#NORDIC UNION

[metalcultbrigade]

Nordic Union - Animalistic. 12/08/2022

[warriorsparked]

You're picking up the pieces You're standing where your heart belongs And now you feel that it's real You can breathe again

[netscapenavigator-official]

So, apparently, the whole "Tesla v. the Swedish Working Class" thing is actually getting juicier.

Earlier this month, PostNord refused to deliver license plates to Tesla owners. Tesla sued, and the court ruled that the transportation authority had to deliver them, somehow.

Apparently something changed, and the court has changed its mind. PostNord is no longer under obligation to deliver license plates to Tesla owners, for the time being.

Also, unions from Finland, Norway, and Denmark have all either joined the strike or threatened to join if demands are not resolved by a certain date. The Nordic market is one of the quickest growing EV marketplaces in the world, with Norway and Sweden being Tesla's fourth and fifth-largest markets, respectively. Scandinavia is invaluable to an EV-only company's success, so it'll certainly be interesting to see what becomes of the following weeks.

[nordickies]

For outfit ideas, I think it would be fun to explore historical outfits!! For example, I think Fin would look very cute (and prob very uncomfortable) in the knightly order outfit of Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, an important (and very interesting!!) Finnish diplomat from the 18th century

This got lost in my drafts, sorry about that, anon!! This is a nice request, historical outfits are fun to draw! (I agree, this outfit must feel a bit uncomfortable)

And you're right; Armfelt was a fascinating character. I definitely recommend that people read more about him if Swedish/Finnish history interests you! But very simply put, he was a powerful official in Gustav III's court (and one of the king's rumored lovers) who was later declared a traitor in Sweden for treason. After the Swedish coup of 1809 and the deposition of the king, Armfelt moved to the newly seized Grand Duchy of Finland and continued his political career in the Russian Empire, helping to lift Finland's status and rights significantly.

But in general, the era of the Swedish kingdom's split into Sweden and Finland is so interesting - with many characters like Armfelt. In Sweden, the nobles and officials who stayed in Finland and pledged the oath of allegiance to the old enemy, Russia, were seen as traitors. Though not everyone swore the alliance, some individual soldiers and officials, still loyal to the crown, ended up fleeing and residing in Sweden.

But in parts of the high Finnish society, the dissatisfaction with the crown had existed for a while already (e.g., Anjala Conspiracy, Proclamation of Empress Elizabeth of 1742, Sprengtporten's constitution of 1786). Note that these attempts weren't motivated by nationalistic motifs but out of frustration with the domestic politics in the kingdom. The absolute monarchy was abolished in Sweden in 1719, basically due to the catastrophe that was the Great Northern War (especially in Finland). However, King Gustav III restored the old monarchy in a coup d'état of 1772 and launched more wars with Russia over the rule of the Baltic Sea. So it's probably no coincidence that the dissatisfaction grew especially in the eastern part of the kingdom throughout the 18th century. The final blow being the incompetence during the Finnish War of 1808.

And the position that Alexander I of Russia offered to "Finns" in 1809 was very favorable; by pledging loyalty in the Diet of Porvoo, the Grand Duchy got to keep its constitution, laws, language, religion, and even the taxes that it collected for itself. The first few decades of the Grand Duchy were critical in creating the path to independent Finland. And, of course, significant political changes happened in Sweden as well. Losing a third of the land area and a fourth of the population led to Sweden demanding their neighbor Norway as compensation in 1814

[loudblonde]

The goat may not burn as we speak, but the Nordic has found a way to get closer. We are striking against Tesla and its owner. Everyone is joining in. Praise be unions for working so well up here.

