Comparatively Superlative @comparativelysuperlative - Tumblr Blog

fun fact: ukrainians call russians orcs because of Tolkien, but not in the way you think. A russian fanfiction retelling of the War of the Ring from the perspective of the industrious mordor orcs fighting off the genocidal elves called 'The Last Ringbearer' became quite popular in eastern slavdom, which clearly re-framed the orcs as the eternally persecuted definitely not russians. Russians themselves very clearly saw themselves as the orcs and lionised it, and thus it became a pejorative for militarist/revanchist russians among those they would revanch. Sometime during the donbass war(s) it would enter russian and ukranian blogger/soldier slang to refer to russian soldiers, and took off in popularity during the russo ukranian war

funner fact: if you see videos released by ukranian military organisations, of ukranian soldiers shooting at russians while screaming, and the captions say "ORCS! ORCS! FUCKING ORCS!!" just know that they are almost certainly actually saying "faggots" instead of orcs, and the translator is just canny enough to realise that this would offend the delicate sensibilities of their western audience-benefactors. if you hear "pidor"...

notaaronsroommate

back during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, I remember footage from an embedded journo where his Ukrainian militia escort was getting pinned down by gunfire from an overpass. An officer said to the journo "watch this" and waited for a lull in gunfire to shout "THE NEXT ONE WHO SHOOTS IS GAY" and then waited. Nothing. no one fired for about an hour. Which sounds like a chain email story, but like. it did be like that.

reach-one-moment

This is hilarious but also kinda sad

People remember that most soldiers are macho young dudes under the age of 24, but don't think about the implications

comparativelysuperlative

Is there a source on the word "orcs" for Russians being connected to the fanfic?

"retelling of the War of the Ring from the perspective of the industrious mordor orcs fighting off the genocidal elves" is not how I remember The Last Ringbearer--most obviously, it takes place after the War of the Ring--but if a random fanfic changed the vocabulary of two armies that's pretty funny.

#ugh what even happens in The Last Ringbearer it's been like 15 years #definitely lots of 'the good guys are Not Actually That Good' and definitely the orcs are just people #as far as I remember the protagonists (orc and human both) are explicitly not fighting a war; I think they're trying to prevent one?#don't remember why destroying all magic would prevent a war unless the Elves really were genocidal so don't remember that but it checks out #all this would be totally consistent with Russians identifying with TLR orcs! but if the one-line plot summary is wrong then yeah source pl

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cryptotheism

"Medieval Christians would have gone nuts for protons, neutrons, and electrons for trinity reasons" sounds like a jokey oversimplification historypost but I cannot really articulate how true that is. They would never shut up about it.

ahopefulbromantic

RIP St Thomas Aquinas you would have loved atomic physics

abalidoth

Also quarks probably. There's also a three in one thing going on there

comparativelysuperlative

I had a textbook try and tell me the strong nuclear force was Literal Jesus in like 2006.

#pretty sure it made the three part trinity connection too!

donjuaninhell

Y'know, I've largely moved on beyond pointing out and lamenting at how openly corrupt the Trump administration is, but holy shit the Trump administration is so unbelievably corrupt.

Article.

morlock-holmes

I find myself constantly wondering about the internal psychology of these people and the folks who vote for these people.

Particularly the combination of incredibly moralizing language and public Christianity with this kind of open, obvious, naked corruption and self-dealing.

comparativelysuperlative

"he's Caesar now so render unto him"

#not really surprising that siding with Our Side over Their Side is a more powerful force than sincere religious devotion #but it sure does suck in this context!#also I bet >50% of Americans don't have the basic civics knowledge to get just HOW illegal this is? Especially when lied to #like I'm sure they get that “handing tax money to personal friends” is technically bad but you know like the rest of it

rainbowgaez

evil great lakes

lake inferior

lake normal

lake offtario

lake hurton

lake michigan

comparativelysuperlative

Fool that I am I actually had to remember the regular Great Lakes with the "Lisa Likes Licking Lettice Lightly" mnemonic.

#the worst part is that it worked

brazenautomaton

The folks saying they want to deport legal citizens (despite that not being a punish for legal citizens, but a punishment for those who broke immigration law) kinda sound like what they want is to bring back exile.

They want to exile people from the country instead of sending them to prison.

