New Testingstan

So I was looking up some stuff on life in the Roman Empire this evening. From the Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley Adkins, Roy Adkins pg. 274: In the pre-Christian Roman period, there was no word for religion: the word religio meant reverence. What practices are so ubiquitous and embedded ...

Contrarianism of the day: Such findings have led some political scientists to entertain a heretical idea called the Capitalist Peace. The word liberal in Liberal Peace refers both to the political openness of democracy and to the economic openness of capitalism, and according to the Capitalist Peace...

It's that political and economic power are intimately linked and so if you want to actually substantially change the position of disadvantaged groups within society you have to work on establishing economic power. This is kind of what I was trying to get at with my "trying to get the Sumerian ...

I'd also like to point out that this is one of those areas where different oppressions strengthen each other, specifically the justifications for oppression of poors feed into justifications for oppression of blacks, women etc.. Open racism, sexism etc. isn't very socially acceptable anymore, so rac...

It was directed at what jester was saying, too. That the Left's fragmentation has slowed down progress. But if we define progress entirely as stuff that the pre-fragmentation Left worked for, then yes that isn't surprising. I just think the definition of what the Left should be working for needs to...

so I'm seeing a similar thing here, where straight white men want total solidarity because that's what would benefit them the most. I get the feeling this is directed at me. I don't want "total solidarity" or think everyone should devote all their energy to advancing one particular cause ...

white american dismisses cultural appropriation as nonsense jung congrats you are the recipient of my first 100% nonironic "check your privilege" If you want to write up a more in-depth rebuttal to my post I'd actually be interested in reading it. Like seriously I'm open to having my mind...

PS while I'm ranting I'd like to talk about how I'm not sure I'm down with this whole "OH NO CULTURAL APPROPRIATION" thing either. In the real world cultures take ideas from each other all the time and incorporate them and reinterpret them and expand on them and make them their own. This i...

While the lower class are frequently ignored and pinned as those people , I don't know that I've observed Randian things specifically so much? Like the immediate responsibility for being poor. I don't think it's so much explicit Randroid beliefs per se so much as reflection of the way the social ac...

Continuing the rant for a moment I suspect this is part of the reason "privilidge" talk gets such a negative reaction from white male cishet people People who are getting shit on are not really in the mood to be lectured about their unearned advantages and need to engage in what can sound ...

Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the problems of the poor are a poor (heh) cousin to the subset of problems blacks/gays/trans/what-have-you have that middle class/affluent people can easily empathize with in provoking internet anger? Like internet people seem to get more fired up about th...

90% of transphobia from "radical" feminists comes from assumptions about the general nature of trans women from particular individual trans women I've had the impression it's one part objection to anything that looks like it might indicate gender being biological, one part religious prohi...

To expand on what I just said a bit, I think part of the issue is we have a culture that tends toward a Manichean and "all the fault of a few bad apples" conception of evil. We tend to Otherize evil, and think of racism, sexism etc. as things associated with alien figures we don't sympathi...

I've never really understood the issue with "too wide a brush". I mean I'm white as hell but people of colour complaining about about white people as a whole it's never upset me? Like, if I'm doing shit that's problematic, I need to figure that out, and if I'm managing to avoid that, then...

The narrative that it's the allies who are the real heavy lifters is pretty widespread and corrosive, and actually pretty well-pushed by those who wish to maintain the status quo (look at the farcical mythology of the civil rights movement for a great example) Well when you're a really small minori...

So I figured I could bring this up here since it's come up in this thread recently A few days ago latfc reblogged a post by a trans woman about... well I'll just link it here Then that person got a lot of hate sent her way so the person running latfc posted this . Then he got tons of hate, as you c...

Prompt ---- It’s dark for daytime, even for this place. My breath is loud in my mask, in the helmet of my alien suit. I wonder what makes the air like that, so dark and thick and green so even on at noon on a cloudless day it feels like being on the bottom of a dirty fish tank, the rocks and towers...

There seems to be this idea that it's superior rationality to ignore motivational context. That treating a statement rationally means treating it as if it came out of a disinterested computer, and not a human being with human motivations and a probable interest in persuading people to believe certai...

Again: that tumblr is run by trans people for trans people as a space to call out bigotry without worrying about the feelings of cis people. I don't think it's anyone's place except maybe other trans people to try to attack their tone. Saying that having these preferences makes you a bad person vs....

As with all of this stuff, though, the only way I make a moral condemnation of them as a person (rather than of their actions or statements) is if they refuse to address or accept the issues, not that they have them to begin with. I don't disagree with that but that doesn't seem like what the thing...

I guess it bears pointing out that the original post that spawned all of this was about bisexual people, for whom neither masculinity nor femininity should be innately a turnoff, who declare themselves unattracted to trans people. However it also applies to monosexual people who are attracted to ma...

If we can bring it back to what I'm saying here, though, if we remove it from "you're a bad person" to "this is a problematic preference", is that something people can at least agree on here? Yeah, here's my issue with the statement: I can very easily see people not being consci...

Well, if you've internalised racism or transphobia or other things like that and you do refuse to confront it and try to better yourself from it, why is that different when it comes from sexual preferences as opposed to any other manifestations? Because people don't have a right to other people's b...

I don't see why sexual preferences should be free from examination from societal biases and internalised bigotries I mean there's such a social and mental component that it's clear those things contribute a lot? The much more obvious one is the huge delegitimisation of black or other nonwhite (but ...

I gotta be honest I get uncomfortable when people treat having insufficiently inclusive attractions as a character flaw. Yeah, it's not like anybody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to sex up people you don't want, but when you call somebody a "cissexist piece of trash" for not...