#society made that inevitable

[luxraydyne]

inhaaaaale if i had a quid for every time a stranger has tried to condescendingly overexplain to me how a use of X ableist trope isn’t abelist at all Actually bc it’s supposed to be about Love and looking Past disability i’m just being mean and/or stupid. i mean it’s not as if i wouldn’t need my disability benefit anymore but like. i could order a takeaway innit.

[nyan-bynary]

As cute as satosugu is, it's SO important to me that no matter how much they loved each other (romantically or platonically idrc to argue w/ ppl) they did NOT tell each other. That they lost their chance bc they were young and strong and full of hope and they thought they had all the time in the world to tell the other how they felt, y'know, like how teenagers are supposed to feel about life. But they couldn't be together, they couldn't have each other's company the way they really wanted. Their youths were forcefully taken away from them their emotions that they were still not fully settled on forced out of their hands because they had bigger more grave things to worry about now. It's so important to me that they were always doomed no matter what.

[raziraphale]

really impressive that misogyny is the oldest prejudice in the world and yet tiktok can still think up new ways to reinvent it every few months

[corpus-incorporated]

current frame of mind is i think of everything in stock market terms now. i don’t know jack shit about economics i dont invest in anything but i will be talking about how my stocks are doing all the fucking time. not stocks i own but stocks that are me, the value of the stocks of me the company. which is REALLY funny considering my url here. it’s not just me too if something or someone does well at anything i go OHHHHH X STOCKS ARE SKYROCKETING and if something goes poorly it’s like OHHHHH THE STOCKS ARE PLUMMETING FILE FOR BANKRUPTCY. this is the new it’s jover and we’re so back. this isn’t something that’s gonna catch on though it’ll probably just be this micro joke amongst my friends for a while lol

[the-trans-dragon]

What if they didn't put ads every 3 posts. Three posts between ads, literally. Not even counting the ad for Tumblr Live.

Also what if tumblr didn't know what city Im in. I do not want my location tracked or stored anywhere unless I give explicit ongoing permission, like with my GPS app that I allow to track me only when the app is open, and then it deletes the data (allegedly) when I stop giving permission.

[gayleafpool]

usually idgaf if someone hates a character that i like but the exception to this is leafpool bc if u don’t like her i’m gonna assume it’s for weird reasons

[noxtivagus]

i'm thinking of hermes again gahhh HIS CHARACTER IS SO INTERESTING TO ME I LOVE HIM

[jadenvargen]

free online james baldwin stories, essays, videos, and other resources

**edit

James baldwin online archive with his articles and photo archives.

---NOVELS---

Giovanni's room"When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy. This book introduces love's fascinating possibilities and extremities."

Go Tell It On The Mountain"(...)Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves."

+bonus: film adaptation on youtube. (if you’re a giancarlo esposito fan, you’ll be delighted to see him in an early preacher role)

Another Country and Going to Meet the Man Another country: "James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit." Going to meet the Man: " collection of eight short stories by American writer James Baldwin. The book, dedicated "for Beauford Delaney", covers many topics related to anti-Black racism in American society, as well as African-American–Jewish relations, childhood, the creative process, criminal justice, drug addiction, family relationships, jazz, lynching, sexuality, and white supremacy."

Just Above My Head"Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land."

If Beale Street Could Talk"Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche."

also has a film adaptation by moonlight's barry jenkins

Tell Me How Long the Train's been gone At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. 

---ESSAYS---

Baldwin essay collection. Including most famously: notes of a native son, nobody knows my name, the fire next time, no name in the street, the devil finds work- baldwin on film

--DOCUMENTARIES--

Take this hammer, a tour of san Francisco.

Meeting the man

--DEBATES:--

Debate with Malcolm x, 1963 ( on integration, the nation of islam, and other topics. )

Debate with William Buckley, 1965. ( historic debate in america. )

Heavily moderated debate with Malcolm x, Charles Eric Lincoln, and Samuel Schyle 1961. (Primarily Malcolm X's debate on behalf of the nation of islam, with Baldwin giving occassional inputs.)

----

apart from themes obvious in the book's descriptions, a general heads up for themes of incest and sexual assault throughout his works.

[dykepuffs]

How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?

(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")

You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.

(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)

Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”

And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.

Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.

So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.

Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)

It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.

So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.

First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?

If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)

How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?

What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")

If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?

When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?

If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?

Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?

And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?

Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.

