#not even a colony either it's just france

[beardedmrbean]

Europe's Ariane 6 rocket blasted off successfully for its maiden flight on Tuesday, a live video feed showed. The success of its three-hour flight is crucial for European countries, who hope to regain independent access to space more than a year after they retired their workhorse Ariane 5 rocket.

Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket launched for the first time on Tuesday, carrying with it the continent's hopes of regaining independent access to space.

The micro-satellites were delivered one hour and six minutes after the rocket blasted off from Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket's success marks a "historic day" for Europe, announced European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher.

The much-delayed inaugural flight of the European Space Agency's (ESA) most powerful rocket launched smoothly into clear skies at 4pm local time (1900 GMT) from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, an AFP correspondent observed.

Crews on the ground at the launch site, which is surrounded by jungle on the South American coast, applauded as the rocket soared into clear skies.

Ariane 6's first launch, which was originally planned for 2020, is hoped to bring an end to a difficult time for European space efforts.

Since the last flight of its workhorse predecessor, Ariane 5, a year ago, Europe has been unable to launch satellites or other missions into space without relying on rivals such as Elon Musk's US firm SpaceX.

ESA chief Josef Aschbacher said it was a "very important moment for Europe".

"We are re-establishing independent access to space for Europe," he said just before the launch. 

Earlier Tuesday, the giant metal structure housing the rocket called the "mobile gantry" was rolled away, unsheathing the 56-metre (183 feet) behemoth in light rain, an AFP journalist observed.

A 10am forecast said that "Weather is GO for fuelling", the ESA said on X.

This gave the green light for filling the rocket's tanks with the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that will propel it into space.

From that point, any physical intervention would force the tanks to be emptied, requiring a 48-hour launch postponement, the ESA's launch base project manager Michel Rizzi said.

Rocket crisis 

Many will be nervously watching the launch, hoping it can bring an end to a difficult era for European space efforts.

Since the last flight of the rocket's workhorse predecessor, Ariane 5, a year ago, Europe has been unable to launch satellites or other missions into space without relying on rivals such as Elon Musk's US firm SpaceX.

Historically, nearly half of the first launches of new rockets have ended in failure.

That includes Ariane 5, which exploded moments after liftoff in 1996 – but out of its 117 launches over nearly 20 years, only one other flight would fail.

Everyone at the Kourou launch site, which is surrounded by jungle on the South American coast, is hoping history does not repeat for Ariane 6.

Tony dos Santos, the ESA's Kourou technical manager, said that teams on the ground would only be able to "breathe our first sigh of relief when the first satellites have been released" an hour and six minutes after liftoff.

The mission will be considered a success after the rocket's reusable upper stage splashes down into the Pacific Ocean.

Franck Saingou, Ariane 6 launch system architect, said there had been so many rehearsals that it all feels "routine – except this time it's the real thing".

Concealed in a nearby bunker, more than 200 experts in the launch centre will scrutinise the rocket until liftoff, ready to interrupt the countdown to solve any problems, he added.

They will be in constant contact with the Jupiter control room, the hub of communication between the teams – and data sent from the rocket.

A large number of armed forces will also watch over the launch, including three fighter jets deployed to deter any curious aircraft nearby.

Europe's 'return' to space

A successful flight would mark Europe's "return" to the space scene, said ESA space transportation director Toni Tolker-Nielsen.

Russia pulled its Soyuz rockets, long used for European launches at Kourou, after Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Later year, Europe's Vega-C light launcher was grounded due to a launch failure. Delays to Ariane 6's first flight – originally scheduled for 2020 – further compounded the crisis.

Ariane 6 is scheduled for one more launch this year, six in 2025, then eight in 2026.

The launch of Ariane 6 is the first step towards "changing the future of the European space transportation ecosystem", ESA chief Josef Aschbacher said on X.

Gareth Dorrian, a space science researcher at the UK's University of Birmingham, told AFP that "the first launch of any new rocket is always fraught".

But Ariane 5 started with explosive failure and "went on to become one of the most successful launchers in history", he added.

[sissa-arrows]

If what’s happening in France right now was happening in the Global South there would be talks about sending troops to bring democracy in France.

The leaders and big figures of the opposition who support Palestinians are getting summoned by the police one by one for refusing to call October 7th a terrorist attack (for the record a lot of them say that it was a war crime because it targeted civilians but not a terror attack so they don’t even support what happened).

All while letting Zionist who actually called for mass murder on live TV get away with it.

But you know what? As strange as it sounds it’s actually a good sign. One of the most violent day for Algerians during the war of liberation (17 October 1961) happened less than a year before the independence just a couple months actually (the independence was on July 5th 1962 but it was signed in March 1962). Because that’s how the colonizers behave and think. The crackdown in France, the new German law forbidding the use of Arabic and Hebrew at pro Palestinian protests, the crackdown in US universities… a wounded dying beast always get more violent. They are scared so they try to silence us harder. They know that it’s a matter of time that the fall of colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy will happen in our lifetime so they try to scare us into stopping the fight.

Don’t get me wrong it will be hard and won’t happen overnight but their reactions are convincing me that we will see a Free Palestine a Free Global South a Free world in our lifetimes.

(P.S: ​tagging the post with Palestine because my previous post being positive about the outcome seemed to help some people who felt hopeless so I hope this one will help too. That being said we don’t have the right to give up the fight and we shouldn’t give up hope either. None of us is free until all of us are.)

[unamazing-sheep21]

The Daroga is actually an extremely important character to the themes of Phantom of the Opera

Many people might not know this but living as a Muslim/brown person in the west ( especially France… see: burqab ban, burkini ban, hijab ban, etc) is extremely difficult for some. Not to mention in a world post 9/11. Not to mention ( probably) in the 1890’s like in Phantom of the Opera where orientalist art and inaccurate and often dehumanising portrayals of the Middle East and it’s people ( muslims, arabs, Persians etc) were common and were used to justify colonialism.

In classic literature there’s only like, ONE character who is brown and is treated like an actual human being by the narrative and is presented as a central cast member to boot: and that’s the Daroga/ The Persian in Phantom of the Opera. And even then, every adaptation after either replaces him with a white person or has an incredibly disingenuous and inaccurate portrayal of him and his ethnicity/religion. Heck, in the Phantom Susan Kay book he’s given the surname “Khan” which isn’t even Persian it’s a PAKISTANI name.

Every other presumably brown/POC character are written animalistically and antagonistically. E.g Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Bertha from Jane Eyre. Bertha especially who is just used as an obstical/metaphor instead of an actual genuine character who deserves her own nuance and voice.

Now, back to the tittle, why do I think The Persian’s mere existence and especially with him being Persian/Muslim is inexplicably tied to the themes of POTO? Because he’s just like Erik and completely unlike Erik at the same time. In the book he’s constantly described as wearing as astrakhan cap/ a fez. Something quintessentially Middle Eastern and exposes him as ethnic right away to the eyes of the then European public. Both Erik and The Persian have sides of them that the society they live in at large shuns/dehumanises/condemns. For Erik it’s his face, and for The Persian it’s his culture/ religion/ race. But unlike Erik, The Persian has the choice to “ take it off” or assimilate more into society. He can, and it was better for him if he wore, a top hat but he CHOOSES to wear a fez. And he never takes it off. While he CAN and he has the chance to be more accepted in society than he already is.

But Erik can’t “take it off”, he can’t take off his face.

Though we don’t know much about the Persians’ beliefs, it’s safe to assume he was probably Muslim since Persia has been a Muslim country for a long time ( ignore the one we have now lmao). And I like to think that even in France he doesn’t give up this one part of him. He could just convert to whatever the majority religion in France was at the time and he would be more assimilated into French society, but he doesn’t . He actively chooses to keep parts of who he is even though they put him at a disadvantage. In contrast, Erik would give anything and does try everything ( even to phycotic lengths ) to be considered “ Normal” in society.

And throughout all of Erik’s efforts the only one who was ever really there for him was The Persian. But Erik dismisses him constantly.

