hi you’re okay anon i know you’re not being antagonistic it’s alright. israeli settlers and idf soldiers burn down and uproot olive trees both as literal violence and cultural violence. olive farming is a major industry of palestine and provides for tens of thousands of families. these trees are ancient, they are beloved by their communities and have been taken care of for generations. it takes at least 20 years for olive trees to bear fruit!!! although farmers plant new olive trees, this has been going on for over forty years and is systematic - the livelihood of these communities cannot be regrown overnight.
Another reason they destroy olive trees is purely for expansion and land grab reasons. Often, most Israeli settlements are built on village lands. If it’s not for settlement reasons, then it’s usually to expand the wall. You get the idea.
not only do they uproot and burn Olive trees, a native plant to the land, but they have planted thousands of Conifers, which are non native to the land and actually native to Europe.
Israel explains that conifers were planted because they are “fast growing plants” and therefore give “life” to an “empty” land. I have also heard that they were planted to make the settlers feel “at home”.
Israel’s way of making the dessert “bloom” is literally uprooting Indigenous life and replacing it. People and plants.
Conifers are catagorized as “invasive species”, their ability to spread fast damages native environments, as its the case with New Zealand, South Africa and Palestine.
the full circle of settler colonialism:
Israeli made conifer forest in Palestine.
[Gary Fields, writes about this]
Did you know that a lot of these pine forests were planted to cover up the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages in 1947-1948?
People interested should read this article by Ilan Pappe.
Friday, October 31, 2014
why does israel destroy the olive trees? (i hope i don't come off as offensive or antagonistic i'm just honestly curious) (i'm on anon because i'm nervous and anxious about asking questions not because i want to start an argument or something)
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Those who say that Marx ignores human nature usually mean by ‘human nature’ egoism, selfishness. Marx does not deny that in existing capitalist society people tend to be narrowly egoistic… To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough.
I don’t think people love me. They love versions of me I have spun for them, versions of me they have construed in their minds. The easy versions of me, the easy parts of me to love.
Men literally do not understand that women can feel their intentions before they even speak. I see your demeanor as you walk up to me, I know what you want.
So yes, I am on guard instantly. I am aware of things you as a male do not even think about. I am programed for protection above all else because everything in this world has proven that the signs you are showing me and the demeanor you are approaching me with could lead to danger without warning. If you come up to me as if I owe you something I will shut you down instantly because you are dangerous to my person as a woman. I’m aware of everything because I have to be because one little slip up could take my life.
Understand this men. Stop being angry when you get shut down by a woman and rethink your demeanor when speaking to her. Because unlike you, women always have to be on guard.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
I. Hades
Listen, I’m a nice guy
for the god of the underworld.
I feel like
we can probably
relate. Everybody dies, and also,
listen, my dog’s name means spot.
Gods, they’re just like the rest of you,
and the daughters of gods
are as close to human
as immortals get.Zeus, he was always
turning into a swan or a bull
and chasing girls when they were still
young as the wheat field
before harvest, young as the amphora
before it was painted, young
as the pomegranate seed—and somehow,
despite the personal tragedies,
as I diligently reaped the fallout,
the trees never died all at once.Hera raged, but the grass grew.
Beneath the ground, I saw the spindles
of many roots grasping at air,
rode the boat to work each morning, and,
surrounded by the dead—who had
nothing new to say and never shed a tear—
I fell in love with her
when I saw her weeping.II. Demeter
When you plant a flower you must take care of the flower and when it blooms,
love its beauty. The same must be said for the grapevine and its grapes, and so on.It was because of her that I invented the fruit, little red beads like laughter
and like blood. When you split the skin, it stains the hands. A beautiful fruitand difficult, too, the way a daughter is difficult. There is so much inside her
for the hungry to eat. She had to learn to plant the seeds, not eat them.“Hera,” I said, and she took my hand, commiserating. If she could, she said,
she would blight the lands, although her jealousy was a mirror and minewas a cracked vase.
III. Persephone
I never knew that anything could die until that morning.
I had only ever seen baby birds and calves and olive treesand loved each one. They were children and so was I.
When I followed the goat I thought we would bothdrink from the stream and return home. I thought
we both left for the same reasons. I thought this.But I saw the fox kill the goat. I saw a farmer kill the fox.
I stayed and saw the farmer bury his wife, who was killedby no one. One by one, all of them went somewhere
I thought I could not follow, but I followed;I was wrong.
The Massive Feminist Protest the Western World Completely Ignored
the ongoing GamerGate saga and last week’s disappointing reminder of Bill Cosby’s rape legacy are disheartening America’s feminists, they should cast across the Atlantic for a glimmer of hope.
Last Wednesday, a massive feminist strike paralyzed the streets of Barcelona, with thousands of women and their allies shutting down traffic and the subways, spray-painting feminist slogans all over city walls and occupying the offices of powerful political and economic institutions.What massive feminist strike, you say? Maybe you didn’t hear about the thousands of Spanish feminists taking over Barcelona because not a single major English-language news source reported on it.
