When Greece is not Ancient: Colonialism, Eurocentrism and Classics

Everyday Orientalism

by Katerina Apokatanidis

cover picture: Temple of Dionysos, Yria, Naxos, Wikipedia

As any survivor of an ancient ‘civilization’ knows, colonialist views on the meaning and interpretation of that ‘civilization’ are still very much alive. European and settler colonies-based scholars (termed Western throughout this post) in the Humanities have often ignored the continuity of a cultural heritage that stretches back to ancient times. Numerous instances from my limited experience in the field come to mind when I think about the Eurocentrism and colonial entanglements within the academic discipline known as Classics.

The most recent of these consisted of having to sit through a talk, which, at the end, compared modern, nation-state geopolitics in Greece with a line from an ancient Greek writer, and found the former lacking compared to the ancient example. The talk was organised by the University of Toronto’s Archaeology Centre. As way of conclusion, the speaker chose to…

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Cancelling Richard Stallman?

Richard Stallman’s creepy emails are not just very obvious Red Flags that apparently so many of you apologists can’t notice, it’s also the fact that Stallman HAS SEXUALLY HARASSED WOMEN FOR DECADES AND GOT AWAY WITH IT.

Seriously,
“Isn’t taking RMS’ autism into account a form of “abelism” by the campaigners?”

Most of the critics of RMS and the Free Software Foundation acknowledge that the vast majority of Autistic people aren’t creeps, and if anything Stallman benefits from Male Privilege as any non-Autistic, ie, he’s gotten away with loads of rotten behaviors for a very long time, with the help of NT men and establishments.

Thirdly I’ll add here it’s insulting as Hell so many of you only pretend to care about Neurodiversity when a man is accused of and or being a creep, support of woman with ASD being harassed by men is never even considered.

Anyhoo, posts like this are why so many who aren’t white cis male are alienated from the Open Source communities, especially when it comes to ones that are associated with the GPL and GNU.

eerielinux

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.]

This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2021/cancelling_rms.gmi

If you have any interest in FLOSS (Free and Libre Open-Source Software), you know who Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS) is: As the founder of both GNU project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), he’s quite an icon to many. In 2019, a scandal around deliberate (?) misunderstanding of what he said regarding one detail of the Epstein affair ultimately lead to him stepping down as president of the FSF. Now in March 2021 he returned to the organization’s board of directors. The latter fact was reason enough for quite some people to start a turmoil again, pressing for his second removal with an open letter.

Now personally I don’t like RMS much. I believe in permissive licenses and prefer those over copyleft in general…

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Is Alexander Reid Ross the CEO/dad of antifa?: On contagion, shades of grey, and the three-way fight

A great response to one of the worst Neopagan publications ever made.

Cautiously pessimistic

In recent years, there have been a number of controversies on the left over the subject of “red-brown alliances”, those areas where some right-wingers attempt to recruit from, or actively cooperate with, sections of the left.

There have been many people involved in arguing against any such alliances; one of them, Alexander Reid Ross, has now gone on to working for a centrist “anti-extremist” think tank linked to various US state figures. To be clear, anyone working for the Network Contagion Research Institute has definitely crossed a line; whatever “our side” is, Ross has definitely ceased to be on it. Some of those who Ross has criticised in the past, notably Max Blumenthal, the Assadist and frequent Tucker Carlson guest, have seized on this development as a way to attempt to discredit everything he’s ever written and all the positions that he’s been aligned with.

This argument…

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I was a teenage Luddite — Freedom News

Two books are on the black desk of my teenage bedroom. Age fifteen, I pick them up, hold them, put them back down. George Orwell’s 1984, of 1949 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, of 1932. A third one is invisible. I never owned it, reading it on the internet in a secret act in…

I was a teenage Luddite — Freedom News

Stanning the Unabomber is really fucking gross, thumbs down, Freedom News.

Tarot suits and social class

Anthony Louis - Astrology & Tarot Blog

Our modern tarot deck appears to have its origins in a playing card deck used by the Mameluk Egyptians and brought into Europe after the Muslim forces invaded and conquered the Iberian peninsula.Muslim soldiers used these cards to play a game called Nã’ib, or the game of lieutenants, and the Spanish language still refers to playing cards as naipes.

The Mameluk deck had court cards consisting of a malik(king),naib malik(viceroy) and athaim naib(deputy), which became the King, Knight and Page of European decks. The French then added the Queen to the group of court cards, producing a hierarchy in order of King at the top, followed by the Queen and the Knight, with Page at the lowest rung.

