This comment from @emizeko on Helen Keller rules, so it's the new mega.
Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen’s hand at the pump. At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made on Keller’s life. Each yields its version of the same cliché. A McGraw-Hill educational film concludes: “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those who taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make us is to help another reach true potential.”
To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to learn from it. Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by history. The result is that we really don’t know much about her.
Over the past twenty years, I have asked hundreds of college students who Helen Keller was and what she did. All know that she was a blind and deaf girl. Most remember that she was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and learned to read and write and even to speak. Some can recall rather minute details of Keller’s early life: that she lived in Alabama, that she was unruly and without manners before Sullivan came along, and so forth. A few know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next, about the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant. A few students venture that Keller became a “public figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf of the blind or deaf. “She wrote, didn’t she?” or “she spoke”—conjectures without content. Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968. To ignore the 64 years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.
The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: “In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!”
Keller hung a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist Party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.
Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller’s research was not just book learning: “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it.”
At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity—this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.”
Keller recalled having met this editor: “At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him.” She went on, “Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”
Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis— a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!”’
excerpted from Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
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Hey everyone! New game just dropped - Black Witchcraft!
1 part Edgar Allen Poe, 1 part crazy high tech anime. You are a witch hunter traveling through the House of Usher trying to stop someone from resurrecting the powerful witch Lenore. Fun little hack'n'slash/beat-em-up, with a pretty unique system of navigation! Just started it a few hours ago, and I'm having fun. Plus theres lots of stats that tick the 'numbers go up' button in my little brain. IDK how long it's gonna last me, but theres a few difficulty levels, and I'm having fun with the whole puzzle of getting around the house doing sidequests and finding treasure. The combat is competent, but not the best. The crazy aesthetics of Poe + mecha weapons keeps me playing.
On of my favorite quotes of all time:
When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.
— Helen Keller
Say the line, Lenin...
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” :thinkin-lenin:
I just remembered something. Indigenous people around here with schizophrenia tend to be really cheery. They say that the voices they hear are that of their ancestors or grandparents giving them advice through life. It's believed that those who stay with the traditional beliefs have a chance at hearing the spirits of their ancestors. Those who abandon them will have the misfortune of hearing the evil spirits of the spiteful ones. I've noticed that the ones who completely converted to Christianity and have it talk about voices urging them to kill.
I'm not sure how true it is but I found it interesting, especially when I remember meeting a few people in the US that had it. They were tortured by the thoughts and the more extreme cases had voices that always disparaged them. Then I meet the guys down here who love it and are a lot happier overall.
Oof sorry, unfollowing now. really enjoyed his gifts, especially the rings of power, had no idea he forged in secret a master Ring, to control all others and that into this Ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life
AcTuAlLy ThE rInGs WeReN't MaDe By SaUrOn ThEy WeRe MaDe By SoMe ElF
-Gamers, probably.Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War are all about that elf and, spoilers, he's a bit of a douche.
anyone else notice inflation isn't really affecting alcoholic beverages? I'm in the US and noticed most prices are pretty much the same as they were pre-pandemic. the only things that have gone up are imported spirits, and even then only like 5-10%.
"I'm owned, I'm owned!" I continue to insist as I slowly grow in size and transform into a gigachad cause I am able to accept defeat, take criticism and learn from my mistakes :dril:
Had a guy in a truck pull up next to me on my bike to tell me to move over despite the facts that:
- there was no dedicated bike lane
- there were bike symbols painted on the road to indicate that cyclists got full use of the lane
- the oncoming lane was clear, as evidenced by the fact that he pulled into it in order to yell at me out his window
- he had watched me move at the same speed as traffic for a solid ten blocks while breathing down my neck
The ensuing middle finger and shouted monosyllabic rant about traffic law were not necessarily mature, but they were proportional.
Every bike should be equipped with anti-automobile artillery, in minecraft.
My minecraft games would be considerably improved with this innovation.
I'm a pretty quiet-spoken dude, but 95% of the times I'm yelling at the top of my lungs I'm chewing out a motorist
Same lol, I am extremely un-confrontational but I've kicked several cars over my biking lifetime.
they pull up and talk to you? pickups just honk at me and pass with 1/2 an inch of clearance
Yeah, I feel accomplished.
Oddly enough, my mother had a miscarriage before I was conceived. I literally beat the odds.
Now to see if I make it past this birthday. :deeper-sadness:
You will, comrade!
(Also that's how I've said happy birthday to my friends irl for over a decade i realize it may not come off that nicely to someone new so sorry if it seems rude)
Feel exhausted, go to bed early because I keep staying up and sleeping in late and never have the time and energy to do job applications I need to do
Result: i've been lying here for 3 fucking hours hating life
reposting my last comment from the mega because i'm not done ranting about eerie indiana
children’s shows in the 90s were wild
i’m watching this episode of eerie indiana and it started with the main character (a 12 year old boy) retelling a story about how he got his first kiss—in a graveyard—and then it cuts back to when the girl he kissed started at their school and we learn that she needed a heart transplant. the main character and another boy, whose catchprhase is ‘live fast, die young - leave a good looking corpse’, instantly falls in love, and a mini love triangle ensues
then the second boy is run over by a car and dies(!) and the new girl gets his heart lmao
literally the plot of a copypasta
in an earlier episode the main character had to travel to a secret underground lost and found to retrieve his dad's briefcase (which was a gift from his wife) to stop his parents from getting divorced
but, plot twist! he didn't need to retrieve the briefcase because his parents still love each other anyway <3
(they drive this point home in the next episode by having the parents almost fuck each other on screen)
Remember all those 90s cartoons that were weirdly, not very subtly horny but no one knew because kids were too young to recognize it and adults completely, totally, reflexively ignored the contents of any children's media?
The white streak in Tulsi's hair makes her look like a witch, so I'm kind of sad she's a reactionary. Witch powers should only be used for good.
She keeps that white streak to show solidarity with the white supremacists she panders to all the time.
Hello mega thread I think I'm feeling better from covid now. Only lost like $1000 worth of wages from being sick haha I'm in danger