#we re radically different from people from other times and places

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Reading modern German Philosophy is always like "truly, Aristotle's et-et mindset is such a rarity, and it makes so much sense for Catholic thought to have latched onto him so hard besides Plato"

[fuckyeahisawthat]

There are so many places in the Villeneuve Dune adaptations where he just...takes all the narrative pieces that Frank Herbert laid out and subtly rearranges them into something that tells the story better--that creates dramatic tension where you need it, communicates the themes and message of the book more clearly, or corrects something in the text that contradicts or undermines what Herbert said he was trying to say.

The fedaykin are probably my favorite example of this. I just re-read a little part of the book and got smacked in the face with how different they are.

(under the cut for book spoilers and length)

The fedaykin in the book are Paul's personal followers, sort of his personal guard. They show up after his legend has already started growing (the word doesn't appear in the book until chapter 40) and they are people who have specifically dedicated themselves to fighting for him, and right from the moment they're introduced there is a kind of implied fanaticism to their militancy that's a bit uncomfortable to read. They're the most ardent believers in Paul's messianic status and willing to die for him. (They are also, as far as you can tell from the text, all men.)

In the book, as far as I can remember (I could be forgetting some small detail but I don't think so) there is no mention of armed resistance to colonialism on Arrakis before Paul shows up. As far as we know, he created it. ETA: Okay I actually went back and checked on this and while we hear about the Fremen being "a thorn in the side" of the Harkonnens and we know that they are good fighters, we don't see anything other than possibly one bit of industrial sabotage. The book is very clear that the organized military force we see in the second half was armed and trained by Paul. This is exacerbated by the two-year time jump in the book, which means we never see how Paul goes from being a newly deposed ex-colonial overlord running for his life to someone who has his own private militia of people ready to give their lives for him.

The movie completely flips all these dynamics on their head in ways that add up to a radical change in meaning.

The fedaykin in the movie are an already-existing guerrilla resistance movement on Arrakis that formed long before Paul showed up. Literally the first thing we learn about the Fremen, less that two minutes into the first movie, is that they are fighting back against the colonization and exploitation of their home and have been for decades.

The movie fedaykin also start out being the most skeptical of the prophecy about Paul, which is a great choice from both a political and a character standpoint. Of course they're skeptical. If you're part of a small guerrilla force repeatedly going up against a much bigger and stronger imperial army...you have to believe in your own agency. You have to believe that it is possible to win, and that this tiny little chip in the armor of a giant terrifying military machine that you are making right now will make a difference in the end. These are the people who are directly on the front lines of resisting oppression. They are doing it with their own sweat, blood and ingenuity, and they are not about to wait around for some messiah who may never come.

From a character standpoint, this is really the best possible environment you could put Paul Atreides in if you want to keep him humble. He doesn't get any automatic respect handed to him due to title or birthright or religious belief. He has to prove himself--not as any kind of savior but as a good fighter and a reliable member of a collective political project. And he does. This is an environment that really draws out his best qualities. He's a skilled fighter; he's brave (sometimes recklessly so); he's intensely loyal to and protective of people he cares about. He is not too proud to learn from others and work hard in an egalitarian environment where he gets no special treatment or extra glory. The longer he spends with the fedaykin the more his allegiance shifts from Atreides to Fremen, and the more skeptical he himself becomes about the prophecy. This sets up the conflict with Jessica, which comes to a head before she leaves for the south. And his political sincerity--that he genuinely comes to believe that these people deserve liberation from all colonial forces and his only role should be to help where he can--is what makes the tragedy work. Because in the end we know he will betray all these values and become the exact thing he said he didn't want to be.

There's another layer of meaning to all this that I don't know if the filmmakers were even aware of. ETA: rescinding my doubt cause based on some of Villeneuve's other projects I'm pretty sure he could work it out. Given the time period (1960s) and Herbert's propensity for using Arabic or Arabic-inspired words for aspects of Fremen culture, it seems very likely that the made-up word fedaykin was taken from fedayeen, a real Arabic word that was frequently used untranslated in American news media at the time, usually to refer to Palestinian armed resistance groups.

Fedayeen is usually translated into English as fighter, guerrilla, militant or something similar. The translation of fedaykin that Herbert provides in Dune is "death commando"...which is a whole bucket of yikes in my opinion, but it's not entirely absurd if we're assuming that this fake word and the real word fedayeen function in the same way. A more literal translation of fedayeen is "self-sacrificer," as in willing, intentional self-sacrifice for a political cause, up to and including sacrificing your life.

If you apply this logic to Dune, it means that Villeneuve has actually shifted the meaning of this word in-universe, from fighters who are willing to sacrifice themselves for Paul to fighters who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their people. And the fedaykin are no longer a group created for Paul but a group that Paul counts himself as part of, one member among equals. Which is just WILDLY different from what's in the book. And so much better in my opinion.

[anarcowboy]

Boiling it down to any single factor is a mistake when it's a soup of dogshit

--there was substantial decrease in voter turnout between 2020 and 2024. more voters than 2016 tho, and still a popular loss. Woof. 3rd party votes did not make a difference and even if all "other", Stein, AND libertarian votes went to Harris she'd still lose (libertarian pulled from Trump more than Harris)

--running to the right of Trump on various issues normalized conservative policy, so those who they attempted to court could get the same results from Trump without having to vote blue

--those they attempted to court are also, yes, a lot of racists and misogynists. The Black vote was almost unanimously in favor of Harris. Just wildly strong polling. The Latino/Latina vote was split, men leaned Trump and women leaned Harris. The white vote skewed pretty strongly to Trump. Failing to ever address white supremacy and instead court it will never make a woman of color appeal to these people, no matter how "lethal military strong border" fascist you try to be

--Harris's campaign ruthlessly belittled her constituents. They refused to speak with people, canceled meetings, mocked them, and tried to make a fool of people in mourning, scared, devastated, yet still ready to vote for her if she gave them crumbs. She didn't. The campaign turned its back, like Clinton did before, on people willing to vote for her if she put any effort into getting their votes. But like in 2016, Schumer was confident you could replace blue collar dems with suburban republicans. it failed. twice. The whole campaign trail has been littered with contempt for their own base. Harris didn't even speak at her own rally last night and sent everyone home.

--2020 has shifted us into an era of extremism and desperation. People are angry. People are scared. Multiple people have tried to kill trump in the last few months. Many voted for him not because they like him but because they have contempt for Harris, whether reasonable or bigoted varies across the board.

--Even as min wage hikes pass, abortion passes, social security expansion passes, and "radical" politicians like Omar and Tlaib win re-elections in the same exact places Harris loses, anchors blame progressive policy for her downfall. Even now, the marginalized people used as pawns by her campaign are being thrown to the wolves for her loss.

--The dems never learn from a loss. They are a center-right party with substantial hatred for progressive policy even as progressive policy polls as wildly popular among the masses. They loathe their base, while Republicans are willing to kiss the asses of theirs.

--Trump will fail to meet all the expectations placed on him, and his base will become angry. Then rather than ever run a platform to help working class americans, marginalized people in substantial and lasting ways, the dems will court those disillusioned by Trump, until they fail to wow them next time and a new fascist runs.

--The two party system does not work, especially when both are right-wing. Trump is not the sole issue and never was. He's convenient cover. Biden is too weak to do anything, then Trump will be too powerful to stop. It repeats forever. But this dance is crumbling for people. Something is breaking and people are tired of it. We have always been a fascist nation that is rapidly becoming more fascist, and unless something truly radical on the left becomes a possibility for dems that can grab the masses and inspire hope--like say, Bernie Sanders--then we are doomed to slide ever right-ward forever until collapse. But hey, the dems certainly wouldn't sabotage and kill a movement like Bernie's, right?

To sum up: we are in a fucked up time where we refuse to reckon with our past and white supremacy and instead cater to it and then have the nerve to be shocked it bites you once again. In politics and in life you cannot appeal to white supremacy, it is a snake to defeat.

