#dean thomas supremacy

[whinlatter]

Hi! I love your writing think it’s phenomenal work. It’s really such a genuine and intimate depiction of Ginny. I also see you have an appreciation of Dean Thomas. I’d love to know why you think Ginny was attracted to him? What do you think their relationship was like and how did it help them for their next partners? I just think that pairing was really interesting and there’s not enough of them being friends.

❗️ Warning... big Dean & Ginny meta incoming ❗️

Firstly - thank you so so much for reading and enjoying my work (phenomenal!!! I’ll dine out on that all week - can't thank you enough).

Secondly - what great questions! This was such a fun thing to think through. Dean’s a quietly lovely character I have so much time for, despite being very underdeveloped in canon (cutting his arc to exclusively favour Neville’s? Side-eye forever). I'm definitely a paid up member of the Dean Thomas Fan Club.

Anyway….. the questions were so good I wrote this too-long meta on Ginny and Dean before going to bed because I apparently… cannot be stopped?

Why was Ginny attracted to Dean?

I think for this question it’s important to think about the timing of when Ginny and Dean became close and when they got together, and especially what Ginny was looking for during and after her relationship with King of Negging, Michael Corner. There are three weeks between the break-up with Michael and Gin getting together with Dean, so we can assume Ginny and Dean had already become close and maybe a little flirty when she was with Michael (Ginny Weasley likes to give herself a nice four-week breather between boyfriends, usually just in time to watch the early summer weather roll in. I for one respect the work rate and the consistency.)

Ginny is with Michael until late in her fourth year, until they break up after the Quidditch final in early June. Dean has his OWLs until late June (just realised Ginny dumps Michael right before his exams - this is how you get revenge on a Ravenclaw).

The events in the Department of Mysteries take place the day exams finish (cue iconic scene where Harry’s rushing up to the dormitory to grab his Cloak and save his godfather’s life and Seamus and Dean are trying to get him on the sesh, absolutely rate it, excellent from the lads). Ginny’s going out with Dean by the time she gets the train home, probably by the end of June.

Given the short turnaround time between relationships, I think it’s likely Ginny and Dean became close during the rest of the school year, where she was able to learn the following things about him (and implicitly compare him with Michael as Michael revealed himself to be, as the great prophet Ronald foresaw, ‘a bit of an idiot’):

Dean Thomas knows right from wrong (and really, really can’t stand Dolores Umbridge). In their first lesson with Umbridge, Dean is by far the person in the class who stands up to Umbridge the most after the trio (he actually comes out swinging a lot more than Ron does). He immediately subs in for Harry when Umbridge refuses to answer any more of Harry’s questions. He defends Lupin and Crouch-as-Moody when Umbridge criticises them (describing Crouch-as-Moody as a maniac but saying ‘we still learned loads’ is extremely funny - Dean's pedagogical expectations are low). Dean is an extremely enthusiastic DA member, he and Ginny often arrive at meetings or take part in dinnertime conversations about the DA together, and I think they likely became mates because they’re passionate about what the DA is trying to do. We know Gin likes a boy with a moral compass, a backbone, and a good sense of outrage in the face of injustice. (I cut this out of a much lengthier first draft of chapter one of Beasts, which had all the DA at the graduation ceremony, but this was their interaction in response to another character acting up: ‘[Ginny] feels an old rush of affection for Dean, a man who always had a good scowl in him when it mattered.’)

Dean’s a sweetheart, even if he’s a bit hopeless. Dean’s a character who is often trying to make people feel better about things and trying to give a bit of comfort – emphasis on trying, because he’s not always good at knowing exactly what to say. I think this is something Ginny would really value – she’s someone who, for all her fire, tries to comfort and support the people around her. I reckon she’s got a soft spot for a man with a heart in the right place and a chronic inability to find the right words to express it. ('“Don’t worry about it, Harry,” Dean muttered, hoisting his schoolbag onto his shoulder. “He’s just . . .” But apparently he was unable to say exactly what Seamus was, and after a slightly awkward pause followed him out of the room.' OotP, 221 - does this not sound like how Harry would try and comfort someone?) 👀

Dean is kind to the underdog. Dean is often seen hanging around with or partnering up with Neville, and in DH, we’ll also see Dean be very kind towards Luna. I think Ginny rates people who are kind to those who are socially awkward and excluded.

Relatedly... Dean loves Remus Lupin. I wrote about this a bit in this short reflection on Remus (and am writing about this at the moment so don’t want to get too spoilery if you’re reading Beasts…), but I have a feeling being Remus Lupin’s biggest fan would be a sure fire way to get a text back from Ginny Weasley.

Dean’s into sports. Like her soulmate, Ginny’s into fellow jocks (I think it's implied that Michael Corner was also on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team – three for three on Quidditch players, Ginevra, if you were on Love Island I’d say you have a type). I think she’d also be amused and endeared by Dean’s die-hard commitment to West Ham - she is Arthur Weasley’s daughter, after all, and she probably enjoys teasing him about how crap football sounds. (That bit in PS/SS where Dean’s yelling ‘send him off, ref!’ – 10/10 excellent Dean content). Also Dean does not seem threatened by Ginny’s Quidditch abilities, but instead just really wants to be on the team with her too, which is a nice change from Michael Corner, the Jack Berger of Hogwarts Quidditch. (Sorry Michael, I know you end up a gold star goodie by DH, but young Mike is a prick to our girl Gin).

Dean is a laugh. Chuckling at Ernie Macmillan in his Apparition classes, mucking about with mice in Transfiguration, getting the giggles because this Lockhart bloke has set a quiz asking students to name his ideal birthday gift: Dean is both fun and funny. That bit in GoF where Dean describes Warrington in Slytherin as a ‘big bloke who looks like a sloth’ – funny.  The bit later in GoF where Dean rinses Harry for rejecting that curly-haired Hufflepuff girl who wants to go to the ball with him – also funny. Ginny Weasley likes a comedian and she also likes an audience. I think that means a big tick in the Dean Thomas column.

Dean's a creative. This is verging on headcanon territory, but I really do love the idea of Ginny finding her way back to writing in the years after Riddle and the diary. I can see her being drawn to someone who also has this gentle, expressive, artistic side to them.

Dean’s not averse to dealing in contraband Firewhiskey. If you’re a fourteen year old popular girl with a rulebreaking streak, the boy who can source you some Firewhiskey for an end of exams party from a cool kid like Harold Dingle is hot property.

Dean… er, really likes Harry. Not Gin's finest criteria for a boyfriend, but I think In GoF, the man draws Harry flying around the Horntail on his Firebolt and draws Cedric, his rival, with his head on fire. It’s not a hugely good look for Ginny, but I reckon Dean really liking Harry probably, in a strange, back-to-front kind of way, is another vote in his favour (Gin, you're messy, and I love you for it).

What was their relationship like?

I loved thinking about this question! It’s easier to write about why Ginny and Dean broke up than it is to write why they stayed together so long, and what good stuff they took from the relationship. Dean's easily bashed in Hinny fic in all sorts of different ways, and I don't think it really tallies with the really positive impression we get of him in canon. Ginny and Dean spend a lot of time together over the year - eating most of their meals together, training together, spending all of their Hogsmeade time with each other. I know it’s a teenage relationship, but this is still so much time to spend with one person. It also actually takes them quite a while to breakup, even if they’re ‘rocky’ for much longer. There's something to their relationship that must, on some level, have worked quite well. After all, it would have been a lot easier for Ginny to have dumped Dean if he was a crap boyfriend. It’s much harder to dump someone who is a good partner, but not the right partner for you.  

I think that's the problem for Ginny: Dean was kind of perfect for her in lots of ways - but for the person she would have been if Riddle hadn't happened to her, and if the war hadn't happened. Their relationship was clearly based on a lot of mutual attraction and chemistry (that kiss Ron and Harry saw was intense, lads - there's a reason Harry was threatened by it, after all). I think Dean was proud as hell of Ginny, especially on the Quidditch pitch (he's so excited to tell her he's going to be on the team with her!). I think he would think she's super cool, and I like fics and headcanons about Dean that show him trying to internalise his feelings about his own dad into doing right by his girlfriend, even if that means overshooting and being overly chivalrous and over-protective with Gin. I think one of the reasons Ginny stayed in the relationship so long is because they genuinely got on, had a laugh with each other, and fancied each other, in a way that she would feel conflicted about when she still feels drawn to Harry.

Really I think it's Dean being so great that is the problem for Ginny. If she's with this really great guy and she's still feeling restless and like something's missing, she knows that means she's still not over Harry, and that means she's in trouble. I think it's why Ginny sabotages the relationship, in very understandable ways, and in the end she finds herself getting the ick over little things, and picks a fight to end it rather than come clean about being in love with someone else. (No judgement: again, messy girl representation is important).

Ultimately, I think Harry is perfect for the Ginny that actually exists, and Dean would be a good match for a hypothetical Ginny where there was no Harry, who doesn't have a family in the resistance, who doesn't have all this trauma from what happened with the diary, and who isn't shaped and forged by a childhood at war. Until DH, Dean doesn't seem to know anything about the Weasleys' involvement in the Order. We have no evidence anyone other than Harry, the Weasleys, Dumbledore and Hermione ever knew Ginny was possessed by Riddle, and I don't know that Ginny would volunteer the information to Dean. (The only reason she brings it up to Harry in OotP and again in HBP isn't because she wants emotional support for it - she only brings it up to try and help him. This is not a subject she talks openly about even with the person who knows most about what went down). This lack of knowledge about crucial parts of Ginny's life would mean huge gaps in understanding between them - not gaps that are Dean's fault, but that Ginny doesn't try to get him to bridge. Dean can't meet Ginny where she's at emotionally at the point in the series where they get together, in many ways because he's much closer to a normal teenager than she has been able to be up to that point. At the end of the day, Ginny's always going to want to be with the strange guy racing to the Department of Mysteries to rescue a loved one and fight Death Eaters on a Friday night than a nice normal guy who is planning on drinking his own weight in Firewhiskey to celebrate him finishing his Wizarding GCSEs.

How did it help them for their next partners?

I think Ginny would always speak highly of Dean, appreciate that he made her feel loved and someone a boyfriend should be proud of, and I think she would feel some guilt about what went down. I think, eventually, Dean would acknowledge that he didn’t fully understand Ginny and what she was going through, and that he couldn't have been able to meet her needs in the same way Harry could. (I do think this would take a while, though - on the way out, Dean would be understandably very bitter, even if bitterness would be quickly surpassed by the much more serious escalation in circumstances in the war for an apparent Muggleborn. Thinking about it, Dean Thomas had a terrible 1996. Man got dumped and then within three months was homeless and on the run from a murderous fascist regime trying to do him in. Like, I know this is very much not funny but… if a man I had shared a bedroom with for six years and called a friend publicly scooped my ex from me from under my nose, dumped her a few weeks later for mysterious reasons, and then I had to look at his face everywhere I looked on wanted posters, I would be a lot more mad at Harry Potter than Dean Thomas ends up being).

