I think if i put into words how happy this type of image makes me I would get diagnosed with something
History of the Harry Potter goblin problem (as far as I can tell)
- Book series by JK Rowling: the goblins are portrayed as fairly neutral and alien rather than evil. They run a bank but otherwise have no antisemitic imagery associated with them. An ill-conceived use of the “race of X’ fantasy trope. The series is very anti-Nazi but doesn’t go too in depth. Rowling describes herself as a leftist with socialist leanings.
- Movie adaptations: the goblins now have big hooked noses and they’re evil. The nose thing could potentially be chalked up to fantasy makeup tropes but someone decided to put a big star of David in the bank so that was a whole thing. JK Rowling had no direct involvement in production design but she did approve it, most likely out of ignorance but come on, Joanne. It was a big star of David. Hard to miss.
- The greedy hook-nosed goblin trope enters the cultural zeitgeist, showing up in other media like BBC’s Merlin and the Warcraft games.
- In spite of her obvious blind spots, JK Rowling maintains progressive public image and becomes known for slamdunking bigots on Twitter.
- Fantastic Beasts movies, again written by JK Rowling: a goblin with a massive hooked nose and stereotypical Jewish New Yorker mannerism is played by Jewish actor Ron Perlman. The bad guy’s evil plan includes averting world war II and stopping the holocaust. He is aided by ambiguously Jewish character Tina Goldstein. Getting harder to give JK Rowling the benefit of doubt. If not actively malicious, she’s incredibly insensitive. Around this time, she starts posting terf shit on Twitter, killing what was left of her progressive image. The series ends unfinished and in disgrace.
- Hogwarts Legacy: Straight up Nazi propaganda. Developed by an alt right YouTuber. Goblins now kidnap children and blow shofars while trying to fight back against their oppressors. And that’s terrible! JK Rowling has no direct involvement but still makes money off of it, showing how far down the right wing pipeline she’s gone and how shallow and performative her progressive leftist platitudes were this whole time.
Avoid sci-hub too👀
If you want to read an academic article that's behind a paywall just email the author and ask politely if they will send you the article. Most academics will be thrilled that you want to read their work and will gladly send it to you.
dyatlovpassingprivilege
i think people need to get more okay with physically hurting people who are participating, nominally peacefully, in a political act that advocates for right wing violence
dyatlovpassingprivilege
if it becomes par for the course that you will get the shit beaten out of you for showing up with a group of chuds outside a gay bar and chanting "groomers", then less people will do that.
dyatlovpassingprivilege
not an imagined situation, btw.
dyatlovpassingprivilege
the par for the course if you do nothing or try to out-chant them, or play funny music, by the way, is that they get more and more emboldened because they see that there's no real consequences, and they run their ideology to their end point, and someone gets killed.
There’s another tweet in that thread of a guy being denied entry to the bar and then filming himself trying to force his way in while shouting about how they’re “Grooming kids” in there. You know what happens if I go to a bar downtown, get told to leave and try to force my way in? The bouncer pulls me into the bar and beats me half to death.
There’s another tweet that contains a video of a man charging after a couple leaving with their kid and being intercepted, peacefully, by antifa activists. You know what normally happens if you try to follow a couple and their kid home in most situations? You get the cops called on you, after they beat the shit out of you. Hell this is Texas, you probably get shot.
I understand that some of you are uncomfortable with dealing violence, I am too. I understand law enforcement and the media are rarely, if ever, on our side. But we also have to start standing up for ourselves. We can’t deny them ammunition to attack us, because they are inventing it. Our existence, our mere presence in a public setting, is increasingly being called “Grooming.” You can’t stop that by peacefully protesting, because the point of nonviolent resistance is to shame the oppressor. But when the oppressor views your existence as violence, they aren’t going to get shamed.
"but violence is wrong" violence is effective. cry me a fucking river.
If someone is participating in a political act or protest that advocates for right wing violence, then they are, by definition, NOT peaceful.
If someone is advocating for violence, they are not peaceful.
If someone is following a family home, screaming outside a school, trying to force their way into a bar? Then they're by definition, not peaceful.
Kick their ass. Literally, if you have the opportunity.
Anonymous asked:
I don't mean this in any jokey or disrespectful way; is there any truth to the alchemy in say, the Full Metal Alchemist anime? The symbols or transmutation circles?
Actually the author of FMA did a ton of research into historical western alchemy. The whole law of equivalent exchange is a real alchemical concept from hermetica, and one that sir Issac Newton expounded into the law of thermodynamics.
The elrics dad, Van Hoenhiem, is based on a real alchemist named Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hoenhiem. At one point Pride even references the real alchemists name.
Basically everything about alchemy in FMA is taken from primary sources, down to the symbology of transmutation circles to the color scheme of Edwards design.
The way alchemy works in FMA doesn’t resemble the way real-life alchemy is or was supposed to work, however, FMA is still packed full of references to real-life alchemy. The most obvious one is Hohenheim’s name, but there are plenty more! (Ed and Al also share their names with real-life famous occultists, Edward Kelly and Alphonse Constant (Eliphas Levi), but this might be a coincidence.)
It is probably no accident that Ed’s color scheme is black, white, and red. The three main stages of alchemy are names the nigredo, the albedo, and the rubedo. Nigredo, the black stage, is when the matter of the Stone “dies” and putrefies, representing spiritual death. Albedo, the white stage, is when the matter of the Stone is washed, boiled, and turns to vapor, which condenses back into water, and the cycle repeats. This represents spiritual ascension and unification with the divine. Finally, during the rubedo, this “volatile” matter becomes “fixed,” crystallizing into the Philosopher’s Stone. Ed also has gold hair and eyes, which is fairly self-explanatory. Gold is a metaphor for the state of spiritual perfection.
The “Flamel” symbol of a serpent nailed to a cross that’s on the back of Ed’s coat, painted on Al’s pauldron, and tattooed on Izumi’s chest is the “crucified serpent,” which actually does come from Nicolas Flamel. It represents the completion of the Great Work, the union of the fixed and volatile, the mercurial serpent physically nailed down to the cross with its four arms representing the Four Elements (with Quintessence in the center) and the reconciliation of polarities. It also demonstrates the death and mortification of the old body that is necessary for the Philosopher’s Stone to be reborn:
The wings at the top of FMA’s “Flamel” is probably meant to represent Mercury’s Caduceus, and maybe also the resurrection of the snake. The crown references the “King” that is a metaphor for the Philosopher’s Stone. The Flamel symbol also bears resemblance to the Staff of Asclepius, which represents medicine in the real world.
Another example is the “Green Lion” on the flag of Amestris that acts a symbol of the military and is referenced a few other times:
In real alchemy, the “Green Lion” is a symbol of antimony ore and represents the Philosopher’s Stone in its “imperfect” state, before it’s been purified. The Green Lion eats the Sun (representing perfection and Gold), causing a solar eclipse, representing the nigredo (death), the first stage of the Great Work. Amestris was created for almost exactly that reason, and it is far from “purified,” with corruption running deep into its core.
The image of the lion eating the sun appears in the show, when Ed and Ling are in Gluttony’s stomach:
There’s also the transmutation circle itself, which looks so realistic, I actually thought it was real when I first saw it online:
Here’s a real magic circle:
Real magic circles are from ceremonial magic, not alchemy, but the text around the outside of the Human Transmutation Circle does reference alchemy. The “peacock’s feathers,” the spotted panther and the green lion (as previously mentioned), the progression of black, gray, white, and red, all are metaphors for chemical reactions that are supposed to take place in an ideal alchemical procedure.
Some of the more complicated transmutation circles that appear throughout the show are also based on real designs from manuscripts. There’s this design on the wall of the Fifth Laboratory:
Here we see the Sun and Moon (more on that in a minute) and three symbols of Mercury, which represent their unification. This looked very realistic, so I did some searching and this is what I found:
It’s not exactly the same, but it’s clearly an image from an alchemical manuscript, and it’s very similar.
The designs on Ed and Al’s doors are real. The design on Ed’s door is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life as depicted by Robert Fludd in his seventeenth-century book Utriusque Cosmi:
The design on Al’s door comes from an alchemical manuscript called The Marrow of Alchemy by George Ripley (as in, the Ripley Scroll). It depicts the alchemical process:
I haven’t managed to find where the design on Mustang’s gate comes from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that one was real, too.
One more thing I want to draw attention to is this dialogue between child-Ed and child-Al in ”He Who Would Swallow God.”
Edward: “The Sun is male, representing masculinity.” Alphonse: “The Moon is female, representing femininity.” Edward: “When the Sun and the Moon overlap, then the two genders become one.” Alphonse: “In other words, the union represents a perfect being.”
The Sun and Moon are kind of a big deal in alchemy, and they are associated with maleness and femaleness respectively. Their role in real alchemy is as the metaphorical “parents” of the androgynous Philosopher’s Stone, the perfect being:
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
—The Emerald Tablet
Through the “chemical wedding” of the Sun and Moon (sulfur and mercury), the Philosopher’s Stone is produced. I actually didn’t consider that a solar eclipse might be a symbol of the chemical wedding, until Ed and Al explicitly pointed it out in that episode. That’s not what an eclipse traditionally represents in alchemy (that’s the Green Lion swallowing the sun, the nigredo and dark night of the soul that follows the first chemical wedding), but I still think it makes sense.
(An image of the Chemical Wedding itself actually appears on the door to the exam room in the 2003 anime.)
Alchemy in FMA mostly doesn’t resemble real alchemy beyond those references. Real alchemy isn’t equivalent exchange — changing something into something else of equal value — but rather, metamorphosing something into a more improved version of itself. Theoretically, this would be turning “lead” into “gold,” the most base form of metal into the most perfect form of metal (as was believed). But real alchemy isn’t about chemicals, and it never really was. Real alchemy is a spiritual process, meant to transmute the soul from its “base” human state into a “perfect” spiritual state. The way to do this is to separate out the “subtle” from the “gross,” i.e. the higher spiritual self from the mundane and earthly human self, and then joining them back together so that the spiritual self purifies the mundane self. This is summarized by the Latin phrase “solve et coagula,” to dissolve and to congeal, or alternately, to separate and to bring together. FMA parallels this with its two parts of alchemy being deconstruction (solve) and reconstruction (coagula). Therefore, the character whose goals and motivations come the closest to those of real alchemists is… believe it or not… Father.
What Father wants, or at least what he says he wants, is knowledge. He wants all the knowledge in the universe. That’s what most occultists want, actually. Most occultists want to either merge with or become alike to God, although they all have different theories and methods of doing that. In FMA, the Philosopher’s Stone is an alchemical catalyst powered by human souls, but in real life, the Philosopher’s Stone is (long story short) a metaphor for the perfect being that Father wants to become. The real Philosopher’s Stone is a being that is a perfect balance of male and female, sun and moon, dark and light, human and divine. It is therefore whole and complete. As I understand it, a person who has become the Philosopher’s Stone can, theoretically, have the power and knowledge of a god whilst still being able to live on earth as a human.
By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. So was the world created.
—The Emerald Tablet
Father’s “perfect” form is a perverse version of this ideal.
(This form gives me some very confusing emotions.)
“As above, so below” is the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence, the closest thing to a real Law of Equivalent Exchange — it is the idea that the Macrocosm (God, the Universe, Truth) reflects the microcosm (humanity), and that by affecting one, you affect the other. The goal of the alchemist is to become the Philosopher’s Stone, the place where Human and Divine meet and become one thing.
I can’t believe it took me until now to see “As above, so below” represented here. Even the episode’s title makes that obvious! But despite that blatant symbolism, there is no healthy convergence of divine and human here. Many occultists believe in something called “ego death,” which I used to think meant losing one’s individuality, which sounded a lot like being trapped in a homunculus with a torrent of other screaming souls. Only now, after watching this show, do I understand what “ego death” really means. This scene is pure ego on Father’s part:
HEAR ME GOD! I DEMAND YOU ANSWER THE CRY OF MY SOUL! COME TO ME! JOIN ME! YES, I WILL NO LONGER BE BOUND TO YOU OR YOUR CONSEQUENCES! I’LL FORCE YOU DOWN TO THIS EARTH AND INTO MY BOWELS! YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BE ABSORBED!
—”Eye of Heaven, Gateway of Earth.”
This isn’t a genuine attempt to understand God, this is just an inferiority-superiority complex. Father doesn’t care to understand anything about God. All he cares about is himself, and acquiring power for himself. Power is all he’s after, to assuage his inferiority complex. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting power (e.g. Mustang), but godlike power to command the universe is a byproduct of having properly completed the alchemical process and become the Philosopher’s Stone. It is not the end in and of itself. “Ego” isn’t having a sense of self, it’s the inability to understand the spiritual. It’s viewing everything in a mundane lens, having all your motivations be ultimately small and petty, no matter how grand the spectacle. It’s wanting power or glory or whatnot just to make yourself feel better, but not having the self-awareness to actually admit that. The first stage of the alchemical process is nigredo, death — watching your old self die away so that it can be reborn as a better version of itself. Father never understands this, and The Truth says as much.
The Truth is a personification of the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism:
Who am I? One name you might have for me is The World. Or you might call me The Universe. Or perhaps “God.” Or perhaps “The Truth.” I am All, and I am One. So of course, this also means that I am you.
That’s basically it right there. God is All. All is God.
The reason why the Homunculus never grew beyond his days in the flask is because, despite wanting to acquire knowledge, he never actually learned anything. Trying to drag God down to Earth is sheer hubris, not because Earth is too far beneath it, but for the opposite reason — it can come down to Earth whenever it likes. It is everywhere and everything. And the Homunculus never did any of the introspective work needed to find God within himself. He tried to separate out (solve) his perceived “flaws” (the Seven Deadly Sins, i.e. the other homunculi) but did not reintegrate them back into himself (coagula), thus only completing half the alchemical process. He is neither human, nor divine, he only steals Hohenheim’s human shape and Truth’s divine power. He never broadened his thinking or improved himself mentally/spiritually, and thus can’t become alike to God. He never became more than what he is, the dwarf in the flask, and thus his Gate is blank.
Edward, by contrast, loses almost everything in attempting human transmutation (nigredo), and then accepts his own humanity at the gate of Truth (albedo), losing the ability to perform alchemy but becoming a better version of himself (rubedo) — thus, completing the alchemical process. In the end, he’s free, which is all Father wanted to be. He acknowledges that you don’t have to use alchemy or whatnot to become more than you are, because who you are is enough.
Thus, Edward becomes the best version of himself, which is what real alchemists aspired to be. He’s completed the Great Work, and therefore has no need for alchemy anymore. “That is the correct answer, alchemist!”
For Everyone New to Tumblr
So! Your shitty social media website has become even shittier? So much so that you’re running to our beloved little hellsite? Welcome! Despite all the jokes, this is genuinely one of the last good social media websites out there that has a considerable userbase, and it’s probably for the best that its growing and people are beginning to grow used to experiences that aren’t dictated by advertisers and algorithms.
BUT
If you want to be welcomed with open arms from said userbase, you are going to have to learn how to use and navigate Tumblr.
Having been stuck here for almost 11 years, now (the fact that this is a retired Once-ler askblog should be proof enough), I feel like I’ve seen a lot of posts that have touched on many different aspects of Tumblr that new users should be wary of, but none that have put the entirety of new user advice into one big post. I feel a little bit of a lacking in both content and convenience that might make taking all this advice in difficult.
So here I go, making a big long post that new users can have as reference.
I strongly recommend that new users at least start the account-making process on a laptop or desktop computer, as opposed to a mobile phone, for reasons I will get into later, but it’s not a requirement.
(PLEASE NOTE: Table of Contents only functions properly when you view this post on my blog, sorry for the inconvenience!)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
MAKING YOUR BLOG
- Editing Your Blog’s Mobile Appearance
- Editing Your Blog’s Desktop Appearance
- Your Blog’s Settings
APP VS MOBILE VS DESKTOP
MAKING POSTS
- Types of Posts
- Content in Posts
- The Tagging System
FINDING OTHER BLOGS
- Following Blogs You Already Know
- Finding New Blogs
INTERACTING WITH OTHER BLOGS
- Reblogs, Comments, and Likes
- Asks, Submissions, and Messaging
- Blocking
YOUR INFLUENCE AS A TUMBLR USER
- You Have None
TUMBLR CULTURE
- Post Circulation
- Miscellaneous Etiquette
- Tumblr-specific Memes
Let’s get started, shall we?
Screaming crying because I hate every piracy guide I come across on here.
HERE IT IS
check out my piracy guide GOGOGOGO
STEAL MAIM KILL!!!
tell me if i got any more splainin todo. i am open to suggestions. reblog this so more people can pirate. DO IT!
THE REVIEWS ARE IN
thank you so much for the support over the last three days! i got over 10k hits on the website!!!
i wish i could upload faster/more often but i have been busy & tired. i did make a number of small updates today though! including links to VPN leak checks, where to find roms and emulators, more torrenting sites, and a small dictionary section that has VERY SIMPLE definitions of some words that i used.
as capitalism continues to decay, expect the role of celebrities in producing and spreading capitalist-imperialist propaganda to become more and more prominent
Everyone in the notes saying “they’re so stupid” / “they’re just idiot celebrities” etc. - they’re not stupid or incompetent. They’re bourgeoisie professionals who are doing a job for their class and doing it well. This is their role in the political economy. It’s not an aberration or them speaking about shit they don’t understand. They understand what they’re doing perfectly well.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) • JIMMY STEWART as George Bailey and LIONEL BARRYMORE as Mr. Potter
wait WHAT 😳 i mean that feels accurate but still…. WHAT.
here’s the official fbi memo about it! you can view the whole document here
the fbi presented these “findings” to mccarthy’s house unamerican activities committee (huac) in an attempt to get it’s a wonderful life pulled from theaters but huac decided not to take any action
“oh we can’t hold the Queen accountable for the actions of her ancestors!!!”
her ancestors? you mean her dad?
y’all realize she was crowned in 1953 right? Nearly 70 years of imperialism with her face stamped on it. She’s the longest-lived, and longest reigning British monarch.
Y’all look at her and see a kindly withered old gramma with memeability, but completely ignore the amount of damage that she and her family have done to so many countries.
“oh well, what did you want her to do, just walk away from it?”
yes.
Yes, I do expect people to look at the harm that systems they uphold do to the world at large and then actively refuse to continue their participation in them. I do not believe that is too much to ask of anyone, let alone one of the most powerful women in the entire fucking world.
Sorry that I’m not particularly impressed with her #girlboss legacy when the Indigenous Peoples of Canada and Australia are still feeling the monarchy’s effects on their homes and families.
70 years and she never once thought, “Hm, maybe imperialism is a bad idea?”
I hope the old woman kicks the bucket, and I hope that her family continues to disintegrate until the entire thing comes crumbling down. May independence finally come to the people England has been crushing under its boots for centuries.
i think the reason people insist on medicalizing trans people and why america by and large only accepted gay marriage under the pretense that gay people were “born that way and can’t help it” is precisely because of this insane fear that they are going to catch the gay if LGBT people are not quarantined from society. again i am by no means an expert on this shit but i think this is all a lot more culturally and socially defined that anyone is really letting on. the ancient greek didn’t think being gay was some genetic condition you were born with they just thought fucking other dudes in the ass was normal. the idea that one cannot choose to be trans or gay - why not? like genuinely why would you not be able to do that who cares. these things shouldn’t have to be characterized by suffering or a reluctant acceptance of circumstances outside of your control, because there’s not really that much evidence to support that anyways
biological essentialist rhetoric being used by white supremacists to disqualify, humiliate and defeminise black women? who would have thought
Remember when Republicants screamed bloody murder about someone returning fire during BLM protests?
Turns out police were driving around in unmarked vehicles randomly shooting people and Jaleel returned fire after being shot by them.
Imagine you’re standing on the side of the street or walking down the street and suddenly a minivan drives by with the side poor pulled open and starts firing rounds at you.
