seems like a lot of yall want enbies to be your sexy little secret that only the Wokest can date
“do you vow to self interrogate all your feelings toward nonbinary people, to only talk about them after we have deemed them non problematic, and to acknowledge that your attraction to nonbinary people cannot be a determinant of your orientation?”
“i do.”
“you may now date the enby.”
if you havent noticed im pissed off about this bizarre gatekeeping of peoples attraction to nonbinary people that has sprung up in the last few months
how weird is it that this all originates in hatred of ace people
aphobes will make the wildest, most convoluted arguments to try to support their aphobia
they dont even try to base their arguments in reality they just make shit up that supports their aphobia and insist that this is something lgbt people agree upon
#i noticed but i didn’t know it was related to their aphobia x.x well fuck
so heres the short version of what happened:
“being aro/ace doesnt inherently make you not straight!”
“attraction to no one does not fit into heteronormative ideals.”
“the ONLY THING that can make your orientation non straight is same gender attraction.”
“well some bi people arent attracted to their own gender, yet are still attracted to multiple genders because…. there are more than two of those….”
“saying that youre bi because youre attracted to nonbinary people is FETISHIZATION! no, what attraction to enbies really means is that youre attracted to whatever binary gender i want to associate then with”
as you can see, around that last point their argument kinda… turned into a hot mess. not that it wasnt already but it got really obvious there. but yeah if you dig deep enough it came from exclusionists trying to justify their aphobia
The other interestingly awful thing about this is, it pretty directly maps to radfem gender protectionism, i.e. it uses the same logical construct:
“Men are so powerful in contrast to women that we must shield women from making their own relationship decisions. We should be resigned to centering masculinity and not try to fight it, but also criticize all men in relationships with women as being inherently predatory or creepy, no matter what their partners say about them.”
Search and replace:
“Cis people are so powerful in contrast to nonbinary people that we must shield enbies from making their own relationship decisions. We should be resigned to centering binary genders and not try to fight it, but also criticize all cis people in relationships with enbies as being inherently predatory or creepy, no matter what their partners say about them.”
The other interesting thing about this is that if you try to argue with people who are saying these things, their example will universally be a specific example involving a “straight man” and a female-aligned nonbinary person, as if no other types of cis people or nb people existed to them. They scratched the serial numbers off, but they didn’t scratch that deep.
As a side note, this also tracks with some of Umberto Eco’s observations on fascist rhetoric, in which the enemy/scapegoat is portrayed simultaneously as all-powerful and weak/foolish.
Earlier this month, European right-to-repair activists sounded the alarm,
warning that the model right-to-repair legislation that had been
proceeding through the EU legislative process had been hijacked by
lobbyists who had gutted its core protections and were poised to make
repairs even harder in the EU.
But Europeans rallied, and now they seem to have the upper hand.
Pressure groups like Germany’s Schraube locker!? (Screwloose!?) have
organised mass write-in campaigns and other ways of lobbying EU
officials, to good effect. This week, they scored a victory over
refrigerator design, securing an amendment to the EU’s pending Eco
Design and Energy Label Directives (where the right-to-repair rules are
enshrined) that will require refrigerator manufacturers to design their
appliances to be repairable with everyday tools, and to supply their
customers with spare parts and manuals so they can keep their property
in good working order.
It could be a model for many kinds of devices, a return to the Maker
Manifesto’s call for “screws not glue” and “user-replaceable parts.”
At the vanguard of the movement are people from ex-Soviet states, where
deprivation was the mother of innovation, so that thrifty, ingenious
home repairs were the key to human thriving. This ethic is also key
today, if we are to reduce our material consumption, carbon footprint,
and complicity in the human rights abuses committed in the name of
securing the conflict minerals in our devices.
Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.
If I ask if a food is spicy at all, and you reply “No, not at all! You can barely feel it!” then that is a contradiction. It is spicy. It may not be very spicy, or even moderately spicy, but it’s still spicy. Please just tell me that straight-out.
