Little American History Things

[historyarchaeologyartefacts]

2300 years old Scythian woman’s boot preserved in the frozen ground of the Altai Mountains[750x451]

[taibhsearachd]

So I was mobile when I reblogged this earlier, but re: the adornment on the soles. These shoes undoubtedly belonged to the Pazyryk Ice Maiden, given the date, culture, and location. (I love her, I care about her so much, and I will never not ramble about her given the chance.) The woman who wore these boots was 30 years old, at the oldest. She was probably a priestess, a storyteller. She was from a horseriding culture, and it’s unclear if stirrups had been invented at the time. She suffered from chronic pain, and she died from breast cancer and/or complications from a fall (probably from horseback). This is the first time I’ve seen her boots, but I’m entirely unsurprised by it. She may not have had to walk much, given her status and riding culture. She may not have been ABLE to walk much, given her apparent disabilities. She was valued in her community, despite these limitations, to the point that they created these beautiful, less-than-functional objects for her, that they buried her with ceremony befitting royalty, that she and her belongings are the best and most solid example of this culture we have. Disabled people have inherent worth in a society, and always have.

[sesiondemadrugada]

Les statues meurent aussi (Ghislain Cloquet, Chris Marker & Alain Resnais, 1953).

[cucullas]

Statues also Die is a good film for those interested in art and museums. Commissioned and partially paid by Présence Africaine it was released in 1953. The film shows how the treatement of African art (called Art Nègre at the time and considered simpler) and Colonialism erased African cultures and denied African and Black people the dignity of their past. It was forbidden as in the ‘50 French still had colonies in Africa, it was allowed on 1963. 

You can watch it here in (French with English subtitles) [many scenes of colonial France and an animals suffering dying]

[thechanelmuse]

Remnants of the British Black Panther’s Lost Legacy

[clatterbane]

Britain’s black power movement is at risk of being forgotten, say historians

The Cambridge academic Robin Bunce said: “There is a fundamental danger of erasing the very notion of a struggle at all. I’ve been researching this for four and a half years and there have been so many occasions when people have said to me: ‘There was no black struggle in Britain. You’re thinking of South Africa or America.’“

The narrative that feeds it is the one that Britain is the utopia of fair play. We have such a commitment to individual rights, we have such a commitment to common sense and decency that there is no systematic racism in Britain.”…

Bunce said it was not just politicians, but wider British society that would rather not dwell on the less palatable.

[clatterbane]

Bringing this one back, while I’m reminded.

[leescoresbies]

so in case you’re about to watch a cw television show based in the southwest that’s featuring an episode based on some supposed reservation – or you’ve read anything about the situation on the navajo nation recently – i wanted to share some ways that we all can help diné (navajo) beyond kind-of depicting them on television. 

today the navajo nation surpassed new york state and new jersey for the highest per-capita coronavirus infection rate in the country. that’s 2,304 cases per 100,000 people. 173,600 people live on the navajo nation, roughly. below are a number of organizations & community groups raising money & resources. it would mean so much to me if you’d consider supporting these communities right now - & continue to think about how you can support the indigenous communities near you, & understand the indigenous land you might currently occupy. 

the navajo water project helps bring running water to navajo families without, and also helps families pay their water & electricity bills 

the adopt and elder project helps feed navajo elders during the pandemic

the navajo health command operations center is the navajo nation’s only official fundraising and donation effort

rez rising is a database of native american small businesses across the southwest

the kinlani mutual aid group is a flagstaff, az based volunteer group collecting supplies

the native american relief fund operated by the native american community foundation provides emergency grants to communities for supplies & more

and a number of community-run fundraising efforts:

northern diné covid relief effort

navajo & hopi families relief fund

native student emergency fund

bluff area mutual aid - supply delivery in utah

navajo nation relief project

if you’re aware of any other legitimate fundraising efforts to help these communities, or the indigenous communities near you, please add them. 

