If you’re interested in some covid compliant Belcher icons with funky little masks, I made some transparents that are free to steal!

We deserve food that's safe to eat. Just fyi. That's like a basic function that our government should be performing. You know, instead of slashing regulations so corporations can cut corners at the expense of everyone else's health.

Daniel Villarreal (he/him) at LGBTQ Nation:

Christian nationalist hate pastor Joel Webbon — a man who thinks maybe Adolf Hitler and fascism weren’t so bad after all — has blamed Jewish influencers for turning the United States into “a very gay nation” filled with transgender people, abortion, low wages, and “the LGBTQ.”

If this makes no sense to you, it’s because it’s just nonsensical, antisemitic, queerphobic bile.

“We, the United States of America, are a very gay nation,” Webbon said in a recent broadcast. “Homosexuality and sexual degeneracy is one of the number one exports of Israel,” he added as his video superimposed a silhouette of a Jewish Star of David over his face.
“We need to look in the mirror and acknowledge our high-handed, flagrant sin. Abortion is downstream of the sexual revolution. AIDS is downstream of the sexual revolution, a whole host of sexual diseases… economic turmoil. Women wanted to be equal to men, and in order to be exactly equal, she must become a man,” he ignorantly added, while displaying a rapidly vibrating image of a bearded transgender man.

He then claimed that women seeking equality in the workplace somehow drove down wages, causing straight couples to have fewer children. Oddly, he never blames politicians or super-rich business owners for paying low wages.

Antisemite “Pastor” Joel Webbon blames Jews for everything under the sun, such as trans people, low wages, and abortion.

He just makes us sound way cooler than we are.

So now it’s coming in loudly and largely overtly from both “sides” of the US political aisle. And it least this guy is real enough to be open about the facts that he believes “Israel” and “the Jews” are interchangeable entities.

But also, speaking as a biromantic Jewish woman, this is particularly infuriating in light of the number of individuals within the LGBTQ+ community who think the Star of David is a hate symbol, and who think that Hamas is their woke bestie.

But ultimately it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s supposed to scare the shit out of Holocaust historians who are presently writing chapters about all the obstacles that stood in the way of German Jews trying to get the hell out of a country that hated them. Spoiler: with few notable exceptions, no one would let those Jews in. Hitler saw this and said “welp no one wants them guess imma have to murder them.”

Had a dream last night where I was a sapient vein of copper in a copper mine so we're just gonna. Scoot on past whatever the fuck that was.

So there's a gas leak in my house and I need the pipes replaced with copper.

New pipes are working out great and I no longer dream of being sapient copper.

📢📢📢

you are not immune to inventing an arbitrary set of rules that only you have to adhere to

Speaking as a childhood Harry Potter fan, the enduring persistence of its popularity including amongst adults is 100% because it is slop without substance.

It flirts with the idea of rebellion and emancipation from slavery but ultimately discredits those notions by having the rebel leader become a lead cop in the institution that was repressing him and by making emancipation seem silly.

It reflects the chauvinisms of a British aristocrat who offers an impossible narrative of an abused child escaping abuse through the purity of their Aryan magic blood. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t even pretend to offer catharsis or self-actualization, merely hundreds of pages of occasionally racist drivel about a special little boy who joins the SS after reforming them from the inside.

That’s why it has maintained such reverence - because it doesn’t actually offer a subversive story but the aesthetic of one while reflecting the conservative biases of the author. It speaks to a certain liberal perspective that is progressive only so far as the oppressed don’t hurt their feelings.

if you mean billionaires, say billionaires

if you mean CEOs, say CEOs

if you mean corrupt politicians, say corrupt politicians

remove the word elite from your vocabulary if you want to not sound identical to every antisemitic conspiracy theorist ever

The Little Art Connoisseur (1863) August Friedrich Siegert

Last time this came around I showed my three year old and he said "He's little like me!" and stared for a whole minute (v. Long in toddler time).

One of the stranger tropes of tumblr (and like, to a lesser extent general) discourse is like - anger or disbelief or outright contempt/mockery for someone whose suffered a traumatic experience or serious misfortune that was not the most statistically likely course of events to occur and/or that is counter to the narrative they find politically convenient? Well mostly that last bit, I'm sure.

