[daughterofstories]

I am a Zionist.

This much maligned word has been taken and twisted by those who are certain there is nothing worse that a person can be, who cannot articulate what a Zionist stands for, except that it is evil, or what a Zionist believes, except that it is wrong.

But I am used to people taking pieces of who I am, and insisting that they understand those pieces better than I do, and I refused to let others tell me who I am and what I believe, or take away the words that I find meaning in, so let me tell you what Zionism means to me.

I love Israel.

I love its people and its culture, their strength and determination, and the way they don’t hesitate to tell you what they think you need to know, the way a particularly pushy family member might. And even when they’re wrong about what you need, you know they are acting out of love, and you cannot help but love them back. Because you also know that, on the day you say to them, “I need you now, and this is what I need,” They will do everything they can to help you, because that is what family does.

I love the land and its history, the ancient city built on ancient city where every layer holds a wealth of knowledge and every ruin contains truths about where we came from and how that shapes who we are today.

I love the natural beauty, and I marvel at how such a small space can hold so much variety as mountain and desert and fertile soil sit side by side in a vision of how peoples might someday learn to live.

Because I am a Zionist.

I know that the country is flawed, that it has as many terrible actions in its history as wonderful actions that its government continues to condone and commit horrors, and I desperately want it to be better,

Because I am a Zionist.

I seek to understand the flaws and the horrors, the obstacles to the best of what Israel can be that come from within as well as from without, because only when threats and obstacles are understood can they be overcome, and I dream of the day when Israel will be the best version of itself,

Because I am a Zionist.

I dream of the day when Jews and Arabs and everyone else will live together peacefully and happily in Israel and in the countries that sit beside it,

Because I am a Zionist.

I worry for my family, for my father’s siblings and their spouses and their children and for the millions of others who are my family because they are my People.

My heart bleeds when they suffer and when they die, and when the world shouts that they deserve it because of where they live (when the world shouts that I deserve the same because of who I am). I dream of the day when they will live in peace and safety, when they will be able to make plans without taking into account if the place they want to go is close enough to the bomb shelter and if that shelter has enough space, when war and its horrors will be something that happens somewhere or somewhen else,

Because I am a Zionist.

(I dream, too, of the day that the Palestinian people will live in peace, without fear of bombs or vigilante violence or totalitarian governments, secure in their borders and able to build the homeland they want.

I dream of this partly because I am a Zionist, and I know that Israel will never truly know peace until its neighbors do as well, but mostly because I dream of these things for all peoples, in all parts of the world.)

And I know how difficult and distant these dreams are. I know how impossible they seem.

But there was a time, not long ago, When Israel itself was an impossible dream.

For two thousand years, we sat in our synagogues and at our seder tables and sang “Next year in a rebuilt Jerusalem,”

And it was an impossible dream.

For two thousand years, we were hated and used and killed and imprisoned in and thrown out of every place we lived, and prayed for a place that could be ours, where we would always be welcome and never told we could not be ourselves,

And it was an impossible dream.

That dream is not wholly fulfilled, when Israel is not welcoming to all of us, and asks too many of us to change who we are, when so many people tells us we do not belong, and Israel sometimes does terrible things when fighting against them.

But we are so much closer than seemed possible just two hundred years ago.

If we truly want it, it is not just a story we tell, not an impossible dream, but a goal we can work towards.

I believe this, because I am a Zionist.

And so I look at other dreams that we have held onto for two thousand years,

That “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they continue to study war,” That “My house shall be called a house of prayer to all the nations,” That hunger and want will be eliminated from the Earth,

And I believe that, if we truly want them, they are not just stories we tell, not impossible dreams, but goals we can work towards.

And I will continue dreaming, and believing, and working,

Because I am a Zionist.

[captain-price-returns]

Theyve mobilized faster against this than anything in the past 10 years and to me that pretty much says it all and justifies what so many have said about them.

[quasi-normalcy]

They won't mobilize to defend your rights but they will mobilize to prevent YOU from defending your rights.

