Kyle Montgomery.

A Living Painting Made of Real Flowers at the London’s National Gallery

So one day a dwarf is talking to a human and finally realizes that when humans say woman, they generally mean “person who is theoretically capable of childbirth” because for whatever reason, humans assign social expectations based genital differences. (What a fucked up culture, the dwarf thinks.) But hey, better communication! So the next time the dwarf introduces theirself, they say, oh, by the way, I am what you call a “woman.”

And the trade negotiations just stop. They just stop cold. The tall people insist on speaking to the man, they insist on talking to the lady dwarf about all sorts of irrelevant bullshit, like recipes and childrearing and perfume

so the dwarf goes back home, enraged

and is like “BTW guess what happened, we’re all just going to be men forever now as far as the tall ones are concerned”

and everyone is justly horrified at this barbarism but they all agree to do whatever  it takes to squeeze those tall bastards for all the resources they are worth

and the dwarves get surlier, and the trade agreements less generous

and the tall people are all “what a miserable and greedy race”

but really they’re just still nursing a grudge about how goddamn backwards and sexist the tall people are

because their best negotiator, one of their sacred cave people, got snubbed the instant she said she was capable of childbirth - and a mortal insult like that can never be forgiven

Because Pi’s tags are great:

#yes good #personal headcanon: dwarves have fundamentally misunderstood human pronoun usage #and gender roles #they are very perplexed by it #eventually they went ‘fuck it apparently ‘he’ is the correct word’ #‘it’s their language and they keep using it for us’ #so then you have this situation where dwarves are cognizant of the words ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ #but not the usual use of ‘she’ secondary headcanon specific to Tolkien dwarves #dwarves that choose to bear children are held in high regard #because they are making new dwarves it is the ultimate craft #that’s what mahal did you made a new person #it is very impressive #everyone is impressed

Just as an additional thought, we hear that women dwarves generally stay within the mountain and are a protected, guarded subset of the dwarves. There’s not many of them, so there’s an implication that women dwarves are too precious to be allowed out.

But what if this too is a mistranslation? What if the dwarves were talking to the Men and when asked “where are all your women?” they hit a wall. They whisper amongst themselves, and eventually come back with a question, “What’s a woman?” The Men are incredulous.

“Why, the members of your race that bear children, of course!“ 

More dwarven whispering.

They reach the conclusion that Men mean dwarves who are currently pregnant. Well! Of course those dwarves are currently safe within the mountain, well cared for and generally loathe to travel until the child is born. The Men take this to mean that all dwarven women are discouraged from traveling, and that their primary purpose is childbearing. Dwarves find this a satisfactory outcome, especially with the way Men treat their women, and so even when the misunderstanding becomes clear to them they never correct it.

I have never converted to fan-canon so hard before.

Every once in awhile I see that a post I added commentary to has BLOWN UP, and of course get no notification since I’m not the OP. Still a cool discussion worth re-sharing I think. 

Dwarves being very confused when humans go “that’s a woman? How can you tell?”

And the dwarves know that the human word for woman means “those who are currently bearing children” or “capable of bearing children.”

The man comes out of that conversation very confused about dwarvish reproduction. He concludes that dwarves must cleave their offspring directly from mountain rock

The oil industry needs to #RezpectOurWater and stop building the Dakota Access Pipeline

I am 13 years old, and I’ve spent my whole life drinking and fishing from the Missouri River in North Dakota. As members of the Standing Rock Tribe, my family has lived here for generations. Today our lives on the reservation are still defined by the river.

But now an oil company wants to build a pipeline that will cross the river a mile away from our reservation, carrying 570,000 barrels of crude oil across each day. We’re terrified that it could leak into our water, but the company doesn’t seem to care. We, the youth of the Standing Rock Tribe, refuse to let them risk our water and lives without a fight. So far over 130,000 people have signed our petition.

— Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer for Identities Mic

“Its like our lives are expendable to others” Let that sink in.  And despite all the oil propaganda that will trivialize the issue like “there is only a chance that it could leak” there has been so many instances where pipelines HAVE leaked, that needs to stop being ignored and swept under the rug. If people feel so comfortable with it then they can choose to do it on their own territories or those who are willing to take that risk. But even that thought im not fond of. Because Indigenous peoples have lost so much, mother Earth has become so damaged… its time to start healing the destruction that humans have caused. Its time to start taking responsibility and moving forward to sustainable solutions. I shouldnt have to parcel out the many instances of environmental violence and injustice that Natives have faced even leading up to now. And although Flint was a separate issue aside from oil, I think it really has awakened the general public to the ways that this injustice, this negligence to taking care of essential natural resources like water, effects us all, primarily those most impacted by poverty and inequity. Bottom line, there are so many communities facing disparities directly linked to environmental violence and economic corruption. We need to seize the opportunity to support those who rise up and organize to implement change. 

This is so damn powerful

Watch: The Wonder Years made Danica McKellar famous, math made her mark on the world permanent.

