Auntie E is on T

A pansexual bilingual middle-aged transmasc auntie (he/they).

[yesornopolls]

do you have any friends that are 4x your age or more?

Do you have any friends that are 4x your age or more?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 2 days 8 hours

[universeleads]

I explained the concept of "blorbo from my shows" to my 71 year old immigrant grandfather because I referenced it in passing and I thought nothing of it, until today when he said "I think I'll watch peaky blinders tonight and see my blorbo from my shows" referring, of course, to Cillian Murphy playing Tommy Shelby

[universeleads]

English isn't his first language so he's not super in touch with modern slang, so I've been accidentally teaching him to talk like a tumblr user. His favorite thing to say lately is "me when I'm a little hater" when he's like talking shit about the neighbor's son

[overwhelmedfernfrond]

I explained the “x before gta6” meme to my immigrant father and he, in turn, explained to me how back in his day in Romania, they had the same type of joke, except instead of it being gta6, it was about the imminent death of a singer named Gică Petrescu, who everyone was continuously shocked by because he refused to die. Every time a momentous event happened people would say, in essence: “This happened and Gică Petrescu hasn’t even died yet?!?”

So. He understood the gta6 meme immediately because they apparently had the same thing in Romania when he was young, except way, way more morbid

[lawbreaker13]

Memes are eternal and this is PHENOMENAL

[twelvemonkeyswere]

not even JRR Tolkien, who famously developed the concept of the Secondary World and firmly believed that no trace of the Real World should be evoked in the fictional world, was able to remove potatoes from his literature. this is a man who developed whole languages and mythologies for his literary world, who justified its existence in English as a translation* simply because he was so miffed he couldn't get away with making the story fully alien to the real world. and not even he, in extremis, was so cruel as to deny his characters the heavenly potato. could not even conceive a universe devoid of the potato. such is its impact. everyone please take a moment to say thank you to South Americans for developing and cultivating one of earth's finest vegetables. the potato IS all that. literally world-changing food. bless.

[books-bread-and-brigandage]

In fairness he wasnt a botanist and might simply not have realsied where potatoes come from, or tobacco for his Pipe-Weed, or the tomatoes in a kingly feast.

Sam would be more liable to be lamenting the loss of his family bread mother, worn in a skin againt his flesh and used to make quick flatbreads at end of day on the trail. Lembas might have simply been what happens when a mother dough is kept and used for millenia.

[tuulikki]

He was a philologist, however. Like, a full-on professor of historical linguistics and translator of multiple historical languages at Oxford University. He knew exactly where New World crops came from. If you’re a language nerd, you can’t not hear just from the sound of them that all those words are decidedly not from European (or even Indo-European) languages.

Middle Earth is distinctly medieval and European. You’ll notice that the people who are culturally and agriculturally anachronistic to Middle Earth, the hobbits, who have waistcoats and whatnot, smoke tobacco and eat potatoes. These words, with fairly obvious indigenous etymologies, get a thin veneer of Anglo-Saxon-ness layered on top of them, which makes them into “pipeweed” and “taters” (Peter Jackson blasts this apart in the movies, but we can’t blame Tolkien for that). This is also true of the rabbits (“coneys”), to whom the hobbits are compared—and rabbits, despite seeming native to the English landscape, are very late arrivals to the British Isles. This all makes the hobbits seem to belong.

But the hobbits are modern. They have modern culture, rather than the archaic heroic culture of the peoples they meet. They’re our anachronistic eyes and ears. They don’t belong in Middle Earth, not really, and Tolkien signals it with language. He had fun with it, too, because he was a medievalist and a philologist who was amusing himself by writing fantasy to procrastinate on grading term papers.

Historically, anything after the Columbian exchange is practically the definition of “modern.” And if Tolkien was going to signal modernity, he wasn’t going to leave out the potato, which has pretty much been voted humanity’s favourite tuber for every year since it went global. Modernity is, arguably, the ability to go to every continent on this planet and find potatoes there.

