Defenders of Anarchy

Fandoms to be found: Sherlock Holmes (all); Animorphs; St. Trinian's; various others. I welcome any and all podfics or remixes of my fic.

[sphyrne]

she

[kactusnz]

#oh SO true#discworld#you've nailed it op that's it exactly#she is a prophet of retribution set aglow from within by the fury of her righteousness#and he's in the dictionary next to the word 'scrungly'

[maryellencarter]

this captures their kermit and miss piggy energy better than anything else i've ever seen

[nzbookwyrm]

June 2026

[yearofdoodles]

When your asshole mentor knows your Dark Secret but literally could not care less... happened to my good friend Dinios Kol

- inspired by this post by @capricciosso

[peachesobviously]

My take on Din from The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

[soottea]

just a moment

[carys-the-ninth]

Robert Jackson Bennett gets it. Let's make everything weirder forever

[inkeaters]

BRO, A Drop of Corruption was soooo gooooood. Ya'll, Malo is so cool and her voice in the audiobook is perfect. Ana has also never been cooler, especially in the scene when she figures out the final pieces of the puzzle(shown here). I also thought it was kinda funny that half of the events can be summed up by "Entire government ultra pressed about fertilizer"

[funrpgocs]

I'm not even halfway through reading The tainted cup, but I'm already obsessed with Ana lol

[alcyoneusgalaxy]

absolutely obsessed with the thai translation cover art for the tainted cup

[rongzhi]

A naked eye 3D pterosaur installation at Shanghai Natural History Museum

(The guide is describing the exhibit and talking about the various "flying dinosaurs" and their appearance through history as they emerge from the fossil displays)

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[fleshengine]

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

We gotta fix that.

[penrosesun]

Very confused atheist Jew here: I've always been told by my parents that Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi are more of jewish "tribes" in a sense that it's more about where this specific Jewish person is from; wiki seems to say it's an ethnic subdivisions.

So I am curious why in the post you talked about it more like it's a difference in religious/cultural beliefs? Not to say there isn't one, just curious why this seems to be how you defined it in the post!

(My family was very much not religious, so I might be missing context. Or haven't seen the particular discourse that inspired you to write the post. Thank you for your time, either way!)

Well so to start out, they’re not tribes in any sense.

Rabbinic Judaism (that is, all of us except for the Karaites and the Samaritans) holds that oral Torah has the same weight as written Torah. This means, among other things, that the transmission and preservation of oral tradition is absolutely critical.

Now, with a written text, you can easily error check. If you have two communities with two copies of the Torah, and the two texts disagree, you can just find a Torah that’s older than both of them, or more likely, consult a scribal reference text that’s older than both of them. With oral traditions, however, it’s harder. You can’t go back in time and ask the rabbis in the time of the Mishnah which tradition they practice, and you can’t rely on written sources that describe their practices to be complete, or to account for newer Halachic rulings made to, for example, account for geographic realities of Jews living in galut.

For this reason, the official Jewish halachic opinion is that we are supposed to follow all of the orally transmitted religious traditions of the place we grew up (or, in the case of converts, of the Jewish community they first joined when they converted), even if there is no halachic source text to support their existence.

This is what is known as minhag, and it’s a different category than true halacha, because the rabbis recognize that transmission errors in the form of “this was actually never a religious tradition, your grandmother just happened to do that for some reason because she was odd like that” are common. The rule is therefore that you are always supposed to follow your minhag, but that unlike halacha, religious authorities are not bound by precedent – if your community’s rabbi believes that your community has a minhag which is not actually a preservation of oral religious tradition (generally with the evidence for that being, there’s no logical support for it and it’s actively harmful in some way), they can rule that people in the community no longer need to follow that tradition, and they can do so on their own authority.

Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi are the three biggest catch-all umbrellas for community minhagim (and technically, Sephardi is an even broader umbrella that includes pretty much all of Mizrahi, with some odd corner-cases such as the Yemenites). These minhagim formed geographically but not ethnically.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Let’s imagine that your father was raised in a small community in Poland. He married your mother, who was from another small community in Poland, and came to live with him in his community. You would then, by default, follow the minhag of your father’s community. This is what most commonly happened, and it’s why the default rule for minhagim is “you do whatever your father did.”

