#antisemitism are far from mutually exclusive | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shittycartoonmomshowdown · 1 year

Note

To the person who keeps saying “can we stop with the antisemitic figure” about Gothel, I understand the way she’s portrayed is hurtful, like a bunch of other Disney characters actually, if you want to boycott Disney as a whole you’re more than welcome but this is a silly tumblr poll about bad moms, I don’t think not including Gothel will do anything against them. We could also exclude all homophobic figures from Disney in all these polls, we’d actually not have a lot of villains left from Disney if we did that.

The point is, I get it’s upsetting. And it’s good to raise awareness about why her representation is rooted in antisemitism, so people learn to see it in media, and avoid doing the same in their own creation. I just don’t think that the way you’re reacting under every post mentioning her is the way to go about this. Maybe do an ask and explain why she’s an antisemitic figure so people are at least aware, but otherwise this is not a poll that gives any money to Disney, it’s a silly competition. She made it in, if you’re uncomfortable about seeing her here you can find other similar competitions. It’s just… there is a lot of characters (partially) problematic or from (partially) problematic authors out there but you can like a work and be critical of it, it’s not mutually exclusive so let people enjoy things as long as they don’t deny the problem

i've actually been wanting to address this for a while, so thanks for sending this ask!

thing is, i'm jewish. and i don't want anyone to use that as an excuse to say, "oh, well, this jew said it's ok, so let's ignore all the other jews who are saying it's not ok." but this is, ultimately, a shitty cartoon mom contest. and when all is said and done, mother gothel is a really good, really powerful depiction of gaslighting and abuse. when i saw how many people were nominating her (she got the most nominations out of any mom by far), i felt so stupid for not including her by default. to disqualify her, especially this far into the tournament, would be to do her a massive disservice.

and yet, whether consciously or unconsciously, her design is antisemitic. it's hard for me to unsee that now. and she's far from the only disney villain that perpetuates the jewish-features-as-a-shorthand-for-evil trope. mother gothel is not an isolated incident, even though she's one of the more obvious ones. i find it strange that her wikipedia article doesn't mention that aspect of her design (though it does mention that her design is based on cher, which i found mildly interesting).

#mother gothel #antisemitism

26 notes · View notes

dreaminginthedeepsouth · 6 months

Text

Jonathan Chait produces a subtle, balanced and impressive summary of Joe Biden's response to the events of 10/7. This week, Fox News reported on remarks by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The headline, “Jean-Pierre refuses to call anti-Israel protestors ‘extremists’ despite fear among Jewish students,” circulated the news that the Biden administration was refusing to denounce antisemitic extremists bullying American Jews. Around the same time, Ryan Grim, bureau chief of the Intercept, circulated a clip of Jean-Pierre, which he summarized, “The White House just compared ‘anti-Israel protesters’ — the phrase used by the Fox News reporter in his question — to the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville.” Grim’s account went viral, attracting more than 3,000 quote tweets, with comments like “a deeply cynical statement that sounds like an administration in over its head” (Carnegie Endowment scholar Zachary Carter) and “The Israeli govt has imposed a siege on every civilian in Gaza, is mercilessly bombing civilian targets, has already forced the displacement of over a million people, has massacred thousands of innocents. To the White House those who oppose these war crimes are akin to nazis.” (Krystal Ball, host of Breaking Points.)

Both these breathless reports, with their contradictory findings, came from the same exchange at the same press briefing. The transcript of the exchange is far more banal. In it, Jean-Pierre announces a series of measures combatting antisemitism. As reporters fling a series of questions at her, Jean-Pierre continually retreats to safe talking points denouncing hatred and bias in all its forms.

When asked, “Does President Biden think the anti-Israel protesters in this country are extremists?,” she replied, “What I can say is what — we’ve been very clear about this: When it comes to antisemitism, there is no place. We have to make sure that we speak against it very loud and be — and be very clear about that.” In a sense, Fox News is right that she declined to answer the question. In another sense, Grim is right that she replied to a question about anti-Israel protesters with an answer about antisemitism, implicitly drawing a link between the two. https://nymag.com/.../joe-biden-policy-israel-hamas...

Obviously, Fox News and Grim’s mutually exclusive interpretations can’t both be correct. If you read the full transcript in context, neither interpretation is fair. Jean-Pierre clearly decided to stick to narrow talking points about how bigotry and hatred are unacceptable and kept repeating those bromides as reporters try to pull her into some more newsworthy or interesting positions. Her strenuous effort to avoid controversy brought about the very response she set out to avoid, in a kind of Larry David–esque farce.

#Biden #political #extremism #Intelligencer

2 notes · View notes

xxlovelynovaxx · 2 months

Text

Screenshot:

I mean...

Yeah, that's still a fucking binary, when you treat transfemininity and transmasculinity as mutually exclusive, when you treat tma as "transfem only" when transmisogyny in fact affects some non-transfems (including AMAB nonbinary people who don't identify as trans women or transfems), and tme as "everyone else".

First of all, you're conflating two things, not just one. It's not "transfem or aren't", it's "experiences transmisogyny and is the 'right' identity for me to believe them" or " a privileged lying man/AFAB person who is just talking over women and wants to pretend to be more oppressed than thareey

And secondly, it's not "transfem or aren't", it's "transfem or [AFAB transmasc, AFAB nonbinary, or cis], intersex people are either AFABish or AMABish depending on their sex characteristics, and AMAB trans people are all transfem even if that's misgendering them, oh and transfemmasc people don't exist".

I can't even go into the fucking tag for one of the primary forms of oppression I fucking face because at least 80 percent of the posts are about some reductive bullshit dichotomy that flattens and erases the lived experiences of anyone who is not a passing stealth binary gender conforming trans person, and even then it's full of transmisogyny itself, like claims that T ruins you and makes you ugly and masculine forever and that feminizing HRT won't ever actually make you look like a woman! That's ter/f shit, and it's coming from other fucking transfems!

Is the word "dichotomy" better than binary? /s

(Okay, 80 percent of posts aren't about that. A good third are wildly transandromisic or exorsexist and another at least quarter are extremely intersexist, not to mention a bunch of racist, fatmisic, and other generally bigoted posts. The ones that call stuff "the [bigotry] community" or "[bigotry] guys" or "[bigotry] truthers" are especially ghoulish. Yes, I made those statements general on purpose. I have a feeling y'all would go "the sanism" community" or "aphobia guys" or "antisemitism truthers" (especially given that if you're using "truthers", you're already wildly antisemitic) given half a chance, but maybe it'll get through to a few people. I'll be honest though, I hesitated on the comparison out of genuine worry that I'd give people ideas.)

Setting aside that people other than transfems actually experience transmisogyny though, is it really ALL transfems and NO nontransfems? Again, what about AMAB and intersex non-transfems who experience transmisogyny? What about AFAB and intersex transfems? What about transfemmascs?

Adding the actual binary in question back in, what about stealth transfems who feel they are functionally TME (not a theoretical - I've met several transfems who have expressed this while discussing transmisogyny). What about transfems who are TMA, but happen to believe in transandromisia as a concept and feel more personally affected by it - especially transfems who experience antimasculinity due to being butch or not performing cisfemininity? What about trans people who are mtftm and ftmtf not as detransition, but because of genderfluidity? What about trans people who are mtx, ftx, xtx, xtm, xtf, and so on? I cannot express this enough, what about intersex trans people, since y'all love erasing and tokenizing us.

Ex. Haust. Ing.

If you wanna argue with me don't waste both our time, just block me and rant on your own blog about how I'm a "definitely tme transmisogynistic loser" despite me, y'know, experiencing transmisogyny daily. Because I know it's not actually about whether or not I experience transmisogyny. I've seen y'all call perisex AMAB binary trans women "TME" because they disagree with you (and honestly, seen some of y'all do far worse to trans women who speak out against your bullshit). It's about shutting up and shutting down anyone who you disagree with.

And if you think you have the one argument that'll "get through to me", I've seen them all. I've even engaged with more nuanced ones that advocate for, for example, use of TMA without TME as a self-label based on actual experiences and not ontological identity.

I've thoughtfully analyzed ones that compassionately look at the language void these imperfect, often inaccurate terms fill and how their purpose could be more accurately and compassionately filled with minimal changes (such as "tme" being changed to "transmisogyny-unaffected" to acknowledge it's not a permanent state).

