ICE killed another person in maine today, just days after the murder of lorenzo salgado araujo in houston
the maine immigrants rights coalition has released a statement confirming he was a 26 year old columbian man who was authorized to work in the US and had a valid social security number
will update this post with a gofundme link if/when one becomes available
his name was joan sebastian guerrero. his 3 yr old daughter was in the backseat of the car in her bluey pajamas. after he was shot, witnesses saw ICE agents pull him from the car and cuff him as he died
If you can’t donate to the gofundme for any reason, you may also consider supporting Presente, which supports Latin American and Afro-Latin people in Maine: https://www.presentemaine.org/
Presente! Maine
Or the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP): https://ilapmaine.org/
The thing about the Karen Read trial is that when I first heard about it I was like “I hope they acquit her because I think women should be allowed to back over their cop boyfriends.” and then I dug into it and realized she genuinely was framed and she was framed by complete dumbasses and if she wasn’t a middle class, college educated, home-owning white woman, they would have gotten away with it and they’ve probably done this to people who could not afford to defend themselves. Then I learned about Sandra Birchmore and the other acts of heinous misconduct and violence committed by the Canton PD and I almost wished it was just a woman killing her fundamentally unlikable cop boyfriend and not open season on girls and women in Canton, Massachusetts. God, what a scary place to live and what a sickening rabbithole to go down.
too much of law enforcement is men with grudges protecting men they see themselves in from consequences. we only really hear about this phenomenon when it comes to rich people because their cases are more high profile (see: #metoo in hollywood, epstein files) but regular women just kind of have to accept the fact and move on lol because only money can save you in such circumstances
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what you’re saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesn’t, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think it’s important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because he’s a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesn’t make the text less racist but it’s an important thing to consider. That’s all, I agree with your other points.
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so I’m snowed under atm ☠️
So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moody’s League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think what’s more likely than ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didn’t know any such antiracist thought existed’ is that ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existed’.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharky’s minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking people’s cats
Anyway, I’m so tired of how “of his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really don’t think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as ‘unconscious bias’ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job 😭
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ‘normal people not kings of men’ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of Númenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramir’s entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the ‘childless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gates’ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a ‘birthright citizenship’ as a consequence of a person’s actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day ‘migrant criminality’ discourse, how can you say he didn’t anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration 😭
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the Fëanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls don’t jump up my ass 😭)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Men™️ being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. It’s not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean ‘he did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm’??? 😭The legendarium isn’t a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that “his time” kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didn’t.
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didn’t have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ☠️
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on “unconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when he’s hit. Which is to say, the insistence on ‘Tolkien was of his time and his time was bad’ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about ‘the time’ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.
On a vaguely related note, I also think ‘this fandom gives grace to the author’ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket you’re in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and it’s doubly baffling considering that he isn’t exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of ‘grateful to the author for this wonderful world’ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going ‘why the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?’
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
the US is currently looting Iraq. seeing Chevron, Space X, and other US corporations pick up $60 billion worth of contracts in the country, we have to remember that the US has controlled Iraq's access to it's own oil revenue since the 2003 US led invasion. revenues that it will cut off if Iraq doesn't play ball
Following the invasion of Iraq, the US occupation of the country became a reality after the collapse of Saddam’s government. Faced with a fait accompli, the UN Security Council had to accept the new status quo.
According to International Humanitarian Law, occupation forces – in this case, the US and UK – become responsible for the well-being of the populations they occupy. So, UNSC Resolution 1483 was issued on 22 May 2003 to establish the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as Iraq’s administrator and create the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) to manage Iraqi oil revenues.
Note that Resolution 1483 did not mention the US Federal Reserve as the depositary of Iraqi funds, nor did it assign a location for the DFI headquarters or account. In fact, the resolution specifically states directed that the DFI should “be held by the Central Bank of Iraq.” It was the CPA, led by Paul Bremer, that decided unilaterally to house the account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
This decision allowed the US government to maintain tight control over Iraq’s oil revenues. From that point until today, the Iraqi Ministry of Finance has had to submit requests for funds to the US Treasury, which then approves or denies these requests based on its own criteria.
This monthly transfer of US dollars – which are literally flown into Baghdad in pallets of hard cash – determines Iraq and its 40-million-population’s ability to pay for basic needs like salaries, food, and medicine.
Whenever Washington feels that Iraq is not compliant with US regional goals, these fund transfers can be delayed or reduced. In January 2020, for instance, after the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel US troops following the assassination of Iranian Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Deputy Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Trump administration threatened to freeze Iraq’s access to its oil revenues.
Today, Iraq’s financial situation remains dire. Despite having oil revenues piling up in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – estimated today at around $120 billion – Iraq is burdened with a growing debt that matches this amount.
source
part of the new contracts is the restoring of an Iraq-Syria oil pipeline to bypass Hormuz
Its weird how you get more disabled over time. Like, most people i know with a disability actually have like eight disabilities and a lot of them slowed up later as a result of compensating for the earlier ones. This brought to you by me filling out a demographics form and wondering when i got to the point of checking that many damn boxes
“You get used to it” true but misleading because someday your back problems are gonna inexplicably cause stomach problems. And then you get used to the stomach problems but your thumbs start hurting because you had to do so much work on your phone lying in weird positions while waiting for the stomach problems to go away. And there are way more distractions on your phone too so while you always had adhd this just makes it more annoying/prevalent-
Anyway hi disabled people with one million conditions i love you and i hope youre having a good day with minimal pain/inconvenience
guy on the subway with one ear pierced, little gold hoop. other guy on the subway very quickly and subtly googling "which one is the gay ear". it is not the gay ear. visible disappointment on his face as he puts his phone away.
