#historical oppression

[alwaysbewoke]

[marzipanandminutiae]

why are skirts inherently evil and oppressive in historical fiction until men are wearing them

I've never heard anyone going on at length about how Universally ImpracticalTM the garb of a Scotsman or an ancient Roman politician are

suddenly everyone has a concept of situational practicality that previously was not there

[5weekdays]

finished rereading dungeon meshi the other day and it’s really kind of beautiful that the two children laios addresses on the last page are an orc and a kobold

[bixels]

Do you have grown up/old version of the mane six in your 1920s au? 👀 like with Rarity having that white strand of hair etc. (Sorry my english not good 😅)

Probably won't get around to designing those. It's funny to think that these girls in their 50s would be, like, living in the 1960s. They'd be watching us land on the moon (much to Luna's distaste). With luck, the main six would survive to watch Star Wars and Back to the Future in theaters. How wacky is that?

Speaking of history, because the Great Depression never happens in this AU (I'm not too keen on throwing literally every single character into an entire decade of poverty and unemployment and starvation), that means the era of the Roaring Twenties will continue into the 30s as well. That also means World War II will be at the very least minimized (the Nazi party would probably not have the political means/climate to take power). The GG20s AU may exist on a timeline where WW2 was not a major, global war, similar to how Kiki's Delivery Service and Tintin's universes never experienced WW2.

[boysborntodie]

“I don’t talk about Palestine because I don’t like going into politics : /” fuck you. The existence of Muslims and MENA people has always been political to the West. Their lives and their deaths. Their happiness and anger and sorrow. Their love and hatred. Their sweat and blood and tears. Everything has always been reduced to politics when they are more than you could ever begin to comprehend. Palestine will be free. And so will Sudan and Pakistan and Lebanon and Yemen and Syria and every other country, place and people who suffer only for their pain to be called political by those responsible for and complicit in it

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

And I'd love to be proven wrong, but I really think all of the ICJ hype is going to end in big disappointment for most folks

[prncewilhelm]

craaazy that some of you are so determined he stays within the mould when the entire show is chronicling him breaking out of it 

[langernameohnebedeutung]

I love that Gentleman Jack as a show is advertised as Anne Lister being this swashbuckling womaniser who just seduces the ladies left and right with her rake-ish charmes. And then you watch the show and really her secret is that she sincerely and deeply loves all her girlfriends and treats them like human beings and listens to them and that her heart breaks a thousand times when she loses one of her partners to obligatory marriage and she tells them their opinions are important to her and has deep conversations with them about serious topics that men would find unsuitable and she makes it clear that she is interested in what they tell her. Like...that's her entire secret here. She cares.

[pennyserenade]

the irish are honorary mexicans and i won’t be explaining further. it’s just the vibe and the truth

[alwaysbewoke]

x

[rotzaprachim]

I think people getting their politics from animated movies for children is so annoying. That being said I think Nimona was Unironically one of the most ideologically complex and serious treatments of modern antisemitism I’ve ever seen.

[nikkoliferous]

IN RECENT WEEKS, as Palestinians rose up in their homeland, in the wider Middle East, and around the world, you probably heard the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In cities across the globe, protesters responded to the pending expulsions of Palestinian residents from their homes in Jerusalem, Israeli attacks on holy sites, and the bombardment of Gaza. If you watched or attended any of these protests, you likely saw the slogan printed on a sign, or heard it drifting over the crowd.

You may also have heard claims that this slogan is antisemitic or even genocidal. On May 19th, for example, the New Yorker Union was widely attacked for tweeting, “Solidarity with Palestinians from the river to the sea who went on a 24-hour strike yesterday for dignity and liberation.” Whether in earnest ignorance or in bad faith, critics of the river-to-the-sea formulation argued that the union, and others who used the slogan last month, were implicitly calling for not only dismantling the State of Israel, but cleansing the entire region—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, an area encompassing the West Bank, Gaza, and all of Israel within its internationally recognized pre-1967 borders—of its Jewish population. (Unfortunately, the union backed down in the face of these smears.)

Like many Palestinians, I’ve long used this phrase. About a decade ago, Peter Beinart started a blog at The Daily Beast called “Open Zion” aimed at bringing together a range of perspectives on Israel/Palestine. He invited me to participate regularly, and at first I was hesitant, given the name. Would a project called “Open Zion” really be open to arguments that challenged the tenets of Zionism? I agreed to participate on the condition that I could write what I wanted and that my column could be called “From the River to the Sea.” As I explained to Peter, I wasn’t concerned with Israel’s identity crisis over whether it could be both Jewish and democratic; I was concerned that Palestinians were being denied basic rights throughout their homeland. My column, “From the River to the Sea,” would be focused on the unity of the Palestinian experience and how all Palestinians faced a shared struggle with Zionism regardless of where they lived.

Today, I believe the conversation has increasingly shifted in this direction. This is due in part to a general intellectual and moral awakening—in media, in academia, in activist spaces, and even among certain elected officials—on the subject of Israel/Palestine, but also because of the increasingly horrific realities on the ground. More than ever before, people around the world are accepting that the problem goes well beyond the occupation of the West Bank, and that discrimination against Palestinians occurs on both sides of the Green Line.

