Fruit Too Ripe To Eat

The thing you have to keep in mind about Moby Dick is that it’s an explicitly anti-racist text written by a white guy in the 1850s. So you end up with stuff like Ishmael spending an entire paragraph complimenting a Polynesian guy on his skull shape.

by @kleefkruid

Oroonoko, The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn (1688) is anti-racist because it is explicitly against race-based chattel slavery. It is not, however, anti-slavery, just makes the argument that many black people have royal blood in them and are therefore intelligent and driven leaders of men, unsuited for this kind of labour, and make bad slaves who will lead the slaves into rebellion because it is their destiny as monarchic heirs to be leaders of men. There’s a line in it that’s like “honestly JUST as many white people ought to be enslaved as black people! Race is a terrible metric for this decision!” she takes pains to talk about how hot the protagonist is because he has a European nose. It is utterly bizarre to read by 21st century anti-racist sensibilities.

If I had a time machine I would use it exclusively to go 200 years into the future to see what anti-bigotry stuff written today makes people go “holy shit wtf kind of mindset is this”

Is this before or after preventing the Soviet lunar sabotage and averting the Great Nuclear War

I need you people to realize that you can be friends with people older than you. like, much older than you. like, decades older than you. you can be friends with these people. regular friends, just like anyone your age. it is possible.

One of my best friends is a decade plus older than me. One of my other best friends is a decade younger than me.

Being an adult is cool. It’s genuinely nice.

i think the world doesn’t know what it really means to live in a theocratic dictatorship. Let me tell you about our experiences living in the islamic regime of iran.

1. Your parents were born to muslim parents so they’re automatically muslim. You’re automatically a muslim too. You didn’t choose your religion and you can’t opt out of it or you will be executed.

2. The compulsory hijab law makes you a criminal if you choose not to wear hijab even tho you didn’t choose to be a muslim and you don’t consider yourself a muslim but the regime has forced you into that role whether you like it or not. And when you ‘break that law’, they can do with you as they please.

3. little girls as young as 7 yrs old are forced to wear hijab at school even tho the islam itself says the age is 9. and all the schools are gender segregated so imagine how they force you to get used to hijab even when you’re just surrounded by other girls. And all day long at school they tell you horrible stories about what will happen to you in hell if someone sees even a strand of your hair.

4. the regime modifies all the textbooks, story books, cartoons and movies to represent the ideal woman with full on hijab. The iranian media is ordered to photoshop every photo of a woman that may be showing a little skin. And if they’re iranian, no hair is supposed to be seen or that will be photoshopped away. Women are mostly excluded from billboards and tv commercials.

5. imagine going to work or meeting up with a friend when suddenly the morality police kidnap you in broad daylight and force you into a van to take you to a station where they will treat you like a criminal and if you don’t agree to get humiliated and do as they say, they will put you in prison. And in case of Mahsa Amini and so many more before her, they will beat you to death. My sister was barely 18 when she got kidnapped and they didn’t let her call home and she’d been so fucking scared and we had no idea where she was. Imagine all the psychological trauma.

6. If you’re in a car and not wearing hijab they will fine you and seize your car. So when u get into a taxi the driver will ask you to keep your hijab on otherwise they’ll get fined. And if you refuse they’ll ask you to get off the car.

7. And its not just about hijab. In Ramadan, they get even more vicious. If they catch you eating or even drinking water on the street they will give you lashes as punishment and even imprison you for breaking the law. If you work in a state-owned company it’s even worse. They will close the cafeteria and take away the water dispensers. All restaurants are banned from delivering food before iftar. It’s a fucking mess. Everyone has to pretend they’re fasting or they’ll be severely punished.

8. And how could I forget about this! iranian women are banned from singing! the islamic regime prohibits women’s singing voices to be heard by men so imagine the horror of having 50% of the population banned from ever becoming a singer. If they identify a female singer in iran, they will take her to jail and force her to repent her sins in the most humiliating way so that she will never dare sing again.

9. And every time the regime gets wind of a private gathering of men and women trying to have fun and live their fucking private lives, the police crash the party and take everyone to jail bc the Islamic regime bans iranian men and women from having fun.