I've found myself having more in common with some people who argue for their continued usage as long as the nuance of people's lived experience is prioritized and it's acknowledged that there are more factors to the labels than just identity, than I have with some people who argue they should be abolished entirely, despite mostly being in the latter group myself!

So just. Like I said, don't waste both our time. I'm dealing with more than enough bullshit from actual oppression IRL to deal with people who think they know an internet stranger's material experiences better than the person experiencing them.

#transmisogyny

5 notes · View notes

writingwithcolor · 3 years

Text

Jewish author writing about antisemitism; should I include racism too?

anonymous asked:

Hi! I'm a white Jewish person who's writing a story set in a fantasy world with a Jewish-coded culture. It's important to me to explore antisemitism in this distanced setting, and explore what the Jewish diaspora means to me. I have a lot of people of color in my story as well. I don't know whether I, as a white person, should include racism in a story if it isn't necessary, but I also don't want to erase the aspects of many mildly/moderately assimilated cultures that are affected by racism, and I also don't want to imply somehow that antisemitism is a more serious issue than racism, which is obviously not the case. I was thinking that bigotry might be more culture-based rather than ethnically or racially based, but again, I'm not sure how or whether to write about bigotry against cultures + groups based on cultures + groups that I'm not a part of, and people of color in the story would obviously have their own cultural elements. Is acknowledging bigotry necessary?

It's okay to focus on antisemitism

Other mods have important advice on what exactly might be helpful or applicable to include in your story and how. I want to take a moment with the anxiety you express that focusing on antisemitism and not talking about other types of xenophobia will imply to your readers that you think antisemitism is “more serious” than other forms of bigotry. I hear and honor that anxiety, especially since “Jews only care about Jews” is a stereotype that never seems to go away, so I’m going to say something revolutionary:

It’s okay to center Jews in a story about antisemitism.

There, I said it. But I’m not making the case that you shouldn’t include references to or depictions of other types of bigotry in your story. There are a lot of great reasons why you should, because of what it can do for the complexity of your characters, the depth of your worldbuilding, or the strength of your message about the nature of xenophobia, diaspora, etc.

- How your non-Jewish-coded characters react to the things they experience can affect whether they sympathize over or contribute to the antisemitism at the heart of your story.

- How other types of xenophobia do and don’t manifest in your world can help explain why your world has antisemitism in the first place, and what antisemitism consists of in a world that also contains other minorities outside of the fantasy mainstream culture.

- Including other real-world xenophobia can help you set your antisemitism in context and contrast to help explain what you want to say about it.

Both your story and your message might be strengthened by adding these details. But if you feel the structure of your story doesn’t have room for you to show other characters’ experiences and you’re only considering doing it because you’re afraid you’ll be upholding a negative stereotype of yourself if you don’t, then it might help to realize that if someone is already thinking that, nothing you do is going to change their mind. You can explore antisemitism in your story, but you don’t have the power to solve it, and since you don’t have that power you also don’t have that responsibility. I think adding more facets to your story has the potential to make it great, but leaving it out doesn’t make you evil.

- Meir

Portraying xenophobia

As someone living in Korea and therefore usually on the outside looking in, I feel that a lot of people in Western countries tend to conflate racism and xenophobia. Which does make sense since bigots tend to not exactly care about differences between the two but simply act prejudiced against the “other”. Sci also makes a point below about racialized xenophobia. I feel these are factors contributing to your confusion regarding issues of bigotry in your story.

Xenophobia, as defined by Dictionary.com, is “an aversion or hostility to, disdain for, or fear of foreigners, people from different cultures, or strangers”. You mention “thinking that bigotry might be more culture-based”, and this description fits xenophobia better than most other forms of bigotry. Xenophobia can be seen as an umbrella term including antisemitism, so you are technically including one form of xenophobia through your exploration of antisemitism.

I understand your wariness of writing racism when it doesn’t add to the plot, especially as a white writer. Your concerns that you might “erase the aspects of many mildly/moderately assimilated cultures that are affected by racism” is valid and in fact accurate, since exclusion of racism will of course lead to lack of portrayals of the intersections between racism and xenophobia. I want to reassure you that this is not a bad thing, just a choice you can make. No one story (or at least, no story that can fit into one book) can include all the different forms of oppression in the world. Focusing on one particular form of oppression, particularly one you have personal experience with, is a valid and important form of representation.

You also comment that you “don't want to imply somehow that antisemitism is a more serious issue than racism”, but I honestly feel that doesn’t need too much concern. Much like how queerness and disability are two separate issues with intersections, racism and xenophobia form a Venn diagram, with large intersections but neither completely including the other. A story focusing on autistic characters that doesn’t also have queer rep doesn’t imply queer issues are less serious. Likewise, a story focusing on antisemitism doesn’t imply racism is less serious.

I am slightly more concerned that there might be an accidental implication of antisemitism being a more serious issue compared to other forms of xenophobia. Of course, exploring antisemitism alone is completely valid representation, and there’s no need to go out of your way to try and portray other forms of xenophobia. A microaggression or two, or maybe a mutual bitch out session with a gentile but marginalized friend should be enough to show that antisemitism isn’t more (or less) serious compared to other forms of xenophobia.

-Rune

Avoiding racialized xenophobia

I think one thing you have to be careful with here is racialized xenophobia. Are your characters of color getting disproportionately more xenophobia than your white characters? You might be falling into the trap of racialized xenophobia, which falls under racism, which you want to avoid. An example would be “all Chinese scientists are untrustworthy, but not you, you’re one of the ‘good ones.’” Although this is technically xenophobia, it is also racism.

--Mod Sci

In the case you choose to include even small snippets of other forms of xenophobia in your story, attempting to portray xenophobia without the complications of racism can be a difficult process when they often go hand in hand (especially to a Western audience). So here are a couple of suggestions I have of portraying xenophobia without racism.

First and the simplest method is portraying xenophobia between people of the same race. For example, there is definitely xenophobia against Chinese and Japanese people in Korea, but it would be difficult to claim there is a racial component when all of us are East Asian. (Something you might want to be aware of here is intersections with colorism, where even within the same race, lighter skin and other more westernized features are considered more desirable. I suggest looking through our colorism tag for more details)

Another idea is to include microaggressions for specific cultures rather than something more broad. For example, calling Korean food stinky because kimchi has a strong scent is specifically xenophobic against Koreans, while commenting on small eyes can be directed against Asians in general.

Finally, while antisemitism is a form of ethnicity-based xenophobia, it is also a form of religion-based xenophobia. Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus can absolutely be xenophobic against each other with no racism involved. Should you choose this method, particularly if religious xenophobia is only shown in a shorter scene, I suggest you try and avoid portraying any of the above religions as the Bad or Oppressive ones. As a Christian I will unironically tell you that Christianity is a safe choice for a religiously xenophobic character, as we’re far less likely to face backlash compared to any other religion, and inspiration should unfortunately be overflowing in real life.

-Rune

Other forms of ethno-religious oppression

Here is my TCK perspective as someone brought up in diverse environments where there are often other axes of oppression including religion, ethnicity and class:

Racism and xenophobia can definitely be apples to oranges, so creating a universe where racism no longer exists or has never existed seems doable to me. Perhaps in your fantasy world, structures that buttress racism, such as colonization, slavery and imperialism, are not issues. That still won’t stop people from creating “Us versus Them” divisions, and you can certainly make anti-semitism one of the many forms of xenophobia that exists in this your story. Meir has hinted that your reluctance to declaratively show the harm of anti-semitism indicates a level of anxiety around the topic, and, as someone non-Jewish but also not Christian or Muslim, my perspective is as follows: I’ve always viewed anti-semitism as a particularly virulent form of ethno-religious xenophobia, and while it is a unique experience, it is not the only unique experience when it comes to ethno-religious xenophobia. I think because the 3-way interaction between the Abrahamic religions dominates much of Western geopolitics, that can be how it looks, but the world is a big place (See Rune’s comments for specific examples).

To that effect, I recommend prioritizing anti-semitism alongside other non-racialized forms of xenophobia along ideological, cultural and class-based lines for both POC and non-POC characters. Show how these differences can drive those in power to treat other groups poorly. I conclude by encouraging you to slowly trace your logic when depicting xenophobia towards POC characters in particular. Emphasize bigotry along axes of class and ideology, rather than traits linked to assumed biologically intrinsic features. Ultimately, I think recognizing commonalities between forms of ethno-religious oppression as a whole will help make you more comfortable in depicting anti-semitism with the seriousness it deserves without feeling as though you are trivializing the experiences of other groups.

