STONEHENGE AND MORE RECENT POLITICS!

[lancrewizzard]

I think something a lot of cis perisex Discworld fans don’t understand is that Cheery is canonically, textually a trans woman by definition. A trans person is, quite simply, someone who identifies as a different gender to the one they were assigned at birth. Cheery was basically assigned Dwarf, but she identifies as a woman. Her physical anatomy is irrelevant. Maybe it’s in line with a human idea of a cis woman, maybe it’s not. The point is, she wasn’t assigned female at birth. She identifies as female. Therefore, she is a trans woman.

(Edit: Yes, cis people are fine to reblog this)

[thestuffedalligator]

[terrypratchettparadise]

"He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living.  The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself. It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane."

- Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

[terrypratchettparadise]

"Have you got any last words?"

 YES. I DON’T WANT TO GO.

"Well. Succinct, anyway."

- Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

[terrypratchettparadise]

"Although not common on the Discworld there are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite.  They are, obviously, rare.  Merely, giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anti-crime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage and/or humiliation to the victim.  So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity).  Anti-crimes have never really caught on."

- Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

[terrypratchettparadise]

"The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal.  Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother."

Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

[terrypratchettparadise]

"It was one of the weak spots of Granny Weatherwax’s otherwise well-developed character that she’d never bothered to get the hang of steering things.  It was alien to her nature.  She took the view that it was her job to move and the rest of the world to arrange itself so that she arrived at her destination."

- Terry Pratchett - Witches Abroad

[terrypratchettparadise]

"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

- Terry Pratchett - Witches Abroad

[terrypratchettparadise]

"Artists and writers have always had a rather exaggerated idea about what goes on at a witches’ sabbat. This comes from spending too much time in small rooms with the curtains drawn, instead of getting out in the healthy fresh air. For example, there’s the dancing around naked. In the average temperate climate there are very few nights when anyone would dance around at midnight with no clothes on, quite apart from the question of stones, thistles, and sudden hedgehogs."

- Terry Pratchett - Witches Abroad

[jaubaius]

A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.

[serialreblogger]

!!! ok but that’s legitimately what it’s doing!! That’s a corvid right there (looks like a hooded crow, to be precise), which means it’s intelligent enough to recognize, a) cars are dangerous and streets should be treated with a certain degree of caution, b) this car’s slowing down for them–cars do that sometimes–which means they’re not in imminent danger, so it doesn’t have to fly away just yet, c) that hedgehog’s still gonna get killed if it doesn’t MOVE, FAST (cars can change speed very quickly and the hedgehog’s still in the way), and almost certainly also d) if the bird does nothing it gets a free lunch.

Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food. 

i can’t - look if you follow me you know I have a thing for corvids, but this is - like!!! People are always saying “ah yes they have sub-human intelligence and don’t consider anything that isn’t immediately necessary for their own survival/pleasure,” but! Whether or not it can do philosophy, this crow is clearly demonstrating compassion. Even if it’s just the kind of compassion a toddler shows to a snail, a social creature that instinctively recognizes the potential for emotion in other beings, that’s still huge and cool and important and corvids!!! are! neat!!! 

[terrypratchettparadise]

Angua Aesthetic - cos I'm rereading Jingo and I love her

[terrypratchettparadise]

"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."

A Vetinari aesthetic, because I can.

[terrypratchettparadise]

Angua Aesthetic - cos I'm rereading Jingo and I love her

[terrypratchettparadise]

"Sometimes scientists change their minds. New developments cause a rethink. If this bothers you, consider how much damage is being done to the world by people for whom new developments do not cause a rethink."

- Terry Pratchett, with Ian Stewart and Cohen - The Science Of Discworld #1

[hengegirl]

Check out @PeoplesMomentum’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/PeoplesMomentum/status/1169650791566794752?s=09

[fullmarx]

This latest phase of the rolling constitutional crisis really does illustrate what many on the Left have been saying all along: that the real dividing line in British society is between working-class Remainers and Leavers on the one side, and the many-headed ruling-class power-Gorgon jostling for power amongst itself on the other. By supporting Ken Clarke over Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Swinson is saluting her former paymasters - choosing quite deliberately to deadlock Parliament on the eve of a No Deal crash-out, in order to preserve the legacy of ingrained austerity which she helped to enforce whilst serving as a minister in David Cameron’s coalition cabinet.

Such actions reveal the true stakes of the Brexit debate: that frustrating the rising aspirations of working-class Brits - embodied for now in the socialist leading edge of the Labour Party - is of paramount importance to the political class, even at the expense of damaging economic fallout from No Deal.

[bookwormingparty]