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OMG i thought he was cringe but this bitch is 20x worse

Good try....but your delusional...it's that simple!

Cringe then and cringe now

the river analogy is not truly analogous. Within the analogy you not jumping into the river to save the person is letting them die, not killing them. There is a massive difference between the two. It also doesn't account for the uniqueness of the parent child relationship. If a parent choses to not feed their own kids because they want to buy something else, that's pure evil and also punishable by law. If that same parent choses to buy something else instead of giving food to a malnourished homeless person, it's still bad but not the same thing. You try to pre-empt the obvious rebuttal that in most cases there is consent to s3x with the adjusted analogy, what if it was your idea to go to the river with that person? However that is not how pregnancy works. In the new analogy the person is still agreeing to go to the river with you, whereas you do not ask a not living person if they want to live in your uterus for 9 months. To make it more accurate I would say, what if you went to swim in this river knowing there was a chance that as a result of that action a random person would fall in? You talk about guns and at best this is an appeal to hypocrisy. I'm not in the USA and it's not my issue but I do recognize that there are arguments for why guns should be legal. Preventing government tyranny, and the fact that in any mandatory buyback scheme the criminals who actually have malicious intent aren't going to give their guns in anyway, so all you are doing is taking guns from good people. Also people having guns doesn't directly result in the killing of an innocent human, abortion does. However even if people are wrong to support gun legislation it doesn't change this. If Hitler said you shouldn't kill people because of their race, he would be a hypocrite but he wouldn't be wrong. You say pro lifers are really just misogynistic, i think that is an insanely dishonest representation of the position but even if you were right it doesn't really change anything. It's possible to do the right thing for the wrong reason. E.g giving to charity because you can show off about how virtuous you are. This wouldn't make giving to charity a bad thing though, just because the person has bad motives. Whatever the motives, that isn't an excuse to not address the issue so why lie about us in the first place. Pregnancy sucks yes, it really really sucks and its also not the child's fault. You talk generally about the hardships around pregnancy and that women can die in childbirth. Here in the UK 13.4 out of 100,000 women die in child birth (if i remember correctly) that's a 0.0134% risk of dying. Also worth considering that some of those deaths will be from women who knew they had a much higher risk of dying but didn't abort for moral reasons. This is worth noting as most pro lifers agree that it should at least be legal to act to save the mother in high risk cases. Anyway does a slight risk of dying justify what would usually be immoral? Take the example of going to work to make money, when you go to work in a car there is a risk of dying in an accident. However this doesn't justify you hacking into other people's bank accounts to steal their money so you don't have to leave the house. Again you make an appeal to hypocrisy by saying most pro lifers are pro death penalty. You don't sight any source for that claim and it's likely false but fine I don't think it was meant literally. You say that although there is not intention from the foetus to cause harm it's still their fault. I think this is ridiculous. It is either the fault of both parents who consented to s3x knowing pregnancy was a risk or the evil r4pist in the 1% of cases. Often times pro lifers using words like "fault" leads to the position being misinterpreted as wanting to punish women. That is not what I mean by fault. I just mean that the consequence is as a result of the action. In the same way that doing good on a test after revising is a consequence of an action you did. You say that pro lifers shouldn't be ok with fertility clinics, contraceptives or the way the human body works. As for the first two, yes, if it is a method of contraception that prevents implantation then that