#astute stuff
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:
There’s a trend on TikTok about white Americans fighting back against white Europeans who say they’re not allowed to claim their European backgrounds and while I’m all about about white Americans getting in touch w/ their ancestry…
I become incredibly frustrated at how uneducated they are about that alleged ancestry. Every time I see the term “Scots-Irish” I can feel a blood vessel pop because they think that means Scottish and Irish and it’s like they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about or the history or geopolitics involved. That’s Ulster Scots and they’re colonizers in Ireland. ❤️
I got blocked on TikTok for pointing out Scottish colonialism LMAO
Like this is precisely the problem. It’s an ethnonationist historical pity party. You don’t actually want to learn the history of the places you supposedly hail from. It’s pathetic
A lot of US citizens are not willing to understand that to speak about heritage as if its nationality (for example saying someone is Scottish when no member of their family has left Idaho in the last century) is DEEPLY insulting in a significant number of European countries.
We saw this a lot after the last World Cup. Lots of people were talking about how the French football team was “really” African and US tv shows made fun of the French Ambassador for correcting this and saying “no, these men are French”. None of them realising that by calling the French football team African they were, in the eyes of French people, invalidating the Frenchness of these young men. “They’re African” is the language of the French Far Right, in fact it is the language of the far right in many European countries, aiming to invalidate the contributions of immigrants to our various societies.
I get pissed off when US-ians say Chicken Tikka Masala isn’t British or was “stolen” from India because to me that erases the contribution to British culture of the person who invented it. Don’t tell me that someone who moved here and created a dish that was so popular that it changed our entire nation’s relationship with food ISN’T British. I will fight you over it. That person is arguably far more British than I am.
When challenged about claiming national identity from countries that they are in no way a part of many US-ians will make the argument that they are “more Scottish than you” or something similar. This is almost always an argument based on blood quotient or them partaking in two or three stereotyped activities that are associated with the culture, ESPECIALLY heavy drinking or violence. It is not a good way to endear yourself to members of a culture you are trying to ingratiate yourself with by calling them all wife beating drunks and claiming that your own drunken violence makes you a member of their community.
And as for the blood quotient, many of us Europeans who have had unfortunate encounters with people like this take great offence to people who have never set foot in our country claiming that a 23% DNA match from one of those fraudulent genetic heritage tests (seriously, literally all their data is fake and you’re paying them to steal information about you, stop using them) makes them a more valid member of our community than our Polish neighbour who has lived here for the last 15 years.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS POST TRYING TO EXPLAIN THE US POINT OF VIEW ON HERITAGE.
I KNOW the US view on heritage. I hear it all the damn time. What US people need to hear is just how insulting the way they speak about heritage is to those of us who live in these countries. When you speak to us remember that these words have different meanings to us and you are being incredibly disrespectful to valued and loved members of our communities and invalidating their identities as members of our communities in order to set yourself in their places.
Also anyone who claims the US “doesn’t have a culture” so you have to claim ours gets an instant block. Please consider just how privileged you are to have your national culture dominate international life. What you see as “default culture” is YOUR culture. You’re buying into Imperialism when you see US things as the default and anything else as “other”.
TL;DR: When people from the US speak about their heritage from other countries they are often unknowingly using language that people from those countries find insulting and is often used to attack immigrant groups within those countries. People from the US need to be more thoughtful in their use of language and make an effort to speak about cultures they wish to claim membership of in ways that are respectful of those cultures and their current members.
I do not have big enough hands to give this the round of applause it deserves
i feel like every activist should read about fruitlands.
fruitlands was a transcendentalist utopian commune founded in the 1840s. the founders (including louisa may alcott’s dad) thought that the existing capitalist economy was evil: alcott described it as a tree “whose root is selfishness, whose trunk is property, whose fruit is gold.“ so they decided to create a commune that was completely divorced from the economy. like, their response to the "you say you’re against capitalism but still participate in it! checkmate socialists!” people was literally “you’re right, let’s not!”
they refused to consume any materials or foods that couldn’t be locally grown, like tea or sugar. they were also highkey vegan: not only was it immoral to eat animal products and use animals for leather and wool, but using animal labor or even using manure as fertilizer was forbidden. and they refused to trade for anything they didn’t have within the commune because participation in an oppressive economy was bad, especially if it supported slave labor (ex: wearing cotton fabric).