[dancinbutterfly]

DSA candidate Planter is an actual Nazi. Mit ein fucking Nazi topenkopf tatto, ja? Fucking verstandt? Ihr ist ein motherfucking Nazi aktual!

DSA Mamdani misplaced 50 million dollars of 65 million dollars he promised to trans public healthcare for DSA healthcare and has not hired a single Black deputy mayor despite his oh-so-progressive politics.

The DSA candidate in Texas wants to put people who committed the of saying Israel should exists in ICE camps.

Normie Democrat Kamala Harris was the Attorney General when Gay Marriage happened. Normie Democrat Chuck Schumer got protection of gay marriage enshrined in federal law in congress. Normie Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Amy Porter have been taking on the banks.

Normie Democrat Joe Biden got the Violence Against Women Act and Victims of Violent Crimes Act through congress in the 70s and made sure it was renewed during his tenure as president that made sure that violence against women was actually treated as a serious crime and saw that victims of violent crime could seek restitution and support not just from their offenders but from the state and federal government.

and there's more. There's so many more and most of them are from normie corporate Democrats. Corporate Democrat Jon Ossoff got RID OF THE REMAING LEAD PIPES! THE RIGHT TO NOT HAVE LEAD IN YOUR WATER!

What right are they preventing you from having?

Seriously?

PREVENTING YOU?!

What right are the Corporate Dems prevent you from accessing?

Because from where I sit? It's the right to attack Jews in public. Because really is the one unifying thing DSA people do. There's a side of just...real racial sketchiness and antitransness and other things. But...ya know, the right to express antisemitism

And if it's that? Fuck you.

If you want to vote for the DSA so you can attack Jews, even antizionist Jews on the street, and put Zionists in camps, and vote for Nazis with Nazi tattoos?

Uhhhhh....you're at the Nazi bar.

[knight-of-skyloft]

How dare Democrats be alarmed that a man with a Nazi tattoo is running with a D after his name? How dare Democrats be alarmed that Mamdani backstabbed Espaillat, one of the biggest voices in the House against ICE, to put Darializa Avila Chevalier, a woman who celebrated 10/7, supports Russia against Ukraine, and thinks interracial relationships are icky in his seat? A DSA candidate, Francesca Hong, is going on the show of a guy who said Jews are a demonic ethnicity (iirc Clare Valdez went on his show as well). A DSA-backed district leader, Carmela Charrington, shared Henry Ford's antisemitic drivel and called it "truth". Eduardo Martinez, the DSA mayor of Richmond, shared posts calling the Bondi Beach shooting a false flag.

They haven't flipped a single red seat. They've won deep blue seats from more competent Democrats and fumbled seats we could have flipped by running bigoted, batshit candidates in more purple areas. Get them the fuck out of the party.

[zaprowsdower27]

I'd even be okay with them taking sapphire blue seats.

If they were, y'know, meaningfully left-liberal, rather than indistinguishable from the far right in every way that matters.

[taylor-titmouse]

i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.

basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.

but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.

bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.

now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.

anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.

that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.

and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.

and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.

troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.

or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.

i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.

anyway.

this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.

[daughterofstories]

I would add that giving your characters setting- appropriate understanding of their own sexual and gender identities isn’t just a way of exploring the character, it’s an excellent way to explore queerness.

Do some research on queer history, and figure out what terms might actually be available to your character, and what implications they might carry.

Or don’t give your character any available labels at all, and explore their specific, personal feelings and journey without the safety net and trap of being able to say “this word describes me, and also forms the boundaries of what I am”.

[byjove]

I do not agree with veganism as a moral standard. If it is your personal moral stance, that is fine. If you think humans eating meat is inherently immoral, I don’t want to deal with you, you’re hopeless. Vegan ideology behaves more like a sect of evangelical Christianity than a dietary choice.

[literallycrashingoutrn]

Veganism is better for the environment, but claiming that it's a morally superior choice ignores cultural and economic factors that make people eat animal products.