No identification on the vehicle. No verbal identification by the police. Just racist cops being racist thugs and hurting/maiming/killing as many citizens as they can - then acting like snowflakes after a citizen responds with appropriate force to their murderous intent.
Details about the police involved here:
This is, without exaggeration, a drive-by shooting committed by the Minneapolis Police Department
My favourite fact about chess ever is how Garry Kasparov, a Russian grandmaster and former world chess champion, once said during an interview:
“Well, in the past, I have said that there is real chess and women’s chess. Some people don’t like to hear this, but chess does not fit women properly. It’s a fight, you know? A big fight. It’s not for women.”
Only for Kasparov to get absolutely obliterated by Judit Polgar, a Hungarian woman, a few years later.
Another fun fact: Judit Polgar, at the time of receiving her grandmaster title in 1991, was the youngest player to EVER receive the title at only age 15. Judit Polgar is straight up a chess legend. She was also the youngest player to ever be inducted into the FIDE top 100, ranking 55 at only age 12.
Judit has defeated numerous other chess legends, such as Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, and Boris Spassky, all former world chess champions. She has even won a match against Magnus Carlsen, who is the current world chess champion as of 2021. When I tell you this woman is a beast I mean she is RUTHLESS.
Famously, in 1994, during a match with Judit Polgar, Garry Kasparov cheated, taking back a move after realising it was losing, even though this is very much against the rules of chess. At the time, Judit was only 17. Imagine being so good at age 17 that you make the world champion cheat!
Anyways. Stan chess legend Judit Polgar because she is a beast!!!!!
Yet another fun fact: her sister, Susan Polgar, is ALSO a chess grandmaster and was women’s world champion in 1996!
And, their sister Sofia Polgar, is ALSO a chess international master! Meaning that all three Polgar sisters are chess masters!
also, she’s Jewish! Bobby Fischer refused to play her because of this. She played in the men’s league, and at the height of her career was 7th in the world
Note, the reason for this is that their father, a researcher, decided to perform an experiment with the goal of proving that innate talent is not as much a factor as work - that ‘genius’ can be taught, essentially. He literally looked for a wife who would help him with this. He found a woman who was interested by the idea and agreed to marry him and have his kids so they could be his experiment. He decided on chess as the medium for the experiment because it has clear goals and rankings. He himself was not especially good at chess, nor was his wife. He taught his daughters chess from a very young age - at age five, his first daughter, Susan, won a local competition against people more than twice her age. I’m not saying their accomplishments aren’t their own - they absolutely are! These are three phenomenal ladies who have brilliant skill. But their unusual upbringing is the root of why all three of them are chess champions. What I would like to know is how he encouraged them to love chess, rather than making it feel like a chore to them. Because that is the most important key, I feel. It won’t help if you start a kid on something young but go about it in a way that leads to them resenting it! And he very easily could have raised three daughters who wanted nothing more than to hurl a chessboard at his head. Somehow, he didn’t, and *that’s* the interesting part to me.
saint-dionysus
Yeah, I see a lot of people in the notes and tags saying stuff like “imagine how much IQ that family has” or “they must have some crazy chest genetics”. Which is funny since they were actually born with the purpose of disproving the idea that talent is a genetic trait and that things like IQ are racist, abelist, and sexist ideas made up to inflate the egos of white cis men.
Coffman navigates over to the Wikipedia article about one of the conspirators—Arthur Nebe, a high-ranking member of the SS. Apart from his role in the plot, Nebe’s main claim to notability is that he came up with the idea of turning vans into mobile gas chambers by piping in exhaust fumes. The article acknowledges both of these facts, along with the detail that Nebe tested his system on the mentally ill. But it also says that he worked to “reduce the atrocities committed,” going so far as to give his bloodthirsty superiors inflated death totals.
Coffman will recall that she feels “totally disoriented.” She cannot believe that an innovator in mass murder would have tried to protect the Jews and other supposed subhumans his troops rounded up. She checks the footnotes. The claim is attributed to War of Extermination, a compendium of academic essays originally published in 1995.
Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.”