Organize, find solidarity, fight, and god while you need to stop bending over for your enemy, you'd maybe be inclined to learn from them, understand them, and realize the way to defeating them has always been with force and a "fuck you I'm here to stay" attitude.

Electoral politics are never the beginning or end of what politics is. The presidential election is even a very small part of that process. Support community work protecting the people neither party will, support organizations working to undo the harm of these parties, and stop seeing this as a team sport with black and white villains and heroes where one side of a corrupt system represents the good guys and so surely their loss can only come from Evil Forces and not a system performing as designed.

[musingmelsuinesmelancholy]

Musings on titles and definitions

I've been listening to Radical Elphame and BiblioSophia. The interview they did recently with Marshal and Austin and the interview Biblia Sophia did with Shani Oates (my god that was fascinating) got me thinking about how we define and title the things we practice.

Why do we specify traditional witchcraft? Is there a difference between witchcraft and trad craft? What exactly is folk witchcraft?

I know we have all heard that tw is used to distinguish from Wicca; but I don't honestly think that's accurate. I know Cochrane disliked Wicca and did consider what he was doing diametrically opposed to Wicca. I do think the two are different, but are really different enough to define trad craft as non-wiccan witchcraft? I don't think so, we use similar tools, laying a compass is similar to casting a circle (having done both I have noticed differences), Sabbatic Craft works with Divine Male/Female pairings. No, I would think that its more accurate to describe tradcraft as non-new age witchcraft. When I see people complaining about wiccans, I find that often, not always, what they're actually complaining about is New Age! Both trad craft and wicca used similar ideas/material in their inceptions, it just seems like it was interpreted differently. They certainly are two different approaches to the craft but in the same way I do not think it would be helpful to describe a Baptist as a non-Catholic Christian, even though that is true, I don't think it's helpful to describe tw as non-wiccan witchcraft. Most trad witches would probably describe witchcraft as the art of trafficking with spirits, becoming like them and the practice of malefica. So why not just call ourselves witches? Imo it is because, generally speaking, the popular idea of witchcraft is more along the lines of energy manipulation, manifestation, angel numbers 'intentions' and tends to conjure up images of crystal healing, eclecticism etc and/or tends to be use as term to describe magic in general with no specific definition. (Not that there is anything wrong with that it doesn't matter what other people do, so as long as it isn't racist or appropriative). There is certainly still some conflation with wicca and witchcraft, but I don't think it's as bad as it was and therefore do not see the need to specifically set us apart from wiccans.

However, I do think wiccans and trad crafters approach the craft differently. (generally speaking!) I feel that the trad craft approach is more about connecting to rediscovering or reinvigorating the culture/traditions of a certain place. This often leads to a dual-faith observance, as our idea of witchcraft came to be in the context of Christianity. When I was wiccan, it felt more about re-inventing and reclaiming witchcraft and participating in a religion which, at the time, I felt made up for the lack of feminine/nature-based spirituality. We have different founders of course, Cecil Williamson, Robert Cochrane, Gardner, Valiente (though I think she was involved in both currents). The two trads evolved differently. Shani Oates said in her BiblioSophia interview "It [Wicca] is something that has no cosmology, and no end times. So, it doesn't have an eschatology, it just exists in its own creation, in its own bubble. Whereas The Clan of Tubal Cain and Robert Cochranes development of that very much has a cosmology and an eschatology, so it's a full rounded thing." I disagree about Wicca not having cosmology, the god/dess and belief in rebirth/Summerland's would be cosmology, no? I'm sure different traditions have their own too, which the public may not be privy to. The rest resonates very well with me and why I am drawn to trad craft specifically. Before I continue, I want to say in this I am comparing and contrasting my own experiences in wicca and tradcraft. I was wiccan for a while. I am not attempting to diss the religion as a whole, there's much about it that I appreciate! I can only speak on MY OWN experiences and in no way am trying to speak for or on wicca as a whole. I absolutely felt that wicca 'existed in it's own creation' during my time as one. It did not engage with culture or folklore. It had no connection, as far as I am aware, to a cosmology or eschatology that had evolved over time/within a certain culture or religion. (this is not a problem per se and I am generalizing). Trad craft gave me a way to connect to existing cosmologies which had connections to the land, the cultures and the histories I was drawn to. (local ones + my ancestors). I felt that I had more "scaffolding". What I was searching for, when got into spirituality, wasn't a re-creation or re-invention of a pagan/witch faith but rather connection to land, culture and its people. I didn't want to re-invent these things, I wanted to appreciate with and engage with them as they are. That isn't to say that a wiccan can't blend their religion with local or ancestral lore/culture or incorporate an outside cosmology into it.

This brings me to folk witchcraft. I'm seeing this word used more and I have a lot of feelings. I would think that a folk witch is one who is practicing the witchcraft of the area they live in or is one who has been brought into a living folk tradition. Can you call yourself a folk witch, if you're one such as myself? Raised in a white homogenous consumerist culture. No language passed down, no folk tales, very few folk customs retained. I seek out the lore and traditions of my state and of the cultures of my ancestors. I use folk spells. but who are my folk? folk magic is community based. I can't call myself a Canadian, French or Scottish folk witch, even if all the magic I did came from those cultures. I don't live in any of those places. I cannot claim those cultures. I suppose, as the lore of my state is a part of what I do, I could call myself an INSERT STATE NAME folk witch. But, again, who are my folk? The old French-Canadian culture that was once here is all but gone. Not that we don't have a distinct culture of our own anymore! We certainly do.

I like how Marshal described trad craft as "loric" as opposed to folkloric. The lore/history of Europe and America do inform my understanding of witchcraft, but folklore is regional! One cannot say their craft is based on European or American folklore. Who's folklore? Which countries? Which states? "loreic" is specific enough to imply that the lore of witchcraft shapes what one does while not claiming that one is part of a folk trad they have no connection to.

Certainly, one's craft being a melting pot of ancestral and local lore(s) while having to navigate practicing on stolen, colonized land, is very American in spirit.

Edit: Forgot to mention this! Honestly the biggest difference between trad craft and wicca is the "astral sabbath" I never encountered mention of a "sabbath" (I don't like the word tbh due to its antisemitic origins. I propose the use of Conclave instead?) as a nonphysical, spiritual event within Wicca. If you've spent any time in the trad craft sphere, you'll know it's a main focus of what we do. Idk if wiccans place emphasis on spirit initiation either. I didn't learn of the term until I got into traditional witchcraft.

[lemonhemlock]

i just think it's ironic how critical stark fans are of the targaryens like robb and dany are veryyy similar and the first men are colonizers too lol

i think robb should be criticised more for his lack of policies and political foresight and planning when it comes to his independence project, but robb did not resort to sacrificing people to acquire fire-breathing monsters or to torturing people to get his way. he didn't set out to conquer lands. he became king in the north and king of the trident not because he conquered the north or the riverlands, but because they pledged themselves to him. there IS a difference between them

you can agree with northern independence or not but the reason robb called his banners and rose up in the first place was because the de-facto monarch was unjustly imprisoning his father, then executed him without a fair trial, thus breaking the feudal contract (coincidentally, the same reason the targaryens were rightfully deposed). then ofc came stannis' letter casting doubt on joffrey's paternity

honestly a fair line of questioning that might even betray authorial bias is, in a series that puts so much emphasis on the dangers of magic and the HIGH price associated with it, why does robb (and the rest of the starks) get the luxury of being soul-bonded to a magical fierce beast (that comes to them without making any nefarious trade), but dany can only access dragons via committing horrifying acts? imo this could very well be a weak point in the thematic consistency of the series

as for the first men, yes, they were colonizers. so were the andals. they are also dead. the process of ethnogenesis (an often violent process, yes) resulted in the westerosi people. what are they to do about it now? they're just regular people living their lives, not wanting to be brutalized, too, by other foreign invaders like dany will bring, not wanting to fight in any more pointless wars.

is that not a valid request or desire they might have for themselves or do they have to pay indefinitely for the crimes of their ancestors by having the same thing done to them?* does it just go from invasion to invasion until the end of time? is colonization or conquest ok to do indefinitely because they have historical precedent? when does it stop?

from the westerosi point of view, the children of the forest don't even exist anymore, so even paying reparations is out of the question. though, who knows, maybe the series finale will address the issue of reconciliation, since WE know the children of the forest are still out and about

*and, before targstans come out of the woodwork, no, i do not hold dany accountable for things her ancestors did, i hold her accountable for the things SHE did. is it her fault her father became a tyrant? no. but her dynasty got rightfully deposed and that's that (see this post for a more in-depth answer: yes, even ~medieval political theorists believed there are conditions in which a population can rightfully rid themselves of tyrannical rule).

is that fair for dany on an individual level? well, how do you define 'fair'? is it fair that feudal lords own all the land and hoard the resources? or, better yet, why do you define "fair" only in relation to nobles, their wants and desires, the real or perceived injustices visited upon them. i understand that the series is high-born-focused escapism, ultimately, and that it won't end in this radical re-ordering of society or in a leveling of privileges across social spheres, but, for real, sometimes what's "good" for your favourite high-born character isn't good for the smallfolk! that's a basic enough idea we can stick to

[seaemberthesecond]

declan csa parallels haven't left me since I made the connection

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this, because honestly same.

