i like to imagine how people in the post-material-scarcity future would romanticise the current time period.
having a job gave people a sense of community and purpose lacking in our modern age where nobody is forcing you to get out of bed on threat of starvation. actually the average office worker in the early 21st century was so much wealthier than a UBI-having-modern if you forget to count paying rent and also make some very bad purchasing power conversions. if you look at contemporary records (sitcom where the main characters are only at work when it's plot relevant) it is obvious that employment was never really a major obstacle to having an active social life or pursuing your own passions.
for those unaware today india experienced one of its biggest protests in half a decade. there were protests all over the nation for various causes but the major one was in delhi. all we asked for was the resignation of the education minister because he's failed the students of this nation time & time again. but we were met with brutality, the police had barricaded the main site of protest (jantar mantar). metro stations were shutdown, the public was restrained from reaching the protest site and all the adjoining areas had signal jammers to make sure the crowd had no access to constant updates. they had us blocked from all the sides. they were lathi (baton) charging students from one side & releasing tear gas from the other. you couldn't walk 100 m on streets without having a tear gas shell thrown at you. there were many students, women & kids bleeding ā some from their head. some couldn't walk anymore. the police had removed their nameplates & acted with full impunity to resort to unprecedented levels of violence. they were pelting stones at us, beating up people for no reason, forcefully detaining them and attacking us constantly with tear gas & rubber bullets. they wouldn't let you exit either. the crowd was peaceful & looking out for each other yet they were met with violence. i made a friend who was all alone & she asked to join me & my friend because a policeman wouldn't leave her alone. he constantly prodded her for personal info, invited her back to the jeep saying they have food there, wouldn't stop following her around. you couldn't call or ask anyone for help, we were left to fend for ourselves & be on a constant lookout if you did not want to be beaten up to death by police. all for what? asking a resignation? shame on this country.
My roommate is transmasc. We were just talking about their reluctance to use the men's bathroom even as they "pass" more and more as a man, which is starting to cause people to give them concerning looks when they use the women's. They said they still use the women's because they feel more comfortable there. Which is fine, we shouldn't have gendered bathrooms anyway. But I told them "you might not feel as safe when you eventually get 'accused' of being a trans woman in the women's bathroom." To which they replied "oh, I'll lust lift my shirt and show them my mastectomy scars. That'll prove I belong in there."
Oh but "everyone is subjected to transmisogyny" (according to tMRA chuds, not my roommate), right?
This is the point of TME/TMA. This is why non-transfeminine people aren't subjected to transmisogyny.
I can't fall back on my AGAB to "prove I belong" in women's spaces.
Their pronouns are they/them. They will accept he/him, but prefer they/them.
What exactly made you confident enough to say "it sounds like they go by he/him," since I never once called them that or said that's what their pronouns are, I didn't even call them a trans man, because thats not how they identify. I said "transmasc."
If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.
It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.
It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.
This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.
to be clear: the people organizing, funding, and directing the current fascist movement are motivated by material and ideological concerns beyond this, but for the average bandwagon chud who won't see any exploitative loot himself, the opportunity to take part in senseless cruelty that makes him feel powerful is the motivating reward
bravely . i think aveline and isabela should primarily be fighting over who gets to do violence and against whom. and what actually counts as violence . instead of what being good at woman is like
like. aveline becomes captain of the guard after having previously been a soldier married to a templar. her Life essentially is defined by sanctioned, culturally noble and respected violence against those perceived as Other, Deserving by the state she serves. child bride to pirate pipeline isabela (who is on the run because she took on her powerful boss to free slaves he would have profited from the sale of) has been the Other against whom it is Acceptable To Commit Violence (but who is not legally or morally permitted to retaliate) her whole life, and i think this has made her incredibly protective of her right to engage in violence of her own. to me this has always kind of been the heart of their conflictā ideas about who is respectable, who is Allowed, who gets to define what that even means. especially with the context that As captain of the guard, aveline quite actively reinforces her institutionās right to enact violence & the Taboo against the disenfranchised returning it; her guardsman sexually assaults an elven girl, and she not only protects him, but literally (accidentally.) starts a war over her right to prosecute the girlās brothers for killing him in retaliation when She failed to deliver appropriate justice. ISABELA WAS SOLD AS A CHILD BRIDE. itās such a gimme. thatās like the main thing that differentiates them and the main difference in their interests. literally how is this not the main thing theyāre clashing about?
they need to come up with more words like necrosis and miasma and mausoleum and cadaver and morose and decrepit and stuff like that just so metal bands can expand their vocabulary
right wing handwringing over birth rates has always unsubtly been a combination of wanting more white babies/wanting control over women, so it's bothersome that the popular response to that is just pointing out the cost of living. "we Would be having more kids if you guys made some positive changes to society" and such. pronatalist sentiment is becoming so much more explicit that I don't think many self-styled progressives are ready to reconcile with the fact that many women simply do not want to have children. we already see how women are demonized for refusing to undertake the thankless burdens of their mother and grandmother's generations lol, I can't imagine how full abdication from child rearing will come across to some people.
