#what the fuck is even the point of your anti-fascism if it's not anti-racist

[jynjackets]

Do you think Jyn and Maarva would like each other?

tl;dr: no <3

I don't think Jyn would get along with maarva as she is a source of Cassian's issues with self-worth and guilt, similar to how Saw is a source for her fear of abandonment. Maarva doesn't even like her own son so who knows who's good enough for her lol.

a long rant below the cut

Jyn being someone who knows exactly what it’s like to be adopted and re-abandoned, her seeing Cassian's mother be consistently disappointed in her drugged n kidnapped adopted son is a whole other level of fucked up parental issues. Maarva opting to be with her her town instead of Cassian in her last days and also disbanding his actual family, it would be very difficult for someone like Jyn to see past these actions.

There's also no real justification for Maarva's treatment of Cassian (because he doesn't do his capitalist ferrix job? because he brings girls home? because he still lives with her even though he takes care of her?). AND even after her death, the last thing she wants him to remember was “hey, you’re a big fuck up, but that’s okay <3”.

Maarva has done nothing but live her life from her fuckass couch and yet had the audacity to tell Cassian that he needs to stand up, that he needs to rebel or get a job. Even after when he fought back and went to child prison after seeing his adopted father hanged. So not only did you get ripped away from your parents, but also the person that supposedly chose you felt like they got more than they bargained for, Cassian therefore feeling ultimately undesired by both the biological and adopted family.

But being a parent is complicated, is she at fault?

Compare it to Saw abandoning Jyn. When Jyn grew older he was forced to choose between his daughter and his life's mission. Abandoning her is, without argument, fucked up. While it created irreparable damage, we can understand why he did it. Not only was it traumatizing for Jyn, but it was THE ultimate sacrifice he was making from himself. The thing that shifts some blame away is that it gutted him to do this, and he did it from a place making sure she was safe and alive.

So with this in mind, what is Maarva’s sacrifice in being constantly disappointed in your adopted son because he isn’t like everyone else? What does she gain when she tells him to forget about Kenari, that there’s nothing left? Imagine being adopted, being told as an adult that, no, you can’t be looking for your biological family and that they’re nothing now, and that even trying is useless. The only thing I can see is that she just wants Cassian to fit her image of an ideal Ferrix citizen, which isn't amazing and isn't enough to justify her actions.

Moreover, as someone who has lost a parent, the last moments you have with them hold a permanent memory that weigh differently than everything else, and imo require its own sort of grief. On Maarva's last days, she made him leave without her, even when she knew she was going to die by not taking her meds. She would rather spend her last days being memorialized as a hero on Ferrix than being with her only son. And at the end of your days, you want to go home. You want to be with family for as long as possible. For Maarva, home was Ferrix and everyone else there, not Cassian.

So Maarva sucks because she was a terrible mother at the benefit of literally nothing. Where Saw was the insurgent leader of the extremist cell that made major attacks against the empire; and not the best father largely because of his life's work but also still wanting to do his best to keep his daughter safe. But look who gets more villainized than anybody else and who is more celebrated as a hero?

On a tangent now, I believe Jyn and Maarva would be comparable to Cassian and Saw's relationship: you don't feel all warm and fuzzy inside meeting the [person you care about]'s greatest source of trauma.

All that Cassian knows about him is that he adopted her, then abandoned her. Upon seeing him on Jedha he almost draws a gun to protect Jyn (doing that before THE guy, THE supposed terrorist and Empire's most wanted, mind you), unsure where their relationship stands. Saw of course, would protect his daughter in turn, not knowing who this guy is.

I would believe Jyn would see Maarva in a similar light on a dramatically smaller scale. That "I hate my MIL and our interests are only mutually aligned around what's best for Cassian", but of course what that means is totally different things. Maarva sees Cassian and believes he needs to change. Even when she’s fucking dead he still needs for things to come together in order to be unstoppable, or whatever vision she had in mind for him and that him on his own is not enough.

And so the rest of this is how I interpret the implications for Rogue One: that the lessons both Jyn and Cassian took from their adopted parents can be mutually shattered as they see each other for who they are and not what they've been molded to believe.

As we know with Jyn, she has a complex moral code. When she sees a stormtrooper she feels the reflex to kill. When she sees a war-torn child, her reaction is to risk her own life to save innocents. And this is what she continues to do when she meets Cassian. She has every reason to shoot him and steal his ship. But on Jedha, seeing him agreeing with her that she was perhaps worth saving after her deed of saving the child, she sees him in return when he shoots the partisan. They see each other for their actions, for the better parts of each other, despite their words and even their own personal doubts. Jyn continues to risk her life for him over and over again and vice versa. She doesn’t want to change him at all and she inspires him to fight in ways he perhaps has forgotten or never knew was possible.

In fact, the reason she’s angry with him on Eadu is because he lied to her. Revealing the intention to kill someone’s dad easily put your anger in the right, but while she is mixed up with grief, the bigger part of her knows he was incapable of doing it and doesn’t revel in the fact of who he could’ve been if he killed her father or even combined with terrible things he's done, but just sees the present man that didn't and instead came back for her. Even Cassian is thinking how she was going to kill him for it, when he hadn’t even committed the crime. He’s caught up with the impression and perception of the kind of man he is, the narrative that he’s been fed his whole life that he’s committed atrocities that deem him unworthy.

Jyn and Cassian offer each other a break from narratives and reputations that they've tried to sound out their whole lives. And although both characters have a lot of integrity, being told the same thing over again through life lessons, you begin to believe it yourself. It's where we meet the two of them at their lowest points. That for Jyn, she wasn't someone worth returning to, that there isn't hope amongst war. And for Cassian, that he's not a good person for things he's done, that war is endless, and he has to follow orders or do things for others in order to belong. As the events of Rogue One unfold, we can see how they come to understand each other. They create a bond by feeling seen for the first time.

IN SUMMARY:

Maarva is like the exact opposite of Saw Gerrera in all the worst fucking ways, I tell you. Instead of being family friends with and saving the child that he later abandons, she kidnaps the child away from their actual family and then holds them hostage on her planet to force-assimilate and take care of her in her old age. And instead of actively rebelling through extremist insurgencies, she sits around and berates her son to go be a rebel, and yet disappointed that he doesn't have a job or doesn't do what everybody else does(?).

Jyn would hate that bitch like. Every Life Day would be an ordeal. The irony of how she fucking dies doing nothing when Saw Gerrera is barely held together by oxygen tubes and yet outlives this couch potato. Andors versus Erso-Gerreras it's first-planet problems versus outer rim problems. Yeah they're both traumatic but the biggest difference is one of these is entirely avoidable if you just weren't a piece of shit.

#maarva is neither an activist nor a good mother #she is a neoliberal that really likes her capitalist town and they like her for some reason #jyn actually punches every neolib she meets #imagine telling people to go fight with their lives when you literally just died from old age 💀 #I'd throw a tomato at that hologram #MAKE IT MAKE SENSE #when she fucking chloroformed him and everyone was like ooooh the layers 💀 #media literacy is actually dead #what the fuck is even the point of your anti-fascism if it's not anti-racist #i don't want it if that's the case #don't even want to look at it its pointless its an oxymoron #saw gerrera did nothing wrong actually #of course there's rebelcaptain in here #anon asks #thanks for the question i finally learned how to turn these back on #anti maarva andor

[corvusissotired]

Trans and jewish ppl also said they still support and love the franchise. It was an integral part to their journey. Guess what. They have been told to stfu because they don't speak for their community. You see how fucked up it is? BOTH povs are valid. You can't dismiss one voice over the other to fit your agenda. The world is not black or white. Ppl are entitled to their opinion and telling trans and jewish ppl that support the game and franchise to fuck off is wrong. Period.

Lol buddy cmon. First, like I'm gonna believe an anon. It's so easy to link evidence of these Jewish and trans people saying they needed to buy the game because HP--an antisemitic, racist series made by a fomenting, raging mistake of a human being who has literally implied ALL trans women are, TRIGGER WARNING, rapists in a wig and skirt--was integral to their journey. Not saying it's not true, just saying it's hard to believe. Put up or shut up.

Second, at no point have I said it's ok to tell Jewish and trans people who play HL that they aren't part of their respective communities because they enjoy HP or even HL. It's not. But please note that, while you're 100% still part of the community and deserve rights as much as the rest of us, I will not trust you. A lot of us won't. Because you put a game above our lives, above your own life. And you absolutely are allowed to be upset about that but...something something fuck around and find out? Your actions have consequences. Literally don't know what else to say. It also makes zero sense. You want rights...but you're actively shitting on them by buying this game. Not saying it's ok to gatekeep, just putting it into perspective that if you do want basic fucking rights, maybe don't buy a game thats made by someone who is actively working to take them away? In any case, I have yet to see anyone in the anti HL tag, to streamers, to ANYONE who's playing the game, say any of that. That sounds fake as hell. Again, could be real but it's a bit unbelievable. Put up or shut up.

Anyway, not sure why you're bent about all this in my inbox. I have said none of these things so sounds like you're just another one of those people who, every time a trans person has a negative opinion about HL, you feel guilty and lash out. If you're here from my post, guess what? None of what I said was meant to be taken as a threat to people who play HL. My point with that post was to point out the people who buy it purely to hate trans people even more and that they're proving our ostracization, our being killed, is merely a joke to them. If you don't see the issue with that, or think there's 2 eQuaLLy iMpOrtAnt siDeS, there's seriously no helping you.

Please also note that none of what I said was untrue either. This is how fascism works. It starts slow and small. It's just a game right? But that game takes money. And that money goes into the pockets of an absolute mistake of a human. And then she gives it to politicians and bills and organisations that actively want marginalized people gone, dead. And now those politicians make office and those bills pass and those orgs are funded even more by these people now in power. And now they've seized that power and are actively killing people like me and you and other marginalized groups.

But go a-fucking-head. Have your game. Enjoy your nostalgia. But please ask yourself: was it worth it? Was it worth it to help put people's lives even more in danger than they already are, just so you could have your few months of dopamine and nostalgia from a game that will be forgotten in about a year? And maybe also ask yourself if it was worth it to put YOUR OWN life at risk for a few months of nostalgia and dopamine. Because a LOT of us don't think it is. And it's unfair that you are putting a literal game above our and your own life.

