#there is a whole system of laws and privileges and hierarchy

[theskyexists]

Really wanna work on my multiplayer game idea again.... Hmmrrm.

[the-library-alcove]

Ironic Parallels

For all that the political Left likes to claim that they're without bias or bigotry, just existing as a Jew in Leftist spaces will quickly demonstrate otherwise. And for maximum irony, the patterns of systemic antisemitism on the Left don't mirror right-wing antisemitism. Instead, they mirror right-wing racism. Imperfectly, for sure, but the parallels between how the Right treats Black people and how the Left treats Jews are striking.

Discussions of systemic bigotry are deflected with Whataboutisms so that the instigating issue isn't addressed. For African-Americans, it's often "What about Black-on-Black crime?" and similar by the Right-Wing, and for Jews, it's "What about Israel?"

Alternatively, a prominent political advocacy organization is attacked and defamed in order to again deflect and dismiss. "BLM is violent and engages in riots!" or the usual libels against ACORN, and "Israel is fascist!" or the usual libels against AIPAC and the ADL.

At the same time, prominent dead members have their words cherrypicked to make people feel good about themselves and their treatment of that group. Contrast how MLK's "I had a dream!" speech is used by the Right-Wing with how Anne Frank's "I believe that people are fundamentally good at heart" is used by the Left.

On that same theme, token members are held up to deflect accusations of systemic bias. African-American right-wingers prove that the Right Isn't Racist, and Jewish Antizionists prove that the Left isn't antisemitic--or, conversely, the extremist members of the individual group are cherrypicked to "prove" that the whole group is like them.

Furthermore, laws are proposed or passed to disrupt cultural practices; people of African descent face bias for having natural hair, while Jews routinely face people proposing banning circumcision, kosher slaughter, or the keeping of an eruv. But, you see, they can't be biased, because they know all about that group... based on what they saw on TV/Movies/Wikipedia, so they know that the group can handle these laws and rules just "fine".

The targeted group are treated as having an unfair advantage in the racial hierarchy. Consider the parallels between a right-winger complaining about Affirmative Action, and a Left-Winger saying that, since "Jews are White and therefore privileged, antisemitism isn't real discrimination."

But as soon as one shows up in a space outside of where they "belong", they're treated with suspicion until proven that they're acceptable... if ever. A POC in a store is treated as a potential thief, and a Jew in public is automatically acceptable to interrogate if they're a "Zionist".

Consider also how historical revisionism is rife as well. For POC, slavery and imperialism are erased from textbooks, as well as the backlash against Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and more. Meanwhile for Jews, pretty much nothing exists in educational curriculums between the start of the Diaspora (assuming it's even mentioned) and the Holocaust, which is treated as an aberration of bigotry instead of the culmination of centuries of hate. Even the admission of the real history is treated as an unforgiveable sin. Black people were never mistreated or enslaved, but were Guest Workers. Jews never came from the Levant and are Just White People From Europe.

And that's before we even get into systemic disenfranchisement. The original "ghetto" was the Jewish ghetto of Venice, and Jews are still routinely discriminated against for hiring, just as POC are.

But at the same time, everyone knows that "Blacks always play the race card" and that "Jews always accuse people of antisemitism."

And so on and so forth.

They're not perfect parallels--and I'm not saying that they are--but they are striking parallels in behavior.

__

I drafted this in April 2023, and it's been sitting in my drafts ever since, as I didn't have the courage to post it.

But given the current SURGE in Leftist Antisemitism, I somehow don't care anymore.

[tanadrin]

That is correct, I didn't think the Mosaic law would be a practical way of running a society but that's what my client wanted so that's what I wrore

I don't really get the joke here, so I'm just going to take an opportunity to add another fact I found pretty interesting:

It was common in the Ancient Near East to create codes of law for display purposes (and outside it--cf. the Twelve Tables). This wasn't so much so that the common person could know and understand the law, because literacy rates were pretty low, but served a similar function as monumental architecture, to display the power of the ruler and at least notionally their justice. But in practice, the law as it actually functioned could be pretty different from the law as these monuments proclaimed it.

I think it's interesting to consider the law-as-a-symbol. There was some incidental discourse crossing my dash recently about whether "law" as a general concept protects the weak from the strong, or whether it legitimates the rule of the elites. And I think the answer is that is obviously does neither: that a society has a system of law tells you nothing about how that system functions, and you have to dig into the nitty-gritty details to determine whether the society has "rule of law" (which is good) or "rule by law" (which is bad). The former is, hopefully, a system where the law binds everybody, attempts to be fair, and there is at least some effort to enforce it equally; the latter is where law is a justification for a system power that makes no pretense at that sort of thing.

And I think rule by law is a very common state of affairs, especially pre-French Revolution! I might be generous and say pre-Enlightenment at best. Because before you have an ideological starting point of "ok, everybody should be equal before the law and the law should be impartially enforced," one-off privileges, aristocracies, and random exemptions from various rights and duties are pretty normal, and one of the major functions of law is to codify these inequities to make sure the king or his judiciary respects them. There is a reason one of the big components of revolutionary projects historically has been administrative reform, because in redrawing internal boundaries and revising old law codes, you can do away with these inequities and legally enshrined hierarchies.

And that pattern of inequity, of legally enshrined hierarchy, is of course thoroughly present in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. As Dan McClellan points out, agency in these codes flows downhill and it flattens everything in its path. The agency of men erases that of women: the law treats what happens if a man violates the property rights of another man over the women under his dominion (his daughters or wives), but the agency of the women ("consent" in modern parlance) simply makes no difference to the law. The only place women's sexual agency shows up in the law is in the one situation where a woman is interacting with a creature lesser than her, i.e., if she lies with an animal.

Even in the European Middle Ages I think there were real disjuncts between the worldview of the people using these law codes for devotional purposes and the worldview of their authors. In the modern era, of course, those disjuncts are yawning chasms, and as a result you get some really weak apologetic attempts to try to reconcile modern ethics with (again, impractical, unworkable, entirely theoretical) Iron Age legal theory. But there are lots of places in the Bible--both in the law codes and in the narrative portions--where I think the disjunct is so great that the aftercomers can't really make heads or tails of the worldviews of their predecessors. This is where the apologists (and before them, the commentaries of the Talmud) often have to invent major details out of whole cloth to try to turn the situation into one that makes sense to them. It would be better, and easier to construct a more consistent system of ethics, to just jettison the bits that clearly aren't applicable to the concerns of your community--but then of course once you admit that what parts of your scripture you do and don't accept are contingent on their relevance to your community, it is no longer the timeless and authoritative book from God, and it ceases to be a useful way of structuring power.

And as with codes of law, holy writ is (among other things) about structuring power! Otherwise all religion would approximately resemble Unitarian Universalism, an honest, gentle, thoughtful faith that is approximately irrelevant.

[house-of-mirrors]

Also hey unrelated but. My autistic ass can only read so much wiki or trawl the Internet for Forbidden Story Information before my eyes start to glaze over. I know the *name* Dawn Machine but I never got around to doing its Sunless Sea quest (something something The Sun drives people mad??? Space is made of gods or something right? I know the giant undersea Mouth is like. A fallen god or something) anyway what I'm saying is please consider this an open offer to infodump potentially in DMs about whatever Fallen London lore is particularly itching your brain because i *will* eat that shit up like a hungry baby bird

Sorry this took a bit to get to, my grad school semester started and I was a bit all over the place. You can ask me about the forbidden story information: But Watch Out. (major spoilers under the cut for FL and sskies) Anyway without further ado, *deep breath*

The Dawn Machine is an artificial judgement built a few decades ago and is now under the jurisdiction of the admiralty. They use it as an excuse to be horrible imperialists but I don't think they actually care about the machine's consciousness beyond using it as a tool of oppression. It hates everyone and itself. It knows it shouldn't exist and that makes it angry. It wTHE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE S- and I digress. It has a counterpart in skies called the Clockwork Sun which is in a similar situation but slowly dying and on its way to taking the whole region with it. They turn stuff to crystal or glass respectively which I'm really curious as to why, considering the White (who is like a cosmic spymaster and the main villain of the judgements, you can fight me on this it's true) is described as having "a hall of poisoned crystal." All my homies HATE the white. YOU can't oppose the white but I'm built differently. I read a single line of text in skies that teased "the war on the white" and I'm like hey get back here! You can't just drop that and leave! I hope the recent lore declassification means we'll get a story in Fallen London exploring more of it (and violence against it)

Which leads into the second point, "space is made of gods." The Judgements, the stars, whatever you call them are godlike beings at the top of the order called the great chain, which is an allegory to victorian era social hierarchy. The chain dictates how powerful you are and what your role is and you're not supposed to be allowed to change your place. Understandably this made many people very angry and is widely considered to be a bad move, etc. Anyway the judgements are more or less what it says on the label, space's judges and courts who make the laws of the universe. Light is Law. From skies, there are lines that suggest the judgements didn't choose their role either. "The chain binds us all. It is our privilege to enforce it." I want to know what happened, like did they put themselves in power a long time ago and current generations remain stuck? Interesting for how an oppressive system harms those on top too. Also, we know that they weren't always in charge. There are characters in skies (Mr Menagerie) who remember a time before they ruled. There is no divine right of kings. This system didn't always exist and it can be overthrown. They aren't gods. They're fallible as mortals with petty wars and affairs and they don't want anyone to know how many problems their society has. "As below, so above." The liberation of the night seeks to overthrow all tyrants, up to and including the stars.

In sunless skies you can interact with the sapphir'd king, the lord of the dead, whom I affectionately like to call the Sapphire'd bitch. I wrote a fic about meeting him and from that point kept talking about how I wanted to plot his demise. Then the truth ambition said "congrats. You get to plot the demise of the sapphird king" and I said "oh. Neat. Back to being a merchant while I process that for 3-5." Sure is a game! Shortly tho, once I work up the nerve, I'll be finishing the "truth" ambition in skies and so will be posting a whole thing when I do, likely incoherent. Look forward to it.

Something specific that interests me in skies is how you can interact with a character who used to be a judgement but seemingly willingly chose to descend the chain to human. She remembers being a cruel leader and is glad she is no longer, and specifically a masculine figure so like yay trans rights. But we already know I have strong feelings towards beings that used to be stars 🙈

Now as for the third thing I haven't played much sea but I know there's speculation the Neath was formed from the skull of a dead god. Storm, one of the zee gods, is a dead god whose consciousness lingers and is angry because it knows it's dead. We see this in skies as well, the "bones of a star" which are large enough to encompass London, whose mind lingers in a ghost, angry to be dead.

I could go into some of the other stellar characters we learn about in skies but I'll save that for another post and more organized thoughts.

I typed up this stream of consciousness rant while in a swimming pool. Hope it's what you were looking for! I have Head full Many thoughts about the judgements all the time all the time

[chokovit]

I'm gonna rant and vent

I'm gonna rant and vent about people I consider my brethren, my comrades, and my peers. I'm 100% not interested in debating or arguing with anyone at all so don't expect that if you message me.

I fucking hate election year. Every 4 years it's the same god damn song and dance and every other election it's worse and worse. And I'm not talking about some shitty pat ourselves on the back, circle jerking feel good about yourself garbage where I preach to the choir and we all sing "Yeah I feel that way too!"

I'm talking about Leftists, specifically, American Leftists (as I am American this will be therefore be from the point of view of one and my grievances will henceforth be specifically about "AMERICAN" Leftists so foh with your "That's an american centric view" shit).

I'm gonna preface what I'm about to say by stating the obvious. I am a leftist. Whether you fucking like it or not, whether you agree with me being one or not, I am. I don't hate leftists, as hard as this rant will make that easy to believe. I'm just very bothered by trends I see among them. They bother me because, unlike conservatives, I actually want leftists to "win". I actually want us to succeed. But in case your world view is black and white to the point you need me spelling it out for you, yes I am a leftist, I agree with leftists, and I am absolutely repulsed by Conservatism.

