boldly gaying

pure of heart. dumb of ass. home of sexual.

[whereserpentswalk]

Thing I made.

[yitzh0k-r3uven-hal3v1]

The crusaders banned Jews from entering Jerusalem.

That’s just one of the MASSIVE list of shit they’ve done to us

[yitzh0k-r3uven-hal3v1]

Although, I think when people use the term “judeo-Christian”, I think they use it to refer to the origins of the values, as Christian’s share most of the Old Testament with us, and not a shared history.

Still doesn’t excuse the amount of shit they put us through.

[greia]

I have very rarely seen the term "judeo-christian" used to refer to things that aren't exclusively Christian.

"The judeo-christian concept of the holy war between good and evil/Satan/original sin/etc" nope, that's just Christianity.

"The judeo-christian concept of eternal damnation" Christianity.

"The judeo-christian value of complete faith and obedience" LMAO no. Christianity.

All the way up to the absolute crowning achievement I've seen of this phrase: "the judeo-christian symbol of the cross"

the

CROSS????????

the only thing "judeo" about the cross is the Jewish people the Romans murdered with them and the metaphorical one that millennia of Christians have continued to use as an exsuse to murder more Jews.

"judeo-christian" is a smokescreen used to appropriate Jewish history and try to lump us in with the people who have spent millennia trying to exterminate us. an attempt to sanitize their own history and use ours to make themselves seem more palatable and benevolent. It's not millennia of oppression and genocide attempts, it's ~shared history~!!!!!

it's also a great way to demonize Jews for things done by Christians. which tool it is just depends on who the speaker using the term and the audience listening are.

and finally, ultimately, it's supercessionism: "your history is ours now, because we said so."

[bizarrebazaar13]

what if your doppelgänger wasn’t evil it was just a person. what if your doppelgänger wasn’t trying to replace you it was just trying to learn to be a person and you were the best model it had. what if your doppelgänger looked at you with your eyes and said with your voice that it just wanted to be loved. what then.

[greia]

isn't this just.... having a child?

[cpericardium]

[themainspoon]

This was a whole thread, here are some of my favourites:

[littlethingwithfeathers]

@ponyponypony I feel like you would appreciate this

[gay-systemdeez]

Turn based sex. Take as long as you need to think of a strategy.

[gay-systemdeez]

HINT: his pussy is weak to fire magic.

[nosayingyes]

Pepper spray his pussy

[gay-systemdeez]

Do not.

[kargaroc]

[xenosagaepisodeone]

newbie asked if we're supposed to look out for 'red flags' in interlibrary loan requests in reference to a request a patron had made for a book about cannibalism. she was looking expectantly at me like she was expecting me to be equally aghast at this........girl why would you work at a library if you want to play book police

[drtanner]

I'm fascinated to know what kind of world this girl lives in. For what reason are those books in the library at all if not to be checked out and read? Are they there as honeypots for Problematic People™? If you check out a Red Flag Book™, you've fallen into the Evil Person Trap™ and need to be taken in for reeducation, I suppose.

[tanadrin]

On the other side of this, I love the mental image of a guy who’d really like to get into cannibalism but doesn’t know where to start, so he heads down to his local library for some pointers.

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

#yeah don’t be weird about what they read — but like um — asking for a book on how to abuse your child is kind of a request that I#dont want to complete and I’m glad to not be there anymore#like I’m a mandatory reporter and have been asked to get a book on how to abuse children — um — conflict of interest no?#and this is not a case of my exaggeration — that book when searched had news articles and lawsuits because children died#it wasn’t in our system so I had to send it to the ILL person and it was their judgement call#but yikes

So I understand having a reaction like that on a gut level (I'm guessing the book was To Train Up a Child, as I've read several news articles about abuse cases in which it was mentioned), but here's the crucial thing that we learn in our very first semester of library school:

You do not know why somebody wants to read a particular book.

Is it possible they wanted to read it for terrible fundamentalist Christian parenting advice? Sure. But it's also possible they read the same news articles about the abuse cases that I did and were simply intrigued about what the book actually said. It's possible they were doing research on fundamentalism or abuse and thought it was an important piece of material to include. It's possible they suspected their own parents used were inspired by the book and wanted to have a better understanding about what happened to them as a child. It's possible they actually wanted How to Train Your Dragon and got the titles confused. You just don't know!

Like, I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody ask for materials on topics that I find unsavoury, only to learn later that said person was doing research on extremism, denial, etc. and very much didn't agree with the materials in question. Hell, sometimes I have students coming in saying "I need help finding scholarly articles on why vaccines are bad/gay marriage shouldn't be legal/Women don't deserve equal pay/etc," only to have it turn out the student is actually making the opposite argument in their paper, but were told by the instructor they need to have one credible opposing source.

