Unsolicited Opinions

Jewish Atheist | AuDHD | Politics | History | Media Literacy | Epistemic Failings | Fisking | Fact Checking | Explainers

[unsolicited-opinions]

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Questions Asked & Answered:

Why are these explainers so long?

How can you be both Jewish and an atheist?

As an atheist, do you want all religion gone?

Is Israel Comitting Genocide?

Is Israel a Settler Colonialist State?

Is the US-Israel Relationship in the US's best interest?

What does "Intifada" mean?

What is the UN good at?

Why does the ACLU oppose the AAA?

What Exactly Is an "Elite?"

If Antizionism is Antisemitism, why are there antizionist Jews?, (followup on tokenism)

Why doesn't Israel hand Gaza and the West Bank back to Egypt and Jordan?

What makes a war "legal"?

Who first called it a "nakba," and why?

Has a country's citizens ever all risen up in revolt to stop a war their country started?

Is Israel trying to conquer and annex Lebanese land?

Is the ICJ reliable in determining what is/isn't genocide?

What was the Hannibal Directive?

Explainers

Intersectionality ➡️ Oppression Olympics ➡️ Oppressor/Victim Binary

Defending Trans Rights is Jewish

Offering Solidarity, Even When it isn't Reciprocated, is Jewish

Changing Your Mind is a Virtue

How Mandate Palestine Became Israel, Jordan, and the Occupied Territories

Understanding Suicidal Empathy Through the Iranian Revolution

How Antisemitism is Weaponized

Moral Sadism and Holocaust Inversion

Understanding Propaganda

Never Again and Black Lives Matter

The Revolution Will Not be Aestheticized

Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts

Truthiness in a Keffiyeh

"14,000 Babies in 48 Hours"

You Can Be an Atheist Without Being a Dick

The Jew in the Rorshach

Polarization and the Death of Nuance

None of Us is Immune to Propaganda

Why Antizionism is Antisemitism

I Am ➜ I Identify As

When Judith Butler Forgets How Identity Works (Just for Jews)

Greta Thunberg's Allegations of Piracy and Kidnapping

Egypt, the Gaza Blockade, and the March for Gaza Activists

Moral Bludgeoning and ICC Warrants

The Aesthetic of Resistance: Why Some Western Leftists Support a Regime Which is Everything They Claim to Hate

Identifying and Coping with Cults

SCOTUS decision in Trump v CASA

On the Gaslighting of Jews

How to be an ally

Maybe I'm NOT an ally?

Jewish Advocacy, The Kafka Trap, and Hasbara

The Selective Solidarity of the Far Left

Intellectual Humility

A Short History of the Word "Palestine"

The Comey Prosecution isn't really about Comey

On Apartheid, South Africa, Israel, and the BDS Movement - Followup on Bantustans

On Hebrew and Yiddish

The Merchant of Venice

Semantic Warfare

Bad Faith Readings and Faux Activism

Algorithmic Repetition Propaganda, Belief, and Breaking the Loop

Why They Hate Huxley

It's a Good Idea to Laugh at Anyone Who Uses the Word "Heretic" Unironically

Writing What I'd Want to Read is Never a Waste of Time

A Brief Primer on the Conflict in Sudan

Right, Wrong, and Social Media

Terrorism and "Validity"

Karl Marx and the Secular Jew

Truther movements and Antisemitism

False Equivilence Between Hamas and Israel

Tokenism: Antizionist Jews and Pro-Peace Palestinians

It's not Moral Clarity, its a Fear of Thinking Too Hard

The History and Status of the Two-State Solution (and Deradicalization)

On Nuance

The Soviet Roots of Antizionism

The Civil War in Yemen (Followup)

Somaliland (and Israel's recognition)

Christian Denominations

The 1973 Yom Kippur War and the Oil Crisis

Spinoza was not the God-Drunk Man

On Israeli soldiers desecrating religious icons (followup)

Conservative on the Roof: Structural Functionalism

Identity Traps and Social reasoning (Mounk and Kahan)

Maimonides, Pastor Miller, the Jewish God, and the Christian God

If you'd like something explained, please Ask

#Asks

#Signal > Noise : Intro to Media Literacy

Responding to Hate Mail

"Kill yourself whitey" (I love meeting Buddhists!)

