Ùrnaigh & Obair

Autistic Anarchist from Scandinavia I He/They I Svenska Gàidhlig Gaelige English I antifa gu bràth l #1 Murchadh MacPhàrlain fan account I Semi-Orthodox Neo-Calvinist (Church of Scotland) l hang me from the Ballad Tree

[cocainejuul]

[freyjaofthenorth]

will forever annoy me that my first visit to the Stockholm dyke march last week was a perfect showcase of how the progressive side of american cultural imperialism is a direct detriment to leftist activism in sweden

all the speeches being in english is one thing, but the content of the speeches was the big issue; a lot of it was about intersectionality and racism within the lgbtq movement (good and reasonable), but how it was talked about was essentially copy-pasted from online yankees, adapted to a situation that anyone with longer on-the-ground antiracist activism experience and some basic knowledge of history can tell is terrible for describing the situation in sweden

not only is the whole white-poc dichotomy poorly suited to describe swedish racism, but most obviously and offensively; for all the mention of black and even latinx people, arabs was an afterthought and the complete silence on roma and sinti people was deafening

döda din inre jänkare

[anarchotolkienist]

People will do this so often, especially in queer circles, and it pisses me off so badly because it shows that our commitment to these stances isn't actually political, it's aesthetic. It isn't an analytical framework applied to struggle, to understand the world and therefore to change it, it's a series of talking points that we say in order to seem like the most cool and correct to jostle for social status, much like having the kinkiest leather outfit or whatever.

Also people do that about police brutality a lot when the evidence of police targeting specifically black people, as distinct from other groups of non-white people, in Sweden is not there and if you want to build a functional coalition here then you'd really need to build one that includes Muslim youths, because they make up a much larger part of the racialised minority. But because Arabs in America are a small immigrant group and only relatively recently properly integrated as targets of the racist systems in America, we don't see them.

[croftingturnblr]

“The Raids” – Sùlaisgeir after the Second World War.

With only one man left after the war who had been to Sùlaisgeir, how did the tradition continue?

[antifainternational]

Scotland's Daily Record targeted by fascist-styled protesters at office

NUJ has seen "increasing amount of abuse and threats" towards journalists in Scotland in recent weeks.

The editor of the Daily Record has pledged to “continue to report without fear” after a fascist-style protest was held outside the newspaper’s office last week. Around 50 people dressed fully in black stood silently in a military-style formation in the road outside the Glasgow office building on Friday, appearing to imitate the Blackshirts of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. They appear to have taken umbrage with coverage of their “silent protests” held around Scotland in the Daily Record, which revealed one of the men involved as a “notorious football thug”. The gathering outside the newspaper office was the fourth in Scotland this summer and the third in Glasgow. The crowd of protesters stood in a military grid formation while one member placed a flag baring a picture of a wolf alongside the name “ALBA DEFENSOR” (meaning “Defend Scotland”) and the slogan “protecting Scotland” outside the office doors. The flag was accompanied by a burning candle and the handwritten note: “It takes courage to seek the truth, it takes none to spread suspicion.” Neil McIntosh, Daily Record editor and Reach Scotland editor-in-chief, told Press Gazette: “Our top priority is to protect our teams as they continue to report without fear on the far-right voices trying to intimidate us and others across Scotland.” The National Union of Journalists expressed concern over increasing intimidation towards journalists in Scotland.

[anarchotolkienist]

It's great that you're doing a queer interpretation of folklore, but before you do, do you actually know anything at all about folklore?

[anarchotolkienist]

This got a lot of notes. It is specifically complaining about the lazy poetry collection Wain, which advertises itself as 'queer readings of Scottish mythology', which got a bunch of attention and funding while huge folklore collections lie unedited in archives and there is no public funding available for collecting actual remaining oral lore in Scotland.

[anarchotolkienist]

Like yeah obviously Europe sucks and people in Europe are likely to be racist and support racist parties including a grim border regime that leads to mass death along the borders of Europe.

But not from a fucking American. Never from an American.

[anarchotolkienist]

Easy to get on your high American horse about how anyone who disagrees with you is a hypocritical European who should shut up because they have problems too when your ruling far-Right government and its loyal billionaires spends a lot of state funds, resources, intelligence and prestige supporting the far right across the European union and recently made it explicit military and intelligence policy to do so as part of the fucking NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY.

And also gave money to re-establish the mafia, a key player in far right organising, as well as neo-Nazi political and paramilitary capacity across Europe through the CIA, which explicitly overrode national sovereignty over and over again across Europe in order to push us further into NATO and American political-cultural-economic hegemony, which is what's currently allowing your far right government to have a huge impact on politics all across Europe.