#anti hogwarts legacy #hogwarts legacy #jkr #jk rowling #what a joke

[textualviolence]

like octavia butler is a black woman writer & she said in interviews she was a feminist and committed to anti racism. So what else could her books possibly be about i mean shes gotta be teaching us how to be even better antiracist feminists, right? Thats why we read her works. to be more woke. become better allies. "gain consciousness" shut the fuck up!!!! xenogenesis has got none of that in it so stop lying!!! just cause the main character is a black woman doesn't mean the book is here to teach you how to not be racist like a stupid little baby. The "Utopian ending" of xenogenesis is one in which fascism has won. And its because the point isn't fascism bad or fascism good but fascism scary and upsetting (& therefore fascism horny). Give up on your sense of self and your ostensible ethics and morality that are all about how "forced eugenic breeding" and "mass sterilization of unfit populations" is something you're "fundamentally opposed to". Just give in, because it feels good. There you go. Good girl. Your morals mean nothing and you're my little doggy now. And you get a Utopia in exchange (a fascist one). Thats what xenogenesis is about. And no one gets it!!! And donna haraway was like "uhhhh its an opening of feminist possibilities" no it isn't!!!! its an opening of possibilities for my pussy but its not saying shit about what we could or should so as feminists shut the fuck uppppppppppp

[chronicallyexisting]

One of my mutuals put an anti-ao3 post on my dash and I'm pretty dissapointed by it. Like I look at the rhetoric that's being used and can't help but draw comparisons to purity culture, right wing fascism, and the current anti LGBT and censorship push. Just because it's coming from the left doesn't mean it isn't the same things. The leopards will eat your face at the end of the day too.

First off, AO3 is an archive. Content being hosted does not mean any moral endorsement. There is no algorithm to push certain content, it is community driven. So if you're tempted to say "this website supports x" maybe recognize that the archive is acting as a library. If a fandom community consistently likes and writes content that makes you uncomfortable, then maybe take issue with the fandom or even source content if applicable.

Look, censorship is very, very bad. Claiming something is problematic and "not safe for those poor children" because it has racist language is the same argument that gets books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn banned. This is also the same argument that's being used right now to ban all books even mentioning anything LGBT. There will always be something problematic in any work of art or fiction, and claiming that it shouldn't exist because of that, or because it makes someone uncomfortable, is a dangerous slope that does not go where you want it to.

Censorship is not okay, yes even when it's the "left" doing it.

While I'm talking about it, the whole point of tags is to give users the maximum ability to control what content they see. Don't want any sexual content? Easy, filter it out. Really don't like a pairing because it's "problematic"/makes you uncomfortable, fantastic! Filter it out. Dead dove don't read. You do not need to subject yourself to anything you don't want to read or experience. Content is expected to be tagged appropriately. If you see explicit racism and it's not tagged, you can report that! It won't get that user suspended unless they repeatedly fail to tag it, but that is something you can and should complain about.

The other argument that constantly gets thrown around is claiming that AO3 hosts "child porn". It doesn't. Period. It's illegal and explicitly against their terms of service. Fiction is not reality. No children are being harmed.

Sometimes I'll see people discuss fic with underage teen characters having sex and they'll be calling the author a pedophile, meanwhile the author is the same age as the characters. Are we saying no one under the age of 18 should ever think or talk or write about sex with characters that are their age? Should we instead insist that a 14 year old only write about sex between people in their 30s?

Also, you are expected to be 13 years or older to join AO3. There are no 8 year olds stumbling around looking at porn of their cartoon characters anymore than there are on any other website. Age restrictions are hard to enforce, but that isn't AO3s job beyond what they already do. They provide plenty of warnings and lock content as best as they can. They are an adult space and are set up as one.

Liking something in fiction does not mean liking or endorsing it in reality. Someone who likes reading about princesses does not necessarily endorse modern monarchy. Someone who likes reading about dubious consent does not necessarily endorse or like dubious consent in reality. The same goes for every squick, "problematic" ship aspect, or content written. Reading dark things does not make someone evil. There are no thought crimes. Reeevalute the culturally Christian, purity mindset. Sometimes people enjoy reading fucked up things. It does not affect or harm you in any way.

Anyway, the current censorship push, no kink at pride, right wing fascists, and TERFs all use the same arguments and rhetoric. I'm begging people to recognize it when they see it.

#ao3 #discourse #I'm not tyring to vague my mutual #I just didn't want to start shit on that post #this is more of a personal rant #this shit always comes around during the donation drives

[countkunt]

We don't fucking like Biden or support his genocide, we're trying not to get slaughtered ourselves by the violent fascist regime looking to seize power here. And unfortunately the only fucking option to prevent them from gaining more power is to vote for Genocide Joe.

It's not a good solution. But it is a means of self preservation. I can't fight for Palestine to be free if nazi trumpers have locked me up or murdered me for being queer and disabled.

Quit punching down on the people who are trying to prioritize their own lives over being a perfect ally in an imperfect world. Only ever supporting perfect people isn't going to make the world perfect. It will just make it easier for the worst bastards to enact their wills on the less fortunate.

keep enabling one wing of the same bird that hates you in the name of “self preservation” and you will have nothing left to preserve. biden is as much a fascist as trump. if the past 2 months haven’t made that clear to you i’m not sure anything will. in fact, looking at his career, he’s actually had a decades long track record of radical support for the zionist project. your final hope against fascism is to the far right of ronald reagan on israeli violations of international law. guess what that effectively makes him and his supporters?

libs have bought into a perverse and frankly racist ideology that anything can happen over there as long as it doesn’t happen here. but even if we convince ourselves our “safety” is more important, let me assure you we are more interconnected than that. if in the year of 2023 joe biden can explicitly and zealously (as he’s done throughout his career) endorse, fund, and arm the second Nakba, and fucking win the next term, what message does that send the Democratic Party? what lines are left to cross? do you actually understand the type of world neoliberalism is and has been building?

if both parties are coming together to censor dissent across the country, if the House is proposing a bill legally redefining anti-zionsim as anti-semetism, if what’s left of Gaza is destroyed with our tax dollars and arms dealers, and voters don’t even fucking flinch in the face of it, exactly what kind of future do you think you’re preserving for us? Cop City and the surveilance state are being championed just as hard by dems, and of course they're learning plenty from israel on how to go about it. biden is continuing the border wall after promising not to and waiving any environmental and indigenous protections in his way. the kids in cages libs used to be crying over are still being put in them. families are still being separated. biden continues the muslim ban. hate crimes against arabs and muslims are drastically on the rise thanks in large part to his administration's abhorrent leadership.

lie after lie, attack after attack against the most vulnerable of the domestic minority and global majority. the House just voted for H. Res. 894 that will legally censor anyone who’s against apartheid israel-finally finding a way to legally redefine anti-zionsim as anti-semitism. 311-14. the US has long dictatied what politcal movments youre allowed to support, but now Congress is bipartisanly deciding which politcal movements you're allowed to be opposed to. even those among the 14 reps who voted against H. Res. 894 have voted for aid to israel in the past or cowardly abstained, and that includes members of the beloved squad ilhan omar and aoc (.). this is the exact shit that got us to this point. and you still think you’re safer under fascists and enablers in blue. giving our government a bright green flag to act upon anyone they don't like with impunity is what liberals are working with conservatives towards.

i want to say more about how as we worry about ourselves a generation of Palestinians are being permanently disabled, how netanyahu is speaking with our congressional leaders of both parties about “thinning” a population of 2.5 million as we try to convince ourselves biden’s ghouls are any better than trump’s. but what can i say that hasn’t already been better said? it’s long past time americans admit that you can’t claim to be against something and then vote for it every election day. the capitalist system is irredeemable. neoliberalism is unsustainable. all our politicians are bought and sold by the ruling class and therefore only serve the ruling class. not disabled people. not the lgbtq community. the ruling class. you couldn’t change that in a voting booth if you tried and this system is not going to get better in any meaningful way. that is not punching down, this is the reality we have to work with. every time a liberal chooses their (ever right-shifting) status quo over human life, that’s punching down on all of us, hardest on the "third world." no one is free until Palestine is free because no one is free until we all are free.

or else, human life is worthless and we in the US will spend the rest of our lives (more time for some than others) watching BOTH parties chip our rights away as they condition the population to accept that this or that minority is merely collateral. or a nuisance that must be disposed of. or it's just the way of the world. fuck that fuck Joe biden and fuck everyone who tries to shame people into playing their games.

#i love you not voting #free palestine #fuck biden #i had more to say and link but i feel awful and tumblr anons are not my priority rn #fuck voting

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i think probably the core issue of lorien legacies, beyond anything to do with individual characters, is the mixed metaphors.

more specifically, about politics.

[longpost after the cut; a lot of talk about racism, xenophobia, fascism--including ecofascism--genocide, and all of the above being poorly handled. also some deeply upsetting anti-indigenous awfulness wrt the w-word.]

the writers try to make the series Heavy-Hitting and Deep and Socially Conscious by addressing real-world political issues like racism, fascism, religious fundamentalism, dictatorship, colonialism, genocide, and so on... and instead of trying to build it into a coherent dynamic with any kind of real statement about any of it, they just blindly grab at every political issue they can find and slap it together into a jumbled mess.

they don't actually understand any of the things they're talking about. and the most disturbing part is that they don't even limit themselves to drawing on bad neoliberal takes, and/or captain-obvious shit like 'genocide bad.' they ALSO draw on the politics of fascists and racists--sometimes unironically, sometimes putting it in the mouths of random protagonists without reason after establishing that it's supposed to be a bad thing, sometimes doing shit that strawmans itself into confirming the Bad Guy Fascism and what have you--and often they mix those metaphors in ways that are anywhere from bizarre to horrific.

('ya so the great replacement theory was completely right actually! the people you're genociding a hundred percent have dedicated their entire life, purpose, and remaining culture to exterminating yours. it doesn't matter if their survivors are down to the single digits, if you fail to kill even a single one of them they WILL successfully wipe you out. they will literally have your last few survivors rounded up and put into prison camps. three cheers for them!' jesus fucking christ.)