- Marika

Worldbuilding ethnically and racially diverse cultures

As has been mentioned by other mods, I think it’s completely fine to focus your story on antisemitism and not portray other forms of bigotry if that’s the focus and scope of the story you want to tell. My fellow mods have also offered several valuable suggestions for writing about “culture-based bigotry” in general if that’s what you want to do, while making sure it’s not coming off as racially based. One element I can add is that from a worldbuilding standpoint, it will also help to have your fantasy cultural groups be ethnically and racially diverse. After all, this was common historically in several parts of the world, and depending on which cultures you’re basing your coding on, you could absolutely have fantasy cultures in your world that include characters we would read (according to our modern-day standards) as white, and others that we would read as people of color, within the same fantasy culture. All these characters would face the same culture-based bigotry (such as xenophobia or religious oppression), even though they are read by a modern audience as different races.

As a note, the reason I say “read as” and “according to our modern-day standards” is that the entire concept of whiteness as we know it is very specific to our current cultural context. Who is and isn’t considered white has changed quite a lot over time, and is still the subject of debate today in some cases. Your work will be read by a modern audience, so of course, you need to take into account our current understanding of race and the dynamics surrounding it. However, it’s also helpful to remember that our modern racial categories are fairly new in the context of the many millennia of history of humankind, and that they are certainly not inevitable. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking a fantasy culture has to align itself entirely with modern-day racial categories.

- Niki

#Asks #fantasy #worldbuilding #anti semitism #xenophobia #racism #Judaism #Jewish

384 notes · View notes

beardedmrbean · 2 years

Text

CLEVELAND — Nina Turner, the progressive activist with close ties to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is mounting another campaign for Congress in Ohio.

The former state senator from the Cleveland area told NBC News this week that she wants a rematch with Rep. Shontel Brown, who beat Turner last year in a Democratic primary.

“The same environment that motivated me to run before motivates me to run again,” Turner, who co-chaired Sanders’ 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a telephone interview. “The environment by which change needs to happen has not really percolated at this moment. I think that it's one thing for somebody to go and to vote the right way. But Greater Cleveland needs a fighter, and that's that's what I am.”

Brown beat Turner decisively in the special primary and easily won the general election to succeed Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge in the overwhelmingly Democratic 11th Congressional District. The race, one of few on the ballot last year, was an ideological battle that attracted an influx of national attention and money, fueled in large part by Turner’s willingness to antagonize the Democratic establishment. Brown ran as a reliable backer of President Joe Biden.

Turner said her decision to run again was not based on Brown’s record so far.

“I believe that I was the better candidate in 2021,” Turner said. “And that has not changed.”

Turner added that she sees an opportunity to make her case to new voters this year. Turnout is likely to be higher in a midterm election year. And the 11th District boundaries are expected to include more of the city of Cleveland under a redistricting plan that is still being hashed out after the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a Republican-drawn map seen as too partisan.

She said she also believes the race will be less nationalized this time. Last year, for example, the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Cleveland airwaves, including an ad that emphasized the time Turner equated voting for Biden to eating fecal matter.

The district, in addition to being a majority-Black district, also includes a sizable Jewish population. Turner, in her concession speech, decried the influence of “evil money” — a remark some Jewish leaders found to play into antisemitic stereotypes. Turner campaign officials said at the time that the comment was directed at Republicans who donated to anti-Turner efforts.

“There was an anybody-but-Nina campaign ran in 2021,” Turner said this week. “Some of those forces may still decide to get into this race, but what they will not be able to do is totally concentrate [on the Ohio 11th District] because this will not be the only race.”

Turner has said she would align herself ideologically with members of “the squad,” a group of progressive House Democrats that includes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Biden’s declining approval numbers, she said, reflect a desire for more action.

“There is a need for people to both lift the president's agenda when they agree with that agenda but also in that same motion push for more,” Turner added. “I don't see those things as mutually exclusive — even though people want to make it mutually exclusive.”

Despite the nationalized tenor last year, Turner’s complicated relationships inside Cleveland’s Black political establishment also factored into that campaign and could again this year. Turner was one of the few Black officials to support a successful 2009 ballot measure to address corruption in Cuyahoga County government, drawing the ire of the city’s Black newspaper and power brokers close to Fudge. She later launched a brief primary campaign against Fudge. Though she eventually became a top official in the Ohio Democratic Party, Turner stunned the establishment again in 2015 when, after initially promoting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, she jumped to Sanders, whose campaign boosted her national profile.

Brown, meanwhile, served on the Cuyahoga County Council created by the measure Turner backed and, with Fudge’s mentorship, became chair of the county’s Democratic Party.

"I'm not new to having to fight against certain people in my own party — and I say 'my,'" Turner said. "But I am standing up for the democratic principles or at least the values that we purport to believe in. So if wanting people to have a better quality of life is wrong, I don't want to be right."

Brown addressed the possibility of a Turner rematch in a recent interview with Jewish Insider.

“We prepare for the worst,” Brown said, “and hope for the best, right?”

#nunyas news #yes please let the blatantly Antisemitic run #she'll fit right in with the other protonazis in the squad

9 notes · View notes

blondiespy · 2 years

Text

#𝑩𝑳𝑶𝑵𝑫𝑰𝑬𝑺𝑷𝒀 an independent roleplay blog for CLOVER EWING from the TOTALLY SPIES franchise. loved & explored by azula , 22 , she / her , asian , PST. mutuals & 18+ only. please read the carrd prior to following. quick rules under the read more !

basics. this is an independent roleplay blog for CLOVER EWING. mature themes will be seen throughout this blog. 18+ and mutuals only. basic rp etiquette applies. DNI. racism, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, incest, pedophilia, and more that fall under this umbrella will not be tolerated. if you are a trump supporter or support the police, get off my blog. if you write with CASS/ASTER (CONJUERD, SOLAIER, ELDEIR) or YOLANDA (MDPSYCH, PUROCORDE), please refrain from interacting with me. REGARDING OZLEM/AZAR, if i catch anyone interacting with them on the dash, you will be reported and blocked. i am not duplicate friendly. FACE CLAIMS DNI. amber heard, hailee steinfeld, chris pratt, lea michele, gal gadot, rachel zegler, scarlett johansson, anyone who asks not to be used. graphics & formatting. all graphics are made by me unless stated. psd is wait until dark by somresources. as far as formatting, i use icons, small text, regular sized text, and double spacing. i am happy to adjust my formatting if you need me to do so. portrayal notes. TBA but series based -- the series leaves off on the girls in college & so i write clover as a college senior. i use florence pugh as my face claim. shipping. i love shipping. but mostly, i ship clover with happiness. chemistry will always take precedent. chemistry is necessary between the characters and the muns. exclusivity. mutuals only. i practice mains & exclusivity, with mains being more common. azula. azula, 22, she/her, asian. enfj. scorpio sun, aries moon, libra rising. i double major in music performance (opera) and music education. i love meeting new people.�� discord available upon request.

#dnr #pinned

6 notes · View notes

cruelsister-moved · 3 years

Text

both the n@zis and antisemitic british conservatives invested in zionist projects to try and find a palatable way to remove jewish people from their societies. the implication of birthright is that jewish people are not a true part of our communities, culture, history, and heritage; that they are temporary outsiders who can and should be returned to where they really belong. antisemitism and zionism are far from mutually exclusive

#they were to send jewish ppl to other places rather than israel mostly #in fact kind of egregiously the british investigated clearing some of their colonies in africa to create a new jewish homeland #which really puts an emphasis on zionism as an inherently colonial project lol #dont rb im not qualified to be a spokesperson i just. found a bunch of zionist blogs n it made. me upset #like Israel treats yiddish language and culture like shit and discriminate against immigrants w Eastern European identity #bc they take the line that everything that happened after they left israel is a mistaken negligible blip #they don't like the reminder that jewish identity is not tied to israel. that jewish people have homes and communities all over the world #ngl I talked abt this before but concepts of origin are still so dangerous and also... kind of silly #bc u didn't like crawl out of the ground so like everything originates from everything else #picking n choosing where to draw the line and adding immense significance to like whereur ancestors might have lived 1000 yewrs ago is #just encouraging racism n xenophobia #I also seemn some. bad takes bc ppl seem confused abt how like the US can be so #supportive of Israel and yet be so antisemitic #so I hope my little history knowledge can maybe help some ppl understand so they can stop bad taking

8 notes · View notes

xhxhxhx · 4 years

Text

Saw something in the further reading section of Michael Kulikowski’s Imperial Tragedy (Profile, 2019) today:

There are countless books on the fall of the western Roman empire, and more appear annually, with variable scholarly trappings but nearly all quite conventional. Still, ripping yarns and neo-Victorian analyses can be found in any bookshop. So, for those so inclined, can thinly disguised nativist tracts on how immigration (and ‘immigrant violence’) brought down the empire. To name names would be invidious.

