Snow | late 20s | they/them | bisexual | autistic | Jewish | EST. Author, artist, and historian/linguist. 15+ years in fandom and Tired of bullshit. Multifandom multishipper who still loves gen content, some political and other irl stuff too. Some nsfw, some triggering stuff, all tagged. Antis, trolls, and other troublemakers are blocked and reported on contact
Hey non-Jewish leftists and progressives who consider yourselves allies to Jews or, at a minimum, not antisemitic: now is an exceptionally great time to step up
This is shockingly similar to Henry Ford — i.e. an automotive mogul seen as an innovator in the general public uses his fortune and outsized influence to establish a large media presence and spread antisemitism.
There are some important distinctions, but nothing that makes me feel better about the situation.
1. At its height, Henry Ford’s publication, “The Dearborn Independent,” had a circulation of 900,000. The largest circulation in America at the time was 950,000.
While it was certainly influential, it wasn’t unmatched. In comparison to Musk’s 140 million followers, Ford reached a relatively small number of people.
2. Ford marketed explicit antisemitism, which eventually led to the downfall of his publication — you’ve probably heard of “The international Jew” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
However, as with most antisemites (on both the right and the left), Musk hides behind the thin veil of dog whistles and oversights, leaving a layer of barely-plausible deniability.
3. Ford was eventually forced to publicly apologize after he made the mistake of attacking Jewish attorney Aaron Sapiro for more than a year, until Sapiro eventually sued Ford for libel (i.e. he fucked around and found out lol). Ford eventually lost the case and was forced to publicly apologize (his apology was written by associates and his signature on it was reportedly forged). The magazine was shut down soon afterwards.
While I can’t predict the future, something tells me Musk’s obfuscations and the current political climate will allow him to continue to operate with impunity. Dancing around the issue allows at the very least for greater longevity of your bigotry (say it with your chest you coward).
Despite everything, Ford was able to secure his position in history, albeit with some, um, unfortunate footnotes and the occasional caveat being mentioned.*
All in all, this feels very similar to Trump copying David Duke’s run for the Louisiana legislature, but that’s a story for a different day.
* some additional footnotes and caveats:
- Hitler quoted Ford in his infamous book
- Ford was a notorious union buster
- Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, the highest honor a foreigner could receive from Nazi Germany, with personal congratulations from Hitler
- After issuing the aforementioned “public apology” in 1927, Ford said that he would like restart the publication of “The International Jew.” In 1940. 13 years later.
- It’s just my personal opinion, but we probably shouldn’t honor literal nazis, but whatever
- To this day, no one at my synagogue will buy a ford car. I don’t know if this is the norm in other places, but I imagine that it’s not uncommon.
- Yes, I’m aware that nobody explicitly praises Henry Ford anymore, and everybody knows what a shithole he was. While “Henry Ford hated the Jews” is a common refrain, specific knowledge of his hatred is lacking, and I think it’s important to point to explicit hatred in the past, because hatred is normally hidden nowadays and needs to be identified outside of the group receiving the hatred.
I’m sure all you Tumblr users have heard by now about the changes being made to Tumblr’s ecosystem so that the site can make more money. And I’m sure most of you are as uneasy as I am or, in fact, are angry about the proposed changes.
The reason they need to make more money is simple: Tumblr is $30 million USD in debt.
For this site to run and for them to pay employees, the site needs to generate revenue.
This place maybe a hellsite but it’s our hellsite. We are still here because we actually like it here. Besides, the other social media sites are crashing or will crash soon. Where else would we go?
Now, I did some research. There are at least 300 million users and over 500 million blogs. One of the cheapest things to buy on the Tumblr store is the crab package you can gift to another blog, which is $3 USD.
If each and everyone of us buys a crab package, we get to keep Tumblr alive and kicking. @oracleoutlook suggested that we make a holiday of it on July 29th. It seems to have resonated with people. Others have also asked for that to extend to August 5th, as some people don’t get paid til the beginning of the month.
Many people have already agreed to celebrate July 29th as Crab Day, a day of posting crab memes and gifting crabs to other users. And if you cannot afford to buy crabs, that is a-okay! Participate in the crab memes. Who would pass up the chance to make and reblog memes about crabs, after all?
