Thievery of the Sweetest Kind @just-a-nyx - Tumblr Blog

About 50% of the inhabitants of Universe-1202 worship a deity designated “The Nameless God”, to the exclusion of all other deities.

The Nameless God does have a name, but the exact pronunciation of it has been lost to time due to his name being forbidden. Thus, most cultures refer to him by their language’s word for ‘god’ such as: Deus, Elohim, Allah.

Worship of the Nameless God is far from unified, being split into three major branches with varying levels of animosity towards each other. These branches are further split into sub-divisions with intra-faith animosity often being more violent than inter-faith one.

choppers-pink-hat

This is some fascinating worldbuild- wait a minute.

keeper-of-the-flames

Way to be antisemitic by putting Jews up there as equal and complicit with the two majority religions that have done the majority of oppressing us over the centuries, in spite of us being trying to exist in peace on our own centuries before either of them. Like it’s our own fault the Crusades and pogroms and expulsions and dhimmitude happened to us by two imperial religions while we’ve never once tried to force our own faith and culture on the rest of the world.

prismatic-bell

…..dude.

Calm down. Go outside, touch grass.

One, he’s literally making the point that this is how fiction often talks about religion, while ignoring how complicated and nuanced religion actually is.

Two, he never says anyone is at fault for anything. It’s literally pointing out that writing like this is bad writing.

Screaming about something that isn’t actually antisemitic is the kind of thing that makes people not take us seriously when we say something is antisemitic and it actually is. Chill the fuck out.

authoratmidnight

Also like, I’m pretty sure the OP IS Jewish.

charlesoberonn

I’m also pretty sure I am Jewish.

When mentioning animosity between branches of Abrahamic faiths I was thinking more of the crusades, Shia-Sunni conflicts, and the European wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants.

charlesoberonn

Thank you.

just-shower-thoughts

Mammals both produce milk and have hair. Ergo, a coconut is a mammal.

blogtitletaken

I know you’re being facetious, but this is an actual issue with morphology-based phylogeny.

castiel--for--king

*leans over and whispers to person beside me* what are they talking about

sonneillonv-deactivated20220218

*leans over and whispers back* Human ability to quantify and categorize natural phenomena is sketchy at best and wildly misleading at worst

nonlinear-nonsubjective

consider the coconut

bemusedlybespectacled

this reminds me of that time Plato defined humans as “featherless bipeds” and Diogenes ran in with a plucked chicken screaming “BEHOLD A MAN!”

kascaban

i love how you say “it reminds me of that time” like you were there.

heartgemsona

listen if an immortal feels brave and supported enough to come out we should respect them

baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

This post is a journey

virtuous-thing

1 Reblog = 1 Respect

dovewithscales

I maintain that humans started attempting classify animals, and some god or another made the platypus, and is still laughing.

eldbitch-horror

Zeus: *hits joint* okay so like. It’s gonna have a duck bill right. But an otter body okay? And then a beaver tail. It’s a mammal. But. It lays eggs!

Hades: wait wait dude. Give it. Give it poison. Make it poisonous

dovewithscales

Athena: You mean venomous, and make sure the eggs have both reptile and bird traits. Hermes: *takes the joint* Give it extra senses. Poseidon: It should be aquatic.

hyratel

I MEAN where’s the lie

dovewithscales

Demeter: … And where exactly do you expect me to put this? Everyone: Australia.

giada-luna

Reblogging for that last exchange.

hugintheraven

@shanastoryteller

omghotmemes

No, no it isn’t.

moonlit-aura

this gif is perfectly timed because it gives you enough time to read it, comprehend it, and still have this too-long-for-comfort moment of suspense before being punched square in the solar plexus

politijohn

Cool solution to the supply chain crisis: Child labor!

dancinbutterfly

No way will this end badly.

smallercommand

Last I heard, something like 90% of new drivers total a car in their first year of licensure.

dancinbutterfly

I dont know if that’s true but I ABSOLUTELY did total a car within my first year of having a license so…

smallercommand

Went off to check my vaguely-remembered statistic:

Nationwide, 43 percent of first-year drivers and 37 percent of second-year drivers are involved in car crashes.

Advanced Driver Training has reduced that rate to 4.6 percent of first-year drivers, as determined in a four-year study.

Individuals 15 to 20 years old make up 6.7 percent of the total driving population, but are involved in 20 percent of all crashes and 14 percent of motor vehicle deaths. (source)

Dunno if the numbers I was originally quoted were that off, or if graduated license programs reduced the numbers from a late-90s horrorshow.

garrettauthor

Real important note in the tags!

