I can't remember who said it but I saw a comment or tweet talking about hypocrisy that essentially said The Hypocrisy Is The Point. hypocrisy is power. it's the ability to set rules for everyone else except you. and if power is a virtue then hypocrisy is a virtue. it's why you never really get anywhere with "by your logic..." or "then wouldn't that mean...". it's not that they don't realize they're being hypocritical. they do it on purpose to prove that you have to listen to them and they don't have to listen to you
I will forever share this excerpt from the end of In Search of a Flat Earth because it so perfectly describes this phenomenon:
All reactionary movements are in tension with reality. A tension that eventually results in psychological crisis. And belief systems like QAnon are the endpoint of that crisis. The point in which reality itself becomes an enemy. Because ultimately it's not about facts. It's about power. QAnons are not otherwise empty vessels who believe one wacky thing. They have an agenda. QAnon, what it accepts, what it believes, is driven by the outcomes it justifies. [...]
The reason they aren't more bothered by the extreme inconsistencies and outright contradictions... is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality.
They claim to be against corruption while hanging their hopes on an openly corrupt man. And that naked hypocrisy is the point. They will effortlessly carve out an exception because it makes them exceptional. They will engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something openly untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth? Their will is a hammer that they are using to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing. A simple world, where reality is exactly what it looks like from their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right, and their enemies are silent. They are trying to build a Flat Earth.
Seeing people who full-chest talk about how transmasculine people need to be decentered in feminism is genuinely ??? "Let women be feminine" levels of online. You can't decenter a group that has never been centered, and the worst part is, you're telling everybody that continued transmasculine erasure is praxis. Rather than organizing around social forces of oppression, you're explicitly abandoning one of the most vulnerable groups to patriarchal violence.
Letās say that Iām a From the River to the Sea person. Letās say that I think the only way to free Palestine is to erase Israel and send its populace back where they ācame from.ā Letās say we reject genetic research about where the Jews ācame fromā and assume that Jewish history magically started in 1000 CE and now everyone has to āgo home.ā What would this require? At its most basic level?
-mass buy in from the SE Asian subcontinent to the British Isles. Iām talking government, populace, infrastructure, the whole nine yards. Every government from Bangladesh to Morocco to Scotland will have to issue immigration papers, determine sources of income, and set up social safety nets. Etc etc etc.
That in turn will require:
-populations the world over to commit themselves to never creating an environment so hostile to Jews that Jews come to feel that a nation state in the Southern Levant is the only option.
Now letās go full idealistic. Letās say that the world decides to free Palestine and send the Jews āhome.ā Letās say all the people and governments are committed to making that happen humanely and equitably. What would that look like?
-trillions of dollars in reparations for murder, property theft, bank accounts, businesses, etc compounded over minimum 80 years
-full buy in from all levels of society to educating themselves about anti-Semitism, and eradicating it. Iām talking from executive branch to the working poor.
If you want Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, you really need to sit down and actually think about where you will send those Israeli Jews and descendants who only ended up there in the first place after they were violently expelled from somewhere else. Iām not talking about the Yishuv. Iām talking about the world after 1945. Are they supposed to go back to Poland? Or Yemen? Or France? Or Syria? What would that look like? Genuinely, how do we administrate and create the infrastructure for that?
Itās a hard, shitty question which flies in the face of blind optimism and overly simple narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But from where Iām sitting as a non-Zionist (I donāt do nationalism point blank; this is not a value judgement or a smug assertion of diasporic Jewish moral superiority) Holocaust scholar, it seems like those Jews are supposed to disappear or like, painlessly immigrate somewhere?
This is another iteration of The Jewish Problem, and if weāre going to seriously say that Israel should cease to exist and be replaced by a Palestinian nation state, we have to answer these questions.
Because in the current global climate? The āsolutionā to the āJewish Problemā in the Southern Levant looks like mass murder. And thatās half the Jews in the world right there.
That bothers me. Does it bother you? Or is it the price youāre willing to pay? You donāt have to answer that. Deep in your heart you already know exactly what your answer is.
