The Daily Stormer wants International Women’s Day replaced by “White Sharia Day”

White sharia seems like an excuse to control white women while preaching how in danger they are from black men like myself.

All of which are tools white men use to rape with abandon.

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/02/24/no-sacred-white-womanhood-racists-rapists/

@Redsilkphoenix

I must admit, the later adaptations of the Cadfael books suffered a bit from poor pacing and characterization. The adaptation of The Raven At The Foregate suffered from this in particular as there were two characters that looked almost identical and I had no idea about how they were related to other characters.

I also thought Sean Pertwee was the better Hugh Beringar.

Actually now that I think about it, a lot of the female characters that Peters wrote had fascinating arcs and motivations. Godith Adeley in One Corpse Too Many , Iveta de Massard and Avice of Thornbury in The Leper of St. Giles and Ermina Hugonin in The Virgin In The Ice stood out to me in particular.

The Leper of St. Giles remains my favourite though, particularly for the final exchange between Cadfael and the titular leper. Cadfael’s last line about God looking on the heart and finding the leper’s beautiful almost chokes me up each time I watch it.

Oh man, loved this Daily Beast article just ripping NRA spokesghoul Dana Loesch to shreds.

The irony, of course, is that you would not dare face me; you can’t even bring yourself to face schoolchildren without feeling like you have to insult them (which, by the way, is another sign of weakness. Most adults don’t have to drag traumatized kids to keep the upper hand.) You pose and posture and parrot, but you lack the courage of your convictions; you would never risk yourself. You will keep talking about how 5 million people stand behind you, and you will never mention that your millions are a vanishingly small part of the population.

You will pointedly ignore the fact that most gun owners actually don’t like kids being massacred, that most of us think you’re a ghoul, and you will continue to babble about the rights you claim to assert on our behalf no matter how clearly we tell you to stop. You will carry on blithely, happy with your tenuous position because some fractional percentage of humanity watches you preen on camera, and you will count that as success while you ignore the body count that you directly contribute to.

When you are old, you will consider your life and find it ash in your mouth while you watch today’s children systematically undoing your life’s work. They don’t fear you any more than I do, and they will win.

Read the whole thing, it is truly glorious.

@PeeVee:

She must think that we are even more stupid than she is, if she thought that we would buy such transparent bullshit.

Laughter at Bigots, right?!?

…and now the NRA filed a federal lawsuit against the new gun control law just signed in FL. Because for all of their hemming, hawing, and doublespeak, they really *don’t* give a fuck about anyone’s rights, other than the ammosexuals who full theur filthy coffers.

@ mish

Villein used to be a legal social status. More rights than a slave, but not the full rights of a freeman.

They were tied to a particular feudal manor and couldn’t leave without permission. They got paid, but they faced all sorts of restrictions. For example, if they married out their daughters off the manor they had to compensate their lord for the loss of an asset.

Alan, was a villein the same as a serf? Or the ancestors or descendants of them? Or are they something else entirely? I’m somewhat well versed in the history of Great Britain back to about the 15th century and remember the word, but not the precise definition. Thank you for listening?

That’s about what I thought but you gave me a lot more details and specifics. A ideal answer, thanks a lot.?
How do barmaids and city workers of that type fit the concept? They’re peasants. Is that higher or equal to serfs in rank? I thought peasants ranked higher, socially if not by law.

They never give women (or anyone) rights freely, only when they have no choice. They take them back the moment we leave them unguarded. We have to tear freedom, bloody and raw, from their clenched jaws.

If you ask me, this is the one reason that’s just a bit more true than any of the rest. Reaganomics and exploitation of third world workers were means to an end and not the end itself, and they could be achieved quite a bit easier and safer because the Soviet Union was diminishing in power and influence. The threat of communism was a major factor in any working class anywhere winning any rights at all in the 1900s. As soon as it went away, so are going the rights. 🙁

@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy

Well you do have Mayuri Shiina for an avatar.

Hi, Katie! I’m a huge medievalism nerd, and you’ve inadvertently asked a really interesting question. I’ll try to be as brief as I can but if you want to ask more, please go ahead and I can rant about it for hours.

How do barmaids and city workers of that type fit the concept? They’re peasants. Is that higher or equal to serfs in rank? I thought peasants ranked higher, socially if not by law.