Ultimately, though, I think both would look back on the relationship as a sort of sweet teenage thing, with a lot of warmth and humour to it, probably some sweet confidence-boosting intimacy early on, and a bit of a lesson that you can't make someone be the right person for you. I like to think Ginny and Dean end up mates, in the end, and that she's always rooting for him to find someone great.

#and that person... is seamus #joking but not really #dean thomas #meta #beasts #this was super fun to think about thank you! #dean thomas supremacy #ginny weasley

[training4theapocalypse]

A Nest of Vipers Ch6. (Cormac McLaggen x Original Female Character - Slytherin)

Rating: Explicit 18+

Word Count: 4.8K

Warnings / Tags: A little bit of smut, pure blood supremacy, tragic romance

Summary: Slughorn's party is tonight and it's time for Una to choose between the Vipers and Cormac McLaggen.

A/N: Una gets worse every chapter I swear to GOD.

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Chapter 6: Slughorn's Party

Una entered the dimly lit common room arm in arm with Meredith and Sabine, their entrance causing a sudden silence among the four Slytherin boys in dress robes. 

“Wow, Sabine, you look… wow,” said the usually aloof Theodore Nott, causing Blaise to give him a haughty look.

“Put your eyes back in, Nott,” said Blaise, rolling his eyes. 

“Now you know how I feel,” grumbled Graham. “Having one of your friends go out with your sister.”

It was the night of Professor Slughorn’s Christmas party, and both Una and Blaise had their own agendas for the evening. They were attending as friends, united by separate pursuits of the heart.

“Una and I are going as friends,” Blaise reminded him. “Better that than fraternising with the enemy.”

“The enemy,” snorted Graham but Una knew Blaise was overcompensating, that he’d slink away and find Ginny Weasley as quickly as he could.

“Well, I think you make a lovely couple,” smiled Sabine, showing off her perfect row of white teeth as she greeted Blaise with a kiss on each cheek before taking Theodore’s extended arm. 

“I dunno, it’s all a bit incest-y for me,” said Graham with a sour look on his face. “You’re going with my sister, your sister’s going with Nott. We’re a hop, skip and a jump away from getting married off to our cousins.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re not my cousin,” said Albie Selwyn, taking Meredith’s hand and kissing it. Una wrinkled her nose. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet and in her opinion, that was much too early for public displays of affection. 

“Just Sabine’s ex,” muttered Graham to Una who covered a laugh by opening her bag and checking her lip gloss in her little black mirror.

This was exactly how Sabine liked it. Having power over Meredith and Una by persuading them to go to Slughorn’s party with people she thought she had influence over. Albie Selwyn was a perfect match for Meredith - he wasn’t good enough for Sabine so of course Meredith was permitted to have her sloppy seconds.

And Blaise, well, Sabine didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. Una had found an unlikely friend in Blaise after her confrontation with Myrtle in the girl’s bathroom. He was alone in the common room when she had returned and she’d confided in him. He was the only person who could understand how she was feeling. Although by Blaise’s account, his and Ginny’s secret was progressing much more discreetly, and successfully, than her’s and Cormac’s. But Blaise didn’t have the same jealous streak as Una and Cormac. In fact, he didn’t even seem to care that Ginny would be there with her boyfriend, Dean Thomas.

Una took Blaise’s arm and the seven of them ascended the stairs, the salty seaweed-tinged air of the Slytherin common room turning to Christmas pine and firewood as they entered the Entrance Hall. 

Cormac McLaggen and Hermione Granger were standing beside Ginny Weasley, Dean Tomas and Katie Bell as the latter awaited the arrival of her date. When Graham saw Katie he practically bounded over, taking her hand and making her do a little spin to show off her dress. It was so sickeningly cute that the other Slytherins rolled their eyes at each other but it made Una’s throat knot in jealousy. Why must her own pursuits be so complicated when Graham could so openly and unashamedly go with Katie?

When Katie stopped her spinning she looked giddy. Graham took her arm and led her towards the direction of the corridor where Slughorn’s office was. Just as Katie and Graham passed between Una and Cormac’s line of sight, they locked eyes.

It was irritating how handsome he looked tonight. Una supposed he must come from money like her, with his perfectly tailored black dress robes. Of course, she knew he was well-connected - he had to have been to receive an invite to Slug Club, but his robes made the other revellers milling around the Entrance Hall look scruffy in comparison. 

Cormac’s curly hair, usually messed up from running his hands through it or playing Quidditch, was elegantly textured. There was a single curl over his forehead that could have been a paid actor. She finally understood what Cormac meant when he said he ‘wanted to make a mess of her’. Una wanted to twist her fingers through those curls and make fun of him for trying so hard, to push that stupid curl out of his face while he was on his knees with his mouth between her legs.

Una snapped out of it when Hermione slinked her arm through Cormac’s and he broke his eye contact. Hermione’s usually frizzy hair was also slicked back, except hers was twisted into an elegant bun. She supposed Cormac and Hermione were well-suited. And as things weren’t working out well between Una and Cormac, maybe he and Hermione would have a flock of wild-haired children one day. She watched as they followed Katie and Graham in the direction of the party.

“You know, you look beautiful,” murmured Blaise as the group of Slytherins followed suit, Una and Blaise lagging behind the others. “Speaking platonically, of course. McLaggen is an idiot.”

“Thanks, Blaise,” she smiled. 

She almost felt guilty about confiding her woes with Cormac McLaggen to him. Especially when even though he didn’t know it, Blaise’s blossoming relationship with Ginny Weasley would be playing right into her plans to get back at the people who had hurt her brother.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Try as he might, Cormac McLaggen was having a difficult time getting rid of Hermione Granger. He should have expected this, of course. He knew how he looked when he made an effort and the effect it could have on girls. It just wasn’t having the desired effect on the right girl. And it really wasn’t fair to poor Hermione to lead her on like this.

What was worse was that he thought he might be able to get to the bar by himself. Be seen there alone - then maybe Una would come over and they could discuss tactics. Arrange to meet later, or better yet, sneak away before either Hermione or Blaise noticed they were gone. But Hermione just wanted to accompany him to the bar. Wherever he went she followed. It was like she wanted to be seen with him in every corner of the room.

“And then, I suppose, my eighteenth best save was when I was playing for the Wimbourne Wasps under-14s,” he said and he was actually starting to bore himself now. “Their seeker was Cassius Burke. Or maybe it was Gideon Blackwood. No, wait - it was Cassius Burke. And it was a kick away from the left hoop.”

“You know, this is really fascinating, Cormac,” said Hermione loudly as a few other Gryffindors passed by.

“It - it is?” he asked. Una would have told him to shut his fat mouth and stop talking about himself long ago. Then he’d have wiped the beautiful sneer from her face by letting her know his preferred way of being shut up. 

The thought made him miss her. 

He looked over to where she was still standing with Blaise, Sabine and her date. Blaise rested a hand on the exposed skin of Una’s backless emerald green dress just below where her straight, shiny hair danced across her spine and he said something that made her throw her head back and laugh. Una’s other friend, the red-headed one, Meredith, was some way away looking uncomfortable as her drunk date pressed his mouth to her ear, half kissing her, half whispering something and accidentally spilling some of his drink down the front of her dress.

It inspired Cormac to try a different tack. He remembered how Hermione recoiled at Slughorn’s dinner party back in October when he’d suggestively sucked on his fingers while looking at her from across the table.

“What do you say we get out of here?” he asked, leaning down to whisper to Hermione and purposefully slurring his words. It was perfect, seeing as he couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask her to leave him alone without offending her. 

“I - excuse me?”

“Come on, you just said I was fascinating. Let me show you something really impressive,” he said, putting a hand on her waist. 

“I don’t think so, Cormac,” she blustered. “Excuse me, I need to go to the ladies.” 

Cormac watched as she turned on her heels and ran off. In the opposite direction of the bathroom and towards the tent-like furnishings where Harry Potter was standing with Luna Lovegood from the D.A. in her spangled silver dress robes. 

Well, that was easy, thought Cormac before spotting Katie Bell and Graham Montague over at a secluded table. He didn’t want to be a third-wheel on their date but he didn’t really know anyone else here except Una. 

“Remember the time Potter practically swallowed the snitch?” laughed Katie as Graham almost choked on his drink. 

“Mind if I join you?” asked Cormac and Katie nodded enthusiastically to the chair opposite them. 

“Graham, this is Cormac McLaggen,” said Katie. “I’m not sure if Una has told you about him.”

Cormac stuck out his hand and Graham put down his drink to shake it before Cormac took his seat. “Er, no, she hasn’t,” said Graham with uncertainty. “Are you friends with her then?”

It wasn’t a surprise that Una hadn’t mentioned him to her brother, after all, they were keeping things between them a secret. Although he had sort of hoped that maybe she’d have confided in Graham, especially since he himself was here with a Gryffindor. 

Cormac chose his next words carefully, mindful of Katie’s suspicious look. “Hardly. Well, I mean, we sit next to each other in Transfiguration,” he said casually. “But she talks about you.”

“All complaints, I assume?”

Cormac laughed. Una had told him all about how Graham was their parents' golden child. According to Una, the fact she was Head Girl paled in comparison to their darling, Quidditch Captain son. 

“Well, she’s so sick of me meddling in her love life, I’m not surprised.”

Cormac covered his momentary pause by taking a sip of his drink. Maybe Graham knew more than he was letting on.

“I asked her not to come here tonight with Blaise because he’s my best mate,” explained Graham.

“Oh?” So that explained Una’s sudden change of heart.

“Yeah, well, she wasn’t having it so I’ve backed off now. Especially after the last time my parents tried to force her to go out with someone and she blew -” Graham stopped himself abruptly and shook his head. “I mean she wasn’t happy.” He laughed unconvincingly.

“What happened?” asked Cormac, his curiosity piqued by Graham’s sudden change in tone.

“Where is she anyway?” asked Graham, ignoring Cormac’s question and looking over his shoulder. “I haven’t seen her and that slimy git Blaise in a while.”

Cormac turned around in his chair. None of the Vipers or their dates were anywhere to be seen.

“Slimy git? I thought you said he was your best mate?” laughed Katie.

“Yeah, well, it’s different when he’s got his hands all over my sister,” Graham grumbled.

Cormac turned back around to see Katie observing him. He shook his head warningly. Katie had been suspicious of his relationship with Una for a few weeks now but the last thing he was going to do was confess his feelings in front of her brother. Katie just smirked as if his head shake had confirmed everything.

Graham turned the subject back to Quidditch and while Cormac had more questions than ever, he was relieved to not have to word his answers so carefully now they were no longer talking about Una.

“And remember when your mates got detention for dressing up as dementors during one of our games?” chuckled Katie.

“Oh god, yeah. That was Draco’s idea. He… hang on. Speak of the devil,” said Graham, his brows furrowed in confusion as he looked past Cormac into the middle of the room.

Cormac turned in his seat and watched the Hogwarts caretaker, Argus Filch, dragging in a pale boy with a pointed face into the middle of the room by his ear.

“Alright, I wasn’t invited!” Draco spat angrily. “I was trying to gatecrash. Happy?” And Cormac was surprised when he looked furiously over in the direction of the table that he was currently sitting at.

