#racial theories

[taliabhattwrites]

Is "hijra" a slur? Contextualizing South Asian (trans)misogyny

A note on the sheer cultural diversity of the subcontinent

There is no realistic way for me to exhaustively examine the context of every South Asian transfeminized population (though believe me, I’d like to). As such, I’m going to limit my scope to India, but make a quick initial note about Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Pakistani transfeminized communities, according to my partner’s sisters who are in the community, do consider ‘hijra’ more derogatory than their Indian counterparts necessarily do and refer to themselves as part of the ‘khwaja sira’ community.

I have sadly not been able to speak to any transfeminine people from Bangladesh, but I have spoken to cis queers who have told me that they use ‘hijra’ in a manner similar to India.

If there are desi queers from those communities who would like to add their perspectives, please feel free to reblog. And for the South Asian communities I haven't mentioned (such as Sri Lanka), please feel free to add your perspectives too! I'm curious to hear from you all.

Etymology and Usage

‘Hijra’ in its meaning and usage amongst the cis is most similar to the word ‘naamard’ (NAH-murd). The ‘naa’ is prefixal, a negation akin to ‘non’, while ‘mard’ is the word for ‘man’. It is a way of unmanning a man, of calling him lacking in the essential quality of manhood, of labelling him, in spirit if not in body, impotent.

As such, you can see how it’s an implicitly third-sexing construction (even before you account for how these communities are explicitly third-sexed, denied the epistemic autonomy to be recognized as women and now third-sexed by law). When Nanda called them emasculated homosexuals, it was not far off from how Indian culture forcibly categorizes and marginalizes them.

Members of the community have told me about their frustration and anger at being referred to as such, even though the word has now become a term through which they organize the community and sometimes advocate for themselves, a political reality that does not inherently contradict their campaigns to be recognized as women, and allowed to self-ID as such. (Recall, the Indian government currently mandates legal third-sexing of the hijra: they must first obtain a “Trans Certificate” and be documented as a third sex before they initiate the process of being recognized as women—a process that is contingent on subjecting themselves to transmedicalist scrutiny and gatekeeping!)

Others, however, have pointed out to me that the term is undergoing a process of reclamation. The term ‘hijra’ has a certain degree of legibility in Indian society even as it is a pejorative with degendering and dehumanizing connotations. It is being reclaimed intracommunally, but also by allies who speak of them without the usual stigmatizing connotations that cis society has saddled the term with.

Even still, I have also been told that the manner in which cis and especially Western academics use the term in scholarship—and I’m quoting here—"makes me want to tear my skin out". The fictions of “recognized gender role in Indian society” and “oppressed only after colonialism” are further simplifications and fabrications that obfuscate the role South Asian ruling-class collaborators eagerly played in petitioning for those colonial-era laws, and ignore such easily available empirical evidence as the Manusmriti mandating punishments for anyone who sleeps with—ugh—“eunuchs”.

Conclusion

In sum, I’d liken the use of the word “hijra” as analogous to the usage of “queer” in the 90s, as a slur in the contentious, contextual process of being reclaimed. As Aruvi put it to me on Bluesky:

We cannot allow cis people to dictate the discursive and epistemic terms of transfeminine culture. At the same time, the term “hijra” still carries with it heavy baggage due to South Asian transmisogyny as well as the academic misrepresentations and epistemic extractivism that Western scholarship has subjected South Asian transfeminized demographics to.

If you want to know how best to use the term, try to do so without third-sexing, and without promulgating fictive ideas of South Asian cultures being “gender-expansive” and “recognizing more than two genders”. Erasing the marginalization of the hijra is endemic to the way the term is used in the West, and that must absolutely be combatted.

On a final, personal note, I also wish to clearly state that I do not reject the label ‘hijra’ because I consider myself essentially different from them. Many Indian (usually upper-caste) trans women wish to distance themselves from the hijra, as though reproducing our society’s disgust for them will spare them from the same fate. That is not an attitude I share, or wish to normalize. The hijra—both those who affirmatively identify with the term, and those who wish to distance themselves from it—are my sisters.

I have simply not been granted the honor of being part of the communities and kin structures, and I do not wish to appropriate their struggles out of respect. Even still, their struggles are and will always be mine.

[giritina]

(Edit: just to be clear I don't mean to emphasize this girl with the tattoo as the primary perpetrator if this stuff. Idk her story, it's in kind of bad taste but there's more to this than a tattoo)

I saw this great video discussing a critique of "lobotomycore"/"lobotomy chic" and the erasure of the racist history of lobotomies.

I can't add further on the subject of race, but as a person with schizotypal I did connect it with this image

(Source, though I have not verified it by sifting through the archive)

"Lobotomy chic" and the humor surrounding it is used so often by people who I've seen have zero empathy for schizophrenic people. For disables people generally.

Even just looking at how they treat an actual lobotomy victim, Rosemary Kennedy, even when she's that archetypical 40s white woman. Her disability is erased.

Here's a popular tiktok about her. No context, just images of her younger self and her older self. Simply "she was normal, glamorous, and then she became strange, disabled." Oftentimes, her intellectual disability is treated more as a conspiracy theory than a fact of her not receiving enough oxygen at birth. People are happy to relate to her as a ~poorly behaved woman~, but not as an intellectually disabled one.

It just reminds me how this has become a sort of coquetteish phrase and a universal joke that erases everything except the low support needs disabled white woman's experience. The idea that for your eccentricities, you'd be at risk. That you might be the only one at risk, so there's no need for solidarity with the intellectually disabled, the schizophrenic and psychotic, anyone with profound or uncomfortable disabilities. Times ten thousand if those disabled people are black. And god forbid they are disabled, black, AND homeless.

