#i have problems when it comes to bringing up ‘politics’ and racism

[medicaltechnician]

i need to vent here for a second sorry. merry xmas and wgatever. (Talk of the genocide ongoing in gaza, antisemtism, zionism, and churches.)

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so i went to church today (first time in literatly more than a decade. I was 4 last time) To accompany a friend. It was a fine experience whatever, the church could be so much better if they weren’t all recruit-y and whatnot, not the point of this post.

One of the songs brings up Isreal, look, I don’t know a lot of about christianity and have no idea what song it was, anyways. my friend decided to text our mutual friend about it. Show’d me the texts laughing. I barely remember what the convo was about cause I blacked out at the phrase “i (blue heart white heart) isreal”. I’m still very very pissed bout it.

Like, they have both mentioned in the past they’re on the side of innocent civillians. Which yeah, and have mentioned they hate the amount of anti-semitism showing up with YEAH! It fucking sucks that anti-semites are co-oping a group of peoples genocide. Idk. I’m fucking mad and dont know what I’m yelling about anymore, because I know they’re good people? And I’d like to think they support palestine (they have said they do. As of recent just too scared to be public about it. Which is fine, i dont mind too much especially in the positions they stand in life rn.)

But idk, that sentence just doesn’t seem like smth you can even write out as a joke. It soured my mood greatly.

If u want to hear bout my church experience sure, it was fun, and funny, and yeah I see why my family doesn’t go to church anymore. It was basically a rock concert, I think I just need to go to a rock concert though. Where they let me light a candle. (Dude compared jesus to the jumbotron and then during the candle thing his candle went out XD)

[wildfairies]

things that are bothering me the most:

antaam stuff makes no sense, full stop. it's also explained poorly/insufficiently.

most of what we see of rivain is completely uninhabited. i also don't care about more warden shit there, i was looking forward to more lore on rivaini people and culture, especially the seers obviously, we've been dying to know more about them for three games.

every elf we've met is ok with the huge revelations that their gods aren't what they seemed and this process happened offscreen. i would think there would be many different reactions to the spread of info about the evanuris, and i would think it would be extremely important to make it clear that info had spread pre-game.

the venatori are the same nonsensical vague useless boring cult with the most nothing goals. as incredibly lame as they are, it's even stretching my suspension of disbelief that they'd serve elven gods for vague promises of 'power' given tevinter's extreme history with the elves. i would think this would come up at least one single time.

the past two points are part of an overarching issue. the contentious and complex political landscape of thedas that makes the setting interesting feels flat. i'm supposed to believe NO ONE in super-elf-racist tevinter would blame the elves for their gods terrorizing thedas? even inquisition acknowledged this, w solas/inky showing concern that revealing the orb was elven would lead to elf racism.

i'm supposed to believe NO elves who've been oppressed by humans for centuries would think 'fuck them' and join up? what happened to the elves who joined solas at the end of trespasser when they heard he was trying to bring back their empire? at least inquisition had wacky cults for every side.

walking down the street in minrathous as an elf or qunari with no difference is simply absurd, i would literally rather never visit tevinter if they were going to implement it so toothlessly. where is the immediate opinion hit for being a mage/elf the inky takes in orlais???

yes the tone is off and a little shallow. yes the companions communicate too healthily for my tastes. yes i was dreading 'evanuris are behind everything' lore reveals and that's what we got. but i honestly think i could overlook those things if the above problems were solved and it felt like the same immersive, problematic thedas.

i'm so completely infuriated by the worldstate choices i'm going to make a separate post about it. but yeah i was concerned but made no noise, i was willing to wait it out and see how the three choices played out in game. and it's absolutely ridiculous that so far two out of fucking three have basically no impact, and the last one idgaf about unless inky romanced solas. i'm so so so so mad and disappointed about this, especially after staying open-minded when it was initially revealed.

everyone loves companion quests, so i don't know why the game feels like it needs to sell you on their significance. why did we get two different scenes of varric spelling it out to rook: do the companion side quests, or else they won't be able to focus! it's such a weird and superfluous tie-in. i don't get why they went so out of their way to clarify this when it didn't need to be clarified, companion side quests are expected in rpgs and their relevance to the plot is very easily accepted/overlooked.

[olderthannetfic]

Okay, I need advice: I'm in a very tiny fandom (like less than two dozen active people and everyone knows each other) and one of the women in it is kind of freaking me out.

We became mutuals because we had some good discussions on some of the characters we liked, but I soon became sort of uncomfortable with a lot of her online behavior whereas simultaneously she's DM-ing me more and more.

She's one of those people who's a hardliner on the issues she cares about (mostly feminism- and SA-related) while talking over people when it comes to issues she doesn't care about (mostly racism and related things). And I see a lot of her trying to intrusively police how other people talk/act, derailing people's posts, arguing with people online over the most stupid shit (where not even her own opinions come off as overly coherent - this week she'll argue something along the lines of "men are evil" and the next she'll argue that people are "demonizing masculinity" - I'll add for clarification that she's not a TERF and supports trans rights but boy... Does she sound like one sometimes) and then digging through people's profiles to find and publicize minor transgressions and bad takes, passive-aggressive vagueposting, and going into mental breakdowns over the most innocuous of online interactions.

TBH she scares me. As someone who suffered through toxic people getting overly attached to me, I genuinely sometimes get a physical reaction when I see her lashing out on the dash.

And she keeps initiating conversations! And sometimes I don't reply or bring the conversation to a natural closure and she keeps at it, or sends me random fics of hers to read that I don't have the heart to tell her don't interest me or whatever. And recently when she disagrees with something I reblogged she direct messages me to rant about it - with a lot of sort of indirect language because she doesn't want to offend me but I can see the intent. The last couple of times I replied politely because I cared about clearing misunderstandings on the topic but next time I'm just gonna tell her I dislike it when she does that.

I really want this person to stop interacting with me, to be honest, and all my polite hints to the effect go unnoticed. But the fandom is so small I feel awkward and uncomfortable about unfollowing or blocking her. I don't think she's too bad of a person, she just comes off as very... Mentally ill, I guess? And since I've tried to be polite so far I feel like it might come out of left field for her?

TBH I feel like something about her behavior also triggers some kind of freeze/fawn reaction inside of me that I don't often get and consequently don't know how to deal with.

So I need impartial advice because I don't see the situation clearly myself

--

To summarize, a person who is a walking red flag wants to be friends, and you can't easily ghost her because the fandom is small.

I think you have to accept that there is no low-conflict way out of this.

