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I've seen some comments that were anti-Bingley recently and this surprised me. Which of these best describes what you think about Charles Bingley staying away from Netherfield in Pride and Prejudice, because he thinks Jane indifferent to him?

'Bingley should never have been persuaded Jane didn't like him that much in the first place' is not an option on this poll. Bingley has this much modesty and no less. To me, Bingley should be read like Darcy and his 'one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever', in respect towards a woman he loves. Bingley, when persuaded that the woman he likes is indifferent to him, goes away and leaves her alone. Bingley doesn’t want to marry a woman who would take him only for his position and feel indifferent towards him as a person. He was happy to court a woman he believed to have a sincere regard for him, if unmatched to his own. This as an attitude also displays a respect towards Jane: that, liking her but becoming convinced that she is indifferent towards him, the course of action he feels to be right is to not return to Netherfield, remove himself from the vicinity and cease to put her in a situation where she might feel pressured to marry him despite her indifference. Unlike Collins, who after he decides to marry Elizabeth, is not only unwilling to take her refusal but wishes her to be forced to yield to pressure to marry him.

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further comment on my post about birth rate and natalism. a lot of women responded, "yes and also so many of us want children but can't afford to have them!" it's totally a fair and important comment to make, but after seeing 100 of them in a row i feel like i have to add... look, my research suggests so far that all types of socialist intervention which make childbearing more attractive for women still do not bring the birth rate above replacement. when i say in that post that the evidence doesn't bear out a version of natalism that is feminist, that's what i mean. what i have read so far strongly suggests that the completely free birth rate as far as we have ever been able to see so far in modern history is probably slightly below replacement. consider that even if you personally want children, if you want fewer than three children, your desires point toward the maintenance of a below-replacement birth rate. for every woman who doesn't want any children, another woman must want five to push the birth rate above replacement. the fact that the birth rate is below replacement is the exact thing that the antifeminist right considers an emergency. so, the argument that women would have more children in a more equitable economy, although it's probably true, is not enough for them and we need to be aware of the weakness in that argument. read this anti-feminist piece in compact magazine for an example of their perspective.

i worry about the consequences of the argument, "well, we would have more children if the state would perform a different policy intervention than the one the right is suggesting." i feel that this argument represents a type of socialist natalism. again, i understand where the comment comes from, but my point is that attempting to alter the decision of a women to not have a child should not be an appropriate motivation for policy intervention point blank. that's why i think we need to be generating economic ideas that presume below-replacement birth rate is the only free and just demographic future for all human beings.

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Woman bore me, I will rise.

A. E. Housman, ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’

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Redner's Rescued Cat Figurine Mewseum located in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin is home to over 3,500 figurines. You can visit the museum on the third Sunday of each month from April to December during their open house days. Alternatively, if you give a 24-hour notice, you can schedule an appointment. All proceeds and donations from the museum's operations go to local cat rescue organizations and shelters in Wisconsin.

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Amina - Conqueror

Amina was queen of the city of Zazzau (now Zaria in modern Nigeria) and led her army in expansionist wars for thirty-four years.

What is known of Amina’s life comes from oral traditions collected during the late 19th century in the Kano Chronicle, commissioned by Sultan Muhammad Bello, ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate in northwest Nigeria. There are thus some uncertainties regarding elements such as her accession to power or the exact dates of her rule.

Amina ascended to the throne circa 1576. There are two different versions of her ascension to power. The first is that she directly succeeded her mother, Bakwa Turunku, who was probably the first woman to rule over Zazzau. In the second version, a male relative named Karama came to power after Bakwa Turunku’s death. During his reign, Amina became a general and earned the respect of the male-dominated military. Her military prowess lead her to be chosen as the next sovereign after Karama’s death.

The queen set to expand the borders of her kingdom, leading her horsemen into battle. She first united all the Hausa city-states under her rule, captured the cities of Kano and Katsina and expanded the sub-Saharan trade routes. She also built defensive fortifications and today ancient Hausa fortifications are known as “Amina’s walls”.

She never married, but legends about her claim that she took a lover from each new town she conquered and had him beheaded the next morning. Amina is regarded as a national heroine in Nigeria, she appeared on postage stamps for instance, and is known as the “woman as capable as a man”.

