A Door on Other Time

Title is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories". Handle means "storyteller" in Nahuatl. This'll mostly be about pop culture, linguistics, philosophy, history, and other things that interest me, but also about writing.

[tlaquetzqui]

[beardedmrbean]

Greater glider,

[tlaquetzqui]

I don’t think greater gliders are new (maybe they found another species of greater gliders?), but damn if their ears don’t look fake.

[ilynpilled]

a character being a perpetrator does not negate their victimhood and neither does their victimhood negate being a perpetrator. u can accept and reckon w both dimensions in ur analysis

[ilynpilled]

there is nothing morally purifying about suffering or victimhood, it is not something that inculcates “goodness.”

one’s character has no impact on whether they were/are a victim or not, victim status is not something that is only afforded to the palatable.

it also does not = absolution.

[ilynpilled]

ppl cant handle this in cartoons made for teenagers lets not get ahead of ourselves

[emmaubler]

Rationalization =/= justification

[tlaquetzqui]

“Explains but does not excuse” is an important concept.

[girlactionfigure]

On This Day — August 12–13, 1952

Night of the Murdered Poets: Stalin massacres the greatest living Yiddish writers in a prison basement.

Thirteen leading Soviet Jewish intellectuals, including poets, novelists, and cultural figures, were taken to Moscow’s Lubyanka prison and executed by firing squad on Stalin’s direct orders.

They had been members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which the Soviets used during the war to rally Jewish support against the Nazis.

Once the war was over, Stalin turned on them.

They were accused of “Zionism,” “bourgeois nationalism,” and treason. Their real crime was writing in Yiddish and maintaining a distinct Jewish cultural identity inside the Soviet empire.

Stalin destroyed the last major center of Yiddish literature in Europe.

The Night of the Murdered Poets remains one of the clearest proofs that Soviet “anti-fascism” had no problem murdering Jews once they were no longer seen as “useful.”

@CptAllenHistory

[damnfandomproblems]

Fandom Problem #16,443:

Most times when someone accuses of a woman of internalized misogyny, or a person of color of internalized racism, it just means they're pissed that a woman/POC/other minority is disagreeing with them

[damnfandomproblems]

Fandom Problem #16,442:

If you're gonna scream about a problematic creator and make people feel bad for enjoying the thing that was created, you might as well go do it for everything that has a creator you deem problematic. Oh, wait, you're not going to do that? Then shut the fucking hell up, you pathetic shrieking child.

I know this is so very hard for you self-righteous little pricks to understand, but people are allowed to enjoy things, creator be damned. Maybe learn that instead of screaming and whining like the toddlers you are.

[tlaquetzqui]

As I always say, you don’t have to endorse Michelangelo chasing his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend with a knife, to like the Sistine Chapel.

[thexfiles2021]

[carlthesolarguy-blog]

Wood chippers are on sale across the USA!

[unindoctrinated125]

No matter where they are in this world muslims are a problem. Don't let them into your world.

[tlaquetzqui]

Radioactive ash never raped anybody…

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

[shieldfoss]

Bananas aren't land though.

[samueldays]

A more relevant but less snappy example for land is the wolf territory map.

[shieldfoss]

See I did consider that* comparison, but I think it actually supports the original tweet. By what right do those wolves have that land? Because they're stronger, and have chased off rival claimants? In that case, a state refusing to recognize private land claims is also fully within its right to do so, because it is stronger still.

Or, if it is meant to be the much more defensible statement "defending private land isn't crazy, even wild animals do it" then yes, but they also do murder and rape.

🞯 well, gorilla/banana led me to tiger/hunting-grounds, but same/same yeah?

[barryogg]

In that case, a state refusing to recognize private land claims is also fully within its right to do so, because it is stronger still.

In that case, we should first decide if the state is ✨ just a name for the things we do together✨, or is a state a distinct entity that takes what it can while the people suffer what they must. People who enjoy fantasies of expropriation based on the latter usually at the same time demand deference to the idea of the state based on the former.

