if u ever wonder how europeans can rely on trains so much to travel thru entire countries
this is why
(312km/h is about 194mph)
? Yea is this not the same everywhere??
doesnt seem to be
Also, most areas in America don’t even HAVE passenger rail anymore
The automotive industry purposely tried to kill off trains here in America
Public transit in general if we’re being honest.
As an europeean, what the fuck america?
if you ever see something weird about america chances are it’s because some powerful industry decided to kill something that would have worked towards the public good for profit
hot take: the word “queer” exists as both a slur and an identity, and to say otherwise is erasure of both the struggles that people went through getting harassed/etc by people who called them that, and the struggles and activism that went into people reclaiming the word for themselves.
it’s called giving other people respect. if they’re uncomfortable with the term, then don’t force them to accept it, but if someone else is using it as an identity, don’t force them out of it. trauma is not an excuse to be an asshole
Something I think a lot of fantasy roleplaying fans don’t pick up on is that the reason many games’ depictions of orcs and other “monstrous races” get criticised for being racist isn’t just because they’re dark-skinned and evil.
I mean, yes, there’s that, but it’s also that a lot of the tropes that are associated with orcs and such in fantasy RPGs are literally eugenicist rhetoric – and, more specifically, anti-Black eugenicist rhetoric – with the serial numbers lightly sanded off.
Like, you ever notice how common the following elements are?
Being capable of using complex tool and weapons, but relying on raiding and pillaging to obtain them, not because they’re incapable of making them, but because they’re simply too
congenitally
lazy to do so
Having an intrinsic drive to despoil and corrupt the fruits of civilisation, and in particular, taking pleasure in destroying beautiful things specifically because they’re beautiful
Being treated as childishly superstitious for believing in evil spirits, even though such treatment makes no sense from a worldbuilding perspective because they live in a fantasy setting and evil ghosts are objectively real
Reproducing rapidly and reaching sexual maturity quickly, typically at an age when a human would still be a child, with great emphasis placed on the danger of them “outbreeding” civilised peoples if left unchecked
Lusting for the women of other species, resulting in all manner of twisted half-breeds; “heroic” members of their kind are typically drawn from these half-breeds, who must struggle constantly with their base natures
Seriously, a lot of this stuff is copied and pasted directly from 19th Century eugenicist screeds about the intrinsic inferiority of the Black race – they basically just scratched out the n-word and wrote in “orc”.
(And no, you can’t pass it off as folks imitating Tolkien without realising what they were doing. While Tolkien’s orcs undeniably employ racist imagery and stereotypes, there it’s mostly anti-East Asian stuff, not anti-Black stuff. The incorporation of explicitly anti-Black tropes into fantasy fiction’s depiction of orcs is a more recent development, and at least some of the folks doing it absolutely knew what they were up to.)
I really think Jackson is to blame for the recent anti-black bs with orcs, considering how he codes them.
And while Tolkien’s racism regarding orcs is specifically East-Asian directed, I do think there are elements of anti-blackness regarding his orcs as well. While he never came out and said it, there are certainly things I’ve seen and written about that can’t be unseen.
also, specific to tolkien - i read a quote from a letter (i think) where he literally said “yeah i described orc faces as east asian-looking specifically in order to show how evil and savage they are”, and tbh you don’t need to have read that obscure letter to know that. like how can you point at this body of work and go This Man Was In Fact A Heroic Anti-Racist
all of this is true but all of this has also been said by black frpg players for years including on this here website and somehow none of our posts got 5k notes lol
anyway modern fantasy gaming has its roots in the wargaming renaissance that started in the 50s, via gary gygax’s fantasy supplement for chainmail (a medieval themed wargame) and unsurprisingly given the subject matter that whole scene was intensely right wing conservative and almost entirely white males of the sort that fap to WW2 documentaries on the history channel. it’s really not coincidental or at all surprising the biases baked into it
Didn’t I write several posts about the depiction of orcs and other non human races in The Elder Scrolls, Warcraft, and even Guild Wars to an extent not only utilizing but NEEDING antiblu stereotypes in order to function? 🤔
This shit is old news we’ve BEEN trying to tell y'all this in several fandoms but nobody wants to listen to a bunch of moon crickets LMAO
“why can’t female heroes kick arse in heels” because it’s not practical and will literally snap your damn ankle you can scream weaponised femininity all you want but first off, you need to admit that they’re not an almighty symbol of empowerment, and secondly that if you do a job with a lot of physical activity in heels you’re risking your own safety. all these women fighting in heels on tv are going to end up seriously injuring themselves.