Mameluk cards, image from wikipedia

The four modern suits were patterned after the suits of the Mameluk deck: Chalices, Scimitars, Polo sticks and Dinars (coins)…

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Man eats 41 tacos in one sitting, is the hero we need — The Takeout

Mark Gdd (yes, that’s how his name is spelled) is a stay-at-home dad from Albany, New York. But in his spare time, he is what I call a superhero, and what the rest of you call a competitive eating champion.Read more…

Man eats 41 tacos in one sitting, is the hero we need — The Takeout

I fully expect a misogynist double standard against any woman who’d even attempted this.

WordPress Alternatives

It might take awhile for me to come up with a list that isn’t terrible, but I swear to God, I don’t think we’d be having nearly enough of these problems if the Telecommunications Act didn’t pass, along with the past few decades of deregulation.

Anyway, I might go for a free service for awhile until I can be sure I can pay up for a high quality hosting service on the regular.

Buyer Beware for those looking for Alternatives to WordPress

There is alas a big business that has buying up MANY other blogging and web hosting sites, and scamming people out of money. The Small Orange incident was unfortunately just one of many.

This is a list of businesses that are owned by the Endurance International Group, plz avoid them at all costs, but if you have the misfortune to have anything hosted by them I strongly recommend alerting your Bank, reporting them, and getting a new Debit and or Credit Card, like many other online scams they will keep charging you if you do not.

As Full As Possible List of EIG Companies and Brands With Details (Beware EIG Hosting!)

Say Hello to the WordPress Block Editor — The WordPress.com Blog

At the beginning of June we’ll be retiring our older WordPress.com editor and transitioning to the more recent (and more powerful) WordPress block editor. Want to know how this may affect your site and what you can expect? Read on. If you’ve launched your WordPress.com site in the past year and a half you may […]

Say Hello to the WordPress Block Editor — The WordPress.com Blog

Thanks, I hate it and now I have to seriously look into switching blogging services.

I do however got one last suggestion, how about testing changes on end users first before you start forcing this on everyone? There are whole industries that depend on TESTING so stuff won’t break or crash or confuse people, especially for UI’s, you guys should look into that.

The new WordPress Block editor sucks now

If this continues I am moving on to a different service, but it’s hard to find good free alternatives, at least aesthetically.

Blogger seems okay, but it’s ran by Google, I’m not impressed by Wix, SquareSpace has no lower end alternative.

Evernote though does look like a possibility, but I need to be sure anything I sign up with is in it for the long term.

Grayzone Boosts Fascists and Right-Wingers

FASHBUSTERS

One of the most pressing tasks for left-wing forces under the Trump administration is to fight the right—politically at the ballot box, physically in the streets, and ideologically over the airwaves and on the internet. Yet the Grayzone WordPress blog and its founder Max Blumenthal have done just the opposite by boosting right-wingers, racists, and fascists.

Here are just a few examples:

Max Blumenthalboosted Paul Antonopoulos after he was fired from the pro-Assad outlet al-Masdar having been outed as a Nazi thanks to his posts on the StormFront message board. Antonopoulos’ website is named South Front and its similarity to StormFront is no accident yet Blumenthal promoted it anyway. In Blumenthal’s error-riddled bookThe Management of Savagery, he cited pro-Assad Syrian Kevork Almassian as a source; Almassian works for the far-right anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD) and equated the suffocation of George Floyd by a cop with…

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The future of this site

I’ve been thinking about deleting this account, but not until I register a few new blogging accounts covering separate topics, but I haven’t even astrologically elected them yet.

In other news, the past two months or so have made me think a LOT about the ethics and lacktherof in the Occult community, its misogyny, and where to go from there. It’s certainly helped confirm my already low opinion of a few too many people in the metaphysical communities, and worse.

Antiblackness in (Service of) the Archive: A Statement

Stitch's Media Mix

Huge chunks of transformative fandom are currently playing the most actively antiblack game of telephone in the world.

And I’m the subject.

What will I be by the time they’re done? I’m already being compared to trans exclusionary radical feminists despite being nonbinary, accused of holding grudges against people I don’t know and have likely never interacted with, and being slandered literally every single time that someone else mentions me as an author to read.

And all because I write about racism in fandom in a relatively sharp tone.

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History Channel Claims to Stand Against Racism, Hasn’t Watched Own Shows

In the wake of the massive protests that have rocked the nation this past week, corporations have issued strong statements in favor of justice and …

History Channel Claims to Stand Against Racism, Hasn’t Watched Own Shows

Michael & Me

Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Following the release of the steaming dogpile of a movie, “Planet of the Humans,” a lot of people have been surprised to hear the details of Michael Moore’s reputational harakiri.