“That’s alright Argus, that’s alright,” boomed Slughorn. “It’s not a crime to want to come to a party. Just this once we’ll forget any punishment. You may stay, Draco.”

“Oh no,” groaned Graham. 

“What’s wrong?” asked Katie. “I thought he was your friend too?”

“He was trying to convince me not to come tonight so I could help him with a job - I mean, a project. I think that’s why he was trying to sneak in.”

Cormac remained fixed on the commotion as Draco thanked Slughorn for his generosity and couldn’t help but notice that Draco looked a little ill. 

“A project? The day before we go home for the holidays?” asked Katie. Cormac wondered if that was why Draco looked so worse for wear. Maybe he had a deadline he was going to miss?

“Well, I’ve not had much time to work on it. I’ve been preoccupied with something else,” said Graham and Cormac turned back around in his chair just in time to see him wiggling his eyebrows at Katie. “Doesn’t matter anyway - look, Snape’s not having it.”

Sure enough, Draco was being dragged back out of the room at the exact same moment Una was coming back in. Alone. 

Cormac raised a hand in acknowledgement and Una halted on the spot, pursing her lips when she saw he was sitting with Graham and Katie.

“Una!” called Graham and her eyes darted everywhere except their table as if looking for an escape route before reluctantly continuing towards them, her high-heeled stilettos clicking on the dance floor ominously as she did.

Cormac stood up and pulled out the seat next to him and she sat down wordlessly, dumping her clutch bag on the table. “Well, I’ve just had to rescue Meredith from Selwyn. Blaise and I had to put them to bed. Separately. And now I’ve got no idea where anyone else is.”

“You’ll just have to put up with our much worse company then,” said Cormac.

Una huffed a derisive laugh and looked directly at Cormac. “I’ll say.”

Her icy glare was full of annoyance and Cormac was sure he’d soon find out that he was somehow responsible for her mood. But even though she looked irritated at him, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. 

She always looked beautiful. He still got a little flustered now that he was actually allowing himself to look at her in her school uniform but he was unprepared for seeing her dressed to the nines like this. He was glad of the commotion caused by Katie and Graham fawning over each other in the Entrance Hall earlier this evening - it meant that nobody noticed that he had stopped mid-sentence when Una had appeared, arm in arm with Blaise wearing that satin green dress that pooled on the floor like it was molten.

“Ouch, harsh, Una,” chuckled Graham. “Cormac was just telling us you’re in Transfiguration together.”

“And come to think of it, that’s just about as much time in Cormac McLaggen’s presence as I can stand sober. Excuse me.” Una tossed her hair over her shoulder before getting up and walking over to the bar. 

Cormac hesitated as he looked from Una’s abandoned bag to her figure cutting through the crown, a backless silhouette of grace and indignation.

“Just go,” said Katie in exasperation.

Cormac didn’t bother explaining himself. He grabbed Una’s bag and followed her towards the bar.

“So much for hardly knowing each other,” said Graham, raising an eyebrow.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Una, what’s up?” asked Cormac, leaning on the edge of the bar at the back of Slughorn’s office as Una caught the barman’s eye with practised ease.

“What’ll it be?” asked the young barman absently, dressed in a white tailcoat and cleaning the bar with a towel. He had a pimply face - he couldn’t have been much older than Una or Cormac, she thought. 

“A shot of firewhiskey please,” said Una.

“Make that two,” added Cormac.

“No can do,” said the barman. “Boss said no shots.”

“Oh.” Una pouted and twisted the end of her hair. “Not even just one tiny shot?” she asked, her voice dripping in saccharine sweetness that was anything but innocent.

The barman shook his head as if strengthening his own resolve by denying her request.

Una giggled. “I suppose that makes sense. Who knows what would happen if the students all lost our inhibitions.” She moved her shoulder discreetly so that her strap fell down her arm. 

The barman blinked a few times as his cheeks turned pink. “Well… maybe one. Just don’t tell anyone, alright?”

He poured a shot and Una downed it before placing the glass back on the bar. “Gosh, that’s gone right to my head.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “Could I trouble you for a glass of champagne, please?”

“Two!” Cormac called after him, a hint of irritation in his voice after being plainly ignored by the barman. “And you can stop trying to make me jealous because it isn’t working,” he added to Una.

“I’m doing no such thing,” said Una. “And besides, you’re one to talk. The way you had your hands all over Granger.”

“I was just trying to get rid of her.”

Una snorted derisively. “By doing your best impression of the giant squid?”

“I didn’t think anyone noticed.” 

“Cormac, it’s time you learned that I see everything and I hear everything,” hissed Una, her voice filled with venom. “So don’t expect me to be grateful when you tell Hermione to doll herself up for you so you can spend the evening getting handsy with her.”

“Fuck, Una. It wasn’t like that -”

“Oh yeah? That’s not what Moaning Myrtle overheard in the bathroom. She told me all about how you asked Hermione to wear something sexy tonight. I mean, what the fuck, Cormac? You think I wouldn’t find out? Oh - thank you.” Her expression softened momentarily as she thanked the barman for the drinks with a forced smile.

She tried to walk away from the bar but Cormac caught her wrist discreetly. 

“Let go of me. You can’t just manhandle me any time an argument isn’t going your way,” she snapped.

“And you can’t just storm off every time you’re about to show the tiniest bit of vulnerability,” said Cormac sternly, his tight grip encircling her wrist bones and pulling her close. 

“That’s not what this is, I -”

“I know what you’re like, Una, I can tell you’ve been stewing over this all day. And I’ll be damned if I let you leave for the Christmas holidays without us sorting this out.”

“It’s not for you to let me do anything.”

“It is when it involves me so shut up for a second and listen.”

Una’s nostrils flared as she stared up at him furiously. That stupid, pretty little curl on his head. It tempted her fingers with a desire to yank it out. “Go on then, try and talk your way out of it.”

“Not here,” said Cormac, increasingly aware of the fact that their whispered conversation was likely to be overheard. “Behind that curtain,” he suggested, nodding to the heavy tent-like draping covering the stone walls of Slughorn’s magically expanded office.

“Are you going to let go of me or should I expect an escort?”

Cormac loosened his grip and handed Una her purse. She snatched it from him and followed him to the secluded edge of the room. Cormac checked the coast was clear of onlookers and held open the hanging to let Una walk through.

“I did ask Hermione to dress up,” said Cormac, his voice tinged with embarrassment and regret. “But that was before I knew you and Blaise were going tonight as friends. I was jealous. And I was trying to make you jealous too.”

“Well, it worked. Are you happy?” Una’s words were sharp but her voice wavered - a tiny chink of vulnerability in her armour that she so wished she could hide.

“Obviously not, Unes. I told you before that I’m terrible at playing games. And this attempt has backfired. Spectacularly.”

Una paused, taken aback by his candour. She was adept at weaving intricate plans. It was like playing wizard’s chess to her, while Cormac... he was more like a player of exploding snap - unguarded and impulsive. And maybe, she thought, what he deserved was someone who wasn’t a game player. Someone honest. Someone who didn’t care about being strategic.

He might not have her cunning, but there was a simplicity, a sweetness in his earnestness. A typical Gryffindor, wearing his heart on his sleeve.

“Maybe you should find Hermione again -” started Una softly but Cormac interrupted her with an exasperated groan.

“Una, come on. We’ve just been over this -”

“No, I’m serious, Cormac. I’m not just saying it to start another argument. Aren’t relationships supposed to be fun? Easy? The two of you looked good together.”

Una was starting to think she should have just let her parents betroth her to someone as planned rather than putting up such a fight. It would have avoided this current mess with Cormac if she had. It would have meant that she’d never have made a mess back then either, a mess that strained her relationship with her parents beyond repair.

“I am having fun. And it could be easy if you just stopped caring about what the Vipers think.” Cormac cupped her face with both hands and she could feel her worries melting away, even if only for a moment.

She sighed heavily. “Cormac, please don’t make me choose between you and them.”

Cormac leaned in closer, his green eyes locking onto hers with a sincerity that made her heart flutter. “I’m not asking you to choose, Una. They are. But if you’re really thinking of ending this...” He leaned in, his warm breath fanning against her skin. “I can’t let you go without one last kiss.”

And then he kissed her. Kissed her as if she were the only thing in the world he ever wanted. And Una kissed him back, the sweet champagne on his lips tainted by the smoky, briny firewhiskey on hers. 

This was all it took. A kiss was enough to turn her to putty in his hands.

She succumbed to her intrusive thoughts.

“Fuck what they think. I’ll have my parents buy me new friends if it means you’ll fuck me again,” panted Una in Cormac’s ear as he kissed her neck.

He groaned. “You’re so fucked up for that.”

“And you’re fucked up for wanting me.”

She grabbed the front of his dress robes and pulled him urgently so he pressed her between him and the stone wall. Fuck, she loved feeling his body between her legs. It seemed to block out all the external problems complicating things. It was just she and him.

Cormac’s hands pulled up her floor-length satin dress.

“Fuck, not here, Cormac,” she said as his hand cupped her lacy underwear. But her cunt was throbbing underneath his touch. She couldn’t deny that she wanted him to touch her.

“But you’re so wet for me,” he whispered, slipping his hand into her underwear and tracing two fingers along her slit. “I can’t let you back out there all worked up. What if that barman gets ideas?”

“You said that wasn’t working - flirting with the guy behind the bar to - to make you jealous,” she whimpered.

“I’m not jealous. I’m furious. And I’m about to teach you a lesson,” he told her with an arrogant sort of appraising look.

Suddenly, the curtains behind them rustled and Una and Cormac broke apart. Panic jolted through her as Una yanked down the front of her dress and hastily wrenched the fallen strap back up her shoulder.

“Mister McLaggen,” said a low voice from behind them. 

Shit. Cormac spun around and when Una laid eyes on the person who’d interrupted them, they widened in horror.

“Miss… Montague?” Professor Snape’s voice had a tone of surprise as eyes darted between them. 

Fuck. Una’s stomach dropped as her Head of House eyed them suspiciously.

“I trust, Miss Montague, that you are of sound mind and have not been confunded?”

“Yea, sir,” said Una sheepishly. “I mean, I haven’t been confunded.” Although for a split second, she briefly considered lying and saying she was confunded. Let Cormac take the fall.

“Detention. Both of you. After the holidays.”

“Sir, please, I can’t be seen in detention,” said Una. It was a risk arguing with Snape, even though he was her favourite teacher and Head of House. But she had to at least plead her case. She knew it would look bad for him too if the student he’d put forward for Head Girl was in detention.

Snape paused, looking at their dishevelled, embarrassed appearances, his expression unreadable.

“I’ll do both detentions,” said Cormac. “It was my fault -”

“Your chivalry is very touching, Mister McLaggen, however…” said Snape, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I am the one who will decide a suitable punishment.” Una held her breath waiting for the verdict. “You will both receive detention. Separately. Miss Montague, you are permitted to use the excuse that you are doing remedial Defence Against the Dark Arts.”