I like to think that The Persian stayed because he understands Erik to a certain degree, and I like to think that Erik resents him because he doesn’t use every chance he gets to assimilate into society. To be considered normal. Sometimes Erik quite literally would kill for. Instead hanging onto every part that makes him who he is even when it only isolates him further.

[qsycomplainsalot]

Lindybeige is Either an Idiot or an Asshole

Most Likely Both

--There could be more flattering ways to put it, but he's never once given us that favor so why should I. His videos are wildly speculative and often based in cherry-picked British sources, when they come with any sources at all - see his masturbatory piece about the Bren vs the “Spandau”.

--There are two videos that I absolutely loathe at the edges of my youtube recommendations, both just filled to the brim with misinformation and logical contrivances. Videos that neckbeards will endlessly quote at me without question, taking a frustratingly long amount of time to untangle by which point they'd have usually lost interest already. The first one is Shadiversity's video about boob armor, the other is Lindybeige's video about the French Resistance.

--This video will have you believe that the French Resistance on its own did nothing of worth, based in great part on the fact that De Gaulle glamorized its contribution to the war for political status. I cannot stress this enough, just because De Gaulle used the general idea of the Resistance to smooth over a lot of Vichy war crimes and restore national unity does not mean the Resistance did not exist as a capable fighting force. --The very first more specific argument he offers to support his view -if you ignore “ME AND ME PA FOUND THAT VERY FONNY”- is that most of the French armor was American-made and provided through the lend-lease policy, making French people less deserving of credit in winning World War 2. I assume that in his mind that would diminish the contribution of the French Resistance to war efforts, even though these tanks and armored fighting vehicles were used by the Free French Army, not the Resistance at any point of its existence, making the point moot while also conveniently ignoring that the United Kingdom received ten times the aid France did through that same program.

--The image is from War Thunder because it makes for a better glamor shot than having it stand behind a museum fence or in black and white.

--His next argument implies that De Gaulle was "allowed" to walk in the liberated Paris ahead of Allied troops to give a speech that solidified the myth of the Resistance I mentioned. Again, in this passing, deceptive comment, Lindybeige implies that De Gaulle walked in after the fact and that Allied forces did the heavy lifting, only allowing him to do his speech a their convenience. Even a cursory amount of research will tell you that Paris was in fact liberated by the FFI, the Parisian people themselves and Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division composed of Metropolitan and Colonial French with Spanish elements, supported only on the very last day by the US 4th Infantry Division and a special British unit sent to gather intelligence. --Following this, he quotes the speech De Gaulle delivered in front of the town hall the day the German garrison surrendered, but cuts it short of the part in said speech mentioning “the help of our dear and admirable Allies” to then call De Gaulle ungrateful, which I have a hard time believing could be anything but intentionally deceptive. He then goes on to claim that the French Resistance was not organized by De Gaulle but by the British, justifying the ludicrous claim with 'they didn’t tell him because French intelligence services were bad and would have leaked all of it’. This is of course ignoring the fact that De Gaulle had personally sent Jean Moulin back to France for the exact purpose of organizing the five big Resistance movements into one organization, which he did, creating the Council for National Resistance that played a major role in the liberation of Paris. How the British would have any hand in this may be explained by his further comments, where he goes on to say that agents of the organization preceding the MI6 had been infiltrated in the Resistance to organize it, which begs the question of who's responsible for it being a non-effective combat force if it had been the case. He then gives us a voice in a sarcastic tone by saying, “of course you and your British bias would say that !” but does not really address it. Because honestly yeah, you and your British bias would say that.

--After quickly rambling that there were too many people in France and not enough bushes for all people to join the Resistance, which I have to admit is an extremely pointed and pertinent thing to say in a video downplaying the efforts and suffering of thousands of people fighting back against Nazi occupation under constant threat of torture and execution if caught, he mentions that the German forced labor system had severely depleted France’s manpower of fighting age. He says that by 1944, only teenagers and decrepit middle aged men were left to fight in the Resistance, to the great disappointment of the British agents he mentioned earlier. According to him, this meant France lacked the manpower and the communication capability required to pull the Resistance off, which is again contradicted by the actions of Jean Moulin, who had seemingly managed to access both before his death.

--There are a few problems with that argument. The Service de Travail Obligatoire, STO for short, was a system put in place by Vichy France to supply Germany with civilian manpower to make up for their own shortfalls due to the Eastern front. Because Vichy had negotiated a relative independence compared to other occupied country, its own government was responsible for the order, although it was in almost every point similar to forced labor orders in Denmark or the Netherlands. Now the STO did deprive France of over six hundred thousand young men, many of them skilled workers. However as an incentive given by the Nazis, every three forced laborer sent to Germany would lead to the release of one French POW, meaning that as far as manpower was concerned, France pretty much lost only four hundred thousand men and received qualified military personnel for its trouble. Not only is it hardly the manpower drain pictured by Lindybeige, it also ignores that many of these forced laborers, my grandfather included, immediately skipped work and joined either the Resistance or Allied military regulars after operation Overlord, as they were not as tightly surveilled as POWs and minorities in concentration/death camps. It also bears mentioning that it was teenagers, dismissed by Lindybeige as a negligible quantity, that acted as reconnaissance troops for the Free French using their motorbikes to scout and guide the way to the German Kommandantur. In any case, most members of the FFI integrated the regular French army after the liberation of Paris, meaning they were definitely of fighting age. Of course that whole argument is dropped as soon as he brings in British involvement, at which point he finally points out how the Resistance disabled most of the railway network and stopped the famously lightning-fast German army from facing the Allied invasion properly. For their role in this sabotage, a hundred fifty Resistance members working for the French national railway company were shot and another five hundred deported.

--To put it simply, Lindybeige dismisses the Resistance as a useless, wasteful and infighting group of functional morons, while every successful operation they carried out, every display of good mobility and coordination is attributed to British uniformed soldiers overseeing it. In reality most of that effort was done by either agents of the French government in exile or the Allied command under Eisenhower, with no account mentioning any significant autonomous British involvement which stands to reason as De Gaulle and Churchill could not stand one another. In fact Lindybeige tries to pass off operation Jedburgh as a purely British operation while it was specifically a joint one with American, British, French, Belgian and Dutch operatives all along the Atlantic coast.

--The next part is baffling. Lindybeige points at the Allies stopping their shipments of weapons to the French Resistance after July 44 and justifies it by saying the various cells were fighting each other and were uncoordinated. Thank god the Brits stopped sending arms or there would have been a civil war between these silly French Resistance members. Of course what happened in August was the liberation of Paris followed by the integration of the FFI into the new French army, which would go on to liberate the rest of the country. But Lindybeige pushes this civil war angle pretty hard, calling at this point of the video both Vichy France and the Resistance to be pro French in a way and underlining the conflicts between the two as a reason why the weapon shipments stopped coming, with examples such as Resistance members exacting reprisals against Nazi collaborators, which is a completely moot point because Vichy France and collaborators had nothing to do with the Resistance and were in fact, at this point of time, recognized as the enemy by all Allied forces, meaning acts of resistance against them would in no way prompt Allied command to stop supporting the French Resistance. Lindybeige goes so far as to say that the OSS and British secret service stopping the weapon shipments in August 1944 legitimately prevented an outright civil war between the different cells of the French Resistance, which was in actuality pretty unified in its support to De Gaulle at this point thanks to the efforts of Jean Moulin as discussed previously. This hardly gels with the events following August 1944, where the members of the Resistance and FFI were enlisted in the Free French Army and were therefore issued American military equipment and training to function as regular troops. Now stop me if I'm wrong but it appears that in Lindybeige's mind all French people were ready to tear each other apart until the British stopped sending them pipe guns, after which the Americans sent them tanks which obviously disabled their ability to start a civil war.

--Two French colonial soldiers using a blend of Allied gear during the winter of 1944-45. They are presumably thinking of killing each other.