it fell apart in less than a year because they didn’t have enough food to survive the winter.
why?
well, part of it was circumstantial: the site they picked had little arable land and they arrived a month behind in the planting schedule. part of it was the impracticality of living in the 1840s and being so vegan that they couldn’t even use oxen to plough their fields or wear clothes that were warm in cold weather.
but the main reason was that the men of the commune (and they were almost all men, except for alcott’s wife and another woman, ann page) didn’t actually, like, do anything. they left all the household chores and childcare to the women, plus most of the farm work, while they sat around and philosophized about how cool their utopia was. even before it fell apart, most people there had began taking “vacations” away from fruitlands so that they could take hot baths and avoid trying to till the soil with their bare hands.
there are a lot of good lessons here.
1. it’s very easy to talk about your great ideas for society but putting them into practice is much harder. you have to actually do the work to achieve the goal: you can’t shunt it off onto other people based on the same oppressive systems you’re trying to subvert.
2. you need to consider the practical implications of what you’re arguing for, including potential downsides. banning wool for ethical reasons is all well and good until you’re stuck wearing linen clothes and canvas shoes in the middle of a massachusetts winter.
3. you can’t expect that a utopia is going to be all the things you like about society staying the same and everything you dislike being changed. that is at best naïve and at worst intensely selfish.
tl;dr: talk is cheap, praxis is hard.
This conversation plays through my head any time I see a “queer is a slur” bullshit post on this site or anywhere, really.
(Homer’s Phobia, 1997 – guest star, John Waters)
Someone just liked this, so I want to add an important note:
“queer is a slur” is a common tool used by TERFs to poison young queers against their own community. They teach young queers that using “queer” is against the rules because “queer is a slur” and then young queers repeat it because the elders in their queer social circle told them so.
Why? Because if young queers understand that queer is a loving and welcoming term for everyone who is not straight or does not match their birth sex, then TERFs lose all their power.
Because TERFs don’t just hate trans and non-binary people. They also hate bisexuals and pansexuals for wrecking their view that to be a wlw, you only live women with vaginas and to be mlm, you must only love men with penises.
But also, to reject the use of queer, you must reject intersex people because TERFs base their entire view on what set of genitals you have, and because intersex people don’t have textbook junk, TERFs don’t like them either.
And you must reject asexual queers across the board because so much of TERF defense is “I just wanna fuck a woman with a vagina or a man with a dick!” And if you have zero or minimal interest in fucking anyone, you wreck their arguments about what queer people want.
You know who else TERFs don’t like? Questioning people. Because to question your sexuality and realize you are straight is a loss for them. To question your gender and realizes it matches your birth sex is a loss for them. Why? Because to question either of these things means you examine who you are beyond a base level, and if you go behind a base level and understand even a basic sense of the confusing and difficult nature of sexual attraction and how it does and does not affect your gender, you can more easily see the holes in TERF arguments, which are all based on stereotypes of gender and sexuality.
The only reason the “B” makes it into the TERF acronym of queer culture is because if they left it at “LG” their hatred of the entire part of the community who is most comfortable using “queer” is a six-foot neon sign.
And to any bisexual TERFs I haven’t yet blocked who want to argue they are bisexual TERFs, so my argument about the use of “B” as a political abuse is invalid: The monosexual TERFs will have you against the wall in a fucking second. You are the sullied allies they put up with until you step out of line.
Lastly, the gay man in this episode is voiced by John Waters. He is a gay legend for tacky film and also an activist for queer rights. When his joke of the Baltimore Museum of Art naming a bathroom after him finally came true a couple of years ago, it was a gender-inclusive bathroom. And he brought his longtime friend and trans activist Elizabeth Coffey with him.
I am certain John Waters would tell you not to fuck TERFs in the same way he has said not to fuck people who don’t have books in their houses. And I am certain John Waters–an out and proud gay man known for his beautiful trash cinema and love and support of trans people–would tell you that queer is not a slur.