The Massive Feminist Protest the Western World Completely Ignored
Kurdistan lives. It burns in the mind of every single person of the 35 million people who were robbed of their identity and made into refugees in Turkey, Iraq and Europe. It is burning and living in the fires of Newroz and in jails where 12,000 political prisoners are buried in isolation cells. It lives in the memory of those who disappeared and in the scars of those who disappeared and in the scars of those who were tortured. It is burning and living in the mountains of the popular resistance, called terrorism by the western world.
Monday, October 27, 2014
panplatonic
definition: seeking a platonic relationship without any preference to gender.
coined by: anonymous
AKA WANTING TO MAKE FRIENDS THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS MAKING FRIENDS OS NOT A SEXUALITY AND ITS NOT MARGINALIZED
What do you think about a poc discriminating against another poc who is not of the same background? Is that considered racism?
I think it’s a shit thing to do. Like I know a lot of Latinos who really don’t talk to black people, a lot of Asians who don’t talk to black people, etc as sort of a matter of course. But I take issue with the idea that any action can be considered racism, regardless of the background of the person committing the action.
I don’t agree with the idea that a person’s actions, or even that a person themselves, can be racist. A person can be a white supremacist, or a person can be anti-black, or anti-POC in general, and I may call them “racist” or “a racist” for shorthand, but even when I do I recognize that as a bit lazy on my part because I don’t actually mean that the person I’m referencing is a racist. There is no such thing as a racist person in the strictest sense of racism. Racism is a system of power distribution that concerns itself primarily with the race of the people it affects. I want to be clear on that. Racism, as far as I’m concerned, is only a racialized system of power distribution, and not a set of beliefs about people of color. White supremacy is a system of beliefs (the belief that white people are superior to other people), and that system of beliefs helps uphold racism. Because power affects all personal relationships and is exercised both in personal relationships AND through institutions like schools, I think it’s safe and politically sound to say that racism is institutional- that is, that racism permeates many of the institutions we all participate in. As such, we all learn the ideologies upholding racism (like white supremacy and anti-blackness) as a result of our interactions with classmates and coworkers, etc. ALL of us have thoughts that are affected in some way by racism, and I don’t agree with any politic that refuses to admit that- those of us who are not “racists” are not racists either because (as is the case for many people of color) it doesn’t make sense for our worldviews or because we have been actively taught that racism is not okay. I don’t agree with any politic that considers a “racist” to be a complete throwaway as a human being- in fact, I think most racists are people who mean to do no active harm but have never been taught how to unlearn white supremacy. I think the same way about capitalism and class as I do about racism and race- a person cannot be a capitalist, but they can be pro-capitalism and it’s easier to say “capitalist” for short. Capitalism is a system of goods distribution, and not a set of beliefs a person holds. Now, as person can totally be a classist because classism is a set of beliefs about class (that the bourgeoisie is better than the producing class) and classism helps to uphold capitalism. I hope what I’m describing makes sense now. Systems are upheld by beliefs which are upheld by cultural practices, social norms, histories, etc. Racism is a system, upheld by white supremacy and other ideologies.
To answer your question more directly, I don’t think it’s helpful to ask whether POC can be racist towards other POC. I don’t care, honestly. If a Latino calls me a nigger it hurts just as badly as a white person calling me a nigger. The intention may be different, and there’s a lot of emotional stuff going on with any POC calling someone a nigger, but the effect is exactly the same. If you smash me in the face with a bat because you’re upset, it hurts just as much as smashing me in the fact with a bat because you hate me. Either way, my face is smashed. If a non-black POC denies me a job because I’m black, it has the same effect on me as a white person denying me a job. Either way, I’m unemployed because of “racist” behavior. Do you see? So framing people’s actions as “racist” and then trying to qualify how “racist” something can be based on the race of the person committing the action does nothing for people of color affected by racism. I’m not saying that it’s totally cool for white people to commit white supremacist actions just because people of color do it do (lol where do you think POC got it?????) but I’m saying that I think it is politically useless to try to rate someone’s racism on a scale of 1 to 10 based on the person’s race. I think it’s much more useful to look at the supporting belief systems and knock them down wherever you encounter them.
To individualize structures of power and reduce them to personal sets of interactions rather than seeing them as structural problems which then infect our daily lives does two things: one, it turns combating racism into a project meant for individuals, meaning it tells us that we should fight racism by fighting individual racists, and two, it allows us to easily ignore the fact that racism and other structures like it are institutional, and that it is our need to live through institutions infected with racism (and often, built on racism) that should be the ultimate target of anti-racist activism and thought.
