@harakanvarvas - Tumblr Blog

Keshet's progress pride flag but I made it colorblind + photosensitive friendly and added the intersex part

[ID: The intersex inclusive progress pride flag with a Star of David symbol in place of the original triangle. The circle of the intersex part is also a Star of David. /End of ID]

#reblogging this again for pride this year

electronicmail

btw with email u dont have to lick the envelope. i know a lot of people have been doing that and its fine and all but you dont acrtually have to do that with email.

i-said-im-a-fucking-star

puts my uncomfortably wet hand on your shoulder. see here, gay boy- can i call you gay boy?

kestarren

Wood engravings by Colin See-Paynton. ~ "Loons" ~ "Puffins" ~ "Tiding of Magpies"

Artist from Berriew, Powys, Wales. Born 1946.

Images courtesy of Bircham Gallery, UK.

kosmogrl

sizzlingcandyj3llyf1sh

“source?” the mold in my water bottle told me

chutzpahchesed

The people who say they can’t utter the charge are saying it from the biggest stages on earth. The people who actually can’t speak don’t get

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

The ones who say they cannot criticize Israel are speaking from the loudest rooms we have. The ones who truly cannot speak are the people who were set on fire for showing up. One of those groups is on a stage at Cannes. The other is in the ground.

abonethrownfromthevoid

Losing my mind over this

softservewidow

Never forget these two queens putting on the most showstopping tiktok of all time

#happy pride to these divas

imissthembutitwasntadisaster

Alright tell me in the tags, what’s Your Poem? That poem you heard once and it has dwelt within you ever since?

estel-system

werewolfmack

#you can argue about whether or not it’s a poem#but the scrapped presidential speech in the event of a failed moon landing#it haunts me in ways little writing ever has

#In The Desert by stephen crane

scratch-meowt

my hottest take

keeper-of-the-flames

Counter point, those machines can make me a peach sprite.

pusheenthenerdcat

guys did you know the tech in that nefangled machine revolutionized preemie healthcare

maimonideznuts

pusheenthenerdcat

yeah the guy who invented them made incredibly precise infusion pumps (as opposed to gravity fed ivs) which not only meant they could give medications to teeny tiny babies safely, it's also used for insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines. the key element is that it's a peristaltic pump so the liquid stays in sterile tubing for safety

(unholy drink cloaca uses it to dispense precise amounts of flavored sugar syrup)

hedgebotherer

Then how the haters loved him,

As they shouted out with glee,

"Unholy Drink Cloaca

You'll go down in history!"

evergreen-femme

im just so happy i live in a time period where actual meaningful biological transition is possible. even if we lose rights or the ability to exist in public, nothing can turn back the clock on that, and just by having any sort of access to that our lives are made immensely better. millions of our sisters throughout history would never have dreamed of a day where they could have what HRT does for us.

please don't lose the plot of this. if you're a trans person on HRT you're a living miracle, the dream of hundreds of millions of your ancestors. your lives are all deeply meaningful no matter what anyone says.

t4t4t

A prayer by Kalonymus b. Kalonymus ben Meir that appears in his poem ספר אבן בוחן, יג Sefer Even Boḥan (§13), describing the author's wish t

unabashedllamamusic

Cursed be the one who announced to my father: “It’s a boy!"... ...How could he twist the course of the stars so much? How could he have erred so in his astrology? A lying tongue, a fool’s mouth it had given him For he foolishly transformed justice to poison He altered the law and transposed the lines

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

I think I'm gonna go lay down for a little while.

raccoonmilf

I’m sorry I didn’t mean to refer to your unvaccinated dog as an “empty vessel for rabies.” I’m sure it’s also something else. Like an empty vessel for distemper.