today’s depressing sight on reddit: a woman being downvoted into oblivion for saying that there is, contrary to what the other posters claim, a vast array of books authored by women prior to 1950 and that, in fact, at one point in time in Western Europe, the novel was seen as an emasculating form and thus avoided by men.
how_to_suppress_womens_writing.txt
Had I expected this to get more than two notes, I would have linked a pdf of How To Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ instead of working under the assumption you all would know what I’m referencing, so here’s the text, belatedly.
”[Denmark] is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, [and] the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun; they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.
That the ideal of ‘toughness’…was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they ‘had always been against it’–or claimed, as Eichmann was to do, that their best qualities had been ‘abused’ by their superiors. (In Jerusalem, he accused ‘those in power’ of having abused his ‘obedience.’) …The atmosphere had changed, and although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.”
Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
I want everyone to go read that link about Danish resistance, please, because it’s a very good example of what to emphasize:
As a descendant of resistance members I do not want you all to get this twisted:
It came to blows. Often. There were shoot outs and people had guns. My family stored many of those guns. They sabotaged everything. And they bombed their offices, usually when no-one was in them. These were thousands of communists and anarchists and farmers and random working class folks and they had rifles. Publicly shaming people who associated with the Nazis was a big part of it too and just making life difficult for them on a day-to-day…
Denmark is the only country honored collectively at Yad Vashem as the “righteous among the nations.”
”[Denmark] is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, [and] the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun; they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.
That the ideal of ‘toughness’…was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they ‘had always been against it’–or claimed, as Eichmann was to do, that their best qualities had been ‘abused’ by their superiors. (In Jerusalem, he accused ‘those in power’ of having abused his ‘obedience.’) …The atmosphere had changed, and although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.”
Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
I want everyone to go read that link about Danish resistance, please, because it’s a very good example of what to emphasize:
Economic disruption
Independent press
Defense of marginalized people by word and deed
The countries most successful at protecting their Jewish populations from German extermination were not those with the strongest military (USSR) or most successful violent resistance (Yugoslavia, Greece). In fact, the regions of greatest violence quite naturally suffered the greatest death toll.
It was in Denmark and Bulgaria, where communities refused point-blank to collaborate in the Holocaust, that Jewish citizens were most successfully protected.
Even the Nazis, even at the height of total war, had trouble dealing with principled nonviolent resistance by a large community.
Well, the Danish and Bulgarians were able to focus on rescuing Jewish people because the Nazis were ruling with an extremely light hand in those countries. Nazi rhetoric viewed Danes as racially pure, and Germany wanted to win Denmark over. Bulgaria, in the meantime, had joined the Axis of its own free will, and was thus similarly well-treated. Non-Jewish people had enough freedom, and governments had enough autonomy, to take action on behalf of Jewish people.
Many countries weren’t given an option of whether or not to collaborate in the Holocaust. Poland is the best example; the Polish resistance was violent because the Nazi occupation was bent on murdering as many people as possible – Jews, Gentiles, they didn’t really care. The mission was to eliminate Poland. This being the case, non-Jewish Polish resisters had very little time to focus on helping the Jews, because they were fighting for their own lives. Had they attempted nonviolent resistance, they would have been slaughtered in even greater numbers.
Whether violent or nonviolent resistance is more appropriate seems, to me, to depend on what the oppressor is bringing. If they come under a pretense of compromise, offering collaboration, nonviolent resistance will work – not that violent resistance won’t also work, but there’s opportunity for a wider range of tactics. If they come with violence, they must be met with violence.
I hate that SEPTember OCTOber NOVember and DECember aren’t the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months.
Whoever fucked this up should be stabbed
If I recall, they did used to be the corresponding months. It was just when Roman leaders Julius Caesar and Augustus came into power, the months July(Julius) and August(Augustus) were added, thus throwing off the numbering of the calender.
