“At the core of capitalism there is not only the symbiotic relation between waged-contractual labor and enslavement but, together with it, the dialectics of accumulation and destruction of labor-power, for which women have paid the highest cost, with their bodies, their work, their lives.”
– Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
The US is the only industrialized country that does not have paid maternity leave. This is not normal.
IKR, all those businesses being forced to pay women who choose to leave the workforce. It isn’t normal.
IKR all those pregnant people being forced to choose between their job/career and their desire to have children because no one respects pregnant people or cares about their health or wellbeing.
Pregnancy is an extremely stressful ordeal and it can take more than 6 months to fully heal. In order to keep their jobs, many, many people are forced to go back to work with severe injuries (internal bleeding, cervical tears, bruising) and are expected to suck it up or lose their only source of income for them and their newborn child. The majority of people on welfare in the US are 1. children and 2. single moms. The discrimination and disrespect this country shows towards pregnant people is directly responsible for their living in poverty. Cis men will never experience this dilemma, so they will never acknowledge just how much pain and stress pregnant people suffer.
You don’t want the businesses to suffer, but who suffers in their place? The poor and the powerless that they exploit. Pregnant people suffer because those businesses choose to drop their employee as soon as they are no longer useful. Pregnant people are not “leaving” the workforce, they are on maternity leave, which means that they want their jobs back after they are healed. Every other industrialized country has managed to grant paid maternity leave without their economy falling into pitiful shambles, so I really, really, really doubt that this issue would actually hurt businesses.
You know how we are having kind of a crisis here because not enough children are born? Guess what happens when women can’t afford to have children if they want a career or even just to support themselves and they know they won’t have any social support to raise a child…
And if you wanna care about businesses so much well guess how well businesses thrive when you don’t have young people who can work and consume goods…
If we make all employers pay for maternity or parental leave, then they’ll try to hire fewer prospective mothers/parents. And enforcing anti-discrimination laws is hard.
In Hungary you can take up to 3 years of maternal leave (reduced pay of course), and they have to keep your job for you when you come back. (Last I looked anyway.) Consequently, a LOT of women are complaining about how the first question on a job interview is usually: “do you have/plan to have children?”. Just a datapoint.
At this point I’m convinced that nothing about the moral aspects of property values, cost of living, and the alleged right to never have your neighborhood change will ever make sense in any degree whatsoever.
So, what if the only way to change density enough to reduce housing costs enough to matter was systematic use of Eminent Domain to seize houses to demolish and rebuild?
My point is that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have any consistent opinions on it. Sorry, I guess that was kind of ambiguous in the OP.
Some property developers in Melbourne just bulldozed a historic pub they bought for five million dollars a few months back. The building was protected by a heritage overlay, so they demolished it on the sly over the weekend. They were told to stop by the council on Saturday, then came back on Sunday to finish the job anyway! Presumably they were also the ones who lit a suspicious fire at the premises earlier, so their unlawful demolition also destroys any evidence of deliberate arson, which is handy. They even deregistered the demolition company on the Monday morning to confuse the issue.
The steepest fine the council can give is $200k plus ordering them to rebuild the facade, which would still allow them to build student apartments on the site and make a handsome profit. Some people would like to forcibly confiscate the land as an example to other developers, but I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening, amusing as it would be.
Anyway, a lot of law students used to drink at that pub so it’s going to be interesting to see how it turns out.
Monotype create Noto for Google: An open-source typeface family for all the world’s languages
With a goal of encompassing every written language, Monotype and Google have released Noto as an open-source typeface for everyone to use.
Noto is one of the largest typographic projects ever undertaken; more than five years in the making, covering over 800 languages with over 100 writing scripts (some never digitised before), each with a harmonious look and feel.
Tofo is the nickname used to describe the blank boxes that appear when a computer or site lacks font support for a particular character. The ambitious brief from Google to Monotype of “no more tofu” which gave rise to the type family’s name.