[tlaquetzqui]

“Society” is fundamentally an agreement between families not to make incursions on other families’ territory. There is no government—there is nothing beyond the family, you can raid anyone you’re not related to—without private property.

[anamericangirl]

We are coming for you guns with force. We do not care how uncompliant you are with the police, we do not care about your feelings. We will use as much force necessary to disarm you.

Lol good luck with that

[the-prequal]

Who wants to bet anon calls themselves "anti-facist?"

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I feel like "we" is gilding the lily a tad.

[tlaquetzqui]

“You got a mouse in your pocket or something?”

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Me, passing a car covered in horny thirst-trap anime girl stickers: while I personally find this to be cringe, given the national push for censorship, I must concede that this is technically Praxis.

[shieldfoss]

#driving my Toyota Praxis

[tlaquetzqui]

The Japanese name for cars with those stickers is itasha. Which literally means “pain chariot” but is more idiomatically translated “cringemobile”.

[zisurru]

something i think would make a lot of historical romance more accurate & interesting is the realization that people are less likely to totally disparage the ethical & social values of their time than they are to use those values to defend whatever it is they want to do

a woman is less likely to go "it's stupid that women are expected to be modest" than she is to go "there is nothing immodest about a woman going out without a chaperone" or even "i can go out without a chaperone because i am so modest"

people also seem less likely to see someone's shitty behavior as reflecting a shitty society than they are to view that behavior as being out of accordance with that society - e.g. a father who's excessively controlling of his daughters' marriage prospects isn't, in her mind, acting that way because he lives in a repressive patriarchal culture, but is actually outdated in his values - his cruelty is unmodern, ungentlemanly, stuck in the past, barbaric. we might think he's upholding the values of his culture perfectly, but the people around him who took issue with his behavior probably wouldn't see it that way

[chocolatepot]

I agree, and I'd also note that people are capable of carving out a hole in their prejudices to accommodate someone who doesn't match them.

If some Victorian dude comes across a capable female doctor, rather than going "she must be lying, or they gave her easy tests to let her through" or whatever, he'd be very likely to see her as an exception to his belief that women couldn't do medicine. She was made without feminine frailties. She has a man's mind. Oh, she's very nurturing, so nurturing that she feels she must heal people beyond the level of nursing.

There can still be an assumption that she wouldn't take really difficult cases or she wouldn't medically examine a man with his shirt off or whatever, but it's much more realistic when prejudices are complex and shifting. And it can still be an obstacle for the character! It can still make her deeply uncomfortable! It would just be more interesting to read.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

And people still do this today. Of course, they also assume others are doing it, in order to explain why others aren't acting according to the beholder's beliefs about their actions.

[tlaquetzqui]

See, for example, “I can’t believe you think this borderline genocidal bigotry is progressive”. Like, homes have I got news for you about Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and vast numbers of other leading figures of the progressive movement.

[khorneschosen]

Communism really does suck at almost every single possible that you could measure success.

And it really is kind of impressive that it. This is a system that is universally bad at fucking everything. It's not great at war. It's not good at peacetime. It's not good at production. It's not good at social cohesion. It's not good at even the shit that you would expect it to be halfway decent at Land Management. The welfare of its citizens just basic necessities, entertainment, art, science just across the board every single metric. You could go to look at a society and see how well it's doing is not there though.

There is one metric that it's actually quite good.

Of all the civilizations which you could look at in the world, you could not look at a communist society and say this one is full of decadence.

It's the common condemnation of any successful society is decadence.

It lacked decadence. They were not depraved in decadence. They were merely depraved and deprived.

So when you hear your culture being derided or any culture really thing to ride it as decadent understand that is why their moral system it is the only claim they can make about his system that some must be sinful because it has plenty. They measure virtue as so many now young Russian men do judging their masculinity by how poor they're upbringing was. This is what they call the spiritual value of deprivation.