The term “model minority” came about in the 1960s in newspaper and magazine accounts of perceived Japanese American and Chinese American socioeconomic success. High levels of educational achievement, low rates of mental disorder and criminality, and job mobility were used as factors to measure this success. Subsequently, it was extended to Asian Americans as a whole. Characteristics attributed to the model minority-of hard work, thrift, family cohesion, deference to authority were explained by pointing to an undifferentiated, essentialized notion of “Asian culture.” These Asian values, it was argued, while still alien, were highly compatible with Anglo-American values, especially the Protestant work ethic. How did Asians, who had historically been subject to immigration exclusion, political disenfranchisement, various forms of discrimination, and physical violence as the “yellow peril,” become the model minority, seemingly overnight? Turning to the domestic and international historical context at this time sheds light on the apparent shift. In the 1960s, African Americans were actively challenging institutional racism through the civil rights struggle. The figure of the Asian American model minority was constructed as a conservative backlash against these activists, who were deemed to be unruly and underachieving. African Americans were told that if Asian Americans could succeed, why couldn’t they? A U.S. News and World Report article in 1966 presented a progressive account of the history of Asians in the United States, the road “from hardship and discrimination to become a model of self-respect and achievement in today’s America.” Asian American “success” was used as evidence to support the claim that American liberalism could indeed function as a multiracial democracy. Therefore, if the system is not flawed, it was argued, the fault must somehow lie with the African Americans themselves. If African Americans “worked” as hard as the Asian Americans, then surely they could become model minorities as well. Indeed, as reported by U.S. News and World Report, “At a time when it is being propose that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans are moving ahead on their own-with no help from anyone else.” So the figure of the model minority was less about Asian Americans per se and more a lesson to be learned by African Americans and a deflection away from the focus on the problem of institutional racism and racial inequality. It attempted to sublate the contradictions of the U.S. nationstate. Such a deflection was necessary not only for domestic race relations, but for Cold War international geopolitical relations as well. In the Cold War battle against communist totalitarianism, the United States was very concerned about its international image and sought to counter and mitigate charges of racism.
Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (via dangerousidea)
RWSWJ / RAWJ
(via theblacknonblackdivide)
African Boys Attacked at NYC School, Called "Ebola": Advocacy Group
A group that advocates for Africans in the Bronx is calling for action after it says two brothers who had recently immigrated to the borough from Senegal were beaten and severely injured by several people who called them “Ebola.”
The boys, in sixth and eighth grade, were attacked Friday afternoon at I.S. 318 in Tremont, according to the African Advocacy Council.
The boys, who have been in the U.S. for about a month, were taken to the hospital after the attack.
The group says that the attack is just the latest incidence of disrespect and bullying of Africans since the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.
They have called a news conference for 1 p.m. Monday to urge school and city officials to protect students and curb bullying.
Senegal is one of several West African countries where Ebola cases have been reported, but there have been no new cases in that country since late August, according to the CDC.
Cases continue to be reported in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. A few health care workers and travelers coming from those countries have also been diagnosed with the disease in other countries, including one person in New York City.
African Boys Attacked at NYC School, Called "Ebola": Advocacy Group
Sunday, October 26, 2014
I can’t believe there are people in this world who have read the entire Naruto manga and reached the conclusion that a) Sakura never formed a deep bond with Sasuke and b) her way of “saving him from the darkness” will be to keep him from killing the two most important people in his life: Naruto and Karin.
Like what kind of sad cognitively deficient life are you leading to reach that conclusion.
Palestinians are living under violent, military occupation. They have the right to resist this violent, military occupation. Remember that. Israel is not the victim. It is the occupier. It dispossessed Palestinians and now militarily occupies the land they were pushed into. “Palestinians threw rocks!” Israel occupies the land those rocks are thrown on, builds settlements, sets up checkpoints, bulldozes homes, tortures children, arrests thousands without charge, lays siege to an open air prison, shoots at fisherman and ambulances, commits large scale massacres, and collectively punishes millions of indigenous people with impunity. No matter what Orwellian tale you tell, the occupier will never be anything but the oppressor.
zuky:
…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.
more.
Reagan knew everything. However, I bet this Time magazine piece doesn’t get into the juiciest part of Iran-Contra, which is that in the 1980s the CIA put into operation a crack cocaine pipeline to import narcotics from Central and South America and distribute it in US inner cities. This is not a “conspiracy theory”, this is a documented conspiracy, most rigorously researched and reported by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Gary Webb, whose series in the San Jose Mercury News and subsequent book “Dark Alliance” literally got him killed. To me, that’s the story of Iran-Contra: not that Reagan sold weapons to Iran, but that the US government imported and sold crack to Black America, as part of an arms and drugs trade which funded war in the Third World and which devastated lives and filled prisons in the USA.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
allosexuality is only a privilege for straight people…ive never felt my sexual attraction to women normalized on a societal scale because general sexualization of women =/= a lesbian-centric sexualization of women. homosexual sex has never been normalized so ive never felt included in societal sexualization
Monosexuality/monoromanticism is close-mindedness. There. I said it.
wow…. this poST opened my eyes…. all these Homophobes saying my attraction to women is a choice are actually Right………. thanks now im a Cool Bisexual instead of being one of those Gross And Prudish Lesbians Who Won’t Fuck Men For Some Reason…… THANKS!