Not to mention backing far right military nationalist governments in Spain, Portugal and Greece (currently the exact countries where most of the killing in the Mediterranean happens) for decades.

So I invite you, dear progressive American, to shut the fuck up. I don't want to hear it from you.

[viralfrog]

[anarchotolkienist]

Ever so often I listen to some slightly centrist bro-coded politics podcast (Lemonade Stand, in case you're curious) just to see what that set of Americans think about things, and it's so frustrating to hear them talk about Iran, even as people who seem to understand that the US is the aggressor in this conflict, that the war is illegitimate and should be stopped as soon as possible. They just don't understand even the basics of what's happening, nor the fact that the US is negotiating a huge concession of defeat - the only thing that seems on the cards is how huge (like, do American bases have to leave the Gulf States huge, or JUST allowing Iran entry to the international oil market on equal terms for the first time ever, the ability to toll the sound on an indefinite basis, and large investments in Iranian industrial capacity huge?). They don't seem to understand why the US is losing, unclear on if they understand that the US is losing. It's just such an inadequate accounting of the world and the war.

[mapsontheweb]

Norwegian colonial empire

Norwegian colonial empire

[anarchotolkienist]

Strange ideological assumption here, that anything once controlled by the state outside of the currently internationally acknowledged international borders constitutes a colonial empire (Norwegian state control of Jämtland and Härjedalen being to my understanding the first state proper to control that area and therefore is not in a distinct relationship at the time than are the bits currently in Norway, for instance), and anything inside of it isn't - the most obvious and currently relevant Norwegian colonialism targets the Sámi inhabitants native to most of Northern Norway, which are part of Sápmi, sámi land. But to whatever Redditor who made this land, that's not possible to understand through a colonial lense, but Norwegian state control of.... Bohuslän (again, the first state to control that area, not distinct from Norwegian state control of Vestlandet or other parts of southern Norway) is. What happens when you look at politics with the assumption that whatever exists currently is the natural state of things that ought to have always been.

[anarchotolkienist]

Just walked the West Highland Way, during the duration of which you walked within view of some 18 or so cleared settlements, about half of which are marked out on the map (without clear explanation for what it is if you don't know). Some are really clear, obvious ruins right next to the path (Rubha Choisich for instance), others are only visible as raised squares of greener turf in the landscape - the lowland shepherds have used their stones to make walls, or fanks, or their new houses.

Not one of these settlements are marked out or memorialised by the Way or it's organisers. Not a plaque, not an informative sign, not a cairn, not anything. I wonder what percentage of people who walk it notice even one of them, notice that we're walking over a graveyard, over an empty terrain that has been burned out of its inhabitants, lost its names. I'd guess it's less than ten percent.

[antifainternational]

Scottish Antifascist Callout!

On July 25th, Scotland's largest fascist group plan to come to Glasgow. They plan to intimidate migrant communities and to call for mass deportations of our neighbours. We will not accept this. White supremacy is not a legitimate political position. Not in Glasgow, not anywhere. We'll be gathering on the Green at 11am to oppose them and to ensure they don't come back to our city in a hurry. Bring friends. Don't talk to cops. Wear a mask.

- Anti-Fascist Action Glasgow

[collapsedsquid]

What is the John Birth Society?

The John Birch society were the people who used to claim that President Eisenhower was a communist who was putting fluoride in the water as a part of a communist plot and as such we needed to pre-emptively nuke the USSR, now they run the government.

[joeinct]

Bernaurerstrasse, Photo by John Gossage, 1982

[anarchotolkienist]

"some of the imagery of the Lyke Wake Dirge are thought to be pre-christian" By whom, the Puritans? It's a direct accounting of orthodox (at least mediaeval) Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, image by image. Every part of it is Catholic. You just want it to be pre-christian because you like it.

[curseofmeatthawsmoth]

I suppose this is inevitable in a world where "fetish" is used far more often in the sexual sense than it is to mean "object with a spirit inside," but "commodity fetishism" DOES NOT MEAN "really, really liking commodities"

It means treating social aspects of commodities as if they're inherent in them, e.g. when we say "a fur coat is worth $5000"

Wallace Shawn, of all people, wrote the best simple explanation of this I've come across.

[anarchotolkienist]

Ranted about this before but occultism and esoteric forms of religion are inherently incredibly open to hucksterism, cultishness, and far-Right ideology because it posits a series of true and deeper truths to the nature of the universe that are only accessible to some (through transmission from some guru, who speaks absolute truth, in secret or in particular places), that the majority can never attain. Any radical teaching is taught openly and publicly, or it loses itself to esotericism and suffocates.