That's what's holding you back, right? You don't want more drama and you know it's coming. I think you already know in your heart of hearts that you need to get away from her even if it's a pain in the ass.

Step one is to stop responding to her DMs. That will probably make her reach out more, but you should keep not responding. If she escalates and attacks you over it, block her.

The more you offer reasons or try to gently hint, the more that will encourage her. I don't think that's true of everyone, but I do think it's the case here. This is both because it doesn't sound like she's good at perceiving or respecting boundaries and because she inspires a bad lack of ability to assert boundaries in you.

I agree that it's unfortunate that you can't stand up for yourself or tell her plainly when she's out of line, but since you can't and that probably won't change any time soon, you'll need to protect yourself a different way. Sometimes, we just have to avoid people who are bad for us even when it's an us problem. (And here, whoaaaa red flags, so I don't think it's just a you problem anyway.)

There are many sad, lonely, needy people in the world. Some of them are officially mentally ill in some way with a diagnosis. Some just need things they aren't currently getting. That sucks...

But it's also not your job to fix.

[jmdbjk]

3D

I had to let some time pass before I wrote this. The discourse is heated and polarized.

You say: "ABG ... Asian Baby Girl, doesn't mean the same as it used to" ... it might not for you but it is rooted in misogyny and racism. Does that mean the n-word doesn't mean what it used to? Or the word bitch, cunt or whore? It's ok to use those words too when rapping about women? What about fag or fairy? Ok? No. Not okay.

You do you, Boo, but:

"The ongoing oppression of women is enshrined in religious, legal, political, educational, and employment systems and structures. An equivalent level of systemic and structural oppression has not been experienced by the current generation of white men in America. "

You can read the article this excerpt is from here.

My first impression upon listening/watching the first time: I did not like it because of fugly white boy, Jack Harlow. I've never liked him, I've never liked his lyrics or his vibe. He is the type of overdone, asshole misogynistic male bullshit rap that had become unavoidable for a while.

I don't have ANY problem with JK singing about sex, having sex, shooting his jizz to the sky or any of that. BRING. THAT. ON. I don't care if the song is about phone sex or masturbating on camera or whatever.

What I do have a problem with is a white guy saying one girl (the black girl) is boring but two girls (add the white girl) is cool. I have a problem with the concept of having women lined up ready to fuck as some sort of thing to laud. And they are all dressed alike, so that means he doesn't care about them, they're all the same. Just another pussy to fuck. Diversity, yay. Not.

I will listen to the alternate version of the song but I will never listen to or stream the version with the rap.

I love Jungkook. I love that he's exploring his sound. He is creating music that speaks to him RIGHT NOW in his career. Do I like that he's put this song out? No. But that's my own personal opinion.

I can't speak for Jungkook, a 26 year old Korean man. He has his own systemic and structural oppressions to deal with.

I am not going to second guess him. He will see the feedback and take it into consideration, I don't have to guess on that, I know he will. They all see what goes on.

I wanted to give JK the benefit of the doubt with Seven. I don't have a problem with Seven the song, but its the hype surrounding it that is perpetuated by the fandom that he is being pushed in the western market. This song proves it.

All that being said, BTS and each individual member all exist within an industry that is heavily influenced by the western market.

As such, every song each member releases will add to the colors that the team will be able to use when they come back together as a group. No one will be surprised if BTS utilizes a hardcore western rapper in the future now. It is just one more color in the mix.

But as my friend says: "Shoot for another Coldplay....They don't need to be lifting people up. They need to find peers. Which is why I would support a Lady Gaga collab with Tae. Which is why Hobi asked for J Cole. That's a peer, man. I can handle Pharrell with them.

The benchmark for peers, to me, is another artist who has nothing to gain from collab'ing with them. An artist who holds their own, on their own, and collabs to let each participant have fun, shine, and grow a bit. Not some newbie who needs the boost. The only exception to that would be if they worked with one of their juniors at Hybe."

And now I move on from this.

[sivavakkiyar]

Sakai is coming up a lot more recently on here so I’d like to bring up a passage from his interview ‘when race burns class’:

A number of years ago, i was trying to help a group of young Chinese-American activists on an anti-racist campaign. This was an interesting case of how a pure "race" issue only fronted for class politics. Now, these folks were "paper Maoists" in every worst way you could think of – and all my friends know that i'm someone who has warm feelings for the old Chairman. Not only did they have what Mao once called "invincible ignorance", but were also arrogantly full of Han nationalism. They did have physical courage, at least. Their project was to protest the sports racism in the famous industrial town of Pekin, Illinois – which was originally named in the 19th century after Beijing, and whose high school sports teams were colorfully named "the Chinks"! (capitalism, what an ever-amazing civilization – what next? "Auschwitz! The Perfume!" ).

Every week a few carloads of young Asian protesters would arrive in Pekin to picket the high school and city hall, hold television news conferences, and keep the issue simmering in the news. You see, the small flaw in the campaign was that all the protesters had to be imported from New York and Chicago. There were only eight Chinese families in town, and all were refusing to have anything to do with the anti-"Chinks" campaign (not wanting to lose their livelihoods, homes, and be driven out of town by the controversy).

By accident, not in any political way, i had casually met two vaguely liberal young white guys there. One was a teacher in that very high school. The second was a UAW (United Auto Workers union) shop steward at the nearby giant Caterpillar tractor assembly plant, which was Pekin's main industry. So i thought maybe they could be persuaded to get some local people to take a moderate wishy-washy public stand, anything just to give the Chinese families some local community cover if they wanted to speak out (there was zero local support of any kind, including all the unions and churches of course).

When i suggested it to this Maoist group, there was a moment's startled stony silence. Then the leader barked, "We do not work with white people!" Discussion over. So, is this a good example of that error of "racial issues taking precedence over class issues"? i know some radicals might think that, but they'd just be getting faked out.

First off, to those activists running it, "race" was not what was central to their thinking. After all, if those Asian American dudes had really been into either "race" or anti-racism they might have started by organizing and working with the local Asian families. They might have tried to help find some survival strategy for these families, who couldn't just drive off into the sunset after each press conference (being an isolated Asian family in a heavy white racist scene is no joke, obviously). This is just a normal problem in anti-racist work, which folks had to deal with all the time in small towns in 1960s Mississippi, for instance.