I thought this was a dig at Peter Heather, Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and author of The Fall of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2005) and Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009), so I looked it up and discovered that not only was I right, but Kulikowski has serious beef with the guy:

Peter Heather has been fiercely criticized by members of the so-called Toronto School of History. Michael Kulikowski, who belongs to this group, has accused Heather of neo-romanticism and of wishing "to revive a biological approach to ethnicity". Kulikowski claims that Heather "manifests a clear methodological affinity" to the 19th-century writer of the Goths Henry Bradley.

But Kulikowki’s beef is nothing next to the righteous fury of Guy Halsall, Professor of History at the University of York:

Guy Halsall has identified Peter Heather as the leader of a "counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking" about the Migration Period. Halsall accuses this group, which is strongly associated with University of Oxford, of "bizarre reasoning" and of purveying a "deeply irresponsible history". Halsall writes that Heather and the Oxford historians have been responsible for "an academic counter-revolution" of wide importance, and accuses them of deliberately contributing to the rise of "far-right extremists".

Halsall got so mad at Heather, first at the 2011 Leeds International Medieval Conference and then online, at his blog, that he threatened to leave academia entirely:

Well, it's more or less a year since I started doing this blogging lark 'seriously' (the inverted commas are obviously necessary). And, as they say, what a roller-coaster of a year it's been. I've shut down the blog twice, brought it back twice, come to the verge of formal complaints being sent to my university twice (once justifiably, once most certainly not), lost at least one friend, lost 99% of the respect I had for someone I had hitherto held in high esteem, quite possibly lost the chance of a job I wanted because of this blog, taken some pretty visceral abuse, and so on. All good fun!

On the other hand I have learnt some lessons. One is that even bastards have feelings. Another is that if you have twenty-odd followers and maybe 100 hits a day, that (allowing for hits from people looking for something else, like Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian or ever-popular balding guitarist The Edge) does not mean that only twenty or thirty people in the whole wide world read your blog. Thus you need to be a bit more careful about what you say and how you say it. I've also learnt that eminent historians don't always read what you write very carefully, and just how deeply-ingrained the elitist culture of the British historical profession is, as well as just how few principles are actually held by the overwhelming majority of the practitioners of said profession. And this in response to something that I actually thought long and hard about how I wrote.

And as a result of all this I have realised that no good is going to come of me continuing to smack my head against the glass ceiling that those of us not from 'a particular socio-educational background' (you know the one) eventually run up against. I have instead come to the decision, essentially, to give up on it and 'seek my fortune' elsewhere than in the confines of the academic career-path, as it is now constructed in the UK at any rate.* I'm actually quite excited about this as I think it offers a lot of possibilities, creatively and ethically. It's been a liberating decision. Those of you who know that I set most store by the writings of those co-opted into the canon of the existentialists (almost none of whom ever called themselves by that name) will appreciate exactly why I am proud of this decision.

To some extent it makes up for the bad faith I showed in backing down and removing my post on why it matters to get angry about the lazy and irresponsible (indeed, yes, just downright knuckle-headed) way in which some historians in and/or produced by our most prestigious Thames Valley-based university write about politically and socially sensitive topics like migrations.

Halsall ultimately sanitized the 2011 IMC paper that started the war with Heather -- the neutered version is still up on his blog -- but the original was apparently quite something:

Perhaps unsurprisingly for those who’ve heard him speak or read him on the Internet, this was the one that really started the war. [Edit: and, indeed, some changes have been made to these paragraphs by request of one of those involved.] The consequences, if not of this actual speech, at least of its subsequent display on the Internet, have been various, unpleasant and generally regrettable, and I don’t want any of them myself.

Thankfully, the purged parts of the original were reproduced by some noble soul on the Civilization Fanatics forums before they were lost to the ages:

Thus we can have Ward-Perkins’ sneering parody of late antiquity studies and Peter Heather’s distortions of counter-arguments. In many people’s minds the choices before us are evidently, either, that nothing happened, or, that there was a huge catastrophe caused entirely by invading barbarians. Obviously this is not the case. Plenty of people other than me -- most famously, Walter Pohl -- have written about serious, dramatic change happening in the fifth century without blaming it on the barbarians and without denying that there were migrations in the fifth century. Yet this -- if I dare call it such -- third way seems nevertheless to be very much a minority position.

But I am not convinced that a simple lack of exposure to sensible alternatives really explains the continuing, fanatical devotion to the idea of the barbarian migrations, especially outside the academy.

I have recently said that:

“When a British historian places an argument that the Roman Empire fell because of the immigration of large numbers of barbarians next to arguments that the end of Rome was the end of civilisation and that we need to take care to preserve our own civilisation, when another British historian writes sentences saying “the connection between immigrant violence and the collapse of the western Empire could not be more direct” [a direct quote from Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009)], and especially when the arguments of both involve considerable distortions of the evidence to fit their theories, one cannot help but wonder whether these authors are wicked, irresponsible or merely stupid.”

Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives.

Are these writers setting themselves up as ideologues of the xenophobic Right or have they simply not realised the uses to which such careless thinking and phrasing can be put? You can draw your own conclusions, although it is worth noting that Ward-Perkins has been happy enough to write on this subject for the neo-liberal magazine Standpoint, which regularly publishes pieces attacking multiculturalism. There comes a point when one has to admit that actually the most charitable explanation for all this really is that these writers are simply a bit dim.

Outside academic circles, it is certainly the case that the adhesion to the idea of barbarian invasion has a heavily right-wing political dimension. Apart from the barbarians’ role as metaphor, already discussed, it is worth, very briefly, thinking about the other reasons why people are so ready to pin the blame on the barbarians. Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian analysis of antisemitism provides some valuable ways forward. Essentially, the barbarian, like the figure of the Jew, acts as a screen between the subject and a confrontation with the Real, which Zizek sees, slightly differently from Lacan, as the pre-symbolised; things that haven’t been or can’t or won’t be encompassed in a world view. Zizek showed that arguments that “the Jews aren’t like that” are almost never effective against anti-Semites because what real Jews (or actual immigrants, one might say) are like is not the point. Similarly, arguments about the empirical reality of the fifth-century cut little weight with those wedded to the idea of Barbarian Invasion. Just as the anti-Semite takes factual evidence as more proof of the existence of the international Zionist conspiracy, the right-wing devotee of the Barbarian Invasions sees factual counter-arguments as manifestations of the liberal, left-wing academy peddling its dangerous multicultural political correctness. I have read a great deal of this on internet discussion lists -- including a review of my own book, and one of James O’Donnell’s! Michael Kulikowski received a similarly-phrased review from a right-wing academic ancient historian.

The barbarian is the classic “subject presumed to”. The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. “He” is not like “us”, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians -- and you only need to read Peter Heather to see this -- are peoples with “coherent aims” (a quote), which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well -- none other than the barbarians anyway.

Halsall has never resiled from his belief that Heather was essentially a fascist, nor backed away from his commitment to resign from his post in righteous indignation -- maybe not in 2011, or 2019, but certainly by 2023 at the very latest:

My anger about all this is justly infamous but has been badly misrepresented. I do think that some things are worth getting angry about, and the misuse of the Barbarian Migrations and the End of the Roman Empire to fuel xenophobia and racism, and the way some modern authors pander to this, is one such. However, to look at the origins of this ire and animus, I invite you to compare my engagement with Peter Heather’s work in Barbarian Migrations, and its tone, with Heather’s engagement – if you can call it that – with my work, and its tone, in Empires and Barbarians. I never expect to be agreed with; I do expect basic academic courtesy to be reciprocated. If people see fit to treat me intellectually as a second-class citizen, the gloves will come off. That may stem from my own biography as (unlike so many) a first-generation academic not educated at the 'right' schools and universities, but there we are. I will be leaving the profession within the next four years (well done, guys) so I have nothing to lose by not apologising for that.