But let’s say that when you’re an infant, your family flees a pogrom and moves all the way to Madrid. Now, you grew up living in a community with a different minhag. First of all, your family might change some of their practices to conform to their new community – you can’t really pass down an oral tradition about communal activities when you’re the only person in the community with that tradition. But secondly, even for individual practices, your father might not pass down an oral tradition for every situation. What happens if you’re an adult and your father has passed, and you’re not sure what his tradition was for, for example, whether or not you could eat beans on Passover, because your mom hated beans and so your family just never cooked with them at all? Well, in that case you’re supposed to default to the minhag of the community you actually grew up in: the oral traditions you learned from your friends, at Hebrew school, etc. And over time, this means that unless your family lives in an isolated community of Polish Jews in Madrid, their oral traditions will gradually and over many generations become just another Madrid variant tradition – with slight differences on household things, just like all other families, but with most of the communal ones the same as what everyone else in Madrid practices.

Ok, so with all that out of the way, what are Ashkenazi and Sephardi and Mizrahi, and why do non-Jewish sources (many of which get cited by Wikipedia) keep claiming that they must be ethnic categories of some kind?

Sephardi is a catch all umbrella for the minhagim of Spain, Italy, and a few other Mediterranean regions. Ashkenazi is a catch all umbrella for the minhagim of most of the rest of Europe. Mizrahi is a catch all umbrella for all of the minhagim of most of the Middle East.

Ashkenazi traditions, being the most isolated, diverged farthest from Sephardi and Mizrahi traditions, but also had the most divergence between communities. Litvaks (a specific Ashkenazi community from Lithuania) are arguably almost as different from Galitzianers (a specific Ashkenazi community from southeastern Poland and western Ukraine) in terms of their various minhagim as either one of them are different from the various Sephardi communities. That said, the cleanest minhag line in terms of categorization is between all of the various Ashkenazi minhagim and all of the various Sephardi minhagim, because there are a couple of specific and significant differences that all Sephardi communities do and all Ashkenazi communities don’t, and vice versa, eg. “Do you eat beans on Passover?”

It’s also separately true that, Ashkenazi communities, being the most isolated, had several major genetic bottlenecks, and as a result, have several genetic diseases which are most common among members of those communities. Now, remember: you don’t have to be related to an Ashkenazi Jew to follow an Ashkenazi minhag. There’s no sense in which the minhagim of the Ashkenazim convey a risk of Tay–Sachs or the BRCA gene; you don’t magically increase your risk of breast cancer by not eating beans on Passover. But given a long history of pogroms and violent expulsions, your family might not have kept good records of where their ancestors lived, and often, the best you can do is use your family’s surviving minhagim to back-figure. For example, if your family doesn’t eat beans during Passover and wears tefillin on the intermediate days of Passover and Sukkot, then your family probably spent multiple generations in Lithuania, and so even if you have no records of that, you might want to consider genetic testing for some of the diseases like Tay-Sachs that are common to those communities of Lithuanian Jews.

Additionally, it is also separately true that Ashkenazi communities, again being the most isolated, frequently had the most interbreeding (both through intermarriage, and also through sexual violence that they experienced at the hands of their persecutors) with the non-Jewish communities around them. This means that phenotypically, Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to look European than Mizrahi Jews are. But… note that this truly only goes so far. For example, all converts who converted into Ashkenazi regions are Ashkenazi, and since a lot of Ashkenazi communities fled antisemitic violence to the United States (note: I don’t just mean the Holocaust; I mean pogroms and other European purges going back well before then) this means that while a majority of Black Jews worldwide are non-Ashkenazi, a majority of African American Jews specifically are Ashkenazi, because their families joined Ashkenazi communities within the United States. You can broadly say that red hair is common among Ashkenazi Jews and rare among Mizrahi Jews – but you can’t say with any certainty at all whether a Jew is Ashkenazi or not by seeing whether or not they personally have red hair. I picked the Episcopalian example in that other post for pretty much exactly this reason. If I knew nothing at all about a person other than that they attended a church that was founded by a community of Anglicans, and if I had to guess their race, I’d say that they were probably white. However, there are a ton of Black churches which are specifically Episcopalian, and so if I stuck to my guns on my guess low-confidence guess and claimed that any and all Christian communities that can trace their sectarian lineage back through the Church of England are white and white only, I’d very quickly look like an absolute idiot.