[communistkenobi]

a very common mistake people make in political/social discourse is applying individualist thinking to some social phenomenon or theory. one of the most common examples is someone responding to the theory of white privilege with “but there are poor white people” or male privilege with “I’m a man but I have no power” etc. and in order to refute that properly you have to essentially get into a philosophy of science debate, to explain that the benefit of a given social theory is its ability to be generalised above the level of the individual, that what is being described is a social process, that human beings occupy various positions within a social space (a family, a neighbourhood, a workplace, a state) that are not individual. To be able to give an account of some social force you necessarily cannot be just talking about the particularities of a single person - if you were, all you would be expressing is an individual opinion about a single person. If you want to rise above the level of ‘mere opinion’ you need to actually provide an account that is general enough to apply to multiple people of varying social situations but systematic enough to be able to differentiate between who you are and are not speaking about. Of course data are lost in this endeavour - probably best summed up by the aphorism “all models are wrong but some are useful” - but the success of a given social theory is its ability to sustain its explanatory power despite these data losses. Like the whole game of generalisation is building a theory to figure out what data points to discard and which to retain. It is no more contradictory to say white privilege is real even though there are poor white people than to say the police are a white supremacist institution even though there are non-white police officers. In fact these seeming contradictions are accounted for in these same social theories - white supremacy has had centuries of policy development at this point, it is a fairly well-tested set of logics that have adapted to a variety of conflicts, problems, and political/economic/social developments (Sylvia Wynter talks about this in the context of the post-slavery US for example). White supremacy is thus resilient to these apparent contradictions (and these contradictions generate further social developments, such as the shifting meanings and locations of whiteness), which is why zooming into the level of the individual is often not helpful in explaining its effects on a social level.

Weber says that I need not know Caesar to understand Caesar - that to talk about Caesar as a historical figure and as a particular location in ancient Roman society is fundamentally different than a description of him as an individual. And nobody actually talks about Caesar as an individual anyway! Even psychological or biographical profiles of him are premised on the fact that Caesar is worthy of this profile as opposed to any other person living in the Roman Republic. The reason we all know his name is that his place in history is extended beyond the individual. A Roman general and leader is fundamentally not an individual, not a private person. The very fact that I can say “Roman General” but not say any person’s name and have people understand what I’m saying is evidence of this. By definition ‘Caesar’ the historical figure is not an individual in any meaningful sense, he has power that is only available through social institutions and formations, and that is why he is known even today. Even the most liberal Great Man Theories of history locate an engine of history within the general position of Great Man (this is a fundamental contradiction within this type of thinking, the generalised Individual). If there can be more than one Great Man in history then he is not an individual, he is occupying a generalisable position in human history that can be calculated, bounded, and studied.

So it’s very frustrating to deal with! It’s an attempt to refute an explanation of a social phenomenon with individual anecdotes, much of which is already accounted for in said explanation. It makes many, many, many discussions about the social and political world endlessly repetitive and uninteresting, because you are always stuck at litigating the most basic, atomic point of reference. And of course that is the point for many people, they aren’t interested in any of this because they are racist and they are misogynistic and so on. It is an extremely effective derailing tactic, but part of the reason why it’s so effective is because individualism is such a pervasive mode of thinking. All of the groundwork is already laid out for people who say white privilege isn’t real because the social and epistemic infrastructure necessary to get other people to buy that argument has already been built for them to make that type of claim. Which is why the people who smirk at the camera when they say shit like this are so pathetic because they behave like they thought of that all by themselves, unaware or (more probably) deliberately ignoring the fact that they live in a society specifically built to facilitate, automate, and celebrate the garbage coming out of their mouth

[visenyaism]

How is Criston Cole subject to a racist view by the Westerosi when he’s white-passing as hell?? The black (Velaryon) and Asian (Mysaria) characters face no racism in-universe (not talking about the racism in the writers’ room), but you think the white-passing man does? He could be subjected to xenophobia because of sharing ties to Dorne (not part of Westeros), but that’s not the same thing as being viewed through a racial lens, like you’re suggesting.

He is literally introduced when he takes his helmet off for the first time and Alicent says “oh gods he’s Dornish.” Because of his appearance. To them he “looks Dornish” and is racialized in-universe as Dornish which is in-universe perceived as a racial “other” in the canon. I do not know if they could have spelled it out clearer for you. Did we watch the same show

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lois Beckett at The Guardian:

Attacks targeting American public schools over LGBTQ+ rights and education about race and racism cost those schools an estimated $3.2bn in the 2023-24 school year, according to a new report by education professors from four major American universities. The study is believed to be the first attempt to quantify the financial impact of rightwing political campaigns targeting school districts and school boards across the US. In the wake of the pandemic, these campaigns first attempted to restrict how American schools educate students about racism, and then increasingly shifted to spreading fear among parents about schools’ policies about transgender students and LGBTQ+ rights.

Researchers from UCLA, UT Austin, UC Riverside and American University surveyed 467 public school superintendents across 46 US states, asking them about the direct and indirect costs of dealing with these volatile campaigns. Those costs included everything from out-of-pocket payments to hire to lawyers or additional security, to the staff member hours devoted to responding to disinformation on social media, addressing parent concerns and replying to voluminous public records requests focused on the district’s teachings on racism, gender and sexuality. The campaigns that focused on public schools’ policies about transgender students often included lurid false claims about schools trying to change students’ gender or “indoctrinating” them into becoming gay. This disinformation sparked harassment and threats against individual teachers, school board members and administrators, with some of the fury coming from within local communities, and even more angry calls, emails and social media posts flooding in from conservative media viewers across the country.

In addition to the financial costs of responding to these targeted campaigns, the study revealed other dynamics, the researchers said. “The attack on public officials as pedophiles was one I heard again and again, from people across extremely different parts of the country: rural, urban, suburban. It speaks to the way that this really is a nationalized conflict campaign,” said John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the study. The frequency with which both school board members and school superintendents were “being called out as sexual predators – it was really frightening”, Rogers said. Superintendents from across the country told the researchers how these culture battles had affected their schools, and cut into resources they would have preferred to spend on education.

