Hey, listen. I know the world’s on fire. But listen.
I’ll tell you a thing.
On
the day after the election, when everything was worst and all I could
do was go numb or cry hysterically, do you know what gave me the most
comfort?
It wasn’t the words of Lincoln or Gandhi or Maya
Angelou, it wasn’t Psalms or poetry, it wasn’t my grandmother, it wasn’t
contemplating the long arc of history. It wasn’t even hugging the dog.
It was the Twitter account @ConanSalaryman.
This
is a joke account. It’s somebody who narrates as if Conan was working
in an office. Tweets usually sound like “By Crom!” roared Conan. “You
jackals cannot schedule a mere interview without gathering in a pack and
cackling?!” or “Conan slammed his sword through his desk. Papers and
blood rained through the office. Monday was slain.”
I followed
it awhile back and have found it funny. (I’m not a huge Robert Howard
fan inherently, but whoever is writing these does the schtick well.) But
if it had not posted once that day, no one would have noticed at all.
Instead, Conan the Salaryman posted something inspirational. And then replied to dozens of people replying to him, for hours, in character,
telling them that by Crom! it was only defeat if we did not stand up
again, that the greatest act of strength was to keep walking in the face
of hopelessness, that the gods have given the smallest of us strength
to enact change, that we must all keep going as long as Crom gave us
breath, and tyrants frightened Conan not, but we must look to those
unable to fend for themselves. (“Though by Crom! We must hammer
ourselves into a support network, not an army!”)
I have no idea
who is behind that account. But it was the most bizarrely comforting
thing I saw all day, in a day that had very little comfort in it. There
was this weight of story behind it. It helped me. I think it helped a
lot of people. If only a tiny bit–well, tiny bits help.
I have been thinking a lot lately about Bluebell from Watership Down.
There’s absolutely no reason you should remember Bluebell, unless, to take an example completely and totally at
random, you read it eleven thousand times until your copy fell apart
because you were sort of a weird little proto-furry kid who loved
talking animals more than breath and wrote fan fic and there weren’t any
other talking animal books and you now have large swaths memorized as a
result. Ahem.
Bluebell is a minor character. He’s Captain
Holly’s friend and jester. When the old warren is destroyed, Captain
Holly and Bluebell are the last two standing and they stagger across the
fields after the main characters. By the end, Holly is raving,
hallucinating, and screaming “O zorn!” meaning “all is destroyed” and
about to bring predators down on them. And Bluebell is telling stupid
jokes.
And they make it the whole way because of Bluebell’s
jokes. “Jokes one end, hraka the other,” he says. “I’d roll a joke along
the ground and we’d both follow it.” When Holly can’t move, Bluebell
tells him jokes that would make Dad jokes look brilliant and Holly is
able to move again. When Hazel, the protagonist, tries to shush him,
Holly says no, that “we wouldn’t be here without his blue-tit’s
chatter.”
I tell you, the last few days, thinking of this, I really start to identify with Bluebell.
I
am not a fighter, not an organizer, certainly not a prophet. Throw
something at me and I squawk and cover my head. I write very small
stories with wombats and hamsters and a cast of single digits. I am not
the sort of comforting soul who sits and listens and offers you tea.
(What seems like a thousand years ago, when I had the Great Nervous
Breakdown of ‘07, I remember saying something to the effect that I had
realized that if I had myself as a friend, I would have been screwed,
because I was useless at that kind of thing. And a buddy of mine from my
college days, who was often depressed, wrote me to say that no, I
wasn’t that kind of person, but when we were together I always made her
laugh hysterically and that was worth a lot too. I treasured that
comment more than I am entirely comfortable admitting.)
But I can
roll a joke along the ground until the end of the world if I have to.
And increasingly, I think that’s what I’m for in this life. Things are
bad and people have died already and I am heartsick and tired and the
news is a gibbering horror–but I actually do know why a raven is like a
writing desk.
There’s a post going around right now claiming that Trans Lifeline is a scam that exists to harm vulnerable trans youth. This is false, and much of the “evidence” is fabricated.
Much of it comes from a site called Kiwi Farms, which functions as a sort of base of operations for 4chan-style online harassment campaigns against marginalized and vulnerable people. Over the summer, Kiwi Farms launched a harassment and misinformation campaign intended to discredit Trans Lifeline. This included creating social media accounts to pose as trans people who’d had bad experiences with the lifeline and spread fabricated stories. (Notice that the Twitter account linked in the post is a bot that was only active for a few weeks in August, and that many of the other links go directly to Kiwi Farms.)