"you’re disgusting and i hope you die. you’re an evil fascist with no regards to human life and if the world is just you will suffer for all eternity you soulless pig."

"God will judge you harshest of all."

"Kill yourself cracker zionazi scum"

If you're going to engage, please bring receipts. Moral judgements made absent a moral argument will be ignored and/or dunked on.

Non-bot followers welcome. I don't need you to agree with me, I need you to express your disagreement with facts and reasoning.

Yes, non-Jews are always welcome to reblog

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[nonevahed]

[unsolicited-opinions]

If a doctor proposed banning all antibiotics but refused to answer "What about sepsis?", you'd rightly walk out of the room.

Of course the ideal should be a world without prisons. In a perfect utopian future, we would have no need for cages because we would have successfully dismantled the root causes of crime, poverty, and harm. But this smug, dismissive refusal to engage with the grittiest realities of human behavior helps absolutely nothing and actively works against her goals.

It treats a foundational question of public safety as a tiresome "gotcha" rather than a deeply legitimate human concern.

When activists retreat into pure idealism and dismiss the public's valid fears about violent crime as unworthy of a response, they don't look visionary. They look condescending, elitist, and entirely disconnected from the reality of human nature.

So I read the rest of this comic and more of her work.

The underlying logic of this deflection relies on a false dichotomy - the idea that if you dare to ask how an abolitionist world handles a rapist or a murderer, you must be a blanket defender of mass incarceration.

Over here in reality, you can fully recognize that our current justice system is deeply flawed, broken, and failing survivors, while still demanding to know what replaces the physical containment of dangerous individuals.

To frame a question about immediate physical safety as a structural roadblock is an intellectual bait-and-switch. It assumes that anyone asking for a practical plan just "doesn't get it," when in reality they just want to know how you plan to keep their loved ones safe.

The comics series "Who's Left" is garbage.

Here's how it dismisses people who lived through the communist (authoritarian) regimes of the 20gh century: by calling them old and xenophobic.

And here's how it defends those regimes:

Speaking as a lifelong left-leaning liberal: this is tankie bullshit and it deserves your contempt.

Idealism is great. Pretending idealism is a suitable replacement for realism or pragmatism is idiocy.

[stardustsideblogg]

I....

The reason it conjures images of gulags, bread lines, and violence is because those things actually happened. There are so many memoirs and histories about gulags out there. The comic is spitting in the face of the people who lived through that.

[unsolicited-opinions]

💯

[unsolicited-opinions]

I'm a Millennial and in my late 30s. I distinctly remember the Bush years and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kids got blown up, families died, hundreds of thousands died overall and yet NO ONE on the left was screeching about genocide. Not a single leftist during that era ever uttered the word because people back then understood what shit meant and that words can't be interchanged and randomly tossed around just due to vibes. I genuinely loathe the vast majority of Gen Z for being dead set on being just flat out fucking WRONG and maliciously ignorant. It would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous to progress

Anon, while your frustration (and their dysfunction) is real and valid, please don't write off Gen Z or regard them as particularly broken or malicious.

Did you see the news a few moths ago about how Generation X has been disproportionately messed up by lead exposure?

