Things I Like.

Because I enjoy liking things. Because I can't work ALL the time. This blog is for fannish fun, and anything else that catches my eye.

[mariacallous]

[jewish-vents]

The next time I see some Spanish--governmental or individual--whine about "Israeli colonialism", I'm going to explode.

Set aside the entire Spanish Colonial Empire. Set aside how they still have colonial enclaves in Africa like that one by Morocco. Set aside all of that.

By the same metrics that has "Palestine as an eternal part of the Arab homeland", Pretty Much the ENTIRE FUCKING IBERIAN PENNISULA is ALSO part of the Muslim "eternal homeland"! Hell, I'd argue that Palestinians--as part of the Arab Muslim people--have more of a claim to Madrid (founded by Emir Muhammad I of Cordoba in the 800s), Badajoz (founded 875 AD by Ibn Marwan), Almeria (founded by Abd al-Rahman III), Tahrif (710 AD by Tarif ibn Malik) and Algeciras (711 AD by Tariq ibn Ziyad) than they do to Hebron and Jerusalem!

So when the Spanish government starts resettling Arab Muslims in their homeland from where they were ethnically cleansed in the Reconquista, I'll start taking their complaints about "Israeli colonialism" seriously.

.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

[notaplaceofhonour]

The “Israel created Hamas” narrative is just Alex Jones “false flag” “9/11 was an inside job” rhetoric repackaged.

It uses the same manipulation of half-truths to remove agency from the perpetrators of mass terroristic violence and massacres, and place the blame on the country being attacked to vilify it, and incite further attacks against said country.

Osama bin Laden having US agency support in the Soviet-Afghan War in the 80s becomes “Osama bin Laden was a CIA agent” becomes “the CIA orchestrated 9/11”. Israel facilitating Qatari aid to Hamas becomes “Hamas was on Mossad payroll” becomes “Israel created Hamas” becomes “Israel orchestrated 10/7”.

It’s the same lie, with similar goals, just applied to a different conflict.

[weemietime]

This argument literally doesn't make sense at all and it further explains how so much of what these people say is nonsense lol. Because let's assume that Israel did send money to Hamas and basically "created" them - according to these people, Hamas aren't terrorists, right?

They're the legitimate government of Gaza resisting 'by any means necessary' lol. So why would it be morally indefensible for Israel to send aid to another government? In fact those Qatari payments which did happen lol, Netanyahu legit sent like suitcases full of money fjdisfjisdf.

But I mean so what? Hamas are legit, right? Israel also handled their water, electrical grid, etc etc. Or could it be that your view of the conflict is literally just shouting nonsense until something sticks?

if Netanyahu funded Hamas then that means Israel was providing aid to Hamas this whole time. You can't have it both ways. Was Israel starving Gaza or were they funding Gaza's government including to civil servants and needy families?

If you view Hamas as the legitimate government of Gaza then Israel providing aid to them should be completely morally defensible. You cant pull "Netanyahu funded hamas" as a gotcha when ur entire political opinion is that Hamas = good guys, legitimate, Israel should be Greater Gaza and israel = bad guys who should all go back to poland.

Cos in that framework Hamas is the legitimate government of a sovereign state and sending them aid including to civilians, workers, etc, is perfectly fine. If you view them as terrorists then obviously this is a scandal. So which is it? Are they legitimate or are they terrorists?

[notaplaceofhonour]

same as it ever was.

“[atrocity] didn’t happen. if it did, it’s not as bad as they say. it was deserved, and we should do it again. actually it’s worse than they say, and it was a false flag, which just shows how evil they are, and we should do it for real this time.”

some of it can be explained by the fact these are often different positions from different people (or the same people at different times, as their (mis)understanding of the situation changes), but that doesn’t really explain why they would be able/willing to form a coalition together or have shared goals.

the bigger deeper explanation is that every argument is an ad hoc justification for the position they already have, that Israel is evil and needs to be destroyed. the exact details of the facts don’t matter as long as they point “the right direction”.

[abislwise]

campus antisemitism got you down? let me introduce you to the TITLE VI COMPLAINT.

This is not foolproof, but it's how I killed SJP on my campus.

See, the thing everyone on campus fucking forgets is that "Israeli" is a NATIONAL ORIGIN, and that's a protected category under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which like... is wildly in danger in this day and age but that's not the point. The point is that anything that receives federal funds is vulnerable to a Title VI complaint, and you know who receives federal funds?

COLLEGES. UNIVERSITIES. EVEN PRIVATE ONES. Because you know what counts as federal funding?

STUDENT.

LOANS.

That's right: if your institution offers federal student loans, YOU CAN MAKE A TITLE VI COMPLAINT.

