#inter-community hostility

[nonbinarymlm]

I think it’s also important to accept that sometimes people will be wrong about their own identity. I mean, sometimes the leading experts in a field are still figuring things out or working without all the information, you know? It’s part of the process. 

Sometimes people will be wrong about their identities, and that’s okay. They’re on a journey and this is a step in that journey. It is not your job to fix or correct someone. You should NOT try. You can never know for sure who still has some serious learning ahead of them about themselves. It’s is NOT in any way morally wrong to still be in the process of learning about your identity or even be mistaken about your own identity. It’s part of the journey to learn about yourself. 

If someone’s a close friend you can serve as a sounding board and maybe gently tell them the impression they give you if they’re open to it, but that’s it.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve been right about people in the past or not. Do not try to “fix” anyone’s identity. It literally does not matter if you’re ultimately right about where they end up in terms of labels, that is their journey and you don’t truly know it.

I gotta say, so much queer intra-community horseshit dropped off my shoulders when I decided to adopt a firm policy that everyone is the expert in their own identity, the single most knowledgeable person about what it's like to live life in their own skin, and that if someone describes their experience in ways I find contradictory or paradoxical I should do them the courtesy of presuming that they are striving to express something very specific and nuanced, rather than leaping to the conclusion that they're just dumb and using words wrong.

Sure, there are some combinations of identity terms that I look at and go "hmm, I don't get how that works." I'm still a human being. But there's a big difference between not getting how something works versus insisting that it doesn't.

[teratosubmission]

Have you ever considered how your relationship with a monster could be judged by your community?

TW: racism

You’d think that a world where humans and monsters freely mix would make it easy to pursue inter-monster relations, but the truth is that old barriers die hard.

From the moment you got with your Monster BF, you’ve attracted an array of criticism. Guys that complain about you ‘stepping out’ instead of getting with someone of your own species. People and monsters who couldn’t accept that you could be with someone significantly bigger and stronger than you without it being ‘icky’. People who try to ‘psychoanalyze’ you, calling you all sorts of insults thinly veiled as medical and political jargon.

And your Loving BF had to endure such insults from the monster community, as well. Continually mocked for being so ‘weak’ He could only handle the frailest of races, not being monster enough to handle one of His own kind. Hurled accusations of exploiting a weak human, that He relished in such an exploitative power imbalance. Insinuations of fetishizing a creature He could easily control.

They couldn’t be farther from the truth. Granted, He is more than plenty for you, which you absolutely adored, and He loved overpowering you with His mind-blowing lovemaking. But that was only part of the equation. They didn’t see how your personalities meshed together as a unit. They didn’t see his beautiful little quirks, and how cutely He responded to your own. They couldn’t see how He just… gets you. Like a piece that just fell in perfectly completing you. You loved Him for who he was, and He loved you for who you are, and that chemistry was what made everything special. Including the bedroom.

But lately, its like no matter where you go, you cant escape the judgements and microaggressions. The two of you could go out to a restaurant together and you would feel all the waiters do a double take. Maybe your tea glass stays empty most of the time as they prefer to avoid the awkwardness of addressing a human and monster together. Maybe their attitude is a little off, as their reactions to this ‘uncanny’ relationship range from apprehensive curiosity to downright hostile.

You’d be hyper-aware of your bruising when your Monster S/O rails you a little too hard. You’d happily claim them as badges of honor, but you’ve been cornered by one too many humans ‘concerned’ that Your Monster may be taking advantage of you. And despite your refutations and continued defense of Your Lovely BF, its starting to get to your head.

You can feel the eyes everywhere, the silent judgement from both humans and monsters. When you showed up to his workplace to surprise him, you got ignored by the monsters, assuming you were some thirsty bitch hoping to harass one of their workers. When He showed up to yours, your coworkers refused, without even consulting you, assuming someone like you would -never- allow yourself in the clutches of a monster like Him. When you bitched them out for that, they doubled down, even though they’ve let other S/O’s visit.

You love your Monster Boyfriend to death, and you know that part of being in a relationship is to deal with all the hardships together and be stronger from it. But it’s like an eternal pressure building against you: never letting up, never letting go, and it feels like someday it's going to topple over and bury you. You wish you never had to deal with this at all.

And from how crushed He's been looking lately as well, it’s been getting to Him, too.

[transmultiphobia-discussion]

Hello, and welcome to transmultiphobia discussion!

I had the idea to create this blog for a while and now decided to put it into action. This blog centered around transmultiphobia, or alternatively monogenderism, the specific bigotry and oppression towards multigendered individuals- people who exist within multiple gendered categories (or simply, identify with more than one gender).

If you want to understand more of the basics of transmultiphobia and how it works, here is the coining post going over it.

Monogenderism is a term I will use that specifically focuses on the erasure, ignorance, and hostility towards multigender individuals while upholding monogender identity, but it may be used as a synonym to transmultiphobia. (EDIT: Expanding on this; I use it similarly to the idea of monogender normativity, that being the concept that monogender is the baseline expectation of all people, and how that idea shows in people's attitudes towards or lack of recognition of multigenders).

Multigender people (bigender, pangender, polygender, genderfluid, etc.) are often left out of discussions, seen as less important or too small to consider, had our identities attacked, accused of being predatory, invaders, had our genders otherized or seen as less real than monogenders (degendering), taken less seriously or as some punchline without actual care to us as people, forced to fit into binary categories/ideas, left out of discussions regarding nonbinary people or not acknowledged to be part of the nonbinary community at all, told to other ourselves from monogender people, told to pick a side, told we aren't real, told we all have interalized transphobia and can't accept we're either trans or cis, and many more. All for existing within the queer community as multigendered. I feel there is little acknowledgement of how we experience identity in people's conversations, when defining terms, and when they go to police who and who doesn't belong. I want to start up more discussions surrounding the way multigender people are treated both in and outside the queer community, and that having and using a word to describe that experience can help navigate it.

I view transmultiphobia as a subset of exorsexism (the belief in a strict gender binary, a form of bigotry against people who don't neatly fit the gender binary), rooted in (trans)misogyny, oppositional sexism (a term coined by Julia Serano based on the idea that man and woman are exclusive, opposing categories), beliefs found in biphobia, and of course transphobia. There can be other bigotries surrounding it, but I found these to be the most frequent culprits in what causes these attitudes towards multigender people.

I also want to say this blog is for all multigender people to talk about their oppression, no matter the genders they identify with- it doesn't have to be man+woman. Though I will say that there is a specific treatment that people who identify as both a man and a woman go through with navigating society existing in both those categories. Not that it's more important or worse than what other multigender people go through, just that it's unique to them and there is quite a lack of focus on their issues that deserves to be given voice to.

Important links:

The Similarities Between Biphobia and Transmultiphobia

You Can't Win

Transmasc Lesbianism

why have us queer people as a community normalized terms like "boygirl" or "girlboy" or other things like that but not like. the actual experience of being multigender

Yeah yeah, okay, we get it, male/female multigenders are “valid”. But move past the nonprofit infographic nonsense for a second

Chameleon

Chameleon (2)

Good Bigender

It's so wild to me that as a community we're still so hostile to multigender and genderfluid people existing in gay and lesbian spaces

Genderfucked

(I am absolutely open to being sent multigender focused posts and links/articles outside of tumblr, finding ones about discrimination multigender people face has been hard so anything will do! I actually plan to write and publish essays relating to multigender identity someday).

A quick FAQ just in case:

Is transmultiphobia really a necessary term? Isn't it just exorsexism/transphobia?

Transmultiphobia IS exorsexism and transphobia, but there are ways it's used against people who exist in multiple gender categories specifically that is often left out in discussions of exorsexism/transphobia. I see it perpetuated by trans and nonbinary allies often, and discussions/ideas that may support non-multigender trans and nonbinary people may not support us.

Does this mean trans people who aren't multigender have privilege over multigender people?

Nope! Not at all. No trans person is "preferred" over the other, and to say this would be measuring how bad each trans persons oppression really is in comparison to another, which is useless and doesn't do anything to help anyone. Trans people who aren't multigender are capable of being hateful towards and furthering anti-multigender narratives, but to say they have it "better" than multigenders would be untruthful and ignorant. Bigoted I would say.

I don't feel like the discrimination multigender people face is significant enough or unique from other forms of transphobia, so transmultiphobia shouldn't be a thing. Why do you feel the need to use this word?

Even if you don't feel like discrimination towards us is significant or 'unique,' there are quite a lot of us who feel the opposite and would like to have a word to talk about it. A lot of us feel alienated from both wider society and the queer community. If you think this way, I suggest you listen to multigender people when we talk about our experiences. On another note, this will not be a blog debating on this topic like so much of 'transandrophobia' discussions gets derailed about 95% of the time. I am frankly tired of seeing these debates and would rather focus on things more productive. I would also like to say that not every single thing we talk about on this blog that we face as multigender people is 100% exclusive to multigender people. That's not a definite line anyone can make and it's not saying other people don't face it too if multigender person talks about a particular thing they experience.

What is the goal of this blog?

I want to bring more awareness of multigender people's issues to the wider queer community and to consider us more in their activism, meanwhile giving multigenders a chance to speak about their experiences and to feel heard.

What's the deal with your banner?

My banner was made by @/bugbuoyx, the reason why I made it that was because tumblr decided to mark this blog as explicit without me ever having made a post or set anything for my blog theme. The reason why? Well the best I can go off of was because it has trans in it. haven't been given any other possibe explanation. But it has been resolved, lets just hope they don't do it again.

What's your opinion on XYZ???

I do want to keep the focus of this blog on multigender people first and foremost, and as such won't be bringing up any other "discourses" too much that may shift the focus and end up with fights on here. I am a person that aims for understanding and inclusivity first and foremost, so I am not against most things if it isn't truly harming anybody. I have self-identified in the past as a radical inclusionist, though I don't tend to use it much anymore as I don't think being accepting of all queer people should be any 'radical' stance and should just be decency.

I won't have any set dni yet, if it becomes a problem with some people then I'll set one, but I just don't want to divert attention away from the main purpose of this blog.

And so a little about me: I'm a member of a plural system, I don't talk too much about being plural and us being plural doesn't affect too much of my interactions. But we're working on communication and trying to share front space more recently (we presumably have pdid), so if I'm out of commission or not as active then that may be one of the reasons why. The other reason is that I won't always be in the mood to have discussions surrounding discrimination as it is a draining topic, so sometimes it'll take me a little longer to get to posting. You can refer to me by he/they pronouns :] feel free to ask off topic questions about my interests, plurality, etc.

I won't be adding on my main blog onto here, but I won't exactly keep it hidden by any means necessary and if you know it you know it. But I will say I also run @our-lesboy-experience

Sorry for the long intro post, sorry for how online I seem and am, and sorry if I possibly add onto it in the future!