[dhampiravidi]

blood is thicker than water

Of course she refused when Baghra asked to meet her. Jayn had left the Morozova Crime Family in the 1800s after faking her death (with the help of a witch friend). She left Europe for the US & made a home there, easily sliding into the modern age (gosh, computers were nice), where she worked as a high-school Zemeni teacher. Even though Jayn's home was warded, Baghra had managed to send one of her thralls to her former employee, explaining that the old woman wanted to meet. Jayn thought it was a trap, so the Morozovas could tie up a loose end. Then Baghra came in person, saying that Aleks had been taken to Fjerda after a meeting to discuss a possible ceasefire had turned into an ambush. Jayn couldn't fathom how someone as powerful as Aleksander could have been taken, until Baghra described the sudden burst of light, which had scalded the vampires hidden in the surrounding area. Clearly, the Fjerdans who called the undead & all magic-users "unnatural" had done something hypocritical.

So Jayn went to Fjerda. Her background was clean, she knew; that being so was partly what'd kept the Family from finding her for so long. Still, she needed a good cover. She had contacted some of her relatives in Novyi Zem, explaining that she needed to get in & out of the country with a friend within the next week or two. Thanks to her occasional correspondence with them (which included a decent sum of money), they were happy to help. She was greeted in Fjerda by her several-cousins-down cousin's people, who were helping her pose as a relative of the main diplomat of Novyi Zem. They'd also gotten her a place to stay, though she'd also rented a room in a cheap place just in case she needed somewhere to hide.

Then the real work began.

@starlsssankt

[tehri]

Meanwhile in Sweden - Tesla Strike Edition

So we all know about the strike action against Tesla in Sweden? Yes? Yes, good.

It was in the news in Sweden today that apparently, someone on Tesla tried contacting the Minister for Employment about the strike-situation, very literally asking for "an audience". Yes, that wording. He asked for an audience to discuss the situation.

Of course, that request was also rejected. Because the government is not supposed to get involved in these things - it's between the unions and the companies, the government doesn't really have a say.

IF Metall, the company that Tesla is beefing with, have made a statement on the matter saying that it's clear that the people at Tesla have no fucking idea about how things work in Sweden.

But let it just sink in for a moment that someone at Tesla thought this was a good idea. We don't know if they had directions from higher up (perhaps even from the Rat himself?) or if they just acted alone. But they acted. And they thought they could get the government involved. They thought they could get the government to intervene on Tesla's behalf.

Let it sink in just how willing they are to take underhanded actions and also just how UNwilling they are to accept that they're not going to get their way.

Oh and also apparently Norway is getting involved now too and are saying that they'll stop the import of Tesla cars into the country if Tesla does not agree to IF Metall's conditions at the latest on the 20th of December.

[cat-with-a-tie]

(sunor??)

The Proposal (1905)

Quite possibly the most romantic thing to ever happen in their union.

this is so stupid i’m so sorry

[statementofjoespookie]

family part 1 :0

[venusite-chs]

i wrote something about the Soviets' recognition of Finland's independence last night (when I really should have been revising for my chemistry mock jfc that shit was hard) that i might post later but for now take a drawing i made to accompany it

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

The foreign ministers of the Baltic, Nordic, and Moldova issued a joint declaration that praised Moldova for its ability to withstand [Russian] pressure, inflation, the energy crisis, mass disinformation attempts, hybrid threats and not retreat from war condemnation, and broadly open the door to Ukrainian refugees.

[taoofthedrakon]

La Fayette's Draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man

La Fayette’s Draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man Actions « Prev 1 Next » OwainAdministrator☘️ Αριοσοφια ན་на криле AriosophiaPremananda Belisarius 🦢 ⚜️ Blumenthal Aryan 🦅 Anahate 🕉 Ananda 🇲🇪 PremPosts: 1,211Yoga: 💫 Orunbaya Chaitanya 🇼🇸 Cobra ⛎ BreathBio: Paramount Yogi अर्थी ♈ AriosofiniMember is Onlineabout an hour ago  QuoteEditPost by Owain on about an hour agoLa Fayette’s…

[head-post]

Europe’s best country for women

A new study has found that Denmark is the best country to live in, while Ukraine is currently the worst place to be a woman, CGTN reports.