This hellsite is ours. Let us remind them of that.
Trans Missourians on HRT, call your doctor as soon as possible and get a 90-day supply or as much as they’ll give you.
Lots of us are going to have to relocate or go through costly and/or illegal channels to acquire HRT now.
I invite trans people in MO to add their payment links this post. We desperately need support. We need people to give a shit right now. This is life-or-death for many of us.
Here is a link to the diy hrt wiki. It has a lot of information for getting hormones without a prescription. There isn’t as much stuff for getting testosterone but it has a lot of information for estrogen and it’s a good place to start.
on the announcement that Disney+ is removing a plethora of shows and films from its service, please read these tweets from Willow writer John Bickerstaff. this is not a tax writeoff like Batgirl, because these projects have already been released. this is a move designed to cut off financial support in the form of residuals, and break the spirit of the strike. here is the deadline article that lists the films/shows that will be removed.
as always, donate to the entertainment community fund, vocally support the WGA online and irl, or join a picket in a major US city if you can. let them know they can’t keep getting away with things like this.
My guys it is starting to work, I’ve seen some people I know complaining about the writer’s strike and turning against them because their favorite shows and/or movie got put on hold. Please do not be fooled like this, this is exactly what the corporations want. It can wait, I promise you will find other things to focus, but writers need this.
Reword every headline they put out. “Due to not wanting to give writers money, Marvel has shut down pre-production on…” You can end this strike any time you want to, pal.
“Marvel too cheap to pay writers, production shuts down”
“Disney too greedy to pay residuals, deletes shows/movies”
“Studios cut corners on safety, production values, writing, acting, etc. in order to make more money; won’t share with anyone below CEO level”
Honestly, if CG artists unionising kills the use of CG in films, I don’t see a downside.
This post has riled a lot of people. For what it’s worth, my point wasn’t that technology is bad and Edison was a witch, my point was that any industry that can be killed by unionizing should be.
i keep seeing jokes about Imagine Dragons showing their support by performing for WGA strikers, like about how bad their music/singing is and jokes about how it’ll hurt the movement and normally i’m neutral to the hatred of popular/used to be popular things, but GOD. as a queer ex-mormon i so badly wish more people knew what this group and what specifically
Dan Reynolds
has done to support queer kids
also while im here Enemy (the arcane song) is also about queer mormon kids <3
I absolutely hate how people took a kind, progressive, good band and decided to give it the nickelback treatment.
(Frankly I don’t even necessarily think they’re bad, sound wise, either. But I guess music is subjective so if you disagree that’s your right, just don’t treat it as some kind of unilateral truth)
My cousin (who is a christian fundamentalist and a massive homophobe) once mocked me for liking the band as an atheist because they’re religious, and I just went silent because I didn’t feel like getting into an argument, but
Like
Dan Reynolds has been an outspoken ally for a while.
Gee, it’s sure a funny coincidence he and ID got branded as cringe. I wonder what motive someone could possibly have to do so.
I got the honour of seeing Imagine Dragons live, and, a. they’re fucking GOOD what the FUCK especially live, like their music style has changed over time and it’s fine to not like that but the live performance was just so passionate and wonderful, and b, I can’t coiuldn’t take any pictures of it but one of the guitarists has a trans flag guitar with a trans flag strap and it’s so fucking beautiful and I nearly cried when I saw that clear and open support in such a subtle way. I’m glad someone else put into words how fucking annoying that attitude has been towards them with the strike.
How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:
Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.
Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I’m a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.
Let’s get something out of the way first: Fallout’s portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of “tribal” to the claims of them being “savage” and “uncivilized” mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas’ narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House “rehabilitated” tribals to create New Vegas’ Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you’ve got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn’t too great, given that two Native characters are marked “Caucasian” despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn’t accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)
As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.
Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.
Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian,American Indian/Native American,Inuit,Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant “half breed” so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)
As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.
Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn’t start dropping Cree words.
Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we’re at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.
Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).
Names
Surprisingly, we don’t have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven’t chosen a last name from another tribe.