10. Did you know that the islamic regime doesn’t allow women’s faces to be printed on their obituaries or headstones? They put a flower for our faces instead and if they see a headstone with a woman’s face printed on it they’ll smash it to pieces. That’s how religious dictatorship continues to oppress and erase women even after their deaths.

11. For some reason, women aren’t allowed to ride motorcycles and the government won’t issue any license for them. In some cities, women are barred from riding a bicycle.

So if you see Islam has become for many iranians a symbol of oppression and torture and discrimination, that’s why. The regime uses islam as a weapon to silence and punish anyone who opposes them. You can love islam all you want from the safety of your home in a free country and talk about how kind and benevolent the religion is, but in iran, it’s a whole different story.

Our economy is fucked. All govt officials are corrupt as fuck. Most websites are banned in iran. Even tumblr is banned. The world has cut the iranian ppl from many services. We don’t have intl credit cards like visa card. Amazon doesn’t do delivery to iran. We cant get netflix, spotify or even a gamepass subscription. we don’t get any Apple services here. iran isn’t listed as a country you could choose when signing up for a lot of services. and when we decide to leave iran and escape this hellhole, every country out there will make it sooo much harder for us to get a visa just bc we had the misfortune to be born in iran at the wrong time.

This is the story of iran for the past 44 years. Held hostage by a corrupt regime that uses religion to suppress and torture the people and being abandoned by the rest of the world bc our lives don’t matter.

Please be our voice. Once they shut down the internet completely and silence our voice, they will start slaughtering us to stifle the protests just like they did in 2019. Please help us. We want this fucking regime gone.

but theyre the leaders of the Axis Of ResistanceTM!! <3<3<3 stunning and brave!!

Reminds me of this article I read a while ago about ballet classes held in secret in Iran;

Imagine being a girl and just wanting to be a ballerina. One of the many ways Islamic extremism stamps the life out of humans and makes life absolutely miserable.

A peek at Yaquina Head Lighthouse

It's crazy because this isn't the first time this has happened this year but no one ever talks about it no one ever cares. A week or two ago a woman was murdered by having her throat slit in front of her two kids by a guy who screamed "free Palestine" and all the comments on the article were theorizing that it was a false flag attack actually organized by The Jews. A few weeks before that a synagogue was bombed in France by a guy who literally wrapped himself in a Palestine flag as he did it and every single news organization cropped the images so you couldn't see the flag. Several Jewish women have been raped in France "for Palestine" and several other Jews in the country murdered. Some Jews were kidnapped in Australia by "activists." In the US an elderly Jewish man was murdered by protesters months and months ago and absolutely no mainstream news reported on it. A plane in Russia was stormed by a mob looking to find Jews and kill them because they mistakenly thought the plane was landing from Israel. A few days ago in NYC several Jewish men were stabbed in the span of a couple of hours in separate incidents by people screaming "free Palestine" and they're still hospitalized. A terrorist convicted of bombing a synagogue in 1980 and killing four Jews in France is now teaching a social justice class at a Canadian University. There was a crowd chanting "Heil Hitler" at the Israeli athletes at the Olympics while waving Palesfine flags. Students at Columbia University made a chain to block Jewish students from attending their classes. They cornered them in a library and chanted "globalize the intifada." Students at UCLA made their Jewish classmates wear badges to identify which had passed their Good Jew test and could be allowed to pass their mob to attend class. Hate crime numbers around the world have gone up by thousands of percentile points and the increase has been driven almost entirely by LEFTISTS and their crazy insistence that the full blown murder of Jews for being Jewish by terrorist organizations "isn't antisemitism" but is in fact a form of "resistance." Against the Jews who secretly control the world. This has been happening for months and months and months and nobody cares and you all just gaslight Jews and tell us we are being hysterical and this is all our fault anyway and now it's normal again to have full blown pogroms in every country in the world where mobs chase down people screaming "Jew! Jew!" to try to kill them and you are STILL. ALL. JUSTIFYING IT. You guys have become literal full blown Nazis and I am not exaggerating in the slightest. Nazism has been normalized again and it hasn't been normalized by the right, it has been normalized by the left through your desperate desire to roleplay a Huger Games type revolution against a tiny minority group who can't hurt you back.

How the fuck is this now the new normal? Why I am not surprised at all the antisemitic attacks in Europe.