The reasons people have for reading things are not cut and dry, and even if somebody is more inclined to have a certain viewpoint, you still can't know with any certainty what they'll actually think of the book once they've read it. They could agree with the premise. They could disagree with it. They could find it boring and not absorb much of the content. They could forget to read the book before it's due back and return it without even cracking the spine.

We cannot presume to know the intentions of our patrons based solely on the content they're requesting. That kind of logic is for cops, not librarians.

[gliklofhameln]

Two Bezalel pictorial rugs, circa 1906, Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, Jerusalem

Bezalel was the artist who built the Tabernacle in the wilderness and after whom the school was named “And He has filled him [Bezalel] with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, and with knowledge all manner of crafts”(Exodus 35:31)

[neenarchive]

no i don't want you to redirect me to your app i want to look at recipe

[neenarchive]

i am not going to a secondary location with you one of us dies here

[galileosballs]

One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

[captainjonnitkessler]

The second you start talking about some mysterious "they" that are controlling society in some fashion, you are engaging in dangerous conspiratorial thinking even if you're being woke about it. "They" did not institute the 40 hour work week specifically so you would be too tired to revolt. "They" did not invent the sleek minimalist aesthetic in order to crush the spirit of art in the common people. "They" are not pushing mediocre media into the mainstream in order to poison people's critical thinking skills.

Your best case scenario after that is you talk to someone who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about and you get embarrassed because you can't answer basic questions about your own ideology because you never learned anything past "the ruling class/capitalists/politicians are making things bad and if we got rid of them the bad things would all go away!"

Your worst case scenario is obviously the woo-to-fascist pipeline and you end up believing Jews are poisoning American food supplies with GMOs in order to turn us all into beta cucks, so like . . . maybe just stop blaming "them" before you fall down that route.

Obligatory round of disclaimers: Yes, sometimes people do bad things. Be specific about exactly who is doing what instead of ascribing it to some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, sometimes things in society are bad. Learn to identify the root causes of complex social issues instead of assuming that they're actually extremely simple to fix and we're just not doing it because of some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, minimalism isn't for everyone. Learn that some people don't share your tastes and get the fuck over it for the love of god.

[hyperlexichypatia]

Also, before you blame a vague "they" for a contemporary social norm or law or policy you think is bad, look up what the norm was before it. What did it replace?

"They created the 40-hour workweek to --" QUERY: What was the average working-class person's weekly workload before the 40-hour workweek was standardized?

"They created credit scores to --" QUERY: How did banks determine who was and wasn't worthy of a loan before credit scores?

"They promote bad media to --" QUERY: What was the average working-class person's entertainment before this era of "bad" media?

"They invented schools to crush children's creativity and --" QUERY: What was the average working-class child's daily life like before universal public schooling?

To be clear. Before someone accuses me of pissing on the poor.

I AM NOT SAYING "Stop opposing current social practices because Things Used To Be Worse, stop complaining about a 40 hour workweek because great-grandpa worked 90 hours a week uphill both ways in the snow --"

We should advocate a shorter workweek, actually! We should advocate abolishing credit scores, actually! We should advocate non-authoritarian schooling, actually!

But we should do it from a place of informed historical perspective that doesn't quickly become romanticizing the past and perpetuating the idea that Things Were Great Until They Took Over.

[immortalbeingz]

[optimysticals]

I needed this

[whitepeopletwitter]

[jackironsides]

I remember my parents visiting the US a decade or two ago and talking about how surprised they were that the US media scarcely talks about things happening outside the country. That kind of made sense, I thought. There’s a lot of the US to talk about. Whereas the entire population of Australia is less than the population of Texas.

Then I found out how little they tell the population about things that happen inside the country. I remember seeing multiple Americans being like, ‘What do you mean other countries give us help when we have wildfires.’

And I – an Australian – was like, uhhh. We send over people and specialised firefighting choppers regularly. (And Australian firefighters have specialised knowledge there – the reason that Californian wildfires are so bad is because there was a mass planting of eucalyptus trees, which are oil rich and well adapted to surviving bushfires.)

I grew up with the evening news reporting on our bushfires saying things like ‘the US has sent over a crew and additional choppers to help fight the blaze in country New South Wales, and the CFA expects that they should have it under control soon.’ But the reverse doesn’t seem to be true in the US.