[byjove]

It is not inherently better for the environment. That is the thing. When you begin trying to explain that local, sustainably sourced animal protein is better for the environment than imported plant proteins that are farmed 3,500 miles away using slave labor, they start tuning you out. Down is better for the environment than polyester stuffing, leather is better for the environment than pleather. We should work on making animal agricultural practices more sustainable instead of trying to shame everyone into eating plant products that are also farmed unethically and unsustainably.

[glasspalacesstoneshop]

Every once in a while I think about how my very anti-Israel coworkers last summer would talk about Zionist Jewish students behind their back and about how they needed to get educated about the conflict, but then I would tell them basic level facts about antisemitism and Judaism and they wouldn’t know it. Like I mentioned off hand that the Soviets used to persecute Jews under the guise of “anti-zionism” and a FUCKING PROFESSOR was like “oh, I didn’t know that” and it’s like, you’re not going to convince these Jewish students to stop being Zionists because the instant you open your mouth about Judaism they’re going to realize you don’t know shit about fuck.

And before you think “what’s the big deal” I need you to know. I was working with mostly RELIGIOUS STUDIES students. We are so fucked

[magical-girl-coral]

“Can you imagine yourself being being Clark Kent on the day he found out he was once a part of a culture that is now no longer here? God, I can’t even think how anyone could function after that.”

My dude, my brethren, my fellow comrade

This is just literally what being Jewish feels like

My grandparents were holocaust survivors that could barely talk about their birth country when they were alive. My great grandmother lost her entire family when nazis gunned down Jewish Latvian villages and left no survivors. My great great great grandfather lived in a desert with barely any water resources because that was safer than staying in Poland next to his christian neighbors. And then there’s also my ancestral grandmother that lost everything when her family barely escaped the spanish inquisition.

My family has more lost history than the library of Alexandria

And you know what’s the worst part is?

My family is considered one of the lucky ones.

[magnetothemagnificent]

Friendly reminder that Superman was created by Jews as a Jewish allegory. Our history has always been there.v

[lanninglurksnomore]

☝️

[daughterofstories]

And the truth is, there is no day you find out.

You learn it in bits and pieces, scattered across your lifetime.

The first time you hear about places we can no longer visit or ceremonies we can no longer perform, you're too young to remember. It is always part of you. It feels more like a fantasy world then a piece of history you've lost.

One day, you are researching family history. So many of the branches of your family tree get suddenly cut off. You start to understand what that means.

One day, you are reading your great-great-grandmother's story's. You read about her sister who moved east when your great-great-grandmother moved west, and the day that the letters stopped coming. You know what it means, even before you look up the name of the city she moved to, and what happened to it.

(You are one of the lucky ones. The trauma is far enough back that you weren't raised in its immediate shadow.)

One day, you learn about the Yizkor book, the collected memories about the inhabitants of a village that no longer exists, which talks about your family.

(You are one of the lucky ones. So many villages don't have Yizkor books, because there was no one left alive who remembered them.)

One day, you visit what used to be one of the cultural centers of your people. Now, it's a museum to what was destroyed.

(It's one of the lucky places. So many of the memories have been paved over and erased.)

One day, "the last Jew alive in [country where hundreds of thousands of Jews once lived]" stops being a shocking statement, and becomes a genre.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You've never been the last.)

There is no one time your culture was violently destroyed. It happened over and over again, across continents and millenia. The survivors flee, and hope they will have a few generations before the place they flee to is also destroyed.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You've never had to flee.)

Your culture is still here, because you are still here. What you have is the fragments of a thousand burned texts and demolished buildings and extinct dialects, but it is real. It is alive. Multiple militaries and paramilitary organizations are actively trying to kill it.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You don't live in their direct line of fire.)

You grow up being told it's better now. People don't hate you for being different; not like they used to. One day, you realize their acceptance is dependent on them not having to think about how different you are.

(You are one of the lucky ones. It is possible for you to pretend.)

You speak your language, and you are speaking for everyone who was murdered for speaking it. You study your texts, and your are studying for everyone who was murdered for studying them. You celebrate your holidays, and you are celebrating for everyone who was murdered for celebrating them. You live your life, and you are living for everyone who was murdered.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You are able to speak, and study, and celebrate, and live.)

