terfs will bitch about how evil and violent men are and then hang out exclusively with men who fantasize about a race war
How a lot of westerners and Americans in particular view platonic intimacy is really warped. I'd always known that there was a tendency among Americans especially to hypersexualize and recontextualize literally any physical expressions of love and friendship as something "hot" or "homoerotic" or "sexy". It never hit me how bad it was until I kept seeing posts like this
For some Italian players, this is the highlight of their careers. I've seen countless players of other sports and any gender just collapse onto the ground on top of each other from sheer excitement and happiness. In motion they're probably rolling around.
But so many people are looking at this and saying "this is actually something sexual before it's something platonic". It's a hug. They're literally just hugging. But tens of thousands in total of notes on this and similar posts just says to me that there's just an incredibly small threshold for what's "acceptable" expressions of excitement and camaraderie before it becomes something that people will look at and say "this is something hot that turns me on".
And I've seen this with other forms of once-neutral expressions of love, or friendship, or even just greetings, like men kissing each other on the cheek. Friends of any gender cuddling or leaning against one another in a photo. People hugging and touching in ways that I guess automatically denote a sexual relationship before they denote people literally just being friends.
And like I know that there's every chance that anyone in any of these photos/examples was actually gay, nobody try and tell me "oh but OP they COULD BE--" because you're missing the entire point.
This is one of the problems with classifying old photos as being same-sex couples unless the pair in the photo are a known and established couple. (And I say this as a queer person.) Once upon a time it was, in fact, totally normal and accepted to kiss and cuddle your friends. We see it in old literature as kissing and “embracing,” which was far different than the modern quick hug.
Certainly people in those photos could be queer. But it could as easily be “why, Gert, I haven’t seen you in fifteen years! And we’ve just got a photography machine in town, let’s mark the occasion!” And to a modern eye, both would appear the same on film.
We need to get back to the days when it was okay to touch. (With permission, obviously. We all remember, or have heard, what a disaster glomping was.) There’s no reason to be cold in a world that needs warmth.
FYI, the one on the right is true whether or not one labels it “critical race theory.”
Even in the cases of Black veterans who did get assistance, the big suburban developments built to benefit returning G.I.s and their families were predominantly white and hostile to the Black families who tried to move in. Some stuck it out, determined to hold onto the equity they had managed to get, living for decades surrounded by suspicious, sometimes openly hostile neighbors.
It’s happening in Canada too with this heat wave. So much infrastructure depends on temperatures being within reasonable margins.
This is frightening in ways I can’t begin to explain.
Some god is buried there
How deeply, though?
Not so deeply they can’t hear the bell, I’d wager.
I was curious so I followed the links and found out more about the bell. The inscription is supposedly in Lombardic: “Lombardic or Langobardic is the extinct language of the Lombards (Langobardi), the Germanic-speaking people who settled in Italy in the 6th century. It was already rapidly declining by the 7th century because the invaders quickly adopted the Latin vernacular spoken by the local Roman population. Lombardic may have been in scattered use until as late as ca. AD 1000. A number of Italian place names and items of Italian vocabulary derive from Lombardic. Some linguists have argued that the modern Cimbrian and Mocheno dialects in Northeastern Italy, usually classified as Austro-Bavarian, are in fact surviving Lombard remnants.
Lombardic is preserved only fragmentarily, the main evidence being individual words used in Latin texts. For example, the Edict of Rothari of 643, the earliest Lombard legal code, is written in Latin, with only individual legal terms given in Lombardic. The many Lombard personal names preserved in Latin deeds from the Kingdom of the Lombards also provide evidence of the language.” (X)
Very few texts written entirely in Lombardic have survived. I found mention of 4: two fibulae with very short inscriptions that suggest commemorating a gift to someone, a bronze box with an inscription that seems to name the maker, and part of a building column. There is also a sword with an inscription some people think might be Lombardic. You’d think if this bell’s inscription were in Lombardic, it would have been mentioned somewhere, since these texts are so rare.
The only sources I can find for the bell being “indecipherable” are tourist-y, “Visit Cumbria” sorts of webpages of questionable accuracy. It seems to be true that linguists know very little about the Lombardic language and so I wouldn’t be surprised that, if this is in Lombardic, it has not been deciphered. However, I’d also be surprised if linguists interested in this language simply ignored the bell when primary texts are so rare.
Reddit lists the original post as “unverifiable” but someone did manage to dig up a picture allegedly of the bell itself. Here’s a close-up of part of the inscription.
As you can see, this is Latin script, not runes, Cyrillic, Greek or some other language you wouldn’t expect to find on a Christian church bell in England. The specific “font”, if you will, is known as Lombardic capitals: “Lombardic capitals is the name given to a type of decorative upper-case letters used in inscriptions and, typically, at the start of a section of text in medieval manuscripts. They are characterized by their rounded forms with thick, curved stems. Paul Shaw describes the style as a “relative” of uncial writing. Unlike Gothic capitals, Lombardic capitals were also used to write words or entire phrases. They were used both in illuminated manuscripts and monumental inscriptions, like the bell tower of Santa Chiara, Naples. In Italian, the style is known as “Longobarda” after an earlier spelling of the Lombardy region.” (X)
This is the source of the rumor that the language is Lombardic. But this is where it gets interesting.
These letters were mass produced and could be set into pre-made indents in metal plaques or bells to form words and texts. (X)
Please note that this way of adding inscriptions to metal, using Lombardic capitals, appeared in the 3rd quarter of the 13th Century (ca. 1275) and were used predominantly until the middle of the 14th Century (ca. 1350), though occasionally much later. The church the bell is in, St. Martin’s in Martindale, was probably built in the early 13th Century– a prime candidate for a church that might have a bell with Lombardic capital script. My guess is that this is the original bell, in which case, the language is almost certainly meant to be Latin and if it’s summoning any god, it would be the god of Medieval Roman Catholicism.
BUT, some of the letters appear to be placed upside down or backwards, and some even seem to be in “ABCDE” order. I don’t know Latin (though I recognize it when I see it) and can’t see the entire text on the bell, but it seems quite possible to me that the bellmakers at the foundry, who were probably not able to read or write Latin, were given a box of metal letters and probably a written text on parchment or some such. All they had to do was insert letters in the same order found in the text but they don’t seem to have done that. This makes me think that either they somehow got the letters but not the written text, or they lost it somewhere along the way and just put letters in the order they found them in the box.
So, the real story is actually much more interesting than the clickbaity “TIL” post. Either it’s an ordinary inscription that anyone who knows Latin can read, or it’s an example of someone’s big screw-up at work and we can speculate who was it that dropped the ball.
big fan of situations where nobody gets hurt
I hate osha bro they make doing construction jobs a bitch
Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.
They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.
Orion in Depth : Orion is a familiar constellation. The apparent positions of its stars in two dimensions create a well-known pattern on the bowl of planet Earth’s night sky. Orion may not look quite so familiar in this 3D view though. The illustration reconstructs the relative positions of Orion’s bright stars, including data from the Hipparcus catalog of parallax distances. The most distant star shown is Alnilam. The middle one in the projected line of three that make up Orion’s belt when viewed from planet Earth, Alnilam is nearly 2,000 light-years away, almost 3 times as far as fellow belt stars Alnitak and Mintaka. Though Rigel and Betelgeuse apparently shine brighter in planet Earth’s sky, that makes more distant Alnilam intrinsically (in absolute magnitude) the brightest of the familiar stars in Orion. In the Hipparcus catalog, errors in measured parallaxes for Orion’s stars can translate in to distance errors of a 100 light-years or so. via NASA