#modern imperialism

[sublimecoffeefestival]

As an archaeologist, I ONLY refer to this place as Looty Booty.

Because make no mistake, they ARE looters. They pay money to illegally acquire artifacts and architectural features on the black market. There have been links to them and some of the terrorist attacks and Syria, because a lot of these black market transactions fund horrific groups.

And before you come at me with “well, they’re playing for it,” these are often objects of cultural patrimony, which cannot, by definition, be owned by any one person. These items are collectively owned by everyone. In the US, we have laws that protect against Indigenous objects—burial goods, sacred objects, objects of cultural patrimony. Looting of archaeological materials is also a war crime. And the erasure of these objects and sites, funded by companies and individuals and governments, have contributed massively to the contestation of land and history in many places (see Palestine right now).

Looting is illegal. The purchase of looted items contributes to terrorism and cultural genocide.

ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google "Hobby Lobby" and get a page full of results that make me go "wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq"

[im-perialism]

Who is an Imperialist?

An imperialist doesn’t have to be someone who is directly conquering other territories – imperialists can also be the people at the top of the social hierarchy, like the wealthy and extremely privileged, who benefit from exercising power over other people.

An Ancient Imperialist: Caesar Augustus

[Photo: Augustus, bronze sculpture from Meroe, Sudan, 1st century CE; in the British Museum. (https://www.britannica.com/place/Roman-Empire).]

Augustus is the guy who solidified imperial power in Ancient Rome, so his status as an imperialist is pretty self-explanatory, but his strongest imperial quality was his skill as a politician. He was a master of propaganda, allowing him to consolidate power without public backlash, and he also established an imperial bureaucracy in Rome that would last for centuries.

A Modern Imperialist: Jeff Bezos

[Photo: https://renaissancemarketer.com/list/jeff-bezos/.]

Founder of Amazon and is thus the leader of a HUGE global company, which, because of Amazon’s prevalence, leads to economic domination over the public. Reliance on Amazon, much like living under an ancient empire, has advantages (convenience, expediency) and disadvantages (local businesses being outcompeted) that people have adapted to live under because… that’s just how the modern world works.

[imperialnyx]

Can’t lose if you don’t add your ships ✨

[sehicks]

I'm so absolutely devastated by everything that's happened over there 😔 The desperation of the Palestinians caught between Israel, Hezbollah, and Hamas is heavy. They will not come out of this well and Israel, Iran, and (by extension) Russia will only gain power. It's sickening. I'm sick. What a disgusting thing to do in the name of wealth and greed.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappé (2006)

Just a reminder that Israel was built, by design, on ethnic cleansing.

[vorbarrsultana]

i finished rereading the first four vorkosigan books (+ "the flowers of vashnoi" because ekaterin!!!), and you really have to feel for piotr vorkosigan because what a nightmare life, truly.

imagine you are born just in time for your world to be unified by dorca vorbarra and rediscovered by people from wider galaxy. things are finally looking good, for the first time in 600 years of isolation there is no more feudal infighting, and the promise of galactic medicine and technologies being available lightens everyone's perspectives. sure, your grandpa is called count pierre "le sanguinaire", but who doesn't have terrible relatives?

then you are 15, and suddenly your planet is attacked by the aggressive eugenecist space empire hell-bent on subjugating your people and turning them into disposable material for unethical genetic experiments. you flee into the mountains, away from your family, and create guerrilla forces from locals sworn to your dad, and it's really terrible for a very long time. you have no high-tech weapons and no food, you sleep in a cave in the dead of winter, and the cetagandans try everything (from carpet bombing to chemical weapons) to murder you.

but hey, at least you now have your bff ezar vorbarra, and (from the bff's words on his deathbed) it sounds like you two had so much fun between unimaginable horrors and despair, and it's not surprising, since no one really believes in death after life at 20. then the emperor makes you a general at the tender age of 22. fortunately for him, you & bff make a frighteningly competent dream-team, and the joke's on cetagandans.