And because a Title VI complaint threatens a school's federal funding? They do NOT fuck around with them. They won't always be able to tell you the exact action they take (in fact, they'll hardly ever be able to tell you), but they WILL have to take action if your local band of antisemites is posting anti-Israel crap.

And how do you MAKE one? Why, through this extremely handy portal! But your school should also have a process for making one, and if you have a diversity office or something akin to that, you can also have fun freaking them out by walking in and saying, "Hi, I'm here to make a Title VI complaint." Usually this will cause people to get managers. Federal discrimination complaints are a big deal.

DO NOT get bullied out of making your complaint. DO NOT let someone file it for you. Fill out whatever thing there is yourself, and let them know you've done so. And get a copy if you can.

[the-lady-of-the-labyrinth]

New UN-led survey shows low levels of malnutrition in children from Gaza | The Jerusalem Post

The nutrition survey, which was coordinated by the UNICEF, showed that children in Gaza have low levels of acute malnutrition.

[chutzpahchesed]

Antisemitic theories blaming Jews for European wildfires spreading | The Jerusalem Post

Cyberwell found that "nearly identical narratives" blaming Jews for wildfires in Norway, France, and Spain were spreading on X/Twitter in mu

Cyberwell has alerted X/Twitter of a new wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories blaming Jews for wildfires across Europe, the NGO announced in a statement on Monday.

The organization, whose goal is to combat online antisemitism, identified “nearly identical narratives” regarding recent wildfires in Norway, France, and Spain, reinforcing what Cyberwell describes as a “recurring pattern of event-driven antisemitism, in which major crises are exploited to spread hate toward Jews.”

Posts in English, French, and Spanish claiming that Jewish people deliberately sparked the fires or orchestrated them for political or financial gain were identified by the organization’s analysts.

Cyberwell found that content on the Norway wildfires surpassed 2 million views on X, “helping transform an isolated conspiracy into a broader wave of antisemitic content,” according to the company.

Meanwhile, content on Spain’s wildfires reached more than 69,100 users, according to Cyberwell’s numbers.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories also emerged following the Los Angeles wildfires in 2025 and the Patagonia wildfires earlier this year, the company said.

Other theories have emerged following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting and the hantavirus outbreak.

“CyberWell found that bad actors and antisemites repeatedly inserted Jews into breaking news through familiar antisemitic tropes portraying them as secretly responsible for disasters or as profiting from human suffering,” the statement read.

“As false claims spread,” it noted, “posts increasingly incorporated dehumanizing language, calls to expel Jews, and well-known antisemitic imagery, including the ‘Happy Merchant’ caricature.”

The “Happy Merchant” depicts a Jewish man with exaggerated stereotypical facial features greedily rubbing his hands together, popular among white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Cyberwell CEO and Founder Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor said that “the same scapegoating stories, once popular in Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich, now trend on every major social media platform after a crisis. Any major event can become a vehicle for blaming Jews online.”

“Whether the story involves a wildfire, a disease outbreak, a shooting, or another international crisis, we repeatedly see the same conspiracy theories emerge within hours,” Montemayor explained.

“The details change, but the underlying message does not: Jews are maliciously portrayed as secretly orchestrating disasters or profiting from human suffering. This pattern demonstrates how antisemitism continuously adapts to the news cycle while recycling centuries-old myths.”

The content, according to Cyberwell, is reflective of “antisemitic conspiracy frameworks recognized under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which include collective accusations against Jews and conspiratorial claims of hidden Jewish control.”

[unprettyextra]

Meet Lochlan O'Neil, the creator of DashCon

"So the whole ball pit was my idea. I wanted a ball pit."

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

God, this part...

But I feel like an asteroid. I feel like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I was very, very guilty for years. I had to go to extensive therapy because I was like, “oh my god, I, Lochlan O'Neil, single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?”

She didn't she didn't she didn't. That wasn't it. She wasn't an asteroid.

She was the first skater that fell through the ice of Web 2.0.

I was also a teenager who found an amazing world, and My People, and friends I'd still talk to every day, on the internet. I spent years getting my mother to let me go to conventions and meet friends in distant cities. I started ambitious internet communities I didn't have the experience or skills to bring to fruition. I don't think there was a lot of difference between us, in a lot of ways. It's not that I was somehow smart or skilled or suave and she wasn't. She didn't have some awful planet-killing stink or velocity that she brought to the show.

The difference was this:

In 1994, when the Endless September began and the Internet felt perpetually full of stupid newbies, there were 20 million people online.

In 2001, when I got my first LiveJournal account, there were 500 million.

In 2012, when she joined Tumblr, there were 2.43 billion.