Kulikowski might have gotten in a good dig, but Halsall will always be a true master of the art of Being Mad Online.

13 notes · View notes

my-world-travel · 4 years

Photo

Auschwitz, Poland

The camp is free to enter, and there is a free shuttle going between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Getting to the camp is a €4 coach ride that takes about an hour. Prebook your tickets. Entry is free, but timed so as not to flood the camp with people,and the camp is often fully booked on the day of. The visitor site recommends joining a tour or hiring a guide, both of which will cost money. I did not, and did not feel like I was missing anything, but: I am Jewish. I grew up with this.

I cannot write a neutral or chipper post here. It’s not possible.

I don’t remember very much of the coach trip or waiting for our entry time except that I was so afraid I was nauseous. Large packs (A4 size, give or take) are not allowed in and have to be left at bag check, which is fine. I kept my camera on me, but photos are prohibited inside the buildings. In many places I will quibble with or outright ignore prohibitions on photos; here, I had no difficulty complying. The photos are all online if you know what to look for, and the rest is...impossible to document in a picture.

There is an area between the modern ticket entry and the famous gate, and that’s where I broke down for the first time.

I need readers to know: I don’t cry much. I don’t cry in movies or at books, it’s very rare for musicals. In my personal life, it’s highly mental health dependent (predictably), but any month where I cry more than once is unusual.

I stepped into this place and started crying.

I couldn’t explain it then and still can’t now. I went from 0 to 100 on tears in 3 seconds, then my blood pressure went through the floor and I had to sit down and struggle to breathe. It was an unconscious emotion, more powerful and primal than the ones we normally deal with, and I just had to wait it out.

And then we went through the gate and I had to force myself to step, because maybe it’s superstition and maybe it’s logic, but I had family who walked under this gate and didn’t walk out again.

At any rate, the camp is...more rattling for what it isn’t. Tired brick buildings and badly paved streets are a feature of most cities, and even the barred windows aren’t unusual. But my mom and my brother and I are descended from a couple who fled Russia in 1905; our several-greats aunt visited the area in 1938. None of the people she met survived. We still don’t know what happened to most of them. I learned very quickly that Auschwitz is an intensely personal experience, and if you bring with your own familial trauma, it will be a much harder trip. There were certainly people for whom this was an outdoor museum.

Many of the blocks are closed to visitors, but a number have been renovated and turned into exhibits. Some are very well done (one block is dedicated to the Roma and Sinti, who do not get the appropriate recognition), some are, if not well designed, powerful without that (a block with photos of the murdered, along with names, dates, and professions--when we have them, which isn’t always), a few I couldn’t go in, and some...are bad.

In 2018, Poland made it illegal to say Poles were complicit in the Holocaust. This is somewhat staggering, because without question, Poles were incredibly complicit in the Holocaust--if not as actors, then frequently as those-refusing-to-act. And at the same time, they were the racial group second targeted by Nazis, the nation to lose the highest percentage of its original population, and the nation to produce the most Righteous Among the Nations--those goyim who risked their lives to save Jews. These are not mutually exclusive statements. Rather, in 1939 Poland had a population of 35 million who spent either the next 6 years or the rest of their lives under Nazi occupation. In that sort of centrifuge, a wide range of human behavior comes to light which wasn’t previously seen--some of it good, some of it unfathomably bad.

Poles aided in Jewish liquidations, they stood by whilst the Einsatzgruppen shot their way through shtetls, and after the war, they perpetrated a pogrom which killed 42 Jews--42 humans. And in erasing their involvement, the modern Polish government continues a long and sordid history of blaming anyone-but-us for antisemitism.

There is no mention of Polish involvement in the blocks. As far as Auschwitz is concerned, Jews just turned up on trains. They never lay out how the liquidation happened. Auschwitz I was originally a Polish camp, and it’s sensible that much of the exhibits there focus on the experience of Poles--but Auschwitz II was flattened, so as a result most of the exhibits at all focus on the Poles. And the majority of the people murdered there were Jewish. (Horribly, not even Polish Jews. The largest nationality murdered at Auschwitz were Hungarians--400,000--followed by Poles--300,000 Polish Jews and 70,000 Polish goyim. The vast majority of Polish Jews died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen.)

However, I would rather be pissed off than...whatever the other emotion was. Fear, most likely.

Everyone is going to be affected differently by the blocks. One I couldn’t go in, just sat outside and shook, but I can’t now remember which one it was. Another had, and it has taken me ages to be able to type this out, a large glass box filled with human hair. I couldn’t stay there. I ran out, I bumped into people, I’m never so rude but I--

Every person whose hair was in that box was murdered.

Block 10, the medical block, is permanently closed. That’s for the best.

Block 11, the execution block, is the least horrible, ironically. Largely because it is so familiar to any prison anywhere, and so much of it is targeted at breaking individuals. Compare the showers, which are designed at breaking masses of people, entire towns in a single day. The level of horror is different.

We were unable to go into every block. Eventually we went back towards the entrance, where there are two points of interest: The showers, and a gallows.

The showers are actually a recreation, as the originals were destroyed. They are quite bad enough as is.

The gallows marks the spot where Rudolf Höss was executed for crimes against the Polish nation as Kommandant of Auschwitz for most of the war. In general I oppose the death penalty but I admit to pleasure at the number of Nazis who were executed for their actions--a feeling only reinforced by how many of them only expressed any sort of regret at the end.

That was all in Auschwitz I. After leaving the camp, you take a free shuttle to Auschwitz II Birkenau, which is where the majority of the murders took place. The site was largely flattened by the Russians (good riddance, honestly), although there are a few standing blocks and a boxcar.

The worst thing about Birkenau is how large it is. It is a full mile from the gate to the crematoria, and the tracks run right up until the end. You could fit a mile of boxcars in here, and every one of them crammed with people. It makes certain numbers easier to process.

At the end of the tracks is a memorial to the fallen, and the remains of the crematoria. Also destroyed by Soviet tanks; I can’t regret that at all. They are dark and twisted, a fitting memorial. Standing there, you can just about see the gate.

This post is dedicated to Alter Shimshilevitz, who was murdered in Eastern Europe some time between 1939 and 1945. His older sister is my great-great grandmother.

#judaism #wwii #auschwitz #poland #holocaust tw

8 notes · View notes

swpoliticsandmemes · 5 years

Text

Imperialism as explored by Star Wars. Sorry in advance.

I think it’s neat how ever since the good guy/American revolutionary vs bad guy/British empire set up in ANH, the Galactic Empire has been increasingly been grounded in more lucid and descript forms of violence, oppression and exploitation so that now we have one of the most monopolistic and soulless corporations (and in some ways the face of modern American capitalism), Disney, ironically owning a property that gives a competent account of what Empire looks like that doesn’t shy away from the political implications (many of which even go against Disney’s interests.)

First off we have the very shape galactic civilisation: densely populated Ecumenopolises such as Coruscant as well as other advanced and politically influential worlds like Alderaan and Chandrila are focused towards the Galactic core, while groupings of planets with decreasing levels of political and economic significant fall to further and further outskirts. It almost seems to be an intentional allusion to the core-periphery model that plays a central foundation to both Marxist and non-Marxist analyses of Imperialism. Although I’m resigned to accept it was more likely a natural tendency for the creators to put the centre of galactic civilisation in, well, the centre of the galaxy, although any look at the galactic map would possibly put this into question as most of the known space is heavily skewed to the Galactic east, and the deep core actually ends up being on one side of civilisation than in the centre.

Either way, the nature of the relationship between the core and the periphery ends up fitting the real-world model, and this is the case for not just the Empire but for the Republic too. In Phantom it’s just a matter of seeing a contrast between the criminally-run Tattooine to the vast wealth of the capital. I should say now that two key facets of this analysis is that 1. republics, even self-professed anti-imperialist ones (America, USSR, Iran come to mind), can and do engage in imperialism, and 2. there is, at least for some people, a sense of continuity between the Republic and the Empire. This latter point sort of reflects how the early Roman Empire claimed to be a continuation of the Roman Republic, as evidenced by the style of the address for the Emperor being ‘princeps’ or first-citizen, as opposed to the later ‘dominus’ or lord. While Mon Mothma and others would see the Republic as having been destroyed by Palpatine’s coup, men like Yularen and Tarkin smoothly transitioning between high-ranking positions in both governments, would disagree, although by the time of ANH the old systems had been so firmly eroded that even Tarkin gloats that the “last vestiges of the old republic have been swept away.” Nonetheless, the Core-periphery system remains and in fact is intensified during this time, with the Core cultural elite being emphasised in Thrawn and Princess of Alderaan (and reinforced on-screen with the constant overindulgence in English accents) and with assignments for Imperial officials being considered more worthy if being closer to the core.

