⍟✪ Drew ⧗𖤍

Don’t forget these tags

She worked with Hydra (knowingly or unknowingly) longer than she knew Steve.

that the same company that hired Buchenwald SS Officer, Wernher von Braun

now owns the rights to Captain America???

First of all, let’s talk more about Reinhard Gehlen. He was a German intelligence officer, he was the chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence. He surrendered to the CIC of the US Army and during questioning the Army recognized his usefulness for the future. Because even during World War II the USA already knew that after the defeat of Nazi-Germany the next enemy would be the soviets. 

Gehlen founded the Gehlen Organisation that had close ties with the CIA. For years his organisation was the only one who provided Intel out of the Soviet block by questioning returning German prisoners of war. Later the organisation was the founding element of the the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

Gehlen  was not persecuted, no he even was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968. 

The cold war had one simple rule: The enemy was the communist. And Nazis or fascist weren’t communist so they stopped being the enemy. And they could be pretty useful after all, right? 

Like Gehlen, or in the MCU’s case: Arnim Zola. 

Steve told Peggy that he would not stop ‘until all of Hydra is dead or captured’. And she tells him ‘you wont be alone’… and then goes off and offers Zola a job, the man that tortured and experimented on prisoners of war, which Peggy knows. But he was useful in their attempt to recreate the serum. Something Howard was obviously obsessed with. And Peggy let them. 

It’s one of the reasons why I always was low key disgusted with SHIELD, with Peggy and Howard. But that’s because I thought about that, not because the movies show that to me. Only maybe when Frank Pym leaves SHIELD but even than no one ever talks about all the things Peggy must have done in all these years. it’s hinted at with Howard, but only barely.

Intelligence during the cold war was not a place for moral or ethics.

Alexander Pierce: Why do you think we’re talking? See, I took a seat on the Council not because I wanted to but because Nick asked me to, because we were both realists. We knew that despite all the diplomacy and the handshaking and the rhetoric, that to build a really better world sometimes means having to tear the old one down. And that makes enemies. Those people that call you dirty because you got the guts to stick your hands in the mud and try to build something better. And the idea that those people could be happy today, makes me really, really angry.

So Peggy Carter has a similar worldview to Alexander Pierce. Ok then.

Please tell me the details of exactly what “good” ends Peggy was trying to accomplish and how that justified her “bad” means.

"Howard Stark was massively abusive and a horrible father" but then

"Tony had every single right to murder Bucky over his father and I would do the same!"

Also "Tony-Wony is an abuse victim and is therefore not responsible for anything he does ever and was mind controlled one time"

When you remind them Bucky was mind controlled and abused literally because of Tony's father.

"THAT'S NO EXCUSE! he deserves to die because he is a murderer!"

Why does Tony never talk about Hydra's infiltration in the organazation his father created?

But let's be real: Howard Stark was an infamous arms dealer, war profiteer and Nazi collaborator. He had a *lot* of very vocal enemies: nobody would have been remotely shocked if he was murdered by one of his rivals or someone he got on the wrong side of. People would have been more surprised that he died in an apparent "accident".

Logically, its highly likely someone within SHIELD tipped off the Soviets about Howard's serum (because how many people would have known?). Peggy? Obadiah Stane? How about Tony himself? There's a long standing theory that Tony was a HYDRA operative the entire time- which just makes a lot of sense.

A also recently heard a theory that T*ny tried to kill Bucky not in revenge for his parents but because to silence him: because Tony himself was the one who tipped off the Soviets or gave the kill order. Now that would be very interesting.

How did Howard Stark recreated that serum? And what was he going to do with it?

There's only two real possibilities: Bucky's blood or Isaiah Bradley's were used to synthetize the serum. We know from "What If.....?" that Howard knew about Bucky from the early 1980s, so nothing to stop him getting a sample.

So at the time they put that WS serum in Howard's trunk, Bucky was quite literally the only person he could've got that serum from!