EDIT: btw, you can filter "#examples of transmultiphobia" if you don't want to see actual hate

[sinistersuns]

i think we gotta be more careful about falling into the trap of placing heaps of blame on the most vulnerable groups around us because it’s easier, emotionally or otherwise, than going after those in power. like i mostly talk about transandrophobia right now and how transmascs get so much shit thrown at us because were easier to attack than cis people, and i’ve seen people do the same thing to transfems and NBs too. to me it’s extra disappointing when it’s someone who is vocally supportive of transmascs doing it (like generalizing all transfems as being hostile to transmascs/being transandrophobic). it’s of course important to talk about inter community issues and point out harmful behaviors and ideologies when we see them, and talk about how someone’s life experience might lead them to be that way, but singling out one type of trans person as The Culprit is not helpful and just feels like it further drives a wedge into our community. we may be able to perpetuate aspects of the transphobic systems cis people put in place, but none of us are responsible for them and we don’t benefit from them, past surface level “acceptance” from people who’d be more comfortable if one type of trans person or all of us didn’t exist at all

[absolutely-normal-about-x]

CARBON LORE: Society and Diggers

Carbon society is distinguished by the large number of islands on which they reside. As a result, a variety of cultures emerge, with the ruins of the previous society serving as a foundation for further development. The majority of these cultures differ from one another, but they all share a common concept: community. Most islands have tight-knit communities that frequently assist one another in difficult situations. They rely on others' assistance to ensure the process and, potentially, a more relaxed attitude. Because of cultural differences between the islands, there is no unified government, and the primary goal of these civilizations is to foster inter-island relations. This has resulted in a one-of-a-kind era of peace within carbon societies, akin to their halcyon days, but there are still problems that must be addressed.

Carbons use a mix of basic and ancient technology. Most of their civilization employs these ancient technologies. It also means that their power sources cannot be replicated easily, as they are not capable of creating a power source. Instead, they must locate and uncover its primary power source. Refractors are mostly found in ruins scattered throughout the planet. This type of responsibility is assigned to the Digouter, which translates as "digger."

Diggers include explorers, treasure hunters, and others. Their primary duty is to search the ancient ruins of Terra for valuable relics, technology, and refractors. They are responsible for ensuring that their civilization has enough power and resources, so they rely on their own efforts. Unfortunately, being a digger is not as easy as it appears, as there are more risks and dangers. The terra's ruins can be dangerous for a variety of reasons, including traps, hostile reaver bots, and the possibility of trickster spirits (Cyber Elves) leading diggers to their demise. As a result, many diggers require training to prepare them to deal with the dangers of the ruins. Most diggers begin their training at the age of ten, but due to their durability, they can withstand it. Diggers typically work in groups of two or more to ensure the success and survival of an expedition; those who go out alone are considered suicidal. Whoever survives as a lone digger with resources in tow is considered exceptionally skilled. Unfortunately, they are diggers who are motivated by greed and fortune and do not respect the law. They are commonly known as "air pirates."

Despite the many dangers of the job itself, many diggers choose either a sense of responsibility, adventure, or something more. In order to support diggers, an organization was formed to not only support them but also their civilization, called “The Digger’s Guild”. An interconnected organization whose main responsibility is to help islands and diggers alike. The guild is where Diggers can find different jobs to help people or support them. This leads to a unique distinction between Guild Diggers and Independent Diggers. While guild diggers are the ones that mostly stay on their main island to help the people there, dealing with difficulties, etc. The majority of the refractors they give to the guild are distributed among other diggers and islands. Meanwhile, an independent digger works alone or with their loved ones, typically traveling across Terra by airship, collecting relics and refractors to keep or trade to a nearby settlement. They frequently sign contracts to get jobs or, on occasion, accept a job from the guild to assist in a large expedition or something else.

[chadillacboseman]

Fuck it, I created a new Mortal Kombat race for an OC.

Race: Strakteran

History: The Strakteran were once one and the same with the Kytinn, a race of insectoid hive-mind creatures that hail from the island of Arnyek. At some point in their timeline, after the introduction of outside life forms, the species began to branch and evolve. While Kytinn are winged and form from larvae implanted into hosts, Strakteran take their characteristics from arachnids. It is theorized that many other insectoid races branched off as well, adapting to survive in various climates and against various threats.

Distribution: The Strakteran are a matriarchal society that hails from Ondarak, a rocky and rather inhospitable world comprised of deep cave systems and short daylight hours.

Etymology: Strakteran can have various levels of resemblance to their arachnid counterparts, with some sporting eight eyes, while others have six or four. Occasionally, a Strakteran will be born with only two, but they typically dwell closer to the surface in more well-lit areas or have had inter-breeding with binocular races. Most, if not all, have eight appendages, with four dedicated to movement and four that function as arms.

Strakteran possess mouths equipped with mandibles and venomous fangs; the level of toxicity in their venom is dependent on their subspecies.

Strakteran use many different methods of hunting, much like their arachnid counterparts. Most weave webs, while some prefer to chase prey, and still others use traps.

Strakteran are oviparous, reproducing by laying eggs in large clutches. The highly competitive pursuit of prey and territory often results in eggs being the target of rival clans.

Society: Unlike Kytinn, Strakteran do not have a hive mind, allowing each to act independently, though the matriarchal nature of their society does mean that females hold a higher rank.

Strakteran form "clans", small to midsize pods that center around the most mature female.

Envoys from various realms have attempted to make contact with the Strakteran, but are almost always met with violence. After Shao Kahn's annexation of Arnyek, they became wary of and hostile toward outsiders.

Culture: Though at first glance they may seem barbaric, Strakteran do have some semblance of culture; researchers have observed them vocalizing in what resembles song and have also recorded art on cave walls.

Strakteran young are cared for by the females of the clan in a communal setting, and orphans from other clans have been observed being accepted by former rivals.

[minecraftbookshelf]

Religion in the Empires: Fae Squad Edition

General disclaimer that, for the most part, the religions in the empires are not analogous to Christianity at all, beyond the general inevitable flavors that come from both the ccs and myself originating in culturally Christian environments.

The exception to this is a little bit the Rivendell siblings, as the way that was set up in canon and grown in the fandom does lend itself to some very Christianity-oriented looks at religion and religious trauma and, at least to an extent, that will be playing out. It will not be a major theme in anything most likely, but it’s there.

And reminder that the modern western approach to religion is historically unusual.

Katherine:

As Guardian of the Overgrown who is able to communicate with the Spring, Katherine culturally functions as a sort of priestess/conduit for Nature. Its actually a similar role to the one Pix holds in Pixandria in some ways, while being distinct because the Spring is less of a god in a pantheon (like the goddess of death that Pix is connected to) and is instead The Overgrown itself.

House Blossom is only one of the Fae Courts but all of them are more animistic than their more mortally-aligned neighbors.

Smajor:

The reform method of dealing with religious trauma. Is genuinely very religious on a personal level and so is kind of the default royal for presiding at religious events that Xornoth is technically ineligible for (elaborated on below)

On a more general level, Aeor’s church is one of Scott’s favorite places. It was the one place he could hide from his parents during the worst years and even the priests generally didn’t bother him there. When he’s mad at Xornoth it’s where he goes because he knows he won’t be followed. So aside from any religious aspects the church building is a Safe Space for him.

That being said does have some deep-running trauma from the fundamentalist practices and ideals that ruled during his parent’s reign and his childhood.

Xornoth:

“I will face god and walk backwards into hell.” Has a literal god living in their head and refuses to do what any god wants ever. Especially the one in their head.

Their relationship with Aeor is extremely complicated, mostly because they (Xornoth and Aeor) are in a weird sort of stasis where they can’t be openly hostile to each other because that would make Exor happy and Scott sad, which they’ve sort of reluctantly concluded are both things neither of them want to happen, to varying degrees. Xornoth avoids Aeor’s church, Aeor leaves Scott alone and continues to bless Rivendell with the usual level of protection and prosperity and they sort of continue through life ignoring each other.

Xornoth was officially labeled as a blasphemer by the high priest of Aeor under their parents’ rule, technically that was never rescinded but the current high priest doesn’t enforce or draw attention to it. (The main reason it hasn’t been rescinded is equal parts it is technically theologically accurate and Xornoth finds it funny/is very proud of it)

Shrub Berry:

As an inter-dimensional refugee they spent some time existing in a sort of religious limbo. The gnomes were very much about casual worship of the local patrons and she doesn’t know who protects the Undergrove for quite some time. Meeting the Mother Wolf is a huge relief for her, though the close connection that the Mother Wolf initiated was a bit of a shock.

-

Ocean Alliance

Wither Rose Alliance

[ben-learns-smth]

today is the 17th of may aka IDAHOBITA* (international day against homo- bi- inter- trans- aspec-hostility). officially it's "phobia" but I've chosen to adapt the practice of (german) queer activists to speak of queer-hostility. while you may argue it's based in a fear of the unknown, the related actions be it individual or systematic are not. they're hostile and threatening to queer lives.

today I'm thinking of those who have experienced (and continue to experience) queer hostility. those who experience it as violence. those who experience it as a legal system. those who experience it from the people meant to support and protect them. those who experience it from strangers. those who experience it and can't talk about it. thise who experience it and are vocal about the injustice. I'm thinking of you and I'm sending you a hug, a shoulder squeeze, a handshake, an affirmative nod. the suffering will end, the hostility will end, we deserve to live peaceful and joyful lives

today I'm asking cis, hetero, allo & endo people to become our allies, to seek out information how to support the queer community better. how to take allyship further than "yeah I'm chill with that". I'm asking you to speak up, to get loud, to get active. I'm asking people who aren't genderqueer and/or trans to become allies to trans and genderqueer people. I'm asking endo people to become allies to intersex people. to make space for conversations about gender, not only about breaking binary stereotypes but about allowing a multitude of complex relations to the idea of gender (including the rejection of it! not everyone has a gender, agender ppl exist!). I'm asking allo people (queer or not) to become allies for the aromantic and asexual community. love is love is a beautiful slogan, but love is not all there is and tbe split attraction model is a thing. amatonormativity is real, different forms of complex relationships are real and conversations about these and the experiences of aromantic and asexual people deserve space and attention.

today is a great day to learn about the hostility queer people experience, to show solidarity, to celebrate our wins and fight for more

[pencil-peach]

G Witch Onscreen Text: Episode 4

This is part FIVE in an ongoing series where i transcribe and discuss the text on monitors and screens in G Witch ! Because I just LOVE words ! We are on episode 4, "Unseen Trap"

<< Click here to go back to Episode 3!

(You reading this post rn) Join me....Under....The Cut....

This seems like a good a time as any to mention that in the Shukufuku opening, Suletta and Miorine are calling each other on the phone.

This gives us a good look at how the current Holder has a Golden Asticassia emblem on their notebook compared to the standard dark blue (compare Suletta's phone to Miorine's) and looking at Miorine's phone shows us that the Holder's first name is rendered in gold as well.

The interface of the online meeting program Vim is using to talk to his investors. We see this same program without changes used 21 years ago in the prologue. It seems that even in the future we never escape the twisted machinations of Zoom meetings....truly this too, is hell.

TEXT: (Left Image, Top Left) THREAT DETECTION EXERCISE EXERCISE PLAN: SEARCH SUPPORT IN MINE AREA

(Right Image, AREA MAP) SIMULATED MINE NO DETECTION MINE DETECTION MODE

The interface of the Threat Detection Exercise as well as the area map, used by the Spotter in the exercise.

TEXT: (Top Left) WEAPONS EXCHANGE AND UPGRADE CONTROL CONNECTIVITY TEST DEMI TRAINER MSJ-121 (Center) WEAPONS EXCHANGE MODE LINK CONNECTION: 72% CONNECTIVITY TEST

This is the screen seen by the Mechanic in the exercise, when the Demi Trainer swaps out its hand for the test gun to use in the second half of the exercise

TEXT: (Top Left) PASSIVE RADAR: UNAVAILABLE ACTIVE RADAR: UNAVAILABLE INTEGRATED COMMUNICATION SYSTEM: AVAILABLE

(Center) EXERCISE MODE EMISSION CONTROL SYSTEM

The screen inside the Demi Trainer, showing the mode its set to. A neat detail is that, in the top left, we can see that the passive and active radars are unavailable, which makes sense as that's the point of the exercise.

