#western arrogance

[standbyforexciter]

Love how every post about Ukraine or Zelenskyy is filled with 'professional' Western fighters talking about what they should be doing or giving orders like they're the reincarnation of William Tecumseh Sherman and that Ukrainians should be thankful that they're there when the only fighting they've done is fighting for a date in Lviv.

[scamallach-1]

Words via keiran_stewart_assheton @ IG

[img text - Another thing want to talk about is how the notion that Decolonial theory and praxis is deemed irrelevant, illegitimate or invalid by many in the west because First Nations people have been reduced to a

"statistical minority".

This is genocide apologia.

What this position says, is that a foreign occupation of a people and their lands can be legitimised through Genocide. What it says, is that someone else's land, resources and very existence can be bought with the blood of these same people.

What it is explicitly saying is that an illegitimate and illegal occupation suddenly becomes legitimate once they manage to massacre a certain amount of the Indigenous population and replace them with their own.

Colonial chauvanists and genocide apologists will try and refute and argue this position and perform all manner of feats of mental gymnastics in order to justify their illegitimate claims to illegally occupied lands - but at the end of the day the fact remains that euro-supremacist notions of Terra Nullius and Manifest Destiny underpin their arguments, arguments built on the stolen lands that have been stained with my people's blood. ]

[downmystreeandupyours]

(via Dictators, Autocrats, Fake Democrat, and Major Idiots)

[utilitycaster]

Wizards and paladins are my favorite classes because of the built in story elements that clearly shape the characters, but also because, on some level, if a character isn't, to quote Jonas Spahr, "arrogant, prideful, and sanctimonious" what is even the point.

[selfindulgentraptor]

Just gonna call it now, this guy is a sleeper agent who is gonna consume my brain in 1-3 months time

[manderleyfire]

You'll always be here for me, won't you?

[trans-phone-eater]

I'm gonna be honest at times things reaffirming that my life isnt bad make me feel slightly worse, because It makes me feel like im just being ungrateful and selfish and mean because im still suicidal despite the fact that I am living an objectively better life compared to the average person on earth.

[russell-crowe]

i consider tornadoes to be a pretty legitimate risk when it comes to natural disasters in europe, but people tend to not have much of a grasp on them occurring outside of tornado alley in the usa. i follow this guy for a couple years now and he is a huge recommendation to follow if you are interested in tornadoes. i am grateful that he did such a well-researched video on tornadoes in europe, and i am also kinda glad that the areas he marked as most active, are the same areas i personally have considered to be remarkably active compared to others. definitely worth a watch!

[beevean]

Sonic is so Japanese they used several American and other Western influences and inspiration when conceptualizing him, including basing his character design off of classic rubber hose cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat.

"Sonic is too Japanese" is literally a wrong take. No matter how you slice it, Sonic is infamous for having being designed to appeal to American audiences (to the point that SoJ wasn't happy with the US still redesigning him lol), and for being more popular outside of Japan. There are videos about it.

Now, granted, there are Japanese influences in Sonic too, that is inevitable, especially starting from the Adventure era. But it's far from being completely unapproachable to Western audiences, and there is tangible proof of it.

[sweetest-devotion]

I genuinely think what Yemen is doing to try and end the Genocide and occupation in Palestine is genuinely beyond the comprehension of the western political and media class. Because it embodies concepts they don't even know the meaning of — real sacrifice, honour, solidarity, community and commitment to a higher cause.

Also fuck the demonizing western Brown Arab Men are Barbaric Terrorists narratives. Fuck your faith in the power of western hegemony, fuck your normalization of the status quo and your demonization of armed resistance. God bless Yemen. God bless the Palestinian resistance. I just don't think enough of us are truly truly grasping the level of unconscionable depravity the non-western world is up against. Shelling a country (without authorization from Congress after stealing tax money to do the same thing) to protect arms supplies to a country (a settler colony) committing Mass Murder and Genocide. This attack just yet confirms that Imperialist nations will mobilize their military might to support Israel’s ongoing Genocide, protect the flow of capitalism AT ALL COSTS and punish any nation that dares to defend Palestine and challenge imperialism.

But hey, they bomb San'aa and then a million show out!!! A milli!!! You can't fuck with people who are running on faith and live with no fear! Glory to Yemen and death to settler regimes! We stand with the fierce open hearted people of Yemen. AmeriKKKanism and Zionism will crumble. Settler colonisers and their empires will crumble.

