Would You Be Willing To Explain The Medieval Vs. Rennaisance Stuff You Were Mentioning In "the Middle

NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh

They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.

So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:

“I” →  “thou”

“Me” →  “thee”

“My” →  “thy”

“Mine” →  “thine”

Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.

We could first imagine it in the first person-

“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.

And then replace it-

“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”

Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job.  That he’s actually quite nice.  That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.

I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book.  (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.)  But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil.  And I think that matters to the story as a whole.

A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer.  It’s to make people sin.  And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.

Take the cell phone network thing, for instance.  This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling: 

What could he tell them?  That twenty thousand people got bloody furious?  That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city?  And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people?  In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves.  For the rest of the day.  The pass-along effects were incalculable.  Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin.  He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day.  Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting.  Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse.  Bad days matter.

Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite.  Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered.  But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes.  I do call that successful evil.

It’s subtle, is the thing.  That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it.  Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it.  It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them.  It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will.  Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close.  We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’  He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves.  He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice.  Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.

You see it again in the paintball match.  “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.”  In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field.  Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder.  Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses?  But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.

Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action.  He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other.  He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.

I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can.  I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else.  And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.

There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been.  Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing.  Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.

That’s a compelling story.  There’s a reason we keep telling it.  The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah.  There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone.  But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.

I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world.  Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations.  Somebody who enjoys it, even.  Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given.  He’s thrived.  He is, legitimately, a bad person.

And he tries to save the world anyway.

He loves Aziraphale.  He helps save the entire world.  Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself.  He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite.  He cares.

It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t.  It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway.  It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants.  It’s about free will.  However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing.  You can still love.  You can still be loved in return.

And I think that matters.

I am exceptionally lucky in that my parents never hit me, grounded me, confiscated my things, banned me from my hobbies or threatened any of these actions to make me behave as a kid. as an adult it has made me realise how very very long a road most people have to traverse before they can take a statement like 'no rule that must be enforced by threat is legitimate' seriously.

imma have a lil rant now

“you can’t say crippled it’s a slur” fuck off with that stigmatizing bullshit! i know what crippled means.

when i was going to the gym in my wheelchair, that wasn’t crippled. when i was fiercely sweating my way through agonizing medical procedures, that wasn’t crippled. when i was laughing through my tears because my spine was so on fire it was funny, that wasn’t crippled.

the days when that meant i couldn’t DO anything? THAT was crippled. it happened, i got through it, i’m proud. i don’t need some officious little shit telling me i can’t use the most apt term to describe the event of my disability keeping me from acting. crippling pain is crippling. crippling executive dysfunction is crippling. don’t try to force me to minimize my experience just because you’re uncomfortable with the english language.

say it until it loses all meaning if you have to. cripple cripple cripple. it starts to sound like an english beverage involving nutmeg and whiskey. mmm, hot cripple.

Look, I am not Jewish – I was raised Catholic and am now agnostic/atheist (I don’t know what there is but I know for a fact it’s not the Christian God) – but I think it is important to point out that being a leftist, socialist/communist, anti-Semite is absolutely like carefully picking out a gun to protect your family with and then carefully and deliberately lining it up with your foot and pulling the trigger.

Anti-Semitism has been used for at least the last 120 years to deflect the working and impoverished classes’ absolutely justifiable rage against the wealthy elite into attacking another oppressed class, which does nothing at all to improve their situation and, in worst case scenarios, feeds the corporations  blood money. (IBM sold 1940′s-era computers to the Nazis.) By conflating “wealthy elite” (most of whom have always been Christian, in Europe and the US) with “Jews” (most of whom are not wealthy, although their strong emphasis on getting a good education and pursuing careers in fields where the demand is always strong, such as medicine and law, means that they are probably statistically more likely to be middle class than people who were allowed to own farmland, which for centuries Jews were not, who are now suffering because big agribusiness ate all the farms), the actual wealthy elite get to redirect the peasants with pitchforks off their doorstep. We can see it very, very clearly nowadays, where idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene repeat misinformation about Jewish space lasers instead of demanding accountability from the giant barely-regulated utility that actually caused the California fires, thus attempting to preserve that utility’s stockholders’ fine dividends.

If you exist anywhere left of center in your beliefs, then anti-Semitism is a tool of your ideological enemies, and only helps them. You are not going to improve the situation of the Palestinians by conflating “the government of Israel” with “the Jewish people” (and if you’re American or British you’re a massive fucking hypocrite for doing so, given what Americans and what British colonialism in general has done to indigenous peoples worldwide.) All you are doing is feeding the misinformation machine that keeps poor white Christians – and for that matter, middle-class white Christians – from recognizing who the actual wealthy elites are and what they’re doing. In fact, you make it really hard to even talk about wealthy elites because of the extent to which “wealthy elite” has become an anti-Semitic dog whistle.