then, several years later, you ask the emperor for weapons, because you still sleep on the bare cave floor, there are little resources, and every ghem on the planet is trying to murder you. he offers you the hand of his granddaughter instead, like it's some sort of twisted fairytale, but you grow to love your olivia more than anything, and the tide of war is finally turning, and you allow yourself to entertain the idea of peaceful life, and then...

the space eugenecist empire nukes your hometown, killing your mom, dad, surviving brothers, and two hundred thousand of your people. plus your bff (ezar) gets a radiation doze large enough for it to cause severe cancer thirty years later. great.

but you win! your district is in shambles, your capital is an irradiated crater, your castle is in ruins, but you win! the old dorca dies, and yuri ascends the throne, but politicking is secondary to the fact that you are alive.

yes, you are probably not entirely sane, and you've long forgotten what the peaceful times look like, but you are alive, just under 35, and your entire life is ahead of you. olivia is alive too, and ezar, and you now have three wonderful children, and the extended vorpatril-vorbarra family that hosts regular get-togethers. sure, your mom-in-law is a betan with all sorts of crazy ideas in her head, but she is not pierre vorrutyer. small mercies.

but then the new emperor goes mad, and decides to murder your entire family overnight. your brothers-in-law are gone, one of your sisters-in-law too, and all your nephews and nieces except little padma. but all of this pales in comparison to the facts that olivia is murdered, and that your heir and daughter lay dead beside her.

all you have left of her, of your house, of the family you've lost in vashnoi not a ten years ago, is aral, whom you keep by your side throughout the bloody civil war to put your bff on the throne.

but you win again. you are 43, and ezar vorbarra is now the emperor. you are responsible for the imperium's entire ground forces. you are also responsible for a severely traumatized boy of 13, and the only children you've interacted with without olivia's genle guidance were little messengers of guerilla companies.

what a mess.

[honouredsnakeprincess]

so, why do magical girls (when they are depicted with weapons) usually depicted as using weapons of a previous era? there are a hundred fencers, a dozen musketeers, but practically no magical girls with anything used after the first world war.

[mahoganygold213]

[neechees]

Colonialism is the root of so many evils of the world

[autismmydearwatson]

Still more important is the realization that all those generations of British people (largely men), who were educated in the classics, were being taught to understand and sympathize with the Greeks and Romans. When thinking of the long confrontation between the Celts and Romans, therefore they instinctively sided with the Romans. They would have all read Tacitus' warning: "Remember, they are barbarians..." For the Romans were seen as the bearers of civilization and the ancient Britons as the uncivilized.....

All manner of pressure was brought to bear to ensure that British schoolboys empathized with Rome. From the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth, every educated person was required to learn Latin. Caesar and Tacitus were among the very first authors which all those pupils were obliged to read. Yet no one taught them anything about the Celts, let alone a Celtic language. Even today, when the teaching of classics in the United Kingdom has sharply declined and Celtic studies receive a measure of official support, for every British schoolchild that learns even a little about the native Celtic heritage, there are a hundred that still learn about the heritage of Rome.

A whole literary genre was devoted to strengthening the bond of identity between the modern Britons and the Ancient Romans. Any number of books and poems have been written to invite the reader to stand in Roman shoes, to put oneself shoulder to shoulder with the legions in the eternal struggle of civilization against barbarity.

-Norman Davies, The Isles

[corvidcaeneus]

Happy 4th of July! May this country crumble into nothing more than a hellish memory so that the rest of the world might finally be free.

[whereserpentswalk]

There is an entity in North America that wanders the bounds of the country. Nobody has seen all of it, its too large, and no soul on earth has seen its mouth has lived. It's the size of mountains, great and dark, with dark smoke coming off its endless body. Most people who have seen it have only seen its claws, long and black, reaching dow out of the sky, or seen its body as a massive shape in the distance. And it kills sometimes. It kills sometimes.

