You know I was watching this rather fun little ted-ed about Shakespeare’s Macbeth and it casually mentioned the practice/discipline of History and the role of historians as they would have been understood in the middle ages.
Basically as storytellers or mythmakers who fit the memory of the past to the needs of the current power structures…
and I thought about our “dark enlightenment” and how goddamned horrible my experience with the path to academia was and the gaslighting I hear about it all the damned time…
and then I read this.
My only comfort is that this idiocy will only be around here. Maybe Raphaël Glucksmann has the right idea. Maybe more countries should either take back or offer to shelter the artifacts that the US can’t be trusted to protect anymore.
Yep, it’s straight fucked up… I just watched the latest Contrapoints video and towards the end she is quoting someone who is approvingly citing Hitler, and she just stops and goes on this whole rant about how stupid the person is… I mean, IT’S FUCKING HITLER YOU DIPSHITS… gah!!!
And yes, it’s about Harry Potter fanfic, so she addresses the awfulness of Rowling, but it’s hard to avoid talking about fanfic without addressing HP… so…
HPATMOR is noteworthy that it’s both a fucking terrible fic, and a fucking therrible Harry Potter fanfic. It also screams that the author believes he’s the smartest person in any room, ever, while being a dumbass with blind spots and gaps in his understanding of, well, everything the size of Grand Canyone.
Yup! I still don’t understand how it got as popular as it did, and think less of a bunch of otherwise reasonable-seeming people for thinking it was great.
Probably cause it seemed more “intellectual” than other HP fanfic? For some people, throwing around big sciencey/rationalist type languages means “smart”…
“As recently as 1989, the Dewey Decimal Classification still classed “Homosexuality” under Social Problems, often alongside “Prostitution” and “Obscenity.” Radical catalogers fought for decades to remove such headings, often facing resistance from traditional cataloging professionals who cited standards preservation, historical continuity, and technical neutrality as reasons to maintain the status quo.”
Use “see” or “see also” references if people are looking up the old headings. It’s not possible to recatalogue all old material, but see and see also references and notes in records regarding old subject headings can cover a lot of ground.
Toronto Public Library has added a note in books about First Nations, which currently have to be catalogued as “Indians of North America”, to the effect that they are looking for better headings, and are lobbying the Library of Congress to change that heading. Some specific First Nations have their own headings, but the general one is not currently acceptable. Of course, they can decide to use a “local subject heading” instead of the standard one, but references still need to be made back to older works, and global changes are not always possible.