This is one of those things that I won't even say is a headcanon because it's not. It's a reading of the text, plain and simple. The evidence is all there.

Violation of autonomy, familial harm, and secrets are all big themes in tdt. The central problematic of the Lynch family is that the secrets in the underbelly tear them apart and prevent the brothers from connecting to each other in real and meaningful ways. They're deliberately denied the language and vocabulary to articulate their experiences out of fear of the family's secrets being exposed, leaving them unable to communicate with each other.

And in the middle of all of this, we have Declan.

Declan who, unbeknownst to his brothers, is experiencing a radically different childhood riddled with danger and violence and is forced to keep it a secret by his parents for the 'good of the family.' Declan who resents Ronan and Matthew for getting the idyllic childhood he's been deprived of, thus creating rifts in their relationship. Rifts that are further exacerbated because of the secrets he's forced to keep – he can't talk to them about what's actually happening in his life, he can't share anything real with them, so he constructs a fake persona to hide behind, even at home. But his brothers pick up on his artifice and withdraw from him, leaving him even more isolated.

This is…such a painfully obvious allegory for sexual abuse that I'm kind of dumbfounded by the fact that more people don't talk about it.

Both Ronan and Matthew recognize that Declan is treated differently by their parents, but they deliberately don't examine this too deeply because doing so would require that they acknowledge that something sinister lurked in the margins of their childhood and that's just not something they want to face. Declan's grief isn't as clear-cut as Ronan and Matthew's, because he's grappling with the very real harm his parents did to him, but he's demonized for his "sceptical and imperfect love" for Niall and Aurora. His attempts at getting Ronan to see that their parents weren't who he thought they were are met with hostility and scorn (and in Matthew's case, hesitant incredulity). Because again, Ronan doesn't want to hear it. He's actively standing there with his hands over his ears chanting lalalalalala. I mean in CDTH, we can see how very discomfited he gets when faced with Declan at the fairy market because it forces him to re-evaluate his own childhood in light of all this new information about his brother's secret life that was taking place right under his nose. And he does not want to do that.

I mean does that not drive you insane?? The subtext is THERE. Everything about how the Lynch Brothers' dynamic is set up allows for the reading that Declan has suffered some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of one/both of their parents.

And this is purely at a thematic level. It gets crazier when you consider Declan displays many of the characteristics and behaviours of sexual assault survivors.

"It wasn’t that he hadn’t gone on dates or hooked up, that unlovely euphemism for what was sometimes a perfectly nice time. It was that he didn’t get too close. Intimacy was allowed as long as it revealed nothing truthful." (ch 69, cdth)

His issues with intimacy

His 'hypersexuality'

“So he’s a man-whore. It’s not your problem,” Gansey said. (ch 4, trb)

His troubled relationship with physical touch

(He never initiates anything physical with Jordan, it's always her making the first move; his discomfort with Aurora's hug in the Dauntless Declan scene; his discomfort with Feniall's hug in CDTH; he avoids touching his brothers even and is surprised whenever Matthew reaches out to him.)

His disassociation from his own emotions

Declan Lynch had a complicated relationship with his family. It wasn’t that he hated them. Hate was such a slick, neat, simple emotion. Declan envied people who felt proper hate. (ch 10, MI)

So even if you choose to believe Declan wasn't assaulted by Niall or Aurora, there is still enough evidence in the text itself to suggest he's suffered from some kind of sexual violence during his childhood. Fairy Markets aren't exactly child-friendly places (the woman getting strangled in one of the rooms in CDTH anyone?) and it's not really a stretch to assume Declan had to put up with some fucky shit as a uhh* checks notes* 10-year-old in the uhhhh *checks notes again* black market for the rich and powerful.

And then there's the declan-adam-hennessy and the declan-adam-mor triangles which exist independent of whether you consider Declan a victim of sexual violence but certainly get reinforced if you subscribe to it. But I won't get into that.

All this to say, CSA survivor Declan you will always be real to me.

[haggishlyhagging]

Radical feminism remained the hegemonic tendency within the women's liberation movement until 1973 when cultural feminism began to cohere and challenge its dominance. After 1975, a year of internecine conflicts between radical and cultural feminists, cultural feminism eclipsed radical feminism as the dominant tendency within the women's liberation movement, and, as a consequence, liberal feminism became the recognized voice of the women's movement.

As the preceding chapters have shown, there were prefigurings of cultural feminism within radical feminism, especially by 1970. This nascent cultural feminism, which was sometimes termed ‘female cultural nationalism’ by its critics, was assailed by radical and left feminists alike. For instance, in the December 1970 issue of Everywoman, Ann Fury warned feminists against "retreating into a female culture":

“Like other oppressed [sic], we have our customs and language. But this culture, designed to create the illusion of autonomy, merely indicates fear. Withdraw into it and we take our slavery with us. . . . Furthermore when we retreat into our culture we cover our political tracks with moralism. We say our culture is somehow "better" than male culture. And we trace this supposed superiority to our innate nature, for if we attributed it to our powerlessness, we would have to agree to its dissolution the moment we seize control. . . . When we obtain power, we will take on the characteristics of the powerful. . . . We are not the Chosen people.”

Similarly, in a May 1970 article on the women's liberation movement in Britain, Juliet Mitchell and Rosalind Delmar contended:

“Re-valuations of feminine attributes accept the results of an exploitative situation by endorsing its concepts. The effects of oppression do not become the manifestations of liberation by changing values, or, for that matter, by changing oneself—but only by challenging the social structure that gives rise to those values in the first place.”

And in April 1970, the Bay Area paper It Ain't Me, Babe carried an editorial urging feminists to create a culture which would foster resistance rather than serve as a sanctuary from patriarchy:

“It is extremely oppressive for us to function in a culture where ideas are male oriented and definitions are male controlled. . . .Yet the creation of a woman's culture must in no way be separated from the political struggles of women for liberation. . . . Our culture cannot be the carving of an enclave in which we can bear the status quo more easily—rather it must crystallize the dreams that will strengthen our rebellion.”

But these warnings had little effect as the movement seemed to drift almost ineluctably toward cultural feminism. Cultural feminism seemed a solution to the movement's impasse—both its schisms and its lack of direction. Whereas parts of the radical feminist movement had become paralyzed by political purism, or what Robin Morgan called "failure vanguardism," cultural feminists promised that constructive changes could be achieved. To cultural feminists, alternative women's institutions represented, in Morgan's words, "concrete moves towards self determination and power" for women. Equally important, cultural feminism with its insistence upon women's essential sameness to each other and their fundamental difference from men seemed to many a way to unify a movement that by 1973 was highly schismatic. In fact, cultural feminism succeeded in large measure because it promised an end to the gay-straight split. Cultural feminism modified lesbian-feminism so that male values rather than men were vilified and female bonding rather than lesbianism was valorized, thus making it acceptable to heterosexual feminists.