would be wrong using the logic. And if fertility clinics are creating excess zygotes and destroying them that would also be wrong. What even is your point? It seems like an argument from practicality, to show that the pro life position is ridiculous because they are against killing human beings in those cases as well. I mean yeah we are against killing innocent human beings, good argument. As for the point about zygote implantation rates, yeah its like 1/3rd that don't implant, so what? People with stage 4 cancer also have a pretty high mortality rate, does this mean they aren't people? Or that we should be allowed to kill them because of that? Also children under 5 throughout basically all of history have had high mortality rates, again so what? What are the implications of that in your opinion? We can't ban periods, but it's also not a serious point so good joke. Now you say that this shows that life obviously shouldn't be protected at all costs. But how are you making this leap? And you say that the pro life position is pro patriarchy, another insane leap that I've already addressed. However it’s also worth mentioning that in the USA which is the place you seem to be focusing on, the percent of pro life men and women barely change its by like 3%. So much for the patriarchy argument. You keep talking about this woman and man who made a bodily autonomy argument and the reaction to it. It's really not relevant to this discussion. Maybe it's sexism, or maybe there is another reason. Either way it doesn't change the ethics of abortion. Prejudice prejudice whatever. Can i ask if you think that because of bodily autonomy there should be no abortion limit at all, and that abortion should be allowed for any reason? Like truly any reason including eugenics? As for the bodily autonomy argument. Some of the differences I've already addressed in first paragraph. Those being uniqueness of mother child relationship and difference between killing and letting die. To build on the latter, what if instead of unplugging yourself from the violinist you had to dismember him with an axe and also smash his head in till his brains were smeared on the beds? Changes things I bet. Another important distinction is that the kidneys being used to filter the violinist's blood is an extraordinary use of the kidneys, whereas a child has at least a natural right to be protected in the uterus for 9 months, that is what the uterus designed/evolved to do. It's an ordinary use of the uterus. And pregnancy really sucks but at least you can move, in the violinist scenario you are stuck in a bed for 9 months, while fully conscious. That's a lot worse. What if you could still do day to day tasks, but it was just a lot harder? Changes it again. If a man was r0ped and handed the child at birth, and he was the only person who could look after it would you allow him to leave the child to die, or expect him to use his body to work and get resources for the child for decades? Even if that's unfair. Maybe we would have to get into personhood arguments to see if it is analogous or not but you seemed to say that was irrelevant. At some point you mention the pain of childbirth, I think that C sections should be offered to everyone, in some cases it's not possible due to some other factors and yeah that is really really really sad that women go through that however I don't think that immense suffering for a short amount of time justifies the permanent ending of a human's life. Same with the mental health argument you made, and it's worth noting that like 1/3 of women have post abortion guilt. So mental health argument goes both ways. I wrote this out quickly, probably forgot some things and wasn't in immense detail but it didn't need to be. I'm just slightly annoyed at the misrepresentation and villainization of people like me who are against killing children. We don't hate women, we just don't believe in killing children. I would never claim that your position is really one of sadistically wanting to kill children, and not protecting what you believe to be a woman's right so I'd appreciate the same honesty in return. Overall I appreciate that you seem to acknowledge that human life does begin at conception, and that personhood arguments are dumb. We both agree on that, maybe on the last point for different reasons but still. Please don't delete this comment.

