anderao

Feminism, Race, Class

[hjarta-deactivated20260124]

i’m watching an ocean vuong video right now and he just said “language is real. the power of it is that it gets deeper than any human touch. if i were to touch you right now, i would only get to your skin. but when i speak to you, i’m all the way through”

[goddofthesun]

I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.

Osho (via feelingisthesecret)

[twofigs]

“do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. do justly now. love mercy now. walk humbly now. you are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.”

from the talmud

[mockiatoh]

You can’t deserve a person’s love. You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking like that. They either love you, or they don’t. That doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough for them to love you, because love isn’t something you earn by being good enough. It isn’t something that can be quantified or doled out. Don’t blame yourself for not being loved how you need to, just teach yourself how to look for love where love lives.

[mockiatoh]

This isn’t just about romantic love, or even skewed towards romantic love, although it does apply there too. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to accept is that my mother simply wasn’t someone who was capable of loving me, and there is no version of me that I could have ever been that would have earned that love. But with acceptance came healing. I was able to love myself more instead of resenting myself for not being more than any one person could be.

[mockiatoh]

Are you listening? Even love for yourself isn’t earned. It is a kindness you give yourself.

[8rujaa]

what’s the psychology behind losing feelings towards someone you liked intensely once you realized they felt the same way back?

[8rujaa]

holy shit

[apocryphics]

from Essays in Love by Alain De Botton

[frognonbinary-deactivated202412]

“The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like to be white is not to say, “We have to level the playing field,” but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with. White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word “advantage” at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist. It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire game, especially in movie acting, which is, after all, hardly a profession notable for its rigor. That’s how advantageous it is to be white. It’s as though all white people were the children of movie stars. Everyone gets in the door and then all you have to do is perform at this relatively minimal level. Additionally, children of movie stars, like white people, have at—or actually in—their fingertips an advantage that is genetic. Because they are literally the progeny of movie stars they look specifically like the movie stars who have preceded them, their parents; they don’t have to convince us that they can be movie stars. We take them instantly at face value. Full face value. They look like their parents, whom we already know to be movie stars. White people look like their parents, whom we already know to be in charge. This is what white people look like—other white people. The owners. The people in charge. That’s the advantage of being white. And that’s the game. So by the time the white person sees the black person standing next to him at what he thinks is the starting line, the black person should be exhausted from his long and arduous trek to the beginning.”

— Fran Lebowitz (via jonnoxvxrevanche)

[antoine-roquentin]

the island of bali was designated for development of a tourist industry by the indonesian government in the late 60s. prior to that, the indonesian government had preferred an internally focused import substitution method of industrialization, but after an american-backed coup in 1965, the government switched to serving the needs of western multinationals and integrating itself with capitalist economies instead. as a result, 80% of bali’s economy is based on serving over a million western tourists a year. this was not possible prior to 1965 because of the communal land ownership arrangements that covered much of the most coveted areas on the island. fortunately for western investors, the coup lead to the mass slaughter of about 100,000 people on the island and up to a million overall in indonesia. police and militias kidnapped people from their homes in order to disappear them, preventing their loved ones from knowing whether they were alive or not. their corpses were mixed in mass gravesites, ensuring they could not be identified. the sites where these bodies were left, like seminyak, were considered ritualistically impure, and most balinese refused to purchase them. however, western investors who wanted to build hotels and attractions were able to purchase this land for a song. consequently, the tourist industry in bali is both metaphorically and literally based on mass death. ironically, one such bar (pictured above) that appeals primarily to western expats as a hidden gem is called “ku de ta”, or coup d’etat in indonesian. the beach it is built on, seminyak, is known locally to be a mass grave, although just how many bodies there is remains a mystery because the indonesian government represses anyone who tries to do research into the killings.

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

scientific institutions aren’t “corrupted” by racism or sexism, they developed specifically in the context of white and male supremacy. modern medicine developed, in part, to provide a biological basis for oppression and to pathologize the vast majority of the world’s population, all women and all “nonwhite” people. not only that, but many of the major developments in medicine have directly been at the expense of marginalized people. oppressive regimes also often rely on scientific institutions to further subjugate the population.

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

some sources to further read if anyone’s interested!

medicine and imperialism:

colonizing the body, chapter 5, david arnold

curing their ills, chapter 5, meghan vaughan

toward an anthropology of immunology: the body as a nation-state, emily martin

ethical variability: drug development and globalizing clinical trials, adriana petryna

science and authoritarianism/imperialism:

japanese doctors’ experimentation in wartime china, jing bao nie

administering colonial science: nutrition research and human biomedical experimentation in aboriginal communities and residential schools, 1942-1952

the humanitarian impact and implications of nuclear test explosions in the pacific region

medicine, misogyny, and racism:

interrogating bodies: medico-racial knowledge, politics, and the study of a disease, melbourne tapper

the woman in the body, chapter 7: premenstrual syndrome, work discipline, and anger, emily martin

the growth of medical authority: technology and morals in turn-of-the-century obstetrics, judith walzer leavitt