--Much like the Phantom Menace review this is addressing a piece of media were essentially everything is wrong, hence the length of this post. Lindybeige has obviously researched the topic to great length, then ignored half of it to record 17mn of vague, dismissive and unsubstantiated claim that each take an equal amount of time to debunk. He present the facts as if everything that happened on British soil was under British orders so as to make the French Resistance only effective on their accord, all the while disregarding the French government in exile and slandering the efforts of French people but also inadvertently of the Americans. It is my honest belief that this sad excuse of an historian is either profoundly lacking in literacy or actively trying to justify his xenophobia by bending WW2 historiography around his bias, and whatever it may be he should be deplatformed to avoid spreading more harmful and disrespectful lies about a group of brave men and women who fought to liberate their country from fascism.

[murfpersonalblog]

I have been thinking about Louis and him being a vampire capitalist means he has to stay connected with humanity. To know art and reality trends means he cannot sever his ties.

I love this @deepalienstudentshepherd.

It really gets to the spindly roots of Louis' unique approach to vampirism, through his approach to what being human is or even means & works--for him.

"Him being a vampire capitalist means he has to stay connected with humanity."

And this is why I roll my eyes when Lestat talks, cuz he swears that vampires are oh-so-removed from humanity, and so above worldly attachments--oh, look at those silly mortals, all they ever think about is Food, Sex & Home. As if Lestat isn't the walking talking incarnation of hedonistic hyperfixations on Food ("and then there was the food"--the MEAT); and Sex ("we can have an orgy; you can F**K them, I can EAT them~!"); and Home ("I am your family, Louis").

Either as a capitalist, artist, butcher, baker, candlestick-maker--or ROCK STAR--vampires doing anything humans do (and passing as humans) naturally requires staying connected with humanity. You have to KNOW your audience; know what makes them tick. We always clown on companies being out of touch, cuz if no one's buying you ain't selling!

"To know art and reality trends means he cannot sever his ties."

And what's sad is that Louis experimented with art via photography, cuz it called to him, and he does have an eye for it--Louis is, after all, very fashionable & stylish; we see it in Ep1 when he gives Lestat a makeover & helps furbish the townhouse & design Claudia's bedroom & dress her; "it's chiffon, it has movement~!" But at the end of the day, Louis realizes & has to accept that he's NOT an artist; that's not his calling. He doesn't have the patience for photography, and what's worse; he can't connect with human muses if he himself cannot be around humans when they're living their DAY-to-DAY lives--cuz he's a nocturnal vampire. (TBH I'd love to see him take another crack at it with modern technology; around modern nightlife.)

But you know what Louis IS good at? What he's always had a real knack for? And what he's much smarter & savvier about? BUSINESS.

The unique thing about Louis is that unlike so many of AR's Old World vampires, who either lived during antiquity (Akasha, the Twins, Seth, Cyril, Teskhamen, Marius, Pandora, Mael, etc), or frikkin ye olde medieval/rennaisance times (Thorne, Armand, Gabrielle, Lestat, Nikki); Louis is a MODERN vampire. book!Louis was born in France and came to the Americas as a colonizer, but AMC!Lou was BORN in the New World. Like anyone, Louis is a product of his environment; and that shapes what drives & motivates him; as his vampirism/capitalism is all wrapped up in how he existed as a human.

The DPDLs lived lavishly in their mansion--land that used to be a slaveowning sugar plantation--waited on by Black servants; giving hefty donations to the biggest White church (vehicles of imperialism & colonialism--"Gold, God, and Glory"); gaining who knows how much money that had been seeded and fertilized by nothing but the exploitation of Black men & women--slavery & prostitution both.

Louis' character is defined by his vampirism--even before he's ever made a vampire. Vampires are predacious parasitical leeches. They are voracious insatiable carnivorous bottomless pits that just eateateat; consuming but never being fulfilled--Hungry Ghosts.

Of course Louis would be attracted to real estate (HOMES); since buying, selling & developing property is in his French White ancestors' colonial settler drug-addicting sugar-growing plantation-owning blood (FOOD). When his father up & died and Lou inherited the DPDL estate, Louis HAD to learn how to successfully run land & shops & people; so he could keep his bougie AF family afloat.

When he ran Storyville, he owned multiple businesses, not just brothels, and was apparently a very good landlord. (Ironically, we also know how quick Louis is to evict a mofo & take their deed--just ask Antoinette, Lestat & Armand! XD) Of course Louis would turn from making art to selling art as an art dealer--Louis is fashionable, and he knows what people like, even if he himself can't produce or even mimic it (like Santiago, Armand, Marius, & Lestat can). We saw Mr. "Fire Escape" Louis flex his skills with the Alderman's racist lawyer dabbling in effery in 1x3; and when Lou renovated the old-timey Fairplay and made it the slicker hipper & more popular Art Deco-themed Azalea.

Louis built a microcosm of the Savage Garden at the Azalea; a tiny corner of hedonistic paradise (full of "hookers, hooch, and cards"), where men could live out their fantasies (SEX). He inspired Armand to even conceptualize Night Island--as Armand realized he needed a better/another companion to teach him about modernity, technology, treasure-hunting, etc. And together, they lived in the neo-capitalist hellscape of Dubai for who knows how long--I wouldn't be surprised if they had a direct hand in its vampiric development.

Louis' character is also defined by his delusional hypocrisy; always tryna justify his place in the world (and the space he wastes/takes up) by tryna do "good" things, to balance out the evil.

During Jim Crow, so many Black people suffered under socio-economic inequality & oppression--even Black folk lighter-skinned than Lou, as seen with Bricktop, Lily, and even BBass!Claudia; all living in the worst slums of Storyville; deriving not a single drop of privilege/benefits their mixed/white ancestry might've given them in better circumstances; other than the dubious Pretty Privilege that made them sexually exploitable as prostitutes, etc.

book/show!Lou's a HUGE exploiter; not just as a slaveowner/pimp, but also as a father; using Claudia to boost his ego and save his marriage. Lou FAILED at being a father, cuz he couldn't relate/connect to the wants & needs of a growing girl/woman past his own self-centered aims. And Lou FAILED at being an artist, cuz he couldn't relate/connect with the human(ist) soul; and rage-quit cuz of his hurt pride/ego, rather than paying attention to what the art deal was saying (albeit condescendingly).

The one thing Lou took pride in that he was actually good at was his status as a businessman/capitalist--exploiting/relying on middle-men to produce/create things for him to buy & sell at a profit. (His failures as a businessman in NOLA were solely cuz of racist white men & the Ordinances that shut down Storyville.) At the end of the day, know thyself, and capitalize on one's strengths. So that's what he did. And cuz capitalism is evil AF, as a vampire, he's pretty good at it, LOL.

[on-partiality]

Today's the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party so here's some information on the Sons of Liberty, the lead up to the Boston Tea Party and what happened after!

apologies for any inaccuracies, I wrote this pretty late

The conflict between the American colonies and New England started after the French and Indian war ended with the Treaty of Paris on the 10th of February, 1763. The French and Indian war started because of conflicting territory claims in North America between the British and the French. Originally it was fought between only the British Americans and the French colonists with Native Americans helping on either side (especially with the French because they were severely outnumbered). However two years into the war the United Kingdom - except for ireland - decided enough was enough and officially declared a war with France which started a large world-wide conflict over many territories. In the end, the war was won by the Colonial Americans and British, the French lost all of their North American territory and what used to be their territory was split somewhat evenly between the Spanish and the British but that was only sorted out after the British fought in a war against the Spanish called the Anglo-Spanish war (the first one). So a victory, that sounds good for America right? Wrong. Wars are expensive, maintaining an army is expensive and the British were dealing with many other wars in all different territories at around the same time so England had a national debt of nearly 177.645 MILLION modern day USD.

England had a HUGE poverty crisis. They had to come up with a way to get money and quickly so on April the 5th 1764 the British parliament amended their pre-existing Sugar and Molasses Act. A tax on the importation of wine, molasses, indigo and sugar from places that weren't part of Britain, mainly the non-British Caribbean. This act also banned all foreign rum. Then on March the 22nd, 1765 the British parliament passed the stamp act. A tax on playing cards, newspapers, legal documents. The main problem with this tax was that it couldn't be paid in the paper money used in the 13 colonies, it had to be paid off using the British Sterling which wasn't easy to obtain in America. That and paper was possibly the most important resource in the 18th century. Later in October 1765, a Stamp Act Congress was held in Philadelphia to discuss all of the problems with this act. Then on March the 24th the British passed the Quartering Act which stated that if British troops want to stay at your house you have to provide them with food and let them inside of your house. This was a clear invasion of two very basic rights of Englishmen, private property and personal security.