“Remedial Defence…” whispered Una, horror-struck. She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her lungs. She couldn’t think of anything more mortifying. That is until Snape held open the curtain.

“Now, I expect you to return to your dormitories. Immediately.”

Una was temporarily rendered speechless. If she and Cormac were to emerge from behind a curtain and frogmarched through the party by Snape… “Sir, I can’t -”

“Miss Montague, I have been exceptionally lenient with you - do not test my patience.”

Resigned, Una muttered a quiet “Yes, sir,” and reluctantly followed Snape and Cormac. The party was thinning out, which only made their conspicuous exit feel like a spotlight. She fought the urge to hide her face, instead lifting her chin with feigned confidence.

“Nice one, McLaggen,” congratulated Marcus Belby, sticking out his fist as they passed. Cormac at least had the decency to ignore him. Or perhaps he knew reciprocating would land him another few weeks of detention.

Una saw Ginny Weasley and Hermione Granger huddled together near the doorway as she continued to follow Snape and Cormac.

“I told you he was vile,” said Hermione quietly.

“Yeah, well I didn’t think he’d sink that low,” said Ginny.

Una slowed her pace, just enough to let Snape and Cormac exit the room ahead of her. This was her chance. Her chance to set off her plan for revenge and provoke Ginny Weasley into attacking her. 

“Sorry about your boyfriend…” Una lowered her voice to a barely audible whisper so that only Ginny and Hermione could hear. Then she said a word that she’d never said before. “...Mudblood.”

Hermione’s jaw dropped in shock but Ginny’s eyes narrowed furiously.

“How dare you!” exclaimed Ginny, drawing her wand. A jet of purple light flew towards Una - she made to duck but twisted her ankle in her high stilettos and fell as the bat bogey hex flew over her head and hit Marcus Belby directly in the face, causing pandemonium as everyone dodged the effects of the spell.

“Goodness gracious” exclaimed Slughorn, flapping his arms in panic.

Snape whirled back into the room, quickly followed by Cormac to find Una on the floor, Ginny standing over her with her wand raised and Hermione tugging on Ginny’s arm trying to pull her back. With a lazy flick of his wand, Snape disarmed Ginny and caught her wand in the air with his other hand.

“Sir, I tried to warn you,” said Una, tears welling in her eyes as Cormac helped her to her feet. “She’s jealous, Cormac, and she got her friend to attack me.”

“That is not what happened!” protested Ginny. “She called Hermione a -”

“Oh, spare me the thrilling details of your personal lives,” said Snape, rolling his eyes and handing Ginny her wand back. “Weasley, detention. Granger, ten points from Gryffindor. You two - follow me.”

“Yes, sir,” sniffed Una as she looked down and rubbed her elbow where she had fallen and grazed it. As Cormac and Snape left the room she turned back and looked at Ginny and Hermione, giving them the tiniest smirk as she left.

This was all working out perfectly.

#freddie stroma #cormac mclaggen #slytherin #slytherin fanfiction #harry potter fanfic #harry potter fanfiction #cormac mclaggen x original female character #cormac mclaggen fanfic #slytherin aesthetic #hogwarts au

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Winkfield Twyman Jr.

Published: Dec 27, 2023

I have a tender spot in my heart for race pioneers. My spirits were lifted when L. Douglas Wilder was sworn in as the first Black American governor of a U.S. state—the state of Virginia, of which I am a native son. My mom was dying of cancer at the time, but she wanted me to witness Black History in the making. So on that cold January day in 1990, I left her bedside and bore witness to the coming of a better time in Virginia.

Similarly, on the night of November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the first Black President of the United States of America, I joined family and friends to run into the darkness of the San Diego night, yelling and screaming, whooping and hollering. It was a sacred moment in our American history to be always cherished and never forgotten. That the American electorate would elect a Black person to the highest office in the land was something our grandparents and our grandparents' grandparents could only dream of.

I considered the project of race in America to be finished that November night in San Diego. The election of a Black U.S. president broke the psychological barrier in our minds. There is no higher office than President of the United States of America—in the entire world. For me, the questions of race were all answered. I was done with race.

But too many Americans can't seem to quit race. Fifteen years after President Barack Obama's triumph, some feel it noteworthy to remark that Claudine Gay is the first Black President of Harvard University. Worse, in the face of numerous mounting scandals, many are defending Gay by claiming that the attacks against her are racial in nature.

They are not. They are all well deserved.

The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against Harvard rules in certain contexts. She also failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israel in real time on October 7, another reason she should resign. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism. And did I mention Gay has published no books—an unprecedented feat for a Harvard President, unless one travels back in time to the year 1773?

And yet, many are coming to her defense. Having finally got their wish of a Black president of Harvard, Harvard seems unwilling to let her go. The racial wagons have circled around Gay, with President of the NAACP alleging that White Supremacy is afoot and Morehouse President David Thomas claiming in a Forbes interview that Gay is a scholar at the "top of her profession... as qualified as any President Harvard has ever had."

This is not only misguided, but deeply ironic. Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?

As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.

What was Professor Sullivan's offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty.

You may excuse this heartless termination as a one-off. You would be wrong. Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.

Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer's research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay's crusade of discharge but Fryer's lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.

No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard. Even if you don't agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the "first Black" defense.

W. F. Twyman, Jr., Class of 1986 Harvard Law School, is a former law professor. He is also co-author of Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America published by Pitchstone Publishing.

==

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Claudine Gay is as corrupt as they come.

#Winkfield Twyman Jr. #Claudine Gay #Harvard University #Harvard #Claudine Gay is corrupt #Roland Fryer #academic corruption #diversity hire #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity #equity #inclusion #plagiarism #corruption #religion is a mental illness

[turanga4]

"Death wasn’t the thing that should make someone a hero."

Short fic for the most excellent @harrypocter winter sun drabble fest: Dean Thomas Supremacy, yo.

A bit of his experience during the year of Deathly Hallows.

#dean thomas #harry potter fan fiction #harry pocter winter drabble fest

[ao3feed-snape]

Daylight

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/YrW9Reb

by Jahmana

Hogwarts enemies to lovers AU where Harry and Hermione spend their years at Hogwarts as rivals rather than friends. Unwarranted preconceptions sparks a deep rivalry and deep-rooted hatred between the two, but as situations force them together, maybe they’ll come to realize that they have more in common than they previously thought.

Words: 1844, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M

Characters: Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Ginny Weasley, Ron Weasley, Cormac McLaggen, Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, Severus Snape, Horace Slughorn, Draco Malfoy, Crookshanks (Harry Potter), Hedwig (Harry Potter), Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Lavender Brown, Dean Thomas

Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter

Additional Tags: Enemies to Lovers, Slow Burn, Banter, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, James Potter & Lily Evans Potter Live, Blood supremacy, Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Pureblood Politics (Harry Potter), Mental Health Issues, Miscommunication, Denial of Feelings, Feelings Realization, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Oblivious Hermione Granger

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/YrW9Reb

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #Severus Snape

[huntingrays]

so, i remembered seeing a post that said that deamus is the one ship the harry potter fandom can agree on and i wanted to see how true that was

so i did ✨ math ✨

i went onto ao3, took the top ten ships for a few characters, and put them into a pie chart, and looked at the results

and here they are

first, harry

draco

ginny

luna

ron

blaise

oliver

charlie

and now

dean

and seamus

wowza

anyway, deamus supremacy, love the boys

also finally interesting math

#harry potter #hogwarts #hp #harry potter ships #seamus finnigan #dean thomas #deamus #deamus supremacy #also gonna include top ships incase those shippers wanna see the stats :) #drarry #hinny #linny #romione #blinny ??? #idk #sure #blinny #perciver #charry ??? #idk ship names #aaaaaaa #finally i have achieved the math skill #why did this take two hours #sobs #but this was (kinda) fun

[thespeedyreader]

Black Lives Matter: A (By No Means Complete) Reading List

“Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are a reflection. Books change your mind.” - Toni Morrison

It has always been, and always will be, vital to educate ourselves on the world around us. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, I hope that this blog can become a platform for sharing resources on black history and literature, in a conscious effort to educate both ourselves and those around us. It is our duty to continue to amplify the voices of people of colour, because it is through education that we can make lasting changes in the world.

Here you will find a list of books and essays by authors of colour, and which speak about the experiences of people of colour everywhere. By committing to read even one of these books, you are expanding your consciousness of the lives around you, and giving people of colour a voice.

(Please reblog with your own book recommendations - keep the chain going!)

Classic Fiction

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Another Country - James Baldwin

Go Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin

The Colour Purple - Alice Walker

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Kindred - Octavia E. Butler

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon

Small Island - Andrew Levy

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Contemporary Fiction

Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo

An Orchestra of Minorities - Chigozie Obioma

White Teeth - Zadie Smith

Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson

An American Marriage - Tayari Jones

Queenie - Candice Carty-Williams

A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James

Black Leopard Red Wolf - Marlon James

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

Sorry To Disrupt the Peace - Patty Yumi Cottrell

Freshwater - Akwaeke Emezi

The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin

My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours - Helen Oyeyemi

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead

The Girl With the Louding Voice - Abi Daré

We Cast a Shadow - Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Washington Black - Esi Edugyan

The Black Flamingo - Dean Atta

Just Mercy - Bryan Stevenson 

The Icarus Girl - Helen Oyeyemi 

Poetry, Theatre and Graphic Novels

A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry

Citizen: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine

Night Sky With Exit Wounds - Ocean Vuong

I Am Alfonso Jones - Tony Medina, illustrated by Stacey Robinson & John Jennings

Your Black Friend and Other Strangers - Ben Passmore

Say Her Name - Zetta Elliot, illustrated by Loveis Wise

Silencer - Marcus Wicker

Don’t Call Us Dead - Danez Smith

How ro Be Drawn - Terrence Hayes

The Black Unicorn - Audre Lorde

Coal - Audre Lorde

Passion - June Jordan

Children’s/YA Fiction

Children of Blood and Bone - Tomi Adeyemi

The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas

Akata Witch - Nnedi Okorafor

Binti - Nnedi Okorafor

You Should See Me in a Crown - Leah Johnson

With the Fire on High - Elizabeth Acevedo

Refugee Boy - Benjamin Zephaniah

Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X - Ilyasah Shabazz

Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness - Anastasia Higginbotham

A Is for Activist - Innosanto Nagara

New Kid - Jerry Craft

This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work - Tiffany Jewell

Non-Fiction and Autobiography

The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy - Lani Guiner

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World - Layla F Saad

Don’t Touch My Hair - Emma Dabiri

Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging - Afua Hirsch

The Good Immigrant - Nikesh Shukla

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge (available for free on Yorsearch)

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander (available for free on Yorsearch)

Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde

So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism - Robin DiAngelo

Divided Sisters: Bridging the Gap Between Black Women and White Women - Midge Wilson & Kathy Russell

They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement - Wesley Lowery

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America - James Foreman Jr.

