-thingswhatareawesome- * Di * aka livingflame * 50+, any pronouns, bi/grey-ace, genderqueer * hi o/ ∞∞∞ Currently: p5x • ffxiv (hiatus) • poltical because I have to be, not because I want to be • p5x: 60063758361 (nagisa kamisiro) / ffxiv: i'vann tia - (aether)cactuar / fo76: shinizero / discord: akseru • bsky: @livingflame.bsky.social • ao3: thingswhat • mastodon: @[email protected] ∞ I'm an introverted and shy socially awkward dork with mood swings from hell. I'm kind of a spammy reblogger. Fairies live in my hair. I'm somewhere between life, the universe, and everything and old bitch. Things are awesome; I am not.
Actually yes I do think that countries that aren't liberal democracies, countries that oppress women and LGBTQ people and religious minorities, and countries that restrict freedom of speech are worse than Western liberal democracies, including the United States
"nooo colonization and imperialism and white supremacy—" stfu I'm not saying we should invade other countries, bomb them, or force them to liberalize, but I am saying that liberal democracies are better than they are
And they and their people and the world would be better off if they did sustainably liberalize
The guy who was a troll with his tattoo and talked in 2019 about how nazis get Viking(and Celtic) tattoos to code their shit covered up his Nazi tat with a celtic/nordic wolf.
It is seldom this neatly All In the Posts, but his redit is whatever the inverse of a gold mine is. A German Salt Mine where the Nazis buried stolen art? IDK.
That cover-up is...like from an artistic standpoint, it is a bad tattoo. Sloppy lines, lazy coloring. Look at the feet. None of them are the same. That green is gonna wash out fast, and I bet that black does not stay that black.
We know he didn't care about covering it up, just that it got covered up, but for fuck's sake, the level of mess going on says a lot about how little he truly cares.
Also, frankly, he should have gone giant American tit flag, but he's terrible at all of this.
I understand why optimization culture has boomed so hard in the past several years.
Something big happened that most of us could do very little about. The world became openly unstable in ways people could no longer politely ignore. Institutions failed. Safety nets frayed. The future got harder to imagine. So a lot of people started reaching for control wherever they could find it: morning routines, dopamine detoxes, habit stacks, sleep scores, screen-time limits, supplement protocols, productivity systems, “nervous system regulation,” whatever the app-store priesthood was selling that week.
I get it. I really do.
But I’m going to pull a phrase people love to use when they want to sound emotionally mature: trauma explains behavior; it does not excuse it.
Because at some point, “I am trying to regain a sense of agency in a chaotic world” turned into “everyone who doesn’t live like me is undisciplined, addicted, immature, morally weak, spiritually degraded, or secretly begging to be rescued from themselves.”
And that’s where I get off the ride.
I’m not saying optimization is bad for everyone. Some people genuinely benefit from tweaking parts of their lives. Some people like routines. Some people feel better with stricter sleep schedules or less social media or more deliberate habits. Great. Wonderful. I’m sincerely glad when people find something that makes their life easier.
The problem is the culture around it.
The culture is ableist because it treats “functioning” as a moral achievement and assumes everyone has the same body, brain, energy, pain level, sensory needs, executive function, and recovery capacity.
It is classist because so much of it quietly depends on flexible schedules, disposable income, safe housing, nutritious food access, leisure time, privacy, and the ability to refuse exploitative work conditions without immediately risking survival.
And it is Puritanical because underneath all the soft wellness language is the same old suspicion of pleasure: too much comfort will rot you, too much rest will weaken you, too much fun will corrupt you, too much convenience will make you less human. You are always supposed to be renouncing something. You are always supposed to be proving that you can suffer correctly.
That’s the part that bothers me.
Not “I tried changing this habit and it helped me.”
Not “I personally feel better when I do less of that.”
But the constant creep from personal preference into moral hierarchy. The assumption that a “better” life is always a more controlled life. The belief that every impulse must be interrogated, every pleasure audited, every habit optimized, every moment made legible to some invisible performance review.
And honestly, I think a lot of people would rather accuse everyone else of being addicted, lazy, dysregulated, or broken than admit how scared they are of being alive in a world where control is often partial, fragile, and unevenly distributed.
