STOP SCROLLING

Thoughts on Life Extension

I think the human race needs an additional 100 years of (healthy) lifespan. I honestly think it'd solve some of our problems and probably make us chill out in general.

The pressure to have children by 20 to 30 in most places would no longer exist. That is something you don't have to worry about until you're 50 or 60, by the time you are more wise to the ways of the world and you can avoid being trapped in a terrible relationship for the sake of the children.

The young would be much more reluctant to take part in wars, as there is far more life ahead of them. Artists and writers would have more time to create closer to their true potential. There'd be less reason to have a midlife crisis and the mad drive to accumulate enough savings for retirement would not be as pressing.

The memory of historical failures would stay around for far longer. Those who lived through the horrors of industrialisation, slavery and totalitarian movements would not let the young make the same mistakes. People would be harder to fool. Imagine if a politician tried to slag off unions in front of voters who were child labourers in 1900. Politicians will take long-term threats more seriously, because there's a good chance they'll be seeing the consequences.

At the same time, accidental death would be more frightening. We'd probably be a more cautious species - the effects of this would flow into many areas. Technological progress would slow from a furious boil to a reasonable simmer as society would have more time to think about the New Things critically and test them with greater rigour. Think of how many lives have been lost over the decades because we were blazé about Asbestos.

At the same time, there might be greater hierachy related to age. The young might have less of a say in society, as they are encouraged to gain more knowledge and experience first. Those who are close to the end of their lifespan might be treated worse, because this is a more distant prospect to most people. Though it might not necessarily turn out that way; since people live longer they are more likely to become disabled by accidents, so society puts more resources toward ensuring the disabled and eldrely can live full lives.

Hmmm... hindi, arabic, mandarin, japanese, malay.

If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?

For some reason, I find this... disturbing.

Abandoned GameBoy post box in the mountains of Shikoku, Kagawa, Japan

looking at you with my tiered exhausted eyes. Are you a TERF or a radfem?

No, in fact I am a trans woman :)

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

And no, I have been thinking about this before I got into Dungeon Meshi.

I’d be 100% a necromancer if possible. But I wouldn’t be the type that brings back mindless hordes of zombies. There are plenty of other ways to be…ethically ambiguous.

Very cool.

Feminine language for God in Christian history: a brief timeline

People have been employing words and images for the Divine that move beyond the masculine from the very start. I thought I’d compile some examples chronologically. 

Links in any of the points lead fuller explanations or excerpts. Feel free to add on to this timeline!

First Century: 

Paul himself, right there in the canonical Bible, implies that God is pregnant with all that exists! And he’s not pulling that image out of nowhere, but from his own Jewish scriptures.

100s:

“In his ineffable essence he is father; in his compassion to us he became mother. The father by loving becomes feminine.” - St. Clement of Alexandria .

There’s a long complicated history around Sophia being identified sometimes as the Spirit and sometimes as Jesus in Christian history, about which @fierysword has many posts, but Theophilus of Antioch is one of the early figures to describe the Trinity as being God, the Word (logos), and Wisdom (sophia), so that the Holy Spirit is described in feminine language because sophia is feminine. Meanwhile, see here for information about Jesus being identified with Woman WIsdom.

200s/300s:

“Come, secret Mother; Come, You who (fem.) are manifest in your deeds; You who (fem.) give joy and rest to those who are united to You (fem.)” - The Acts of Thomas .

”She is the kind and heavenly mother…” - Symeon of Mesopotamia (speaking of the Holy Spirit) .

St. Barbara envisions both God and those who follow God as Saints as being beyond the human gender binary

300s-400s:

the earliest Syriac Christians frequently employed feminine language to all three members of the Trinity, including Mother language for God and sometimes using She pronouns for the Holy Spirit .

“He who has promised us heavenly food has nourished us on milk, having recourse to a mother’s tenderness. For just as a mother, suckling her infant, transfers from her flesh the very same food which otherwise would be unsuited to a babe…so our Lord, in order to convert His wisdom into milk for our benefit came to us clothed in flesh.” - St. Augustine of Hippo 

1000s-1100s:

“And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen, gathers her chickens under her wings? …. And you, my soul, dead in yourself, run under the wings of Jesus your mother and lament your griefs under feathers. Ask that your wounds may be healed and that, comforted, you may live again.” - St. Anselm of Canterbury  .

“In Hildegard’s day there were other traditionally feminine theological ideas: for instance, the Cistercians feminized the language for God by replacing ‘God’ with ‘God is love’, and, because love (caritas) was a feminine noun, God could be denoted as ‘she’.” - Andrea Janelle Dickens For more on Hildegard’s feminine conception of God as Caritas, see here. .

“Our good mother Charity loves us all and shows herself differently to each one of us, cherishing the weak, scolding the restive, exhorting the advanced. But when she scolds she is meek, when she consoles she is sincere…” - Burgundian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux

1200s:

“What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From the beginning of eternity, God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to all.”  - Meister Eckhart, German theologian (c. 1260 – c. 1328) .

St. Francis of Assisi envisioned the Trinity as a group of three women (who give him a feminine title!): “Three poor women appeared by the road as Saint Francis was passing. They were so similar in stature, age, and face that you would think they were a three-part piece of matter, modeled by one form. As Saint Francis approached, they reverently bowed their heads, and hailed him with a new greeting, saying: ‘Welcome, Lady Poverty!’” .