“Our goal for Noto has been to create fonts for our devices, but we’re also very interested in keeping information alive,” he adds. “When it comes to some of the lesser-used languages, or even the purely academic or dead languages, we think it’s really important to preserve them.” Bob Jung, Google internationalization expert.
Intense Research
Rising to this enormous challenge Monotype coordinated an intense research effort, partnering with researchers, designers, linguists, cultural experts and project managers around the world.
The more obscure scripts required significant research to ensure the scripts adhered to their traditions and rules. Experts were consulted and direct feedback was sought from communities using the scripts.
For the Tibetan face, Monotype conducted in-depth research into a vast library of writings and then enlisted the help of Buddhist monks to critique the font and make adjustments to the design.
Sketches for Adlam (left) and Tibetan (right)
Using Noto
Not only will the breadth of languages covered by Noto expand the availability of information to more readers and preserve rare writing systems, the typeface is also “a digital workhorse”. It powers the text shown across Android and Chrome devices and importantly because it has been released as a suite of open source fonts it can be used any where.
Download Noto from Google here. and read more about making Noto at Monotype.com
The weirdest thing about the theater to me is that it wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century that the norm of “shutting the hell up and watching the performance in silence” developed.
Until then, people would just talk as loud as they wanted. Usually, there was a large “pit” without seats for standing only, and people would come in there to sell stuff like snacks and drinks. It was more like watching a race in the infield than watching a play.
And this didn’t apply only to “lowbrow” stuff like Shakespeare. Italian operas were the same way. People would boo singers they didn’t like off the stage. If they did like a certain aria, they’d shout for an encore, and the singer would come right back on and sing it again. They would shout at or heckle the actors while they were on stage. It was just chaos.
Going off that last post, I actively like Middle Earth, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. But given that all three have blatant Jewish stand-in races, the Dwarves in Middle Earth (short, big noses, obsessed with gold, speak in a semitic-inspired dialect, diasporic), the Quarians in Mass Effect (diasporic, use Jewish-inspired naming conventions, say the Shecheyanu prayer, unfairly distrusted, highly studious, your token Quarian party member has a Hebrew Name), and the Elves in Dragon Age (the City Elves were literally inspired by Ghetto Jews in Medieval Europe), I feel particular frustrations in how those races are portrayed, though the Quarians less so than the other two, if only because Tali’Zorah is such a great character I named my cat after her.
Of course, those are hardly the only examples. There are the Darcsens in Valkyria Chronicles, which is a fantasized recreation of WWII. There are the Ferengi in Star Trek, G-d help me, who are mostly played by Jewish actors in Deep Space 9. There’s frickin’ Watto in the Star Wars Prequels (Thanks, George.) There are the Goblins of Gringotts from the Harry Potter series, which J.K. Rowling has decided to apologize for by making two of the protagonists in Magic Beasts and Where to Find Them Jewish.
I could also write long posts about how numerous witch and vampire characters are based on European antisemitic beliefs, but I’ve already done that several times.
>I feel particular frustration in how those races are portrayed But why?! All those races are portrayed in a good light.
>Dwarves Dwarves are shown as skilled, honest, and hard-working. They’re seen as heroic and worthy of renown, and equal to the other races in terms of their contributions.
>Dragon Age elves Dragon Age elves are the best kind of elves: the kind that are actually people instead of being a race of prissy marry-sues.
>Quarians Quarians one of the better races in Mass Effect (especially compared to the krogans and salarians), and they have one of the best party members.
>Darcsens Literally did nothing wrong. Oppressed through no fault of their own and the game makes it pretty clear that all the awful shit said about them are just lies used to perpetuate oppression.
>Ferengi “The Ferengi are us. That’s the gag, the Ferengis are Humans. They’re more human than the Humans on Star Trek because they are so screwed-up, and they are so dysfunctional. They’re regular people. And that was the fun of that.”
>Goblins Shown as being equal in capabilities to humans, and that their oppression is unjustified. Besides, they’re based mostly on Georgist thought, rather than Judaism.
Stop seeing antisemitism everywhere where there is none.
OK. Let me go through these.