On the most zoomed out and least loaded level I can think of, it is basically axiomatic that large military operation by any organized and armed force will commit some atrocities. It's one of the reasons people say (but mostly don't believe) that crimes of aggression are the most serious and foundational war crimes of all. Despite this, basically no one on here who has ever picked a side in a conflict as 'the good ones' seems capable of accepting their guys might have done a massacre or tortured prisoners or abused civilian populations.

Certainly people seem incredibly resistant to accepting that states or administrations (or even specific policies and projects) that they consider praiseworthy has some price in blood and tears. The reaction to first-hand accounts of said price are usually reacted to as entirely bad-faith propaganda.

To instead use as personal and loaded an example as possible, see the intense emotional investment a certain number of people have in women being Safe and incapable of being abusive in relationships.

i've seen a couple reactions to this type of thing.

there's the denialist, as you say, they think any personal experience with an army or state project or political group or what have you that's bad is fake or exaggerated.

then you get moral scrupulosity. So, if you find something distasteful or vile in something like the operation of national parks, that means burn the thing down. Zealotry of the convert, second opinion bias, no one anywhere is allowed to have a bad or subpar time and anything that has ever caused harm must be damned in the strongest terms.

then you get the patriot. If your confronted with the idea that your chosen "side" in a war or gender war or any kind of thing has done wrong, you openly embrace the cruelty as being a good and even necessary thing. This is the type where they post a meme of stalin with a big spoon any time someone says their family starved under the soviets.

I do think these things can apply both to big geopolitical things, and then on down the line to personal relationships. All women are victims and all men are perpetrators. things of this nature.

i swear to god if people don't start understanding that responding to doylist critique of a piece of media with watsonian exonerations is not an actual rebuttal

somebody saying "hey i don't like that the only gay man in this story is a weird pervert and it portrays gay sexual promiscuity as a moral failing and character flaw" cannot be rebuked by arguing about how the character's backstory or personality traits explain their behaviour. the choices made by a writer are all fundamentally mutable; somebody saying an author's choices should have been different is not going to be persuaded by an argument that takes those choices as immovable fact

I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".

*fishes this absolute treasure from the tags*

one curiousity search on ebay to see if people are still going nuts over beanie babies has led to getting a strong contender for the funniest email ever

When your doctor prescribes you the generic

you would think the paganism subreddit would be more respectful of other religions considering virtually nobody but other pagans respect paganism. but i just politely informed them that “yahweh” isn’t the jewish name for god and they didn’t do the normal thing — go “alright thanks for correcting my misconception” — but instead decided that the jews are wrong.

Unfortunately not that surprising. In my experience many if not most pagans, regardless of specific religion, still have a christian worldview with all the supercessionist baggage that entails and they think having renounced jesus specifically means christianity no longer has any influence over them.

and they’re probably the people who get very angry about being called out on their cultural christianity that they’ve failed to unpack too

Unfortunately, paganism has also become a gateway into Neo-Nazism, especially Nordic paganism. This antisemitism doesn't surprise me one bit.

The friend I lost last year, who said stuff like "voodoo and hoodoo are not for white people" and "I don't think you should study Appalachian folk magic if you're not from Appalachia" told me Lilith was a Christian creation to uphold the patriarchy and that her being "the personification of child death" was a Christian lie.

He was extremely upset when I told him Lilith was a Jewish demon and was ancient before Christianity was even thought of.

I just find it so fascinating that people just can't seem to grasp the idea of "hey this very very old culture came up with a mythological explanation for why sometimes children die suddenly seem for seemingly no reason." Seems like the kind of things a lot of cultures might come up with!

So many cultures when you go back have various just-so stories that explain "yes this happens because of X."

It's because it's Jews. We have no culture, dontcha know.

Also, don't forget how Anything* A Jew Creates Automatically Belongs To Real People.

*The thing in question can be culture, wealth, inventions, history, technology, infrastructure, prosperity, religious texts, identity... it's never something that Belongs To The Jews.