(don't get me started on shit like tossing blatant racist caricatures of north korea and its political issues into the mogadorians at some point, because why the fuck not, and then piling on the anti-japanese racism with a dump truck at the end of the first series and throughout the second. internment camps.)

(jesus fucking christ.)

and like. people don't react to this shit the way they realistically would. you cannot tell me that not a single one of the majority-POC cast in the second series would not rip a black hole into nine's irl-racist and scifi-MAGA, white-man-in-a-position-of-authority ass, or the shit that john's white-man-in-a-position-of-authority ass brings about himself under the guise of ~kindness and peace.~

and there's no logic to the kind of shit people will say and do about this stuff, especially in the sequel series. sometimes they'll express, like, basic antifascist/anti-racist/humanitarian/decent-in-general beliefs, and other times the most absolutely wild shit will come out of their mouths which either directly contradicts things they've said before--and might say after--or pulls from other blatant parts of that same horrific ideology. there is no rhyme or reason to most of it. it's just a clown car of racist/fascist/xenophobic nonsequiturs. what the hell.

and when i say nine is irl-racist in reborn i mean he casually calls a native american child the w-word as a '''lighthearted''' punny joke about his legacy. the kid is not even from any tribe whose culture they originate from; they never specify, because of course they couldn't be bothered lol, but miki is from alaska. on top of that, they had the dick ass and balls to have him randomly throw in a Very Special Episode scene where he talks about how his family are the direct-action variety of activists who he got separated from when they blew up an oil pipeline.

and he does not fucking blink at this. he doesn't say anything about it, he doesn't uncomfortably not say anything about it, he just goes on with the friendly conversation about his legacies which nine just called him a w-word for without missing a single beat.

and the ecofascism. good unholy fucking god the ecofascism. probably the most fundamental driving force of the entire first series is that if you don't ~take care of your environment~ your entire race/ethnicity/culture deserve to suffer and die slowly in the results. yes, all of them. it doesn't matter who was responsible. every last one. including the masses we see protesting on mogadore in flashbacks/visions.

also did i mention the Great Fascist Cult Leader who is responsible for the loric's genocide is a race traitor who took charge of wiping out his own? because that is a thing. it's a thing.

like. man i could go on. i could go on. and in other posts i probably will, because WOW is there a lot to unpack here. but it really does all come down to the fact that the writers wanted to sound meaningful and important and socially conscious, because that's what seems to be hip with the youth nowadays, and they don't have anything to say.

it's just gibberish. gibberish that arranges in some very telling ways as to the beliefs of their own that they are putting into the books. but gibberish.

and it pisses me off in a different way to have realized this, but god damn does it make it less tear-my-hair-out distressing than racking my brain trying to figure out what in the goddamn fuck am i looking at here.

(capitalism. capitalism is what i'm looking at here. and also racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and just plain being fuckin stupid.)

lord.

#lorien legacies #the crit files #LL tag #LL crit tag #stares at the ceiling this series is so much #all of this is not even scraping the surface #the literal climax of the entire series is a japanese girl protagonist sacrificing herself by absorbing a nuclear bomb #with extremely graphic radiation victim imagery #takes two ibuprofen and holds a glass of ice water to my temple #racism cw #genocide cw #fascism cw #xenophobia cw #w-word cw #i am doubtless forgetting tags and will try to add them later if so #this shit is exhausting; both emotionally and because Writing Longposts #it says something here that the character analysis would be a welcome break #that does remind me i need to draft up and post some headcanons i came up with to move away from the gross NK shit with the mogs #and draw on the weird sxual/romantic overtones wrt god and jesus in evangelical christianity lmao #i am invested in writing about stuff to do with five; the mogs; and setrákus ra #and the thought of unironically using the term 'beloved leader' in my writing makes me taste copper in my mouth lmao

[hjellacott]

Genetic "contamination"

I'm pretty sure if I started digging in my ancestry (and at some point, you can bet I will) and I knew more about my family tree, I'd find we're related to Muslims, Jews, descending from Eastern Europeans, descended from Southern Mediterranean people, and mixed-up with French and Spanish Christians-Catholics. I'm pretty sure I'd find all sorts of people from all sorts of places within the first 10 generations before me. I don't even need a blood test to feel there's Christian, Muslim and Jewishness in our bloodline. You just have to see the way we look, know our surnames, or look a tiny bit at the history of the towns and cities we come from, and it's evident that we're from all over, and that no one in my family has really spent more than one or two generations in one same place, ever, but rather we constantly travelled across the world and mixed our blood with all sorts.

We've never even discussed anti-semitism at home. Or muslim phobia. There was no need, in my home, to teach us we're all the same and related, it was a given. I don't remember anyone in my family even suggesting something else. We learned our local history in school, we knew our native country (Spain) and specially our region (lower half) were always populated by people from all over the world and all sorts of religions and we always assumed, without it being dramatic or problematic, that there was no way we were pure Catholics, or that our bloodline wasn't filled with genetic material from all over the world. And it's always been a source of pride to me and to my family.

So imagine my surprise to grow up to find out about Fascism and racism, and see that what to me is a source of huge pride, to so many others is disgusting and shameful and wrong. That there are people who will deny their genetic connection with any other race or culture no matter what, because the idea of not being "pure", of being "contaminated" is unacceptable. It's been a hard pill for me to swallow, all my life. It's been another hard pill to swallow to realise that my looks, that in my native city were normal and common, made people look at me, in cities such as the multi-cultural London, and point fingers at me thinking "she must be Hindu, or Muslim, or Jew". No one where I come from even stopped to try and put me in some cultural and race-based box or category. I was simply human. I was simply Spanish. But you get out of home, and instantly, people are trying to categorise you, and they don't even realise the internalised racism this shows.

It just shouldn't matter, what religion or culture or race you belong to. It should only matter to you, in as much amount as you want, for the celebrations and festivities of your people, or for religious reasons. Why should anyone else look at me and decide that my looks must mean I'm Hindu, or Arabian, or Muslim, or Jewish, or whatever? why should my looks be that important, or mean anything? why should my looks put me in boxes people use against me, to put their prejudices and racial bias on me?

So whenever I hear about people getting mad about some people being supposedly anti-semitic (and not against people that are well-known for really being anti-semitic and racist) I have to scoff. Because often, it shows more anti-semitism and racism in them, than in anyone else. Like when people say Goblins repressent Jews. Like, fine, no one in my living family actually practises Judaism (or anything any more for that matter), but we know quite well Grandma was Jewish-descent, and I'd NEVER spot any similarities between my sweet Grandma and a fucking Goblin. I'd never even stop to draw comparison. My grandma was a beautiful, very dark woman, why the heck would I think an ugly goblin with a big nose and big ears repressents her or any other Jew or Jewish-descent?!

Are people even conscious that Jews and Muslims not necessarily look like they'd expect? fuck stereotypes, you know? because the more we mix, the less stereotypical traits you find. I see blonde, blue-eyed Muslims a lot, and I bet a lot of people would never imagine them like that. A lot of people would also not imagine a Catholic to be dark-haired, with bushy dark eyebrows, dark eyes and long dark beards, but that's a bunch of men in the Catholic branch of my family. As for the bit of my family that I know to come from a mixture of Muslim and Jew, none of them have huge ass noses, or weird ears, or look yellowish, which I've learned through mainstream media is how people tend to imagine Jews (like Goblins?).

So get rid of your bloody stereotypes and racial bias. Look into yourself and stop thinking of what traits make someone a race or another. The only races that you can clearly see from outside with an extremely low window of failure are white and black. Other than that? we can look like anything, because the bigger distinctions are associated to geographical location and exposure to the sun. And it shouldn't fucking matter to you. Regardless of what race or ethnicity I am... I am a person. A hard-working, loving woman. None of the rest of it matters to anyone but myself.

#race #xenophobia #racism #muslim #jew #christian #catholic #religion #racist bias #ethnicity #society #politics #women

[steamedtangerine]

A message from Rev. Magdalen

Yes hello, I'm Rev. Magdalen. You may have heard the story of how a court once ordered me to stop having SubGenius materials in my home, back in the aughts, but those events aren't what define me as a person, and aren't the center of what the Church of the SubGenius means to me, so I want to share what it does mean to me.

As a teen, I really loved the books, tapes, and radio show, so as an adult it was a huge honor to get to be part of SubGenius HQ and hang out with Ivan Stang and other great artists, helping my husband, Rev. Jesus, grow the group. I packed membership packs, hauled gear for devivals and X-Day, took my shifts checking people in for the festival, welcomed newcomers and showed them around so they could feel at home, among friends, in a place where people wouldn't be cruel to them over what they look like or their unique interests or whatever made them different.

Life happened, and I hadn't been as involved in the past few years, focusing more on personal stuff and progressive political activism. I just assumed there was no way the SubGenius community, a place for the kind of nonconformist people that fascists would despise, would be affected by the current alt-right/fascist movement that is tearing so many other groups and families apart. I mean, our entire deal is sticking up for those who are strange and different, turning the tables on the kind of conformist bullies who shout "Can't you take a joke?" after saying something cruel to someone they consider a misfit.

I know there was a big schism a while back, over the issue of hurtful language, but I never thought that would lead to people who used to be just "edgy but nice-deep-down" committing to anti-civil-rights as an identity. And yet here we are now, with some online SubG spaces (not reddit, yaay) where what seems like should be an oxymoron, "Fashy SubGenii" not only exist but are now claiming that mocking the very idea of civil rights is what it was always about, and that it was always intended to be a regressive group where you'd get judged and mocked for your physical traits as a person.

Some of these fashy SubGs have even gone all the way Q, believing racist conspiracy theories about the civil rights movement and Covid, and pizzagate-type conspiracy theories about Democrats.

They point to the edgelord "ironic bigotry" of the nineties and aughts that some SubGenii created to mock the brutality and stupidity of bigots, and say "See, it was always secretly a fashy org! We, the fashy ones, we're the real SubGenii!"