The Left can be, and often is, as anti-Semitic as the right… but the problem for the Left is that anti-Semitism is, in itself, a tool of corporatism and right-wing beliefs. Anti-Semitism, like racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc, is wrong because it’s wrong, because it’s morally bankrupt, incorrect, accomplishes nothing positive and causes enormous human misery, etc… but anti-Semites don’t care about that. Well, care about this. If you’re on the left, expressing prejudice against Jews, conflating Jews with the capitalist 1% (or hell, even the bourgeoisie), or conflating Jews with the government of Israel, is actively harming your cause. Actively. Harming.

So get the fuck out of your own way and stop clinging to anti-Semitic beliefs, expressing them, repeating them… just fucking stop, okay? It alienates your allies, it gives aid and comfort to your enemies, and oh yeah, it also makes you a bad person. But even if you don’t give a shit about being a good person, try to at least be a good Leftist, or liberal, or progressive, or whatever you define yourself as.

spaci1701 replied to your post “Just in case you’re ever embarrassed about doing something silly or…”

So nice that he’s willing to offer his professional opinion of your husband’s teeth for free. Did he have some good news for you? Does it involve pliers?

So I had a CT scan, and lots of other stuff done, and they “couldn’t find anything immediately wrong” on film, which he very quickly assured me, didn’t mean there wasn’t a problem.

He thinks the pain coming from one particular tooth (the one making me want to rip my face off) is a filling I might be allergic to which is causing the tooth to self destruct, so before he takes the whole tooth out he wants to see if he can fix the filling and pack it with something I wont be allergic to and just try to save me from any more surgery. So that’s what I will be doing next week to try and get me out of pain. (We need to wait for some testing to come back before he feels happy putting things into my jaw)

He’s also willing to extract my root canal teeth because in his own words “there’s no way they should hurt like that”, but first he wants to send me to an orthodontist, to evaluate my bite because my jaw muscles are a mess, and it’s because my teeth have been ground so far down by the previous dentist none of them touch, so I’m performing gymnastics just to be able to chew and eat. And braces would help with that.

We also discovered that I also have a cluster of excess of nerve bundles, all on the lower left side of my jaw, which is why I can get drilled on the right side of my face and not flinch, but the left side never goes numb. Which is why no matter what they are doing, they are not able to get me numb for procedures.

Which is why the root canals on the left side of my face all feel like they are failing, despite appearing fine on film and upon re-opening. It’s my face recovering from the trauma of being fully “live” while having the roots stripped out. When I described my root canal experiences he sat with his eyes closed gripping his head in his hands. He also doesn’t think with my inflammation issues I am a candidate for root canal or implants, he thinks my body will reject them based purely on the fact that my root canal teeth just won’t heal, like my jaw is trying to push them out.

He also thinks one of those nerve bundles might have got hit by a needle when they were trying to get me numb—based on some residual bruising I have inside my mouth. So now my nerves are all freaking out and healing from being quite literally stabbed multiple times, which explains why NONE of my pain killers are working either.

He was very much “why are you not screaming from pain right now” and I was very “I am too tired to scream, just help me, please help me”. He promised me he’d find a way or find someone else who could.

I cried.

Several times.

Because someone believes me.

And they think they might know what to do. Also they made me a cup of tea when I started crying and held my hand.

They seem like good people who care. So I’m hopeful.

I’m still in a LOT of pain, but I’m really hopeful.

Frankly I don’t see the point in fussing over the precise gender identities of historical figures and what they would hypothetically describe themselves as were they alive today. They’re not fictional characters—they’re dead people whose opinions on a continuously evolving topic are largely unknowable, but are part of a shared history nonetheless.

For example, whether a historical figure lived secretly as a man because she was a woman in a society where that was her only option to actually do the things she wanted to do, or because he was just more comfortable that way and wanted to be recognized as a man... how can we know? How can we determine that it was not both? How can we look back through history to a world so different from ours and come to conclusions about things that are often complicated and indistinct in our own time?

I just don’t see what is accomplished by trying to sort and separate trans history from GNC history based on factors we can’t truly be certain of. In an earlier generation, I think I may have lived and presented quite differently based on the choices available to me and the ease with which I may have pursued them. The world changes so much in so many ways and I can barely make sense of myself in my own time—it seems more practical to simply say, “Ah. Relatable. I can see much of myself in the record of your life.” and leave it at that. Our history is cultural, not ancestral, and in a hundred years we may be the source of just as much confusion and consternation even if we believe ourselves clear today.

How I weave in ends in advance when starting on a new colour