Not text, but did you notice that Chuchu is allowed to use her own custom Demi Trainer in the exercise? That's neat !

TEXT: Goat Noise

Analysis: This is a goat, I think

TEXT: GAY PEOPLE

Analysis: hehehe....eehehehehuhuhuuu....teehee! Teeheheeeehheee...uwaaaaa..!

TEXT: (Top Image, From top to bottom) THREAT DETECTION EXERCISE EXERCISE PLAN

PARTICIPANT TEAMS: Student teams made up of Pilots, Mechanics, and Spotters [data analyst]

EXERCISE ELEMENTS: DETECTION: Investigate MS threat using simulated mines. SNIPING: Respond to MS threat by shooting targets.

TEAM OBJECTIVES: Harmonize MS threat response capabilities with task requirements Enhance cooperation between Pilot, Mechanic, and Spotter with a strengthened inter-team approach. Continue to assess cross-functional MS threat response in hostile environments, operating under new concepts.

EXERCISE ELEMENTS FOR STUDENTS:

Pilot: Manual operation via direct visual recognition. Traverse mine area. Exchange weapons. Target sniping in shooting area.

Mechanic: Preliminary Maintenance. Support weapon exchange. Mid exercise repairs and adjustments.

Spotter: Search support in mine area. Search support in shooting area.

For details, please see >>HERE

EXERCISE SUPERVISION MS Threat Response Center

EXERCISE PLANNING TEAM MS Threat Response Center : 4th planning team

(Bottom Image) Reading Completed. You will receive a confirmation message once you have read this EXERCISE PLAN.

So, there's a lot here...lot of words. But there are 2 main takeaways I think, one more important than the other.

The first is that if you look under the Mechanic's responsibilities, you can actually see that "Preliminary Maintenance" is one of their duties, so while the teacher for the exercise was definitely being harsh when he wouldn't let Miorine suspend the exam to clean the spray off their Demi Trainer, he wasn't lying when he said that it WAS a part of the assignment.

The second is that this is a BIG manual, and Miorine somehow had it completely memorized (and able to put it into practice) by only reading through it one time. This is meant to demonstrate that she's very smart, obviously, but I think it's also implying that she has a photographic memory. (Which is how she had the entire genome sequence of her mother's tomatoes just at the tip of her fingers)

TEXT: (NOTE: For the sake of legibility, Suletta's correct answers will have an OK, and her incorrect answers will have an X) (Top to bottom) PILOTING DEPARTMENT ID No: LP041 NAME: SULETTA MERCURY

TEST: MOBILE HEAVY MACHINERY ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES ANSWER THE QUESTIONS BELOW >> 50 MIN.

QUESTION: 1. WHAT ARE THE FIRST FOUR STEPS IN THE MOBILE SUIT AND MOBILE CRAFT DESIGN PROCESS?

OK: PLAN. TEST. EVALUATE. IMPROVE.

2. WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WOULD NOT BE A CONSIDERATION IN MS DESIGN?

X: LEGAL RESTRICTIONS FOR CIVILIAN MOBILE CRAFT.

3. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MS AND MC?

X: MS ARE MORE DIFFICULT TO OPERATE.

4. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF PERMET-LINKED MS AND MC?

OK: SIMPLIFIED CONTROL MANAGEMENT. IMPROVED USABILITY.

5. WHO CREATES THE PROCESSES TO MASS PRODUCE NEW MS AND MC FOR CONSUMERS

X: FACTORY PERSONEL .

6. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO WORK TO A DETAILED SPECIFICATION WHEN ASSEMBLING MS FOR USE?

X: FOR WORK SAFETY.

Number 7 can't be made out. It has the word "LINK" in it though.

So, as we can see here, Suletta is not doing very well in her class. Out of the 6 questions we can see, she only got 2 right. You can't really blame her too much though, she's never been to a school before...

I think my favorite of her incorrect answers is Number 5. You can just see her reading that question, tapping her tablet pen on her lip before going, Oh! The people in the factories make the mobile suits, it has to be them!

Do your best Suletta...!

(The Asticassia emblem is also golden on her tests too. They REALLY will not let you forget that ur holding.)

TEXT: (From left to right) JUSTICE AND PEACE FOR EARTHIANS WE ARE SUFFERING! EARTHIAN RIGHTS WORK OR RESIST! DOWN WITH SPACIAN OPPRESSION SPACIAN CAPITALISM KILLS!

TEXT: BREAKING NEWS: DEMONSTRATORS TURN VIOLENT INSIDE EARTH FACILITY! EARTHIAN EXTREMISM RISING

If you aren't paying attention to the news report, the utter dissonance of the actual incident we just saw of Mobile Suits and gas canisters big enough to leave dents in the street being used against unarmed civilians running for their lives being reported on as the demonstrators themselves being violent extremists could be lost on you.

The actual words the news anchor uses here, "Business administrative laws" being enforced on "an illegal occupation" also serves to remove agency from spacian corporations and push blame onto the earthians. (You can also see this in the prologue)

It's like Martin says, the major media companies (like INN) rely on Spacian Capital, and their reporting on these topics will always be inherently biased towards the people keeping their lights on.

Not text, but Chuchu's family at home seem to primarily be mobile craft operators. (This is probably why in the epilogue, she appears to be working AS a mobile craft operator with Rouji)

Not much here, but I figure it important to mention that in the bottom left, you can see that the Demi Trainer ALSO has a Cockpit Voice Recorder. I had assumed it was strange for Aerial to have one, but perhaps it's standard for all MS units?

Regardless, I wouldn't put it past Prospera to use such a thing for her own ambition...

And that's all four episode 4 !! Not as much text this time, but there was still a lot to talk about!

And of course, as thanks for once again reaching the end, I have a gift for you...come closer....

...

.....

...

...

ONE THOUSAND KILLING BLOWS TECHNIQUE 👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊👊

DIE ONE MILLION DEATHS

If you aren't dead, click here to go to Episode 5! >>

If you aren't dead but hate chronological order, click here to go to the Masterpost!

[mesetacadre]

(not the original "maga communism" anon)

tbh i'm not so sure the kke's analysis is not homophobic (or transphobic), i read their statement on same-sex marriage and it rubbed me the wrong way. i don't think it was an issue of translation

https : // inter . kke . gr /en/articles/The-position-of-the-KKE-on-civil-marriage-of-same-sex-couples-and-its-impact-on-childrens-rights-00001/

what do you think of the text?

I hadn't read this text, like I said my opinion was informed on conversations with two KKE militants. The text flip-flops between what I'd consider a principled (albeit rushed in the context of their material situation, marriage abolition is not a realistic position to take at this time) rejection of marriage and the state involvement in it, along with a good point that just legislating marriage won't solve the oppression queer people suffer, and between backwards ideas of parenting and gender. I do think they do genuinely not oppose homosexuality in itself, like they say, they express that they don't think two men or two women can adequately raise a child because of "motherhood and fatherhood".

In the original post you're replying to I did say that "I am not saying that the KKE is free from reactionary tendencies and that it's a paragon of absolute social progress, but just like it isn't that, it is also not comparable with crypto-fascists or glorified socdems playing into transphobic or racist tendencies." and that, in the context of communist parties in the past "Just like we can understand that an individual communist today may be insufficiently educated and express reactionary views and hurt people because of this, I think the analogy can be made that these past communist people and parties hadn't yet been sufficiently educated by practice and theoretical discussions. We can't ignore the harm that they did, but we can recognize that it was in no way necessary, and that it was counterproductive, so we can acknowledge those mistakes, carefully separate those elements from the rest of their achievements, and learn about them.". And I still think these two statements hold true.

The KKE is a historical communist party, one that did not follow eurocommunism. While I'm not intimately familiar with the makeup of their Central Committee, it does seem that their 100 year trajectory along with the resistance against reformism has made their leadership entrenched in excessively orthodox anti-western positions, and they do identify the connection between pro-NATO elements in the Greek parliament with advancing queer rights: "It is important to note that government officials, in order to promote the bill, resort to crude anti-Sovietism and anti-communism, linking its promotion to the further integration of our country into the "camp" of Euro-Atlanticism".

The KKE is still an extremely positive force for Greek workers, their capacity for organization is unparalleled anywhere else in Europe, and I'm certain that, if the sufficient opportunity presented itself, they would be able to overthrow the Greek government. And like I said in the other post, we can acknowledge that, as harmful and backwards as their stated positions are, we can't wholly reject their project because of it, and we can probably expect these positions to change as leadership is renewed. I believe this because one of these militants I talked to is trans, and they (using a gender neutral pronoun to protect their identity as much as possible) do not feel unsafe within the KKE.

TL,DR: Yeah, some positions in that text really suck and are homophobic, transphobic, and generally backwards. But the context of the development of the party and my communication with a couple of militants leads me to believe it is not hostile within their ranks, and that they will improve on this sooner rather than later.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter 4: Mutual Aid Among the Barbarians

The great migrations. — New organization rendered necessary. — The village community. — Communal work. — Judicial procedure — Inter-tribal law. — Illustrations from the life of our contemporaries — Buryates. — Kabyles. — Caucasian mountaineers. — African stems.

It is not possible to study primitive mankind without being deeply impressed by the sociability it has displayed since its very first steps in life. Traces of human societies are found in the relics of both the oldest and the later stone age; and, when we come to observe the savages whose manners of life are still those of neolithic man, we find them closely bound together by an extremely ancient clan organization which enables them to combine their individually weak forces, to enjoy life in common, and to progress. Man is no exception in nature. He also is subject to the great principle of Mutual Aid which grants the best chances of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle for life. These were the conclusions arrived at in the previous chapters.

However, as soon as we come to a higher stage of civilization, and refer to history which already has something to say about that stage, we are bewildered by the struggles and conflicts which it reveals. The old bonds seem entirely to be broken. Stems are seen to fight against stems, tribes against tribes, individuals against individuals; and out of this chaotic contest of hostile forces, mankind issues divided into castes, enslaved to despots, separated into States always ready to wage war against each other. And, with this history of mankind in his hands, the pessimist philosopher triumphantly concludes that warfare and oppression are the very essence of human nature; that the warlike and predatory instincts of man can only be restrained within certain limits by a strong authority which enforces peace and thus gives an opportunity to the few and nobler ones to prepare a better life for humanity in times to come.