Good news, though: whoever fucked it up did in fact get stabbed.
if you call someone to witness and they refused to show up, you are legally entitled to stand outside their house and scream, but only every third day
you can sell your son into slavery once or twice, but after the third time he doesn’t have to put up with that shit anymore
no wailing allowed at funerals
also you can only have ONE funeral per person, don’t get greedy
if your neighbor’s tree has a branch hanging into your yard, you can legally cut down the entire fucking tree
however, if some of your neighbor’s fruit from his dumb tree falls into your yard, he can legally come into your yard to snoop around get it
if you call someone to witness and they’re too sick or old to get to court themselves, you have to provide a cart for them to come in, but it doesn’t have to be, like, a nice cart if you don’t want it to
they are indeed real! they’re from the twelve tables, a roman law text so old that it’s hard for even people who are well-versed in latin to read by the text is archaic (also half of it is missing but whatever)
while we’re on the subject, here are some more good ones that i forgot to put in:
the penalty for writing a song slandering someone (it’s very specific on the song bit) is getting clubbed to death
if you hurt someone (or if you just sort of inconvenience them) through magic arts, the penalty for that is also death
however if you maim someone’s limb through normal limb-maiming processes you just sort of have to figure things out between yourselves
if there’s a road right next to your property, feel free to build a fence around it to prevent people from driving into it, but if you don’t build your own fence then tough shit
if you waste all your money you can legally be prevented from wasting even more of your money
if you’re a woman and you live with a man for a year, that technically makes you married, unless you spend three successive nights at somewhere other than his house, in which case you’re not married i guess
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Kids who grew up in the 90s manga boom weren’t old enough to get scanners and the like, so the first webcomics were Newspaper comics based on nerdy things.
Like General Protection Fault, which was an even nerdier version of Dilbert.
And, of course, 1999′s Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade’s success would inspire a million “two dudes on a couch playing video games” clones.
A dude saw Penny Arcade and convinced his artist friend to make a comic with him. He wanted a standard 4-panel comic just like in the newspaper. But his friend was a huge weeb, and wanted to have four vertical panels like in Japanese 4koma comics. So they found a compromise format and started a comic in 2000.
Megatokyo had a lot of video game jokes early on, but quickly morphed into being about anime stuff, which happened to be pretty popular. In lieu of video game jokes, it introduced some light sex humor, a woman with huge boobs who wanted to fuck the gamer dude, and a sentient android that everyone accepted as normal because it was a silly comic and a lot of early-2000s internet humor tended towards randomness.
So you had these two really popular webcomics with elements that had obvious appeal: Dudes on a couch playing video games, sexy chicks with huge boobs who wanted to bang the MC, robots, and a weird square format that happened to be easier to read at lower resolutions. But could these elements be combined? One man dared to dream they could. And in 2002 he made his dream a reality
Given what a joke it’s rightfully since become, I feel the need to emphasize that CAD was one of the big early webcomics, and helped inspire it’s own share of imitators. It’s probably fair to say that it was more influential than even Penny Arcade, in that it had more elements that could be slavishly copied and passed around.
(If you ever wondered why it took so long for anyone in Questionable Content to acknowledge the weirdness of all the robots, it’s because random unexplained robots were really popular in webcomics in the early 2000s)
Meanwhile, it its own little isolated corner of the internet, Bob and George was popularizing “sprite comics”, a genre that consisted of itself,8-Bit Theater the next year, and a trillion shitty comics not worth mentioning. These were less influential than the Penny Arcade ==> Megatokyo ==> CAD ==> Questionable Content progression, but even this early the tiny webcomic scene was start to grow and split. Questionable Content was much more grounded than other webcomics at the time, and it’s rom-com plot was a big step away from the gag-a-day strips, but its influence was dulled because a bunch of other comics were starting to spring up. In the early 2000s, everyone was reading the same things because there were so few comics worth your time, but by the mid-2000s you were starting to see some quality.
You were also starting to see people getting serious about monetization. Scott McCloud’s dream of selling your comics for ten cents a pop and making bank in volume had crashed into the twin peaks of “most comics are also good and they’re free” and “credit cards charge fees, idiot”. Some of the better, more respected comics started joining together into one site with all of them that you needed to pay to access, kind of like how Slipshine works now except without the porn.
This didn’t work out financially, and it also meant that the best webcomics of the mid-2000s like Digger and Narbonic had really small audiences because you couldn’t read them without paying a fee first. Advertising was less useless then than it is now, but times were tough for the webcomics business in the pre-Patreon days. But some webcomics realized that they could find a profitable niche by appealing to new audiences. Instead of the straight white boys who made up the general webcomics audience, they’d reach out to a new demographic:
Perverts!