It also wasn't true that those Chinese-American leftists "didn't work with white people". They did that all the time, when they wanted, and these Han nationalists even argued for the "revolutionary" nature of the white working class . What i came to realize was in that situation they didn't want any broad community support for the Chinese families there, or to let others into "their" issue. Because they had a really different agenda. Which was to get sole public credit for this and other anti-racist issues, so that their little Maoist "party" could vault into political dominance over the Chinese-American communities. Later, when they thought it necessary, they even used physical violence and death threats to drive other Asian groups away. They intended to be the people in ethnic power, in effect like replacing the tongs . These "paper Maoists" had a pure class agenda, all right, only it was a bourgeois agenda. Although they themselves might have honestly believed what they did was "revolutionary", they had anti -working class politics hidden by "anti racism" and left people of color talk.

And this Maoist group really did get their Andy Warhol-like "15 minutes of fame", becoming large in part because the more dishonest and destructive their "anti-racist" maneuvers became, the more support they got from white middle-class liberals and "progressives" (coincidentally?). i mean, from many white social-democrats, those white anti-repression "experts", academic leftists, etc. Those types that subject us to those endless droning lectures about "the working class" (which they aren't in and don't get, of course). As a sage comrade of mine always says, "Like is drawn to like" even if their outward appearance is very different.

This is a more difficult, easy to slip and fall on, even dangerous way of seeing things than radicals here are used to.

[ausetkmt]

When Donald Trump talks about undocumented immigrants, he often brings up genetics.

Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally last year.

“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he said earlier this month. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” 

The former president’s language underscores a larger trend, experts tell STAT. The eugenics movement is once again taking center stage in the U.S. — both in the immigration policies and rhetoric promoted by Trump, and through a rise in race science in academic literature.

Eugenics — the pseudoscientific idea of fixing social problems through genetics and heredity via policies ranging from selective breeding to forced sterilization and genocide — was popular at the turn of the 20th century, before the devastation of the Holocaust quelled public support for it. The reasons for its resurgence include an increase in funding of race science from private donors, as well as proponents of scientific racism and white nationalists manipulating the push to make science more public. 

Even well-intentioned scientists have fed into this shift by promoting genetic determinism — the idea that genes are the primary driver of traits and behaviors — and by platforming problematic work in the name of academic freedom. 

“I wasn’t surprised that people are being demagogic about this stuff, but I am a little surprised that they’re so clearly not even hiding [it],” said Paul Lombardo, a professor of law at Georgia State University who has done extensive work on the legacy of eugenics. “This is not just saying the quiet part out loud. This is coming up with quotations in which, instead of using quotation marks, you’ve got swastikas at each end of the sentence.”

‘Bad genes’ and the birth of eugenics

Trump is frequently accused of racism, but the fact that he is embracing eugenic thinking has not drawn sufficient attention, according to Shannon O’Brien, a political scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has written a book on eugenics in American politics. 

While racists harbor hatred for others because of their ethnicity or the color of their skin, eugenicists take it a step further and “like to legislate people out of existence,” O’Brien said. “They are OK with sterilization. They’re okay with extermination, and they believe that certain groups are superior and it’s OK to enact things that make it difficult for other ones to exist. I find that far scarier than racism.” 

Asked about Trump’s rhetoric and the eugenics movement and his remarks about “bad genes,” Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s press secretary, told STAT, “President Trump was clearly referring to murderers, not migrants.’’

The former president also has a history of statements suggesting that certain people are genetically superior. A 2016 documentary pointed out Trump’s father, Fred, introduced him to “racehorse theory” as a child — the idea that “that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.” He’s used this idea to promote his own intelligence as well. “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor, Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart,” he told CNN in 2020. 

This way of talking about genetics is rooted in a long history that begins with the English anthropologist Francis Galton, who took his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and applied it to humans, first using the term eugenics in 1883. The nascent field of eugenics matured into a full-fledged field of study in the United States. Much later, in the 1990s, the sequencing of the human genome inadvertently created a new surge in eugenics — emboldened by the idea that scientists could isolate genes responsible for complex behaviors, like poverty, crime and intelligence. 

How companies like 23andMe bolstered genetic determinism  

Those affiliated with the Human Genome Project hoped sequencing the genome would end notions that genetics created significant differences in different groups — “that it would lead us to this post-racial world,” said Aaron Panofsky, the director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

“But it turns out that both scientists and the public spend all their interest in the 0.1% of genetic variation that makes us different, not the 99.9% that makes us the same.”

In promoting their research to the public and getting research funding from the government, geneticists often hyped up the role genes play in people’s lives. The Human Genome Project “was a huge public undertaking,” said Emily Merchant, a historian of science at the University of California, Davis. “It was almost $3 billion and took more than a decade to complete. So it needed a lot of popular support. The scientists who were trying to generate that popular support did it by promoting genetic determinism.”

This sentiment persisted in ensuing years because of popular genetic testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, which marketed its products with the premise that an understanding of genetics held the secret to good health and could quantify people’s sense of belonging to racial or ethnic groups. 

In the early 2010s, there was another shift in how mainstream academic circles discussed ideas that intelligence was genetic or that race had a biological basis. Richard Lynn, a psychologist who claimed that people from certain countries had lower IQs, promoted a biased dataset on IQ differences between countries that became increasingly widespread in academia. Another theory, called “differential K theory,” began to circulate around this time, stating that Black people have lower IQs and are more aggressive. 

“The national IQ database, differential K theory, they should have died the death bad science deserves to die. They have no scientific merit,” said Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Brunel University who has documented the resurgence in eugenics in demography. “They’ve both been extensively critiqued. They are both currently thriving in the academic literature.”

While controversial among the scientific community, ideas like Lynn’s continued to spread in academia, in part because of the ethos of academic freedom — the idea that scholars should be able to research and debate any issues in their field, and that rejecting a paper based on problematic findings is tantamount to censorship.  

“That’s a very, very problematic argument, but I think it is quite widespread,” Sear said. “Academic freedom isn’t the freedom to say literally anything in an academic forum. It’s the freedom to say anything with a sound methodological basis.” 

While these ideas lacked scientific rigor, Sear explained, they were often not intended for other scientists. “Scientific racism really is not aimed at academia. It’s aimed at the outside world. And this, I think, is why it’s so often such bad science,” Sear said.

The appropriation of open science 

The open science movement around this time also proved to boost the spread of flawed research on race, ethnicity, and genetics. Academic journals increasingly were publishing papers without paywalls, so anyone could access them, and often requiring the data underpinning research to be available. 

Some scientists had also begun posting early drafts of their work, called “preprints,” on public forums. By doing science in the public square this way, people with explicit political agendas could access, manipulate, and reinterpret published research in a way that sometimes took academics by surprise.  

