Day: August 22, 2017

wetwareproblem:

the-ace-of-weasels:

the-ace-of-weasels:

I’ve seen a few people say on occasion that the fact aces feel “relieved” when they realize they’re ace is “telling” and imply it means being ace isn’t so bad.

let me tell you a thing.

I went years without one of my worst chronic illnesses being properly diagnossed. the day I got a formal diagnosis I felt relieved.

I felt relieved even tho I knew it still meant even with good insurance to help pay for the best treatment of it I’d still be dealing with debilitating levels of pain and fatigue. knowing that with my shitty insurance I would not be able to get the proper treatment to minimize it as much as possible. knowing that doctors don’t even know enough about what causes it let alone know how to fix it. knowing they know so little about it compared to something better studied that they’re still finding stuff out about the symptoms of it. knowing that some doctors and nurses still claim it’s a psychological condition. knowing I am going to live my whole life in moderate to severe pain and exhausted and never be able to live a normal life.

I felt relieved because I had a name for it, because that gave me a source of support. I could use the internet to communicate with other people who had it and get support and knowledge of their experiences with it from them. because it made me feel less alone.

that relief didn’t make what I deal with any better, it was because it gave me a frame of reference, made me feel less alone, and helped me find support from other people who experience the same thing.

I implore you people who think the fact asexuals feel relieved when they realize they’re asexual to think on this.

since this has started happening again I think it fair to reblog this and remind people this same “the fact aces feel relieved when they realize they’re ace means they’re not LGBT+” BS was already pulled over a year ago and they’re just recycling an old tune.

I felt relieved when I realized that I was actually trans. I felt relieved when I realized that I had BPD, ADHD, autism.

We felt relieved when we realized that we are a system.

Relief happens ebcause “holy shit there’s a name for this and people like me and I’m not alone!” It has literally nothing to do with oppression.

Also just remembering one conversation not that long after I moved here, where some of the odd looks I got made much more sense after I found out later on that generic “beans” generally refers to the canned baked kind here. As in, pork and beans minus the weird fat chunks on the US market, not the more seasoned kind. (As compared to “pulses”, which I was vaguely aware did refer to beans/lentils, but had never encountered in common use before.)

Yes, I suppose very bland canned baked beans could serve as a cheapish source of vegetarian nutrition. No, I have never relied as heavily on that option as the person I was talking to probably assumed based on the strange looks.

I haven’t yet managed to pick up that trash scattered around by our foxy visitor, and rebag the one they ripped into.

That is indeed probably one of those “Wait! Don’t do that, you’re going to hurt yourself!!!” things these days. But, I still feel pretty bad that it hasn’t gotten done yet.

Both because ugly unsanitary mess, and because I don’t want him to have to come in from work and take up that slack before the bags can go our for collection in the morning. Especially with the litterbox to wrestle already.

cosmic-aria:

nicatine:

some time in my first month of living in england i was making myself some chicken for dinner and my flatmate walked in and said “oh, you’re making tea?” and i don’t remember ever being so fucking confused in my entire life i just stared at her and said “no, it’s chicken” because back then i didn’t know that the english can apparently substitute every single god damn word with “tea” and for a second i thought my flatmate considered chicken a fucking beverage

when i first moved to australia the first thing i notice, as a kid who is fresh off the plane, is that all of the candy is different, there is a chocolate bar called Flake that i found pretty dang good. i adjust pretty quickly because hey, simple enough right?

so then one day my friend suggests we go to a fish and chips shop, and since i have never been to one before, i was like yeah sure ok you just order because i don’t know what im doing. the closest thing to a fish you get in wisconsin is the “mystery fish” on a fish fry friday. so anyway, half way through ordering he is like do you want flake? and i see the box of candy bars on the counter and im like hell yeah i do that is some good shit.

so our number comes up and he goes and collects this parcel of white paper which is smoking hot and which i assume has our chips and as we are leaving i realize there was not a candy bar in sight. so i asked him about the flake and he was like “what? oh, its in with the chips”. to which i reply, aghast, “wont it melt??”

he then proceeds to give me the strangest look i have ever seen and just says “no?????” so we get back home and open up the parcel and im ready to see the grossest chocolate-covered french fried mess and lo and behold, there are two MASSIVE pieces of what appears to be fried fish, like the size of my forearm??? so now im even more flipping confused like WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT??

turns out Flake is chocolate but it is also some kind of shark?? go figure

long story short: for a moment there he thought i was the most bat-shit insane person he had ever met who thought fish melted when exposed to minor heat sources and i thought people in australia liked chocolate shavings on their fries.