Baby name sites aren’t reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren’t Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.
You may also hear “spirit names” because that’s what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let’s dive into that for a moment.
The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.
A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don’t follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)
If you’re not Indigenous: don’t try this. You will be wrong.
Legal Terms
Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and “Sioux”. How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.
For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.
Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. “What, so they can’t even drink?” You might be asking. That is not what I’m saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm’s research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.
Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as “childlike” for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.
Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.
“But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?” Cherokee don’t and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves “defending their lands as the Indians did”.
Also, don’t make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.
Our lands are not cursed. We don’t have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.
Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum
Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to “breed out the Indian” in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.
However, this isn’t how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.
Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of “Indian” the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.
Here are twotumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.
However, if you aren’t Indigenous, don’t bring up blood quantum. Don’t. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.
Cherokee Princess Myth
“Princess” was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.
Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a “Cherokee Princess” had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.
For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.
Religion
Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren’t Indigenous, that’s smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.
Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.
Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn’t be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.
Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope
Now we’ve come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar’s Legion and Joshua Graham.
(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to “civilize” tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)
We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man’s Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.
As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don’t need to. People of Color can save themselves.
Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: “Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others.” (Positive, here, is referring to “benefits” for the colonizers. Indigenous people don’t consider colonization beneficial.)
Moving on, don’t sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent “undesirables” (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn’t officially considered a crime.
The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.
It wasn’t until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn’t automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.
I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.
Topics to Avoid if You Aren’t Indigenous
Child Separation. Justdon’t. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.
I’ve already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm’s research, remember that it isn’t inherent to us.
For our final note: remember that we’re complex, autonomous human beings. Don’t use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don’t reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.
Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.
This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.
I keep telling people this, but SO much of American culture and particularly the ‘Protestant work ethic’ is derived from Calvin’s view that everything in life is predestined by God - that winners and losers are already chosen.
Those Puritan pilgrims who came here seeking ‘religious liberty?’ Hardcore Calvinists who were so obnoxious they were kicked out of their home countries.
And they use this belief to excuse the worst behaviors in American history: Racism, colonialism, genocide, segregation, patriarchy, prejudice against minorities, slavery, economic disparity, low wages, no public healthcare, systems that punish the poor and disabled while rewarding the already wealthy; attempts to impose theocracy and infiltrate democratic institutions to wreck them from within; the constant stream of made-up moral panics; the parochialism and fear of outsiders.
The belief, common among many conservatives, that humans are inherently evil, is why they distrust anything from government that advances the common good and instead praise church-based charity.
I pointed this out in a Discord server I’m in and thought Id share here:
Bob Iger announced that Disney is going to absorb Hulu, and Hulu will no longer exist next year. All shows will move to the Disney+ app.
Disney also announced they were going to remove shows and movies periodically from their streaming services.
I believe both of these moves are because of the Writers Strike.
Disney knows its going to lose the strike. There is too much public support. Specifically, the WGA is going to win writers getting more residuals from streaming.
So if Disney takes shows off of streaming, they dont have to pay the writers the residuals.
They are going to use excuses like “not enough funding for the server capacity” or “not enough views to warrent keeping the show”. These are BULLSHIT. Its all greed. Its only GREED.
Pay attention to what happens in the following weeks.
And keep supporting the writers’ strike.
This is similar to what happened with HBO - new owners merged two streaming services, and all of a sudden there wasn’t enough server capacity for all the shows somehow. A total lie.
Time to start downloading EVERY Hulu show. Hoist the colors high.
And yell at your congresscritters about antitrust laws.
Download everything that isn’t a major franchise. If its name isn’t Marvel, Star Wars or The Simpsons, assume it’s getting canned and get a copy in as high quality as you can store. Eventually your copy could be the only one.
This.
This is especially true for the weird stuff you’ve never heard anyone else mention. Lost media is a tragedy regardless of what it is.
But don’t take a random tumblr’s word for it, here’s a verified source
The town of Hay River and the Kátł'odeeche First Nation (KFN) in Canada’s Northwest Territories are under evacuation due to an out-of-control wildfire that began on Sunday (May 14, 2023) and has already destroyed homes.
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