[...] While disagreement, debate and dealing with angry parents are a normal part of local public school administration, the researchers noted, the political campaigns that schools have faced in recent years have been anything but normal. Many of them have been driven by “a small number of active individuals on social media or at school board meetings”, and fueled by misinformation. The school-focused campaigns, which started with claims that elementary and middle schools were harming white students by teaching critical race theory and later shifted to attacks on schools’ policies for transgender students, were nationally organized, with “common talking points” that could be traced back to conservative foundations and rightwing legal organizations, and were intensely amplified by rightwing media coverage, Rogers said.

Public schools across the US burned up nearly $3.2BN worth of money fending off right-wing culture war items such as book bans, anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, anti-student inclusion, and anti-racial equity policies.

See Also:

The Advocate: U.S. public schools lost $3.2 billion fighting conservative culture wars: report

[rhetoricsofraceandidentity]

[randomnameless]

A Master’s Thesis for a university no less

-----

Yep, I’ve seen that!

at least that people got some dedication, I nearly died when I wrote mine but it wasn’t for shitposting so maybe that made it even more tedious lol

But I’d say, how can you even write a Thesis about something as empty as Fodlan? I think the writer mentionned how Supreme Leader didn’t attack civilians but... while we don’t see her do it, Ashe mentions they’re starving, Baldo’n’Waldi must come from somewhere (the experiments started in Remire, before the War, but obviously to be used for said war in, basically, Supreme Leader’s maternal territories!) and I guess the religious people fleeing the Empire or not bothering to send letters to their friends who don’t hear about them anymore since the war started must have been busy Zumba’ing with Rhea in the 5 stars Enbarr resort.

As someone from SPE (!) mentionned, the Fodlan games take explicit care not to have anyone seriously challenge her beliefs of criticise her, or give spotlight to her main, self-perceived, nemesis who... well, is either fridged, exists off-screen or gives infodumps before dying.

Which makes any discussion about a “Just War” completely moot - Watsonian wise, especially if you take Fodlan as this entity functionning under the Crust System - same, Doylist wise, with any comparisons with real world Conventions (iirc OP mentionned that one of they juries asked if taking a dragon prisoner could be considered a war crime or something like that lol) because, hey, it’s a video game basically centered around a gameplay mechanic of depleting a red unit’s HP bar by hitting them with a weapon.

This is basically a really good shitpost which shows a lot of dedication - and that’s the kind of stuff fandom thrives for (remember zigludo chan sama senpai’s wiki page?) !

but as a serious/discourse/meta piece...

It’s basically the same redshit 10k words, with a bit more formatting and no word limit.

I mean, I used the search engine for “nabatean” and found nothing, and I think you can’t valably discuss Supreme Leader’s motives, ignoring this 

“You are a child of the goddess. You must not be allowed power over the people!“

part of her reasoning to fight against the Church.

Not wanting to give that chamber pot any credit, but if they sprout heinous arguments to support their fave, imo, it’s basically because even the members of that hellpit noticed Supreme Leader’s, uh, fondness for Nabateans as a species, and since she can’t do anything BaD or be wrong, it means the species are BaD.

[overleftdown]

farleigh start and racism; oh boy.

(some people are going to find this post really annoying. some people are like felix catton.)

read this.

just some thoughts from the perspective of a person of color who is slightly too obsessed with this character. this movie leaves the viewer a lot of wiggle room to interpret how dynamics such as race and privilege come into play. there are certain parallels between this movie and the real world, and how unnoticeable white privilege tends to be for white people.

lemme lay some groundwork. from what i understand, the most prevalent form of racism and white privilege within upper- and middle-class circles is implicit bias. this is racist conceptualization that subconsciously interacts with one's perception of society and people. implicit bias is often externalized through microaggressions, differences in treatment and language towards a marginalized person, misplaced guilt or pity, and persistent denial of any existing privilege or marginalization. most of these biases are also founded on stereotypes. some racial stereotypes are heightening (e.g. asians are all smart) and some are lowering (e.g. black people are all lazy). all stereotypes are harmful. i'm going to discuss some of the stereotypes that could theoretically interact within the saltburn canon, as well as some things i've noticed within viewers. can of worms, to be honest. boutta get INTO IT.

to use one of my externalization examples, let's discuss (or, more accurately, let me discuss) the denial of existing privilege or marginalization. this is a subconscious way to uphold a sense of morality, effectively avoiding "white guilt," so to speak. as is clearly presented to us, the cattons are very attached to their methods of upholding their own self-righteousness. saviorism is a common theme within both elspeth and felix. in oliver's conversation with elspeth about poor dear pamela, you can see that oliver recognizes elspeth's need to justify her actions in an attempt to preserve her sense of decency. one can only assume that this applies to how they view farleigh's relationship with them. there's more to talk about there, but i'd like to start with the only overt mention of race in this movie.

in felix's confrontation with farleigh, farleigh makes the bold and brave decision to mention his blackness. i call this brave because it's genuinely a terrifying thing to do, and the end of this conversation is proof. "oh, that is... that is low, farleigh. seriously, that's where you want to take this? make it a race thing? i never know our footman's names; the turnover for a footman is notoriously high!" we have felix's intentional or unintentional shaming of farleigh. we have felix's appalled denial of any involvement of race or racial bias. we have felix's diversion away from farleigh specifically and onto his own inability to know his staff's names. felix made no further attempt to recenter farleigh, aside from telling him that the cattons have "done what they can." (which is SO absurd on its own. they are clearly and obviously able to do more. they are disgustingly rich). farleigh does feel ashamed after felix's response; you can see it on his face, and archie says it directly. here is a relevant and prevalent stereotype for all marginalized people: that the discussion of marginalization is exclusively weaponized to gain something or manipulate a situation. this is how felix chooses to see farleigh's implication of existing white privilege. this conversation results in nothing, does nothing, as felix chooses not to confront what he's probably thinking as he repeats the words "begging bowl" to venetia.