I know there’s a good chance you’re mocking me in your head when I say that I cannot handle spices at all, and that even the mildest of sauces, that you insist are barely there, are going to hurt, because I’m mocking me too. I know I’ve got a child’s palate when it comes to spicy food. I know it’s almost laughable, how badly I react to even table pepper in more than the most minuscule of doses.
But if I ask “is this spicy,” and you answer “not at all,” and then proceed to tell me that it’s mild, then I will still consider it too spicy.
If I ask “is this spicy at all” and you say “no” while knowing that it is, just a tiny bit, because you can’t imagine anyone reacting, then please don’t be offended when I take one bite and then throw it out, because I asked for a reason.
It’s a dumb thing to talk about, but… yeah. Just do your cannot-handle-spices friends a favor and be honest when they ask. Mild is still a level of spice.
(This goes doubly for strangers, because if they have a digestive problem like, IDK, ulcers or something, then spicy food can irritate the stomach lining further and cause extreme pain. Some people claim that capsaicin can be used to treat ulcers, but you know… just play it safe, yeah?)
Let people be babies about spices! It doesn’t hurt you any.
MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY
That aside.
I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome.
1) Canned chicken and beef
looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins.
2) Fancy nut butters
Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)
3) Canned or packaged tuna
You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend.
4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like)
Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry.
5) Shelf-stable juice
This is one people never think of! But if you show up with a bunch of (preferably reduced sugar stuff) bottles of juice at my door, oh man, you are gonna get so many check mark and okay hand emoticons. This stuff is great for kids, and it doesn’t require refrigeration until it’s opened, so it works great for food drives.
But seriously, give money
And it’s way better food, too, anything you get prepackaged has A TON of sugar and/or salt in it…collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done
Yoooooo heads up for those of you with kids, I know this time of year schools start holding canned food drives so keep this in mind if you’re able to give.
collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done .
Superheroes that are like “if we kill them we’re just as bad as they are uwu” ? Micro dick energy
The only exception is Aang, whose whole “I’m not gonna kill him if i can find another way” thing is less false moral equivalency and more “I’m twelve and I have been through way too much bullshit this year to add ‘commit my first murder’ to the list.”
I do respect superheroes who don’t kill, and I really think “we’re as bad as they are if we do it” is a terrible oversimplification of why someone would come to that moral conclusion.
Three reasons why a hero might not kill:
1. They are not granted by their society a “licence to kill.” Many (not all) people accept that a soldier or a judge might need to kill a wrongdoer in the course of their duties. Those people (should) act under strict rules and processes to determine when a death is just. A society, to be peaceful, usually functions under a guarantee that people won’t on their own judgement decide to off people. Vigilantes don’t usually have state-sanctioned authority, but they do rely on public goodwill to be counted as heroes and not menaces or even villains. A hero, especially an independent, self-proclaimed one, may lack the authority or judgement to serve as executioner. Most just societies require a trial before delivering a sentence.
2. They don’t need to. Paradoxically, or maybe not so much so, the stronger a hero is, the less they need to kill. One of the most common defenses for a murder is “self defense,” the idea that the person making the plea was in so much danger from the deceased that killing them was justifiable. But once you’re a swordsman swift enough to cut bullets or a muscleman strong enough to lift trucks, who’s that big a threat? As your control over your power and your ability to master an opponent both increase (and barring completely wild or uncontrolled abilities, these two are very linked) the easier it becomes to hold back, to subdue with the minimal amount of damage and to render even the worst villains neutralized without going nuclear.
3. The power to kill is bad for their mental health.Not everyone can perform even a “just” killing with a clean conscience. A hero might fear the trauma of killing, and seek to avoid the damage. Or a hero might introspect, and realize that, should they kill today, tomorrow the choice will be easier. Killing an opponent, rather than subduing them, is often the easy way out, and a hero who comes to rely on that solution might find themselves killing more and more, Even if killing isn’t addictive, a hero might still fear that mindset.
