Harryhenry

there's been a lot of obnoxious pop history trends in the last few years but the bizarre total sanitization of vikings/pirates has to be one of the worst. like sorry to the queer neopagan anarchy symbol in bio twitter user community but like. are you aware both vikings and pirates enthusiastically traded slaves

and to be clear i'm not calling people out for liking the aesthetic or being into historical fiction or whatever i'm specifically talking about the genre of post that's like "it's crazy how most people think vikings were violent raiders when they were actually antiracist feminist sheep herders living in free love communes and operating dog shelters"

I think this comes from an inability people have to, like, be moderate on things.

The initial failure to be moderate comes the traditional received view, e.g. "the Vikings were all horrible barbarians who did nothing but raid and pillage and be evil". Then someone comes along and, rightly, tries to question this view. They say "hey, the Vikings were just people like you and me. Maybe they even did some things that are worth admiring, you know. Maybe we've been treating them unfairly." And this catches on, especially as the original power dynamics that motivated the received view start to fade (slander of Vikings has a lot less motivation when the Catholic church stops being so politically relevant). And people are often inclined to use these other, traditionally maligned societies as foils to critique their own society. And so it becomes widely accepted among the sort of people who consider themselves smart and thoughtful that the Vikings really weren't as bad as they've been made out to be; they've been unfairly maligned. They were just people, like you and me.

Except here comes the second failure to be moderate, when the view slowly morphs into "the Vikings were right about everything, Viking society was so much better than modern society" etc. And that's where you get these twitter leftists, who are somewhere down the second-failure-to-be-moderate telephone line.

Anyway, I'm responding to this post, and respond to many like it, in an attempt to preempt what I have often seen as an inchoate third failure to be moderate, a return to the received narrative that the Vikings just totally sucked, man. No, no! I'm not accusing OP of this specifically (I don't think they're guilty of it), but it is... in the air, around these parts.

Moderation! Moderation! Nuance! Be careful lest you become what you sought to destroy!

(Tags from @tarantula-hawk-wasp :

#tbh this is the hardest part about teaching any type of history bc people want to either valorize or vilify and like no!! #seek truth not goodness in the past #no society is free of sin and no society is free of merit #but that shouldn't be your goal in learning about them - it should be understanding)

YOU CANNOT SELF-FLAGELLATE YOUR WAY INTO EXCELLENCE

SHOCKINGLY, SCORN AND PUNISHMENT MAKE FOR WEAK MOTIVATORS. PRACTICE IS A HABIT HARD TO FORM WHEN ERRING'S MET WITH BLOOD.

BEYOND ALL THAT, REMEMBER: YOU WILL NEED MORE THAN LITTLE TREATS IN ORDER TO SURVIVE. BUT YOU DO NEED THE TREATS

very cool how the gender binary in the emerging trad terf synthesis is like, there are two genders, the one that does bad things and the one that bad things are done to. the only thing in the world is immorality and it flows from unexperiencing agents to unacting experiencers.

which naturally appeals to people who would like to be perceived as inherently lacking the capacity for immorality. for whatever reason

anyway remember bell hooks’s very cogent critique of second-wave feminist organizing in ‘sisterhood: solidarity between women’ where she argues that by “bonding as ‘victims’, white women’s liberationists were not required to assume responsibility for confronting the complexity of their own experience … Identifying as ‘victims’, they could abdicate responsibility for their role in the maintenance and perpetuation of sexism, racism, and classism.” it’s not by accident that terf gender essentialism dovetails so much with other biological-determinist & essentialist assumptions including Extremely Racist Ones   

I hate that social media has commodified performative grief and outrage to the point that every fucking person thinks that every tragedy that happens needs to be addressed by them, personally. I hate that there’s an expectation that everyone make some grand statement and that if you don’t do it, you must be heartless or hate the victims. We’re not all celebrities or politicians. Not every voice needs to be heard at all times. The world probably doesn’t NEED anyone’s take if it doesn’t contain new information. Processing things silently isn’t bad and it doesn’t make anyone a bad person and I honestly much prefer it to a lot of the self-serving bullshit you see when something awful happens in the world.

I fall into that trap. Most people do. It’s shit and it produces a lot of shit sentiment. “WHY AREN’T PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS?!” is my least favorite sentence in the world right now. Most people, when it comes to tragedy, have nothing to say. Most uninvolved people, in these circumstances, should say less.

my two main thoughts on this are:

-i dont think it's immoral to not care or to even laugh at the deaths of some shitty billionaires but i dont think it's immoral to like, have the tiniest shred of sympathy for their situation either.

and

-i think it's very strange how the migrants in greece being murdered is being positioned in the discourse here. i fully understand juxtaposing the way countries are flocking to rescue these five rich people while scores of innocent struggling migrants just trying to enter a nation to seek livelihood were murdered by an EU nation. it's both topical and representative of a deep sickness in our collective culture. but it's at a point now where it feels like people are almost solely using it as a cudgel in some ideological debate around this hodgepodge submarine. and i think it deserves far more than being a rebuttal in an internet philosophy debate.

brooooooooo i hate when ppl get like insanely weirdly anxious Abt interacting w other cultures Problematically and it ends up being just like "actually let's go for progressive ethnocentrism". it is literally always better to clumsily interact with ppl and culture different than you than to stay closed to the world and others

i hope this cartoon causes teenage infighting the likes of which steven universe couldnt even dream of

this is objectively one of the worst opinions on history i’ve ever read thank you grimes.

No, she's right -- canon history is rich white boy fanfic. We should absolutely fuck their shit up and imagineer our own versions.

There are countless historians who aren’t white or male. Don’t defend biased historical revisionism, especially since I doubt Grimes cares about the reality of any historical situation. She wrote this tweet in response to an inaccurate rendition of an Ancient Greek shield.