[fairuzfan]

I'm to the point where if I hear you're endorsing/voting for Kamala Harris and you're publicly getting mad at people for not voting for her, I'm not even going to listen what you have to say, you've made it clear you have to strong principles to guide your decisions beyond "what's worse for me personally?" I think Harris voters have no actual ideologies to live by, despite claiming they do, and I fundamentally don't respect them for it. It's one thing to be angry at people who won't vote for Harris, but it's another thing to pretend you're doing it because you have some sort of moral authority and not basing it off pure selfishness. You think that solidarity is posting about things and that's it. You refuse to make yourself uncomfortable, even momentarily. And you get mad at people who are willing to go through discomfort for the sake of others. You call them names, ans claim that THEY are the selfish ones in this scenario. You've given up on making a change in the world for the better, or maybe you were never interested in it. All of your arguments pale in comparison to reality, because Harris is actively funding a genocide. She has even refused to acknowledge a reality in which she does not fund that genocide. Has made such a thing clearer and clearer. All my problems here in the imperial core are secondary to that. I'm about to go through multiple personal issues that are made increasingly hard by political factors and I still think that's nothing in comparison to what Palestinians and Lebanese are going through overseas. You've placed yourselves as the ultimate victims in the world and to me it's laughable and completely out of touch with just how fucked everyone else is because of the imperial beast that is Amerikkka. And speak nothing of the way the victims of Amerikkkan imperialism on Turtle Island bear the brunt of societies' woes for your personal comfort and refusal to make any meaningful change. Not ev baby steps! You think trump is an accidental anomaly and not a product of a larger issue within white amerikkkan politics. Is it not shocking to you that so many people here are voting for trump so enthusiastically?

Seeing things like the weaponization of personal identity, like "Muslims for Harris," used so plainly is an insult to the ideas of internationalism that you all claim to follow. What use is solidarity with the victims of imperialism if you refuse to acknowledge the entirety of the imperial complex? That includes the democrats you hold so dear as well as the Republicans? What use is any of this if you only think for yourself?

You claim to be thinking of others, and that's why you vote for Harris... but what is so incomprehensible to me is the comfort in which you accept the inevitability of Palestinian deaths. Why are you so willing to accept that reality? Why are you comfortable with that reality? It shocks me and disgusts me in a way that I can not really describe. You lot argue and argue and argue, but in the end, the difference between you and me is that I refuse to engage in a reality where Palestinians must die in any case. You have yet to refuse that. In actuality, you all refuse the baby steps, the bare minimum, of refusal to engage in continuation of that reality. And because of that, I do not take you seriously, nor do I view you as being moral in your decision to sacrifice Palestinians.

[pawberri]

If you think someone saying "we can never end all bigotry so why should I bother fighting it" is bad, but would say that about grooming online.... consider........ Why...

Political cartoon but I’m the one who loses my mind

[evangelifloss]

Thinking about a certain scene in Dungeon Meshi that completely encapsulates the Autistic experience of making friends as an adult and how hard it is to try and navigate it without ending up getting hurt.

Like IDK about y'all, but this is a common problem ALOT of Autistic Adults face when trying to make friends with other people, because unlike children who aren't good at keeping their opinions to themselves, Adults ARE. In society, we're even encouraged to "keep the peace" "be polite" and etc, which commonly leads to awful scenarios as shown above when Laois finds out his buddy has come to resent who Laois is without actually telling him. All too often the friends that we love to hang out with, people that we're so happy to spend time with, don't feel the same way and in many cases, come to blame us for our social cues or lack thereof.

And when/if we do eventually find out how our friend feels, Dungeon Meshi hits us with another painful panel of how that usually ends up playing out.

It's hard for Adults with Autism to make friends, and even harder to maintain them because alot of the ways Neurotypicals tell other Neurotypicals that they don't like a certain behavior is by quietly disengaging. Whether that involves having one sentence answers, going quiet, or having a certain tone in their voice, all those things signal annoyance or disapproval, but for the Neurodivergents, those subtle cues are completely missed.

And yet when we inevitably discover we DID do something, it is natural to ask "well why didn't you tell me?" because in our minds, it should've been the next step in the equation. However for the Neurotypicals, that's NOT something to bring up. Its important to be SUBTLE about the issue at hand and rely on signals to tell the other person. Blame is placed on us for not noticing the "obvious" signs of disapproval rather than the idea of talking it out as such things are uncomfortable and harder to do. Alot of the time what ends up happening is resentment due to the idea that it was "obvious" and the fact one didn't notice indicates a deliberate ignorance rather than a complete unawareness. It ends up calling into question our quality as a person and our sincerity. We get called "fake" or "malicious" or even "stupid" for failing social cues rather than questioning the decision to be indirect and vague.

For a manga about exploring the dungeon, it seems that the artist would rather explore very real and prevalent dynamics in society with the adventuring premise as a backdrop. I felt VERY seen in these panels, and many others, because it happens so suddenly and dare I say it, plainly. There's no dramatic build-up or spectacle made and in essence, it just Happens.

