#maybe... hegemony... bad....

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do the ethnostates inherent in major fantasy ever feel real weird to you? You’ve got elftopia (full of elves, where everyone speaks elf and worships the elf gods), orc-hold (full of orcs and maybe their slaves, where everyone speaks orc and worships the orc gods), and dwarfton (made by the dwarves! for the dwarves!).

You might have some cosmopolitan areas, usually human-dominant, but those are usually rare enough in-setting that they need to be pointed out separately. Is this just based on a misunderstanding of the medieval era, and the assumption that countries were all racially homogenous?

This has been bouncing around my brain the last little while. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it just in my head?

I think what you've noticed is a quirk of derivative fantasy writing, which like a lot of hangups with the genre originates in people trying to crib Tolkien's work without really understanding what he was going for:

Though it contains a lot of detail, Tolkien's world is not grounded. It functions according a narrative logic that changes depending on what work in particular you're focusing on at the time (The Hobbit is a fairytale full of tricks and riddles, Lord of the Rings is a heroic epic, The Silmirilion is a legendary history).

One of the reasons the races are separate is to instill the feeling of wonder in the hobbits as POV characters for the reader, other folk live in far off places and are supposed to feel more legendary than our comparatively mundane friends from the shire. The Movies captured this well where going east in middle earth was like going back in time to a more and more mythologized past.

In real life, people don't stay static for thousands of years, no matter how long their people live. They meet, mingle, war and trade. Empires rise and fall creating shrapnel as they go, cultures adapt to a changing environment. This means that any geographic cross section you make is going to be a collage of different influences where uniformity is a glaring aberration.

What the bad Tolkien knockoffs did was take his image of a mythical world and tried to make it run in a realistic setting. Tolkien can say the subterranean dwarven kingdom of Erebor lasted for a thousand years without having to worry about birthrates or demographic shifts or the logistics of farming in a cave because he's writing the sort of story where those things don't matter. D&D and other properties like it however INSIST that their worlds are grounded and realistic but have to bend over backwards to keep things static and hegemonic.

Likewise contributing to the "ethnostate" feeling is early d&d (backbone of the fantasy genre that it is) being created by a bunch of White Midwestern Americans who were not only coming from a background of fantasy wargaming but were working during the depths of the coldwar. Hard borders and incompatible ideologies, cultural hegemony and intellectual isolation, a conception of the world that focused around antagonism between US and THEM. These were people born in the era of segregation for whom the idea of cultural and racial osmosis was alien, to the point where mingling between different fantasy races produced the "mongrelman" monster, natural pickpockets who combined the worst aspects of all their component parts, unwelcome in good society who were most often found as slaves.

This inability to appreciate cultural exchange is likewise why the central d&d pantheon has a ton of human gods with specific carveouts for other races (eventually supplemented with a bunch of race specific minor gods who are various riffs on the same thing). Rather than being universal ideals, the gods were seen as entities just as tribalistic as their followers.

#dnd meta #history #tolkien

[tiktaalic]

suddenly having secret T*d L*sso fans take over my dash, expressing disappointment that the show created as a spin-off series from a comedy sketch character had a lame ass finale. and from what I can glean. they’re upset at the throughline of unnuanced forgiveness and the idea that real family is more important than found family.

and all I can think about is your post re: bill hader vs divorced man writing a show about a divorced man 🧍‍♂️ so thanks for that bit of context I guess

I’ve heard it’s QUITE bad. I’m really excited. I’ve seen INSANE posts about like the hegemony of nuclear family and capitalism and how no one is willing to interrogate the toxic intersection because it clashes with the values we’re taught by society. About. Him going. Actually maybe I’ll move back to the same country as my young son. I saw a screenshot where beard marries his crazy fucking girlfriend that everyone has been gently encouraging him to break up with for three seasons. I’m so sad that my sleazy streaming site hasn’t uploaded it yet

#ask #anonymous

[lassieposting]

So anyway, things I've been thinking about this morning: Garrus Vakarian probably likes foreign films

Like.

Turians are the Proud Soldier Race Guys. They have an incredibly rigid, collectivist, by-the-book kind of culture, where every single individual is obligated to spend a good chunk of their formative adolescent/young adult years in the military, where Turian Ideals are hammered into them. So they don't seem like they'd have a big media scene glorifying tropes which go against their general cultural values - specifically, in this case, an individual going outside standard procedures to Get Shit Done on their own terms.

And this is a trope that Garrus loves. When we first meet him, he's sick of being the Good Little C-Sec Cop who follows orders and gets swamped with red tape and can't get the bad guy because Procedure Says No. He clearly sees himself as/wants to be the cowboy cop, detective-gone-rogue type, and he's got a pretty romanticised idea of what that would look like in his head. Bless him.

But. He's learned about that trope from somewhere, and I can't really see it being his own people. Especially with a father like Castis, who's so staunchly exactly what's expected from a turian. He seems like the type who'd have strong opinions about what his kids are reading and watching and being influenced by, because while he obviously loves Garrus, he wants him to grow up to fit a certain mould. The Turian version of the wish-fulfilment vigilante flick is the Spectre Movie, but Garrus isn't allowed to watch those, because Castis doesn't approve of Spectres being Outside The Law.

So baby Garrus grows up lowkey feeling stifled by the way society works, and maybe that's a problem with him, so he gets his head down and does his best to be a Good Turian and make his dad proud, and then he gets his discharge papers and goes to work for C-Sec, and suddenly he's living on the Citadel by himself, and he's got free time nobody is telling him to do X or Y with. He's basically moved away from home for the first time - the Citadel is not Turian-controlled, it's a thriving multicultural melting pot with plenty of people living there who don't exactly conform to Turian standards, he's got colleagues with interests he's never even heard of, and he's gonna start seeing new things.

Human superhero films and cop movies with lots of explosions and no paperwork. Small-budget Batarian short films about victorious anti-Hegemony rebellions. Even his own people's Spectre films. Some kid selling drugs in the wards has a Batman comic in his confiscated backpack? Garrus borrows it to browse on his lunch break. Some Salarian ex-STG operative publishes a memoir? Garrus reads it on the shuttle to work. All these people who feel like he does.