Now let me get into the meat and potatoes of what I want to bitch about. Basically, in the past, whenever I saw people bemoan that leftists are largely signal virtuing, morally uptight, jerkasses I thought of it as nothing more than the typically reactionary pant shitting rhetoric we've come to expect from Right-Wing discourse. And to be fair, back than, in the early-mid 2010s it probably was. But now? I don't fucking know anymore, it really does seem like at the very least a worryingly large amount of leftists think they're a part of some clique or social group and don't understand both the implications and power of their own standing. Particularly and most especially when it comes to voting. Let me tell you something, something really fucking important. You have nothing, you are nobody, and you are mostly powerless to do anything at all...EXCEPT for one thing, and that's voting. Yes, you can call your senator and congressperson but even thats only really gonna work if your congressperson or senator is one that'll even consider your interests. Do you think people in Lauren Boebert's district feel confident calling her to complain about trans issues? Yeah no. Every single fucking vote, every single god damn one matters and you can fuck off with your "both parties are the same" and "voting doesn't matter" bullshit. One party is waging a culture war on our entire nation, one party wants to make sure you're following a rigid social hierarchy, one party wants to turn Christianity into state law, one party wants to drape everything in repugnant Christian Nationalism and it's not Democrats.

Yes, yes it sucks that we can only pick from the two. No, no voting third party is not an option, we do not get the privilege of living in a country with a multi-party system. The DNC and the RNC both respectively own the two whole halves of the media industry in the United States, and no I'm not making that up. As cool and based as you think you look here on tumblr preaching about how we'll all vote for some super sick Ultra-Commie Socialist Dream party it's not going to happen. How many people will be inspired by you organizing on tumblr? in public even? on campus? Do you know the statistics you'd need? 2020 had an election turn out of 154 MILLION people! over 81 Million of them voted for Biden, and 74 Million of them voted for Trump! Now let's do a hypothetical, and lets be god damn realistic about it okay? REALISTICALLY, you and your lefty friends will never, ever, in all your attempts and rhetoric and debate, will ever be able to convince a MAGA Trump supporter from 2020 to vote for the Green Party. It will. Not. Happen. So that 74 Million? That stays, you get none of that. But, you could probably convince Progressives and Liberals who voted for Biden to do so (you know, if you actually want to shut the fuck up for 10 seconds and stop crying about how much you claim you hate them so all your friends nod and clap at you for being a super cool edgy leftist). So okay, let's be REALLY optimistic, let's say you convince like 20 million of those people who would've voted for Biden to vote for you, lets be even more optimistic and say you started with a base of 2 million people. I want you to keep this in mind that 2 Million people alone would be a record for the green party. In 2020 they had a popular vote of 406,000, literally less than half a million. But I digress. You're at 22 Million people, now lets consider people who didn't vote in 2020. That's 80 Million people, but, BUT, that's not a big pool of 80 million for you to grab from. We need to consider statistics first. Out of that 80 Million only roughly 30% of them didn't vote specifically because they either were undecided or didn't like the candidates. Therefore your actual pool of candidates interested in voting for you is 56 Million people. If you were only able to convince 20 million Biden voters, chances are you'd convince even less undecided voters. Realistically you should only get a hairs fraction of voters but, I'm trying to make a point here so lets say you get the largest share of Undecided Voters, somehow you're just super cool and based and you convince 30 million to vote for you. Not you have 54 Million votes. Congratulations, you have made US History by being the most voted for third party in the history of the US. You have beaten the previous record set by Jo Jorgensen in 2020 by a whopping 52 Million Votes (yes, really, that's the most a third party has ACTUALLY ever gotten before, just shy of 2 million votes). Despite your epic feel good win, the Orange piece of shit running against you, who has been galvanizing his base and everyone from the most fervant of maga's to your needle dick co-worker you kind of get along with despite voting republican for "fiscal" reasons, has surpassed his previous record by a little bit, he only really pooled in about a million more....which is 75 Million voters. Which is over 20 million people more than you.

Now I get it, I hear you barkin' big dog, we don't decide elections on popular vote, it's decided on the Electoral College. My point here is showing you how unfeasible third parties really truly are. This isn't a movie, this isn't like someone's gonna make some grand speech and everyone claps and comes to their senses and all of a sudden votes for "the right candidate". No, for a party that's NOT Libertarian to get even 10 million people to vote for them would be a historical precedent. And you don't need me to tell you that 10 million people is not nearly enough people spread across 50 states to make up for the electorate you'd need to win an election.

So why is this important? Why is it important we vote against republicans instead of voting for whatever helps us sleep at night, makes us feel good, and makes us look super "in" with our buddies online? Uh, because republicans will continue to do the things they're doing so long as they see it as a means to make themselves electable. Sure, some people say "well it's not MY fault it's the dems faults for not being GOOD enough for me to vote for them" and to that I say pbbbbth, you fucking KNOW better. You KNOW better, because you're a leftist, how dangerous fascism is, how bad and poisonous and terrible Traditionalism is. Consider this, another hypothetical okay? Everyone is so disgusted by the perils of conservatism they unite, as they did in 2020, to vote against them. They do it again in 2024, They do it again in 2028, and a 4th time in 2032. You've now had two full term presidents in the United States, will that make the conservatives go away? no. But will it swing the pendulum back? Yes! YES IT WILL! Politicians only give a shit about one thing and thats GETTING ELECTED. And if those mother fuckers start to realize that conservatism is an UNWINNABLE position, than they will, at the least, begin to abandon Conservatism as a platform for their party.

At the moment, that's NOT what's happening. Instead, we have Conservatives emboldened by 40 years of Reagan Rhetoric slowly shifting the pendulum ever more right. They've been doing it for 4 god damn decades okay, and you think 1 term from a dem president is going to start shifting it back? Fuck. The Fuck. Off. Dems are, from a global perspective, a centre-right party. When and if they do anything to "shift" the pendulum left, it's going to be shifted less to the left and more toward the "centre". Right now THAT IS WHAT YOU WANT!!!! YOU WANT THAT!!! HAVING THE PENDULUM FARTHER AWAY FROM THE RIGHT IS A /GOOD/ THING BECAUSE RIGHT NOW ITS DANGEROUSLY FAR TO THE RIGHT.

This shit doesn't make me liberal, this shit makes me pragmatic. I DONT. LIKE. CONSERVATIVES. I'm guessing if you've read this far /YOU/ probably don't either (or at least you claim to). But I don't hate them because they're rhetoric is bad, because they act like bigots or say mean/offensive things. I hate them because I genuinely hate their ideology, I hate their beliefs, I think everything they want for you and me and society at large is a fucking POISON to us as a modern, progressive society. And that's for obvious reason, they don't WANT us to be a modern, progressive society. If you've hated conservatives this entire time because of any "shocking" or "apalling" things you've seen or heard from them or that MSNBC or your lefty friends have shown you (including me) than I'm sorry but you're hating them for the wrong reasons. I mean, not that it isn't valid to hate someone for being a dick head. But your repulsion, your disgust should run deeper than that. You should be terrified and stop at nothing to want to crush Conservative ideology from the grip it has on American society. The vast majority of conservatives want to kill you, do you understand that? Whether that's because of their bigoted views, or because of LITERALLY CENTURY LONG WORTH OF PROPAGANDA AGAINST LEFTIST AND SOCIALIST VALUES they see you as a threat and want you dead. As much as they point and ridicule "libs" and "liberals" like you do, the liberals will be fine. It's YOU who won't be, it's YOU who should be hating them the most. And from what I see, you don't. Because if leftists truly felt threatened by conservatism they'd be stopping at nothing to rid it from our system. Instead, Leftists are more concerned with policing themselves, more concerned with having some super cool "hot take" on whoever the current president is. Leftists are more comfortable being the edgy outcasts, and if they're successful, they're not outcasts anymore. Fuck that. I haven't claimed leftism my entire life since I was 13 (I'm 30 now) just cuz I wanted to be edgy, and different. I didn't want to "look smart" and prove some "moral superiority" over people. You can do that shit with literally any political ideology. I claimed Leftism as my political ideology because it is, to me, the most pragmatic to ending universal suffering. And with that, I want leftism as an ideology to prevail and succeed. Not remain in the fucking shadows, ever caught on the side-lines of a worsening tug-o-war between Liberals and Fascists.

And most importantly of all, I want this to succeed, it NEEDS to succeed. And to do that we MUST unify, divide, and conquer. Yes, that means at least for a while we have to unify with Liberals. Our battle right now should be with the scourge of Fascism. The Soviet's didn't turn their guns mid-way through fighting the Nazi's cuz "erm actually the Allies are cringe too" no, they fucking united against a common, worse enemy. In fact, let me dive into the Nazi's cuz there's an interesting tid bit here. The Weimar republic, pre-Nazi rise, was composed of like 3 "left" wing parties. Needless to say by US standards all 3 of these parties would be considered left of Democrats but I digress. The refusal of all 3 of these parties to unite and caucus together created fractions in the political system of Germany at the time. This made it way fucking easier for the Nazi's to come in and sweep things up afterwards. There's many reasons WHY they were fractured, but those are beside the point of what I am trying to say here. It's like, that one part from Sun Tzu's Art Of War that people actually remember: "Divide and Conquer" with political division, the Nazi's easily just swept in and destroyed them. Do not forget, Fascism is an inherently authoritarian ideology. It is therefore organized and demands rigid conformity. If we do not unite, we will be easier to break apart and fall victim to it's clutches.

Finally, and lastly, I think this last part just comes from our horrible education system in the US. I understand many people probably didn't take Civics in high school, to those people I am sorry. As there's no way you could get how our system works because the system itself failed to educate you. If you did take civics in high school, or god forbid college, than you fucking know better. YOU! WILL NOT! CHANGE ANYTHING! IN A MEASLY 4! FUCKING! YEARS!

I know what we want, I know because I share a lot of the same values as you, even if I don't share your methods. I also know them because I've been reading you people post about them for the better part of like 15 years! NOTHING YOU WANT TO SEE IN GOVERNMENT, NONE OF THE CHANGES YOU WANT TO SEE HAPPEN! NONE OF THEM ARE GONNA HAPPEN IN ONE PRESIDENCY! Need I remind you that the current state of affairs has been shifted to the Right over a process that has taken FOURTY! FUCKING! YEARS!? and you think somehow that you'll just come in with some super cool epic revolutionary spirit and change shit in a couple years? That's not realistic! IT's just! NOT! But that doesn't mean we CANT change things. Yes, it does mean we have to change things slowly, it DOES mean we have to play the long game. But guess what, the Conservatives have been playing the long game since that shit bag Reagan leaked poisonous venom from his gunshot wound in DC. In fact they've probably been doing it longer, from 1965.

You wanna know if things can get worse? You already know the answer to that, yes. Yes things can get worse. Yes a society can advance forward, only to move backward. This literal exact fucking thing happened once in modern history, and it took 3 major super powers to defeat it.

Leftism isn't a fucking club, it's not a circle jerk for all of us to feel good about ourselves for being intellectuals and morally upright people. It's a fucking political ideology, that's it. It's not one of your fandoms. So no, you don't need to spend all the energy spent arguing with and debating with every other leftist and YES I know how that sounds coming from me. As much as this rant will have you assume otherwise I don't really spend much time debating other leftists. Mostly because a good chunk of leftists are way too reactionary to give me a charitable and honest platform. Anyone you disagree with is a fascist. And yes I've ACTUALLY had people call me this before. You dilute the term, you HELP the fascists this way. Fascism is a very specific evil, it's not just people who disagree with you. Sometimes, you will feel uncomfortable about the views other leftists have. That's normal. That doesn't mean they're "Liberal" or "Fascists". Again, this isn't a little pow wow where we sit around and agree with each other and get super psyched together about our favorite piece of political theory, and than if someone says something we disagree with we just kick them out of the circle. That's not how that works. That's not how any functional political movement succeeds. Right now, you and I have ZERO seats at the table, we don't exist on the grand political spectrum, as much as the GOP tries to fear monger that we do. So yes, we will have to unify sometimes with people we don't like. We will have to agree to disagree and come together for a common enemy.