Online, white nationalists used popular genetic testing websites to prove how white they were, and reanalyzed scientific data with a bent to affirming biological differences between races. They also seized on uncertainty among biologists about how to discuss race in the academic literature. Discussion forums on the subject might lean on anti-science conspiracy theories, but users could sometimes make sophisticated arguments about statistical uncertainties or the distinction between correlation and causation.

“They read both against and with the scientific literature, and that’s the way in which it becomes a very complicated dance that they sometimes make,” said Panofsky, who has studied the ways that far-right movements weaponize genetics. 

The solution to the weaponization of genetics isn’t gatekeeping research, experts studying the issue agree. But, they say that academia hasn’t confronted the ways science can be used to embolden bigotry. 

“We have basically a metric for how much Nazis like your research,” said Jedidiah Carlson, a population geneticist at Macalester College who led an analysis of how preprints circulate among right-wing extremists online. But it’s not a feature many are interested in. He wants to see researchers more attuned to the long-term impact of their work. 

Incentive structures in research are also responsible for the continued popularity of research on topics like the links between genetics and intelligence or educational attainment, Carlson said. It’s “easy to get money for it, because you can say this has immediate policy implications for education and immigration policy … It’s just treated as this generic ‘apolitical’ research when it never has been.”

Challenging the idea that genes are ‘in the driver’s seat’

The failure to deeply engage with the dark history of eugenics and the way it’s informed a number of academic fields is linked to current political hostility directed toward immigrants, according to Marielena Hincapié, an immigration scholar and lawyer at Cornell University who hosted a symposium on the 100-year legacy of eugenics and the Immigration Act of 1924. 

She points to recent attacks on immigrant communities carried out by people that believe in the Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy that posits there is a concerted effort to diminish the power and influence of white people in the United States. The gunman behind one such attack, in Buffalo, New York, directly cited genetics research in his thinking.

The incident sparked some soul searching within the genetics community, which has also pushed back on problematic use of its research. In one case, a genetics consortium challenged the use of its data by a private company to screen embryos. On another occasion, a now-defunct app claimed it could test users on whether they had genes associated with same-sex sexual orientation, drawing on a paper published in Science. That prompted a protest petition signed by more than 1,600 scientists. 

There’s also growing interest in the scientific community in how social determinants, such as economic policies, racism, and climate change, shape people’s health, and in the field of epigenetics, which studies how the environment affects gene expression. These paradigms open up an understanding that “genes are not necessarily in the driver’s seat, but they’re in an interactive relationship with a whole bunch of other factors,” said Panofsky. “They seem to open a door to a post-deterministic biology and genetics.” 

Even so, the field has yet to truly rethink its buy-in of the idea that genes play a central role in people’s abilities and behaviors, Panofsky said. That thinking can inadvertently support the kind of problematic rhetoric Trump has applied to immigrants. While much of the U.S. has moved on and forgotten about its eugenic past, the country hasn’t done the work to refute the ideas it made so popular. 

“We presume that we’ve done the work of rooting these matters out of our society,” said Michele Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law and global health at Georgetown Law. “But that presumption is proving to be quite thin and weak in these times.”

Just over 100 years ago, eugenicist Harry Laughlin testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that “The character of our civilization will be modified by the ‘blood’ or the natural hereditary qualities which the sexually fertile immigrant brings to our shores.” His argument wouldn’t be out of place today.

[kuzzzma]

To Catch a Killer (2023) – is a strange film, that outright LIES to it’s intended viewers.

It’s not about how they are going to catch a killer, this title is just a feint, to fool critics and audience alike. The purpose of the film is to ask some very uncomfortable questions sneakily, so subtly that viewers are not even aware that they were asked anything, yet the question will linger and doubt will fester and maybe this will lead to finding some answers in oneself.

Problems stated, questions posed:

Homelessnes

Sexual harassment

Human and LGBT rights

Gun control

History

Racism

Sexism

Police bias

Media responsibility

Media sensationalism

Ecology

Pollution

Politics and populism

Workers rights

Police unprofessionalism

Police brutality

And it’s not an attack on any one country. You see people at the mall, workplace, struggles with higher-ups, who don’t care one bit about solving the crime, but only about how it will reflect on their political aspirations (and everything can be sacrificed for that). It’s universal.

I look at those human interactions and it’s the same everywhere. I look at these landscapes and see a typical Russian small town during winter:

РУС!реал

– How long have you been married? – Ever since we were allowed.

This snippet of dialog jolts the viewer with it’s choice of words: the notion that you need to be ALLOWED to get married feels instantly WRONG, and yet… I find it much more effective that just silently doing token “representation”.

This jolt is much needed, it shakes up viewer and pokes at their assumptions about what kind of film they are watching just in time to pose the main Question right in the next scene.

The Question is stated outright, as well as the answer author proposes and later puts to test.

Big question to ask.

– That’s the big question. How people shape systems and how systems shape us. Today it’s all about the STATUS. People who have it will kill to protect it. People who want it will kill to achieve it and everyone else will be crushed inbetween. Governments, corporations, high school.. pattern seems to be the same. – How do we change that? – You need empathy. Connection. If we truly see ourselves in other people, we want to raise them up, not bring them down.

This is exactly what our protagonist will try to do when facing their perpetrator – establish connection, empathise, work together.

The perpetrator with his need for space and time, with his cabin in the woods reminds me of Henry David Thoreau. He even looks like him!

In the last arc wounded and dying perpetrator is hunted down with the whole might of police force. It’s all blinking lights, whole fleet of cars, helicopters in the air, radio chatter and sirens, all hands on deck. Hunters form a line and their prey is trapped.

We got his tracks!

This comes after this man stated his need for quiet, desire and inability to hide from society.

Makes viewer feel sick long before suicide by the firing squad of cops.

It’s a strange sad film, but it’s got sharp teeth and claws, and it puts boredom, glory, beauty and horror on display:

Boredom and Glory.

Beauty.

Horror

The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. T.S. Eliot

[wenellyb]

Tommy was definitely racist to Hen and Chim. It seems like in season 2 they all moved past it though. Fans don't have to forgive Tommy. He's not owed forgiveness but so far it doesn't seem like Hen and Chim are bothered anymore by his past racism and horrible behavior. In season 2 we saw a change in Tommy and the dynamic at the 118. In season 2 we saw Hen, Chim, and Tommy being friendly together. That doesn't mean he wasn't racist but it seems to imply that they all moved on or at least were able to be okay with each other. This show is known for bad behavior happening onscreen and then we don't see apologies, people just seem to move on so I don't know if we'll ever see Tommy apologize to Hen and Chim for being racist to them.