Also, literally no historian nowadays says that Columbus discovered America. Bad history curriculum does not represent the mainstream academic view.

"Canon rich white boy fanfic," like I dare you to translate a single one of those words into genuine non-fandom english

-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023

society's infantilization of decorated objects is honestly one of the greatest recent crimes against humans' innate desire for beauty

"the toothbrush/hairbrush/bike/vanity desk with flowers on it is For Kids! this plain beige one is For Adults!"

I am literally throwing you into a volcano

Women Often Mistaken For Men In Public Restrooms

another day of being furious at how the "100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions" statistic has been manipulated for leftists in capitalist economies to completely absolve themselves from acknowledging how we as a society need to change our consumption habits (and that means the individuals who make society. all of us). i seriously hate that the buck for so many stops at "omg it's the companies not me!" like i think it's equally important that 90% of those emissions are associated with the use of products from the 20 most polluting companies (overwhelmingly oil, fracked gas, or petrol) that go into mass producing and shipping the products of convenience that we in capitalist economies have been defanged by. likeee the top 3 biggest plastic polluters are consumer based companies that in addition to the plastic waste they facilitate everywhere also have massive emissions from utilizing oil & gas from other top polluting companies to produce the shit they sell to us

production/consumption/exploitation/pollution are all part of the same cycle, sides of the same cube. everything consumed and used is produced somewhere somehow by someone using something that came from somewhere going in an infinite chain. none of this happens separately from each other, it is all interconnected this is all in response to manufactured demand and we need to literally stop buying into it

The way people interact with vegans on this website is so exhausting. I can understand why vegans get so defensive if people call you "ableist white privileged vegan uwu" right from the get go. They just box you because your opinion on animal husbandry makes them uncomfortable. There are demographic polls that indicate most vegans are of color and don't make significantly much income (which Im like, hello me at both lol.) Not that it should even matter but. Yknow. People will discredit vegans on this false belief that we are all somehow white and make 6 digits annually LOL.

You dont have to agree with veganism but people dish out so much hate towards a group of people who hate the way this world treats animals. Animal husbandry in most countries is not what it once was and its kkay for people to boycott it or speak about it. If you dont wanna hear it then you don't have to engage with vegans. Thats understandable.

monoculture forests are deeply unsettling in a way that is hard to explain to people who do not spend a lot of time looking at forests

this thing is alive in an undead hivemind kind of way and it wants to fucking kill me

Something Good – Negro Kiss is a short film from 1898 of a couple kissing and holding hands. It is believed to depict the earliest on-screen kiss involving African Americans and is known for departing from the prevalent and purely stereotypical presentation of racist caricature in popular culture at the time it was made.

“There seemed to be something a lot more intimate and having more to do with self-presentation. And that’s unlike anything I had seen from that period when all moving picture images of African Americans were through a white lens and are distortions, misrepresentations, or pseudo anthropological. And this is none of that.”

their identities are known!

Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown weren't a couple in reality, but they were a well-known vaudeville acting duo at the time this impromptu film was shot

This is why the whole “all vintage/historical costumers are trads” attitude is jarring to me

Because like

SO MANY of us are queer, guys

If you expect fiction, especially so-called genre fiction, to educate you on politics, social issues and morality, you might just read too little nonfiction

Or you may know some high-quality genre fiction writers.

OP answering 'tell me you haven't read Pratchett without telling me you haven't read Pratchett' with their whole chest

I have, in fact, read Pratchett. And my point still stands, because it’s less about what individual fiction writers put into their fiction, and more about everyone and their grandmother approaching fiction with the expectation of being educated on these matters and complaining when a fantasy novel doesn’t contain correct messages on every social and political issue because it’s too busy telling a story. Pratchett is good, but you’re still doing him a disservice as a writer of fiction if you rely solely on Discworld for your political education.

Take, for instance, The Handmaid’s Tale, an explicitly political work of fiction. It can serve as a wake-up call and a rallying cry with regards to women’s reproductive rights in particular and feminism in general. But it cannot give you a complete understanding of the history and struggles of the real world feminist movement, because it is a work of fiction set in a fictional society, and Atwood is first and foremost an author telling a story, not a schoolteacher educating you on history and politics. If you want to understand, for instance, the events leading to Roe v. Wade being overturned, you’re at some point going to need more substance than «oh this is just like Gilead».

Or take Animal Farm. You can’t understand the Russian Revolution and Soviet Communism just by reading Animal Farm, on the contrary you need knowledge of both the Soviet Union and Orwell’s own political views to fully comprehend the political allegory acted out by the farm animals. Even the most political fiction isn’t a substitute for nonfiction if you want a nuanced understanding of the politics and social issues around you.

Look, I’m not forcing anyone at gunpoint to read nonfiction, nor insinuating that nonfiction is inherently better than fiction, they’re just different things and I’m tired of seeing people read fiction and complain that it doesn’t do the things nonfiction does.

I think @dduane's misread here happened with the word educate.

Fiction can and does comment on social issues all the time, and this is a good thing for it to be doing (though fiction that doesn't do it isn't less good, which is another thing snobs are snobby about.)

But COMMENTARY isn't EDUCATION.

Education is ideally neutral. Here's what happened, here's who was affected, here's how, now make up your own mind about whether the people who decided to make it happen were heroes or villains.

example: "Here's why Israel and Palestine are fighting."

Commentary is the exact opposite.

Commentary is "it's understandable, maybe, why the people who made this happen saw themselves as heroes. But actually, if you pay close attention to the people who it affected, as I am helping you do by writing This Book, you realize they really weren't."

example: "Here's which side, if any, I the person who wrote Book believe you should be on."