I know this will change literally nobody's mind but I just really needed to get all of these thoughts out. I want them out and I want people to read them so that they can at least SEE the perspective of leftists outside their fucking echo chamber. Our division is NOT conducive to our success. We are going to /FAIL/ because the pendulum will keep going to the right. It'll fail cuz we are more concerned about making a choice that makes us feel morally vindicated than one that is pragmatic. I have nothing else to say anymore. Fuck Americans. Fuck all of them. Fuck all the American Conservatives. Fuck all the American Liberals. Fuck all the American Leftists. And Fuck all the undecided pieces of shit who couldn't decide whether or not they want to vote against fascism or let it slip on in. Fuck all of you, you uneducated, feel-good, self-satisfying, non-communitarian, individualistic, pigs of society. I sincerely wish I was born in literally any other country because at least than I wouldn't have to deal with being around some of the most inane, vapid, superficial fucking human beings on the planet. American Society is a god damn joke. Only above Israel. And that's not a bar you should be proud of.

[xavierkhalil]

"My Little Soapbox!"

 Every day I am noticing how artificial everything is beginning to feel in the world. I don’t think it’s me dissociating or being delusional, but nothing quite feels real anymore. However, what’s crazy is I see the reality but its crazy everything happening is occurring in our lifetime. Allow me to explain.

There has been nearly a year-long genocide happening in the Gaza where innocent Palestinian lives have been taken. The United States being one of the main funders in the war. A felon is being allowed to run for president, and he is supported by so many which is baffling. Even the folks who KNOW he doesn’t have their best interest are endorsing his presidency. The economy is not at its best. All news nowadays is bad news. Books and other forms of curriculum are being banned to make “the majority” of students remain comfortable rather than restricting gun laws for the safety of ALL students. And even the food is beginning to taste different. But what’s scarier is I am now finding myself feeling stuck in my advocacy. I am struggling with being real in a world where everything seems so fake.

The older I got, the more I was able to see it for what it really is, but something about 2024 has been extremely enlightening. Ignorance is better received and strongly supported than truth sometimes. There is a battle of power when it comes to preserving privilege for a few that brings harm to the majority. Consciousness and morality are often dismissed from conversations. Money is more treasured than humanity, and there seems to be an increasing lack of compassion for our fellow man. People are dying and saying they cannot “afford” to get sick because of a poor healthcare system. Hell, people are having to work nearly 80 hours a week, just to keep up with living expenses and pay debts. I’m talking about myself in the last part.

We know how we found ourselves here. I don’t have time to give a historical lesson on these things. It always goes back to slavery, colonization, and the failed promises of politicians vowing to learn from history rather than repeating it. We have and still are repeating history and sometimes I think did we ever learn or did we just find a new way to inconvenience less while still hurting others. All of this got me thinking to myself, “What do I stand for, and how authentic am I in it?” I have been on a hiatus for some time now, and I miss the days when a fire burned in me to make a change. Like I explained to someone, I did it out of anger before, but this time I m trying to lead in love.

Don’t misinterpret, all of the discriminatory and hateful acts happening to people all across the globe pisses me off, but sometimes a rally protest or speaking out on social media doesn’t feel like it’s enough. And, honestly, I am tired of having conversations with people who are willfully ignorant. When it comes to things that require the people to come together as a collective, which is millions of us, I have little faith in our ability to make the right choice for the future of our world. I can do my part in it, yes, but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough.

Overall, I am sick of politicians jeopardizing the future of our country and the world just to maintain the status-quo. Let’s be honest, the status-quo we know today has not always existed, and the reason all these reversions are taking place is because people see the status-quo slowly eradicating. This is good, great even. It was born out of a way to build a global hierarchy, and since the dawn of its philosophy, it has been successful. However, we have spent more time than it took to create it dismantling it, and it’s not quite dismantled just restructured.

In total, our country has come too far to revert back to the 1950’s. We have a requirement to vote and vote correctly. We cannot just vote for what benefits us, but what is in the best interest of our nation as a whole. Beyond that we have to advocate for the rights of all people, and acknowledge that protecting people’s rights doesn’t take away your privileges. In an artificial world, let’s be real about the crises we’re in. Let’s be real about the things we say we care about and advocate for them. I am being authentically intentional in advocacy, and I can only hope that others are showing up the same.  

[alliluyevas]

@oysterish-sympathies this is a great question! The answer is complicated and depends partially on the time period and the individual family.

I’m putting this under a cut because it’s insanely long lol

Just some context introduction before I get into the actual doctrine on the subject: when Joseph Smith (and a select few other high ranking members of the Mormon Church) began the practice of Mormon polygamy in Nauvoo, Illinois, they did so in secret and this practice was not widely known in the broader church. Doctrine & Covenants 132 was the revelation regarding polygamy that Joseph Smith claimed to have received during this time period (in 1843), but again it wasn’t publicized until after his murder in 1844.

Some background on the composition of Joseph Smith’s revelations including D&C 132: these revelations were dictated by Smith, who seems to have been overall much more comfortable with oral as opposed to written communication, to a scribe (in the case of 132, it was his brother Hyrum). The revelations are spoken in the narrative voice of God, and the Mormon church party line is that God was speaking through Smith in his role as prophet.

The part of D&C 132 that is relevant to your question is towards the end where God/Joseph Smith addresses Emma Smith (his first/legal wife) by name and, through her, other first wives. After explicitly threatening Emma with eternal damnation if she doesn’t comply with polygamy a few times, the revelation introduces something called the Law of Sarah. Initially, this states that the husband must have the first wife’s consent to marry the second (or, presumably, further wives), much like the Biblical Sarah gave Abraham her consent to take Hagar as a second wife. However, then two paragraphs later the revelation completely backtracks on this presumably because while dictating this Smith realized he had accidentally implied Emma would have real veto power and he needed to give himself a loophole.Then, we get the Law of Sarah restated as only applying to first wives who accept that polygamy is God’s law, and that wives who deny this have no say and are the “transgressor” against God’s laws and their husband can override their wishes and marry whomever he wants. So basically if the first wife accepts the basic tenant of polygamy, she has say in who the plural wives might be, but she doesn’t get to have a say in whether there will be plural wives at all.

(Note: on the reality tv show Sister Wives, which portrays a modern Mormon polygamist family, they seem to have interpreted this theological doctrine to apply not just to the consent of the first wife but of all existing wives in the selection of subsequent wives, because when Kody wants to take Robyn as his fourth wife, they definitely portray this as something that he needs the collective approval of wives #1-3 for, removing the at-least-theoretically-privileged position of the first wife implied in the Law of Sarah. However, from my memory of my years-ago watch of Sister Wives, at least two of the three existing wives’s approval seems to be very unenthusiastic and conflicted. So like, in general whether you interpret this doctrine as applying to the first wife or to all existing wives, there’s a loophole written quite explicitly into the idea of the Law of Sarah and in general it is definitely a situation of de facto male authority)

Okay, let’s step away from the doctrine and into the actual practice of polygamy. Back in early days, as you’ll remember, polygamy is not yet publicly part of Mormon religious practice and Joseph Smith is a stealth polygamist. During this time period, he’s living with Emma and their young children in what externally appears to be a typical monogamous household, while secretly having a variety of plural wives who did not live with him. There is no shared household and, as far as we can tell, he did not father children with any of the plural wives. So there’s definitely a pretty strong delineation between Emma’s situation and the situation of the plural wives. However, I don’t think we can necessarily view this as deference to the first wife: while Emma’s situation and that of the plural wives were obviously very different, none of the women involved in this seem to have been exactly thrilled with the situation to say the least and there was clearly a lot of religious coercion (carrot and stick of salvation and damnation, promised by their prophet/husband) being used to get them to comply and go against what they had been taught their whole lives was the natural order of marriage. (There are also obviously some extremely troubling implications here regarding sexual consent, especially for the plural wives). Again, I think we’re very much looking at a situation where patriarchal and religious authority are being dual wielded by the men against the women in their own interest.

In later years, once the Mormon Church colonizes Utah and Brigham Young institutes polygamy as the official and open doctrine of Mormonism, the situation looks very different because nothing is secret anymore, polygamy is status quo, mixed households are the norm, and especially in later generations you’re looking at women who have been raised to believe that this way of life is both normal and the will of God. So you’re not going to see as much pushback from either first wives or potential plural wives as you did in Joseph Smith’s period, because they’re not being completely blindsided by something that goes against their sense of morality and social norms. I don’t think that necessarily means that later polygamy was any better for women, it’s just that they were less likely to express open dissent and that the exercise of religious coercion came more in terms of lifelong indoctrination than a sudden onslaught meant to convert them to this new system of marriage. I also want to point out that I’m not saying that every 19th century Mormon polygamist was abusive or coercive towards his wives or that every plural wife was clearly desperately unhappy. I just think that those are the roots of the doctrine and that it’s a system rooted in an absolutist sense of male authority with a high potential for mistreatment.

Once polygamy has been established as the norm, I wanted to get more into your question of hierarchy among wives in terms of how polygamy was practiced. One point I’d like to make: the majority of Mormon polygamists had only two wives. Church doctrine taught that you needed to embrace polygamy in order to be exalted in heaven, but for logistical and financial reasons, having more than two wives was out of reach for most men (they also may have viewed it as emotionally overly complicated, I’m sure). It’s really only the upper echelons of church leadership that you’re seeing with wife numbers in the double digits. So obviously the dynamics in a household that has Husband, Wife #1, and Wife #2 is going to be very different than a household with Brigham Young and thirty different women living under one roof, both in terms of how the wives interact with their husband and, perhaps more crucially for your question, how they interact with each other.

Typically, you might often see the first wife taking on a head-of-household role among the women, because she was the most established and also almost certainly the oldest. (While, again, really striking and disturbing age gaps were more common with church leadership, the first wife was more likely to be close in age to the husband, who would then continue to marry young women as he himself aged). The stereotype was that the first wife ran the household but the second wife was the husband’s favorite because she was younger and prettier, and I’m sure that was the case in a lot of families. (That also seems like it would breed extreme resentment on both parts, potentially). However, particularly as the number of wives goes up, you can also see other practical matters have effect in terms of who did what and who had what authority--a wife with ten kids, a wife with four kids, and a childless wife would have different positions and duties in the household. A wife who was viewed as intelligent or better educated might end up serving as schoolteacher for the family’s collective children.

In Brigham Young’s household, one of his wives, Zina Huntington Young, was seen as a figure of authority and admiration among the other women because she was very intelligent and had strong leadership skills, even though she wasn’t the oldest or had the most children or anything. Sometimes in bigger polygamist families the man almost becomes less important in determining who stands where, because there are so many women they kind of have their own community standards. Brigham Young didn’t decide his other wives would see Zina as a leader, they did. There are definitely situations where the husband’s actions directly affect relationships and power balance between wives, though. In 1863, 61-year-old Brigham Young married 24-year-old Amelia Folsom who was apparently extremely pretty and became the recipient of a lot of favoritism and special treatment from her husband, which seems to have pissed off the other wives to some degree because they felt Amelia’s presence and Brigham’s treatment of her was upending their normal household structure and elevating her above the others. So sexual favoritism on the part of the husband could also have an impact on wife power structure. (Interestingly, this seemed to sometimes brook more resentment than wives taking on more status within the family because they were older/more experienced or because they had a special skill, at least in Amelia’s case).