Itās ok if this post makes you angry, and triggers intense cognitive dissonance that make me you want to yell. But I will not be engaging with abusive and/or anti-Semitic responses, and whoever replies with that material will be blocked.
yeah gotta be honest every time i think about how the dome of the rock was literally built on top of the holiest site to judaism and that jews are actually literally banned from going there i wonder how the jewish people havenāt set the world on fire with justifiable rage
and not only that but the people whose religious structure now sits on top of the temple mount have historically fear mongered about jews supposedly plotting to take over the site and used these misinformation campaigns to justify violence against jews ā the hebron massacre for example ā and yet the jewish community is expected to not be pissed about any of this
also i should be used to this by now but i think itās wild how every fucking time i make a post like this validating jewish pain i IMMEDIATELY lose followers. some of yāall just plain disgust me.
I... I don't even have words for the nonsense I've just witnessed, really. Recently, Israel was added a UN sexual violence in war zones blacklist. And just, look at this. Listen to this video.
.... WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T NEED TO DO ANY VERIFICATION???? EXCUSE ME???
hundreds of generations of jews didnt suffer through horrific shit only for us to see people on the internet posting photos of ugly ass "yeshua" tattoos
franz kafkaās writings are often analyzed in a trans lens the person who wrote that was almost definitely a trans person who related. people who call kafka a trans woman are almost entirely trans women. there is also a huge subset of literature shitposter girls who use kafka and the metamorphosis specifically to talk about their experiences with womanhood. so while i agree that the trope you are talking about is antisemitic i donāt think that applies here. heās not being called a woman in a disparaging way.
It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.
Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!
Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.
It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.
Kafka's Metamorphosis and writings about his depression are from the viewpoint of a disabled Jewish man who was watching as antisemitism was slowly escalating around him and Jews were becoming insects in the minds of society. And "he's not being called a woman in a disparaging way" is the dumbest excuse ever- antisemitism is antisemitism. I've seen trans people infantilize Jewish men, calling them "different breed of man" or "scrunkly" and then insist they meant it positively. Intent doesn't matter. Calling a Jewish man, who never ever indicated having any gender identity otherwise, a woman, or implying he's somehow not a full man, is antisemitic.
I hope I'm not derailing here (please tell me if I am and I'll delete this), but I'd like to especially call attention to this line (which I love, btw):
I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.
At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky⢠person? She must actually be autistic!"
Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!
It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.
People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.
OP, I'm sorry I only spoke on being transgender and autistic. Those are the only two points that I could speak on from experience. Talking about real people like they're fictional pisses me off, and I sort of... got off on a thing.
I'm not OP, but one thing that's frightening about this from a Jewish perspective (especially in the context of discussing someone who was alive in the interwar period) is the recurring idea that Jews only matter as lenses for other people's stories. That we can be empathized with, but only if our narratives can be twisted to someone else's.
Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.
It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).
Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged
Well. I'm a cis woman. GNC, perhaps, but cis. And I get misgendered (and degendered) a lot because of how people read Jewish features. And... when friends insist that any discomfort I have with feminine stuff is because I'm an egg... I get that they're trying to be helpful for a journey of self-discovery. But I've done that introspection. I check in with myself periodically just in case. And "oh, you're really nonbinary/a trans man because you're [insert list of stereotypically Jewish features//personality traits commonly ascribed to Jews [whether or not I have them]" -it hurts. Because not only are they minimizing my actual identity and my self-knowledge, and deciding that they're the experts on my life, rather than me, they're doing it in a way that's constantly used to hurt me.
another thing! Jewish men are (pretty often) seen as feminine/unmasculine and like they could never be 'true men'. In a lot of media they're the awkward nerds, the virgins, the weirdos. Point is this is not just misgendering anybody (which would be awful enough), this is misgendering a group that's known to be seen as less masculine than a white man for example
*this is a bit of derailing but it reminds me of how black men face the opposite issue of being seen as hyper masculine & in turn hyper violent. None of us can win in this racist ass society my g-d
āheās not being called a woman in a disparaging way.ā
No, but everything in his writing that gets commented on is something that speaks to feeling out of place in society, or something that conveys emotional or social vulnerability.
So for someone to say ābecause of these things I think she was a trans woman teehee!ā they are implicitly 1) denying that any other aspect of identity might cause these feelings, and 2) asserting that if someone feels these things, they must be a woman.