That brought home to me just how much of the US news is filtered to emphasise the US’s emphasis on individualism. It’s harder to sound believable about how little you need others when other countries are regularly pitching in to help keep your wildfires under control. It’s hard to keep a consistent message going about US exceptionalism if you admit that the country you vilify regularly as being full of people who are champing at the bit to invade your country are actually there on the ground helping you recover from a natural disaster.

[januariat]

this thread on twitter is fucking killing me

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

IT GETS BETTER

.

[seimsisk]

lmao prev

[omeryotam4]

A few days ago, in my quest to fight the antisemitism that lifted its head around the world following the massacre of October 7th, I stumbled upon a clip from a UN assembly where the speaker asked a simple question-

Dear Arab world, where are your Jews?

A lot of people think that Israeli roots come from Europe exclusively. But in fact, Jewish people were hunted in all corners of this world. In Europe, of course, but also in Asia, Africa and other places all over the planet.

My grandma is an Iraqi Jew. Iraqi Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, being the direct descendants of the Babylonian exile Jews, so ancient it is an exile mentioned in the Bible.

Recent studies, in which DNA retrieved from canaanite burial lands was compared to current populations in the area of ancient Canaan, has found that Iraqi Jews share the highest similarity to canaanite DNA out of all Jewish communities, more than 50% of the DNA on average.

All the beautiful, peaceful Jewish communities of the Arab world were wiped out in the blink of an eye.

The Arabic world has never treated their Jewish communities as equal citizens, oftentimes robbing them of any rights and performing violent acts of genocide against them (check 'Farhud' on Google).

But their voice was silenced once they fled to Israel.

So I decided to recap my grandma's story in the comments of the clip:

Soon after, many Jewish people with Arabic, or 'Mizrahi' heritage, shared their stories as well:

Jewish people all over the planet were driven out of their homes, ethnically cleansed by their neighbors, rulers, and governments.

We are still not welcome in most of the countries of the Arab world. Unable to see glimpses of our history.

My grandma still wishes she could see the house she grew up in. Holding the memories, but unable to set foot in that land, because she would be executed.

Nevertheless, she's not a refugee. She might've fled to Israel, but in Israel, her family got equal rights as citizens, and she built a house on a land she now calls her home.

Don't erase my grandma's story. Don't erase the Jewish ethnic cleansing that brought her to seek a safe haven in Israel.

Israel is a home for more than half of the Jewish people on this planet. Out of the ~8,000,000 Jews who live in Israel, there are about ~2,500,000 Jews of Mizrahi heritage.

And as Golda Meir once said: "our secret weapon is that we have nowhere else to go."

[chutzpahchesed]

the speech in question, if you’ve never seen it:

[leg-stealing-bee]

both fish and women love me

[flagellant]

give a woman a ring and she'll eat for a day. give a woman a lifetime fishing license and she'll be loved and feared by all marine life for eternity

[fiendfifofum]

Posts a spider would make

[fiendfifofum]

Hey chat, what the fuck did I mean by this?

[ofishal-fish-posts]

official fish post

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Every post about the antisemitism of the word cabal includes reblogs or comments from people very sincerely offering alternatives but.

You don't need alternatives, okay? If you mean billionaires, then say billionaires. If you mean CEOs, then say CEOs. If you mean conservative politicians, then say conservative politicians. Etc, etc.

You do not actually need a word to describe a shadowy group of all powerful people who control the world's governments, media, and money because that group does not exist and if you think it does, congrats, you've fallen down antisemitic conspiracy theory pipelines and you need to pull yourself out of that shit immediately.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I've seen some tags on this post that seem to indicate that people are not aware of this, so:

The word cabal did not have antisemitic implications added to it later. It is not a fine word that was tainted by antisemitism over time. Cabal is literally derived from the word Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism used for Torah study and to better understand the world, and is a direct reference to the idea of Jews controlling society in some way (whether through money or through made up ~evil Jewish magics~ that involve the sacrifice of gentile children). You cannot divorce that word from the antisemitic meanings because it has always been and will always be antisemitic.

[an-colm-fuinniuil]

to be clear.

I am not saying you're a bad person unless you grieve the united CEO like your own precious son. I don't really care if you experience schadenfreude over this. I don't even really care if you reblog jokes about it.

What I take issue with is people sincerely arguing that vigilante gun violence is not only okay but was the right thing to do. I take issue with the assertion that the only reason someone would disagree that vigilante gun violence is the right thing to do is if they don't understand how much damage united has done. It's the sickeningly widespread notion that this is somehow the more progressive and therefore morally superior viewpoint: that capital punishment, denial of justice, and extrajudicial gun violence are good if used to punish CEOs.

[clarenecessities]

there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”

[crockpotcauldron]

[ossacordis]

I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy. 

[winchysteria]

have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!