not a squid

this is fine

[overthinkingit]

hello lovely human. this land is unmapped but here are some signs.

fact-checks tagged as : #always reblog the fact check

stuff about advertising : #advertising things

poetry : #poetry

art : #art

skills and good thoughts: #useful things

delight: #perfect. no notes

[scheidungsgrund]

from twitter user deejaygeejaygee

[galecstatic]

it just gets better

and better

[goingonanadventuremaybe]

[funnyfroge]

[swiftievolturra]

i need everyone to understand that mamma mia is not just a movie to me it is a lifestyle a personality trait a religious experience. like i don’t “watch” it i return to it. i orbit it. i exist in a constant state of thinking about donna sheridan spinning on that dock like the world cannot touch her and honestly it can’t.

this movie is the ultimate feminist movie and i will die on this hill. not in a “girlboss” way but in a messy, human, complicated women kind of way. donna is not punished for loving freely. she is not reduced to regret. she built a life, a home, a daughter, out of chaos and memory and joy.

and the film never once tries to shame her for it. instead it surrounds her with women—friends, daughters, versions of herself—and lets them all be loud and flawed and alive.

and what makes it even better is that this isn’t accidental. the director, the writer, the creative force behind it—women. you can feel it in the way the story refuses to center men, refuses to moralize donna’s past, refuses to shrink any of its female characters into something digestible. it’s women telling a story about women, and it shows.

also stellan skarsgård literally said that in this movie the men are the “bimbos,” and i think about that daily. because it’s true. they’re decorative, they’re confused, they’re emotional, and the women are the ones driving the story, holding the power, taking up space. it’s such a perfect, playful reversal of everything we’re used to seeing.

also i know we’re not supposed to pick a father. i know the whole point is that it doesn’t matter. but i have thoughts.

i went into this rooting for sam. like of course i did. he’s the love story. he’s the one the narrative builds up, the one you’re supposed to feel something for.

but it’s bill.

i’m sorry it’s literally bill.

sophie says she’ll know when she sees her father and the first person she truly connects with is bill. the first one she sings with, the first one she asks. and more than that, they mirror each other—restless, curious, always searching for something more. she doesn’t have sam’s steadiness. she has bill’s sense of movement, his pull toward the unknown, his relationship with the sea.

like you cannot watch her jump into the water and tell me that is not bill’s daughter.

but the movie is smarter than that. it gives you all the clues and then quietly removes the need for an answer. sophie starts off believing she’s incomplete without knowing her father, and ends up realizing she was never missing anything at all. it was never about him. it was about her.

(and yes, that’s the part where the movie casually becomes about identity and introspection and i lose my mind.)

and meryl streep. oh my god meryl streep. she makes donna feel so alive, like every laugh and every heartbreak has history behind it. she is a multiple-time oscar winner for a reason.

mamma mia is chaos and sunlight and women who refuse to shrink themselves. it’s not about fathers. it’s about freedom. and also bill is the dad thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[overthinkingit]

[diamondeyes-deluxe]

My favorite thing about The Drama is Rachel's character because she reminds me of the kind of young person online who thinks the mere act of performing disgust or outrage at the morally wrong actions of someone else is somehow politically productive at all, or that it makes them a "good person."

Whenever I see someone disregard or disparage ideas of rehabilitation for people who have done (or in this movie's case, almost did) unforgivable things, I want to grab them and ask "what should be done, then?" Because, people like that do exist, in spades, and short of executing or imprisoning or Black Mirror White Bearing every person who's done or thought of doing something immoral, rehabilitation is probably the best bet for minimizing harm, right? (And if your answer to immorality IS execution or isolation... i do not think youre really the more moral one here...) But even taking out any potential empathy for the humans who do or think of doing immoral acts, sometimes, giving them the tools to lead a happy and fulfilling life are the exact thing that leads them AWAY from the potential acts of like, shooting up a school, regardless of how undeserving you think they are of that.

Its especially interesting because, in the movie, Emma had arguably done way more activism against gun violence than Rachel ever did, despite her cousin, but this means nothing. Emma's primary motivation for her planned shooting was bullying and the isolation she felt (and TCC tumblr), but it was when she found friends and real community and something else to invest her energy into, she was able to pull herself out of those dark thoughts and, like, rejoin society. And what does Rachel do when she finds out? Spreads rumors, and tries to isolate her. And, I say this not to victim blame, but to acknowledge that no one makes those big decisions in a vacuum and that understanding these things better is a NECESSITY for preventing them, which should be the fucking goal; that is exactly the kind of behavior that made her want to do that when she was 15.

[macgyvermedical]

Homemade Electrolyte Mix

Guess what, folks! It's summer! And it's gonna be a hot one, because they all are, recently :(

Did you know you can lose about a liter of water, a gram of sodium, and 300mg potassium in an hour of profuse sweating? If you're working outside in the heat, or even just existing in a very hot and humid environment, you're gonna want to replace the electrolytes you're losing, and you're gonna have to be purposeful about it.

But electrolyte drink mixes, while convenient, are surprisingly expensive for what they are. So I'm going to give you a top secret recipe that you can whip up for literal pennies that will replace what you're losing in sweat.

1 liter of water

1/2 tsp table salt (about 1g of sodium)

1/8 tsp potassium chloride salt substitute (about 350mg potassium. NuSalt is a popular brand, it's sold near the salt at the grocery store. If you don't have this, replace 6oz (180ml) of the water with orange juice or eat something high in potassium, like a banana, each hour you're sweating)

6-8 tsp of granulated sugar (you do actually need this and not a no calorie alternative- sugar helps speed up the absorption of electrolytes in the gut. You can omit if using orange juice for your potassium source, though!)

Lemon or lime juice for flavor, optional

Mix together and drink 1 liter for each hour you're profusely sweating. Adjust your intake so that your pee is light yellow.

If you want to make this mix ahead of time, put 1x the recipe of salt, sugar, and potassium, along with unsweetened Kool Aid powder or crystalized lemon or lime juice, in a small baggie. I do not recommend putting multiple servings worth in a baggie, as the ingredients settle differently and you might not get the right ratio.

NOTE: like any electrolyte drink, it works better if you sip it instead of chugging. If you chug it, you end up pooping out a lot of your electrolytes, even with the sugar.