Which means that you will go without medicine for disease. You will go without treatment for health concerns you will be missing most of your teeth knocked out by the hard life. Your entire body will hurt from the hard labor you all have to have done in order to survive and yet will be no stronger for it. Only more simwy and this is what they call the virtue of the third world that it is of people who have had to do more with less and do it with a boot on their neck. Maybe two boots, maybe three at any given moment.

And I must stress this communism is a system that uniquely produces. Nothing but sub-optimal at best are outright objectively worse and every metric. Then the system is constantly compares itself to and finds itself lacking.

[tlaquetzqui]

North Koreans are shorter now than when 40% of them were slaves and they had no trucks or tractors. And Romanians who grew up under Ceaușescu are as much shorter than those who grew up in the generations after as the average Asian is shorter than the average European—communism is like being born into another race.

[gsirvitor]

[proteinmom]

this is epic btw

[proteinmom]

[emmaubler]

How dare that bitch Ursa Vance--checks notes--get pregnant and let people see her in that condition in public.

[tlaquetzqui]

“Pronatalist movement” you mean people who don’t favor the genocide of their own community? Yeah what goddamn monsters.

[tvirusresearchlabs]

Another day, another violence-inciting, fake fact about Jews. Getting tired of the internet being over saturated with these.

[outraged-honk]

Most Jews did not live on Plantations, they lived in/ close to local towns. This stat is mixed with the Dutch slave trade as well, making those stats inaccurate for usa.

When it comes to this statistic, you need to know how many jews were in the USA at the time, what percentage of those where in the southern states, which percentage owned plantations compared to others around them.

There were about 100,000 Jews in the USA at that time, total. That was .2 of the US population at the time.

Source¹

[outraged-honk]

[emmaubler]

Love the Woke Right going from "You can't assign collective blame to white people for what a fraction of their ancestors did!!!" to "Acksually, it was all the Joos' fault!!!"

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Also, weren't Jews famously enslaved themselves? Didn't most slaves shipped across the Atlantic originate with African captors, not da Joos?

[tlaquetzqui]

It is fun, though, to tweak leftists with the fact that the Confederate flag is a saltire rather than a more typical cross (× rather than +) partly because one of the members of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet was Jewish and felt that the non-diagonal cross was too implicitly Christian. Which is however more “the Confederates were better (namely more sensitive) than you thought”, not the Jews being worse.

[sr-roto]

[tlaquetzqui]

The real first days of the seasons are not the equinoxes and solstices, but the points halfway between them. They roughly correspond to Candlemass, May Day, Lammas, and All Saint’s—early in February, May, August, and November, the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh months. The solstices and equinoxes are the midpoints of the seasons—in fact the former are called Midsummer Day and Midwinter Day, in many eras and societies.

Incidentally, the first Chinese solar term, Lichun or “Establishment of Spring”, roughly corresponds with Candlemass.

[cluelesbo]

My dad calls them "crossover days", and describes them as the point where you start to really notice the seasons changing.

The shortest day of the year is the winter solstice — but it's not noticeably shorter than the day before it, or the day after. But you do notice Groundhog Day, when suddenly it feels like the days are getting longer again. They have been for months at that point, but the rate of change accelerates here and won't slow down until Mayday — or, approximately the next crossover day. And likewise, the rate at which daylight decreases day-by-day is about to accelerate. It will slow down again around Halloween.

[tlaquetzqui]

An old name for them is “cross-quarter days”.

[ausefulblogforputtingthingsin]

Cross-quarter days are a hill i will die on and here's why: Pretend the solstice is the first day of summer, and then describe what happens to days during summer. "Summer is when the days start getting shorter." Do you hear yourself? You sound crazy. The solstice is the height of summer, aka Midsummer. Same with winter. The beginning of winter should not be when the days start getting longer. The solstice is the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the daylight has been dwindling for months. Once the solstice happens, you're halfway to spring.