I got a 4 min long video of Kimchi dreaming today, so here's a clip
You get the whole walk cycle and the little sprint at the end.
Sometimes her sprints last for like 4 or 5 seconds and she can shoot herself off the couch or into a wall if she gets a grip with her back claws. If she does it next to a wall, her head smacking into it sounds like someone is trying to break into the house. She doesn't wake up.
Later in the dream she injured her paw and was limping, and earlier she caught something and ate it.
i have been feeling especially low blood volume lately so an infusion nurse came out to give me fluids + magnesium+ b vitamins today and it was our favorite nurse. the very buff firefighter nurse who is also a gamer with encyclopedic knowledge of every Geeky Thing. some days he does not speak to us at all. some days we have pretty equitable conversations. today it was His Turn On The Talking
we got an hour long infodunp about dungeon crawler carl, the author, the story, all of the adaptations and which are the best, the voice actor who reads the audiobooks, how much the kickstarters raised, I mean EVERYTHING
gentle attempts to widen the scope of the conversation into things like "the phenomenon of lit rpg in general" were very strongly resisted so after a while we just stopped trying and just nodded and Reacted to what he told/showed us. and then after he left we absolutely lost our shit about the Unskippable Dungeon Crawler Carl Nurse Cut Scene
i feel like when I talk about social skills I have learned I often focus on, like, things that are perceived as autistic deficits and how I compensate for them. that's true, I have worked a lot on those things. but also VERY IMPORTANTLY, along with the skill "remember to take turns in a conversation and ask the other person questions back," there is a parallel skill of "understand that incidents of failing to do this in a conversation are not malicious"
I try to think of being patient and friendly during an hour long infodump about something I'm not particularly interested in as a gift that I can give someone. it's annoying but it isn't hurting me. sometimes people have weird communication days just like they have weird hair days.
I understand that it is important to try to have reciprocal conversations where I show interest in other people and actively listen and ask questions about them. I also have a few friends who don't have that skill. they'll just talk about themselves. so a skill that *I* have learned is to pretend they have asked me about myself and respond as though they have. they'll say some things about them and their lives, and then I will take the initiative to share stuff about my life. this was difficult for me for a while because I felt like if I wasn't explicitly invited to say something or asked about myself that indicated a lack of interest. it usually doesn't. my friends who don't have that particular conversational skill respond to my spontaneously listing all the stuff that's going on in my life/stuff about my interests/etc very positively. they like that I do this so they don't have to feel self conscious about having trouble remembering to ask me about myself.
i think that understanding different communication methods that may not be the extremely basic rote "take turns in a conversation and invite people to talk about themselves!" type stuff is a VERY important social skill. and tbh? goes along with trying to give people grace and the benefit of the doubt/good faith/whatever.
i think that outlining what "usual" conversational expectations are is helpful bc people may not understand why they get the reactions that they often get from others during or after social interactions.
i also think it's not great to frame it like "if you don't do this you're Rude and Bad and it is correct that people do not like you"
something can be broadly understood and experienced as inconsiderate and ALSO be something someone can't help. we can learn to compensate for some things to the degree that we are able and I think it is important to try and learn as much as we can about social interactions and expectations. and also, like... sometimes that doesn't look like "I simply know now that interrupting people is rude and elect not to do it"
Interrupting people is the conversational issue I still struggle with the most. i know ! its bad! to interrupt! and also sometimes i just do. so part of "compensating" for me is knowing when I do it (something it sometimes takes effort to spot in the moment) and making dure to say "I'm so sorry, I interrupted you, what were you saying?" when I do
if "knowing most people find it more Socially Correct to ask questions -> get asked questions in return" is information that someone can possess about socialization, then "some people's brains don't really work in a way that makes doing that intuitive. they may not do this in conversations and it is not malicious" IS ALSO information you can know and SHOULD APPLY to your interactions
i have been seeing an increasing number of like "y'all don't know how to act/manners are important actually" posts and like... i agree... they are. and also it's important to not end up just sounding like we are ABA practitioners because I will be so real, some of these posts are pretty much an ABA hand out 😬
I will say that we were both intermittently glancing at the IV bag throughout the infodump to see how much fluid was left. which is very funny and would make a good comic. i think that all slightly uncomfortable interactions should come with an built in hourglass this way.
The great man turns his back on the island.
Now he will not die in paradise
nor hear again
the lutes of paradise among the olive trees,
by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time
begins now, in which he hears again
that pulse which is the narrative
sea, at dawn when its pull is strongest.
What has brought us here
will lead us away; our ship
sways in the tinted harbor water.
Now the spell is ended.
Give him back his life,
sea that can only move forward.
idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms
most english translations of the odyssey embellish the existing sexism with additional misogyny, so simply not doing that, while being female, has caused wilson's translation to be dubbed "feminist," seemingly to her bemusement.
i would love to see her take on a feminist translation as an intentional project! i think the hate and harassment she would get for that would be intense, unfortunately.
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