if I could take one moment into my hands

I've always written everything by hand before typing. Staring at a blank word document doesn't inspire the words to come.

There's a pretty damning commentary on this paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517235/full

"almost nobody outside of her field has read her paper" was a big red flag for me actually and I've been bothered by this study since I first saw this post. there's this intense urge to posit researchers with fringe ideas as being intentionally ignored. but no, this study was just done abhorrently. This is a bad study with ill intent and a biased design. Nobody was talking about this because there's nothing to talk about other than "these findings are unsound and unreliable."

tl;dr: if a captcha asks you to "prove you are human" by holding down CTRL or ALT or the Windows logo keys on your physical keyboard as part of the test, it's a scam. They're trying to hijack your computer.

There's a post somewhere out there about Smaug being a one-hobbit problem and the War of the Ring being a four-hobbit problem, and it is a very good and funny post but I would like to refine it further. No single event in the War of the Ring was so cataclysmic as to require four hobbits. It's just that they had several hobbit-level problems simultaneously, and even the best hobbit can't be everywhere at once.

From @melliabee 's tags:

Correct! Which means we have a spectrum!

On this day, 28 August 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi. Till was accused of propositioning a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, and dubbed a "wolf-whistler" by media outlets like the Washington Post. Bryant's husband and his half-brother then kidnapped, tortured and shot him in the head. The men were put on trial for murder but despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt, they were acquitted by an all-white jury, in which Black people were barred from participating. The murderers later proudly admitted their guilt, and sold their story to a magazine for $4,000. According to author Timothy Tyson, Bryant herself later admitted that her court testimony about Till's advances was a lie. At Till's funeral, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley made the decision to have an open casket, so that everyone could see the mutilated remains of what had been his face. His killing and the acquittal of the murderers provoked national outrage, and gave added impetus to the civil rights movement. In particular it inspired Rosa Parks' act of defiance exactly 100 days later, was thinking of Till when she decided to refuse to move to the back of a segregated bus. In 2008 a historical marker was erected to Till in Mississippi. It was destroyed by white racists, as were two replacement markers. In late 2019, the latest memorial which was riddled with bullet holes was replaced by a 500 lb steel sign covered with bulletproof glass. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9983/emmett-till-murdered

Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”

Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)

Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.

*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT

i deliver propane.  this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold.  i was the first woman my company ever hired.

This post gets better everytime it crosses my dash!

“do you think hall and oates explored eachother’s bodies?” hehe haha what a delightful concept

Do you want kids? Is disagreement on wanting kids a dealbreaker for you in a long-term relationship?

On this day, 13 August 1977, anti-fascist South Londoners battled with police and National Front (NF) members in what would come to be known as the Battle of Lewisham. The fascist NF had hugely grown in strength and numbers during the 70s, and was winning tens of thousands of votes in London. They were also carrying out frequent racist attacks, and firebombings and physical assaults on left-wing groups. In a clear provocation, the NF planned to march through the multi-racial, working-class area of Lewisham. However, around 10,000 local residents decided to try to confront the NF directly at their assembly point. 4000 police, using riot shields for the first time in mainland Britain, were deployed to try to protect the NF and facilitate their march. Despite the police guard, anti-fascists, including many Black, white and Asian youths, began pelting the fascists with bricks and bottles, injuring many. Police indiscriminately attacked anti-fascists, but residents used their superior knowledge of local geography to outsmart the police and launch surprise attacks. At one point, anti-fascists managed to breach police lines, break the fascist march in half and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the NF. Many of the fascists were forced to flee. One eyewitness, Suzy Harding, recounted: "There was a bit of fighting but most of the [fascists] were so terrified that they just ran away." While the NF complained that the police did not protect them well enough, the Daily Mail attacked anti-fascists as "red storm-troopers". The right-wing Daily Telegraph decried the idea that "native-born Englishmen [were] denied the right to march through a part of their city merely because it is settled by immigrants", and suggested that socialist and communist protests be banned. The abject defeat of the NF helped create a groundswell of enthusiasm for militant, direct action against fascism, and significantly boosted the anti-fascist movement. We have anti-fascist books, posters, and more, in our online shop: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/anti-fascist Photos: Peter Marlow/Magnum