[kiyokospeaks]

What’s up just a reminder that the Hula Girl stereotype can go to hell and is in part responsible for Hawai’i being the tourist destination and getting invaded by rich white people, and for Hawaiian culture being disrespected and appropriated

Here’s a few sources on the topic:

How America’s Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai’i (the site is weird but the research is legitimate, gives a good overview of the issue and references a lot of sources that are harder to get your hands on read: books)

“Pop” Goes Hawai’i: The Twentieth Century Origins of Tourism in Hawai’i and the Impact of U.S. Pop Culture on Women in the Islands of Aloha (this one is very long but a really good read)

Misperceptions of the “Hula Girl” (this one is a personal essay but it’s an entry in the University of Hawai’i’s academic newspaper)

[kiyokospeaks]

Cool cool so its Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month so I’m gonna uh. reblog this

[kiyokospeaks]

Also if you don’t have the time and/or energy to read through these articles lemme give you the basic breakdown (I’ll try to keep this short, but I’ll put it under the cut because it’ll probably still take up space)

Keep reading

[kiyokospeaks]

Happy Pacific American Heritage Month! Reblogging this again with a bit of extra information.

[disasterhimbo]

Hey y’all, I don’t normally do this but there’s a black man in Texas about to be wrongfully executed so please consider signing this petition:

FREE RODNEY REED

FREE RODNEY REED

[odinsblog]

10 facts you need to know: https://www.innocenceproject.org/10-facts-you-need-to-know-about-rodney-reed-who-is-scheduled-for-execution-on-november-20/

Link to article: https://www.innocenceproject.org/stand-with-rodney-reed-on-texas-death-row/

Link to the petition: https://www.freerodneyreed.com/

[cyndigenous-deactivated20210204]

When we talk about colonization and genocide in the Americas, we are often met with the same statement: 

“This happened hundreds of years ago, get over it”.

Sure, it started centuries ago. But it didn’t end hundreds of years ago, or one hundred, or even 50. 

When we talk about these issues, we don’t just mean small pox-infected blankets, or forced migration. We don’t just mean settlements, bounties on our heads, the physical attacks on our villages. We don’t just mean the residential schools, or the laws that banned our traditional languages and practices. 

We mean: 

- The Sixties Scoop, when Indigenous children were ripped from their communities to be placed with white families.

- Residential schools, the last of which only closed in 1996, where children were forced to give up their languages, culture, identity, and were abused horribly.

- The Millennium Scoop. The child welfare system in Canada is still ripping children from Indigenous communities. Despite only making up about 8% of the age demographic, Indigenous youths under 14 account for more than half of the foster system. (x)

- 80% of reserves in Canada have median incomes that fall below the poverty line (x)

- A vast number of reserves in Canada do not have clean drinking water (x)

- Indigenous rights and land titles are routinely ignored in order to create pipelines and sell off resources. (x)

- According to Indigenous women’s groups, there are approximately 4,000 cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The RCMP only acknowledge about 1200 of these. (x)

-  “Between 1997 and 2000, the homicide rate for Indigenous women was nearly seven times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous women.” (x)

- A man literally confessed to the murder of Tina Fontaine, a 15 year old Indigenous girl, and he was acquitted. (x)

- Colten Boushie, a Cree man, was shot multiple times by a Saskatchewan farmer. A jury featuring no Indigenous people declared his murderer not guilty. (x)

- The Starlight Tours. Saskatoon Police routinely took intoxicated Indigenous men outside of the city in sub-zero temperatures and left them to find their way back. Several froze to death. The Saskatoon Police were caught deleting the article about this from Wikipedia. (x)

- Suicide and self injury are the leading cause of death for Indigenous men under 44. In addition, the rate of suicide in Indigenous women is seven times higher than that of non-Indigenous women, and the rate of suicide among Indigenous men is 5.25 times higher than that of non-Indigenous men. Suicide rates for Inuit youth are among the highest in the world, at 11 times the national average. (x) In certain communities, like Attawapiskat, suicides reach epidemic levels. (x)

These are just a few of the many legacies of colonization that impact us today. 