@somecunttookmyurl this seems like the perfect post rn XD
Post link
What is it anyway with everything having to be family friendly these days
Like, idk but this entire development seems really weird to me. Having adult spaces is fine. Keeping kids out of adult spaces is also fine (and necessary!). Adults often have a need for sexual or more explicit content and that’s healthy and fine, too. Adults need to be able to also discuss difficult aspects of life that might not always be child-friendly but is nevertheless vital to our lives and communities. Making the Internet into a weird Disney-esque fantasy land where nothing more than one quick kiss is allowed and the exploration of darker content is forbidden because it would interfere with the happy-rabbits-jumping-around-there-are-no-bad-things-in-ba-sing-se imagery is not only extremely censoring but also straight up unhealthy, for the individual as well as the larger community
Idk where I’m going with this but this watering down and toning down of content that we see also on other sites to the point where youtubers cannot discuss issues like addiction without fear of demonetisation… It’s just straight up unhealthy to society at large and we will feel the repercussions of this even strongly if we don’t firmly combat it
I think it’s interesting to see the reactions to today’s Dracula Daily that are like, “He did a racism! He used the g-slur!” and don’t go deeper than that. I was born in the early 80s and didn’t know the g-slur was a slur until like between 5 and 10 years ago. I mean, there was a whole Disney movie that used the word like it was no big deal when I was in middle school. I’m not saying Disney wouldn’t do a racism, I’m saying Disney wouldn’t have put language in a 90s kids’ movie that wasn’t considered “politically correct” in mainstream America at the time. Anyway, my point is that until sometime in the mid 2010s, I honestly thought G****** was just what that group of people were called, or was a term for nomadic people in general. I guarantee there are well-meaning Americans in the year 2022 who aren’t tuned into online antiracist discourse who still think that. Stoker could’ve easily used the word thinking it was no different than calling someone an Englishman or a cowboy.
The blatant racism here is how the Romani are portrayed. They are “without religion, save superstition,” i.e. Godless heathens, i.e. their religion isn’t a version of Christianity so it isn’t a legitimate religion. They’re ignorant for only speaking their own language, even though Jonathan doesn’t speak or understand it and doesn’t understand most of the foreign language he’s encountered on this trip. They act overtly deferential and subservient to Jonathan. They take his money and then sell him out to the Count.
If this narrative had only used the word Romani or the name that this particular group of Romani used for themselves (I’m seeing meta that Szgany is a slur, too, but I haven’t looked into it), this depiction would still be racist. While it is important to update our language as we gain better information, I think terminology is ultimately less important than whether a marginalized character or group is being portrayed as an offensive racial stereotype. I see all kinds of writing by modern writers, professional and amateur, that uses all the correct 2020s terminology but still portrays characters as the invulnerable black woman, the submissive Asian woman, the predatory brown man, the Jewish moneylender, etc. Again, I’m not saying terminology doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be critiqued in older writing, I’m just saying we shouldn’t let terminology distract from content.
Maybe not the biggest culprit behind the Radioactive Bad Takes on this website, but the one that’s bugging me the most lately: Please, I am begging you, learn what genre conventions are and read the text accordingly.
Fiction is not reality and pretty much every genre of fiction has certain standard ways in which it deviates from reality. And I’m not just talking about how we shouldn’t nitpick the physics of how Superman is able to fly. There will be ways in which the characters’ behavior and relationships will be informed by the genre as well and it makes just as little sense to judge them by realistic standards as it does to complain about something in Star Wars being scientifically implausible.
For example, “Adults are Useless” is a well-recognized trope in children’s literature. But that’s not because children’s authors are all going around writing adult characters who are terrible parents or teachers. It’s because the protagonist of a story written for children is almost always going to be a child, and the protagonist of the story has to get into trouble and solve problems themselves for the story to be any good. Yes, in real life, teenagers shouldn’t be fighting in a war. But if the grown-ups stepped in and stopped the teenage protagonist of your action-adventure series from fighting, there would be no story.
Does that mean the grown-up characters in that series are evil people who use child soldiers? No, because we accept a child being in these kinds of situations as a conceit of the genre of children’s fiction, and we interpret the characters and their choices accordingly. We don’t apply a realistic standard because the very premise is unrealistic to start with.
