Let's Tweet the Carmagnole!

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

First time you hear the Free Planets Alliance anthem: "Oh, they made it comically shitty to highlight how bad the FPA government is"

When you hear it again at the end of episode 86: "OH HAIL! LIBERTY BELL!" 🫡 

[unionizedwizard]

also just a general rule of thumb: when nationalized/public service industries are striking, they ARE striking for YOUR benefit, ultimately. bus drivers are the ones who fight against capitalist upper management trying to shut down bus routes that "don't generate enough profits" or trying to generally set up a worse (public!) service for the sake of """"efficiency""""" and """"""cost optimization""""""" (read: pay less people and overwork them to give YOU, the public, a much worse service or commodity).

it's like this in schools, hospitals, public transportation, literally everywhere. the striking workers care for the public' needs more than the bosses will ever do. sure they want better work conditions which is (should be) enough of a reason to support strikes in general, but by supporting striking workers, you ultimately support your own quality of life. it's all intertwined

[left-reminders]

[politijohn]

Railway workers: "sick days pls or we'll strike"

CNN: "is a strike worth it? the holidays are just around the corner. think about the economy! now joining us live is the Bank of America CEO to weigh in"

[zoesupreme]

the "most pro-labor president in history" says christmas shopping is more important than sick leave for rail workers so he's forcing a deal thru that workers have rejected and forbidding them from striking

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

Free tip for undergrads writing their history final exams and papers

Using the phrase "In the 20th century" or "In the 1900s" is both 100% accurate and will make your professor feel like a walking corpse, so it's a great troll

[zvaigzdelasas]

Unionist Press: Sinn Fein, are you the political frontgroup for the IRA?

Sinn Fein: uhm... *cheeks full of provisional IRA*..........no............

*25 years pass and Sinn Fein becomes the biggest political party in ireland*

Moral of the story: lying works and its morally permissable to lie to the anglos

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

Is there such a thing as “labor tumblr”

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

Back on this after 4 years, whomst up

Forgot how much history I posted about, wow

Uh looks like about 4-6 people I used to follow are still active (hi!), but life update: no longer a history grad student, left academia/higher ed entirely to... work for a union representing higher ed workers lol.

This might be a much more labor/politics/personal interests blog if I stick around because I forgot a lot of books I read and grad school destroyed my ability to enjoy reading!

[memecucker]

What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.

[memecucker]

Since this is getting notes here’s a link to a translation of the papyrus scroll and here’s an article that gets further into the economic situation surrounding the strike and giving an explanation of the events. The workers didnt just refuse to construct Rameses III’s future tomb, they actually occupied the Valley of the Kings and were preventing anyone from entering to perform rituals or funerals. Basically they set up the first ever recorded picket line

Again the workers went on strike, this time taking over and blocking all access to the Valley of the Kings. The significance of this act was that no priests or family members of the deceased were able to enter with food and drink offerings for the dead and this was considered a serious offense to the memory of those who had passed on to the afterlife. When officials appeared with armed guards and threatened to remove the men by force, a striker responded that he would damage the royal tombs before they could move against him and so the two sides were stalemated.

Eventually the tomb workers were able to win the day and acquire their demands and actually set a precedent for organized labor and strikes in Egyptian society that continued for a long time

The jubilee in 1156 BCE was a great success and, as at all festivals, the participants forgot about their daily troubles with dancing and drink. The problem did not go away, however, and the workers continued their strikes and their struggle for fair payment in the following months. At last some sort of resolution seems to have been reached whereby officials were able to make payments to the workers on time but the dynamic of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed – as had the practical application of the concept of ma’at – and these would never really revert to their former understandings again. Ma’at was the responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers; and yet the men of Deir el-Medina had taken it upon themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in the policies which helped to maintain essential harmony and balance. The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities of the king.