Tolkien Dwarves: the whole thing with Thorin’s Gold Sickness was built on antisemitic tropes about Jewish greed.
Dragon Age Elves: SPOILER******* The Dalish are proven to be false and their version of ancient Judaea fell by their own hand rather than by the Roman equivalent Tevinter which runs counter to our real history. ********SPOILER
Quarians: I said they’re not as problematic as the Dwarves or Dragon Age Elves. However, their exile is their own fault.
Darcsens: Not really problematic. I’ll give you that one.
Ferengi: This one’s not really debatable. They’re straight up stereotype that they gradually added depth to over the course of DS9, but not so much in TNG.
Goblins: I think you’ve confused Goblins with House Elves. The Goblins of Gringotts are squat, greedy bankers with large noses.
“Our plan to deflect the asteroid was a long shot, but we knew it would work. Refugees from doomed timelines were pouring into our reality.”
-QuietPineTrees
The Nobel Prize winning Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, was once asked whether he believes in the existence of extra-terrestrial beings. He answered:
“Of course, they are already here among us: they just call themselves Hungarians.”
At that time Fermi worked with such unearthly intelligent people as Leó Szilárd, Tódor Kármán, János Neumann, Pál Halmos, Jenő Wigner, Ede Teller, György Pólya and Pál Erdős. And originally it was Szilárd, who answered Fermi’s question “…the extra-terrestrials should have arrived here by now, so where are they?” Szilárd jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars and the group of prominent scientists was then named “The Martians”.
Precisely because I think people sometimes ARE writing these things to make political statements, and that usually when they do the result is a bad book.
“Fantasy is set in another world, even those fantasies that take place on Earth, since they include concepts that most people would not accept seriously in the Earth that we know it…. A world that is exactly like our own except for those aspects that the author wishes to add to further her point… is a fake and false construct. A world that is supposedly other but includes the exact same political structures and struggles and messages as our own is likewise false.
Embrace fantasy with your whole heart, or don’t write it at all. What’s the point of making your heroine have an evil husband and then discover that she’s really a fighter for women’s rights in a fantasy world whose history doesn’t support that kind of thing? Why not set it in the real world, the one you’re probably more familiar with anyway?
I am sick unto death of feminist fantasy, environmentalist fantasy, religious fantasy (both Christian and Wiccan), family rights fantasy, and any other fantasy that thinks the politics of our own world are more important than building something Other and Alive.”
I’m not saying don’t write about politics if your political opinions inspire your work. Hell, astute readers (by which I mean anyone with two brain cells to rub together) will quickly be able to guess what political issues were on my mind when I wrote my novel coming out in December. I was concerned about some recent-at-the-time events and I said so. In a book. Whee.
But to go with that book: the characters aren’t bisexual because Diverse Books, they’re bisexual because I am, and because I wanted to set a story in a world where that’s unremarkable. Not yell at people that Bisexuals Are Here!!! but show people what a setting comfortable for us would be like, just because it would be nice.
If I’d been pressured into making them bisexual, then I’d be yelling about it. And I don’t think that would make it feel real.
I don’t like the idea that some people have “trouble imagining” diverse characters. But I don’t know if that’s even true or not. I am not inside their imaginations. And I don’t like the idea of supposing I am, just so I can be mean.
So all I can really say is that I think there are books where the author is making a point because it’s part of the story they’re telling, and then there are books where the author isn’t really writing a book, they just heard that fiction might win some people over.
Don’t make that last thing the reason your dragon shapeshifts into a brown trans person. People will notice.
But by all means write brown trans dragon shifters, if that’s what you meant to write about.
So, I don’t disagree with most of your response here, but I’m bothered by this:
“So all I can really say is that I think there are books where the author is making a point because it’s part of the story they’re telling, and then there are books where the author isn’t really writing a book, they just heard that fiction might win some people over.”
We both know that writing a novel takes an enormous amount of effort and creative investment, and is probably among the least efficient ways to persuade people of your cause (especially if it’s a self-published novel advertised mostly on your tumblr, which is what a lot of these Bad Identity Politics Books are).