Assuming that published lead-psychopathology associations are causal and not purely correlational: We estimate that by 2015, the US population had gained 602-million General Psychopathology factor points because of exposure arising from leaded gasoline, reflecting a 0.13-standard-deviation increase in overall liability to mental illness in the population and an estimated 151 million excess mental disorders attributable to lead exposure. Investigation of specific disorder-domain symptoms identified a 0.64-standard-deviation increase in population-level Internalizing symptoms and a 0.42-standard-deviation increase in AD/HD symptoms. Population-level Neuroticism increased by 0.14 standard deviations and Conscientiousness decreased by 0.20 standard deviations. Lead-associated mental health and personality differences were most pronounced for cohorts born from 1966 through 1986 (Generation X). [x]

Those of us in Gen X had our brains disproportionately poisoned by our environment. There's nothing we could have done to change what we were exposed to as children. The resulting uptick in difficulties we experience are not, scientists believe, the fault of Gen X.

Lead poisoning did this to us. It isn't a generational weakness, character flaw, or moral failing. We were poisoned and it damaged our brains.

So I find Gen Z sort of relatable - because they were also poisoned, and it isn't their fault, no matter how much those of us in elder generations act as though it is a generational character flaw in Gen Z.

Generations are different because their environments are different - so let's look at the media environments of Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.

Gen X was the first generation to embrace the internet, but we grew up in a pre-digital world.

Stranger Things isn't exactly right, but it's the portrayal which most matches my memories and photos (photos taken on film using analog cameras).

Gen X remembers rotary phones mounted or tied to the wall with cords and incredibly expensive long-distance rates if you made a call outside your area code. We grew up with large, deep CRT televisions with curved screens which looked like pieces of furniture with bunny ear antennae and no remote control. The really fancy homes had projection TVs.

VHS came out while we were kids, and we kept our teenage music collections in large binders of CDs.

Cable TV was the peak of our childhood media technology and a lot of people had it at home, but most people watched the three broadcast networks, listened to the radio, and read magazines/newspapers.

Almost everyone at school watched the same TV shows and knew the same top 40 pop songs.

Facebook and Gmail came into existence when Gen X was in it's 20s. We were young enough to embrace the new internet technology of the Web more quickly than our elders.

We started the first big blogs and big online forums and we read long-form articles online from mainstream media and new online-only outfits like Salon.com (which didn't suck at the time). We invented (for better or worse) early social media. We stayed on Facebook a long time, even after our parents joined.

You millennials mostly experienced computers and the internet early in life.

You witnessed the transition from analog technology to digital as kids. You had landlines, but they were definitely cordless and push-button. You saw the new flat-screen TVs come out. Cable was more ubiquitous for you, and you experienced on-demand viewing, an explosion of cable channels, and the advent of the streaming age.

Your media was much more fragmented and personalized. Someone else at school might not have heard of the music you loved. Yours was the first US generation to broadly experience that sort of thing.

Millennials were the first generation which had easy access to global content, and experienced much more connectivity to the internet than prior generations.

Millennials were into Facebook and Instagram for longer than most admit. Y'all read blogs, and very well may have had one. You still liked to some read long-form articles, but also got interested in more short-form content. You recognized how much of what you saw online was bullshit and prioritized authenticity over almost all other virtues. You were about 20 when the first smart phones were released.

Gen Z, though? They're the REAL first digital natives

They were born into a media ecosystem where smartphones, high-speed Internet, and social media were a given, totally ubiquitous from early childhood. They had constant, integrated connectivity which research suggests has made Gen Z more accustomed to rapid, always-on interactions and instant content gratification.

Gen Z, as a result, favors fast, engaging, and interactive content. They were the early adopters of SnapChat and TikTok. Short-form videos, memes, and ephemeral, quickly-forgotten content were the norm. Understand: This isn't how you or I grew up, Anon.

They consume media much faster and adopted the Millennial devotion to authenticity while adding a new twist. For Gen Z, authenticity and real-time engagement are highly valued over polished, edited works. They want it not only real, short and fast, but personalized.

They're grown up with their dopamine reward systems being constantly manipulated.

The content targeting them is designed to capture attention in a matter of seconds. Gen Z's social media usage is not just about consumption, it's also deeply tied to creating and shaping digital identity - and this isn't just me ranting, the research supports this.

