#modern enslavement

[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.

[rotzaprachim]

Much observed but also highly entertaining the extent that fundies are worse at every discernible “home making” skill than many a group that they claim to be part of the Them group keeping women from their true roll as home makers

[hippodamoi]

as someone who never believed in god at all, religious people are just incomprehensible and odd to me. it never made any sense to me and i never understood the kind of grip it has on people.

[karmaphone]

hmm. that jokey post going around about an enemy missing ur vital organs & that being an insult to them bc of relative biomass and idk the wording is bothering me a little bc like. no single organ is Vital really. disabled ppl exist. lots of people don't have functioning intestines or pancreases. many people have one lung or kidney, or are on respirators or dialysis, people have pacemakers and artificial and pig hearts. I think all the time about that one woman who led a relatively 'normal' life until they discovered she just didn't have 70% of an adult human's brain mass and then she became another Scientist Test Subject

[bijoumikhawal]

Rotating siskarak in my mind again

[somethingaboutnoodles]

only americans are real people. a not american picked foods that, yes are historically black and historically poor people food, that has been modified into comfort food, but, I need to point out, ARE STILL WEIRD if you haven't grown up with them, same as LITERALLY ALL OTHER COUNTRIES AND FOOD TRADITIONS ON EARTH. americans are having a fucking shitfit about it, as if americans don't immediately reach for poor people food and ethnic minority foods when making fun of other people's food traditions. it's fine when you fuckers replicate classism at people living in a society where class is real and tangible in ways you guys don't even understand that's just a joke bro calm down, but god forbid anyone do it back at you. get over youselves, if you gonna dish you gotta take it.

I'm well aware of classism in England, since it's one of the primary reasons my dad moved to the US and had me, a dual citizen who is uniquely positioned to see through your complete and utter bullshit.

Classism and racism exist in both countries. Stop acting like Americans, who live under greater wealth inequality than Brits do and in the country with the most billionaires, don't know what classism is. Stop acting like Brits don't know what anti-Black racism is when Black people are the third-most impoverished ethnic group in the UK and are so marginalised the UN filed a report on it in January.

Making fun of beans on toast is not the same as making fun of grits. Both sustain people through poverty, but only one sustained enslaved people through being bought and sold like livestock.

I did not expect the OP to know that when they made the post because I do not expect people to know everything about American culture or history. But you (and the OP) should have backed off once people tried to educate you about the importance of many of the foods on the list. My 80-year-old English grandmother would tell you the same.

Sending me a pissy ask like this tells me everything I need to know about you. Your behavior has nothing to do with your country of origin.

You're just a racist twat.

[enbycrip]

201 years ago, in March of 1822, Harriet Tubman was born. Her exact date of birth is unknown, due to a lack of records. It's estimated that she personally helped at least 70 other enslaved people find freedom on the Underground Railroad.

It’s not well-known that Harriet Tubman was a disabled person. A slaver threw a heavy weight at another enslaved person and hit her on the head when she was 12, causing her to have severe, crippling headaches and epileptic seizures regularly for the rest of her life.

I don’t mention this as an inspoporn thing; much more that simple and sanitised biographies of rebels and heroes are not only disableist, ignoring the fact that disabled people are frequently capable of enormous and important things, but also frequently ignore the *magnitude* of barriers Harriet Tubman faced. She was a disabled, Black, enslaved woman in a society where all of those things marginalised her. And her escape removed only one of those barriers in a partial sense.

In Sarah Bradford's 1869 biography of Tubman, Harriet describes her escape and calling: "I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land [Exodus 2:22].... But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also; I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all there."

The language of a faith which settlers and slavers had appropriated as a weapon of colonialism and slavery was reappropriated by many enslaved people of Harriet Tubman’s generation. It genuinely beggars belief to me that they didn’t expect the story of Exodus to become incredibly meaningful to enslaved people and a talisman not only that racial slavery and oppression was deeply unjust, but that rebellion and freedom was more than possible, it was inevitable.

[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

[hazbinbabbles]

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. :)