#i forget not everyone is as into anthropology and actual cultural analysis as i am

[kaitlez]

i feel like subordinate (affectionate) has got to be the funniest thing ive ever read ngl

this fake grown ass man's emotional issues are not anyone else's problem but his own if he can't figure out how to act right at 30 that's on him

and i wasnt supposing a general "everyone has to feel this way" because the analysis i gave was for one specific point of contention. family is only one aspect of the situation and not the only thing i discussed. no one denies jgs is horrible. nmj wanted jgy to further his goals with the recommendation letter he writes and wouldn't hold him if he wished to leave. there are certainly many comparisons between wwx's and jgy's circumstances. jc didnt care to change wwx's position nor how people viewed him bc he didnt attempt to even when he had the power to do so. you could argue jc saw wwx as more than his births circumstances of a servant's son all you want but when it comes down to it, jc's own actions are self-serving because he doesn't want to let wwx. because wwx does explain what he's doing and what he wants to do which is protect the wens, jc just doesn't understand why

PSA for “canon jiang cheng” folks:

please stop using the “subordinate” thing as a basis for your arguments. that word does not mean what you seem to think it means.

y’all talk about jc asking wwx to be his subordinate as if it’s like some show of disrespect. some of y’all literally use it as “evidence” that jc “never cared about wwx” and that he “never viewed wwx as anything but a servant” but like.

my friends. subordinate literally just means “someone with a lower rank (than someone else).” it does not carry any connotations of subservience, servitude, lesser worth, or disrespect.

you understand how sect leadership works in mdzs, yes? there is One (1) sect leader.

Everyone who is Not the sect leader, but is affiliated with that sect, is Subordinate to the Sect Leader.

nobody ever claims that lan xichen didn’t care about lan wangji, lan qiren, or any of the juniors, even though they were all subordinate to him as the sect leader.

nobody ever claims that jin guangshan viewed madame jin, jin zixuan, or jin zixun as “just servants” or even servants at all, even though they were all subordinate to him as the sect leader.

hell, nobody even claims that nie mingjue viewed meng yao as “just a servant,” even when meng yao actually WAS a servant!

that’s just how leadership works! being subordinate isn’t a bad thing!! it’s just “a person who has a boss”

“right-hand-man” IS a subordinate position to “sect leader,” and it’s also literally the highest position jc could have given wwx without quite literally making wwx sect leader!

so like. unless you ARE legitimately arguing that jiang cheng should have forced wei wuxian to become sect leader of yunmengJiang, just…please drop it.

that word Does Not mean what you Think it means. the thing you are Mad about is Made Up. please just let it go.

[garregmachmatchups]

hi mod ava!! would i please be able to request a regular matchup?? i’m bi, so i don’t mind any gender. i hope this isn’t too much info, but i hope the layout makes it readable?? thank you so much!! 

personality

the good: 

curious

i love to learn? is that a good thing? (as long as I’m not being graded on it,,, otherwise that’s a disaster)

open-minded

thoughtful

good conversationalist/listener (or, at least I’d like to think so,,, i can talk for hours and hours)

trustworthy (ish)

compassionate (or at least, i try to be!!)

patient

accepting (within reason aadjsdfkjhfds essentially i just try to not judge people)

understanding (i do my very best!!)

the bad:

prone to catastrophizing (that’s the anxiety poking through)

indecisive (I cannot make a decision to save my life)

shy (it’s not that I’m quiet or withdrawn, I’m just Deeply Afraid Of Rejection)

unforgiving (while I can be pretty patient, once I’m done with someone, I’m Done)

prone to melancholy (I do my best to fight it, but that melancholy be Strong)

overthinker (i literally write a whole dissertation in my head about a topic literally No One cares about… or i’ll decide to pick apart my relationships with others when it’s really not that deep. this one’s a mixed bag.)

irresponsible (ish. i can take care of myself and my roommate, but i get a bit scared of Responsibility with a capital R. idk if i’m making much sense but,,, i can take responsibility, i’m just scared i’ll mess up so i try not to?? ir’s something i really need to work on)

the neutral:

opinionated (I’m putting it as a neutral trait bc I’ve been told that I’m “interesting to talk to” because of it, but my god… sometimes I wish I’d just calm down,,, and there are just some things it’s not worth being opinionated on, you know?)