This is colonialism. This is genocide. 

It never stopped.

(please add more to this list)

[cyndigenous-deactivated20210204]

Update:

- Starlight Tours have been recorded in Calgary as recently as mid-October 2018. Facebook posts about it have been vanishing from accounts soon after reposting.

[valtsv]

discussing history w men is just like

[domainlight-deactivated20220516]

【PLEASE REBLOG AND SPREAD OUT TO THE WORLD】

Hong Kong police = Terrorist.

This is the truth of what happened in Hong Kong last night.

To you who is reading this right now,

We, Hongkongers just experienced a terrorist attack planned and executed by our Hong Kong Police Force. At about 10pm today, our police force rushed into our railway system in Prince Edward station, got in to the carriage and indifferently beat up all the people in it regardless they are protesters or simply passengers. They ignored the weapon guidelines and fired tear gas indoor in the carriage which is in fact lethal. Also, they beat up innocent people causing them seriously wounded. Some passengers kneeled before them asking them to stop but the response they got were beaten ever harder. Meanwhile, the police haven’t arrested the passengers after they got beaten up, showing that the only purpose of their brutality was to sort their anger to violence but not dispersing the crowd.

Not only that, they refused to let first aider enter gated station with wounded inside even the first aider was begging and promising to ditch all his gears. He even pleaded that the police could beat him up after he has saved the people inside. The police still wouldn’t let the first aid team in.

We, Hongkongers are experiencing a humanitarian crisis and we hope that people all over the world can help us in anyways you can think of. Thank you and we will stay strong.

Hongkongers

[shoyowo]

Hey remember when US and Russia was all like “We’re the best!!! We’ve won the space race!!!!” But India sent a kick-ass space probe to Mars and the whole mission was fuel efficient, costed less and a roaring success in the first try and then they were like “…..wait no that can’t be true” and still have the audacity to call us “underdeveloped” or only view us as a ‘third world country’? :)

For anyone who needs more info, the probe was called Mangalyaan (which literally means space probe vehicle) or Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and you can also get more information here and here

[shoyowo]

Remember when NYT mocked India for this very thing and an TOI (a major indian newspaper) responded with this? :)

They were being racist asf and we were till respectful literally fuck you if you think ‘third world counties’ can’t be better than you

[shoyowo]

white people can and should reblog this

[seriesofnonsequiturs]

and shout out to the women engineers integral to the launch

“Indian staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft entered Mars’s orbit.

On November 5, 2013, a rocket launched toward Mars. It was India’s first interplanetary mission, Mangalyaan, and a terrific gamble. Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations—NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s—had ever been a success. No space organization had succeeded on its first attempt. What’s more, India’s space organization, ISRO, had very little funding: while NASA’s Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million. 

This was not the only success of the mission. An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

x

[gahdamnpunk]

This is insane

[maribelmayde]

holy fuck, this is A LOT

[red-stick-progressive]

Also that figure is way too low, modern population estimates might be as much as twice that. There were between 25 and 40 million in central Mexico alone, almost as many people in the North Amazon, almost as many in the Andes, and almost as many in the American South. All saw 80 to 99 percent population loss in the period of 2 to 3 generations.

The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.

Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.

That’s not even genocide, it’s apocalypse.

[diasporangael]

Why are you all omitting the well known fact that it was not purposeful genocide but simply new microbes introduced that no one knew about at that time.

[red-stick-progressive]

Cuz that’s not true.

Tw genocide, tw violence

When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.

They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.

Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.

The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.

The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.

And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.

Colonizers are not innocent just cuz the germs did a lot of the work of the apocalypse.

[radicalmuscle-deactivated-2019]

Colonizers were savages, and people who defend their actions have no soul.