Ok, so final thing here, and then I’m done: what’s up with Sephardi being used as a catchall term for both Sephardi and Mizrahi? Well, there are two elements to that. The first is that, again, the cleanest single line you can draw is between Ashkenazim and Sephardim/Mizrahim, because the Ashkenazim have traditions (like not eating beans on Passover) that no other communities have. But the second equally important factor is a little thing called the Spanish Inquisition. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, the a huge number of them moved to the Middle East. This means that there was a lot of cross-contact between Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, and a lot of mixing of minhagim. Although there are many oral traditions that are still only Sephardi or still only Mizrahi, the line between, for example, Sephardim whose families fled Spain in the 1400s, settled in Iran, and then eventually fled to Israel and Mizrahim whose families had lived in Iran since the 1100s and then eventually fled to Israel is much blurrier than the line between many Ashkenazi communities living side by side in places like NYC. So in a big tent sense, since certain communities of Sephardim have less difference between themselves and their neighboring Mizarahim than the Ashkenazi communities in that area have with the other Ashkenazi communities in that area, it often makes sense to just talk about Sephardim as though the category includes “anyone who isn’t Ashkenazi” – and this extends to things like community politics, where in some places the Sephardim and Mizrahim are likely to broadly share community interests and vote as a block. But again, note that this only goes so far: there are particular Sephardi communities that have significant beef with particular Mizrahi communities, and in those cases, saying that Sephardi is an umbrella which encompasses both sides of an ongoing fight about, eg. whether or not one community ought to be allowed to keep doing an arguably public nuisance tradition they’ve had for centuries is silly and unhelpful.

Hope this clarifies things!

[penrosesun]

#i dont love the way you explain minhagim#but solid overview#minhagim in many cases became halacha basically#see: kippah

No no no, see, that’s the beauty of it!

All minhagim have the same weight of obligation as halacha, because the halachic position is that you are obligated to follow all of your minhagim – unless those minhagim are overruled by an authority, typically because they are both unsupported and harmful.

Wearing a kippah is not halacha, you’re right. However, most Jews (or at least, most Jewish men) are halachically obligated to wear kippot, because wearing a kippah is a valid minhag for most communities, and the halacha says that you have to follow all the minhagim of your community.

It’s a little bit like traffic laws. One pretty common traffic law is “you must follow the flow of traffic.” So, let’s say that there’s an area without a posted speed limit, but where everyone drives at 20 mph. You could arguably say that there isn’t a legal speed limit in this area, only a customary speed limit. But it is still true that you are legally obligated to drive at 20 mph – it’s just that the means by which that 20 mph might change to a different speed limit over time are distinct from the process by which a posted speed limit might change.

I should probably clarify that “minhag” is a bit of a term of art in a halachic context. The literal meaning of “minhag” is “custom”, and in casual speech, people will often use “minhag” to refer to any custom at all, eg. “My family has a minhag to order Chinese takeout on Christmas.” But in a halachic context, minhagim are specifically those religious customs which might be a preservative of oral Torah, either because they are a direct continuation of a practice handed down at Sinai, or because they are a prior halachic ruling that was simply never written down. So, if your family has a “minhag” to order Chinese food on Christmas, that’s not halachically binding, because it’s not the sort of minhag that the Talmud cares about – it’s not a religious practice, and it’s certainly not oral Torah, and no one thinks that it is.