Now, a common version of this problem is Batman, who wouldn’t kill the Joker even if the Joker is at maximum edge, dealing out huge terrorist acts and body counts. The best reason for Batman not to kill him isn’t “I am as bad as the Joker if I kill,” but more, “I am a man who uses superheroism as a trauma coping mechanism, and if I start committing extrajudicial killings my mental state and my loose alliance with the police will both deteriorate.”
THANK. YOU.
4) There’s specific ethics/religious beliefs/cultural values at work and people have the right to have different ideas about those things. See, for example, how often in anime you get resolutions that aren’t about killing your enemy. The idea that killing is the only valid solution to problems is actually very extreme and nobody is obligated to agree with it or promote it in their stories.
5) A hero is being written as aspiring to or embodying really high ideals because they’re a hero and heroic literature is about people who move outside the bounds of the ordinary. It doesn’t mean everyone has to walk around with that level of extreme commitment to whatever their ideals are. So they’re more forgiving or whatever… it’s not the end of the world or an insult to anyone who isn’t so forgiving.
As someone who can’t pick up on that kind of stuff without it being spelled out for me, I would be incredibly interested in description of how exactly Clarke leverages those things. What stereotypes is she playing off of?
So @anorthernskyatdawn is the one who does Four Nations stuff (and has actual real-life experience on the complications of British identities) and therefore is much more qualified to discuss this than me, but I’ll give it my best shot and he can hop on afterwards!
I’m mostly working with 19th century concepts of “proper Englishness” here, both because that’s what’s relevant for jsmn, and because that’s what I happen to know. Anyway, “proper Englishness” was pretty narrowly restricted by the upper-class English in this period: a “properly English” person was middle or upper-class (you get a lot of weirdness with working-class people and servants being somehow faintly foreign in 19th century lit), white, southern, and, of course, English (not “Celtic”). Strange and Norrell have rich and white taken care of, but it’s the latter two properties I’m interested in.
I should back up the “northern England isn’t REAL england” thing a bit: here’s a page from a book about Northern English linguistics that explains it well. You can also see this in a lot of period novels: in North and South particularly, the two regions are portrayed as almost literally different countries (”they don’t understand our northern ways blah blah blah”). This is in our actual world, so imagine how much greater this split in identity must be in a world where the North was in fact an actual different political entity for another three hundred years or so.
The stereotypes I’m working with are (and I should emphasize that they’re complete crap really like all stereotypes are, I don’t agree with them or anything, but they’re pervasive in literature):
-”“celtic”” people are fanciful, dreamy, romantic, creative, and stuck in the past” (this is a sort of pan-Celtic stereotype that the 19th century English liked to apply to Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, etc folk all alike)
-people from the North, at this time lately the site of the Industrial Revolution, hardheaded, practical, mercenary, and fixated on the modern and the future to the destruction or exclusion of the past*.
So, we’ve got Strange and Norrell:
-Strange is energetic, mercurial, his name literally means, well, strange, and his approach to magic is highly charismatic, highly romantic. He also spent half his childhood in Scotland and the other half on the actual border with Wales. Although he doesn’t seem vested in claiming a Celtic identity, that wouldn’t necessarily prevent these stereotypes being applied to him because English folks thought culture was like, in your blood or some xenophobic nonsense. And he wants to bring back the Raven King and his magic, and reopen communication with Faerie.
-Norrell hates mystical nonsense and thinks that magic should be modern – I know we think of him as old-fashioned, but “modern magic for the modern age” is a thing he actually utters. He hates the Raven King, he wants to erase the legacy of the Aureates as far as possible, and thinks fairy-magic is a grave mistake. Also, his name means “from the North” as far as Moll can find. And, I mean, he is A Northerner in his own mind as well as others’. I think he tries to downplay it for the sake of safety (he’s much more aware of his uneasy status than Strange is) but it’s there: cf “Childermass and Norrell’s respect for Vinculus would have increased a little, knowing that he was like them, a Northerner.”**
I don’t want to make too much of this, I don’t think it’s a major theme of the book or anything, I just think it’s quite possibly another thing she plays with very subtly to emphasize the differences both between Strange and Norrell and between the two magicians and the London society they are living in for most of the story.