I think it’s deeply unfair to say that people who aren’t very good at writing subtle and nuanced political messages don’t sincerely care about the story they’re writing. As someone who used to write this way, I can tell you that including ham-fisted political messages was never an indicator that I didn’t truly care about my characters or my story. Rather, it was an indicator that I wanted to say something Meaningful and Important in addition to telling a story about my characters. The correct response to people who clearly desperately want to write something Meaningful and Important isn't “you’re not real writers.” It’s “here are some better ways to include Meaningful and Important themes in your work.”
Point taken.
It is a huge investment to write a book, absolutely. And anyone who does is really good at sticking to a task, bare minimum.
But my thing isn’t that I think it’s a Terrible Thing to write bad message fiction. My thing is that I think it’s a terrible thing to DEMAND THAT PEOPLE write bad message fiction, and go around saying things are crappy if they aren’t bad message fiction. Like the really common idea that if you don’t write POC or gay people in your specfic, you “can imagine” dragons and space ships but “cannot imagine” minority members.
Like, it’s a handy way of pointing at a problem, but it actually immediately falls apart when you point it at an individual person – especially if you’re just not seeing behind a computer screen and you missed that that person is gay, or something, and perfectly capable of imagining someone like themselves in space, just not doing it right this minute.
I mostly just really don’t want this sold to people as a way you have to write. I also don’t want it sold to people as good writing, which I think it sometimes is, what with all the “you have to make clear that your narrative condemns this character’s Problematic Stuff.”
Like… sure, you can do that? And if you’re writing something really didactic you probably will do that. But stories should never have to be like that to be okay.
And that’s my worry. That we are equipping people to make propaganda and are not actually being honest with them that that is what we’re asking them to do.
That someday they are going to feel really betrayed because, well, sure, a propagandist is a writer! Yes! But there is a lot more to being a writer than that, and I fear we are making it hard for these people to see that.
Which means stunting them, even if they are actually talented.
Oh, for sure, I definitely think that pressure to write bad message fiction exists and is bad. I do think there’s a distinction between encouraging people to have a diverse cast of characters and telling people their narrative has to Condemn Problematic Attitudes, and we should stop doing the latter but the former is probably benign.
(Anecdotally, I, personally, think that the “if you can imagine Fantasy Things but can’t imagine a diverse cast you should critically examine your writing” thing made my writing more interesting, but I can definitely see how it would come off as condescending).
I just think it’s bad to write talented people off just because they’re going through their Bad Message Fic phase, and it seems like we’re in agreement here.
Sidenote: How do you shapeshift into a trans person? I mean, you can get a body with an estrogen-dominant system and a Y chromosome and so on, but isn’t “trans” more a property of having been assigned a different gender at birth and then in some way transitioning? IDK, it just seems confusing.
The story behind the photograph dates to early April 1945, just a few days before the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. The Nazis were in a hurry to get rid of the inmates. Three train transports left the camp between April 6 and April 11, each consisting of about 2,500 prisoners. Their destination was the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Ultimately only one train reached the camp, after a few dozen of its passengers were killed in an aerial bombing by Allied forces. A second, later known as the “lost train,” traveled for two weeks back and forth between the lines of combatants, was caught in Russian-German crossfire, and finally came to a halt near the town of Troebitz, in eastern Germany, where the prisoners were liberated by the Red Army.
It’s the fate of the third train – actually the first of the three to leave Bergen-Belsen – the one in the photo, that is of interest to us here. Its passengers exited the camp’s gates on April 7, trudged 10 kilometers to the town of Celle, where they boarded the train. Among them were Jews from Hungary, Holland, Poland, Greece and Slovakia. Many of them were “privileged” prisoners who had previously been in the “special camp” at Bergen-Belsen: They had been selected by the Germans for future prisoner exchanges with the Allies.