Like. Give me Archangel who regularly spouts lines from Batman or X-Men or Krogan Thunder 3 (or whatever the fuck else he's been watching) as part of his Good Guy Victory Speeches, that makes at least one of his multispecies team who Knows That Franchise pull up short and go "Oh my god, you're a nerd."

#mass effect #mass effect headcanons #garrus vakarian

[miyuecakes]

@tianshiisdead help our post is blowing up

tbh the amount of tags ive seen being like "i learned something new" or expressing absolute shock at the normalization of what is essentially chinese raceplay in japanese fetish culture makes me quite happy we've had this discussion publically. because this is a subject that honestly isn't studied well but HAS history:

Desire Sung with a Lisp: Chinese Women Represented in Japanese Popular Songs During Wartime; thesis by Amane Kusai

The Allure of a Woman in Chinese Dress: Representation of the Other in Imperial Japan; chapter by Ikeda Shinobu

Politics, Art & Eroticism: The Female Impersonator as the National Cultural Symbol of Republican China [in the Imperial Japanese Worldview]; chapter by Catherine Vance Yeh

and is just... incredibly normalized, like beyond sexualized caricatures of chinese women in anime/manga. "cheongsam" is a whole category on japanese porno sites. (you can google it!)

but also the lack of awareness on this kind of aggrieves me because for me personally, the only discussion i've seen of intra-east asian fetishization on mainstream sms is like. regarding genshin's sexualization of the kimono or whatnot. it's a fair and valid critique and it is worth criticizing. the hegemony of white supremacy means that even the marginalized can reproduce white supremacist ideas against other marginalized people (it's like women who perpetuate patriarchy against other women). chinese media in general is no stranger to this, especially with it's depictions of inner asians, southeast asians, MENASA, and black folks.

but i would argue that the conversation about how japaneseness specifically is presented in chinese media takes place under a premise that ignores the reality of japan-china modern relations. there's absolutely very little recognition that in the contemporary era, japan is the largest east asian producer of culture. and as a consequence, china's pop culture is therefore heavily influenced by japanese pop culture.

i think it's unfair to accuse chinese media of japanese fetishization without recognizing this fact. unperfect example, but: it's not too different from the the fact that east asian makeup and fashion styles are popular in southeast asia. it would be bad faith to accuse southeast asians of fetishization without recognizing that east asian pop culture dominate a significant part of their media (though this doesn't excuse the fact that many seasian govts have a pretty bad history w their chinese minorities!). the fact this seems to be completely ignored indicates to me something metaphysical; there's a default guilt placed upon china wrt japan in spite of the historical-cultural facts. it's sinophobia ingrained into discursive "common sense".

on the contrary, japan's fetishization of chineseness, in it's current-day iteration, is based on racial hierarchy. maybe you could potentially make an argument that any pre-meiji objectification comes from the same place as mentioned earlier (with china being the historical lingua franca of east asia) ... but as it stands now, the casual sexualization of china comes from the imperial era which sees chinese people as an object to be dominated. if you read the sources i've listed and if you watch japanese imperial movies like Shina no Yoru and find similarities of how the Chinese female lead is portrayed to characters like Chun-Li, Ada Wong, Shampoo, etc. ... the literary legacies of japanese colonialism will reveal itself.

#not art #disk horse #rambling #you may have noticed even wrt the sources i provided that the majority of the authors are japanese. this is not a coincidence either.

[terulakimban]

The “cultural Christianity” stuff is making the rounds again. And what I think a lot of people who object are missing about that designation is that you have to actually leave a culture to not be part of it anymore, and even then, it will still shape a lot of how you first react to things.

I’m American. I have spent, collectively, a grand total of four months (rounded up) outside the US. My parents were born here. My grandparents were born here. I am pretty definitively culturally American, for all that literally no one in my family identifies as “American” before they identify as “Jewish.”

I can say American culture sucks. There’s a lot about it (yes, I know there’s more than one. Yes, they can be quite different. Yes, there can be a great deal of tension between them. No, that doesn’t necessarily make that much difference from the outside. Yes, that is quite relevant to the extended metaphor I’m going for here) that does. What I can’t do is say I’m not actually a part of it. I’m a citizen. I’m surrounded by other Americans at pretty much all times. I’m not emigrating, I’m not making a point of immersing myself in specific local expat communities as a cultural immersion thing. I’m certainly not “from no country.” I definitely don’t have a more objective sense of American culture than someone who isn’t American and is living here reluctantly. I may have a more in-depth sense of it, but there’s no way they don’t have the basics down, because it is fucking everywhere, and they are constantly running into people who are trying to make them assimilate into it (further) in some sort of attempt to help them be normal. And they, unlike me, have a sense of what it looks like in comparison to something else.

Now. Let’s say I decide I hate America and everything it stands for and I don’t want to live here. But my family’s here, and I’ve got positive memories. I don’t have the money to go somewhere else. So rather than actually leave, I develop a deep fixation on another country. Maybe it’s based on a shallow understanding from stereotypes, maybe it’s a genuine respectful interest. But surrounding myself with a bunch of other Americans while we go on about... I dunno, how much we love England and tea does not erase how we’ve spent our whole lives being American, and it certainly doesn’t erase how we’re still living in America. Let’s say I take it a step further. Let’s say I actually emigrate somewhere. There’s two extremes. Either I fully immerse myself in my new country. I learn the language, I participate in the culture, I genuinely try to immerse myself. Or, I feel uncomfortable because things are weird and different and not quite what I’m used to, so I surround myself with a bunch of other American expats, and we spend all of our time talking about America. Maybe we talk about how much we hated it and how awesome we are for leaving it and how much it sucks and how everyone who’s there is terrible. Maybe we talk about the good things. But we’re still centering our existence around America.

But even in the first of those options, where I genuinely try to acculturate, there’s still going to be things that pop up for the rest of my life where those initial few decades of life in the US will shape my expectations. Maybe they’ll be small things “oh right, sales tax is listed on prices here.” Maybe they’ll be big things “excuse me, what just happened in parliament?” But I will always have that American lens with me. Even if I hate it. Even if I found it traumatizing. That’s not a moral judgement on me, it’s just how formative life experiences work. I can become not-American. I can’t become never-American. 