Gen Z's experience has been packed with immediacy and interactivity, and they have high expectations for both authenticity and rapid change. Authenticity and relatability are prized over expertise. Moral resonance is prized over research.

These things satisfy the quick gratification their media environment has hacked their brains to need.

I know that my own attention span has taken a hit in recent years, and I didn't grow up online or with a smartphone. Imagine what the same media environment did to developing minds which never experienced anything else.

It's not a character flaw in Gen Z.

It's something that was done to them by the environment in which they have been raised.

Gen X was poisoned by lead exposure.

Gen Z was poisoned by their media environment.

Don't hate, my friend. Its not their fault.

The reward systems of their brains have been hijacked and they need our understanding. We need to try to help them.

[unsolicited-opinions]

It's not Gen Z's fault. This was done TO them by their environment. It's a media ecology problem.

[jewish-culture-is]

Non-Hebrew-speaking Jewish culture is hearing a kid yell שׁשׁ שׁבּע and not knowing what that means until you pull out Google translate

(side note: anyone else never want to hear those numbers again?)

.

[edithsweetithh]

same energy

[unsolicited-opinions]

Milkshake duck:

Source

[unsolicited-opinions]

Writing about not-writing

Or

Feelings about indiscernable feelings

---

This blog has 147 partly-finished drafts. Some of them just need another round of editing, but I haven't done any of that editing in the last couple weeks.

In itself, the not-writing isn't a problem. The problem is that I don't know why I'm not writing.

Why is not knowing a problem?

Something shifted and that's fine - things shift. The problem is I can't name it. I can't point to the day, the conversation, the thing I read, the thing I didn't say, and go "Ah! There, that's what did It! Now it makes sense!"

The desire to write just seems to have quietly slipped out without leaving a note.

And I hate that. I want things to make sense.

Some of you are familiar with this difficulty identifying and naming your own emotional states. It's called alexithymia, and it's not uncommon among autistic people.

It's not as difficult for me as it once was. I had a great therapist who helped me start working out many emotional states by paying more attention to how they felt in my body and pattern recognition, but I still struggle with it.

So maybe this whatever-it-is has a name or a cause and you just can't work it out. Why is this a problem?

I realize intellectually that most people don't know their own minds as well as they believe, but this is still genuinely distressing for me.

So I'm trying something different.

Instead of perseverating on it and fruitlessly trying to puzzle it out, I'm treating it like weather.

My internal states aren't required to have discernible causes right now. One doesn't interrogate and integrate a storm, one just...waits for the storm to pass.

That's weird.

Nah. If you like fiction, you've probably read this move a hundred times without noticing it for what it was.

"Loneliness crept in around the edges of the evening."

"A wave of nostalgia washed over him."

"Despair took hold and wouldn't let go."

"Something dark moved in beneath his ribs."

"A sadness settled over me."

"A wave of grief hit her."

These metaphors externalize emotional states despite the fact that emotional states are not external.

In these literary examples, the emotional state arrives from outside, does its business, and, like a storm, eventually passes. The self stays intact underneath the storm, and the self is the ground the weather moves across.

So...why is this helpful?

"I am anxious" makes anxiety a trait baked into you. "Anxiety is visiting" makes it a guest. Guests eventually leave. We want to make it easier for the guest to depart.

The stoic Epictetus draws the line between what's actually up to you and what isn't, then dumps most emotional states into the second bucket, externalizing them.

You don't choose whether the storm rolls in, says Epictetus, but you can choose whether you stand in it screaming at the sky...or go get the fucking umbrella.

To externalize a state doesn't excuse it or ignore it. Ideally, I'm acknowledging this thing is real, it's happening to me, but it is not me.

I'm not "a person who has stopped writing." I'm a person currently experiencing weather that precludes writing. This storm, however, will pass.

Doesn't that give up agency and promote passivity?

Yeah, there's a trap on the other side of this. "I can't help it, it's just how I am" is a coward's version of the metaphor.