I think that's what makes the scene hit even harder. It seemingly comes out of nowhere for Laois, like how it always comes out of nowhere for alot of people, and it's never a dramatic twist either. It's always mundane and hurtful. A sudden unforeseen bump in the road that ends up calling into question one's entire friendship with someone and consequent other friendships. It asks "what if other friends feel the same. What if the people that I really like actually hate me and I don't know it?" Or at least that's what I came away with after reading the chapter. I've been where Laois was and the only reason I'm not there now is because I lost the naivete I had and doubt everyone else's sincerity.

[wilwheaton]

I woke up yesterday morning to learn that Don Trump—the famed rapist, convicted felon, and white christian presidential candidate—had mimed performing a blowjob on his microphone stand to the clear delight of his crowd. There's a famous Christian thinker named Jesus H. Christ who you may have heard about; people will often say his full name when they see things like this. [...] It cuts against the dominant social narrative to say we need to fight the white supremacist cult, and this is for the very good reason that our society is traditionally white supremacist. If you suggest that a white supremacist cult's behavior and intentions are indecent and absolutely unacceptable, there is a general realization that this means not accepting it, which would inevitably mean the social exclusion and isolation of people committed to pursuing unacceptable behavior, and who have made indecent and unacceptable behavior a core part of their identity. And it's very unhealthy to be socially excluded and isolated. And who could be against health? In the eyes of those who control the platforms of communication, and in the halls of power, and in the minds of many comfortable and privileged people, it is a far less divisive act to hold a Nazi rally, crammed with racism and hatred and bigotry and Nazi speakers delivering Nazi slogans and Nazi intentions to enact Nazi policies, than it is to refer to such a thing as "a Nazi rally." In the eyes of those who control the platforms of communication, and in the halls of power, and in the minds of many comfortable and privileged people, saying you intend to fight a white supremacist cult is considered far more divisive and radical than being a part of a white supremacist cult who intends to force a fight with everyone else. In fact "we're still going to be sharing a nation with them and there are millions of them" is usually what's said to anybody who suggests we even oppose them. It's said as a reason to not oppose them, as a reason to not even name them for what they have chosen to be. "You can't just get rid of them," it's said. The suggestion seems to be that in so doing we are excluding them from society, isolating them, dehumanizing them, by naming what it is they have chosen to become (which, again, is a white supremacist cult), and by refusing to accept their unacceptable propositions as acceptable. It's not so popular to suggest that the answer is for white supremacists to change their behavior. It's far more popular to say we need to heal the white supremacist cult. It's far more popular to issue reminders that we need to leave paths open for the white supremacist cult to find redemption

Apology Not Accepted

Another exceptional post from Andrew Moxon that I encourage you all to make some time to read.

When all of this is over, no matter how long it takes to send Shitler to prison, I will not forget and I will not forgive the christian nationalist white supremacists who have brought us here.

This includes people I thought I knew.

We must drive these cancerous, violent, hateful people back into social isolation and societal rejection, where they have always belonged.

This includes people I thought I knew.

[apas-95]

As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.

The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.

This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.

Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.

[hareofhrair]

I wanted to put this one the previous post but it was long and this is a tangent but- In regards to the hypothetical "If House was my doctor I'd just tell him everything. Rip to all his other patients but I'm different."

The whole point of the show is that you wouldn't. Like a major theme of the show is about how the various shames and stigmas and habitual dishonesties that plague our societies both metaphorically and literally kill us. "Everybody lies" isn't just a cynical catchphrase, it's the shows thesis. Because of how we operate as a society, everyone feels compelled to suppress and hide things and that inevitably leads to suffering.

And there are plenty of episodes where this is obvious, ie "I cheated on my partner and gave them an STD." But there's also much more of "This little girl went through early puberty and because of the way our society stigmatizes women's bodies her single father never discussed puberty with her and she was so afraid and ashamed of her new pubic hair that she tried to shave it without telling anyone and mutilated herself, leading everyone to think she'd been abused and throwing off the whole case until House figured out her hormones were going crazy because she'd been exposed to her father's low T medicine, which he hid because of how our society regards masculinity, which he started taking because he began dating a younger woman (because of shame stemming from our society's unrealistic expectations wrt sex in relationships) which he was hiding from his kids, because of shame regarding our societies toxic views on monogamy."