Of course, by 1973 the women's movement was also facing a formidable backlash—one which may have been orchestrated by the male-dominated New Right, but was hardly lacking in female support. It is probably not coincidental that cultural feminism emerged at a time of backlash. Even if women's political, economic, and social gains were reversed, cultural feminism held out the possibility that women could build a culture, a space, uncontaminated by patriarchy. Morgan described women's art and spirituality as "the lifeblood for our survival" and maintained that “resilient cultures have kept oppressed groups alive even when economic analyses and revolutionary strategy fizzled.” There may even have been the hope that by invoking commonly held assumptions about women and men, anti-feminist women might experience a change of heart and join their ranks. The shift toward cultural feminism also suggests that feminists themselves were not immune to the growing conservatism of the period. Certainly, cultural feminism's demonization of the left seemed largely rooted in a rejection of the '60s radicalism out of which radical feminism evolved.

-Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967-75

[velvetvexations]

anon really went Ah a trans woman who isnt skinny or hairless or feminine and doesnt want to be (thing that can also be true for cis women) clearly this must be a man. anyway (horny voice) wow you are a foot taller than me

I sure am~!

I don't know if it's your blog aesthetics or your kinks or your outspoken opinions on trans rights that gets me the most but i have a huge crush on you for all of the above

I'm a gift.

The way some of the trfs you reblog talk about "tmes" just sounds so much like the way a lot of incels I've seen talk about women, and it still makes me double take sometimes. I don't have an eloquent explanation of how exactly, but the vibe is just so similar to what I saw as an edgy teen on 4chan and it's so weird to see in places that claim to be "progressive"

lotta resentment

MALL ANON HAS A TUMBLR NOW??? we got side-characters fuck yes

an ever expanding cast

came for the trf takedowns and stayed for the neato aesthetic posts hope youre havin a lovely day miss velvet

thank you!

I’m so sick of people on this website taking every opportunity they get to accuse trans men who are just talking about their oppression of being 1. A violent misogynist 2. Not even trans 3. A straight up rapist or abuser. I’m actually so exhausted.

I know anon, and I'm so, so sorry. It's tiring. Take breaks as often as you can.

TRFs saying they need to post discourse and be rancid shit because theyre doing it for "the transfems who cant" (ex, trans women of color & sex workers) sounds INCREDIBLY similar to TERFs saying they need to Post Discourse and Be Rancid because "women in third world countries cant"

it sure is

Maybe i just misread it wrong but why was that one anon implying its bad for transmen to make “trans ppl should be having crazy t4t sex?�� Jokes. Is there anything actually wrong about that joke?

I think you mean person I reblogged? They were saying it was sexual harassment lmao.

I feel like a lot of confusion about terfs and radfeminism is simply because a ton of self identified terfs arent radfems but are ppl whos politics abt men arent as intense (like dog standard gender essentialism) but for a lack of a better term coopt the terf concepts around transphobia.

That's certainly true, the term is becoming rapidly diluted not just from people who call all transphobes TERFs but all transphobes calling themselves TERFs. We're still not to where radical feminism is not at the core of it, though.

Some very weird trans people in the dropout tag are complaining about how dungeons and drag queens "makes them uncomfortable" PLEASE explain to me how this is literally any different from conservatives whose reaction to drag is "icky!!! Gross!" Like??? Do they think its progressive to shit on drag queens? Do they think this is ok because they happen to be trans? They sound like Republicans!

well see transfems who do drag aren't real transfems because something something

thoughts on this applying to transfem TRFs?

Blocked so I have no clue what this says.

Re: wounded gazelle. I don't even think it's always that and on purpose. Sometimes it very very blatantly IS. But other times people feel (understandably!) hurt by the backlash they are receiving and instead of thinking "This feels shitty... but could I possibly be in the wrong?" they think "I'm being attacked! This means I am a victim and therefore correct!" genuinely and through lack of self awareness rather than planned malice. Not always easy to tell the difference though!

They are very stupid and egotistical, that is true yes.

[bopinion]

2024 / 51

Aperçu of the week

“Basically, it is always the connections with people that give life its value.”

(Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussian scholar, writer and statesman who reformed the German education system in the spirit of Neo-Humanism)

Bad News of the Week

As we all know, genius and madness go hand in hand. No one is currently more archetypal of this than Elon Musk. It is one thing that he has used his business acumen and ruthlessness to achieve a level of wealth that the world has not seen since John D. Rockefeller. But it's another thing that he acts like a politician without ever having been elected to any office. Only recently, the “adviser to the US president” single-handedly and out of nowhere prevented a budget compromise between Republicans and Democrats and almost plunged the USA into a government shutdown.

With his commitment to Trump's re-election - with pleas in (his own and other) media, an estimated 250 million campaign donations and, above all, wise buddy advice - it almost seems as if he won the election. Not to say he bought it. Hateful comments are already referring to his boss as “Vice President Donald J. Trump”. Which apparently encourages Musk to let other countries benefit from his infinite wisdom too. At least their right-wing representatives. For example, Brexit idol Nigel Farage can apparently look forward to a 100 million US dollar donation to his far-right party Reform UK. Which at least does not have an immediate election opportunity ahead of it, as elections were only held in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland last summer.

The situation is different here in Germany, where elections are due in two months' time. And according to all election forecasts, the radical right-wing AfD (Alternative für Deutschland / Alternative for Germany) has been stable in second place for months with around 18%. And now Elon Musk comes around the corner and tweets “Only the AfD can save Germany”. In the debates that followed, one thing quickly became clear: he doesn't have the slightest idea about either Germany or the AfD. When I express a political opinion - as I do in this blog for example - it is well-founded on the one hand. On the other hand, it is a personal opinion. Musk, on the other hand, informs himself superficially at best, but still hesitantly dares to make a definitive analysis of the situation.

The problem is that a dazzling personality like Elon Musk is a role model, especially for those people who would not classify themselves as right-wing extremists but feel addressed by “Germans First”. A guy who takes risks, doesn't care about conventions and crosses boundaries. And in the end, his success proves him right. So I'd rather listen to such a refreshingly colorful parrot than the boring gray pigeon who calls himself a knowledgeable politician. Cover beats content. The political caste must finally understand this in order to stop allowing such shouters to exert such far-reaching influence.

Incidentally, the Standard Oil Company, the centerpiece of Rockefeller's wealth, was broken up in 1911 for violating the Antitrust Act. And it was all about excessive economic power. The first billionaire in history had probably simply failed to make the political system compliant in time. In 1915, correspondent J. M. Allison of the New York Sun assessed Rockefeller's life's work as follows: “[I am] a believer in the truth that there are only three perfect organizations: the Catholic Church, the Standard Oil Company and the German army.”

Good News of the Week

Unfortunately, Time magazine didn't ask me. Otherwise it wouldn't be Donald Trump who would be Person of the Year, but Gisèle Pelicot, a woman who a year ago nobody outside the Avignon region in the south of France knew. Pelicot's service to society is undoubtedly more valuable than Trump's - especially when it comes to respect for women. The weekly newspaper “Zeit” wrote: “Gisèle Pelicot does not want to be a role model and yet she is one - for her daughter (...) and for millions of women who have experienced sexual violence in their lives.”

For years, Pelicot was drugged by her husband and offered to rape at least 82 men on the internet. For years, she did not understand what her physical and psychological problems resulted from - because she was unconscious during the more than 200 acts of sexual violence. However, she conducted the trial against her husband with the maximum possible consciousness. And thus became a feminist icon. This is because she prevailed with her wish for her trial to take place in public. This “changed her role from victim to a woman who radiates strength and dignity”, according to the public broadcaster ZDF. There is now a consensus that Pelicot not only plays a major role in the #MeToo movement, but also for all people who find themselves in a victim role. As shame has changed sides.

At the end of the trial, there were not only solid verdicts against all (!) fifty defendants, but above all insights into how society can deal with taboo topics. “Rapist, we see you! Victim, we believe you!” was one of the claims chanted by thousands outside courthouses across France. This is thanks to the courage of a single woman who stood alone for so long. And yet, as President Emmanuel Macron wrote on the day the verdict was announced, she “moved and inspired France and the world”. Chapeau!

