I joked a few minutes ago about how in internet discourse anyone over 25 is a “queer elder” but come to think of it most of these young discoursers don’t even believe such a concept exists. Gay men who watched their entire friends groups perish to AIDS are “privileged cis gays,” older trans women who use dated terminology to describe their own experiences are problematic, elders are just a conservative old guard to rebel against, and anyone over thirty who speaks to you at all must be a predator. The first time I heard the phrase “okay groomer” online, it wasn’t coming from self identified conservatives but from tiktok teens reacting against leather at Pride. You guys are ignorant and uncultured and proud of it!
Love seeing something from TikTok and going “girlie that is literally what led to the downfall of the Papal States”
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
nothing makes me blush quite like a michael leonard painting
just the way these paintings sit in the center of some precarious intersection of mundanity, voyeurism, casual nudity, and unassuming sexuality. each inhabits one of those moments where you steal a glance and then quickly force yourself to look away, except now the moment is lovingly rendered as a lush, warm vignette that invites you to look longer because of its very nature as a painting. the tension, the drama, the mystique. dare i say… exquisite
It is much easier to hate nazis and conspiracy theorists than it is to love Jews.
It is much easier to puff out your chest against a hypothetical, obvious villain than it is to help the real people they exploit.
I gently challenge allies to ask themselves today: “Where am I directing my energy? Am I putting in the work to show the world how much I hate nazis, or am I putting in the work to uplift Jews and Jewish voices?”
Not queer as in “queer is not a slur” but queer as in “I do not give a fuck if its a slur, you don’t get to censor my identity regardless”. Queer as in “I HOPE my identity upsets you”. Queer as in “my identity is not only a slur but a threat”
queer as in “every word we have used to describe ourselves has been turned around and used against us. so no, i will not surrender another word to those who wish to shame us out of existence.”
it is past time we jettisoned the useless false dichotomy of introversion vs. extroversion and just accepted that everybody has a minimum amount of social interaction, failing which, they get really weird. and everybody has a maximum amount of social interaction, exceeding which, they get really weird. these levels are different for everyone, for a variety of reasons, and have no moral dimension. and that is all.
why would you come to this club and just shoot Myers & Briggs like this
IMO, it’s healthier to conceptualize it this way. So instead of being like “why am I being so weird? I’m an introvert, I like being alone!” you say, “Ah, I must be supergluing googly eyes to my bathroom faucet because I haven’t met my minimum threshold of social interaction and I’m trying to fill that void with these tiny pieces of plastic. Maybe I should invite someone over for dinner. They sure will be surprised by all these eyes watching them while they poop.”
