I'm not new here, I came with the influx of redditors who joined in 2023 after Spezzy did some bullshit with APIs. My previous run on Tumblr was terrible to say the least. While I won't say Tumblr is entirely to blame for this, I ended up in a Zionist echo chamber of manufactured trauma. Unfortunately it took me two years to fully accept that Zionism is irredeemable. I think stepping away from that Tumblr echo chamber definitely helped me explore other pools of information. I'm not gonna defend what I did, and I don't need forgiveness. I just want to grow beyond it. I'm here because I got a border patrol ad on Reddit that I couldn't downvote, and I thought to myself, why not try out the leftist hellsite again. This is however a kind of a trial run. I haven't actually redownloaded Tumblr on my phone. I'm doin this all on my laptop. If I feel like I'm spiraling down a rabbit hole again, I'll leave. If I feel like it, I'll download the app again.
Edit: I can see that there are many Palestinians here on Tumblr, so I'm editing this to add some of the resources I have found.
This is a spreadsheet of all the fundraising campaigns for Palestinians on Tumblr. It is important not to forget that behind each one of these campaigns is someone who has lost everything. Who's friends, neighbors, parents, or children have all been placed in life threatening danger.
PCRF provides medical heathcare to Palestine.
Droplets of mercy provides Palestine, Sudan, and other places with food, aid, and shelter.
This document also has a ton of donation resources
Weird. They said nothing during his last video, or when the flotilla was arrested in international waters, or when Greta Thunburg was tortured, or about Palestinians being tortured, or when they were raped, or when their colleges were wearing noose pins and cackling over hanging Palestinians, or when Palestinians were being held in their prisons without trial, or about how Palestinians are starving, or when their soldiers were bragging about killing unarmed Palestinians, or when they bombed schoolchildren in Iran, or when they bombed children in Gaza, or when they were carving up Palestinian land with checkpoints, or when settlers were invading Palestinian land and attacking Palestinians, or their ties to Epstien, or the Israeli children burning puppies and kittens.
As a Jewish historian, I fucking hate Israel in ways most probably will never be able to comprehend. I'm going to try and explain it anyways. The central creation myth of Israel is that it is Jewish, and then consequently, that Israel is a part of Jewishness. Its easy to simply state this is false, but fully comprehending this and putting it into practice in thought and deed seems rare to me.
The evil at the heart of this violence predates the recent acceleration of genocide. Israel is a colony, and more than that, an antisemitic fraud itself. After WW2, when Israel was being founded, the Jews of Europe generally did not wave goodbye to their neighbors and head to the promised land. Many were expelled from their homes. Zionism itself, as an action, was a false choice at the time. A mere excuse to place an ally in the middle east, and an excuse to complete the expulsion and destruction of the European Jew. The Zionist Jew is more than complicit in this, they actively seek the destruction and assimilation of all other Jews.
Many fail to realize, and largely because of Israel, that Jews are not inherently white, Ashkenazi, European-descended people. Our faith and culture has an immense variety that is spread all across the globe. Jewishness, in population and volume of culture, exists more so outside of Israel than within it. Israel is for a very specific kind of Jew. The kind that lets Yiddish die, that attaches themselves to European things, that makes themselves and their practices as white as possible.
And they have the nerve, the fucking belligerent GALL, to frame themselves as the necessary saviors of our people. To the Zionist, questioning Israel is to question Jewishness itself. They bake adoration for the colonial machine into their very prayers, and push them on us even as children. To *not* oppress, to *not* kill, to *not* genocide, is to invite death. This is the core of fascistic thought, of course. "Kill them before they kill us." And they KNOW this too, they really do. The truth of that irony does not matter, because as is true for all fascists, the truth itself does not matter to them. They wanted this, they wanted this even before the British saw it in their best interest to give them the land. Any excuse to RETVRN, as the neo-nazis say of Rome, or the German Empire, or whatever the fuck stupid country they want to poorly animate the corpse of. Some select Zionists even *sided with the fucking Nazis* in agreement they should abandon Europe to colonize Palestine. (Haavara Agreement)
My people have proved time and time and time again you don't need a nation state to have an enduring culture. We have protected ourselves for thousands of years without the help of these spiteful, doom-saying maniacs. I was going to post something like this on Passover, but that would be hypocritical. The state of Israel doesn't actually have shit to do with Jewishness.
Hear Israel
(the state and supporters, Israel the icon)
I should outlive it long enough to bury it.
(old yiddish curse)
Free Palestine. Donate what you can, they need it right now.
(ID in alt text)
Each link in this post will lead to another post with further links to individual fundraisers, verification sources, and r
It's also hilarious how 25 years later some people are still stuck on the fact that, yes, being hit by a passenger plane can cause a building to collapse. Also, yes, being showered under the direct debris of 2 buildings often causes a building to collapse.
i’m from maine. i’ve lived here my whole life. i am also native american, and in community with other native people here (wabanaki people— passamaquoddy, penobscot, mi’kmaq and maliseet). i have been to mount desert island and bar harbor (you may know as far harbor) countless times throughout my life. i am also a native studies minor in a wabanaki-led program.