The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir - Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower - Brittney Cooper

Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race - Debby Irving

The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy - Andrea Flynn, Susan R. Holmberg, Dorian T. Warren, & Felicia J. Wong

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race - Beverly Daniel Tatum

How to Be Anti-Racist - Ibrahim X. Kendi

#black lives matter #blm #books #booklr #bookblr #book #reading #reading list #education #justice #change #thespeedyreader #study #studyblr

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

Stream of Consciousness: Gender  by V

“It's about men preserving the power imbalance.”

Comment by Mancheeze  on “Thomas Mulcair & the NDP respond to open letter about Bill C-36”  by Meghan Murphy - Feminist Current

“All oppressed people must be controlled. Since open force and economic coercion are practical only part of the time, ideology--that is, internalized oppression, the voice in the head--is brought in to fill the gap.”

Joanna Russ, “Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement” - feminist reprise

“What those in power ‘like’ to see are the characteristics of willing slaves.”

Dumby, “Blackface & Drag” - A FreudianNightmare

“The game is rigged against us — it’s designed to control us.”

 Jindi Mehat, Let yourself go - Feminist Current

“I think that most people are ignorant of the system of male-supremacy, because it’s like how a fish is ignorant of the existence of water. We’re just swimming in it.”

MaryLou Singleton in an interview, “Are we women or are we incubators? An interview with MaryLou Singleton” - Feminist Current 

“our understanding of ‘sex’ is extremely heteronormative”

Meghan Murphy, “Can 'maintenance sex' ever be gender neutral?” - Feminist Current

“Gender is the rulebook of femininity and masculinity.”

Antilla Dean, Trying to understand radfems - Antilla Dean Tumblr

“a synthetic ideology cruelly imposed on sex”

Aoife, Who’s Afraid of Germaine Greer - aoifeschatology

“part of the systematic socialization process that defines what it means to be women and men in our society.”

Laura Kamienski, For Us: Feminism in Defense of Women-only Spaces - kicks4women

 “it is one of patriarchy’s best tools for maintaining inequality and the illusion that inequality between the sexes is natural and inevitable.”

Karen Ingala Smith, “Feminism: Nope, it’s still neither for nor about men” - Karen Ingala Smith

By definition there can be no such thing as “gender equality” because gender is a construct which divides human beings into a hierarchy where men are superior and women are inferior. ... that’s the function it serves in society: to classify human beings into two categories, one which is active, aggressive, empowered, and another which is passive, surrendering and disempowered.

Francois Tremblay, “What the fuck is ‘gender equality’?” - The Prime Directive

“Gender equality is an oxymoron, gender is inequality.”

Karen Ingala Smith, “Feminism: Nope, it’s still neither for nor about men” - Karen Ingala Smith

“From the beginning of patriarchy, every philosophical system has defined women as inferior and marginal.”

Anna Djinn, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner - The Feministahood

“The emotional, sexual and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says ‘It’s a girl.”

Shirley Chisholm

“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.”

Stevie Nicks

“the Feminine Imperative allows of no self-help at all”

Joanna Russ, “Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement” - feminist reprise

 “It’s always supposed to be women who care – who do those labours of love”

 Sarah Ditum, “Expanded bumholes, unexpanded minds” - Paperhouse

“we are confronted, bombarded! with an insidious cultural narrative that assures us that ‘She’ exists for the pleasure of others.”

katedrury, “There are things we can do to help STOP THE VIOLENCE”. - REAL for women 

“We’re so uncomfortable with female power that we fight it on the smallest scales.”

 Monica Potts, “Why Women's Colleges Still Matter in the Age of Trans Activism” - New Republic

“women are socialized through gender to be docile, to put everyone else’s needs first, to not trust ourselves”

MaryLou Singleton in an interview, “Are we women or are we incubators? An interview with MaryLou Singleton” - Feminist Current

“women judge success in women to be the worst sin, women force women to be "unselfish," women would rather be dead than strong, rather helpless than happy.”

Joanna Russ, “Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement” - feminist reprise

“Compliance and obedience became virtues for women while for men, who took charge of all aspects of life, both within and outside of the home, masculinity itself was the virtue.”

 SueVeneer, “Real men. Really?” - hrimfaxi

“If you've been forbidden the use of your own power for your own self, you can give up your power or you can give up your self. If you're effective, you must be so for others but never for yourself (that would be ‘selfish’). If you're allowed to feel and express needs, you must be powerless to do anything about them and can only wait for someone else--a man, an institution, a strong woman--to do it for you.”

Joanna Russ, “Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement” - feminist reprise

“In fairytales, the savior is always male and the distressed is always female.”

Nafiza, “Beauty and The Brave... ~ from Nafiza” - The Book Rat

“Being ‘feminine’ supposedly means hiding behind a man and ‘letting him handle things.”

Comment by sepultura13 on “Part 2: Healing from Abuse Is Unfeminine (So You Must Really Be a Man” by lovinglilystevens  -  loving lily

“There's a phenomena of ‘keeping women down on a pedestal’: you will see a lot of ‘reverence’ for women who fulfill their roles as subservient to males well ...I've never seen that translate into treating women like equals or human beings, especially if she does such "unwomanly" things as protest against abuse.”

C.K.Egbert to Jessica on “A 'war' on the police? How about the war on women and other marginalized groups?” - Feminist Current 

“Men have fought to maintain the status quo and have resisted women’s attempts to correct the imbalance.”

Anna Djinn, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner - The Feministahood

“Women who do not perform femininity correctly themselves, as well as women who dare to suggest that femininity is in and of itself an expression of the hatred of women, face repercussions.”

Dumby, “Blackface & Drag” - A FreudianNightmare

“Femininity is ritualized submission, a set of culturally enforced behaviors created by men to make obvious the division of power in society.”

Jonah Mix (lonesomeyoghurt), Sorry, Dudes: Exclusion from Femininity is Privilege, Not Oppression - Gender Detective

“The reason that femininity is held in contempt is because it was engineered to make females seem contemptible, justifying male dominance.”

Aurora Linnea, “Reclaiming femininity, crippling feminism” - Feminist Current

“It was in men’s interest to keep women in the place they defined for them. Men understood this. Men needed women to believe in their inferiority.”

Anna Djinn, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner - The Feministahood

“Our society runs on self-aggrandizement for men and self-abasement for women”

Joanna Russ, “Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement” - feminist reprise

“Social oppression becomes institutionalized when its enforcement is so of social life that it is not easily identified as oppression and does not require conscious prejudice or overt acts of discrimination.”

Michael Laxer, “Part of the problem: Talking about systemic oppression” - Feminist Current

“The real brilliance of patriarchy is right here: it doesn’t just naturalize oppression, it sexualizes acts of oppression. It eroticizes domination and subordination and then institutionalizes them into masculinity and femininity.”

Lierre Keith, “The Girls and the Grasses” - Radfem Repost

“in patriarchal society, both men and women eroticize hierarchy, ‘variously socially coded as heterosexuality’s male/female, lesbian culture’s butch/femme, and sadomasochism’s top/bottom.’26 The hierarchical dynamics of heterosexuality are the easiest of these to see.”

Freya Brown, “Let’s Talk About ‘Consent’ - Anti-Imperialsim.com

 “how to act like a man neatly maps onto how to act like a dom, and how to act like a woman neatly maps onto how to act like a sub. In this way, heterosexual M/f couples (male dominant, female submissive) wherein the man is a sadist (enjoys giving pain), and the female a masochist (enjoys receiving pain) can easily perform their two roles flawlessly at the same time. This is exemplified by the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey. “

Dev quoted by maymay, “The BDSM Scene is an abusive social institution; let their world burn (they’re doing it already)”- Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

“Men become real men by breaking boundaries—the sexual boundaries of women and children, the cultural and political boundaries of indigenous people, the biological boundaries of rivers and forests, the genetic boundaries of other species, and the physical boundaries of the atom itself. The sadist is rewarded with money and power, but he also gets a sexual thrill from dominating. And the end of the world is a mass circle jerk of autoerotic asphyxiation.”

Lierre Keith, “The Girls and the Grasses” - Radfem Repost

“Studies have found that men get anywhere from 10% to 25% of full erection (on average) from seeing non-sexual violence (Earls and Proulx 1987, Barbaree et al. 1979). While rapists show a higher level of arousal, any man can experience it. So men get some sexual charge from the idea of violence against women. This is not an issue of conscious decision (arousal rarely is), but rather an issue of indoctrination.”

Francois Tremblay, “Male entitlement as a cause of mass violence” -  The Prime Directive

“Male dominance is not ‘society,’ and male violence is not ‘human nature.”

Carolyn Gage, ‘Bowling for Columbine-Michael Moore Off-Target’

“So fuck this bullshit BDSM rhetoric”

Meghan Murphy, “The media keeps referring to Ghomeshi's abuse as 'non-consensual' like that's a thing” - Feminist Current 

“One could also argue that patriarchy demands not just "giving into a base nature", but the artificial creation and enforcement of a bad nature to give into”

ThrupennyBit, Nightmare Dystopian Present (Why Lionel Shriver Is Wrong About Rape) Everyday Victim Blaming 

“Threat of male violence alters you whether you want it to or not. Men know this, because we do it to each other. Fear being yourself. Don’t make yourself a target. Women know this very well.”

Miriam Afloat, “Body Acceptance” - Miriam Afloat

“There is a toxic dynamic between male entitlement and masculinity: male entitlement is the carrot, the incentive for men to invest themselves more and more into the gender system, and masculinity is the stick, because it provides the threat of ‘not being a real man’.”

Francois Tremblay, “Male entitlement as a cause of mass violence” -  The Prime Directive

“Men, generally speaking, are afraid of other men thinking they are gay.”

Miriam Afloat, “Restroom Risk: a Patriarchal Reversal” - Miriam Afloat

“The purpose of homophobia is to ensure that gay men are bullied into rejecting any sexual expression that undermines male power.”

Christopher N Kendall, “Little Sisters, LEAF and the Sexism That Is Gay Male Pornography: A Gay Male Defends ‘Equality Now”

“the first rule of masculinity is that whatever he is, women are not”  

Andrea Dworkin, ‘Pornography: Men Possessing Women’

There were many behaviors I censored in childhood when I learned they invoked negative reactions in others 

Miriam Afloat, “The Re-Transing of Male Miriam” - Miriam Afloat 

“there have been so many times I have see a man wanting to weep but  instead beat his heart until it was  unconscious”

Nayyirah Waheed

‘As the status of women was so low, there was nothing as bad as being considered feminine or to display what were considered feminine characteristics, such as tenderness and empathy.’

SueVeneer, “Real men. Really?” - hrimfaxi

“Homosocial bonding through misogyny is a well known behaviour ... Misogyny seems to be the safest way for hetero men to come together since gender forbids them normal relationships.”

House Mouse Queen , “Weekend Open Thread” - Mancheeze

“Fighting is a masculine act which proves one’s ‘manhood,”

Miriam Afloat, “Restroom Risk: a Patriarchal Reversal” - Miriam Afloat 

“Recently, an arms manufacturer ran an advertisement showing an AR-15 rifle jutting out with phallic pride beneath the text, “Consider Your Man Card Reissued.” The message underlies a basic truth about what it means to be a man: You are at once inescapably male, yet in danger of losing your manhood. Life as a man is a struggle to earn what you cannot escape.”

