#modern enslavement

[shotofstress]

Usa white youtuber casually saying that now there is technically no enslavement and the only that there is, hear me out is prison work. Yeah, bc can I expect that a white woman fron usa despite being leftist lesbian jew descendant acknowledge that all the trinkets, clothes and food and anything she owns was in 98% percent made by Global South enslaved people, specially women and children and the well known statistics of how we were never have so many enslavement than in this age. ? No, of course not, what I was expecting right? Whitness is one hell of a drug but not worst than being middle class usamerican bc that will put all categories that you belong is a second place bc being gringa will be the primary point no matter what and no matter what you belive or think of usa or yourself. Enslaved congolese people? Never heard of them. The fuckton of global south people doing enslaved work? Nop.

Erase nonbinary queer artists identities to call them lesbians even when the artists themselves said there were neuter, now this bs. Everything always so casual, so matter-of-factly, so i-know-better-than-most that keeps reminding me what always global south fighters says since ever: usa nor western ppl gonna save us. Is always global south being there for the rest of the world, from picking your food to traveling across the sea to kill the fascists to protect you and liberate you from camps and prisons.

But hey, she has a yt channed so must know better that others and can't accept when someone correct them.

[somepinkthing]

"Hector was a good man" "diomedes was an honorable man" BZZZT WRONG. Diomedes was there to steal, burn, and wage war same as the next person. In fact, he was pretty adamant about it. Hector had no issue with the greek's actions, merely that they were directed at him—I mean look at what he wanted to do with patroclus's body, only to then cite respect for funeral rites when it was his own turn to die. Hector also owned slaves within his own city walls—people that he likely took from their homes during troy's own conquests. All that seperated him and the greek warriors was which side they were on.

The Iliad isn't a story about morally upstanding men. Sure, it has men who have honor and perform honorable acts, but these are not good samaritans. It's is a story about war and grief and the real victims of fights between so-called-honorable men and gods. The urge to find a "good guy" in this story is wasted. Hector doesn't have to be morally good just because achilles isn't. Troy didn't lose because they were more or less evil than the greeks. It all just. Is. Because of fate? Because the gods said so? Because people will always make disastrous mistakes and it will always end up biting not only them, but everyone else around them? Who knows? In the end though, doesn't it all feel so pointless in the face of the endless amounts of grief and destruction that war leaves behind? Maybe that's the whole point

[bedlamsbard]

okay what I've learned from this semester and this round of grading is that if I ever use an essay prompt about premodern women again (extremely likely) I'll have to say "you cannot talk ONLY about how women were oppressed by the patriarchy or I will fail the essay" instead of "talk about the ideal woman of [insert historical time period + geographical location] vs. the reality of women in [time period/location] based on the evidence that we have" (obvs it was better phrased than that on the actual prompt and it would probably be different in another context).

I...I restructured the entire class so that we'd be able to talk about stuff Greek women actually did based on the evidence. thanks for showing you didn't come to class that day, look at the powerpoint online, or do the reading.

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

Why do you hate Alexander Hamilton so much? The guy lived and died before you were even born dude. He isn’t going to come alive and bite you XD

No, his actions just persist in the policies that my home nation was founded upon.

[inanshalla]

Okay Flemeth/Mythal I see you

[scottguy]

Sigh...help me to get *yet another* mutually exclusive set of paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories straight...

The LEGAL.. invited Hatian immigrants that "took all the jobs" (that Springfield couldn't fill otherwise) now have a great income because they're smart, sophisticated, and clever enough to be employed skilled factory labor and "replace" whites.

But... those SAME Hatians are ALSO so primitive, so backward, and so hungry (despite earning a lot of money) that they will lower themselves to eat "the dogs" and "the cats" when they could afford to eat filet mignon or at least pork, chicken, and hamburger?

Please make up your mind.

Do you hate them because they're SO NORMAL that they hold jobs and you resent it? Or do you hate them because they are so low-functioning, beastly, and inhuman that they couldn't possibly hold a job?

You can't have it both ways!

People are just people. But racists think, "only white people are moral."

Oh yeah?

White German people sat idely by while Germany murdered six million Jews! White Americans enslaved, murdered, beat, and separated black family members while treating them like cattle.

So, BEFORE you IMPLY how awful brown people ....

look in the fucking mirror and consider the utter inhumanity of Caucasians in recent history.

White people have NO high moral ground regarding their history of moral purity and behavior. We white people have a lot to atone for before we DARE to cast aspersions on other ethnicities for being "inhuman." We white people have set the bar impossibly low what constitutes "civilized" behavior.

Think about THAT REALITY before you believe LIES about decent people who NEVER HURT ANYONE just because those people have a naturally darker and better tan than you.

[enbycrip]

This was still happening in the mid-late 19th century.

And white supremacists are arguing that this is no longer affecting the modern world.

[bijoumikhawal]

Rotating siskarak in my mind again

[envolvenuances]

recently read the english translation and was quite pleased with the work done so my recommendation goes to A Colour Defect by Ana Maria Gonçalves

At the end of the 19th century, Kehinde, an elderly African woman, blind and almost on her deathbed, travels from Africa to Brazil in search of her son who has been missing for decades.  During the crossing she tells the story of her life. Born in Savalu in 1810, Kehinde, still a child,  watches as her mother is raped and killed. With her grandmother and twin sister Taiwo, she manages to escape the massacre and flees to another town. There, Kehinde and her sister are captured and put on a slave ship to Brazil. After a time, already the mother of a child she bore as the result of a rape, Kehinde manages to buy her freedom, and becomes involved with Alberto, a white man, father of her second son. Under constant watch as a freed slave, she ends up being arrested, but, with the help of friends, manages to escape from jail and leave Salvador. Some time later, she returns, only to confront the biggest tragedy of her life: Alberto, who has become an alcoholic and gambler, has sold their son to pay off a debt. From that moment on, finding her son becomes her sole goal in life, taking her to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and, finally, back to Africa, where new discoveries and tragedies await her. In addition to being drawn into an utterly engrossing narrative, marked by fatality, readers will discover, in impressively rich detail, little known aspects of African culture and religion in Brazil and Africa, as they accompany the saga of Kehinde, an unforgettable character, who will go down in the history of Brazilian literature. UM DEFEITO DE COR (A COLOR DEFECT) -- the name of an old law that allowed Negroes or mulattos to request that "the color defect be overlooked" when they demonstrated extreme talent, competence or will -- already has a guaranteed place among the great masterpieces of Brazilian literature.

desperately need to read or watch something that will alter my brain chemistry and turn me into a new person

[grandwretch]

my love for a good book fighting with my classics snobbery when an author's world building mixes Greek and Roman names and myths

[taahko]

every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said "oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point". and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon

[hazbinbabbling4ever]

Been studying roman history lately and boy do these racist get it wrong lmao. Anyone could become a roman citizen, and based on census, people could be called to military campaigns abroad. In the latest centuries a lot of people settled in different places. The Mediterranean was basically one giant highway of trade and one giant military battleground and these racist jackasses want to really believe small cities lived entrenched in their own ethnicities and never met with each other apart from some careful trading and military conquests that ended with the romans going away and leaving the populations un-enslaved? Nah.

Surprise. :)

[notebooks-and-laptops]

Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.

About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.

How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.

So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.

But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.

We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.

None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.

The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.

Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.

Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.

Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.

And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.

Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.

This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.

Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.

And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.

I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.

[lovesexrelationships]

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