I just can't enough of them chanting "We don't care, we don't care, we don't care, make it a major world war. We will defend you palestine with our blood and soul" can't get over Yemen saying "Now we are relieved, because we are being bombed like Gaza. We were ashamed of the Palestinian people that they are being bombed and we are not" Can't get over Yemen vowing to continue it's blockage in support of Gaza no matter what. Can't get over Yemen saying "Threatening us with war is like threatening the sick with health" Can't get over them saying "Our morale is stronger and firmer than steel"

Yemen is steadfast. Yemen is heart opened Yemen is love. Bombs? Sanctions? It will only make Yemen more resilient and determined. You can’t defeat this. This is Love in action right here. Heart cracked open brave sacred warriors of peace.

Also if you need further proof that Palestine's liberation is an ARMED STRUGGLE, it's the fact that global "powers" would immediately condemn, attack and sanction you for resisting and defending Palestine, yet are allowing South Africa to take this case to the the International Court of Justice.. They want you to continue relying on their white colonial systems. (even though the ICJ is a great historical powerful move and one more nail in Israel's coffin) They want you to have "faith" in their process and systems they can easily penetrate and manipulate, not the resistance and not your own sovereignty. That's not justice or liberation. It's called mind control and going in circles. Stay sovereign. Stay principled. Support armed resistance. And have faith in liberation at all costs.

A million people marched in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa today, in solidarity with the people of Palestine and in protest against the US-UK strikes on the Yemeni people.

[confessionsofanarcheologist]

Something I’ve noticed about archeology in America is that the companies where I am at seem so desperate for workers.

You don’t even have to be qualified, they will train you. Even if you lie and say you’re qualified to do analysis sometimes they won’t check to ensure you are. It’s terrifying.

We only get one chance to record everything properly. Let’s get it done right. Hired qualified people please.

People are qualified through education, experience, or both.

[hanazawat]

puts my degree to good use and codes the nonverbals in mp100

[scottguy]

Doctors have always been quick to write off what they don't understand. They take it personally because modern medicine (which is ONLY) about 125 years old) made them all feel like Gods. They just won't admit they don't know, so they blame the sick patient.

Arrogance is just baked into the system as well as medical schools - because medicine is hard to learn, selects those with good cortexes but little emotional intelligence. (I find the two are often at odds, you get one or the other.)

A lot of doctors can tell you the treatment, but understanding that *compassion* is part of the process of delivering care is totally alien to those ostensibly "smart" people.

Here, in the west, we "treat" and usually just the affected part. We DON'T care for the entire person, especially patients' emotional needs and questions, which are just routine to the doctor. Doctors can't be bothered to take the time to explain, especially in our American system, which is about maximizing profit and seeing 40 patients a day. (Which leaves precious little time for any meaningful interaction.)

Not all doctors are like this, but even the well-intentioned get pressured by our ridiculous for-profit (for shareholders) system.

In 2016, years before long COVID was a thing, the US National Institutes of Health, the largest single public funder of medical research in the world, launched a study into a long-neglected and puzzling condition: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS. Eight years later, the results of that study are finally out. In one of the most thorough investigations to date, researchers took a deep dive into a small group of 17 people who developed ME/CFS after an infection and found distinct biological differences compared to 21 healthy controls. "Overall, what we show is that ME/CFS is unambiguously biological, with multiple organ systems affected," neurologist Avindra Nath, lead researcher of the study and clinical director of NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), said in an interview with JAMA. For decades, many doctors had dismissed ME/CFS as a psychosomatic condition that was 'all in patients' heads'. Now there is little doubt: a host of biological changes underpin ME/CFS.

Continue Reading.

[the-eeveekins]

I'm so proud of how Sulemio fans have come togther to support these girls, but also defend them from the flood of misinformation and bullshit. We're pouring post after post of love explaining who they are, why they're important and why we love them.

I'm familiar with Destiel because of the memes and it being one of the most infamous cases of Queerbait/Bury Your Gays around, but never interacted with the fandom (why would I?). And man like... the arrogance? They're so dismissive of Sulemio as "generic anime girls I've never heard of" and act like we should vote for them and hand them the win on a silver platter because of something like tumblr history or a the number of A03 fics. Those "generic anime girls" you've never heard from are currently kicking your ass, and it just show how much you underestimate the competition. Competition that beat Hannigram, Avatrice, Bubbline and Ineffable Husbands. The way they're so dismissive of anime and don't even know what Mobile Suit Gundam is is very telling that they look down on any form of media outside a very western/live-action sphere.

The majority of them can't give a reason why you should vote for Destiel beyond Tumblr History, like any of us should give a damn about that? I care about media with queer couples being important FROM THE START, and getting happy endings married to each other. Destiel's history has nothing to do with my fandom experience, especially as a sapphic women who loves yuri.

[criphd]

At the outset of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans’ genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other’s present is the colonizer’s own past. Wells’s Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race’s own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age,” and thus their “extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged” (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of “our” past, with Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of “primitive” societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on “Scientific Exploration and Empire” in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, “absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel” for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable “fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old” (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction