factysatin

Not very long since, a double suicide was committed in Massachusetts by a young married couple from Ohio, who were clearly proved to be led to ruin and death by these most pernicious books. Not many winters ago, in a town of New England of not more than five thousand inhabitants, to the certain knowledge of the writer of this volume, three divorces were distinctly traced to the influence of this class of writings on the minds of young romantic wives and mothers, one or two of whom were professors of religion. Police officers too in London and some of our own large cities, have given mournful evidence of the results of some of these novels when dramatized and performed on the stage, as leading to burglaries and murder.

I love not farming

I respect the hell out of farmers and I'm glad that's someone's dream. because it's sure not mine

I would not be taken in by the tradwife influencer grift about milking a cow in a sundress. I have been around cows. my uncle was a dairy farmer. I love not milking a cow. I love getting milk from a store. I love getting vegetables and fruit and meat and bread from a store.

would I rather it be a local farm's store or a local bakery or butcher shop? yes! maybe when I make more money!

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

At a meeting of urban wildlife researchers in Washington, D.C., in June, one diagram made it into so many PowerPoint presentations that its recurrence became a running joke. The subject, though, was serious: The diagram illustrated the links between structural racism, pernicious landscape features such as urban heat islands, and impacts to biodiversity, and it came from a study published in the fall of 2020 in the journal Science.

That study was “Ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments,” led by Christopher J. Schell, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. It synthesized what a handful of urban ecologists around the country had begun demonstrating: that patterns of bigotry and inequality affect how other species experience life in cities.

Dr. Schell, who is Black and from Los Angeles, said he grew up with an understanding that “there is a ton of heterogeneity that exists in a city, and it’s not by accident that it’s that way.” Those variations could include the numbers of parks and street trees in different neighborhoods, whether a highway or rail line ripped through a community or whether an oil refinery spewed toxins into the air.

As a discipline, urban ecology is only about a quarter-century old, and until very recently its practitioners tended to treat cities mainly as a contrast to rural areas, without considering the wild disparities between and within cities. Dr. Schell wanted to show that urban heterogeneity in turn “is driven by systemic inequities,” he said, like “oppression, residential segregation, gentrification and displacement, unjust zoning laws, homelessness, so on, so on, so on.” Those issues don’t only impact people, he added: “How we operate influences the rest of the natural world as well as the social world.”

Over the past few years, a widening group of urban ecologists has been fanning out to study the overlap between environmental justice and biodiversity conservation, fields that had previously tended to keep to their own corners. Dr. Schell said that, in his lab, researchers “oftentimes do our own version of ‘six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon’” to show how human actions ripple out to wildlife.

“Air pollution isn’t just restricted to people,” he said. “Other animals have lungs. Why would we not expect them to also be inhaling the same amount of pollutants that we generate?”

Batman is breaking into your landlord's apartment and and saying they would be seeing Batman EVERY NIGHT until they got running water in the apartment building, there are literal plague rats running around

Batman is solving crimes the police ignore due to sexism and racism, finding the perpetrators, and dangling them off a roof, promising if they ever do that again, he will also dangle them off a roof again

Batman is breaking into mafioso bedrooms, tying them up, gluing 500 individual feathers onto them, then taking pictures and sending them to every big newspaper chain in the country to remind people that the ones they're afraid of are still only men

Then he finds police officers on the take and glues feathers to all their uniforms so they can't walk around without everyone knowing they are also associated with the chicken mafia, what a loser.

He is seeing violent crime happen on the streets and swooping in to get in the way as it is happening. Extortion, assault, murders-- get good, assholes, your crime is witnessed and you have been punched in the face, AND he's going to tip off the police commissioner who last year started listening. He is blowing up a mobster weapons depot so they have fewer guns on the street.

like, are they in cahoots. can they laugh together. do they have a similar enough or at least complementary enough outlook that they can connect over something being funny (even if it's funny in a fucked up way! sometimes those are the best in-jokes!)

Sometimes when researching the history of slavery you come across a connection to your own life that takes you by surprise. Here's a connection I only made recently.

In the village where I'm from there is one old mansion dating from around 1800 and a lot of small newer houses. That mansion has been owned by the same family for centuries: they are the local Protestant landowners who made their money out of selling flax, the plant fibre from which linen cloth is made.

The reason that Ulster (the northern quarter of Ireland) has Protestant landowners is an interesting one in itself. It was historically the most Catholic region of Ireland, and the most resistant to English rule. It was sparsely populated and had difficult terrain, plus dense woodlands and bogs that made the guerrilla tactics of the Ulster lords effective. It was actually in response to this resistance that the Plantation of Ulster occurred in the early 1600s.

As punishment for the resistance, land in virtually all of Ulster was seized by the English and redistributed to Protestant settlers from northern England and southern Scotland. These new landowners were forbidden from having Catholic tenants and were required to import further settlers from England or Scotland to populate their lands (in practice it proved impossible to find enough settlers, so these landowners often skirted the law and rented to Irish Catholics anyway). The woodlands were deforested to provide timber for the new settlers, to make more land agriculturally viable, and to make Irish resistance (which naturally continued) more difficult.

It meant that very quickly Irish families in the area were either kicked off lands they had lived on and farmed for centuries, or else had to work the same land but pay rent to British colonists for the right to do so. For nearly two hundred years after this, Catholics were effectively banned from land ownership, until in the late 1700s they were finally permitted to buy back the lands their ancestors had once owned by saving the money they earned by working that land for the descendants of the British settlers who had seized it. There remains a clear religiously-stratified class system in Ulster to this day as a result of this historic injustice.

What does all this have to do with slavery? Well, the local Protestant landowners in my village made their money by selling flax to be made into linen. Much of that linen was shipped to the Caribbean to clothe the enslaved Black people who had been kidnapped from Africa and trafficked to islands like Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados where they were forced to farm sugarcane until death. The very merchant ships that brought slave-produced sugar and cotton to Britain and Ireland often returned with a cargo of Irish linen, beef, butter, and pork. On an island like Antigua, for example, the ecosystem was totally destroyed by plantation owners who deforested everything they could to make way for a sugarcane monoculture, naturally resulting in a situation where food and clothing needed to be imported rather than produced locally.

During the era of slavery, Ireland accounted for a huge portion of the produce imported into the British Caribbean. Different areas and cities in Ireland grew wealthy off the unusual role of provisioning the slave plantations. While it was linen that created much of the wealth in Belfast at that time, in Cork it was beef. This is just one of the many ways that so many Europeans benefitted off the proceeds of the transatlantic slave trade, even if they didn't own or invest in slave plantations themselves (though of course many Irish people did that too, including many Catholics).

It's often said that Ireland is where the British practised the techniques of colonisation they would later employ so ruthlessly in the the rest of the world. In fact, many of the Scottish colonists who settled Ulster moved on in a generation or two to settle Virginia and Pennsylvania, no doubt using the valuable lessons they had learned from their first attempt at colonisation.

But although there is no way you can compare the colonisation of Ireland with the unequalled horror of the transatlantic slave trade, it is so interesting to see the repeated colonial tactics of land seizure and deforestation to enable large scale industrialised processing of agricultural products shipped back and forth across the Atlantic, whether it be linen or sugar.