just another nerd

So, genuinely no hard feelings, I get where y'all are coming from, but that was actually kind of my entire point

The Rosetta Stone was and is real.

This is indisputable. You can go see the Rosetta Stone on display right now!! I'd say you could even it touch it, but there's museum glass in the way, so that the oils on human skin can't further degrade this 2,000-year-old stele, which is one of the most important surviving historical texts in the world.

The Tower of Babel is not real, and it never was.

The Tower of Babel is a millennia-old religious story about a mythological tower, which serves as a mythological explanation for the origin of different human languages. Yes, there are some religious historians who speculate that the myth was inspired by one or another physical tower, but no, that doesn't prove anything other than "this is how many people in this culture/time and place explained or understood that sort of event."

The Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, is an object of translation that actually exists

Photo credit: By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved from Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone." https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928

That picture is of a real object. It is not of a picture of a 3,000+ year old myth.

Our attempts to understand each other will not result in us being struck down by some force from on high!

And the true path to a world where we can all understand each other does not involve us all speaking the same language. That's racist bs

Preserving and revitalizing endangered languages is a race against time. For many languages, especially Indigenous languages and languages from an oral tradition, the loss of each individual fluent speaker is a permanent loss of language

Almost half of the world's 7,000 languages are endangered! You can learn more about, and find resources and education on, the Endangered Language Project and similar organizations, especially ones that are Indigenous and respect knowledge sovereignty and traditional ownership

knowledge sovereignty: when it comes to language and traditional knowledge, knowledge sovereignty is the simple but super important principle that the speakers of a language and members of a culture should have full, independent control of their own traditional knowledge and knowledge systems. For Indigenous languages in particular, sometimes knowledge sovereignty means certain language resources are closed to those outside the tribe, Nation, and/or culture - which is absolutely fair, given what white people have historically done and are still doing when it comes to stealing, and then fucking copyrighting, Indigenous traditional knowledge. (Related: Fuck Monsanto)

But good news - you can learn more about, support, and access community resources on language preservation at The Endangered Language Project here:

From a 9th century Irish manuscript, the phrase ‘massive hangover’ (Latheirt) written in the ancient Irish text Ogham. The monk must have been having a very rough day…..

So first, let's clear a common misconception: no, President Abraham Lincoln did not love Black people nor see them as human equals. At best he was centrist about it (though, even his implication that 'exceptional' Black men ought to vote got him assassinated).

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do, it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union...I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free."

The "freeing of slaves" after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 was meant to kneecap the economic and military powers of the seceded South. Lettuce stop making a white savior figure out of Lincoln, or thinking that my people's shackles were unchained via anything other than desperate war strategy and extreme violence. Think on that, for a moment.

That being said!

But not everyone in Confederate territory would immediately be free. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as "Juneteenth," by the newly freed people in Texas.

Rare examples of native children’s buffalo toys, made with love and care by their people to honor the buffalo that gave everything to native nations who depended on the buffalo for millennia.

#1. Shoshone. Wyoming. 1892.

#2. Arapaho. Sept 8, 1898.

Liberation is not a solo project, and Black history and queer history are not parallel stories.

Our stories have always overlapped and informed one another.

The LGBTQ+ movement owes an enormous debt to Black queer and trans activists, writers and authors, such as Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Stormé DeLarverie, Bayard Rustin, William Dorsey Swann, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and so many more! Many of the movement’s defining moments were made possible because Black queer activists put their bodies on the line to fight for liberation, literally.

The very first Pride celebration was a commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots, 6 days of protest led by Black queer and trans activists.

@meraxes-of-new-albion peer reviewing your tags because yeah you get it.

I think part of the problem is also that people hear 'WWII history knowledge' and immediately associate it with the 'worshipping-the-death-machine-advancements' branch of irritating history buffs, but if you write off all WWII history like that, you'll miss things like how Fascism smooths over power hierarchy disagreements by constantly pushing the 'remember, it's us against them' line. You'll miss resistance stories of Dutch schoolgirls luring Nazis into the woods to a waiting anti-fascist with a gun or of Norwegian freedom fighters sabotaging the Nazi nuclear programme or of Allied planes that survived direct hits to the fuel tank because Czech slaves made empty shells with no explosives inside. You'll write off the ghastly things done in concentration camps as horror stories from another time and not recognise them as Real Things done to Real People that were justified on the grounds of pure vitriolic hatred and allowed to continue by others' sheer apathy. And you will not know how to recognise it when it begins building momentum in your own country.

The Fascists want you to be apathetic. They want you to shut off your ears and look the other way. They want you to be so removed from the idea of Fascism beyond a red swastika armband on a 1940s soldier that they can roll out their hateful regime stealthily while you only protest the flashy meant-to-be-offensive parts.

You will find yourselves taking sides in fights between Goebbels and Göring. And then you will remember "oh, right, you might be human, but you're also fucking evil".

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time