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YOUR EMAIL FINDS ME ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE

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adhd will get you thinking "i should make this doctors appointment" every day for 7 months and counting

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Dang, what DID happen during the reconstruction then? It's way more fun to have you say it rather than books or google

So 1865-1876 is one of the most important decades in American history like genuinely our failure to do this right is the root of all evil today. It is very complicated. Here is the best shortest answer i can give you.

After the Civil War, with the plantation south destroyed and about 5 million previously enslaved people freed, the American government faced two big questions: what to do to reconcile the South back into the union to prevent another civil war, and what the social, economic, and political status of freedpeople in the South was going to be. Note that at this time Republicans were liberal and Democrats were conservative.

Abraham Lincoln had a plan that was a bit too lenient to the South than his more radical party members in Congress liked, but he was more committed to Black civil rights than his Democratic contemporaries. Radical Republicans wanted to take steps to ensure none of this would happen again, including redistributing land to freedpeople as a form of reparations, mass industrialization in the South, and preventing white ex confederates from voting or holding office while giving freedpeople the right to vote. Southern Democrats (white supremacists. Not that northerners werent but christ alive these were evil people) resisted this at all costs.

Unfortunately for everyone to this day, Lincoln’s vice president was a southern democrat, so when Lincoln got shot in the hat and died, now-president Andrew Johnson decided to let mostly everything slide. He let the Southern states back in with very few guardrails, took redistributed land and gave it back to enslavers (they had to personally ask him because he liked when they begged), and generally neglected Black civil rights the entire time he was President because he was super racist. Congress (much more radical) ended up in the drivers seat of Reconstruction halfway through his admin.

Congress passed the 13th Amendment to end slavery except as a punishment for a crime. White ex-confederates retaliated by passing the Black Codes, state laws that made it a crime to exercise really any social or economic autonomy while Black so that freedpeople could be incarcerated or coerced into essentially doing the same plantation labor they previously had been. Many white plantation owners put Black people (later also poor whites) into perpetual debt with systems like sharecropping and crop-lien, so they could not afford their own land. A lot of it was recreating the conditions of slavery in the aggregate using capitalism and a white supremacist legal system.

The federal government passed the 14th and 15th Amendments, which nullified the Black Codes, protected Black citizenship, disenfranchised white ex-confederates for a while, and protected the right of Black men to vote. This was especially critical in states like South Carolina and Mississippi, which had Black majorities. Some Southern states had biracial (black and white) populist political parties, because poor whites had common class interests with many freedmen.

White ex-confederates responded to these civil rights milestones with what can only be described as mass terrorism: the formation of the KKK, sundown towns, widespread lynchings, voter intimidation, voter fraud, public beatings, etc. President Grant, who took office after Johnson, tried to combat this by putting chunks of the South under martial law, which sort of worked when the army was in fact there.

However, Grant was mired in scandal and not super popular, and it really came to a head during the panic of 1873: the economy got bad, and lots of white northern liberals lost enthusiasm to keep forcing the white south into modernity. They decided essentially that they had their own problems to deal with, that Black people could fend for themselves, and that white ex-confederates had “been through enough” (very little.) White Southern racists called “redeemers” gained a lot of political power during the mid 1870s as more white people got their right to vote back.

All of this comes to an end in the election of 1876: due to “voting irregularities” in SC, LA, and FL (an overt violent white supremacist coup in SC and some significant fraud in the latter states), the election came down to the House of Representatives instead of the Electoral College. Rutherford B Hayes, the Republican candidate, promised the white south that if they made him the president, he would pull all the US troops protecting civil rights and fighting the Klan out of the South and end reconstruction. They happily took that deal, actively condemning millions of African-Americans to a century of severe white supremacy.

After reconstruction, the white South passed Jim Crow laws like segregation and voter disenfranchisement to cement the electoral, social, and economic control of southern whites. The US Supreme Court also enforced these (racism is a national problem.) The biracial political coalitions of Reconstruction died out as more and more poor whites picked white supremacy over class solidarity.

Conditions for African-Americans obviously improved over literal slavery, but the South remained a deeply racist, largely agrarian, and economically regressive place for a long time. Many opted to flee the South for the urban north in the early 1900s. A lot of the damage done by the failure of Reconstruction did not get addressed until the Civil Rights movement, and a lot of it still hasn’t been addressed at all.

Watch this video it will help you with the basics.

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I would not trust Ruby with the map if I was Weiss, just sayin

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Extremely extremely funny btw. That Lex Luther knows Superman inside and out. He’s cloned the guy. Studied his fighting style and knows it to a T. Can predict his moves with total accuracy, can manipulate him into interfering with (manufactured) global conflicts, wants to kill him so badly it’s kinda embarrassing. And also he has no idea that Superman is Clark Kent. Like, man, I thought you stalked him every hour of the day and you don’t even know his secret identity?

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I'm so glad that Superman called Lex Luthor out for being so obsessed with him because it's gonna make the sequel where Lex tries to babytrap Kal-El using Superboy even funnier.

Like, Match is already there, we're so heading towards Superboy in the next movie.

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Only one person died. Only one singular person. In a superhero movie! The type that love to throw around casualty counts like it’s all a big game, waving off 70 people being killed in a handful of days like it’s no big deal, yet only ONE PERSON died.

