What are those

they put them on coastlines to prevent erosion, they’re made of concrete

That’s…really cool. 

A wild herd of tetrapods!

You know what else prevents erosion

Wetlands

I keep seeing things like this and can I just say, you're probably not actually ending your entire bloodline.

1st of all, your line is probably traced through one side, depending on whether your people value matrilineal or patrilineal lines. Either way, there's a whole 'nother side not being counted. What about all the siblings of the people who are actually in your line? They had families, they're part of the bloodline. And of course, the children that the men of your bloodline never claimed or admitted to...they're out there too.

So, my lovely queer family, we can go ahead and let go of this responsibility, it's ok, there's lot of folks we dont know we're related to, your ancestors had plenty of descendants.

— Juansen Dizon, Be Your Own Kind of Magic

IN THESE TIMES

We have only 12 years to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent, according to an October report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The feat, it admits, would require “rapid, far-reaching” societal transformation. If we fail, coastal cities will be inundated, food will run short and the damage will cost $54 trillion by 2040, when babies born this year will be old enough to graduate from college.

The clear path to curbing these catastrophes involves rapidly phasing out carbonintensive fuels, which requires changes on a scale for which “There is no documented historic precedent,” the report’s authors note.

But more dramatic approaches have crept into policy discussions, like solar radiation management, known as SRM. First imagined by scientists during the Cold War, SRM promises a comparatively cheap, quick fix: the continuous dispersal of aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect and absorb sunlight, cooling the planet. In effect, SRM means dimming the sun.

For proof of concept, advocates look to volcanic eruptions, which spew out plumes of aerosols. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, for example, reportedly lowered global temperatures by 1 degree Celsius. The best modeling suggests SRM, too, would work like a charm.

Like a volcano, however, SRM is enormously risky. Side effects could include decreasing crop yields, melting the ozone layer or irreparably altering the water cycle, flooding some parts of the world while causing prolonged droughts in others—and those are just the few we are able to model.

If starting SRM is risky, so is stopping once we’ve started: Stanching the flow of aerosols would risk the Earth rapidly warming by several degrees within a decade, known as a “termination shock.” This sudden heating would do more damage than the current, more gradual warming, disrupting the climate while giving species and ecosystems little time to adapt.

But given the stakes, many SRM boosters say the benefits seem to outweigh the risk. After all, what choice do we have?

If it sounds like we’ve crossed into science fiction, we have: This scenario is more or less the opening narration of Geostorm, a critically panned 2017 film about climate-controlling satellites gone rogue. The better-received 2013 class-struggle flick Snowpiercer also starts with a similar premise: an attempted SRM-like scheme backfires into endless winter.

Yet SRM and other risky high-tech climate interventions inch closer to reality by the day. The IPCC report has reignited a long-running debate: How far are we willing to go, and what risks are we willing to take, to keep the Earth from further warming? Humans have altered the climate for centuries by pumping out greenhouse gases. What’s so different about interfering with the climate to save the world instead of cook it? Do we have any other options left?

Stratospheric Aerosol injection — the type of SRM described above—is one of a suite of technologies aimed at large-scale manipulation of the climate, known as geoengineering. There are two broad categories: solar geoengineering to block or reflect sunlight (like SRM), and “negative emissions technologies” to suck greenhouse gases out of the air. Negative emissions technologies have been factored into climate modeling for years and have a long-established (if controversial) role in IPCC mitigation strategies; solar geoengineering has been more fringe.

But in the past few years, the governments of the United Kingdom and United States have each sponsored research into solar geoengineering, outlets from The New Yorker to the New York Times have commissioned lengthy articles on it, and an editor at The Economist wrote a whole book on the subject, The Planet Remade. Just after the release of the new IPCC report, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass opined that world governments should “accelerate R&D on geoengineering,” and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) called to “incentivize oil companies to help.”

SRM has even found a research base in the Ivy League. Thanks to Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, founded in 2017, the first steps toward implementation may soon float above the United States through the program’s Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment.

Known as Scopex, the experiment is not an SRM test, per se—to truly test the concept would require a global scale. But it is an attempt to go beyond computer modeling to understand the chemistry and microphysics of how particular aerosols interact with the stratosphere. A propeller-powered balloon will disseminate the aerosols; a small gondola, attached, will carry sensors. Researchers hope to launch in 2019.

Opposition to SRM has increased as well. As IPCC researchers met in South Korea to finalize their report, 110 civil society organizations across five continents, from First Nations peoples to think tanks to environmental NGOs, issued an anti-geoengineering manifesto: Hands Off Mother Earth, or HOME.

