ancolie

Hey Alex! I help run a roleplaying group (Game of Thrones themed) where people play families across generations, and one of the requirements for creating new characters is rolling traits for them. One of the traits you can get is 'genetic disorder'. Inevitably if someone hits this, they often pick one of two disorders- either albinism or heterochromia. The reason for this, it seems, is that these are thought of as 'cool' and people believe they wouldn't really impact the character's life or ability to function day to day. When they write these characters later, there's no mention of struggles they go through because of their disorder- it's just treated like a minor detail that only affects their appearance, with no downsides or deeper impact.

My question, I guess, is what advice you could give to people trying to write from the perspective of a character with albinism and any recommendation you have for how they could more realistically and sensitively portray them. If you lived in the medieval era, before vision could be corrected and before the cause of albinism was understood, what challenges do you think you'd face as a result of albinism?

I agree with you to the extent of monuments to generals or that commemorate the Confederate cause, but battlefield markers or monuments to the dead don't necessitate anyone being a winner. If anything, those tend to take the stance that the war was explicitly a tragedy, which is hard to deny. Most people who've lived in the south for generations have ancestors who fought in the war, either as volunteers or as draftees; if your family is from Tennessee or Kentucky or North Carolina, chances are you have ancestors that fought on both sides (I had two great-great-grandfathers fighting against each other at Shiloh that only grew up ten or fifteen miles apart!). I don't see why that shouldn't be acknowledged by monuments. You can make a case for those being meaningful history in a way you can't for a statue of Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee.

Hey Nathan! I went vegetarian this summer and am really pleased with the choice, and I'm considering veganism. But I'm a bit hung up on some of the hostility I see from vegans towards local farmers who produce eggs, milk, cheese, honey, or especially meat. I grew up on a farm where we raised beef cattle, and while I've made the choice not to eat meat as an adult, I've also seen first hand that there are plenty of farmers who provide good care to their animals, who genuinely care about them, and who produce quality products without the cruelties or excesses of mass factory farming- even when the end result may still be the animal's death.

Do you consider local meat and dairy produced on a small scale a viable alternative to factory farming? Would you encourage people to switch to those products even if they're unwilling to become vegan or vegetarian? What about subsistence hunting?

My hometown didn't have any Confederate monuments a la generals on horseback, because my hometown is in East Tennessee, a region that was forcibly occupied by the confederacy due to so many of its inhabitants trying to break away and join the Union. The city itself was a battlefield for most of 1863 and is home to a few mass graves of hundreds of Confederate troops. But after Charlottesville, when people were (understandably) extremely upset, protesters targeted the battlefield markers that made explicit reference to Confederate casualties or that had rebel flags on them - regardless of the context. These were monuments that explicitly acknowledged the confederacy lost these battles - in the final failed assault they attempted to get the city back, the Confederates took like eight hundred casualties while the defending Union army took only thirteen. Definitely not a part of history that could be seen as glorifying the Confederate cause, but the monument was put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy and had a rebel flag on it, so it got defaced with paint.

I don't like the argument that people are deliberately erasing the past, but there's definitely a lot of people out there (on both sides) that are a lot more concerned with modern political statements than with preserving it.