Thorns

My list of links to post was getting ridiculous, so I have come up with a hopefully more workable system, and will try to divide the backlog into digestible chunks.

"Current" here means, uh, 2017 in some cases >.>
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Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage Felt a little overly optimistic but that's a nice change in these dark times, and was an interesting read.

This really irritated me. Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man, a snarky essay riffing on the ~hilarious~ idea that she is a "poor imitation or substitute man" with no mention of the fact that, you know, she could actually identify as male if she wanted. This is a thing afab people do sometimes, and they are not "poor imitations" of men. I mean I haven't read the full essay being quoted, maybe she really does identify as male to some extent, and the article is glossing over that. But either way, it annoyed me as presented, and Le Guin should know better. She could very easily have made the same point without erasing trans people.

Strips and Pieces, a really good comic (with transcript!) about men's resentment of sex workers.

I'm listening to the audiobook of "Debt, the first 5000 years" by David Graeber while I play video games and it's fantastic, exactly the modern left wing exporation of economics I've been wanting, and legally available for free.

My dodgy take on some interesting ideas so far (up to chapter 3):
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So a while go it occurred to me (aka various POC/non-white poeple pointed it out) that while space exploration proponents use the metaphor of Frontier (and the US frontier specifically), the thing about the frontier was that it wasn't actually untouched land that had to be settled from scratch, it was cultivated farmland, complete with local crops, that was stolen from it's original inhabitants. Plus a lot of the really difficult work was done not by wide eyed settlers but by slaves and indentured workers etc.

And in space there are no original inhabitants to prepare the land, no indentured workers to die on the railroads, not unless we build way better robots or find aliens to exploit or something and neither of those look likely.

And it turns out, some of the people who see space as a Frontier we Must Explore have realised this! And have decided that the obvious solution is to send out some brown people to prepare the land and then die.

If science wishes to proceed, it's going to have to start killing some people, deliberately, instead of through malfunctions due to old equipment or overlooked things. As callous as it sounds, those places that are already rife with overcrowding are probably also rife with people who have the necessary brains and disciplines to be able to make a one-way mission successful and transmit their data back so we can build the better mousetrap and send again. If nothing else, we should have enough material sent in intermittent missions for later missions to be able to cannibalize and use to make their work that much better and easier.

(the mod of politics has apologised for letting this through and is going to try and fix things so it doesn't happen again, thankfully it's not representative of the usual type of post, but I guess given the nature of the comm you have to expect some fail from time to time)

This keeps coming up in speculative fiction and it bugs me. I'm not a historian, and I know it's wrong (and the more history I learn, the more obviously wrong it becomes). If there's some actual historian debunking this narrative somewhere I can link to I would be very grateful!

EDIT: So apparently this was named and described in 1931: Whig history. And yet people still use it! (Well, that isn't exactly what I'm talking about. But it's certainly close)
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People have gotten sick of the feminist site Feministing's ableism, from never talking about disability to letting anyone who calls out ableist comments/posts be dogpiled rather than supported. Here's a Feministing and Disability linkspam, with an open letter to sign as well as a selection of the responses to this at Feministing.

Personally I decided I didn't like Feministing because of their racism back before I got disabled and started noticing ableism more, but they're pretty popular and influential, I hope some good comes of all this.

And now some miscellaneous links.

• Another post by trouble, (WARNING) Take Back The Night has some truly disturbing stats about abuse of PWD. Jesus.
  
• The Open Letter To Those Without CFS/Fibro
  
• Students remember inaccurate history films seen in class as fact
  
• 
  Visibility Matters: The Woman Who Cried "Bisexual" There's a lot of creepy sexuality policing where bisexuals are told they're just straight people trying to sound cool or whatever. So I found it instructive to read about how it looks when someone really is pretending.
  
• Recent Migrants and Inclusion in the Australian Arts Scene: Part 1 - Education
  

I am so unbelievably low on spoons right now I cannot express it (on the plus side this is as a result of building myself to have a Serious Conversation About My Future at work, which is now done. More on that when things are more settled)

But something on Foxtel just now I wanted to note: a documentary about possible terraforming of Mars explicitely comparing it to "other frontiers through history", with images from the American West and talk about how "Colonists would do the same thing all colonists have done, packing light and preparing the land as they go..".

Some context: For those not aware of it, there is a Big Conversation happening right now about A fantasy novel with an American frontier..minus the American Indians(*). And one of the major points which has been brought up is that without indiginous peoples to exploit (not to mention indentured workers and slaves) the american colonists would have died, or at least not expanded so fast or so easily. In lots of ways the whole myth of the Frontier is a horrible racist lie.

And it's a lie with a lot of attraction to nerds, and this documentary illustrates that pretty well.

As to comments: I probably am not up to answering them, not for a while. And no playing BINGO.

(*)In case you can't find a synopsis in there, I shall arbitrarily pick one by someone I know :) And yes, that is my favourite author in the whole world making a racist ass of herself :(

Seeing as I know very little of history, let alone gay history, I've been doing a fair bit of research for my story.

All the histories of lesbianism I could find basically said "First there was Sappho, then we don't know very much, then there was the late 19th century, etc". Via nico_wolfwood however I came across Anne Lister and from there absolutely adorable story of The Ladies of Llangollen.

A pair of pretty young anglo-irish heiresses they fell in love in their teens, ran away together to Wales, and stayed in a big rambling strange old house until they died in their 80s. They became famous for their life-choice and lots of people came to meet them, after they died their house stayed a local attraction. In this 1840s book there's lots of quotes from various contemporaries about how they're odd but charming. They do tend to be a bit condescending, but personally I'd rather have people think I was cute than chase after me with pitchforks.

Also I've been listening to the History of Information podcast, about how the american postal service was originally meant as a way of cheaply delivering newspapers (and thus keeping the scattered population informed) Actual letters were just seen as a way of subsidising this, and thus were charged at a days wage per page. So people sent newspapers with coded messages encoded in them, by doodling "random" images or poking teeny holes in the letters etc, until the government gave in and made everything cost the same to post :)

Having finished my Phd and had some time for my brain to bounce back, I've been filling my brain with lots of different things, including history. The thing is, I find most history books to be either too dry and technical for my not-so-arty brain, or very conventional and uninteresting: all about the lives of kings and other rich white men, and tending to uncritically regurgitate the traditional and nostalgic ideas people already have with just a few glosses of extra facts. I think the desire to try to fit morally grey people like bushrangers and colonists into neat little good guy/bad guy boxes is one of the reasons I find my own country's history so unbearably dull.

One solution to this is to seek out histories which are explicitly from a more non-conventional viewpoint. Tony Robinson is about the only tv historian I can think of who does this, mainly with the lower classes, ie with his Worst jobs in history.

Beneath the cut: a synopsis of what I've found so far, including "The Homosexual History of Australia", "Damned Whores and Gods Police: the history of women in australia" and "Understanding Deaf Culture".
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Something I've seen a few people imply about the Stolen Generation, and something I used to believe myself, was that while regrettable it was just the result of an unfortunate combination of children taken into care being badly cared for in the past, and non-specified racism making government agents more likely to assume indigenous parents were incompetent.

While both of these factors come into it, afaict it went well beyond that (anyone who knows more about this is VERY welcome to pipe up)
EDIT: and they did! You're probably better off just reading the comments than my badly expressed blargle.

Most of this I got from Wikipedia and then this article.
( In which I rant )