And yet, as soon as the every-day life of man during the historical period is submitted to a closer analysis and so it has been, of late, by many patient students of very early institutions — it appears at once under quite a different aspect. Leaving aside the preconceived ideas of most historians and their pronounced predilection for the dramatic aspects of history, we see that the very documents they habitually peruse are such as to exaggerate the part of human life given to struggles and to underrate its peaceful moods. The bright and sunny days are lost sight of in the gales and storms. Even in our own time, the cumbersome records which we prepare for the future historian, in our Press, our law courts, our Government offices, and even in our fiction and poetry, suffer from the same one-sidedness. They hand down to posterity the most minute descriptions of every war, every battle and skirmish, every contest and act of violence, every kind of individual suffering; but they hardly bear any trace of the countless acts of mutual support and devotion which every one of us knows from his own experience; they hardly take notice of what makes the very essence of our daily life — our social instincts and manners. No wonder, then, if the records of the past were so imperfect. The annalists of old never failed to chronicle the petty wars and calamities which harassed their contemporaries; but they paid no attention whatever to the life of the masses, although the masses chiefly used to toil peacefully while the few indulged in fighting. The epic poems, the inscriptions on monuments, the treaties of peace — nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. So that the best-intentioned historian unconsciously draws a distorted picture of the times he endeavours to depict; and, to restore the real proportion between conflict and union, we are now bound to enter into a minute analysis of thousands of small facts and faint indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with the aid of comparative ethnology; and, after having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which used to unite them.

Ere long history will have to be re-written on new lines, so as to take into account these two currents of human life and to appreciate the part played by each of them in evolution. But in the meantime we may avail ourselves of the immense preparatory work recently done towards restoring the leading features of the second current, so much neglected. From the better-known periods of history we may take some illustrations of the life of the masses, in order to indicate the part played by mutual support during those periods; and, in so doing, we may dispense (for the sake of brevity) from going as far back as the Egyptian, or even the Greek and Roman antiquity. For, in fact, the evolution of mankind has not had the character of one unbroken series. Several times civilization came to an end in one given region, with one given race, and began anew elsewhere, among other races. But at each fresh start it began again with the same clan institutions which we have seen among the savages. So that if we take the last start of our own civilization, when it began afresh in the first centuries of our era, among those whom the Romans called the “barbarians,” we shall have the whole scale of evolution, beginning with the gentes and ending in the institutions of our own time. To these illustrations the following pages will be devoted.

Men of science have not yet settled upon the causes which some two thousand years ago drove whole nations from Asia into Europe and resulted in the great migrations of barbarians which put an end to the West Roman Empire. One cause, however, is naturally suggested to the geographer as he contemplates the ruins of populous cities in the deserts of Central Asia, or follows the old beds of rivers now disappeared and the wide outlines of lakes now reduced to the size of mere ponds. It is desiccation: a quite recent desiccation, continued still at a speed which we formerly were not prepared to admit.[114] Against it man was powerless. When the inhabitants of North-West Mongolia and East Turkestan saw that water was abandoning them, they had no course open to them but to move down the broad valleys leading to the lowlands, and to thrust westwards the inhabitants of the plains.[115] Stems after stems were thus thrown into Europe, compelling other stems to move and to remove for centuries in succession, westwards and eastwards, in search of new and more or less permanent abodes. Races were mixing with races during those migrations, aborigines with immigrants, Aryans with Ural-Altayans; and it would have been no wonder if the social institutions which had kept them together in their mother countries had been totally wrecked during the stratification of races which took place in Europe and Asia. But they were not wrecked; they simply underwent the modification which was required by the new conditions of life.

The Teutons, the Celts, the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, and others, when they first came in contact with the Romans, were in a transitional state of social organization. The clan unions, based upon a real or supposed common origin, had kept them together for many thousands of years in succession. But these unions could answer their purpose so long only as there were no separate families within the gens or clan itself. However, for causes already mentioned, the separate patriarchal family had slowly but steadily developed within the clans, and in the long run it evidently meant the individual accumulation of wealth and power, and the hereditary transmission of both. The frequent migrations of the barbarians and the ensuing wars only hastened the division of the gentes into separate families, while the dispersing of stems and their mingling with strangers offered singular facilities for the ultimate disintegration of those unions which were based upon kinship. The barbarians thus stood in a position of either seeing their clans dissolved into loose aggregations of families, of which the wealthiest, especially if combining sacerdotal functions or military repute with wealth, would have succeeded in imposing their authority upon the others; or of finding out some new form of organization based upon some new principle.

Many stems had no force to resist disintegration: they broke up and were lost for history. But the more vigorous ones did not disintegrate. They came out of the ordeal with a new organization — the village community — which kept them together for the next fifteen centuries or more. The conception of a common territory, appropriated or protected by common efforts, was elaborated, and it took the place of the vanishing conceptions of common descent. The common gods gradually lost their character of ancestors and were endowed with a local territorial character. They became the gods or saints of a given locality; “the land” was identified with its inhabitants. Territorial unions grew up instead of the consanguine unions of old, and this new organization evidently offered many advantages under the given circumstances. It recognized the independence of the family and even emphasized it, the village community disclaiming all rights of interference in what was going on within the family enclosure; it gave much more freedom to personal initiative; it was not hostile in principle to union between men of different descent, and it maintained at the same time the necessary cohesion of action and thought, while it was strong enough to oppose the dominative tendencies of the minorities of wizards, priests, and professional or distinguished warriors. Consequently it became the primary cell of future organization, and with many nations the village community has retained this character until now.

It is now known, and scarcely contested, that the village community was not a specific feature of the Slavonians, nor even of the ancient Teutons. It prevailed in England during both the Saxon and Norman times, and partially survived till the last century;[116] it was at the bottom of the social organization of old Scotland, old Ireland, and old Wales. In France, the communal possession and the communal allotment of arable land by the village folkmote persisted from the first centuries of our era till the times of Turgot, who found the folkmotes “too noisy” and therefore abolished them. It survived Roman rule in Italy, and revived after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was the rule with the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, the Finns (in the pittäyä, as also, probably, the kihla-kunta), the Coures, and the Lives. The village community in India — past and present, Aryan and non-Aryan — is well known through the epoch-making works of Sir Henry Maine; and Elphinstone has described it among the Afghans. We also find it in the Mongolian oulous, the Kabyle thaddart, the Javanese dessa, the Malayan kota or tofa, and under a variety of names in Abyssinia, the Soudan, in the interior of Africa, with natives of both Americas, with all the small and large tribes of the Pacific archipelagoes. In short, we do not know one single human race or one single nation which has not had its period of village communities. This fact alone disposes of the theory according to which the village community in Europe would have been a servile growth. It is anterior to serfdom, and even servile submission was powerless to break it. It was a universal phase of evolution, a natural outcome of the clan organization, with all those stems, at least, which have played, or play still, some part in history.[117]

It was a natural growth, and an absolute uniformity in its structure was therefore not possible. As a rule, it was a union between families considered as of common descent and owning a certain territory in common. But with some stems, and under certain circumstances, the families used to grow very numerous before they threw off new buds in the shape of new families; five, six, or seven generations continued to live under the same roof, or within the same enclosure, owning their joint household and cattle in common, and taking their meals at the common hearth. They kept in such case to what ethnology knows as the “joint family,” or the “undivided household,” which we still see all over China, in India, in the South Slavonian zadruga, and occasionally find in Africa, in America, in Denmark, in North Russia, and West France.[118] With other stems, or in other circumstances, not yet well specified, the families did not attain the same proportions; the grandsons, and occasionally the sons, left the household as soon as they were married, and each of them started a new cell of his own. But, joint or not, clustered together or scattered in the woods, the families remained united into village communities; several villages were grouped into tribes; and the tribes joined into confederations. Such was the social organization which developed among the so-called “barbarians,” when they began to settle more or less permanently in Europe.

A very long evolution was required before the gentes, or clans, recognized the separate existence of a patriarchal family in a separate hut; but even after that had been recognized, the clan, as a rule, knew no personal inheritance of property. The few things which might have belonged personally to the individual were either destroyed on his grave or buried with him. The village community, on the contrary, fully recognized the private accumulation of wealth within the family and its hereditary transmission. But wealth was conceived exclusively in the shape of movable property, including cattle, implements, arms, and the dwelling house which — “like all things that can be destroyed by fire” — belonged to the same category.[119] As to private property in land, the village community did not, and could not, recognize anything of the kind, and, as a rule, it does not recognize it now. The land was the common property of the tribe, or of the whole stem, and the village community itself owned its part of the tribal territory so long only as the tribe did not claim a re-distribution of the village allotments. The clearing of the woods and the breaking of the prairies being mostly done by the communities or, at least, by the joint work of several families — always with the consent of the community — the cleared plots were held by each family for a term of four, twelve, or twenty years, after which term they were treated as parts of the arable land owned in common. Private property, or possession “for ever”, was as incompatible with the very principles and the religious conceptions of the village community as it was with the principles of the gens; so that a long influence of the Roman law and the Christian Church, which soon accepted the Roman principles, were required to accustom the barbarians to the idea of private property in land being possible.[120] And yet, even when such property, or possession for an unlimited time, was recognized, the owner of a separate estate remained a co-proprietor in the waste lands, forests, and grazing-grounds. Moreover, we continually see, especially in the history of Russia, that when a few families, acting separately, had taken possession of some land belonging to tribes which were treated as strangers, they very soon united together, and constituted a village community which in the third or fourth generation began to profess a community of origin.

A whole series of institutions, partly inherited from the clan period, have developed from that basis of common ownership of land during the long succession of centuries which was required to bring the barbarians under the dominion of States organized upon the Roman or Byzantine pattern. The village community was not only a union for guaranteeing to each one his fair share in the common land, but also a union for common culture, for mutual support in all possible forms, for protection from violence, and for a further development of knowledge, national bonds, and moral conceptions; and every change in the judicial, military, educational, or economical manners had to be decided at the folkmotes of the village, the tribe, or the confederation. The community being a continuation of the gens, it inherited all its functions. It was the universitas, the mir — a world in itself.

Common hunting, common fishing, and common culture of the orchards or the plantations of fruit trees was the rule with the old gentes. Common agriculture became the rule in the barbarian village communities. True, that direct testimony to this effect is scarce, and in the literature of antiquity we only have the passages of Diodorus and Julius Caesar relating to the inhabitants of the Lipari Islands, one of the Celt-Iberian tribes, and the Sueves. But there is no lack of evidence to prove that common agriculture was practised among some Teuton tribes, the Franks, and the old Scotch, Irish, and Welsh.[121] As to the later survivals of the same practice, they simply are countless. Even in perfectly Romanized France, common culture was habitual some five and twenty years ago in the Morbihan (Brittany).[122] The old Welsh cyvar, or joint team, as well as the common culture of the land allotted to the use of the village sanctuary are quite common among the tribes of Caucasus the least touched by civilization,[123] and like facts are of daily occurrence among the Russian peasants. Moreover, it is well known that many tribes of Brazil, Central America, and Mexico used to cultivate their fields in common, and that the same habit is widely spread among some Malayans, in New Caledonia, with several Negro stems, and so on.[124] In short, communal culture is so habitual with many Aryan, Ural-Altayan, Mongolian, Negro, Red Indian, Malayan, and Melanesian stems that we must consider it as a universal — though not as the only possible — form of primitive agriculture.[125]

Communal cultivation does not, however, imply by necessity communal consumption. Already under the clan organization we often see that when the boats laden with fruits or fish return to the village, the food they bring in is divided among the huts and the “long houses” inhabited by either several families or the youth, and is cooked separately at each separate hearth. The habit of taking meals in a narrower circle of relatives or associates thus prevails at an early period of clan life. It became the rule in the village community. Even the food grown in common was usually divided between the households after part of it had been laid in store for communal use. However, the tradition of communal meals was piously kept alive; every available opportunity, such as the commemoration of the ancestors, the religious festivals, the beginning and the end of field work, the births, the marriages, and the funerals, being seized upon to bring the community to a common meal. Even now this habit, well known in this country as the “harvest supper,” is the last to disappear. On the other hand, even when the fields had long since ceased to be tilled and sown in common, a variety of agricultural work continued, and continues still, to be performed by the community. Some part of the communal land is still cultivated in many cases in common, either for the use of the destitute, or for refilling the communal stores, or for using the produce at the religious festivals. The irrigation canals are digged and repaired in common. The communal meadows are mown by the community; and the sight of a Russian commune mowing a meadow — the men rivalling each other in their advance with the scythe, while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into heaps — is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work might be and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is divided among the separate households, and it is evident that no one has the right of taking hay from a neighbour’s stack without his permission; but the limitation of this last rule among the Caucasian Ossetes is most noteworthy. When the cuckoo cries and announces that spring is coming, and that the meadows will soon be clothed again with grass, every one in need has the right of taking from a neighbour’s stack the hay he wants for his cattle.[126] The old communal rights are thus re-asserted, as if to prove how contrary unbridled individualism is to human nature.