A barmaid is not a peasant, and she would probably punch you if you called her one. There are surviving legal records of cases where exactly this happened, and in most cases the courts took her side.

The word “peasant” comes from the Italian word “paisan”, meaning “person from the countryside.” English uses the term “villain” meaning “person from a village”; French uses the term “peon”, and so on. They all fall broadly under the concept of “serfdom”, which as Alan says means that they’re sorta free but also sorta not. Basically, the different words refer to the same thing, but with local and regional variations. In some places, like Poland, serfs had it worse; in other places, like Sicily, they had it slightly better.

A serf is not a free person: their employer does not have to pay them and they are not allowed to choose the work they do, which for agricultural workers also meant that they aren’t allowed to move from one place to another. However, they are also not a slave: they can’t be bought and sold, and they can own and inherit their own property. These differences were incredibly important to people at the time. From the records we have, it seems that medieval European society was a very legalistic place, where everyone knew their rights and duties and would quote them at one another.

In the very early medieval era, most people were serfs. In Northern Europe, where the rivers run north into the Atlantic and people drink beer and cider, serfs were over 90% of the population and there were very few slaves. In Southern Europe, where the rivers run south into the mediterranean and people drink wine, serfs were a smaller but still dominant share of the population, and large-scale slavery was more common.

However, as you point out, this doesn’t cover town dwellers.

Southern Europe has always had large cities around the mediterranean rim and the big rivers; and the people of the cities have always looked down on the people of the countryside. The law there was that people in towns and cities were automatically free.

You may be wondering why serfs didn’t just run away to the cities. The answer is that they did, in huge numbers. This really alarmed the rural landowners because their workers were leaving, so a lot of laws got made to try to stop serfs leaving. City people didn’t always like having lots of desperately poor unskilled immigrants coming in (some things never change) so they sometimes made laws to try to stop them too. However, the rural landowners and the city people tended to hate one another, for economic and political reasons I don’t have space for right now. This means that a lot of the time the city people would welcome in fleeing serfs just to spite the landowners, and even when they did make laws, those laws were pretty hostile to the landowners.

In Northern Europe, it was a bit different. When the medieval era began there were almost no cities or towns in Northern Europe. When it ended there were lots. This meant that as the medieval era went on, many towns and cities got founded. Sometimes these were built from scratch, but lots of times it was done by giving a big village the legal status of a town. This was often done by the kings, and it would be very unpopular with the landowner who used to own the village.

Northern Europeans copied the legal system of towns and cities from the South, together with the idea that town and city dwellers were automatically free (or became free after living in the town for a certain length of time). This created a new class of people, which historians generally refer to as “burghers” from the German word “burg” meaning a town. In most towns, burghers organised themselves into crafts guilds, some of which were more like what we would think of as corporations, schools or labour unions today. As the towns grew the burghers became not only more numerous but also wealthier, which meant that they were more powerful.

The most prominent town in northern Europe was Magdeburg, and its laws were often used as a template for the laws of other towns. Every adult resident of Magdeburg had to belong to a guild. This means that there were guilds for jobs like bar workers and domestic servants. This was often the case for other towns too, because of how influential Magdeburg law was.

Let’s take your example of a bar worker in a town. She may have been a runaway serf, or may have been the family of her employer. If she was a runaway serf, she would almost certainly belong to a service guild, and the rest of her family would probably still be serfs on a farm somewhere. Either way, she would legally be a free burgher, and would almost certainly know her legal rights by rote.

(Lots of guilds didn’t allow female members, but lots did, especially the more service-oriented guilds. Some gave more rights to male members.)

I hope that helps. I wrote about three times as much and then deleted a lot of it to try to make it simpler and less of a textwall.

Thanks, Alan.

I wonder if that’s etymologically related to ‘pagan’? That originally had the same sort of implied condescension about country folks.

I believe so but I am not a linguist.

There seems to be a fixation in European jurisprudence with the idea of “a year and a day” being the magical cut off point. I wonder what the origin of that is?

You’re right that it’s very common. Interestingly, it’s also made its way into fairy tales – but then, medieval stories about fairies tend to be extremely legalistic.

It is my understanding that medieval law basically goes back to one of three sources: The Corpus Iuris Civilis, Germanic traditional tribal practises, and whatever was pragmatic during the Carolingian era.

You’re a law nerd; is the year-and-a-day rule found in the Corpus Iuris Civilis?