You always know when it's coming. The other magical creatures are always the first to sense it. Ghosts and spirits return to their realms and practitioners find their gods and devils quiet, cryptids migrate to lands they rarely see, things that can appear human have sudden business trips, and even the last dragons in the forests of the west know to fly away. Then the birds go, and the rats if they can, and the cats seem nervous. Then it comes. You always see it's shadow first, and hear it before anything else.

Every now and than it'll go somewhere, perhaps a dying mall, perhaps a small backwater town somewhere in the mountains, ever so often it's seen in Detroit or a similarly dying city, and even on occasion it may visit the South Bronx or Sckid Row. It will play it's little game, destroying a block or two of buildings, crushing some souls, or grabbing some to take into it's mouth. Useally it's deaths number in the hundreds. And then it will disappear. When it leaves it leaves ruins and death, children without parents, businesses ruined whose workers will be left to starve, bodies left bloody on the street, dead or forever disabled, half eaten and half crushed. There are lakes of blood, and dams of rubble.

It has a deal with the leaders of America, the businessmen, the politicians, the clergymen, that it will never kill what they care about, never them, never where they live, never what makes them money. But other than that it's free to kill, and nobody will say they can stop it. But they've made sure it knows that it's destruction will only ever reach a certain kind of community. The creature often leaves residue, it's shed scales are made of a valuable material, and the oil it leaves in its path can be harnessed. And many who've made deals with it wouldn't mind if it oh so tragically crushed a town or neighborhood where they could build a new more lucrative community, or perhaps just another mall. And so it goes. And so the creature cannot be stopped. Not for that the bombs won't hurt it, but simply that the bombs won't fall.

[perenial]

What are good books about explorers, if I may ask? I'd love to get into some harrowing survival (or just trying to survive) stories.

HI ok these are all heroic age antarctica-centric bc that's all i've had rattling around in my brain for a solid year and a half now so if anyone has non-polar recs pls feel free to throw em in the replies lmao

if we're talking harrowing survival there's nothing more fucked than shackleton's trans-imperial expedition aka endurance and the ross sea party. the classic here is endurance by alfred lansing (and ofc south by ol ernie shackles but i feel like his own account is less approachable to a first time reader) but i also highly recommend the lost men by kelly tyler-lewis for the ross sea party half of the story that often falls to the wayside.

and we can't talk abt shackleton without getting into scott & the terra nova & the race for the pole which WILL take over ur life if u get into it lol. the worst journey in the world by apsley cherry-garrard is required reading (and so is cherry by sara wheeler, possibly my fave biography of all time), and for a more general overview a first-rate tragedy by diana preston is the absolute gold standard. for amundsen ask @roaldamundsen there's the last viking by stephen r. brown which i haven't read yet but i've heard v good things about (nb: u may be recommended roland huntford's books when it comes to amundsen. read them if u want but he's got a Thing against scott which in turn distorts how he approaches amundsen but then again every polar biographer wants to make tender romantic love to their special little guy so)

OH and we can't forget the northern party aka six guys in a hole (NOT sexy) (well–). there are banger first-hand accounts (especially raymond priestley's) but weirdly enough my fave when it comes to this part of the terra nova story is a polar affair by lloyd spencer-davis, which is technically abt the sex lives of adélie penguins. it was the first book i read connected to terra nova and although it leans more popular history than rigorous biography or historical analysis it rly primes u to understand the fricative relationship between the expedition's two intertwined objectives – scientific advancement and imperialist glory – that were the root of most of their issues.

outside of endurance & terra nova i'd be remiss not to rec The gateway book to antarctic history, the madhouse at the end of the earth by julian sancton. i should have put this first bc this is genuinely one of my fave books of all time, polar-related or otherwise. it's a comedy it's a tragedy it's an adventure it's an insight into colonial ambition (although imo this aspect could have been pushed further) it's a romance for two specific guys it could easily be a musical it might be adapted into a tv show or movie in the near future?? it's an absolute trip i rec it to anyone who stands still enough to let me shove a copy in their hands. read madhouse NOW

finally i want to give a shout out to the australasian antarctic expedition which in comparison is less insane than everything else here but it's entirely possible the guy who was once on the australian $100 note ate his dog handler. so like. read alone on the ice by david roberts

(ps. for more boat books see @jesslovesboats's banger posts ✌️⛵️)

[naturalist-fr]

I intend to base pearlcatchers very heavily on qilin/kirin, so I'm considering getting rid of the wings entirely. They feel a little slapped on otherwise. I think I can have way more fun with their design if I omit the wings.