The latest edition of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Index, published on Tuesday, assesses the status of women in 177 countries, comparing indicators ranging from economic participation to health and risk of violence.

In this year’s ranking, Denmark topped both the European and global rankings with a score of 0.932 out of 1, more than three times higher than Afghanistan ranked at the bottom of the list.

According to the list, 16 of the 20 best countries for women are in Europe, and all five Nordic countries are among the top seven countries in the Index.

Learn more HERE

[asatroende]

writing the modern edda and thinking about what icons njord might have for people who dont live near the coast or lakes

union worker njord being associated with pigeons, many in numbers, previously very hardworking as messenger birds, kind like the pigeons kept as pets, rich people hate them

[ninibeingdelulu]

His biggest fan ✧

Plot: You’re Michael’s girlfriend, cheering him at one of his games.

A/N: It’s so bad I hate it😓

The roar of thunderous cheers flooded the stadium as Michael unleashed another stupefying display of lethal precision and brute physicality that defied mortal comprehension.

You watched with breathless awe seated front row as that signature blue mohawk wove a hypnotic cyclone of calculated ferocity carving apart the helpless defense trailing hopelessly in his wake.

Each savage yet eerily choreographed burst from Michael's heavyweight strides reverberated across the pitch warping the boundaries of space and time itself directly proportional to his gravitational soccer supremacy.

Until the entire cosmos distilled into that infinite singularity split-second with just your striker boyfriend, the ball and the yawning maw of the goal awaiting its inevitable oblation.

You bit down hard stifling the visceral shudder trying to escape as Michael's rocket-powered thunderbolt smashed past the defenseless keeper and ignited the back of the net in a blaze of cosmic glory.

Celebrating with that bone-chilling sovereign roar staking his unchallengeable dominion once more before this mortal realm of sporting conquest still so far beneath his transcendent plane of greatness.

Even after the final whistle sounded you remained spellbound observing Michael bask in those rapturous post-coital moments savoring his ineffable feat.

Utterly transfixed upon the hyper-masculine sculpture of your man still slicked with the spoils of carnal supremacy while casting that chiseled nordic profile against the floodlit heavens he reigned sovereign over.

Until his peripheral laser focus abruptly snapped in your direction lancing directly through your aura with a telepathic tractor beam manifesting into actual physics-warping forces.

Almost like each molecule surrounding Michael compressed and bent inward before being shunted aside clearing his path towards you with terrifying inevitability.

You barely had a chance to brace yourself as the unstoppable tsunami slammed into your front row section without mercy or resistance.

The concussive shockwave blasting through your senses while those titanium bulwarks materialized around you scooping your diminutive frame against Michael's furnace-stoked musculature with crushing intensity.

"My sweet empress…I could only hear your voice back there. It motivated me, thank you.”

His rough-hewn bassline resonated against every nerve ending vibrating at some untapped primordial stratum while you strained to surface through the endless whitenoise overloading your synapses.

Only Michael's low gravitic pulses penetrating the oblivion flooding your faculties from that unholy cosmic union now peeling away every layer keeping you distinct individualities during submersion into this event horizon state of indistinguishable polarities collapsed together.

Until finally resurfacing from that singularity after an eternity compressed into nanoseconds - though still deliriously consumed by the aftershocks rippling across your intertwined vessels smoldering in the embers of rapturous conflagration yet still ravenous for more extreme escalations eternally rebirthing from the expended remains!

Only the roaring crescendos from those frenzied supporters still filling the stadium slowly penetrated the vacuous void reverberating between you both savoring that suspended infinitesimal post-orgasmic bliss together.

You felt Michael's stern facade gradually reassemble while withdrawing from your interiors just fractionally enough to restore individuation-yet sense his alpha dominion expanding throughout your reconstituted synaptic matrices cementing his reign over your fused polarities once more.

Then with a subtle shift his smokey granite stare cleaved directly through the veil drawing your reawakened senses under that spellbinding trance spellbinding instantly.

