going to stop being excitable, loud, and emotional. And I'm not going to magically stop being myself. While in person, my tone and facial expressions would help others to at least see that I am not mad but excited; here, you're going to have to take me at my word.

If I am angry, you will know it. It will be extremely, painfully obvious. I might even explicitly say it. But the fact remains is that, every time I have gotten (frankly, condescending) anons in my inbox telling me to "calm down", I haven't been angry at all. And that is a cultural bias a lot of you have to examine in yourselves. By policing how people - not just me - on how they talk and express themselves, you are upholding white supremacy. And you need to stop.

I am too much for some people. That's okay! If I am, you are free to go. No one has to follow me. But I am not going to minimize myself just to make some people comfortable, especially when I am doing nothing wrong. And if you continue to insist that I am, you are missing the point of this post.

Stop worshiping the empty alter of stoicism, of emotionlessness, of quietude. It's not how most humans act. And it shouldn't be, because emotions exist for a reason. That reason? Is communication.

And if you're still not convinced, just get invited to a Pesach seder. Good luck with that being anything close to "calm".

~ Meig

[rotzaprachim]

there’s a really interesting linguistics post in me about how a lot of conservatives in the uk and England (& broader anglophone world) uphold a conservative idea of Greek and Roman supremacy as the center of western civilization but don’t give their kids the modern forms of Greek and Roman names in good part because they are associated with minorities and or people or color or immigrants - latine in the U.S., southern European in the uk. Those same Greek and Roman names are ethnicized now as Mexican, Romanian, Greek etc like imagine a white Anglo republican or Tory naming a kid Julio or Cesár or Dionisio or Florian. so they either don’t go for those names - because the modern continuations of Latin and Greek speaking culture are actually alive and well and they don’t Like them - or they have to go totally off the plot and name them Sixtus or something like mogg

[whereserpentswalk]

I keep seeing this same thing over and over again where people try to divide up the "good trans people" and the "bad trans people". Useally by trying to claim that the bad group is some combination of over represented or giving the group a bad name. And like, there's always something very racist about what's considered good and bad, specifically conflating trans people with traits the west considers eastern.

"Good" transmascs are defined by having facial hair and body hair, having traditionally masculine body types, have extremely western interests and ways of dressing, etc. And the "bad" transmascs are stereotyped as being too slender and hairless, and for wanting to look like anime boys or Kpop idols, and for being somehow both sexless and perverted, etc. Like, there's a very clear trend here with these truscumy posts.

Same goes for transfems. Where "bad transfems" are seen as being obsessed with looking like anime girls, being too into computers, being flat chested and childlike, and being horny in a submissive way.

There's a very clear trend where every trait members of the queer community consider negative in other queer people match up with negative stereotypes the west has about eastasian people. It's why you hear "you can't transition into an anime boy" coming from people who in the past we would call truscum, when fandoms like Dr. Who or Hazbin Hotel which also have a lot of transmasc fans and twinkish characters get ignored by them. It's why the standards for what they consider passing are always bodies that look white and dress very western. It's why femboys are seen as gross and perverted, while drag queens are seen as wholesome and marketable, they're both crossdressing performers, but one has Anglo-Australian origins while the other has Japanese origins, which is why you'll never see a library with femboy story hour.

Just like how people who enforce the gender binary may be bioessentialists, but will also claim being male or female is something one can fail at, the same goes for white supremacy; whiteness is seen as something white people can fail at. So even if the "bad trans people" in question are white, what they're being scolded for is ultimately that they're failing at whiteness, and because whiteness is tied to gender roles they're failing at masculinity or femininity.

Every trait trans people say makes other trans people "one of the bad ones" is just an orientalist stereotype. This truscumish behavior that's getting more and more popular isn't happening in a void.

[cto10121]

how is jk rowling closer to dickens than donna tartt?

Rowling, like Dickens, is supremely devoted to social realism, which includes comedy, satire, and commentary. So naturally she also uses his techniques (significant character names, child POV with adult sensibility, etc.) and sometimes even tropes (abused orphan boy, mean relatives, relative and abject poverty, snobbery and classism, etc.). This is most glaringly apparent in the Strike series, to the point where they are more like sociological tomes than mysteries, but Harry Potter also fits the Dickensian mode very comfortably.

The difference is that Dickens was not really a mystery writer, whereas Rowling is, at least in plot. Also, Dickens had a much more visceral experience with poverty and institutional injustice than Rowling; there is a lack of that both-sides centrism in Dickens. He was also more influenced by Shakespearean psychology and tropes than Rowling. Rowling, however, was much more aware of white supremacy than Dickens could ever be—her understanding of class struggle includes colorism (Voldemort and some of the Death Eaters especially are aristocratically coded to the extreme - all those Anglo-Norman names! Revealingly, none of them are POC).

As for Donna Tartt, from the two (very popular) books I’ve read by her, she only uses Dickensian tropes for quasi-mythic and romantic journeys; they are largely empty of their political and social commentary, almost serving as mere literary allusions. Above all, she seems mostly concerned with the power of art, literary or otherwise.

[vampiricvenus]

I won't reblog because the url of the (admittedly idiotic) white person in question was visible and while I'm disgusted and all the user is transfem, so I'm sure she'll get enough angry responses as is.

But, holy shit, can Anglo-Saxon Germanic Celtic-descended Scandinavian-adjacent super Whites from the imperial core stop commenting on how the rest of the world deals with our losses to white supremacy and American and/or European imperialism?

And, especially, stop calling our liberation efforts, more so in the face of fucking genocide, "throwing oneself to the meat grinder", no matter how the hell you all intended that to sound or not.

[freedelusionshere]

Still not forgetting that random Fak uncle showing up in S3 and talking about Valhalla to Neil and Ted for no reason whatsoever except that, oops (said in a Cicero voice) It's extremely white-supremacy coded and also has ties to Chicago.

This whole out of nowhere moment is on purpose, of course. Like everything on this show.

Make of it what you will in regard to the Faks who are neither Italian or Polish. Fake is an Anglo-Saxon name, though.