By all means, arrange your life in ways that help you. But the second your coping mechanism turns into a cudgel against people with different needs, different limits, different joys, different bodies, different schedules, different resources, or different definitions of a life worth living, it stops being self-improvement and starts being social pressure.
We read Persepolis, and watched the adaptation, in the 10th grade, and it's stayed with me ever since. I'm eternally in awe of Marjane Satrapi's bravery and resilience, and may she rest in peace.
nobody needs to know your real name or your hometown or where you work or your home country or your race or ethnicity or skin color or phone number or the name of your first pet or the model of your first car or your mother’s maiden name or how many siblings you have or what school you go to or your credit card number
The Kennedy Center is removing references to President Donald Trump after a federal judge ruled they were added illegally.
The Kennedy Center is beginning the process of removing references to President Donald Trump a week after a federal judge ruled that his name had been illegally added to the performing arts center.
Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, said in a statement to The Associated Press that “we are complying with the court’s order while evaluating all legal options to preserve this revitalization and recognize President Trump’s leadership.”
In a Thursday memo to staff from the Kennedy Center’s Office of General Counsel, the institution’s lawyers said email signatures, letterhead and other documents must reflect the name as “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” or “Kennedy Center.”
The changes, the memo said, must be completed by June 12.
In a May 29 decision, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper also blocked the administration from closing the cultural and arts venue for major renovations that had been planned to start in July.
Anyone who tries to tell you that Jews hate goyim or “outsiders” and that Judaism as a religion encourages that.
Is either someone who has never actually looked at how Judaism functions and is spreading misinformation ignorantly.
Or is a fucking liar who is looking for an excuse to continue hating Jews.
And either way the outcome is functionally the same.
Anyway no, Judaism doesn’t “hate outsiders”. Like pretty explicitly Judaism doesn’t have that whole “if you are not one of our religion you are less than us and going to hell” thing that some other religions do have.
Department of Health admitted system is ‘failing to protect’ the community
Shots fired at a yeshiva, shuls firebombed and businesses vandalised
Jewish surgeons are leaving Britain and Canada. Their patients aren't going anywhere.
A doctor in London said something on television last week that ought to have been a national scandal. Somehow, it wasn’t.
He told ITV News that colleagues of his had said that if an Israeli arrived in the emergency room, dying, they would not treat him. They wouldn’t refuse his referral to their care. They’d purposely let him die on the gurney, on the principle of where he was born.
The doctor goes by Baruch. He would only give his first name. He and his wife, Daniella, are packing up their home in Golders Green and moving to Israel, and the ITV crew filmed them doing it. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he had also seen Jewish patients refused kosher meals. The Department of Health called his account “shocking” and admitted, in writing, that the medical regulatory system is failing to protect Jewish patients and staff.
Hold the part about the dying patient for a second, because it is the whole story in miniature.
A hospital works on one promise. The person who comes through the door gets treated. You do not check his passport. You do not poll the room about his politics. The promise is older than any of us, and it is the reason a stranger will let another stranger cut into his chest.The Hippocratic Oath that all doctors swear to. When a doctor decides that a nationality is grounds to withhold care, that oath hasn’t just been broken. It has been abandoned by the people who need to keep it the most.
That is what makes the medical version of antisemitism different from everything else in the news. You can argue forever about flags and slogans, about what a particular chant really means when ten thousand people sing it while marching in a Jewish neighborhood. You cannot argue about a man bleeding out in front of you. The case is closed before it opens.
Baruch is not imagining the weather around him. The same week his interview aired, Lord John Mann published a sixty-page review of antisemitism in the UK National Health Service (NHS.) It found that Jewish staff “suffer in silence,” that they face what the report calls routine ostracism, and that Jewish staff are the only religious group in the NHS for whom discrimination from colleagues is rising rather than falling. Some are thinking of leaving the service. The government accepted the recommendations and promised new training and standards. Good. But training is a plan for people who haven't yet made up their minds. It does nothing about the colleague who already decided some patients aren't worth saving.
In April, the Jewish Chronicle profiled three British doctors who had already left the NHS for Israel, among them a young pediatrician from north-west London and a GP who said plainly that she could not have coped with the antisemitism her Manchester colleagues were living with. Across the Atlantic, Dr. Emmanuel Moss, chief of cardiac surgery at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital and one of Canada’s leading robotic heart surgeons, has resigned and is moving to Atlanta. He cited the climate in the city, where synagogues have been firebombed and bullets were fired at a yeshiva.
