BlackHeart Biohazards

In his 1883 book Traps for the Young, Comstock wrote that newspapers, magazines, novels, and even fine art were snares used by Satan “to capture our youth and secure the ruin of immortal souls.”

To fight the devil, Comstock claimed, Christians must eradicate the very words that encourage lust and licentiousness.

There is “no more active agent employed by Satan,” Comstock wrote, than “EVIL READING.”

In seven years of work for the YMCA, Comstock played a key role in “seizing and destroying 134,000 pounds of books, 194,000 ‘bad pictures and photographs,’ […] and 60,300 ‘articles made of rubber for immoral purposes, and used by both sexes.’”

Comstock’s most consequential accomplishment, however, was the federal legislation formally titled “A bill for the suppression of trade in, and circulation of, obscene literature and articles of immoral use” — the law now widely known as the Comstock Act.

–Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of art and sex, is suddenly relevant again

The same laws and principles that fancops want to use to censor fanfiction they consider “nasty” or “immoral” are currently being used to oppress people seeking abortions and transgender care.

If you call fanfiction “trash” and it’s not as a self-deprecating joke, I neither like nor trust you.

nightbringer24:

purlturtle:

khantoelessar:

brunhiddensmusings:

orwellsunderpants:

socialmaya:

[image description: tweet by Netchimen’s Reverie that reads “Tolkien describing places that are evil: no trees grow there” /end description]

This is doubtless because of his experience of the trenches in the Great War.

Like, this is what things looked like to soldiers who fought in that war (image in black and white of a solitary soldier walking across a muddy wasteland pocked with puddles):

Here’s Delville Wood, the site of a battle in 1916 (sepia image of a wasteland dotted with broken and dead trees):

Here’s an image from the Battle of the Somme, in which Tolkien participated (image of soldiers standing above and inside a trench or earthwork in a grey wasteland; smoke from artillery is on the horizon)

So yeah: no trees = evil was Tolkien’s own direct lived experience. It’s precisely why Mordor and the wastelands around it look like they do in his books.

the plateau of gorgoroth, the heartland of mordor, is described as being scarred by countless pits dug by orcs

the true seat of evil is full of foxholes and trenches

There’s a lesson to be learned here.

I hope Tolkien would be happy to learn that a hundred years on, trees grow again here:

From The Atlantic.

I think that Tolkien would be very happy to see that.