Source: Where There Is No Doctor by David Werner

[yorgen-sh]

The Chinese shoe manufacturer decided to demonstrate the indestructibility of their shoes

[scarlettohairdye]

And also the indestructibility of that woman's ankles

[teaboot]

This is Peak Yuri media and I hope my beautiful feral daughters love each other forever

[cheesenames]

also idk if it's a generational gap or a more general shift but i feel like people used to frame it as "i'm in x fandom and my otp is [ship name]" and now i see a lot more "i'm in [ship name] fandom"

[cheesenames]

adding @grumfy 's expert insights

[cheesenames]

#theres something in there that when you have people just in “ship”fandom these ships get so isolated and myopic#that they lose all distinction...the ideal breeding ground for migratory slash fandom#like in most media the relationship to other characters and the settings is. important. to whatever the ship is#but if youre just like “im in here with the ship!” it doesnt really matter#plug in fanfic trope number 3 and youre good

interesting points from @ireallyamabear too

[natalieironside]

As funny as it is to watch Jake Paul get his head stove like a November pumpkin while demonstrating a downright remarkable lack of boxing knowledge, influencer boxing fuckin blows. Like. The audience isn't there to see feats of martial arts and athleticism and they're not even there to see the simple spectacle of two big lads doing violence on each other. It's just a pissing contest between two internet guys. They could be playing tag or checkers or anything and it would be the same. Uwe Boll and Lowtax could've had a literal pissing contest.

[aphrodites-clownery]

I think its about the machismo and mythology of it all? Like theyre pretending to be boxing and even if their fans arent fans of boxing, boxing signifies something to a jake paul fan, I guess. Im not disputing that its stupid and means nothing though.

[natalieironside]

I think you're onto something there. I think it's akin to how republican dudes with white-collar jobs are always LARPing as farmers and carpenters and such.

[overthinkingit]

as an enormous boxing fan / amateur boxer myself, i will also note that the pleasure of watching Jake Paul get his jaw shattered is the whole selling point for influencer boxing. like it isn't that the product is a tainted form of boxing, it's that the product is a different thing - more understandable in the lineage of freakshow fights that pit two little guys against one big guy or two guys in one shirt against two guys in another shirt. it's not the sweet science, it's a deep fried cheeseburger - fails if you're expecting a steak, but successful at heart disease, and sold by men who pretend to know steak. i obviously loathe it because i am myself a steak man and find it crass and disgusting. but i also have rewatched that Jake Paul getting his jaw shattered so many times

[mkinnon]

my aesthetic is gillian anderson completely forgetting all her lines in the first season of the x files

[oneafternineonine]

i would totally watch entire episodes of this

[the-blazin-asian]

someONE someTHING where we dug up ˢᵒᵐᵉ…thingsome

BODY

SOMETHING

*inhale* THAT I CAN’T EXPLAIN ᴵᴹ ᴳᴼᴺᴺᴬ ˢᵀᴬᴿᵀ ᶠᴿᴼᴹ ᵀᴴᴱ ᵀᴼᴾ

Agent Miles (ahuhuhuh)

Agent

MULDER

I AM STANDING HERE IN

The rain

AND

2. The mud

LOOKING AT TWO COFFINS THAT WE—AGENT MULDER I AM STANDING OUT HERE IN

The rain

AND

The mud

AND

The rain

ᵃⁿᵈ…ᵗʰᵉ ᶠᵒʳᶜᵉ ˢᵘᵐᵐᵒⁿᵉᵈ ᵗᵉʳᵉˢᵃ… ⁿᵉᵇᵇᶦⁿ’ˢ ᵇᵒᵈʸ (nemmin’s body) ⁿᵉᵐᵐᶦⁿ’ˢ ᵇᵒᵈʸ

AND THE FORCE SUMMONED TERESA NEMMIN’S BODY………………INTO THE WOODS TONIGHT

⁽ⁿᵒ, ᵍᵒ ᵃᵍᵃᶦⁿ, ᵍᵒ ᵃᵍᵃᶦⁿ⁾

AND TERESA NEMMIN’S AND THE PUH-

AND THE FORCE…..IT

Summoned

TERESA NEMMINS,,,,

INTO,,,,,

the woods tonight

*crowd goes utterly apeshit off camera*

[specialagentartemis]

People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once

[angel-starbeam]

Is there a real life example of this?

[specialagentartemis]

It happens a lot.

[lostinhistory]

I know it's bad but I kind of want to know more about the woman who thinks the Roman Empire never existed

[funky-writer-man]

Oh shit i believed the Leonardo Da Vinci one

Also why do people make these

What do you hope to gain

[specialagentartemis]

There are a lot of different misinformation dynamics at play here.  Only some are innocent, only some are malicious.  But that’s why it pays to fact-check things, because the innocent misunderstandings, the arrogant personal hypotheses stated as fact, and the malicious lies are all jumbled together.

Some of these are a misunderstanding or conflating of true facts.  The Da Vinci one goes here.  Many historians do believe that Leonardo da Vinci had a romantic/sexual relationship with his apprentice(s).  And it’s well-established that his apprentices modeled for some of his paintings.  But they did not model for any of his paintings of Jesus - which was the core point of the post that this fact came from, enjoying the irony.  So this isn’t true because it’s a conflation of several true facts into a false but understandable conclusion.

Some of these are just a victim of internet telephone.  The “Persephone’s daughter” and “fake Greek goddess” ones refer to Mespyrian, who was some teenager’s wattpad OC daughter of Persephone and Hades, that someone else on tumblr accidentally mistook as a real figure from Greek mythology.

Some of these come from people making their own conclusions about history, and then turning around and insisting that the experts therefore must be lying to you.  This is where it gets dangerous.  The “archaeologists broke the noses off Egyptian statues to hide the fact that they were African” one goes here.  Many Egyptian statues are missing their noses, so several years ago someone on the internet claimed that it was because archaeologists deliberately broke them off, and this gained a Lot of traction because it felt true and people wanted it to be true.  People overwhelmingly want to believe that they, ordinary citizens of the world with no special training, are actually smarter than the experts.  People love to believe that, so it’s very, very easy for people to decide the experts are stupid and clueless (the “History Hates Lovers” song, the thing about the dodecahedron or the Roman hairstyles or the leather burnishers) while salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk are smarter than those ivory-tower eggheads.  At worst, people decide the experts are maliciously hiding the truth about the world for their own gain (the Lovers of Valdaro one here is an example of this, but you also see this a lot regarding “all ancient cultures were feminist utopias until the Catholic Church invented misogyny and covered up the feminist past” type posts that are extremely popular with TERFs.)  This is the dynamic I’m comparing to anti-vaxxers and flat Earthers, and yes, this kind of anti-intellectualism is dangerous.

Some people are just trolls because they like lying on the internet and riling people up.  This cannot be discounted.  People do do this.  The tiktok woman who doesn’t believe in the Roman Empire and doesn’t believe that Vesuvius erupted is almost certainly a troll who likes the attention her wild false claims get.

It’s a combination of things, but it’s why you shouldn’t assume that historians are all old homophobic clueless idiots and only you, tumblr user persephonesmassivebadonkers or whatever, know the REAL truth.  Because that’s how you get Flat Earthers, but more pressingly, it’s how you get antisemitic conspiracy theories and transphobic radfem proclamations of We Need To Return To The Ancient Feminist Utopia (By Destroying All Trans People)(And, Usually, Abrahamic Religions). 

But also by believing easily-debunked falsehoods it makes genuinely well-meaning people easier to dismiss by bigots as Brainwashed By Those El Gee Bee Tees Who Will Lie Because They Want To Destroy Academia/Biological Sex/The Church.

Spreading misinformation on tumblr is an understandable consequence of the existence of the internet, but it’s not harmless and really ought to be challenged when it’s seen.

[specialagentartemis]

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "the evidence for that is super flimsy, and significantly more evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[specialagentartemis]

So you know how Trump is trying to make the Smithsonian Museum rewrite history to eliminate anything critical of him or the USA? Someone sure thinks historical misinformation is valuable and powerful.

[beemovieerotica]

the cognitive dissonance from people who want the products of modern medicine but get weird about animal research. like im sorry but this is necessary for the survival of the society we currently live in. and the scientists who work on these things are not evil cackling psychopaths. anyone you talk to in animal research has incredibly complex feelings about their work and incredibly complex relationships to the animals in their care. there are regulations and oversight and penalties in place to make the work as humane as possible and scientists are overwhelmingly the ones enforcing and advocating for better care.

[beemovieerotica]

@velvetdemon I'm doing a full reply because I want to give this question the time and space it deserves, and I really do appreciate your curiosity about this.

The short answer: It is deeply unethical. There are nowhere near enough willing patients in the world to be able to do this, and it would be criminal to put them through this.

The long answer: The one side of the equation you're focusing on is: how much of a drug is too much, to the point where it will cause negative side effects or even death? And this is crucial to know. But it's not just a matter of finding out the lethal dosage of a heart cholesterol medication, you need to know that it can actually lower the cholesterol of any living thing. There is no way to know this without giving it first to...a living thing.

But beyond this, I need to emphasize: The goal of a drug trial is to effectively cure people who are already suffering from disease, who are living on limited time.

Drug trials don't just happen on any member of the public, they need to happen specifically on people affected by the disease you're trying to treat. There is at any time a very limited and very marginalized population of the world affected by early onset, familial Parkinson's disease. Because you cannot ethically induce disease in a human being, you are working with, speaking with, and helping patients and their families who are hopeful and desperate for a cure.

If you were to jump straight to human trials from petri dishes, not knowing absolutely anything about how the drug functions in a living, breathing animal body, it would look like this:

We didn't know that minute quantities of the drug interact lethally with x, y, z medication that people are commonly also taking. X number of patients have died as a result.

We didn't know that the drug is fatal to people with [common variant] in their genetics. X more patients have died.

We didn't know the drug exacerbates x, y, z chronic illnesses. X number of people have acquired permanent, lifelong disabilities.

We didn't know the best way to deliver the drug, so we tried multiple ways: the people who received it intravenously are now suffering from a painful, costly, and debilitating condition that did not happen with the ingested form.

I could go on, and on, and on.

The vast majority of these problems can be nearly or almost entirely averted by testing other animals first.

These are all people who possibly could have waited for the normal progression from animal testing to human testing and thus received better outcomes. Some people will pass away in the time it takes to get to that point, and that's heartbreaking, and we all wish science could be faster.

But the cost of expediting science could mean a life of profoundly greater suffering or an even shorter life than the one where no intervention happens at all. And at that point, you have completely exhausted your trust, your goodwill, and your patients' hope, after you've failed to do anything or even worsened the lives of people who are already deeply suffering.

[manslaughter]

hi, i’m an animal research professional. making sure laboratory animals stay alive, healthy, and enriched has been my full-time job for several years now.

animal research is not the mad scientist wild west that PETA wants you to think it is. there are extremely strict federal laws in place to protect the well being of these animals. animal welfare organizations like AAALAC ensure that lab animals are treated with dignity & respect and are given enough specialized care & enrichment to be happy and content in captivity, just like AZA accreditation with zoos.

not a single animal from a zebrafish to a mouse to a dog to a macaque goes unaccounted for. if an animal gets moved to a new cage, paired for breeding, has a procedure performed on it, gives birth, gets sick or injured, dies, etc. it is legally required that this information is recorded and kept on file for the US federal government to access. failing to record & retain this information is very much punishable by US federal law.

let me tell you - if you abuse or kill an animal, even a mouse - you are almost certainly getting both fired & blacklisted from the industry. if you abuse or kill a more ‘advanced’ animal, such as a dog or monkey, you will likely face criminal charges. killing a monkey is as serious and disastrous as a nuclear meltdown. you are expected to reasonably explain every illness, injury, or death of an animal under your care. you must record all of this information. animals that are clearly suffering with low QOL are required to be euthanized according to AVMA guidelines.

research animals are highly expensive. yes, even the "lesser" animals like mice. the cheapest mice will run you a few hundred $ per individual, with some of the most expensive mice i've cared for being $25,000 per individual. in research we have the "three Rs" - reduction (reduce amount of necessary animals to a minimum), refinement (refine processes to ensure research is accurate and animals feel no pain or distress), and replacement (replace animals with non-living research models as they become available). i can assure you no proper research team is wasting animals (*do not* say "b-b-but elon musk--" his research team is actively being investigated for animal abuse by the government).

research methods that do not require live animals are currently being looked into & efforts spearheaded by - you guessed it - the animal research industry itself (notice how the animal rights people are strangely silent & unhelpful when it comes to this?) but current technology is rudimentary and does not compare to live animal models.

some research animal fun facts (US edition):

all species of animals are only allowed to have one single major surgery performed on them in their entire lifetime.

institutions with nonhuman primates must have a behavior program in place (run by knowledgeable primate specialists) to ensure that they are happy and receiving enough daily enrichment and social interaction.

institutions with dogs are required to have physical exercise programs in place. this means every individual dog gets a substantial amount of leashed AND free-roaming exercise daily, including playgroups with other dogs.

a majority of nonhuman primates get to retire to sanctuaries like peaceable primate sanctuary, and almost all dogs get retired and adopted out by organizations like homes for animal heroes. some institutions will also adopt out unneeded young rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, etc.

some strains of mice glow neon green (or orange or blue) under UV light. this is not harmful to them and is commonly seen in cancer research.

so yes, you can rest knowing that laboratory animals are treated with the utmost respect by their caretakers. and you can stop this awful, ignorant talk of human experimentation that will only end in the abuse of nonwhite people, LGBT people, disabled people, indigenous people, and so many others. please just take a look at this wikipedia page if you think “ethical” human experimentation can exist.

[prismatic-bell]

Listen, y'all. In my home county, there was a dude with cancer--a longtime radio deejay, John Kanzius. (Yes, I just violated a major rule of internet security by telling you this. I don't live there anymore or we wouldn't have names on this post.)

He threw himself into cancer research because traditional methods weren't working--they were just making him sicker. That's not to say "oh nooooooo, Big Pharma wants you sick," it's to say that chemo is no walk in the park, and for some people the cure can be worse than the disease. So he read an absolutely insane amount of cancer research, taught himself, and invented a way to treat cancer with radio waves. His cancer went terminal. He begged for the chance to test the treatment on himself. As he put it, he was going to die anyway--if it killed him quicker, so be it. And if it gave him a few more years, a few more months, a few more days, well....they'd have their Patient Zero to show it was safe to go into clinical trials. The research team said no. And they said no because even though it'd successfully killed cancer cells in petri-dish testing, it hadn't gone through requisite animal testing yet. Everything researchers stated above? True. Correct. They will not put a human at risk, even a dying human, even a dead man walking, until they know the risk is minimal. John Kanzius died in 2009. Want to know when first-in-human trials started? July of 2021. That should tell you a lot about how human experimentation is viewed in medicine. He--and others who'd heard him mistakenly claim he'd "cured cancer" before he understood just how much research still needed to be done--was ready to die for the chance to live. People offered to sign every waiver, release every legal liability. And the answer was still no. Because without seeing how his treatment would work on an actual living being as opposed to just some cells in a dish, there was too much chance someone could spend their final days in unspeakable agony if things went wrong. And unlike a mouse, you can't provide compassionate euthanasia to a human. It's illegal. Yes, even if there's 0% chance of recovery. (Look up Jack Kevorkian if you want a bit of understanding as to why.) There is a reason animal testing exists. I'm not a fan of it. I wish it didn't have to be a thing. I also recognize that if we want to successfully research a lot of cutting-edge medicine, it has to be a thing. It is possible to hold both of those positions at once.

[racethewind10]

i mean all of this but like. they very much have 'just done human trials' like i understand where you think you're coming from tumblr user velvetdemon and others with that perspective but that was a pretty significant thing that has happened. multiple times. and almost every single time it was a case of horrific abuse of vulnerable populations. they very much have done human-only trials.

[stuckonaglacierwithmacgyver]

I present for your consideration, some of the human trials they 'just did':

Nutrition experiments carried out on Canadian Aboriginal children in residential schools between 1942 and 1952, in which various control and experimental groups were deliberately malnourished. Also the Qu'Appelle BCG vaccine trial.

Basically everything the Australian government has done to the Aboriginal people, but especially experiments in the 20s and 30s, which tested basal metabolism by forcing subjects to lie still and breath through a rubber tube for hours, or those testing their response to pain.

Testing of a new antibiotic* on children in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningococcal meningitis outbreak, by Pfizer. The lawsuit the families and the Nigerian government brought against Pfizer also alleged that this further reduced the public's trust in vaccines and contributed to poor uptake of the polio vaccine.

The Tuskeegee Syphillis Study, which is a landmark in medical ethics fuckery that everyone should know about. The US has also carried out variations of this in so many places

Southam's experiments on prisoners using HeLa cancer cells** without their informed consent.

The Rawalpindi experiments carried out on members of the British Indian army to test mustard gas.

I'm not even going to talk about the Nazi ones.

*In this case they actually did do animal trials beforehand, which contraindicated its use in children, but I included this because it demonstrates how unethical research practice can impact public health.

**HeLa cells in themselves are also a colossal fuckup of informed consent!

[brighteyedbadwolf]

Another lab animal facility staff member here, as a vet tech

FunFact! The facility/company is SO dedicated to the welfare of their subjects that techniques to reduce mental and emotional stress on the animals brought on by repetitive tasks, interpersonal/colony stressors, industrial setting, and a shitload of other work-related stressors that they EXTRACTED THAT SHIT OUT LATERALLY INTO HOW THEY SCHEDULE AND ORGANIZE THEIR STAFF.

My schedule is fucking amazingly calibrated. I've never had burnout ONCE because my breaks and days off are timed almost exactly when the average person hits a fatigue point.

[bogleech]

Laboratory researchers in shitty media: bwahaha, how I love injecting acid into kitten's eyeballs until they explode

Laboratory researchers in real life: put up memorial statues to remind humanity how much it owes to the lives of even mice

[all-made-of-stardust]

Thank you so much for adding the examples of unethical human experiments cuz jesus christ people sometimes don't even know about that stuff.

I briefly almost worked with mice, and my cousin frequently does, and i can confirm all of the above is true. He also confirmed that yeah man, some of these mice can be valued the same as a luxury car - we don't want to fucking hurt them.

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

Reblogging this version because the additions are important - even outside of the conversation about animal testing, it is important to be aware of the history of unethical research on vulnerable humans.

However, prismatic-bell's addition about John Kanzius is nonsense, and I can't in good faith reblog this without addressing that. He did not invent a device that treats cancer and then die because no one would agree to use it on him. He had an idea about using radiowaves to heat metal nanoparticles to kill surrounding tissue, which got caught in the same issue every single cancer treatment gets caught in, which is: how do you kill cancerous cells without killing non-cancerous cells? For his device to work you would need to be able to successfully target nanoparticles into cancer cells, which was simply not possible at the time.

The companies working on his device got bogged down with legal issues in 2015 and went mostly defunct. However, in 2020 one of them did emerge with a device that has entered human clinical trials. The treatment is called hyperthermia and the idea is that it might possibly help other treatments like chemo and radiation be more effective than they would be on their own. And for those of you not clicking through to the National Cancer Institute link: It is not clear if it actually helps people live longer. Searching for clinical trials on hyperthermia produced one result: Chemoimmunotherapy Combined with Deep Hyperthermia and Spatially-fractionated Radiotherapy for the Treatment of Advanced Biliary Tract Cancer. This is a Phase I trial, so the primary objective is determining safety. Note that even if it does work, this is a treatment that would be used in conjunction with other cancer treatments for a very specific type of cancer, because cancer is fucking complicated.

Any time someone tells you about a singular guy who invented a method of treating cancer by doing his own research, please remember that cancer is fucking complicated and you have to actually test things before claiming that they work (with peer review/oversight to make sure you adhere to ethical standards and that you're not making stuff up).

[dresshistorynerd]

https://www.tumblr.com/thebaconsandwichofregret/189924928150/comepraisetheinfanta-thebaconsandwichofregret

whenever i see people rbing the op without the additions i die a little inside so i thought you should have a go at debunking it 🫠

So these are the tweets from the post. I had blissfully not come across it before. This is one of the weirdest takes I have ever seen. It's amazing to see these fashion history takes that are so boldly and confidently wrong and inaccurate.

It's honestly hilariously ignorant to think that a massive cultural and societal shift that took couple of centuries was all because of one guy. It's so reductive and even goes to the great man territory to pick one person to blame for something like this that really had much more broad and complex reasons than "a guy did it". It's stressed in this tread that Beau Brummell was not noble or gentry and "just some guy", so how would he single-handedly change the fashions and concept of masculinity of the whole western world? He was a London socialite, it's not like most of his contemporaries in continental Europe knew about him. Like maybe the French, but does anyone really believe people in Eastern-Europe or Nordic countries or the Mediterranean knew about? Not to mention places like US. Yet everyone dressed like that in his lifetime, so how could his influence reach so far so quickly? Not even kings and queens could so directly and massively shift the fashions. So in the face of it the whole claim is ridiculous, but it's also full of inaccuracies.

The shift from Rococo fashion to regency fashion was extremely stark and quick in both men and women's fashion, but it happened during 1780s and 1790s, before Beau Brummell became a well known figure in the London society (he was born in 1778 and became well-known in the society after his military career, during which he befriended the Prince of Wales, around the end of 1790s). Here's first an example from 1780s and then from 1793-94 and 1797.

The one from 1780s still has some Rococo elements like the wig, but it's already much more toned down and the coat is already turning from frock coat to a tail coat. It's an example of the more casual men's countryside dress from the period. The court dress was still quite elaborate, though also toned down from the 1770s. But there's a big shift when it comes to the examples from 1790s. They are unmistakably Regency fashion. All of these example are French too. I'm sure these people had no idea and gained no influence from an unknown middle class English officer. So what did actually happen? Well, I'm pretty sure the French Revolution in 1789 had a little bigger impact on the European society and fashion than Beau Brummell.

I'm not going to go too deep into this, since I'm working on an in depth post about the masculinity and fashion in the modern era and I go into detail about how the French Revolution had a massive part in shaping them. But the short version is that the French revolutionaries rejected the elaborate fashions of the Rococo French nobility (in both men and women's fashion) as those over the top fashions stood as symbols of the excess wealth of the nobility and the extreme wealth gap. This is also why the high fashion was getting toned down thorough the 1780s before the Revolution. The anger towards the ruling class was mounting at the time and it encouraged the nobility to try to act a little more palatable in their aesthetics to maybe appease the angry people without doing any actual change to address the wealth gap and the centralization of power.

The revolutionaries looked for ideal masculinity and femininity elsewhere then. To contrast themselves against the ruling class, they looked to the antiquity and it's simplicity as well as the peasantry and the country gentleman fashion. Romanticism was the driving force behind the artistic expression of the Revolution. It weaved nationalism to the class struggle that was at the core of the revolutionary movement. So the Revolution was not just the working class and peasantry against the ruling class, but the French People against the nobility. That's how the bourgeois was able to align themselves with the working class and peasants. This is when physical labour, militarism, dominance and leadership really became intrinsically attached to masculinity, as the ideal man of the revolutionaries was a working peasant, who with military might took the the power back to the people from the nobility. The democracy would not last long, but it's not a mistake that only men could vote under the new democracy after the Revolution was won. It's also not a mistake that even when the post-Revolution France eventually abolished slavery (but not without some push-back first and a couple of slave revolts to force their hands) they didn't give most people of color rights to vote. Since colonialism whiteness had become intrinsic part of masculinity and femininity to dehumanize everyone else, and the new form of masculinity and femininity born out of the Revolution did not contest that. In fact the Enlightenment philosophy that had laid the ground work for the Revolution and the Romantic movement and it's nationalism that were driving force in it, in no way contested colonialism or it's white supremacy. In fact Enlightenment aimed to rationalize those things. Which is why the power in the new democracy went to the (mostly) white men.

These elements were in the new men's fashion too. Nationalism, the idealization of militarism, romanticization of peasantry and antiquity were basis of the fashion. Because antiquity was seen as the origins of democracy and the so called Western Civilization, that made it, and especially Antique Rome with it's militaristic connotations, perfect inspiration for the Revolutionary France. The short hairstyle was inspired from the Roman fashion seen in statues. The fashionable tail coat was influenced by military uniforms and the short jackets of the working class. The long trousers also came from working class dress. Here's examples of the revolutionary fashion of commoners, first from 1792 and then around 1790.

To be very clear, the revolutionaries were not a single entity with single ideology. They were collection of movements, who were united in their shared desire to overthrow the ruling class and establish some sort of democracy. But inside the movement were much more radical factions than what eventually ended in power after the French nobility. Socialists, abolitionists, feminists, slaves and others also fought for the Revolution and there was a lot of internal struggle too. Romantic movement was also very varied and contained extremely nationalistic elements as well as outright socialist elements.

It's important to note that the 18th century Rococo fashion was never as extreme elsewhere in the world as it was in France, so the change from Rococo to Regency style wasn't as stark elsewhere. If you put the most elaborate French court fashions of mid 1700s and Beau Brummell's style next to each other the difference is certainly massive, but fashion for men as well as women was through 18th century much more restrained and somber in England. Here's an English example from 1755-65 and for comparison a French example from 1755.

In fact as the tensions were rising in France the upper class begun to adopt the more toned down English styles. After the Revolution the new Republican styles would spread to Britain too. In Britain though Romanticism had a more pronounced effect as it stayed firmly monarchist. Therefore the English fashion was especially influenced by the styles worn by country side gentlemen.

There's another claim in the thread that fully fails to understand the broad implications of fashion and societal gender and how these things change and evolve. It's the claim that Beau Brummell created the modern men's suit and he's the reason the suit has long trousers. We already went through how long trousers initially got into men's fashion and it was not him. But the writer is not wrong in saying that Beau Brummell's outfit in this picture is a direct ancestor of modern men's suit. It is.

But you know what else is a direct ancestor of men's suit? This.

The modern three piece suit has it roots as far as in late 17th century. Before suit men wore doublets, hose and jerkins, where the sleeveless piece, jerkin, was on top of doublet. Aside from hose, these were also items women used and the fashions for men and women resembled in style and construction each other much closer than after the suit took over (as seen in these examples from 1630s). However the distinction between men and women's fashion had started to grow much earlier. A big shift that happened during the 16th century was that men stopped wearing skirts. Men and women wore the same garments for centuries before that. The styles and silhouettes for men and women had some differences (the skirts were often shorter for men for example) but they were parallel to each other. I wrote a whole very long post about how skirts stopped being acceptable for men. In it I write about how the shift in men's fashion was part of the large shift from feudalism to colonialism and capitalism, that needed a new hierarchy to justify the new system after the previous divinely justified feudal hierarchy was no longer an option. The new hierarchy was white supremacist patriarchy and therefore needed a clearer distinction between white men and white woman, that would also help distinct white people from the racialized people.

But such fundamental changes in the societal structure and culture are long processes. The process was continuing in the latter half of the 17th century, when Orientalism first became very popular. Orientalism is the dehumanization and fetishization of Asia and North-Africa, and it was born as the European colonial project was properly getting going in Asia. Colonialism in Asia and North-Africa took a little different form. I suspect it was because it was not that long ago, when Europeans had felt inferior to many of the peoples and empires in Asia and North-Africa, which they had always had much closer relationships with than the rest of Africa and certainly the Americas. I think that's why Orientalism is such a mix of coveting Asian and North-African cultures and bodies in a very fetishistic ways, while also demeaning and diminishing them. Nevertheless, Orientalism had a huge impact on European fashion in late 17th century. Both the way men and women's clothing was made after that to this day was strongly impacted by Orientalism. The coat and waistcoat combination was an adaptation of Turkish fashion. The three piece suit became popular in 1670s and fully took over men's fashion in 1680s (an example from 1687). The cravat was also adopted around the same time to men's wear from a light cavalry mercenary army in the Habsburgian Empire known as the Croats or Cravats. They were mainly Croatian, which to Western European was almost "Oriental" due to their proximity to Asia and Turkey in particular, and therefore the popularization of cravats as a fashion item was also influenced by Orientalism. Orientalist fashion encompasses the paradoxical nature of Orientalism itself; the Europeans coveted "the Orient" so they bastardized their fashions to construct a gender binary that left out the people who originated those fashions.