Have to say, I was not.

But you see, I knew Michael Moore before he was, you know, Michael Moore.

There’s been a barrage of criticism of the film, much of it simply pointing out gross factual errors,anachronisms, and boneheaded omissions.
But, perhaps especially in light of the embrace the film has gotten from the fossil fuel lobby, the climate denial media machine, and the white supremacist right wing, Moore felt he hadto puff his environmental credentials in a recent op ed.

“I founded the Huron Alliance, a Flint-based anti-nuclear group. We organized massive demonstrations to block the building of the Dow Nuclear plant in Midland, Michigan. Remarkably we were successful in its cancellation.”

Well…

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Anti-Wynn: Contra-ContraPoints

Desperate Times

Dedication

To the Left, who deserve a much better beating than I could ever give them. And to the people, who deserve a much better Left.

Introduction

“Offline, I don’t have any radical aspirations.” – Natalie Wynn, “Canceling | ContraPoints,” 52:29 to 52:33

Among the online “Left,” there are a handful of people who could rightly be called “celebrities.” These people exert almost a frightening amount of influence over the movement. They are most young peoples’ introduction to “Leftist” politics, and their every opinion is met by thousands of loyal fans who can’t wait to repeat their newly memorized slogans. These influencers are usually media creators, and they have often found themselves platformed on YouTube.

The members of “LeftTube” or “BreadTube” often set the stage for what conversations are to be had by the movement at large. They work as a sort of barometer for measuring the state of the…

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Caliban and the Witch: A critical analysis

1919

The following is a translation of a collaborative critique of Caliban and the Witch, written by Yann Kindo and Christophe Darmangeat in December 2017, and published in two separate essays on their respective blogs: La Faucille et le Labo, and La Hutte des Classes. The first, for the most part, deals with the historical facts themselves and the method with which S. Federici deals with them (badly); the second tries to discuss the main theoretical understandings developed in the book. The foreward, by Alain Bihr, was taken from the abridged brochure, available at des éditions Smolny.

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Forward

I. History and the facts abused

Critical analysis of Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch demonstrates her lack of seriousness in dealing with an important issue: why was the last phase (from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century) of the multi-secular transition from feudalism to capitalism accompanied in Western Europe…

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The Keys of Solomonic Magic and Spirit Conjures

benebell wen

Clavicula Salomonis, grimoire in Arabic

Solomonic magic is pretty much the foundation of occultism, modern witchcraft, and ceremonial magic west of India and China, encompassing Europe, the Middle East, and now the Americas.

What you will discover within the pages of this book I’m sharing, you’re going to find to be the keystones of Persian magic and witchcraft, the magical practices of Muslim-influenced Southeast Asian countries, the Golden Dawn (though many of their correspondences differ), hoodoo, Wicca, and maybe even the traditions you’ve inherited and have been wondering where those traditions might have come from.

If you’re serious about your occult studies, then I hope you’ll add this text to your library and read through it cover to cover at least once.

From my vantage point, this book is essential reading, even if for no other reason than to take it apart to realize once and for all this is…

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Reclaim Gluten-Free: Help Stop the Misuse of the Term Gluten-Free by Restaurants — Gluten Free Watchdog

The term gluten-free has a regulatory definition. This definition was created because of celiac disease. Only those restaurants that are able to provide appropriate meals for folks with celiac disease should use it. What the FDA says about gluten-free claims and restaurants: “If restaurants or other retail food establishments wish to make “gluten-free” claims (or…

via Reclaim Gluten-Free: Help Stop the Misuse of the Term Gluten-Free by Restaurants — Gluten Free Watchdog

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Glorifies Abuse and Assault Against Women

Guest Post by Emily (reys–speeder)

On Friday, December 6^th, a timely two weeks before the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Disney issued a warning that certain scenes in the film would contain flashing lights and may negatively affect those with photosensitive epilepsy. While the announcement was admirable and demonstrated a gesture of goodwill from the company to consumers, there is another warning needed for Rise that the company didn’t disclose: That the film romanticizes abuse and assault against women.

It is important to note that the descriptions following technically qualify as spoilers for the new film that debuts in theaters today on Friday, December 20. However, when it comes to the portrayal of serious, harmful, and triggering content, the safety of viewers should be more important than allowing oneself to be surprised while watching a film. Not all surprises are enjoyable.

In order to inform…

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