This is a long ass post, but I hope you/other people find it informative!

[mc-critical]

Watching the MY series, a generational pattern I’ve noticed in the series is how jealous daughter-in-laws become unsympathetic mother-in-laws. Such as Hafsa telling Hürrem she’ll have to learn to “share the sultan as she once did.” Or Mahidevran telling Fatma that surely Mustafa wasn’t going to seek her permission before marrying Helena or lying with other women. Or Kösem telling Aysë and Farya that their purpose, along with the rest of the harem, is pleasing her son and etc etc etc. I wonder if it’s a trauma response of sorts? Something parallel to “if I couldn’t have the monogamous married life than neither will you” kind of thing?

It's not only a pattern, I guess it was the reality of those days. A self fulfilling toxic cycle. They are different people after all and their motivations shape up how they came to be in different ways and yet, that particular behaviour obviously originates from the exact same place.

It's a part of the adaption to the circumstances in the harem, something that is just inevitable. No matter how hard one resists, there is always someone that would remind them of the rules they should follow, of their position, because it's precisely the polygamous system that is established, what the harem leans upon. Putting an end to it is unheard of and presumably impossible. But the interesting thing is, this is what all these women stand up the most against early on, the thought they would ever accept it never slipping their mind. They show hard resistence against these rules and everyone, more or less, wants the Sultan/the Prince all for themselves and the reason is two-fold: because they love him or have learned to love him dearly (most of the cases in the show, probably to minimize the toxicity in these relationships) and because this was the most effective way to gain at least a bit of peace and stability and privileges in their life. But finally, we see how they've given in and how they've absorbed and now apply what they have been told. Why? They all get so engrained in this harem life, it drains their youth, their innocence, their dreams, their ideals and when they're older, already into all the power and the intriguous, mysoginistic environment, they recite to new people all these same rules all over again. Perhaps to get used to them before they do the foolish mistakes they did, perhaps truly because of the trauma they've experienced and never got the chance to cope with, using every possible chance to hammer in the fact that these other people shouldn't even try - the fight is already lost. Trying to change this "law" would only bring in conflict and would cost everyone in the room dearly.

The MC/K franchise presents the evolution of this cycle very thoroughly with one sultana after another, connecting the adaption to the system with other different factors that depend on origin, personality and character themes in the beginning and as the series go on, so I might as well briefly go to each Sultana I can recall, one by one:

This high and mighty initial remark sets its roots, of course, with the collective representative of the old traditions herself, Hafsa Sultan. She applies it to Hürrem and Mahidevran, and is very firm in keeping it, it seems she has even devoted her whole rule of the harem to it. The notable thing is, she is a Crimean princess, a member of a dynasty, one who is actually married to her Sultan (confirmed in E49-50.), on a high position from the start, and yet, she had to witness "other women". She probably was "into" the laws even before she went to the harem, and when she had experienced blows from them firsthand, her will to keep them in check had probably strengthened even more. She may be one of these cases where she really uses the remark out of spite on a personal level ("You don't know what hardships I had to experience with Sultan Selim." i.e well, I experienced it, so should you!), but that also couples with her love for the law overall, that is so in line with who she is and her overall character traits. ("Love in this harem doesn't exist../Love makes you blind."; "The Sultan can't be with only one woman.")

Hürrem is a particularly interesting case, because she's the one whose fight with the laws and traditions is shown the most, in all stages, and yet, she succumbs to the "obligatory" remark anyway. She applies it to Nurbanu and Huricihan, which, despite of the other reasons present, is exemplary of what the harem is capable of doing even to the most daring and rebellious people. I see her character arc as symbolic to letting the past go and the adaptation to current curcumstance. She was very often going with the flow, risking it all for success, but her fight with the polygamous system was ultimately, the biggest fight she had fight with the haremly traditions. Gülnihal, Sadıka, the Russian concubines, Isabella, Firuze, Nazenin... no, it was hard and tough, having to face it in every season, and it ended only when she realized her life would be over. (signora Porzia in S04 around E131-132, while neither a concubine, nor an arc, being more of a thematic reminder of how well known Hü is around the world, still spent time with Süleiman and seemed to show a last sign of slight jealousy on Hürrem.) In fact, to completely win Süleiman over, is one of the first things she set herself to achieve (with Nigar's advice in the first episode.) and due to it opposing the system in its very core, it had the most stable traditional opposition. It questions the system itself, it risks to break it all apart, and she didn't fully succeed. It must have been exhausting for her to track one woman after another and to put her love to the test again and again. She didn't fully make it, and believe it or not, she realizes it very well. And this whole desire connected with her striving to achieve the highest position in the hierarchy. She fought to get rights for herself, but not for anyone else. So, when she finds herself in a comfort zone, she applies what Valide Hafsa and the others have once applied against her, being more than them and thus, already too far gone to sympathize. (I think this post elaborates on these dimensions of Hürrem's character way better than I ever could, though being more about how another aspect of the toxic system, the elitism, is applied in what ways, respectively.) It's more of a turning into a ready product of the environment rather than some personal negative resentment or entitlement, even though that could be it, too, as an endorsement of her ethos that she's Hürrem Sultan and no one could be like her. (as also said by Selim, her own son.)

We encounter something quite similar with Mahidevran on some extent, with her not only striving to be the only woman SS loves in his life, it was something she already had, and only then had to fight to get back - making rash, impulsive decisions due to the loss of her attachment, which is why accepting and getting in accordance with her loss is presented more as character development than regression. And ironically (or not), it began to happen after her conversation with Valide after she sent Sadıka to SS in E16, seeming to take her advice to heart. (her stopping to be jealous of other concubines, even befriending them in their distaste for Hürrem.) But then again, the coin always has two sides, because while she got calmer, wiser and more decisive in Manisa, every possible sympathy she could have to those that experience the same, is now gone. She applies these remarks to Fatma and Elena for them to begin living with it and behave accordingly. For them to accept it, just like she once did. She does judge them to herself. ("All good things come to an end. It's hard to accept it, but I accepted it. Because this is the truth.") And because Mahidevran also cherishes laws and tradition and considers every single imprudence as unprecedented and off limits, she would obviously recite the words Valide reminded her of every other day, to "keep piece and order".

After these three cases, this remark turns into a behaviour, applied more to those the Sultanas would perceive as ambitious rivals to themselves, that began building up from Hürrem and Nubanu, and would keep on to the other "generation" of the Sultanate of Women right into Kösem.

Nurbanu, albeit not so directly, applies it to Safiye. With her being sent from Mihrimah and her bold streak, Nurbanu perhaps used it as a "precaution", to warn her what is in front of her. She probably doesn't hold much belief in a monogamous relationship, especially due to what she experienced with Dilşah, but her relationship with Selim was way more stable than any of this kind in the show.

With Safiye we actually have something bizarre, because right in episode 1, she tells Anastasia that the possibility of going home is the first thing she should forget, and yet, she utters this "weird" (in retrospect) quote: "Should we tell her that the only thing that could make this cage bearable is love?". She doesn't tell her that she has to accept "other women", she motivates her to fight for her love and to get it, seeing her potential. But that happens only as a long as she's loyal to her. Once Anastasia became Kösem and she didn't give Safiye the reciprocal loyalty, their enmity began.

Kösem is the paralleling contrast to Hürrem, since she doesn't truly adapt to this system, but she merges herself with the country that is vital to this system. This is why she applies it to Farya and Ayşe. I think Kösem is the sultana that accounts personal feelings the least here, since she's the one that let them behind in favor of the country. So, her reminding Ayşe and Farya of their purpose, is to prevent them from causing any kind of unrest. Because she values her relationship with Ahmet and sees it as something beyond love. ("Today, I married not only Sultan Ahmet, but the country, too!" - this isn't the exact quote, but the meaning is the same.)

[sugar-petals]

Understanding The Death Card In Tarot

the great juxtaposition. we start with a detail and my favorite card reference. so, you’ve seen the skeleton, the horse, the people... i ask you to center in on the imagery again though, to extract whether DEATH really wants to convey all but despair and the inevitable. if you look twice, you see the message. plain image analysis: it's a sunrise scene. THE SUN in tarot is the absolute best arcanum you can get. happiness, freedom and enlightenment in its pure form. look at it, that’s paradise. it could even be the formerly kneeling baby that is now riding DEATH’s horse! DEATH can be read as the key to to all your wishes fulfilled, and you being spared from doom. that’s what it boils down to. so whatever you worry about has a good end. if you know that THE SUN is the level up-result of DEATH, you will view it differently.

relating the card. see how it intertwines with other cards. your spread will tell you what kind of sunrise it means. if it relates to a wonky card, rejoice because this issue will be resolved big time. if it comes with a wholesome card, even better, double the sunshine, a grand new reveal, the old is gone. the skeletal rider brings the tidal wave to usher in the bright atmosphere. humans cannot understand the concept of happiness without knowing DEATH equally. no DEATH, no sunshine.

DEATH’s power. if i had to associate an animal with the card, it’s the snake. shedding its skin and presenting the new shining self, pretty much. and it’s still the same snake, but with less baggage and old outer woundings and personas. so, if DEATH shows up in your reading, that skin shedding effect is already taking place and it’s a good thing. 

no hazards. there is few sense of immanent danger or doom in that card. at least, less than it seems. the skeleton on the horse treads very slowly. it’s not the KNIGHT OF SWORDS rushing in and mowing you down. also, unlike the sword suits that are all cloudy and gloomy, DEATH has the sun on it!  

predicting real death? it’s hard to know if the card means literal passing or not unless you create context in the spread. to be sure about that is crucial given the severity of the topic. of course, if you explicitly ask if there will be somebody dying and you draw that very card, the answer is unequivocal and you can take it at face value. but when DEATH pops up seemingly at random, check whether it is paired with the 5 OF CUPS (=grief), swords (=conflict, cutting away), and compelling reversals of beneficial cards to see whether an actual fatal event is involved, which, given the probabilities, is rare. 

metaphors. in most other cases, DEATH is best read as metaphorical, much like the fertility theme of the EMPRESS doesn’t mean you get pregnant 100% and extends to creative projects coming to fruition instead. so, read DEATH as a revolution in an area of life, e.g. with the 2 OF SWORDS you can interpret that you finalize a decision between two options. 

but who, and when? even if you do spot the 5 OF CUPS nearby, you gotta find out what person is involved in this. look for court cards or a signature arcanum that you associate with someone. e.g., the page that always jumps out when you do a reading on relative XYZ. this is where directions come in handy. IMPORTANT: where is the horse on the card headed? if it faces to the right, see what it points at. or, which card on the left it has embarked from. that way you can see what happened (lean back in that case) or what is still to happen (be curious what gift death brings in that case).  

DEATH and serfdom. if there is one historical theme that is always squarely ignored it’s that DEATH is about to trample over a highly decorated 1) rich 2) white 3) old 4) catholic 5) man. quintuple feudal threat combo. yes, the scene does depict a tragedy, especially as there are kids kneeling before DEATH to appease his horse. but the nr. 1 focal point is DEATH marching towards the guy who made a fortune via taxes and people’s fears of death and now ironically gets targeted himself. even if he is supposed to be the most blessed and protected of all as a cleric, and looks like a walking deity in his shining gown. interesting, isn’t it. so: ouch. the DEATH card is one huge medieval roast. 

the crown takes a tumble. it gets even wilder. check out the background. you see that there’s a king without his crown (!) lying on the ground as DEATH’s first casualty. this card is nothing but a savage blow to the feudal system. DEATH killed the head of state and now he’ll take down the top of the hierarchy, the clergy, too. the entire machinery is defeated. like why would you not want this card in all of your spreads, DEATH is the greatest symbol of nation-wide liberation you could possibly think of.

the warning that’s not for you. you gotta understand this. the card’s scenery is a rather deliberate potitical statement and probably doesn’t concern you unless you’re the 1%. DEATH, in essence, is a ‘lol, even you won’t last’ and a warning for larger-than-life elites. or, not even a warning, but a plain fact. the funny thing is, DEATH doesn’t do this on purpose, but naturally without giving a damn on his funky horse. as a tarot reader, if anything, you can interpret this card as the laws of nature working against privileges and buddha’s teaching of how everything passes. karma is a relief. 