When he says he's depressed, not texting you back and engaging in other activities, it's your cue to understand that you are the problem.

30:18

If you have a penis, you’re a man. If you have a vagina, you’re a woman. Plain and simple You can claim that you’re non-binary all you want, but at the end of the day you’re either born male or female.

So if a woman objects to another woman aborting a little girl, that's misogyny? C'mon, be serious. I could make the argument that being pro abortion is misogynistic because it so often hurts the women who do it and as a woman hater you'd encourage that. Misogyny is serious, abortion is serious, but engage with the pro-life position don't just claim or assume that they are disingenuous woman haters. As for the argument that to be consistent they should put equal efforts into making laws forcing people to risk themselves to save others, well think about it, how many lives would that save and what would be the serious risks to those doing the saving? The risk to reward would be save dozens or hundreds with maybe dozens killed. Whereas with abortion you could save millions with very low risks to the saviours. So it would make sense to focus all your efforts on abortion from that perspective. Don't assume I'm pro-life or pro abortion from my comments, my point is that I believe that on the whole both sides are arguing their position in good faith.

I'm pretty sure making Catra more visibly black would bring a lot more discourse than there already was. I was in the fandom back then. There were already sooo many people trying to make the show controversial.

loved this vid

I can’t believe we’re categorising people by skin colour in the 21st century. Culture is race, not colour. Don’t be part of the problem.

Personality and self expression are not gender

After I read Watchmen I did wonder if Tim Minchin was making fun of the "humans are individual miracles" plot beat in the opening numbers of Mathilda. (I had experienced both at around the same time and found the juxtaposition funny).

Yes! I feel exactly the same about how romance focuses so much on the getting together. I'm literally writing an adaptation of a classic work that extends the plot for another half to explore the character relationships because that is what I want to read and it seems so hard to find.

I'm just going back through your videos, having seen your one the other day, and I must have missed this one previously! Thank you for your explanation of everything.. although my health problems are different (auto-immune & undiagnosable, apparently) a lot of this feels so relevant! 😪

After being chiefly a fantasy fiction reader for almost a decade from childhood, I had decided to try a few science fiction books like 6 years ago and Machineries of Empire just happened to be one of the series I picked up (with the others being Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe short stories and novellas, Kate Elliott's Jaran series and some stand-alones like Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigade and The Stars are Legion). Honestly, I'm glad I just happened to choose just right with all these options because otherwise, I may not have popped my fantasy bubble. I really love SFF in general for the interesting worldbuilding - not just as in having cool imaginary systems or rules for worlds (because, honestly, even when I love it, it alone can't sustain me as a reader), but for the way I follow characters try to navigate them as their own reality. Honestly, your review made me want to reread Machineries of Empire so I might do that next year. Maybe it will help me bear waiting for Kate Elliott's conclusion to The Sun Chronicles. 😭(I cannot recommend it enough to everyone, at this point it's my favourite series period even without the conclusion but waiting is still Pain.)

shonalika back at it again!

i read the night circus last year and had a lot of the same issues you did. i just REALLY did not buy the central romance, and i could't get over how awful marco was to his girlfriend. I bought marco being a little obsessed with celia, i don't buy her falling in love with him. I did really enjoy the author's second book 'the starless sea'. it has some similar aspects to the night circus but executed much better imo.

Really enjoyed reading all these comments. One newer band that is both brutal and yet does not reject any notion of femininity is Sweden's Avatar. Within a single song, you'll hear some very heavy riffs, and sprinkled in is the vocalist - who wears gender-neutral clothing and proudly prances around the stage without any worry about how feminine he looks. With so much machismo and bravado in metal, it's refreshing to watch a band that isn't encumbered with toxic masculinity.

the 'we're just normal men' reference had me cackling lmao got to respect those cbbc memes

Yoon Ha Lee's books sound like my initial experience with the Locked tomb series. I know its super popular but if you havent read i highly recommend! I'll pick up those 3 Lee books....

It's always a good day when Shonalika uploads! Now to find out if my library has some of these books.

yesss the machineries of empire is so good!! I also think the stuff yoon ha lee is able to do with characterization is just as, if not more, impressive than the sci fi worldbuilding. no spoilers, but the things we come to understand about characters and the ways we come to understand them are so. juicy!!