Jonah Mix (lonesomeyoghurt), The Body and the Lie – Queer Theory’s False Promise - Gender Detective

“Do you want your son to kick or be kicked? ... It’s not just men feeling terrified of women and girls are encroaching on “their” space. It’s men knowing that letting go of an immoral, unjustifiable dominance puts them at greater risk of those who are still clinging on to it.”

glosswitch, “Male violence is a greater threat to our sons – so why are we so over-protective with daughters?” - New Statesman

“Young men are socialized to understand power over women is an unspoken but real part of this exchange. “

  Ernesto Aguilar, “Of monsters and men” - Feminist Current

“Rape was used as a means by which to humiliate African men, who were powerless to protect their wives, mothers and daughters.”

Monique, “A Big Butt Girl’s Frustration with Big Butts” - JUST ADD COLOR

“In a world in which so many of us are powerless, I came up among men who believed such hallmarks of manhood made us strong. Yet these things never changed our economic and emotional poverty.”

 Ernesto Aguilar, “Of monsters and men” - Feminist Current

“He seems to see himself as somehow feminised and disempowered. The way he seems to deal with this is to seek to control and abuse women – he's empowered by that and it reasserts his idea of masculinity."

Chris Johnson,  “How Adrian Bayley was transformed from cocky and arrogant to a whimpering, emasculated shell of a man” - The Age 

“hyper-sexualisation and objectification of girls on the one hand, and hyper- masculinisation of boys on the other, perpetuate and reinforce each other.”

 Dr Linda Papadopoulos,  Foreward in “Sexualisation of Young People” (Review)

 “Society doesn’t teach us toxic ideas about manhood. It teaches us a toxic idea called manhood”

Jonah Mix (lonesomeyoghurt), “Mass Shooters Don’t Have a ‘Warped View’ of Masculinity - Liberal Man Do” - Gender Detective 

“sustaining an ‘us against them’ attitude.”

Emma-Li Thompson, “Pornography: The Normalization of Violence and Abuse” - AntiPornography.org 

“manhood isn’t in crisis; it is the crisis”

Zach Stafford, “It's time to do away with the concept of 'manhood' altogether” - The Guardian  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/29/time-to-do-away-with-manhood

“The men most likely to enact violence are, I strongly suspect, also the ones most likely to be in fear of having their masculinity questioned.”

Miriam Afloat, “Restroom Risk: a Patriarchal Reversal” - Miriam Afloat

“Masculinity ... depends on reducing other people to objects.”

glosswitch, It's extreme masculinity – not love or despair – that drives a father to kill his children - New Statesman

“Objectification is not natural. Men are socialized to sexualize women's bodies and fetishize women's bodies. All you have to do is look at other cultures. In the west, for example, women's breasts and buttocks are sexualized. In China they used to see women's feet as sexual so they practiced foot-binding. In some cultures women's necks are fetishized. There are cultures in which women's breasts are not sexualized and are seen as just a normal non-sexual part of women's bodies”

 Comment by EEU to David on “Ghomeshi played the role of a feminist ally, but in private he was fully enmeshed in porn culture” by Gail Dines - Feminist Current 

“The association of men with lust is as much an artifact of recent times as the association of girls with pink and boys with blue (less than 100 years ago, this system of gendered color-coding was also reversed). Yet even with all this switching-around, some things have stayed suspiciously the same. When women were sexual, their proper place was in the home as caregivers and mothers. When women became passionless, their proper place was still in the home as caregivers and mothers.”

Alyssa Goldstein, “When Women Wanted Sex Much More Than Men - And how the stereotype flipped”  -  Alternet 

“we are biologically too good, too bad, or too different to do anything other than reproduce and serve men sexually and domestically.”

Andrea Dworkin, “Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea”,  ‘Letters From A Warzone: Writings 1976 - 1989‘

“Every patriarchal society has different tools to subjugate women, and every patriarchal society will go out of its way to pretend its favored method is not only acceptable, but positive. Men who mutilate the breasts of preteen girls in Cameroon justify their abuse by recasting it as a measure of protection against lustful suitors. Men who murder their own daughters for having sex will tell you they do so to protect women’s honor. And men who film women’s abuse for other men’s pleasure proudly announce they’re doing their part to end rape.”

Jonah Mix (lonesomeyoghurt), “Does Porn Cause Rape?’ Is a Stupid, Meaningless Question” - Gender Detective

“Gender is malleable, because it is a pretense.”

augustuscarmichael, “Man celebrates death of Women’s Studies Programs” - Hypotaxis

“we live in a society organized around a hierarchy of the sexes, where males violently subordinate females and oppress us on the basis of our female sex.”

Next Years Girl as quoted in “QotD: ‘Part of that oppression is the construction of femininity” - Anti-Porn Feminists

“That we can so little imagine a world without violence against women is the point. It is the very air we breathe. ...Free from that, we stop. We breathe. We embrace freely.  We are more creative.  We name things confidently.

 “A day of truce – imagining freedom” - Reclaim the Night Perth, Australia

“To be a woman, under patriarchy, is to be a mirror. We are raised to reflect, to efface ourselves and accommodate. We are the surface and material upon which men make themselves, winnowing out our subjectivity in the service of others.”

Jane Clare Jones, ‘You Are Killing Me’: On Hate Speech and Feminist Silencing - Trouble and Strife

Heterosexuality is not, as it appears to be, masculinity-and-femininity in opposition: it is masculinity. Within this masculine heterosexuality, women’s desires and the possibility of female resistance are potentially unruly forces to be disciplined and controlled, if necessary by violence.

‘The Male in the Head :young people, heterosexuality and power’ by Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe, Rachel Thomson  Via  “Sex & Zika: On contraception and the coital imperative” by Meagan Tyler - Feminist Current

“Sexuality for men is conquest of a woman’s body. A woman’s sexuality is something to be ‘taken.” 

Freya Brown, “Let’s Talk About ‘Consent’ - Anti-Imperialism.com 

Women having sex for their own pleasure is rarely portrayed in popular culture, porn or even sex education.

Kasey Edwards, “Teen girls don't need boys to 'protect their character” - Sydney Morning Herald (Daily Life)

To the extent that men are concerned about women’s pleasure, it is because the female orgasm is a man’s ‘trophy,’ a reward for a successful conquering, a validation of masculinity. 

Freya Brown, “Let’s Talk About ‘Consent’ - Anti-Imperialism.com

“A female body remains a thing to use, to own and to look at.  ...In contrast to the female body, the male body is simply allowed to be: to fill the room, legs spread wide, adding its own sounds and scents to the air. ... It expresses an ownership not just of the body, but of the space around it.”

glosswitch, “Why farting is a feminist issue” - New Statesman 

“Moreover, men see women’s submissiveness as ‘sexy,’ while women learn to eroticize male dominance and assertiveness, and to associate their own submission with sexual pleasure. Pornography, nearly ubiquitous and undeniably, overwhelmingly an arena of objectification and dominance ... teaches us all how to ‘fuck’ or ‘be fucked.” 

Freya Brown, “Let’s Talk About ‘Consent’ - Anti-Imperialsim.com

“Women who live in a culture in which they are objectified by others may in turn begin to objectify themselves. This kind of self-objectification may reduce women’s involvement in social activism, according to new research ...Women who were primed to engage in self-objectification showed greater support for the gender status quo and reduced willingness to participate in social action that would challenge gender inequality. ... self-objectification may be part of a wider pattern of behavior that maintains gender inequality.”

“Self-Objectification May Inhibit Women’s Social Activism “- Association for Psychological Science

“It's a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it.”

Yashar Ali A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not "Crazy" - The Huffington Post (HuffPost Women

#https://monkeyspawnskydiam.wixsite.com/lucy-the-love-doll-a/post/stream-of-consciousness-gender

[unwellpodcast]

Content warnings: police violence, racial violence, victims of hate crimes, white supremacy, and police violence.

Read by: Shariba Rivers, Pat King, Alexander Danner, Ryan Schile, Bilal Dardai, Duo Yang, Eli McIlveen, Amelia Bethel, Joshua K. Harris, Michael Turrentine, Kathleen Hoil, Marsha Harman, Ele Matelan, Jeffrey Nils Gardner, and Eleanor Hyde.

Transcript below the cut.

Today is Wednesday, June 10, 2020. There will not be a new episode of Unwell today. Following the example and the words of Black Lives Matter Chicago, we call for an end to the state violence against and criminalization of Black communities through police forces, an unjust legal system, and federal, state, and local political organizations.  

As the artists of HartLife NFP, we call on our fellow art makers in positions of institutional power and privilege to take concrete actions to make your institutions and artistic work explicitly and actively anti-racist.  

We affirm our commitment to do the same here. We will interrogate ourselves when we have fallen short of this goal and recommit to do better every time.  

The United States is a country founded on land stolen from indigenous peoples, built with the stolen labor and lives of enslaved Black people. We call especially on White listeners to reckon with this fact, today and every day.    

The following list is both incomplete and horrifyingly long. These people were victims of hate crimes, police officers and of an unjust, white supremacist system.

We say their names and we remember their lives. Tamir Rice Samuel Dubose Walter Scott Jordan Davis Tony McDade Dion Johnson Dante Parker Michelle Cusseax Laquan McDonald Richard Perkins Nathaniel Harris Pickett Benni Lee Tignor Miguel Espinal Michael Noel Kevin Mathews Bettie Jones Quintonio Legrier Keith Childress Jr Janet Wilson Randy Nelson Antronie Scott George Mann John Crawford III Ezell Ford Aaron Bailey Ronell Foster Stephon Clark Antwon Rose II Tanisha Anderson Alton Sterling Philando Castile Botham Jean Pamela Turner Akai Gurley Rumain Brisbon Trayvon Martin Jerame Reid Mathew Ajibade Frank Smart Alexia Christian Brendon Glenn Victor Manuel Larosa Jonathan Sanders Freddie Blue Joseph Mann Salvado Ellswood Albert Joseph Davis Darrius Steward Billy Ray Davis Michael Sabbie Brian Keith Day Christian Taylor Troy Robinson Natahsa McKenna Tony Robinson Anthony Hill Mya Hall Phillip White Eric Harris Walter Scott William Chapman II Asshams Pharoah Manley Felix Kumi Keith Harrison McLeod Junior Prosper LaMontez Jones Patterson Brown Dominic Hutchinson Anthony Ashford Alonzo Smith Tyree Crawford India Kager La’Vante Biggs Michael Lee Marshall Jamar Clark Wendell Celestine David Joseph Calin Roquemore Dyzhawn Perkins Christopher Davis Marco Loud Peter Gaines Torrey Robinson Darius Robinson Kevin Hicks Mary Truxillo Demarcus Semer Willie Tillman Terrill Thomas Sylville Smith Michael Brown Eric Garner Sandra Bland Fredie Gray Terrence Crutcher Paul O’Neal Alteria Woods Jordan Edwards Dominique Clayton Christopher Whitfield Christopher McCorvey Eric Reason Michael Lorenzo Dean Breonna Taylor Atatiana Jefferson Ahmaud Arbery Doug Lewis George Floyd Manuel Ellis Maurice Gordon

Black Lives Matter.