The Americans fought back against these acts like with Boston's non-importation agreement where merchants from Boston agreed not to buy or sell anything from/to Britain and the Golden Hill riot in New York and the Gaspée Affair which was when a group burned a British ship while the soldiers were off looking for smugglers in Rhode Island, the group was then accused of treason. The most notable of all of these protests though was the later Boston Tea Party.

The Boston Tea Party happened because of a group called the Sons of Liberty which was created in 1765 out of a strong hatred of the Stamp Act. They believed that it was ridiculous that the British could tax the Americans when the Americans didn't even have a representative in parliament, their phrase was 'no taxation without representation'. There's a lot of dispute over what kind of organisation the Sons of Liberty actually was. I might go into all of the theories in another post but for the moment if you want to come up with your own idea on it I suggest looking into them yourself, for this post I'm just going to call them a group or organisation because it's pretty ambiguous. Anyway, the Sons of Liberty usually met at liberty poles/liberty trees which are believed to have been marked as meeting places using the Sons of Liberty's flag. The group was founded in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay colony and it's leader was Samuel 'Sam' Adams.

The Sons of Liberty's first big really move was to burn an effigy of the local Stamp Act enforcer, Andrew Oliver and then burn his office and destroyed the house of his associate. The group's protests were more often then not violent but they got their points across. It didn't help when the Boston Massacre happened in 1770, which only further outraged the colonists, expect the Boston Massacre to get it's own in depth post one day because the court trial was super interesting. Then on the 10th of May, 1773 the British made another act called the Tea Act which made it so that the colonists had to pay more for tea that wasn't legally imported. The Tea Act was meant to help the British East India Tea Company because they were making most of Britains money and they'd gone into a huge debt which caused 20-30 English banks to collapse and started the British Credit Crisis of 1772-1773. The problem was that because the imported tea from Britain was really cheap people didn't buy from local businesses which caused farmers to go completely bankrupt. The Tea Act was the final straw for the Sons of Liberty and many Americans.

Britain sent a shipment of East India Company Tea to America and all of the American colonies that the tea was going to be sent to convinced the people on the ship to resign except for Massachusetts. So the Dartmouth, a ship full of tea arrived in Boston Harbour, Samuel Adams called for a meeting at Fanueuil Hall and thousands of people turned up so they had to move meeting places. During the meeting the Colonists discussed possible resolutions, they decided to have a medium group of men watching the tea to make sure it wouldn't be unloaded and pleaded for the ship to leave. The governor of Massachusetts refused to let the ship leave and two more ships arrived. On December the 16th, 1773, Samuel Adams met with the people of Massachusetts again to tell them about the governors refusal, the meeting caused total fury amongst all of the colonists.

In protest of the Tea Act and all of the other taxes the British had put on the Americans, the people ran out of the meeting room, some of them put on Native American costumes both in an attempt to conceal their identity because what they were about to do was illegal and as a symbolic choice to show that America's their country, not Britain. They then ran onto the 3 tea ships while Samuel Adams was telling everyone to calm down and stay for the end of the meeting. And spent 3 hours hurling all of the chests of tea into the water.

The British did not respond well, they believed that the Colonists needed to be punished so they passed the infamous Intolerable Acts which consisted of the Boston Port Act, meant to force Boston to pay for the tea by closing the port until the people of Boston paid for the tea which the Colonists argued was unfair because it was punishing the whole population for something only about half of them did, the Massachusetts Government Act which changed the way that the government of Massachusetts worked by giving people appointed by the British Parliament/King far more power, this made it easier for the British government to manage the Massachusetts Bay colony from England, the Administration of Justice Acts which state that any accused Royal officials can get a trial in England if they don't believe that they would be judged fairly in Massachusetts - which seems like a strange thing to add given how the Boston Massacre trial with John Adams went? - And I've already talked about the last intolerable act, the Quartering act which states that you have to let British troops stay in your house if they want to and you have to give them food.

[their-name-is-fake]

I know it seems like I talk a lot about Algeria, but i really think some of yall should look into its revolutionary war. Not just like the general strokes but I mean get INTO it. There are some revolutionary fighters I think some of yall really need to know, especially in relation to Palestine and their revolution.

Morocco is another one that’s overlooked because TECHNICALLY it wasn’t a war, but I promise you France had no interest in letting Morocco go either, and they did some real messed up stuff in an attempt to keep Morocco as a “protectorate” like CIA type torture on children type stuff.

That’s why anytime France is pro something, you have to look at it with a grain of salt. To provide context, one of Frances most well known in generals during the Algerian revolutionary war, still believes that the Algerians were terrorists. This was an interview given like 30 years ago.

I’m just saying, I think a lot of people who are neutral, or even pro Palestinian could learn a lot from the Algerian war of independenceAnd the Moroccan peoples fight against the French. I think, in general Africas fight against colonialism is often washed in a way to make it seem far more pacifist, or in some cases, as if the white community came to stop the atrocities, as opposed to what really happened, which was that the natives revolted and spilled blood.

Either way, y’all should really know some of these revolutionaries and some of the tactics used.

[teecupangel]

So I had this idea of Connor meeting adéwale who gets a sense of deja vu but can’t pinpoint from whereand the two of them teaming up to find the son of adewale’s friend and Connor’s father both not realizing that they are looking for the same person until they have a run in with haytham and adewale having a lot of things of Connor suddenly make sense with the reveal

So this would be a bit hard considering Shay killed Adéwalé while Ratonhnhaké:ton was just a kid but we can fudge it a bit. They did talk a bit after Shay struck him down so we can make this a case of “he almost died but he didn’t”.

Let’s say one of Adéwalé’s crewmembers survived and found him, dragging him out of danger and helping him survive.

During that time, Adéwalé dreams of Edward Kenway, of the past they shared, the letters they sent to one another…

When he wakes up, months have passed and he was still too weak that he could barely walk.

He had been transported to Port-au-Prince and being taken care of by his son, Babatunde Josèphe. His son tells him to rest and that they’re trying to get in contact with the Colonial Assassins but with no luck. Messengers either return empty handed, talking about the danger and the heightened Templar presence, or they do not return at all.

The Templars had the colonies under their control and it was becoming too dangerous to try and infiltrate the colonies while Shay Cormac, the Assassin Hunter, is on the hunt.

Adéwalé can’t do anything but try to heal his weak body, his mind dwelling deeper and deeper into the darkness the more news they hear about what had happened to the Assassins in the colonies.

The Assassins Adéwalé knew.

By the time he was strong enough, the damage had been done and the Brotherhood were too busy in France and Britain. Their letters asking Achilles if he needed help only being met with silence.

But Adéwalé knew he needed to go back there.

No.

He needed to see Haytham Kenway.

And kill him.

Even if it was the last thing he did.

Haytham Kenway had destroyed what the Kenway stand for, what Edward had worked so hard to create.

As Edward’s friend…

As his only remaining friend…

It was Adéwalé’s duty to destroy the last remaining Kenway before more damage could be done.

His son tells him he was projecting his guilt and anger to someone else.

His grandson did not understand why he was leaving.

Adéwalé was part of the past and he was dragging Haytham Kenway with him if it was the last thing he would do.

So he returns to the colonies and meets up with Achilles.

That’s when he meets up with the young man learning under Achilles.

Ratonhnhaké:ton.

There was something about him that reminded Adéwalé of Edward Kenway…

So he took Ratonhnhaké:ton under his wings as well and Achilles didn’t say anything. Ratonhnhaké:ton never told Adéwalé about his father by name because Achilles had told him months before Adéwalé had returned that he should keep it a secret.

Being known as Haytham Kenway’s son would only put him in danger.

So Ratonhnhaké:ton kept quiet.

And they formed a bond with Adéwalé assisting him.