Nothing you do will ever be fully for yourself. You are a memorial to everything that was lost. You are everything that has been salvaged. You are the hope that something can be rebuilt.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You can only begin to understand how much luck was required for you to exist.)

[afurioushawk]

[biglawbear]

"genocidal supporting center right shill"

Read: Wiener is Jewish.

[leg3ndarycatlover]

He is a progressive leftist who calls the gaza war a "genocide" and opposes military aid to Israel.

He's just also a Jew who says Israel has a right to continue existing.

Not supporting the genocide of Israelis is "genocidal" to these darvo-gaslighting assholes.

[pedro-friedeberg]

“Arab and Islamic societies” ok

[mariacallous]

#remember when ppl here try to paint the Middle East as a multicultural bastion lol#the officials don’t seem to think so!

[haunted-house-heart]

some of yall want so badly to frame your hate as progressive but the truth is that hate can never be progressive. only compassion and understanding.

[auntiegothdolly]

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that people will jump at any chance to justify their worst impulses 😣 They want to find the one group whom it's "OK" to scapegoat and negatively stereotype. They want to find the one person whom it's "OK" to treat unfairly. And they'll dress it up in language that makes it sound like *you're* the bad person for criticising this attitude, whether it's religious or socio-political. It's a universal behaviour that does my head in 🤦‍♀️

[daughterofstories]

And because of *gestures at all of Western history,* the group that it's okay to treat unfairly inevitably ends up being the Jews.

[bluesardine]

I keep seeing the following image linked on TikToks about the rights of Afghan women, and how in the past they were allowed to walk freely in skirts and now are unable to even leave their homes. And yes, absolutely, this is something we should be loud in addressing. But it’s also important to not spread disinformation and this image is a clear example. The street signs and taxis are clearly in Hebrew. A quick google search reveals Luntz St is in Jerusalem (maybe this street is a different one, I don’t recognize it, but it’s definitely in Israel, right?).

[mindlessmockery]

Also, note the mix of Arabic, Hebrew and English on that street sign - you'll not see this anywhere on earth other than in Israel. But Israelis are evil white colonizers, even though they put Arabic on their street signs and can apparently be mistaken for Afghans.

[theres-a-hole-in-my-wall]

Arabic is a national language of Israel alongside hebrew. So aparthied /j

It's Street luntz in i think tel aviv < edit, it's probably not. There's too many streets with this name in Israel lmao

[bluesardine]

That’s the thing that gets me!! Israel (unidentified) is good, an example of a historical place/time worthy of nostalgia! But once they learn it’s actually Israel they’d be hard-pressed to find anything positive in the image at all. The “context” (by which I actually mean the interpreter’s pre-existing bias) changes the meaning entirely.

[chutzpahchesed]

Yesterday in Dublin at the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, a speaker took the mic to declare that “Jews” are “harmful to the whole planet” and described them as “the chaos engine of humanity”. He then went on to say that we need to change Jewish religion and culture to “save humanity”, which was followed by a round of applause.

This isn't new. In 1921, the Association of German National Jews was established and was defined by a radical, self-directed hostility toward traditional Jewish identity. They despised their own heritage, viewing Eastern European Jews with open contempt and fiercely opposing Zionism. They later went on to back the Nazi party.

Just like the Association of German National Jews, these antizionists goal are the total assimilation and self eradication of Jewish Identity.

Most antizionist Jews don't just hate Israel, they hate the Jewish religion, they hate Jewish culture and they hate Jewish history. Antizionism is a hate movement regardless of who's practicing it.

to quote the video verbatim, he said,

“it changed it, it’s converted Jews from people who were not harmful to anyone, to people who were harmful to the whole planet, who are the chaos engine of humanity, and of the West, and therefore, I want to say, that the only people that can actually tame and change the type of religion and type of culture that Judaism is, is us, people like us, everywhere in the Western world. we need to do that in order to save humanity. in order to save humanity!”

so yeah, he’s literally saying Jews as they exist need to be changed or eliminated because they’re an existential threat to the rest of humanity. they’re pretending that’s not the core of Nazism, though.