…According to one version, the S.S. personnel escorting the transport had been ordered to destroy the train and drown the prisoners in the adjacent Elbe River if they came under Allied fire. However, Israeli writer Uri Orlev, another passenger on the train, wrote in his book “The Sandgame” that the German commander stated to the prisoners from the beginning that he did not intend to drown the inmates. He said that once the train reached the front lines, he would flee with his troops.
…According to [Aliza Vitis-Shomron one of the 2,500 people on the train], the Germans fled at night with the aid of the train’s locomotive, but returned before dawn. “They didn’t want to let the birds in their hands escape, even though the Allies had already encircled them on all sides,” she wrote. Orlev remembered that the Germans left behind two rather elderly soldiers to guard the Jews, and they were pummeled by the young people among the prisoners.
…Another woman on the train, Hilde Huppert, then in her mid-30s, recalled in her book “Hand in Hand with Tommy” (English translation: Yael Chaver and Reuven Morgan), that a jeep approached, “manned by four G.I.s with steel helmets coated in dust. They pulled up and approached us warily: a motley crowd of women and children together with a couple of men here and there, all clad in rags and tatters. We must have been a pitiful sight. ‘Who are you?’ they demanded. ‘Hello friends!’ we shouted back in a chorus [in English]. ‘We love you! We are Jews!’ They slipped off their helmets and mopped their brows. One of them pointed to the Star of David he wore on a chain around his neck. ‘So am I.’
Dr. Mordechai Weisskopf, a retired physician who lives in Rehovot, was a boy of 14 on the train. “The train stopped, the Germans fled and we were there without a guard, in the midst of the front, with artillery fire in the background,” he told me. “The joy that seized us at the sight of the American tank is indescribable. Suddenly, from, nonhuman slaves, we were transformed into free people. It was very thrilling, unforgettable. We saw American soldiers, and one of them shouted in Yiddish, his eyes flowing with tears, ‘I am a Jew, too.’ There was an outburst of joy that is hard to describe.”
The First Amendment protects CNN and the person mouthing off about politics on tumblr in equal measure. “The press” at the time the Bill of Rights was written more closely resembled Breitbart than the New York Times. Two tiered systems of rights, where the president can remove those rights, isn’t a “free press.”
“At the core of capitalism there is not only the symbiotic relation between waged-contractual labor and enslavement but, together with it, the dialectics of accumulation and destruction of labor-power, for which women have paid the highest cost, with their bodies, their work, their lives.”
– Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
The US is the only industrialized country that does not have paid maternity leave. This is not normal.
IKR, all those businesses being forced to pay women who choose to leave the workforce. It isn’t normal.
IKR all those pregnant people being forced to choose between their job/career and their desire to have children because no one respects pregnant people or cares about their health or wellbeing.
Pregnancy is an extremely stressful ordeal and it can take more than 6 months to fully heal. In order to keep their jobs, many, many people are forced to go back to work with severe injuries (internal bleeding, cervical tears, bruising) and are expected to suck it up or lose their only source of income for them and their newborn child. The majority of people on welfare in the US are 1. children and 2. single moms. The discrimination and disrespect this country shows towards pregnant people is directly responsible for their living in poverty. Cis men will never experience this dilemma, so they will never acknowledge just how much pain and stress pregnant people suffer.
You don’t want the businesses to suffer, but who suffers in their place? The poor and the powerless that they exploit. Pregnant people suffer because those businesses choose to drop their employee as soon as they are no longer useful. Pregnant people are not “leaving” the workforce, they are on maternity leave, which means that they want their jobs back after they are healed. Every other industrialized country has managed to grant paid maternity leave without their economy falling into pitiful shambles, so I really, really, really doubt that this issue would actually hurt businesses.
You know how we are having kind of a crisis here because not enough children are born? Guess what happens when women can’t afford to have children if they want a career or even just to support themselves and they know they won’t have any social support to raise a child…
And if you wanna care about businesses so much well guess how well businesses thrive when you don’t have young people who can work and consume goods…
If we make all employers pay for maternity or parental leave, then they’ll try to hire fewer prospective mothers/parents. And enforcing anti-discrimination laws is hard.