*Moll says there’s another “backwards and provincial” contrast to the latter, but ask him about how they interact, this is part of his Thing, he calls it Thornton versus Heathcliff; this is partly a class thing, so Norrell being rich plays on the forward-thinking. You could do something interesting with the difference between Norrell, a rich man, and Childermass, a working class man, ‘s view of the Raven King and his role in magic, but I digress.
**interesting that Vinculus was conceived in Wapping so he was almost certainly born and raised in the environs of London, but because his father was from Yorkshire, he is still A Northerner to a degree significant enough to count to both Childermass and Norrell, so that’s more “the North is another country” stuff – by analogy if your dad is Spanish but you’re born and raised in England, you’re still going to be thought of as least partly Spanish, probably.
I’m going to give a real expansion of some of these things later once I’ve had a think but I want to share this, from the opening of Matthew Arnold’s On The Study of Celtic Literature from 1867, emphasies mine:
“But, putting aside the charm of the Liverpool steamboats, perhaps the
view, on this side, a little dissatisfies one after a while;the horizon
wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the coast wants verdure, and has a
too bare austereness and aridity. At last one turns round and looks
westward. Everything is changed. Over the mouth of the Conway and its
sands is the eternal softness and mild light of the west; the low line
of themystic Anglesey, and the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great
group of Carnedd Llewelyn and Carnedd David and their brethren fading
away, hill behind hill, in an aërial haze, make the horizon; between the
foot of Penmaenmawr and the bending coast of Anglesey, the sea, a
silver stream, disappears one knows not whither. On this side,
Wales,—Wales, where the past still lives, where every place has its
tradition, every name its poetry, and where the people, the genuine
people, still knows this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives
with it, and clings to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the
other side, the invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has long ago
forgotten his. And the promontory where Llandudno stands is the very
centre of this tradition; it is Creuddyn, the bloody city, where every stone has its story; there, opposite its decaying rival,
Conway Castle, is Diganwy, not decaying but long since utterly decayed,
some crumbling foundations on a crag top and nothing more; Diganwy,
where Mael-gwyn shut up Elphin, and where Taliesin came to free him.
Below, in a fold of the hill, is Llan-rhos, the church of the marsh,
where the same Mael-gwyn, a British prince of real history, a bold and
licentious chief, the original, it is said, of Arthur’s Lancelot, shut
himself up in the church to avoid the Yellow Plague, and peeped out
through a hole in the door, and saw the monster and died. Behind among
the woods, is Gloddaeth, the place of feasting, where the bards
were entertained; and farther away, up the valley of the Conway towards
Llanrwst, is the Lake of Ceirio-nydd and Taliesin’s grave.
ETA: I’m not just leaving this quote hanging – I am going to talk about this properly in a bit when I have spoons and have ceased misplacing my glasses, but I wanted this here because imo it’s important context for Strange
So, I have spoons now and I got my glasses.
@bookhobbit has been very thorough here, and I just want
to fill in a few things that might help with the full weight of what Clarke is
doing here.
They mentioned my “Thornton vs Heathcliff” thing, and I’d like
to expand on that quickly before going on to apply that to JSMN.
First, to start with Heathcliff. Our narrator, Lockwood, casts
Cathy and Heathcliff in just about the most Gothic-Romance roles he can manage,
and by doing so, locks (ha) the North out of narratives of modernity. This is,
for the London reader, armchair tourism; this is looking at the “isolated
peasantry” of Europe on the Grand Tour except Europe is shit right now (then)
so we’re going North instead. Heathcliff and Cathy are being cast as part of
that isolated peasantry even though they’re landed, albeit poorish, gentry.