We haven't seen Tommy being racist or sexist towards Hen and Chim or anyone since season 2. I guess we'll see what happens in season 8. Personally, as long as Hen and Chim are okay with Tommy then I can be okay with Tommy but if they bring up his old behavior and feel like they need him to address it then I am right there with them. When it comes to shows sometimes I feel like if the victims are okay and have moved on then so can I and that's how I view Tommy. If we see Tommy being racist, sexist, or horrible again in anyway then I'll have problems with him again but so far we haven't seen that. He's come back and been nothing but helpful to everyone at the 118. Nothing excuses his past behavior though, not even him being better now.

I think you should definitely block shippers and stans if they impact your enjoyment of a show or character. Please don't let stans ruin things for you.

Hi Anon!!! Thank you for sending this! And honestly I have no problem with people liking Tommy, far from it, I hope I didn't imply that in my previous posts.

My problems are:

1) people who say that Tommy wasn't racist because Hen and Chimney were civil with him when they were working together. As if it's some kind of evidence...a lot of people have been civil and polite to racist coworkers, for various reasons (for exemple: they weren't in a position where they would afford to jeopaedize their job).

2) people who act like the fandom should forgive Tommy because Hen and Chimney forgave him. Racism is a complexe issue that can't be summarized in a Tumblr post. But it's not as simple as Hen and Chimney were the "victims", in the case of racism, the victim isn't only the person it's direct towards, but a whole group of people.

Let me give a stupid example, but just to explain what I mean. Let's say A says the n-word to B. Later, A apologizes and B forgives A because he was drunk or didn't realize what he was saying or for whatever reason, it doesn't mean that other Black people should forgive A. That slur wasn't only directed at B, even though B was the victim in that scenario, that slur targets every Black person who witnessed or heard about that conversation.

(I apologize I'm bad at giving example I hope you understand what I mean😭)

If Hen and Chimney, have fogiven Tommy it doesn't mean that other fans should "get over it", unless they want to.

If Hen and Chimney forgiving Tommy is enough for you then that's ok, more than ok, but it might not be the case for everyone, especially non-White fans.

Side note, I also don't like when people assume the only reason other people dislike Tommy as a character is because they ship Buddie. Some of them do, but not all of them.

Thank you for the ask, I really appreciate your input.

And you're right, I'll start blocking some people, at first, I thought I shouldn't be blocking some people because we're part of the same fandom but that's obviously the wrong strategy.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Philosopher Susan Neiman: ‘I hate the words pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. I’m pro-peace’

American commentator criticises tribalist politics and pushes for Jewish universalism

+

Out of centuries of Jewish suffering have come two contrasting philosophical impulses. One focuses on the need for the Jewish people to protect themselves against inevitable attacks. It is supported by the biblical verses that urge Jews to remember the Amalekites, the tribe who once killed their ancestors. It is epitomised by the nationalism of Benjamin Netanyahu. The second emphasises Jews’ responsibility to other oppressed peoples. This was the tradition Susan Neiman imbibed as a child in 1960s Georgia. She attended an Atlanta synagogue whose rabbi supported Martin Luther King. When she was three, it was bombed, most likely by white supremacists. She recited Passover verses with her mother, remembering those that urged Jews not to oppress strangers because they were once “strangers in the land of Egypt”. “That was the central experience of growing up — if you’re a Jew, you care about social justice and the civil rights movement.”

Now an outspoken philosopher, Neiman wants to reclaim Jewish universalism as a radical act. Israel’s war with Hamas has pushed the world to pick sides. “People have, differently in so many places across the world, become so tribalist. I hate the words pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian: they make it look as if we’re talking about a football match. I’m pro-peace.” She has the advantage of being able to invoke Albert Einstein. For 23 years, she has led the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, a research institute based at his one-time summer home. “Einstein was a total universalist Jew . . . We do care about his politics and his biography because that’s why he became a cultural icon. The second half of his life, he spent more time as a public intellectual than he did working on physics.”

Einstein became convinced of the need for a Jewish national home, but he feared the cost if it came without peace. “Should we be unable to find a way to honest co-operation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing from our 2,000 years of suffering and will deserve our fate,” he warned in 1929. Today Neiman echoes Einstein’s concerns. “[Netanyahu’s] policies are creating anger and frustration all over the world, they will rebound on Jews, see Dagestan [where an antisemitic mob stormed an airport].” The “carpet bombing . . . of Gaza is not in Israeli interests, even if you just care about Jewish lives.”

She strives to see the mistreatment of Jews and non-Jews through the same eyes. “Discrimination and oppression of any group of people on the basis of their ethnic heritage is racism.” She condemns Hamas’s “pogrom” against Israeli Jews and the ensuing “pogroms” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Yet a strong universalist commitment faces a difficult context. In 1948, Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other leading Jewish figures wrote to the New York Times, criticising a future Israeli prime minister’s party as “fascist”. By contrast, “calling the Israeli far right fascist today would not just bring accusations of antisemitism, it would carry a professional death sentence,” says Neiman.

To many Germans, criticism of Israel clashes with the paramount importance given to remembering the Holocaust. To many Jews today, universalism itself feels hollow, when parts of the left have shown little compassion for Jews’ own suffering. “I’m scared about rising antisemitism,” says Neiman. “But I don’t think the way to solve the problem is to become more anti-Muslim. That is one direction that people are going in, particularly in Germany.”

