munin_and_hugin

yennasollapoghirai:

people getting offended about purposely misspelling benedict cumberbatch’s name while complaining about how annoying it is to spell quvenzhané wallis 

• Reblogged from deliciousKaek

• May 17, 2013, 7:26pm

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werewolfpussychiapet:

native-detroiter:

marfmellow:

aboutexhaleprivilege:

The best thing is that these people are complaining that white people ruin everything and are the devil and only steal everything from PoC while 99% of them sits in a country that wouldn’t be in the modern state it is now if not for white people, while using a machine made by white people running a operating system made by white people blogging on a website made by white people .

I’m sorry but who built America nigga? LMAO YO GETCHA HISTORY TOGETHER BABY!!

lol at the bolded. hooray for oppression and capitalism!  good job guys.

I’m going to keep this brief and undetailed since I’m out of time and on my mobile phone, but first things first—I am an engineer. I’m going to assume you don’t know much about engineering at all, because I otherwise can’t imagine why you would write what you have. A working machine is not built by one person, its mechanisms not drawn from thin air. Development is a long process—occasionally punctuated by strokes of genius and happy accidents—undertaken by multiethnic (and usually multinational) teams, and the final product is a synthesis of theory and ideas that form something new (and hopefully useful). So it’s very odd to me that you would attribute things like “operating systems” and “computers” to “white ingenuity” as if that is logical by any measure. Do you know the history of microcomputing at all? The teams behind the ISA systems bus or the one gig processing chip? How about MCM or the development of modern RAM? Modern PC display? The development of the colour computer? Does Wang Laboratories sound familiar to you? Perhaps doctors An Wang or G.Y. Chu? Surely Mark Dean and IBM do. I know they do, because I know that you are well-informed about the development of modern computing and the countless engineering teams that put all their time, sweat, effort, and research into it.

I’m also curious to this “modern state” you attribute to white people. Is it this Western civilisation built by five hundred years of violent exploitation set to end, within the century, in global ecological catastrophe? Because even then, you at least surely recognise that it was built on the ruins of civilisations far more complex, and in many ways, more advanced. You at least surely realise that technological catalysts like the Textile and Industrial Revolutions would have been literally impossible without black African labour; that Western infrastructure was built both literally and physically, by black and Asian individuals, sustained by Native American agricultural practices (yes, including Europe, which accrued wealth by establishing colonies), was created financially by both riches stolen from the continents of Asia and Africa, and an economic system that relied entirely on the fabulously lucrative trade of human bodies, subjugation, barbarism, and slaughter.

Or did you mean before that—the European Renaissance that was only made possible by Moorish intervention in Europe?

Or did you mean before that, when Europe was experiencing its “Dark Ages”—a time of unprecedented death and disaster marked by violent superstition, sectarianism, and lack of hygiene—when, meanwhile, empires of the rest of the world—the Sahelian kingdoms; the caliphates of North Africa; the empires of Mali, Ghana, and the Songhai; the sultanates of Sudan, the Ethiopian and Somali city-states; the polities of the Americas; the universities of West Asia and Africa; the Song, the Mongols (and countless many more) were all in top form?

Or did you mean before that, during much-lauded Greco-Roman era…whose academic achievements were far outmatched by their West and South Asian counterparts, and whose greatest thinkers were educated by Africans?

I mean, seriously. Please show me this elusive age of white nobility and white achievement, because I’m keen to know where in history it ever existed. You won’t be able to. Do you know why?

Because that simply isn’t how civilisation works.

If you really think the world was built brick by brick by whiteness, or that the humans were pulled out of the primordial ooze by white men, you just aren’t as clever as you think you are. Like the process of engineering, the development of humankind has been one long synthesis of cultures, and the (not always peaceful) trade of languages, knowledge, and ideas. At no point in history did humans sit on their laurels with hands over their ears and eyes, ignorant of the world around them and entirely isolated from one another. It’s why you can find ancient Chinese coins in East Africa, West African bones in the Americas, Polynesian chickens in South America, Arab accounts of Asia and Africa, Central Asia vestiges in Eastern Europe, black Africans all throughout European history. The world is not stagnate. It never was. Your entire argument is facile.

Do you know why people on this website are angry?

Because it’s about the only place where you can express that anger and be (relatively) safe.

Do you know why we are angry in real life?

Because these last five hundred years have seen unprecedented cultural destruction, murder, ethnic cleansing, and subjugation in the name of greed, all sustained and justified by the construction of race. And nothing has changed.

 

You can write legislation to “guarantee” rights. Lands can be rewon in litigation. A few languages can be relearnt by handfuls of individuals. But you can never repair a culture. You can never repair a metaphysical holocaust, revive those lost to genocide, retrieve forgotten languages, customs, modes of thought, identities. Not only have they been destroyed, they have been actively and systematically been written out of history.  How much of human development has been lost? How many lives do you think this earth has forgotten? How many ghosts wailing beneath cotton fields and rail ties do you think had wisdoms passed down by countless generations or held intellectual properties cultivated by thousands of years?  A concept in its purest form may be as immutable as mass and energy, but like all Forms they are meaningless if there is no one to access them. Not even ideas are infinite; they disappear when no one is there to think them into existence. Gods die like everybody else. Whole perspectives destroyed. Thoughts, feelings, concepts, entire ways of viewing the world, all wiped out through magical feats of destruction. All this, by writing a few words in a book. Like magic.

