asides & digressions

I saw someone censor their own fucking fanfic description on AO3!!! "[The characters] f*ck." DO THEY??? DO THEY?!?!??! HOW CAN I TRUST YOU TO WRITE THE FUCKING WHEN YOU DON'T EVEN DARE USE THE WORD.

Your blog soothes my rage. You make right what has gone wrong.

God fucking bless you.

Honestly yeah tho. That’s why I fucking do this. There is a lot of complying in advance I am seeing that we do not need to be doing at all.

up and die. Say fuck like your

life depends on it.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

—

Jeanine Pirro’s Reflecting Pool reckoning

This was always such a stupid thing to lie about. The evidence was out in the open for everyone to see, the entire time. Literally everyone with a pulse knew what had happened and why they were lying about it.

And what will the reckoning be, actually? She probably gets fired and replaced with someone who is equally incompetent and corrupt. Nothing happens to Trump, who repeatedly insisted there was extensive video evidence of antifa cutting a 300 foot gash through the middle of his hideous pool liner job, yet never – NEVER – produced it. And, weirdly, the damage he claims was caused by vandals matches precisely over the tire tracks he left when he drove over it for a photo op.

This is like every other thing Trump fucks up. It was fine, it didn’t need anything at all but he decided to create a problem, declared that only he could fix it, made it worse than it was before he touched it, blamed an innocent person who had nothing to do with it for his own fuck up, and is now walking away from it like it never happened, leaving behind wreckage for someone else to clean up and repair.

That’s Trump in a nutshell. The reflecting pool calamity is a perfect metaphor that anyone can understand. This is exactly what he did with the Strait of Hormuz. This is exactly what he did with the Kennedy Center. This is exactly what he does with EVERYTHING.

And that zero experience turned out to be a problem, because we hadn't had much to do with birds and the thing about a bird's feathers, right, is that you've got a feather that sits in a little sheath thing that's rooted in the body. So what you want to do is pull the feather and sheath both out. But if you're a little kid who's never done this before, all too often, the feather comes out and leaves the sheath in the body. So we'd be doing our best but the ducks would come out maybe a quarter plucked properly and otherwise still full of these feather sheaths, and then it's a matter of going back and pulling all these little sheaths out.

I remember quite clearly, my mother and aunt helping us with this part, because it's fiddly and we were taking forever. They'd take the plucked ducks and re-pluck them properly. And I remember my mum making a remark to my aunt (not maliciously, she didn't know I could hear and was just making conversation), "You know, it would've been easier for us to just do it from the start and not have to deal with all these fiddly little bits." And she was absolutely right -- my brother and I were involved for our benefit in the same way you get a young kid to "help" wash the dishes, we were learning a life skill. But even though we'd done most of the work, we'd removed most of the unwanted mass from the duck's skin, we'd actually made things harder. We'd removed all the feathers and a quarter of the sheaths, but the sheaths are much easier to remove with the feathers attached, so working on a "mostly plucked" duck was a lot more work for the adults than just doing the whole duck from scratch would have been.

There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”

So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.

I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.

First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.

Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.

Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.

In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]

Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]

Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.

There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”

Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.

And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”

The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.

Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]

A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.

Finally, fifth: Fiction.

However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.

Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.

One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]

Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]

Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.

This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…

The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.

And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.

It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.

Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.

This isn't a purity thing. This is a "everyone stand with us against destroying the environment and giving asthma to poor people" thing.

Did you know that when one community says no to an AI data center, they specifically search out communities with fewer resources? Communities that can't defend themselves? And the pollution 100 percent affects their health and wellbeing, in addition to burning through our already scarce drinking water.

add to it that ilya loves resting his head in peoples laps, getting his hair played with.. and has an oral fixation

so what i am saying is that ilya loves, loves, LOVES! cockwarming shane - sometimes they just chill on the couch, watching a renovation show or a movie ilya isn’t particularly interested in so while he rests his head in shane’s lap he simply turns around, tugs shane’s sweats down and puts shane’s cock in his mouth

they stay like that for a long time, ilya gets all floaty and sleepy bc shane’s hand is stroking through his hair, lightly scratching at his scalp and his cock is in his mouth