Cultural existence in a religious framework -any religious framework -works the same way, because religion both has and shapes culture. When I bitch about the omnipresence of cultural Christianity, I’m not calling anyone who is culturally Christian bad. I’m complaining about the pervasiveness of Christian hegemony. When I complain about culturally Christian atheists (which I only ever do in the context of specific behaviors by specific people), I’m not saying “these people are terrible and unredeemable,” I’m saying “there is a very clear pattern of people taking the step of saying they dislike Christianity but then trying to enforce Christian hegemony by claiming the parts they like are secular, thereby effectively coming across from an outside perspective as a continuation of the general attempt at forced Christianization.”

If you hated the Christian family you grew up with and everything about them and Christianity but like Christmas and want to celebrate it, that’s fine. Genuinely happy for you you’ve got something you enjoy! Have fun! Nog your eggs! Deck your halls! Call it Festivus and put up a pole instead of a tree! Do an anti-Christmas where you decorate with Halloween decorations in Santa costumes and celebrate with spooky stuff! But that doesn’t make it secular. It makes it you finding the one bright spot you had in darkness and hanging onto it. I sincerely respect that -it’s difficult to do. The thing is, I’m not in that darkness, and you trying to insist everyone have that light of yours comes across as yet another person shining the interrogation light of “why can’t you just be normal like me” in my face.

I don’t want Christmas. I want freedom from it. “Everyone can have Christmas” in response to “I don’t want Christmas” doesn’t come across as a friendly offer to share. It comes across as an aggressive attempt to force assimilation specifically on people who say they’re actively fighting it.

#longpost #Silamy likes to ramble

[yourtongzhihazel]

Wish all the people that go "lol ur communist country just ended up doing market reforms so clearly capitalism is superior after all 😝😝😝" would realize that maybe those reforms were a result of the material conditions of living under capitalist hegemony and that perhaps they would not be necessary if that hegemony were to be abolished

Yeah material conditions are a real kick in the nuts.

But its a double edged sword for them tho :P

If the gains of, for example, the PRC is the result of capitalism, then why can't we have HSR or cheap housing or cheap groceries or cheap healthcare and etc., etc.. On the flip side, if it is communist then badabing-badaboom baby you just owned yourself! Of course, liberals, reactionaries, and other paper tigers will take the incoherent position that the good stuff the PRC does is capitalism and the bad stuff is communism in which case, you reiterate your original position which is that why isn't it that the west has the good, "capitalist" stuff that the PRC does if that stuff is indeed "capitalist" at which point, they usually call you a slur or 'tankie' and then block you

Alternatively, what you will want to do is switch off the safety on your service pistol. then you want to line up the front sight with the rear post then put the target on top of the middle post and then firmly pull the trigger.

#i fucking hate liberals #hazel's press releases

[septembriseur]

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Do you think it’s fair to assume any/all calls about “terrorism” to be red flag imperialist framings? Like, anyone called a terrorist by the us/uk etc can be assumed to be a desperate and angry person protesting the horrors imposed on them? Maybe “any/all” is too generalizing? I’m struggling to make sense of this place and its politics! I first started paying attention as a teenager when Mike brown was killed and I feel like each few years another layer of lies gets pulled back lmao. My instinct is to go find another book to read but there’s literally endless books to read about endless atrocities and I have no money

Well, for starters, on the internet almost all books are free. Definitely jot that down.

There are specific excellent articles and books that have been written about the idea of "the terrorist." Depending on your ability to plow through academic jargon, they may or may not be interesting. Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages is definitely one of the best-known. Sunaina Maira's article "'Good' and 'Bad' Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms" is good. You might be interested in Lauren Wilcox's Bodies of Violence or Purnima Bose's Intervention Narratives. I would also recommend Azadeh Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows, which is about so-called "jihadi brides."

I think that the way the term "terrorist" is mobilized by officials (in other words, who gets identified as a terrorist and who doesn't) is inconsistent and often reflects elite capitalist hegemonies. Actually, another important book to read in order to gain insight into this inconsistency is probably Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

However, I would say that what this inconsistency means is that the term "terrorist" actually just doesn't provide you with any useful information about the person who is being identified in that way. You have to do the research to understand who they are and what the moral judgement of their actions ought to be.

[jhscdood]

i woke up in a Bad Headspace today and imma use by blog to vent about it like it's livejournal circa 2004.

tw for discussion of medical stuff

- I hate xmas. I'm jewish but my dad is not and the pressure to have An Perfect Xmas every year and the disappointment every year just grosses me out now. Not even going to talk about american xtian hegemony but there's some of that in there too.

- Today i began to suspect that the awesome new migraine med that actually stops my weather-induced migraines might also be interfering with the efficiacy of my prediabetes meds. or maybe im wrong and im Just That Fucking Exhausted.

- Spouse spent all last week recovering from a severe medication allergy and hives on 70% of his body. and steroids Do Not Agree with him so it was just. a wild time. terrifying af. stood over him with an EpiPen basically the entire time.

- 3 days before The Hives, i scratched my cornea while pruning bushes and that right there is a pain i do not ever want to revisit. had to go to the optometrist and get The Goo.

- 2 days before Cornea i had my first Botox For Migraine treatment. 31 injections to the face, neck and shoulders. it stung but it was over in like 4 minutes. takes 3 sessions to start kicking in. sessions are 12 weeks apart. so i guess we'll find out in August if it's working.

- day before Botox i had an ENT appointment and he stuck a camera up my nose and then diagnosed me with a weird vocal cord paralysis thing so now i have to go back to speech therapy for the first time in 26 years.

- Week before that, saw my neurologist and she diagnosed me with a weird intermittent lazy eye / motion lag thingamawhatsis so now i have to go to an ophthalmologist AND vision therapy.

- That week I also saw my PCP and explained to her about the intermittent abdominal pain I've been having since like 2021. She took me seriously!!! Which is good!!! But now i am scheduled for baby's first colonoscopy. And i have to keep a food journal, which i HATE because food is STUPID.