But, here, let’s use a personal example: When my own family ritually washes our hands, we always splash the water alternating between the two hands, three times each: first on open palms, then on the backs of our hands, and then over closed fists. I have never seen another family do this, and I have no idea where it comes from. My father has likewise never seen another family do this, and he also has no idea where it comes from. It’s possible that it might not even be religious – it’s possible that some great, great grandfather or other just washed his hands like that as a personal quirk and it’s no deeper than that. But, even so, I am still halachically obligated to wash my hands that way, because it’s theoretically possible that my family are the sole preservers of a piece of genuine oral Torah about how you are supposed to wash your hands. From the moment I took the practice on, it was as binding on me as a vow, and if I ever want to stop being halachically obligated to wash my hands in that specific way, I’ll need to find a beit din (or at least a learned scholar) and explain to them the reason why I believe I should be allowed to give it up – which typically means that I would need to make the case that either: A) it has a clear non-religious origin, B) it conflicts with halacha in some way, C) it is a harmful practice, or D) even if it is real oral Torah, I should still be released from it in order to practice a different minhag because I have joined a new community, either through marriage or relocation, and it would be harmful for me to practice it in isolation.

However, even though I am halachically obligated to wash my hands that way, washing my hands that way is not itself true halacha, and that does matter. Even though it’s halachically binding on me, it’s definitely not halachically binding on you. And unlike true halacha, any rabbi or beit din (or even any particularly learned individual in some cases) can theoretically annul it, just on the grounds mentioned above – if I presented compelling evidence that my great grandfather started washing his hands like that purely because he was a weirdo, then that’s all it would take to get rid of the obligation forever, and I could make my case orally and be verbally released from it on the same day, with no further source consultation necessary.

[jewish-hot-takes]

conservative Judaism has been a major bulwark against total assimilation and its most halachically controversial decisions were all made with this in mind. its decline signifies increasing assimilation and should be mourned; the conservative movement should be recognized for what it was able to do for 100 years, and its converts should be considered halachically Jewish

.

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

Converts from all denominations should be considered halachically Jews so long as they go through the same basic process. Someone attracted to Reform or Conservative Judaism should be able to study their teachings and practices, go before one of their batei din, and use one of their mikvot. The whole "Orthodox conversions are superior" is a consequence of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel being gatekeeping, snooty assholes sneering down at everyone who doesn't practice their very specific flavor of Judaism.

[gogogadgetgolem]

This right here. I studied for five years, changed almost everything about my life, had a beit din and the mikveh immersion, and yet because I find the Reform stream of Judaism the one that best fits who I am as a person, my conversion is “invalid”? To whom? Cause my rabbi and my community see me as fully Jewish and that’s enough for me. As my husband says “the Orthodox don’t own Judaism. As much as some of them pretend to..”

Obviously this isn’t a dig at all Orthodox Jews. But I do find it really aggravating that people see them as the “best” Jews and everyone else is Doing It Wrong.

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have the life you've always wished for, BUT

https://wheelofnames.com/bff-wrs

Is it still the life you wished for?

yup! I can live with this

I'll learn how to deal with it eventually

this sucks, now I can't [do a certain thing]

NOPE. NOT AT ALL

Voting ended onApr 17

(the side-effect only applies to you) (not including the explosions)

[cosmogyros]

At what temperature do you prefer to keep your home?

less than 20 degrees Celsius

20–21 degrees Celsius

22–23 degrees Celsius

24–25 degrees Celsius

26–27 degrees Celsius

28–29 degrees Celsius

30 degrees Celsius or higher

I use Fahrenheit and don't know how to google F to C conversion

Voting ended onApr 13

[jurassicdaily]

Tyrannosaurus Rex rampaging through San Diego (requested by zillaofcybertron)

[greykolla-art]

The Reigate squire is one of my favourite stories! It has the atmosphere of solving a murder on your summer vacation.🌻

And the bbc radio episode had such good conversations between them! it was very sweet how concerned Watson is about how depressed Holmes is. There’s a lot more talk about Sherlock using cocaine in these episodes, and Watson basically says: “I’m afraid if I leave you on your own right now youre going to do cocaine and you’re going to die!”

(The bbc radio show is so good it’s so good, it’s so INSANE how “forbidden love “ coded they are in it!

I don’t even ship them all the time, but I think making Watson be married so early in this adaptation made the dynamic…DIFFERENT.👀 )