Where Achilles pushed for caution, Adéwalé supported any way he can.

Ratonhnhaké:ton was free, like Edward. It would only serve to push him away if they try to chain him down.

The best way to support Ratonhnhaké:ton was to help him.

And then…

That faithful winter day…

In an abandoned church…

Ratonhnhaké:ton and Adéwalé come face to face with the man they were both searching for.

[unoficialy-married-to-ace-austin]

Biden isn't committing a genocide he's not an Israeli leader. You're either overestimating his power in this situation or you somehow think there's an illuminati thing going on which is actual flat-out alt right psycho shit.

Being wrong for no reason isn't going to help Palestine.

It actually has nothing to do with the Illuminati and you’d know that if you understood the US’s role in the colonization of Palestine.

The entire reason israel was formed was so the British could start another colony in the Middle East in the attempt to make a grab at oil, and both the US and France agreed this was a good ideas as it gave them access to the oil as well, which is were the half assed excuse of ‘making it up to the Jewish population’ came from. (I hate that I have to clarify this but this is not at all against the idea of making it up to that population after the awful atrocities that took place, these large governments just used it as an excuse. They had no real desire to ‘make it up’ to those who are Jewish.)

The US became a strong standing ally to the Israeli government over the years, despite the slaughter that has been taking place in Gaza since the beginning. The US is unlikely to gain as much access to oil if the Palestinian people take back their get so the US has no reason to stop the genocide because they actively benifit from it. And if you aren’t against something you're for it.

But that’s just the US government as a whole, what about Biden himself? Well, Israel has been given 3.3 billion dollars in the past year alone, most of the money goes to military expenses. Biden could cut this aid but refuses to. Also, most of the weapons being used by the Israeli army are American weapons, which again, Biden could easily stop but chooses not too. Finally, many Americans have gone over to fight on the side of Israel, including active duty members. Biden could make this a punishable offense seeing as he is THE HEAD IF THE US MILITARY. The president is in charge of all of that and he chooses to not even condemn Israel.

You say being ‘wrong’ isn’t helping Palestine, but here the thing. 1, I’m not wrong about this. And 2, it’s hurting the Palestinian people more to actively ignore how America is an active member in their destruction, colonization, and oppression.

Finally, why do you feel the need to be on anon? I’m confident enough in my stance to be open on my blog about it, why do you feel the need to hide behind the anon button? I’d be happy to have a full conversation on the topic, but instead I’m left to just hope you see this. And I really hope you do as I think you are simply miss-informed on what is really taking place.

[olympeline]

A few more headcanons for my National Animals AU. This time let’s talk about some mainland European nation-people to go with my British Isles bros post:

Germany: dog

Germany’s national animal is a black eagle - kinda, it’s the one on their coat of arms - but ehhh, any kind of bird doesn’t fit Ludwig in my mind. A dog does, though. I can definitely see him as some kind of giant, scary looking canine like a German shepherd or a rottweiler. One that appears intimidating but is soft on the inside. These dogs were bred to be hard workers too, just like Ludwig is. As for what he was in his days as Holy Rome…IDK. Their symbol was, again, a black eagle. Maybe Holy Rome was a black eagle chick who never got to fly. What do you guys think? And yeah, I know “Germany is Holy Rome” is very canonically dubious at this point, but I don’t care. I still like it

Italy (North and South): Italian wolves

They get it from their grandpa! It’s Romulus and Remus all over again. Feli and Lovi were a pair of fluffy little wolf pups for a very long time. Grandpa Rome himself started as a wolf, but I’m on the fence if he stayed that way until he died. Or if he became an eagle - the standard of Rome - as the Empire expanded. Wolves were very feared in Europe and that fits with everyone being scared of the descendants of the infamous Roma…until they meet Feli and Lovi and realise they are a pair of Moon Moons. 😂

France: ??? → lion → horse

I’ve already talked about why Francis would be a lion that became a horse, so let’s focus on what he would have been before. When he was a babby nation pre-French unification. I’m thinking either a fox cub or a young hare. To match with Arthur’s rabbit because I love these two always being connected in some way, hehe. Red fox pups are bluish grey before they mature and blue is Francis’s colour. He became a lion and cast off his fox form before it grew big enough that he would have had to wear a red coat. Yay, Anglo-French rivalry symbolism! Francis is also sleek, cunning, and pretty like a fox. But hares are sleek and pretty too. IDK, but I can imagine a rabbit looking at a hare and having the “god i wish that were me” meme reaction, you know? Hares just seem cooler in general. Arthur looked up to Francis and was jealous of him when they were kids, even if he would never admit it. 😆 The young nations being prey animals when they were conquered by Rome is good too. Yay, more symbolism! So hmm, not sure which is better. Do you guys prefer a fox or a hare for Francy-pants? Tell me in the replies if you like. Either way, he’s one of the nation-people who’s been through the most dramatic transformations over his lifetime.

Spain: ??? → black (fighting) bull

Ey! Toro! Toro! Not much needs to be said here. The toro bravo image is so married to Spanish culture, I can just leave it as is. I don’t know if Antonio would have been something else before, or if he was always a little calf that grew up. My knowledge of Spanish history is full of holes, sadly. I know there’s a lot with Carthage and Rome and the Punic Wars and that Spain was a Roman colony. Then various invasions, religious wars, the reconquista, all leading up to eventual unification. But it’s all too surface level to make headcanons for this AU. If any of you guys have ideas about how Antonio’s history might translate to pre-bull animal form(s) - or if you think he should have any at all - please tell me below! I’m really interested.

Russia: Eurasian brown bear

Another one where not much needs to be said. Russia is a huge, historically feared country with an incredibly tough climate. So Ivan would be a huge, feared animal that could survive the ice and snow of Northern Eurasia’s winters. Also, bears are solitary and blah, blah “friendless Ivan wants companions but they don’t want him” etc. You know the story. Bears were once so feared and hated in some parts of Europe that people refused to even say their name aloud in case it summoned one. They’re also tall af on their hind legs, eat a lot and get chubby, and love sweet things. Ivan was on easy mode for this post, lol.

(This AU is addictive. I think I need an intervention at this point ffff 🫣)

[laviejaguardia]

Is Latino not an ethnicity????

It isn't (and it isn't a race either). Latinidad is a political identity with some sociological, cultural and historical background. What it does not have -and I cannot stress this enough- is shared genetics/common ancestry which is how I see it most referred.

Here's the definition of ethnicity from Wikipedia:

And to use roughly the same source, here's the Wikipedia disaggregation of Latin America today (which ofc I have issues with lol I'm not missing the irony of telling you "Latin America is sooo diverse" while using the "Asian" category, but I need to make do:

See what I'm getting at?

Let's continue, you can say "well I didn't mean genetics, I meant everything else"

Okay language:

Latin America includes hundreds of native languages like Quechua, Mayan, Guaraní (oficial language of Paraguay!), Aymará or Nahuatl, and always has! Without counting the beautifully mixed and improved Spanish, Portuguese (which I called Brasilero for years as a kid lol) and French, or even later additions like Welsh, Japanese, Chinese or Arabic from immigrant clusters that still speak it or are currently arriving into the continent.

So language isn't it either.

I don't even need to get into traditions c'mon look at Carnaval in Brasil, día de los muertos in Ecuador, an 9 de julio in Argentina and tell me those are all the same. Look at empanadas, tacos, humitas, pizza brasilera, tequeños, asado, sudados, etc

Religion? Argentina alone has the second biggest Islamic and Jewish populations in America after the US. Sure Christianity is paramount given the invasion and imposition by Catholic monarchies by the Spanish and Portuguese, but to say it's the only religion is to spit in the face of again, hundreds of native people's whose religions have been systematically erased since 1492. It is also quite reductive to only take institutionalised religions as valid forms of worship, or to ignore the fact that most Catholicism here would give European orthodox Catholics a stroke.

Now, history and social treatment, here's where the good stuff is.