Can you tell apart "currently, some law somewhere says to deport people for X" and "thinking people should be deported for something other than X is wrong"?

these are asks from (I assume) two different people that touch the same theme

if you want to bring back exile you have to say that, because the word deportation means a specific thing. you cannot deport a citizen because that isn't the thing that is. saying that deportation should be a punishment for citizens is kinda like saying non-lawyers should be disbarred if their takes are bad enough.

you have to acknowledge the claim that you are making and acknowledge what it is that you want, you can't just say "well it's a bad thing and therefore it is a punishment and therefore it makes sense to apply it to people I don't like"

the-grey-tribe

I actually think exile is underrated, and it's something that should be brought back in many modern democracies, but it should work like in Athens. I.e. people can only be exiled through direct democracy, like a ballot initiative.

comparativelysuperlative

Are you trying to get disbarred?

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parkchanwoohoo

comparativelysuperlative

If it's a globe with a thousand facets, you are reading Tolkien.

If people are fighting about building a whateverhedron in an orb, that's sci-fi, unless you are on a boat in which case it's just math history.

#and watch out!

toolusingmammalgirl

thinking of that incident years ago where a big pop-SJ blog got really into Hindu nationalism for a while, what an on-the-nose parable

toolusingmammalgirl

tfw you have such a shallow and America-centric view of politics that you get trivially dogwalked by the first foreign fascists who can speak your political dialect

comparativelysuperlative

I'm always really curious how much of this is because the Hindu nationalists happened to be the first to speak the dialect, and how much is because India is just, descriptively, the kind of place where the usual terms go pretty dramatically wrong.

Like, there's a millenia-old indigenous people! Invaded by a conquistador-era conquering empire! And the traditional indigenous practices actually were more tolerant and modern-liberal-friendly than the invaders' in a lot of ways! (Not all. But lots, and we don't need to talk about the other ways.)

A colonization super happened. Taking land back from the descendants of the Mughals is obviously "decolonization," if you personally aren't on the vibes/papers/essays end of that scale.

If you throw a dart at a globe somewhere, would Fascism Local Flavor fit this well? I kind of suspect it wouldn't.

#obviously anything that puts a lot of weight on Being Indigenous is going to be very vulnerable to the 'blood and soil' parts of fascism #but in India it's the descendants of the conquerors that are currently being oppressed and I'm guessing that's not usual

The tricky part of the definition of "genocide" is usually intent. Was the atrocity "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," or was it just, you know, a regular atrocity.

This is usually hard to know, because they usually don't Tweet it.

#note that this is not binding on the United States because SOMEONE (every President since Clinton) didn't wanna.

blurds

do you have an "about" page with relevant information about yourself (eg pronouns, a name you go by, etc)? only i like your blog but always feel strange about following blogs with no face so to speak

I’ve answered this before so we’re going to do this bullet points style

-If there are categories of people you don’t want to follow please assume I belong to all of them

-If you need my demographic info before you can decide if you agree with my opinion or not please disagree with my opinions

-Please assume I am up to no good - this is a good thing to assume with any blog on here - even blogs with faces may be no-faces in disguise

-All of the information you want has been posted here at one time or another if you want to know but I like having that threshold of difficulty in place - if you want to get your creep on I want you to have to work for it

-I am hoping the irony of your having sent this ask anonymously is not lost on you

And, for all bloggers everywhere, a quick reminder: you don’t owe anybody jack shit!

comparativelysuperlative

Had someone ask my gender irl once and told them I identify as "what are you, a cop?"

#imo this specific anon's message might not be Cop Shit at all!#'I like knowing the faces of the people around me' does not necessarily imply 'because I want to know if they're Demographically Pure'!#except maybe on Tumblr of course

argumate

this is an act of war against the menswear guy for sure

erikag59

Those are his hooves you bitch.

argumate

phaeton-flier

They're $145 and you don't just buy a second pair that actually fits?

psychiccat

Exactly, buy the same shoe in your size, no one is going to check, wtf is wrong with them?

argumate

nooo, buy even bigger shoes as a visible signal of extreme loyalty!

kindigo

It gets funnier. I bet some of these guys with too-large shoes were asked their shoe size and lied about it

argumate

he was already calling Rubio “Little Marco” 😩

comparativelysuperlative

okay but if that's what's going on then you BETTER buy a duplicate pair in your real size before it's international news that you lied.

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ironychan

rainbow-femme

To update this, the astronaut didn’t actually do it, she and her wife were getting a divorce and the wife plead guilty to lying to the feds about it

And framing your ex for a crime mid-divorce while they are actively in space is some Agatha Christie level shit

comparativelysuperlative

I stand by saying the best move here is to confess and concede whatever the underlying argument was, because letting the wife take everything in the divorce is worth it to be able to call yourself ANNE MCCLAIN, SPACE CRIMINAL

#the actual Anne McClain may have sadly different priorities

paradigm-adrift

I think I haven't mentioned Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" in a long time.

It's a terrific essay from the 1980s that swaps sexism and racism around to let you see with fresh eyes how fucked up sexist language is. Reading it is like getting kicked in the teeth over & over.