When the European traveller lands in some small island of the Pacific, and, seeing at a distance a grove of palm trees, walks in that direction, he is astonished to discover that the little villages are connected by roads paved with big stones, quite comfortable for the unshod natives, and very similar to the “old roads” of the Swiss mountains. Such roads were traced by the “barbarians” all over Europe, and one must have travelled in wild, thinly-peopled countries, far away from the chief lines of communication, to realize in full the immense work that must have been performed by the barbarian communities in order to conquer the woody and marshy wilderness which Europe was some two thousand years ago. Isolated families, having no tools, and weak as they were, could not have conquered it; the wilderness would have overpowered them. Village communities alone, working in common, could master the wild forests, the sinking marshes, and the endless steppes. The rough roads, the ferries, the wooden bridges taken away in the winter and rebuilt after the spring flood was over, the fences and the palisaded walls of the villages, the earthen forts and the small towers with which the territory was dotted — all these were the work of the barbarian communities. And when a community grew numerous it used to throw off a new bud. A new community arose at a distance, thus step by step bringing the woods and the steppes under the dominion of man. The whole making of European nations was such a budding of the village communities. Even now-a-days the Russian peasants, if they are not quite broken down by misery, migrate in communities, and they till the soil and build the houses in common when they settle on the banks of the Amur, or in Manitoba. And even the English, when they first began to colonize America, used to return to the old system; they grouped into village communities.[127]

The village community was the chief arm of the barbarians in their hard struggle against a hostile nature. It also was the bond they opposed to oppression by the cunningest and the strongest which so easily might have developed during those disturbed times. The imaginary barbarian — the man who fights and kills at his mere caprice — existed no more than the “bloodthirsty” savage. The real barbarian was living, on the contrary, under a wide series of institutions, imbued with considerations as to what may be useful or noxious to his tribe or confederation, and these institutions were piously handed down from generation to generation in verses and songs, in proverbs or triads, in sentences and instructions. The more we study them the more we recognize the narrow bonds which united men in their villages. Every quarrel arising between two individuals was treated as a communal affair — even the offensive words that might have been uttered during a quarrel being considered as an offence to the community and its ancestors. They had to be repaired by amends made both to the individual and the community;[128] and if a quarrel ended in a fight and wounds, the man who stood by and did not interpose was treated as if he himself had inflicted the wounds.[129] The judicial procedure was imbued with the same spirit. Every dispute was brought first before mediators or arbiters, and it mostly ended with them, the arbiters playing a very important part in barbarian society. But if the case was too grave to be settled in this way, it came before the folkmote, which was bound “to find the sentence,” and pronounced it in a conditional form; that is, “such compensation was due, if the wrong be proved,” and the wrong had to be proved or disclaimed by six or twelve persons confirming or denying the fact by oath; ordeal being resorted to in case of contradiction between the two sets of jurors. Such procedure, which remained in force for more than two thousand years in succession, speaks volumes for itself; it shows how close were the bonds between all members of the community. Moreover, there was no other authority to enforce the decisions of the folkmote besides its own moral authority. The only possible menace was that the community might declare the rebel an outlaw, but even this menace was reciprocal. A man discontented with the folkmote could declare that he would abandon the tribe and go over to another tribe — a most dreadful menace, as it was sure to bring all kinds of misfortunes upon a tribe that might have been unfair to one of its members.[130] A rebellion against a right decision of the customary law was simply “inconceivable,” as Henry Maine has so well said, because “law, morality, and fact” could not be separated from each other in those times.[131] The moral authority of the commune was so great that even at a much later epoch, when the village communities fell into submission to the feudal lord, they maintained their judicial powers; they only permitted the lord, or his deputy, to “find” the above conditional sentence in accordance with the customary law he had sworn to follow, and to levy for himself the fine (the fred) due to the commune. But for a long time, the lord himself, if he remained a co-proprietor in the waste land of the commune, submitted in communal affairs to its decisions. Noble or ecclesiastic, he had to submit to the folkmote — Wer daselbst Wasser und Weid genusst, muss gehorsam sein — “Who enjoys here the right of water and pasture must obey” — was the old saying. Even when the peasants became serfs under the lord, he was bound to appear before the folkmote when they summoned him.[132]

In their conceptions of justice the barbarians evidently did not much differ from the savages. They also maintained the idea that a murder must be followed by putting the murderer to death; that wounds had to be punished by equal wounds, and that the wronged family was bound to fulfil the sentence of the customary law. This was a holy duty, a duty towards the ancestors, which had to be accomplished in broad daylight, never in secrecy, and rendered widely known. Therefore the most inspired passages of the sagas and epic poetry altogether are those which glorify what was supposed to be justice. The gods themselves joined in aiding it. However, the predominant feature of barbarian justice is, on the one hand, to limit the numbers of persons who may be involved in a feud, and, on the other hand, to extirpate the brutal idea of blood for blood and wounds for wounds, by substituting for it the system of compensation. The barbarian codes which were collections of common law rules written down for the use of judges — “first permitted, then encouraged, and at last enforced,” compensation instead of revenge.[133] The compensation has, however, been totally misunderstood by those who represented it as a fine, and as a sort of carte blanche given to the rich man to do whatever he liked. The compensation money (wergeld), which was quite different from the fine or fred,[134] was habitually so high for all kinds of active offences that it certainly was no encouragement for such offences. In case of a murder it usually exceeded all the possible fortune of the murderer “Eighteen times eighteen cows” is the compensation with the Ossetes who do not know how to reckon above eighteen, while with the African tribes it attains 800 cows or 100 camels with their young, or 416 sheep in the poorer tribes.[135] In the great majority of cases, the compensation money could not be paid at all, so that the murderer had no issue but to induce the wronged family, by repentance, to adopt him. Even now, in the Caucasus, when feuds come to an end, the offender touches with his lips the breast of the oldest woman of the tribe, and becomes a “milk-brother” to all men of the wronged family.[136] With several African tribes he must give his daughter, or sister, in marriage to some one of the family; with other tribes he is bound to marry the woman whom he has made a widow; and in all cases he becomes a member of the family, whose opinion is taken in all important family matters.[137]

Far from acting with disregard to human life, the barbarians, moreover, knew nothing of the horrid punishments introduced at a later epoch by the laic and canonic laws under Roman and Byzantine influence. For, if the Saxon code admitted the death penalty rather freely even in cases of incendiarism and armed robbery, the other barbarian codes pronounced it exclusively in cases of betrayal of one’s kin, and sacrilege against the community’s gods, as the only means to appease the gods.

All this, as seen is very far from the supposed “moral dissoluteness” of the barbarians. On the contrary, we cannot but admire the deeply moral principles elaborated within the early village communities which found their expression in Welsh triads, in legends about King Arthur, in Brehon commentaries,[138] in old German legends and so on, or find still their expression in the sayings of the modern barbarians. In his introduction to The Story of Burnt Njal, George Dasent very justly sums up as follows the qualities of a Northman, as they appear in the sagas: —

To do what lay before him openly and like a man, without fear of either foes, fiends, or fate;... to be free and daring in all his deeds; to be gentle and generous to his friends and kinsmen; to be stern and grim to his foes [those who are under the lex talionis], but even towards them to fulfil all bounden duties.... To be no truce-breaker, nor tale-bearer, nor backbiter. To utter nothing against any man that he would not dare to tell him to his face. To turn no man from his door who sought food or shelter, even though he were a foe.[139]

The same or still better principles permeate the Welsh epic poetry and triads. To act “according to the nature of mildness and the principles of equity,” without regard to the foes or to the friends, and “to repair the wrong,” are the highest duties of man; “evil is death, good is life,” exclaims the poet legislator.[140] “The World would be fool, if agreements made on lips were not honourable” — the Brehon law says. And the humble Shamanist Mordovian, after having praised the same qualities, will add, moreover, in his principles of customary law, that “among neighbours the cow and the milking-jar are in common.” that, “the cow must be milked for yourself and him who may ask milk;” that “the body of a child reddens from the stroke, but the face of him who strikes reddens from shame;“[141] and so on. Many pages might be filled with like principles expressed and followed by the “barbarians.”

One feature more of the old village communities deserves a special mention. It is the gradual extension of the circle of men embraced by the feelings of solidarity. Not only the tribes federated into stems, but the stems as well, even though of different origin, joined together in confederations. Some unions were so close that, for instance, the Vandals, after part of their confederation had left for the Rhine, and thence went over to Spain and Africa, respected for forty consecutive years the landmarks and the abandoned villages of their confederates, and did not take possession of them until they had ascertained through envoys that their confederates did not intend to return.

With other barbarians, the soil was cultivated by one part of the stem, while the other part fought on or beyond the frontiers of the common territory. As to the leagues between several stems, they were quite habitual. The Sicambers united with the Cherusques and the Sueves, the Quades with the Sarmates; the Sarmates with the Alans, the Carpes, and the Huns. Later on, we also see the conception of nations gradually developing in Europe, long before anything like a State had grown in any part of the continent occupied by the barbarians. These nations — for it is impossible to refuse the name of a nation to the Merovingian France, or to the Russia of the eleventh and twelfth century — were nevertheless kept together by nothing else but a community of language, and a tacit agreement of the small republics to take their dukes from none but one special family.

Wars were certainly unavoidable; migration means war; but Sir Henry Maine has already fully proved in his remarkable study of the tribal origin of International Law, that “Man has never been so ferocious or so stupid as to submit to such an evil as war without some kind of effort to prevent it,” and he has shown how exceedingly great is “the number of ancient institutions which bear the marks of a design to stand in the way of war, or to provide an alternative to it.”[142] In reality, man is so far from the warlike being he is supposed to be, that when the barbarians had once settled they so rapidly lost the very habits of warfare that very soon they were compelled to keep special dukes followed by special scholæ or bands of warriors, in order to protect them from possible intruders. They preferred peaceful toil to war, the very peacefulness of man being the cause of the specialization of the warrior’s trade, which specialization resulted later on in serfdom and in all the wars of the “States period” of human history.

History finds great difficulties in restoring to life the institutions of the barbarians. At every step the historian meets with some faint indication which he is unable to explain with the aid of his own documents only. But a broad light is thrown on the past as soon as we refer to the institutions of the very numerous tribes which are still living under a social organization almost identical with that of our barbarian ancestors. Here we simply have the difficulty of choice, because the islands of the Pacific, the steppes of Asia, and the tablelands of Africa are real historical museums containing specimens of all possible intermediate stages which mankind has lived through, when passing from the savage gentes up to the States’ organization. Let us, then, examine a few of those specimens.