weaponised femininity is a concept made up in an attempt to get us to embrace the industries created to hold us back/profit from our insecurities so that we can continue to fit into the male expectation of what a woman should be and not question why we are forced to spend thousands on our appearance every year
just a small anecdote. I had a friend who worked in theater; she was the stage manager and an actress came to her in tears one day because the director absolutely refused to let her do a choreographed fight scene in less than 3 inch heels because “they’re platforms so you’ll be okay.” My friend, who is a woman’s size 10, brought her own heels in the next day and DEMANDED the director put them on and try the choreography before the actress did it. He finally agreed to change it, without putting the heels on.
so like I know you might think of “all those women on tv fighting in heels” as fictional woman who WOULD hurt themselves in real life, but its fiction so its okay…except those women are portrayed by real actresses who are actually fighting in actual heels, being directed by dudes who have never worn a pair of heels in their lives, alongside men who aren’t expected to constantly wear things that make their stunts 2x more dangerous than they have to be. Just a thought.
Men take “let’s see feminine women being badass” to mean “let’s see women impractically focused on their appearance in combat situations.“
That’s why I loved Black Panther even more Nakia took off her heels and used them as weapons and was running and driving around barefoot in that one scene
A number of stuntwomen have spoken out about getting injured on sets because the character is wearing heels and skimpy clothing that provide no protection or padding. It literally harms rl women.
The only way I wanna see a women fight with heels is if she takes them off and fights with them a la Mulan/Nakia style.
sorry i can’t hear the noise of male entitlement over the sound of Evangeline Lilly and every other woman sighing in frustration
They photoshopped the heels onto wonder woman. Not even Gal Gadot could fight in them, but it was so important to The Look™ that they frame by frame added them. Gal wore flats to the red carpet in protest.
“I’m laying there, scared enough, not wanting this done, telling her I didn’t want it done. All of a sudden I smell something burning. If I could’ve moved my legs I probably would’ve kicked her.”- Brenda Pelletier on being sterilized against her will
Brenda Pelletier checked in to Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon five years ago to give birth to her baby girl. She left, with her tubes tied. The tubal ligation procedure happened, she says, after she was pressured into it by hospital staff, while she was in a vulnerable state.
And as a Métis woman, Brenda Pelletier’s experience appears not to be an isolated case.
At least three other aboriginal women have come forward to say that they too were pressured to be sterilized at the Saskatoon hospital in recent years.
Ok but this is true!!! I was 19 years old when i went into the hospital to give birth to my first child and while i was laying in bed reading and signing consent forms i came across one that woukd give them.permission to tie my tubes. The nurse kept telling me i didnt have to read them all that they were all about my stay in the hospital and intake forms and when i began to read that particular form the nurse came to me laughed nervously and said well we put that in there just in case you wanted to get your rubes tied. I then asked if they always gave them to woman giving birth she said no, the doctor had asked for thematic be put in there “just in case” I didnt want any future children. The nurse then went on to ask me about my future and if i was really sure i wanted to have more children or not. Until my mom came intimate room to check up on me and the nurse then took all the papers from me and left. For the rest of my delivery the nurses refused to give me medication for the pain or an epidural saying it was too early for that and it might stop my labour. I honestly think they withheld pain medication and the epidural to show me how hard child birth can be. Afterwards when they were releasing me the nurse asked me again if i was sure i didnt want to get ny tubes tied. Which i said no to. She then went on and explained thaf if i did i woukd just have to make an appointment with my doctor and i would be in and out in no time at all. That is my experience with the Canadian healthcare system and being a native woman. It is wrong that anyone would try and force something like that on a 19 year old. Please share. Let it be known what is happening to native woman. We have rights just like any other woman and shouldn’t be pushed into suxh decision at such a young age.