It reads, in part: “Geoengineering perpetuates the false belief that today’s unjust, ecologically and socially devastating industrial model of production and consumption cannot be changed and that we therefore need techno-fixes to tame its effects.” Signatories fear the development of SRM will be used as an excuse to continue the carbon status quo, calling it a “dangerous distraction” from real solutions and a “further entrenchment of fossil fuel economies.” Fossil fuel corporations have yet to throw their weight behind SRM specifically, but Shell’s chief climate change advisor, David Hone, praises the “sulphur solution” (referring to SRM) as the simplest in his book, Putting the Genie Back.

Harvard scientist David Keith, a contributor to the Scopex project, has emerged as something of a public face of SRM. He disagrees that geoengineering protects fossil fuel companies, envisioning it instead as a complement to decarbonization. “If solar geoengineering was much better understood, I don’t think it would make all the environmental forces give up and let Exxon win,” he says. “There’s not an alternative to cutting fossil fuels. We have to get them out of the energy system.”

Keith isn’t pushing for SRM deployment—just research— and says it’s important to understand all of the risks before moving forward. He worries about the Trump administration or other fossil fuel-friendly governments grasping onto SRM as a perceived quick fix. Still, he thinks we should be able to simultaneously research SRM and take action against fossil fuels.

The HOME manifesto, however, calls for a ban on open-air field experiments like Scopex. “[Scopex] makes no sense if you are not going to pursue deployment later,” says Silvia Ribeiro, one of the manifesto’s authors and the Latin America director of ETC Group, which addresses the social and environmental impacts of new technologies. “All powerful technologies have started with small experiments.”

Oxford physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert, a lead author on the IPCC’s third assessment report in 2001, sees Scopex as a crossing of the Rubicon. “Proceeding to field experimentation,” he writes, “crosses a thin red line beyond which lies the slippery slope down to ever-larger field trials and, ultimately, deployment.”

Skeptics also note that SRM only addresses some of the effects of global warming—those stemming directly from temperature. It does nothing to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which means ocean acidification would continue apace, causing irreversible damage to coral reefs and other ocean life that will reverberate up the food chain. The continued accumulation of greenhouse gases would also heighten the impacts of potential termination shock.

(Continue Reading)

Instead of changing anything, let's just block out the sun

For those unaware because staff isn’t saying it

Tumblr was deemed too full of inappropriate content to be allowed to be downloaded from the app store.

It has this “inappropriate” problem because of rampant porn ad bot accounts. The old solutions were bots to detect image sets with nsfw content, the automatically enabled safe mode, tag filtering for mobile, and wide takedowns of nsfw bots based on words used (that’s why their messages are full of numbers and symbols, to evade this)

Tumblr released their own bot supposedly capable of wiping the ad bots, but it’s taking down many popular blogs, possibly due to sheer amounts of posting or sheer amounts of ad bots in their notes. This bot was likely rushed to be put out.

You are more likely to be accidentally flagged if you post external links, as well. If your acct is taken down you CAN get it back, but it’s a pain. E-mail tumblr support for help with this. It takes down side blogs with the main ones.

I’ll be halting posts for about a week or until this problem is fixed.

THIS

Oh shit

Chico, CA

“The campaign against body hair on women originates in Darwin’s 1871 book Descent of Man, explains Herzig. Men of science obsessed over racial differences in hair type and growth (among other aspects of physical appearance), and as the press popularized these findings, the broader American public latched on. Darwin’s evolutionary theory transformed body hair into a question of competitive selection—so much so that hairiness was deeply pathologized. “Rooted in traditions of comparative racial anatomy, evolutionary thought solidified hair’s associations with ‘primitive’ ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, ‘less developed’ forms,” Herzig writes. Post-Descent, hairiness became an issue of fitness.

An important distinction in this evolutionary framework was that men were supposed to be hairy, and women were not. Scientists surmised that a clear distinction between the masculine and the feminine indicated “higher anthropological development” in a race. So, hairiness in women became indicative of deviance, and researchers set out to prove it. Herzig tells the story of an 1893 study of 271 cases of insanity in white women, which found that insane women had excessive facial hair more frequently than the sane. Their hairs were also “thicker and stiffer,” more closely resembling those of the “inferior races.” Havelock Ellis, the scholar of human sexuality, claimed that this type of hair growth in women was “linked to criminal violence, strong sexual instincts … [and] exceptional ‘animal vigor.’”