I can't even see "we Would be having kids" as a strategic approach to get conservatives to consider advocating for a higher quality of life considering that they truly could not care less if you, specifically, are poor. it's true that more couples would have kids if it was cheaper, but that will not be enough for these types until women's subservience is codified. even now, they consider the lack of child rearing in today's insane society to be a matter of selfishness. they view themselves as completely different animals than you. they have and will continue to advocate for more advantages for people of their specific backgrounds and income brackets to reinforce this lol.
I think this rhetoric also ignores that the right wing want the inverse for Black and brown people - this logic of āraise living standards and weāll have more kidsā is a white perspective that ignores white supremacist medical violence, forced abortions, forced sterilisation, mass deportations, mass incarceration, police murder, imperial aggression, and forced removal of children from families as institutional programs of population control (Canadian residential schools, for example, were built for this exact purpose).
Increasing white birth rates is only one half of the equation for the right wing, and this raising-living-standards rhetoric fails to address this completely. Even in the outlandish scenario where the right wing accepts this logic and institutes robust welfare programs, do people think the state will offer these things to black, brown, and indigenous people? In any scenario where this happens it would just be Aryan UBI
Engineering teams around the world have been attempting to develop new methods of seawater desalination.
Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.
The goal is now to scale the technology for use in coastal areas and islands experiencing water insecurity.
Her name isĀ Gazal Dhaliwal and sheās a screenwriter. She talk about her lifeĀ hereĀ andĀ here.
Sheās the writer for Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, anĀ upcoming Indian coming-of-age romantic comedy-drama with a lesbian couple.Ā
She was also the dialogue writer for Lipstick Under My Burkha,Ā which depicts the secret world, including the sex lives, of four small-town Indian women.
She contributed to the screenplay for Wazir and Qarib Qarib Single.Ā
I really donāt want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkisā ākeep Tolkien whiteā commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isnāt seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkienās āI hate apartheidā valedictorian address being used as a ācounterā to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except itās only ever the āI hate apartheidā line thatās shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isnāt exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going āomg we relateā and expressing what is a very, very mild āsegregation is not greatā opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around āwhat do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?ā in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose oneās own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist itās anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuckā¦ and then getting really Pikachu-meme ābut theyāre misreading itā every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with āI donāt see colourā interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely donāt have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. Iām not surprised by Serkisā comment. I donāt really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy āI felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther setā āI somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possibleā Serkisā opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesnāt exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response āfuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, letās see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptationā. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. Theyāre interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we donāt have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, itās always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had āa few racist elementsā but ānothing like the racism of todayā. Of course itās nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isnāt writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very āget thee gone from my gateā but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkienās own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkienās āproblematic elementsā except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway āBlack men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauronā¦ itās the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidentalā, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legibleā¦ casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge āscandalā around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politicsā¢ļø, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didnāt want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesnāt need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkienās few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And itās just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they donāt realy say about most other ācanonicalā twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic āloveā? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in NĆŗmenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and weāll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkienās world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We donāt need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting ākeep the Shire whiteā Serkis soundbites and āhooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!ā news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
i think understanding the family as a system of ownership over both women and children will lead you to understand both misogyny and the oppression of children a lot better and also be able to draw informative parallels between both
#the western/nuclear family#iām a huge fan of cubaās family policy where any two or more people can register as a family unit#and receive all of the benefits and legal recognition from that
the patriarchal system of ownership of women and children that the family consists of exists all over the world and is just as present in extended family structures, which offer their own means of control and ownership
cuba's groundbreaking family policy should be recognized as good because it loosens the bonds of and takes a step towards the eventual dissolution of the family form, not because it invented a way to make the family form good, and especially not because "the family form but good" has secretly existed somewhere in the world all along
i think understanding the family as a system of ownership over both women and children will lead you to understand both misogyny and the oppression of children a lot better and also be able to draw informative parallels between both
#the western/nuclear family#iām a huge fan of cubaās family policy where any two or more people can register as a family unit#and receive all of the benefits and legal recognition from that
the patriarchal system of ownership of women and children that the family consists of exists all over the world and is just as present in extended family structures, which offer their own means of control and ownership
cuba's groundbreaking family policy should be recognized as good because it loosens the bonds of and takes a step towards the eventual dissolution of the family form, not because it invented a way to make the family form good, and especially not because "the family form but good" has secretly existed somewhere in the world all along
i think people really under sell the physical side effects of mental health disorders sometimes. like sure the depression and anxiety may be 'just in your head' but when what's in your head happens to disrupts your sleep schedule and prevent you from going outside regularly and eating consistent meals and exercising and generally taking care of your body. well it sure takes its toll huh.
efforts towards a "positive vision of masculinity" or whatever are so funny because what these guys are trying to figure out is literally "what's a way of being a good person that's Not For Girlsā¢"
The Pink Mage @andthusiamreturned - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