They are familiar things but I am a stranger now

in history of translation class, listening to an argument about what constitutes as a "book"

@stressfulsloth

The idea comes from Suzanne Briet (in this text here) and the thought behind it is essentially that if something contains information, and has been deliberately catalogued and placed in a collection, it becomes a document. There are archival theorists with very strict definitions (Ranganathan calls a document a "four sided piece of flat paper or parchment" iirc) but Briet theorises that the process of cataloguing and interring within a collection or archive- ie. placing the antelope in a zoo intended for zoological study- enforces its status as a document. Sketches, reports, anything that is then derived from the antelope becomes a secondary document.

i want to wear my slippers but fives stole one of them and she's asleep cuddling it so i guess my feet will be cold

in her little crown because she is the princess

I'm so fucking sorry but I have processing issues and I can not for the life of me tell what this animal is

does this help?

i have to get into bed twenty times a day or ill start following through on various threats ive made

Hey what the actual fuck Europe??????

Copy cats planning shit??? Already???? And for anyone who excused the first Amsterdam pogrom, you can't deny this one as they conspired to attack Belgium jews, not Israelis not that it matters nor is it any better to attack Israelis.

You know what’s astonishing about Katara? She grew up in a world without bending.

It’s not surprising that Sokka calls her bending ‘magic water’ in the first episode. It might as well have been magic to them at that point; they had never seen it in practice until they meet Aang.

So not only did Katara not have any teachers, she didn’t have any kind of guidance, no visual aids, no idea of how bending is supposed to look or work. The first time she ever sees actual waterbending movements is when she steals the waterbending scroll from the pirates. The first time she meets another waterbender is when she reaches the North Pole, where within weeks she outmasters pretty much everyone and goes on to teach the Avatar.

Everything she does is so incredibly impressive, and yet I can’t help but feel the most proud of her when she catches a fish on that little boat.

Literally insane to think about. Hama was the last waterbender of the south to be captured, when she was a young woman, i believe in her late teens / early 20s. She is approximately the same age as Kanna. Katara’s parents were born into a tribe in which all the benders were already gone. Then they grew up and had her. Thats two generations raised with the stories of a lost tradition, “back when my mother was young”, “back when gran gran was young”. decades of learning how to live without, how to adapt and survive. Decades of bending, in this far off, remote land, becoming a distant memory. Everything Katara learned before the scroll might as well have been reinventing bending itself. Did she beg the elders for stories about their lost friends and family, trying to glean some insight into how they did what they did? The southern raiders ship is forever frozen in place. Did she look at it, and wonder how anyone could command water at that scale, while she struggled to lift a fish?

My dad has bees. Today, I went to his house and he showed me all the honey he had gotten from the hives. He took the lid off a 5-gallon bucket full of honey and on top of the honey there were 3 little bees, struggling. They were covered in sticky honey and drowning. I asked him if we could help them and he said he was sure they wouldn't survive. Casualties of honey collection I suppose.

I asked him again if we could at least get them out and kill them quickly, after all he was the one who taught me to put a suffering animal (or bug) out of its misery. He finally conceded and scooped the bees out of the bucket. He put them in an empty Chobani yogurt container and put the plastic container outside.

Because he had disrupted the hive with the earlier honey collection, there were bees flying all over outside.

We put the 3 little bees in the container on a bench and left them to their fate. My dad called me out a little while later to show me what was happening. These three little bees were surrounded by all their sisters (all of the bees are females) and they were cleaning the sticky nearly dead bees, helping them to get all of the honey off of their bodies. We came back a short time later and there was only one little bee left in the container. She was still being tended to by her sisters.

When it was time for me to leave, we checked one last time and all three of the bees had been cleaned off enough to fly away and the container was empty.

Those three little bees lived because they were surrounded by family and friends who would not give up on them, family and friends who refused to let them drown in their own stickiness and resolved to help until the last little bee could be set free.

Bee Sisters. Bee Peers. Bee Teammates.

We could all learn a thing or two from these bees.

Bee kind always.

also: the bees aren't strong enough to pull the drowning ones out, and the humans aren't delicate enough to clean them off afterwards. helping takes a lot of forms.

You see it's quite simple: if they call the earth Gaia, it's fantasy. If they call it Terra, that's sci-fi

If there's one vampire, it's horror. If there's 100+ and they have politics, it's urban fantasy.