Yeah, I’ve gotten a lot grouchier about some of this stuff after too many run-ins with willfully ignorant assholes who have tried to score political points with their buddies by turning me into some kind of straw racist. Based on some atrociously bad (and, yes, frequently xenophobic) assumptions about who they were even dealing with.

Better focus on cleaning your own house first.

The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”.

The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

(via

knowledgeequalsblackpower

)

an interesting article. this tidbit though: “About 40% of the slave owners living in the colonies were women” – this is why I don’t trust white feminist analyses. Even in a time considered to be highly oppressive to “women” (note how that term is never racially designated), white women could and did hold the power of owning Black human lives, at a rate almost equal to white men. 

(via sofriel)

Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean.

That is also very disingenuous. British slavery started in the 17th century in North American colonies, over 150 years before there was a “continental United States”. Virginia was the first permanent English colony in the “New World”, as they kept bragging about when I was in school there. Though, there they initially concentrated on tobacco and some other cash crops which were in high demand back home, rather than on cotton.

Unsurprisingly, there was tons of trade and movement back and forth between the Caribbean, the Chesapeake, and other convenient colonial ports like Charleston and Savannah. Including trade in slaves.

A settler revolt just created a new government entity, and changed who was in control on paper. (I.e., disgruntled wealthy British people starting out, who already had some political power–many of whom ran plantations.) They took over the systems set up under British colonial governance, and just went from there.

The same goes for genocidal policies toward indigenous peoples, after the attempts at “just” using them for slave labor didn’t work out so well. The new US government just took over existing inhumane systems, and ran with them.

The distinction is not that useful. There is no distinction to be made until about 1780. But, this is a popular separation in the UK. And it’s part of a larger pattern of denial.

As Robin Bunce and Paul Field point out:
They add that Britain is consistently portrayed by politicians as being “on the side of the angels” in race relations, and point to the 2007 celebrations of the abolition of the slave trade as an example of how Britain prefers to propagate a myth of itself as “the utopia of civilized fair play”.

I’m glad that the number of (often still-existing) British fortunes made through colonial exploitation and slavery is getting a little more attention recently. But, that didn’t just happen in the Caribbean colonies, and it’s very intellectually dishonest to act like that was the case. It’s frustrating when someone writing more honestly about some of this ugly history prefers to keep up the largely false distinction there.

(via clatterbane)

Reminded of this again, partly because there was indeed no honest distinction until about 1780. The abusive colonial systems that Jefferson and the others used to their benefit–and then took over to run for themselves–were already up and running for over 150 years at that point.

Chattel slavery in British North America went on for more years before the settler revolt than afterwards. That doesn’t get mentioned much anywhere.

(via clatterbane)

Source: tooyoungforthelivingdead

Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next | Afua Hirsch

tranarchist:

One of the obstacles all these abolitionists had to overcome was the
influence of Nelson, who was what you would now call, without
hesitation, a white supremacist. While many around him were denouncing
slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it. Britain’s best known naval
hero – so idealised that after his death in 1805 he was compared to no
less than “the God who made him” – used his seat in the House of Lords
and his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial
rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he
counted among his closest friends.

The reaction in Britain has been, as in the rest of the world, almost entirely condemnatory of neo-Nazis in the US and of its president for failing to denounce them. But when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward. The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised: despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious slaver Edward Colston. When I tweeted this weekend that it’s time we in Britain look again at our own landscape, the reaction was hostile.

Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next | Afua Hirsch

Why is the “historical realism” thing always rape?

sulemania:

jessicalprice:

animatedamerican:

nextyearsgirl:

drst:

darthmelyanna:

drst:

A couple weeks ago The Mary Sue announced they weren’t going to cover “Game of Thrones” any more after yet another female character being brutally raped. The thread is still being invaded by trolls periodically, and there are more than 12,000 comments on the article, which is a site record and probably an internet record. (12K comments because a single website said “We’re not going to recap or promote this show any more.” Baffling.)

Tons of trolls have thrown out the “but THINGS WERE JUST LIKE THAT BACK THEN!” argument ad nauseum. Which is total bullshit, of course. Now with the season finale of “Outlander” (which, spoiler, also included rape) the trolls are coming back.

I just want to ask, why is it whenever producers/directors/writers want to demonstrate “gritty historic realism” it’s ALWAYS RAPE? It’s always sexual violence toward women/girls.

You know what would be gritty historic realism? Dysentery. GoT has battles and armies marching all over the place. You want to show “what things were like back then”? Why aren’t we seeing 500 guys by the side of a road puking and shitting their guts out from drinking contaminated water while the rest of the army straggles along trying to keep going? Or a village getting wiped out by cholera? Or typhus, polio or plague epidemics? 

You want to show what it was like back then for women? Show a woman dying of sepsis from an infection she caught while giving birth. Show a woman coping with ruptured ovarian cysts with nobody know what it is. Breast cancer that the audience will recognize immediately but the characters think is some mark of the devil or some shit.

But no, it’s always rape. And we all know why that is. Because these douchecanoes that do this, though they’ll deny it, think rape is sexy. Because they can’t make a modern set story where women get raped in every god damned episode without being called monsters. So they use “but but historical realism!” to cover their sexism (see “Mad Men”) and misogyny. Then they tell us “That’s just how it was back then!” with the clear implication “Shut the fuck up bitch, because that could be you  and you should be thanking me that it’s not.”

Can we propose a rule for “realistic” historical fiction/fantasy? Twelve graphic cases of dysentery for every one graphic rape?

^^ I like this idea.

Maybe if high fantasy writers and creators weren’t all fucking hacks who’ve been riding JRRT’s dick for the last fifty years and insist on making every single god damn fantasy world they create a boring retread of Middle Earth based on the same three hundred year span of time in four countries of Western Europe they wouldn’t all have to rely on the same garbage logic to justify their garbage misogyny. 

You know, they could deny that they find rape sexy, and they might even believe their own denials.  But the point is that they clearly don’t think of rape as something distasteful enough and disgusting enough to omit.

And you know what, I’m not even gonna insist on the dysentery.  Just this: if you’re going to include rape on the basis of historical accuracy, none of your female characters are allowed to have shaved legs or armpits.  And all of your characters have to have terrible teeth – yellowed and worn and crooked, because nobody’s getting braces or regular visits to the dentist – with at least a few teeth blackened or missing for every character over the age of thirty.

Of course, if your reaction to blackened teeth and hairy armpits is “ugh, no, sure it might be historically accurate but it’s gross, nobody’s going to want to watch that" and you don’t have the exact same reaction to rape, you might want to think about why that is.

Not to mention that some of the societies portrayed, or inspiring similar fantasy settings, actually had STRONGER protections against and consequences for rape than the ones we live in today. 

Accounts from Vikings’ contemporaries recount a lot of raiding, but not a single case of rape. Viking law didn’t treat rape as a property crime, and the penalty for it was outlawry, which was essentially a death sentence. Medieval English law prescribed that rapists be castrated and blinded. And the sagas contain vanishingly few references to rape (and violence against women is usually followed with comeuppance–often death–for the perpetrator). 

TL;DR: History wasn’t one giant rape-fest, and in fact, members of the cultures high fantasy is usually based on may have actually been more disapproving of rape than we are today (imagine trying to pass a bill making rape a capital offense today!). 

These writers include rape because they like writing about rape, not because history dictates it. 

The teeth weren’t really quite as bad as you might think because of less sugar in the diet (except for like the richest and most decadent), though they were a bit more ground down from e.g. the bread containing bits of grit.

Still, to hell with all the rape in fantasy shit, it’s neither accurately historical or interesting.