Ignoring his Judaism AND implying that men canāt feel alienated or vulnerable and if they do they must actually have been a woman. Doesnāt seem very respectful or deconstructing of gendered norms to me.
People need to either start recognizing that you can empathize and identify with jews on our own terms or you can stop fucking talking about us.
Was going to add this to a post I saw (the gist being a rebuttal of antizionist āseparating Jews from Israelā talking points), but the app refreshed when I came back and now I canāt find the original post lol
A lot of people seem to not grasp that just because things are ādifferentā or conceptually distinct doesnāt mean theyāre entirely separate or inherently unrelated, where any relation between them is entirely arbitrary & artificial.
Are there distinctions between Jews, the state of Israel, and the land of Israel? Yes. But the relationship between these things has so much overlap that you cannot honestly fully separate them.
If I had to visualize it as a Venn diagram, it might look something like this.
Eretz Yisrael is incredibly important to Jewish history & Jewish religion, and half of all Jews reside there, as citizens of Medinat Yisrael (where most of its population is Jews, and the makeup of its government reflects that), which represents the most substantial embodiment of Am Yisraelās political autonomy at present or in the last two millenniaāwhich is very clearly necessary with the amount of violence Jews faceāand whose borders encompass most of Eretz Yisrael.
The historical boundaries of the land of Israel are not 1-for-1 with the modern state of Israelās borders; there are plenty of Israelis who arenāt Jews, including in the government; there are Jews living in the diaspora; some of them do not care for the state of Israel at all. So yes, these three things are different ideas. But that doesnāt change the fact that they are still tightly related in every direction, and the exceptions are statistical outliers, not normative.
Itās not that we are āconflatingā these things; itās that they are intrinsically blended concepts with inherent heavy overlap.
what this does not mean is that āany criticism of Israel is inherently antisemiticā nor that āall Jews are complicitā when Israel does something wrong.
what it does mean is that attacking Israelās very existence as a Jewish state is an attack on Jewish political autonomy, that ācriticismsā of its government which employ tropes historically used against the Jewish people are still targeting Jews with antisemitic tropes, which is antisemitic, and that Jews have every reason to call that out for what it is when they see it.
The tumblr experience is having politics that make the most left leaning progressive you know irl blush and then logging on here and getting called a bootlicker fascist because you said that you dont think we should make the reign of terror happen again
Me irl: the problem isnt taxes, youre thinking too small. The problem is that the federal government isnt taxing the right people the right amount. Theyre taking all our extra cash in our measly little wealth bracket and letting the billionaires hang on to more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime. The only way anybody gets a single billion is either through exploitation or inheriting it from someone else who did the exploitation, nobody who has that kind of money earned it legitimately. Not only do we need to strip that back into social safety nets for those of us theyre bleeding dry instead, but they need to establish hard laws and regulations to prevent that kind of exploitation from happening in the first place!
My coworkers: man, youre a real red-card commie, arenāt you? You gonna start telling us to vote NDP and that healtcare isnt a scam too? Jesus christ go give someone else your goddamn revolution pamphlets, lenin.
Me on tumblr: while i appreciate the animosity towards billionaires, i dont think literally dragging a guillotine into the streets and beheading people as a public spectacle is going to actually solve the problems inherent in the system considering the french already tried that and it didnt work out well for them. Also i dont think anybody has the right to decide who lives and who dies, im pretty anti death penalt-
Hi, I saw a post on here the other day implying that Russia is pushing/making pro-Palestine propaganda (something along the lines of its surprisingly easy for Tumblr users to fall for Russian propaganda using the pro-Palestine movement as an example). I feel like I've heard this before but nothing concrete, and I'm genuinely curious if you know whether this is happening and to what extent?
These images illustrate how the Soviet Union visually equated Zionism with Nazism and colonialism throughout the 1960s and 70s.
Youāll notice striking similarities between these graphics and the infographics commonly seen on social media today.
This is not coincidence.
Most of the slogans and frameworks used in the "Free Palestine" movement today weren't created by Gen Z activists. They were engineered by the KGB and Soviet Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda) departments over 50 years ago.
The Great Pivot
In 1948, the USSR actually supported Israel. But when Israel aligned with the West, the Soviets needed a way to turn the "Global South" against them. They launched a massive ideological campaign to rebrand Zionism (the movement for Jewish self-determination) as a form of "white supremacist colonialism."