Sensitive (with a capital s) 

imaginative (fun for creative things, bad when your catastrophizing)

talkative (for similar reasons as opinionated… I love to talk and I have So Much to say, but sometimes I wish I’d just learn to… shut my damn mouth)

my sense of humour (i’d describe myself as a “chaos goblin”, and one of my friends once said I’m a “mixed bag of human”, meaning that he can never predict what I’m going to say to him next; essentially i have a very “flexible” sense of humour, but the more absurd, the better)

perceptive (neutral just bc while it’s good when dealing with people I like, it’s fuel for anxiety)

a bit of a “mum friend” (in the sense that,,, i’m always concerned with people’s health and wellbeing but that can come off as overbearing at times? and it’s ironic that i’m a mum friend because as stated earlier, i can be kind of irresponsible hhh)

Interests

reading (when I can actually commit to a book sjkdfhs)

writing (when I’m not LAZY!! Also, my genres tend to be more along fantasy or urban fantasy lines? A little sci-fi, when I’m not scared off by trying to do worldbuilding for that genre because O H B O Y science & technology is a LOT scarier than magic tbh)

trawling Wikipedia for an unreasonably long time

drawing

character analysis (my favourite part of engaging with any new media skdfhkfhj)

anthropology (it’s my uni major and I love it!! so much!! i could talk about it for hours!!)

history (shamefully, i am a nerd)

art history (I LOVE ART, my fave artist is probably alphonse mucha? If you’ve never seen his stuff definitely have a look! It’s A Lot but it’s stunning)

sociolinguistics (it’s so interesting!! And I guess languages too, but I’m so bad at learning them asjfdhddsklj)

fashion (in a way? I just love pretty clothes, and my style is… a lot of patterns, especially animals and flowers, and it’s retro-adjacent?)

D O G S

most animals tbh (I love foxes and owls! i also adore mythological creatures, like dragons and griffins and all that)

again, i hope this isn’t too much!! thank you again, and i hope you enjoy the rest of 2019!! (when will i stop using exclamation marks my goodness–)

Hewooo!💕Omg I love your matchups I can’t believe you asked me for one I feel honored lsfdjdjakj. I really hope I don’t disappoint lol. Also haha I got inspired. So without further ado, let’s get to it! Your match is…

Claude von Riegan!!! 

Bro you and Claude are like two peas in a pod. You both share a passion for knowledge, curious about the world and people around you. It’s a big part of who you are, which makes it all the more important for you to find someone who sympathizes with that need. For Claude, it’s one of his biggest motivators. Same as you, he appreciates different cultures and societies greatly. For that he needs someone who is open-minded and accepting, someone who can support his dreams, a world without borders, as well as someone who can accept who he truly is. With Claude’s curious nature, he always looks to be engaged, so your conversational and passionate character would certainly be intriguing to him. I can just imagine you two going on about for hours and hours, discussing anything and everything that comes to mind, especially about stuff relating to different cultures and different ways of life. Because Claude is more on the lighthearted side, someone with a sense of humor would be best suited for him, so someone who is as “chaotic” and unpredictable as you would be perfect to keep him engrossed and prying. All the same, Claude’s light-heartedness would be greatly beneficial to you, as you often struggle with anxious thoughts and feelings. A calm presence in your life to remind you things aren’t as bad as they seem, especially one as rational and reasoned as Claude. As we all know though, Claude despite acting light-hearted is quite secretive and wary of others. Therefore the fact that you have a trustworthiness about you could really get Claude to open up to you more so than to others. You being patient and perceptive would also be of great help, knowing Claude has his reasons as well as you being willing to wait until he opens up. Together, you’d be sure to change yourselves and the world for the better

Headcannons:

When you first meet Claude, you are incredibly drawn to him, as he possesses a very mysterious air about him, which of course only entices your curiosity.

Claude, sensing this, in turn, becomes curious about you (meanwhile everyone else just senses sexual tension)

Um, lowkey a detective couple? Discovering the mysteries of the world together…or your classmates’ secrets

Also tea time with you guys is #DEEP. Just thinking about the world and life in general

Sometimes it just turns into you rambling about your opinions or just in general things you want to talk about and Clause just listening to you with admiration or vice versa where he just talks about his vision of the world and you just staring at him in wonder, just goals

When Claude first hears you talking so passionately about stuff like anthropology and history, he immediately goes “Yep, they’re definitely the one”

He really appreciates how patient you are with him, even when you are curious about him. He promises though that one day he’ll share everything with you

Claude is always there to help whenever you start overthinking or catastrophizing, as he always has a logical argument as to why the situation is not as it seems. If it’s something more serious though and you really start panicking, he’ll hug you while reassuringly tell you it’s okay (he doesn’t always help with the indecisiveness though, like my bro how are you so chill about every decision you take)

He could also be of great help with your fear of responsibility, teaching you to have faith in yourself

Loves that you are imaginative, seriously you just brought his schemes up to a whole new level

Also haha chaotic couple, people are either dying of laughter with you guys around or are super confused about your dynamic (or scared who knows)

I get the impression that because Claude is always so immersed in his goals and responsibilities he has, he sometimes forgets to take care of himself, so you being a sort of mom friend would definitely be good for him

Umm also i’m pretty sure Claude loves dogs and animals (he rides a wyvern for christ sakes). He’ll totally take you out on a ride on his wyvern, just soaring across the sky seeing the world

If you’d ever take an interest in Almyran art history or fashion the man will love you forever. Honestly just taking an interest in the Almyran culture, history, etc. Will increase his love tenfold

Ughhh I just stan

Other matches: Ignatz Victor, Petra Macneary

Hope you enjoyed the matchup! If you feel like you weren’t portrayed correctly/I misinterpreted your information let me know and I’ll make the corrections!