When I started out, and you joined a new messageboard or chatroom or mailing list, you had to introduce yourself to the community. Except in the biggest of websites, people expected to log onto the internet, read through all the new things that had been posted to their local bit of it, and then log off again. Older members took it upon themselves to greet the newbies and answer any questions they might have, directing them to the relevant community FAQs. People would say things like, "Oh yes, I remember you. This is only your second Thursday with us, right? I hope you have fun!"

I joined an Internet full of adults who got online through their jobs or their universities, one of the first wave of kids allowed to roam free. And the proportion of adults to kids kept steadily changing, but until DashCon, I don't think people understood how much. I remember a discussion that happened in early 2000s slash fandom, where the very true observation was made that in particular artistic ways, we had all agreed to suspend shame, which created a unique kind of space. As a community we could all admit that we were there to be embarrassingly enthusiastic in unusual ways about absolute nerd shit, and we understood that it wasn't life or death, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it also wasn't going to get broadcast onto the clouds and our bosses didn't know who we were. Everyone was (willing to act like) an adult, and we could hold the circle and create safety there.

That felt like a lot of geek spaces, then. Anime conventions, science fiction conventions, furry conventions, videogame stores, D&D meetups. Images were bulky and pixelated, video incredibly hard to move. When you got to a con, it was like a brief oasis of Weird that sheltered you and screened you from view, and you ended up volunteering because the weary, cynical, intelligent, kind people in the con ops office looked like you were throwing yourself in front of a bullet just for offering to run a clipboard down to the other end of the hotel for them.

The ice was thick enough to skate on. The circle was strong enough to let you be brave and funny and silly and free, and you could buckle down with some friends and clean all the trash out of the ballroom by 11am on Sunday, and you'd see everyone next year.

The bubble was going to burst, but nobody seemed to worry about it.

Things were changing fast for fans, all kinds of fans, in the early 2010s. Conventions that used to get news coverage like "Local Freaks Weird Out Hotel Employees: This Weekend Only" to "#Cosplay: The Hottest New Trend" and from Geocities sites that shut down if you exceeded your page visits for the month to AO3 getting 10 million pageviews a week.

It was great. We could conquer the world together. We could stay safe and together and the circle would hold.

And then the ice broke open and Lochlan fell through. Right through the bottom of that goddamn ballpit into freezing arctic sea. Right into years of people sorting through the churned ice of the wreck, taking years to come to the realization that there really had not been ANY goddamn adults in the room making sure things were okay. The community had not actually failed so much as never been formed in the first place.

Because as it turns out, group-bonding techniques that work for 100 or 1000 people do not work for 10,000. Or 100,000. Or one million. Or one billion.

That line about agreement to suspend shame sticks with me all these years after because the defining feature of post-Dashcon Tumblr has been shame. And scorn, contempt, derision, and hatred. Cringe, in short, and kys. Exactly the kind of bullshit I saw every day in junior high school, and ran to the Internet and fan conventions to get away from.

I got the kind of community and mentorship and support that have made fandom a refuge and a resource my whole life. Lochlan O'Neill didn't. Not because there was anything worse or dumber or less experienced about her.

Because a system built in the 1990s was incapable of bearing the stress of a load fifty times bigger than what was already "way too full."

Just because I'm from one generation, and she's from another.

It was not her fault.

[inber]

Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

That is to say: you are not a bad, lazy, or selfish person for struggling, even if you know why you are struggling.

[thepolymorphexperience]

Genuinely, thank you so much for this.

[jewish-vents]

The way so many prominent climate activists abandoned their original cause in favor of Israel hate gets even worse when you realize they did it with funds from Qatar, a country whose wealth entirely depends on the sales of fossil fuels. They hate us so much they shut off their brains.

.

[the-library-alcove]

This is seriously one of my most significant issues with Greta and the rest of those people, to be honest. The Jew-hating bigotry? Yeah, that's par for the course and practically expected.

But the way in which that shift from her now undermines and damages the credibility of climate advocacy, because now she's so clearly an easily manipulated mouthpiece with no capacity for critical thinking or independent research...

It's not a deadly blow to climate advocacy, but we're already dealing with an uphill battle there, and her and her fellow travelers showing that they don't actually have principles or fact-based worldviews just makes it harder.

Hell, there's a bitter, sick irony that Trump has done more to turn the world economy away from fossil fuels than Greta ever did.

[hillsofspices]

i love when shuls don’t mess around

from central synagogue

[chutzpahchesed]

leftists love nothing more than adopting KKK rhetoric. horseshoe continues to be a circle.

[chutzpahchesed]

adding this:

replace the word “Israel” here with “Jews” and it is precisely how Jew hatred functions, how it has always functioned, and how it has fueled itself for centuries of destruction and death.

blaming everything on Israel is not about “criticism,” this is classic antisemitism.