[…]

The success of the tomb-worker/artisan strikes inspired others to do the same. Just as the official records of the battle with the Sea Peoples never recorded the Egyptian losses in the land battle, neither do they record any mention of the strikes. The record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll discovered at Deir el-Medina and most probably written by the scribe Amennakht. The precedent of workers walking away from their jobs was set by these events and, although there are no extant official reports of other similar events, workers now understood they had more power than previously thought. Strikes are mentioned in the latter part of the New Kingdom and Late Period and there is no doubt the practice began with the workers at Deir el-Medina in the time of Ramesses III.

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

Haven’t been on here in over a year, still getting likes/reblogs??

🤔

[prokopetz]

I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:

On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.

On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?

[roachpatrol]

well, come to think of it, we’re at the top of the food chain but we almost exclusively hunt and kill prey out in the country. 

raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.  

anyway like, we’re masters of our environment, we make weird shit happen all the time, we have lots of great food and sometimes we share, and we almost never eat someone. it makes sense for urban animals, over the last century or so, to just keep an eye out for opportunities to use us, and to pass the habit on to their kids. 

[tsfennec]

It really is a weird, funny thing. Like yeah, technically they’re predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???

I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.

(Which brings me to an interesting thought about the ubiquitous rule about never eating the faery food lest you find yourself forever unsatisfied with anything in the human world - and the potential parallels to the dangers of feeding wildlife human food lest they become addicted and too tame and dependent to be safe for either themselves or us. Hmm.)

[absurdistocchiolism]

Okay, but that last bit with the Fae…makes almost perfect sense.

Of the stories I’ve read, the food of the Fae, its origins and effects, are often strange and/or obscure.- Just like our food to most animals.

The Fae are strange beings that seem to know weird things that give them power or an edge over us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae work and live by strange rules also often nonsensical or obscure to us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae can easily obtain vast amounts of things we consider rare/precious/desireable, and have no problem with dishing it out wantonly for no other reason than amusement.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae sometimes are amused by having us around, but only on their terms and IF it amuses/intrigues them.- Just like us to animals.

GUYS, I SENSE A PATTERN….

[roachpatrol]

-they have arcane social conventions and the punishment for not paying the correct respects right is banishment, if you’re lucky, and death if you’re not.

-they have wild and unexpected parties where you’d least expect to find them, but if you’re bold enough to entertain them they’ll feed you and caress you and play with you all night.

-time runs strangely in their realm. their homes are summerlands: warm and bright, no matter the season. there is always fruit on their tables. but not everyone who comes in from the cold is let back out again.  

-their games are cruel and complex and unfair, but if you can beat them by their own rules you will access riches beyond imagining.

-sometimes they just fucking fuck with you, the fuckheads.

-they will absolutely steal your children away. when your children return— if they ever do— they will come back strange. they will have magic earrings or necklaces or bracelets. they will know things they shouldn’t. they won’t know things that they should. your strange children might survive, might even prosper, might take wives and husbands and have children of their own. but they will always be marked by their time away from your world.

-the price for pissing them off is always death. sometimes just you. sometimes your whole community. 

-if you are very good, and very smart, and very brave, they will grant your wish.

[teal-deer]

- they aren’t quite immortal, maybe, but they live a long, long time. Whole generations might grow up in the shadow of one of their nests. When one dies, it is a great and sad event, and many come from miles around to cry. 

[flo-nelja]

Also they seem invulnerable, but sometimes you can kill one for no apparent reason, when the stars align or they are allergic or some unpredictable shit. You often die in the process, though.

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

This subtext is basically text when it comes to the Wild Hunt.

[theawesomeadventurer]

this is Doritos flavored Mountain Dew. God is dead and we fucking destroyed him

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

Reblog if you went to teach a history class wearing a tricolor cockade to rep liberty, equality, and solidarity or death, or if you wish you had.

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

#i wish i had and i’m gonna do it for a presentation on my frev essay that is crushing me and i’ll have to put up with obnoxious dudebros

This sounds like an absolute blast, good luck!