And, more specifically,
Furries!
Because furries really wanted furry content, and they were willing to pay for it. Pay a lot for it. Furry cheesecake comics prospered, and even though they didn’t have mainstream success, they were pulling it the big bucks compared to your average video game comic. People were starting to realize that 1000 hardcore fans was better than 100,000 casual fans, and a lot of comics started searching for a niche. (This is kind of related to webcomics becoming more progressive/inclusive a bit later, but that’s a whole ‘nother essay that I’m not the one to write)
These webcomics were pretty tame PG-13 stuff like you’d see in the shounen manga its creators were fans of, with nary a nipple to be seen, and a lot of them would die out in favor of straight-up porn.
In the late 2000s, art students realized that making a webcomic was a great way to build a portfolio, and we were hit with the Great Boom Of Webcomics By People Who Can Actually Draw. In 2003, that TwoKinds art was not only acceptable, it was top-tier for a free comic
By 2006 it was not the top tier
By 2008 it was no longer acceptable.
The world of webcomics became flooded with high-quality work by actual artists who’d gone to school and everything. The first generation of webcomics creators no longer ruled as the comics everyone read. Doctor Fun, the first-ever webcomic, ended in 2006. So did Narbonic and Mac Hall. Applegeeks, one of the most successful PA clones, ended in 2010 alongside 8-Bit Theater. Ctrl+Alt+Delete ended and rebooted to the interest of no one.
While in 2001, a bad artist could build a following just by updating regularly and slowly improving, that became a lot harder to do as the Bush Administration ended. There were too many brilliant artists making great content for someone to break onto the scene with simple art or sprites. And one day a lot of people gave up on ever being able to make a successful webcomic if their panels didn’t look like a magic the gathering card.
And it just so happened that that day, the 13th of April 2009, was a young man’s birthday…
You guys, as a US labor historian, let me tell you: It is actually very significant that US union membership actually increased in 2017. Like it probably won’t get huge play on the major media outlets, but that is a big fucking deal. That hasn’t happened to any significant degree since the 1970s. Unions have pretty much only declined since 1976. But unions added over 200,000 members last year, most of whom were under 35. That is a massive deal. That is building people power. That is a huge reason to be optimistic.
Keep it going. Join a fucking union y’all. iww.org
One of the most powerful moments I experienced as an ancient history student was when I was teaching cuneiform to visitors at a fair. A father and his two little children came up to the table where I was working. I recognised them from an interfaith ceremony I’d attended several months before: the father had said a prayer for his homeland, Syria, and for his hometown, Aleppo.
All three of them were soft-spoken, kind and curious. I taught the little girl how to press wedges into the clay, and I taught the little boy that his name meant “sun” and that there was an ancient Mesopotamian God with the same name. I told them they were about the same age as scribes were when they started their training. As they worked, their father said to them gently: “See, this is how your ancestors used to write.”
And I thought of how the Ancient City of Aleppo is almost entirely destroyed now, and how the Citadel was shelled and used as a military base, and how Palmyran temples were blown up and such a wealth of culture and history has been lost forever. And there I was with these children, two small pieces of the future of a broken country, and I was teaching them cuneiform. They were smiling and chatting to each other about Mesopotamia and “can you imagine, our great-great-great-grandparents used to write like this four thousand years ago!” For them and their father, it was more than a fun weekend activity. It was a way of connecting, despite everything and thousands of kilometres away from home, with their own history.
This moment showed me, in a concrete way, why ancient studies matter. They may not seem important now, not to many people at least. But history represents so much of our cultural identity: it teaches us where we come from, explains who we are, and guides us as we go forward. Lose it, and we lose a part of ourselves. As historians, our role is to preserve this knowledge as best we can and pass it on to future generations who will need it. I helped pass it on to two little Syrian children that day. They learnt that their country isn’t just blood and bombs, it’s also scribes and powerful kings and Sun-Gods and stories about immortality and tablets that make your hands sticky. And that matters.
just moving along like everyone else 