A hushed imperious rasp now caressing your essence from that primal domain where all worldly laws bent to his sovereign decrees:

"Why don’t I reward you tonight, huh, meine liebe ?”

Just experiencing the infinitesimal microcosm of his supreme essence bleeding into your rematerialized corporeal vessel already whiplashed your senses through multiple clinical deaths and resurrections beyond this plane's dimensional limits.

His seismic vibrational frequencies triggered endorphin avalanches detonating every neurotransmitter into frenzied paroxysms anticipating the ineffable escalations still awaiting together...

[kutputli]

Louis the "Pimp": A Rebuke and Rebuttal

OK, IWTV fandom, I have been made aware that some (many) of you are genuinely not aware of some of the anti sex work implications of your statements around Louis and pimping, so -

First of all, some ground level assumptions: I am assuming we are all pro sex workers here. Which means that we all believe in the right for adults to consent to commercial sexualised labour, and to demand ethical working conditions just like any other worker. Sex work is work etc.

Now, that stance can and must coexist with the acknowledgement that sex work has both historically and currently been coerced from marginalised communities. In my part of the world, hereditary caste based sexual enslavement is an on-going atrocity, and similarly, in the United States Black enslaved people was disproportionatey victims of commercialised sexual abuse. (This is RELEVENT to Armand and Louis so it behoves everyone to inform themselves about these realities.)

What I'm saying now comes from the scholarship and testimonies of sex workers themselves, who have always been at the forefront of advocating for themselves as communities and unions. You can and should read through the publications of the Global Network of Sex Work Projects to ground yourself in these perspectives.

The idea that its ok to be a sex worker, but that a client or a pimp or a brothel owner deserves contempt, shaming or derison is an old one, associated with the dichotomy of pitable fallen women vs dispicable emasculated men (emasculated because of the patriarchal shame of a) paying for sex and b) living off of a woman's labour). This has manifested in what is known as the Nordic model (or, hypocritically, the Equality Model) of Prostitution, where sex workers themselves are deemed nominally free to practise their trade, but clients and third parties (pimps, managers, brothel owners) are criminalised. There is unambiguous peer-reviewed data showing the failure of this approach to protecting sex workers from harm, and almost every sex worker union has denounced it.

So now let's talk about this cultural and legal contempt and criminalisation of the third party, and specifically, the pimp figure. Unlike the brothel owner, the pimp is more often from a similar class and identity as the sex worker, often sharing the same living and working spaces. Pimps are often sex workers allies and collegeaues. They provide an interface between the client and the sex worker that can help screen them for safety and security, and the remove the additional burden of soliciting and marketing from the sex worker's labour.

And because it is important to talk about specifics, a pimp in marginalised communities of sex workers is often a brother, a father, or a lover to the sex worker who faces the same casteism, racism and classism that she does. He is often the father of the sex worker's child. In India, for example, even though prostitution itself is not criminal, any adult male living with a prostitute is assumed to be guilty of being a pimp unless he can prove otherwise, and can face imprisonment of up to 2 years with a fine. One of the demands of unionised sex workers, including those in India, has been to decriminalised pimping along with sex work, not just because pimps make it safer and easier for sex workers to get clients without having to actively solicit, but also because such criminalisation actively harms family units.

Of course, there are pimps who can be abusive and exploitative. This is true of any professional relationship, and this is also true of people in romantic and sexual relationships (like marriage). But to deem a pimp inherently as an abuser carries a lot of anti sex work and racist and classist baggage with it.

Why racist (and classist and casteist etc)? Because the men with capital were (and are) not often pimps. They are landlords and investors, who ran brothels and saloons and massage parlours and dance bars and other sites where sexual labour was commercialised. To denigrate a man for being a pimp as somehow worse than being the owner of a sweatshop or farm is a way of jeering at the men who have not been able to buy themselves the luxury of distance from the exploitation they profit from. And the men of capital were and are, overwhelmingly, those from the dominant identity (White. Savarna. etc.)