[the-anachronism-journal]

thank you for your support, i really appreciate it! the thing is that, quite recently, i went from being homeschooled in britain in a rather miserable way to going back to holland and enrolling in a dutch school for people who didn’t manage to graduate. it's okay actually, but i have had many cringe-attacks at the wide range of bizarre, reactionary ideas of some fellow students and teachers, especially in the social studies and history classes. i had a nasty confrontation in the class on the french revolution when i objected to ’‘bloodthirsty dictator robespierre who personally guillotined everyone, manipulated and killed his political opponents and even invented the republican calendar and after he was killed a peaceful period followed before and napoleon came along and saved france and the revolution.“

now i have almost finished a long essay on the french revolution and i’ll have to cram everything into a ten-minute presentation, while the assignment itself was pretty huge, and i’ll have to present it to some of the most annoying people in my school, incluiding a very stereotypical MRA i hadn’t even expected to find in holland who supports trump’s foreign agenda and a guy with right-wing nationalist sympathies who wants more police despite being known as The Petty Criminal…

anyways, i'm gonna dress up similarly to a jacobin revolutionary, perhaps make a guillotine choker, and of course a cockade, and try not to die. and honestly i’d be happy to scare the living daylights out of the audience

and still convince them that robespierre and stalin are not the same persons

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

First off, wow that shit is in Holland, huh. 

Second, right off the bat I think the best place to debunk that particularly dumb account (if that’s your aim) is to present something about the events of the years after 9 Thermidor. Standard accounts don’t really say too much about it, but you could do a lot with all the violent counter-repression and insurrections. There is, after all, a reason why anyone thought they needed a general to save their government.

Last, I recommend this to everyone because it owns, and if you have time to add more reading I think it’s well worth it: Recent Historiography of the French Revolutionary Terror is a paper that makes an interesting case about just what “the Terror” really prefigured.

[mooniicorn]

“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”

We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”

[iamthethunder]

Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.

[rosslynpaladin]

Or, backing up FURTHER

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.

[vicecommanderhijikata]

Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.

[jenniferrpovey]

Yeah. The autism epidemic is a myth.

The only geographical pattern for autism is that it clusters in wealthy areas with highly educated parents - who are more likely to hire a good pediatrician, so they’re not clusters of autism, they’re clusters of autism diagnosis.

The term “autism” was not actually coined until 1911, and then it was used in Switzerland to talk about a subset of schizophrenics. It wasn’t used in its current sense until the 1940s, and until the 1960s it was still thought autism and schizophrenia were connected.

So, obviously, there’s no chance of people who lived before that being diagnosed. Analysis of people’s lives has sometimes indicated the possibility - it’s pretty commonly believed that Einstein was on the spectrum from the way he dealt with/didn’t deal with other people.

Now, here’s a big part of it.

The two major researchers who established autism were Hans Asperger in Germany and Leo Kanner in the United States.

Asperger’s view of autism was much like how we see it now - a spectrum, with some people only showing a few traits and some showing more of them.

Kanner thought it was a rare condition AND he thought it was caused by bad parenting. And THAT is the view of autism and autistics and parents of autistics that dominated in the US for a long term. He framed it as psychosis, favored institutionalization (because they needed to be rescued from the bad parents who caused it). And because he said it was a rare and severe psychosis only the most severe cases were counted.

What’s actually happening now is that people are acknowledging that Asperger was right and Kanner was wrong and counting the people Asperger would have counted all along.

Hence, sudden autism epidemic.

That doesn’t exist.

[pausemeplayme]

Also there was a really good post that I can’t find right now that explained how like …

Society these days is way more overstimulating, and so our autistic traits are probably more noticeable now.

I’m not explaining it right but the point is basically technology and a faster-moving, louder society in general is going to make it easier to spot autistic people.

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

Reblog if you went to teach a history class wearing a tricolor cockade to rep liberty, equality, and solidarity or death, or if you wish you had.

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

#i wish i had and i'm gonna do it for a presentation on my frev essay that is crushing me and i'll have to put up with obnoxious dudebros

This sounds like an absolute blast, good luck!

[prudencepaccard]

Frevblr URLs are really something else

@cameme-desmoulins, @tweetonslacarmagnole, @kinkshamekeats, citizens, I like the cut of your jib. Please help me get on your level

[tweetonslacarmagnole]

I can only open the door. It's up to you to walk through it.