- All of the above all happened this month btw. December 1-23.

- My final appt in November was yet another ultrasound of my former left tit because there is an oil cyst at the site of my top surgery and they are VERY SURE it is a benign oil cyst but the rules require them to poke it every few months for 2-3 years.

- Before that I had a 48 hour ambulatory EEG which was the itchiest i have ever been in my LIFE. That same week our basement stairs collapsed and a contractor had to come rebuild them (up! to! code!). That same week i also went to the dentist to get my crown fitted.

- I think my MIL was in the hospital that same week, too. so that's a thing that's been going on the whole time since then.

- I spent most of October deathly ill with food poisoning thst was originally misdiagnosed as viral. I ended up with a CT scan and colitis. and, eventually, cipro. it was the sickest i have ever been in my adult life. i would rather have mono again. i fantasized about those cholera beds with the hole in the center so you didnt have to get up to have your horrid dysentery. nightmare.

- The day before that hit i had ONE golden day where i felt good and had energy. we went to temple and i got glomped by about 10 different people. my 80 year old bestie kept finding me to hug me again. Rabbi hugged me super hard.

- Before that was a root canal, and before that was a tooth infection that took 2 rounds of antibiotics to kill, and before that was the original cavity filling that started it all. the dentist kindly comped me the $172 for the filling against the $3,800 bill for the root canal + crown.

- Before that? IDEK man. I have lost track. Somewhere in there i got diagnosed with insulin resistance which explained my HORRENDOUSLY TERRIBLE fatigue and cloudiness and waking up starving every 3 hours. The meds they gave me changed that literally overnight. it was a miracle. which is why im freaking out about the new migraine med possibly counteracting that. i spent the entirety of last summer in a fog. several of my very good friends visited and all i could do was nap on them. i couldnt go anywhere or do anything. it was a nightmare. i don't want to go back to that. but also i don't want to have a migraine every time the wind blows. but i would rather have a migraine 50% of the time than be back to that fatigue fogged state 100% of the time. nope nope nope.

- and amongst all of this, still having the seizures. they were going down for a while but the last week or so has been 1-2 per day. so. another checkmark in the "gee do you think you're stressed?" column.

- it is going on 10pm and I'm tired so i very likely have accidentally omitted several other things. to be fair to me, there's Quite A Bit to remember.

- so if youre wondering why i havent updated my latest fic, its partly bc i am TIRED and partly bc if i gave jason even a third of the health bullshit i have dealt with the past few months, it would absolutely defy belief. TWO kinds of eye problems AND a speech problem AND food poisoning AND dentistry?? surely no one in the world has to deal with that much!

sigh. anyway. thanks for listening. i promise i am stressed out of my GOURD but, shockingly, have not slid into any sort of depressive space. mostly im just annoyed. i spent today watching dinosaur documentaries and reorganizing my craft supplies.

tomorrow will be better. today just sucked.

#me #personal

[vaspider]

Tbh, everyone I see trying to come up with alternative words for Culturally Christian keeps reminding me of when white people got really upset about the term White Privilege. Maybe the term SHOULD make people uncomfortable. Maybe we shouldn't have to take the complaints of others about a term we created to describe our experiences as more important than our needs. As well-meaning as some folks have been, it's been so frustrating to feel like that aspect isn't being seen. We created this term to discuss our oppression and others keep coming to us about their feelings about it, their discomfort. We didn't get rid of the term White Privilege just because it upset a bunch of white people. Why do we have to get rid of the term Culturally Christian because it upsets people it describes?

I'm trying to be compassionate too but it's hard for me to be when it feels like most of the criticisms of the term have been in bad faith and that the criticism is centered around OTHER people's feelings rather than our need to describe our oppression. Idk it doesn't feel fair I guess.

I didn't really expect you of all people to react like this to me having a compassionate conversation with someone who isn't Christian, wasn't raised Christian, and was abused by Christians for not being a Christian, about that person not wanting to be labeled as being inextricably tainted by a religion that abused them for their whole life. That's not something I expected from you. Maybe you missed that part of the conversation, or maybe you read a good faith conversation as if it was in bad faith, idk, but this seems rather unkind for you.

I understand your frustration. I also think it that if I'm actually dedicated to tikkun olam, if someone also being hurt in this situation respectfully talks with me about how I'm hurting them with splash damage from these discussions, I really should hear them out. And if, in the course of that discussion, we talk through how to not only be more accurate with what we're talking about but how to be less hurtful to other victims of Evangelical Christianity, I think that's pretty good, actually.

The person you're talking about isn't Christian and never was, so your analogy doesn't really hold. That person didn't hold any particular privilege and was never part of the dominant group in the first place. Like... that's the whole point. They're also a survivor of religious violence. You assigning privilege to that person which they never received is part of the problem we were addressing in the first place.

Plus, like, isn't the desired outcome that people who are carrying ideas and mindsets which come from Christian hegemony work on shedding those ideas and mindsets? Labeling people - especially people who aren't Christian and doubly especially those who never were - rather than ideas means those people are labeled regardless of what ideas they hold. That seems counterproductive to me, and, again, hurtful to fellow victims to label them with an identity they don't hold. It's like someone calling a bi person a Spicy Straight because they don't look queer enough or whatever - they're assigning an identity that someone else doesn't have because it makes it easier for them to speak their pain, and ignoring the damage that does.

The best part of the conversation is that by the end of it, someone pointed out that there's already an academic term -- Christian hegemony -- which has been in use for a really long time, well before "cultural Xianity" came into use. It looks like it goes back at least 50 years. So because I was patient and compassionate with someone else who was victimized like I was victimized, I got to learn something which will make it easier to communicate in the future, since that term is widely established and it's easy to point to PDFs that define it, or articles with Jewish educators explaining it.*

Sounds like a win to me - I get to avoid accidentally hurting others who were hurt like I was hurt, I learned something, and now I have a better, clearer term and can speak more clearly.