Personal happy moment of the week

We have a new car. After BMW unfortunately decided to discontinue production of its all-electric i3 model, the fourth version of that was no longer an option and we had to find an alternative. The Model 3 from Tesla was out of the question because of you know who. The Volkswagen ID-3 wasn't iconic enough for me, the ID-Buzz was too expensive and oversized. All Japanese cars seem rather boring to me, and I don't like the Chinese on principle (employee rights, unfair subsidies etc). Now it's a Mini Cooper. And because of the successful combination of go-kart chassis and electric drive, I can't wipe the grin off my face. Fun with a clear conscience makes me happy.

I couldn't care less...

...that there are people who feel cheated by the influencer “Immo Tommy”. Anyone who listens to a YouTuber on something as important as deciding on a real estate investment is even more naive than someone hoping to win the big lottery. The chance of winning is just as low. But the stakes are much higher.

It's fine with me...

...that the incumbent Minister President of Saxony will remain in office, even if Michael Kretschmer only heads a minority government (consisting of his conservative CDu and the social democratic SPD). Here, too, the AfD was the second strongest party in the state elections in the fall, but did not make it into government because the much-cited firewall held firm. And the fact that legislation now also has to convince members of the opposition on a case-by-case basis because their own coalition does not have a majority is not undemocratic either.

As I write this...

...the crooners are playing on the HomePods. For someone like me, who can't stand the typical Christmas songs from Wham! to Mariah Carey to Cliff Richard, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and company are an extremely worthy alternative, which in some strange way fits very well into this season, but is also stylish and sophisticated.

Post Scriptum

There are families in Ukraine who have lost everything but their hope. There are children in Gaza who are missing their parents and both legs. There are still people in the world who are dying of malnutrition. And even in our own neighborhood, there are people who lack the most basic necessities after a flood, for example. Especially at this time of year, when you stop and reflect, it doesn't hurt to remember how well off you actually are. And whether you can give a little of it to those who are not doing so well. With this in mind, Merry Christmas and thank you for every donation to a good cause.

[ivyial]

I'm shocked that Leshley/Eagleone is classified as a "rare pair".... like... the potential these two have. It's one of the rare (ironically) ships where both parties could end up genuinely happy together, despite horrific circumstances lmao. Why in the world isn't it more popular? Simple answer? People have no taste and can't read between lines. 😤

(omg my first ask thank u ily)

no cause exactly. i tweeted something similar a few months ago about how people go wild for disney fairytales but not this. especially since at the time, the new little mermaid movie had just come out and everyone on twitter was losing their minds over it. people love a good fairytale, so it's surprising that leshley/eagleone gets this much hate. like the reply to the tweet said, it's probably a matter of other shippers not wanting to change their mind because unfortunately, people are very intense when it comes to ships!! you either have to be all in or fuck off, which to me sounds like a ridiculous way to approach shipping in media. so that's the first reason why, and arguably a dumb one too, because when it comes to franchises that are not going to give you romance outright, like RE, there is no need to invest this much energy into a ship. it's not like there is a ship war to be won, at least not in my eyes.

the second reason is the whole age gap thing. since the loudest part of fandoms is populated by literal teenagers who apply high school logic to both fiction and real life adult situations and a teenager thinks it is wrong for a 14 year old to date an 18 year old (and they'd be right, because age gaps matter greatly as a teenager, due to puberty and the various experiences you either get or do not get at a certain age), they automatically think that any and all age gaps between adults are wrong. UNLESS it's people who are their parents' age. i've seen it happen a lot on tiktok, where kids would be like "you can't ship them, they have a 7 year age gap" and someone would inevitably reply "but my mom is 35 and my dad is 42". so they'd be forced to acknowledge that "yeah, but it's different in your case, they're old enough" (???) because you're not gonna tell a stranger online that their parents' relationship is "morally wrong" (though, honestly, i wouldn't be surprised if someone did).

teenagers, as well as teenagers fresh out of high school, are convinced that your early twenties are the direct follow-up to your high school experience. that is straight-up not true. as soon as you get to 20, everyone you know will be in radically different places in life. i mean, i have friends who are already engaged, some who have never been in a relationship, and i know someone from high school who had a child at 19 and got married right after. to them, maturity can only be gained much later in life, like in your thirties, because their parents are around that age, or because that's when people start to have kids these days. maybe i'm wrong. but that's how i see it.

and that's when they start to resort to the sibling coded thing lmao. and if you look at tweets or tiktoks about leon and ashley's dynamic (not framed in a romantic manner), everyone will go out of their way in the comments to make sure that it's known that THEY VIEW THEM AS SIBLINGS GUYS. like the average reply will be "THEY'RE SO SIBLINGS" or "MY FAVOURITE SIBLINGS" which makes me throw up in my mouth a little. like okay, we get it. you don't ship them and you think no one should either. no need to be flamboyant about it.

and then as you mentioned, there's also the fact that people can't read between the lines, or maybe they don't want to. when i played RE4R, i didn't pay attention to leon and ashley that much because i was too focused on the game itself hahahaha. my primary takeaway was that they had a great, supportive dynamic, and then i'd noticed a few moments like ashley flirting with leon about the armour, or leon's fingers trailing down ashley's arm for no reason on the bed in chapter 13, or leon's weirdly boyish and bashful tone when he says "can you make it down? i can catch you" (seriously. he tried to make this into an incentive and i'm not sure who it benefitted more, him or ashley). after seeing some eagleone content and analyses, i was like hang on a sec... there is something there. i will admit that i personally suck at flirting, or at recognising it for that matter, unless i try really hard. i mean, a guy once tried to get my number with a magic trick, and my only response was that he didn't logically need my number to tell me what my card was, and he could tell me right there and the trick would be the same. like no shit girl. you're fucking dense LMAO. but that's just a me thing. when you really start paying attention, leon and ashley's flirting gets pretty obvious.

i've also seen people argue that ashley's crush on leon is "innocent" and she just views him as a hero so that's why she thinks she likes him. you know, because a 20-year-old woman can't make decisions for herself. she doesn't know any better. obvious sarcasm. in wanting to protect (young) women, people are starting to shelter them to the point where we're going backwards towards (male) guardianship.

so so sorry this ended up being longer than i thought help

[man-down-in-hatchet-town]

Ani: A Parody and the Radical Act of Recovery

Okay, so let’s talk about Ani, and why I love it. It’s not my favorite Starkid show (look, they can’t all be), but the older I get the more precious it becomes to me. And I think that's because of the way it handles failure, damage, and healing.

Ani is of course about the villains, but in some cases it's specifically about those who are the villains of their own story. It's about the losers, the characters maligned for years for being too cringe or pathetic, the ones who self-sabotaged their way out of all success and potential they once held. Even Tarkin, who in A New Hope was a pretty cool and collected guy, is an awkward mess in this version of the story. In different ways and to different degrees, Ani, JJ, and Jeffrey (looking purely at his relationship with Emily here) all start from a place of hopelessness, a nest of despair they each built for themselves despite having once been at the top of the world (for Jeffrey, that would be holding a position of power inside the Empire that could easily impress Emily).

And they're also founding members of the Empire. The creation of the Empire went hand-in-hand with Ani's worst moments and JJ's worst instincts. Really, if you want to get symbolic about it, the whole damn system is a representation of those two characters' failures and traumas. Without even really realizing it, Ani's cast spend their entire lives drowning in a manifestation of their worst selves and mistakes. And whether they are able to put it into words or not, it's clearly not working out for them.

To borrow from Black Friday, the characters' psyches are riddled by holes caused by the decisions they made within the lives they lead. The idea of these "holes" is of course not unique to Ani. Characters having unmet wants and needs is a vital component to storytelling. But Ani stands apart from other Starkid shows because its protagonists start in a place of dreamless failure, where they have already fallen so completely from grace, and dare to dream anyway. Despite all reason and learned helplessness, Ani gets back in that podracer. He chooses to believe that the holes can still be patched.