To this outsider (so, y'know, thoughts priced at a discount on this subject), it is because It's Jews, but perhaps not necessarily in a straightforward way. It's a very common asshole test, imo, for someone who has an ideal-such as 'don't appropriate a belief' or 'don't tell minorities about their own cultures and faiths'-to see whether they actually apply that ideal even when it's inconvenient, much less involves a real sacrifice. 'Inconvenience' being 'can't just claim this belief and feel cool about it', 'sacrifice' being 'needs to engage with critical thought and doing the work to address a lot of unconscious junk floating around in one's thoughts'.

Jews, though, for us Westerners, are very often the minority on many given questions, especially aaaaaaanything touching on faithor at least, regarded as the minority, as though their existence is chiefly in relation to us. Judaism isn't the oldest religion on Earth, but it's surely got to be in the running for the oldest religion on Earth that is still practiced across the world with ideas Westerners are likely to have been exposed to, however indirectly. Which unfortunately means Jews get a lot of chances for people to fail the asshole test, and that's before any other expressly instilled hostilities are taken into account.

It is the oldest religion in the world still practiced today that uses permanent structures. The Aboriginals are of course over here breaking the graph re: oldest religion at all, and many Native American and First Nations religions are "they're old, we've been doing this for as long as we've been a nation and that's all we're telling you," so it's difficult to say how many of them predate Judaism. Probably at least some, probably not all.

Judaism's oldest antecedents--that's to say, the point where it began breaking off from the rest of Canaanite religion but still looked closer to that than it did to modern Judaism--date to about 2000-1500 BCE. The earliest Hindu literature is just a hair younger--1500-1000 BCE. Note that just as Judaism was a baby at this point, this is only the earliest bit of Hinduism--most Vedic literature was written in the 800s BCE, and Krishna doesn't appear until sometime between 800 and 600 BCE.

Jainism dates to "probably the 800s BCE with a small margin for error to the younger end."

Zoroastrianism and Confucianism both date to the 500s BCE. The Buddha is born sometime between 563 and 400 BCE.

The Second Temple period begins in 515 BCE. At some point shortly before this, the written Torah was redacted into its final form.

Taoism dates to the 300s BCE.

The first Christian Council dates to sometime between 50 and 63 CE.

The Temple was destroyed, giving rise to rabbinic Judaism, in 70 CE.

Christianity in the most basic form it exists today dates to the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

Muhammad lived between 570 and 632 CE. The Qur'an was written by one of his followers beginning with his death in 632 CE.

The entirety of both the Greek and Roman religions fits within the lifespan of Judaism. The beginnings of the ancient Egyptian religion date to the prehistoric era, but the version of it we'd recognize from school, with Isis and Osiris and so on? Yeah, that only dates to about the 2600s BCE. It predated Judaism, but Judaism's lifespan from "we wrote down the version of Torah we still read" to, well, now, is roughly equal to the entire existence of the ancient Egyptian religion as we'd recognize it.

We refuse to die. And that pisses off a whole lot of people.

A lot of progressive people’s idea of justice is rooted in the idea that having tradition as a value at all is inherently backwards/reactionary and holding everyone back from progress, and thus progress necessitates letting tradition die.

When it comes to some minority traditions, they may be willing to extend an exception, out of an image of those traditions as some kind of “noble savage” deeper Natural Truth (and this not tradition at all), and/or a spin that said tradition was actually secretly proto-progressivism the whole, and/or a devaluing of the tradition to little more than quirky ritual play-acting.

Mostly they just don’t think too hard about it, and don’t actually spend enough time around indigenous people to even know enough about their traditions or face this contradiction.

But they are forced to face this contradiction with Jews more often, due to how much their arch-nemesis Evangelical Christianity relies on claims to Judaism via supersessionism and “Judeo-Christian values”, and now, post-Oct 7th, with the culture war over the existence of Israel.

To be entirely honest, I do not think the discomfort some people feel being around masculine presenting butches, transmascs, and trans men is purely a lingering trauma from cis men that they cannot help. While I think it certainly can be, or can contribute- I believe this line of thinking often functions as an excuse to refuse examining that what many are actually uncomfortable with here is gender nonconformity.