#unwell #podcast blackout

[theotherjourney7]

“I asked former lord chief justice John Thomas about alleged judicial activism

He said the true fault lies with parliamentary process

“Attacking judges for activism is quite often concealment, or an excuse for not allowing proper parliamentary scrutiny”

In some areas, “work by judges has been encouraged, or has arisen, because of… the failure of the government to permit much of their work to be subjected to proper scrutiny,” he told me

“There has been a tendency for judges to look much more at subordinate legislation, whether it’s compliant with the powers granted to the government by parliament”

But “if parliament had been given the opportunity to look at it properly, these problems wouldn’t arise”

But going forwards, “If you look at any of the modern bills dealing with our exit from the EU, most of them are frameworks, and everything important will be done in delegated legislation”

That means the issues “will grow much worse”

While railing against legal decisions may be “convenient,” the government would do better to look at its “own position [and] the way in which legislation, particularly delegated legislation, is made”

He stressed: “It’s not parliament’s fault, because I do think an awful lot of people would like to have more scrutiny, but no one will amend the processes to allow this to happen”

Against this backdrop, any effort “to curtail any attempts by the judges” to remedy problems “is, to my mind, trying to promote the supremacy of the executive and make it unaccountable”

The government meanwhile is in the process of examining how the courts operate. “As if we haven’t got enough to be dealing with,” said Thomas.

“In my view at the moment it’s completely the wrong time””-Alex Dean

#life #real life #uk #politics #uk politics #uk government #conservative #boris johnson #human rights #prime minister #member of parliament #the justice system #the rule of law #uk parliament #parliament #important #for reference #english law #uk judge #opinion #barrister #lawyers #human rights lawyer #immigration lawyers #criminal law #international law

[arcticdementor]

Thread: I was sent this and felt the need to thread it here on Twitter. It will be long. It is purported to be an anonymous, open letter from a professor at UK Berkeley in the History Department. The only comment I will make is to say it is worth every moment of the read.

C Berkeley History Professor's Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy

Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders.

Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

…

A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.

Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates' undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department's apparent desire to shoulder the 'white man's burden' and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority myth is white supremacist". "Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

…

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders.

Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald's and Wal-Mart.

For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

…

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

…

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach.

He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn't affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating.

No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

#twitter thread #threadreader #anonymous letter #berkeley #read the whole thing

[leviathangourmet]

Dear profs X, Y, Z,

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

A counter-narrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews.

None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. No discussion is permitted for non-black victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of non-black violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd.

For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

The claim that black interracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship. Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors. And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise.

Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic.

I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end. I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.

#black lives matter #BLM #racism #social justice

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

Was Mary Stuart as tolerant with religious disidents as Elizabeth? Would you call Elizabeth a tolerant Queen in the subject of religion?

I will reply only to your second question because I know very little about Mary Stuart’s religious policy. You should ask someone else about her.

I think Elizabeth was fairly tolerant towards Catholics during the first decade of her reign.

“It would have beeneasier to stir resistance if Elizabeth had only martyred a fewleading Catholics. But there was no early Elizabethan equivalent ofSt Thomas More. Although some would have willingly died for thefaith, the Queen was not willing to give them that honour.

This left theirapologists frustrated, for the resistance needed role models.Nicholas Sander, in exile for his faith, recognized this, as JohnFoxe had. Foxe, however, had the advantage of dead martyrs; Sanderhad to rest content with a martyrology of men who lost theirpositions and were imprisoned. For example, Reynolds, the CatholicDean of Exeter, told Sander that Elizabeth had been sent by God as anact of divine providence, a punishment for worldliness under Mary.Mary had to die because her presence had become prejudicial to thefaithful, who were running riot. “Then at length,” Dean Reynoldssaid, “comes Elizabeth, not destined to benefit herself but usonly. For it is the privilege of the Church of God to grow by meansof persecution.” Believing that by dying for the faith he could dopenance for having abjured the Pope in the time of Henry VIII, hegave his goods to poor and went to London to “be available toconfess the faith”. Summoned before the Ecclesiastical Commissionhe made so glorious confession he lost his benefices and wasimprisoned. Then he died disappointingly, of natural causes.

Not even EdmundBonner, Mary’s bishop of London and a man vehemently hated byProtestants, was martyred, despite Sander’s valid assertion that hewas nearest to martyrdom. Bonner had been so zealous in hunting andburning heretics that even some Catholics were disturbed by hisbelief that to kill one heretic was to save many lives. At his trialhe was thanked, with deep irony, for having done so much to promotethe Protestant cause. And yet he, too, would die of natural causes.

Elizabeth, who seemsto have been the architect of this policy of toleration, hadsucceeded in stunning the Catholics into acquiescence. They were asconfused as everyone else about her true religion. Though they werecertain she was not a Catholic, some thought that she could bebrought to be one by a husband, a political deal or the sheerincivility of the Protestants. Domestic Catholics and Catholicdiplomats maintained this hope, as did the Roman curia.

Their hopes werestrengthened by her amazing refusal to persecute them as they hadevery right to expect. Although the Act of Supremacy and its oathcould be used to find and punish Catholics, she did not allow it tobe widely administered, and those people who did refuse to take itwere treated with a gentleness (..)

This was afrustration to her Protestant subjects, many of whom wanted blood,but it kept much of the country in peace.“

Norman Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s

I respect Elizabeth greatly for this effort, especially since there was much pressure on her to exact revenge for Marian persecutions. She refused to do so and was criticized for her leniency.

Elizabethan religious settlement had a compromise character, it was designed the way to make her church acceptable to as broad number of people as possible. Elizabeth didn’t want to pry into the private beliefs of her subjects - hence her saying of not to making windows into men’s hearts -, and didn’t attempt to root out Catholics, she rather hoped that Catholicism in England will die in natural death. But she expected her subjects both Catholics and Protestants to conform to her established compromise, to her laws, if only outwardly, whatever opinions they may have held in privacy.

However, there was a fundamental problem in Elizabeth’s relations with Catholics. In the eyes of the Catholic church (because it never acknowledged her parents’ marriage) Elizabeth was illegitimate and consequently didn’t have rights to rule. It’s a massively important moment because in theory to be a Catholic potentially amounted to deny Elizabeth’s power and her government. Elizabeth’s fellow rulers didn’t have this problem, and it grew acute after the Northern rebellion when in 1570 the pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth thus absolving her catholic subjects from allegiance to her and legalized her deposition. This was a turning point in Elizabeth’s policy towards Catholics after which new anti-catholic legislation was enacted.

“In April 1570 the pope had issued the bull excommunicating Elizabeth, depriving her of “her pretended title to the throne”, absolving all oaths sworn to her and ordering the faithful to disobey her orders and laws. The original intention had been to help the rebel northern earls, but the bull came too late. To make matters worse, the following year Pius V and Spain joined in a plot to depose Elizabeth, which marginally involved Mary Queen of Scots and the duke of Norfolk (who was executed). Elizabeth still clung to the hope that a church of conformists would emerge over time and blocked legislation aimed at putting further pressure on the indigenous Catholic community, but she did except measures against the pope. Expressing support for the papal bull or saying that the queen was a schismatic or a heretic was declared high treason. So too was bringing papal material into the country or attempting to convert anyone to Rome; importing Catholic artefacts such as rosaries was made a lesser offence. As for exiles, any who did not return within six months were to lose their property. The hostile reaction in England to the pope’s action meant that although the missionary priests arrived claiming that their purpose was exclusively spiritual, the crown, understandably and justifiably, saw them as traitors determined to set up a fifth column. Increasingly severe penal laws were passed against them and against laity who gave them assistance  and soon against the whole recusant community. In 1577 the first missionary priest was executed. The situation became even worse in 1580 when Jesuits arrived, the counter-reformation corps d’elite swearing absolute and direct obedience to the pope. In all some 124 Catholic clerics were put to death by Elizabeth, plus perhaps 59 lay folk.”

Eric Ives, The Reformation Experience: Living Through the Turbulent 16th Century

It’s also claimed that there was little of persecution in the 1570s, and the most intense phase of it (of missionary priests and their supporters) was during the second half of the 1580s and the first half of the 1590s which leads me to think that it was influenced by outbreak of the war with Spain.

Besides, as time was going by there emerged a clash within Elizabeth’s church itself between defenders of the established order and the hotter sort of Calvinists who became known as puritans and who urged for further church reform. The former won (because they had Elizabeth’s support) and the latter had to conform, in separate occasions the acts against Catholics were applied to them.

There is a very good article here. It’s about the Gunpowder Plot and Catholics in early Jacobean England but it goes back and very well covers Elizabeth’s dilemmas regarding Catholics.

#ask #Elizabeth I #Norman Jones #Eric Ives #sorry for my grammar

[ao3feed-dramione]

The Awakening

read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2TDtKmT

by Johnstonr3

In order to eradicate Pureblood supremacy, the Ministry of Magic has decided to send all seventh and eighth year students to learn how to live in the Muggle World. Each student who has connections in the Muggle World will be assigned a group of students to take care of and teach about Muggle living.

What happens when Hermione get's chosen to mentor three Slytherin's who have made her life hell? Will they learn to put aside their differences, or will they continue torment one another? Will they be able to work together with new threats on the horizon?

Follow Draco Malfoy, Blaise Zabini and Theo Nott as they learn that no matter where you come from; every one bleeds the same red.

Words: 3756, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Categories: Multi

Characters: Harry Potter, Luna Lovegood, Ron Weasley, Ginny Weasley, Dean Thomas, Seamus Finnigan, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Pansy Parkinson, Astoria Greengrass, Neville Longbottom, Daphne Greengrass

Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy/Theodore Nott/Blaise Zabini, Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger/Blaise Zabini, Hermione Granger/Theodore Nott

Additional Tags: Cinnamon Roll Harry Potter, Good Blaise Zabini, Good Draco Malfoy, Good Theo Nott, Muggle Life, The Ministry of Magic (Harry Potter) is Terrible, Post-War, Ron Weasley Bashing, Ginny Weasley Bashing, Original Character(s), Out of Character, Hermione and Dean are Bros, Eventual Smut, Light Angst

read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2TDtKmT

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #dramione #draco x hermione #dramione fanfic

[obsidianarchives]

The Oracle: Victory Day Tribute Issue

From the desk of Parvati Patil:

It’s been 20 years since the Battle of Hogwarts, a battle in which I fought Voldemort’s forces along with my sister, best friend, and so many classmates. Unbidden memories of this day return to me nearly as often as the good times that I shared with my Hogwarts mates.

Several people lost their lives on 2nd May, 1998, to ensure the world was free from Wizard supremacy. In this special edition of The Oracle, we pay tribute to the Fallen Fifty in gratitude for their sacrifice and service to humanity. The very first person we pay tribute to has a very personal and sentimental tie to me as my closest friend, Lavender Brown.

