Alara doesn't actually hate Tumblr anymore

So there's this woman I follow on YouTube named @aketchjoywinnie, and she lives in a traditional village either in or near the border with Uganda. She does a lot of short videos on the local culture and diaries going up through her current day-to-day, which is that she has a suitor she likes and is hoping the tribal elders approve the match.

So I'm sitting here crocheting and watching YouTube shorts and she just straight-up rewired my brain chemistry. She's explaining how dowry works, and then she said "in some western cultures, the dowry can be an expensive ring."

HOLY FUCK

Like

She's not wrong

She's absolutely not wrong

We tend to view an engagement ring these days as consumerism for consumerism's sake but it was historically a way for a man to show he had the wealth to care for a wife, and, should anything happen to him, it was something she could sell to support herself through the mourning period while her family helped her get everything back together.

"If you can propose with a dowry of a ring, why can't you propose with a dowry of fifty goats?"

SHE'S NOT WRONG.

There are a number of ways money can change hands at a marriage. Sometimes it goes to the couple, to help them establish themselves, sometimes it goes from one family to another.

My brother in law's wife grew up in rural China, an only child (of course). When he traveled there to meet her parents, he understood that he would be expected to provide a substantial gift to her parents, enough to help ease their old age. They were Chinese village middle class, but he's urban American middle class and thus far wealthier.

He thought he might have to buy goats, but it turned out her parents wanted a boat. A nice little fishing boat with a motor and fish-finding sonar.

Bride price says "women are highly valuable. If you want our daughter, you must compensate us for the loss." Dowry says "women are a huge burden. We will pay you to take our daughter off our hands." They are actually enormously different and have very different implications for women.

Her culture may call it dowry when they speak English, but the British, who for obvious reasons invented most of the words we speak when we speak English, had dowry as a cultural thing, and when they encountered societies that did the opposite, they didn't call it "male dowry" or "reverse dowry" or something, they coined a completely different phrase. (A phrase that itself carried sexist implications, as it was positing that women in that culture were property that could be sold... in most cultures with bride price, it is not thought of as buying a family's daughter but as compensating them for losing her labor. Which just goes to show you that people who have dowry find it very hard to comprehend women being valuable in a culture.)

Anyway, as a native English speaker, I wouldn't call it dowry even if she does, because the word "dowry" has a specific meaning in English and what she's talking about is actually neither dowry nor bride price. It's the man paying the woman for her companionship and labor, or, viewed another way, it is the man expressing that he can take care of the woman, as the woman in the video said. It's given directly to the woman on marriage, not to her parents, so it's not bride price... but because it's given to the woman and not to the man, it's not dowry.

(Another interpretation of dowry, more charitable, is that it consists of things the woman will use to make a household -- cups and plates, cutlery, blankets, etc -- so it's not a gift to the man, it's the property she brings to the marriage in order to immediately get started on the work of a wife. But I have also heard this referred to as a hope chest, assembled by a girl as she grows into a woman in "hope" that someday she will marry, in which case it's not a dowry because the girl herself is building it and she will keep it, she'll just share it with her husband.)

What critters are common in your neighborhood, but really exciting to visitors?

I was something like 50 years old when I learned that not only are they not a worldwide phenomenon, they aren't even universal within the US. I hear the West Coast doesn't have them.

Everyone should come here and experience a night with fireflies at least once. They're bugs that glow, and they land on you and then fly off harmlessly, and they're pretty to look at. You can catch them just by putting a hand near them so they land on it. Then you let them go because the point to catching fireflies is just to catch them, not to keep them.

The specious argument they make is that misandry is not a thing because men are not systematically oppressed. Setting aside the fact that the patriarchy actually hurts everyone, you can say, yeah, as a gender men aren't oppressed, never mind the statistics that show that 80% of all murders are murdered men... but see, that's not what misandry would mean.

Misandry and misogyny are cognates to misanthropy, hatred of humans. Misanthropes do not systematically oppress humans. They do not have broad power over humans. The mis- or miso- prefix literally means "hatred of", and says nothing about it being systematic.

As it happens, women are systematically oppressed, so these people are pulling a bait and switch, claiming that misogyny means "systematic oppression of women" rather than just "hatred of women". If it meant that, then yeah, misandry couldn't exist. But it doesn't. Imagine a society where women are completely and wholly equal to men, you could still have a misogynist. (Though it'd be a lot less likely.)