Wanda Maximoff fancast(s)
v1: Franciska Farkas
v2: Alina Serban
#both ladies are of romani descent and eastern-european (franciska is hungarian and alina is romanian) #so pleaseplease don’t make anymore white fancasts it’s enough to see the official one
Corporation:*Puts smaller stores out of business and creates an inescapable monopoly using unethical business practices*
Corporation:*Uses child and other exploited labour in developing nations*
Corporation:*Creates an endless cycle of wage slavery and dependence on a minimum wage that's below living costs*
Corporation:*Makes a tokenistic and safe signal of support of LGBT rights which aligns with a clear majority of societies moral beliefs in 2014*
Tumblr: OMFG YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING AND I LOVE YOU SO MUCH IF YOU DON'T SUPPORT THIS COMPANY AND REBLOG THIS OBNOXIOUS 30 GIF SET JUST UNFOLLOW ME AND GO BACK TO YOUR FUNERAL PICKET WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH LOVER
So apparently the most important requirement of the heroine status is being in love with the MC? Are you kidding me?
I don’t care if not even Kishi or his assistants think of her as a heroine. She is MY heroine. She is inspiring, kind, smart, mature, beautiful, strong and much more.
And I’m sure many people here agree.
It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines. Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh. Author Madhusree Mukerjee tracked down some of the survivors and paints a chilling picture of the effects of hunger and deprivation. In Churchill’s Secret War, she writes: “Parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains. Starving people begged for the starchy water in which rice had been boiled. Children ate leaves and vines, yam stems and grass. People were too weak even to cremate their loved ones.”
Remembering India’s Forgotten Holocaust.
Sarah Waheed notes: “One of the students in my modern South Asia history class a few years ago, was extremely upset that the book we were reading referred to the Bengal famine as a holocaust, calling the author ‘biased’. When I asked him to clarify and elaborate upon what he meant by ‘biased’, he exclaimed, inflamed, “There was only one holocaust!” The rest of the students were, however, more open to the idea of the 20th century being a century of multiple holocausts. The terms ‘holocaust’ and ‘genocide’, however, continue to elicit trauma envy.”
(via mehreenkasana)
Monolinguals often assume that this kind of switching happens because speakers are not competent in one of their languages - a sort of deficit hypothesis - or because a concept just can’t be expressed in one of the languages - a sort of lexical gap explanation. Analysis of recorded multilingual speech doesn’t support these ideas, however. Speakers who code-switch the most often are usually those who are the most fluent in both of their languages, and there are linguistic rules about where in a sentence a switch can happen.
Van Herk, What Is Sociolinguistics, chapter 11. (via transliterations)
The Wikipedia article on code-switching has a nice classification of the types and linguistic rules involved:
- Intersentential switching occurs outside the sentence or the clause level (i.e. at sentence or clause boundaries). It is sometimes called "extrasentential" switching. In Assyrian-English switching one could say, “Ani wideili. What happened?” (“Those, I did them. What happened?”)
- Intra-sentential switching occurs within a sentence or a clause. In Spanish-English switching one could say, “La onda is to fight y jambar." ("The in-thing is to fight and steal.”)
- Tag-switching is the switching of either a tag phrase or a word, or both, from one language to another, (common in intra-sentential switches). In Spanish-English switching one could say, “Él es de México y así los criaron a ellos, you know.” (“He’s from Mexico, and they raise them like that, you know.”)
- Intra-word switching occurs within a word itself, such as at a morpheme boundary. In Shona-English switching one could say, “But ma-day-s a-no a-ya ha-ndi-si ku-mu-on-a. (“But thesedays I don’t see him much.”) Here the English plural morpheme -s appears alongside the Shona prefix ma-, which also marks plurality.
(via alcindora)
Friday, October 24, 2014
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Favourite Australian saying: “have a good one”. Have a good what? We’ll never tell. You’ll never know Australian secrets.
who’s gonna take the 82 hour trip down to no where land to tell these people half the english speaking world uses their apparently exclusive phrases
favorite american saying: “how are you.” how’s my what? what are you asking me how to do?
Israeli settlers run over and murder a 5 year old Palestinian girl, the Israeli army executes a Palestinian kid with three shots to the chest, Gaza fisherman are routinely shot at, and Israel shatters the ceasefire in a multitude of way on a regular basis, but the narrative presented by Israel and the US media is that a Palestinian is behind “rising tensions” and Israel must now “respond” to this out of the blue breaking of the ceasefire in Jerusalem
It is not true that if we had true faith we would not be sad. Prophets (as), and righteous people experienced a great deal of sadness. The Quran is full of stories in which the central theme is sadness. Sadness is a reality of life. The Quran is not there to eliminate sadness, but to navigate it. Sadness is one of the tests of life, just as happiness, and anger are tests.
Italian miner avoids work for 35 years before retiring aged 52 - Telegraph
Carlo Cani confesses he draws a pension despite inventing an imaginative range of excuses for not venturing down a mine in Sardinia over 35-year career, underlining Italy’s problem with benefit fraud and dysfunctional pension systemThis man is a fucking hero
I like imagining the shock and disgust the general readership of the telegraph must have experienced while reading this. What a legend
Italian miner avoids work for 35 years before retiring aged 52 - Telegraph
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
The initial phase of Mecca’s destruction began in the mid-1970s, and I was there to witness it. Innumerable ancient buildings, including the Bilal mosque, dating from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, were bulldozed. The old Ottoman houses, with their elegant mashrabiyas — latticework windows — and elaborately carved doors, were replaced with hideous modern ones. Within a few years, Mecca was transformed into a “modern” city with large multilane roads, spaghetti junctions, gaudy hotels and shopping malls.