now. saviorism, guilt, and pity. felix specifically tells oliver that sir james made an effort to support farleigh out of guilt. i'd like to order some things in a way that i perceive them. frederica start runs from england, which is explained in a condescending way by felix. frederica start marries a so-referred-to "lunatic" who dug through fred and jame's money, although it's farleigh who only mentions fred's financial irresponsibility. out of guilt, james offers to pay for farleigh's education. the specificity of education is compelling to me. perhaps james is simply a patriotic man who strongly believes that english education is better. or this is a mobilized racial stereotype! who can truly know. i digress. james' offer to pay for farleigh's foreign education puts the cattons in an odd position; if farleigh is to attend english schools, he will need to stay with the cattons. if farleigh is staying with the cattons, he will need to be treated as equal to felix and venetia. this is all one long chain of obligations. none of these acts from one family member to another should be considered "charitable," because family should intrinsically create a trustworthy and supportive dynamic.

i believe that the cattons do consider their fostering of farleigh as obligatory. moral obligation, as they recognize that families are intended to have a sympathetic and loving relationship. they cannot, however, escape the truth that they're just guilty. the "begging bowl" and "biting the hand" are more symbolic of a starving dog and its charitable adopter than a cousin/nephew who's staying with his absurdly rich family. see, the cattons are fully and entirely capable of affording another child, of supporting frederica financially, etc. the only way i can rationalize their reluctance to do so is by assuming that they don't feel like farleigh deserves it. is this a crazy assumption? i genuinely don't see why else. of course, i don't think this mentality is explicit or conscious. it's more-so the reality that when farleigh walks in a room, he's not the same as anybody else. aside from background characters at oxbridge, the only on-screen black people are liam, joshua, and james' godson's wife (who gets degraded on-screen). this is the reality of being different in an environment such as the english aristocracy. the cattons choose to see themselves as the hand that feeds the less fortunate, more entertaining, and least inconvenient. the cattons' inclusion of farleigh is not only reliant on how well farleigh performs, but also on their own pity and guilt.

all of this is somehow, painfully mirrored by some takes i've seen on farleigh. maybe this entire post is presumptuous, but you know what isn't presumptuous? saying that certain people hold farleigh to an incredibly odd standard. while the cattons never canonically said anything along the lines of "farleigh doesn't deserve our love and support," mfs on the internet have. the number of times people have referred to this character as greedy, lazy, petty, and malignant is so odd to me. i'm insane, i know. i just don't understand how people can hold farleigh to the backdrop of an english aristocratic family and so passionately say that he, of all characters, is the most detestable. or that he, of all characters, has no reason to behave in the way he does.

is farleigh greedy? greed is defined as a desire for more. farleigh has no desire to climb ranks, no desire to replace or surpass felix, no desire to hold any power over any family member. he is maintaining, upholding a standard that has been set for him throughout his life. is it kind or selfless of him to meddle in other people's affairs with the cattons? no. does he have a reason to be upset that non-relatives of the cattons are a threat to his inclusion in the first place? yes. is farleigh lazy? i don't even need to explain this one. no. if you don't consider oliver lazy, then i really don't want to hear anything. is farleigh petty? pettiness is defined as "an undue concern for trivial matters, especially in a small-minded or spiteful way." farleigh's meticulous attention to trivial matters isn't undue in any sense. a person of color and their meticulous attention to trivial matters is almost never undue. elspeth is a good example of petty. is farleigh malignant? there are a lot of definitions of malignant and i've seen people apply all of them, in some way, to farleigh. that's just wrong. archie madekwe once said, "i was interested in humanizing what, on paper, seemed like a mean character, a villain, or a bully. i don't think he's any of that. he's very self-serving, but i think he's really a heartbreaking character." case closed, this was for my own piece of mind. had to write this section because good lord.

in conclusion to this post that has gone tragically off the rails, i think the in-canon and viewer perspective of farleigh is, perhaps, a little racially motivated. sue me. they are all very centered on this idea that farleigh doesn't deserve inherent respect, support, and love. to remove farleigh's rational position within the cattons family would be akin to removing his right to familial love. genuinely, that's how i see it. the transaction nature of farleigh's actions is responsive. he sees felix as a social shield at oxbridge, he sees elspeth and james as the beholders of his perceived security, and he sees saltburn as a way to escape from his lack of privilege and his lack of stability in america. boom. bam. pow.

[cheesebearger]

agatha all along had a really tight, well-constructed narrative until episodes 8 and 9. i actually think the conclusion episodes undermine what was working so well at the beginning. my main points:

Alice should not have died to, as Jac Schaeffer said, "punish" Agatha; having a woman of color die to "punish" a white woman flattens her character into an object designed to inflict white pain;

the revelation regarding who bound Jen's power reduces her trauma to a joke and disregards how interesting her having been "bound" by trauma rather than magic would have been;

Agatha's backstory fails to engage with the "why" motivating her serial killing or with her emotionally negligent and abusive parenting irt Nicky and the reveal that she can control her powers is significantly less interesting than if she cannot;

and Billy being revealed as responsible for the road and the trials fundamentally changes the significance of every moment of the show - to the point where you have multiple women dying for what is, literally, no reason due to his actions.

To preface: I never expect anything well written from the MCU or Disney, but about 65% of this show was surprisingly well-written. However, like with most Marvel franchises or TV shows, they just ruin it with their last moments by shoehorning in something, or having a very choppy constantly shifting emotional tone for the conclusion. I'm just glad that the show didn't end with a huge CGI battle sequences like Moon Knight and WandaVision did as they are the definition of a cop out for story telling.