With the core-periphery model being the basis assumption, there are three predominant models of imperialism. One is based off international realism, which we can dismiss out of hand because it depends on multiple independent states playing a zero-sum game on an anarchic chess board, but in the GFFA, with a few exceptions like the distant Chiss, there is an assumed universal (or in this case, galactic) governance. However, we will come back to IR realism in a bit. The other two models are in direct opposition with one another, although they are not mutually exclusive as most modern theorists try to adapt aspects from both.

One is the metrocentric view, based off the works of rabid antisemite J.A Hobson and general scumbag V.I. Lenin. The nub of their theories was that imperialism was an extension of surplus capital from industrialised nations, as the faster rate of growth in productivity outpaced demand in the home country/metropole (or core) it became more profitable to invest in less developed countries as lower wage-bases would help maintain a high rate of return. However, so many of these places had strong religious or cultural institutions or were even based on non-monetary sharing economies, which necessitated political intervention for a capitalist incursion to work, and so financial interests prompted national governments to dominate these countries, destroy said institutions and build physical infrastructure based around hard resource extraction.

In the sense that the Empire is centrally driven, this theory applies, although the motivation is different. As far as I’m aware, none of the major colonial empires were run by an evil cult centred around the totalitarian authority of one single individual and his acolytes (in this regard the Empire is more like Nazi Germany than anything else.) However, the Empire does clearly work on extracting value from peripheral planets to fund the opulence of the core, and with the clear distinction from the Republic where this process also happened, the Empire wields its military power to protect and accelerate that process, with Imperial Star Destroyers deploying to investigate a slave revolt on Kessel in Solo and a permanent military presence between the resource-depleted Gorse and Thorilide-rich Cynda in A New Dawn.

It’s difficult to ascribe the motivation for expansion in the Empire since it begins already controlling the Galaxy, although picking up on my earlier point about republics engaging in forms of Imperialism, we have something from Tarkin, when it’s revealed that the Republic expanded from the Core, “ravenous for new resources and not above exploiting to enhance the quality of their lives.” The book goes on to explains how competing financial interests propelled expansion, which is interesting because it possibly clues us into the instability underlying the Republic in the prequels, with unchecked financial interests causing corruption and unrest (just short of suggesting class conflict) and feelings of resentment from predominantly Outer Rim and non-human planets who join the CIS. Although the CIS was mostly just a project for those same opportunistic financial interests (such as slavers and interplanetary banking cartels), it’s interesting to note that the regular citizens genuinely thought they were fighting against the corruption of the Republic, with one Parliamentarian in The Clone Wars suggesting that unlike the Galactic Senate, the Raxus Parliament is not influenced by corporations.

But for the faults of both the Republic and the CIS, the Empire outstripped them both; bringing back slavery, coercing entire races such as the Geonotians to work before eradicating them, and with the word ‘stripmining’ becoming a very popular word among various OT media. However, a counterargument to this being a form of metrocentric Imperialism could be the relative non-presence of financial interests during the Empire era. Indeed, while most callous resource-extraction in Africa during the late 19th century was geared towards creating products to dump into world markets, most of the resource extraction we see in the Empire is about directly supplying the military (tibanna in Thrawn, thorilide in A New Dawn) and even the presence of people profiteering seems lacking. Even the villain most clearly associated with profit-seeking capitalism, Denetrius Vidian from A New Dawn, is a member of the Emperor’s inner circle. This alignment of industrial and state interests is probably why the Empire is described as being fascist by Wookiepedia. While I don’t contest the definition, I still think we can accurately compare it with late 19th century colonial Empires, which also had large military-industrial complexes to supply, and whose alignment with private joint-stock companies such as the East India Company is not too unlike the Empire’s close ties with the Mining Guild.

The opposing view is the pericentric model, which argues that the nature of Imperialism is more determined by local conditions, and that colonial empires preferred to rule with a light touch when necessary. The view was supported by the fact that different Imperial territories would have different arrangements. For example, Britain was content just taking a concession from Qing China and dumping Opium into its markets, while it became more direct involved with various African lands which didn’t have a relatively stable system of governance for which to work with. Meanwhile, Britain found itself entangled into occupation of Egypt after the local situation deteriorated after an anti-colonial rebellion, even under the generally anti-empire prime minister William E. Gladstone.

I feel this model applies less to the Empire, since we’ve seen that it pursues imperialism with an almost perverse fervour, but there are examples which fit. Although with less power, the Queen of Naboo remained as an institution, and Clan Saxon collaborated with the Empire and became a pro-Imperial client regime. Meanwhile, the King of Mon Cala resisted the Empire and so was deposed, with it being implicit that had he cooperated, he could have remained as ruler. In Rebels, we see how increasing insurgency leads to greater and greater direct control by the Imperial Navy. Ultimately, however, it’s clear that the Empire, contrary to the pericentric, has a greater inclination towards greater direct rule, with Tarkin saying in ANH that more power will be handed to the regional governors.

Finally, we return to realism, but not to investigate the Core-Periphery model any further but rather to look at another aspect of the Empire, it’s overextension. Part of this is probably to the do with the last point, its desire to control as much as possible, leading to Leia saying in ANH, “the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.” This form of realism, offensive realism, plays right into this. This theory comes from Jack Snyder’s The Myth of Empire, and it postulates that late 19th and early 20th century empires became fixated on constant expansion, to deter any incursion into their own hinterland and to break up opposing alliances. This policy, in fact, led to the opposite happening, with empires becoming too stretched thing to properly defend its hinterland, an being so aggressive as to prompt fearful opposing nations to band together to take them down.

In the Star Wars, we can see this in the Tarkin doctrine and the Death Star. The belief that total aggression will be necessary to deter even the slightest thought of resistance leads to an ungodly amount of resources being devoted to this one superweapon, at the expense of other projects getting less than they need (as explored in Thrawn: Treason with both protagonist and antagonist feeling rather miffed by the lack of funding for their own projects). The destruction of Alderaan (among countless other cruelties and war crimes) does more to spur on the Rebellion than anything else, especially once the superweapon they spent so much of their resources on gets taken right from under them. And in a way perhaps that’s the good thing about any empire, that it sows the seeds of its own destruction half the time.

So yeah, sorry about this ungodly and incomprehensible overanalysis of an IP for children. It ended up being way longer than I thought it would, and this was just about imperialism (empire on a grand scale, as opposed to colonialism which would be the specific practices employed by empire in a territory.) I might make another one of these if I get the time.

#star wars #star wars the clone wars #star wars rebels #the clone wars #rebels #a new hope #the phantom menace #attack of the clones #revenge of the sith #tarkin #thrawn #thrawn: treason #a new dawn #princess of alderaan #leia #imperialism #empire #republic #essay

45 notes · View notes

gotinterest · 4 years

Text

I actually decided to sit down and watch that contrapoints “cancelled” video.

Shockingly I didn’t actually feel like the video was all that bad. She does do a pretty good job of describing how internet justice (”cancelling”) can go wrong (namely how things can get exaggerated and how people can make snap judgements based on little info/ totally unverified claims, how people can give internet personas no opportunity to learn or grow, how internet personas and celebrities are expected to be perfect and react perfectly to criticism at all times when that just isn’t realistic.).

She surprisingly also made some pretty reasonable points about how the whole situation with her got out of control to the point of harassment and to the point of hurting people who weren’t even really involved in the situation. And she did make a really good point about how someone taking the time to think, process, reflect, and grow before they apologize is better than apologizing insincerely in the moment just to avoid bad PR.

All in all, I did come out of it having a slightly higher opinion of her than I did when I went in. She apologized for her NBphobic comments and clarified some of the things she said in the past. I certainly don’t believe that she is truscum or NBphobic anymore.

That all said, I do still have some major problems with the video. Her apologies should have been their own thing, rather than being thrown into the middle of an almost two hour long video that she makes money off of. If you’ve wronged someone, your apology shouldn’t come with a long winded preamble about James Charles.