And he was mourned. Superman cried for him—this stranger who gave him free falafel and, while facing death, told him that he still believed in him. Metamorpho, this cold-seeming man who is being actively blackmailed to do this, breaking down and taking the risk to believe in Superman, too, because seeing someone murdered right in front of him is devastating enough to take the risk. The newspapers run a front page article talking about how they’re going to memorialize him.

The stakes didn’t have to involve real actual loss of life. The threat of it was enough to convey the severity of the situation. Because human life is that important. All life is that important, at least to Superman who goes out of his way to save dogs and squirrels.

(Hawkgirl does kill SHEIN Netanyahu but genocidal dictators don’t count as human beings lol.)

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It's funny to me that we've come full circle back to the Russian/ambiguously Eastern European comic book villain for completely different reasons this time.

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Guys do you think she’s excited

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excuse me for stating the obvious but like. james gunn outright calling superman an immigrant and doubling down on it when he got backlash (because he IS an immigrant, that's the point of superman) + the in-movie dialogue of "aren't you going to read me my rights?" "you're an extraterrestrial, son. you haven't got any rights to read." + the violence of his arrest and how they torture and mistreat him unapologetically, all under the guise of "protecting america", in a film releasing during the onslaught of violent ICE kidnappings and abuse... yeah it's really no wonder right-wing knobheads are crying about this being woke. they're being forced to look directly at the reasons one of the most well-known and beloved heroes of all time would not be on their side. and that's only ONE of the reasons this movie covers

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For the record, Team name options include:

Team RRWN (Rowan, meaning readhead, or RRWN as in Maroon)

Team RRNW (Rainbow, could be a Wizard of Oz reference since Somewhere Over the Rainbow)

Team RRSN (Crimson, but everyone calls them Team Arson because...it's Weiss and Nora and Ren and Ruby, come on, they totally will given enough time)

Team RWNL (Periwinkle)

Team RWLN (Vermillion)

Team RWRN (Rhododendron)

It it wasn't clear I have in fact been thinking about this. Help me pick?

I want you to know that I saw one of your rewatch posts and briefly misread "The Badge and the Burden" as "The Bagel and the Burden" and...

I can't even call the result of that brief misread a mental image because I am struggling to figure out what that would even look like.

That's the version of RWBY where Ruby and Weiss had Nora and Ren as teammates.

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Ok, so I watched the new Superman movie and had one (1) complaint:

WHY was Lex Luthor's translation of the lost/recovered end to the message from Krypton treated as gospel?

To be clear: I am not opposed to the idea of Krypton as a society, or Jor-El as an individual, having some fucky morals or politics. The idea that Krypton destroyed themselves and therefore had serious problems (in particular issues similar to our own with climate change and denial of it) can be really powerful and interesting!

It can get dicey, don't get me wrong. Given the immigrant themes so strongly associated with Superman as a character, making his family have any motive besides wanting their son to live and have a good life — even if they couldn't — can turn bad very easily. But the new movie handled the immigrant message and experience behind Superman very well regardless, so I'm okay with it.

However. However.

The notion that any number of linguists, however skilled, could immediately accurately translate the second half of the recording, is absurd.

Like, it doesn't even matter that the first half of the message from Jor-El was already translated, because it uses completely different vocabulary!!! With only good words having been defined so far, anyone trying to translate the second half would have no context for the stuff about the people being "simple" or Kal-El being sent to "rule."

And unlike any language from Earth, those linguists would have zero frame of reference; there's no common root language like Indo-European that they could then trace Kryptonian back to and figure out the meaning of the unknown words from. It'd be pure fucking guesswork, throwing spaghetti at the wall rather than actually analyzing the language to get the meaning of those words.

I'd maybe believe that the first half of the message being translated and dubbed over by the Kryptonian tech in the Fortress of Solitude means that Lex also got the translation straight from the source; I could be convinced that Jor-El really did say all that.

But I cannot be convinced that a group of accomplished and qualified linguists would actually sign off on that translation as legitimate and accurate, no questions asked.

What I headcanon happened in-universe is that Lex Luthor held a bunch of linguists at gunpoint and told them to claim the translation was legitimate or else. Or he just got a group of hacks with false credentials to sign off on it and the media ran with it. Because no actual linguist worth their salt would watch that recording and go "yeah I can precisely translate this language I've never fucking heard before and have zero frame of reference for right now, give me an hour."

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The True Allegory of the Faunus Plot

Or: the Faunus Plotline is actually great, y’all are just Amero-centric.

I’ve always enjoyed the Faunus Plotline in RWBY, and I’ve never really understood the criticisms. But recently, I saw someone talking about how “Adam doesn’t fit the Malcolm X role” and I had a realization why.

For natural reasons, the African-American Civil Rights Movement and subsequent movements are the most prominent touchstone to Americans on the subject of racism and civil rights. It’s the thing that you guys automatically compare stories with racism allegories to. And while the Faunus Plotline does have parallels, it fails to follow that sort of narrative, and as a result it’s kinda throwing people off.

But I don’t think that’s a failure of writing. I think the fandom, as a whole, is looking at the wrong racism.

Now, let me be clear: no matter what race you are, if you feel that the Faunus Plotline represents you, that is completely valid. I’m not here to take that away from you. All oppressed peoples face similar struggles.

But I believe that the intent of the writers is not to create an allegory for African-American discrimination, but instead to create an allegory for Anti-Irish discrimination.

Or, TL;DR: The Faunus are Irish, Atlas is Britain, Vacuo is America, and our heroes are partaking in Gulliver’s Travels.

Confused? I’ll explain under the cut.

Keep reading

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