By the early 1900s, unwanted hair was a significant source of discomfort for American women. They desired smooth, sanitized, white skin. They wanted to be feminine. “In a remarkably short time, body hair became disgusting to middle-class American women, its removal a way to separate oneself from cruder people, lower class and immigrant,” writes Herzig.”

I do understand this- that is is a societal construct, made by men, but now it’s something that is more of a personal choice. I, for one, love when I shave my legs, and they’re super smooth- but I’m also incredibly lazy and don’t shave a lot of the time, because, you know, it takes so long. I understand that some are put under pressure, but, if anything, how you groom yourself should always be based off of personal choice. 

Is it fully personal choice if you think you're "incredibly lazy" for failing to live up to a standard that was just exposed to have deeply racist and classist origins?

I think people really underestimate how fucking evil a large chunk of American Christianity is, when they try to say to antichoicers “well if you’re against abortion, at least you should support things like WIC and SNAP, so that women facing an unplanned pregnancy can still feed their future kid”

I’ll be blunt, to American Christians like this, “but single mothers and their kids will starve!” is the entire fucking point. Being ostracized by your family and community and left for you and your bastard child to starve alone in abject misery and deprivation is what they believe the Godly punishment should be for being “unchaste,” and that things like food benefits and contraception are destroying moral society because they let women have unapproved sex without being as controlled by the fear of being cast out to starve with an unwanted kid (this also heavily ties into misogynist racism against woc, especially black women, who are accused of being “welfare queens,” draining good, properly chaste white Christians with kids born from their supposedly mindlessly lustful and irresponsible behavior, that can only be kept in check with threats of starvation or violence).

“Women (especially woc) cannot overcome their base urges and live virtuous lives without being heavily trained and coerced by threats of deprivation, isolation, and violence” is one of the most important unspoken ground rules of reactionary movements, both religious and secular

Evangelicals have no long-standing theological problem with abortion. My parents have been married for longer than evangelicals have been against abortion. Evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t care about abortion. Being against abortion was a Catholic thing. Evangelicals thought abortion is unfortunate, but not evil.

What changed?

Bob Jones v. US (1983).

Bob Jones University, an evangelical school, had a segregationist dating policy. It means what you think it does - they wouldn’t allow white students to date black students. They also wouldn’t admit black students who supported interracial marriage. This was in the mid-70s. Loving v Virginia was nearly a decade in the rearview mirror. The government threatened to revoke their tax-exempt status as a university unless this Jim Crow shit stopped. The school sued, and this eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Court, unsurprisingly, agreed with the government.

What was clear to evangelical leaders, then, in 1983, was that out-and-out racism was no longer going to be tolerated. What could they focus on that would have the same effect? What could rally the base without openly espousing racist views?

Reagan, with his “welfare queens” dog-whistle politicking gave them a like-minded politician glad of their support. And Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was only to happy to tell people what he thought of abortion.

So here we are, thirty-five years later, with every evangelical doing their damnedest to pretend that evangelicals have always been against abortion. They’ve lied themselves into believing it, and now they claim they’re against birth control too. That’s even more spurious - If they actually thought life begins at conception, then birth control would be a necessity, because fertilized eggs being rejected is the norm. Most of what they want to call human life never even gets implanted in the womb, or lasts very long if it does. And if they cared about life, welfare programs ought to be the most important, to ensure everyone has a good standard of living worthy of human beings.

But they don’t care about those things, so the only conclusion is that they are not pro-life. They just don’t want to see family planning and health care go to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, etc.

It was never about being pro-life. 

(and incidentally - Bob Jones v US was an 8-1 decision. Who was the dissenting voice? None other than William Rehnquist. Who was elevated to Chief Justice by Reagan when Warren Burger retired a few years later. None of what has happened has happened by accident)

Randall Balmer has a really good article about that here.

And it’s worth noting that Bob Jones University defended their policy exclusively on religious freedom grounds, but Rehnquist’s dissent was based entirely on procedural grounds. Even the one justice who was “on their side” didn’t buy  their argument and had to justify it on other grounds. It’s been a long road from BJU v. US to the Hobby Lobby case.

I have a similar theory about why evangelicals fight so hard against believing climate change when supposedly humans are stewards of the earth. It’s all about evolution. Climate change is a proxy war. It’s all the same rhetoric about scientists being corrupt and only looking out for their own interests and trying to shove their research down other people’s throats.