I also feel as though she downplayed the problems with Buck Angel and wrongly equated people wanting to know if a horrible accusation against him was true (that he tried to out one of the Wachowski sisters) to bigots digging up dirt on marginalized people just to hurt them.

She also weirdly implies that a person’s actions are disconnected from their character. As though one’s actions are not indicative of their beliefs/ character.

The biggest problem, though is that she doesn’t at all address the antisemitism criticisms against her, or the tweets where she cosigned TERF rhetoric about trans women having male privilege before transitioning (which, admittedly, is probably more a result of her not actually knowing the difference between privilege and the effects of privilege. But given she is claims to teach people about philosophy... so she should really know that difference).

The antisemitism criticisms were a not addressed at all, even though she has not properly apologized for either (she has never addressed her nazi fetish gear as far as I know, and her David Icke response literally wasn’t an apology at all).

So, at the end of the day, while I do have a slightly higher opinion of Contra than when I started, and I do think that some of the online treatment of her is disproportionate to the actual harm she has caused and turned into just plain harassment, I still don’t like her and I’m still not a fan of her videos.

I still definitely don’t like that she is the go to face of the trans community online and I still don’t think she really understands how harmful a lot of Buck’s rhetoric is to specifically the NB part of the trans community. She also misrepresented the problems with Buck as just “old trans guy from a different time who just needs new trans issues explained to him” and not as someone who actively supports a harmful line of thinking that is popular among young trans men right now.

I also feel as though she has done very little research into issues going on in the specifically transmasculine/ trans male side of the community because of the way she misrepresented truscum (who are, lets be honest, a trans male community. There are a few female truscum, but most of the female transmedicalists I’ve seen are not actually part of the truscum community, who are a very specific type of people, and aren’t just all “transmedicalist trans people”). She also acted as though transmedicalism and gender performance politics are mutually exclusive, even though they are DEEPLY intertwined with one another.

So yeah, maybe don’t harass her and everyone she associated with. BUT that doesn’t mean I don’t still have legitimate issues with her.

#long post #contrapoints

14 notes · View notes

schraubd · 5 years

Text

On Conservative "Support" for Intersectionality

Vox has an interesting profile interview by Jane Coaston with law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, best known as the originator of the term "intersectionality", on the contemporary uses and misuses of her progeny. One of the most fascinating portions of it is when Coaston starts interviewing conservatives who have, over the past few years, treated intersectionality as their primary intellectual bogeyman. To a man, there response was basically identical: "intersectionality", as conceptualized by Crenshaw, is "relatively unobjectionable" (Ben Shapiro); even "indisputable" (David French). What they say is that Crenshaw's ideas, themselves, as articulated in the late 1980s and early 90s, are unproblematic. Clearly, Black women experience forms of discrimination that differ in kind from those faced by White women or Black men. Who could argue? What's problematic is how intersectionality (is perceived to have been) extended in contemporary college debates, where it does allegedly stand in for some sort of inversion of hierarchy where White men are at the bottom of the pack. This is something I've started to hear more and more frequently. In Gabriel Noah Brahm's essay on "Intersectionality" (in the infamous Israel Studies "Word Crimes" symposium), for example, Crenshaw's original 1989 essay is called a "modest, precise, and useful intervention in American jurisprudence." But things go quickly off the rails: "Over the last several years, it has become the watchword, shibboleth, and passkey to belonging on the "woke" left, among the "politically correct" who arrogate to themselves the duty of thought-policing the rest of us." Brahm contends that among intersectionality-skeptics, "A consensus that cuts across the liberal-conservative divide has emerged ... to the effect that the term's expanded uses as a metaphysical totem have outrun its otherwise valid, more limited definition." (the "liberal-conservative" is generous: Brahm lists nine critics he has in mind, of whom at most two -- Cary Nelson and, when he's in the right mood, Hen Mazzig -- can be described as "liberal"). Yet, like most conservative critics of intersectionality, Brahm's description of its contemporary effects is a self-contained system, remarkably insulated from the words or ideas of actual contemporary intersectionalists. Indeed, once he gets past the portion of the paper talking about Crenshaw's original essays, Brahm effectively ceases to cite any work on intersectionality by any self-described intersectional theorist. Once or twice, an essay will be cited seemingly at random as offering "a representative piece of intersectional feminism", despite not meeting the seemingly minimum threshold of ever saying the words "intersectional" or "intersectionality" (this is especially hilarious given Brahm's insistence on the power of intersectionality the word as a "watchword, shibboleth, and passkey". Some passkey -- it needn't even be used to open the doors!). But for the most part, contemporary intersectionality is understood almost exclusively in terms of what it is stipulated to mean by popular conservative critics in outlets like Commentary and The Daily Caller. As we know, they hate it, even though they concede that the primary texts aren't actually problematic at all. In other words, conservatives are fine with what intersectionalists describe as intersectionality, but loathe what conservatives call intersectionality. So maybe the problem lies in the conservative descriptions? And that raises the question: what do we make of the conservative contention that they are actually willing to endorse the "original", supposedly unproblematic intersectional claims? The basic form of the question is whether they think -- in harmony with Crenshaw's original argument -- that discrimination against "Black women", specifically, should be recognized as an independent basis for Title VII liability beyond "race" or "sex" discrimination. I've seen little evidence that they do back any legal or statutory reforms to provide clarity here, but perhaps I'm wrong. More broadly, the question is whether conservatives object to research programs which seek to uncover the specified and particular modes of discrimination faced by, e.g., Black women, or other permutations of several marginalized identities. After all, to quote French, it's just "commonsense ... that different categories of people have different kinds of experience." Yet in practice, I'm guessing the answer is no. The closest Brahm gets to citing a contemporary articulation of intersectionality by a backer rather than a critic is in the National Women's Studies Association declaration of what "Women's Studies" is:

Women's studies has its roots in the student, civil rights, and women's movements of the 1960s and 70s. In its early years the field's teachers and scholars principally asked, "Where are the women?" Today that question may seem an overly simple one, but at the time few scholars considered gender as a lens of analysis, and women's voices had little representation on campus or in the curriculum. Today the field's interrogation of identity, power, and privilege go far beyond the category "woman." Drawing on the feminist scholarship of U.S. and Third World women of color, women's studies has made the conceptual claims and theoretical practices of intersectionality, which examines how categories of identity (e.g., sexuality, race, class, gender, age, ability, etc.) and structures of inequality are mutually constituted and must continually be understood in relationship to one another, and transnationalism, which focuses on cultures, structures and relationships that are formed as a result of the flows of people and resources across geopolitical borders, foundations of the discipline.

This seems to be an articulation of intersectionality that is no more "problematic" than Crenshaw's original: "categories of identity" and "structures of inequality are mutually constituted and must continually be understood in relation to one another." A little more jargon-y, perhaps, but not something that strays far from Crenshaw's original formulations. Yet Brahm cites this as his proof-text for the claim that "the majority of radical academic feminists today, in theory and in practice, hold to some version of this sort of 'post-essentialist' understanding of what it means to study gender" and therefore(?) the contemporary feminist project is irredeemably fascist, antisemitic, and racist. (Don't shed too many tears: feminism "achieved its proper goal long ago, when women gained equal rights under the law in the developed world"; now " we can all contribute toward restoring sanity in the academic arena by rejecting" contemporary feminism's "shrill, hectoring discourse"). So what we're really seeing is the classic historical pivot of contemporary conservatism: hating some feature of progressive discourse right up until it becomes too mainstream to effectively challenge, at which point critics say that the term they've just spent years assailing used to be valuable and important but only now has turned astray. The National Review did it with "civil rights", David French did it with "white privilege", and now they're all doing it with "intersectionality". It's bad scholarship and bad history, all wrapped together in a neat little bow. via The Debate Link http://bit.ly/30OZ7ip

#conservatives #intersectionality #scholarship

6 notes · View notes

ivanstarenkome-blog · 5 years

Text

Post #15

1. I think we should be able to appreciate Wagner’s music while still acknowledging his shortcomings as a person-- those don’t have to be mutually exclusive. One shouldn’t have to be friends with someone to be able to appreciate their art, although there’s certainly a line that should be drawn there. Wagner had extremely problematic views, but these views weren’t reflected in his art and I don’t think he caused the world such harm that his art can’t be enjoyed. If the likes of Hitler made art, then I wouldn’t be interested in supporting that in any way. Wagner’s art should be able to be enjoyed, but people have to come to terms with his Antisemitism with that. I think we grow as a society from both of those initiatives, and making Wagner’s work taboo removes the opportunity for either. Professor HaCohen, from the Hebrew University of Israel, outlined this when she spoke to the Times of Israel, saying, “when it is performed in public, it always needs to be embedded in a framework that critically discusses the worldview of its composer in relation to the works performed and their reception and impact.” The other controversial issue surrounding Wagner’s works is their appropriation by Hitler. Although that is an unfortunate part of their history that should absolutely be reckoned with, I think Wagner’s works are much larger than only that aspect. Daniel Barenboim writes in “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” “ When one continues to uphold the Wagner taboo today in Israel, it means in a certain respect that we are giving Hitler the last word.” The legacy of Wagner’s works belongs to the world now and I don’t think we should let that end with Hitler.