The level of bad faith is eye-opening for Coffman. She is “very appalled.” She sees that her confidence in Wikipedia was “very much misplaced.” All it takes to warp historical memory, she realizes, is something this small, achievable for almost anyone with a keyboard. “So few people can have so much impact, it’s a little scary,” she says. She begins to turn a more critical eye to what she sees on Wikipedia. Especially the footnotes.
[…]
Coffman finds her next target in the footnotes of the article about the tank division. This one’s name is Franz Kurowski, and he seems to pop up all over the place. Kurowski served in the Luftwaffe. After the war, he tried his hand at all sorts of popular writing, often with a pseudonym to match: Jason Meeker and Slade Cassidy for his crime fiction and westerns, Johanna Schulz and Gloria Mellina for his chick lit. But his accounts of the Second World War made him famous under his own name. Kurowski’s stories weren’t subtle. As the German historian Roman Töppel writes in a critical essay: “They depict war as a test of fate and partly as adventure. German war crimes are left out—much unlike allied war crimes.”
To understand this dubious chronicler better, Coffman goes to Google, where she comes upon a book called The Myth of the Eastern Front. It describes how, in the immediate aftermath of the war, characters like Kurowski worked to rehabilitate the image of the German army—to argue that a few genocidal apples had spoiled the barrel. With a guy like Hitler to pin the blame on, the rest was easy. The so-called “myth of the clean Wehrmacht” took root on both sides of the Atlantic: German society needed to believe that not everyone who wore a gray uniform was evil, and the Americans were courting every anti-Communist ally they could find. Then, in the mid-1990s, a museum exhibit cataloging the crimes of the Nazi-era military traveled throughout Germany. An odd situation emerged: Germans began to speak more honestly about the Wehrmacht than non-Germans did.
When Coffman reads this, something clicks. She is dealing with a poisonous tree here. She shouldn’t be throwing out individual pieces of fruit. She should be chopping it off at the trunk. She starts to pivot from history (the facts themselves) to historiography (the way they’re gathered). She begins to use Wikipedia to document the false historical narrative, and its purveyors, and then make the fight about dubious sources rather than specific articles.
This is a great time to talk about how biased Wikipedia can be with geopolitical and historical articles!
Do not view Wikipedia as this end-all resource, especially for political history. It’s been known for a while in (more) academic circles that wiki is bad for ‘soft’ sciences even if it’s good for ‘hard’ sciences.
Especially with how propagandized Western history is, please do not hold wiki up as this champion of neutral knowledge.
Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.
I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.
Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!
That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.
it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me
Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.
Remember lions? Fellow apex predators?
Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.
The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.
Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.
How about Orangutans?
Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.
Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-
How about Stone Age people in Europe?
They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)
Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.
Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.
But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?
6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.
Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!
During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.
So what changed?
The industrial revolution, baybe~~
New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.
The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!
THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”
(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)
Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.
Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.
Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.
We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.
Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!
Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”
Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.
In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.
Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.
Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.
In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.
“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva
"fair trade" shouldn't have to exist and the fact that it's considered normal you have to go out of your way to avoid billion dollar corporations using the labor of trafficked child slaves really says a lot about globalized capitalism...and it's even more dreadful corporations will advertise themselves as not using child labor or sweatshop labor as if it's an accomplishment. we really let this system become normalized to the point where we see abuse as a necessary evil and it infuriates me. most people do NOT associate capitalism with slavery and human trafficking but without those things the most popular corporations would panic. the only time I see this brought up is when there's a lawsuit against a well known corporation like nestle regarding it, but even then people direct their hatred towards nestle, not the economic system that embraces the worst of humanity and shoves it under the rug while painting a pretty picture of surplus and opulence. THAT is capitalism, and how 'the gilded age' got its name--flashy on the outside, deadly behind doors. if you oppose it, if you decide to take resources out of the hands of corporations and oligarchs, you can expect the CIA in your capital with some regime change, and then when people are massacred for oil companies, you'll check the news and see some millionaire political pundit tell you that socialism did it. then decades later evidence will drop showing the whole thing was a lie--the regime change wasn't promoting freedom, it was profit motivated--and at that point the blood is spilled and all you can think is, "for how long can they get away with this?"