As to point one: Alice's story was left unfinished. Multiple characters mention they made no effort to save her. Agatha is revealed to have complete control over her power, too. So ultimately, Alice dies for nothing. To "punish" Agatha, but that flattens her into an object, a weapon, directed at Agatha. She's no longer a person, she's merely a tool being wielded by the writer literally, and narratively by Billy and Agatha. Rio's words to Alice additionally make no sense - she tells Alice that she's a "protection witch who died protecting someone," but she didn't. She began to protect Agatha, and then Agatha consciously made the decision to kill her (as we know she has complete control over her power). Alice is murdered. She doesn't die heroically protecting someone. She dies for no reason, and dies with her story unfinished and unfulfilled. Is that how life goes sometime? Yeah, obviously. But this is a story, where the writer made a conscious decision to kill off a woman of color to "punish" her white main character. Alice fully deserved a complete character arc and the fact she did not have one is due to racist objectification of her.

Point two: Jen's power should have been revealed to be internally suppressed rather than bound by Agatha. Firstly, because making Agatha responsible makes the entire thing a joke - Agatha is flippant, she doesn't even remember necessarily how it happened, it completely undermines her "I left you alone..." comment to Jen. Secondly, the show introduces Chekov's Racist in episode 3 and, as a result of the reveal regarding Agatha, his existence in the story fails to have any significance. In fact, it reads as Jen simply being too blind or too foolish to "understand" who took her power from her. It robs her of the weight of her trauma at the hands of a violent racist and completely reduces the depth and affect of the trauma from racism that Jen experiences. Rather than having her cope with and come to terms with the reality of the trauma she experienced at the hands of the unnamed doctor, her entire story comes to be one of a woman "foolishly" misinterpreting her own life and lived experiences. It also would have been more interesting if Agatha had, genuinely, left Jen alone out of respect for her midwifery; that allows both characters to exist within the complexities of their own traumas without sacrificing one's pain for the other.

Point three: Agatha's backstory was rather limp. I think it could be immediately improved if a single line of dialogue was added, from Rio to Agatha. If, when Agatha asked what Rio would want to allow her to keep Nicky, Rio had responded, "I'll give you as much time as you give me bodies." From there, it would be easy to see why the loss of her son would drive her to engage in that ritual serial killing even more out of grief and out of resentment for being so alienated from her community. Personally, though, I think the backstory we needed was actually Agatha in Salem, being put on trial. Though I do think it's interesting to have Agatha make her son bait for her victims, thus making him an accomplice in her murders, and doing so using a song he wrote with his mother out of love; I just wish it was presented as how disturbing it all actually is - the episode itself never quite gets the emotional tenor it needs, it needed to empathize with Nicky as a child who is absolutely being emotionally neglected and abused, existing with the knowledge that he must help his mother murder.

And point four: Billy being revealed to be the creator of the road immediately destabilizes and reduces the show's stakes. I suppose I should lump in here the fact the road is a con by Agatha as part and parcel of this issue. I feel like the show kind of shied away from committing to the idea of the Witches Road - a really cool concept that, if well executed, could have been the stage for a great story from start to finish. By having Billy create the Road, we actually have Lilia's entire life become centered around him - the time loop she is trapped in, across her entire lifetime, is because of him. Not because of her, not for her, not for her growth, not for her coven. She dies for Billy. She dies for nothing. And sure, everyone ultimately dies for "nothing" if we want to get nitpicky. But how sad is it, for Lilia to be trapped dying in Billy's mind-road, for her entire life. Everything she is, flattened into a mere device for Billy's pain and growth. Way to completely ruin an incredible episode of TV by adding additional context lmfao.

Ultimately, I think the show is fine. Just fine. It could have been much better, which frustrates me. My assumption of what the show was going to be was this: the Witches Road exists as a journey wherein one must overcome their fear of death and strengthen the bonds of the coven to ward off social death, and to ultimately experience a form of "death" at the end of the road wherein the coven would be reunited, fundamentally changed as a result of their journeys. I thought that the meaning appended to "Death" in the show was going to align with the meaning of the tarot (upright: spiritual transformation, new beginnings, letting go, endings, sudden upheaval, etc.; reversed: inability to move forward, fear of beginnings, etc.) given they went through so much effort to put together the "correct" tarot spread. I'd also note that the "What's Missing" was community - so having the ending of the season be most of the coven permanently dead leaves that "What's Missing" still unfulfilled.

[taliabhattwrites]

Understanding Third-Sexing

Crossposted from my Troonsky account.

[system-of-a-feather]

Just gonna slide this here taken from "addressing racial trauma in behavioral health" course I'm taking for my work because this absolutely does not apply to the Theory of Structural Dissociation what so ever

[biologusputrifier777-blog]

Grim Tidings for International Communism: F1nnster Fuckery

I have long since come to the conclusion that my ass will not live to see the fruits of class struggle, this generation of proletariats is cooked. If the supposed "leftists" of this generation fall into the sheer liberalism and cracker barrel ass takes because someone who they thought was a man (and later turned out to be a part of the very group they accused them of exploiting because these stupid fucking social democrats have the situational awareness of deaf dog) did gender wrong and presented too femme without being part of the right type of class (gender is enforced as a class and exists therefore as a construct perpetuated by the capitalist class to retain the power of capital over the proletariat, if you deny this you are either a Maoist, or even worse a Dengist) to do so is fucking crazy. This is the shit that crooked ass Social Democrats like Mussolini and Chairman Gonzalo would be doing if they were bitchless crypto redditors in the year of our lord 20 24. Lenin himself would not be able to redeem your anarcracker asses.