The recent Palestinian uprising foreshadowed a future struggle in which the Green Line is unimportant if existent at all, because across the country, Palestinians mobilized collectively on a large scale under their national banner. The phrase “from the river to the sea” captures this future as no other can, because it encompasses the entire space in which Palestinian rights are denied. It is in this space that Palestinians seek to live freely. It is across this space—and across the political and geographic divisions that Israeli rule has imposed—that Palestinians must unite to create change. It is this space that Palestinians call home, regardless of what anyone else calls it.

“From the river to the sea” is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege. All of them suffer from a range of policies in a singular system of discrimination and apartheid—a system that can only be challenged by their unified opposition. All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.

But it is precisely because Zionist settler colonialism has benefitted from and pursued Palestinian fragmentation that it seeks to mischaracterize and destroy inclusive and unifying rhetorical frameworks. For example, journalist Marc Lamont Hill was attacked and ultimately removed from his position at CNN for calling for Palestinian freedom “from the river to the sea.” After all, it is far easier to dominate a divided people fighting different battles on different fronts than it is to dominate one people united in a single battle for the same universal rights.

Since Zionists struggle to make a persuasive argument against freedom, justice, and equality for all people throughout the land, they seek instead to attack the message and messenger. When Palestinians proclaim “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” many Zionists argue that this is a Palestinian call for genocide. But as historian Maha Nassar has noted, there has never been an “official Palestinian position calling for the forced removal of Jews from Palestine.” The links between this phrase and eliminationism might be the product of “an Israeli media campaign following the 1967 war that claimed Palestinians wished to ‘throw Jews into the sea.’” Jewish groups such as the American Jewish Committee also claim that the slogan is antisemitic because it has been taken up by militant groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas. But as Nassar writes, the phrase predates these uses, and has its origins as “part of a larger call to see a secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine.”

The claim that the phrase “from the river to the sea” carries a genocidal intent relies not on the historical record, but rather on racism and Islamophobia. These Palestinians, the logic goes, cannot be trusted—even if they are calling for equality, their real intention is extermination. In order to justify unending violence against Palestinians, this logic seeks to caricature us as irrational savages hell-bent on killing Jews. Nor does the attempt to link Palestinians to eliminationism stop at the deliberate mischaracterization of this slogan; rather, it is deployed in many other contexts. In 2015, for instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged in Holocaust revisionism by stating that it was really a Palestinian, not Hitler, who inspired the final solution. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, actually had to remind the Israeli Prime Minister that it was the Germans who were responsible for the Holocaust. Raising the constant specter of eliminationism has political utility for Zionists; in such a threatening environment, perpetual abuses of Palestinians can be rationalized.

This twisted logic is not only reserved for Palestinians. Marginalized groups are often accused of not being trustworthy and of having deep-seated ulterior motives aimed at destroying society. Jews should know this trope well, as it has long been a central feature of antisemitism. In fact, the worst antisemitic attack in American history was carried out in recent years by a murderer who attacked a synagogue because he thought Jews were destroying white Christian-dominated society by bringing in brown immigrants under the guise of humanitarianism.

Fundamentally, such arguments disregard what Palestinians are calling for when they use the phrase in question: a state in which Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them. When we call for a free Palestine from the river to the sea, it is precisely the existing system of domination that we seek to end.

(article dated June 11th, 2021)

[banyanas]

Okay there is no Way this is gonna fit in the fic wordcount limit (and a lot of it is background understanding to all my other fics too lmao) so who wants to talk about fiddly somewhat mundane toad-centric worldbuilding in regards to Imperial Amphibia -> Caste System Implementation time period??? And even if you don't want to I'm showing it to you anyway.

The 4 tower lords (Cardinal Lords used as an older title when I write) as participants and vassals to the Newtopian military is... pretty new. Especially because toad clans didn't really have a formal military in the first place (and still don't- toad army we see is an arm/branch of the overall Newtopian/specifically Leviathan-ruled Amphibian military). Previously, of course everyone paid fealty (and taxes but we will get to those) to the crown, expected to follow the laws of the united empire under the Leviathan dynasty, but toad clanheads and lords acting in a formal military position in direct vassalage to another army is... definitely new. As far as 'new' goes for a place with an implied-lengthy history as Amphibia does.

Nowadays becoming a Cardinal Lord means becoming an officer- if said lord wasn't already one in the first place. It's a more concrete requirement in the modern era, but before that, hey, remember what I said about taxes? It's relevant just stick with me a bit pls.

So, with the Me-Brand toadbuilding, toads were traditionally nomadic, and likely a more pastoralist society (tarantula cheese...). This did include very few permanent communities toad caravans cycled through, usually as a place of trade/commerce and cultural significance (specifically cairns and mass gravesites) for individual and allied clans. And from there, the majority of toads split into a bunch of much smaller semi-mobile camps that joined and split, in accordance to whatever understanding or trade agreement or alliance or rivalry their clan might have with other clans. These towns are still around despite how vastly different they are, and three of them are in the territory of a Tower- South Tower is the exception to this, since the southern toad population used to be so heavily intermixed with frogs they lived pretty equally spread inside the same township. Which oof, way to show how things change for the worst in a thousand years.

