#even in the same ethnic group

[fly-for-a-lifetime]

idk how to articulate this but i feel like ppl on this site act like speaking about humanitarian issues Correctly the same way christians act like the bible is the only thing keeping them from being an Evil Murderer

[blessedmoonsoul]

ok might be my third world privilege but if i had the option to vote for someone who I agreed with 30-40% of their policies i won't be excited or pleased abt it but I'd be in that polling booth doing my part idk

[suncattle]

There's something in how some people try to turn the word "Palestinian" to Hamas.

Like immediate you say Palestinian they hear it as Hamas. You say Palestinian children and they hear young Hamas terrorist. You say hey maybe calling an entire ethnic group violent bloodthirsty animals is racist and they go "so you support Hamas?"

[muirneach]

it is fascinating to me that the majority of people it seems have never considered that borders are just lines on a map? its just a piece of paper? not to have anarchic tendencies but like. it’s just words

[natalia-lafourcade]

I had an indigenous client I needed to speak with through an interpreter the other day. the interpreter and I stayed after to chat and it turns out we've been to the same events hosted by the indigenous collective here and she works with some other groups I'm familiar with 😭😭😭

[zhuhongs]

if any of yall are interested in taiwanese music like in taiwanese/southern min/hokkien(台語) not standard mandarin. def check out collage 珂拉琪. their music is so good. its the only like contemporary group ive found that sings fully in 台語 and its really neat. also if youre interested in other chinese dialects, i recommend the hakka/客家話 speaking group Zenkwun

[aralintheobsessive]

Just unfollwed someone for reblogging an video saying this: Jews are direct descendants of Abraham, who was Arabic, and Abraham was there first, so Arabs were there first, so Jews are White Colonizers. DO YOU KNOW HOW ANCESTRY WORKS???? 'Oh yeah this Arab guy's great-grandkids? They have no claim to being Arabic. But his OTHER great-grandkids? Those are Arabs because he's their ancestor.' It could be argued if you follow Abrahamic geaneology that Ishmael's Arab descendants get their claim to that ethnicity through his mother Hagar, who was Egyptian (although at that time that could have been what we modern people would consider like three different ethnicities but whatever). However, if you are going to say (and he did) that Abraham was Arabic because he was born in the region that is now modern-day Iraq (not set in stone but a viable argument), then that makes ALL of his sons and their grandchildren Arabic! If you want to claim that Arabs were 'there first' because Abraham was Arabic, you then have to admit that all of his descendants are HIS DESCENDANTS

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

🔥unpopular charles opinion

The thing is, it’s not an opinion, really. The question isn’t meant to be a complaint or a rebuttal or anything. I just genuinely don’t get it! The question goes something like this.

So Charles/Klinger seems to be the one actively disliked ship in the fandom, discounting the h*nn*hawk vs p*erc*ntyre gang war and that one rabidly anti-hawnk person (lol). Most nobody has any love for the ship, because it’s stupid and OOC, of course, but mostly because it’s egregiously obviously racist and gross, which is the critique that seems most common, and to be of most importance to people.

And to be clear, for the purposes of this post I am wholly agreeing with all that! It’s distasteful and immoral and people who are into it are insane, including me. I’m not arguing against this line of thinking, I just wanted to look at its inner logic. Because when I first heard people saying this, I thought, “Yeah, makes sense, Charles is truthfully a terrible person with abhorrent opinions. Nobody watching this already unfortunately bigotry-riddled show is obligated to try and look past that! It is Always valid to hate Charles’ guts.”

But it turns out most of the fandom (I assume it must be most, given how shockingly few people here have blocked me) actually don’t hate Charles, in general. It’s the specific ship, not the character, that’s distasteful. (Not to say any Charles ship is anything resembling popular, but like with most ships, that’s just a result of the general population’s Hawkeye BJ Laser Focus Gaze. I’ve never seen anybody actively dislike these ships when they’re brought up.) And the more I think about it, the more I wonder why, because well. to put it bluntly. It’s not like someone stops being racist when they’re not actively interacting with a nonwhite person.