The line about the founder showing up at someone’s house refers her reaction to the harassment campaign: locating the person who runs Kiwi Farms and going to confront him in person. Her “vague threatening posts” were in response to being doxxed and having threats directed at her and her family.
Is Trans Lifeline unable to answer every call they receive? Yes. I’ve witnessed it happen. This is because Trans Lifeline is a small org struggling to fill a massive need for services, not because they’re all sitting around ignoring the phone. And I don’t doubt that some people have had bad experiences with Trans Lifeline operators. However, the project’s flaws result from a lack of resources – which is why they’re fundraising to hire more staff and provide better training for volunteers.
And about their post-election day blog post? They’ve since updated it to read “rumors that eight or more trans folks died” in light of the information that the list may have been fabricated.
Stop spreading misinformation, especially when lives could be at stake.
holy fuck yea that post had almost every single link go to kiwifarms i feel like a complete ass for not checking before reblogging god damn
That post fell wrong/off to me, especially the “mentally ill people shouldnt be in charge of helplines” part and the part abt not calling emergency services. Im glad to get confirmation.
Some good news for y’all. The ACLU won a victory the other day in Flint Michigan. What do you want to bet that the cost of having to supply residents with clean water will inspire change pretty quickly?
YES. Everyone’s reporting these as ‘protests against Trump’s election’ but the ones I’ve actually SEEN HAPPENING are protests against white supremacy, against homophobia, and for planned parenthood and community diversity.
Black Freshmen At University Of Pennsylvania Receive Racist Messages Depicting Lynchings
A number of black freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday received multiple messages via a mobile group messaging application containing graphic racist imagery and racial slurs.
The students were added to a GroupMe account titled “Mud Men” that contained “violent, racist and thoroughly repugnant images and messages,” the university said in a statement about the incident. The school added that it is still trying to determine how many students had been targeted .
GroupMe is a mobile app in which users can add people to a group chat and then send them photos and messages; the UPenn students were added to the racist group without their consent. It remains unclear how those responsible for the group obtained the contact information of the freshmen, and university officials declined to comment on the matter.
Screenshots of the group chat posted to social media show a series of vile messages, including a photo depicting lynchings with “I love America” written below it. Another message came in the form of a calendar invitation to a “Daily lynching” event set to Friday’s date, with a statement reading “Never be a n****r in SAE,” a college fraternity. The profile picture for the group, which appeared to have been altered, showed an African-American man wearing an orange prison jumpsuit.
Adrienne Hopkins, a 28-year-old MBA student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who had seen the messages, told The Huffington Post that the name of the group changed throughout the day, and that at one point it was called “Trump lovers.” Hopkins also said she believed the individuals sending the racist messages had political motivations, because they had usernames that were variations on “Barack Obama” or “Trump disciples.” Some messages contained other racist slurs and Trump-related images, she said.
According to the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, in a group chat message titled, “Trump is love,” an individual wrote “dumb slave.” Another individual posted a photo of the Donald Trump campaign’s signature red hat with the words, “GRAB THEM BY THE P***Y,” the newspaper reported.
Hopkins, who is black, said the mood on campus was deeply somber and students felt “uprooted” by the racist messages. For many, she said, it was the first time they had been confronted by such explicit racism and vitriol.
“It was really sad to see their faces, they were crying,” Hopkins said, her voice cracking. “It was a reminder for them that no matter how much education you obtain, no matter the riches you amass, there are some people who will view your humanity as not worth the same amount as theirs.”
Please, list me all of those female architects, scientists and great minds that male architects and scientists ripped off. No, really, I am curious to see all of these female inventors and pioneers you’re speaking of.
Ada Lovelace – Founder of scientific computing, the world’s first computer programmer. Modern computers as we know them wouldn’t exist without her innovations.
Queen Seondeok of Silla – Silla was one of the three kingdoms in Korea’s Three Kingdom period and Seondeok was its first reigning Queen. She is well known for setting up the first astronomy tower in Asia and for founding several Buddhist temples.
Cecilia Payne – Discovered what the sun was made of. Was then prohibited from publishing her work. Henry Norris Russel republished her work as his own and received all the credit.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – Discovered the first pulsar. Anthony Hewish took credit and listed her a non involved assistant, he had nothing to do with the discovery. Not only did he receive all the credit, he received the Nobel prize.
Lise Meitner – Co-discovered nuclear fission and her male colleagues refused to name her in their publication. The men won the Nobel Prize, and she received no credit.