References:

“Queen Amina, woman as capable as a man”, BBC News Africa

Toler Pamela D., Women warriors, an unexpected history

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Day 2 in the Middle School Time Loop: you remember that last time, everyone ignored you at recess because they were talking about a TV show that you hadn’t watched. This time, you lie and say you’ve seen it. They ask you who your favorite character is, and you don’t know any of the characters, and so you’re tongue-tied. They think you’re weirder than ever, or maybe a liar, which is worse (and true).

Day 3 in the Middle School Time Loop: you tell your parents that you feel ill. They let you stay home while they’re at work. You spend the whole day watching past episodes of the TV Show.

Day 4 in the Middle School Time Loop: Recess again. The same person asks you who your favorite character is. This time, you're ready. You eagerly tell them, and supplement your reasons for liking them with solid evidence from all 4 seasons of the show. But! Tough luck: you’re now too invested. The atmosphere turns uncomfortable. They go back to ignoring you like they did on the Day 1 that you didn’t know was Day 1.

Day 5 in the Middle School Time Loop:

You decide to try a different approach and update your style. You've noticed that Ashleigh, who’s blonde and constantly surrounded by friends, always wears pink stripey sneakers. You try wearing a pink dress. Someone says it’s cute, but you know from how they say it that it isn’t the good cute.

“I thought that pink was cool,” you protest, more to the uncaring universe than to anyone in particular.

Your interlocutor shrugs. “Maybe on someone else.”

Day 6 in the Middle School Time Loop: You keep your head down, but still surprise the teachers by somehow knowing the correct answers to every spontaneous question they throw out to the class. You study the outfits of your classmates more closely. You realize that it wasn’t the color, so much as the brand that made the difference. It proves the shoes were expensive. You note down Ashleigh's sneaker brand in smudgy ink on the back of your hand, and then after school you take half a year's saved-up allowance and buy a matching pair at the mall. Your mom raises her eyebrows but doesn’t stop you.

Day 7 in the Middle School Time Loop: Today you make it to lunch before anything major goes wrong. You think that the sneakers have protected you, and stare down at them lovingly, watching the Barbie-pink plastic stripes reflect the tube lights on the ceiling as you turn your feet this way and that. But then at lunch, Ashleigh comes up, arm and arm with a friend. Her eyes are a little pink, but only a little.

“Ashleigh wanted me to tell you that she’s really hurt that you copied her sneakers,” the friend informs you, nobly, as if it would be too unpleasant for Ashleigh to have to say this herself. Her mouth is solemn but her eyes are gleeful.

“I didn’t…” You start to deny it automatically, even though it’s true. And yet, something won’t let you apologize. Doesn’t she see your imitation for what it is: the most sincere compliment you know how to bestow? This is your Hail Mary.

As you meet her eyes, you realize she does know, but this only makes her despise you more.

“I think a lot of people have these sneakers,” you stammer, in the end, and they just sniff and turn away. You go back to eating your lunch alone.

Day 8 of the Middle School Time Loop: even though you do well in every class, you must be so much more stupid than your classmates, to be missing whatever detail it is that they seem to have caught. How do they do it so quickly? Before recess, before the end of homeroom, even, they all just know. You’ve had endless chances to do this day over and yet you never seem to be able to catch up with them. Running to stand still, you’ve heard your mother say, when she’s busy at work. That’s you. Running to stand still.

Day 9 of the Middle School Time Loop: you pretend to be sick again, and you realize that if you want to, you can pretend to be sick every day. It's easy to convince your parents: you look tired and unhappy, your eyes small within their dark circles, like some underground creature. You stop watching that TV Show that you never really wanted to watch in the first place, and instead dream your way through all your favourite childhood movies. Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli. You retreat into jewel-colored landscapes, where everyone is magical or beautiful or at least funny, and the heroes always win in the end.

Day 10 of the Middle School Time Loop: You notice that most of the Pixar heroes, the Disney princesses look more like Ashleigh than you. Long hair. Pale eyes. Button noses. And all of them, so thin.

Day 11 of the Middle School Time Loop: you go to school, but you don’t talk to anyone. You don’t even answer your name at roll call. Your teacher asks you if anything is wrong at school, or at home perhaps. You shake your head, but that evening you hear your father taking a call. You shrug off his worry: it’ll be forgotten tomorrow anyway.