You know what I mean? I feel like Charles’ bigotry would be a turn off for all of our generally morally sound protagonists, not just one who happens to be personally affected by it. But it only becomes an issue when it involves Klinger. I’ve heard people say that any Charles/Klinger ship fic would obviously have to go out of its way to address Charles’ racism, but I’ve read a few Charles/Hawkeye and Charles/Donna (and Charles / other strange and varied choices too, because of course I have) fics–really, REALLY good fics, that captured the characters very nicely and are very beautifully written–and I’ve yet to find one that discusses The Bigotry In The Room with any degree of seriousness.

(Pssst this is everyone’s chance to absolutely dunk on me by sending me fics that do this if there actually are a bunch and I’ve just never read them because I would in fact LOVE to read some fics with that topic regardless of ship!)

And to be clear, that’s fine with me! I truly do not care. When I read Charles running away to Maine or romancing Ms. Parker and I don’t see his love interests stop to ask “Hey, um, so any updates on the fact that you and your whole family are eugenicists?”, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because I just assume that Charles has already gone through the cult deprogramming step of his character development at some point prior to this, and either the love interest in question has already confirmed this off-page, or they are making the same assumption I am. After all, at least in Hawkeye’s case, the mere act of admitting romantic interest in a Democrat from the back of beyond would necessarily imply a shift in values, right?

(Admittedly, for all we canonically know Donna could be a fashy scumlord herself, so this reasoning doesn’t wholly apply there, but it obviously does to her fanon background/personality.) (Which is adorable, by the way. Everyone go check out the collective oeuvre of AO3 user onekisstotakewithme.)

So that’s all cool! It’s just that the same thing applies for me when it comes to Charles/Klinger. If anything, it applies even more, because you can have a fic where Charles’ whole family attend his and Donna’s 2nd wedding (Everyone go check out the collective oeuvre of AO3 user onekisstotakewithme!!!) but if Charles gets with Maxwell in any capacity, his father is at the very LEAST never going to speak to him again, ever. And personally I think that is SO fun and sexy, because Charles’ father is a white supremacist and I want him to die painfully forever and ever amen. <3

I got sidetracked a few times here and I just realized I never actually asked the question, which is, TL;DR: If it’s immoral–or at least gross and nonsensical–to ship Charles/Klinger, because Charles is bigoted, shouldn’t the same also apply to shipping Charles with many other characters too, given that they should logically also have a problem with his bigotry?

For what it’s worth, I have a bit of a theory about the answer to this, all to do with the incompetent way Charles’ bigotry (and other characters’ reactions to it) are portrayed in canon and the deeper Doylist factors that I think forced the showrunners into writing it like that, but I wanted to stay strictly on the topic of fandom attitudes for now, because it may be niche and silly, but I find it interesting. And I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on it!

[beanmaster-pika]

You ever think about traditions that died on your birth

[nicks-disks]

I hope you realise this means we have to boycott AO3. Like, seriously.

People are giving up other things, brands and products they like or hold dear, and it's fucking devastating, but we're gonna have to leave AO3 for the time being. If you're willing to boycott other goods and services for the same reason, I don't think there should be exceptions unless it's for essentials.

I know after this I'm gonna stop using AO3 until I hear anything new, and I use it every day so it's gonna be the worst, but I mean innocent kids and civilians are dying and for what? The literal least I can do is read my gay ass fanfiction on a different site.

just got a second official warning for my use of "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" on the OTW volunteer slack

people are also currently asking board to ban saying that the founding of israel was colonialism—equating this to saying racial slurs—and were complaining about my status back when it was "palestine will be free", too

suffice to say, fuck that place, don't give the OTW your money, and don't fucking volunteer there

(the second screenshot is from the warning I got a few days ago)

[the-cryptographer]

done with guns, germs, steel now and, hmm... feel like the criticisms of diamond and his thesis probably overstated and tbh a fair number of them do seem to be motivated by covert racism, but i do also see where some of his critics are coming from.

like... i'm not well read in most of the fields of study he is drawing from, but there were imho a number of... if not outright inaccuracies, definitely dichotomies drawn in the linguistics portion of the book that i felt were misleading or examples I thought were poorly considered. the one i remember most readily is him using english as an example for how languages usually have more phonemes than alphabetic symbols - which I cannot wholly contest without further research, but most linguists could tell you english is quite unusual insofar as languages go for its number of phonemically distinct vowels and is very much not a language you would want to use as a typical example for how languages and their alphabets interact. so i imagine people more into the nitty gritty of some of the other fields he is summarising work from are likewise finding these types of small irritations and disagreement on some of his flashpoints.