The hobbits are modern, and to be modern is to have potato. So, to comfort you, a modern, when you read his medieval setting, he writes you a little short self-insert people who, like you, did not grow up in a culture with chain mail and swords (even though there are fucking dragons and shit?). But never fear, little modern: you still have potato.

[wheeloffortune-design]

at work they're showing us how to use AI tools like Copilot to help in our day to day tasks.

I have many reasons why I will not use those tools, going from lack of accuracy, lack of ethics, and a higher waste of energy.

But my main reason is this:

I will do things the hard way. I will learn how to do things the hard way.

Because AI is a subscription. And when the world is dependant on AI, they will raise the price of that subscription.

And when the company I work for decides that paying for AI is too expensive for their bottom line, they will remove it.

But I will still know how to work.

[threefill]

In which my uncle is the best de facto parent of a queer kid ever

It’s Pride, and also the first anniversary of my uncle’s death, so I want to type up a story about him. (NB: my aunt, his wife, is equally cool, but she’d want this story to be about him too.) So here goes.

I skipped town when I was 16. Nothing interesting about that part; just standard queer kid in a conservative place in the 1990s stuff. I’d just gotten my driver’s license (this took a while; I’m good at other things), it was the beginning of summer break, and my parents had recently bought a new car and were planning to fix up their old one to sell. In the meantime, the old car (whom I’d named Harold Godwinson because one of his headlights kept exploding) was sitting all by himself in a corner of the driveway, and I thought he might be down for a little adventure. So, one night, I threw some stuff in my backpack (documents, journals, a few changes of clothes, my $235 in babysitting cash) and snuck out after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep.

Harold Godwinson and I hit the highway. The thing about him was that he started shaking violently at speeds over 57 mph, but in fairness so did I – I’d driven on the interstate in driver’s ed, but, like, twice, and for 5 minutes at a time instead of several consecutive hours – so we made a good pair. We were lucky enough (seriously: I cannot stress enough how lucky we were in this) to have a destination in mind, and we reached it just as the sun was coming up.

My uncle was in the kitchen making breakfast for my aunt, who’s not a morning person, and he did not look surprised at all to see me coming up the path with my luggage. He met me at the door and said, “Well, hey there babygirl, we were just thinking you might want to come and stay with us for a while, and I’m so glad you read our minds.” I ate my aunt’s breakfast and then faceplanted in the attic bedroom while he called my parents to tell them where I was and that I’d be staying. (I could hear the yelling even through the adrenaline crash; I think that’s the only time I ever heard my uncle yell and, believe me, I did a LOT of dumb shit in front of him over the years.)

The next week my uncle and I went out to run an errand. I’d thought we were just going to the hardware store – we were forever putting up shelves together – but instead we drove 45 minutes to the state’s only “alternative” (plausible-deniability term for “gay and lesbian”) bookstore. He walked me inside, poked his head into every room while I watched, confused, from the entrance hall, and then came back over. “Okay, babygirl. Here’s a twenty, you should, uhhhhhh, buy yourself some, uhhhhhh, alternative books. Back in one hour, I gotta go to the grocery.” At this point he looked around and realized that the cashier (who, I was about to learn, was permanently cosplaying Mo from Dykes to Watch Out For) and a nice middle-aged lesbian couple were trying very hard not to stare at him. He bowed slightly toward them, said “Ladies,” and then backed out the door in what might have been the most awkward little shuffle ever.

“Your dad is really sweet,” said the cashier. I didn’t bother correcting her.

[threefill]

Okay so tis the season to reblog this and I have a key addition to the story, which is:

We were all hanging out at my aunt’s house earlier this month to celebrate my uncle. We drank a toast – cheap scotch, his favorite – and after a while of telling stories about him I asked something that should’ve occurred to me a lot sooner: how did he find out about the queer bookstore? It was so obviously not his natural habitat.

My big cousin swallowed his scotch the wrong way and my aunt said, “Oh, you’re going to love this. He asked around at church.”