[sawthatmountainburn]

I haven't watched the barbie movie and don't really plan to, I just have a problem with some arguments people have been making in its defense, as they are weak arguments regardless of what piece of media they're defending. specifically it's the "this is just feminism 101 for kids, it doesn't have to be a whole manifesto!" type of dismissive arguments.

first of all, if a movie is marketed as feminist and the fanbase praises it for its feminism, people who go see it will have certain expectations based on their own idea of feminism, since feminism is an umbrella term for different ideologies whose common trait is that they want rights for women. who counts as a woman, what specific rights they should have and how we should get them are all points of contention, without even getting into intersecrionality just yet. (very broad generalization, also some leftist feminists disagree with the 'rights' framing) there's only so many grains of sslt you can take, before you decide this is just too far away from what it was presented as and clearly, many women feel this way about the movie.

second of all, regardless of how a piece of media is marketed, it is always fair game for critism, whether that be from a feminist perspective, an anti-racism perspective, a leftist perspective or whatever else you can come up with. to demand that people simply not bring up these critiques because it's ruining people's fun or it's not that serious (but still serious enough that you call people misogynists for criticizing it?) is blatantly reactionary. it's the same thing angry geek boys do when you point out their funny little sci-fi and fantasy shows have weirdly few POC in them. you can say a criticism is in bad faith or based on a misreading of the text (I've seen this about the gynecologist scene, for example), sure, but what I'm seeing more commonly is just a total dismissal of these critiques and perspectives, as if the movie simply isn't subject to it for whatever reason.

expounding upon this, the "feminism 101" part of the argument is similarly reactionary. to reiterate what i said in my last reblog about this, the way people talk about this movie gives me the impression that it's way more suited to the ~2012-2014 pre-gamergate era of tumblr feminism, when people said stuff like "eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man" and feminist criticism was treated as more of a checklist of good and bad tropes. we're almost a decade past that era, with many events that changed the political and pop cultural landscape in the meantime, so what was passable back then might not be such now. we've talked extensively about intersecrionality, issues of race have been brought up time and time again, especially in light of the BLM movement and anti-Asian racism in the COVID era, queer issues have also been gaining more and more traction, etc etc, I can't and won't recap the last decade of political development. my point is, if you're a feminist in 2023 (or any other type of left-leaning politically active individual, but the barbie discourse is about feminism, so that's what I'm talking about specifically) you cannot simply ignore these issues and say multiply marginalized women will have their time, but they need to wait for the privileged women to go first. actually, it was always unacceptable to demand marginalized women support more privileged women while getting nothing in return, but it's even more obvious and ignorant in the current era, after we've been trying to make people understand intersecrionality for years.

it's also insidious how the implication is that feminism needs to be dumbed down for kids (a dubious claim in the first place) and for some reason, that dumbing down involves flattening everything to being about the most privileged women possible. why shouldn't young privileged girls learn about the issues that face their less privileged peers face? why should girls of marginalized groups have to sit and listen about the issues facing their privileged peers, but never being given the tools to discuss their own issues? whom does this dynamic serve exactly and why is it not only acceptable to continue to exist, but it also important to so vehemently defend?

I'm not trying to tell people not to like the barbie movie, that's really not what I care about. I'm saying the types of arguments being made reveal a failure of intersectionality and a dismissal of multiply marginalized women's issues, coupled with a self-centeredness which should be unacceptable to any serious feminist. stop making excuses for a hollywood blockbuster funded by a multi-billion(!!) dollar toy company and start giving a shit about the women in need right in front of you!

[stranger-rants]

Actually, to contextualize racism in the United States for Stranger Things fans, you all should read about the Newark Riots which happened in the late 60s.

My family is white. My parents are white. They grew up in New Jersey at this time, in an ethnically diverse neighborhood where the majority of their school classmates were black. Poverty rates were high, and whites with money had already fled those areas. The riots happened due to the extreme disenfranchisement of black people in the United States. Not wanting poor whites to organize and support black people protesting their conditions, white politicians intentionally sewed discord among poor white people and poor black people. So, it became an us vs. them situation. My parents did have friends outside of their race, but they also experienced a lot of violence that negatively impacted their perception of race. That’s something growing up that I had to grapple with and I had a lot to learn and unlearn, including understanding that prejudice against a white minority in this context is not the same thing as systemic racism.

This system made it easier for affluent whites to avoid criticism for their own racist actions, where their contribution to systemic racism was in the voting booth and in the pockets of racist politicians instead of on the streets. So, they could maintain their clean appearance while being responsible for the extreme disenfranchisement of black people. This is what racism in the north looked like, and in areas perceived as more progressive like California. This context is important to understand when you think individual characters are stand ins for systemic racism when it’s quiet clear, politically, that the existence of Hawkins and its white majority are a result of decades of white flight to that area, redlining in cities preventing black people from moving, and WASP conservatism. It’s no accident that the Sinclairs are one of the few black families in Hawkins.

I don’t think The Duffers intended to represent this. I think this is a result of white men who grew up in a largely white community, recreating the nostalgia of their childhood which was… a white fantasy. It’s why they say they wanted to deal with racism by bringing Billy onto the scene, and it’s easy to get upset at Billy pushing Lucas, even going to the extreme of arguing he was going to kill him (which he wasn’t), because it’s so visible, but Billy is one person and racism is systemic. At the same time, they’re seemingly unwilling to address or maybe just ignorant to the fact that Hawkins really is a racist town. The uncritical Reagan signs in the Wheeler’s front yard are 80s nostalgia decoration, not meant to call into question the kind of political environment the Wheeler children are being raised into - because they’re the heroes, they can’t be racist! That’s bad!

The problem with decontextualizing racism in Hawkins by making Billy the scapegoat for it becomes clearer in the last season when Billy is no longer around. Whether they intended to or not, they show how racist Hawkins actually is with how easily they form a lynch mob against children. While they shift their focus onto the D&D nerds (because they just have to victimize themselves through their stand in characters), Lucas and Erica become the primary target of that lynch mob in scenes that graphically evoke racist lynch mobs in American history. The narrative doesn’t address this in any way as evidence that Hawkins in racist, even going on to sanitize Hawkins in the wake of Eddie’s death by showing everyone coming together after a tragedy - a tragedy they contributed to. The end result is that many fans with no understanding of racism in America completely miss the racist undertones within the 80s nostalgia the Duffers created.

Long story short, we can talk about the racism of individual characters but it is a systemic issue and it is present in Hawkins. It’s never a good idea to decontextualize racism or any other systemic issue to blame it on individual “bad people” while promoting the white fantasy of the respectable suburb full of good white people who turned to violence because they just didn’t understand what was happening and those kids were “acting suspicious.” Nope. They’re racist, too. It’s just packaged nicer.

[quotesfrommyreading]

As a Black guy who grew up in a politically purple area—where being a good person meant adhering to the kind of civil-rights-era color-blindness that is now passé—I find this emergent anti-racist culture jarring. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances now seem to believe that being a good person means constantly reminding Black people that you are aware of their Blackness. Difference, no longer to be politely ignored, is insisted upon at all times under the guise of acknowledging “positionality.” Though I am rarely made to feel excessively aware of my race when hanging out with more conservative friends or visiting my hometown, in the more liberal social circles in which I typically travel, my race is constantly invoked—“acknowledged” and “centered”—by well-intentioned anti-racist “allies.”