[fromchaostocosmos]

why is all the "bibical" movies and tv shows they have the ancient Israelites dressed so ugly.

I refuse to believe that we dressed that ugly.

You expect to believe that there was no color, no bead work, no embroidery? Just the most blah and bland item ever.

We have the clothing for Kohanim and Kohan Gadol described in the Torah and it is so beautiful.

Sure regular people aren't going to dressed like that, but seriously I'm expected to buy that no didn't interesting patterns with their weaving.

That no dyed their yarn? That everyone worn shades of brown and tan and white and the occasional light blue.

I know us. I know we enjoy beauty too. I know that it would a way to express ourselves and the areas of the land we live in.

We expect to buy that not single one of use didn't have pomegranate something going on in their clothes or any of the 7 species.

That we didn't go all out for Shabbat wear.

Give me a break.

Where are my beautiful clothing and accessories that we would have wore in times of the Tanach.

[haunted-house-heart]

some of yall want so badly to frame your hate as progressive but the truth is that hate can never be progressive. only compassion and understanding.

[h4ganah]

"It's progressive to hate injustice'and oppression" is the kind of thought-ending cliché that feels like a great and foolproof way to justify your rage, but I have some unfortunate news about what that attitude almost ineviatbly ends up like

[afurioushawk]

Really loving this whitewashing of the Free Palestine activists who were in the streets celebrating on 10/8. Everyone remembers how y'all were cheering when Israeli men, women, and children were being raped and burned alive, when Thai farm workers were getting the heads chopped off with shovels, when African students were getting their heads plugged with bullets.

You were all out and proud and cheering on 10/8. You were saying "This is what decolonization looks like." Where's that pride now? Why are you suddenly getting shy when your posts and videos are being played back to you?

[ichooseyoupikajew]

God, I’ll never forget how proudly some pro-Palestine activists were tweeting about how happy they were watching videos of the carnage.

[iswearbyalltheflowers]

[still-searching-for-something]

I’ll never forget the weeks and months after October 7th, 2023. The left died that day, and demonstrated what they really were.

[hero-israel]

Came back wrong from the Pet Sematary "progressivism"

[zaprowsdower27]

Just Jewish Things: seeing people refer to something they obsess over as "my roman empire" for literal years before you realize they mean it in the sense of "autistic special interest that they love learning and talking about"

and not, like, "a thing which no longer exists but nevertheless holds a place in my mind akin to the one Moby Dick does for Captain Ahab, an obsession I constantly wonder about what life would be like without and which I blame for three quarters of my problems"

[indecisiveavocado]

i think it was @greco-roman-jewess who made a post that boiled down to "if you're jewish you can blame like EVERYTHING on the romans"

[lostxanadu]

there's been this romanticization of radicalization on the left for at least the past 5 years but probably closer to 10 that i think started with people being like "okay, if you think UBI is radical leftism, then sure, i'm a radical" but over the years has slid into just unironically embracing political extremism and violence

[ziskeyt]

seeing people say "what radicalized you?" become this seeming call of righteousness has been so strange. "human empathy radicalized me" i've seen a number of times, and i'm gonna be honest if you are radicalized i'm not sure that's because of empathy. to be radicalized is to become more extreme in your beliefs. hope may be a radical act in times where it can feel like we are on a path that leads to despair, but to hope for better, to believe we can do better and continue the work to make the future better for those who come after us is not extremism. as the world bends more toward conservatism i am not more extreme in my hope, i hold onto hope with the stubbornness of one who will not be moved from my position: the future is always coming, and we have it within us to make it better than our today through kindness, understanding, and refusing the siren's call of the tool that is dehumanization.

extremism leads to violence, and as we see over and over, violence only leads to more violence. to be radicalized is not a badge of honour.