Heathcliff, to Lockwood, is a historical kind of gentleman;
he’s not your modern type like the Lintons over the moor. He belongs to another
time; he’s distant and moody and Gothic*, his house is old-fashioned, etc etc.
There’s very few, if any, references to Northern modernity
in WH, apart from the fact that as I say the Lintons are the modern foil to the
Gothic and thus historical Earnshaws (Heathcliff is an Earnshaw fight me).
The Earnshaws are not working class, but they are rural and
not especially rich; it’s not quite right
to say Childermass is a Heathcliff-type or that the North of WH is also
Childermass’s North. It is however important to note that Clarke pulls on the
same things (Ann Radcliffe) that Bronte is pulling on with Heathcliff. Clarke
pulls on Radcliffe to Gothicise and thus historicise Childermass (thus putting
him in the category of “backwards and provincial”, even though he (and Heathcliff)
are absolutely not either of those things), and Bronte pulls on Radcliffe to Gothicise
and thus historicise Heathcliff.
Anyway. This isn’t actually supposed to be an essay on the
similarities between Childermass and Heathcliff. What I’m trying to show here
is that the North is romanticised, by Lockwood, into being a place where, to
quote Arnold, the past still lives.
This is something still going on in JSMN, which is obvious
by the fact that Norrell has to loudly and repeatedly reject it and Childermass,
your archetypal Gothic Hero who looks like one would expect a magician to look,
is connected to Heathcliff – in whom the past still lives.
The Thornton part of this, on the other hand, is that aspect
of the North that’s progress at all costs, industry, destruction of the past***,
etc, etc. While Heathcliff is poorish landed gentry-by-adoption, Thornton is “dragged
myself up by my bootstraps once-working-class/(probably actually lower-middle)
nouveau riche”. It’s also important to note that this still doesn’t give you
complete access to Southernness or “True Englishness”, because most of N+S is
spent with Thornton having No Idea how to access “True Englishness”.
So what I’m aiming at with this Heathcliff vs Thornton
dynamic of 1800s Northern identity is that Norrell is on very thin ice. Magic
is a thing that belongs to the Heathcliff type – the Celticised North, let’s
say, yr hen ogledd – but Norrell has dressed it up in Thornton’s clothes.
The ultimate tragedy of identity here is that, because of
the gauche, nouveau riche implications Thornton’s clothes, magic is never going
to be fully accepted when it’s coming from a Northerner. It’s either backwards and
provincial or gauche and embarrassing.
This is where Strange comes in. Now, Strange is a stranger
in quite a few ways, as Book noted. He’s half Scottish and from the Welsh
Marches – but he also has access to Southern, London-based Cultural Englishness
and is thus a stranger to the North as well.****
The access to Cultural Englishness is something else that
shows up Strange’s identity as tangled just like Norrell’s is. According to the
wiki, Ashfair is conceivably medieval – and thus more rooted than Hurtfew
(although Hurtfew is built on very old ground). This suggests an older, more
rooted family – and thus not remotely mistakable for nouveau riche. This gives
him the cultural capital to get away with Doing Magic in the Celtic Way – especially as he can dress it up in the
language of the literary elite.
Norrell, through the twin identities of the North, cannot
access the elite. Strange, despite his access to and use of Arnold-esque Celtic
stereotype, cannot escape the elite.
*Important to note that Gothicism at this time drew heavily on
medievalism (that’s why we call it Gothic); if the Heights makes you think of a
medieval manor house and Heathcliff as a potentially warring local lord from 1500,**
that’s intentional
**See my theory about how the constantly interlocking names
in WH are meant to evoke the sense that life there is, and ever was, cyclical.
The house was built in 1500 by Hareton Earnshaw, and Hareton is also the young man
at the end of the text who is the leader, with young Cathy, of the new
generation.
***Please see the Jacobites in JSMN as an analogy for the
Luddites. Smashing machinery that destroyed your way of life 5eva. Also see how Luddite has become a byword for
backwards, provincial resister of progress, and thus falls into the Heathcliff
camp
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