Day 12 of the Middle School Time Loop: an unexpected development: your apathy almost seems to make your classmates like you more. When you say, truthfully, that you don’t care much for the TV Show that eternally dominates the recess chatter, some people look impressed. They ask you what you think is better. But you’re wise and don’t admit to liking anything. "Mysterious," someone says appreciatively.

At the end of recess, the girl who told you off for copying Ashleigh nudges you. “Hey. Look, Robert has an Up shirt. Kind of cute, that he’s still into that stuff, right?”

You know that it’s not the good cute.

You stare at her coldly. “The shirt just has a dog on it. It doesn't say he's from Up. So you must have liked the movie enough to remember him.”

She flushes scarlet, and hurries to catch up with Ashleigh, throwing you a dirty look. Robert glances at you gratefully but you don’t return his smile. He won’t remember that you did this for him. Anyway, you didn't, really. Do it for him, that is.

Day 13 of the Middle School Time Loop: You tell your parents you’re sick again. Today, you watch the second tier of Studio Ghibli movies, the ones that your parents always say, self-consciously, that you’ll find dull. Only Yesterday, Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There. You’re only a few minutes into Marnie when there’s a line that pulls you up short:

“In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle. There’s inside and outside. These people are inside. And I’m outside.”

The relief that washes over you is so profound that you almost cry, and then, when the movie's over, you do cry. Ugly sobs that make you sound like a toddler throwing a tantrum at the mall, that make your head pound with a dehydration headache. But behind the tears, there's relief. There it is, the truth that you were searching for, through all these do-overs. There’s an invisible magic circle. Of course there is.

But here’s the thing about circles: the inside is small. The outside is scary, and lonely, but it’s huge: huger than you could ever have imagined before you turned around and looked.

When your dad gets home, he asks if you’re feeling better. “Much,” you say, and it’s true.

Day ?? of the Middle School Time Loop: Sometimes you go to school, but ditch class and go to the library or the playground and do your own thing even if teachers yell at you. Sometimes you wander around the neighborhood. Sometimes you ask your parents crazy things, like to take you to work with them, or to the beach, or to DisneyWorld. Sometimes they say no. A surprising amount of times, they say yes. You wonder if maybe they’re trapped in a time loop too.

Sometimes you sit quietly in other classrooms than the one you’re meant to be in, until they shoo you out or even send you to the principal. (He finds you baffling. You feel a deep, slightly mournful affection for him, like you would for an very old and tired dog). It’s surprising, the amount of different things that are getting taught in one school in one day. It takes you a long time to work your way through them all.

You watch a frog getting dissected a few times before you start to feel bad and don’t go back to that classroom again. Your favorite class to crash is art, because the teacher always clocks that you’re not meant to be there but smiles and lets you stay anyway. When you meet her eyes, it feels like you’re sharing a secret.

Day One-Hundred And Something of the Middle School ...Wait.

At some point, time started moving again, and you didn’t even realize it.

For so long, the reprimands you received about your future seemed so empty, so laughable. There was no future. Only a more- or less-bearable present. But now, your classmates remember the unhinged things that you do; now, your teachers’ and parents’ worries about the future have the full juggernaut weight of reality behind them.

You thought that you’d be more terrified. For so long, you’ve dreaded this forward momentum. No loading screen, no mini-games, just one single, awful, pulsating life. But things are different now. Time’s moving again, and here you are, so far outside the invisible magic circle that you’re not even sure that you'd be able to see it any more. You can still feel its power, but faintly, like the pull between two magnets when they're an arm's length apart. Easy to ignore.

“Are you ready?” Robert says, catching your eye over the kitchen table. He comes here first thing so you can get the bus together. At some point, during the time loop, you started to seek him out. He was outside the circle, too, you realized. But even more importantly, not once, on any of those grimly looping days, did you see him try and push someone else out to make a space for himself. In this crab bucket, that’s something that counts for a lot.

“Our final day of middle school,” he sighs, half to himself. “Never thought I’d see it.”