and i do feel he often loses sense of scale moving between different parts of his book. like... i think he builds a very holistic and, lbr, socially important argument that the geographical landscape and barriers to animal and plant domestication and the spread of information and technology were the deciding factors in favouring eurasians in social conflict and colonial struggles with other peoples, in contrast to culture, behaviour, and, most importantly, genetic variation between ethnic groups. and on a macroscale that works, but at the same time I feel he does describe what sound to me like bottlenecks on a microscale where it's hard to imagine culture did not play a role. for instance, he fails to sell me on the fact that aboriginal Austrailians failing to adopt bows and arrows through the inhabited archipelago between them and Papua New Guinea could not have been culturally determined, when he invokes an image of a very limited group of communities with specific cultures moving through this one point of contact (and when he also admits women were moving between these communities because they were being abducted and taken as wives by neighbouring communities, but were it seems not considered meaningful vectors for the transfer of cultural information and technology). not that aboriginal australians having bows and arrows could have been sufficient to chase out european invaders with firearms and standing armies but... I guess a more important one is that he admits that cultural changes in how european colonialists approached indiginous peoples changed so much in the space of only a few centuries that it effectively led to different outcomes for Papua New Guinea's sovreignty than that of indiginous peoples in the Americas. so the line between where things are large scale enough to dismiss cultural factors as a random variable in determining current geopolitical landscape, versus where they are small scale enough we cannot dismiss them as such, is poorly construed imho even if I find myself impressed by his work and thesis overall. so I would be interested in reading at least some of what his critics have to say, I think.

will have to wait tho. for now i'm considering listening to either clash of kings or jane eyre next. haven't quite made up my mind.

[i-am-the-egg-to-rule-all-eggs]

Arghhhh there's a person on the bus explaining why humanity is sinful by saying that christ had our sins on his skin (?) and he knew all of humanity was sinful like ouuuuuughhhh make some more sweeping generalizations about the morality of an entire race puhLEASE and refuse to think about why the concept of sin might be useful for controlling uneducated people.

[busket]

I notice sometimes in queer and feminist spaces the idea of "this group is generally given more leniency and privileges in wider society; it's okay for us to be critical or even a little nasty to them because anywhere else they'd be praised". and that's understandable, i think. when you have real issues with men and how men act, it's ok to express that and to mock mens behavior. cis men who are generally praised and celebrated in society should be able to take some mean jokes or criticisms and accept they're not always going to be lauded.

but since queer and feminist spaces are generally more accepting of trans people and the wider society is not, this is also projected on to trans men. "trans men are men" was an affirming statement to our validity, but that was interpreted as "since trans men are men, and men are celebrated by society, I get to be a little nasty to them because the rest of society worships men. they can take it."

but the rest of society doesn't have that same level of trans acceptance. they don't see trans men as men, they see trans men as mentally ill, broken, mutilated women. so it's absolutely aggravating when we turn to queer and feminist spaces for solidarity, we face the same reactive nastiness cis men get and are told "come on, trans men are men. you are celebrated in society. you can take it." and when we look at the rest of society there's no celebration. there's only more nastiness and cruelty. so how can we "take it" when we have no community that accepts us and treats us without mockery? we don't have the shelter of acceptance that cis men have in the status quo, and sometimes we can't find a small umbrella of acceptance in queer communities either.

to be honest, I think a lot of people view trans men as a safe punching bag to vent their frustrations with men. you can mistreat a trans man and he's probably not going to fight you back since he's already so beat down. you can feel like you put a man in his place, you can feel like you're resisting the patriarchy. but all you did was act cruel to a marginalized person. and you know if you treated a cis man like that you might be putting yourself in danger, cos he might not take it lying down and he might not care as much about your wellbeing!

trans men are men, but trans men are not cis men. cis men are lauded and celebrated in society as long as they conform to the gender roles that were placed on them at birth. and this privilege is extremely conditional and not equally spread between men of different sexualities, races, ethnicities, ability, age, etc; trans men and intersex men are thrown to the side completely. I understand needing to vent about men. trans men do it too. but a persistent attitude of resentment and cruelty towards all men, including trans men, is not activism. all you do is push marginalized men out of the only communities they belong

