Learning to delete/mute/block before a negative comment takes root in your mind is a modern survival skill. If you’re going to wander the overgrown countryside of the internet, you need to develop a quick eye for ticks.
It’s deeply tempting to respond to the “well, actually,” to the cruel assumption, to the unjust accusation, to the odious viewpoint. It’s tempting because you’re defaulting to the etiquette of dinner conversation. This isn’t a dinner conversation. Someone is shouting at you from a moving car. Turn away.
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
You whose roots go down forever; the whisperer of all twelve winds; strong against the storm; harbour of birds; knot of your own tying; you whose glades dance in dappled delirium; seeder of a thousand saplings; who stands alone at the hilltop; anchor of the oldest forest; you of the dancing green; you who rise again after endless Winter; the thorn in the thicket whom no axe will move; you who have grown silently; observer of nine centuries; to whom all paths lead; whose branches snag both clouds and dreams; the lord of your own grove; berry-provider; moss-grower; whose heartwoods are ancient secrets.
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.
Instead, the primary inspiration for George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki seems to come from deeply flawed Hollywood depictions of noamdic peoples, rather than any real knowledge about the peoples themselves. The Dothraki are not an amalgam of the Sioux or the Mongols, but rather an amalgam of Stagecoach (1939) and The Conqueror (1956). When it comes to the major attributes of the Dothraki – their singular focus on violent, especially sexual violence, their lack of art or expression, their position as a culture we primarily see ‘from the outside’ as almost uniformly brutal (and in need of literally the whitest of all women to tame and reform it) – what we see is not reflected in the historical people at all but is absolutely of a piece with this Hollywood legacy.
But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of ‘reality’ and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of ‘real history’ and how things ‘really were.’ And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized.
And as I noted at the beginning of this series, Martin’s fans have understood that framing perfectly well. The argument given by both the creators themselves,often parroted by fans and even repeated by journalists is that A Song of Ice and Fire‘s historical basis is both a strike in favor of the book because they present a ‘more real’ vision of the past but also a flawless defense against any qualms anyone might have over the way that the fiction presents violence (especially its voyeuristic take on sexual violence) or its cultures. No doubt part of you are tired of seeing that same ‘amalgam’ quote over and over again at the beginning of every single one of these essays, but I did that for a reason, because it was essential to note that this assertion is not merely part of the subtext of how Martin presents his work (although it is that too), but part of the actual text of his promotion of his work.
And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate spot blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.
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.
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.
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!”
Polar bear Station Russian-based wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh ventured to an abandoned meteorological station on Kolyuchin Island, where polar bears have taken over the station.
girl what the fuck is even the theme of a midsummer night’s dream. is there even a lesson to be learned. is it just vibes or what
puck at the end of the play: god did you see that shit? insane, right? haha alright take it easy
Actually more like puck at the end of the play: sure this play was an attack on how you run society and deal with love and filial duty! But don’t worry, it’s all just a joke haha alright take it easy