Poet and mystic Hadewijch wrote in Middle Dutch about God as Minne, or Lady Love (and it gets pretty gay; see this excerpt) .

“Even if you gave me everything that you possess in Heaven and on earth, I would not consider myself satiated until I had you, because you are the life of my soul, I do not have a father and mother outside of you.” - Marguerite d'Oingt

1300s:

“As we know, our own mother bore us only into pain and dying. But our true mother Jesus, who is all love, bears us into joy and endless living.” - Julian of Norwich  .

In various places in medieval Europe starting around 1320, Jesus’s side wound was frequently depicted as a vulva. Scholars have suggested various reasons for this depiction, including: making Christ androgynous as androgyny was seen as more holy than belonging to an earthly (binary) gender; and helping women see themselves in their Lord (birthing girdles were even made bearing Christ’s wounds so that one could imagine their labor pains in parallel to Jesus’s pain on the cross) - See my #androgynous Christ tag for more info + scholarly sources

1400s-1500s

Madre Juana de la Cruz in Spain imagines the Trinity as working together to weave divinity and humanity into one being (Jesus), just as a seamstress sews a shirt. She also envisions God the Father as having a womb, and, speaking in the voice of Jesus, said: “And all those who seek in me a father, will find in me a father. And those who seek in me a mother, will find in me a mother. And those who seek in me a husband, will find in me a husband. And those who seek in me a bride, will find in me a bride. And those who seek in me a brother, or a friend, or a neighbor, or a companion, likewise will find in me everything they desire…” .

A convent in Belgium commissioned a painting of Jesus in which he has breasts  .

God cares for us with an everlasting maternal heart and feeling.” - Martin Luther, who also pictured scripture as God’s womb.

1800s:

1800s: “My Father, my Mother, it is in You that I sleep, it is in You that I breathe. Awaken!” - Saint Mariam Baouardy (1846 – 1878)

I recommend Lynn Japinga’s article “Language about God” for information on how and why to expand what gendered language one uses for the Divine. I share excerpts from the article in this post, as well as a link to the full thing.

tell about the history of oil?

Alright, so most of what I know about crude oil is from The History of Standard Oil, 1904, which was written by this very cool woman Ida Tarbell, who grew up in the oil fields in the late 1850s to 60s where her father worked and she saw numerous accidents and awful things there.

So, Oil was once very easy to find, it would often be floating ontop of ponds. For a long time it was turned into medicine by cranks and considered a nuisance byproduct in the salt industry. The first real use for oil was when people figured out it was good substitute for whale blubber in lamps, as that was incredibly smelly.

The first oil drillers were individual small businessmen in places like Ohio who shipped it to the cities by horse and cart and boat, though this was not to be for long. Railways were built and the first oil pipes were made in 1865.

John Rockefeller was the man who monopolised the Oil supply under the banner of Standard Oil, and he got into the business in 1860. His modus operandi is exactly like Jeff Bezos: he defeated his competitors by buying the entire supply chain, which meant he owned the refineries, the railroads, the towns the oil workers lived in and every business operated there.

Ida Tarbell managed to prove beyond any doubt that he'd secured control of the railroads like the Southern Railroad company via kickbacks and corruption, and her reporting was essential to railroad regulations passed in 1906 and court cases that entirely broke up the Standard Oil company in 1911.

To me, the fact that the public read a 400-page book, which led the USA's own courts to break the oil monopoly within only a few years is amazing. Nowadays, even worse things like the Panama Papers are exposed, yet the government does very little.

BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil are the awful offspring of this breakup. Unfortunately, even in its weak form, it seems the oil industry has had the last laugh (so far).

I have about a 90-year gap in my knowledge from there, but I do know some interesting facts

The first offshore oil rig, Neft Daşları, was made in 1949 in the USSR, where it was used to extract oil in the Caspian Sea.

Oil companies have known about climate change for decades, and their scientists made, highly accurate predictions about global warming in the 70's, which Oil companies covered up and lied about. This is a verified Conspiracy Fact™ ✅

Vice-President Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton before he worked for Bush. Halliburton was given many lucrative contracts during the Iraq War, including supplying military bases.

Rex Tillerson was Secretary of State in the 1st Trump administration, he was an Exxon executive.

Peak Oil: oil supply will eventually peak, and production will slowly go down. This is true, but it is discredited in the public imagination because some environmentalists made doomsday predictions about it in the 90's. People also seem to think 'Peak Oil' means 'no oil'.

While oil production is still expanding, the discovery of oil reserves hit a peak in the 60's. Oil being extracted now is much lower quality and more expensive to get.

In a dark twist of irony, climate change has made new supplies of oil in Alaska and the Arctic accessible, which may prolong the life of the oil industry for decades to come.

Since around 2010, the Lakota and other indigenous peoples have led the resistance to the huge Keystone XL oil pipeline, due to the huge environmental cost building it would entail and the inevitability of leaks.

Yep. All of them.

All my mutuals are hot. Reblog to tell your mutuals they are hot.

It's one of the things I wanted to be once, but since I am a follower of rules, I instead desire them.

I am a strong advocate of bringing back that guy who messes people's lives up just a little bit, especially if they have their priorities in the wrong order.