sine lucro friget ludus

The High Priestess and Ace of Wands

King of Pentacles and King of Swords

Five of Wands and Four of Pentacles

Six of Wands and Page of Cups

The Hanged Man reversed and Ace of Pentacles

The Hanged Man and Page of Cups

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

I need links to news articles about recent book bans and other censorship, particularly in a US context.

We generally find two models of history dominating popular discourse: a heteronormative model, in which only male/female relationships may be readily accepted as romantic or sexual and so all same-gender relationships must be read as socially normative friendship, or an amatonormative model which, in being open to the possibility of same-gender romance or sex, reads all intimate friendship as actually romance in disguise. The latter is an understandable compensation for the former, which dominated much 19th-20th century scholarship, but is just as essentialising and limited.

But the more I allowed that openness to lead me to consider how relationships were actually being constructed, rather than just how I expected them to be constructed, I also found myself doing the opposite: considering the ways in which marriage was constructed to resemble these specific kinds of friendship.

This is the thing.

Common friendships can be shared. In one friend one can love beauty; in another, affability; in another, generosity; in another, a fatherly affection; in another, a brotherly one; and so on. But in this friendship love takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway: that cannot possibly be duplicated.

Montaigne, M. de, Screech, M. A., & Montaigne, M. de. (1993). The complete Essays. Penguin Books, p. 215.

THIS IS THE THING.

Although Montaigne distinguishes this model of loving-friendship from pederasty, he connects it to marriage

Haggerty, G. E. (2012). Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship. The Age of Johnson, 22, 331–XIII.

THIS!! Is the thing!!!

Throughout the late eighteenth century husbands were encouraged to be friends with their wives, to be as close to their wives as they had been to their intimate male friends. The effusive rhetoric of friendship was not modeled on that of romantic love, but rather romantic love took on the semiotics of friendship.

Tobin, R. (2000). Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15sk9bt, p.37.

This is not the only thing, and marriage is also an imperfect analogue for these relationships.

and yes! the label of 'romantic friendship' (or even just 'friendship') has absolutely been used to erase the queerness of relationships that were they heterosexual scholars would be SHOUTING romantic relationship or lovers at. things like shakespeare's sonnets, to use my personal favorite example, or hamilton and laurens. and yes! it is also my personal opinion that a not insignificant amount of romantic friendships contained what we would nowadays call romantic and or sexual feelings that were expressed through the model of romantic friendship because that was the model they had (which, despite it being due to homophobia, is a fundamentally different model of relationships to ours, which is by no means the Best one Ever, etc etc), and replicated perfectly into a 2025 setting they very well might have dated.

but! ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIPS WERE REAL GUYS. this was a REAL historical social structure and it should be treated as such. and many of these relationships do not fit neatly into modern 'romantic' or 'platonic' because they are NEITHER. they are their OWN THING. they are ambiguous! they vary from 'modern-day-besties' to 'qpr' to 'qpr with benefits' to 'passionately in erotic love' to 'intimacy born out of circumstance' to 'lovers' to 'modern-day-married'. and most of the time you, the historian, cannot definitively tell the difference. just like how you cannot really definitively tell the difference between what we would nowadays call a trans man, a lesbian, and a girl who just really hated the patriarchy and decided to make her own way through the world. because all of those concepts are MODERN. deciding that the historical figure in question HAD to be one or the other erases very real nuances and very real histories, and it serves as a 'fuck you' to every single person who sees themself in that story and history but who isn't the identity you've decided on.

Pedestrian traffic lights

On the most zoomed out and least loaded level I can think of, it is basically axiomatic that large military operation by any organized and armed force will commit some atrocities. It's one of the reasons people say (but mostly don't believe) that crimes of aggression are the most serious and foundational war crimes of all. Despite this, basically no one on here who has ever picked a side in a conflict as 'the good ones' seems capable of accepting their guys might have done a massacre or tortured prisoners or abused civilian populations.

Certainly people seem incredibly resistant to accepting that states or administrations (or even specific policies and projects) that they consider praiseworthy has some price in blood and tears. The reaction to first-hand accounts of said price are usually reacted to as entirely bad-faith propaganda.