[a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark]

You know how the Plains Bison was almost extirpated in the Prairies? How it was saved by one rancher who had a cockamamie scheme about crossing them with domestic cattle to get a breed with the environmental tolerance of Bison and the tractability of domestic cattle? You do know. You know WHY it happened? Because the British government encouraged industrial scale slaughter of the wild herds. Not for any economic reasons. A lot of times they were shot with repeating rifles from trains, and the carcasses left to rot. But a lot of the Plains Nations were heavily dependent on the Bison population. They used every part of the animal, and even engaged in ecological practices to mantain optimal habitat for them.

Removing the Bison removed not only a major resource for them, but also had a huge cultural impact.

[jessicamiriamdrew]

Friendly October reminder not to put Spock or other Jewish characters in costumes with horns

[jessicamiriamdrew]

to clarify: it is an antisemitic idea that Jews have horns (dating to a mistranslation of karan (shone) v keren (horns) ) which was perpetuated in art by the likes of Michelangelo. this is not a thing of the past–some gentiles still believe that jewish people have horns, and putting jewish characters in costumes/aus with horns is insensitive at best and also really fuckin gross

[fromchaostocosmos]

also do not depict Jewish characters as demons there is a very long history of Jews being seen as demons and that being used to kill us 

please do not dress Jewish characters in costumes that are priest outfit or nun outfit or with crosses 

[emptydragonseverywhere]

Just to give y'all an idea of how modern the horn issue is: My dad, when he went to college in the early 1980’s, was asked by someone who had never met a Jew before where his horns were. In the 1980’s. My dad was asked where his horns were. This was only 30 years ago. I have been lucky not to deal with that particular stereotype in my lifetime, but that was less than a decade before I was born. And I know other Jews in areas where Jews are scarce have dealt with this much more recently than the 80’s.

[theforestsoulbird]

Yup. When my mom went to college, her freshman year roommate woke up the first Sunday and started getting dressed for church. My mom was still in bed, so the roommate came over and woke her up.

Roommate: Did you want to come to church with me, or do you have your own church you’re going to?

Mom: Well, I don’t really go to religious services, but if I did I would go to a synagogue, not a church, because I’m Jewish.

(Long silence. My mom opens one eye to see her roommate staring in shock.)

Roommate: You … you don’t look Jewish.

Mom: (Who looks VERY Jewish) What do you mean?

Roommate: Well, my pastor always told me that Jews have horns and a tail.

Long story short: they didn’t end up getting along very well.

[janothar]

@optometrictzedek and @theforestsoulbird, it’s more recent than that.

I’ve been asked about my horns as recently as 1997.  In a public school in New Jersey.

[jewishdragon]

It would b cool of my non-Jewish followers to reblog this!!! Spread this bc it’s scary and real and you should know!

[fuckyeah2000s]

[cobblestonestreet]

Four women chug bottles of illegal liquor, circa 1925.

[mariedemedicis]

favorite presidential kid? probably alice roosevelt.

-her mother died two days after she was born and on the same day her maternal grandmother also died. teddy was so sad that he left his newborn daughter with his sister anna for two years and could never bring himself to say his wife’s name so alice who was named after her mother had to be called “lee”, her middle name.

-when teddy remarried, alice’s stepmom edith made it clear that she thought alice’s mom had been beautiful but dumb. when alice’s parents couldn’t handle her anymore, they sent her to her aunt anna’s. according to alice, “If auntie Bye had been a man, she would have been president”. alice claimed to feel one-sixth as loved as her five half-siblings.

-then alice got polio which at the time could kill, not to mention cripple. her stepmom put her through an uncompromising regimen of nightly forced wearing of torturous leg braces and shoes, which left alice with no trace of the disability and able to run up stairs and touch her nose with her toe well into her 80s.

-alice’s dad and stepmom tried to send her to a conservative girls’ school but alice wrote home, “If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will”.

