Derin When I Get Over There In A Few Months I'm Going To Have To Find You And Sit You Down With A Big

Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.

Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?

2018 is þe year of using þe þorn again instead of þe letters “T” and “H” in succession

what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.

EDSers- do lidocaine patches work for you? Should the area that you have it on be numb to touch? (I don’t think it’s doing anything, pain is the same and isn’t numb at all but idk if it’s normal or an eds thing?)

Behold, a sideblog!

just somewhere to reblog things so that I can bookmark them - and have a better chance of said bookmarks not turning into dead links

(yes I know that still relies on tumblr existing/having consistent urls for posts, but at least my bookmarks won’t become useless just because somebody changed their url or deleted a post?)

every time i see trad gender roles people being weird about fibercraft i wanna tell them

-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients

-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle

-men who were away from women for a long time had to know how to knit and sew at least well enough to mend their own clothes. soldiers knitted. sailors knitted. cowboys and frontiersmen knitted. vikings probably knitted (actually they would have been doing a kind of proto knitting called nalbinding, but that's beside the point). all those guys the far right love to treat as ultra masculine heroes were sitting around their barracks and campfires at night darning their socks and knitting themselves little hats

A second note prompted by something else, but is a wider issue I see people missing a lot: 

Oppression and suffering/harm are not actually the same thing. Which is not to say that oppression doesn’t cause harm - it pretty reliably does! - but rather that oppression is not the only thing that causes suffering, even suffering that we “should” care about. 

(I mean I’m of the opinion that misery, harm and so on are pretty bad and we should look for ways to alleviate them in all people, but I’m talking here in a “you’re concerned about how society works? Ok look over here.”) 

Oppression is a commentary on power-dynamics and organization - specifically, systemic abusive power-dynamics and organization. But many things are bad and cause significant human harm and suffering even without being a matter of systemic abusive power-dynamics. 

For instance: due to how society works, chronic depressive disorder does in fact fit within the ambit of the systemic abusive power-dynamic called “ablism”. 

However, even if it weren’t, it would still cause significant suffering and probably death, because that’s literally what the disease is. 

(This, btw, is often a source of contention between disabled people whose problems would significantly be solved by society not being an ablist piece of shit, vs those whose conditions are inherently, fundamentally harmful. Chronic pain will still hurt a lot even if society has no abusive power-dynamics: the only way to stop chronic pain hurting is to, well, adequately treat and solve chronic pain. Conversely there is absolutely no need to “cure” hearing problems or neurodivergence in order to solve the primary problem of society’s shit power-dynamics. Because Intersectionality Is Hard, we fight about this a lot.) 

This is important, because observing that a particular group suffers because of this, that or the other, is not actually the same as saying that the same group is oppressed in any given system. 

So for instance, on the axis of “gender”, cis men are not “oppressed”: that is to say, the fucked-up power dynamics do not target and disenfranchise them. 

That doesn’t mean it’s not harming them, or even killing them. It is. In fact toxic masculinity kills men continually. It just means that in terms of the power dynamic, they’re on the top of it. 

Likewise, on the economic axis, the wealth-class are by definition not an oppressed group! AT ALL. EVEN REMOTELY. They are the top of the fucking heap. They have all the power and all the structural bullshit to the nth degree. 

They are not oppressed. 

However, they do still suffer and die from it. It still harms them. Because oppression is not the only form of harm. 

This, for me, is perhaps part of the biggest reason understanding that systems don’t have to actually benefit anyone is important.  

We have a tendency to look at groups and go “you’re not oppressed, ergo your reports of the suffering you’re experiencing are unimportant/made up.” Which doesn’t get very far, because humans as an entire species react badly to being told “you’re not actually suffering”. 

But because we synonymise “suffering” and “being oppressed”, it also means that a person who knows (because they experience it) that they are suffering - that pain, harm and damage are occurring to them - will in turn either need to deny their own reality, or they will have to reinvent reality so that they are oppressed. 

This?

This is what allows radical groups to recruit. Regardless of their focus and ideology. They can go: yes, we totally get that you’re suffering! And you know why you’re suffering? Because you don’t have enough power! And you know why you don’t have enough power? Because [whatever target group] actually has it! And any time they ask you do to something that’s difficult or uncomfortable or annoying, that’s them using their power over you, and oppressing you. 

And bob’s your uncle. 

Don’t get me wrong: oppression is absofuckinglutely a major cause of suffering. But it’s not the only cause, and it is not necessary for suffering, and suffering still matters even when it’s not caused by systemic power-imbalances. Hell, even when it’s causing same, because weirdly enough sometimes solving the suffering is a necessary part of solving the systemic power-imbalance. 

(It is rarely sufficient: you usually have to do a shitload of stuff along with it. But it is often necessary, which is to say that if it’s not solved, all the other stuff won’t do it - at most it will just … flip who has the systematically imbalanced power.) 

And because there are many ways in which power works in a society, it may be an abusive imbalance on one axis (like, say, economic class) that is causing significant suffering which is then misidentified as being caused by a different axis that the person is actually on the top of! And this is how you get the MADDENINGLY ILLOGICAL PERSISTENCE of violent white supremacy among the rural poor* so that they’re constantly working to maintain the power of landlords and members of the wealth-class who are directly exploiting them, because those landlords/etc are successful at convincing them that the actual problem here is that White People Are Oppressed. 

Because humans are complicated and difficult. 

And very very bad at thinking clearly when we’re miserable and suffering. 

So that’s another thing that I think it is useful to understand, when trying to take the steps necessary to stop this world from being a miserable hellpit. 

*(y: being inculcated with racism by society from birth helps a lot for sure. But have you ever been frustrated by the fact that white rural poor will, in fact, often ACT AGAINST THEIR OWN SELF INTEREST IN EVERY WAY? *points* Welp.) 

I thought it was fairly normal to feel empathy for bad people.

I thought it was common, even.

But after my Elon/Grimes post... now I'm wondering if I was mistaken about that.

I wrote a post about Trump being traumatized after his assassination attempt and a post about his poor adaptation to aging. I expressed sympathy for him in both cases. But I still maintain my white hot hatred of him and wish for him to face consequences.

Elon was abused by his father. Some of the stories are incredibly tragic. Hearing those stories triggers an involuntary response in my emotional systems that I can't stop no matter how much I despise present-day Elon. I also wonder if that abuse never occurred maybe we wouldn't be dealing with this current clusterfuck.

I have never held so much anger towards a single person as I do my brother. But I also see him as a victim of abuse. I know he was once a really good person and he was slowly corrupted. I feel sorry for him. I mourn the amazing person he used to be. And I still love him.

But that doesn't make me any less angry.