Hey white folks with uteruses who do not want or should not have kids,
you know how you’re outraged about how hard it is to get a Doctor to agree to sterilize you even to save your life?
Guess what else they do? Double your outrage.
And those two issues are not unrelated. White supremacy pushes an idea of who should be having kids and who shouldnt. White, abled women are prioritized especially ones who arent poor, they should have many kids, to further white supremacy, while those deemed “undesireable” (people who arent white, people who are disabled, people who are poor and uneducated and especially people who are more than one of those things) should be kept from having children for the good of society.
So when doctors refuse to sterilize white, educated women who want it, they are functioning within the same thought process as when doctors sterilize non-white women against their will.
Since this article came out in 2016, a class action lawsuit has been filed by two of the victims.
The history of birth control in Canada is riddled with this racism and white supremacy. Some of the first women to get birth control? People of colour and poor white people, because non-white babies were a threat and if you were poor and white you were considered bad stock.
If you were reasonably well off and white, you couldn’t get birth control because it was considered your duty to pump out white babies of good stock.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise it’s going on to this day. Canada and women’s rights in Canada are founded on racism and genocide.
When somebody says that “a man likes to feel like a man,” all I hear is “A man likes to feel superior to you and it’s your job to make him believe it.”
Someone said this to me once, that a man needs to feel like a man, I replied “well I’m not stopping him” and had to watch this fragile creature try to explain to me that my strong personality could demean men.
Like, if I have to pretend you are a strong man and cater to that then clearly you’re not that strong dude.
“if I have to pretend you are a strong man and cater to that then clearly you’re not that strong dude.”
what exactly makes america the “best country” here? america doesn’t excel in anything.
I was gonna say aren’t we like #1 in a bunch of bad stats? Like aren’t we the top for rape and abuse?
Up there for percentage of the population imprisoned. But I’m pretty sure we’re #1 in military spending. It and advertising are pretty much our only industries, after all.
The US military spends more than China, Russia, France, India, UK, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.
women’s body hair is attractive and if you disagree you’re wrong
if you disagree it’s actually because you’ve internalized the unrealistic body standards created and perpetuated by men in order to facilitate the idea that women are hairless beings but like you’re still wrong
As a woman, I gotta say, nerds and “nice guys” create the most awkward situations.
Ive been given a diamond bracelet by someone who I only knew by their D&D name.
Another guy gave me a birth stone necklace after I’d just had a break up and just couldn’t understand why I needed time
Ive come home from a late night of studying to find a guy sitting beside my apartment door at 11pm. He’d “been waiting for hours” and “just wanted to see me.” (I don’t have to tell you how scary it is to see a grown man in an empty hallway when you are all by yourself.)
Ive had a guy send me 1000+ text messages…which started as a conversation about cartoons, turned into a love confession, then turned into him calling me a bitch
Not to mention the ones with jungle fever whose wet dream is not only a “nerd girl” but an “exotic nerd girl.” (“exotic” is just a cute word for fetishizing women of color)
And ALL of these men were self proclaimed “nice guys.” But what they don’t understand is that what they consider “nice” is usually creepy. You are a grown ass man. Waiting outside for hours is horrifying to women. Giving gifts and expecting sex in return is not a “nice” thing to do. I just wish “nice guys” would realize that the things they think are chivalrous and romantic are straight up horrifying and sociopathic. They think their loner status deserves some kind of sympathy and I should be greatful for the attention. But if they saw things from the female perspective they’d realize that that kind of behavior is literally stalking and bribery
me who try to overwhelm you with expensive gifts right off the bat are showing a classic warning sign of future abusive behavior
i'm aether and i love to sin. (she/her)
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