Look at the job titles. A cardiac surgeon. A children’s doctor. The clinicians you want on the schedule when it is your kid on the table at two in the morning. These are not people who spook easily, and they are not cheap or quick to replace. A surgeon takes well over a decade to train. When that is who decides to go first, you are not watching people flee an inconvenience. You are watching them flee an actual risk.
Here is the honst part, and it cuts against the alarm. By the raw numbers, there is no exodus. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research looked at the data this spring. In 2025, 742 British Jews made aliyah, the highest count in over forty years. But that figure still sits inside the normal range of the last two decades, which runs from about four hundred to about seven hundred a year. Roughly one Israeli moves to Britain for every British Jew who leaves for Israel. JPR’s director put it flatly: there is no Jewish exodus from the UK, at least not yet. So if you want to file all of this under noise, the spreadsheet will let you.
The spreadsheet is measuring the wrong thing. A census counts volume. This was never about volume. It is about composition, about which people are the first to quietly conclude they have no future somewhere. When the early movers are the surgeons and the paediatricians, the number on the page can stay small while the signal screams. The canary in the coal mine was never impressive by weight, either.
Britain and America, of all places, should be able to read this signal because they were once the lucky recipients of the same event running the other way.
In the 1930s, Germany and Austria purged their Jewish physicians. First, the 1933 civil service law pushed them out of public positions. Then, the regime forbade Jewish doctors from treating non-Jewish patients, and by 1938, it had stripped their medical licenses outright. The doctors did not vanish. They got on boats. A great deal of them landed in London and New York and rebuilt Anglo-American medicine and science over the following half-century. The countries that opened the door spent the next hundred years collecting the dividend.
Germany’s own healthcare measurably degraded once so many of the healers were gone, with child and maternal health indicators sliding in the wrong direction. The lesson is not subtle. A government can revoke its doctors' licenses for who they are. It cannot revoke the illnesses those doctors were treating. The patients stay. The expertise leaves. The gap between the two is filled with funerals.
What is happening now is that same experiment, this time running in gentler register. Nobody is passing a law. No license is being torn up. The pressure is ambient and plausibly deniable. A kippah that comes off before the ward round. A colleague who muses that some patients aren’t worth the trouble. A regulator the government itself concedes is not doing its job. Doctors are trained to detect diseases from their earliest signs. That’s exactly what they are doing, and it’s making them choose to leave.
The cost is not theoretical. The NHS is carrying roughly 100,000 vacant posts. More than four in ten of its licensed doctors are qualified abroad. On any given day, the service is busy persuading physicians in Lagos and Manila to uproot their lives and come to fill a British ward. In that same season, it is handing the doctors a quiet list of reasons to go. A health system that imports clinicians by the planeload while supplying its own with reasons to leave is losing a race it set up against itself.
This is the cost that gets lost when the conversation stays on antisemitism as a question of feelings and offense. The Jewish doctor who leaves does not take only himself. He takes the operations he would have performed, the residents he would have trained, and the night shifts he would have covered for a colleague whose child was sick. The loss is borne by whoever needed that surgeon and now waits longer, or does not get seen, and will mostly never know the trade that was made on his behalf.
Moss will be in Atlanta. Baruch will be in Israel. The patients they would have treated are still here. So is whatever it was that convinced them it was time to leave.
I recently came across a post from you stating that it’s “insidious” that Pride events are often scheduled on Saturday which means you as an observant Jews can’t go. Why is your schedule more important that everyone else’s? Why do non Jews, such as myself, need to schedule things according to your schedule?
Are you a religious Christian for whom a Pride parade is considered "work" and therefore something you would not be able to attend were it scheduled on a Sunday? Do you attend Mass on Sunday that takes all day and therefore limits your free time on Sunday? No? So then why is it such a hassle for things to be scheduled on a Sunday? In fact, many workplaces still don't give off Saturday as a given, but they do give off Sunday. Wouldn't you want more people (Jewish or not) to be included?