Misandrists don't have systematic power over men in general. But boy oh boy, they sure have power over trans people (if they're cis). And if they're trans women, they have very little power, but they definitely can use what they do have to do a lateral oppression on trans men, enbies, intersex people, etc. If they're trans men... well, I feel deeply sorry for them, but they can use what little power they have to be One Of The Good Ones (tm) and argue that trans men aren't oppressed, which, um, dude, what if you developed uterine cancer? And no one would see you for it because you're a man? And insurance wouldn't cover treatment, because you're a man? This is not a hypothetical, men have died of this. Trans men are definitely oppressed, and if you don't believe it, and you're a trans man... wow, you've led a pretty charmed life so far, aside from the shit you get just for being trans at all. Did you ever talk to a different trans man, not from your socioeconomic class, before flapping your lips to betray your own people?

Like.

Wouldn't it have been a huge problem for a trans man to be property of a cis man and not allowed to wear pants?

Has it... just never entered their head, at all, that when women are oppressed to the point where they're not permitted a life free of strict social control, where they must depend on family or a husband for a living because they're not allowed to work... that this affects trans men as much as it affects cis women? Because how the fuck do you transition when you aren't allowed to live on your own, control how you dress, manage your own money...

I guess in the 19th century maybe you could run away to sea? Good luck never getting caught when you try to have a piss, though. And people in that situation now don't have that option.

I have quite a bit if difficulty discerning pleasant from unpleasant sensations. I can tell if I absolutely fucking hate a smell, taste, sound or colour, but I have more difficulty telling what is good or bad on a more subtle level than that. I know that I do prefer some things over others (Zambrero's burritos are much better than my home made burritos, for instance), but I generally have a hard time telling in the moment, especially when it comes to things that are going to be combined together to make other smells and flavours. I tend to prefer things that are simple and familiar unless they're Super Good, and since i don't know how to make the spice blends reliably Super Good and very few spices are familiar to me (didn't eat a whole lot of spices growing up), I'm mostly avoiding things I hate while making a flavour that's more interesting than plain tomato.

Kind of seems to me like people saying you need to put pasta in boiling water, when it cooks just fine after tossing it into cold water too, idk.

Or not burning your rice due to just putting it in copious amount of water, which is wrong somehow too.

Adding way too much water to rice will end up with rice porridge -- mush that used to be rice, but each grain absorbed too much water and now the whole thing is glop. I don't necessarily hate rice glop but a lot of people do, and I can respect wanting a texture where you can taste that it's grains instead of slush.

Doctors are to black women what police officers are to black men. That may seem controversial but I believe it to be true and I speak from personal experience.

If you've seen this TikTok you know that a 2016 study showed that 50% of medical students and residents thought that black people couldn't feel pain the same as white people.

And we learned from this video that because of a 1999 study, to this day, there's a black correction factor for the creatinin levels in black people's kidneys, meaning we're less likely to recieve a kidney transplant if needed.

So if you go to a doctor, feel you aren't getting proper treatment or they refuse the treatment you've requested, say to them the following:

If you weren’t already going to spread this advice because black women are at risk, then spread it because it’s applicable to everyone else as well, including you reading this.

Whenever someone kills someone and gets away with it, people are mad. Whenever someone kills someone and is immediately jailed, people are less mad.

Also, if one group are paid with tax money to keep us safe and the other group are random nobodies, the group paid with tax money to keep us safe are going to be held to higher standards.

OP: "Decarbonized formaldehyde is great. Just wash daikons with decarbonized formaldehyde and they turn white."

"Decarbonized formaldehyde" (脫碳甲醛) is an online phrase used to make fun of people that blindly avoid chemicals. Formaldehyde (H2CO) decarbonized is water (H2O).

I don't label my politics, but I'm what someone would call on the left. I spent my teenage years when Tumblr social justice was at its height. I learned things, checked my own biases, and I would like to think became a more empathetic person because of what I learnt from online progressive spaces.

The way these spaces have treated Jewish communities over the past 2.5 years has been nothing short of fucking appalling.

The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was minimised, denied, justified, or outright celebrated.

Jewish people were immediately told to put their grief and trauma over this to away, because Palestine's pain was more important to talk about.*

Jewish and Israeli people were told they needed to try and understand why armed men raped, tortured, and killed members of their community. Because, you know, the murderous rapists are who we need to have sympathy for here. Anyone can be pushed to the point of, I don't know, murdering a young woman and parading her corpse around a street for men to spit on her dead body. If you really think about it, isn't that actually kind of an understandable thing to do?

When raising concerns over the rising antisemitism that was starting to look a lot like the build-up to that little historical tidbit called The Holocaust, Jews were told they were selfish for raising the issue.

When asking people not to call for intifadas that have historically resulted in thousands of dead Jews, they're told they're taking it all the wrong way.