1. In the documentary “Wagner and Me,” Wagner’s Antisemitism is discussed by the academics and musicians that Steven Fry talks to. Professor Chris Walton, for instance, voices the notion that Wagner seemed to need an enemy or some disturbance to motivate his art and that this makes confronting Wagner very unpleasant and far from easy. Still, he says that this doesn’t take away the greatness of Wagner’s music. Valery Gergiev, Artistic and General Director at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, says that Wagner is an international artist and his stories are stories of the world with themes larger than any single country. The Ring shouldn’t simply be associated with the Nazis and, if it can be performed in Saint Petersburg aftter WWII, then it could be performed anywhere. Stephen Fry says Wagner was very important to Hitler’s vision for the world but Hitler only saw one side of Wagner and that that’s the side that most people look at today as well. It’s also Wagner’s descendants’, like his daughter-in-law Winifred, welcoming and revering Hitler (long before the rest of Germany) which taints Wagner for many today. His remaining descendants today, however, are launching an independent investigation into their family’s links with Hitler to settle the matter. A recent production of “Parsifal” at Bayreuth also adapted the story to incorporate the Holocaust. Finally, Steven Fry talks to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived Auschwitz at the age of 18 because she was a gifted cellist who performed Wagner for Dr. Mengele. Still, music is holy to her and this experience didn’t ruin Wagner for her.

2. Wagner was banished for being a left-wing nationalist revolutionary (he was liberal but Antisemitic) and lived on Lake Lucerne for 12 years, from when he was 35 to 47 from 1849 to 1861. It was here that he wrote about the Gesamtkunswerk, started writing the Ring, and wrote his Antisemitic essay on Jews in music. The Ring took over 20 years before it was finished and performed. Wagner’s Antisemitism may have been partially due to his jealousy of the success of Jewish composers like Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer.

Wagner’s forbidden love for the wife of his patron family, Mathilde Wesendonck, inspired his opera “Tristan und Isolde.” Wagner wrote and dedicated a song “Traeume” to Mathilde, which became the love duet in act II of “Tristan und Isolde.”

The Tristan Chord creates tension because it doesn’t perfectly resolve and it’s simultaneously uplifting and depressing, since some of the voices resolve upwards and others resolve down.

Wagner was the first composer to compose with his back to the audience.

Hitler’s rallies in Nuremberg may have been inspired by a rally scene in the third act of Wagner’s opera “die Meistersinger von Nuremberg.” The music from the opera, which Hitler loved and would often whistle, was performed at the Nazi rallies.

1. “Lohengrin” is loosely based off of events in 933 A.D., in which King Henry the Fowler of Saxony united various German principalities to defend their lands against Hungarian invaders. The opera, however, also includes fantasy tropes like an evil witch and a knight in shining armor saving a damsel in distress.

2. The description of Lohengrin as “an artist, somewhat above the world but not above needing love” certainly fits my impression of Wagner’s self image and I wouldn’t put it past him to depict himself in one of his operas as a holy knight in shining armor.

3. An overture contains themes from the music of the opera, whereas a prelude doesn’t as much.

4. Elsa is accused of killing her brother Gottfried and for having a secret lover.

5. After being banished at the end of Act I, Telramund is in the courtyard of Antwerp Castle at the start of Act II.

6. Ortrud is Pagan and worships old Norse and Germanic gods like Woden and Freia.

7. Elsa feels unworthy of being with Lohengrin and feels like he will leave her and go back to the holy and glorious place he’s from that she can’t compete with. Eventually she can’t help herself and she asks him his name.

8. Lohengrin kills Telramund when he attacks him in his honeymoon suite and Ortrud dies as Lohengrin’s swan transforms into Gottfried (?). Elsa dies from sadness (?) as Lohengrin sails away at the very end.

9. eh.

10. Since, after Thomas Mann said the score to Lohengrin reminded him of blue and silver, it’s been a tradition for the production to be in blue and silver and I think that would be interesting to see. I hope Lohengrin’s entrance on the swan-drawn boat is as ridiculous as possible and that the costumes are really over-the-top and fantastical and not understated, more contemporary costumes that are sometimes used in recent opera productions.

1 note · View note

fangfucked-a · 5 years

Photo

WHAT'S MY NAME Howdy, I'm Pilot, whichever you prefer. I'm 21 despite the fact I look about twelve. I'm a trans guy who uses exclusively he/him pronouns. I'm your local optimistic punk kid who likes Animal Crossing, Twenty One Pilots ( no shit right ), tattoos, and cinematography. Writing is fun but it's not necessarily a passion of mine so probably don't expect some elegant and fancy writing lmao.

BASICS

I'M HEAVY So Francis is a character I've had for a while now, about seven years now, he's bounced between a few blogs. Anything I write is my own and I use lore based on random shit I come up with and various mass media interpretations of vampirism The only things I don't own are the theme coding, PSD, and border. The PSD is found here while the border is found here.

HEAD TILTED DOWN I don't send rule passwords. While I don't have much anxiety anymore sending in random sentences or passwords without ever previously speaking to the person seems weird to me. However, I always read rules before following and once more before interacting so I've read your rules!

THEY WILL NOT CAST YOU OUT I adore multimuses, you're all stronger and much more organized than I. I'll interact with them, of course, but I just ask if you send in a meme or like a starter call, please specify a muse. If you don't I'll either come to you and ask or you won't get one. If I'm the one liking or asking for a meme, I'll specify who I want one for, obviously! It's just a lot less time consuming if when you're the one asking for something that you specify who it's for, thanks!

FOLLOWING & UNFOLLOWING

COBWEBS AND FLIES I'm private and selective as stated, this is for my own personal comfort. I don't really want to become overwhelmed and I've had a lot of bad experiences on this hellsite. I'll follow I can see people Francis genuinely interacting with and characters that really catch my eye. If I don't follow you back, please don't take it personally! I'm sure you and your character are lovely, I just need to keep my dash at a minimum.

STAY IN YOUR LANE This may sound bitchy but there's plenty of people I will not follow. If you or your character are transphobic, homophobic, racist, intolerant in any way. I won't follow people who roleplay incest, r*pe, dubcon, pedophilia, a/b/o, or anything of that sort. I won't roleplay with rule!63 / genderbent / cisbent whatever they're called nowadays characters. This includes verses or trans verses. It's transphobic and I'm a very tired trans guy.

SHIPPING

I KNOW I'M EMOTIONAL Ah I love shipping! Francis is an easy character to get things going with because he tends to fall for people easily, but there DOES need to be chemistry! If there's chemistry and we both ship it, I'm down for just about anything. However, any talk about relationships is referring to Francis' wife, kenzi.

AM I THE ONLY ONE I KNOW This isn't really regarding shipping, but I love pre-established shit. Friends, enemies, they knew each other as kids, they're supernatural pals, ect. Whatever you're feeling, I'm probably down for honestly. The only thing that I don't accept pre-established things of is romantic relationships.

REPLIES & MEMES

WE'VE MADE IT THIS FAR. I'm slow! Not gonna lie about that. I have a very active social life, other blogs ( though Francis is my main ), I'm mentally ill, and am just a very sleepy boy. Roleplay doesn't come first in my life, it may take some time to get to things. However I'll get to it eventually, if you think I forgot about it, just give me a nudge once and I'll tell you whether or not I have it in my drafts.

HEARD YOUR VOICE Memes are a great way to break the ice and I love them! I'll reblog plenty for this reason. IC memes are for mutuals only but OOC memes are for everybody! Feel free to change the pronouns or wordings on things to fit better too!