If we take the village communities of the Mongol Buryates, especially those of the Kudinsk Steppe on the upper Lena which have better escaped Russian influence, we have fair representatives of barbarians in a transitional state, between cattle-breeding and agriculture.[143] These Buryates are still living in “joint families”; that is, although each son, when he is married, goes to live in a separate hut, the huts of at least three generations remain within the same enclosure, and the joint family work in common in their fields, and own in common their joint households and their cattle, as well as their “calves’ grounds” (small fenced patches of soil kept under soft grass for the rearing of calves). As a rule, the meals are taken separately in each hut; but when meat is roasted, all the twenty to sixty members of the joint household feast together. Several joint households which live in a cluster, as well as several smaller families settled in the same village — mostly débris of joint households accidentally broken up — make the oulous, or the village community; several oulouses make a tribe; and the, forty-six tribes, or clans, of the Kudinsk Steppe are united into one confederation. Smaller and closer confederations are entered into, as necessity arises for special wants, by several tribes. They know no private property in land — the land being held in common by the oulous, or rather by the confederation, and if it becomes necessary, the territory is re-allotted between the different oulouses at a folkmote of the tribe, and between the forty-six tribes at a folkmote of the confederation. It is worthy of note that the same organization prevails among all the 250,000 Buryates of East Siberia, although they have been for three centuries under Russian rule, and are well acquainted with Russian institutions.

With all that, inequalities of fortune rapidly develop among the Buryates, especially since the Russian Government is giving an exaggerated importance to their elected taishas (princes), whom it considers as responsible tax-collectors and representatives of the confederations in their administrative and even commercial relations with the Russians. The channels for the enrichment of the few are thus many, while the impoverishment of the great number goes hand in hand, through the appropriation of the Buryate lands by the Russians. But it is a habit with the Buryates, especially those of Kudinsk — and habit is more than law — that if a family has lost its cattle, the richer families give it some cows and horses that it may recover. As to the destitute man who has no family, he takes his meals in the huts of his congeners; he enters a hut, takes — by right, not for charity — his seat by the fire, and shares the meal which always is scrupulously divided into equal parts; he sleeps where he has taken his evening meal. Altogether, the Russian conquerors of Siberia were so much struck by the communistic practices of the Buryates, that they gave them the name of Bratskiye — “the Brotherly Ones” — and reported to Moscow. “With them everything is in common; whatever they have is shared in common.” Even now, when the Lena Buryates sell their wheat, or send some of their cattle to be sold to a Russian butcher, the families of the oulous, or the tribe, put their wheat and cattle together, and sell it as a whole. Each oulous has, moreover, its grain store for loans in case of need, its communal baking oven (the four banal of the old French communities), and its blacksmith, who, like the blacksmith of the Indian communities,[144] being a member of the community, is never paid for his work within the community. He must make it for nothing, and if he utilizes his spare time for fabricating the small plates of chiselled and silvered iron which are used in Buryate land for the decoration of dress, he may occasionally sell them to a woman from another clan, but to the women of his own clan the attire is presented as a gift. Selling and buying cannot take place within the community, and the rule is so severe that when a richer family hires a labourer the labourer must be taken from another clan or from among the Russians. This habit is evidently not specific to the Buryates; it is so widely spread among the modern barbarians, Aryan and Ural-Altayan, that it must have been universal among our ancestors.

The feeling of union within the confederation is kept alive by the common interests of the tribes, their folkmotes, and the festivities which are usually kept in connection with the folkmotes. The same feeling is, however, maintained by another institution, the aba, or common hunt, which is a reminiscence of a very remote past. Every autumn, the forty-six clans of Kudinsk come together for such a hunt, the produce of which is divided among all the families. Moreover, national abas, to assert the unity of the whole Buryate nation, are convoked from time to time. In such cases, all Buryate clans which are scattered for hundreds of miles west and east of Lake Baikal, are bound to send their delegate hunters. Thousands of men come together, each one bringing provisions for a whole month. Every one’s share must be equal to all the others, and therefore, before being put together, they are weighed by an elected elder (always “with the hand”: scales would be a profanation of the old custom). After that the hunters divide into bands of twenty, and the parties go hunting according to a well-settled plan. In such abas the entire Buryate nation revives its epic traditions of a time when it was united in a powerful league. Let me add that such communal hunts are quite usual with the Red Indians and the Chinese on the banks of the Usuri (the kada).[145]

With the Kabyles, whose manners of life have been so well described by two French explorers,[146] we have barbarians still more advanced in agriculture. Their fields, irrigated and manured, are well attended to, and in the hilly tracts every available plot of land is cultivated by the spade. The Kabyles have known many vicissitudes in their history; they have followed for sometime the Mussulman law of inheritance, but, being adverse to it, they have returned, 150 years ago, to the tribal customary law of old. Accordingly, their land-tenure is of a mixed character, and private property in land exists side by side with communal possession. Still, the basis of their present organization is the village community, the thaddart, which usually consists of several joint families (kharoubas), claiming a community of origin, as well as of smaller families of strangers. Several villages are grouped into clans or tribes (ârch); several tribes make the confederation (thak’ebilt); and several confederations may occasionally enter into a league, chiefly for purposes of armed defence.

The Kabyles know no authority whatever besides that of the djemmâa, or folkmote of the village community. All men of age take part in it, in the open air, or in a special building provided with stone seats, and the decisions of the djemmâa are evidently taken at unanimity: that is, the discussions continue until all present agree to accept, or to submit to, some decision. There being no authority in a village community to impose a decision, this system has been practised by mankind wherever there have been village communities, and it is practised still wherever they continue to exist, i.e. by several hundred million men all over the world. The djemmâa nominates its executive — the elder, the scribe, and the treasurer; it assesses its own taxes; and it manages the repartition of the common lands, as well as all kinds of works of public utility. A great deal of work is done in common: the roads, the mosques, the fountains, the irrigation canals, the towers erected for protection from robbers, the fences, and so on, are built by the village community; while the high-roads, the larger mosques, and the great market-places are the work of the tribe. Many traces of common culture continue to exist, and the houses continue to be built by, or with the aid of, all men and women of the village. Altogether, the “aids” are of daily occurrence, and are continually called in for the cultivation of the fields, for harvesting, and so on. As to the skilled work, each community has its blacksmith, who enjoys his part of the communal land, and works for the community; when the tilling season approaches he visits every house, and repairs the tools and the ploughs, without expecting any pay, while the making of new ploughs is considered as a pious work which can by no means be recompensed in money, or by any other form of salary.

As the Kabyles already have private property, they evidently have both rich and poor among them. But like all people who closely live together, and know how poverty begins, they consider it as an accident which may visit every one. “Don’t say that you will never wear the beggar’s bag, nor go to prison,” is a proverb of the Russian peasants; the Kabyles practise it, and no difference can be detected in the external behaviour between rich and poor; when the poor convokes an “aid,” the rich man works in his field, just as the poor man does it reciprocally in his turn.[147] Moreover, the djemmâas set aside certain gardens and fields, sometimes cultivated in common, for the use of the poorest members. Many like customs continue to exist. As the poorer families would not be able to buy meat, meat is regularly bought with the money of the fines, or the gifts to the djemmâa, or the payments for the use of the communal olive-oil basins, and it is distributed in equal parts among those who cannot afford buying meat themselves. And when a sheep or a bullock is killed by a family for its own use on a day which is not a market day, the fact is announced in the streets by the village crier, in order that sick people and pregnant women may take of it what they want. Mutual support permeates the life of the Kabyles, and if one of them, during a journey abroad, meets with another Kabyle in need, he is bound to come to his aid, even at the risk of his own fortune and life; if this has not been done, the djemmâa of the man who has suffered from such neglect may lodge a complaint, and the djemmâa of the selfish man will at once make good the loss. We thus come across a custom which is familiar to the students of the mediaeval merchant guilds. Every stranger who enters a Kabyle village has right to housing in the winter, and his horses can always graze on the communal lands for twenty-four hours. But in case of need he can reckon upon an almost unlimited support. Thus, during the famine of 1867–68, the Kabyles received and fed every one who sought refuge in their villages, without distinction of origin. In the district of Dellys, no less than 12,000 people who came from all parts of Algeria, and even from Morocco, were fed in this way. While people died from starvation all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death due to this cause on Kabylian soil. The djemmâas, depriving themselves of necessaries, organized relief, without ever asking any aid from the Government, or uttering the slightest complaint; they considered it as a natural duty. And while among the European settlers all kind of police measures were taken to prevent thefts and disorder resulting from such an influx of strangers, nothing of the kind was required on the Kabyles’ territory: the djemmâas needed neither aid nor protection from without.[148]

I can only cursorily mention two other most interesting features of Kabyle life; namely, the anaya, or protection granted to wells, canals, mosques, marketplaces, some roads, and so on, in case of war, and the çofs. In the anaya we have a series of institutions both for diminishing the evils of war and for preventing conflicts. Thus the market-place is anaya, especially if it stands on a frontier and brings Kabyles and strangers together; no one dares disturb peace in the market, and if a disturbance arises, it is quelled at once by the strangers who have gathered in the market town. The road upon which the women go from the village to the fountain also is anaya in case of war; and so on. As to the çof it is a widely spread form of association, having some characters of the mediaeval Bürgschaften or Gegilden, as well as of societies both for mutual protection and for various purposes — intellectual, political, and emotional — which cannot be satisfied by the territorial organization of the village, the clan, and the confederation. The çof knows no territorial limits; it recruits its members in various villages, even among strangers; and it protects them in all possible eventualities of life. Altogether, it is an attempt at supplementing the territorial grouping by an extra-territorial grouping intended to give an expression to mutual affinities of all kinds across the frontiers. The free international association of individual tastes and ideas, which we consider as one of the best features of our own life, has thus its origin in barbarian antiquity.