[mashpotatoe]

im a white jew, i was born in israel,

ive lived there all my life and was brought up in an environment that fosters racism driven by nationalism, nationalism driven by racism.

in israel, they teach you jews and muslims (though usually, they just say arabs) have always been enemies, the same way the US deems the entire middle east as a inherent war zone, ridding them of the responsibility for perpetuating war in thst region.

they tell you "were the fair and humane side who strives for peace! its the arabs who never accept the offer!"

i remember the first time i began doubting that sentiment was in fourth grade, when we were having a discussion in class about the character of Saul from the Torah. the teacher was talking about how Saul, the first monarch of the Kingdom of Israel, used to fight the Philistines, and when she added that the Philistines were the natural enemy of the Israelites, she asked the class what group of people is their modern equivalent to which everyone very eagerly replied "Arabs!" and nevermind that there in that same class sat two arab boys, one of whom sat next to me, who i looked at and thought "but he isnt my enemy? hes just a boy in my class."

they teach you to hate arabs. sometimes they say it outright. sometimes they say it more carefully, or make a distinction between good and bad arabs, those who are with us and those who are against us.

in a state based on the idea of (white) jewish supremacy, they teach you jews are naturally superior. they use the conspiratorial narrative of "jews controlling the world" to their favor, giving their own watered down explanation for why antisemitism exists, saying that it must be driven by jealousy.

the zionist movement always used antisemitism to its advantage, either for reinforcing the notion of jewish supremacy or appealing to the real pain and trauma of generations, people who survived the holocaust, connecting them to stolen land where they are "guaranteed" safety ergo granting "justification" for the suffering of others.

its using peoples real pain that makes fear mongering so effective, and when the israeli population grows up being told all of their neighboring countries want to kill them, they quickly get defensive of the "only land where they can feel safe", but the only explanation ever provided for Why these neighboring countries are considered enemies is because theyre arabs.

and when it comes to palestine, it isnt even recognized as a country, nor identity. just a threat. ive talked to many people who are genuinely unaware of the occupation, and they arent willing to believe it either, because the media narrative has successfully shifted the blame on hamas. because "how could it be us? we want peace! its the terrorists who make us look bad! and their children, they grow up to be antisemites*, might as well get rid of them too!" they never stop to think what environment these children must grow up in to develop these "radical" ideas.

* what they mean by antisemite is really just antizionist, but the term anti/zionist isnt practiced in local dialect, being a zionist is treated as a given

any jew who stands against israels oppression is dubbed a self hating jew, but the biggest contributors to antisemitism is the people in charge of an ethnostate, because at any moment they could decide who is not white enough to be jewish, who is too jewish to be white, who stood against the current coalition government and who is an obedient dog.

israelis arent a monolith, but many of them have been won over, convinced its an "us v them" situation, when in reality it could never be the "us" that "loses"

the israeli government was waiting for an event like the massacre on the seventh of october to declare war, to have the so called "right to defend itself", so they could initiate the final steps of an ethnic genocide and displace, if not kill, all remaining palestinians. under the guise of bringing peace.

it isnt too late to call for a permanent ceasefire, to end the occupation.

please contact your representatives, attend protests and rallies if you are able. palestine will be free, and the flowers will rise again.

[star-spangled-man]

not to get political on the main. but if you make a comment that about someone or a certain social group which you obviously have not walked in their shoes or experience it on a daily basis and then say “chill out. It’s just a joke!”

I hate you. You’re a dick and there is a special place for you in hell.

[recreationaldivorce]

ppl using "indigenous" to mean "~place where an ethnic group was originally from~" (as if that's something that can even be objectively determined) instead of as an ongoing political relationship to a colonising power is really giving race science lol

edit: this post is literally not about zionism (though zionists' claim of "indigeneity" is using the particular definition i am calling racist here) but if every mention of colonialism without any reference to israel whatsoever makes you think of zionism perhaps that tells you a little thing or two about zionism! also it is not saying that people are "misusing" the term indigenous, if you used another word to mean the same thing ("ethnic group who originated in this place") it would still be racist pseudo-science. now stop being illiterate under my post and actually read what it says