To make up for that, pearlcatchers are quite the scholars, especially when it comes to magic and spells. So magic that allows them to fly isn't that unusual. A spell that briefly "hardens" the air beneath the foot is a very popular one, allowing them to essentially run through the sky.

[imperialnyx]

A place of worship..

shrine provider @dannymans66

[justacynicalromantic]

If you are an English speaker and looking for a report "from the ground" on what is happening on the Norther border of Ukraine in Kharkiv Oblast👇

[centuryberry]

What are some of their attempts to convince Wukong? What Modern dating methods do they try (and occasionally butcher)? Old ones that don't quite translate (or Wukong pulls Amnesia)?

I sense shenanigans.

(And also have been struck by the image of Wukong opening a door to find one of the trio laying in bed with a "F*ck me" sign above them.)

(I was then subsequently struck by the image of Wukong responding, "Uhhhhh, I can't read? *closes door*"

When RinRin, Macaque, and Shanzha started their attempts in luring their husband to bed, they were completely blatant…in traditional standards.

Romantic gestures in that era were subtle. A simple exchanging of gifts would be a proclamation of eternal love. And there are so many secret languages: the language of flowers, the language of fans, etc.

(Warning: Slightly suggestive)

RinRin preferred slipping in sly, subtle innuendos in conversations and teasing Wukong like she used to do when they were young. She also likes using food as a tool to be touchy and suggestive. (Those poor bananas.)

Macaque would drag Wukong out to walks in the garden and anywhere else pretty. He would cling onto his arm during walks while wearing all the pretty hairpins and jade pendants that OG!Wukong had gifted him throughout the years of their marriage.

Unlike the other two, Shanzha doesn’t have any history with Wukong and is in an unstable position, so she’d be less blatant. She’d show off her skills in archery and would spar with him to encourage contact. She’d also wear clothing that would turn slightly sheer with enough sweat during these sessions.

When all of this didn’t work, the three of them would outright ask Wukong to come visit their rooms.

All of this, of course, flew over Wukong’s modern head. The first time he accepted, he thought it was a sleepover. Shanzha and RinRin were too shocked to correct him when he visited them for the night (he tried to recreate scrabble lol) but Macaque doubled down and scared Wukong off when he made it clear what he invited him into his room for.

It was a little heartbreaking for Macaque but that sting was quickly eased when Wukong came to him with flowers the next morning and babbled about his amnesia. He played dumb and would continue to play dumb.

Unfortunately, upon every “failure,” the three became more and more bold. (Thus, the hilarious scenario you painted in your ask. They had to spell it out for him at that point.)

When it was revealed that Wukong came from another world and time, everything clicked. They shifted gears. Instead of approaching all of this like spouses, they would then approach this as suitors. This would be a courtship.

After wiggling as much info about modern day courtship out of Yue, they took a try at this “dating” thing. It was…fun. There was a bit of flower giving and hand holding. They would watch plays together with snacks (a try at a movie date). They would try to make homemade food with varying results (RinRin and Macaque burnt their offerings). They snuck out of the palace in disguises once to have a casual date without the pressures of court.

(Though they did bungle up the “Netflix and Chill” idea and flustered the hell out of Wukong lmao. Yue only added that one as a joke.)

Wukong would see all this effort and be so, so flustered and yet so, so happy. He’s a bit of a romantic so he’s a bit of a sap about these things. Even if the results aren’t perfect, he appreciates the effort and he tries to reciprocate traditionally (though the three are beyond subtleties at this point and prefer the modern straightforwardness.)