Another example: An adult hitting a child in real life is horrible. But if the child is a superhero, and the adult is a super villain, and they are in a cartoon, then we can’t read it the same way. All cartoons with any kind of action or fighting in them use violence unrealistically, and if the child and adult characters are presented as equally matched adversaries then that’s how any violence between them has to be understood. The villain might be a real bad dude, since he’s, you know, a villain, but hitting a child superhero in the context of a super-fight does not make him a child abuser, specifically.
I’m focusing on children’s books and cartoons here because I think that’s where tumblr fandoms have the biggest trouble with this but it applies to everything. Characters in a romantic comedy won’t behave realistically, characters in fairy tales won’t behave realistically, characters in police procedurals won’t behave realistically, all of them will behave as characters within their specific genre have to in order to make that genre work. The second you start trying to scrutinize every single action a character takes by realistic standards, you miss the point.
Repeat to yourself: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
Now, you are absolutelyallowed to dislike a genre or find most of it non-consumable because you just can’t jive with its conventions.
The solution to this is generally to not consume that content.
This is fine! You can just not like things!
For example, I avoid most things billed as ‘comedies’ not because I don’t like to laugh but because the conventions of comedy-as-genre tend to require a very particular style of ‘suspension of emotional engagement with fictional suffering’ that I am not at all good at, especially without losing interest altogether.
I’m not required to get better at it. I can just not watch comedies.
It’s also fair to say ‘this is a really badly executed version of this genre element’ or ‘the attempt to deconstruct this thing within the text didn’t go anywhere so now it’s just conspicuously, diegetically present and that sucks’ and so forth. Targeted analysis.
But it’s ultimately pointless and disingenuous to refuse to acknowledge when a genre convention applies to a fictional scenario and demand other people ignore it as well.
What I’m saying is that JKR, like so many average people, very likely started off in a place of well-meaning ignorance. Then she started exploring new and different ideas being shared online. Some ideas resonated deeply with her experiences as an abuse survivor, so she began exploring them deeper. Then, wham, public backlash. Her trauma is triggered - but so is her curiosity. After all, if something she did or said set people off, maybe she’s onto something. So she starts exploring more. Starts asking more questions. And when she does this in public, there is always backlash. Meanwhile, however, in private, her new friends are telling her “See? This is proof we’re right. This is proof that the world wants us silenced, because they’re scared of the truth, and they really hate women that much.” And what do you know, what they’re telling her starts sounding more and more reasonable, especially since the outside world is becoming more and more hostile.
Well…
People keep searching for ways to argue that JK Rowling has always been a horrible person deep down as a way of explaining her recent behaviour.
But here’s the thing: that’s probably not true at all.
Pretending it is discounts the harsher, scarier truth: that even decent, well-meaning people can be radicalised by dangerous, hateful, predatory groups, and given enough time they can become truly hideous versions of their former selves.
It can happen to me. It can happen to you. It can happen to any of us, given the right mix of circumstances. And over the past few years, we’ve seen it happen to one of the most famous children’s authors of our age.
Nobody is immune.
So you’re saying that The Clown wasn’t always… outright evil?
No one is born evil
Good point, but prejudice is best installed at a young age. Why is why I assumed the said Clown was just evil since some early part of their life.
And round and round it goes, until you have a radical.
This is absolutely how radicalization works. I started out “I could never be a feminist, they hate kinksters” (yes, this was a massive oversimplification) and within, oh, i think two years? i was saying “well, i don’t like the overtones of ‘radical feminist’ but what’s so wrong with saying you’re a radical AND a feminist? we need to make sure there’s space for traumatized women who really do legitimately hate and fear men.”
When you become an extremist, you become UNRECOGNIZABLE even to YOURSELF.There is also this….revisionist tendency to say that JKR has always been a closet bigot and conservative and right-wing since she got famous, but that’s not even entirely true. One of her first major political stirrups was criticising Tory austerity measures and David Cameron, (she also once said “people who send their children to boarding schools seem to feel that I’m on their side. I’m not.”), donating to Labourandbeing openly supportive of the British welfare state.She has, in at least one interview (from 2000) self-proclaimed to be left-wing.As early as 2003, she claimed that one of her biggest writing influences was a Jessica Mitford, who Rowling described as a “self-taught socialist”.