Follow @the-future-now

Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People Episode 4 is here, with the legendary Kate Bornstein. (link)

I first read Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw when it was assigned to me in college. It was one of those books that you end up devouring in one night, not caring that you’re blowing off a term paper. For the first time, I was reading a gender theorist whose words made the world make a little more sense. And whose ideas helped me make sense of myself. Her complex ideas weren’t masquerading in complex academic language; she told it exactly as it needed to be said. Last week I got to interview her for “Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People.” We talked about Caitlyn Jenner, Doctor Who, tardises, and more. We sat on tandem toilets and made poop jokes. (The poop jokes were cut.) But what remains is an interview I’m incredibly proud of. Thanks, Auntie Kate. Love you.

The problem with postmodernism is two fold.

1. It fails to direct critique towards any given aim. Postmodernism critiques with an ability unrivaled in other philosophical traditions, but loses sight of the entire point of criticism, which is not its own end but is rather to avoid reifying ideological categories which uphold material and structural systems of violence. Moreover, critique cannot be the end of the line. After we critique modernism, empiricism or univeralism, we cannot assume that we then have moved beyond them as the ideal theorists do, rather we need to recognize our situatedness within an imminent historical context which allows us to repair the flaws of those systems of thought. Deconstruction should not be a process of destroying, but of internally reconciling illusory binaries and contradictions.

2. It easily loses any sort of normative ground for delineating a political space or even a space for resistance. Derrida is correct that the internal is the external, yet he is silent on the profound political implication. He is correct that the logocentric model is eurocentric, yet nowhere in Of Grammatology does this evolve into a tool for resisting coloniality. It remains in the purely formal and ideal realm, never brought into the material space of politics.

every night as i fumble to plug my phone into its charger i think of how bbc sherlock holmes would classify me as an alcoholic

I AM SO GLAD I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO DOES THIS.

“Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!” 

…

Mr. Vimes had told him never to get too excited about clues, because clues could lead you a dismal dance. They could become a habit. You ended up finding a wooden leg, a silk slipper and a feather at the scene of a crime and constructing an elegant theory involving a one-legged ballet dancer and a production of Chicken Lake.

-  Feet of Clay

And finally, “Harry’s short for Harriet.”

Just some natives chilling and minding “they” own business ;-)

people who actually think Natives were all peaceful people..

^^^ white people not minding their own business 

@paraxylene & @hannahlevant try me bitch! We all peaceful until u ask for a knock in the head or a nice haircut - just a little off the top for not mindin ya business

lmfao threaten to scalp me for bringing a little truth into the light of this dark hole of a site that coddles snowflakes into ignoring real history

you’re so peaceful, threatening people for having a voice 

Lmfao like these are the only photos you can find and taking a scalping to heart like I can still legally do it.

I also really! love! how you’re telling an indigenous person that you’re shedding light unto a situation, while being non native, and trying to act like you’re teaching me something? if you find some factual information, then you can come for me sweetie.

until then, have this little bit of information rather than pictures: the United States governments used to kill our children with rocks, attacked us at night with no warning and no reason & knowing full well it wasn’t a fair fight, GO BACK on their promises to us through their treaties - just to be surprised when we fought back? If you’re going to tell me that I’m at fault for being angry at someone with a so-called “voice,” then maybe you should recognize who you’re talking to.

lmao, I really can’t either. :)

Y’all white people need to stay in your lane. This is what y’all do: you all use these art pieces in classes, trying to demonize Indigenous cultures and criticize us, like shut the hell up. Thank you @nozhazhe for this. 

I’m not disputing that native folks (also across the entire continents of North/South America) weren’t peaceful or weren’t violent at times. Folks also had conflict, not like any one group ever had no conflicts. It’s life! 

Also who the hell did the majority of the paintings? Western European folks, with the context of it being propaganda to demonize the native peoples they came into contact with, so it was easier on their souls to colonize them. If the images were made by native peoples, who knows the context- the people it came from know it. 

But okay, yeah sure, let’s go with folks using the images as whatever they believe in to (re)inforce this violent image of native peoples. 

yikes. 

More proof that Dwayne Johnson is basically a perfect human. I’m glad that this beautiful little girl is growing up with so many cultural heritages. Glad that Dwayne is so proud of the culture of his grandfather. Glad that he is exposing her to that even now.

Here to help y'all gorgeous children

i don’t know what this is

human courtship rituals make no sense.

Decades old slash pairings are still good slash pairings.

Star Trek Advent Calendar: Day 7 – favorite character who isn’t a member of starfleet 

Naomi Wildman

Obviously Naomi. She’s smart, curious and insistent. She knows what she wants and how to get it. Her following Seven around is the cutest thing ever, her reactions in Once Upon a Time are spot on and her presenting a plan to rescue Seven in Dark Frontier really shows not only her abilities to think about complicated matters but also that she can be very adamant when it comes to something or someone that is really important to her. 

Oh, and one of my favourite scenes ever is in Bliss, when she touches the forcefield and goes “forcefield?!?”

@face–the–strange made a gif set of that scene. So cute! 

Update from Tan Jiu, translated by Yaoi-BLCD. IF YOU USE OUR TRANSLATIONS YOU MUST CREDIT BACK TO THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR!!!!!! (TAN JIU). DO NOT USE FOR ANY PRINT/ PUBLICATIONS/ FOR PROFIT REASONS WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR!!!!!!!!!!!

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Watch: Michelle Obama sends Native American students a crucial message in graduation speech.

I hope America realizes how amazing Michelle Obama is.