Real weather changes, and that's the point of the analogy. If you use "it's just weather" to justify never checking the barometer again, you've stopped using the metaphor and started hiding behind it.

But if I can regard this as weather, I don't have to treat a drop in output as a verdict on my character, my discipline, or my ability to write.

147 drafts sitting there isn't an indictment. They're just waiting for the storm to pass.

I don't know why the desire to write left or when it will come back. The reason is probably knowable, but not to me, not right now.

So I'm going to take a break from the idea that this is a problem I can think my way out of.

I'll get back to writing when the storm has passed.

💙

[unsolicited-opinions]

In March of 2016, I sort of liked Lindsey Graham briefly. It was refreshing to see a side of him that seemed honest, funny, and relatable

Watch from 00:00 - ~10:20 and you'll see what I mean.

It turns out that Lindsey didn't believe in anything as much as he believed he should stay in the Senate.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Sure, @ido100.

The smallest domino is the Assassination of RFK

In 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Bobby Kennedy) was assassinated for his support of Israel by a Palestinian man, Sirhan Sirhan.

Because of his father's tragic death and his family's legacy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. grew up in the political spotlight. Decades later, he aligned with the Trump administration and was appointed as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

As part of government funding cuts in July 2025, the administration and HHS Secretary RFK Jr. dramatically scaled back a crucial CDC program called FoodNet that actively monitored foodborne outbreaks.

FoodNet went from tracking eight major foodborne pathogens down to just two.

One of the pathogens they stopped tracking at the federal level was a microscopic parasite called Cyclospora.

Because the federal government stopped tracking the parasite, health departments lacked coordinated, day-to-day data to catch early warning signs.

This made the outbreak harder to detect and contain early. Without early detection and containment, the parasite spread rapidly through contaminated produce, causing weeks of violent, explosive, watery diarrhea as it spread.

The last domino is Michigan being hit the hardest by this outbreak, going from ~50 cases a year to thousands of confirmed infections.

----

The Palestinian/Sirhan Sirhan detail isn't the point of the meme, it's just the tragic villain origin story for the shitstorm RFK Jr. was instrumental in creating.

[unsolicited-opinions]

How would you go about disproving the claim that Israel is “fascist?”

I’ve seen both the claim that it’s a fascist state and that its goals regarding the current war are fascist as well—but any time I, or someone else, try to refute these claims, the accusations of “fascist,” “nazi,” “genocide apologist” all roll in and I struggle to find the words to defend myself and my stance.

I really enjoy reading your posts, they’re very informative and well thought out, so I figured I’d ask what you thought.

When people call Israel "fascist," when they call Israelis "Nazis," or when they accuse Israel of "genocide," they're not usually making a serious claim that meets the historical or legal definitions of those words.

Remember, such people are not moved by facts, reasoning, law, or dictionaries - they're moved only by emotional resonance and righteous outrage.

So rather than actually making an allegation based on the meaning of the word, they're reaching for the strongest words of condemnation our culture has. They're using words they can't actually define, driven only by a red haze of outrage which convinces them that their abnegation of reason is righteous. They use these words as thought-terminators.

"Fascist," for instance, doesn't mean "a government I dislike."

Political scientists tend to define fascism with a cluster of traits:

One-party rule that crushes opposition

A cult of personality around a single leader

State control of media, culture, and unions

Suppression of dissent through secret police, torture, and executions

An expansionist or messianic mission to dominate other nations

Glorification of violence as an end in itself

Think of Mussolini's Italy: one-party dictatorship, cult of the leader, suppression of dissent, and glorification of violence.

Can Israel be described this way?

Israel has competitive, multi-party elections where governments rise and fall regularly (too often, say some).

Israel's media are fiercely free and critical, often savaging the government.

Opposition parties, NGOs, and protest movements operate openly, including the massive anti-Netanyahu demonstrations and anti-war demonstrations.

Israel has an independent judiciary that has repeatedly blocked and overturned government policy.