Independencias:

These all look super different but these are processes and most of them took place in the first 3 decades of the 1800s so they're not that far off. These were carried out with an idea of hermandad. They used to be virreynatos under the same rule, we (patriotas) were all getting independence from the same monarch power (realistas). There was a lot of collaboration between administrations and armies. This was a decision from the leaders of the time, to seek strength in numbers.

The fact that we had to gain independence is a point of contact as well. At that time "patria" was understood as the desire to be independent, there were no neat lines to separate the territories. At this point in history you'll find lots of key people like San Martín, Juana Azurduy and Bolivar talking about "pueblos americanos" as a way to claim independence from imperialist/colonial European rule. (Brasil had a different history with the Portuguese court moving there)

The term Latin America or Latinoamérica came by a little later, the earliest it's been found used is 1856 by a politician from Chile, as you can see, the context it is used in is purely political.

Historically, the term when used by Americans is heavily tied to a way to gather strength in solidarity for independence and rejection of foreign imperialist aspirations, from the United States, France, Spain, etc etc.

I think latinidad is in a way a self fulfilled prophecy, we were invaded and as such "unified" where before were hundreds of different peoples. We took that very same unification and made it ours, in part because the rest of the world insists on putting us all in the same bag (included with things like the School of the Americas in the 1960s-1980s where all of Latinamerica was deemed safer for the US to be ruled by genocidal military governments than democracies that smelled just a little communist. Spoiler! it wasn't safer for us who had to actually live under them)

I reject the idea of latinidad as an ethnicity because it stems from the idea of "la raza latina" which is very very racist ("latinos" were the white Europeans from Romance language countries aka Spain, Portugal, France and Italy, there was a clear hierarchy there usual to the era that still affects our social and economic framework). It's reductive and it pretends to obscure and muddle a very clear and deliberate political choice that is to identify as latinoamerican.

This also applies to the latin people who emigrate to the US and their descendants, both the ones fixing the lawns and the ones emigrating without need of a visa to work a stable 9-5. Even if it seems only the first ones get the name.

So what's latinidad? It's whatever we say it is, hope this helps ✌️

[pinkflipphonez]

Hello! Really love your content so far and it makes me so incredibly happy seeing more people reimagining Alfred and Matthew as nonwhite compared to it being controversial 8years ago.

Ever since I joined the fandom I always had the (at the time) unpopular opinion that the NA bros were from mixed heritages (White/Indigenous), which as an American non-white Latino with Indigenous roots made the most sense to me especially considering that even in the manga they don't really represent the government, but the people themselves and both countries (especially the US) are so diverse it absolutely baffled me that they were just plain white boys. I always imagined them being mixed, but never quite fitting in with either groups.

I am sorry if I overstep on this next bit, please feel free to correct me on anything I say, I've just had a long time to think about this and how other countries would react, which is gonna put England/France into a bad light but...they were straight up horrific to the Natives. Even France.

I know you mentioned how in Hetalia, the personifications get along with their overseers/colonizers and that they wouldn't be okay with this, and I think I may have to *slightly* disagree.

I think when it comes to Nations and how they view their fellow personifications, how they look won't matter as much compared to how they act or culture wise. I can see that while the two heavily resemble Native features, when they were taken in by their colonizers they were raised to hold to those same European values that still do plague the country today. I can imagine Arthur making sure that Alfred ignores his Indigenous roots and that he's raised as a proper British colony, speaking and writing in English only, being raised as a proper Christian etc. Forced to assimilate, which has been done to so many people that come from different cultures from the time America was colonized to even now in some places. They may not look completely white, but by god will he makes sure they act like they do.

I don't think he would have ever been okay with his people being killed, tortured, having their cultures and languages erased or even enslaved, because he does not represent the cruel ideas the government has, but the people itself...which also do include the people that *ARE* okay with this. A constant battle Alfred has to deal with, which ends up with him making not the best choices.

Things aren't perfect even today, there's still so many issues that's happening where Indigenous folks are still fighting for basic rights to water, working roads, etc. But at the current time, more Americans these days (especially the much younger generations that were taught/look up about the atrocities that our government has committed, especially now that the Native voices have platforms to speak on), are much more aware. I see the brothers trying to reclaim their roots, and start what will be centuries long reparations on what their people have done to the Indigenous community. Which honestly, reconnecting with cultures after being forced to assimilate to American culture is something big thats happening here all across the United States with Latino-Americans embracing their heritage, African-Americans who were descendents of those stolen from their homeland reconnecting with their culture, Indigenous people bringing their languages and foods back to light.

It's honestly just a very difficult journey I think they would have as they have to deal with Nationhood, but forgetting who they came from and having to give themselves up to a certain group. Again, never fitting in completely with one or the other.

Again, I'm so incredibly sorry if this is overstepping in anyway or if some things don't make sense. It's such a complicated subject that really can't be summed up super easily and I did want to go longer but I felt like this was long enough already @_@

Firstly, you are not overstepping in the slightest! I am legitimately so content and kind of misty-eyed to see so many other native fans of the show both interact within the fandom and give their own interpretation on both canon and OC characters. It was never this wholesome and community-oriented when I first joined the fandom and I'm glad I stuck around to see the tide change.

Secondly, your interpretation of France and England's involvement in Canada and America's assimilation is... very accurate, and while it's something I've fought about with myself in my plotting of Alfred's life (because I don't want to hate them lol), they most definitely did have a hand in his disconnection. However, as much as I agree they are influenced by both their natives and settlers, I do think they very much hold their own reservations and opinions on the social climate around them as any individual human being would.

While American society and most American presidents were anti-indigenous and pro-slavery, there were also vigilant indigenous activists and abolitionists; there were men and women who defended and engrained themselves with native communities and there were men and women who fought mercilessly to free enslaved people. I believe Alfred was one of those people. Alfred noticed the wrong within the society around him and despised it-- but alongside his overseers and the people surrounding him, his thought process was in the minority.

I don't see Alfred participating in the genocide, assimilation, or enslavement of indigenous or Black people-- and it is not because I wish to sanitize this true history, but because I earnestly do not see Alfred being so cruel (as he was someone who also thought himself a better person than his brutal fatherly figure). I do think he did try to feel indifferent most of the time to... well, assimilate, but I also like to think he was infuriated, enraged, while at the same time having convictions on where his help is best suited as a native man with the privileges and appearance of a white man (I hc that he very consciously slaughtered slave-owners and triple k members, especially during the civil war, but I realize that may be a heavy hc to have).

I appreciate you bringing up the increase of younger folks in America beginning their decolonization/reconnection journeys because that is absolutely what I feel Al and Matt are going through actively, but I like to think they began their reconnection journey much earlier, during the rise of AIM in the 1970s. I see them being the biggest activists for all their native communities and they help in every possible way they can. Not only because they want to reconnect and amend their mistakes, but because they altruistically care for their people.

Their hobbies absolutely include remodeling the homes of elders and delivering food to them. They are very much for the landback movement and will call out anti-indigenous sentiment without hesitation. I also think Alfred separates himself from his governmental supervisors in current day and will challenge them now compared to when he stayed relatively compliant as a young nation.

I still have SO MANY theories about Alfred and Matt's origins and experiences with assimilation that I am working out, but I want to carefully plot it all out so as to not trivialize legitimate indigenous trauma, especially as a reconnector. All I can say is that if the land I stand on had a personification, it would be an indigenous being, no question.

[sissa-arrows]

by settler/coloniser do you mean like, west bank settlers and the like (i mean actively settling or whatever. i hope you understand what im trying to say) or like all descendants of settlers who may no longer have a settler role like idk some guy in jaffa whose grandparents were settlers but he himself is just. a guy and doesn't own property etc etc.

asking bc in the first sense i fully agree with you but i saw too many leftists embrace a practically ethnic definition of coloniser which i find rather disagreeable

ps this is not meant to be like an attack i am curious

First of all this is how I personally view things and I’m Algerian not Palestinian so my definition is not a rule. At the end of the day my opinion, our collective opinions don’t matter in the scale compared to Palestinians’ opinions. I’m still choosing to answer because I don’t think Palestinians should carry that burden alone BUT if a Palestinian read this and think I’m overstepping send me a DM I will delete my post without any arguing.