[crystalistrappedintheinternet]

adding tme to my bio bc while on one hand announcing my birth sex makes me dysphoric on the other hand. some of you are misogynists

[brick-van-dyke]

TERFs 🤝 Zionists

Using the exact same talking points and rhetoric.

[this-acuteneurosis]

I kind of want to get you started on mind tricks. cause like weak minded to strong minded dynamic and the blur away, but also the sith back in the day were for SURE a Caste system of force sensitive rulers and non force sensitives, and the jedi were their ENEMY off and on for thousands of years, cultural bleed through and dynamics of their own power systems but Ben we are not the droids you are looking for go away so I dont have to kill you, versus Qui hey I want this thing trade it for me.

Alright, Oct anon, it's been a while, but I have not forgotten you definitely forgot this ask in my drafts for who even knows how many months but it's found again, whoo!

It's taken me a while to get this together partly to try and arrange my thoughts in a logical order but also...

Guys, I really, really care about the use of agency in stories. Like, I've ranted about it in relation to droids, I've explained some of my problems with it in the context of the thematic changes between the OT and the PT, I stew over it constantly in my brain, it's a central theme of many of my own stories (including DLB).

I really don't like mind control, and not just in Star Wars.

Now, just because I don't like a thing doesn't mean it doesn't have a place in story telling. As a device, mind control/manipulation can be useful or important to a plot. To a theme. Overcoming it can be powerful or cool (Ella Enchanted-I prefer the novel personally, Tanjiro in Demon Slayer: Mugen Train), watching someone succumb to it can be agonizing (Frodo in Return of the King, anyone? Princess Euphemia in Code Geass?).

So, what is the point of Mind Tricks (and that naming choice, "trick," making it sound almost...harmless) in the Star Wars story, and maybe in the universe?

I feel like in its initial reveal, the mind trick was supposed to a) convey how "magical" Jedi were and b) get the plot from point A to B. Obi-Wan waves his hand, someone believes something hideously untrue, move along move along, don't think about it too hard.

Like, literally, audience, please. Don't.

Luke uses it in RotJ for pretty much the same reason. To convery a) Luke is well on his way to being a "magical" Jedi now (oh but wait, there's more character growth he needs!), and b) Luke needs to get into Jabba's palace and why would they let him in? Because he says so, so we will take him to Jabba now. Move along, move along.

I don't like the implications of this power existing, and as an adult who has been in situation where I have to report to higher powers, the disregard of the consequences of these things are a bit darker if I look too closely, but like...move along, I guess. It's fine as long as we're only using these powers on space nazis and slavers. Right?

Except then we get more movies. And cartoons. It's fine if Obi-Wan mind controls a person into not smoking, right? Smoking is Bad and Obi-Wan is Good.

Only.

Only...

Who taught Obi-Wan to use mind tricks?

Ah yes, my old nemesis.

To all you Qui-Gon fans out there, you may wanna leave. This analysis is probably not for you.

So like, Qui-Gon Jinn. Qui-Gon "I'm friends with the current Chancellor and thus an obvious, notable representative of the Jedi Order but I don't get along with my higher ups" Jinn. The thing you have to understand about my opinion of him is that, as a young, first time watcher of TPM, I liked him. He was funny, irreverent, direct. He was wise, or at least seemed to know things no one else did. He was a maverick, ready to go against all orders and advice for what he knew was right. And everyone around him was just stuffy and uninformed.

And to be fair, he wasn't wrong about everything. He's set up to be sympathetic. He's trying to treat with the gungans and they won't listen? Well he and Obi-Wan are right, the Trade Federation does go for the gungans. The Order says there are no Sith? Oops, wrong on that one. The Council makes the ambiguous assertion Anakin is "too old" to train. We've seen the OT. We know "too old" is nonsense.

But like, what does Qui-Gon do when he's thwarted?

He takes away people's agency.

Oh, you don't want to help us, Boss Nass, political leader? Cool, well I'm gonna undermine you in front of your entire court and you're gonna give us a whole ship (that we won't return) to help us defend a people you've been in an active war with for centuries. Oh, my currency doesn't work on this planet? I think it will mister small time junk dealer with a gambling problem (jokes on you for that one, sir).

This to me is a huge red flag in a story that is about literal slaves. I know people will defend the above examples. It was necessary. There were lives at stake.

You wanna know who would have suffered if Qui-Gon had been able to con Watto out of that part?

Anakin and Shmi.

Worthless (or event mostly worthless) currency on a planet where you have to buy water is literal death under the right circumstances. And who do you think Watto's going to reduce rations on. He's got cash flow problems? What's the quickest way for him to make back what he just lost? I'll give you a hint, he gambles on them later in the exact same movie.

So like, well before we get to "weak minded" or anything dubious like that, there's this awkward question of, "Why are the good guys always using powers to make people do things? And not worried about the consequences?"

And like, if we go back to simple story narratives, and trying to move things from point A to point B, that's fine I guess. I enjoy the OT. I'll move along.

But if you ask me to stop and think about it.

Well...

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Skeptic

Published: Oct 4, 2024

Christopher Rufo

Skeptic: You are a controversial figure for your work in the area of Critical Race Theory (CRT). What led you to this subject?

Rufo: My professional background is in documentary filmmaking. The book writing process was totally different. I hope what I was able to do with the book is bring my narrative training to telling stories that engage people and move them at an emotional level.

Skeptic: Well, you did that. It’s a highly readable book in which you present a history of ideas. One of the difficulties is drawing causal connections between thinkers across generations. How do you address that problem?

Rufo: There was a lot of looking for explicit connections. For example, I profile Angela Davis, who I think is really kind of the godmother of CRT. She tied the original critical theory from the early part of the 20th century to American race politics in a deliberate way. Her thesis advisor was the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who is also profiled in the book. Then I connect Davis to the modern Black Lives Matter movement; she is the personal mentor to a number of BLM leaders. I tried not to make any specious connections, and I wanted to be charitable to my subjects, to see the world first through their eyes and treat them fairly. Only then did I layer on my criticism or my critique.