This “acknowledgment” tends to take one of two forms. The first is the song and dance in which white people not-so-subtly let you know that they know that race and racism exist. This includes finding ways to interject discussion of some (bad) news item about race or racism into casual conversation, apologizing for having problems while white (“You’re the last person I should be whining to”), or inversely, offering “support” by attributing any normal human problem you have to racism.

The second way good white liberals often “center” racial difference in everyday interactions with minorities is by trying, always clumsily, to ensure that their “marginalized” friends and familiars are “culturally” comfortable. My favorite personal experiences of this include an acquaintance who invariably steers dinner or lunch meetups to Black-owned restaurants, and the time that a friend of a friend invited me over to go swimming in their pool before apologizing for assuming that I know how to swim (“I know that’s a culturally specific thing”). It is a peculiar quirk of the 2020s’ racial discourse that this kind of “acknowledgment” and “centering” is viewed as progress.

My point is not that conservatives have better racial politics—they do not—but rather that something about current progressive racial discourse has become warped and distorted. The anti-racist culture that is ascendant seems to me to have little to do with combatting structural racism or cultivating better relationships between white and Black Americans. And its rejection of color-blindness as a social ethos is not a new frontier of radical political action.

No, at the core of today’s anti-racism is little more than a vibe shift—a soft matrix of conciliatory gestures and hip phraseology that give adherents the feeling that there has been a cultural change, when in fact we have merely put carpet over the rotting floorboards. Although this push to center rather than sidestep racial difference in our interpersonal relationships comes from a good place, it tends to rest on a troubling, even racist subtext: that white and Black Americans are so radically different that interracial relationships require careful management, constant eggshell-walking, and even expert guidance from professional anti-racists. Rather than producing racial harmony, this new ethos frequently has the opposite effect, making white-Black interactions stressful, unpleasant, or, perhaps most often, simply weird.

  —  I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up.

[jewishbarbies]

Hey so I'm the anon from earlier with the long essay about the closeting thing and sorry I came across very angry but it wasnt directed at you as much as everyone in general who say queer celebs have a jollie good time in hollywood being queer and don't need beards because all's well in utopia and that frustrates me and I directed it at you which I shouldn't have

But I still stand by the general opinions I said and honestly, if you ask me about taylor, I am queer and when I hear her lyrics, I feel quite strongly that certain songs couldn't have been written unless she has experienced some deep longing for a woman. But what a lot of ppl seem to think is that just because she might be queer means she is a good person and that simply is not true. I mean look at Ellen DeGeneres. She is very gay and she is also an asshole. Taylor Swift, in my view, is very much an Ellen kinda queer

And her being queer doesn't erase her racism, her anti-Semitism, her white feminism none of it. I just think we can criticise her without saying she "queerbaits" because sexuality is not something that exists in a box like a costume that people can just try on. Sexuality is not a political thing, it's human nature. If you ask me, none of us are probably totally straight and I understand that there's a lot of heteronormative societal structures that prevent people from understanding this but when it comes down to biology, it's really as simple as that. That's why i do loathe the accusations being leveled these days at real people for queerbaiting because that's not the definition of queerbaiting nor has it ever been.

And I think if she chooses to be closeted, she is going to behave like a closeted, publicly straight artist like many others do. I also don't think she chooses to hide because she is afraid of discrimination but I think it's cos she is so attached to her fame and the attention she gets from dating men, she wouldn't sacrifice it by revealing certain truths about herself. She is too narcissistic for that imo

There's no shortage of problematic things taylor has done without needing to bring up the sexuality aspect that's all

Sorry this got long, I've had this on my mind for a while now

that very well could be true about her, but as long as she identifies as straight I’m going to also identify her as straight and I feel like it’s leaning into problematic territory not to. she could’ve felt something for a woman at some time in her life but still identifies as straight. I don’t think we’ll ever know and frankly it’s none of our business. all you should know is what she tells you, and she’s straight up told us that she’s straight in interviews. so no matter what she writes about, I’m not saying OR speculating that she could be anything else. I think that’s the biggest issue with saying not to speculate is that most people still speculate anyway to some degree, and it just needs to stop. you’re more than welcome to hear her music however you hear it and have the opinions you have. but as far as taylor specifically is concerned, she identifies as straight.

the way I view the queerbaiting situation with taylor specifically, is there’s taylor the person and Taylor™️ the brand. Taylor™️ the brand makes money. she can be whatever she wants in her personal life. the problem is when Taylor™️ the brand is putting out a song about herself with one or two throwaway lines that are either just ambiguous or are intentionally placed to make the song seem ambiguous and claims it’s a queer anthem, during pride month, and then never again is just straight up rainbow capitalism at best. but the songs she releases and only claims later they’re from the pov of a man when questioned if it’s about her expressing queer feelings because The Brand, that’s queerbaity to me. she seems fine letting fans praise her and hail her as a queer icon when it benefits her until it stands to affect her perception to her conservative fanbase, and then she tells the truth that’s it’s from the pov of a man. does this make sense? like things like that feel deliberate. there’s a couple she hasn’t spoken on to my knowledge, but for those specific two instances, it feels like rainbow capitalism and queerbaiting as Taylor™️ the brand that makes money off of people like gaylors who obsessed over her sexuality and “hints” she may be queer.

I can’t speak to other situations with other celebs, this is just my perspective on taylor specifically, and it’s totally okay if you disagree.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

I'm sorry for asking you for how to find some one. it was late at night and I wasn't thinking well. I'm sorry to put it on you. I just knew in any anthropology field people know how to look up family trees and stuff. I've just kept loosing family these past few years and my brain isn't good late at night.

I appreciate that you recognize that the way you asked your questions didn't come off quite the way you intended. My intention is for this blog to be a learning space, and so I'm going to do my best to answer your question in this response in good faith.

The summary of your questions (at least the way I read it) is: with the rise of antisemitism, I'm worried for the safety of any potentially unknown Jewish family members I might have. How can I find them through genealogical records?

I get where you're coming from in asking this question. Antisemitism is real, it is scary, and you are right to be worried. However, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to show your concern. If I had a non-Jew (family member or not) reach out to me in this way, my response would be something like this:

Respectfully, it's nice that you're worried for my safety, but where were you when my synagogue was the victim of three separate hate crimes during the Trump era? Where were you when there was the shooting at that synagogue in Texas? Why are you reaching out now to tell me you're worried? I know it's a problem—I've known for years. Your concern is functionally meaningless unless you act on it. What are you going to do to support your local Jewish community? What are you going to do the next time you see someone do/say something antisemitic? What are you doing to actually educate yourself on the reality of antisemitism? What can do to help me address the antisemitism in my life?