mount desert island, or pesamkuk (passamaquoddy name) has been a gathering place for wabanaki people since time immemorial. indigenous presence on the island has shaped what it is today. tourism and white settlement (summer homes, a coast guard base, a national park, and myriad other tourist businesses in places such as bar harbor) during the “rusticator period” (1840s-1920s) all but pushed major seasonal camps off the island. in fact, today most average-income people will have a difficult time living on MDI now. the crisis of affordable housing on the island was at one point so bad that teachers and firemen were traveling upwards of an hour to get to work. not great!
but that does not mean that indigenous people are simply gone from the island (or maine in general!)
in maine, the major wabanaki communities are: penobscot nation on indian island, motahkomikuk (passamaquoddy), qonasqamkuk (passamaquoddy), and sipayik (passamaquoddy). the houlton band of maliseets and mi’kmaq nation are both in aroostook county and do not have formal reservations in the same way. indigenous lands in maine are subject to some very interesting and frustrating legislation. for more info, look into the maine indian claims settlement act (MICSA).
image: wabanaki alliance
today, the abbe museum is in the middle of the tourist district in bar harbor— it is dedicated to wabanaki history and is largely wabanaki-run. efforts into restoring traditional harvesting are ongoing (such as picking sweetgrass)!
indigenous people are still very much here and deserve much, much better than complete erasure for the kitsch aesthetic of the game. wabanaki presence COULD HAVE BEEN integrated into the game. bethesda could have made an effort to reach out to wabanaki peoples to work on representation in some way or another. the history of the place could have been mentioned. it was not.
why is this?
i think a lot of it boils down to laziness. companies do not want to pay for cultural consultation. they don’t want to take a risk at either seeming “too woke” or, on the other side, not socially aware enough.
so indigenous people continue to be written out. because it is easier to pretend we are all dead.
for more information about wabanaki presence on pesamkuk:
https://abbemuseum.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/4b8da-namingthedawnlandgeorgeneptune_web.pdf (written by a passamaquoddy knowledge keeper— i have met them, very cool person!)
indians in eden by bunny mcbride and harald prins: https://ppld.overdrive.com/media/1239742
some discussion of suzanne greenlaw (maliseet) and her work around sweetgrass harvest: https://www.abbemuseum.org/blog/2018/6/21/a8ox8s8wxde6nenklfm77gayl60h87
the abbe museum website: https://www.abbemuseum.org/
New Vegas is not any better, I’m afraid to say. I’ve been meaning to do a write up on the issues associated with Indigenous representation in NV, but suffice to say, it’s really, really bad.
The rep in NV plays into a lot of the worst stereotypes— noble savages, white saviors, and positioning of ‘native adoption’ in the worst and most stereotypical way. I really deeply recommend reading Tuck & Yang’s ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ for a more in-depth analysis of some of those problems (as part of a broader and systemic conversation around Anti-Native racism)
New Vegas nearly starts to have an interesting conversation about Indigenous positionally, but fails miserably. Mormons and Anthropologists both (who are represented by Joshua Graham and Caesar) have extremely loaded histories with Indigenous people. From an essay I wrote last year (About Twilight, but still relevant):
Mormons and Indigenous people have a long, bloody, and contemptuous history. From the start, The Book of Mormon states that both Jewish and Indigenous Americans are “scattered Israelites,” descendants of an ancient family of Jews who came across the sea from Israel and settled in America. Indigenous people are believed by Mormons to be “Lamanites,” sons and daughters of the wicked “Laman,” and at the top of a hierarchy of cursed lineages, “cursed with redness” or “marked skin” for turning away from God.
[…]
Mormons believe that ancient Lamanites slaughtered Nephites (pale-skinned, righteous God warriors and descendants of Nephi), despite the fact that there is no archaeological evidence or oral tradition from any Indigenous group to suggest this ever happened, and there is no genetic link between ancient Jewish populations and ancient Indigenous populations.
As a result, Mormons (like many other Christian organizations in America) took part in the brutal and paternalistic residential school system, believing that Natives needed to be “saved.” Of all the residential schools in the U.S., one third were run by Mormon missionaries. Beyond residential schools, Mormons also operated the “Indian Placement Program” from 1954 to 2000, responsible for sending up to fifty thousand Native children to live with Mormon foster families. Both residential schools and the Indian Placement Program were rife with every kind of abuse imaginable. The last student within the program graduated in the year 2000, five years before Twilight was published. Mormons also took part in colonial expansion, believing their cause of slaughtering and converting “Lamanites” to be righteous retribution. Along with the U.S. government, Mormons were responsible for the Bear River Massacre of 1863, in which Shoshone women and children were raped, and more than four hundred and fifty Shoshone were slaughtered.
For context around the issues with Anthropologists and Native people, refer to Vine Deloria Jr.’s collection of essays: https://archive.org/details/indiansanthropol0000unse
x, 226 p. ; 24 cm
New Vegas falls short. It does not do a successful political critique of Indigenous treatment by simply acknowledging our existence (in the most offensive, stereotypical light). Even for a piece created in the 2000s, it is beyond egregious.
Indigenous fans of Fallout have been talking about the problems of New Vegas for years. This is not a Bethesda problem, it is a systemic problem. I can think of very few game studios who have ever done any better.
Just wanted to add if you appreciate my writeups and such, a great way to support me is through my ko-fi tip jar. Things are tight for a lot of people right now, including myself, so don’t trouble yourself if you don’t have anything to spare.
I’m definitely heartened by the response this has had 💖