A particular episode stands out as a really good example. S06E15 "Private Lives," which aired in 2010 but was fairly prescient about where social media was heading. The patient was a blogger who documented literally every moment of every day for her followers. She made it very clear she left *nothing* out, from her and her boyfriend's sex life to, eventually, asking for feedback from her followers on whether to get her heart valve replaced with one from a pig or a "vegan" plastic one. She handed the whole blog over to House as soon as he took the case and the team poured through the whole thing. Surely this is proof you're wrong about everybody lying, the team says to House. She's give us her whole life and you still can't find out what's wrong! Spoiler, it turned out the crucial symptom that allowed House to put it all together? Was the one thing she *didn't* include in the blog- Her bowel movements. Shame and stigma around talking about *poop* nearly killed this woman. It was also a detail that should have been picked up immediately by a normal doctor, who would have asked about her bowel movements as part of the standard checklist of diagnostic questions. But this woman was so confident that she'd laid out every relevant detail of her life in her blog, she wouldn't answer those questions, obfuscating what she was actually ashamed of underneath a pile of curated, rationalized, narritivized junk she could pretend was proof of a lack of shame and not simply a skill at creative writing.

When I say "I'd just tell House everything" is ridiculous, I don't just mean "well, because of the way the show works, you HAVE to be hiding SOMETHING." I mean literally, you- because you are a human being- are ashamed of *something.* And because you are a human being, the more info you try to give House the more deeply you will bury whatever it is you're actually ashamed of. And, because of the way the show works, that *will* end up being the key to what's making you sick.

[sarahreesbrennan]

Are all the themes in “in other lands” supposed to be a commentary on something? Or do you just like writing sex scenes between minors, age gaps, and reverse misogyny?

Genuine question.

Ohhh, my dear anon, I don't believe this is a genuine question.

But it does bring up something I've been meaning to talk about. So I'll take the bait.

Firstly. Yes, my work contains a commentary on the world around us. I wonder what I could be doing with the child soldiers being sexually active in their teens (people hook up right after battles), and the age gap relationship ending in the younger one being too mature for the elder. What could I possibly have been attempting when I said 'how absurd gender roles are, when projected onto people we haven't been accustomed by our own society to see that way'? I wasn't being subtle, that's for sure.

Secondly. Yes I do enjoy writing! I think I should, it's my life's work. Am I titillated by my own writing, no - though I think it's fine to be. The sex scenes of In Other Lands aren't especially titillating, to be honest. It is interesting to me how often people sneer at women for writing romance and sex scenes, having 'book boyfriends,' insinuating women writers fancy their own characters. Women having too much immoral fun! Whereas men clearly write about sex for high literary purposes.

… I have to say from my experience of women and men's writing, I haven't found that to be true.

I’m not in this to have an internet argument. Mostly people use bad faith takes to poke at others from the other side of a screen for kicks. But I do know some truly internalise the attitude that writing certain things is wrong, that anyone who makes mistakes must be shunned as impure, and that is a deeply Victorian and restrictive attitude that guarantees unhappiness.

I've become increasingly troubled by the very binary and extreme ways of thinking I see arising on the internet. They come naturally from people being in echo chambers, becoming hostile to differing opinions, and the age-old conundrum of wanting to be good, fearing you aren't, and making the futile effort to be free of sin. It makes me think of Tennyson, who when travelling through Ireland at the time of the Great Famine, said nobody should talk about the 'Irish distress' to him and insisted the window shades of his carriage be shut as he went from castle to castle. So he wouldn't see the bodies. But that didn't make the bodies cease to be.

In Les Mis, Victor Hugo explores why someone might steal, what that means about them and their circumstances, and who they might be - and explores why someone else is made terribly unhappy, and endangers others, through their own too rigid adherence to judgement and condemnation without pity. The story understands both Jean Valjean the thief and Javert the policeman. Javert’s way of thinking is the one that inevitably leads to tragedy.

Depiction isn't endorsement. Depiction is discussion.

Many of my loved ones have had widely varying relationships to and experience of sex (including 'none'). They've felt all different types of ways about it. If writing about them is not permissible, I close them out. I'd much rather a dialogue be open than closed.

I do understand the urge to write what seems right to others. I've been brain-poisoned that way myself. I used to worry so much about my female characters doing the wrong things, because then they'd be justly hated! Then I noted which of my writer friends had people love their female characters the most - and it was the one who wrote their female characters as screwing up massively, making rash and sometimes wrong decisions. Who wrote them as people. Because that's what people do. That's what feels true to readers.

I want my characters to feel true to readers. I want my characters to react in messy ways to imperfect situations. I love fantasy, I love wild action and I love deep thought, and I want to engage. That's what In Other Lands is about. That's even more what Long Live Evil is about. That sexy lady who sashays in to have sexy sex with the hero - what is her deal? Someone who tricks and lies to others - why are they doing that, how did they get so skilled at it? What makes one person cruelly judgemental, and another ignore all boundaries? What makes Carmen Maria Machado describe ‘fictional queer villains’ as ‘by far the most interesting characters’? What irritates people about women having a great time? What attracts us to power, to fiction, and to transgression?

I don’t know the answers to all those questions, but I know I want to explore them. And I know one more thing.

If the moral thing to do is shut people out and shut people up? Count me among the villains.