The few remaining buildings and sites of religious and cultural significance were erased more recently. The Makkah Royal Clock Tower, completed in 2012, was built on the graves of an estimated 400 sites of cultural and historical significance, including the city’s few remaining millennium-old buildings. Bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night, displacing families that had lived there for centuries. The complex stands on top of Ajyad Fortress, built around 1780, to protect Mecca from bandits and invaders. The house of Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, has been turned into a block of toilets.
Apart from the Kaaba itself, only the inner core of the Sacred Mosque retains a fragment of history. It consists of intricately carved marble columns, adorned with calligraphy of the names of the prophet’s companions. Built by a succession of Ottoman sultans, the columns date from the early 16th century. And yet plans are afoot to demolish them, along with the whole of the interior of the Sacred Mosque, and to replace it with an ultramodern doughnut-shaped building.
The only other building of religious significance in the city is the house where the Prophet Muhammad lived. During most of the Saudi era it was used first as a cattle market, then turned into a library, which is not open to the people. But even this is too much for the radical Saudi clerics who have repeatedly called for its demolition. The clerics fear that, once inside, pilgrims would pray to the prophet, rather than to God — an unpardonable sin. It is only a matter of time before it is razed and turned, probably, into a parking lot.
The alien will seep into your depression, turn it manic and deadly. You will contemplate suicide so much, you realize that ultimately, a dorm room is a glorified jail cell. You will drink a bunch of NyQuil, and wake up a day later, life out of focus. You won’t move for two days after that. You will start drinking heavily just to engage in casual conversations with your floormates. You will fixate on your eating and exercise, some days you won’t eat at all. You will have sex with anyone who shows a modicum of interest in you. You will hang out with boys you shouldn’t and get written up by your RA, like an after school special. You will be forced to take a course on alcohol abuse, where you will think it’s safe to admit it—to quietly check the boxes that ask, “In the past 6 months have you felt depressed, anxious, lonely, or scared?” and “In the past six months have you thought about killing yourself?” You will regret it when a specialist pulls you aside to ask you if you’re okay, to come back for another session. Next time, you will look into their white and hopeful face and tell them you’re doing much better now. You will enter into an extremely abusive relationship with a boy who tells you he loves curry and never truly realize how miserable you are. Your only source of joy will be filling out transfer school applications. They become your lifeline. Each school will invariably demand, “Tell us why you’re worth it.”
Alana wrote about trauma dealing with academia and whiteness
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
i was gonna send u an embarrassingly mushy ask but then i remembered that you're gonna hold it against me for the next 8 years and i refrained bc I LEARNED FROM THE BEST
I wouldn’t hold it against you I’d treasure it dearly in my fragile tsun heart and re-read in times of trouble
fuck now i forgot what it was…………………..it was kinda cute tho
Ur such a ho
i was gonna send u an embarrassingly mushy ask but then i remembered that you're gonna hold it against me for the next 8 years and i refrained bc I LEARNED FROM THE BEST
I wouldn’t hold it against you I’d treasure it dearly in my fragile tsun heart and re-read in times of trouble
Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself
my God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
I think "____ game strong" is AAVE, so don't appropriate it
anarchists-for-big-government:
Oh it is? Okay apologies I’ll go edit them
Here’s the problem with this. AAVE is not this completely separate dialect and culture that does not overlap at all with Standard* American English and mainstream American culture. Words, phrases, and styles developed by black American speakers filter and diffuse into the mainstream dialect. If white people weren’t allowed to use AAVE, we’d also have to get rid of words like “cool” and “rock’n’roll”. Do some white people use AAVE to mock and insult black people? Of course, and they’re racist scumfucks and need to be called out when they do it. But to genuinely adopt phrases used by black speakers because you find them useful and enjoyable in your speaking, is not racist or “appropriation.” And furthermore, for the vast majority of words and phrases, this happened naturally, without anyone consciously thinking to themselves “this is AAVE”. They just learned a new word or phrase, found it useful or cool, and started using it. When “hella” spread around the American dialect, very few people consciously thought “Bay Area young people invented this”, They just heard it and started using it, because that’s how language evolves.
Alright here’s the deal. Using bits and pieces of AAVE isn’t cultural appropriation. It just isn’t. First of all, AAVE speakers regularly come into contact with non-AAVE speakers and AAVE leaks its way into mainstream English use. To imply that they don’t is ridiculous. That’s the first problem here.
The second problem here is that “appropriation” is used entirely wrongly and entirely too often on this site. Cultural appropriation should only be used to refer to when one group (usually white people) CLAIMS the creation of another group as its own. That’s it. If it doesn’t fit that definition, it isn’t appropriation. And here’s why!
The third problem, and the reason people need to stop fucking using “appropriation” as a term so loosely on this site is because it allows us to ignore instances of racism by calling them something else- a more technical, academic seeming term. So
- If you use another culture’s speaking pattern as a joke, that isn’t cultural appropriation. That’s being a racist. You’re literally making a joke about how other people talk. That’s racism. Not appropriation. RACISM. We have a word for that already.