This isn’t to apologise for her behaviour or rehabilitate her into some former activist who is still worthy of saving; it’s to contextualise her recent descent into TERFdom compared to her previous political stances she’s openly held. She was probably never going to be a staunch ally for equality and diversity, and yes, a lot of the HP series were very problematic in retrospect, but she could very easily have gone the other way and at the very least turned out to be less of a bigoted shitbag she is now. The fact that her politics in late 2000′s/early 2010′s were similar to so many people who are now activists and organisers for queer, BIPOC and vulnerable communities should tell us to be all the more careful about radfem ideology and transphobia in progressive spaces.
It’s comforting to say “we should have known in hindsight that she was always going to become a TERF, the early signs were all there!” but that’s also not true. We have to recognise that the toxic ideology, the active harm she chooses to participate in, was a deliberate choice; this was a path she chose to go down, not one that was pre-determined for her. It’s also an easy way to separate ourselves from being critical of radfem influence; “JKR was always a right-wing bigot and that’s why she became indoctrinated with radfem bullshit. I’m not a right-wing bigot, therefore unlike her, I will never fall for radfem bullshit.”
People who become radicalised, including those to become radfems, were not always irredeemable right-winger proto-Conservatives doomed for extremism and hatred, and that’s the point. The revisionist idea that she was always beyond salvaging erases how TERFs recruit people (especially vulnerable, impressionable people) in queer, progressive and liberal circles and how easily their dogwhistles can go undetected. The idea that JKR was already a closet right-winger from the get-go and therefore could never have been a good person is ultimately unhelpful because all it does it separate from the reality of how radfem doctrine spreads. TERFs sell their own toxic, harmful views packaged as progressive ideas as part of their strategy and that’s why their ideology is dangerous and requires constant vigilance to drive out.
All of this.
I know that for me JKR’s terfdom came out of nowhere. I was honestly shocked by her liking Tweets made by TERFs but wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt…like “maybe she doesn’t really understand”, etc, like that time Stephen King accidentally liked a Tweet of hers and then walked it back after people explained to him how harmful it was (Stephen King was a huge fan/advocate of the Harry Potter series). But then she got worse instead of better.
This ideology is very insidious and can sneak up on you, and TERFs in particular like to target vulnerable people, especially women who are abuse/assault survivors who might be in a place where they’d rather not interact with men until they’re feeling stronger. TERFs take those women and make sure those women never heal and get to a place where they can love and enjoy men’s company again. And it goes from misandry and snowballs into..well, we all know.
It’s important to recognized dogwhistles such as someone describing themselves as an Adult Human Female, Real Life Genetic Woman, Actual Woman, etc. or talking of how women are being “erased”. Rational Wiki has a whole glossary of terms and such that TERFs like to use, and it’s a very good study.
Yes. And this is why screaming at people who begin to display “problematic” behavior does more harm than good. Anger leads to more anger, and the “other side” will find ways to make use of that.
It’s not my place to tell discriminated people what to do or not to do. But some topics that directly concern me - sexism, anti-vaxx conspiracy bullshit, and professionally, ableism - make me very angry indeed. I don’t feel like patiently explaining to men why sexism ist wrong.
And yet, if we don’t do that, if we answer with aggression to the slightest provocation that may result from ignorance - it’s well within our rights, but it will make things worse.
I’m not saying we should back down. I’m not saying we should be nice to JKR. If someone continues to behave like an asshole even after the assholery of said behavior has been explained and understood - well then, there’s a limit to everyone’s patience. But if someone gets screamed at for something they didn’t even know was wrong, they’ll probably listen to those who say “you didn’t deserve to be screamed at, you were right!”
Basic psychology, I’m afraid. ATM I’m valiantly trying not to scream at anti-vaxxers who appear like they may still see reason at some point. The other side though, neonazis and conspiracy ideologists? They try to broaden the gulf. They deliberately try to isolate those people from the rest of society, which is easy because the rest of society is angry, and then say “Look? The others don’t take you seriously. They laugh at your fears. They hurt you! But we understand. We’re your true friends!”
It’s a trap.