These bad apples claim that the real message of this experimental art collective isn't that you deserve Slack even if bullies torment you for things you had no control over, and that your life matters even if socially-dominant-caste people around you say you're worthless, no. The message they now put in "Bob's" mouth is "Being a bully is awesome! It's hilarious to mock people for the bodies they were born into, or for wanting to dismantle an arbitrary caste system that makes society treat them as lesser!"

The way I see it, too many good people gave too much to this experimental art collective/online community for that hateful stuff to be what new people see when they want to know more about the group after learning about it from the documentary or from a social media post.

I urge every SubGenius to stand up to any fashy gimmebobs who might come around your online hangouts. Tell them in explicit terms: No more retconning this group of outsider artist weirdos into a milkshake duck. Yes, we've always had problematic people, but no, "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" was never meant to be a free ticket to bigoted hate or outright fascism.

by /u/revmagdalen on /r/SubGenius (ca. 7 months ago)

Pretty much everyone there was in simpatico: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubGenius/comments/mowcjz/subgenius_isnt_just_edgelordism_with_a_pipe/

The original book also warned about those turning the CoSG into a joke for those “who only get off on death and laughter”. It also warns about some conspiracies that have been manufactured by The Conspiracy (TM) itself to further it’s own agenda.

There was a time I used to read Jim Goad’s Answer Me! and listen to Boyd Rice (and his contribution to RE/Search Pranks! still seems on the level from that time), but it turned out Goad was endorsing rape, and his working with Nick Bougas was a bad idea, all while Boyd’s “ironic fascism” wasn’t all that ironic in the long-run. They all ended up chumming with white supremacists and inspired a lot of racism and Q crap on 4Chan (oddly enough while also chumming with satanists like LeVay and his daughter-something NAR fundies are still clueless about when it comes down to the origins of QAnon).

#top tier #just another day on reddit #slack! #punk rawk! #propaganda #idiocracy

[catbountry]

Glancing over some of my older essays on politics, I’m kind of struck how, despite them not being written that long ago, I feel like I come across as a dumbass, or at least like somebody who thinks they’re much smarter than they actually are. And it’s weird, because most of my views are roughly the same; rather, it’s that I feel the way that they’re articulated comes across as too... I don’t know, smarmy? Smug, maybe? Lacking nuance. Blunt. Like I’m talking down to people. Obviously, this was never my intention, but it’s weird how something that was written while in my early 30′s somehow makes me wince a little... as I rapidly approach being smack-dab in the middle of my 30′s. God, I’ve been in my 30′s for almost 5 whole years now, fuck, where does the time go?

I think being able to come out of the other side of the Trump presidency in one piece has kind of helped add some much-needed perspective, at least for myself. I think the hypothesis that a lot of people who voted for Trump were desperate for some kind of change was proven correct when he failed to be re-elected due to his bungling of COVID, which, funnily (or not) enough, he almost could have looked like he was doing the right thing when he initially wanted to close the U.S. borders... except he’d been trying to restrict travel and close borders so often that of course nobody took such a suggestion seriously. And even if they had? Rich people still would have brought it over, because as we all know, rich people can just get away with all kinds of shit. Of course, once it actually hit, Trump really couldn’t handle the idea of looking weak at all, so instead, it was downplayed, joked about, not taken seriously, even though he’d been briefed that it was going to be really, really bad. And when he got it, and in private thought he was going to die? Well, once he beat it, of course he had to say it wasn’t so bad... even though it killed almost a thousand times more people than the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Most of them were seniors. I think that, as well as a general fatigue and disappointment over the lack of swamp-draining from those who weren’t fanatical devotees, probably sealed his fate. I admit, I wasn’t very sure Biden really had much of a chance for a long time... until COVID happened. But hey, at least we got our stimmy from Trump, right lads?

I’m still fully convinced that Trump never intended to win, and that his run was done purely for ego and financial gain, but his ability to effortlessly bait the media, as well as his unexpected exposing of the sham we all knew presidential elections to be, wound up rocketing him to success. Trump will no doubt go down as one of the most successful conmen in American history, one so slick he wound up conning his way all the way into the White House. The whole thing was like if The Producers was a presidential campaign, fascism included. Granted, I don’t think Trump was ever a true fascist; I think he wanted to be a dictator, but the actual job of being President was a drag. The cult of personality he accrued, however, was the biggest source of narcissistic supply that he’d ever experienced in his entire life. Hell, just being the literal President, the most important person in the entire fucking world, is a hell of a high that I don’t think he’ll ever really be able to reclaim. Trump’s going to be chasing that dragon for the rest of his life. Having “President” in front of your name is a lot nicer than actually, you know, having to be the President. I mean, look at how quickly Obama went gray. A lot of people are convinced Trump will run again in 2024, and I don’t doubt it, but unless something happens that completely throws us for a loop, I don’t see him being able to recreate the, er, “magic” of 2016. Everyone getting to see that, not only was his fanbase capable of having embarrassing public meltdowns just like the le epic triggered snowflake lib Hilary supporters, but that their meltdowns were even more embarrassing, and that they all looked like a bunch of fucking English soccer hooligans during the Capitol siege... well, I think that’s going to put off the swing voters, as well as the moderate Republicans.

Also, that Twitter knock-off founded by Trump’s aide, Gettr, being flooded by gay furries posting Sonic the Hedgehog foot porn? Feels like classic 4chan-style raiding. I approve. It almost feels like we’re healing, even if it’s just a little bit.

But what the fuck did we even learn from all this? What did I learn from this?

I don’t know. It feels like over the time I’ve been on Tumblr, what was once SJW became woke, and being woke has become very normal; so normal, in fact, that fucking massive corporations that use slave labor overseas will change their Twitter icons to rainbow every June because The Gays have become a safe, marketable demographic. On one hand, it’s nice to know that, at least in what I guess is considered the western world, LGBT people are more accepted now than they ever have been. On the other... god, it feels so cynical, doesn’t it? This is all very stream of consciousness, here. I don’t write very much on here since, surprise surprise, Tumblr’s been kind of dead since the porn ban. I still see people post, but it used to be that I couldn’t refresh my dash without seeing dozens of new posts. Now it feels like I refresh my dash and I’d be lucky to see a new post there an hour later. This is why I’m on Discord more. It feels like I have more productive conversations than I ever could on Tumblr or Twitter. Twitter is just... god. It’s like all the worst parts of Tumblr without the parts that made it fun aside from a few memes.

Sorry, I got off track there. The point I was going to make before is that, while I am still very firmly anti-censorship, I’ve managed to put myself in a position where it no longer feels like the stakes are so high. I can relax. I don’t have to feel like I’m on the defense the whole time as somebody grills me over some slip-up. I don’t use Twitter that much. When I do post something in response to somebody, I feel like I instantly regret it. I posted in response to some dumbass spreading a rumor that 4chan’s favorite Simpson’s meme about Sneed’s Feed and Seed is secretly ableist, and I got a response from some dude with an Umaru-chan avatar telling me how he’s proudly racist because he and his friends call each other slurs? Like bro, you’re posting cringe, you’re going to lose subscriber-

I don’t know what I’ve learned yet. Maybe that social media sucks and that chatrooms with friends are the superior way to communicate online. I tried out Telnet recently to go into some random IRC, that was neat. It just feels nice to not have to get into a fucking argument every fucking day over shit that doesn’t matter as much as people thinks it does, to not have to hear about every fucking time the President sneezes or farts. It’s not that there’s no longer anything to worry about; there is. I’d really like to see fellow lefties go after the handful of massive corporations that control the majority of the online experience, who censor not just all the racist white dude grifters in suits who all look suspiciously similar to one another, but us as well. I want to see us raise a bigger stink about the web being santized, sterlized, and gentrified to be friendlier to corporations who only want your precious data and eyeballs. Maybe without the constant distraction of Bad Orange Man, we could make that happen. Maybe.

Or maybe fucking Dream will breathe again and all the fucking children will piss their pants and clog up Twitter, fuck these kids, get off my internet, GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

#not fan fiction #political bullshit

[qqueenofhades]

Your political posts recently have been excellent. I was 17 during the 2016 election and watching everything go down while not being able to vote (and watching people choose not to vote) was horrible. I can’t believe how many people on the left seem to have forgotten 2016. I’m worried about the leftist twitter mob and the anti-trump conservatives in swing states who might not vote at all and the voter suppression. I’m so worried about everything right now.

Oof, hon. That is a Big Big Mood.

It’s a hard and surreal feeling when you’re having conversations, as have happened in my family and probably in many of yours, with your parents about what to do if we need to leave the country and flee to Canada (or wherever else) at a moment’s notice. My father is 67 years old and disabled, and he is so worried about all of this (as he damn well should be) because we’re well past the dress-rehearsal stages of fascism and into outright fascism. We are making serious plans to relocate permanently out of America no matter how the election goes, because I honestly cannot take this country at all anymore, and my family feels the same. We have had the conversation about “what if this country collapses and we have to get out.” It’s scary and it’s awful and I hate that we’re having to do this, and I hate even more that people are deliberately rejecting their chance (again, the LAST CHANCE WE HAVE) to reject Trump in a (somewhat) democratic fashion. No wonder we can’t remember history at all when we can’t even remember, as you point out, four years ago.

I just can’t with the renewed kerfuffle that the Harris pick has kicked up, not least because most of us knew or figured for a long time that it was coming. Somehow the twitterati wants us to believe that they would have happily skipped to their polling station to vote for Joe Biden, despite months of screaming about rapist/dementia/corporate ghoul/worse than Trump/senile/won’t follow through on his promises/insert tagline here, if only he hadn’t picked Kamala “Cop” Harris. (She’s a lawyer, not a cop, and her prosecutorial career also specialized in putting away male predators for rape and murder and taking financial giants to town for multibillion-dollar fraud settlements, aka the kind of people we want to see punished, but hey, all nuance is evil.) Because... come on.... seriously???