The Regency three piece suit also has all the same elements as the suit 150 years earlier, the individual pieces had just evolved into different cuts and silhouettes. The construction and the basic elements have stayed pretty similar to this day.

My point is not to in any way deny Beau Brummell's influence on Regency fashion. He was the most influential fashion icon for men in his era after all. I hope this just made it very clear that these bigger changes are not about individual people but much larger shifts and movements in society and culture. His actual influence was popularizing some of the English countryside styles, that were already part of casual fashion, as more formal fashion in the London high society, making extremely elaborate cravats into the fashionable items of the day and becoming the image of the English dandy.

The picture of him above shows him the typical English countryside suit with dark blue tail coat, white cravat and light pantaloons with polished hessian boots. He helped to make the outfit and pantaloons in general fashionable. Breeches would stay as the formal leg wear for some a decade still, till young fashionable men would start to use black or gray pantaloons in formal events too. Pantaloons, which originated from military wear, were very fitted, basically similarly constructed as breaches but long. The trousers, which were looser than pantaloons, had their moment in France during the Revolution, but because of their Revolutionary and working class association, they didn't at first pick up in the high society, especially in Britain, until 1810s. They stayed as casual fashion through the Regency Era and only started gaining formal status in 1820s and 1830s. Beau Brummell is credited for inventing or at least popularizing trousers that have strap to go under the foot in order to keep them straight. Here's first a painting from of a gentleman in a very country style emphasized by the setting. Then a illustration from 1810 of a full formal dress with breeches and a fashion plate from 1817 of day wear with trousers.

The thread also misses what dandy really was. Dandy was the embodiment of the middle class social mobility of the modern era. He was the "self-made man", the fashionable middle class and the new celebrity of a post-feudal era. He dressed in refined fashionable countryside middle class clothing and was celebrated for his style and refinement, not for his birth. Ironically though, there was a distinct reactionary quality to the Regency dandy. After all dandy did not embody social equality, but mobility. He was the ideal man of the capitalist hierarchy. A bit of dilemma for the dandy was that being extremely fashionable was central to the dandy, but after the French revolution being too fashionable and too concerned about looks had been associated with the aristocracy and was now therefore unmanly. Which is why dandy quickly came to be seen as effeminate. There is a lot of satiric cartoons from the time period that make fun of dandies and their preoccupation with fashion and looks. Here's couple from around 1810s.

In conclusion it's pretty ridiculous to say modern men's fashion was all created by one guy. The real reason why men's formal suit (and to be clear more colorful and elaborate styles have come and gone from men's informal fashion during that time) has been what it is for more than hundred years is because much bigger changes, like capitalism, colonialism, Orientalism and white supremacist patriarchy.

[puppygirllaika]

not to sound like a weak, morally impure centrist over here, but i think online leftist communities need to be a little more accepting of the concept that most people are just. not that well informed. we live in a society that provides access to an overwhelming amount of information and yet which discourages actually diving into much beyond the surface level. Most of the people you meet out in the world are just not gonna know much about a lot of what you care about, but that's not the same as being against those things, or being unwilling to learn, or being unnamenable to those ideas. Our modern society is an unending cascade of information and misinformation and disinformation and filtering through that shit enough to actually have a solid grasp of a subject, let alone a nuanced antiestablishment political take, is a skill that takes time and effort to develop, time and effort that is in very short supply. It really bothers me when I see leftists talk about how capitalism keeps us down by taking up all our time and energy and making recovery, both physical and emotional, cost what little we can afford, and then turn around and get upset that people are politically uninformed. On some level, you gotta meet some people where they are, and have a little faith in them to be open to new ideas and information. Ignorance is not inherently intentional, and it's not the same as antipathy.

[ariaste]

In my experience, you can just say in a friendly/excited tone, “Ooh actually I know something about that!” when someone says something wrong or misinformed. And 9 times out of 10 it'll make them blink and go “Oh? Really?” and then listen to you. Starting with a vibe of "Actually that's wrong" puts people reflexively on the defensive (closes their brains down) because VERY FEW people actually enjoy being corrected. But getting a moment of curiosity about what you have to say, even just "Oh? Really?" or "What is it?" OPENS the brain. It's a foot in the door because the conversation starts from a perspective of SHARING info rather than CORRECTION.

And look maybe they don't change their minds right then, but THAT'S OKAY. Most people aren't completely spineless pushovers with no opinions of their own, THEREFORE you need to be content with planting a seed and then stepping back and giving them time to chew it over. And sometimes (especially if you're dealing with cult deprogramming) it is going to take a LOT of seeds planted before you see their mind start to change. But as long as you believe lovingly and compassionately that people CAN change, then a lot of the time... they will. But as OP said, you GOTTA have that faith in them. Everyone is capable of change. Everyone is capable of learning. EVERYONE.

[findingfeather]

People live in information ecosystems. Including all of us.

Most people live in fairly polluted and/or impoverished ones (including more of us than most leftists like to admit). Much of it DELIBERATELY POISONED.

You might not have the wherewithal to clean and improve that ecosystem on every given day, or any given day. But since a system of reeducation gulags a) first needs a war of takeover that will end up with every medical fragile person in our countries dead due to the social collapse, b) have not been historically very effective, the metaphorical equivalent to “just bullldoze it” isn’t an option.

[hypokeimena]

the museum, cultural violence, & repatriation-rehabilitation

okay here's a selection of readings.

these are drawn from coursework i was assigned primarily at my undergrad institution, which--for the sake of clarifying my quote-unquote credentials--was a progressive/respected US university. i also worked in the university's anthropological museum and had a number of opportunities to coordinate with (and, perhaps more importantly, get industry gossip from) other regional university & anthropological museum employees. i'm currently working to complete an MA at a canadian university, and have been on archaeological digs in both north american and european contexts. i am white. a lot of the more meaningful experience i had was in the conversations this coursework and work experience facilitated with other students, employees, and indigenous community leaders, which obviously, though unfortunately, can't be reproduced here.

my particular academic focus was the ancient mediterranean world (rather than indigenous studies), so some readings here will reflect that; some of these articles also cover archaeology (i.e. the process which generates 'museum pieces'. as the current discussion is not about artworks or paintings, but rather about material culture in museums, the readings also focus on this).

this is a whole fuckton of readings (this is most of the assigned readings for multiple higher level undergrad courses); the ones i remember most clearly as having a significant impact on me are bolded, just to make it easier to pick a few to jump in with. articles are organized (broadly) by topic, and within topic chronologically.

i have also tried to prioritize readings which are readily available. usually this means: i found a pdf on the front page of a google search and could read it with no institutional log-in; it was available with a free JSTOR acct; or (esp. for books) that you can find it on one of the open-access databases (use a VPN if you need to!). i have not included links to articles and other content originally published online because tumblr absolutely hates that--if you are having a really hard time finding a particular resource, let me know and i'm happy to help.

