Have yall seen that people are blaming Israel and jews for Egypts loss against Argentina? Its gotten so bad that they've now edited the referees Wikipedia page to say he's jewish.
Imagine being so braindead that "The Jews have rigged the World Cup" is a more reasonable conclusion to you than "Lionel Messi is really good at football"
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It never fails to gobsmack me the things some of y'all believe Jews believe. I remember someone confidently saying that Jews believe they all go to the Christian version of Heaven, regardless of whether they were good people or not, because they're "chosen" and in Heaven they get a segregated all-Jews section. Like, y'all are just making shit up at this point. And you could just, idk, ask Jews, but even when a Jewish person tells you "um that's not what we believe" you think they're lying.
.....Do (religious) Jewish people even really believe in a Christian-y style of Heaven? I was under the impression it wasn't something y'all concerned yourselves about too much
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What I enjoy the most about Count Binface’s candidacy in the Clacton by-election is that he’s not there as a joke candidate to turn a serious election into a farce. The by-election was a farce already thanks to Farage’s action. Count Binface being the only opposing candidate is just him and the other political parties going «you made this into a joke, Nigel, so we’re going to make sure the joke’s on you». In other words
The point is that Farage is doing this to hold up a thin veneer of democratic legitimacy in the face of investigations into his own and Reform’s finances. «See, the people still want me in parliament, even if the establishment is against me.»
However, even if he wins the by-election, the fact that the only other candidate was Count Binface, makes it a lot harder for him to spin his victory the way he wants. It’s not going to be a narrative of the people preferring him to the establishment, but rather a case of him getting only marginally more votes than the obvious joke candidate.
If he loses to Binface, I think his political career is over.
"Whether someone understands it or not, these are the consequences of the political views they're espousing" is a pretty important analysis tool for online movements because quite honestly, over half of everyone engaging in politics online have no foundations for the stuff they're saying and are just saying whatever makes them feel like a member of an in-group.
If your in-group is "the left" you're very much not immune to this. In fact, trying to do left-wing politics without even trying to build a foundational political understanding is a great way to end up as a neo-nazi with a tumblr accent rather than an effective left-wing advocate.
Re: the last post I reblogged, when I entered the Tolkien fandom as a teenager, my understanding of racism was very much of the «personal, intentional bigotry» variety, a bill I think Tolkien didn’t fit specifically because of quotes like his retort to the Nazi publisher, and it was a process to get to a point of recognising the structural racism ingrained in the worldview, the very idea of Empire. Which is to say, this isn’t something that comes automatically to you if you’re raised in a (white, Northern European) context where people around you also don’t have any concept of racism that extends beyond «it is bad to be mean to people because of their skin colour/ethnic background» - a better starting point than outright white supremacy, of course, but not something that makes you remotely equipped to take part in any discussion of structural racism either. And in order to get to any kind of more nuanced understanding of the topic, you have to pack away the ego that says «I can figure this out for myself without listening to other people or without ever being wrong» and recognise that most likely you will have major blind spots in your analysis of the kind of structural racism of which you have never been on the receiving end. «I hadn’t considered that, but I see your point now that you explain it» is a much better response to a person of colour pointing out racism in your favourite book, than «you’re wrong because Tolkien said XYZ».
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Top 10 BtVS characters (as voted by my followers): #7 —Tara Maclay (53.9%)
↳ “Hey, Wil, this is me. It doesn’t all have to be “good” and “fine.” This is the room where you don’t have to be brave. And I still love you. If you’re worried, you can be worried.”
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
It's important to have at least two blorbos that fit into specific roles in your life
The blorbo you can look to in hard times, and ask yourself what they would do in a situation, and draw motivation from them on how to be better and stronger!
The blorbo you can look to in hard times, and remind yourself that no matter what happens, you probably aren't going to fuck your shit up as much as they did even if you actively tried
Tumblr is the reason why I have something I call the cashier test which is, if i told this to a random cashier at the grocery store, would they think you're crazy at best or at worst would they be warranted in leaping over the counter and beating the shit out of you. Karl Marx mpreg is crazy, but not beating the shit out of you crazy. The cashier will probably talk about you to their coworkers and it might even make their day. Telling someone they're complicit in their own oppression by working a minimum wage job at a grocery store makes them warranted in leaping over the counter to beat the shit out of you.
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So I kind of rambled about this in therapy but I think it's worth sharing, and I think one of the things that really gets me about space travel is like.......it really is turning swords into ploughshares. I've seen a lot of cynicism from people asserting that it's the opposite, that space travel is used as a cover to develop military technology, but that really isn't the case.