- If you use another culture’s sacred symbology or something like that, it isn’t appropriation. It’s being clueless at best and thoughtless/insensitive at worst. It isn’t appropriation. The basic problem there is not theft of another culture’s items: the basic problem is not participating in a culture on that culture’s terms.
- If you use another culture as a prop or a joke, that isn’t appropriation. It’s racism. You’re pointing at a group and laughing. That’s just racism. Let’s not call it something else. Miley Cyrus isn’t appropriating black culture. She’s making fun of it. That’s racism. Easy.
- If you use another culture’s symbology inaccurately, again that isn’t appropriation. It’s being thoughtless and inconsiderate but it isn’t appropriation.
- If it isn’t one group claiming it created something it isn’t, then it isn’t appropriation.
There are several problems with insisting that white people participating in AAVE even in small portions is appropriation. 1- it lets white people off the hook for instances of actual racism by calling it something else, something which seems less intentional than it really is. 2- it assumes that white people already have a frame of reference for everything and should never have to refer to other cultures for ideas/concepts. That second idea is fucked up because:
- It assumes that white/mainstream/Western culture understands everything already. That’s literally just colonialism wrapped up in a nice liberal package people can use to pat themselves on the back.
- It ignores the fact that white culture (using that loosely, but I’m sure most people understand what I mean by this) actually doesn’t have a way to express everything. For example, “—— game strong” says more than just “you —— look[s] good.” There is no approximation in standard English. Standard English is not a perfect, all-encompassing language.
TLDR: use of AAVE in bits and pieces is not appropriation, and outside of tumblr I know very few black people who actually consider it to be appropriation. If you use it poorly, you’re just misinformed and will probably be laughed at. If you mock it, you’re just a racist. Stop calling every single instance of two cultures interacting “appropriation” because it allows us to ignore the fact that many times when people on here use it, we are referring to instances of racism and letting the racism itself go unaddressed by not calling it what it is. I only know a few black people ON tumblr who consider use of AAVE phrases to be appropriative or racist, and quite frankly I think that view 1- is simplistic and makes no sense and 2- would be laughed off by most black people who hadn’t been steeped in that narrative.
Monday, October 20, 2014
The darkness of the heart is the worst kind of darkness.
Screenshots of Abu Iyad, a resident of the Ain El Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon, speaking on how Palestinians are barred from most professions in the country. The screenshots are from the documentary A World Not Ours (2012).
Can all new followers introduce themselves please shrimp-crackers
TOO SOON
*chugs red wine while laughing*
Mankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
i can’t believe tsun just cut off all skype contact with me over a friendship jealousy with gigi
baticul you are the number one homewrecker
honestly it isn’t even about you.
it’s about fenris.
GIGI CAN HAVE YOU BUT FENRIS IS MINE.
YOU’RE DOING THE THING. YOU’RE DOING THAT THING WHERE YOU DEFLECT THE PROBLEM BY MAKING IT “NOT ABOUT ME” I KNOW YOU I FUCKING KNOW YOU
AND YOU MAKE IT SOUND AS IF YOU DIDN’T LET CAED UNDER THIS ROOF FIRST
bruh idk how to make this any clearer
gigi can have you but fenris belongs to me
i can’t believe tsun just cut off all skype contact with me over a friendship jealousy with gigi
baticul you are the number one homewrecker
honestly it isn’t even about you.
it’s about fenris.
i can’t believe tsun just cut off all skype contact with me over a friendship jealousy with gigi
baticul you are the number one homewrecker
honestly it isn’t even about you.
it’s about fenris.
GIGI CAN HAVE YOU BUT FENRIS IS MINE.
like, people make fun of other people for having complex starbucks orders but what the fuck is the problem with it? it’s not like you have to have what they’re ordering, it’s their fucking drink, not yours. you can just sit there with your bitter filter coffee and i’ll be over here with my white mocha with hazelnut living the whipped cream fucking dream you catastrophic pavement slab
This is the most pointless thing to be this intense about
Saturday, October 18, 2014
my position on psychiatric drugs is that they should be prescribed on the basis of informed consent.
informed consent means not having a nurse hold down an 18 year old kid while they’re given an injection.
informed consent means not withholding necessary medical treatment until a patient is compliant.
informed consent means telling patients that anti-psychotics have been linked to shrinking the size of the brain before they’re prescribed.
informed consent means telling patients that risperidone can cause lactation before it’s prescribed
informed consent means telling patients olanzapine can cause weight gain before it’s prescribed
informed consent means you are completely honest about the pros and cons of a particular drug before you prescribe it. it means you list all the side efffects and their likelihood of happening. it means you are honest about the potential for therapy as an alternative. it means you don’t pressure, guilt or emotionally manipulate your patients into taking drugs
informed consent means you let patients decide for themselves
and that if a patient decides they want to go off drugs you help they titrate down
also if you are the doctor you have a RESPONSIBILITY to keep parents from manipulating/coercing their children into medication if they don’t want it. If the minor is your patient, you need to advocate for THEIR informed consent not the parent’s. If a parent is threatening a child—with inpatient, with yelling/violence, with guilt, with “normal” punishments like taking away privileges—that is not informed consent. If you go along with that you are still guilty.
Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
your fave is problematic: frank ocean
- too fine
- rumored to have hooked up with willy cartier but we didnt get to see them together at any red carpet
- hasn’t dropped an album since the french revolution
Friday, October 17, 2014
“before he died, my grandfather used to bring me to your palace so that i could see it for myself. there was a party and dancing one night, and the palace was full of people. i went to the kitchen garden to hide because it should have been empty, but once i was inside, the door opened from the flower gardens, and you came in by yourself. i watched you walking between the rows of cabbages and then dancing under the orange trees. i was above you, in one of the trees.”
he’d seen her in a pale dress dancing in the moonlight, pretending an entire troupe of dancers danced the harvest circle with her, her arms open to embrace the sisters and friends who existed only in her imagination, and he’d never seen anything so beautiful or so sad.
The Queen’s Thief dreamcast: Sui He as Attolia
“I inherited this country when I was only a child, Nahuseresh. I have held it. I have fought down rebellious barons. I’ve fought Sounis to keep the land on this side of the mountains. I have killed men and watched them hang. I’ve seen them tortured to keep this country safe and mine. How did you think I did this if I was a fool?”
West African Teen Taunted With Chants of ‘Ebola’ at High School Soccer Game
One Pennsylvania teen, who is originally from Guinea, recently had to endure his high school rival’s soccer team chanting “Ebola” at him during a match, WPVI reports.
According to the station, Ibrahim Toumkara, a Nazareth Area High School student and soccer player, got into a fight last week after he heard players from rival Northampton High School taunting him about the deadly virus, which has killed more than 4,000 people across West Africa, including in his home country.
"Being from western Africa and having family in that area, he didn’t take too kindly to those remarks and went after one of the players on the Northampton team," the boy’s coach, Edward Bachert, explained. Bachert is also Ibrahim’s legal guardian, as well as a police chief for Lehigh County.
The 16-year-old moved away from Guinea three years ago, the station notes.
"There were tears coming down his eyes. He was visibly shaken by this, that it got to that level on the field," Bachert added.
Ibrahim’s parents are still in West Africa, and according to WPVI, he is constantly worrying for them.
After the tasteless incident, both Northampton’s head soccer coach and its assistant coach resigned. Some of the student athletes are also expected to face disciplinary action, according to the station.
"This is part of the educational process to make sure that students are understanding sportsmanship and what’s happening out there in the world," Northampton Area Superintendent Joseph Kovalchik said.
Since when is a deadly virus funny? When will African lives not be nothing but a comedic piece to westerners?
West African Teen Taunted With Chants of ‘Ebola’ at High School Soccer Game
Jealousy, it really is jealousy, but I promise you, Milena, that I’ll never plague you with it, only me, only myself.
But I don’t want it to pass. I don’t want to stop loving her. I prefer this sharp pain, this crushing anguish, to the tedium of lovelessness, of being normal… This pain is my final way of being with Aida, of being faithful to her, of prolonging my passion. I am not separate from her: in her absence, her memory accompanies me, it follows me, it gives her to me everywhere that she is not. I’ve never been apart from her for a single moment, although no one knows it.
you don't have to answer this but i wanted to ask you because your politics have shaped mine. im a radical feminist and i was wondering if this is a bad thing to be. this sounds stupid but the way tumblr makes it sound i feel like im doing wrong by aligning myself with radical feminist ideology. this is a weird question im aware but you have shaped many of my feminist thoughts regarding porn/sex work etc so i trust your judgement in a way. i dont know who else to ask.
forte-fievre-deactivated2014101:
This is a very interesting and important question. To start off, you’re not doing anything wrong per se by being a radical feminist in that you view male hegemony as the most pervasive form of oppression against women. That’s the crux of radical feminism. However, the legitimate issue that people often have with radical feminism is its a frequent expression of trans-exclusionary sentiment that isolates and renders trans people extremely vulnerable to attacks, stigma, social exclusion and a lot more that they already have to unfortunately undergo. This doesn’t speak for the entirety of radical feminism because there are many trans-inclusive radical feminists but it often is painted as a wholly anti-trans movement because of the lack of support radical feminists show in this particular case. The problem is that more often than not, radical feminists will make little effort to dispel these very relevant concerns shown by trans people.
The flip side of this, and this is where both trans individuals and radical feminists are exposed to dishonesty and violence respectively, is that cis-hetero men will co-opt this very real and very important cause of fear and pain for trans people as their own and use it to attack radical feminists who they have always hated because radical feminists have been the most vociferous in their critiques of patriarchy. This is why you will notice that, for some curious reason, many cis-hetero men will hijack the sentiment of trans people and use it to state that they will - and I have literally read these statements - kill or “beat the shit out of” radical feminists who are “cis scum bitches.” The heinous irony here is that cis-hetero men are already doing this all over the world, these were the same acts of violence that brought radical feminists out in the first place. So, it is a disgusting misfortune to see how this misogyny for radical feminists is portrayed as concern for trans individuals, which isn’t concern to begin with because the most vicious and propagated forms of exclusion and attacks against trans people are predominantly from cis-hetero men. For an even more curious reason, cis-hetero men do not pursue confrontation with their transphobic cis-hetero peers the way they hound and chase radical feminists. This does not happen arbitrarily. There is a very specific reason behind that singling down of radical feminists. The saddest part is that it completely shadows the demands of trans people.