I say all of this politely, because this is a safe environment and you are learning, so please don't mistake this as hostility. It's just the blunt truth. Reaching out to a Jewish person to say you're concerned about antisemitism is like reaching out to a Black person to tell them you're worried about racism.

If you want to get in touch with this part of your family, do it because you're curious about your relations and you want to make a connection. Plenty of people find out about unknown relatives through a DNA test, and your situation isn't that unusual, especially if you're looking for connection after losing relatives. They may or may not be receptive to you making contact, and that is their decision, just like it is yours to seek them out in the first place.

Keep your worries about antisemitism to yourself unless they purposefully bring it up. In the meantime, work to educate yourself on antisemitism wherever you live—do not expect Jewish people to be your teachers.

Finally, in your original question you ask for genealogy resources that aren't ancestry because ancestry is run by Mormons. This is a popular misconception. Ancestry.com is not affiliated with the Mormon church. Here's an article that provides a rundown of the company's history. There are also ethical concerns arising about DNA and information ownership. Here's a snopes article about how Ancestry handles your data.

Honestly, I use ancestry all the time. Is it sometimes problematic? Yes, but I try to engage with it in ways that satisfy my own ethical boundaries. You can feel free to do the same, or not. It's up to you.

I think we've all said things late at night that we wince at in the light of day—I certainly have. You asked your question with good intentions, and I'm trying to honor that with my response. I'd like everyone to be kind in the replies and notes. There are no such thing as bad questions, just inappropriate times/places to ask them. This blog is a place where questions can be asked without judgement.

-Reid

[neotrances]

And it’s always so random too?? Like it’ll be meme meme funnny joke post “all blacks should be lynched” cat meme 9/11 joke like HEY REWIND THAT?? And everyone just doesn’t read into it like no one kinda raises and eyebrow or anything it’s always a black person who gotta say something and now it’s oh u bring race into everything 😭😭

and they will be like “ur destroying the unity ur creating problems ur messing with the solidarity” if u dare speak up like GIRL? there was never any solidarity ur politics are very flimsy when it comes to race and racism u never considered us one of “you” i donot want class unity with mfs who can’t admit white ppl yes even the queer ones even the ones that never say slurs even the ones who have blm in their bios can be racist, yall don’t want solidarity with us u want a pat on the back for being a “”””leftist””””

[eradicatetehnormal]

Social politics online is so irritating because everyone is so shit at wording themselves. I'm watching a video By Ella Pastoral on how there's anti-blackness in the Gyaru community. The video talks about the origins and ideas behind Gyaru and how it has different subcultures. It brings up B-Gyaru and some other trashy-looking subcultures, and how people mischaracterize the movement as Japanese girls intentionally making themselves look ugly.

Part of the video is dedicated to this rant about a Twitter user who made an insensitive thread where they called people dumbasses for not understanding that it's all Gyarus that appropriate black culture and that the point of the tanning is to rebel against the pale skin standards of beauty in Japan. That thread was in response to a video of a Japanese girl with tan skin and box braids doing makeup.

The person in the video calls the Twitter user and the Japanese girl, or their actions, "anti-black," and it's just like, are they? The phrase "Anti-black" implies a malicious intention on someone or something's part. It is possible that the girl *thinks* she's paying homage to or appreciating black culture without understanding the wider implications due to the history of appropriation, assimilation, and how specifically, black women have been condemned for dressing, acting, and looking "black" while women of other races of flourished BECAUSE of looking, acting, and dressing that way. Bitches like Kim Kardashian.

This isn't me excusing her. The idea that Japanese people, or people of any other culture that isn't some sort of black culture, aren't racist for wearing blackface or stealing black aesthetics because they come from a different cultural background is racist, or at the very least it can help perpetuate racism because there's the implication that because someone is from a different culture they have no obligation to LEARN, and when a black person is offended, it's actually completely the black person's fault and not at all the foreigners fault for not caring to understand why they aren't being accepted by the people are supposedly trying to appreciate. I don't think Ella would disagree with me here. I assume this was the point of the rant section of the video about the aforementioned Twitter thread, but she's bad at articulating that and connecting it to a broader point because she's barely acknowledging the possible intent of the girl with the box braids, instead opting to call her actions anti-black.

When it comes to that Twitter user, their thread was insensitive. I do however, think they were responding to a specific type of person. You see, online especially, there is this type of person, who tends to be more liberal in terms of their politics. They LOVE Japanese animation and/or fashion aesthetics, but then they have a weird hatred towards Japanese people and don't even try to understand their culture. They're the type of people who think that Lolita fashion is meant to sexualize little girls. If this person is truly blasian (people lie about their race all the time online), then it's unlikely that they were actively trying to dismiss black people and may have only been using the "It's not all Gyaru" defense because they felt like once again, people were refusing to engage with Japanese culture and score few brownie points by calling something racist or fetishistic. Ella later said the person in the Twitter thread probably has a fetishization problem, but in light of what I just typed about, that feels dismissive. Oftentimes, in America, Asian people tend to group themselves together because socially they're put in the same box and the cultures were all treated the same. Bitches were all oriental up until very recently. So yeah, it probably hurts them as someone who's half Asian to see people dismiss Asian cultures and ideas as racist or fetishistic without addressing the nuances or looking at other aspects of what is being critiqued.

It's around the 20-minute mark that Ella really starts spitting. She talks about how some Gyaru girl's tendencies to tan their skin to black complexions and steal black hairstyles aligned with the false idea that Gyaru is meant to be ugly, is anti-black on principle. That using black aesthetics as a means of counter-culture against Japanese ideals is anti-black as it's insinuating that black people are somehow in opposition to Japanese people. These are great points, but I had to sludge through a rant with half points and a shotty example to get there.

Ella Pastoral isn't a bad channel. Quite the opposite, but I feel like she was being a bit internet-brained with this video, which is something no one is above. It is also worth bringing up that there are times when people are TOO defensive of one's culture that they'll use bad examples or straight up just defend racist behavior. Like, remember that Japanese comedian who came under fire for doing blackface? I once saw another Japanese guy who was RAISED IN AMERICA defend him because "He wasn't doing blackface. He was just parodying Eddy Murphy". Okay, bitch. Whatever you say.

Edit: I do want to preference that the rest of the video is fantastic