The mountaineers of Caucasia offer another extremely instructive field for illustrations of the same kind. In studying the present customs of the Ossetes — their joint families and communes and their judiciary conceptions — Professor Kovalevsky, in a remarkable work on Modern Custom and Ancient Law was enabled step by step to trace the similar dispositions of the old barbarian codes and even to study the origins of feudalism. With other Caucasian stems we occasionally catch a glimpse into the origin of the village community in those cases where it was not tribal but originated from a voluntary union between families of distinct origin. Such was recently the case with some Khevsoure villages, the inhabitants of which took the oath of “community and fraternity.”[149] In another part of Caucasus, Daghestan, we see the growth of feudal relations between two tribes, both maintaining at the same time their village communities (and even traces of the gentile “classes”), and thus giving a living illustration of the forms taken by the conquest of Italy and Gaul by the barbarians. The victorious race, the Lezghines, who have conquered several Georgian and Tartar villages in the Zakataly district, did not bring them under the dominion of separate families; they constituted a feudal clan which now includes 12,000 households in three villages, and owns in common no less than twenty Georgian and Tartar villages. The conquerors divided their own land among their clans, and the clans divided it in equal parts among the families; but they did not interfere with the djemmâas of their tributaries which still practise the habit mentioned by Julius Caesar; namely, the djemmâa decides each year which part of the communal territory must be cultivated, and this land is divided into as many parts as there are families, and the parts are distributed by lot. It is worthy of note that although proletarians are of common occurrence among the Lezghines (who live under a system of private property in land, and common ownership of serfs[150]) they are rare among their Georgian serfs, who continue to hold their land in common. As to the customary law of the Caucasian mountaineers, it is much the same as that of the Longobards or Salic Franks, and several of its dispositions explain a good deal the judicial procedure of the barbarians of old. Being of a very impressionable character, they do their best to prevent quarrels from taking a fatal issue; so, with the Khevsoures, the swords are very soon drawn when a quarrel breaks out; but if a woman rushes out and throws among them the piece of linen which she wears on her head, the swords are at once returned to their sheaths, and the quarrel is appeased. The head-dress of the women is anaya. If a quarrel has not been stopped in time and has ended in murder, the compensation money is so considerable that the aggressor is entirely ruined for his life, unless he is adopted by the wronged family; and if he has resorted to his sword in a trifling quarrel and has inflicted wounds, he loses for ever the consideration of his kin. In all disputes, mediators take the matter in hand; they select from among the members of the clan the judges — six in smaller affairs, and from ten to fifteen in more serious matters — and Russian observers testify to the absolute incorruptibility of the judges. An oath has such a significance that men enjoying general esteem are dispensed from taking it: a simple affirmation is quite sufficient, the more so as in grave affairs the Khevsoure never hesitates to recognize his guilt (I mean, of course, the Khevsoure untouched yet by civilization). The oath is chiefly reserved for such cases, like disputes about property, which require some sort of appreciation in addition to a simple statement of facts; and in such cases the men whose affirmation will decide in the dispute, act with the greatest circumspection. Altogether it is certainly not a want of honesty or of respect to the rights of the congeners which characterizes the barbarian societies of Caucasus.

The stems of Africa offer such an immense variety of extremely interesting societies standing at all intermediate stages from the early village community to the despotic barbarian monarchies that I must abandon the idea of giving here even the chief results of a comparative study of their institutions.[151] Suffice it to say, that, even under the most horrid despotism of kings, the folkmotes of the village communities and their customary law remain sovereign in a wide circle of affairs. The law of the State allows the king to take any one’s life for a simple caprice, or even for simply satisfying his gluttony; but the customary law of the people continues to maintain the same network of institutions for mutual support which exist among other barbarians or have existed among our ancestors. And with some better-favoured stems (in Bornu, Uganda, Abyssinia), and especially the Bogos, some of the dispositions of the customary law are inspired with really graceful and delicate feelings.

The village communities of the natives of both Americas have the same character. The Tupi of Brazil were found living in “long houses” occupied by whole clans which used to cultivate their corn and manioc fields in common. The Arani, much more advanced in civilization, used to cultivate their fields in common; so also the Oucagas, who had learned under their system of primitive communism and “long houses” to build good roads and to carry on a variety of domestic industries,[152] not inferior to those of the early medieval times in Europe. All of them were also living under the same customary law of which we have given specimens on the preceding pages. At another extremity of the world we find the Malayan feudalism, but this feudalism has been powerless to unroot the negaria, or village community, with its common ownership of at least part of the land, and the redistribution of land among the several negarias of the tribe.[153] With the Alfurus of Minahasa we find the communal rotation of the crops; with the Indian stem of the Wyandots we have the periodical redistribution of land within the tribe, and the clan-culture of the soil; and in all those parts of Sumatra where Moslem institutions have not yet totally destroyed the old organization we find the joint family (suka) and the village community (kota) which maintains its right upon the land, even if part of it has been cleared without its authorization.[154] But to say this, is to say that all customs for mutual protection and prevention of feuds and wars, which have been briefly indicated in the preceding pages as characteristic of the village community, exist as well. More than that: the more fully the communal possession of land has been maintained, the better and the gentler are the habits. De Stuers positively affirms that wherever the institution of the village community has been less encroached upon by the conquerors, the inequalities of fortunes are smaller, and the very prescriptions of the lex talionis are less cruel; while, on the contrary, wherever the village community has been totally broken up, “the inhabitants suffer the most unbearable oppression from their despotic rulers.”[155] This is quite natural. And when Waitz made the remark that those stems which have maintained their tribal confederations stand on a higher level of development and have a richer literature than those stems which have forfeited the old bonds of union, he only pointed out what might have been foretold in advance.

More illustrations would simply involve me in tedious repetitions — so strikingly similar are the barbarian societies under all climates and amidst all races. The same process of evolution has been going on in mankind with a wonderful similarity. When the clan organization, assailed as it was from within by the separate family, and from without by the dismemberment of the migrating clans and the necessity of taking in strangers of different descent — the village community, based upon a territorial conception, came into existence. This new institution, which had naturally grown out of the preceding one — the clan — permitted the barbarians to pass through a most disturbed period of history without being broken into isolated families which would have succumbed in the struggle for life. New forms of culture developed under the new organization; agriculture attained the stage which it hardly has surpassed until now with the great number; the domestic industries reached a high degree of perfection. The wilderness was conquered, it was intersected by roads, dotted with swarms thrown off by the mother-communities. Markets and fortified centres, as well as places of public worship, were erected. The conceptions of a wider union, extended to whole stems and to several stems of various origin, were slowly elaborated. The old conceptions of justice which were conceptions of mere revenge, slowly underwent a deep modification — the idea of amends for the wrong done taking the place of revenge. The customary law which still makes the law of the daily life for two-thirds or more of mankind, was elaborated under that organization, as well as a system of habits intended to prevent the oppression of the masses by the minorities whose powers grew in proportion to the growing facilities for private accumulation of wealth. This was the new form taken by the tendencies of the masses for mutual support. And the progress — economical, intellectual, and moral — which mankind accomplished under this new popular form of organization, was so great that the States, when they were called later on into existence, simply took possession, in the interest of the minorities, of all the judicial, economical, and administrative functions which the village community already had exercised in the interest of all.

[cloud-based-and-rainpilled]

Old Gay VS New Gay discourse is so interesting to me as a “new gay” (milennial) growing up around “old gays” (boomers)

Old gays refuse to adapt to new nuanced gender and sexuality labels, feeling they’re superfluous and not “real issues.” New gays refuse to understand the point of view of a community not that long ago that was ravaged by AIDS and was (and is) straight-up illegal in public to be in most parts of the world

It’s a microcosm of the boomer/milennial dichotomy and imo shouldn’t even exist. There’s always been gay men VS lesbian VS bisexual disagreements and schisms and even proto-trans discourse about drag and androgynous presentation, but I’d like to think with a larger, more vocal community than ever, we’d come to an understanding that we don’t need to be fighting! We’re on the same side even with very strong disagreements!

Tl;dr if Boomer gays and Milennial gays could just rest thinking the other was cringe instead of completely disregarding and getting hostile towards the other we’d be in a much better place inter-community wise. But, to be honest, mostly I just see milennial gays completely disregarding the feelings of the people who made it possible for us to go outside idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[whitesinhistory]

On July 7, 1893, a crowd of over 5,000 white people lynched a Black man named Seay J. Miller in Bardwell, Kentucky, for allegedly killing two young white girls, despite ample evidence of his innocence.  Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusation of murder. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. Here, suspicion immediately fell on Mr. Miller and led to his death despite available evidence pointing to a different culprit.   Statements from Mr. Miller’s wife and from law enforcement witnesses indicated that Mr. Miller was not even in Kentucky on the date the girls were killed, and multiple eyewitnesses identified the girls’ killer as a white man. Even the girls’ father was unconvinced of Mr. Miller’s guilt. Only one person implicated Mr. Miller, but he originally told police that the person he saw was a white man—as did other witnesses. The witness who implicated Mr. Miller changed his statement only after the county sheriff threatened to charge him as an accomplice if he did not do so. This same sheriff handed Mr. Miller over to a crowd of thousands of white citizens to be lynched. Though charged with protecting the people in their custody, law enforcement almost never used their authority to resist white crowds intent on killing Black people and were instead often complicit in lynchings. In a system where law enforcement did little to protect Black communities, white crowds acted as judge, jury, and executioner.  The mob was determined to ensure Mr. Miller’s death was brutal. Reasoning that immediate lynching by rope would be “too humane,” the white mob fastened a chain weighing over 100 pounds around Mr. Miller’s neck and forced him to walk through town until he fainted from exhaustion.  “I am standing here an innocent man among excited men who do not propose to let the law take its course. I have committed no crime to be deprived of my liberty or life. I am not guilty,” Mr. Miller reportedly said as he was led to his death. “Burning and torture here last but a little while, but if I die with a lie on my soul, I shall be tortured forever. I am innocent.” These were his last recorded words.

Around 3 pm, the heavily armed mob hanged Mr. Miller from a telephone pole, shot hundreds of bullets into his body, then left his corpse hanging from the pole for hours. Afterward, white people cut off his fingers, toes, and ears as “souvenirs” and then burned Mr. Miller’s body in a public fire.  White people used racial terror lynching as a tool to instill fear in the broader Black community. Lynchings were not merely retaliation for a specific crime. Rather, lynchings were meant to send a larger message to the entire Black community of how quickly and easily they could be killed with no protection from the authorities. Following Mr. Miller’s brutal lynching, armed white residents began organizing to force Black residents to leave the area; law enforcement arrested no one for participating in Mr. Miller’s lynching and made no effort to investigate a white suspect in the girls’ killings, but continued to indiscriminately arrest local Black people on unfounded charges.  Within days, famed journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells traveled to Kentucky to investigate Mr. Miller’s lynching. Her account later published in the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper detailed the cruel brutality of the lynching, the heartbreak of Mr. Miller’s widow, and the racism that allowed lynching in America to continue. Thus perished another of the many victims of lynch law, but it is the honest, sober belief of many who witnessed the scene, that an innocent man has been barbarously and shockingly put to death in the glare of the nineteenth century civilization, by those who profess to believe in Christianity, law, and order. These and similar deeds of violence are committed under the protection of the American flag and mostly upon the descendants of the negro race. Had Miller been ever so guilty under the laws, he was entitled to a fair trial. But there is absolutely no proof of his guilt. His widow says he left his home in Springfield July 1 to hunt work. She had a letter from him July 5, mailed at Cairo; when next she heard from him he had been murdered. The poor woman seems to have lost her mind since her trouble, and during her first frenzy destroyed this letter, the only clue by which her husband could be traced. She seems incapable of answering questions intelligently and lives in a state of nervous excitement. How long shall it be said of free America that a man shall not be given time nor opportunity to prove his innocence of crimes charged against him? To learn more about our country’s history of racial terrorism, read EJI’s reports, Lynching in America and Reconstruction in America.  