If Biden had picked Stacey Abrams (and don’t get me wrong, she was my favorite too for a while) the narrative would be about she is inexperienced and has never held any executive office (which she hasn’t), and this is bad because it means he’s senile. If Biden had picked Val Demings, who was ACTUALLY a cop, more cop screaming. If Biden had picked Karen Bass, they would have fixated on her remark praising Castro at his death (which she has subsequently apologized and retracted) and moaned about how this lost Florida. If Biden had picked Susan Rice, who was entangled with the whole Benghazi scandal, BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI HILLARY CLINTON EVIL would have been shouted by both the right and the left. If Biden had picked Elizabeth Warren, oh my god. FAKE PROGRESSIVE CORPORATE SHILL WHITE DEMON WHO DARED TO ATTACK BERNIE!!! would be bellowed from the rooftops. There is literally nobody who would have been Progressive enough for the leftist twitterites, and if they claim there is, they’re lying. Plus, the Vice President does.... not make policy??? He (or she, in this case, and I love that) is there to implement the President’s goals, to advise, consult, take over if necessary, and otherwise serve in a supporting role. So why the fuck on earth is a long-expected VP pick suddenly The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back?

You wanna know the Upside Down we’re living in right now? Sarah Palin (yes, that Sarah Palin) has been openly more supportive of Kamala Harris than some of the supposed members of her own party for getting the pick. And that’s not because RAH RAH HARRIS’S POLICIES ARE JUST LIKE SARAH PALIN!!! Sarah Palin has offered her advice to Harris without a partisan bent and even said she’s happy to see her picked and that she hopes Harris isn’t attacked in the same way she was (fat chance) and that she should be confident and present herself to the American public as she is. And that is... surprisingly... not terrible advice?? And I’m genuinely happy that the only other female VP pick, as embarrassingly unprepared as she might have been, is doing that, while wondering how on earth we’re living in a world where, again, Sarah Palin is being more supportive than supposed Democratic voters. I don’t get it, chief.

The racist, misogynistic, “nasty woman” attacks on Harris have already eagerly begun from the right, the same stuff they hit Hillary Clinton with, and just as before, the left is eager to pile on rather than to defend their candidate, because they’d rather tear her down for not having policies that perfectly aligned with their own at all times rather than attack her outright fascist opponents. I don’t agree with everything Kamala has done either. But guess what? I DO agree with some things that she HAS done! And I’m going to defend her like crazy, because lord, I am tired of us eating our own. Kamala is experienced, competent, her nomination is historic, and she can clearly do the job. AND SHE IS STILL THE VICE PRESIDENT. NOT THE TOP OF THE TICKET.

The good news is: Biden has leads outside the margin of error in almost all swing states (which don’t matter a damn unless voters actually show up and vote, and we’ve already discussed how hard the GOP is deliberately making that, because they can only win by cheating) and far larger than Clinton’s leads at this time in 2016. Black voters, while being wary of some elements of Harris’s past, are largely very happy with the pick and agree that she can continue to evolve on her policy stances, and that the selection of a Black woman who has been a leader on criminal justice and police reform sends a strong message. Biden’s campaign had its best fundraising hour ever and ultimately raised $26 million in 24 hours after Harris joined the ticket, reflecting a surge of Democratic voter energy and enthusiasm. (That does not count leftists, who aren’t registered Democrats and don’t vote for Democrats and yet still act like their views are mainstream within the party.) So as loud and as obnoxious and maddening as they are, the hard left twitterati still aren’t actually the people that we are counting on as a core constituency. But this election is going to be very hard, and all the people threatening to sit out for some ridiculous moral-ideology reason are only going to make it harder for themselves and us.

I don’t know what to say. I spend a lot of time being scared too. Especially when it can feel like I’m yelling into the void over all this, and the sanctimonious circle-jerking baffles me beyond all reason. But we are not alone, we will do our best, and that is all we can ask for.

#politics for ts #your salty internet aunt is Fed Up kiddos #anonymous #ask

[tes-trash-blog]

🌙 hmm... an age old question but opinion on the whole Imperials Vs Stormcloaks fiasco Skyrim tried to feed us?

*cracks neck*

Goodbye follower count, I’m going in!

I’m going to preface this with a confession: In my first ever playthrough of Skyrim (2014), I did side with the Imperials. On my second, I sided with the Stormcloaks. Since then, I have done three more playthroughs on the Stormcloak side, and three more on the Imperial side. In four more still my Dragonborn was neutral, slaying Alduin without ever taking a side. In my playthroughs, especially the ones after 2016, I’ve developed my own opinions about the Imperials and Stormcloaks alike.

In order to better articulate my opinion, we must first briefly examine four factors: the American landscape in which Skyrim was conceived, Skyrim itself and its portrayal of the Imperials and Stormcloaks (and the Thalmor), and Umberto Eco, the usage of terms like “fascism” and especially “Nazism” in American popular culture, and how this all relates to the Imperial/Stormcloak fiasco.

So let’s get started.

Part 1: Thanks, Obama.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. It was a landslide victory against Republican runner John McCain, a conserative who frequently brought up his service in the Vietnam War (and his time as a prisoner of war) during his campaign, as well as his years of service in political office. In a move to make his (very white, very male) campaign seem more inclusive in the face of the frontrunners of the Democratic campaign (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), he appointed Sarah Palin as his VP. She was the only conservative woman who agreed to be his running mate, as all three  conservative women in the Senate already said no, and the Republicans couldn’t find a black conservative.

(I’m not making this up.)

Anyway, come 2008, the conservatives lose their goddamn minds because Bush’s reign of actual terror was over, a Black man is now President and Whiteness is in peril. This was before the term “triggered” became a popular sneer in the conservative dictionary, but “snowflake” was used a lot. Come 2009, the Tea Party emerges. And now we get to the crux of my, uh, observation.

For the young, uninitiated, or non-Americans who are thinking “What the fuck is wrong with America”, the Tea Party Movement was/is a rash of hardline rightwingers who, still licking their wounds from a sound beating by the Democrats in the 2008 election, sought to rebrand themselves. With some bootstrap lifting and millions of dollars in funding from media tycoons such as the Koch brothers, the Tea Party made its official debut in 2010 after the signing of the Affordable Healthcare Act. Their message was simple: It’s time to take America back from the lazy, the entitled, and the “uppity”. What was really just a rehash of a song and dance that’s been turning its ugly white head since at least 1964 gained something of a stranglehold on America, in spite of its relatively small size of active members. It hit all the notes: a populist movement rooted in the perceived threats to their faith, their culture, and their social and economic capital.

They also believed shit like this:

For instance, Tea Partiers are more likely than other conservatives to agree with statements such as “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,” and are more likely to disagree with statements like “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” (Williamson, 34)

Like I said. Since 1964.

What made the Tea Party different from the other conservative temper tantrums was one thing: Internet access. All of a sudden, these angry white men had an outlet for voicing their rages, and an open recruiting forum for other malcontents and disaffected youths. I’m not implying the Tea Party had anything to do with Gamergate, nor that Gamergate had anything to do with the rise of the alt-right or whatever these tennybopper neo-Nazis are calling themselves now, but I am saying those circles at least touch in a Venn diagram.

“But tes-trash-blog! What do the machinations of American politics have to do with Elves?” you may ask. Well dear reader, this leads me to..

Part 2: Hey, you! You’re finally awake!

Skyrim was an overnight hit. On release, The Elder Scrolls 5 generated 450 million dollars on its opening weekend alone. This game sold for around 20 million copies, not including Special Edition, VR, or Switch, and continues to see an average of around 10,000 players a week 9 years later (Steamcharts).

And 20 million people see one thing first: A strong, noble Nord in captivity, telling you that you’re on your way to be executed by the Imperials, who are in bed with a scary, sneering bunch of High Elves dressed in black.  20 million people already were told who was the clear bad guy in this game, and it wasn’t the strong, noble Nord in captivity. I’ll be going into this more into Part 3, but suffice to say, the Imperials were already coded as Bad Guy by association. The Imperials decided to execute you, the player. They shot a man in the back because he ran from his own execution. He stole a horse, which was a crime punishable by death in those days. The game doesn’t tell you that part, and is content to say that Lokir was killed because he was in the same cart as the Stormcloaks.

Speaking of Imperials, the Third Empire is written as obtuse, corrupt, uncaring, and cruel. The Septim Dynasty is wrought with scandal and intrigue, plagued by conflict, and powerless to do anything about the Oblivion Crisis that almost ended the world. They flat out abandoned Morrowind and Summerset to better protect their own, offered no help during the Void Nights that destabilized the Khajiit, and worst of all, signed a treaty outlawing Talos worship. That is the crux on which the Stormcloak/Imperial conflict lies. These damned outsiders telling these humble Nords what to do and what not to do. They’re corrupt, lazy, and know nothing of the hardships these people endure, and now the nanny state Empire is telling them they don’t have the freedom to worship what they want? How dare they!

Going further, in the seat of Imperial power in Skyrim is none other than Jarl Elisif, a young widow who relies heavily on the advice of her (overwhelmingly male) thanes, stewards, and generals. She’s weak, thinks mostly of her dead husband, and is written as someone who overreacts to scenarios; the “legion of troops” to Wolfskull Cave over a farmer reporting strange noises, banning the Burning of King Olaf in the wake of her husband’s murder via Shout come to mind. Compare and contrast that to the seat of Stormcloak power, Windhelm. Ulfric spends his time pouring over the map of troop movements and discussing strategy when he’s not delivering his big damn “Why I Fight” speech. Elisif is weak, Ulfric is strong. The Jarl of Solitude is even told to tone it down during the armistice negotiations in Season Unending. She’s chastised by her own general. The first thing you see in Solitude is a man being executed for opening a gate. The first thing you see in Windhelm is two Nords harassing a Dark Elf woman and accusing her of being an Imperial spy.

Both are portrayed as horrific, but only one has bystanders decrying the acts of the offender. Only one has a relative in the crowd proclaim, “That’s my brother [they’re executing]!” The best you get with Suvaris is her confronting you about whether or not you “hate her kind”. Even a mouth breathing racist would be disinclined to say “yes” when confronted with the question of whether or not they’re racist, but that’s how the writers of Skyrim think racism works.

I acknowledge that this was an attempt at bothsidesism, but the handling was.. clumsy.