Back up for a second: most of my side of the family is Catholic, but through various plot twists in her life my aunt became a member of one of the earlier groups of women to be ordained in the Episcopal church. Not one of the Philadelphia Eleven or anything, but pretty early on. Of course, not everybody – particularly in more conservative parts of the US (like, say, the south) – was cool with women priests right away, and things could get a little hostile at times. My uncle never had much truck with any form of religion or philosophy whatsoever, but he did believe in my aunt, so he would periodically show up at whatever church she was assigned to and stare down anyone who was looking at my aunt in a funny way.

Fast forward again to just before I showed up at their house: my aunt and uncle figured they might ask me to come stay with them, and my uncle, in preparation for this, decided to find some places I might like to hang out. He didn’t find anything in the immediate neighborhood, so one Sunday he tagged along with my aunt, who was then working in a church about 45 minutes from their house. During the coffee hour he approached a group of random church ladies and this happened. (Bear in mind that these ladies saw my uncle only once a month or so, when he showed up for his periodic glaring at the conservatives.)

My uncle: Morning, ladies! What a nice service that was. [Pause while they all stare blankly at him.] We hope that our niece will be coming to stay with us soon. [More blank stares from the ladies. Uncomfortable pause.] She has always been a tomboy, and –

One of the ladies, who was about to become my friend Amelia: OHH!!! Okay. [Turning toward the coffee urn.] HEY! POLLY! WE NEED YOUR EXPERTISE AND GUIDANCE!

Polly – imagine the woman from “Ring of Keys” and you’ll have it – came right over and said: Oh, a tomboy? Okay, I’ve got you. Let me just get some paper.

Anyway, happy Father’s Day to those who celebrate.

[xclowniex]

I will say that it's been wild watching people go "fascism bad", when they're the same exact people who have been pushing fascism for almost 2 years.

Because these people don't view fascism as bad, they just view right wing fascism as bad, they view it as bad only when they're oppressed.

Because leftists for the almost past two years have been shouting for Israelis who have left Israel, immigrated to other countries to be deported. Deporting immigrants good apparently if it's immigrants you don't like. Kinda sounds like right wingers when they are fine with European immigrants, sorry "expats", but dislike any brown or black immigrants.

Protecting minorities good until it comes to jews being physically attacked on campus when walking to class, or when jews in Australia are doxxed en masse. Or when a 12 year old jewish girl is raped.

The core component of fascism, killing people who disagree with you, is bad, unless it's those darn joos with their zionism, because killing zionists is good and not at all a sign of fascism.

I say this as a leftist, as someone who holds leftist values, the left as a fascism problem. The far left in its current form, does not care about actually helping people, about improving the lives of those underserved by the government. They don't care about preventing fascism, they just want to be the ones doing it.

[ednav]

It’s always a good time to re-read Umberto Eco, who’d seen the original article up close:

Ur-Fascism | Umberto Eco

I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These fea

[asparklethatisblue]

children of any species are very good at being annoying and very cute while doing that

a sphinx child based on this post

[jessaerys]

how do i say "horror novels these days are too woke" without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary

[jessaerys]

something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is.... dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don't use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom's abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it's like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel

[some-stars]

YOU ARE MAKING THE TEXT DO THE WORK OF ANALYSIS!!!!!!!

[ednav]

I’ve just realised that this is my problem with most “modern” opera stagings (there have been exceptions), and with ALL the “reimagined classics” I’ve seen on stage in the past 5 years (no exceptions). Special mention for Paradise by Kae Tempest at the National Theatre, that turned the ethical dilemmas of Sophocles’ Philoctetes into two hours of “men = war = bad, women = peace = good”.

[takereveng3]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[tartrazeen]

[creekfiend]

its crazy how feeling your feelings and having someone say "it makes sense that you are feeling that way" actually works. smh. I was having some Big Feelings about a thing that is objectively not that big a deal, due to my tragic backstory, (many such cases) and I told ship all about why this thing was bringing up all of those feelings and cried and they held me and now I'm like. Regular. now I'm like. ok I felt those feelings I didn't shove them away for being "unreasonable" OR act on them as though the amount of hurt I felt dictated the degree of Misstep on the part of the other people involved. I just felt them and we both went "it makes sense that this feels that bad" and then I was able to eat some almond butter and now I'm like ok! that hurt a lot, but that doesn't mean it sucked of them a lot. it only sucked of them a very small amount. it just hurt a lot for other reasons. and that's for me to handle. and now I can approach the situation as it is in reality, which is to say, as a situation that is Not That Big A Deal, but without feeling like I'm bottling up my reaction or betraying myself by ignoring how briefly unsafe it made me feel