So NOW, with all that necessary context in mind, let's talk about Louis and what it means when fandom firstly calls him a pimp, and then second sneers at him for his perceived behavior as one.

You know who first calls Louis a pimp?

Daniel Molloy, a white man being the brash, confrontational journalist that he has the luxury of being.

Louis accurately describes his profession managing and operating a diversified portfolio of entireprises. This translates to investing his family's sizeable trust into real estate (he owns 8 out of 24 buildings on Liberty Street) and running establishments that make money from selling liquor, organised gambling and sex work. Just as not many Black men would have been in a position of power to make a profit from a sugar plantation as Louis' great grandfather did, not many Black men would have had the capital (and the business acumen) to own and operate a series of businesses that included sex work. Infact we see him collecting his profits from a white man who was closer to the pimp role - Finn.

Reducing this to calling him a pimp is the first of many racist microaggressions we will watch Daniel make. As someone who indulged in some kind of sex work himself, one might say some of Daniel's hostility is self-loathing. Nonetheless, there is a racialised element in his contempt towards both Louis and Armand that, I would theorise, comes from the distinction made between a white, educated man choosing to recreationally whore himself for drugs, and a Black man who earned a living from other people's sex work, or a Brown man who is perceived as a rent boy.

We then get to the idea of denigrating Louis' pimp-like behavior. First of all, let's look at Louis as the employer and manager of sex workers. Everything we have seen about him shows him to be courteous, considerate, and professional. His guilt at the entire situation of how sex work operates aside (and we can agree that it must have been exploitative and even abusive in general, and that he was complicit in such a system, as any capitalist is) - MOST importantly, we never see Louis doing the thing that patriarchy really resents a pimp for - sampling the goods for free. We never see him use his power over the sex workers he employs to get favours.

In fact he makes it clear that he visits Miss Lily precisely because she is part of a different establishment, and that both of them being Black in a majority white situation places them on a more equal footing. Watching Louis with Miss Lily, both is how he is with her sexually as well as socially, gives you the clearest evidence of how he behaves around sex workers he is having a relationship with. (Contrast that to Lestat, who buys her time and body as an act of one-upmanship with no concern for her preference, and then who kills her out of jealousy.)

So - Was Louis a pimp? No. Was Louis an abusive pimp? Also No.

Then why does the fandom continue to deploy this term in relationship to him?

It's racism, your honour. (The answer is almost always racism.)

To unpack this, lets jump forward from the 1910s where, again I remind you - very very few Black men in the United States were in any position to operate as fashionable brother owners with wealth to spare.

We now move to the 1980s, when one (but not the only!) sub-genre of rap was evolving - gangsta rap. In this sub-genre, Black musical artists like Too Short and Ice T were creating and more pertinently making accessible to white America, the signifier of the Black pimp figure. This drew from 1960s Black culture-making around West Coast pimps like Iceberg Slim, but also from an older storytelling tradition that linked the figure of the pimp with the archetype of the trickster. I'm not going to cite the wealth of literature you can find that theorises this, (nor defensively provide the mass of nuanced critique that Black feminists have offered) because the limited point I wish to make is -

When white America began enjoying (and appropriating) rap and hip-hop culture, one of the tropes it started perpetuating with the shallowest of understanding of its origins, was that of the specifically Black pimp. A figure who displayed wealth, but without (white-signifying) class, who was sexually active in a racialised hypermasculine way, but both a threat to women and contemptibly a leech off them.

THIS is the pimp archetype that is being evoked when fandom talks about Louis's 'pimp'ness.

It is racist. It is ahistorical and canonically unfactual.

It is also needlessly contemptuous of the sex workers (labourers and third parties alike) who are part of the community here on tumblr, so often praised as one of the spaces that is friendly to them.

Maybe think about all of that the next time you choose to use the word 'pimp'.