In Israel, governments collapse from too much dissent, newspapers trash the Prime Minister daily, and mass protests shut down highways without tanks rolling over them.

That's not fascism.

"Genocide" doesn't mean "a war with tragic civilian deaths."

It means a systematic attempt to annihilate a people as a people, like the Holocaust in Europe, Rwanda in 1994, or the Yazidis under ISIS.

Israel's critics might argue about proportionality or strategy, but "genocide" has a very precise definition, and stretching it turns it into just another word for "war I oppose." As I wrote previously, we need to be careful, responsible, and honest when we use words like "genocide," because once those words are emptied of meaning, they lose their power to stop the very horrors they were coined to prevent.

And "Nazi"? That's not an argument. That's just an insult meant to shut down conversation - it's Holocaust Inversion.

These words have definitions. If someone wants to use them, they should be prepared to defend their claim by the actual meaning of these words, not just the emotional weight. Because if "fascist," "genocide," and "Nazi" are reduced to "bad," they don’t just smear Israel. They rob us of the language we need to describe real fascism, real genocide, and real Nazis when we encounter them.

So what can you do when these words are thrown at you?

Remember that you don't have to prove Israel isn't fascist.

They have to prove it is.

Start there. Ask:

"What’s your definition of fascism, and how does Israel meet it?"

No snark, no defensiveness, no turning out your pockets for their amusement - just precision and truth.

You're not arguing with their outrage, you're calmly exposing their emptiness.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Natalie nailed this one.

[hyperrbolic-orange]

SILENCE IS VIOLENCE and 50 Other Convenient Hashtags and Slogans You Can Repeat Ad Nauseam Instead of Trying To Develop a Well Informed Political Opinion or Having and Articulating a Single Original Thought.

Brought to you by Twitter, TikTok and Tumblr.

[baked-wry]

I find it funny that silence is only violence when it pertains to issues they care about.

But for issues they don't care about? Bringing attention to those issues is somehow violence.

[unsolicited-opinions]

[unsolicited-opinions]

I'm curious.

How do y'all respond when you hear the "I'm gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn't just about Jews and I don't know why people think that yadda yadda yadda" patter?

( @mascula-sappho, your comments elsewhere inspired this question.)

[some-israeli-guy]

I'd find that bar graph that shows the amount of Jewish Holocaust victims and next to it a barely visible, one pixel high bar of people imprisoned by the nazis for homosexuality.

If it's someone who seems willing to listen I'll explain how the nazi homophobia circles back to antisemitism. If not, maybe some derogatory comments about them and their close family.

Is it the "good" choice? No. But it gets me through the day a bit easier.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Looking for that graph, found these:

[jewishmuppet]

the one I always think of is this bar graph, from this post by @jewish-sideblog:

Reblog by @jewish-sideblog · 1 image

💬 70  🔁 1125  ❤️ 1745 · This is the orange bar btw. Seems like a lot of people are having trouble seeing it which definitely helps make my p

there's a lot of great points in the notes about how the Nazis' homophobia was rooted in antisemitism. Another thing for me is the fact that, had the Nazis been successful, there would be no Jewish life today. Queer people will always continue to be born, but for Jews, the only way to become a Jew requires other Jews - either being born to Jewish parents or being affirmed as a Jew by a rabbinical court of three other Jews. Had all presently living Jews been wiped out, all future generations of Jews would have been wiped out as well. The Nazis certainly would've liked to wipe out all queer existence, but that isn't possible. The complete eradication of all Jewish existence was at stake in a way it simply wasn't for queer people.

I'm Jewish because the Jews who came before me survived. I don't have the same feeling as a queer person - I mourn the history that was destroyed, the research, the communities that existed then, absolutely. But I know that I'd still be queer either way, and I can't say the same thing for being Jewish.

[shofarsogood]

I'd like to reiterate what @jewishmuppet said. I'm a trans and bisexual Jew. I've been out since I was four. My parents were accepting and they made sure I was exposed to queer and Jewish histories. I've spent years studying the Holocaust and studying gay culture in the US. I know what I'm talking about.