On Institutions & Complicity; On the Construction of 'Western Civilization'

Fabian, J. (1983): Ch. 3, "Time and Writing about the Other," in Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object. Columbia UP, pp. 71-104

Coombes, A. (1994): Ch.s 3, 5, from Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. Yale UP.

Cohn, B. (1996): "Introduction," from Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton UP, pp. 3-16.

Herzfeld, M. (2002): "The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism," in The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4, pp. 899-926. (uploaded on researchgate; absolutely critical for conceptualizing colonial extraction of meaning in addition to material resources)

Moten, F. & S. Harney (2004): "The University & the Undercommons: Seven Theses," in Social Text, 79, 22(2), pp. 101-115.

Hanink, J. (2007): The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity, Belknap (Harvard) UP. I realize that putting a whole book on here is insane but it's a really good book. If you only read a tiny bite, make it the "Epilogue: for Educators" (pp. 272-278) which addresses how primary and secondary education handle the idea of 'Western Civilization'; if you can handle a bit more, chapters 2, 3, and 7 are excellent.

Arnold, B. (2008): "The past as propaganda: totalitarian archaeology in Nazi Germany," In Histories of Archaeology: A Reader in the History of Archaeology (eds. Murray & Evans). Oxford UP, 120-144.

Krebs, C (2011): A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus' Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. Norton. iirc discussion of the connection between Roman perceptions of Germanness and German self-understanding of themselves as descendants of an Aryan 'noble savage' warrior race (& identification with indigenous Americans) was in this book? I can't think where else it would have been. (<- subject to removal if i find a better source.)

Mattingly, D. (2011) “Identity and Discrepancy,” in Imperialism, Power, and Identity, Princeton UP. pp. 203-244.

Versluys, M.J. (2014): “Understanding objects in motion. An archaeological dialogue on Romanization,” in Archaeological Dialogues 21: pp. 1-20. Woolf, G. (2014) “Romanization 2.0,” ibid, pp. 45-50. van Dommelen, P. (2014) “Fetishizing the Romans,” ibid: pp. 41-45. ^^these 3 get to share a bullet point because they're pieces in conversation with each other in the same journal. they're in this order bc that's the order my prof recommended we read them. extensive commentary on how categorization can flatten power relations and actual occurrences in historical analysis (more abt. the university than abt. 'the museum').

Alcock, S. et al. (eds) (2016): Beyond Boundaries: Connecting Visual Cultures in the Roman Provinces. Getty Publications. See "introduction" & esp. chapters 3, 5, 12, 13.

Chapoutot, J. (2016) trans. R. Nybakken: Greeks, Romans, and Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past. UC Press. See especially Ch. 6: "From Empire to Reich: The Lessons of Roman Rule and Classical Colonialism" (pp. 229-285)

Malamud, M. (2016): African Americans & the Classics. Bloomsbury. Another excellent full book; the "Introduction" (pp. 1-9) is a good place to dip a toe in & "Ch. 1: Fighting for Classics" (p. 10-51) is more in-depth.

Sarr, F. & B. Savoy (2018): The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. French gov't report; available online in French & English translation.

Zuckerberg, D. (2018): "How the Alt-Right is weaponizing the Classics," in Medium. Article available online.

Gannon (2019): "When Ancient DNA Gets Politicized," in Smithsonian Magazine. Article available online.

(undated): Website of Makronissos Digital Museum (available online); discusses usage of Makronisos island as a forced labor and re-education camp during WWII.

(Colonial) Origins of the European Collection | there's also one or two essays about the academy/university (how creating categories for analysis also limits understanding) in here as well.

Pomian, K., trans. E. Wiles-Portier (1990): Ch. 1.4: "Museums and Private Collections," from Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800. Polity Press, pp. 34-44.

Blom, P. (2002): Ch. 1: "The Dragon and the Tartar Lamb," from To Have and Hold: an Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting. Overlook Press, pp. 13-26.

Najmabadi, A. (2006): "Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Historical Analysis?" in Journal of Women's History, 18 (1), pp. 11-21

MacGregor, A. (2007): Ch. II: "The Cabinet of Curiosities: Concept and Realization," from Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Yale UP, pp. 11-70.

Boydston, J. (2008): "Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis," in Gender & History, 20 (3), pp. 558–583.

Hartman, S. (2008): "Venus in Two Acts," in Small Axe, Nr. 26, 12(2), pp: 1-14

Fuentes, M. (2010): "Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen's Troubled Archive," in Gender History 22(3), pp. 564-584

Bleichmar, D. (2013): Ch. 1: "Seeing the World in a Room," from Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World (eds. Bleichmar & Mancall). UPenn Press, pp. 15-30.

Benson, S. (2013) “European Wonders at the Court of Siam,” Ibid., pp. 155-176.

Perspectives on Objects: Anthropological, Indigenous, and Imperial Ways of Looking | This category is not neatly divided up into the above-listed categories; asking yourself what perspective each article has as you read is part of the point, here!

Kopytoff, I. (1986): “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (ed. Appadurai). Cambridge University Press, pp. 64-91

Jones, S. (1997): Ch. 2: "The archaeological identification of peoples and cultures," in The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing identities in the past and present. Routledge, pp. 15-29.

Ingold, T. (2000): "On Weaving a Basket," in Perceptions of the Environment. Routledge, pp. 339-348

Edwards, E., C. Gosden & R. Phillips (eds.) (2006): "Introduction," in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture. Berg, pp. 1-34

Henare, A., M. Holbraad & S. Wastell (2006): "Introduction: Thinking through things," from Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically. Routledge, pp. 1-29

Rorick, I. & J. Gijssen (2006): "Following the Discipline of the Old Masters," in Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art. Vancouver Art Gallery, pp. 126-139.

Svensson, T. (2008): "Knowledge and Artifacts: People and Objects," in Museum Anthropology 31(2): pp. 85-104.

Hamilakis, Y. (2011): "Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece," from Scramble for the Past: The Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire 1733-1914 (eds. Bahrani, Celik, & Eldem). Salt, pp. 49-69. (<- this author has also written further on Greece as crypto-colony and extraction of history & artifacts as such a process)

Bilsel, C. (2012): "Epilogue: Regimes of the Authentic," from Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. OUP, pp. 215-236.