Pre-Andrias, taxes could be paid in both currency and bulk goods or productions- and they could make that work, because of the seemingly-infinite power source music box battery maintaining all their tech and infrastructure. Frequently, this was how toads paid their taxes- a bit harder to do pure currency payments, as well as y'know not rlly paying property taxes due to not privately owning much land.

(It was also, I want to note, supplemented by raiding rival or enemy clans, because they’re still a martial society- they aren’t peaceful nomads before Andrias fucked up everything, they’re violent and there’s inherent problems with gatekeeping someone from community aspects on the basis of whether or not they've killed something/own a weapon. Which we will get to the owning a weapon thing Also in a bit).

Buttttt after the box was stolen, there were a few policy changes. Taxes were required as coppers- ostensibly to bolster restructuring efforts now that the Calamity tech that was the fulcrum for their ENTIRE INFRASTRUCTURE was burglarized. Coppers hich they don’t have much use for and thus don't have much circulating… yeah. But hey, specifically military service can be offered instead of coppers for taxes, at least for toads and some newts. Doesn't hurt that offering an out from taxes via military enlistment keeps toads and some newts from kicking up a very bloody, very messy fuss while the whole 'I invented speciesism and an oppressive caste system because I'm mad at my girlfriend and boyfriend' thing was being pushed through to law. Between breaking the law with all the severe risk of a nasty punishment/heavy fine that entails, or military service with some Perks of Power for an already highly combative culture? Yeah, no-brainer for why we barely see any non-military toads on screen. (This entire thing is a pretty damn slick move when it comes to enforcing ranks and systems. And admittedly less hamfisted than what we see in modern canon because frankly I think Andrias stopped caring about being careful with his enforcement of it once it became more self-sustaining)

The very messy, very bloody messes did happen, btw. After the last rebellion early into Andrias's reign (mostly made up of toads and frogs working together. Man this just makes it even more depressing to see the state of things in modern eras), only toads that were either in training, currently enlisted, or veterans were allowed to own and carry weapons. Which, beyond the practical problems of 'Amphibia is a dangerous place with lots of things that want to kill, eat, and/or poison you', when toad rites of passage and traditions, up to and including standards for being considered and allowed to act as a legal adult, rely on the use, ownership, or exchange of weaponry and blades... hm. Oh dear.

It's even worse for the frogs btw. Unless a frog somehow ended up actively serving a military term (which they are discouraged to), frogs were disallowed weapons at all. Because de-fanging and controlling who is allowed to be armed is kinda one of the first steps to suppressing and controlling groups of people, with one of the OTHER steps being financially suppressing and controlling (see the taxes thing, upward movement being nearly impossible for frogs and toads). Also contributes to casualties for frogs being way higher than they used to, since if they're a law-abiding citizen and get caught by a hungry predator, or bandits on the road, or any number of things they cant just drive off with pitchforks and slingshots, they're kinda screwed! It's messed up! And it's usually disregarded by newts and toads, because frogs are light on their feet, quite springy, they can just run, yeah?

Fun fact tho, this makes the Plantar basement stash SUPER illegal for some spicy revolutionary reasons. Hell yes good for them.

[tell-them-the-north-remembers]

If I hear the word "broodmare" used in a 3rd wave feminist, anti-patriarchy speech by a female character who is supposed to be from a time where bicycles aren't invented yet in one of these "historical" dramas I am going to lose my mind.

Like yes, feminists existed before the late 19th century! Good job! But am I supposed to believe that every single 16 year old princess had the exact same "I don't want to be sold off like a broodmare and bear children for my husband!" reaction to the news that they were going to have an arranged marriage, y'know the thing they have been prepared for their entire lives because children of monarchs in a pre-modern world were (and knew that they were) practically political bargaining tools?

Like showrunners of period dramas need to dial it down on the #girlboss juice and instead put more energy into historical costume research beyond typing "old timey dress" to Pinterest and running with the first five results.

[sundaysundya]

there's a post going around saying that jewish people would be considered settlers (perjorative) anywhere they went that's annoying me because it fundamentally misunderstands what settler colonialism is. Moving somewhere and joining an existing community isn't being destructive, and those who claim it is are xenophobes and racists, and historically have been being antisemitic when saying this to jewish peoples in various countries! On the other hand zionists creating settlements on the west bank and telling palestians who are Also indigenous to the land that they have to leave on pain of death (or just killing them up front) is a totally different situation. It's just not true that it's impossible to go anywhere without displacing people. I think that recognizing that jewish ppl have been and are frequently targeted by xenophobia can be really clearly separated from the criticisms being made of Israel and zionist ideology.

[gothyanki]

thinking about her (Gith the Liberator)

Thinking about how much I wish she were the deliciously messy, morally complex, and believably motivated protagonist of a Space Lesbians vs. Empire trilogy instead of a flat villain/historical footnote in the Fiend Folio. Unfortunately, DnD.