Jews, whether you like it or not, were and are deeply foundational to the modern LGBTQ Pride and Rights movement. Magnus Hirschfeld was a Jew. Harvey Milk was a Jew. Brenda Howard, the literal "Mother of Pride" was a Jew. They may not have been Orthodox Jews or Shabbat-observant, but Jews of all levels of observance and religiosity deserve to be included. And Jewish religious institutions have been supportive of LGBTQ causes for decades. And even if Jews weren't part of and supporters of the community from the start, Jews are part of the community now and ought to be included, as should people of all ethnicities, races, religions, and nationalities.
But honestly? My views have changed since I made that post that earned it a screenshot and post onto reddit saying "look how crazy and entitled those Jews are". I think the Western LGBTQ movement's exclusion and hatred of Jews now goes far beyond scheduling things on Saturdays. That's just the surface level. Things are far more overt when Jewish interest groups are quite literally banned from Pride events, when Jews are regularly harassed and attacked both off-line and online, when the overwhelming message from the Western LGBTQ world is that an LGBTQ person who is also a Jew is a traitor to their own kind. And it gets worse and worse each year as more LGBTQ people trade in their own safety and welfare and future prospects to spend their time, energy, and money hating Jews. Not only is it disgustingly hateful, it's counterproductive. LGBTQ rights are being attacked and stripped away all around the Western world, but people care more about investing their energy into best excluding Jews, Jews who, LGBTQ or not, would be and are supportive of LGBTQ causes. It's deeply insidious.
My schedule isn't more important than anyone else's. I know that. You know that, and you know that you were reading my post in bad faith. Jews are not the only people who would benefit from important Pride events not being scheduled on Saturdays. People who still have to work on Saturdays would benefit too. And I know you read a tiny snippet of my post and blacked out, because in that post I also mentioned Pride events being scheduled on Jewish holidays (Shavuot often times falls out in June). I think if you are in a community with a large number of Jews who are contributing members, it's only basic decency to be considerate. I am annoyed at conventions that do that same thing, mind you. But "niche interest conventions" are not a broad, umbrella movement the way the Western LGBTQ movement is. A science fiction convention isn't part of the same movement as a WWII history airshow, for example, and they are often not run by the same kinds of people and they are often not even attended by the same kinds of people.
Put on your thinking cap and think for a moment as to why you have such a visceral reaction to a Jew asking to be included.
It is actually very easy to google holidays so that you don't schedule your event on a major religious day and end up forcing people to choose between your event (a protest, pride parade, etc) and their religious beliefs and community. Scheduling things like that on Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Shabbat, Eid, etc is not ignorance, it is a willful choice to exclude big chunks of the community for their religions and cultures.
The House has passed a bill to aid Ukraine and sanction key segments of the Russian economy. That's despite Republican leaders warning the l
The House passed legislation Thursday that would aid Ukraine and sanction key segments of the Russian economy, overriding objections from Republican leaders who warned the bill would undermine negotiations designed to achieve a comparable but stronger result.
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., seeks to cement U.S. assistance for Ukraine by providing more than $1 billion in security and reconstruction aid. It would make another $8 billion available for Ukraine’s defense through loans.
The 226-195 vote is a sign of impatience with President Donald Trump’s approach to the war and represents the House’s second major foreign policy break with Trump this week.
By now you might have seen some reports of SJP at University of Colorado Boulder celebrating the murder of 82 year old Karen Diamond. Here are some screenshots of the statement (that is still available on their website whose url is visible in the screenshots):
They’re disturbing so here’s a line break
This SJP chapter no longer receives funding from the school, but they do continue to organize regularly on campus.
Additionally, CU Boulder has a group of faculty and professors called FSJP . This organization is petitioning to have SJP reinstated as a student organization in good standing:
Update 2- To be clear, the statement is definitely still up at the link bouldersjp.neocities.org/mohamed, but I can’t navigate to it from their homepage.
In case they do take it down, I have downloaded the statement in full.
This is absolutely unacceptable speech from students enrolled in any university, and it’s even more disturbing that professors who condone this statement are teaching classes.
PUBLIC STATEMENT · 06/01/2026
FREE MOHAMED SABRY SOLIMAN
One year ago today, Mohamed Sabry Soliman took direct action against the Zionist death cult festering in our city. He struck against the colonist procession that gathers weekly to celebrate the pretext for ongoing genocide.
CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST
ABOLISH ICE
VICTORY TO THE RESISTANCE
06/01/2026
BOULDER STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE
STATEMENT OF SOLIDARITY
One year ago today, on June 1st, 2025, Mohamed Sabry Soliman took direct action against one manifestation of the Zionist death cult that we have allowed to fester in our city and our state. He hurled a molotov cocktail into the heart of the Run for Their Lives march in Boulder, striking against the colonist procession that gathers weekly to celebrate the pretext for ongoing genocide.
A CASE OF CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST.
The colonists present at the Run for Their Lives procession each week carry posters celebrating war criminals who have served as the pretext for the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. When community members confronted those at Run for Their Lives with cries of "Stop killing kids!", the marchers responded with proud declarations that they wished death upon every child in Gaza, while flanked comfortably with a police escort.
The state would have us believe that Mohamed took the action he did because he is insane—a fanatic, a terrorist, guilty of a hate crime—but we know the truth and we reject the state's inversion of it. Mohamed chose the only sane response available to a rational human being confronted with the normalization of genocide. He refused the comfortable position of the grateful immigrant and the role of obedient subject, choosing confrontation with a violent system over passive proximity to the comfort of empire.
We reject the distinction between speech and material force. The Run for Their Lives procession functions as a mechanism for normalizing the celebration of mass killers, rendering ordinary the sight of war criminals treated as heroes on streets that sit upon stolen land. Mohamed refused their normalization with direct action. He chose to treat the manifestation of Zionist violence as the lethal threat it actually constitutes.
Boulder Students for Justice in Palestine stands in solidarity with Mohamed Sabry Soliman. We condemn the eight consecutive life sentences imposed by Colorado courts early last month. We condemn all attempts by the federal government to assassinate him. We honor a man who sacrificed his comfort and his proximity to empire, willingly expending his own liberty in attaining his objective.
We unequivocally condemn the federal agencies that seized his family within hours of his arrest and imprisoned them for nearly one year until their release last month. The seizure of Mohamed's family by ICE reveals immigration enforcement as an instrument of collective punishment—a tactic of the colonizer applied here as it is in Gaza.
Prosecutors added hate crime and terrorism enhancements to Mohamed's charges—the same legal mechanisms consistently deployed against Arabs and Muslims in the United States since 2001. These charges demand that observers view resistance to genocide as equivalent to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We reject this framework utterly. The hatred here lies not with Mohamed, but with a legal order that characterizes resistance to genocide as "terror" while legitimizing the actual terror of the state.
No court exists within the imperial legal order to try the officers and politicians responsible for the systematic destruction of Gaza. Boulder Students for Justice in Palestine affirms that the Palestinian Resistance stands as the sole legitimate authority capable of delivering accountability for the genocidal actions of the Zionist entity. Mohamed acted alone on June 1st, compelled by the grisly realities of a war against his people and the absolute refusal of formal channels to deliver anything resembling justice.
DEMAND RELEASE
Call for the immediate release of Mohamed and the continued freedom of his family from all forms of state custody.
ABOLISH ICE
Join the call for total abolition of the agencies that kidnapped his family and operate as instruments of collective punishment.
CONTINUE THE STRUGGLE
His act of resistance obligates us to maintain unyielding opposition against every structure that normalizes occupation while enabling genocide.
READ THE FULL STATEMENT
DOWNLOAD SHARE GRAPHICS
VICTORY TO THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE. FREEDOM FOR MOHAMED. DEATH TO SETTLER COLONIALISM IN ALL ITS FORMS.
Published by Boulder Students for Justice in Palestine · June 1, 2026
After a marathon 18-hour vote, the Senate has funded immigration enforcement. The GOP bill funds ICE and the Border Patrol for three years.
After a marathon 18-hour vote, Senate Republicans advanced roughly $70 billion in funding for immigration enforcement agencies that had been carved out of an earlier funding deal to reopen the rest of the Department of Homeland Security. The funds would extend through the remainder of President Trump's time in the White House.
One Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against it.
The package now heads for a vote in the House of Representatives, which could happen as early as next week.
While the Senate passage is a victory for Republicans, who have been trying to pass immigration enforcement for months, the overnight vote-a-rama exposed rifts within their ranks.
At the center of it all is the Trump administration's proposed $1.8 billion fund to distribute taxpayer dollars to people who allege they have been politically targeted by the government, perhaps including Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
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