DEATH and authority. the card is the better version of JUSTICE. there’s no court ruling that someone gets a fine and the case is closed. there’s no idle debate. no exceptions and cop-outs. death has not discriminated once. the bad guy gets what he deserves. DEATH is anti-hierarchy in nature. he tears down rigged systems, and whatever theme your spread has, this card hails of oppression coming to an end. the HIEROPHANT is quaking. the EMPEROR, too. the entire court cards, also. DEATH made the entire conceited and power-hungry population of the tarot his bitch. 

a lesser evil? i know that shifting your worry doesn’t help, but how dangerous the DEATH card really isn’t while other cards are much more alarming reflects the truth of the deck which is the ultimate goal to grasp as an advanced reader. if you draw THE TOWER, THE DEVIL, 3/5/9/10 OF SWORDS, 5 OF PENCACLES, and the 5 OF CUPS, possibly all at once, aspecting other positive cards in your reading, then you gotta watch out. DEATH is nowhere near as crazy. look at the coloring and weather deptictions of the imageries and the difference is very visible. weather in tarot reflects the entire meaning and mood of the card. DEATH has clear, neutral skies and big fat shunshine emerging. meanwhile, it’s going bonkers right here: 

the skeleton = you! i’m not kidding. it’s crazy. DEATH is the best self-insert as it’s a skeleton. it could be anybody. now think of what a good position you’re in. you got this badass horse, you got the flag with the rose of life cycles on it, you command the sea to rise and fall, you got an armor to protect yourself. you’ve likely been a knight. you’re about to make a clean sweep with this annoying bishop who thinks he’s god. because you literally rule life. pretty good position you’re finding yourself in. the DEATH card ascribes superpowers to the one receiving it, as exaggerated as that sounds. if you realize that DEATH is you, that’s a whole new dimension of interpreting.

[solesurvivorpaigeargot]

Paige, 16?

16: Dark Secrets, skeletons in the closet?

Not necessarily dark, but Paige does keep PLENTY of secrets. She avoids talking about her vault and what happened to her, in part because its interwoven with her loss and explaining that is a whole bunch of NOPE (she will cry) but also gets kinda uncomfortable admitting she's an old-worlder in general because she fears judgement or pity from her comrades for how soft her life used to be. Paige has been a woman making in spaces that weren't made for her for the majority of her life (in law school it was suggested that she drop out of the program before she 'became somebody's lawsuit', and was regularly accused of only doing well because she was pretty, and there was a looooooot of sexist background radiation to her career after she graduated) and if there's one truth in all that shit that she's taken home, its that sympathy is fucking worthless and and an insult. If someone can see she's having a hard enough time to pity her, she's not doing a good job and needs to kick it up a notch.

The other big secret is that her marriage wasn't actually that good. Paige's Nate was... the safe choice. A white military boy following all the unwritten rules of the privileged class in a society that was hastily crumbling from within. Her Nate wasn't going to beat the system into submission, he wasn't going to challenge the hierarchy that kept him fed and, up until that fateful day, safe.

In short, Nate was complacent. Paige was very much not. She took low paying work to do a job worth doing (defending folk who couldn't afford private lawyers) to do it right, and dig her fingers into a deeply broken system. Nate might have supported her schooling and career on the surface, but 'why don't you go for something better? You're worth it' is a fight they'd had more than a few times.

She won't come back around to the old resentments for a long time. While the grief is still fresh, its hard to be critical of who a person was to you. She was affectionate to Nate, and she did love him, and his is a wound she'll keep for a very long time... but upon reflection, she'll probably realize their marriage would have fallen apart not long after her going back to work, had the world not exploded.

[destructiveurges]

Indigenous Anarchy & The Need for a Rejection of the Colonizer's "Civilization"

First, let's define some basic terms. “Indigenous” means “of the land we are actually on”. “Anarchy” means “the rejection of authority”. The principles of anarchism include direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. "Anarchy; A Journal of Desire Armed" envisions a primitive anarchy that is "radically cooperative & communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild".

Civilization is a culture that revolves around cities. A city is a collection of people that live permanently in one place, in densities high enough that they must import their food and resources from outside the city in order to survive and ensure the continued growth of the city. So, cities depend on the exploitation of external bodies to maintain themselves.

This externalisation alienates us from both our food supply and our waste. Our food is purchased from a supermarket, grown far from home, prepared and packaged on an assembly line. We are denied any participation in the processes that feed us. Our garbage gets trucked away to be disposed of somewhere out of our immediate sight, and our human waste is flushed down pipes. We don't fully know where it goes, what it affects, what place it has in our ecosystem.

Civilization aims to dominate life through its various structures that are designed to domesticate us. These structures include industry, colonialism, statism, capitalism, agriculture, racism, schooling, religion, media, police, prisons, military, patriarchy, slavery and more.

Indigenous peoples throughout history have fought and died to resist the forceful encroachment of civilization into their lives. This struggle continues today, as the "uncivilized" are pushed closer and closer to the edge of survival by the "civilized" all over the world, and the technological imbalance between us continues to expand and create a sociological divide that renders us unable to understand each other on even a basic level.

The lifestyles of the civilized and the uncivilized have diverged to such an extent that it has become near-impossible for the civilized to see that their civilization has become an obstacle to our basic survival. Instead, they hold their civilization up as the instrument of their survival and fear living in a world without it. They are so conditioned to the order of their civilization that they can't fathom a life in its absence.

The entire concept of 'civilization' depends on the rule of the colonizer and his brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples. The perpetual march of global civilization is fed by the forced labor and the exploitation of natural resources in the global South (and historically, all lands beyond the European continent).

In order to strip the land of its resources, the people that live on the land need to be displaced and moved to tightly-packed cities, farms or "reservations" where they will be forced to labor to turn those resources into consumer products for Western markets. This process of civilizing indigenous peoples is rapid, and our culture, language and history is often forcibly extinguished by the colonizers to ensure we don't attempt a return to our previous "uncivilized" lives and reclaim those lands that they have taken for their industry.

The ruling classes are always looking for new avenues to accumulate wealth for themselves. Rulers create subservient underclasses by depriving uncivilized peoples of their natural habitats so they have no choice but to accept domestication and be integrated into the industrial capitalist system. The ruler can then successfully convert the people they have tamed and domesticated into profitable commodities; docile workers that can labor their whole lives to create more wealth for the ruler.

A ruler sees no use for a hunter-gatherer or any person that is not creating wealth and power for the ruler. If people didn't need to work for rulers to acquire food and shelter, rulers would cease to have power. So the worst enemy of the ruler is a person that doesn't depend on rulers to survive, or worse; an entire culture of self-sufficient people. An uncivilized culture that he has no control over is a ruler's worst fear.

Under civilization, no longer will indigenous peoples be permitted to survive off of their ancestral lands, hunting and foraging. Now to survive in this new world forced on us by the colonizers, we must endure back-breaking labor in factories, warehouses, mines and industrial farms. Our children must be educated in the ways of the colonizers; to shape them into productive and submissive workers. We must depend on the state and colonizers to feed and clothe us. We must consume and waste and participate in destroying the ecosystems that sustained us for millennia. We must be "civilized" so that the ruling class may prosper at our expense.

Freedom Through Rejection

To reject civilization is to oppose this coercive arrangement where our history, our culture, and the collective knowledge that allowed us to survive and prosper on our land is taken from us by profiteering industrialists that would have us devote our entire lives to laboring for their benefit as they deny us access to our own lands and resources.

To reject civilization is to oppose urbanization; the cramming of people into small, barren, concreted areas that can be more easily controlled by our rulers to stop us from breaking with their demands that we be "civilized" and obedient.

To reject civilization is to oppose exploitative industrial agricultural methods that force the rural poor to sacrifice their labor to feed the materially wealthy cities, while rapidly despoiling the land of its fertility and sapping the groundwater for irrigation at a much faster rate than it can be replenished.

Civilization depends on a massively unequal concentration of wealth; a brutal capitalist hierarchy where the few that have been lucky enough to climb to the top control everyone beneath them. At the very bottom of civilization's hierarchy are the indigenous peoples of the world.

Control & Domestication

The voices of indigenous peoples, whether they are accepted by their colonizers as successfully "civilized", or rejected as "uncivilized", have been long ignored by everyone that benefits from the march of civilization and the shiny things it gives them. Shiny things made possible by the rampant exploitation of indigenous lands and the manipulation and control of indigenous peoples through domestication.

"Control" is the key word to understanding why civilization has come into being. The capitalist colonizers work hard to convince us that we need to be controlled by them and their civilization. That we need their civilization to protect us from harm. If we labor for them, we won't go hungry. If we give them our lands and relocate to their "reservations" or their farms or their cities, adopt their language and religion, they will give us protection, allow us to survive with "dignity", accept us as successfully domesticated and civilized.

The irony to this is staggering. The colonizers decimate our forests and slice open our land to empty it of its resources. They slaughter our wildlife to extinction and douse our plant life with herbicides to ensure we can't sustain ourselves. They render our water toxic and undrinkable. They destroy our climate with their burning of carbon. They murder us if we dare stand in their way.

And then they offer us sanctuary from their tyranny. A choice between enslavement or extinction. Move to their cities, slums, plantations and reservations and be accepted as "civilized", or die at their hands for being "subhuman uncivilized savages" that can't be "saved". Anything civilization can't control must be purged to ensure the march of civilization continues without obstacle.

To embrace anarchy is to oppose the very idea of control. To reject the authority of the colonizer and his coercive civilization that takes so much from us to provide comforts to cultures that would sooner see us slaughtered than threaten their industry-fueled lifestyles. Anarchy is to trust in ourselves and our neighbors to work together through mutual aid to solve our own problems, without needing the "charity" of powerful authorities.

Anti-civ indigenous anarchists recognize that the very concept of civilization depends on our colonizers' ability to control us. Our forced assimilation into the colonizers' alien civilization, and the punitive laws we're forced to obey are designed to keep us from resisting the perverse order our colonizers force on us. Their order depends on our domestication and the destruction of our way of life. Their civilization is designed to destroy everything it touches.

Embracing our "Inhospitable Wilderness"

The so-called "inhospitable wilderness" that civilization has seen fit to beat into submission is the lifeblood of our existence. For millennia, we lived in peace with this wilderness, nurturing it as much as it nurtured us. We were caretakers of the land, rather than exploiters of it. Now, as civilized people, we labor for a lifetime for the right to assert ownership over a tiny piece of the land. So that we may pave it over and erect a concrete block to live in. If we are successful. Most of us don't even get this privilege and are forced to pay wealthy landlords for the right to live in one of the concrete blocks they own.

Uncivilized, we roamed freely, wild fruit and herbs grew in every direction; ready for the picking. Freshwater streams filled with fish dotted the landscape. The sounds of wildlife filled the air. Our labor was minimal and the rewards were instantaneous. We only knew abundance. Or, more accurately: affluence without abundance.

Hunter-gatherers are able to meet their immediate needs without needing to stockpile a surplus the way civilized people must do to survive (with agriculture, jobs, loans, savings, mortgages, pensions, insurance). The uncivilized have no want of material possessions because such frivolous things would stand in the way of their ability to live nomadically with the seasons. Having too many possessions forces us to stay in one place at all times to guard those possessions with our lives, so that we can continue to possess them and not risk them being taken from us. It creates a paranoid security-centric lifestyle that puts owning and protecting property above our most basic needs.