A lot of my fiction writing is inspired by or influenced by it.

If you're a believer in the legitimacy of language taboos, this anti-sexist anti-racist essay is not for you. But otherwise, I highly recommend it.

comparativelysuperlative

This convinced me that gendered language is kinda dumb while I was Republican. It's that good at what it's doing.

#granted 'Republican' meant something very different back then and there's no guarantee it would work on the current losers #but still. Great writing.

lookoutsea

comparativelysuperlative

"Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons."

-sturnb

toskarin

the discourse around when the english longbow was invented feels like an actual example of one of those "shadow passing under boat" topics because the average person probably assumes the extreme end of the debate would lie on when the bows reached their early modern length, not "was the term longbow coined just to denote that a bow was not a crossbow?" and "did the english EVER use shortbows or is that a myth?"

comparativelysuperlative

I have no horse in this fight but do want to know whether famous English archer Robin Hood could have used the famous English bow. If England has both of those things but the timelines don't match up it would be very stupid.

#robin hood: probably already an established character by the late 1200s #The English Longbow: may or may not have been being developed around the late 1200s under Edward I?#to train a longbowman: start with his grandfather

sissa-arrows

In France if you suffer from hair loss as a teenage girl and cannot afford a real hair wig the school will try and force you to go to class bald. The school will make you buy a chemotherapy turban, you will buy two different so that the school can choose which one they prefer and you will prove that they are chemotherapy turban and not hijab but once you wear it they will change their mind and say it looks too much like a hijab and insist on you going bald or buying a real hair wig that you cannot afford.

If your doctor makes multiple documents confirming that you suffer from alopecia because of stress and the medicine you have to take for your epilepsy and that wearing a bonnet or something is recommended for your mental health as you’re not ready to go out bald in high school as a teenage girl, instead of admitting they are wrong the school will accuse the doctor of lying and report him to the Ordre des Médecins (equivalent of the General Medical council). Your doctor will find himself asking you for a document stating that you are not Muslim in order to defend himself and prove that no he wasn’t colluding with you so you could wear a substitute for hijab.

Source

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In France if you are a North African nurse at a public hospital and wear a fabric surgical cap they will try to make you remove it because apparently it’s a hidden hijab. They will accuse you of going against secularism and when you’ll argue that they are discriminating you by assuming you’re Muslim for a surgical cap on your head they will change their angle and claim that you should wear nothing on your hair because you wear the same surgical cap in multiple bedroom which is unhygienic apparently (which is a bullshit argument cause you wear the same scrub/uniform in different bedrooms as well). They will go as far as claiming that disposable scrub caps (you know the thin papery ones?) are not okay to wear in a hospital even if you change it regularly. And then they will fire you for a lack of hygiene because you wear a surgical cap.

Source

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All of that will be done in the name of secularism and women’s right despite having nothing do with either quite the opposite.

The teenage girl’s story is also not just about racism and Islamophobia it’s also about ableism as the girl is convinced that the real reason the school is trying to push her out is because she had an epilepsy crisis in class and nobody knew what to do and the school nurse was absent. It could have ended badly had her best friend not known what to do to help. Apparently it was bad enough to cancel class for the rest of the day and the teacher was shocked to the point of ending on sick leave.

comparativelysuperlative

The best defense of these laws I've heard came from a European Muslim woman who (I'm paraphrasing) thought banning the hijab was a downside worth paying because she wanted her more tolerant brand of Islam to succeed relative to those other, worse Islams.

And that's a reasonable thing to want! But--even apart from the personal freedom violations, and even apart from whether it could possibly work--taking sides in a dispute between religions is kind of the opposite of doing something in the name of secularism.

#“going against secularism” yeesh. Really hope that's either a misquote or a translation issue because yikes. But probably not.

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So the song "Far over the misty mountains cold" is probably pretty politically radical, right?

Most of the Dwarves do not want to go poke a sleeping dragon! Singing heroic songs at parties about how we should totally go do that is probably something you only do if you're in Thorin's, well, party.

This is not an aspirational "next year in Jerusalem." It's about trying for it Literally Today. You have to wonder what the song sounds like from the perspective of the Dwarves who think that would be a nice goal if it weren't suicide, or even the ones who think it's cynical propaganda from people who want to give Thorin more influence.

Is Goncharov a Christmas movie?

Yes

Voting ended onDec 25, 2025

No nuance, no arguing over definitions, just give me your yes or no.

#Goncharov #there’s the repeated appearance of the numbers 12 (Christmasy) and 24 (not not Christmasy)#and obviously it takes place at rhe right time of year #but offhand I can’t think of any Christmas-related themes at all #Christmas

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