Skeptic: On that political front, how do you distinguish between old-school liberals, such as Steven Pinker, and the more radical progressive thinkers of today?

Rufo: The critical theorists I profile in my book are explicitly anti-liberal, such as Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derek Bell, the father of CRT. Their whole movement is explicitly and deeply anti-liberal. It’s against the concept of individual rights, private property, and Enlightenment values. So, I hope that I can also speak to some of those estranged liberals and explain how the movement that has really taken over the institutional left in the United States has deviated from that small ‘l’ liberal tradition and really originates from something much more radical, revolutionary, and Marxist in nature.

Skeptic: Walk us through these influences, starting with Marx.

Rufo: Over the course of the 20th century, there was a deviation from orthodox Marxism as people became more infatuated with the new left, the more activist 1960s youth movement, and racial unrest. Angela Davis was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, and she ran for vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket. She was deeply influenced by Marx (although she had written her graduate thesis on Kant) and was also well-versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Paulo Freire—the same. He was working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in the Third World, and his idea of critical consciousness originates in Marxist concepts that he had learned when he was a student in Brazil.

However, the most interesting case is Derek Bell, who was a Harvard Law professor, and in many ways the founding figure of CRT. His students at Harvard Law and other elite law schools around the country, inspired by Bell, established the discipline of critical race theory in the late 1980s. Bell grew up in the Pittsburgh area, served in the U.S. Air Force, went to law school, and was a very successful—even brilliant—student. Then he became a lawyer for the NAACP, handling cases in the Deep South desegregating schools in places such as Mississippi. I think he oversaw something like 300 school desegregation cases. He was a civil rights advocate and activist, a small ‘l’ liberal at the time.

However, Bell became disillusioned with the Civil Rights Movement and utterly disillusioned with Martin Luther King-style civil rights activism that turned to the Constitution, focusing especially on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He thought these were all illusions in that they provided the appearance of freedom but were actually used to reinforce secretly and covertly the structures of racial domination. It is this aspect of Bell’s work that survives and is really the foundation of what we now see as critical race theory.

Skeptic: There’s this push to find deep root causes of specific events among politicians. Is this a useful approach?

Rufo: It’s amazing because it’s totally backwards. Politicians say, “Well, no, we’re not going to do the thing that actually could have a significant and immediate impact, and instead we’re going to implement the 1619 Project and focus on the first arrival of African slaves in North America.” That certainly is something of historical importance and scholarly relevance, and should even be part of the public debate, but what do you do with that? Short of having a time travel machine, you can’t change the past 400 years of history. Nor can you show any real relevance to today beyond a very broad and metaphorical interpretation of current events.

When you go back and look at the civil rights movement, against which Derrick Bell rebelled later in his life, you had, for the most part, people who wanted to cash in the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to conform to not only the system of individual rights in the United States as a form of law, but also conform to middle class or bourgeois values as a matter of culture. Look at these great civil rights marches in the 1960s. Men were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. And these weren’t necessarily wealthy people. They were mostly working-class African Americans. However, the image that they wanted to convey was one of dignity, self-respect, and an immense hope for equal participation in American society. I’m still really moved and struck by some of those images.

Compare those images to the kind you see of Antifa or BLM activists in 2020. You have deranged-looking mugshots of people. You have people that visually look quite disordered, committing sprees of violence. And in the name of what? It was never quite clear what they wanted beyond defunding the police or just having a justification for violence. Those two images, if you look at them side by side, reveal the kind of fundamental change in the modern left.

Skeptic: What do you think is the right approach to social change?

Rufo: When you ask people in surveys, “Do you support affirmative action? Do you support race-conscious college admissions? Do you support mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training?” They overwhelmingly say “No.” This is true for people of all political affiliations and all racial backgrounds. And yet, all of those things are now required in nearly all of our major institutions. So, you have this mismatch problem where public sentiment is against something, but all of our institutions and even our public policies are for it. Why is that? If we live in a democracy, shouldn’t majority sentiment eventually translate into public policy?

The answer is that, in my view, there are concentric rings of influence on these issues. You have the tightest ring, which consists of the fanatics, the people who are deeply committed to it. They work in it. These are the DEI administrators. These are the critical race theorists. These are the BLM activists. Then you have another concentric ring of people that say, “Well, you know, I more or less buy into the premise of this. I want more diversity.” That’s roughly 30 percent of the public, maybe a little bit more depending on the issue. Then you have an even larger concentric ring of people who are neutral, slightly opposed, or even quite opposed to it, but they don’t speak out because they fear the consequences. This creates an opinion environment in which those very committed activists can really run up the score and impose their point of view as the de facto policy.

That’s the environment we live in. The people who care most about it have figured out where the levers of power are. They’ve gone, in most cases, around the democratic process to impose their will. And they essentially say—as we’ve seen recently with Harvard and the University of North Carolina [the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]—“We know what we’re doing is unpopular. We know what we’re doing is likely illegal and unconstitutional. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

Skeptic: Erika Chenoweth and Maria Steffen’s research on political violence demonstrates that since 1900, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. This trend has been increasing over time. In the last 50 years, civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. No campaigns failed once they achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population, and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.

Rufo: That’s right. I think academic critique is still valuable. However, what we really need is political opposition because this issue has moved from the realm of academia to the realm of politics. So, it also has to be fought politically. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of criticism for this approach.

I’ve taken the battle out of the realm of academic discourse and into the realm of practical politics. I’ve been very explicit about that. I said I want to change public perception; I want to turn critical race theory into a brand, and I want to destroy it not just in the realm of public opinion, but also in the realm of public policy.