Part 3: Ur-Fascism, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Bash The Stormcloaks

And now we move on to Umberto Eco, fiction writer, essayist, and writer of the famous essay Ur-Fascism. In short, Eco summarizes 14 separate properties of a fascist movement; it’s important to stress that this should not be treated as a checklist if a piece of media is fascist, or if a person is actually a Nazi, or to say “X is Bad Because Checklist”. It’s frankly impossible to even organize these points into a coherent system, as fascism is an ideology that is, by its nature, incoherent.

With that in mind, let’s run down the points:

1. “The Cult of Tradition”, characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by Tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

2. “The Rejection of Modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

3. “The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

4. “Disagreement Is Treason” – Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

5. “Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

6. “Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

7. “Obsession with a Plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite’s ‘fear’ of the 1930s Jewish populace’s businesses and well-doings, or any anti-Semitic conspiracy ever).

8. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak.” On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

9. “Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy” because “Life is Permanent Warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to NOT build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

10. “Contempt for the Weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

11. “Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

12. “Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

13. “Selective Populism” – The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the Leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People.”

14. “Newspeak” – Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

I did copy and paste the list from Wikipedia, but you can read the full essay here. It’s 9 pages long. You can do it, I have faith in you.

You may notice that you can’t really shorthand these concepts, or at least not in an aesthetically pleasing way. However, you can point to the most infamous of fascist regimes and take their aesthetic instead. You see it in Star Wars with the Empire (hmm) and the First Order, in Star Trek with the Mirrorverse and the Cardassian Dominion (hmm), and in the.. Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue..

Oh, yeah. The Thalmor. They dress in dark colors, are a foreign power trying to exert their influence on the downtrodden Nord, enact purges, and scream about Elven superiority. The Thalmor express every surface level perception of a Nazi in American popular culture. TVTropes has already pretty well covered this ground in their Video Games section of A Nazi By Any Other Name, so I won’t go too much into here seeing as I’m already at the 2000 word mark. Suffice to say, it’s hard to think Bethesda wasn’t trying to make the player associate the 4th Era Altmer with the 1930’s German.

And in doing so, they accidentally created a group that is.. Well, you’ve read the essay or at least the 14 points. Try and tell me how many of them don’t apply to Nordic culture. What grabs me the most are points 9, 11, and 13: life is a perpetual struggle in which you must emerge victorious, a culture of Heroes impatient to die in a glorious fashion, and the Common Will that is enacted and reinforced by one strongman leader. You see these elements in play in Nord culture, in Stormcloak ideology especially. I, for one, hear what Galmar really means when he says “We will make Skyrim beautiful again”. I hear the echoes in George W Bush’s speeches and McCain’s campaign when Ulfric talks of duty and service, of “fighting because Skyrim needs heroes, and there’s no one else but us.”

It’s less of a dog whistle and more of a foghorn if you ask me. And to go back to part 2, this is a message that 20 million played. Not all of them are Stormcloak stans, but that compelling message was still present. Americans love being a strongman hero in their media; we eat that shit up. The setup was enough: you’re a lone hero about to be executed by milquetoast Imperials and Nazi-coded Thalmor. The story was enough: a strong man rebels against a system gone awry, one that seeks to destroy his way of life. 

It was enough to compel a “fashwave” artist to take on the monkier Stormcloak(Hann). It was enough that Skyrim was lauded as a “real” game instead of say, Depression Quest, and to justify ruining a game developer’s life over it.

It was enough that when Skyrim came out in 2011, the game did not do so well in Germany because of these elements, because the game was written for you to be sympathetic towards these very white, very blond and Ayran-coded Nords. I can’t speak for the popularity of the game now in Germany, but when I lived there, there were a few raised eyebrows among my age group about the message of the game.

I think about that a lot, especially when the tesblr discourse heats up about the Stormcloaks. I see how visibly upset people get when someone throws shade at Ulfric. The talk of “it’s just a video game” and “lul get triggered” starts to look less like passive dismissal and shoddy trolling and more a kind of funhouse mirror to how they really think.

I can’t lie, it reminds me so much of 2009, of these angry people screaming racial slurs on the Internet because there’s a Black president or posting sexist screeds because Michelle Obama wanted kids to have access to healthy meals. It reminds me of the kid in my sophomore class who said he was going to “take out” Obama on his inauguration day. He was 15 years old then. He’s a father now.

Hell, it reminds me of right now, of Republican Senators demanding civility and tone policing as they kowtow to an actual fascist. The Stormcloak in the Reach camp “had to do something” about the Empire telling him and his what to do, and the neighbor I used to dogsit for had to do something too. I don’t watch his dogs anymore. When I told him I wouldn’t, he tried to make himself the victim and say I was getting political about dog sitting. It’s just two dogs. It’s just a video game. All political messages are just imaginary, snowflake.

But it’s really not, is it now?

TL;DR and Sources

TL;DR: The imperials are portrayed as weak and effectual, as the bootlicker to the Thalmor, and the writers were so busy trying to make one side look bad and weak they inadvertently made actual fascists.

Even though this is pretty long, this really only scratches the surface of the.. Well, everything. In all honesty this is just a very condensed version of my opinion. Big shockeroo, there.

Do keep in mind that this isn’t a condemnation of Skyrim. Lord knows I love that game, or I wouldn’t have this blog. This also isn’t a damning of people who play the game and side with the Stormcloaks, or think Ulfric is hot, or don’t like the Thalmor or what have you. You do you, fam. You do you. This is my observation and opinion on one aspect of the game, just with some tasty sources to better paint a picture of where I personally formed my opinion.

This also isn’t to say that I’m trying to draw a 1:1 comparison between The Elder Scrolls and reality, or that Ulfric is obviously a McCain/Trump/Hitler expy, but Skyrim is, like all things, a product of the minds that created it. Skyrim didn’t happen in an apolitical vacuum, and apolitical stories about war simply do not exist. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply reinforcing the status quo, and it is our responsibility as people who consume this media to question it, and that status quo they so dearly wish to hang on to.

Also, Elisif hot.

Sources:

Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism”. The New York Review of Books. 1995. https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf>

Williamson, Venssa, Skocpol, Theda and Coggin, John. “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”. Perspectives on Politics, Volume 9. March 2011. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/tea_party_pop_0.pdf>

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Steamcharts.com https://steamcharts.com/app/72850>

Schreier, Jason. “Bethesda Ships 7M Skyrim, Earns About $450M”. Wired. November 16, 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/11/skyrim-sales/>

Hann, Michael. “‘Fashwave” - synth music co-opted by the far right”. The Guardian. December 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/dec/14/fashwave-synth-music-co-opted-by-the-far-right>

#holy shit this got long #lore overanalysis #the trash talks

[antifainternational]

But antifa is pro fascist... fascism is the act of suppressing opposition, With violence and anger (sound familiar?) shutting down opposing voices in the media (conservative bans because of cry baby antifa reporting them) you’re no better than the nazi party... it’s also funny that you’re pro socialism and the nazi party was called the “the national socialist party” 🤔🤔🤔🤔 as a European jew, that’s not blinded by liberal american ignorance, I can see you for the racists, you are..

If anti-fascists are pro-fascist and you’re against fascists, then you’re an anti-fascist, right?  But if you’re an anti-fascist, then you’re pro-fascist, according to you, right?  So you’re against yourself, right? Getting away from your ouroboros of “logic” for a second, Anon, let’s also point out that you have no fucking clue of what fascism is! Fascism is nothing more than “suppressing opposition” “with violence?”  Then literally every government in the world is fascist, since they all do that.  Which renders your definition completely meaningless.  Here’s a little cheat sheet for you to look at the next time you’re about to make a total ass of yourself on the internet:

Shutting down opposing voices in the media?  When did antifa get control of the media?  Hold on a second, we’ve got a call coming in from CNN, asking if they should allow a guest on to speak. OK, now that that’s taken care of, does everyone have an inherent right to be published in the media?  Or is the media a bunch of platforms from which views are broadcast entirely at the discretion of the owners of said media, who are under no obligation to provide these platforms to anyone, much less to genocidal bigots? Antifa is not “pro-socialism.”  Antifa is a broad-based movement of people from all sorts of political backgrounds, united solely in their opposition to fascism.  Some antifa are socialists, some are not. Still, it’s funny that you think if something (e.g. the nazis) is called something (e.g. national socialists)  that means it actually is the thing it’s called.  

And it’s weird how, if the nazis were really socialists, they did nothing to nationalize industries or seize capital from anyone besides Jews and kept all the largest German corporations and capitalists in place and in fact even gave them slave labour and confiscated assets and outlawed independent labour unions and made actual socialists the first people to be sent to concentration camps and executed.  Almost seems like they were, if anything, the opposite of socialists.  Which is what any credible historian will tell you. Finally: who exactly are anti-fascists racist against, Anon?  The fascist “race?”  Please tell us, we’re dying to know who we’re racist against!  As a “European jew,” you’re the expert, right?  

[thatwaywardwolf]

With the election on the way and the literal hellscape that’s about to unfold with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, let me make something abundantly clear for anyone who is new here or never got the hint about how things run on here because I’ve gotten some shit on my side blog for it and I’m still salty about it.

If you ever supported Trump at any point during the election, even if it was a second passing thought and you didn’t actually vote for him, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to unfollow me and never ever show your presence in my notifications ever again. Don’t tell me you’re leaving either. Just go and don’t let the door hit your sorry ass on the way out. I don’t give one flying fuck if you regret your vote, because that’s your problem. You made your bed and you can rot in it for all I care. You people fucking disgust me and I hope you’re happy with who you voted for. I hope you’re happy knowing you have blood on your hands and that you had a role in what got us to this point. In my eyes, you’re absolutely no better than the ICE drones and the neo-Nazis who march in the street with their ugly ass MAGA hats and banners.

It’s absolutely fucking mind boggling to me that you saw him mock a disabled reporter, mock POWs, and call Mexicans a bunch of gang-banging, drug mule rapists, and you still thought he was fine. You saw his racist ass wall and thought he was fine. You can’t ignore that or justify it. If you have any morality, you can’t justify or excuse it; especially as a Heathen - which is fucking disgraceful. You cosigned that. How fucking dare you. Now, we’re here with thousands kids separated from their parents, many dead in ICE concentration camps or just completely missing, people being arrested for saying fascism is bad (which is what antifa fucking is, being anti-fascist), Nazis being called “fine people”, trans women being targeted on “how to be spotted”, the LGBTQ community as a whole being thrown under the bus, people losing their first amendment right to free speech and protest calling for justice for all the black folk who have lost their lives to senseless police brutality and racial profiling, and over 202,000 people are dead from COVID (and counting).