I'm sorry it frustrates you. I don't think your analogy works, though, and I'm happy with using "Christian hegemony" to describe ideas and not labeling people. I certainly wouldn't like it if someone insisted on calling me Christian, because I'm not, so forcing that label on others who also are not Christian seems hypocritical and unkind. Someone can hold ideas they learned from Christian hegemony without being Christian, and saying it that way doesn't hurt me, so it's no great burden to me to use a more established, more accurate, less hurtful means of addressing my own hurt.

* I don't agree 100% with everything in these links, please don't send me asks or reblog this with nitpicks of the links, I'm not interested bc that's not the point of including them.

[ahaura]

the liberal idea of "good vs evil" in the media is insidiously being used to justify genocide. the state committing genocide right now (israel) is objectively the bad guys. the existence of the apartheid, fascist, genocidal ethno-state was created and is maintained by the murder, displacement, brutalization, and dehumanization of palestinians. the idea that israel is "the only democracy" in the middle east is nothing more than colonial propaganda garbage when an apartheid ethno-state cannot functionally be democratic, and the claim/implication that a country is "civilized" while it brutalizes the people whose presence in the region that predates both the creation of the zionist state and the zionist, colonial movement itself is not only racist and stupid but absurd. it's been a month and western media still touts the line that "israel is the victim" and "they're surrounded by enemies on all sides" when 1) israel cannot be the victim when experiencing the blowback of its own violent, heinous occupation and ethnic cleansing of the people who were there first 2) any and all deaths that occur are the fault of the apartheid state; violence begets violence and when you eliminate all other forms of resistance except for armed struggle then that resorting to violence is the fault of the apartheid, settler state, 3) maybe if they didn't constantly bomb their neighbors things would be a little different wouldn't you think? they're the only country who can bomb 3 different countries at once and the media will still say they're the victim

irt the united states: the two-party system is always described as "the worst people [republicans] vs. the lesser evil [democrats] and it's true that their facades are different and on internal social issues they differ but the truth is that both parties have the same corporate backers and they both functionally serve capital, and US imperialism. biden was elected on the premise of being "less bad than trump" despite being pro-segregation and pro-crime bill during his tenure prior to being obama's vice president. the police receive equal material support from democracts and republicans alike even if party members decry police brutality. and despite biden being "the lesser evil", he is not only allowing genocide to happen but is on record for saying, as of today, that there is "no chance" of a ceasefire for gaza. over 11,000 people have been murdered en masse by israel, with even more injured and displaced. the material goal of israel is to remove palestinians from their land by any means - be it murder or displacement. the existence of israel ensures that the u.s. and the west has a military base and foothold in the middle east; the u.s. empire is waning and desperate to maintain its hegemony and power and the benefits reaped from exploitation and extraction.

the u.s. disguises their material interests by saying "this is about defending jewish people" (when the u.s. and israel clearly don't care about jewish people) or "we're defending democracy" (israel cannot be a democracy as an apartheid ethno-state) or "it's a country defending itself from terrorists" (never mind that 'terrorist' is a political designation that western powers use when it suits their interest; the mujahideen was famously referred to as "freedom fighters" by the white house when the u.s. used them against the soviets; 9/11 happened when the fighters the u.s. trained turned their sights on america; then the government lied about WMDs and iraq's supposed role in 9/11 to justify the invasion of iraq, et cetera) and they depend on people not taking a good hard look at the real, material reasons and the reality of the united states' role and actions, both direct and indirect across the global stage and, in this case, specifically in israel.

the idea that zionists care about jewish people is laughable when the vast majority of zionists in the u.s. are evangelical christians who see the jewish people's presence in israel as a means to trigger the rapture (i think?). the deliberate conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism is genuinely dangerous for jewish people; it benefits the israeli state - and by extension u.s. interests - for people to defend the existence of an apartheid settler colony. zionism was originally acknowledged as a colonial movement; it still is. that zionists are now trying to humanize and rehabilitating nazis in their efforts to demonize palestinians and justify genocide should tell you all you need to know about who they actually care about.

never mind the fact that, if you simply take a look at u.s. history, it has and never will be a country founded on "freedom" or "democracy". the genocide and displacement of the indigenous peoples should tell you that; the history of chattel slavery and the conditions that followed the abolition of slavery should tell you that. the united states role following WWII and also in korea, vietnam, nicauragua, iraq, afghanistan, cuba, cambodia, and practically everywhere across the world should tell you that. it's not hard to look at the history and begin to understand where american interests and motivations come from & how they manifest.

colonial movements and imperialist interests are disguised as good vs. evil conversations. they depend on people's liberal frameworks, partnered with the unmitigated propaganda on behalf of israel and the genocide the state is carrying out against palestinians, in order to justify their actions (or lack thereof) to the public. no one is immune to propaganda but there are ways of combating it and educating yourself so you are more resistant to it.

#people have already talked about it but i am directly addressing liberals here. #again. im just some guy on the internet. u should read and consult theory 4 more. #📁.zip

[familyabolisher]

what do you think of gretchen felker-martin’s work, if you’ve read it? I expected a lot from manhunt based on everything I heard about it but found it to be just fine

short answer: manhunt's prose sucked

long answer: i'm so over this little clique which has identified - by and large correctly - that what tends to sell in mainstream publishing scenes for genre lit is v meek, tepid writing with timid politics and didactic liberalism shaping its discourse, and used this fact to effectively carve out a marketing niche. the selling point of manhunt wasn't felker-martin's skill as a writer (to be perfectly honest: she does not have a lot of this); it was her consciously positioning herself amidst a discourse of "puritanism," liberalism, "censorship," "childishness"(!) etc in genre lit such that buying and adulating her book was a way to signal one's immediate "side" in the genre lit discourse wars. like ... that's a grift and a half, innit.

i do have some sympathy for this position! i know that gretchen is largely responding to the harassment of isabel fall, and i respect that. and i do, i guess, agree with her that the bulk of contemporary anglophone genre lit in mainstream spheres is having to measure up to a particular palatability such that eg. trans women's writing comes under heavy scrutiny & the sort of writing that fall was doing encounters precisely the backlash she got. i just - don't buy into her imagined solution of publishing a very graphic horror book about terfs with tor nightfire to own the libs.