[stopthatimp]

no sorry this is silly. this is not what "radicalization" means, nor what "radical" means. there are absolute pacifists who are radicals, there are practitioners of nonviolence (people who use nonviolence in movement work but who are not absolute pacifists in all contexts) who are also radicals. I personally know people who describe themselves as radicalized by Metro Surge and what that means in practice is that they spent more of their time and money and risked more of themselves than they previously would have to stop Trump's fascist ethnic cleansing campaign, because what they saw horrified them and moved them to act and reorder their lives around the necessity of that action. These people were radicalized. Large portions of the country consider them extreme. They are still not violent.

But, I will go a step further and say that it's very strange to me to see terms defined against a possibly-very-awful norm - "radical", "extremist" - framed as de facto unreasonable, aberrent, non-normative. If you "hold onto hope with the stubbornness of one who will not be moved from my position" then okay great, but are you doing the same stuff as things get worse? Would you ever reconsider what you are doing and what you are willing to do? I don't necessarily mean violence, though I don't personally preclude the possibility of violence from my political thought. I mean things like spending thousands of dollars to help others, or taking someone into your home. If things get really, really, really bad, will you still see "radicalism" as de facto unreasonable?

And speaking of violence - if you are a committed pacifist then I applaud that. But this post doesn't really communicate that, it communicates some squishy feelings about "violence begetting more violence" that I don't think really stands up to scrutiny. I mean, in the US's history alone we did very much use a lot of violence to stop one specific moral horror (chattel slavery). Radicals worked to fund and enable slave rebellions for decades prior to the Civil War. Was that violence wrong? What about race traitors? Was funding, agreeing with, or being John Brown not a badge of honor? Do you really earnestly believe that?

if you have an issue with an increase in uncritical promotion of violence, or promotion of violence at all, on the left, you can just say that. if you have issues with a specific movement on the left's relationship to radicalism, you can say that too. but insisting on a specific and non-representative definition of a term for the purpose of problematizing it is just goofy.

[lostxanadu]

i have an issue with the fucking murderous antisemitism actually

[daughterofstories]

Also--radical pacifism is not a good thing, either, actually.

Radical pacifism leads to "peace is more important than fighting back against evil". It leads to "Ukraine should give up land to Russia for peace; don't ask what will happen to the people living in that land, or whether Putin will just attack again and demand more land."

Radicalism--extremism--is not bad because it is violent or because it isn't. It is not bad because it goes against society.

It is bad because it leaves no room for nuance. It leaves no room to understand that different situations require different responses. It leaves no room to understand that someone can disagree with you without being evil. It leaves no room to consider alternate perspectives.

It leaves no room for the possibility that you might, sometimes, be wrong.

It heavily encourages an us vs them mentality, and a "by whatever means necessary" mentality, and that inevitably leads to the aforementioned murderous antisemitism.

[auressea]

Terminology is often based in a theory or a particular school of thinking. If you want to have a meaningful and sincere discussion; or simply make your point understood to a wider audience, you MUST GROUND your statements with the specific definitions you intend to use.

"Context dependence refers to the way in which the meaning of expressions, words, or sentences can change based on the context in which they are used. This feature is crucial for understanding how language functions in communication, as it affects interpretation through factors like speaker intention, listener knowledge, and the situational background."

Additionally: some words are never meant to be used in common, everyday speech. If you attempt to use them in a slogan, idiom, or catchphrase; they will immediately lose their inherent meaning. THIS is a rhetorical device used to manipulate people.

So. if you find people are being dismissive, or outright rejecting what you are saying - it may be that you are misapplying the words. OR - it may be that you are trying to manipulate them and they know it.

[daughterofstories]

I mean, I'm not sure how much clearer we can be than "radical and extreme leftism involves murderous antisemitism, and that is bad," but sure.

[shabbytigers]

okay being jewish has been kind of a downer lately but i need to appreciate it more. i just hurt myself laughing about this thread. it’s all true. it would be even funnier if the last tweet had audio

[daughterofstories]

I mean, sometimes they're trying to get you to ritualistically light candles with them...