[chutzpahchesed]

unsurprisingly, look who’s joined in on this:

[mr-crocodile]

Not only is all this stuff painfully obvious Judenhass. But, as a Spaniard, it is also deeply frustrating to see what has happened be used as a weapon in this international ordeal. Because it exonerates the ratfuck who sits in the Moroccan throne and his corrupt billionaire prime minister from being the true culprits of what has happened in Ceuta.

Morocco is an antidemocratic regime currently and illegally occupying a chunk of land the size of New fuckin Zealand. And every time they don't get what they want from Spain (anything from who gets to host the next world cup final, to us having commercial deals with Algeria) they orchestra migrant avalanches to destabilize us.

They weaponize the desperation of tens of thousands migrants from all over Africa to hassle my homeland into accepting whatever this week's greedy or invasive plan is. The international community should be talking about Rabat the way they talk about Moscow, but instead all that matters is finding an angle that lets you call Jews slurs.

¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA Y SAHARA LIBRE, COJONES!

[knight-of-skyloft]

An estimated 35%-50% of NYC lawyers are Jewish, btw.

[justdane13]

Just a reminder of the numbers

BTS may be too classy to do this, but it would be poetic justice if they went live in some form or another during the Grammys broadcast.

[fuckass-politics-sideblog]

How Wikipedia defines Zionism has significantly changed over the years. This has contributed to the misunderstanding of what Zionism actually is.

Just look at how it's described in 2026 (now), in 2016, in 2006 and in 2004 (below the cut).

2026/Now: "Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine, which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."

2016: "Zionism (Hebrew: צִיּוֹנוּת, IPA: [t͡sijo̞ˈnut], translit. Tziyonut, after Zion) is a nationalist and political movement of Jews and Jewish culture that supports the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel (roughly corresponding to Palestine, Canaan or the Holy Land). Zionism emerged in the late 19th century in central and eastern Europe as a national revival movement, called Hovevei Tziyon. Soon after this most leaders of the movement associated the main goal with creating the desired state in Palestine, then an area controlled by the Ottoman Empire."

2006: "Zionism is a political movement and an ideology that supports a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel, where the Jewish nation originated and where Jewish kingdoms and self-governing states existed at various times in history. While Zionism is based heavily upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the modern movement was originally secular, beginning largely as a response to rampant antisemitism in late 19th century Europe."

2004: "Zionism is a political movement among Jews holding that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland. Formally founded in 1897, Zionism embraced a variety of opinions in its early years on where that homeland might be established. From 1917 it focussed on the establishment of a Jewish homeland or state in Palestine, the location of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. Since 1948, Zionism has been a movement to support the development and defence of the State of Israel, and to encourage Jews to settle there."

[notaplaceofhonour]

the “sources” for some of the most extreme & totalizing claims on the page are literally just a small handful of people claiming this or that is what Zionists wanted, repeating a buzzphrase with almost the exact same wording, and not citing evidence from the mouths of Zionists themselves that they wanted that.

one of said sources, Rashid Khalidi, is a former PLO spokesperson. like, actively produced propaganda in an official capacity for the PLO.

another of the sources claims that “as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible” was a position that “enjoyed the unanimous support of Zionists of all inclinations” (emphasis my own), which is just… an utterly batshit and easily-disproven statement for anyone who has ever met a Zionist (or for that matter, a Jew) or read the writings of the early Zionists.

at best the most extreme claims get a [ disputed - discuss ] slapped on as a band-aid, but I have seen much better-sourced edits to significantly less impactful pages removed far faster for far less. there is no reason claims that easily debunked or from a PLO propagandist should even be considered.

[arcenciel-par-une-larme]

In broad daylight.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

It's worth pointing out that Israel has more Arabs, with more guaranteed rights, than Palestine has Jews.

[cantotallyeven]

Israel has more Arabs than every Arab and Muslim country put together has Jews. Actually Israel has more Arabs than every country except Israel and the US put together has Jews.

[amaditalks]

There's no way to honestly deny, at this point, that there has been an ongoing and accelerating effort to edit all English language Wikipedia entries linked to Zionism, Israel or in many cases, Judaism and random Jews with remarkable bad faith. The edit wars are clearly visible in the logs and the names of the people who've taken ownership and exert an explicitly anti-their-definition-of-Zionist editorial stance are known, but there is no mechanism that can loose their grip on these pages to return neutrality to the content. The "democratization" of Wikipedia died a long time ago but no other pages make that as apparent.

[girlactionfigure]

[kosher-salt]

Whenever I share my theory that the left will continue to embrace more and more traditionally hardline right talking points so long as they can loop it into being antisemitic, I get laughed at

But I just keep seeing it.