When Israeli victims spoke of the abuse they received on Oct 7 and in captivity, they're told they need to stay silent because otherwise they risk justifying the genocide of Palestinians.

When 15 people were murdered at a Hannukah festival, there were no social media icons, no surge from progressive groups to find out what support they needed.

To be clear here, progressive groups seem more concerned with antisemitism in the Harry Potter books than they are about the actual, you know, string of dead Jews that have been murdered over the past few years. If you condemn antisemitic representations in diction and then turn around and completely ignore real-life fucking murder, then I'm sorry I genuinely do not think you ever gave a shit about fighting antisemitism, you just wanted to fight Jk Rowling. **

Absolutely fuck everyone who has justified or denied what happened on Oct 7th. There were ways to advocate for both Israeli and Palestinian victims, but the people who should have known better have ensured that Oct 7th wasn't just one day of hell for Jewish communities, but that its been currently 2.5 years of hell that seems to just be getting worse.

And the most infuriating part is the people who did justify Oct 7th will never admit they were wrong, because that would mean admitting they argued that the murder rape mutilation torture and kidnap of a Jewish community was acceptable, and that would break their brains. I mean it. The cognitive dissonance between believing you are someone who cares for human rights, whilst also being someone who justified all of that, is too great. The brain will always protect itself. Its why people are currently doubling down on there being no rapes on Oct 7th. Rape is not resistance, it is not self defence, it is not landback, it is not right of return, it is not decolonisation, it is not any of the shit people tell themselves Oct 7th was. Rape is just rape. It is just men torturing people (mainly women) for no other reason than because they enjoy it. You will never see these people admitting rape occurred, because the second they do is the second they realise just how horrifically they have behaved.

And it's not getting better. Hate crimes and murders of worldwide Jewish communities are rising. Jewish people are looking to leave places like the US, UK and Australia, which were once considered some of the safest places for them to live. A KKK slur (zio) is now common online usage. Jewish people are expected to sever any connection to an important part of their culture (Israel/Hebrew) in order to be treated somewhat civily. The more IDF crimes are uncovered in Gaza, the more worldwide Jewish communities bear the brunt of the anger. Typing 'Jewish' into any social media brings you into an absolute clusterfuck of the most horrific things you can possibly see people say about their fellow human beings.

I am just sick and exhausted and furious and it feels like I'm hitting my fists against a brick wall that is not knocking down. How do you even get people to realise how bad this is????

I am not Jewish. I know full well that Jewish people talking about all of this get ignored. I know full well that a Jewish person standing up for Palestine gets thousands of notes, and a Jewish person standing up for their own people barely breaks 100. I know full well that Jewish people are being smeared as paranoid or crazy or selfish. I know full well that non-Jewish people speaking up about antisemitism is taken more seriously than Jewish people talking about their own experiences.

Can you all just start fucking having some fucking empathy for Jewish and Israeli communities who have been facing the worst 2 years of their lives. Fucking please. It is not that fucking hard to feel empathy for lots of groups at once. To empathise with both Palestine and Israel, Muslims and Jews. Empathy for all is part of what brings us away from just being animals and makes us human.

If you can't do it, it is not an issue with Jews or Israelis or Zionists or the IDF, it is an issue with you.

*I am not saying Palestinian pain isn't important to raise awareness of, and the people fearing what the IDF would do immediately after Oct 7th were right to raise it. I'm saying asking Jewish communities to take on the trauma of Palestinians, when they were still reeling from their own inter-community trauma, was wrong and unhelpful. I wouldn't ask Palestinian communities to have centered the trauma of Oct 7th either. Trauma is not a competition and everyone deserves to have their respective pain treated fairly.

And if the first officer was drugged and hauled into an alley and sexually assaulted that's a. That's a fucking crime. Or at least I hope it's a crime, but seeing Argo's response to these incidents, I'm honestly not sure. You're gonna exile the VICTIM? Really? This is real 'deal with school bullying by expelling the target' behaviour.

I suspect the truth is that it's districts where the power grid is old and weak, aka, poor people live there. Did they vote for Mamdani? Don't know, don't care, we know for a fact the poor never have the political power of the rich, so it would hardly matter who the mayor is or who voted for who... and it's likely to be decades of not improving the infrastructure there taking a toll.

Which means shutting down Times Square probably wouldn't help; Times Square is going to be on the most modern parts of the grid, like the rest of the businesses in Manhattan. The idea isn't to reduce overall electricity to New York City, but to reduce the draw on the parts of the grid that cannot handle the overage caused by the AC use.