"Me either," you reply, getting up to put on your talismanic pink sneakers. They’re scuffed and dirty after years of wear, and certainly Ashley would never be caught dead in them these days. Maybe that’s what you should have told her, all those loops ago: that no imitation, let alone one as unskilled as yours, can ever be perfect, and that indeed the very imperfection renders it an original work in its own right. Time and thought and human care transforms even the most diligent copy into something else entirely.

But you’ve been through enough time loops to know that that sort of explanation wouldn’t go over very well.

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Exactly.

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Generic AUs are out! AUs based on law cases are in! AU where in 1928, Albus Dumbledore goes to a café in Paisley and orders himself some ginger beer.

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sdxfcgvzdxfcgvhzdxfcgvhbjnkmlcgvhbjnk science

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Fiodor Dostojewski – Zbrodnia i kara

Juliusz Słowacki – Balladyna

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They say you die three times, first when the body dies, second, when your body enters the grave, and third, when your name is spoken for the last time. You were a normal person in life, but hundreds of years later, you still haven’t had your “third” death. You decide to find out why.

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Jedno jest ważne - mam być szczęśliwa.

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FINAL ROUND 🎉

Well, here we are. If I remember correctly exactly one year after I made this sideblog. And now the two powerhouses who have swept the entire tournament are facing off against each other!!

The undefeated champs, the unstoppable forces of nature that are both in a style I'm not at all used to drawing, are you guys ready?

NO PROPAGANDA THIS TIME VOTE WITH YOUR HEART

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Why don't you feel all right for the rest of your life? Why don't you feel all right for the rest of your life?

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The trial of Olympe de Gouges

Audience of … … 12 Brumaire, Year II of the Republic. Case of Olympe de Gouges.

Questioned concerning her name, surname, age, occupation, place of birth, and residence. Replied that her name was Marie Olympe de Gouges, age thirty-eight, femme de lettres, a native of Montauban, living in Paris, rue du Harlay, Section Pont-Neuf.

The clerk read the act of accusation, the tenor of which follows.

Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, public prosecutor before the Revolutionary Tribunal, etc.

States that, by an order of the administrators of police, dated last July 25th, signed Louvet and Baudrais, it was ordered that Marie Olympe de Gouges, widow of Aubry, charged with having composed a work contrary to the expressed desire of the entire nation, and directed against whoever might propose a form of government other than that of a republic, one and indivisible, be brought to the prison called l’Abbaye, and that the documents be sent to the public prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Consequently, the accused was brought to the designated prison and the documents delivered to the public prosecutor on July 26th. The following August 6th, one of the judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal proceeded with the interrogation of the above-mentioned de Gouges woman.

Read More

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NAME IS ERASED

Uchiyama, 56, a high school teacher in Nagano Prefecture, lives with her former colleague and ex-husband, Yukio Koike, 66. In 1991, she and Koike became engaged, but Uchiyama wanted to keep her family name. Koike, who was the eldest son in his family, vehemently opposed the idea. The wedding took place in the same year without a decision on whether they would register the marriage. However, Koike’s father did so while the newlyweds were on their honeymoon. The couple continued to discuss—and argue—over the name issue. Uchiyama went by her maiden name at work but was forced to use “Koike” for her payroll and other accounts. Some time later, Koike found a book about separate family names among married couples. The book explained the meaning of living under someone else’s surname and the difficulty of changing one’s family name to another. “This is what she (Uchiyama) was talking about,” he realized. They remained married for the birth of their son in 1992 so that Koike would be registered as his father. The couple then were “paper divorced,” but they still lived together and carried on as if they still legally married. They remarried for the same registry reasons when their two daughters were born. They are now technically divorced. In 2019, their second daughter, who was a senior in high school at the time, made a documentary in the school’s broadcasting club about her parents and their separate surnames. The daughter said she wanted to tell as many people as possible about the issue. In 2020, Uchiyama received a call from the eldest daughter, who had just gotten married and was in the process of changing her surname to that of her husband. “I feel like I’m at my own funeral,” the daughter said. “My name is being erased one by one.” Uchiyama and Koike had thought their generation would resolve the surname issue. But when their married daughter revealed her torment, they decided to actively work for a dual surname system and joined the lawsuit.

Couples who ended marriages to sue state over 1-surname rule (22 February 2024)