[rxttenfish]

tiny, unedited lore drop from a discord discussion:

on the topic of inter-sophont relationships:

it depends on the community, mostly merfolk don't, but this isn't really a specific ideological thing and moreso because they've had no contact with the other sophonts in their modern history due to the current governmental body favoring isolationist policies (though they don't really view it as isolationist in the same sense as that exists in our current political climate… primarily it's because they view the land as functional but unfit for habitation wilderness, and only recently have viewed other sophonts as having any society at all worth discussing). given how contact is going right now, they probably have the highest rates for seeking interspecies relationships, due to how they view social cohesion. this doesn't come as a surprise, given the gorgons have the highest population in shared spaces as merfolk, and the merfolk attitude is to barely even recognize them as a different species and to treat them as normal members of the community. (merfolk pareidolia is a hell of a drug) catfolk don't really have romantic partnerships at all… their strongest bonds are between family members, usually sibling-sibling or parent-child, and although they'll have sexual relationships, these are not established nor consistent in the same way as human relationships are. catfolk have been known to adopt other sophonts, but in communities where the catfolk are the majority, they have the lowest rates for interspecies relationships. werewolf communities also don't really have established relationships in the same way, having a group of related females and a group of unrelated males, where the females raise both on their own and with any lower-ranking females they can rope into childcare. however, unlike catfolk, they have favored and preferred partners, who are also included in the childcare in the same way a friend would, and would come off as a very non-committed relationship to a human. that said, it still absolutely happens, just usually through the two getting established as friends first. humans ironically have some of the lower rates of interspecies relationships, since often the cultural pressure is to form relationships that lead to children, and this is a dead-end in most interspecies relationships. it's not to say it doesn't happen, but humans are notoriously more judgmental about these things than the other species. i really need to work on demons more, but considering how they reproduce, i imagine it's the opposite of catfolk. demon relationships are brief and non-monogamous, with each one usually having an ever-changing cast of partners, but demons would also be non-specific with what other species it involves and wouldn't view it as being any different from being with another demon. gorgons… gorgons don't have any relationship at all with other gorgons, being broadcast spawners who evolutionarily viewed other gorgons in their area as a threat and a risk, and are usually hostile to each other, so the only relationships they can get into are with other species.

[ ........ ]

in terms of hybrids, the only two sophonts who can hybridize with radically different morphologies are merfolk and "gods". this is done through probability magic in both cases. for the "gods", they are entirely magic lifeforms who don't have DNA like your typical example of life, but are capable of creating parts of their bodies that mimics DNA, and will use probability magic to get as close as possible to creating a functional offspring with DNA-based life. the second part of that equation usually produces far more radical results and is not always accurate or even very effective, because the magic has a larger leap to make, since there's no guarantee that the magic-coding bits will be very close at all to the other person they're reproducing with. merfolk probability magic is far more developed in this regard, but also because evolution on that magic made it far more effective and refined. merfolk seem to have an evolutionary pressure for this because there's multiple different species of them in three genus. frequent hybridization meant not only the reinforcement of their social relationships that made them so effective, but also because it encouraged gene flow. they don't tend to put a lot of importance on these different species, and stigma that exists ends up functioning moreso on a cultural and social lens. the three species that are the exceptions to this lack of care are because theyre more tied to a specific culture that's been viewed disfavorably. the same goes for hybrids - it's only of note due to cultural aspects, and not necessarily because they're hybrids. a pacific migratory-pacific reef hybrid isn't something people would particularly care about, but a pacific migratory-arctic hybrid would, all "grouper" hybrids hold a bit of suspicion to them, and all (known) abyssal hybrids are usually outright shunned due to the political implications of their existence. there are some communities that are more even blends of different species of merfolk, but usually these hybrids just filter back into the genetic pool of one species or another, not forming their own. humans can hybridize with the other human species (neanderthals, denisovans, and h. sapiens are all extant in this universe), and demons… demons are like citrus. there's probably different species of them? but they hybridize so frequently and turn up with so many in-between traits it's hard to even track, which is made worse by the fact that, being entirely magic-based life, they also tend to "steal" traits of other species that they just hang around a lot. humans and werewolves might be able to hybridize but most likely this is outright impossible. gorgons are the one species who cannot hybridize with anyone, since they reproduce radically different than all other species. maybe "gods" but this probably wouldn't involve the gorgon at all. this probability magic could, theoretically, be used in reproductive science and healthcare, but it's so specific and finicky and poorly understood that there's a reason the only examples of it are those who have it physically within their bodies. any medical science at all is a huge risk in this setting due to how complex any part of the body is and how badly magic can mangle it if its not explicitly "told" what to do and what everything is, so this is not something that's getting made anytime soon.

[celira]

(this marks the end of using days 1-6 of Whumptober to write a very rough TLT 5+1 draft - thanks for following along! guesses about the overarching theme are welcome, too. it'll be probably less consistent posting &/or a multifandom grab bag from here on out) +1/5+1

An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force, Camilla thought to herself, echoing some long-forgotten Scholar, and then, more fancifully, and balance is in short supply. She had been off-balance since the moment they received the ostentatious paper invitation from the First, though, and persevered nonetheless. That she should be so derailed now felt frankly ridiculous.

But here she was, all the same, lying on the threadbare couch of the strange apartment she’d newly moved into with unlikely companions for ease of access to formerly-enemy collaborators on a foreign planet, unable to lift her head. 

Her body, it seemed, wanted to retread old ground, as if the act of doing so would offer recompense for indelible wounds or could shield her from the same in the future. Lies, and not even ones that offered any great solace, but ones difficult to override. There was ersatz-Dulcinea, fluttering her eyelashes at the Ninth cavalier as the Warden turned to hide a wince. Abigail Pent’s still form. The half-inch her right foot slid in the wrong direction as Cytherea’s construct bore down on her. There was every opportunity Camilla had to press a little further, dig that much deeper, work harder.

She was peering down this mental wormhole so intently that she didn’t hear one of the unlikely companions come in.

“Hect,” said Pyrrha. “I haven’t seen you leave that spot in an hour. What gives?”

“Irrationality,” Camilla said dryly. 

“Say more,” was the reply. Camilla looked up. The red-capped head above her seemed politely curious, even in the face of her deadpan response.

She paused, rolling the thought around in her head, and then blurted, “It’s been a year since we – were…found at Canaan House.”

“I get it,” Pyrrha replied, and Camilla found that sentiment more believable than she expected. “I really do. It should have been me, too. Catch.”

Camilla automatically raised her hands to intercept the object flying toward her face, reflexes superseding thought, and found herself examining the antique object before she’d fully registered it should have been me, too. The other woman continued:

“Listen. You’ve been running on fumes. Now that you two have moved your House, set them up with BoE, used up possibly all the flimsy and paper I’ve seen you touch, you need to regroup. We have a strange kiddie to figure out and this cell to work from, and I’m here in it. You don’t need to do things the hard way all the time. We’ll never get through this in one piece otherwise. Okay?”

Without waiting for a response to this impromptu monologue, she turned and left as unceremoniously as she’d come.

We, Pyrrha’d said. Camilla wondered at the static tingle of strange warmth, discomfiting in its unfamiliarity, and thought that there might be a singular disorientation to being understood by someone similar to you. She thought of Pyrrha’s unerring support in the whirlwind of days that followed the disastrous Cohort encounter: her knowledge of inter-system communication arrays, her facilitation of contact with the Sixth, her stoicism in the face of Blood of Eden’s persistent, smouldering hostility.  A commander, a dogged survivor – and a cavalier through and through.

She stared at the recorder in her hand.

For the better part of a year, she’d been fueled by more belief than reason, driven Now that their plans were starting to gain momentum, now that the veil separating her and the Warden was – not surmountable, still, maybe not even strictly bearable, but perhaps more manageable – perhaps she didn’t need to keep reexamining her mistakes, taking them out of their specimen drawer and turning them over and over again. Perhaps this was the beginning of a return to form.

Cam raised the box to her lips, and pressed the red button at the end. “Warden?”

Perhaps she could start to believe that they were on the right track.

[eidolonpost]

san francisco | session 0 agenda

nestled on the west coast, the city of san francisco is coated in an everlasting dense fog. skillfully manipulated by 『Villa del Refugio』, the resident genus loci, the banks of fog act as an impermeable barrier to the outside world. until recently, the city and its small community have been a safe home for our protagonists.

additional notes on the agenda under the cut:

Re 1, 1.1, 1.2; here are some prepared scripts:

the world

In time immemorial, the world ended. In a single moment, the overtow and undertow merged; in a longer stretch, the two came to annihilate each other. The cataclysm came at the hands of the BLACK EMPEROR, who saw fit to claim indefinite rule of these wasted lands. From his seat upon THE GREAT TIDE CLIFFS, his invisible hand holds a grip upon all. And yet we know what the world once was. It was not always pockmarked with invasions of illogic; the seas were not always a scattered salt-waste. Each night, memories of the past echo across the radio waves, reminding us all that things need not be this way.

an additional note, "from the notes of dr. loraine"

The spirit of the world limps on, in pockets. The GENUS LOCI are powerful shades¹, born of this spirit. With the MEMORIAL, we can gather their power, and mend the world from the source of the tear: Montreal.

the city of san francisco

You hail from San Francisco, the city of fog. For generations, a tight-knit community has toiled here, supporting a simulacra of survival. Though tough, the fog at least deters outside meddling. San Francisco is home to 『Villa del Refugio』, a LOCI. It amplifies the fog, obscuring all inside. Despite years of effort, the soil here lays fallow; food and supplies arrive yearly from travellers to the east, delivered in the secret of night. "In support of the last hope – P" is inscribed each time.

the incident

Two weeks ago, the peace of the fog was shattered. A single bullet of monumental scale decimated San Francisco, and killed many in its wake, including Dr. Loraine, creator of the Memorial. Clearly the work of the Black Emperor, the safety has been compromised. The Memorial must work now, or risk being destroyed forever. You have volunteered to make this journey.

Re 1.3, hear are collected notes on answers given as clarification:

the world

for the purposes of this campaign, the world is largely wasteland, with intrusions of more saturated strangeness centered on a couple dozen key locations.

the wastelands are largely mundane wastelands, formed more indirectly due to the climate collapse brought on by large zones of undertow influence.

ruins of the world are common in the wastelands.

the black emperor

the black emperor has not been verifiably seen in person in living memory, though some of the bravest of those to have seen the outside world may boast of seeing him.

the black emperor's will is largely exerted through a network of assassins

the black emperor does not usually demand tribute or fealty. rather, he seems to target those who seek to shift the status quo.

san francisco

the fog has the ability to shift the space within it, but it does not exert this within the city.

the community is about 200 individuals.

few enter, few leave.

there is a major effort to revitalize the land to grow independent of the current supply drops. there is a scientific effort surrounding dr. loraine & the memorial. beyond these, the last major scene of combined effort is a large performing-arts community.

the recent attack

a single, city-block sized bullet.

center of trajectory hit dr. loraine; collateral damage hit dozens more.

no hostile activity since.

the radio

the "strange" signals only arrive at night; in the day, radio is the major source of inter-city communication

the fog around san francisco does limit this communication, but it does not fully stop it.

the night radio

what plays is not necessarily the same for each person who listens at any given moment.

groups listening have different experiences than if they listen individually.

narrated stories about people from this world, taking place in a world without an apocalypse.

year: 1994

people are specified by name

people are always known to listener, or someone the listener will someday know.

the stories never involve or mention eidolons.

Re 2.4; each player creates a tie to each other player, plus one npc tie.

Re 3; there are two rules we will be trying:

"Realm Cards": Many areas of this world hold strong archetypical alignments. These zones have a Realm Card. Whenever a player plays the current realm card, it is shuffled back into the fate deck rather than being discarded. If it is a neutral or negative card, the play is worth 1 additional experience. Apply forecasts and polarity as normal.

"Draw on the Memorial": When you Draw on the Memorial, you can bring to your aid the power of anything that has lent its power to you so far. Draw 2. On a negative card, you sever the connection to the spirit you draw upon permanently.