-when teddy became president in 1901, alice became an instant celebrity and fashion icon at age 17. she did scandalous things like smoking cigarettes in public, riding in cars with men, staying out late partying, keeping a pet snake (called emily spinach) in the white house, and placing bets with a bookie. 

-she even had a color - alice blue - and a song - alice blue gown - named after her. the press called her princess alice.

-during an imperial cruise to japan, alice jumped into a pool fully dressed and coaxed a congressman in to join her.

-one time a white house visitor commented on alice’s frequent interruptions in the oval office, usually with political advice. after the third interruption, teddy explained, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both”.

-in february 1906, alice married congressman nicholas longworth and was the social event of the season. it was attended by more than a thousand guests and thousands gathered outside hoping for a glance of princess alice. she wore a blue wedding dress and cut the wedding cake with a sword.

-alice publicly supported her dad’s 1912 presidential candidate while her husband supported president taft. alice appeared on stage in her husband’s own district with her dad’s vp candidate. longworth lost by 105 votes and alice joked that she was worth at least 100 votes (meaning she was the reason he lost).

-alice’s campaign against her husband caused a friction in their marriage and longworth was known to be carrying on many affairs. it was also generally accepted knowledge in dc that alice had a long, ongoing affair with senator william borah, who by alice’s own admission was the father of her daughter, paulina. alice had a wicked sense of humor and had initially wanted to name her daughter deborah (as in de Borah).

-after the death of her daughter paulina in 1957, alice fought for and won custody of her granddaughter joanna. 

-in the 1950s, alice’s health began to fail her and she broke a hip. she also discovered she was suffering from breast cancer and had to have two mastectomies. in 1960, alice was diagnosed with emphysema. 

-alice was also a champion of rights for african-americans. one day, in 1965, alice’s african-american chauffeur and good friend, turner, was driving her to an appointment. turner pulled out in front of a taxi and the driver yelled at him, “What do you think you’re doing, you black bastard?” turner stayed calm but alice told the taxi driver, “He’s taking me to my destination, you white son of a bitch!”

-after many years of ill health, alice died of emphysema and pneumonia at age 96, outliving all five of her younger half-siblings.

-her most famous quote was, “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me”. 

-when senator joseph mccarthy joked at a party, “Here’s my blind date. I am going to call you Alice”, she replied, “Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice. The trashman and the policeman on my block call me Alice, but you may not”. 

-she told president lyndon b. johnson that she wore wide-brimmed hats so he couldn’t kiss her.

-when a kkk member dressed in full costume asked her to trust his word, she said, “I never trust a man under sheets”.

so in summary, alice roosevelt longworth was badass.

this is her:

here’s little alice

more of teen/young adult alice

alice with her daughter paulina

alice as a grand old lady

[elyssediamond]

River Water-crowfoot (Ranunculus fluitans) in River Vramsån Photo Patrik Olofsson

[lesbianshepard]

stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life

[pastel-selkie]

Reblog if you would burn down the statue of liberty to save a life

[randomslasher]

Here’s the thing, though. If you asked a conservative “Would you let the statue of liberty burn to save one life?” they’d probably scoff and say no, it’s a national landmark, a treasure, a piece of too much historical importance to let it be destroyed for the sake of one measly life. 

But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”  

The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical. 

But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?

People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you. 

P.S. I would let the statue of liberty burn to save a pigeon. 

[boyist]

[robotmango]

also, there is an extreme difference between what things or principles *i* personally am willing to die for, and what i would hazard others to die for. and this is a distinction i don’t think the conservative hard-right likes to face.

an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.

they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.

the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.

if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.

and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.

but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.

would i be willing to risk death, trying to save the statue of liberty? probably, yes. but there is no culture without people, and therefore i also believe there are no cultural treasures worth more than other people’s lives. and as far as i’m concerned the same goes for laws, or markets, or borders.

[aquatixwitch]

Well said!