Obviously, we aren't villains like Ani Skywalker (I mean, I guess I can't speak for you guys, but I hope that's the case). But Ani is nonetheless a show about potential that has already been lost, an adult life that has already and irrevocably become something different and worse than dreamed of years ago. And that's... what life is. At least when you're like me (and at the time of writing Ani, that's what the Langs and Brian were), and just trying to survive your late twenties in an unsteady industry fueled by latent dreams but swamped by late-stage capitalism (hahahaha the arts). And I think it's probably true for people in other paths as well. Unless you're very lucky, growing up contains that moment where your life turns from something you will get to live into something that you are currently enduring until it can be fixed, if such a thing is even possible. Can you recover from this fall? Are you your hero or your nemesis? Did you make the wrong choices? Are your weaknesses and failures going to be what defines you in the end, drowning out all that promise and hope you felt in your youth?

Black Friday says "Probably. All you can do under this system is learn to see the holes, accept them, and stop them from making you worse."

Ani says "No. It doesn't matter how fiercely you burned out. It's never too late to heal." More than lost potential, it is a show about recovery as a radical but ever-possible action, about re-learning to get Back of Top once more no matter the obstacles.

And I think both answers are important.

[daffodilhorizon]

i've always been outspoken about equal rights. It started with posts about mental illness stigma. Since being traumatized as a child, i've struggled with depression and anxiety. I opened up about this, in hopes others would feel inspired to share their stories. There's every reason why suffering from mental illness should not happen alone. Then i started talking about gay rights and biphobia and feminism and #metoo and the patriarchy. I tirelessly educated on rape culture and mansplaining. I went hard on telling people to vote (haha) for the most liberal option available. I told people about the wealth gap and classism. I educated myself and read both anarchist and communist theory, and then i started criticizing colonialism and exploitation itself. I advocated for unions, i told people to never cross a picket line and to support strikes. I was already ACAB before Ferguson, but after that i spent years reading antiracist theory and seeking out black revolutionaries. I had to tell an extended family member "all lives don't matter until black lives do". I did not shy from my work in attempting to gently radicalize the people in my life. I attempted to educate others on why we need prison and cop abolition and the alternatives. I got pretty far, even with people i don't consider leftists! Like anyone else, i of course, advocated for environmentalism. I myself do not own a car and go to great lengths to use fully renewable energy. I re-use before recycling. I avoid plastic when i can. In my veganism self-education, i learned about disability rights. This was enforced further during covid. I stopped using ableist language or comparisons. I have successfully eradicated using comparisons to intelligence in my daily life and gently correct people around me when they use them to use a better word. None of this lost me any friends. Until i brought up animal rights. Even the tamest "i'm vegan" had acquaintances putting distance between us. My entire family turned on me, simply for saying stuff like "you are a good person, you just don't see the difference between your cat and a pig because of defense mechanisms, but you would be upset if your cat went through what animals at those places do." or saying killing a turkey is wrong. Then i started losing friends and being ostracized. From people who said nothing even when i pointed out war crimes against Palestine and are full anti-capitalists. People who are open minded, and generally kind to others. People's environmentalism evaporated when i pointed out that methane from cows is x28 as heating as CO2 in the short term, that we can't stay under 2c without people being plant based, or that the majority of plastic in the ocean is from fishing nets, or that fishing is killing way more sea turtles and other "cute" animals than straws. Even just mentioning animal victims a few times every now and then is enough to make people uncomfortable. Definitely not a sign of their own guilt or anything! How painful must the reminder be, to have to completely block out not only the victims at every meal, but humans who remind them of the suffering they are inflicting as well. So it's very jarring to me now, to see other people advocating for other causes saying much more extreme things and not getting any negative social feedback. Straight up mainposting things like "you are a bad person for voting wrong" is becoming more normal with the election season coming up. But vegans get shut down simply for bringing up animal abuse, because carnists know deep down it's wrong to hurt animals and objectify them into commodities. That's why they care so much about animals they view as "cute" "pets" or value (at least on the surface) animals they admire for being free and wild such as Elephants, pretty birds, and whales.

[starlsssankt]

RE: this gifset

Where do I even begin?

I mean, I'll preface this all with "yes, yes, atrocities committed and countless lives lost and he's a murderous immortal" blah blah blah. I know what the story is trying to say with this character, but bear with me, okay?

One of the things I love about villains/morally grey characters is the reasons behind why they do what they do. I need the nuances, I need the explanations, the whole "why why why" answered. I need to be able to get in their head and reasonably explain the thoughts behind what led to certain actions.

Which is why I cannot STAND it when some shows/books/etc. diminish those complex characters down to one-dimensional "Disney villains". But that's a rant for another day.

When it comes to the Darkling, I think this set shows really well (and it was one of the better scenes done in s2 of the show, let's be honest) how many times he's gone through the same old path, the same old fight, lost more people than anyone can remotely imagine...

I've always head-canoned, of course, that he tried to work "within" the system at first. He tried the peaceful approach, the "let's get more rights for Grisha, let's get them a safe place in society" by whispering in different ears of the nobility/royalty, by trying to orchestrate it as, I don't know, "legally" as he could.

Every single time, it didn't work. It either wasn't enough, or he didn't have the power to truly affect the change he wanted, or whatever the reason, he came to the conclusion that the only language those in current power would understand was VIOLENCE.

(To reference different real life things, you have it with every sort of marginalized group in history, every sort of revolution/rebellion/etc. There are those who work in the "peaceful" way and then those who are more "radical" about it. I firmly believe Aleksander started as the former and after so many (life)times, became the latter.)

The only other being that he knows that is enough like him that he doesn't really fear losing them, is his mother. Until such a point that Alina comes along and ...

Yeah. Another topic for another day.

But even then, ultimately, he does lose Baghra. And in that moment, he feels that overwhelming pressure of being utterly, truly alone. No one else bears what he does, no one else has seen what he has, has endured what he has--so how could they possibly understand?

Of course, after all those lifetimes, of seeing the same thing happening again and again and again-- He cracked, for lack of better words.

I mean, we see in Demon in the Wood how he was as a child, how Grisha lives in general were. Think of any marginalized group in history, and imagine being not only a part of that group, but marginalized even within that group.

That is what he and Baghra endured. Not only were they marginalized because they were Grisha (which dealt with enough prejudice on that fact alone), but they were shadow summoners, which marginalized them even from other Grisha. (Tack on the whole "he's an amplifier" and you get even more distance.)

So of course, after (who knows how many) lifetimes and decades and centuries, after losing friends and lovers and every single person he meets and knows (outside of Baghra) to (and I quote) "sickness, desperation, hate, and time", he's closed himself off from letting anyone in.

What's the point, when he'd just lose them? Why let himself feel anything for anyone else when they'd fall in one way or another, and he'd continue trudging onward...?

And there's the whole "reinvent yourself" aspect he names here, too. Because yes, think about it: He can't just continue in the same line. He has to become an entirely new person. Lies and half-truths that make up one identity after another... To never quite be known by the truth of who you are, to the point even your true name isn't what you're called?

What sort of mess does that do to a person's sense of self? Their identity? He clings to his name tattooed on his heart because he doesn't want to lose who he is-- and I don't even want to think of the mess his head ultimately is in, after doing all of this for literal centuries. (Dude needs major therapy but yeah...)

I mean, has he ever known a moment's peace? Because let's remember:

Grisha (marginalized)

Shadow Summoner (further marginalization within that)

Amplifier (secrets b/c lack of touch, assassination attempts, etc.)

Immortal (literally outlives every single other being save one and then ultimately even does that when Baghra dies)

All those facets of who he is, not a single one of them let him know peace. Prejudiced with some of them by others, literally hunted and killing attempts by others (amplifier)...

I mean, this guy was totally messed up from the get-go. (Again, dude needs major therapy.)

But yeah... ultimately, his intentions were right. And can we really blame him (completely) for shattering after all this? After a past like this? For finally saying "you know what, fuck it. they want a monster, i'll give them a monster to get the result" or whatever.

