hoursofreading

[hoursofreading]

part of what pisses me off so much about AI is how confident all pro-AI people are that it can do basically anything when there's literally no evidence that it can do anything even remotely well. it really feels like the only thing keeping this industry going is the refusal of anyone with any amount of money and power to hit these losers with a [citation needed]

[hoursofreading]

i feel very stongly that elizabeth 100% would have sworn darcy to eternal secrecy about the fact that he had already proposed once unsuccessfully when she accepted, solely bc you just KNOW mr collins' smug ass would be like, "oh ho ho! huh! so apparently it IS the usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept when he applies for their favor! hm! interesting!" and then she would be honor-bound to leap over lady catherine's dining table and strangle him

[hoursofreading]

Sometimes I think about how a significant chunk of American political discourse and online political discourse in general over the past 10 years has been dedicated to pretending this tweet was not true or was never actually posted

[hoursofreading]

[hoursofreading]

Nikoleta Sekulovic, Virginia Woolf, 2024

[hoursofreading]

when gentle parenting fails

[hoursofreading]

With the way that some Leftists seem to conceptualize international politics, history, and race relations, I'm honestly waiting for someone to attempt to take the stance that Genghis Khan didn't kill all of those people and forge his empire. Why? Because as a Mongolian he was a Person Of Color, and everyone knows that POC can only ever be the victims of colonization and imperialism, never the perpetrators.

[hoursofreading]

[hoursofreading]

[hoursofreading]

This made me bust out laughing

[hoursofreading]

Book Rec List: My Favorite History Books Written by Black Women

Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits. As a Michigander, I had to start with a book about Michigan history and this is genuinely one of the best. Tiya Miles is true scholar and artist in her ability to work within limited official records to tell meaningful stories. She has also recently written an amazing biography of Harriet Tubman and a wonderful collection of essays about women who were influenced by the natural world. I love all of her books and you can find more of them at her website here.

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. This is a book people often feel like they can skip because they think they know the story but I cannot recommend it strongly enough as one of the most powerful reflections on the horrors of what a person will do to be loved. It is the story of a lonely man, full of grief who gave himself a new family to replace his dead loved ones who would never be allowed to leave him. Gordon-Reed has also written a small history of Juneteenth, On Juneteenth that I also deeply recommend.

Kellie Carter Jackon, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. I often put this book on my recommendations because it is one of the best examples I've seen of a book that isn't explicitly about women's experiences but that which takes women's lives and women's resistance to sexual violence seriously. Absolutely essential to anyone's reading on violence and non-violence.

Stephanie E Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. This is a book I wish was read as much as it was referenced because it is an extraordinary scholarly work that should influence feminist scholarship more than it does.

Edda L Fields-Black, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom During the Civil War. Fields-Black's actual training is as a historian of rice farming, which was, to me an extraordinary selling point and roundabout area of expertise. This is a wonderful, deeply researched history of the Combahee river raid.

Kerri K Greenridge, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family. This is a favorite book of mine, a history of the black members of the Grimke family, their relationship with their white relatives (including the famous Grimke Sisters) and the way that the Grimkes made their way in the world in the years after the Civil War.

Kidada E Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. A grim but wonderfully researched narrative of white violence in the fall of reconstruction that clearly takes its model from other histories of genocide and atrocities in how to center the experiences of victims and survivors. Also an important reframing of the fall of Reconstruction that emphasizes the terror inflicted upon black Americans as political campaign.

Marcia Chatelain, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. I've included so many grim histories in this list that this is something a little bit lighter, telling the story of fast food, and McDonald's in particular as it effected black families in a time when traditional restaurants were segregated.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns. You have heard of this book, probably incessantly. And that's because it's great. Truly worth all the hype. Truly an heir to Studs Turkey.

[hoursofreading]

[hoursofreading]

[hoursofreading]

A large part of the reason families were bigger in the past was because marital rape was not considered rape and birth control/abortion methods were ineffective, dangerous and/or illegal. We can dance around this and act like our great great great grandmothers just loveddddd being mamas so much that they decided out of their own free will to have 11 children. We can pretend that they DECIDED to have big families because it was a financially advantageous decision so they could have more labor around the farm. But a lot of children in the past were fundamentally unwanted and not conceived out of love, children were not a choice women got to make. We need to admit that and stop pretending historical women were inherently more maternal because they were impregnated at the age of 15 and kept having babies until they were 40. That did not make them loving mothers, it did not make them ‘the divine feminine’ and it sure did not make them happy.

[hoursofreading]

Someone on that post about fear-mongering birth control mentioned that a lot of prolifers are against birth control because they believe it ends pregnancies instead of preventing them. Then I had that super religious anti-birth control lady on my post. There is a large fraction of absolute nutjobs who think using contraception thwarts God’s will to send souls to earth or whatever. Even people from religions that absolutely do not have that doctrine anywhere in their scriptures. I know that is similar to the reasoning and ideology against birth control in Catholicism, which is darkly horrifically ironic to me because that is an organization with a long horrific history of passively killing babies and children. God sends you vulnerable souls who are living breathing children, not zygotes or fetuses, and you neglected and abused them to death in orphanages and mother and baby homes.

If God’s will can be thwarted by a pill, then it either isn’t God’s will or your God is weak. That’s my opinion.

But anyway, reaching back around, these people with religious convictions against abortion and birth control should not have a say in our laws. They should have a say in their bodies. They should be allowed to reproduce at their pleasure. Let God send them all the precious little children He wants. And let those of us who have a scientific conviction or a God that says life begins at birth practice our beliefs in peace. Leave us the fuck alone.

[hoursofreading]

this might sound stupid but I can’t help but believe that the new wave of “birth control is actually horrible for your body, you need to get off it immediately” misinformation from influencers and the ‘natural cycle tracking’ apps suddenly being advertised is a sneaky underhanded way of causing more unplanned pregnancies that people now cannot abort. now is possibly the worst time ever to turn towards ‘natural family planning’

[hoursofreading]

That woman is a middle school teacher too. Imagine working with 11 to 14 year olds day in and day out and thinking “Abortion should be banned. Don’t want to get pregnant? Don’t have sex. These are individuals with bodies and minds strong enough to carry pregnancies.” that takes a level of evil so vast it is almost unfathomable. I got my first period age at the age of 11, the week of my grandpa’s funeral. I was so small and so scared and my teachers were so nice to me and so patient when I bled through my pants. To imagine this woman holding interacting with vulnerable children like that and thinking they should be denied abortion almost has me tearing up.