Now to answer the actual question. All Israelis are settlers excluding the rare Palestinians who have the citizenship but then those are Palestinians not Israelis. Settlers = colonizers = non indigenous people permanently living in a settler colony.

The difference between the settler in the West Bank and the settler in Jaffa is not that it’s them doing the settling or their grandparents. Both live on stolen land that does not belong to them and never will. So both are settlers. The difference is somewhere else. The settler in the West Bank is fucked. He is unredeemable because he is doing the colonizing himself right now. He should leave that’s the only option. Now the guy in Yaffa there’s more nuance to it.

That guy whose grandparents were settlers and therefore stole Palestinian land… he is still living on stolen land even if he is not a land owner even if he didn’t do the stealing himself… he is still benefiting from settler colonialism. He doesn’t get to just wash his hands and pretend he is not involved because his grandparents did it not him.

Is he actively fighting against Israeli colonialism? Is he in favor of giving ALL the land back to indigenous people aka Palestinians with the right of return for the Palestinian refugees and one single Palestinian country where those who fought for its liberation could stay and live with equal rights regardless of religion? If the answer is yes he is still a settler BUT he is a redeemable settler he can get rid of his status of settler by helping get rid of settler colonialism. If the answer is no if he just sits there thinking the status quo is good enough thinking the problem is Netanyahu or any other politician when the real problem is Israel itself because it’s a settler colony, then he is a settler AND he can go fuck himself too.

Living in a settler colony as a non indigenous person means that you cannot be neutral. You cannot just exist. You are either a settler trying to end settler colonialism (and in the process put an end to your status as a settler) or a settler supporting settler colonialism.

The “suitcases carriers” I mentioned. They were still settlers (excluding the mainlanders who helped Algerians in France). They just made the right decision and stood for the liberation of Algeria. That decision led to the end of French settler colonialism which put an end to their settler status. By fighting to end settler colonialism they freed themselves of being settlers. It even allowed those who wanted to stay to do so and stay as Algerians.

Lastly I want to add that a settler colony cannot create people who do not have racist bias against the indigenous people of the land they occupy. So one also needs to actively work to unlearn those bias because even settlers who fight for the liberation of indigenous people have those bias.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read The Traitor Baru Cormorant, The Monster Baru Cormorant, and The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. The series is quite well written on the whole, but I have some very significant caveats that will make my recommendation a bit narrow. In particular, the books ask the question "Is it possible to replace imagination wholesale with trivia?". The answer, by the way, is no.

I really like the characterization of Baru Cormorant. Most of the time. It is an interesting character conflict for the main character to have a deficient theory of mind and be continually blindsided by the behavior of others, either because she has not sufficiently informed herself as to what the rational thing for them to do would be, or because they are behaving non-rationally. It would be even better if this conflict consistently manifested in scenes other than those in which other characters berate Baru for this failing. Unfortunately during much of every book all other characters acquire Isekai disease. That said, the books do a good job of allowing character growth without robbing her of her characterization the way removal of character flaws can sometimes.

I mentioned that the books felt lacking in imagination. Instead of developing the various cultures that exist in this universe, they have all been randomly assigned a set number of inventions and social structures and geopolitical phenomena known from our world, unmodified, except with less/different misogyny. What if there were Romebritain and Chinafrica and Centroasiamerica and Just The Norse Basically, and they were all around the Mediterranean Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes the name of the invention is kept, like with hwachas, and sometimes it is changed, I'm not entirely sure what determines when. Ultimately, I am not of the opinion that pressing Randomize on the Age of Empires 2 civilization creator mod constitutes worldbuilding, though it certainly could be the first step towards it.

Now, this is perhaps a purely personal gripe, but every time a semi-vague allusion to a real-world thing was made, I winced, and every time it was "revealed" to be a real-world thing, I started swearing mentally. It was genuinely unpleasant to read when the density of references got too high. And the worst part is, I recognized every single reference, I think (at least, I'm pretty sure I know what the ant thing is, but I'm not sure what ants actually have to do with it). There's ways that moderately deep engagement with a handful of obscure fields can, if not quite substitute for, then at least enhance the effect of creativity or reduce the amount required. Unfortunately, outside of neuroscience (guess what Dickinson studied in college) and to some extent cryptography the engagement on display is remarkably shallow, and if I'm not mistaken consists primarily of the front page of r/TIL, CGP Grey videos, Mike Duncan's podcasts, the occasional wikipedia binge, and memes (though I salute the restraint it must have taken not to reference the ability of a trebuchet to launch a 90kg projectile over 300m oh god now I'm doing it).

Many of the references don't even make sense, I mean maybe the ant thing is just my ignorance showing, but there's other stuff. Pointing to the South Sea Bubble and John Law's Scheme as models for geopolitically disastrous market crashes is bizarre, since over the course of the ensuing century France and Britain occupied half of Europe and conquered India respectively, with literally all of their notable setbacks in the time period having been engineered at great expense by the other party. Of course peer conflict is not a thing in the Ashen Sea because each polity is a representation of a different colonial concept rather than a country per se. A market crash being totally devastating might perhaps be made to seem more plausible if the Ashen Sea economy as described made any goddamn sense. Falcrest has extraordinarily advanced metallurgy and tooling, which they use to do unreasonably complex cryptography and surgery and for no other purposes, presumably because Dickinson is mostly interested in cryptography and surgery.

Additionally, there are maybe two things that as far as I can tell aren't straight up lifted from reality (unless we count the general gender rebalancing), and they are the cancer cult and the lightning cult. Both fundamentally run on blatant author fiat. Now, I imagine Dickinson would prefer to call it plausibly deniable magic, but, well, it isn't. What he is putting in his books is physically impossible technology. It is described in technological terms and references mechanical phenomena, just in a way that does not hold up. I've seen Baru Cormorant described as Hard Fantasy. In my opinion it is actually low-tech Soft Science Fiction. This is going to be a matter of personal readings and I'm not saying it's impossible to interpret as Magic and/or Fantasy, but, well, I got the vibe that I got.

A thing I really appreciated about The Traitor Baru Cormorant is that a man wrote a book entirely from the perspective of a woman without ever seeming uncomfortable with it or getting weird and off-putting. Ideally this would not be a thing to point out specifically (it's not a thing I point out in books whose protagonists are men or boys written by women) of course. I apologize to men for what this implies. I just think it's worth highlighting and praising. For the other books, the point of view jumps around, but is still handled pretty well.

That said, I think for all their predominantly laudable handling of race, gender, and sexuality, I think the books highlight a substantial drawback of the concept of sensitivity readings. Obviously I don't have access to the drafts sent to sensitivity readers, their feedback, and the differences that feedback made to the result, but it's easy to get the impression that one of the most significant products of sensitivity reading is a proliferation of caveats and redundancies. Now, ultimately I suspect sensitivity readings probably helped rather than hindered the books overall, but it's something to watch out for and hopefully improve as it becomes an industry standard.

Between the haphazard assembling of moderately well-known references in place of worldbuilding, occasional clumsily didactic tone from both the characters (sometimes makes at least a bit of sense) and the narrative itself (less so), and seemingly morally insecure caveats, reading these books often feels like wandering down a street and seeing a building site, only to realize after a couple of minutes that there's a perfectly fine building there, except nobody ever took down the scaffolding, so now there's protruding steel bars and walkways and torn green netting all over. In other words, I suspect the books could have used a fair bit more editing, though of course I do not have sufficient information to assign responsibility.

I've been really mean about these books, I think. I did actually enjoy them quite a bit, when I wasn't cringing at the real-world references or the inexplicably didactic passages. I'll read the fourth one if it comes out, probably. Who should read them? Hm, it's tricky because I don't know whether you will consider it Fantasy, (Alt-)Historical Fiction, or Science Fiction, all of which you could reasonably consider it to be. If you like any or all of those, don't particularly mind seeing references all over the place, and like smartass protagonists, this is probably a series for you. Otherwise, read it if you like but it's by no means an instant classic or a must-read.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Mandatory Latina ask: do Matt feel American as in part of one of the Americas? Part of the New World? Mexico and Cuba would try and explain they are all American and Alfred feels The New World™ on a Manifest Destiny kind of philosophy but do Matt feels some kindship with his friend Cuba and Caribbean commonwealth brothers and Latinos and former or current French colonies nations?