And I will now end (sort of) this rambling post with the fact that I don't think anyone could have acted the hell out of this character like Ben did. To put forth those nuances and give him depth that even the pages themselves sometimes lacked.

I've said it before and I'll say it one more time here: I love the Grishaverse for a lot of the potential it had. The avenues to really dig in and explore, the nuances and the motifs of light and dark and yin and yang...

I'd kill for some more of that... yeah...

Okay. I'll stop now.

(Sorry this got so long... Oops.)

[piqued-curiosity]

hi ive just peaked. ive been questioning the trans rhetoric for a while but after the mass shooter situation i can't support this community anymore. not the shooter, but the community reaction to it is what peaked me. how could they watch kids be gunned down and worry about themselves??? i feel so awful, i have normal trans friends, but the movement as a whole is just so sexist and self centered i cant support it anymore. im so sorry, ive been drinking but i need to get this off my chest, i feel like an awful person but the trans community makes me sick rn. i think everyone should live a life free from legal discrimination but im done campaigning for them and making myself small for them. as a radfem who has peaked, what do i do now? i feel so lost and angry...

Hi!

First of all, I’m sorry that you have to feel this way. You are not a bad person. It’s okay to question your beliefs and change them, and as long as you aren’t advocating for the harm or death of trans people (which nobody here does), you are not hateful and are not harming people. You just have different beliefs.

The feelings you’re describing are so familiar to me, because it’s exactly what I was feeling when I peaked. It was the homophobia, sexism, and reaction to the Chris Chan debacle that did it for me, and I felt lost and angry and guilty as well. It’s hard to manage the first two feelings…you’re going to feel angry for a while, especially as you begin to notice more and more flaws with the movement. Because peaking isn’t just a one-time thing, it’s ongoing. Speaking from experience, the deeper you dive into this community, the more sexism and homophobia you encounter. It really is like the iceberg analogy, with the tip being the normie “I’m just more comfortable as a boy/girl” trans people, and the bottom being telling homosexuals we need to be attracted to the opposite sex, sending women death and rape threats, trans identified males having fantasies about raping “terfs”, etc. I just reblogged a post that talks about this, how it starts with “we just want to pee!” Which gets well-meaning LGB people and our allies on their side…but quickly spirals into always demanding more.

So unfortunately, the anger won’t go away. But the feelings of being lost will. I would encourage you to do what I did, which was make a blog here. Make a post asking any questions you have about gender criticism or radical feminism, and post it in tags like #radblr, #terfs please touch, #terfs do touch, #gender critical, #radical feminism, #LGB drop the T, etc. I quickly found that women here were very open to answering the questions I had, and it really helped me get my mind around the whole gender issue, and eased me into feminism (I don’t consider myself a radfem though, just adjacent). Don’t put much effort into the blog at first, just have it be a no-obligation filler thing to get your feet wet. I found that also helped with my guilt as well. Because I wasn’t going full “terf”, I was just asking questions. And any ideology that is worth believing allows questions, even difficult ones, to be asked (but of course, gender ideology does not allow even the simplest of questions to be asked). Just having a place to read what other women were saying and to engage with them made me feel so much less alone, and assured me I wasn’t the only one in the world thinking this way. It kept me sane while I was coming to terms with the fact that the community and ideology I had so passionately defended, was a giant mass of homophobia and sexism that hated me for being a lesbian.

And again, I cannot stress enough that you have nothing to be guilty for. You are not an awful person.

Here are some YouTube channels I can recommend:

Looking through some of their videos might help you wrap your mind around this whole thing and ease some of your feelings of being a bad person and of being lost.

There’s so much I could say to somebody who’s in your position, and I’m not sure if I’ve said it all but I did my best with just telling you what came to mind first. I really hope this helps, and if you need, please feel free to either send more asks with your questions or DM me. And others please feel free to reply or reblog with your thoughts.

I wish you the best in navigating through this, because I know it’s difficult!! 💕💖💕💖

[jupitermelichios]

Hi @glorioustidalwavedefendor, always happy to to talk theology! Sorry this got so long - these aren't ideas that condence very well.

Re: Augustine of Hippo, I explained it in depth here but the tl:dr is that Christianity used to be a pacifist religion, then he got horny for Greek philosophy and said holy wars were fine and cool actually, and that's how we got the first Crusade

High Church vs Low Church is a distinction which matters in Anglicanism (aka Church of England, or if you're American and have heard of Episcopalian christians, they're basically the same thing) and basically nowhere else. But Anglicanism is the third biggest communion in all of Christianity, so it matters to a lot of people.

Basically, the Anglican church is interesting, because the split from the Roman Catholic church wasn't initially theological, it was political, but a whole bunch of protestant reformers took advantage of the split to introduce their ideas into the Anglican church, so it got increasingly different from catholicism over time. This meant that you'd got a group of Anglicans who wanted the church to be as much like catholicism as possible, which generally means fancy robes for the priests, incense, stained glass and statues, and a big emphasis on church hierarchy and priests acting as a kind of go-between between the congregation and God. This group is also why Anglicanism is basically the only Protestant church to have saints, and to baptise infants rather than practising adult baptism. So high church = basically catholics who aren't into the pope.

On the other side, you've got a faction that grew out of the radical protestant lutheran sects which were emerging in mainland Europe, especially in what is now Germany. They rejected ostentatious decoration because they think it distracts people from God and is basically worshipping idols (they think people will pray to the statues and not to the actual God and Jesus), they accept church hierarchy as necessary for administration, but emphasis that every person can have a personal relationship with God, and doesn't need a priest to intercede for them, so they don't think a bishop is necessarily more important or spiritual than a lay person, it's literally just a job to them. They see infant baptism as purely symbolic, because they reject the catholic version of original sin. This is low church anglicanism.

(brief side tangent about original sin because it's important for understanding this stuff - catholics teach that humans are born already sinners because we are tainted by Adam's sin. This is why limbo lane, where unbaptised babies go, was a thing, because until a baby is baptised, in catholicism, it is a sinner and so they can’t go to heaven even if they haven’t committed any sins of their own yet. Baptism resets your sin counter to 0. Most protestant sects on the other hand teach that babies are born capable of sin, because Adam's sin changed the nature of mankind to make us inclined to commit sins, but whether we go to heaven or not is judged purely on our own sins, not those of adam, and since babies don't have a lot of opportunities to commit mortal sins, they go to heaven regardless of whether they're baptised. So babies are born with a sin counter of 0, but with the ‘enable sins’ cheat code turned on, basically. infant baptism in anglicanism is therefore largely just a symbolic 'welcome to the church, here have a name' which stuck around just because it was a big part of English life and culture. but if you had a high church vicar like i did as a kid they might have told you the catholic version, because again, there's a bunch of anglicans who are basically just catholics in different silly hats)

There is also a big class divide here. Working class people really couldn’t become priests until the 20th century, because of the cost of education, so the greater the emphasis placed on priests and church hierarchy, the greater the class divide between the church as an organisation, and the people it preached to. Remember this, it will be on the test.

The Georgians and Victorians were obsessed with elaborate and intricate architecture and design, and this manifested in an interest in mediaeval churches (which in the UK were all catholic churches that got repurposed when the switch to the church of england happened), so they started building gothic revival buildings (there's also a bunch of stuff with architecture as a propoganda tool happening here, but it's not actually important to understanding what's about to happen). This is cool, because gothic revival architecture slaps, but remember there's a whole section of low church anglicans who think fancy buildings and stained glass is worshipping idols, which is breaking one of the ten commandments, so they're really not happy about it.

The UK also has long a history of producing radical protestant sects, because there have been many periods of british history where there was relatively high religious tolerance provided you were broadly protestant (which I know doesn't sound like much freedom at all, but compare that to somewhere like spain where catholic converts were executed en masse for not having been born catholic, and england suddenly looks super chill). During these periods of tolerance, you get movements like Calvinism, the Levellers, Quakers and Shakers (sounds like a song lyric but they are actually 2 different groups), Methodists, and the Puritans, and although some of these groups are expelled or arrested during less tolerant times, their ideas stick around.