They’re going to exploit the fuck out of these children.

what-even-is-thiss

I never used to understand what “making connections” looked like but it turns out it’s standing at a party and saying “I’ve been thinking about getting into the film industry” and someone saying “Oh, Sarah works in the film industry” and Sarah yelling from accross the room “Did someone say my name?!?!?!”

what-even-is-thiss

You casually mention that you’ve been thinking about such and such and your professor overhears and is like “oh I know someone who works there. Do you want me to email them for you?” And you go “Sure.”

what-even-is-thiss

It’s the six layers of separation thing. Everyone is only so many layers away from everyone else. So if you stand in the correct rooms and say the correct things out loud once in a while eventually someone will say “Oh, I know a guy.”

what-even-is-thiss

And then eventually you turn into the guy that someone knows. I think. It’s hard to tell.

erinmar13

that literally just sounds like witchcraft

what-even-is-thiss

I mean what is witchcraft but just saying things out loud and hoping something happens

baixueagain

People keep searching for ways to argue that JK Rowling has always been a horrible person deep down as a way of explaining her recent behaviour.

But here’s the thing: that’s probably not true at all.

Pretending it is discounts the harsher, scarier truth: that even decent, well-meaning people can be radicalised by dangerous, hateful, predatory groups, and given enough time they can become truly hideous versions of their former selves.

It can happen to me. It can happen to you. It can happen to any of us, given the right mix of circumstances. And over the past few years, we’ve seen it happen to one of the most famous children’s authors of our age.

Nobody is immune.

agender-thanos

So you’re saying that The Clown wasn’t always… outright evil?

the-angry-ship-deactivated20220

No one is born evil

agender-thanos

Well…

Good point, but prejudice is best installed at a young age. Why is why I assumed the said Clown was just evil since some early part of their life.

baixueagain

What I’m saying is that JKR, like so many average people, very likely started off in a place of well-meaning ignorance. Then she started exploring new and different ideas being shared online. Some ideas resonated deeply with her experiences as an abuse survivor, so she began exploring them deeper. Then, wham, public backlash. Her trauma is triggered - but so is her curiosity. After all, if something she did or said set people off, maybe she’s onto something. So she starts exploring more. Starts asking more questions. And when she does this in public, there is always backlash. Meanwhile, however, in private, her new friends are telling her “See? This is proof we’re right. This is proof that the world wants us silenced, because they’re scared of the truth, and they really hate women that much.” And what do you know, what they’re telling her starts sounding more and more reasonable, especially since the outside world is becoming more and more hostile.

And round and round it goes, until you have a radical.

fierceawakening

This is absolutely how radicalization works. I started out “I could never be a feminist, they hate kinksters” (yes, this was a massive oversimplification) and within, oh, i think two years? i was saying “well, i don’t like the overtones of ‘radical feminist’ but what’s so wrong with saying you’re a radical AND a feminist? we need to make sure there’s space for traumatized women who really do legitimately hate and fear men.” When you become an extremist, you become UNRECOGNIZABLE even to YOURSELF.

filthyjanuary

#also JKR is just the most famous and most heinous case#there are MANY MANY young people being indoctrinated with the same ideals within the circles they found safety and community in#i do not care that JKR has been radicalised; i am far more worried about people not recognising the radicalising process#and how it invades queer and women’s communties to deliberately and actively create harmful environments#as disappointing and gross as JKR is; it’s#it’s important to recognise that radical ideologies (be they alt-right racism or TERFdom) are spread (via @wondersmith-and-sons)

wondersmith-and-sons

There is also this….revisionist tendency to say that JKR has always been a closet bigot and conservative and right-wing since she got famous, but that’s not even entirely true. One of her first major political stirrups was criticising Tory austerity measures and David Cameron, (she also once said “people who send their children to boarding schools seem to feel that I’m on their side. I’m not.”), donating to Labour and being openly supportive of the British welfare state. She has, in at least one interview (from 2000) self-proclaimed to be left-wing. As early as 2003, she claimed that one of her biggest writing influences was a Jessica Mitford, who Rowling described as a “self-taught socialist”.

This isn’t to apologise for her behaviour or rehabilitate her into some former activist who is still worthy of saving; it’s to contextualise her recent descent into TERFdom compared to her previous political stances she’s openly held. She was probably never going to be a staunch ally for equality and diversity, and yes, a lot of the HP series were very problematic in retrospect, but she could very easily have gone the other way and at the very least turned out to be less of a bigoted shitbag she is now. The fact that her politics in late 2000′s/early 2010′s were similar to so many people who are now activists and organisers for queer, BIPOC and vulnerable communities should tell us to be all the more careful about radfem ideology and transphobia in progressive spaces.

It’s comforting to say “we should have known in hindsight that she was always going to become a TERF, the early signs were all there!” but that’s also not true. We have to recognise that the toxic ideology, the active harm she chooses to participate in, was a deliberate choice; this was a path she chose to go down, not one that was pre-determined for her. It’s also an easy way to separate ourselves from being critical of radfem influence; “JKR was always a right-wing bigot and that’s why she became indoctrinated with radfem bullshit. I’m not a right-wing bigot, therefore unlike her, I will never fall for radfem bullshit.”