Hunter-gatherers can trust that the environment will provide for us, that going for a walk to hunt or forage will give us and our loved ones with all the food and water we'll need for a few days. After taking that walk, the rest of the day is wide open for casual leisure.

Civilized people love to refer to hunter-gatherers as being stricken by "poverty". But this poverty is a material poverty; a lack of surplus, luxuries, things. In real terms, hunter-gatherers are far richer than the perpetually in-debt civilized workers who have little room for leisure and must measure their entire existence in terms of "time". The civilized, in their agriculture-based societies, must work 5 or 6 days a week simply to survive. The uncivilized have no want of such absurdities. As Marshall Sahlins noted, hunter-gatherers are the original affluent society. With no material needs, there is no need for poverty or wealth. All people may be equal; a true anarchy.

Civilized people plant rows of crops in fenced in, sterilized industrial monocultures that barely resemble the diverse mutually-sustaining interconnected food forests that fed us throughout history. Farmers repeatedly strain the same plots of land year after year to grow these single crops, soaking them with chemical fertilizers and pesticides so nothing but the monocrop can survive. The soil is eroded, barren of life, dependent on the chemical concoctions the farmer must go into debt to procure.

In civilization, water is scarce, controlled and expensive. Fruit comes wrapped in plastic and you must labor in misery for a full day to afford it. Fish is contaminated by the toxic waste that industry spews into waterways, and yet we still are charged for the privilege of eating it. Wildlife has been largely replaced by vast expanses of caged livestock. The endless excrement from these industrial meat facilities also pours into the waterways, further poisoning the ecosystem and sterilizing the land.

The wildness that once defined us has been coerced out of us by our colonizers. Like dogs bred from wild wolves to be obedient and subservient to their masters, we have come to depend on the state and capitalists for our basic survival. Sick and domesticated, we fight each other for the scraps of food thrown down to us by the rulers that deprive us of our land and our very lives.

Understanding Neo-Colonialism

Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah succinctly explained Neo-colonialism in 1965:

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. (Most) often, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.

This description of neo-colonialism still rings true today, with indigenous cultures all over the world experiencing what Nkrumah described in its various forms. Most recently, Chinese neo-colonialists have flowed into indigenous lands, promising to lift us up with their wealth. Their investors, bankers, traders, lenders, developers and charities all promise to improve our lives for the better.

African countries are especially incurring massive debt to Beijing, offering up their land, oil, gas, minerals and other resources as collatoral for every new billion-dollar loan they take out. When they inevitably default on these unsustainable loans, China will seize the collatoral and strip the continent of its natural wealth. Malaysia recently realized the dangers of this debt trap and pulled out of Chinese development deals. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned the world, "there is a new version of Colonialism happening."

The non-profit Confucius Institute that operates in indigenous lands is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, restricting what the teachers they supply from China can say, distorting what students learn. This propaganda-via-schooling is designed to promote China's economic interests by conditioning indigenous children to accept colonization and a life of subservience. Colonizers go to great lengths to normalize the terror they bring and convince us it is good for us.

Kwame Nkrumah:

Neo-colonialism might be also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.

Similarly to China, South Korea and its multinational corporations have bought farming rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in "under-developed" countries, in order to secure food resources for their citizens. The history of colonialism and banana republics have shown us that this kind of arrangement has only led to misery for indigenous peoples and the degradation of our lands.

South Korea's RG Energy Resources Asset Management CEO Park Yong-soo:

The (South Korean) nation does not produce a single drop of crude oil and other key industrial minerals. To power economic growth and support people's livelihoods, we cannot emphasize too much that securing natural resources in foreign countries is a must for our future survival.

The head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, warned that the rise in these land deals could create a form of neocolonialism, with poorer regions producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. It's safe to say that this latest form of neocolonialism has already arrived, and our corrupt governments are signing deals that make us increasingly dependent on these foreign nations and their promises to "lift us up" by building us cities and infrastructure.

It's integral that we resist their attempts to civilize our lands so that we will be forced to labor for them; helping them steal our natural resources to grow their empires so they may expand further and exploit more indigenous populations across the world.

And our local authorities, who are so quick to sell our futures for the fleeting luxuries of concrete towers and faster trains are just as culpable in this neo-colonial push to shape us into the beggared workers of foreign empires.

The Maasai, a semi-nomadic tribe that inhabits mostly Tanzania and Kenya, have been migrating with the seasons for centuries. They have increasingly been pushed out of their land by the states and business interests that collude to write laws that prohibit them from cultivating plants and grazing their animals on large tracts of their traditional land.

Tens of thousands of Maasai were left homeless after their homes in the Ngorongoro Crater sightseeing area were set on fire, supposedly to "preserve the region’s ecosystem" and attract more tourists.

The Tanzanian government works with Tanzania Conservation Limited, which is owned by the US-based Thomson Safaris, and Ortello Business Corporation; a luxury hunting company based in the United Arab Emirates, to drive the Maasai off of their land. They're beaten, shot, and their property is confiscated. Young herders are so frightened that they now run whenever they see a vehicle approaching, fearing for their lives.

The state has now ordered the Maasai people to leave their homeland so it can be turned into a hunting ground for affluent tourists who pay a premium to shoot big game animals and take the carcasses home with them as stuffed trophies.

The state aids in these genocidal acts to secure foreign investment to build its cities. The state will always put the civilized before the uncivilized because the entire reason a state exist is to grow its cities and plunder food and resources to feed that growth.

Civilization has always been the weapon used by the powerful to condemn us to a life of servitude. Reject civilization. Reject the state. Reject capitalism. Reject all attempts to conquer our lands and enslave our peoples.

Looking a Gift-Horse in the Mouth: The Technological Divide

We should understand that there's a big difference between the concepts of "tools" and "technology". Tools can be made on a small-scale with local materials, either by individuals or small groups of people on occasions when the tools are needed. Unlike technology, tools don't construct systems of authority and obedience to allow one group to dominate another, just so long as everyone is able to realistically create or acquire tools on their own. Technology depends on the ability to mount immense operations of extraction, production, distribution and consumption. This demands coercive authority and hierarchy. Oppression.

The Fifth Estate explained the pitfalls of technology in 1981:

Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible.

Technology is used by rulers to control and pacify their citizens. The societies of the colonists are laden with technological marvels. But their people are detached from the land they live on, alienated from each other, their eyes constantly fixated on mindless distractions emanating from their screens, as their lands dry up and burn to pay for their addiction to these toxic industrial products.

Technology is used to conquer, to assert dominance, to destroy entire cultures that dare to reject the empire's world order. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, entire countries decimated by the great technology of the imperialists, raining death down from the skies.

The colonizers will always have better technology than us. Whatever technologies they promise us in return for our cooperation with their agenda will pale in comparison to the technologies that drive their own societies. They'll tell us we need their technology to be civilized, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world, but there is no catching up with the empire's machine. It will grind us up and churn us out long before it ever gives up the secrets it promises.

Technology is a weapon wielded by the most powerful and there is no way for us to ever match that power, so why try? Why dedicate our lives to playing their game, by their rules? To receive their obsolete cast-offs in return? They use their technology to convince us that we are less than them, that we are "backwards" and that they need to "save" us from our "savage" existence. They say all this while their technological supremacy depends on our resources and our labor, on them being able to coerce us into sacrificing ourselves and our children and our children's children to give them the fuel for their big important machines. Machines that allow them to maintain their dominance over us, so that we remain perpetually inferior to them. If they ever gave us what they promise; the liberation they say their technology will bring, their power over us would be lost. We would no longer need them to "save" us from our wildness because we would be as civilized as them.

When we give up so much of ourselves so that they will give us their technology, they make sure we will need them to maintain it. We become dependent on their technology, and thus dependent on them to continue feeding it to us and to fix it when it breaks. Our lives begin to revolve around the technology and we forget how to live without it. And while we're distracted by the calming glow of our little screens, our ecosystems are decimated by the colonists.

Technology is a carrot on a stick and it cannot liberate us, only domesticate and enslave us. Reject it. Reject being measured by our technological prowess or how civilized we are. Reject the colonizer and his false-gifts and manipulations. Reject his civilization. Reject his control over who we are and who we will be.

(via The Anarchist Library)

[stripedfutures]

I’m gonna headbutt Anderson Cooper

I've been thinking a lot about that Anderson Cooper video and the more I think about it the more it just gets frustrating

I keep coming back to this article, because the framing of his little speech is just about dead on for its critique It feels like he just can't seem to let go of the notion that this is an intellectual dissonance. He goes on this whole tirade about how Donald Trump and his cronies are simply incorrect about what Law and Order™ is. As though what Law and Order is is a function of strictly rational, apolitical, facts

But this is a moral dissonance. This is a values dissonance. This is what Law and Order looks like. This is exactly and perfectly in line with moral code and values system of the people he's trying to shame and scold

The hypocrisy is the god damn point. It is the desired privilege of power. It is the privilege of the ruling classes to dominate their lessers. It's a values system that prizes hierarchy, and kneeling on an innocent black man's neck until he dies in the street is exactly what Law and Order™ looks like to that values system

The cruelty is the point. It is the privilege of being higher on the hierarchy. And it has been that way for all of American history. It's not something that just went away after the Civil War. It's a values system that's still very much alive and well. It continues to thrive in America. It is foundational to the American justice system

This is what Law and Order looks like in America, and that's the god damn problem

[hussyknee]

Colour is the *foundation* of racism.

The darker the skin the lower down the racial hierarchy.

White-passing people are oppressed because they aren't considered white *enough*, or "white infiltrators".

Race can be arbitrary and geo-politically varied. The Irish, Italians and Armenians were not considered white in the US until the Naturalization Act and anti-miscegenation laws codified what it meant, albeit flimsily. This meant that white-passing people of colour would still be considered as dark as the darkest of their race (Latinos), while dark-skinned people of white races would be considered as white as the fairest (Italians). The Japanese were considered white by Germany but Japanese American people still interned by the US.

However, racism at its core is the systemic oppression that disenfranchises Black, Indigenous, Roma, Latino, Arab, South Asian, East Asian people under the global superstructure of white supremacy. It is not restricted to North America. It is not different in Europe for the black and brown-skinned. Race was the rationale for white colonization and is in fact the whole reason the Global South even exists. It's the basis of slavery and Orientalism. Islamaphobia is a phenomenon based on the racialization of brown bodies.

Your "white people racism" is xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and white ethnic disenfranchisement, all of which are separate from but intersect with racism.

White Jews, white Irish, white Eastern European and white immigrants all still have white privilege and can be complicit in racism against People of Colour. You can't remove yourself from one axe of oppression to validate another. No one anywhere has a leg up on a white person by being black, brown, Indigenous or East Asian. Especially not in Asian and African countries themselves. The ones in closest proximity to literal whiteness will always be the beneficiaries of institutionalised racism.

Now please, for the love of God, stop with the "white people also experience racism" posts. It is not a hot or revolutionary take. It's a sad, bad, tired one that doesn't understand what racism even is.

[transastronautistic]

queer history: a chat with Anne Lister and Leslie Feinberg

you know what i’d love to witness? a conversation between Anne Lister and Leslie Feinberg. can you even imagine it??