anyway did y'all know about this. it rules. highly recommended

[creekfiend]

this is why like. bc all trauma is relational, healing that has to also be relational. bc when we are hurt we have a strong need to have that pain recognized and acknowledged and not dismissed. if we have a safe person to express how we are feeling hurt to, who can see and validate that, then that meets that need.

if we DON'T have that, we still have the need. and most often we seek to meet that need by SHOWING people just how hurt we are with our behavior or words. which often looks like lashing out! which like. doesn't help anyone! it just compounds relational harm.

sooooo many kinds of conflict and bad behavior are just like.... (looks under the mask) its old man Unmet Relational Needs Again!!!!

[hownottolearnalanguage]

[absolxguardian]

I'm kind of glad to hear that everyone does this. Because it means it isn't colonizer bullshit, it's what everyone does. It's just people discovering new things. Everyone goes:

"Oh hey these people have their own style of [language A's word for thing. Say, what do you call it?"

"Oh it's [language B's word for thing]."

"Got it, it's [language B's word for thing] variety [language A's word for thing]"

[house-of-crows]

added to which it is LITERALLY JUST LINGUISTIC SHORTHAND for 

[item] the way [culture] makes it. 

If you don’t want sliced bread, you want bread the way Eastern Indians make it you ask for Roti, not bread. Because Roti is bread THE WAY [EASTERN] INDIANS MAKE IT. Like fuck, it’s not that complicated a concept. 

OF COURSE it’s not colonizer bullshit! It’s just linguistic shorthand!

[chaifootsteps]

[doomhamster]

One of the many things that infuriate me about recent trends on the left is the way they talk about solidarity, but what they demand looks and smells an awful lot like loyalty.

Read theory. Read the commentaries on the theory. If you don't understand, that proves you haven't read enough. If you disagree with any of it, that proves you're a bad person.

Follow the right influencers. Support the right politicians. Follow the leaders of our movement. Until we decide they're bad people, anyway.

March in our protests. Commit to our boycotts. Donate to our causes. Don't ask what we hope to achieve or how we think we're going to get that effect from what we're doing. Only a bad person would ask those questions.

Wave the flags and shout the slogans of people who want to kill you. People who don't see you as human because you're a woman, because you're queer, because you're Western. If you think solidarity requires any element of reciprocity, even to the point of both sides recognizing each other's human rights, that proves you're a bad person.

[some-israeli-guy]

I've been seeing this since before 2023. They're always talking about "allies" when they mean "supporters". allyship goes both ways, but a lot of the western left decided on a list of causes you have to support and expect nothing in return because "support isn't transactional", yeah well I'm not gonna support people who want me dead no matter if they claim to be helping others.

[tinlizziedlinwa]

THIS! Exactly this!

Loyalists to a cause or a person must set their bars somewhere well below room-temp-IQ-level given how amoralistic, unethical, and dishonable they're prone to acting.

Loyalty is the last refuge of the idiotic and the malign. When there's leadership positions involved, we'll often see those demanding Loyalty are the malign, while those blindly giving it and demanding more of it of their peers are the idiotic.

[sound-the-horn]

I cannot recommend bringing your heritage and culture into how you view media enough.

It is important to consider the culture of the person who created the piece, absolutely; but the different perspectives offered by the viewers is fascinating in and of itself and does not always detract from the message.

As an example, when I was younger, I watched Schindler's List. This movie is famously shot in black and white except for one section, concerning a little girl in a red coat. The camera follows her until her eventual death.

I am Turtle Island Indigenous and I was always taught that the only color spirits could see was red, because it is the color of life and blood.

So the second the girl in the red jacket came on screen, something inside me chilled with fear.

The only color in the movie was that red. At some point, I, the viewer, had died.