I've heard people say that left hand of darkness is meant to have a flawed narrator who is unreliable in some ways, though I don't know how much is the narrator and how much was Le Guin's limited views in that era. The fact that in the story the previous female researcher shared many views as the narrator might betray the idea that she thought that way or that maybe other women did in that era(?) But having read many of her earlier and later books I do think she is both good at writing from a flawed (frequently but not exclusively male) perspective but also seemed to write about topics that were more and more progressive as she went along, with older stuff having more that didn't age well. Her earlie(st?) sf book, Rocannon's world, was progressive at the time in that its male lead wasnt a red blooded military man who chose violence but a sensitive anthropologist who chose subtler approaches -- which isnt much in the grand scheme of things. But her later sf book "the dispossessed" has an anarchist moon colony that uses a newly created language with no built in gender or ownership terms, suggesting she understood the concept of gender neutral language by then. And in the first books of her Earthsea fantasy series, all the mages being male is accepted as de facto, but in her later book Tehanu she highlights how this is the result of artificial social factors and not innate ability and picks at how being a women in this fantasy world kinda sucks. And in "The word for World is Forest" and "The lathe of heaven" she has whole sections written from the perspective of... just the most horrible male villains, lol, whom you are supposed to hate, and in the case of the first, some of it (i think) really sounds like stuff male writers had their male protagonists say straightfaced in old sf stories, making it especially poignant - but its def like what people say on Twitter today But I will add that I personally get the vibe that Le guin deliberately wrote Left Hand from a limited first person POV bc she wanted to highlight that it would be flawed regardless - I think she saw herself as too deeply enmeshed in a highly gendered society to accurately describe a largely genderless one, and I think that self awareness is part of what made her attempt so much more successful overall - by acknowledging her weaknesses she was able to push past them a little and not fall for a lot of simple mistakes, and even with those mistakes you can see the human researchers in that story as just mistaken. Like, the Gethens do use gender neutral language, regardless of how the narrator transcribed it. The story says so. And that counts for something.

I tried reading The Left Hand of Darkness. Ummm, actually Ursula, they/them are better as neutral pronouns than he/him. It quickly became clear to me that this book is un-readable.

You present as fem, tho if you look ambiguous -- that is when harassment happens

Machineries of Empire sounded exactly like a series I could recommend to my friend to the point he had already read it and they made the exact same points you did independently so I guess you really got it as well

Artemis Fowl did things better than a lot of books

wasn't expecting the Watchmen slander 😐 might re-watch the motion comic this year 🤔

YES! We're so glad you are doing gigs again!

I read the first book in the Machineries of Empire series and it didn't do it for me in the same way, even though I agree about not doing exposition and simply throwing the reader in. I think I simultaneously wanted more details on all the math everyone's doing all the time and knew that if it were there I probably wouldn't follow it. I think I maybe also didn't like the main character enough. Anyway, I'm weirdly glad to know it hit for other people anyway. They're really ambitious books and I respect that despite feeling they aren't for me. I'm also once again embarassed by not liking Left Hand of Darkness as much as I'm "supposed" to. To the point I think I need to read it again to figure out what I'm missing. In general I don't like Leguin's writing as much as a lot of art critics whose opinions I usually allign with. Like, I didn’t really click with Earthsea either. I think the androcentrism (is that a word? I mean something different than misogyny or sexism) is part of thr problem. It makes me feel almost claustrophobic in an otherwise expansive world. Still, I very much feel that we wouldn't have my very much beloved Imperial Radch series without Leguin laying the groundwork. And I don't exactly *dislike* Left Hand of Darkness, it just doesn't hit like I expected and wanted it to. Also, idk if this makes sense but I simultaneously strongly agree that The Dispossessed is the drier, less accessible read by a longshot, and yet I personally liked it best of the Leguin I've read. I think this is because I was most engaged with its speculative aspects; the challenging bits were talking directly to me about something I'm interested in, and in a way that's rare to find. The Left Hand of Darkness is both obviously groundbreaking and ahead of its time, and also isn’t challenging *me* very much about gender.

The part where you were describing the pissing in The Devourers had me HOWLING 🤣

Thank you for the books! I'm gonna try to read several of them in coming months. I'm one of those people who hasn't read much of anything except technical manuals since highschool, so this seems like a good opportunity to get back into actually reading less technical things for fun

LOVE the Machineries of Empire, though trying to visualise the calendrical mathematical battles made my head hurt (in a good way????)