From the first time I sat myself at the Gryffindor table, Lavender and I were fast friends. We shared a love for all things fashion, mystic, and witch power. In her, I found a great confidant, private dance party partner, and sharer of dreams. Without her encouragement and dedication, I never would’ve gotten our secret international student paper, Seer Circle, off the ground nor learned what it takes to run a major publication. It is thanks to her that The Oracle exists and our mission to inform an audience shaped by the Wizarding Wars persists.

Thank you Lavender, I love you from the orb and back.

In the creation of this tribute issue, we asked that in addition to our regular English The Oracle correspondents, Angelina Johnson, Ginny Weasley, Luna Lovegood, and Padma Patil, that those who were close to those lost in the Second Wizarding War pay tribute to their fallen as well. Our hope is that every reader not only recognizes each person lost but also feels the love that they have shared with the world.

Public memory is a victory. Thank you for paying tribute with us.

Parvati Patil

Editor-in-Chief

A Tribute to: Lavender Brown     pg. 9

by Parvati Patil

A Tribute to: Florean Fortescue  pg. 17

by Angelina Johnson

A Tribute to: Fred Weasley          pg. 20

by Ginny Weasley

A Tribute to: Alastor Moody        pg. 29

by Luna Lovegood

A Tribute to: Bathilda Bagshot    pg. 33

by Padma Patil

*Tributes by Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Dean Thomas, and others continued on page 58*

#Victory Day #Accio Books #The Oracle #Battle of Hogwarts

[angielaw]

Harry Potter is worse than you thought.

Everyone knows that J. K. Rowling is racist, sexist, homophobe and transphobe, etc. But when you actually read the books, you can notice some really messed up stuff. Harry Potter's writer, J. K. Rowling, obviously puts various racist, transphobic and insensitive views in her books. Trigger warning.

One such example is the goblins being an allegory to jews:

"I was thinking of writing a book about how difficult it would be if you were born with special powers but had no idea who your parents were or where you came from," she said in an interview with The Guardian. "That then led me into writing about the war between good and evil." She added that the goblins are based on anti-Semitic stereotypes, saying they have "a small goatee beard and big noses". But she is also aware of the irony in the fact that the creatures are Jewish. "Goblins are not just anti-semitic, they're quite clearly based on the stereotype of Jews as people who don't wash properly and haven't cut their fingernails for years, so they look like they've got terrible skin diseases," she told BBC Radio 4 in 2012. "They're very much based on that kind of image... I thought 'Well, what if they were actually Jews?'"

Rowling has never publicly made a statement regarding her use of white privilege as a metaphor to describe Voldemort's magical supremacy over Muggles.

To conclude, the author of Harry Potter is obviously a racist and a transphobe and should be ashamed of herself.

***

One final example of the racism and transphobia in the books is the portrayal of Hermione Granger as a lesbian. The word "gay" is used frequently throughout the series by characters which usually describes something good or positive. However, when it comes to describing Hermione Granger, the word is always negative.

"What's this? 'The gay old days'?" asked Ron, looking at the poster.

"'The gay old days!'" Hermione mimicked him loudly, rolling her eyes. "'They're so gay! They're so gay!' Seriously, Harry, why do you listen to the twins? They're always trying to make themselves sound clever…"

Hermione is constantly referred to as 'the gay one.' This could possibly be an attempt to give her character more depth. But instead, it makes her seem like a character that only exists to show how 'evil' Voldemort is.

racism, transphobia, homophobia

The second example of racism and transphobia in the books is the portrayal of Hagrid as a racist. The way he treats students of colour is another example of white privilege. It's worth noting that Hagrid was half-giant; yet, his racism towards giants was never commented upon by any of the other characters.

"There's nothing wrong with them, Professor, they're great kids!" said Hagrid, looking round at the few remaining black and brown faces. "It's just that some of us are better than others, that's all," he added, grinning broadly.

As well as this, Hagrid's constant use of the n-word proves his racial prejudice against anyone outside of the 'white norm'. In one scene, Harry overhears Hagrid telling Dean Thomas that he hates wizards who are not pureblood.

"You know what I hate most of all?" said Hagrid suddenly. "Wizards who aren't pure blood. You think I'm prejudiced because I'm a half-giant? Well, maybe I am a bit, but I don't care. If you weren't my best mate, Harry wouldn't be here today — he'd probably be dead by now, or worse, be mixed up with those Mudbloods. He ought to be grateful I saved his life, instead of spouting off at me about blood purity. Maybe he thinks I'm a little too fond of them, maybe I am a bit, but it's not my fault he's a Mudblood."

Hagrid's constant use of the n-word is another example of his ingrained racism. His hatred of non-whites is revealed when he explains to Harry that if they were to find out that he was dating a mudblood, they would kill her.

This is a clear example of Hagrid's toxic masculinity. His fear of being labelled homophobic is also apparent when he tells Harry that his mother was a Mudblood, and that he is scared that someone might discover that he is related to a 'mudblood'.

racism, transphobia, homophobia, toxic masculinity

Many readers of the books will already know that Hagrid is a violent bully. However, we can see that his violence is entirely directed against Muggles, and not against other wizards. One example is the following quote:

"Oh yes, that was an accident, I'm sorry," said Hagrid, apologetically. "But sometimes accidents happen, especially when you're dealing with wild animals. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed before I get nightmares."

The problem with this line is that it shows that Hagrid does not realise that what he did was wrong. He doesn't understand that he has assaulted his own students, and he doesn't seem to care.

This type of behaviour is unfortunately reflective of many people in positions of power. Although there are numerous examples of Hagrid's violence, it is important to note that these are not isolated instances. Throughout the story, we see Hagrid using his authority as a teacher to intimidate students into complying with his demands.

In the sixth book, Hagrid is shown to be physically abusive towards a student who refuses to comply with his instructions.

"Come on, hurry up, then, or you'll be late for your potions lesson!" he snapped.

Harry and Ron glanced at each other nervously, waiting to see whether Hagrid had noticed their lapse. Hagrid turned round to glare at them, and Harry saw he was holding a large wooden spoon in his hand. It was a kitchen implement and looked very heavy.

"I've told you both before, I don't want to hear any more of this nonsense!" he roared.

As punishment, Hagrid takes away Dobby's freedom and locks him up in his cupboard. Later on, the two friends witness Hagrid calling out to Dobby, who is hiding in the Forbidden Forest.

"Dobby!" Hagrid shouted. "Don't tell me you're still here, boy! I told you to leave me alone!"

When Dobby comes to ask for help, Hagrid threatens him with the same wooden spoon that he used to punish Harry earlier on in the book.

"No, no, don't come near me, or I'll really give you something to cry about!" he shouted, his eyes flashing dangerously.

He took a step forward and swung the spoon down hard on Dobby's shoulder.

"Ow!" squealed Dobby, jumping back.

Hagrid smiled nastily.

"Go away, Dobby — go home!"

Later on in the book, Dumbledore makes a comment about Hagrid's treatment of Dobby.

"Why do you keep such company?" asked Dumbledore calmly. "You treat that house-elf terribly, Hagrid. And yet he seems so loyal to you. Is it because he sees you as a father figure, perhaps?"

Hagrid stared at Dumbledore, his face twisted with rage. Then, without another word, he stalked off to join Professor Sprout.

This quote reveals that Dumbledore knows that Hagrid abuses his power over Dobby.

It is also important to note that Hagrid's attitude toward Dobby is far from uncommon. The majority of the wizarding world views house-elves as slaves, and they are treated as such.

In a similar vein, Hagrid's bullying of students is rarely punished. In fact, it is only when he bullies Harry that Dumbledore even reprimands him.

However, this does not mean that Hagrid's abuse of power is acceptable. It is crucial to remember that he uses his position as headmaster to manipulate students into doing things they would never have done otherwise.

"Go on, then. Eat the worm."

"No!" said Harry, sitting upright. "That's disgusting!"

"Eat it up, then," said Hagrid, unperturbed. "Won't harm you, I promise. You'll feel much better after it."

"I won't!" said Harry furiously.

"Yes, you will," said Hagrid firmly. "Now eat it up, or I'll give you something to really cry about!"

His tone of voice left no doubt that Hagrid meant just that, and Harry felt his gorge rise. The thought of eating what Hagrid had obviously been chewing was too revolting to contemplate. He pushed the plate away violently, got up from the table, and ran upstairs.

Hagrid is clearly prejudiced against Muggles. This becomes clear when he refers to them as "giant oafs" and "stupid brutes".

Hagrid is also shown to be racist towards people of colour, particularly Dobby. As we have seen, Hagrid blames Dobby for the death of Mad-Eye Moody and does not believe that he could ever change.

Dobby is not the only victim of Hagrid's prejudice. When Harry and Ron take Dobby to Diagon Alley, he insults an Arab man by yelling "Get out of my shop, you filthy Muggle!"

Hagrid is also shown to be anti-Semitic. He believes that all Jews are evil, and he is convinced that Sirius Black is a spy. Hagrid even goes so far as to burn all of the books in the Hogwarts library that contain information on the Jewish people.

"Them lot were always trouble, those Jews," said Hagrid. "Always scheming, every one of 'em. Always trying to get rich quick. They never did anything useful with their lives. Good riddance, if you ask me. I say kill 'em all and let Allah sort 'em out."

When Harry tells Hagrid that Sirius Black is not a spy, Hagrid loses his temper and throws a jar of spiders at him.

"You can't trust those blokes with anything," Hagrid snarled. "They're all the same, they are. Evil, they are. I should know — I've known plenty of 'em in my time. Black's a spy, mark my words. I wouldn't be surprised if he's in league with Voldemort himself. Ha! That'd finish him off good and proper — the pair of us teaming up."

Hagrid uses some rather violent language to describe the people who follow the Jewish faith.However, he is also prejudiced against his fellow witches and wizards because of their gender. He does not want Hermione to come to Hogwarts, believing that she has a terrible temper and will cause trouble. When Hagrid first meets Lupin, he assumes that he is a Muggle. He later realizes that Lupin is a werewolf, but still calls him a "bloody great hairy Muggle" for most of the book. Hagrid is also prejudiced against people who choose to wear the uniforms of other houses. He throws a hex at Harry when he tries to enter Gryffindor Tower wearing Slytherin robes, and throws another when he enters Hufflepuff Tower after Harry. Finally, Hagrid is prejudiced against people who choose not to attend Hogwarts: he thinks that Harry and Cedric are wasting their time, and criticizes them for "going off to play quidditch like bloody children". Hagrid clearly doesn't approve of the way people dress. And my final point, which is probably less obvious than the others, is that Hagrid is prejudiced against people who are different.

He seems to think that people with pink hair, freckles, and glasses are somehow less of a person. Similarly, he treats Dobby as if he is not fully human, even though he has lived among wizards since he was a baby.

I hope you learned something new today. Please send your questions and comments through the usual channels.

Thank you,

Harry Potter

P.S. If you ever need to contact me, write to the address below. Don't forget to include a return address.

Yours truly,

HARRY POTTER

#harry potter #potterhead #jk rowling #may be triggering #this is serious #hagrid #harry potter series