I remember sobbing at the sight of the burning human piles that were shown, convinced I was buried in there somewhere. The reason I had only seen red on the girl was that my death was recent. I was the ash in the air mistaken for snow. I had died before her and had followed her, helplessly, until she followed me.

The message I got for that was maybe not what the creator had intended: that there was no "being clever enough" or "good enough" or "kind enough" that would shield or protect you from such a massive tidal wave of evil.

You are not exempt from tragedy, that red jacket whispered. You are not special.

When I told some of my white friends about my experience with viewing Schindler's List, some were shocked and the rest just out-and-out mocked me for my "media illiteracy".

"it was just a filming trick to make you feel something," I remember one saying, which terrified me. How had he not felt anything even before she showed up?

However, when I repeated my viewing to a college class, they were fascinated. The implications of what I had seen and felt made the film all the more terrifying and solemn. It encouraged a lot of people to try to ask themselves what media meant from a cultural perspective, where they hadn't done that before.

[hefnerama]

“Japan was the first non-English production [of Fiddler on the Roof], and I was very nervous about how it would be received in a completely foreign environment,” Joseph Stein, who wrote the show’s book, shared in The Guardian in 2007... “I got there just during the rehearsal period and the Japanese producer asked me, ‘Do they understand this show in America?’ And I said, ‘Yes, of course, we wrote it for America. Why do you ask?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s so Japanese.’” (Source: Kveller)

[ednav]

“I’m a man, I’m concerned with anything that’s human.” (Terence, Heauton Timorumenos/The Self-Tormentor, 163 BCE)

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Imagine The Fellowship all sitting around the campfire halfway up Caradhras retelling the events of the Hobbit to Boromir and Aragorn Rashomon-style with Gimli going "my dad tells it this way" and Legolas going "well, my dad tells it this way" and the Hobbits all going "but Bilbo tells it this way!" and, even though Gandalf was fucking there for half of it, he refuses to weigh in on anything because watching them argue is more fun and also he doesn't remember because it was over 75 years ago.

[felinecorpse]

Even better: Gandalf remembers it perfectly fine but he keeps making shit up and agreeing to multiple different versions just to throw everyone off

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Too good to hide in the tags!

[lelif]

on survival

-// @aridante // @orivu // @buzzkillgirls // ? // ? // richard siken// @cemeterything // moomin, tove jansson// @disenchanted-killjoy // isn't that enough, shawn mendes// @ prettytheyswag on twitter// @ coletyumuch on twitter// ? // ? // bird by bird, anne lamott// undertale// @strawberrycircuits

[murkyfulcrumparadigm-deactivate]

Whenever I talk about anti-Israeli xenophobia, I inevitably get somebody come up and explain that they’d like to not be xenophobic (although they don’t call it in that term, of course), but that it’s those damn Israelis making them be xenophobic. And they always say it in this kind of, sense that I’m going to sympathise with them.

I don’t.

The reason I have no time for this excuse is because of the distinction between emotion and action.

What Israel has done to Gaza is horrific, and I would hope that regardless of your views on the conflict, we can all acknowledge that there are now many people living among what is an almost-destroyed country. The IDF has committed war crimes at a minimum, and Israel’s current government (at the time of this post) is blatantly racist and anti-Palestinian. And I get that when we see those things, especially with social media where you now see children being blown up on your feed, that is going to give you negative feelings about Israel. And when you have negative feelings about a country, you very quickly end up having negative feelings about a country’s people.

That’s normal. It is normal to feel like this. It is normal because from the very start of our species, our brains had to group people into boxes in order to survive. This Group of people give you berries and help sharpen your hunting sticks and so they are Good; This Group of people chase you with their hunting sticks and steal your berries and so they are Bad. Placing friend or foe into simple boxes is how human beings made it through so many centuries.

Which is why whilst it is sometimes difficult to read, I do not blame Palestinian, Lebanese, etc people for fearing or hating Israelis. They are genuinely in fight or flight, life or death mode right now. Trusting the wrong Israeli could end with them getting attacked or killed. Mending the hatred and fear between all of these populations is going to take centuries, generations. That trauma will not go away easily.