Do you understand that? Is isn’t us who constructed this system, but we are still the ones dying because of it, erased because of it, dehumanised. And that’s worth owning. You should be as angry as we are, that anyone should have to endure centuries of and current suffering for arbitrary reasons that were installed by terrible legacies left by people who committed horrific acts of evil…whether those people were your forebears or not. Unless you don’t recognise those actions and the actions of the present as evil at all, and you genuinely don’t care about the welfare of your fellow human beings, you should be as angry as we are.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if you really don’t care or not. This five-hundred year system that’s been in place is unsustainable. And honestly? It will probably ultimately destroy itself and take all of us—and you—with it.

(Source: the-pietriarchy)

• Reblogged from Quietly Thinking Aloud
• Tags:
  • someone did it for me!

• May 17, 2013, 7:22pm

        617 notes

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THERES ONLY 116 SAND CATS LEFT ON EARTH

thegreenwolf:

nightbloggerkurloz:

thorsgoddess:

twingeneticist:

THERES

ONLY

116

SAND

CATS

LEFT

ON

EARTH

I’M GOING TO CRY

NO

WHAT

SOEMHTING MUST BE DONE OH MY GOD NO

No. DO YOUR RESEARCH. There are around 200 or so in captivity. There are plenty more in the wild (here’s an estimate of around 11000), though they are CITES II (which allows limited hunting) and the IUCN has them listed as “near threatened”, which is just one step below “least concern”. 

• Reblogged from The Green Wolf

• May 17, 2013, 6:58pm

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Irene “The Ham” Adler. [SPOILERS BELOW]

irresistible-revolution:

tvandcomplaints:

yeahbeeswax:

tvandcomplaints:

OH! Can we talk about how the opening seen of “The Woman” is the cringiest thing ever? I literally turned away from the screen making a barf face and said, “OK, she’d better be evil because if this is real I might not be able to continue watching the series.”

I was having an extreme antipathy for Irene’s character in her first scenes not because I was hating her, but because she was been portraited as one of my most hated tropes of all time, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. And worst: she was a mix between MPDG + Damsel in Distress + a kind of Mary Sue (the Mary Sue trope is problematic in it’s concept, but I’m talking about general narrative devices here). 

I loved how the show deconstructed these 3 tropes spetacularly. 

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl was totally deconstructed when the woman who showed true love to the protagonist and was interesting, smart, optimistic and different… was just faking it and her real self is a manipulative evil person, cold, professional who doesn’t give a damn about anybody and just wants to get the job done. I find interesting how Holmes described her in “Risk Management”, as “extremely optimistic” and her optimism made him create a connection with her, made he see optimism in his own life. Wow, what a twist. Her optimism - one of the principal traits of the MPDG trope - was just an illusion.

Interesting too how Holmes describes Irene in a idealized way but when we see the flashbacks she is an ordinary person with sophisticated taste and knowledge in her area of expertise - not very different from any professional. Usually MPDGs are ordinary but treated as “uber uniques” when they are an extremely stereotyped view of what femininity is like. Irene was this idealized view of what femininity is in Holmes head and it just fell apart when he realized that she was much more than an “unique beautiful smart optimistic sexy girl”. 

The Damsel in Distress was played by her. She pretended to be weak and vulnerable because she knew Holmes would protect her out of a sense of duty and this was his weakness. She wasn’t vulnerable at all and just played with the whole concept for her own sake. 

And the Mary Sue. She was presented as a fallen angel, all in white (the color of love and purity), vulnerable, everyone admired her (in the flashback she is known as a top restorator), Holmes fell in love for her in 5 minutes, has a long and floaty hair and even has birthmarks making a constellation (as you know, birthmarks in significant shapes are a trait very used in Mary Sue’s to show how ‘unique and cute’ they are). 

When her mask starts to fall, the birthmarks are the first thing to show her true side. One of her ‘unique and cute’ characteristics. She starts to wear black (the color of evil), she is no longer ‘sweet and sanguine’, she puts her hair back and loses all of her dream-like characteristics - in appearance and in personality - showing that Irene Adler’s persona was an illusion, a constructed type that doesn’t exists in reality. Moriarty is the real person, with a real personality and real objectives. 

I could go on, but you got my point. I loved this, I really did. 

I was really suspicious about the whole approach of Irene’s character, but I’m very satisfied with what we got. 

Yes. I was recoiling so hard but when she reached up and sort of clawed his face, that’s when I realized the whole thing was a cynical construction and I was kind of in love with it immediately. She played the perfect woman for him, smart and hyper sexual and just funny enough and just quirky enough. I went from cringing to salivating in that moment.

I’m just continually impressed by the Elementary writers’ self awareness. I think it’s safe to say the show is all about subverting tropes: the sidekick trope, the white boy genius trope, and now the MPDG trope, the  Womanly Muse trope and just trope after trope after trope. I’m still digesting the way Moriarty/Irene PLAYED Holmes like a fine-tuned violin, deploying a feminine image to do so; it’s bloody brilliant.

• Reblogged from state of grace
• Tags:
  • elementary
  • elementasquee
  • elementary spoilers

• May 17, 2013, 6:54pm

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irresistible-revolution:

cakespeare:

FISTBUMPS TO EVERYONE WHO INITIALLY SPITE-STANNED ELEMENTARY. A+ return on investment y’all, crack open a cold one with me.

• Reblogged from state of grace

• May 17, 2013, 6:48pm

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