Laforet, A. (2013): “Objects and Knowledge.” In Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas (eds. Townsend-Gault, Kramer & Ki-Ke-In). UBC Press, pp. 128-165.

Sakka, N. (2013): "'A Debt to Ancient Wisdom & Beauty': The Reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos in the Ancient Agora of Athens," in Hesperia, 82(1), pp. 203-227

Varutti, M. (2014): "Polysemic Objects and Partial Translations: Museums and the Interpretation of Indigenous Material Culture in Taiwan," in Museum Anthropology, 27(2), pp. 102-117.

Anderson, B. (2015): "An alternative discourse: Local interpreters of antiquities in the Ottoman Empire," in Journal of Field Archaeology, 40(4), pp. 450-460

Lasser, E. (2015): Ch. 7: "The return of the Wunderkammer: Material culture in the museum," in Writing Material Culture (eds. Gerritsen, Riello). Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 237-250. (see also Ch.s 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, if interested!)

Hannan, L. & S. Longair (2017): "1: Approaches to the Material World," in History Through Material Culture. Manchester UP, pp. 1-42

Bennet, T., et al. [F. Cameron, N. Dias, B. Dibley, R. Harrison, I. Jacknis, C. McCarthy] (2017): Ch. 5 "Producing 'The Maori As He Was': New Zealand Museums, Anthropological Governance, and Indigenous Agency," from Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government. Duke UP, pp. 196-216

The Social Function of the Museum | some overlap in this category with 'institutions and complicity'.

Bennet, T., et al. (1995): Ch. 3 "The Political Rationality of the Museum," from The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge, pp. 89-102.

Winichakul, T. (2000): "The Quest for Siwilai: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam," in The Journal of Asian Studies 59(3), pp. 528-549

Conn, S. (2010): Ch. 6, "Museums, Public Space, & Civic Identity," from Do Museums Still Need Objects? UPenn Press, pp. 197-232

Duncan, C. (2010): Ch. 6, "Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship," in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (eds. Karp & Levine). Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 88-102

Hill, K. (2016): Ch. 4 "Women visiting museums," in Women and Museums 1850-1914. Manchester UP, pp. 103-126

Modern Approaches to Collections, Acquisitions, Repatriation, and Display | again some overlap with previous categories, but i do think it's important to be very clear that these institutions do exist, and many of the people working within them DO ~have the spirit~ and care about repairing these historical wounds and their relationships with affected communities and stakeholders.

American Alliance of Museums (2012): "Alliance Reference Guide: Developing a Collections Management Policy." Available online.

British Museum (2013): "Acquisitions Policy." Available online.

Peabody Museum (2016): "A Guide to Looking." Available online.

Peers, L. (1999) “’Playing Ourselves’: First Nations and Native American Interpreters at Living History Sites,” in The Public Historian 21 (4): 39-59.

Kramer, J. (2004) “Figurative Repatriation: First Nations ‘Artist-Warriors’ Recover, Reclaim and Return Cultural Property through Self-Definition,” in Journal of Material Culture 9 (2): pp. 161-182.

Mignolo, W. (2005): Ch. 4, "Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity," speech given at CIMAM Annual Conference.

Layne, V. (2008): "the District Six Museum: an Ordinary People's Place," in The Public Historian, 30 (1), pp. 53-62

Lonetree, A. (2009): Ch. 12, "Museums as Sites of Decolonization: Truth Telling in National and Tribal Museums," in Contesting Knowledge : Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (ed. Sleeper-Smith). University of Nebraska Press, pp. 322-337

Boast, R. (2011): “Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited,” in Museum Anthropology 43 (1), pp. 56-70.

Phillips, R. (2011): “Toward a Dialogic Paradigm: New Models of Collaborative Curatorial Practice,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. McGill-Queen’s UP, pp. 185-204.

Schultz, L. (2011) “Collaborative Museology and the Visitor.” Museum Anthropology 34 (1), pp. 1-12.

Bouquet, Mary (2012) “Object and Image Repatriation.” In Museums: A Visual Anthropology. Berg, pp. 151-180.

Boast, R. and J. Enote (2013) “Virtual Repatriation: It is Neither Virtual nor Repatriation.” In: Heritage in the Context of Globalization. Springer, pp. 103-113.

Hutchison, M. (2013) “'Shared Authority': Collaboration, Curatorial Voice, and Exhibition Design in Canberra, Australia,” in Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration (eds. Golding & Modest), pp. 143-162.

Krmpotich, C. and L. Peers (2013) “Museums as They Are, and Museums As They Might Be,” in: This Is Our Life: Haida Material Heritage and Changing Museum Practice. UBC Press, pp. 233-256.

Labadi, S. (2013): "The National Museum of Immigration History (Paris, France), neo-colonialist representations, silencing, and re-appropriation," in the Journal of Social Archaeology, 13(3), pp. 310-330

MTL Collective (2018) “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art,” October 165: pp. 192-227.

Hemenway, E. (2013): Ch. 3, "Finding Our Way Home," in Accomplishing NAGPRA : Perspectives on the Intent, Impact, and Future of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (eds. Chari & Lavallee). Oregon State UP, pp. 83-98

Bernstein, J. (2013): Ch. 11, "The Impact of NAGPRA on Communitites," in ibid. pp. 265-284.

Wali, A. (2014): "Collecting Contemporary Urban Culture: an Emerging Framework for the Field Museum," in Museum Anthropology 37(1), pp. 66-74

Kreps, C. (2015): “University Museums as Laboratories of Learning and Engaged Practice,” in Museum Anthropology 38 (2): pp. 96-111.

Kiechle, M. (2016) "Preserving the Unpleasant: Sources, Methods and Conjectures for Odors at Historic Sites," in Future Anterior 13 (2): pp. 23-31.

Atalay, Sonya, et al. (2017): NAGPRA Comics: Journeys to Complete the Work.

Kauanui, J.K. & M. Bruchac (2018): "Margaret Bruchac on Erasure & Unintended Consequences of Repatriation Legislation," from Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 51-64

Labadi, S. (2018): Ch. 6, "Employment and museums: the occupation of the National Museum on the History of Immigration," in Museums, Immigrants, and Social Justice. Routledge, pp. 107-127

Morgan, J. & S. Macdonald (2018): "De-growing museum collections for new heritage futures," in International Journal of Heritage Studies. Routledge, open access.

Colwell, C. (2019): "Can Repatriation Heal the Wounds of History?" in The Public Historian, 41(1), pp. 90-110

OK. well. that was a lot. in general, i also think familiarizing yourself with the work of a variety of social theorists (e.g. Foucault, Hall, Butler) can be very helpful for approaching academic discussions that are fairly abstract and making them concrete. the other primary recommendation i have is to read shit that you disagree with and that makes you uncomfortable--the particular balance to strike is something only you can determine, but in general if you see an article title and scoff at it, maybe take your time with that one.

[fleysh]

[bluesardine]

Some great additions from the comments.