Westerners watching this all on social media? No, I’m sorry, you do not get that excuse. You are not over there. You are not being bombed. You are not being killed. You are watching this on your TV, and you can turn off whenever you want. If you really wanted to, you could disassociate from the entire thing and never think about Israel again, by constructing your social media feeds and being careful about what news channels you watch. You have an immense amount of privilege in that if you are wading into this conflict, you are choosing to do so, and you are making the choice that you will be presented with death and destruction and suffering. You are choosing to interact with this.

And yeah, good. It’s good for people to witness this and to take an interest and to want to end suffering. But you do not get to hijack that suffering and act as though you seeing the destruction of Gaza on a screen is the same as actually being in it.

You hate Israelis? Fine. Now it’s your responsibility to unlearn that. Because you can unlearn it, because you are not the one having your villages ransacked, or guns pointed at your head, or your home taken over by settlers. You are not directly in that horror and fear and fury.

And you need to take a step back, and start taking some responsibility for your emotions. If you hate Israelis, that is your issue to solve. Israelis do not need to perform in the way you want in order for you to recognise their humanity.

You have the Internet. You have libraries. You have bookstores. Go look for the Israelis who protest against their government. Go look for the Israelis who try to help Palestinians. Go look for the Israelis who write nuanced, conflicted essays. Go look for the Israelis who create books and films in order to explore their reality via fiction. Go look for the Israelis who set up interfaith groups. Go look for the Israeli children who aren’t old enough to understand anything about what’s happening. Go look for the Israeli scientists who are creating incredible progress in medical science that can benefit everybody in the world. Go look for the Israeli engineers who help create the same technology you use to publicly deny their humanity. Go look for the Israeli musicians who have created beautiful music for the world to enjoy. Go look for the Israelis who were traumatised by Oct 7th, but still want to give peace a chance. Go look for the Israelis who want nothing more than to have a happy childhood, get a job, marry a nice spouse, raise their children, then retire—just like everybody else. Go look for the Israelis who are just like you.

If hearing Hebrew frightens you, go listen to Hebrew until it doesn’t.

If you think all Israelis hate Palestinians, go talk to them until you find one who doesn’t.

If you think all Israelis are ugly, go Google Image them until you find one you find beautiful.

If you think all Israelis are bloodthirsty, go research it until you find one advocating for peace.

If you point the finger at Israelis, remember there are three more pointing straight back at you.

I don’t really care if the past couple of years has ‘caused you’ to dehumanise and hate an entire population of people. Your emotions are your responsibility to tackle. Dehumanisation is your problem. Take some goddamn responsibility and sort yourselves out.

Hating an entire population is not a sign that population is flawed. It’s a sign that you are.

[smegorl]

Also must be stressed that if you want to justify and excuse feelings of antisemitic bigotry and willingness to violence among Arabs because of Israeli actions you need to understand that many if not most Israelis have the exact same trauma from attacks by Arabs. Both sides have deep-seated traumas and valid grievances which must be negotiated for a just peace to be possible.

If you can excuse the crimes of Yahya Sinwar because of the intergenerational trauma of his family being dispossessed by Israelis then you need to understand that Itamar Ben-Gvir has the same trauma from his family being forced by the Arabs to flee Iraq. The vast majority of Israelis are descended from refugees who fled antisemitic violence from Christians and Muslims within living memory. It isn't just Palestinian Arabs who are traumatized by Israelis, both sides are acting out of trauma in a messy intergenerational conflict that was horribly mismanaged by the UN and Arab League in the 50s and for which millions are still paying the price to this day.

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

Boris "professional idiot" Johnson wanted to build an island airport in the immediate area.

it's fucking visible

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It is fun to learn.

[therealraewest]

Hey what the fuck

You weren't kidding they've been trying to get the masts off for 5 years and keep getting foiled because there's probably bombs leaking out of her

[angeluslupus]

Fun fact: Doxing myself but I live in the blast zone if that thing ever goes up! It's even immortalised in a local artwork:

[slowlymychaos]

@tatzelwyrm