TJ Klune's books are all kinda like that and also he is even worse at writing women. Idk I like reading his books before bed because it's often a fun premise with very light reading.

yaaaaaaay I was hoping we'd get a 2023 Shonalika books vid

noticed that for the last three years running my top-rated books have all been works of weird horror by racialised authors. I wasn't seeking that genre/identity out specifically so that's interesting

But you actually do have to admit the comedian gets IT 🤔 Never read the book or watched the movie but I did watch the series and liked it a lot And and I'm pretty sure the Creator Alan Moore hates the comedian and Rorschach Or maybe it's just Rorschach I can't remember Or maybe he hates all the characters The guy is weird The series takes place after the book tho And It's not really canon

Bump

Thank you so much for sharing your experience! Most relatable content for me also being Autistic, disabled, not masc presenting enby going for no nips top surgery. I'm a few weeks away. It was really good to hear that the meds in hospital made the oxygen/ IV non issues for you and that the moderate neck pain was worst than top surgery recovery. I expect it could go either way for me.

I find the argument over whether or not abortion is murder or at what stage of a preganancy pointless since it's both completely subjective and is a different question from whether it should be permissable

The thumbnail is scary but the songs are good though 👍👍👍👍👍

The problem with the argument and it's the bit you seem to be self-aware of (7:57) is that you're basically saying that adults should have human rights but everything before an adult has less. AKA parents shooting their 1 year old baby in the head because they had some financial trouble IS A OK! Which as a philosopher might say "FUCKED UP, BRO!" or Incredibly immoral and unconscionable. You can defend abortion and women's right to bodily autonomy without relying on immoral, childish, and extremist views. Like just think about it for 5 minutes, when you start saying some people's lives (or just comfort) is worth more than other people's lives then you should REALLY REALLY consider whether you're saying some stupid shit.

Insanity/reality check: Gender and sex are the same. There are only 2. Non-binary IS made up.

I tried this new app that tracks my water intake and my sleep as well as my steps and my hygiene . Its called healthify me . It's an Indian app

lol just a salty bitch airing her personal dirty laundry and throwing shade

Your video boils down to being mad at men doubling down on being masculine and women doubling down on being feminine (all while trying your very best to present femininity in accordance with your self-id). There's nothing wrong with either, as long as people allow for others to be who they are. Your auto pilot is ''women = oppressed victim'' and you lazily read that in to any disparency you see. But no, The fact that women go for certain roles in bands and are less prominent all in all, doesn't automatically mean they're pressured into do that by others, nor that there's pressured against joining metal bands. The fact that gothic rock singers tend to have a feminine presentation, doesn't automatically mean they're pressured to look that way either. Women taking up masculine roles in metal are beloved by the metal community, anything from girlschool to arch enemy. I love how you still assume ''... male metalheads are threatned by women tho'', is that a pure asspull or do you actually base it on something? Because what we have now is a positive reaction from male metalheads, the only indication we have is that they are positive to masculine as well as feminine women. Do you have anything speaking against that, except for asspulls? You're also dishonest in your framing, for while making a point about glam metal having to overcompensate their masculinity, you willfully ignore it's the metal genre where 'feminine' emotions were most frequently expressed via their ballads. Furthermore, the fact that something is dominated by white people doesn't automatically mean there's ''a whitness problem''. But ok, I'm assuming you think hip hop's got a blackness problem as well. Tl;dr your analysis get less accurate by the year, no one gives shit if a metal band sings about love now and women are not limited to the roles you're talking about either. It's telling your examples are often from 40 years ago.

holy fuck this is cringe

The reduction of "doing that for attention" always pissed me off. As though the people saying that do not do things for attention, including clothing that fits into the mainstream. As though the entire industry of music, all of the arts, celebrity, etc does not exist on the basis of attention. As though rights are not won based on harnessing attention. As though attention is not a precious resource. As though attention is not the foundation of relationship. As though they are paying any fucking attention to the people they tell this to, or how attention works, or even what it is they are attending to

If you don't like white guys, why did you choose to date one?