“scenes of an indelicate character”: the medical “treatment” of victorian women, mary poovey

[rincewindsapprentice]

Other ones I would add, though I only have good links for some, and others are partial:

Rana Hogarth’s Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (discusses the formation of “slave medicine” and the invention of African-specific diseases as a form of control)

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (discusses modern genetics, pharmaceuticals, and biotech and their role in perpetuating racism and sexism)

Melissa Stein, Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 (discusses sexology and scientific racism and their roles in constructing modern masculinity and racism, along with the resistance to such efforts)

Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (Also see “What Was Wrong with Eugenics?” and From Eugenics to Medical Genetics (unfortunately an inaccessible pdf)) (discussion of the history, proliferation, and continued staying power of eugenics)

Alexandra M. Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (history of the California eugenics program, and the intertwined roles of law and medicine in perpetuating racism and genocide)

Cynthia Eagle Russet, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (discusses the 19th century scientific and medical construction of womanhood)

[rneadowsoprano-deactivated20211]

White men trying to get clout for saying they hate white women on Twitter is driving me insane sir we have seen the domestic violence statistics we know you feel that way

[finita--la--commedia]

– Faraj Bou al-Isha (b. 1956), “Wait” translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa in: “Poems for the Millennium. Book of North African Literature”, edited by Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour

[mezzodical]

friend: [shows me a bad picture they took of me]

me: “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

[en--dear]

Philosopher José Medina has talked about how entrenched racist ideologies make us ‘cognitively worse off’, leaving us with an array of cognitive deficits. That is, growing up in a culture marred by some form of inequality—and here I’m talking about racial inequality—will inevitably shape how we cognitively process the world around us.

⁠I would suggest that most of us have a socially-produced attentional deficit when it comes to dealing with people of colour. You see it, for example, in the strained face of a Q&A audience member when the Arab woman has spoken for too long, or the reporter who approaches only white members of the public for comment. These may seem like small oversights, but inattention is insidious in the harm that it can cause. A 2014 study looking at patterns of care among cancer patients in Queensland found that being Indigenous was a risk factor for being diagnosed at a later stage and receiving less cancer treatment than non-Indigenous patients. Meanwhile, a well-known study conducted by researchers at ANU found that job applicants with Chinese last names needed to submit 68 per cent more applications to get as many job interview offers as applicants with ‘Anglo’ surnames.

– Reena Gupta, Yes, Your ‘Honest Mix-Up’ is Racially Biased

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Isn’t the real question this: Is the work worth doing? Am I, a human being, working for what I really need and want—or for what the State or the advertisers tell me I want? Do I choose? I think that’s what anarchism comes down to. Do I let my choices be made for me, and so go along with the power game, or do I choose, and accept the responsibility for my choice? In other words, am I going to be a machine-part, or a human being?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, in an interview for Algol, conducted by Jonathan Ward

[slangtasy]

In rebuilding a broken world, we will have the chance to choose a less hurried life.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the pace of life has been driven by the speed of commerce and business. And the speed of business, in turn, has been driven by the speed of communication. In the 1830s, the fast, new communication device was the telegraph, which could relay information at about 3 bits a second. That speed rose to about 1,000 bits a second in the mid-1980s with the advent of the internet. Today, the rate is 1,000,000,000 bits a second. The resulting increase in productivity in the workplace, coupled with the time-equals-money equation, has led to our acute awareness of the commercial and goal-oriented uses of time.
As a result, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which not a minute is to be wasted. The precious 24 hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced to 10-minute units of efficiency. We become agitated and angry in the waiting room of a doctor’s office if we’ve been standing by for 10 minutes or more. We grow impatient if our laser printers don’t spit out at least five pages a minute. We cannot sit quietly in a chair for 10 minutes. And we must be connected to the grid at all times. We take our smartphones and laptops with us on vacation. We go through our email at restaurants, or our online bank accounts while walking in the park. We have become slaves to our “urgent” appointments and to-do lists and addiction to nonstop stimulation by the external world.

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[heavyweightheart]

people are obsessed with taking a righteous, sacrificial approach to diet & exercise and that’s honestly tragic because there are so many evils in this world that actually warrant that righteous, sacrificial energy but we struggle to form movements against them while most people are off fighting this crusade for their individual health/holiness

[9944swbd]

How to change the course of human history

The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable…

“Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. Still, even as researchers have gradually come to a consensus on such questions, they remain strangely reluctant to announce their findings to the public­ – or even scholars in other disciplines – let alone reflect on the larger political implications. Abandoning the story of a fall from primordial innocence does not mean abandoning dreams of human emancipation – that is, of a society where no one can turn their rights in property into a means of enslaving others, and where no one can be told their lives and needs don’t matter. To the contrary. Human history becomes a far more interesting place, containing many more hopeful moments than we’ve been led to imagine, once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there.”

[quoms]

The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.

[sizvideos]

Video - Source: Siz iOS app