This is a fascinating question because it's a D.) all of the above. Question if this was multiple choice.

I think, in the year of our lord 2023, he would probably call himself a North American and think of himself as a part of the New World, but usually, that definition for Canadians silently includes some of the South Pacific, so that doesn't make a whole lot of goddamn sense either. North Americans in a different way than the Americans but not as much the Pan-American sense of America. And that's very new. There's a small spurt of French Canadians considering themselves Latin Americans in the early 19th century with our revolt against the British and nationalism that corresponded with some participation of individuals in the wars of independence and other conflicts in South America. Matt had a moment before anglophone domination took over that he might have seen a future in that sort of Pan-American definition of American, but it was done by the 1830s.

After that, it was the British Empire. He defines himself by participating in that imperial system, not the French and not a sense of being North American until after WW1. And even then, it took until NAFTA in the early 90s for an actual large-scale cultural flow with the mainland. Cuba and the Caribbean are a little different because the trade relationship was there. Halifax was the main port for centuries, but it's still... it's an odd relationship. Suppose I look at the British Empire in Africa. In that case, it's easy to see how that would work because the Canadians played a small but very bluntly colonialist role in multiple conflicts. With the Caribbean, there's some exchange of people and trade. However, it's from an early enough date that Canada is still kind of too shitty and underdeveloped to have an oppressive relationship from the very get-go. Still, there is a lot of fuckery in there. I will say I think it's a bit easier than it might otherwise be as Black Canadians were politically organized in the late 19th and early 20th century, and that, amongst other forces, largely blunted our own want for a mini-empire in our sphere the way NZ and Australia did with island ports in their own neighbourhood. There's an alternate universe where Canada fought the Falklands War. So I think Matt gets along with them, but I'm not sure there's a sense of kinship so much as comradery in an 'oh fuck what'd the limeys/yanks/frogs/Spaniards/Portuguese do this time.'

Born a francophone, he has... it's a weird relationship he's got with the rest of the Francophonie. I don't think he feels a sense of kinship at all. Friendly, sure, increasingly interested in them, yes. But French Canadians, particularly the Quebecois, are pretty proud and tend to think of themselves as entirely different from France or Belgium. And despite what the Quebecois nationalists would say in the 1970s, we really cannot compare our history with, say, Algeria's or Vietnam's. And Matt is really aware of that. He was way more privileged under Arthur than practically anyone was under Francois.

He's not unique by any means. There's been middling anti-social sorts in every empire since the Akkadians, but he's just kinda everywhere and nowhere. He and Cuba have definitely had a relationship. Like, I don't believe it, but there's a reason there's a conspiracy that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's son and not Pierre's lmao. If nothing else, Cucan has had some good sex. I think he gets along with Maria (my friend's Mexico) really well too. It doesn't help that he's not the most extroverted type either. He's such a weirdo I'm so sorry to whoever has to interact with him or us as a country lmao.

[weirdestbooks]

The Living Ghost of a Long Dead Brother (Wattpad | Ao3)

This oneshot is spoken entirely in Swedish.

Sweden had never met New Sweden. Her half-brother had died over fifty years before she was born. So when her king asked her to visit America and the former site of New Sweden to celebrate its founding anniversary with them, Sweden agreed, despite her lack of emotional attachment to the area, to come.

She didn’t really know why she agreed. Maybe she wanted to see the land where her older brother would have been raised or maintain positive diplomatic relations with America. Sweden didn’t know, but she was glad she did.

It was a lovely trip, and Sweden was glad for the break from her duties as a country. Now, she was sitting by the Delaware River, smoking a cigarette and wondering what the New Sweden Colony would have looked like back when it existed.

And wondering what her older brother looked like. Her father had never commissioned any portraits of him, despite his status as a countryhuman, so Sweden had never had a face to put with the name. There were even conspiracy theories regarding the status of the colony, with some people thinking that New Sweden had never been personified despite evidence to the contrary.

“You think I’d have an easier time finding you since this is my land,” a voice suddenly said behind her. The voice was odd, his Swedish almost archaic or spoken with a very strange accent. Sweden turned to see a countryhuman behind her, a nervous grin on his face, which bore the flag she had been seeing flying around Wilmington all day.

“Delaware?” She murmured, surprised. The state shrugged.

“Yeah,” he said, before laughing slightly. “But I’m also the replacement for New Sweden if that means anything to you.”

Sweden blinked before looking at the countryhuman, now with renewed interest. Was this her half-brother? Or, more accurately, the child of her half-brother? Of course, that might not be the way he saw things. Sweden knew replacements didn’t always see it the same way, with some seeing themselves as the children of their past and others seeing themselves as a new beginning for whatever they personified.

“Replacement, huh? How do you see your past?” Sweden asked.

“I’m New Sweden, just with some amnesia and a new name,” Delaware said, “So, I do consider myself your brother.”

So, her long-dead brother was alive in the form of an American state.

She wondered if her king had known about this, and that’s why he was so insistent that she came with them to America. She would have to ask him later.

“I didn’t know the American states were personified,” Sweden stated. It wasn’t a question, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want answers.

“You know Britain and how he treats his kids?” Delaware asked. Sweden nodded, her lack of knowledge of the American states making much more sense.

“Does America fear him?” she asked. She knew most of Britain’s former colonies weren’t comfortable around him, but with everything that had happened in the past few decades, she figured America would be over that.

“Not him. What he could do to us. Dad’s overprotective like that.” Delaware said, walking to stand next to her before shooting her a small smile, “You won’t tell, will you little sister?”

Sweden snorted, “Who willingly wants to spend time with him?”

“France.”

“Well, she’s never been right in the head,” Sweden replied without missing a beat. Delaware laughed.

“I don’t think very many of us are.” He said before the conversation ended. They sat silently for a while before Sweden acknowledged the topic they were avoiding.

“Replacement? What happened?” She asked. Delaware shrugged.

“I don’t know. Don’t want to either. I know it had something to do with Britain and that New Netherlands was killed the same day, but aside from that–” Delaware made a clicking noise with his tongue, pointing at his head, “I got nothing. But that is not a New Sweden memory I want to have. I’d rather have the others.”

Sweden hummed in acknowledgment before speaking, “So you remember our father?”

“Not really. He was very neglectful. He was busy with wars in Europe and didn’t have enough time for me.” Delaware said. Sweden sighed.

“Sounds like what I’ve heard of him. Was he a bad parent, the parts you remember?” She asked. Their father had died the day she was born, and she grew up being compared to him and told of how amazing he was as a person and a country. And she grew up with the whispers, too, people saying that God was upset with Sweden, which is why he replaced the Swedish Empire with a skinny little girl.

Sweden took great pleasure in punching the particular noble where the sun didn’t shine.

But now she had someone who knew Father as a parent and could…verify the things she had been told.

“He tried. He wanted colonies, though, not kids. And I think he was convinced that we are inhuman enough to take care of ourselves from birth. He could’ve been worse. He tried more than others I’ve seen. Unfortunately, the bar for countries as parents is so low; neglectful parents are considered good parents.” Delaware said, with a sigh, “But much of my New Sweden memories are incomplete or missing. He could be better than that, but…”

“He could be worse.” Sweden said, shaking her head, “That’s better than I expected.”

“Glad I could help. Now, I know you’re here for politics and such with your monarchs, but if you are willing, I’d like to show you around Wilmington and some nearby areas…and get to know you as a sister or something. Only if you’re willing, of course. We just met, and I’m a part of another country so it would be stupid to wan—”

“Delaware,” Sweden said, cutting off the state’s worries,  “I would like that.”

Delaware looked at her, surprise in his eyes, “really?”

“Why not? It seems fun, and we don’t have to do human forms or names, just country…or country and state,” Sweden said. Delaware smiled, visibly reminding Sweden of America.

“That sounds great. Thank you, Sweden.” 

Sweden smiled back.