NASA I would say is the most infamous example. Like it or not, NASA got to where it is today through Operation: Paperclip, most notably through the recruitment of Werner von Braun, who during WWII developed the V1 and V2 rockets along with other devastasting technology and horrific exploitation and murder of Jews, Roma, and political prisoners. I vehemently condemn the clemency afforded to von Braun and all the other Nazi scientists recruited by Operation: Paperclip and similar operations conducted by other members of the Allied powers. However. Given a choice between these scientists continuing to make weapons of war or putting their skills towards the development of a space program, I heartedly choose the latter. Initially, von Braun did work to make weapons for the US, but eventually he was put to work on the fledgling space program. Technology initially conceptualized for war was used to put people in space, to put people on the moon.
On the other side of the Cold War, the Soviet space program also used technology initially developed for war. The rocket that launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, was designed initially as the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. The Vostok rocket, which would launch the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space, was also a variant on a modified R-7. Both the Soviets and the Americans were using missile technology that could have been used for horrible things, but instead they used it for space travel. The space race was an extension of Cold War hostilities between the West and the Soviets, but it was an example of a competition that did not involve war. It was a competition of intelligence, of science, and I am absolutely not discounting all the animals and people that died in the process of developing such technology.......but it's nothing compared to what it could have been has these hostilities been expressed through combat.
Even today, people complain about space programs being expensive, about the money going to NASA and other countries' programs as being money that could be used to feed or house people....but that money could have also gone into war. The massive amounts of fuel that go into a space rocket launch is fuel that could have been used to fuel tanks and missiles and warplanes. The brilliant minds employed in every step of a space mission are minds that could have been used to develop weapons, but instead they are used to push the boundaries of human exploration and understanding of the cosmos.
Additionally, astronauts and cosmonauts and taikonauts and all other space travellers become national and international heroes who have made incredible achievements not through being champions of war, but through being explorers. They are figures that people can rally around and be proud of, but they are not soldiers. In the US, NASA has close associations with the military, and many astronauts are former military pilots, but NASA is not military. NASA and other space agencies actively demonstrate that there are ways other than war to achieve greatness.
Another great thing about space travel is that explorers and adventurers have been heroes in public consciousness for a long time- just look at the way cowboys and pioneers and Christopher Columbus have been glorified in American culture. But unlike the global navigators and explorers of the Columbian age, and unlike the pioneers of the age of American westward expansion, and unlike so many other explorers in history, there is no concern with displacing and exploiting the indigineous people and biomes and resources in the lands explored when it comes to outer space. Perhaps this would become an issue if we discovered alien life on other planets, but that has yet to happen. For now, it's just us Earthlings in the vastness of space. Humans landing on the moon didn't displace or exterminate any native Moon-dwellers. Space travel allows humans to express the natural human desire to explore and discover without the prevalent side-effect of such exploration that occurs on Earth.
Finally, space travel is unifying. These days, a lot of space travel is cooperative. The International Space Station is an excellent example of this, with five participating space agencies, and its predescessor, the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, became known as the "handshake in space" in the midst of the Cold War. Putting cameras and people far enough in space to be able to look back at Earth as a single planet really puts things into perspective. We are one planet, as far as we know, alone in the universe. We really only have each other. Space travel has proven time and time again that it can unite us, and I believe it still can. Christina Koch, one of the four astronauts who last week went farther into space than any human had ever gone before, said that "we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.” And I think that's what we need to hear.
"And He (G-d) shall judge among the nations and arbritrate for the many people, and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation against nation shall not take up a sword, and they shall not learn war any longer." Isaiah 2:4
What is the transformation of war technology into space exploration techonology but a fulfilment of this prophecy? The missiles are beaten into space travel rockets, the fighter pilots into astronauts. Legions of scientists are learning space exploration instead of war. Nations who would otherwise be engaged in war cooperate in space.
I think anyone who calls themself a pacifist, or at least anyone who is critical of war and hopes to see less of it, and anyone who wants to eventually see world peace and unity, should appreciate space travel for how much good it has done and how much good it has the potential to do. Aside from all the research done in space that has gone towards other things to benefit humanity in the realm of medicine and technology and biology and geology, space travel really can (and has) improved society. I truly believe that despite how chaotic the world seems right now, despite how much war and factionalism and polarization there is in the world, we are still far more united as a species than we have been for most of history, and that is in no small part due to space travel. We still have a long way to go, we still have more work to do, but the achievements space travel has been able to accomplish gives me hope. A better world is possible, and I believe that we have it in us to see the complete fulfilment of the prophecy, that "they shall not learn war any longer."