For a group of people who supposedly believe that God charged them with taking care of the Earth, they really seem to have bought into the whole “I can do whatever I want to the planet because God put us in charge of it” mindset really hard. Of course, maybe this is just the 21st century version of manifest destiny.

I think another problem is that with a large chunk of US evangelicalism, the world ending is what they want. The apocalypse means that the chosen few get carried off to heaven as a reward for beating the shit out of their gay kid or whatever, while the rest of us who failed to give the true believers the obedience respect that they feel entitled to are left behind to die in slow agony before being cast into eternal hell. It’s really hard to get people to give a shit about the planet dying when they view literally would have the world end to own the libs

It’s ABSOLUTELY what they want. During the Bush years, they were pretty up front about it, too. The entirety of the Evangelicals’ support of Israel is explicitly so that the Jewish People rebuild the Solomon’s Temple; which is a prerequisite for the events of Revelations to happen. The sooner it’s built, the sooner the Rapture can sweep them up into Heaven so they can laugh as all the “sinners” suffer the End Times. They don’t ACTUALLY care about Israelis or the long lasting sociopolitical factors of the area; they’re literally just pawns for the most death cult aspect of American Evangelical Christianity. It’s legitimately terrifying that people like this run large sections of a nation already capable of destroying all life on the planet.

It’s a fatal but common liberal mistake to assume that evangelicals are motivated by (misguided) compassion. They’re not. They will watch you die and be pleased about it because youve gone to hell faster.

I think some people will read this and think it’s really dramatic, but I was raised in a mega church in the Bible Belt. This all spot on.

Yup, spot on, I was raised in a tiny church outside the Bible belt. They are waiting for the Rapture, nothing else matters.

US Military Enlistment has been on a Steady DECLINE since the Iraq Invasion Fraud was Acknowledged in 2006. 

US Military Spending (a.k.a Our National Debt) has been on a Steady INCREASE since 2012.

The Veterans’ Administration has been Understaffed by 50,000 employees since 2010.

And the US Military has been Waging War on the People of Afghanistan since 2001- the Longest War in US HISTORY.

Also, wealthy students will typically have more options and resources available at graduation, allowing them to earn more out of the gate regardless of GPA because of connections (either from family or because of having all that extra time to make connections, build relationships with professors, etc). The system needs an overhaul, people are being crushed.

reblog if your blog is safe for trans witches, non binary witches, bisexual witches, gay witches, pansexual witches, closet witches, mental ill witches and all type of witches 🔮🌿

Speaking as someone whose parents and family members still refuse to be persuaded to keep their cats inside, if your cat dies as a result of being allowed to roam freely, whether hit by a car or killed by another animal or disease or whatever, that’s 100% on you. The owner of the cat is responsible for the death of that animal as surely as if they killed it themselves because it was completely preventable. This makes people upset to hear, but you can’t claim to love something in one breath and then completely abandon them to the many dangers of the world in the next. If you love your pet you do everything in your power to keep it safe.

You know what? No. My cat needs to have a life and be a cat. It's fucking cruel to keep a creature inside all the time. And I know something might happen to one of them. We mitigate the risk by keeping them in at night but I'd rather let them be happy cats than long lived and neurotic and miserable. If you keep your cat indoor I hope you spend hours playing with it cause if not your little darling is just gonna be stressed out and miserable and neurotic because cats are social creatures and yours is fucking bored all day. Life demands life. Stop denying your cat a chance to live because you can't stand the thought of it dying. We all die and I sure as fuck wouldn't want to be kept safely inside out of love.

smfh pathetic

Re-fucking-diculous

Smh

“I guess I’ll have a new daughter” I’m so glad there’s women like this in the world because initially I really thought she would have no where to stay

Praying for this poor girl whoever shit is. Her mom is an idiot.

Beautiful parenting. This is how you do it!

heres an update

https://www.gofundme.com/ReemaDavis

she’s got a gofund me right now, not all heros wear capes.

This is sick

This shit here is why ace people have a hard time even realizing they’re ace. When your story isn’t told, how are you supposed to find yourself?

This is really really fucked up

Some people always get super salty when they come asking for help with a “ghost haunting” and the first thing i ask them is “have you checked your living space for carbon monoxide”.

Like maybe you thought coming to a witch you’d get some neat spell or some shit, but a big part of being a (good) witch is also looking at what is in front of you and ruling out some basic things first, and a lot of the things people describe to me when it comes to ghost hauntings also sound a helluva lot like carbon monoxide poisoning. So like sorry for giving a shit over whether or not you’re actually about to die or not I guess *shrug emoji*

Like I know we joke about my house being haunted (and maybe it is) but when the lights flicker in my house I don’t do a cleansing spell, I call an electrician. You gotta do the physical world things first before you jump to the metaphysical. That’s just how it is.