Lister wrote, “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I dare to say I am like no one in the whole world.” but i think she’d quickly realize that Feinberg is “made like” her -- that Feinberg has a very similar sexuality and gender expression to her own, and truly gets what it’s like to be persecuted for those things. Lister’d be so thrilled and relieved to find she’s not alone!

and Feinberg? when ze was younger, ze was desperate to find hirself in history -- just like Lister, ze was convinced that “No one like me seemed to have ever existed” (Transgender Warriors, p. 11). Feinberg would absolutely recognize Lister as a part of the big beautiful queer history that ze eventually discovered.

there are many parts of Feinberg’s story that come to mind as i watch Gentleman Jack -- such as when Lister is talking to the little boy Henry, who asks if she’s a man, and she replies:

“Well, that's a question. And you are not the first person to ask it. I was in Paris once, dressed extremely well, I thought, in silk and ribbons, ringlets in my hair. Very gay, very ladylike. And even then, someone mistook me for a...Mm. So, no, I am not a man. I'm a lady. A woman. I'm a lady woman. I'm a woman.”

when i watched that scene, i immediately thought of this passage from Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors:

“...I was considered far too masculine a woman to get a job in a store, or a restaurant, or an office. I couldn’t survive without working. So one day I put on a femme friend’s wig and earrings and tried to apply for a job as a salesperson at a downtown retail store. On the bus ride to the interview, people stood rather than sit next to me. They whispered and pointed and stared. ‘Is that a man?’ one woman asked her friend, loud enough for us all to hear. The experience taught me an important lesson. The more I tried to wear clothing or styles considered appropriate for women, the more people believed I was a man trying to pass as a woman. I began to understand that I couldn’t conceal my gender expression” (p. 12).

over a century separated these two, but people who could or would not conform to their assigned gender suffered in both eras. both of these people longed for a connection to a wider community of people like them, longed to know why people like them were persecuted and hated and told that God reviled them. but while Lister did manage to cultivate a tiny haven for herself of loved ones who accepted her, she never found the wider community that Feinberg found -- the world of “drag queens, butches, and femmes,” a world in which “I fit; I was no longer alone” -- a world that extended beyond gay bars, deep into past millennia as well as across the entire globe!

Feinberg worked hard to dig up the answers to all hir questions of why -- “Why was I subject to legal harassment and arrest at all? Why was I being punished for the way I walked or dressed, or who I loved? Who wrote the laws used to harass us, and why? Who gave the green light to the cops to enforce them? Who decided what was normal in the first place?” (p. 8). what ze concluded was that the rise of class so many ages ago is what sowed the seeds of transphobia.

in Transgender Warriors, Feinberg argues that in ancient societies that followed a matrilineal system and shared all resources communally, whenever agriculture enabled some men to begin accumulating and hoarding resources, an intolerance for gender diversity would also arise (see pp. 42-44, 50-52). once these men had capital, they had power. the Few could use their capital to bribe, to threaten, and to control the Many. eventually these men would twist their communities into a patriarchy in order to ensure that they could keep the power in their own hands. for patriarchs rely upon a rigid gender binary to keep their power, wherein those assigned male are placed above everyone else. after all, if men behave "like women," how can we place them above women? if women behave "like men," will they try to force their way into the dominant group? if some people are too ambiguous to be categorized into either group, what does that say about our argument that this binary is the natural way of doing things or divinely ordained?

i think that there are some aspects of this history that Lister would be excited to learn. she’d recognize herself as one of those women trying to force their way into the dominant group, and agree that the patriarchs of her day were not happy about it. she’d appreciate Feinberg’s scholarship around those religious texts that she as a Christian and Feinberg as a Jewish person shared, how Feinberg shows that it was not God but men who decided that the gender binary must be enforced. Lister would heartily agree that her nature is God-given, not God-hated.

but the conversation between Lister and Feinberg would very quickly break down, for the same reason that transphobia sprung up: because of class.

not long into their discussion, Feinberg would be like “and that’s why Capitalism is the root of all evil and people like us will thrive only once we’ve overthrown the landed gentry and disseminated all the wealth” and Lister would be like. “excuse me. i am the Landed Gentry. the lower classes will get their callused hands on my wealth over my dead body"

and the relationship would promptly dissolve from there -- and i’d take Feinberg’s side 1000% and hope ze could knock some humility into Lister’s classist ass!

but anyway to me the similarities between these two historical figures combined with the stark differences in their worldviews only goes to show what an enormous factor class is! Feinberg notes this fact, that “trans expression” has existed among all classes -- and that social privilege makes a big difference in a trans or gnc person’s life:

“For the ruling elite, transgender expression could still be out in the open with far less threat of punishment than a peasant could expect. For example, when Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated in 1654, she donned men’s clothes and renamed herself ‘Count Dohna.’ Henry III of France was reported to have dressed as an Amazon and encouraged his courtiers to do likewise” (80).

(to be fair to Henry III, his gender non-conforming ways were used against him to justify his overthrow. but for a time, he had the means to express himself and to gather others who were like him into his court.)

if Feinberg had been born in the uppermost class of hir society, would that have protected hir from much of the cruelty and violence they experienced? after all, ze would never have had to scramble for a job, to try desperately to conform to gender expectations just to survive. Lister was able to spend much of her life refusing to listen to the hateful words circulating behind her back because to her face people tended to be much more polite. would Feinberg have had that experience too, had ze not been of the lower working class? would ze have never gone through the pain and struggle that caused hir to dig so ferociously into the history of transphobia and queerphobia?

it’s much less likely for someone at the top of the food chain to question the food chain -- even if they notice how the Way Things Are does work against them in some ways. Lister was unlikely to notice how a social hierarchy that pits the wealthy above the poor is intrinsically linked to the structures that pit men over women and confine each person into a rigid binary box -- because to notice that truth would have been to her own detriment. she may not have wanted to keep the cissexism, but she did want to keep her wealth.

As Feinberg puts it in Transgender Warriors when discussing afab people who fought for the Confederacy in the US Civil War, “just being [trans] doesn’t automatically make each person progressive.”

Lister was not prepared to fight a battle against her own privileges, even if it would also have been a battle against her own oppression. that doesn’t mean that those of us looking back at her story today can’t treasure what we have in common with her! we can. after all, in Transgender Warriors, Feinberg recounts the stories of the more “problematic,” complicated figures in queer history right alongside the ones that better fit hir own views. ze finds value in their stories despite the flaws, and we can too.

but at the same time, we have to acknowledge where Lister fell short, and do the hard work of examining our own privileges and considering how we can be better than Lister. we can instead be like Feinberg, whose marginalization -- as a butch lesbian, as a Jewish person, as a transgender person, and as a lower class person -- inspired hir not to cling to the privileges ze did have as hir only foothold in the power structure, but rather to be the best ally ze could be to people of color, to trans women, and others:

“We as trans people can’t liberate ourselves alone. No oppressed peoples can. So how and why will others come to our defense? And whom shall we, as trans people, fight to defend? A few years before he died [Frederick] Douglass told the International Council of Women, ‘When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.’ I believe this is the only nobility to which we should aspire -- that is, to be the best fighters against each other’s oppression, and in doing so, to build links of solidarity and trust that will forge an invincible movement against all forms of injustice and inequality” (p. 92).

so, yeah. i’d love to hear these two people chat. i relate deeply to both of their experiences and think they’d find a lot of commonalities between themselves. ...and then with Feinberg i’d love to give Lister a piece of my mind when it comes to her classism.

[jewish-privilege]

...Diana Clarke, 27, is a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh whose research focuses on Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of [Central and Eastern] European descent) in the United States and their relationship to whiteness and systems of oppression. Clarke is one of many arguing that the ideology of alleged [Tree of Life] shooter...draws on centuries of myths and stereotypes about Jewish people that continue to animate and support oppressive ideologies.

Clarke interprets the shooting through the constructs of white supremacy and anti-Semitism that “give Jews contingent access to whiteness and safety and power and then blame them for all the systemic violence in the world.”

...[The shooter] appears to have viewed the congregation’s partnership with HIAS as evidence supporting an age-old anti-Semitic myth that Jewish people have control of the world and sinister intentions to weaken or eliminate white Christians. [The shooter’s] posts on social media in the weeks preceding the shooting broadcast his fear of “white genocide” at the hands of non-white Americans and immigrants in a plot masterminded by Jews.

Explosions of anti-Semitic violence like the Tree of Life shooting can sometimes appear to come out of the blue. And many people reference only the Holocaust in Hitler’s Germany when discussing anti-Semitic violence.

But in reality, anti-Semitism functions as a system of oppression that goes beyond these violent acts. Understanding the pattern of discrimination against Jews is a crucial step toward processing the trauma of violent incidents like the one that occurred at Tree of Life.

...Ben Case, an activist and Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Pitt, has studied and written extensively on how anti-Semitism functions in relation to other systems of oppression.

“A lot of us assume that because we understand other forms of racism that anti-Semitism is kind of like that but not as bad… it’s actually just different,” he said. “Jews don’t fit well into the frameworks that we use to understand race and racism.” As a result, “we end up trying to shoehorn the Jewish experience into” existing categories like ‘white’ and ‘non-white,’ when neither is accurate. “That sort of lack of fitting in either camp is part and parcel to the way Jewish identity has developed in an anti-Semitic system.”

The nature of anti-Semitism is unique compared to other forms of oppression, such as anti-black racism, in at least two ways. According to scholars studying it, anti-Semitism functions cyclically and also by pushing Jews into an intermediate position between the ruling class and other oppressed groups.

The cyclical pattern of anti-Semitism is defined by recurring explosions of anti-Semitic violence followed by periods of perceived safety. Those safe periods allow some Jews to accrue real but limited privilege in between heightened anti-Semitic violence.

Unlike anti-Semitism, anti-black racism functions through a fixed racial hierarchy that constantly enacts physical, economic, political and spiritual violence against black people. There are no “safe periods” during which this systemic racism seems to disappear. (To be sure, some Jewish people are black and may experience both levels of prejudice.)

Some Jewish people say anti-Semitism’s cyclical pattern inflicts a state of constant low-grade anxiety.

...Dafna Bliss, a 25-year-old social worker who is Jewish and living in Squirrel Hill [explains,] “No matter how well things seem to be doing, the Jewish community never feels completely secure. There’s always this little inkling, this little seed of fear.”

In contrast to anti-black racism, which situates black people at the bottom of a fixed racial hierarchy, anti-Semitism allows Jewish people some amount of power and privilege over others.

Historian Aurora Levins Morales writes in her essay on the subject: “The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of those at the top.”

The dynamic of Jewish people as an intermediary between marginalized groups and the white ruling class still exists today and can be seen in the history of redlining. “Because of racist economic policies like redlining you get Jews becoming landlords in a lot of poor neighborhoods,” Case said.

...As author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in an essay on Jews and redlining in Chicago, many Jewish property owners took this opportunity to rent to black families whose housing options were otherwise severely limited. Some Jewish landlords were kind and helpful, and others were oppressive and manipulative. Regardless of their behavior as landlords, Jewish people were only permitted to have power over black people because of the confluence of structural anti-Semitism and anti-black racism.

...Christian vilification of Jews as heretical nonbelievers and “Christ-killers” became institutionalized in European Christendom. The construction of the “Jew as enemy” trope took on a supernatural component as the medieval European Catholic Church began to teach that Jews were united with the devil in his quest to destroy Christ and Christians. To spread that message, Christians often relied on specific stereotypes and myths to illustrate Jews’ supposed spiritual corruption.

One of the most well-known negative stereotypes is that of the greedy Jew.

Jews are often seen as financially untrustworthy or “good with money,” whether that be for good or ill. Negative representations of Jewish people that emphasized greed and corruption have followed Jews throughout centuries of transcontinental migrations, making Jewish communities more vulnerable to violence.

Historians argue that anti-Jewish stereotypes like this one are the result of structural anti-Semitism. In other words, they believe anti-Semitic laws and societies created conditions that pushed Jewish people into financial work and then punished them for it.

The Catholic Church taught that money-lending was a sin and tax-collecting distasteful. Therefore, in the faith-based societies of the Middle Ages, only non-Christians were permitted to lend money or collect taxes. As a result of laws and restrictions that funneled Jews into work as money lenders and tax collectors, among other professions, Jewish communities gained financial expertise.