If it’s in the K–12 school curriculum, it’s a policy question. If it’s in a public university DEI bureaucracy, it’s a policy question. If it’s in our criminal justice system, it’s a policy question. These are political questions, and those who think that we can resolve them through discourse are really doing a disservice. They’re not grappling with the actual difficult nature of statesmanship and political activism that’s required.

If we want to have a society that says, “No, we’re not going to engage in racial scapegoating. We’re not going to judge individuals based on a racial category. We’re not going to imbibe in notions of hereditary blood guilt,” the only way, I think, is through political pressure, by changing the laws by which our institutions are governed.

Skeptic: What are your thoughts on systemic racism? What is your explanation for racial group differences in income, wealth, home ownership, representation in Congress and the corporate C-suite?

Rufo: What is the standard by which we measure systemic racism? How do we define systemic racism? There’s an interesting bait and switch here, because they say, “Well, all of this is systemic racism, from chattel slavery to the fact that a Lakeisha Smith is less likely to get called back than a Lisa Smith.” [“Call back” studies submit the same resumés to businesses and compare the response to identifiably Black versus White names]. You have this transition in the mid-20th century from explicit, formal, and legal racist policies to what amounts to implicit racist policies. Well, what do they mean by that?

They mean that when you measure things statistically, that there is a disparate impact on outcomes. Lisa versus Lakeisha Smith is just one such example. You can say that there are no outright racist policies in policing or housing or geographical distribution, but there are still disparate outcomes. Is it because people are secretly and subconsciously racist? That’s the unconscious bias theory, which has been debunked. [It has been demonstrated that The Implicit Association Test, often cited as confirming evidence, does not measure racial bias but rather reaction time to familiar versus unfamiliar terms.] Are police more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect? Roland Fryer at Harvard showed that this is not the case. [Although he did find that White police rough up Black people they pull over more than White people.]

Then you have to ask some uncomfortable questions. If, for example, there are more African American men in jail than Asian American men, is it because our society is systemically racist against African American men and systemically giving privileges to Asian American men?

You could make that argument, but I think that on the face of it most people realize that it’s not true. Then you ask about the rate of criminality—do African American males on average commit more crimes than Asian American males? You might find that it’s not racism that is operative. It’s another set of background variables. Robert Rector published some papers on this subject 20 years ago that are still foundational to my thinking. He showed that if you control for those background variables, you find that the argument for active systemic racism vanishes across a whole range of things, not just Lakeisha versus Lisa Smith, but for things that are especially meaningful. For example, if you control for the mother’s academic achievement, the mother’s participation in state welfare programs, and household family structure, the gap between White and Black childhood poverty disappears. It’s zero.

If we aim our public policy towards fixing those variables, we’d be much better served and we’d be much more likely to reduce overall inequalities.

Skeptic: Those causal variables are largely left out of the conversation. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about them right now?

Rufo: I think it is, because it’s a very inconvenient disrupting narrative when you have minority groups that are enormously successful in the United States. The most successful ethnic groups in the United States today are majority non-White ethnic groups, including some Black ethnic groups, particularly Nigerian Americans. Part of that may be due to a selection process—immigrants from Nigeria are disproportionately better educated, have more resources, etc. So, it’s not quite a one-to-one measurement.

Nonetheless, there’s a huge range in success among ethnic groups in the United States. The ones that have stable family structure, commitment to education, a strong work ethic, mutual support within a community, etc., are very successful. Those ethnic groups that do not have those attributes do very poorly on many measures, including income. Appalachian Whites do very poorly while Nigerian Americans or other recent immigrants are doing extraordinarily well.

Skeptic: Are you optimistic we can achieve a colorblind society?

Rufo: There are reasons for optimism and for pessimism. The reason for optimism is that the American people really despise the DEI affirmative action principles of governance. Even in California and Washington state, where I live, voters have rejected affirmative action policies when they’ve been put to a ballot initiative. And the majority of racial groups also oppose these kinds of policies. Despite all of the media dominance, academic dominance, and bureaucratic dominance of the DEI movement—the American people want equal treatment for each individual, regardless of group category. They want colorblind equality, not racial favoritism and enforced equity.

The case for pessimism is that it’s going to be difficult. The problem of racial equality is a thorny one. It is one that has vexed the United States for its whole history and is, frankly, likely to continue. As long as there is visible inequality—statistically measurable inequality—the narrative of critical race theory will have a base of support. It will have the political, emotional, and intellectual grounds that can feed that narrative. This puts us in a bit of a conundrum because paradoxically, the remedies of critical race theory are actually likely to make inequality worse. And for the people who are running a critical race theory style regime, inequality justifies their claims to power. So, they have no incentive to make things better in the real world. If we go in that direction, we face a very long, very brutal, and very disillusioning politics in our future.

Skeptic: Do you see any role for any kind of reparations for formerly oppressed peoples or even currently oppressed people?

Rufo: I have certainly opposed any kind of race-based reparations payments. I think it’s absolutely the wrong direction to go for a host of reasons. Historically, if you look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs, these were to a large extent a kind of race-based reparations policy that was—they thought—backed up by the latest discoveries in social science, deployed at federal mass scale. These programs now are spending about a trillion dollars a year, disproportionately to African Americans, especially descendants of slaves.

These are policies that sound great, and that’s why they’re often passed in legislation. But we have to be sober and level-headed in analyzing whether they actually work. Do they help us achieve the stated intentions? The evidence that it has helped in any way is lacking. In fact, the most persuasive evidence, in my view, shows that it has had negative, though unintended, consequences. In my reading of it, both statistically and as someone who spent three years researching and documenting public housing projects in Memphis, Tennessee, and getting a first-hand look at their impact, I just don’t think that reparations would work.

[ This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online. ]