the problem is that it's an incurious position. going to the capitalist hegemony and getting mad when there's liberalism in the literature is like going to the circus and getting mad that you saw clowns. there's no desire to move away from these circuits which reward easy stories & bury difficult ones; there's no desire to question why we hold these sites of production up as ultimately legitimating structures. there's a real sense that just getting the big names in publishing to publish the Right books is a significant accomplishment (and by extension, you as the participant who Agrees with gretchen on this matter must therefore Support Her Work).

i'll admit that i never actually finished manhunt - i didn't get very far in at all because the prose just drove me insane. so maybe i can't give a fair assessment of the book. but the problem i had reading it was that like, the prose was bad! more specifically, it was an incurious prose, reflecting what i identified above - an incurious approach to storytelling. it was an excessively didactic voice guiding me as a reader from discourse point to discourse point like she was worried i wouldn't get what she was going for if she didn't make it absolutely crystal clear in quotidian prose. this tends to make for the kind of story where i'll think about it for maybe 20 minutes and then be done with it forever, because you've already given me all the answers yourself. like. challenge me! stop patronising the reader! if i wanted this i would go read a medium article!

like, i like novels that construct discourse through literary technique such that they leave me with these various entry points & angles from which i can think about them & respond to them in a sophisticated manner. when a book comes barrelling into my living room and goes Hi, I Am About Discourse Points 1, 2, and 3, i am left with very little space in which to do that. i also just - and maybe this is boring of me, but - i like when prose is good! it's very like, well, congratulations on publishing a novel where you write jkr getting like burned alive in her castle or whatever it was but did you care about this story as anything more than a vehicle for Discourse? lol

(there's absolutely a place for quotidian + straightforward prose, fwiw, and i wouldn't appeal to Literary Technique as a measure of quality, but - like, it just wasn't a technically skilled book, and it wasn't a book which had much of a desire to be received as much more than a bit of grist for the discourse mill.)

also i find gretchen annoying on twitter but since twitter is the website for annoying people i guess i can't hold that against her

#ask #oh ALSO if anyone remembers the bitchy tell me i'm worthless review i wrote: #alison rumfitt read it (WHOOPS!) and tweeted about it & GFM was in her replies reassuring her about how good it was #which i found funny.....making waves in the annoying bad horror writer community #i have a handful of other issues w/ gretchen and the kind of claims she makes around lot #*lit #but this is the long and short of it

[horizon-verizon]

You should ABSOLUTELY read Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay on anti-fantasy, “Why are Americans afraid of dragons ?”. It is such a brilliant and insightful piece.

https://w3.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/temp/waaaod.pdf

“They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.”

I remember reading this some time ago, maybe in a college class? Reread it, and yeah in the U.S., with capitalism but not only here, people (mostly & often men) derive their sense of being from their ability to make a profit from something and deny the fantastical, and it doesn't have to even be an activity to be worth something that will give you identity. Houses, stocks, other properties, anything you can objectify and sell, or make an object and sell. Let me say patriarchal capitalism, in fact.

And yeah, it has its roots in Puritanism, which while that religious group developed as an offshoot response to the Catholic Church's spiritual hegemony--and got their idea of "pleasure=sin" because it does not have a purpose (any sex that wasn't performed for reproduction was "sodomy")--did not even try to reincorporate pre-Catholic English rituals or fairytale creatures for fear of oneself showing that you were not part of the pre-birth assignments of salvation or damnation. The fear of showing that you were damned and for the Devil instead of losing oneself to being aware of their connection to God even in the moments of prayer themselves. Thus the perpetual searching for signs of God's favor or anger.

The Following is a Long Diatribe about American Masculinity (But Honestly, A Lot will cover Men of Various Patriarchies) So if You don't Care or Want to See This, OK

(And Before it's "Not All Men!", this is about the Nature of the Practicing Man and his Masculinity; if none of this has ever determined a man's psyche and sense of self, it should be no bother)

Even though this essay was written in 1974, much of it rings true, especially after thinking/watching others talk about that recent Twitter post about men resenting their girlfriends for not breaking up with them after they purposely try to get them to break up with them with emotionally abusive behavior AND discussing mental load in domestic labor. Basically, men do that to their partners because they:

do not want to be accountable for "ruining" a relationship and being the "bad" guy (feels very fundamentalist Christian and no-fault divorcy...Joe Jonas?)

and if they could "allow" a woman to lead forward & dictate their domestic actions they themselves would not have to engage in that labor while profiting off of that labor -> low effort, high reward

To be a man is to make money, or to control money, yes?

All the while, they will never be okay with actually being alone with their own thoughts because they cannot bash their partners or anyone who offers them affection and care to assuage the pain they are not able to nor willing to try to express to those around them...even other men for fear of being humiliated for showing "useless" and "girly" emotions because they cannot "control" and "use" said emotions or compulsions to propel them into an ideal state of "focus" (NoNut November) and stability that never lasts long and is thus frustrating. There is a compulsion to get into a vague mind-state of "stability", almost as if putting a halt to the busy-busy of necessary life, but simultaneously holding life by the reins and directing it to their own desires...which they ignore once they seem too "much", or complicated.

Instead of developing better critical thinking skills or how to empathize with others and communicate apart from how to dictate and dominate for the sake of "taking" rewards for little-as-possible labor, they may fantasize about mimicking some male celeb or embodying the image of this hypermasculine "winner" at capitalism, signaled through wealth. When together, they either ignore or scoff at thoughts that were not told to them (from childhood) on "how to be a man", which they take as the official moral and phenomenological guidebook on how to perform or think of certain tasks and how to perceive certain things. And in those same get-togethers, many just go along with what their male peers say about the world around them and parrot it more often than the reverse so they can reaffirm those things and that they are performing stoic masculinity well.

Add in family trauma from fathers themselves experiencing this and alienating themselves from families (abuse and neglect as in domestic violence or never coming around to see them and pick them up for visitation) and you have a very resentful man-child who wants to be an ideal and to finally justify his own reckless pursuit of being an ideal/ideal man. The recipe for that, to them, is also, to have a penis, and then bring others "in" sexually.