Later laws that barred Jews from specific professions and land ownership kept Jewish people employed in work that was undesirable to the church and ruling elites, but nevertheless essential to Christian states.

...The example of the greedy Jew stereotype shows how anti-Semitic laws pushed European Jews into the intermediate position described by Morales, where some were allowed to prosper if they managed the taxpayers on behalf of those in power. The dynamic put them in a position vulnerable to scapegoating and violence.

“Jews bec[a]me this face of capitalism,” Clarke said, and that “can create a discourse [among] more marginalized people that Jews are the ones oppressing them.”

In this situation, Clarke explained, the ruling class is “rendered invisible by the visibility of Jews,” which sets the stage for Jews to be blamed for the economic misfortune of others.

The stereotypes are often mobilized before and during periods of sustained anti-Semitic violence to blame Jewish people for the exploitation of the masses. The Third Reich, for example, disseminated vast amounts of anti-Jewish propaganda, often in educational materials for children, that emphasized anti-Semitic lies like “The God of the Jews is money.”...

[Read the entire piece at PublicSource.]

[readyaiminquire]

Not my president? - Understanding charisma.

Note: While I’m reworking this blog’s format, I wanted first to finish a planned series of posts on charisma that I began publishing a while back. Rather than making it a series, I figured I might well play around with a long-form format instead. This post will re-hash some of the information from the earlier post, but this time I promise it will actually reach a conclusion!

With US election campaigns in full swing, and with Democrats hoping to oust Trump from the Oval Office, the question of how Trump won at all has re-emerged. After four chaotic years, no-one Blue would want another four. Despite a laundry list of failures, scandals, and broken promises, will Trump be able to galvanise enough voters – again? Though I am by no means an expert on US politics, I feel that one area that a lot of pundits and commentators have failed to consider is that of his charisma. At the end of the day, it is Trump’s charismatic leadership that allowed him to be elected in the first place - and bear with me on this! We must really begin to look and deconstruct charisma to get to the heart of it all. Make no mistake, charisma serves a fundamentally important function within any democratic system – they would not be able to operate without it. As oxymoronic as it might sound, charismatic leadership is not reserved for the despotic, but it is a process we all engage with.

Who are our charismatic leaders? We think of Gaddafi, Stalin, the Kims in North Korea, or indeed the Ayatollahs in Iran – alongside questionable undercurrents of fooling the masses, abusing one’s power, and the creeping, assured emergence of ever more oppression. Charisma’s negative political baggage, however, doesn’t really help us to understand what it functionally is. So let’s shed all judgement, positive or negative, and instead look at charisma as a process. German sociologist Max Weber succinctly defined charisma as

“a certain quality of an individual person by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men”

In other words, charisma is a sort-of otherworldly quality that sets you apart from the masses. Authority is derived from charismatic qualities. Unlike other forms of authority, such as legal-rational authority (which relies on some sort of legal code, such as, a constitution) or traditional power (where authority is derived from something outside of the system itself, like the divine right to rule), charismatic authority comes from the very simple fact that people want to follow you.

It’s quite evident that Weber effectively sees charisma as some innate and mystical power – some sort of magic you have that makes people want to follow you. So, let’s look at Weber’s definition from a different perspective. Let’s consider charisma as something you do, rather than something you have. Charisma must always be the result of a set of rhetorical actions intended to convince the ‘common man’ that the charismatic person is indeed not common. Through such conviction, the ‘common man’ becomes a willing follower. In his book How to do things with words, J. L. Austin outlines that there are two different kinds of rhetorical actions: referential and performative. Referential actions simply describe the world, which means that it is either right or wrong. Performative actions, on the other hand, doesn’t describe anything at all and therefore cannot be right or wrong, merely successful or unsuccessful. To shamelessly steal an example from Alexei Yurchuk:

“If one makes an oath under appropriate conditions, while internally not intending to keep it, the oath is not made any less powerful in the eyes of those who accept it as such”.

Assuming you accept the above, charisma as something performed has some broad implications in the real world. But to make sense of that, we need to look at the typical Western democratic system.

Democracy comes with an awkward promise: that all people are created equal, and that the whole system is run by the people and for the people, while at the same time requiring elected hierarchies and leaders to effectively function. In other words, democracy only works because we’re willingly giving up our sovereignty to the system – something which, in most situations, might be perceived as deeply undemocratic. This tension, obviously, needs to be resolved somehow. The relationship between the State and the leader is roughly analogous with the relationship between power and authority. The State has power, and without diving far too deep into Foucault, power is inherently relational rather than what we might classify as material. Put simply, it emerges from social structures. In the case of the State, this relational power is very clear when you consider the different experiences and interactions different people – minorities, the homeless, immigrants, the privileged, and so on – have with its representatives. They all have a very different relationship to the State as an entity (anthropologists Veena Das and Deborah Poole refer to this as the ‘centre and the peripheries’, arguing that the best place to ‘see’ the State is the border at which its power breaks down). 

In the same way, the State as an entity is also immaterial – we only interact with representatives of the State (civil servants, politicians, police officers) or we see the outcome of these representatives enforcing the power of the State upon us (laws, regulation, taxes). Authority, on the other hand, is effectively the ability to ‘direct’ power. The leader of the State relates in the same way to its structure, coming to embody the system as a whole, while the structure itself maintains the overarching power relations. 

It is commonly understood that states only ‘work’ as a concept if the people within them act as if they do, something akin to the thought experiment of ‘would war end if all soldiers refused to fight?’. The leader, as the embodiment of the whole structure, begins to play a key role in maintaining this illusion. Much work has been done on this idea of ‘two bodies’. Alexei Yurchuk wrote that this set-up is traditionally very common among kings and other monarchs – in some cases very literally, with dolls being made of the monarch upon their deaths to quite literally give them a second body. The bodies a king inhabited were their ‘individual’ body, i.e. the person itself, and the second being that of the ‘office’ of Kingship, a divine-like body. It is this second regal body, in full regalia upon their throne, surrounded by servants and gold and pomp and circumstance, who is truly the king; the individual person will always simply be the person. This process is largely the same within the modern democratic state: there is the elected individual – the person – then there is the leader (president, prime minister, etc.), the embodiment of authority. 

It is here we must return to what I wrote above about voluntarily submitting. When imagined, the idea of a leader as an embodiment of authority immediately sounds inherently un-democratic; non-democratic at best. It is this tension, alluded to previously, that charisma serves to reconcile. 

It may sound contradictory, but in these cases charisma functions to dictate how – for example – a President can behave. It is what causes world leaders to attend particular events, or why they partake in completely-natural-totally-not-staged photo-ops. It’s not necessarily because they want to, or indeed because they think it’s fooling anyone, but rather because it is what the system requires the leader to do. It is, in other words, charismatic performance. Even more importantly, it is not the individual which fulfils the requirement, but rather them in the function as President. It is their second body, so to speak, which is having their photos taken beside some national memorial. This leads us to the crux of the whole situation: returning to the issue of democracy and leadership. We the people need to willingly submit ourselves to the leader’s authority. This is often done through voting. However, to effectively convince people, the leader must not only follow a particular agenda, philosophy, or give the correct promises, but they must also follow along in the ‘dance’. They must act statesmanlike (stateswomanlike?), to fulfil what we can in practical terms call ‘the minimum amount’ of charisma needed to be considered for leadership at all. In this sense, all democratic leaders are (somewhat) charismatic, by necessity.

Nonetheless, this of course highlights that charisma isn’t binary, despite often being spoken of in terms of haves and have-nots. Instead, we should imagine charisma as a spectrum: two people can be charismatic, and one more so than the other. Indeed, it also means that charisma is individually understood, that is to say, that different people are differently charismatic to different people. Despite the initial Weberian definition, it isn’t a magic spell. It is a performance, a dance, which functions as a safety-vale in Western political systems, a means to reconcile what is seemingly a fundamental contradiction. 

This, of course, has very real-world implications. Let’s turn to an example. A rather thinly veiled metaphor, if you will, but such a reduction of an (obvious) example can help give some grounding – while playing with some nuance. You have Mr Red and Ms Blue, two presidential candidates in a totally hypothetical country. Ms Blue is a well-established politician, with a strong pedigree of various political posts. She’s experienced, educated, well-spoken, intelligent, and internationally respected. Mr Red, a newcomer on the stage, has no background in politics. He is radically outspoken, blunt even, criticised for his lack of experience, his limited rhetoric. His background is as a somewhat successful businessman, a stereotype he fully embraces. He’s divisive, to say the least. I’m sure you’re seeing where I’m going with this.

Within this completely hypothetical country, you have a traditionally large working class, which used to be strong in the past but has since declined as production jobs moved overseas. The perception among this group is that they have been abandoned by the powers that be – abandoned for several generations. They feel they’ve been systematically shut out of politics, unable to make themselves heard (lack of education, money, and so on), while the politicians – across the board – have continued toeing the same line. The established body politic, like Ms Blue, doesn’t much represent, let alone understand, them. Stage right: Enter Mr Red, down a gilded escalator. His rhetoric is outrageous, his promises ridiculous, his beliefs morally bankrupt. No-one believes what he says, not really. But it doesn’t matter. Mr Red wins anyway. He wins every time. Why? Because he dances to the tune of these otherwise marginalised voters. He speaks to them, makes promises for them, and whether he intends to keep these promises or not, or indeed whether he is expected to keep them, is irrelevant. At this stage, it was no longer about his promises but rather because he acted to this otherwise downtrodden group as the State, the leader, is expected to act: he listened to their issues, spoke to them directly, in a language they could connect with, made them a part of his wider political discourse, stepped out of the ivory tower, extended his hand as a candidate for the Presidency. He at this stage fulfilled the minimum amount of necessary charisma to even be considered as someone to follow. To counterweight this, Ms Blue maintained her distance and stance, equating herself with previous ‘establishment’ politicians, and as a result became unelectable: not because of having a worse programme, or lack of political merit, but rather because she became someone impossible for these voters to follow at all. She could not have been voted for, because she didn’t dance at all.

Charisma, though a funny thing, something we’ve all heard of and often instinctively see and understand, operates in not only a perhaps more complex way when dissected, but also with much more material force. In a sense, society as we know it requires a particular ebb and flow of charisma. But even then, it is not as random or magical as often believed; instead, it is simply the result of certain actions, of convincing people that you are indeed charismatic. Weber throughout most of his career maintained that charisma cannot be learned, that it was something you were born with, though he might have changed his mind on this, as an unfinished paper (sadly only a collection of notes) showed that he intended to write a paper on learning charisma after all. This isn’t the topic here, though, but rather to understand charisma as a social performance, a dance, which lies at the heart of the Western political system and discourse. It is a force rarely considered, not often analysed, and if even invoked, done more so to paint a mystical picture of the person in question. 

The funny thing, of course, is that all leaders are charismatic, and necessarily so. Some do it better than others, of course, but without it democracy as we know it wouldn’t be able to function. Without charisma, we would all simply vote for ourselves. 

 Selected bibliography / recommended reading:

Austin, J. L. 1955. How to do things with Words (J. O. Urmson & M. Sbisàeds ). Oxford University Press. 

Das, V. & Poole, D. (eds.) 2004 'Anthropology in the Margins of the State' Santa Fe: Scool of American Research Press; Oxford: James Currey Ltd. 

Hansen, T. & Stepputat, F. 2006 'Sovereignty revisited' Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 35 

Weber, M. 1946 [1919] 'Politics as a vocation'. In Gerth, H.H. and Wright Mills, C. (trans. & eds.) Max Weber: Essays in Sociology pp. 77-128. New York: Oxford University Press

Yurchak, A. 2003 ‘The Soviet hegemony of form’ in ‘Everything was forever, until it was no more’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(3): 480-510

Yurchak, A. 2015 'Bodies of Lenin' in Representations vol. 2(2015) pp.116-157 215