But to your main question. Is there anything wrong with radical feminism? If the trans-exclusionary equation of the debate is handled, there’s not much wrong with radical feminism. But am I a radical feminist? No and this isn’t because I find radical feminism wrong or pointless but because I have my ideological differences as a Marxist feminist. The dual theory system in radical feminism is what I personally differ with and find that its limits are something I cannot work within. i.e. For radical feminists, patriarchy is the sole source of oppression against women. For Marxist feminists, patriarchy and the mode of production (which is capitalist right now) combine to create the condition women live under. For radical feminists, women’s oppression takes on a universalist understanding (which means, every woman goes through the same kind of oppression) but for Marxist feminists or Womanists, one woman’s oppression often differs with the other woman’s oppression. Race, class, other social factors intersect and create a dynamic where gender alone is not the source of contention.
You also might know this: Radical feminists appeared after breaking away from the New Left in the 60’s because they believed that traditional Marxist theory did not adequately address the origins, structure, dynamics of male domination and they abandoned socialism as a viable means of organizing social activism. So, Marxist feminists and radical feminists will often have long, detailed discussions over the nature of capitalism and patriarchy. Radical feminists believe that it is not capitalism that wounds women but patriarchy. Marxist feminists believe that both destroy working women’s lives. Radical feminism will often insist we look beyond class while Marxist feminists will never give in to such an idea because class is the material reality of subjugated women but also that there are indeed women who benefit at the expense of other women. So, essentially, radical feminism and Marxist feminism have a different notion of sisterhood. For Marxist feminists, the valid critique from radical feminists posed a big theoretical dilemma: How do we remain aligned with our socialism without forfeiting female autonomy and how do we remain aligned with our feminism without abandoning the critique of economic institutions? Hence, a synthesis of radical feminist thought and socialism was brought together by understanding mode of production (capitalism) and mode of reproduction (patriarchy) so we could remain together with both because both capitalism (economic structure) and patriarchy (social structure) affect us. Some marxist feminists and radical feminists agreed that capitalism is an expression of patriarchy (something that I don’t necessarily agree with). The debate continues between both groups.
Sorry for pulling you through that but it’s important to understand the qualms suppressed groups have with an ideology to improve the ideology and movement. Naturally, there is a lot more to it and I suggest that you read people like Iris Marion Young or Annette Kuhn, etc. Theory and praxis can only become better through dialogue and exchange; isolating ourselves will never help. There’s a difference between creating safe space and downright attacking someone who simply wants to understand. I think radical feminism has a very strong potential to become a more effective movement if it addresses the trans question, and I’m sure many radical feminists are doing this. What is important to remember here is that patriarchy will find a way to seep into these realms and that both cis-women and trans people are affected. An alliance between both becomes not only socially nutritive but necessary.
A recurring mistake made by commentators on Plato’s Phaedrus and Aristotle’s Rhetorica is the conflation of the messages found in both texts. While Plato and Aristotle share the same contempt for Sophistic school of oratory, their methodology in studying and demonstrating the nature and purpose of rhetoric differs greatly. Aristotle’s Rhetorica can be understood as technē which reads like a handbook against Sophism while Plato’s Phaedrus, planted in a more idyllic setting surrounded by the resplendency of metaphors and myths, is not a manual guide on the interplay of speeches, texts and words. The dominant method in Phaedrus to improve rhetoric concerns itself with two approaches that function optimally together: dialectic and psychological analysis. In this paper, I will specify the techniques within Platonic theory of rhetoric.
And hit my head against the wall repeatedly.
Early Christianity:
W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity. (this is a go-to for me, it covers just about everything in the first centuries of christianity, including “heretical” groups, ecclesiastical and theological conflict, etc.)
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity.
Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity.
Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity.
Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World.
Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity.
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. (any of the oxford handbooks on christianity will be excellent, also Ashbrook Harvey is one of my favorite scholars of early christianity, she works on the early syriac church and especially women of the syriac church)
Virginia Burrus, ed. Late Ancient Christianity.
Western Christianity:
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200 - 1000.
Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336. (Bynum is without a doubt, the most famous and revered historian of medieval western Christianity and her work is revolutionary and spectacular)
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion.
Daniel Bornstein, Medieval Christianity.
John Arnold, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity.
Eastern Christianity:
Derek Kreuger, Byzantine Christianity.
Elizabeth Jeffreys, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies.
Cyril Mango, The Oxford History of Byzantium.
J.M Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire.
John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes.
John Haldon, A Social History of Byzantium.
Bonus contemporary stuff:
Twentieth Century Global Christianity.
Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective.
The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity.
The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism.
Geoffrey Wainwright, The Oxford History of Christian Worship.