People who become radicalised, including those to become radfems, were not always irredeemable right-winger proto-Conservatives doomed for extremism and hatred, and that’s the point. The revisionist idea that she was always beyond salvaging erases how TERFs recruit people (especially vulnerable, impressionable people) in queer, progressive and liberal circles and how easily their dogwhistles can go undetected. The idea that JKR was already a closet right-winger from the get-go and therefore could never have been a good person is ultimately unhelpful because all it does it separate from the reality of how radfem doctrine spreads. TERFs sell their own toxic, harmful views packaged as progressive ideas as part of their strategy and that’s why their ideology is dangerous and requires constant vigilance to drive out.

plantsandothers

this actually happened to me in seventh grade, i knew what terfs were and i didn’t want to become one, but i started seeing posts about how sex work is used in society and how it harms women, and i started getting into it by saying ‘alright, i’m going to listen to these people but i’m not gonna be a terf. i’m not gonna let that happen’ but the posts turned from sex work, to sports (“women athletes are at a disadvantage to trans women athletes, i’m not a transphobe i just think this should be noticed”) to trans women in womens spaces (“there are women who are vulnerable and traumatized because of their pasts with males especially, and trans women can’t relate to that in the same way they’re just concerned with being in a woman’s space, i’m not a transphobe i just think this should be noticed”) until it was genuinely, irrevocably transphobia and terfness (“trans women keep harassing lesbians, nobody is obligated to feel attracted to you, other women understand that, why can’t they? unless…”) and still i didn’t notice how far i had fallen.

i don’t remember what it was that made me pause, step back and say ‘no, actually this is exactly what i said wouldn’t happen. we need to stop’ but i did, i looked up trans perspectives and forced myself to unlearn the bullshit i had absorbed. and while i’m glad i did that, it’s not an exaggeration to say the internet lives forever. there’s still comments under posts from years ago that i wish i could find and delete, but i doubt i ever will.

prismatic-bell

It may be true that everything is forever on the internet, but that includes the fact that your story should be one of hope.

It IS possible for someone who’s been radicalized to go “what the fuck am I doing?”, learn better, and then openly say “I fucked up and this is wrong.” You literally did it on this post.

That should be the end goal: creating a community so open that radical groups stand no chance of growing, and indeed people can be rescued.

nonasuch

For Rowling in particular, it’s also worth noting the effects of suddenly coming into a huge amount of money and power, and the subsequent case of Never Being Told No Disease that so frequently develops.

Never Being Told No Disease is what happens when someone is so wholly insulated from pushback, criticism, disagreement, and consequences that, after a while, being told No in even the most trivial context becomes a huge blow to their ego. Rich people are particularly susceptible to the condition. It’s reversible, but the cure requires having someone in their life who will call them on their bullshit.

Rowling, who more-or-less opted out of being edited past book 4 (and whose publishers let her), who went from a pre-HP life composed mostly of being told No to a life largely devoid of it, seems to have let the Handle Being Told No With Grace center of her brain wither away to nothing. So when her initial bad takes were gently corrected by trans activists, she reacted to this very mild No like a vampire to sunlight, and fled the searing gaze of mild criticism for the soothing darkness of TERFS who told her she was right about everything.

stickandthorn

Holding indie artists who have released hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours of free content to much higher standards than you hold anything or anyone else to is stupid. Yes this is about Critical Role and Amazon. Now, to be clear, I fucking despise Amazon. If you don’t want to watch the show or support it because it’s on Amazon, I understand completely. Personally, I’m going to be using a family member’s account to watch, and if they didn’t already have one I could use, I wouldn’t be paying any money to Amazon to get one myself. So I do get it.

But the claims of the cast now being horrible people because they’re working with Amazon is really dumb in my opinion. Because guess what, Critical Role started on Geek and Sundry. Which is a company, owned by larger parent company Legendary Digital Networks, owned by even larger parent company Wanda Group. It was only after they broke off to form their own company that they were truly “indie” if you’re a purest about it, but I don’t see anyone who criticizes them for this.All the cast members have been in the industry for years. I’m sure they’ve all worked with companies you and I would rather see dead before. Let’s look at it from a different angle. Avatar the Last Airbender? The darling show of every single cartoon or animation lover? Made by large company Nickelodeon, which is owned by Viacom. Encanto, an absolutely amazing story about Colombian families and generational trauma and just an overall amazing story with such good… everything? A huge Disney property. Amazing pieces of art I see very few people criticize come from huge corporations. So many of them, especially animation. And do you know why?

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