This goes into another reason why men get very resentful of their partners and women in general: in lieu of what they think is "doing a lot" of mental and physical labor, they believe all a woman needs to do to be financially or emotionally set is to get someone, i.e. a man, to take care of them financially. So to see women they call "golddiggers" receive gifts and money and things they actually want to have without having a job or having that as their main source of income (impossible for most of the population) is indicative of the monolithic Woman--all women. AND because men race to reserve women or their domestic, reproductive, and sexual activities for themselves so they can prove their superiority and successful masculinity, women are more in--excuse my French--"high demand" within the patriarchal sexual dynamics. It does not matter to them that women experience a lot of sexual violence and reject or try to divert them because of the fear and/or true threat of violence and they do not link that violence to the man's need to own women. Because to deny is to justify objectifying the woman/target. So men, by default, have very low standards for a potential female "partner's" personality, as her role is economic and male-group validating above everything else.

If women could have this and I can't, all women must be "luckier" than me, so I hate her. And why should I have to provide for a woman to have sexual control over her or get her interested in me when any other guy could do better than me?

Meanwhile, they don't even get how:

anger is an emotion, and it just builds until it lashes out at the right conceived inconvenience

their preoccupancy with work-work-rewardness "proving" their masculinity directly contradicts its own purpose when they wax remorse over "all" women having the ability to gain rewards without "work" (which is it, you want eternal "rest" or eternal work? AND it is men with accumulated generational wealth or men who have no business willingly spending money they do not have)

And finally, because they perceive that they are close to that stoic-everyman-topman-ideal, that their manhood grants them proximity to it--and thus superiority over women to it--they can always replace their current partner once they do not "love" them anymore OR they look to the "upgraded" trophy woman who makes them look better to other men...until they get intimidated or resentful of that woman's success, wealth which he covets.

Man is inherently self-sabotaging and justifying it.

#u.s. society #not asoiaf #patriarchy #fiction vs reality #fantasy fiction #mini rant #capitalism #consumerism #labor in capitalism #male consumers

[whumpbby]

Since i'm dropping some of my takes here on your ask box let me tell you my most controversial one. I fuck with Jiang Cheng more than i do Lan Xichen, like, i don't hate the guy, but his "bad choices" have a body count on the hundreds thanks to him neatly handing Jin Guangyao a solid backing in the form of sworn brotherhood with two main sect leaders and i don't care what anyone says Nie Huaisang was a 100% right to include him on his revenge. I love him as a character, i want him happy, but he's a bad politician (I also think that Xue Yang would kinda be his type but that's less of my views on his character and more my thoughts when i was delirious on a headache a few weeks ago)

I love to see other people's takes:)

I agree here to a degree.

I have... conflictung feelings about LXC. Because I like him a lot - he's a type of a character archetype I actually adore. The stoic, good, kind person that will also kick ass.

But he is not a great politician - partly due to his uncompromising kindness and partly due to being raised in Lan sect and knowing how his mother's situation played out.

My issues with the Lan are numerous and the hypocrisy is the main one. For all the rules stuffed into their heads, there doesn't seem to be much space left for actually wanting to be a good person. Hence Lan Xichen and Lan Sizhui are so interesting to me - they are the outliers. In general, the sects are focused on themselves, and to a degree that's to be expected, you want your people happy and fed first and foremost. But the Lan have this fame of being righteous and wise - but when you actually meet the Lan and see them act, that illusion kinda goes away. Lan Wangji picks fights with teenagers and wilfully destroys other people's property. Lan Jingyi "decorum I don't know her" is on that list too. Lan Qiren doesn't stick to his own rules. His brother was a rapist and that's somehow okay. It's all about visuals with them. Following the letter of the rules and not the spirit.

And then there's the fate of LXC's mother.

The woman imprisoned for a crime no one knows the reason of, that has spent her life paying and paying for it. Like, how horrific it had to be for Xichen to get old enough to start asking questions and finally realise what was happening? That he and his brother were a result of what was basically rape. (Sect Leader couldn't leave seclusion to, you know, run the sect but could do it to fuck? Okay then). That there wasn't a fair trial - just one mistake and a horrific lifetime of paying for it.

And I think as much as Wangji is scared of becoming his father (trapping the person he loves because he's ineffective at communication), Lan Xichen is scared of becoming the sect elders - of judging someone too harshly for one mistake.

Meng Yao is kind, helpful, gentle and wise - just like LXC's mother. That NMJ judges him so harshly for something he might have done without considering the reasons rings a bell with LXC. He's all about giving people second chances, chances to explain themselves and so on, because what if he makes a mistake and someone ends up like his mother? He is downright predisposed to falling for JGY's lies, just as Wangji is predisposed to be a doormat of a husband.

That's how I see it.

And yeah, his decision to swear the brotherhood comes form a position of immense privilege of not having to think too much - the fact he didn't even consider how it would shift the political powers either means he didn't care to consider anything but his current crush, or that there was a political play there (in maybe trying to limit the scope of Jin hegemony as the one sect standing that took almost no damage, which is what I think would convince NMJ to agree, because he's actually a decent politician when not deviating) that purposefully excluded Yunmeng Jiang and threw smaller sects to the wolves. Either way, not a good showing. Out of everyone, you'd expect Zewu-Jun to be caring for this stuff? (Can you even wonder why Yunmeng Jiang became known for being dangerous to mess with? What other choice did they have to secure their place at the table? JC doesn't have to be nice to anyone of them - no one was in his corner when he needed help, it's a wonder he even talks to these people and his sect being the last one standing undamaged at the end is poetic justice 👌)

Nie Huaisang was 100% right to include Lan Xichen in his plan. Even if not as a straight up revenge - then out of anger at the wilful blindness the man kept exhibiting. Because if Huaisang caught on that something wasn't kosher - how could it be that Lan Xichen didn't?

#lan xichen #mdzs #i like a big brother type #I'm not gonna lie

[xenodelic]

In general, I don't think we're really comfortable with the term "anti-recovery" at all.

There are definitely people out there who continue to partake in harmful behaviors, and who perpetuate their own patterns of self-sabotage. There are people who refuse to reach out for help, that much is absolutely true.