(There was even a big hooha in the AC show about how all of Steve's blood samples had been used up by 1946, but Howard had stashed one for himself to make money off replicating serum. So it's completely in-keeping with his canon that he'd have Bucky's-blood serum and be sneaking off with it, and lying about him, for his own monetary gain!

You all know this, right? You know that when you mock people in Western states like Utah you're talking about people who live under theocratic laws that they didn't vote for and can't vote out of and gerrymandering so severe that despite the majority of voters in Utah being registered Democrats, it's blood red because they built it that way... right? You know this? Please tell me you know this.

The people of Utah voted on and passed a ruling to have a neutral 3rd party draw up new voting districts back in 2018 (basically democratic districts were carved up to be ineffective so people wanted them fixed)

The legislature decided they didn't like that and decided to ignore the votes and keep doing what they were doing (bad gerrymandering)

League of Women voters took them to court and in July of 2024 the judge said, uh, actually, yeah, you have to do what was voted on/approved by the people

The court decided that they would meet for a special session to pass an amendment to the state constitution saying that, actually, if they didn't agree with something the people voted on/passed they wouldn't have to uphold that decision

They got taken to court again (surprise surprise)

In September 2024 the lower courts ruled once again that no, you can't just fucking do that, you're actively trying to deceive voters with your convoluted phrasing

They don't meet again until January so god knows what hijinks they'll come up with to keep the state voting districts fucked up

by “americanise” i mean purely in terms of vocab/grammar, for example the use of em dashes is different (in the uk we use -, in the us you use —), or you guys would say “apologize” rather than “apologise”

if you are comfortable using american english when writing from the pov of an american character, or even to spoof the style of a specific american writer, that can add an extra amount of verisimilitude to the prose, but that's a level of effort i wouldn't expect from a fic writer. if you feel comfortable doing it, go for it! if not, stick to what you know.

sam wilson drawing challenge day18- 3am

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

--

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.

The Thin Veneer Theory--the Christian one, the one that says humans are inherently violent--falls completely the fuck apart when you realise that we would not have survived if we were that violent. We just would not have! If you kill someone in your very small group--because we lived in very small groups at first, under 10 people--then you've lost someone's knowledge, their hands, their legs, their eyes, their HELP. Help that you are going to need! Makes no sense. Not even chimps, our most violent cousins, are this violent to one another across their species. Because it's impractical for a social animal.

But the data says otherwise as well. Humans help. From birth. Other social animals also help--not just their immediately family or their group, but even other species of animal from them. Helping is inherent to being an intelligent animal that lives in groups, it seems.

But if you don't want to believe all those experiments and data, that's fine. Believe your own DNA then. Unless you are from Subsaharan African peoples, you have more than one species of human in your DNA. This means at some point, your grandmother and grandfather found someone of a whole other species attractive. That's a fact. And we keep finding more species hidden in our DNA even now--I think the most recent one was Denisovian! I don't know HOW you could interpret THAT information as "humans are violent and hate strangers" because it wouldn't be there if two people of two different species hadn't fucked enough to make a baby that survived long enough to make another and so on down the millions of years to now. That's incredible stuff. That means MILLIONS of humans had cross-species relationships! That means our species is SO friendly that we willing to reach across species and make babies with someone else! That is an incredibly high amount of friendliness!!!

We are a motley of many species of human being. That alone should be proof enough that we are inherently so full up with the desire to Make Friends that we will do it over and over to strangers and other animals unlike ourselves. We domesticated one of our main predators. We were so friendly and kind to cats they decided to bring us their babies and we were so friendly and kind we took care of those babies and now we make images of cats and put them everywhere and share them with one another. Even animals we eat, we are kind to and even decide that some of our gods are in their image, and make rules that say "it is Forbidden to kill this animal in a way that brings it suffering, it is Forbidden by the gods to make this animal suffer while it is alive" in MANY religions.