[sociologyontherock]

A Meandering Life in Politics

By Marilyn Porter 

Stephen Riggins asked me to write an article for Sociology on the Rock about the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He knew I had once been a member. This is true. I had to be very quiet about this affiliation when I applied for immigration to Canada in the early 1980s. At the time, membership was an absolute bar to entry to the US, and while such a bar was not explicit in Canada, I chose not to mention it at my immigration interview. In any case, my sojourn in the CPGB was neither long nor very significant. I will come to why I joined a little later in this meandering saga of my political life.

My first memory of politics came when I was about eight. It may have been the 1950 election that kept Attlee and the Labour Party in power. More likely, it was the 1951 election that restored Winston Churchill and Tory rule. My mother was a die-hard Tory mostly, I think, because she saw conservative politics, like attending church, as some kind of class obligation. My father took no interest at all. The men who worked on our farm in Wales were devout working-class labour voters. The trigger issue in 1950 or 51 became what colour of ribbons to put on the farm’s cats and dogs. I forget how it was resolved but I do remember absorbing the remarkable tension around the issue. 

Our Welsh constituency (Caernarvonshire at the time, later Gwynedd) had been Liberal under its most famous MP, David Lloyd George, but became a safe Labour seat until Plaed Cymru took over the seat in 1974 and they have retained it ever since. The MP when I was growing up was Goronwy Roberts. He had a long and fairly distinguished career as Minister for Foreign Affairs and later as Leader of the House of Lords. He was also a very good constituency MP. Even my mother had to admit that. In 1960, I became 18 and eligible to vote. Despite my blinkered education, I already knew that I was aligned with the progressive Left, although I had little notion of what that might mean. I did know that I would not vote Conservative. So I wrote to Goronwy Roberts and asked him why I should vote for him. He replied with a detailed and personal letter, which not only convinced me to vote for him but also instilled in me the importance of elected representatives taking a personal interest in every one of their constituents.

At this point, I was also starting my degree in history and political science at Trinity College Dublin. While Labour and socialism in Ireland have a distinguished record (think James Connolly), by the time I got there official party politics had been reduced to irrelevant squabbles between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The real action was, and continued to be, the situation in the North.

The Trinity population was a strange mix. Literally in the middle of Catholic and radical Dublin, it had very few Irish Catholic students partly because John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, was an extreme conservative and expressly forbade Catholics from attending Trinity on pain of excommunication. And partly because University College Dublin had moved to a much bigger campus, Belfield, and was expanding rapidly with considerable government (and church) support. My two closest friends were both Anglo-Irish, one a daughter of a general in the British Army and one the daughter of a tea planter in India. Of my two closest classmates, one was a Protestant from Belfast and the other was an Ibo from Nigeria. For both of them “home” was fraught with danger and division. The Northern Irish fellow student survived at least a bout of violence, but the Nigerian became involved in the civil war and was killed the year after we graduated. I learned from both of them that politics was not a game to be taken lightly. My activism at the time tended to be short term and practical. I sat under Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin fasting for some cause in Africa and picketed to stop police “moving on” itinerants, meanwhile learning a radical version of Irish history and a sympathetic version of the nascent IRA movement in the North. 

At this point – 1967 – I had another transformational experience and added another layer to both my analysis and action, although it did mean that I missed a good deal of the political action of 1968. 

My husband and I went to Africa, to work as volunteers at a socialist run school in Botswana. Swaneng Hill School was specifically founded by Patrick van Rensburg to challenge the apartheid state of South Africa. It was designed on Nyrere-inspired socialist principles and staffed entirely by volunteer teachers. I have written elsewhere about some of the problems caused by enthusiastic but untrained volunteer staff trying to provide the only secondary schooling in the country, while at the same time trying to develop a socialist commune. (“My First Day at School,” Your Voice: Newsletter of the MUN Pensioners’ Association, December 2020. See also “The Edge of Experience” in Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience, edited by Stephen Harold Riggins and Roberta Buchanan). However, while the practice may have been a little bumpy, theory was flourishing. A good proportion of the staff were American draft dodgers and many others had come from repressive regimes. We had study groups on radical theorists like Laclau’s Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory; Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man; Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and education pioneers like Paulo Freire. I actually read Marx’s Capital for the first time, or most of it. At the time there was scarcely anything written about Botswana apart from the anthropologically interesting Bushmen. However, trying to find something relevant to teach the students introduced me to a range of literature on development and social issues and set me on the path to sociology.