Nettie Stevens – Discovered chromosomes determined sex, when she sent her work to a man for peer review, he published a book of her work passing it off as his own and named her a technician.
Marie Curie – Noted Nobel prize laureate (first lady to earn 2), discovered radium. Barred from many prestigious male dominated academic organizations like the French Academy due to being a female. She was demonized and attacked by men all her life simply for being superior to men in the field, and men in general.
Marie Van Brittan Brown – Co-invented home security surveillance that is the precursor of home security systems today. You wont hear her name in history class, not only is she a woman, she is a black woman. ERASED by nasty white men LIKE YOU.
Lucy Terry – Another historical black woman, erased by neo-colonialist white men. This young lady was a teenager when she composed the first known work of literature by an African American person.
Mary Shelley -Invented science fiction. She literally invented a genre of literature, she was a teenager when she wrote her first piece. Across the northern American continent. While she was pregnant.
Sacagawea – An indigenous American (Lemhi Shoshone) who led Lewis & Clark across the northern American continent. While she was pregnant.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – feminist, suffragette, civil rights activist, founded the ACLU
Sarah Parker Remond -worked to desegregate schools and end slavery. Also noted physician- but you wont read about her in your white history books because she is black. Its like you white dudes just threw together some shitty fan fiction and called that history.
Hedy Lamarr – came up with an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary for wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. She invented your wi-fi in addition to being an actress. SUCK IT.
Vera Rubin -Rejected from Princeton because she was female, went to Cornell instead and discovered dark matter while earning her PhD. Went on to make contributions that your simpleminded white male self couldn’t begin to fathom.
This list is just a taste of what women have accomplished. Women invented the core technologies that make civilization possible. This is a not a feminist myth, this is what anthropologists KNOW. Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school, or not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Hell, some of these women were legally deemed property, a fraction of a human being.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Catherine the Great, Queen Christina of Sweden, Anacaona of Hispaniola, Hypatia of Athens, Aspasia of Thebes, Dido, Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Nzhinga of Matamba, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine of Spain, Queen Isabella of Castille, Florence Nightingale, Boudicca of the Picts, Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise of Paris, St Theresa of Avila, Theodora of Constantinople, Queen Sybila of Jerusalem, Queen Catherine de Medici, Mirabai of India, Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Murphy, Rosa Luxembourg, ArchEmpress Maria Theresa of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire…
…..
Did you want more? Those are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
aww you put in mirabai :)
and of course…from the sciences…rosalind franklin, jocelyn burnell, ester lederburg, LISE MEITNER, mathilde krim, and countless, countless others (did you know that menten of michaelis-menten was a woman?); these are just from the west; this doesn’t count women elsewhere who are trafficked and raped from birth instead of being allowed to explore their potential in the sciences. here’s a list of indian women overshadowed in the sciences. if women’s potential in the sciences were fulfilled and nurtured and credit duly given then it would probably change the world as we know it overnight.
Of course! Theology was a major area of philosophical study, and from what I read, she was very knowledgeable And any woman who survives three assassination attempts (iirc? I know there was more than just the one) is p badass. Also women have always had a place in the sciences. We were the first computer programmers, telephone technicians and medical professionals (rural women figured out how to prevent smallpox hundreds of years before Germ Theory or the concept of inoculation was a thing). Haven’t died of smallpox recently? You’re welcome. <3
You ladies are amazing! All this history, our history off the top of your head!
Thank you both, this is exactly what I was trying to convey to this ignorant dudebro. Who has yet to respond, btw.
Also, to throw in some of my other favorite ladies that I don’t see listed so far: Simone de Beauvoir, Émilie du Châtelet, Princess Elisabeth of the Palantine, Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, Emmy Noether… I could go on and on. All sorts of brilliant ladies who directly influenced men we cherry pick from history (Voltaire, Sartre, etc.) or whose accomplishments we’ve forgotten despite their value have existed throughout time, everywhere and every place.
Oh look, more erased women who built civilization as we know it! What would women do without men to steal our discoveries and take credit for them? IDK thrive, probably
This beautiful Native American woman… Brave and true… Fighting for her land, for her people, for her children. And by the way, Dakota Access Pipeline nearly completed. The construction has reached within a half mile of the Missouri River, which flows into Lake Oahe.
Their pain is real and Native Americans need our help. Dressing in Native costumes on Halloween won’t change anything, they need our voices. The state oppression must be ended.
WE WILL NOT GET OVER IT!
#NoDAPL
This is so vile and disgusting I actually felt the urge to regurgitate while reading this.