You’re no friend of mine nor are you deserving of hospitality or leverage.

This is it. I’m done. I can’t take this shit anymore and this might be the election that actually kills me instead of landing me in the hospital for a panic attack.

Fuck every single last one of you who voted for him. You are the literal worst and I wouldn’t be surprised if you would have joined the teams that rounded up my grandma and the other Japanese citizens for the camps either. In my eyes, no amount of justice or how much you talk about supporting the protests and calls to action will ever undo what you did. You’re just an undercover cop or thug in blue waiting to provoke the crowds and I want nothing to do with you.

Fuck you. Fuck off. Goodbye.

#this blog fucking hates trump and every single motherfucker who ever supported him #fuck trump #fuck trump voters #fuck trump supporters #pagans against white supremacy #heathens against hate #adam rambles

[wittynameme]

update to the “a confession” feasco.

if you dont k ow what im talking about just look up “a confession” on my page and read all the way through . (its an unorganized mess im so sorry)(my name is chloe plz ignore that.

f:For the racist thing- A country with two different races might have a bad history with each other. So generally the country that got the beat down the most is gonna hate the other, so that country's people are gonna be racist and against them. With the stealing thing- Animals steal eggs and what not all of the time. Also with artifacts the governments take those and preserve those for the future. Racism is bad I understand that because it usually is because of someone's skin which is wrong to be against someone for there skin tone. Stealing is also bad, like robbery and shoplifting and so on

me:you do realize that you just used like , three natoriously rasist talkinhg points used by kkk members all the time right?

me:you think that humans are naturally rasist because of a war and the winners tell the story and the losers are bitter about it? in this case the losers of this "beat down" being africa?the "rasism is natural" thing . the "africa is just bitter" thing.or are you sayig whights were the victims? which in that case is the "whights are being attacked" thing

f:Both aren't necessarily wrong actually

we are not like dumb animals, we have the ability to know when we sis something wrong .yes animals steal but the full grown people who grave robbed thoghs tombs did so because they thought they could and should have known etter

and the "its for there own good were just keeping them safe" thing implies the people we stole it from wont take care of it. even if they dont its not our call cause the mummys are not ours, its not like they want the artifacts any less tha we do

So you're saying we shouldn't take artifacts and preserve them and let people destroy them and sell them off.

Chloe it assumes we just love these mummys more than they do and were scarered they will hurt it so that completly justifies us keeping it from them.we should ask permission first 

That's what they do

Chloethe whole "its for preservation" thing is exactly what the british museum said when people lobied for the artifacts to be moved to and african museum.

"they"

africans fuin and sell there artifacts as trinkets?thats ALSO a rasist sterio type.

That's just how the world is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chloe no it isnt you have been fed propaganda and you dont even know itall the things you said have been used by the kkk constantlyits like ypur reading right out of there apologetic s book.

I don't see the problem in that. I'm a person of history. Does it help to mention that my preferred ideology is Socialist-Imperialist. Does it also help to say that I'm also Atheist/Satanist. I'm also a Republican and conservative. I also see things from abroad. I also believe history should be preserved at all costs.You sent Today at 12:18 AMif you knew the hystorical contexts of the arguments you just used i dont think you would be usseing them

What are you talking about?You sent Today at 12:20 AMi litteraly just said where the "were preserving them" argument comes fromYou sent Today at 12:21 AMand if you love the accurete preservation of hystory than you must be anti confeterate right?sent Today at 12:21 AMNoYou sent Today at 12:22 AMthe confeterates literraly flodded public schools with confeterate propaganda and tried to pass laws that forsed american nationalism to be taght in schoolYou sent Today at 12:23 AMand banned any books deemed"against the confeteracy"You sent Today at 12:23 AMmost of the confeterate monuments are from the 60sYou sent Today at 12:23 AMas a fear tacticYou sent Today at 12:24 AMnot real authentic confeterate statuessent Today at 12:24 AMOkay..You sent Today at 12:24 AMthe flag we assosiate with the confeteracy is actually very resentYou sent Today at 12:25 AMcan you guess who poularized the confeterate flag we see today?You sent Today at 12:25 AMa literal kkk dragon who adopted it as a symbol of the "opressed whights"sent Today at 12:25 AMThe Confederate flag is not popular, the Confederate battle flag isYou sent Today at 12:26 AMthats what i was talking aboutsent Today at 12:26 AMOkYou sent Today at 12:27 AMmost of the people who say they are modern confeterates adopted the flag and lable as something to stand under for a more modern political agenda , usually whight nationalism.You sent Today at 12:27 AMbut the spin it as "were being opressed by minority groups"sent Today at 12:28 AMTo a degree yesYou sent Today at 12:28 AMthey dont want to preserve hystory , they whant to preserve this weird fantacy world where the 1940s were the good old days , there perseptions of hystory.

What's wrong with ww2?You sent Today at 12:30 AM.....uh people diedYou sent Today at 12:30 AMthere was a warYou sent Today at 12:30 AMa war of the worldssent Today at 12:30 AMWell yeah that's what happens in warYou sent Today at 12:30 AMgermany , italy, and japan were ruled by horrible dictatorssent Today at 12:31 AMWrongYou sent Today at 12:31 AMehy do you just say that like thats normal??? like thats a good thing?sent Today at 12:31 AMKinda yeah

wtfYou sent Today at 12:32 AMyour a nazi lover?sent Today at 12:32 AMNoYou sent Today at 12:32 AMi thoght you said you were americansent Today at 12:32 AMI amYou sent Today at 12:32 AMthen tell me you hate nazis

No, I don't hate any ideology

but you hate the one that caused the halocaust more right?

millions of peole died it shouldnt take you that long to type "yes"

No I look at them negatively, it was some horrific things they did but they never did anything to meYou sent Today at 12:36 AMso what !You sent Today at 12:37 AMthat they have never done anything to you!You sent Today at 12:37 AMthay never did anything to you because your whight conservitive and not jewish

say itYou sent Today at 12:38 AMsay the halocaust was bad and hitler was evil

say the halocaust was bad and hitler was evilsent Today at 12:40 AMYou know Judaism is just a religion. Yes the holocaust was bad. Hitler was good at bad, just depends on how you look at it.Jimmy Goodson sent Today at 12:40 AMGood and bad*You sent Today at 12:40 AMhe was evilsent Today at 12:41 AMIn some aspects yesYou sent Today at 12:41 AMwhy wont you say it? why do you beat around the bush?Aa

Because he did some great achievements toYou sent Today at 12:42 AMwhat the fuckYou sent Today at 12:42 AMlemmy guessYou sent Today at 12:42 AMthe train thingsent Today at 12:43 AMNoYou sent Today at 12:43 AMno he did not that is a rumor satrted by neonazi groups-You sent Today at 12:43 AMthan what!You sent Today at 12:43 AMwhat prey tell could pissibly be worth so many lives? you scare mesent Today at 12:47 AMHe United a shambled country. He fixed the economy of Germany. He put Germany back on the world stage. Helped stop hunger and joblessness in Germany. He made the first super highway. Because of him Europe is a prosperous place. Without him NATO wouldn't be a thing. And so on.

you think communist germany was a thriving economy? even if it was that would be outshadoewd by the mountain of dead bodyssent Today at 12:50 AMWho ever mentioned communist?You sent Today at 12:50 AMand the second bit?You sent Today at 12:51 AMnato was made to stop him??????You sent Today at 12:51 AMto stop the red scurge?sent Today at 12:51 AMAll of that was before ww2 (for the top part), Germany was fascist.You sent Today at 12:52 AMand what is the deffinition of fascismsent Today at 12:52 AM...You sent Today at 12:53 AMa dictator who tortures and brainwashes people , opressing the right of others.You sent Today at 12:53 AMisYou sent Today at 12:53 AMnotYou sent Today at 12:53 AMasent Today at 12:53 AMNo...You sent Today at 12:53 AMgoodYou sent Today at 12:53 AMthing a dictator who tortures and brainwashes people , opressing the right of others.You sent Today at 12:53 AMisYou sent Today at 12:53 AMnotYou sent Today at 12:53 AMasent Today at 12:53 AMNo...You sent Today at 12:53 AMgoodYou sent Today at 12:53 AMthingsent Today at 12:54 AMYou got the fascist thing wrong but okayYou sent Today at 12:54 AMyou missed the other 4 texts following it but oksent Today at 12:55 AMThat's not the definitionJimmy Goodson sent Today at 12:55 AMI also don't see the problem in a dictatorshipYou sent Today at 12:56 AMand you call yourself an americansent Today at 12:57 AMI never said I call my self anything I never said I call my self anythingYou sent Today at 12:58 AMso you just hate everyone then?

No I see everyone as equalsYou sent Today at 12:59 AMequally ok to murder in the persuit of money and metirial growth?

equally ok to murder in the persuit of money and metirial growth?You sent Today at 1:00 AMyou can see why im upset right!sent Today at 1:00 AMThat would be different thenJimmy Goodson sent Today at 1:00 AMYea I seJimmy Goodson sent Today at 1:00 AMSee*You sent Today at 1:01 AMwell you just said it was fine the halocaust happened because hitler ultimatly ended up creating economic ad political grrowth That was before ww2 and yes the holocaust bad.You sent Today at 1:04 AMwhy did you not just say that in the first place?

I said that sometime beforeYou sent Today at 1:04 AMyou cant call a horse a horse when you see a horse? I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the fact you shrug at the holocaust discusts me

the fact you shrug at the holocaust discusts meYou sent Today at 1:06 AMi hope you never hold any knind of power

Okay?Jimmy Goodson sent Today at 1:07 AMI have my own country technicallyYou sent Today at 1:07 AMwell its not americasent Today at 1:08 AMIt technically somewhat owns America I have my own flag, ideology, religion, currency, map, and so on

(he then directs me to this link after i ask him what the fuck hes talking about)

https://www.nationstates.net/nation=the_orangeempire?fbclid=IwAR1PpZaq_r6oVFXdZ0j3WZnoUIbH3c1suPEfD58msuX_gFB9T9FJq1X3fOQ

this guys actualy insain

i need a hug.