There was, however, no feminism and the structure of the school and the culture around it was downright sexist. My husband was a teacher; I was just “a wife.” Progressiveness only goes so far. I noticed this – how could I not, stuck teaching staff kids in the school-run primary school and hanging out with other “mothers.”

In the summer of 1969, we came back to the UK and settled in Bristol so that my then husband could get an education degree. With a two-year-old and pregnant, I risked boredom and frustration. That soon ended when I became simultaneously involved in the local women’s liberation movement and a PhD student in sociology at Bristol University. This marked my true birth into academia, politics, and feminism.

I will try to deal with the three strands separately although, obviously, they were not distinguishable in real time. Nor should they be as it was the mingling and interaction among the three that led to my individual, probably idiosyncratic version of them.

The PhD program, which took me 5 years to complete (1974-79) enabled me to acquire a full – and hitherto missing – education in the philosophy and theory of Marxism and socialism. I studied all the usual Marxist texts and learned about Maoism and forms of socialism emerging in Latin America. Most of all I studied Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and related writings. Like many of my generation, my introduction to Gramsci came through John Berger’s A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor. In particular, Berger’s reading of the Gramscian distinction between “common sense” and “good sense” resonated with me. Reading Gramsci threw a whole new light on how to understand what “ordinary” people meant when they talked and how better to interpret it while leaving “ordinary” people with the dignity they deserve.

Meanwhile, my fellow feminists were educating me in contemporary left politics. This was particularly messy around the fracturing Trotskyist groups. While Leninism was attractive in its lean rigor, I could not handle the authority of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which obviously was not going to include me. The Maoist groups wore really drab clothes and always shouted everyone down at meetings, but supporting strikes and movements like the Night Cleaners and the Ford Seamstresses was becoming an important part of my life and the Women’s Movement on its own did not seem to provide all the tools I needed to become fully aware and involved. I had noticed for a while that many of my feminist friends were members of the CPGB, and that they exhibited a kind of discipline that was markedly lacking in the broad women’s movement. If they said they were going to be on the picket line at 6 AM, they were, and with coffee for the rest of us. So I joined, although in Bristol it made very little difference to my activities. The difference occurred when I moved to Lancaster 1978-84 to teach at the University of Manchester (sorry, complicated husband troubles).

In Lancaster, feminism was largely confined to the university and not many feminists got involved in local left-wing politics. However, the Communist Party in Lancaster was small but very active. We even had a band that marched with strikers and other labour demonstrators. Alas, the CP’s Women’s Band marked the lowest point of my musical career. I was demoted from the cymbals to the triangle. As a local branch, we were able to send delegates to the regional meetings held in Manchester. I remember them as smoke-filled and full of testy disagreements about tactics, but I did also meet and learn from older members who could remember times when the CPGB had been much larger and more influential than it was in its dying days. (The CPGB effectively vanished in 1991 when Nina Temple disbanded it in favour of a more European-focused organization.)

I was also gone by then, taking up a one-year position at Memorial in 1980, which I eventually transformed into a proper position in 1984, via a number of summer sessional appointments. I also began my Newfoundland-based research, mostly on women in the fishery, which led to my 1993 book Place and Persistence in the Lives of Newfoundland Women and introduced me to a network of women scholars working on rural and fishing issues in Scandinavia. It also led to two co-edited collections of writings, Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador: A Collage (with Carmelita McGrath and Barbara Neis, 1995) and Weather’s Edge: A Compendium of Women’s Lives in Newfoundland and Labrador (with Carmelita McGrath and Linda Cullum, 2005).

By this time, my attention had turned to women’s issues in international development, especially Indonesia and Pakistan. I learned countless lessons about both countries, especially Indonesia, and about doing fieldwork in such a different place and about conducting research with colleagues from different backgrounds. 

In terms of politics, I learned a lot about how people, and especially feminists, put their ideas together in very different circumstances. I learned to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open.

Meanwhile, back home I, along with Ken Kavanagh and Bill Hynd, established a successor to Oxfam, which had closed its St. John’s office, the Social Justice Co-operative of Newfoundland and Labrador. This is now in the hands of a new generation, as it should be. I remain a member of the Newfoundland and Labrador New Democratic Party, and have served on the executive several times. For me, the NDP fills one of the lowest common denominator roles for my political identity because I live here and feel a sense of duty to contribute to the best possible political party. However, most of my current concerns and activities are national or international, and mostly around peace and environmental movements such as being an active member of Oxfam and Inter Pares, a Canadian social justice organization.

So my political life dwindles, in step with the state of my hips and, indeed, the state of the world. But as we dwindle, the next generation steps up. My own family is an illustration that ideals and activism and political knowledge do pass down to the next generation. All is not lost. The world will turn again.