They created a state-sponsored "science" called Zionology. The goal was simple: make Zionism synonymous with the worldās greatest evils (Nazism, Racism, and Imperialism) so that opposing Israel became a "progressive" moral requirement.
The crowning achievement of this era was the 1975 UN Resolution declaring "Zionism is a form of racism." This wasn't a grassroots human rights initiative; it was a Soviet-led diplomatic hit job.
Though the UN revoked it in 1991, the damage was permanent. It gave activists a "scholarly" and "international" license to treat the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate. When you see modern infographics using these exact terms, you are seeing the tail-end of a 50-year-old Soviet PR campaign.
And yes, Russia is doing this again (along with Iran and Qatar).
Why Russia is doing it again
A pro-Russian propaganda group is taking advantage of high-profile news events to spread disinformation ā and theyāre spoofing reputable new
The research for this study was supported by The B.L. Manger Foundation, Inc. Executive Summary Since April 2023, Russia has been running an
For at least two years, Russia has been running a global disinformation campaign that has targeted Ukrainian, French, German, and Israeli au
Today, Russia (and its modern disinformation machine) uses the Israel-Palestine conflict in the West as a wedge issue. They don't have to invent new lies. They just amplify existing tensions. By flooding platforms like Tumblr or Twitter with high-emotion content, they force Westerners to pick sides and fight each other.
If Russia can make young Americans believe their government is funding a genocide, it weakens domestic support for all Western foreign policy, including support for Ukraine.
---
It is surprisingly easy to fall for it because this propaganda is designed to look like social justice. It uses the language of liberation to hide its origins in Cold War geopolitics.
When you see a post that frames a 3,000-year-old indigenous connection as settler-colonialism, or equates the Star of David with a Swastika, you're seeing a Soviet turd that's been polished for 21st century "progressives."
___
The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-Hatred by American Historian Gil Troy
American progressive ideologues have formed a new ideology based on the negation of an all-powerful phantasm they call āZionism.ā To fight
Anti-zionism is perhaps the most sophisticated form of anti-Jewish bigotry precisely because it was designed to masquerade as political crit
Going to add another source that covers specifically Academic "Antizionism" and how that derives from Zombie Soviet bullshit. Feel free to remove/ask me to delete if you don't feel it serves your point.
Shaul Kelner Fall/Winter 2025
See also from 1999:
Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 37) concerning anti-Semitic statements made by
and 2011 (Links are good)
Various state department pages that are still un-fucked with as of yet (Links are good)
Even if I didnāt have a solid plan, in the back of my head, I always assumed Iād kill myself.
Now Iām an adult and people my age have their lives in order and Iām stuck here, confused, because I never planned to be alive and Iām so far behind.
New addition two years later. Iām still going strong!
Iām getting married. Iām still in that loving relationship.
Iāve learned that thereās no real timeline. Itās okay. And while it sucks that I lost time, thereās still so much for me to experience and enjoy.
I got married last month! My dog is laying on me snoring. Iāve learned to have healthy friendships and relationships. Iāve learned that Iām not alone and that even when things are hard, Iām going to be okay.
This showed up in my notes again. And here we are. 2026.
Iāve been married a little over two years. I just got home from friendships that feel like home and family. My husband and I have our own place. I have a full ass book ready to be published.
I donāt know. Iām still in a good place and I canāt believe how far Iāve come from my original post.
I think this is just a trend everywhere but I've been very frustrated this week by how much admin work is being outsourced to me as the patient/customer.
My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.
The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.
I feel like at a certain point these constant fetch quests become unreasonable?? Is it too much to expect these groups to communicate with each other instead of making me run back and forth between them???
Made this post and then the new property manager (who started on Monday and only finally emailed us today because I sent a vaguely professionally hostile email to her boss because I hadn't heard anything and was not convinced she existed) asked for a list of open action items which her predecessor should have had but apparently wasn't keeping track of, which I learned when I met her boss and provided her with the list of open action items, which I guess tragically died in a fire in the last 2 weeks since she was sitting at my kitchen table, being menaced by the skull. How many people's jobs am I doing now