#public school #facebook #politics #tw #facebookisterrifying

[anubianpagan]

Ma’at and Is/f/et

It seems the kemetic community is confused as to what is Ma’at and what is Isfet.  So let’s break this down using the most recent instance of this ignorance.  Prompted by @secondgenerationimmigrant ‘s hate-fueled rages.  I’ll let @belovedbysetandsekhmet​ and @ngdiscourse​ speak for themselves but here is my take.

Let’s start with Ma’at, there’s been alot of great discussions of what Ma’at is and I feel these discussions are some of the more pertinent and excellent ones to peruse for understanding Ma’at.  These discussions all make very excellent points and are well worth the reads: Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here and Here!

To begin with the hate anons “someone” sent me directly after a post of light mocking beginning with this one:

Now, I appreciate the politeness of saying “please” but the rest shows a complete lack of understanding about what Ma’at is.  Nothing I’ve posted is “anti-ma’at” unless of course you are a radicalized extremist who relies on overly emotional and manipulative mental gymnastics to justify yourself.  Most of the kemetics in the little political fandom group tend to think along these lines, that being a hateful, bitter person is somehow justifiable because they have convinced themselves it’s “ma’at” mostly these people are misguided and ignorant, and to be pitied. 

It is one thing to send such hate anons to someone, and another to wish horrific harm to someone for lightly mocking you.  As evidenced in this link: Here.

To be clear, this is not an execration because nothings being purged, nothings being removed, is/f/et isn’t being snuffed out, the wyrm isn’t being destroyed, this is just pure bitter hate.  Pure malice wished on someone because you can’t handle anythign outside your echo-chamnber.  Lets break this down:

“I hope your government fucks you personally over and that you drown in debt and starve like the people who were victims of austerity in the UK. “

It takes a special kind of evil to truly wish this on someone for mocking you.  Getting a light bit of mocking and you wish the government destroys their lives and they go into financial ruin?  This is not fighting is/f/et this is actively trying to feed it.  This is not Ma’at, this is actively stomping on Ma’at out of such bitter hatred and lack of moral fiber, even in a rage, this is a truly vile thing to wish on people you politically disagree with. However, when you justify to yourself that everyone who disagrees MUST be evil and all political dissent is the work of pure evil...it’s easy to cast yourself the hero in your own demented morality play.

“I hope you feel the despair of the people who had to choose between food and heating, of the people who had to work several jobs to exhaustion just to make ends meet, of the people who had to ration lifesaving medication because they couldn’t afford refills.“

Good vitriol but poor choices of wording.  How can you think you have any morality what so ever, that at the sight of being mocked for your political opinions, you immediately turn to this as your go-to reaction to wish on people?  Wishing harm, despair, pain and suffering on people who disagree with you or don’t believe you.  How can you honestly sit there and pretend you have felt even one modicum of Ma’at’s light fill you when this is where your mind goes because you lost a political event?  Your team didn’t win this time, it sucks, sure, but turning to wanting such horrible poverty and hardship and wishing it on people who politically disagree with you...is honestly, not anywhere near Ma’at, in fact, it’s directly the opposite.  You aren’t fighting FOR Ma’at here sweetie, you’re DEFENDING Is/fe/t.  We are just people disagreeing with you on the internet, we aren’t salivating over people dying and suffering, or complicit in desiring pain and hardships on families you deluded downer debby duckling.

“How is this Ma'at, you awful pieces of shit? How can you justify this to yourselves and be OK with treating the whole situation as an occasion to get your shits and giggles out of the “leftie snowflakes who have finally gotten got”?“

To be clear, we’ve mocked SGI’s politics, we never agreed with the opposing parties.  But to an extremist so blinded by their own hubris and false senses of moral superiority...I’m sure it looks the same.  Much is the case with social justice crowds, they are completely blinded by their own foolishness that they hurl themselves into the darkness and call it light.  To blame some people who mocked you, for the evils of the world, is at best terribly naive, at worst, willfully ignorant.  These same people also tend to not understand the difference between “I disagree with you” and Fascism™, but that usually stems from not actually wanting to know the difference.  It’s a lot easier to disgrace someone’s name when you claim they are literally evil and morally abhorrent.  This is why so many who don’t bow down to the kemetic fandom’s crowd of toxic sjw’s get called fascists, or nazis, or any kind of -ism imaginable.   Mostly it just shows these people are profoundly ignorant and exist in a toxic echo-chamber headspace that is, in the long run, unhealthy.  It’s an ideology of unlearning and unthinking, it’s gross, it’s not “social awareness” because social awareness would include knowing what words mean.  Not throwing them around so hard they lose all meaning.  “Owning the leftie snowflakes” isn’t the goal, usually it’s to argue against what is thought to be bad leftist ideas, with better, more sound arguments that go over their heads because they worship their politics.

I’m sure some would argue it’s “mean” to tease these people or mock them for their bad ideas/opinions, but when you watched them support the people who led the charges in the sjw war on the kemetic community, the people they hurt, the people they smeared and chased away, the content they trashed, gods they disgraced...They become comically tiresome clowns.  We’re tired of their bullshit, the kemetic community was trashed into a garbage heap because people wouldn’t bend the knee to their political tripe.  In hateful revenge they made sure everyone who didn’t agree was either smeared, chased off, or they lied their asses off to disgrace their names.  None of them really have any idea what Ma’at or Is/fe/t are, they just throw the words around without any care for meaning, or quoting some violent racist rapists book as holy doctrine on the subjects of Ma’at.

To be clear, I’m not angry, I’ve long since passed angry and went all the way around to pity.  I pity these kids, alot.  I hope they wake up someday.

This clear overreaction is even more hilarious when you consider that they have no idea how to form an execration...imagine if such terrible people actually knew how to use magical systems to achieve working goals...the world would look like the middle east, shredded in war and poverty and religious extremism, terrorism and death.  It truly is a blessing of the Netjeru that these fools have no concept of how to use magic, heka, or execration ritual prayers.

#kemetic fandom #kemetic #hate anons #secondgenerationimmigrant #in the house of ma'at #sjw bullshit

[brilliantfantasticgeronimo]

still need to rewatch the ep, but for future reference i’m c+p from discord my thoughts on Some Scenes:

(tw all the -isms) (tw unedited chat-speak)

I respect people not wanting to see these things portrayed, because they hit too close to home

But I also think the way people now resort to critique things that are "problematique" [tm] is kinda whack

[Speaking very generally and not about an specific group of critiques]

we want want poc characters and for doctor who to be topical and relevant to our worldAnd not just an empty rompt throuh ~space time

And not just an empty rompt throuh ~space time... and that means sometimes having to show dark atuff

Because our world is dark

(...)

[did you know discord has a 2000 charqcter limit flgodjd][trying again....bear with me]The thing is, all of this IS [intentional], that's what makes it an affecting scene. that's the thing , the connotations DO exist and they ARE gross...... But that's because they're meant to be like that.

These dynamics exist in our world, and when the show uses them, that's being truthful, that's respecting that this is a reality for people. If you're going to have an Asian master, a female doctor... as a writer, you gotta go all the way, imo. Not doing so would be the "i don't see colour or gender nothing means anything " type of  "blind casting" which can lead to fake diversity which leads to cheap tokenism.

Is it kinda fucked up that 13 leaves the master without the perception filter?.... yea. But that's the point of having a main female white character and an asian master. The point is to make you question stuff.

And seeing thirteen doing questionable things... is part of the deal of having a main female character. That you get to see a complex woman that's on the side of good, kind and hopeful.... sometimes doing questionable things for a selfless cause. The  ruthlessness is part of the doctor's character [specially thirteen].... and glossing over it, in an episode that's practically screaming to you "fascism is on the rise right now, beware,, fight"... ["that's low, even for you"] ["these are dark times but they don't last"] now that to me, would be insensitive writing.

tldr, Having this kind of implicit racism and sexism on a story.... doesn't make the story racist and sexist, necessarily. it makes it a story that reflects our world the way dw needs to do if it wants to be relevant to this era. Tone and context matters. If the "knee" scene  were cheeky,if it were in the middle of a more fun episode, it were like "haha innuendoes on dw just your regular saturday"... that would make it very insensitive and tonedeaf. But it's not the case at all. Your audience is acutely aware and sensitive to any misogyny his doctor goes through [bc of #ndms bullshit and bc of how aware this show has always been of the female pov].... and that's why this lands. And it's even mo1e complex by having all the extra layers an uber fan is aware of, of the extra gender complexity at play for these characters.

Like when people are like "killing poc's and queer characters is problematic!!"... and then proceed to ignore context and tone and what the death meant.... on doctor who, 73% of minor characters will be introduced to be super sympathetic only for them to die 3 minutes later. If we want to have more diverse background characters, that means dealing with them being killed off, the same as  the white or straight etc characters. For example horrifically killing off barton's mom...... there's nothing about that scene intrinsically  anti-black [that i could tell], it's not playing on a stereotype, she's not being killed off bc she's a black woman... it's the show using the same horror/sci-fi trope it's used since always. And it's doing a thing of fleshing out your main baddie in a very compressed time [for the very* purpose* of visibility, even]

[Ok and actual tldr; because i didn't do it right the first time lmao] i respect if people are triggered by this kind of Episodes.and they're totally valid to want to avoid that and stick to lighter ones. That being said,having darkness and isms in a story isn't to be avoided all the time.

Ultimately everything is a tool. These are tools to make the sanzy space/time adventuring more grounded in reality. And imo actu ally discussing scenes like these and their implications -rather than dismissing them as "problematic" automatically and not talking about why they might be that- is it's what it's all about.

#doctor who #spyfall part 2 #Thirteenth Doctor #chris chibnall #dw #disclaimer: i do not experience (some) of these issues myself #disclaimer: this is missing some of ppl's in the chat's previous thoughts and also follow throughs when some articulated all this much bette #disclaimer: im a clown #13 #dw spoilers #s12 #meta