But I think what we hate about the term is the way its used to police how other people go about their recovery. The way its used as a form of lateral aggression by disabled people to perpetuate ableism against other disabled people. The way its used as form of social control.

Maybe its just the way we've seen the phrase used is almost always in the context of trying to uphold hegemonic structures of mental and physical health. Honestly, even the idea that you need to or should want to recover from your disability and/or disorder is so utterly rooted in White Christian Hegemony. The idea that there's a "correct" way to be that is the default, and all other ways of being are an anomaly that needs to be fixed. That "recovery" from your defect is always what you should strive for, and that you have to do in an a socially approved manner.

Call me radical, but if someone simply wants to live as a disabled or disordered person, without trying to "fix" it, then they should have the right to do that without being ostracized from their community.

Now don't get me wrong. I understand that when people say "anti-recovery" they are often referring to things such as the way extreme self-loathing is so normalized and socially acceptable (even encouraged).

But honestly, there's better ways to go about naming it. Maybe its just a personal preference, but the phrase anti-recovery is far too steeped in ableism and sanism for us to feel comfortable with it. It could just be our personal experience with the way we've seen it used. I mean hell, we've seen people say that not wanting to take anti-psychotics because of the side effects is "anti-recovery". That supporting fictives in your system is "anti-recovery". And all sorts of other absurd and nasty things.

Just puts a bad taste in our mouth

#antipsych #antipsychiatry #psychpunk #mad pride

[argentconflagration]

On the subject of the 'cultural Christian' discussions going around, have you heard the term Christian hegemony? I heard the term recently (in a ms-demeanor post maybe?) and, like, it just fits so much better—emphasizes systems over individuals, less blame-y, inclusive of internalizing bits without ever being Christian. Plus the term is used beyond chronically-online spaces.

Yeah! And to be honest I do think there are people who use the term "culturally Christian" itself without any intent of excusing bad behavior toward atheists/nonreligious people, like when people talk about "cultural Christianity" with the focus, like you said, on systems rather than individuals. It's important to me that I mention that I'm not actually talking about the term "culturally Christian" per se, but about the

entitlement to speak over atheists/pagans/nonreligious people about their religious identity

belief that people's ex-religions still get to 'claim' them

presumption that you [general you] understand other religious minorities' relationship to Christianity better than they do

implication that people who experienced Christian religious abuse are privileged for having been abused in that way

essentialism about people not really having autonomy over their religious beliefs and identity

implication that nonreligious people do not have complete belief systems (like religious people do)

erasure of experiences of religious oppression that look different from your own

implication that apostates of non-Christian faiths aren't critical of their former faiths or aren't critical of religion in general

erasure of non-Western atheist thought

and other bad behavior typically associated with using the term.

#loquacious lex #asked and answered #cultural christianity #religion #atheism #sj

[sayhelloanimalfriends]

i saw my dude @sodom-hussein (hi i like your blog so much it is good and so fun and keeps me scrolling) RB this post that was like “I compared today to 1930s germany and the results aren’t good”

and then OP proceeds to just make a bunch of very vague and unmeasurable statements like

‘we are about to die horribly in concentration camps because

antisemitism is increasing

LGBT discrimination is increasing

ableism is increasing

indigenous people are continually threatened etc etc’

The post doesn’t have any facts or information to back any of these claims as true, but it doesn’t need it. because it’s using the same kind of rhetoric that Fox News uses with its users. Fox News doesn’t have to prove something is true if it *feels* true.

and firstly if you go find the post and compare it to my wording of that first statement, you’ll see that i’m sensationalizing a little bit

and secondly, i have love for OP and i have love Sodom-hussein both because i am confident they only want to inform with the goal of changing our world for the better.

BUT I believe that these kinds of posts are not helpful, and while my wording was sensationalizing it wasn’t doing so all that much because of what the post is implying. The post’s intent it seems is to strike fear and terror into the hearts of those most vulnerable in society.

So if you are still reading I would like to use a bit of bad news to maybe ease the fears that many of us are having about the state of our world. Let me explain:

There exists a theory of social organization called Social Dominance Theory which was constructed by Jim Sidanius (oh my god i just found out he died in 2021 ☹️ what a legend) and Felicia Pratto. These two psychologists took behavioral sciences and combined them with historical record of societal hegemony to explain why and how humans seem to organize our societies unfairly.

I won’t go into the minutiae of the theory, but my main point of bringing it into this conversation is that according to their writings, when humans define categories on which to base discrimination (such as race, sexual orientation, cultural/religious identity, etc) these categories remain as subjugated for VERY VERY long periods of time.

This part is the bad news but stay with me.

What i mean to say is that as a gay man, I will probably always be discriminated against in our society. That is just the way these things seem to play out. Now, within my particular place in society things may improve or worsen. But there isn’t really any realistic hope of full liberation. And apparently, also according to social dominance theory, even if gay people WERE to be liberated, a new arbitrary category of discrimination would just take its place.

So how can we use this information to cope with our world?

Well the reality is that you may need time to grieve this truth. But once you are done grieving, you can look at our world and realize that nothing is changing. Everything is staying the exact same.

Just yesterday youtuber Matt Baume released a video about Ellen coming out on TV and it was literally all the same shit as what we’re hearing now. Conservatives feigning disgust and fear for what it means to acknowledge the existence of lesbians. Censorship. Blah blah blah. That was 25 years ago but it could easily be today.

So when you are able to accept that society has fixed you at a disadvantage that is permanent, you are more immune to the kind of brain-numbing effects of fear and terror.

And that’s what I really want you all to do.

I want you to Think Critically. I want you to Think Clearly. And when you’re scared shitless you can’t think at your max capacity.

Because yeah I mean shit is scary. But panicking isn’t going to help anyone. It’s just going to ruin your mood and make it harder for us to organize.

We’ve been dealt a shit hand. But we’ve got each other. We’re not alone. And we’re smart! We can figure out how to protect each other and ourselves. We are resilient. There’s no reason to be terrified. There is every reason to be brave. Bravery, courage, determination. These will help us more than fear in the days to come.

Anyway check out social dominance theory it’s really cool. RIP Jim Sidanius. Your work changed my life man.