Responsible witches. I really love this. I love that sometimes The Craft is just asking uncomfortable questions.

excuse me griffin but

what are you implying

dear griffin,

it took me a solid half-hour to remember that america has politics happening after seeing this instagram post with no context

i’m sorry for making a rude assumption about your dick habits but i mean

c'mon

yours sincerely,

me

Famous people really gotta start putting context on their social media posts

It took this going by a third time to realize that GriffinMcElroy is apparently someone famous?

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What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.

Like someone will offer a very obvious example of - say - two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians - surprise surprise! - say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.

It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.

It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.

I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.

It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian) mentality has got to stop.

You’re absolutely right.

I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.

Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.

That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.

Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.

TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).

Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?

All of this.

I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.

And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.

It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones - even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.

I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.

@lazarusquince for old english content

also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.

Jesus Christ all of this

I swear I saw people on tumblr seriously reblogging a conspiracy theory that Beethoven was black (because he had some ambiguous African ancestry) and that some mysterious cabal of historians are working behind the scenes to convince the entire world that he wasn’t black. (I looked into this, it’s pretty much 100% a tin-foil hat conspiracy made by some very strange people on the internet)

Around the same time I saw another post claiming that British historians went around removing and disfiguring statues of Egyptians (including the Sphinx) as a way of removing non-white facial features to keep up the myth that Egyptians were white…

While there have been incendences of people trying to devalue/hide black peoples histories to keep up a racist agenda, there wasn’t a group of men in pith helmets and chisels going round chipping noses off because they didn’t look Caucasian.

It’s called erosion and its effect on the smaller details of statues such as faces (especially their noses as they stick out and are easily worn away by rain and cold) is in basically every basic science book you can find. It’s everywhere, not just egypt.

I myself am very aware of atrocities that happened that have wiped women, queer people and POC from history, but we need to stop spread paranoid conspiracy theories as fact.

Exactly. Erasure of diversity in history is a real problem, and that’s all the more reason why we need to hold ourselves to a high standard of legitimacy when we talk about it. And it’s specifically because of this erasure that my profs and their colleagues are working very hard to teach their students that medieval history is more than just the exploits of cishet white men in armour. But part of that new style of teaching also involves debunking false claims and questioning unsubstantiated claims, and I think a lot of the problem is people confusing that with deliberate erasure of known diversity, which isn’t the same thing.

Telling people that the idea that Renaissance artists modelled Jesus after Cesare Borgia has no factual basis is different than trying to convince your students Sappho was straight.

Though given what some people in the comments have told me about what their teachers were like, I don’t blame them for being suspicious of academia.

But going back to your Beethoven example, that’s why we need to teach people about actual PoC in classical music. Beethoven probably wasn’t black, but the Chevalier de Saint-Georges was, and his massive talent deserves to be remembered.

i’d like to just make the note that for many non-academic folk, access to the work academics do in history is very, very limited. if your interest in history is not deep and ever-abiding, you’re not going to be able to call out false claims online. most people do not have access to an academic library, most people cannot afford to pay to read academic articles. even if you have access to them, through open-access journals or otherwise, the language we historians use is technical and articles take a shitton of time to read. access to history is limited to school teachers, books and media, and those go through several filters to make it palatable to audiences.

like, we’re not exactly making learning about history easy. and although our methods make sense to us in an academic sense, we can’t expect laymen to engage in the same way we do. If we’re insistent on sticking to inaccessible journals and weirdly long-winded grammatical constructs, we can’t exactly be angry that folk are spreading misinformation so widely.

(yes, i am still bitter that my medieval welsh texts professor marked me down for using contractions, and being too “casual”. >:( )

taking the Beethoven thing as an example - you have your average forward-thinking layman, knowing that the history they learnt at school is overwhelmingly white and sanitized. someone comes along, sounding psuedo-smart - “hey, beethoven is actually black bc XYZ” - and what are you going to believe? you know full well that the history you learnt in school is deficient, you know someone somewhere made the decision that only certain things should be taught at school, you can’t access current academic work, and you have nothing to draw on that tells you “hmmm maybe this isn’t right.”

anyways, tl;dr the proliferation of history conspiracy theories among non-academics/newbie academics isn’t exactly surprising