In Scotland, they still have what are sometimes called the 'Wee Frees', a loose configuration of small independant strict Calvinist churches famous for firebrand preachers who think everyone's going to hell.

In England, the law literally gets amended for Quakers - they don't have to swear the oath to tell the truth when giving evidence in court, because being honest is so fundamental to quaker beliefs that they find the oath offensive (because it implies there was ever a chance they'd lie)

Methodists basically lead the whole teetotal movement in the 19th century, which was massively influential, and there probably isn’t a town with more than a few thousand inhabitants anywhere in the UK that doesn’t have a methodist church in it today.

So basically, there's a lot of people pissed off with the established church, in a country which is historically pretty tollerant of people just making up their own flavours of christianity. I think you can see where this is going.

And then something called the third great awakening happened. Great Awkenings are the name given to periods of history where there's suddenly a huge renewed interest in religion, especially new and unconventional religion, in the English-speaking world. The third great awakening, in the late 19th century, is responsible for the creation of mormonism, the jehovah's witnesses, seventh day adventists, christian scientists, pentecostalism, and theosophy, among others. (you probably haven't heard of theosophy, but basically every western high control group/cult that isn't christianity in a silly hat is just a riff on theosophy. hugely influential among absolute bastards.) There was even an area of upstate new york that was known as the ‘burned over district’ because there were so many preachers there claiming hellfire would be coming any second now to burn it all down.

Big things we see in churches created during the third great awakening are an emphasis on prophecy, especially prophecies of armageddon, a belief that the world is going to end any second now, (which stems largely from a guy called william miller deciding he was a dan brown protagonist and trying to “decode” the bible - since there’s nothing to decode, he ended up with a whole lot of absolute nonsense, but he was real charismatic and humans really like puzzles, so people believed him), a belief that there is a limited number of spaces in heaven and only the ‘elect’ (usually 144,000 ‘true believers’) get to go there on armageddon, and what I’m going to call ‘church as entertainment’. Not that these people weren’t sincere believers, they were, but things like faith healing, speaking in tongues, exorcisms, that thing where people have what looks like fits but they say is the holy spirit coming upon them, all that stuff is spectacle. It’s entertaining to watch, and that draws in more believers, hence church as entertainment. And if you know anything about Evangelical Christianity, this should all be sounding very familiar.

And the awakening happened in response to a bunch of things, but one of the big ones was the revived interest in high church anglicanism - remember, anglicanism is literally the third biggest sect of christianity, so changes there ripple out across christendom. When they started building gothic revival churches and putting up stained glass, a lot of people around the world felt this was genuinely a spiritual attack that was endangering their souls, so they began to look elsewhere for salvation.

In theory, I think that was pretty based of them, honestly, but it does create a bunch of problems. Firstly, mass movements of people looking for a new church is the perfect environment for cults to form, and oh boy did they. Secondly, because of the class divide in between priest and laity, and the fact that these people are often leaving high church anglicanism where there’s a reliance on the priest to be the one who knows shit, a lot of the people forming and joining these new churches are illiterate, or can read but know nothing about biblical history or translation or any of the stuff you need to actually understand the book, and they think knowing that stuff makes you classist snob. And they’re right that the people gatekeeping this info were classist snobs, but also someone in your movement needs to know this shit, or you end up with shit like rapture theology which has 0 biblical basis but sounds cool and so catches on easily with people who don’t actually understand the bible. The requirement for leading a church among these new sects becomes 'how charismatic are you' and not 'how many hours of bible study have you done'. This is where evangelical anti-intellectualism begins.

From the UK, this spreads to America, and there it mixes with Calvinism, because Calvinism was way bigger in American than Europe (and still is), so all that fun ‘anyone who isn’t like me is going to hell’ sauce gets stirred into this religious soup, along with America’s incredibly high tolerance for destructive cults.

Although the modern evangelical movement wouldn’t come together as a voting block until the 1960s, this is where American evangelical christianity begins. In the burned over district where people are prophesying the end times, and in welsh villages where they’re speaking in tongues, and in London where biblical scholarship is being decried as a tool of class oppression.

The Evangelical movement isn’t actually very theologically coherent - independent fundamental baptists don’t think women should even speak in church, while female megachurch pastors are some of the biggest voices in the movement. Prosperity gospel megachurches fund the movement while the snake-handling churches of appalachia preach wealth is a sin. Half these churches have leaders claiming to be modern prophets and all contradicting one another. The mormons consider themselves part of the movement while everyone else in the movement doesn’t even consider them to be christians. There’s a whole lot of disagreement about just about everything that isn’t ‘vote republican’. But all of them have their roots there in the third great awakening, and the backlash against high church anglicanism.

TL:DR; a backlash against catholic-influences in the Church of England lead to a lot of people leaving and joining extremist sects and even cults, and these sects and cults are what would, over the course of the next 60 or so years, take on a bunch of calvinist ideas and turn into modern Evangelical christianity

[johannesson]

I shit on Back to the Future II for a loooooooong time

~ The other night I watched the original Back to the Future with my grandmother. It's a popular take on time travel and it was a good movie. I loved it, thought it was funny, exciting, endearing at times. I enjoyed the fifties setting, and the concept of a kid raised in the eighties finding himself a fish out of water in the previous era. I just enjoy seeing the set designs of the old town buildings, costumes, music, and how they contrast with the 'modern' look of Marty. Good popcorn movie, and it didn't overlap with anything I was writing in my novel (it's good to know that your ideas are fresh and not re-used, even on accident). So, the next night, we started watching the sequel. I couldn't even get through it. Cheesy, boring, stupid, and painfully unoriginal. Shit, the first scene of the movie is /exactly the last scene of the first/. Maybe besides the added scenes of Biff, who overstayed his welcome by far. It felt disappointing, did the creative well dry up? It's a textbook example of why sequels should expand on the universe, build characters further, and give us more to look for. Apparently the third movie is also just the original movie but /set in the wild west/. They teased the bad guy in the second movie.

Speaking of that, I wasn't a fan of the dropping hints towards sequels, in all the movies. The gall of something as trashy as Bttf-II out loud contemplating a sequel midway through its horribly long run felt big-headed and presumptuous.

The whole thing felt like a Hollywood-funded AU fanfiction, something I'd read on the old .net on my Kindle tablet. What if BttF was set in the future, not the past? Dark!AU, Future!AU. The mom wears slutty clothes, Marty is kidnapped and brought to his room, Biff is his powerful rich stepdad! Also Dystopia!AU, where crime runs rampant, upper-middle-class wet nightmare about how the world will explode and those punk kids will shoot at us from their trucks.

There were also some weird story elements that just didn't make sense either? Why does Marty's son look exactly like him, but his daughter looks totally different? How does genetics works? The thing about being seen in the DeLorean, having it seen flying, and now it's suddenly a bad thing with consequences? Can you imagine how many people also looked outside of their windows and saw the same thing? Also, if Biff and others remember Marty being in their past, wouldn't they remember his face, too? The sound of his voice? Besides when the plot calls for it.

The use of catchphrases, repeatedly, was grating fast. Just needed to add that. There's so many times I can hear them say the line before it gets annoying. Plus the acting in some places was almost painfully subpar for being really good in the first movie. One-liners, missed lines. I actually winced at the scene where Marty got fired from his job, like man, I thought you were good at this shi Lastly, I do have to say that the attempted changing of common phrases in 'future-talk' was a good little detail, with how many times I consider how phrases and ways we casually talk have changed even over the course of the past ten years, five even. Rizz? Swag? Radical? Awesomesauce? Half these words make little sense outside of context and sound even more ridiculous when you try and look closer at them, so weird slang words made sense. But having seen 2015 myself, not finding it all that impressive really, it kind of made immersion difficult. Aged like milk imo.

It's as frustrating as watching a guy create something so original, cool, fascinating and fun, and then intentionally, laser-focused shooting himself in the foot. Twice.