There isn't a single gay culture, not really. People talk about it, but they mean gay culture in their country, and usually gay, lesbian, and transgender people have different groupings within that. A Chinese gay man is going to have a different experience than a lesbian in the US. People in countries where people are arrested or potentially killed for being queer are not having the same experiences as people in countries where being gay is more acceptable. That's just how it is. And for most people, myself included, this is a culture you discover when you're older. You're not a child going to ballrooms and drag shows; you start doing that as a teen or an adult (if you choose to. No shame if you don't interact with the wider queer community at all). This is not your experience from infancy onwards.

I grew up Jewish. I grew up attending Seders and lighting yartzheit candles. Our house always had a mezuzah. This was my culture since birth, and it's my mom's culture, and my grandparents' culture. And when I talk to Jews in other countries, we have similar experiences. Yes, we have different minhagim, but we're celebrating the same holidays. I say the same prayers as a Jew living in Israel or Argentina or Russia. If you know Hebrew, you can speak to Jews all over the planet because they know it too. We have a unified culture, even if it's been tweaked a little here and there.

That culture was nearly destroyed. My great-grandparents' village is fucking gone. They escaped prior to the Holocaust, but there's nowhere to go back to. I can't find any info on it because their records and letters are in Yiddish, which their children never learned. (My grandfather and great uncles threw out a lot of stuff from the Old Country.) I don't speak a lick of Yiddish, so even with the letters, I couldn't find my way back to where my great-grandparents lived. There are stories of Jews returning to their homes to find everything Jewish destroyed. I remember one story of a Polish man returning to his town to find that the synagogue had been used to house cattle during the Shoah and was unusable (because of all the feces), and the grave markers in the cemetery had been removed and used to pave roads. (You can still find roads with fragments of Hebrew on them throughout Europe for this reason.) Everything was gone.

There's a difference between a community you enter as a teenager or adult and the community you're born into. Right now, my gaming community could implode and I'd be upset, but I wouldn't be devastated the way I'd feel if the US stopped existing. Hell, I was involved in leftist circles that ate themselves alive (iykyk) and that sucked, but I recovered. I don't think I could if my entire childhood was eradicated. If I couldn't go back home or find people who spoke my language, if the cemetery that housed my grandparents was desecrated, if all the important cultural buildings were filled with animal droppings.

You know how when you visit your hometown after you move away, and the ice cream place you really loved went under and it became a gas station? I think we all have an experience similar to that. It hurts, but imagine that on the scale of thousands. It's not just the ice cream place where you celebrated birthdays; it's your school, your library, your soccer fields, your favorite restaurants, your movie theaters, your malls, your parks, your clubs, your house, your neighbor's house, your best friend's house, all gone.

Look, gay culture in Germany was eradicated, too. We know this happened. But those men got to go back to their cities that were still standing. The same people were there. Of course, not all—I won't pretend that Germany didn't lose people in the war and buildings weren't destroyed. But people still spoke GERMAN. Yes, they were occupied, but their culture was intact. It wasn't suddenly impossible to get German food or hear German songs or read German books. That was true of every country hit by the war. Yes, it was tragic, but their culture remained. They got to remain German.

Jews suddenly had nothing. Our culture was gone. Our little pockets of Yiddish were gone. That culture was ripped from us and from the places we lived. We carried it to different countries, mostly the US and Israel, but it was an effort. There was a concentrated effort in trying to keep Jewish culture going. We built ulpans and yeshivahs to keep our culture going. We worked at ensuring our children knew our heritage and history.

Gay people just... didn't have to do that. Not because they didn't have kids, but because their larger culture was still intact and gay culture was usually transmitted through other ways, outside the families. (Cause let's be honest, if you were a homosexual who had kids in the 1940s, you were closeted and likely didn't tell your kids.)

Yeah, the numbers show how few homosexuals were in the camps, but that's not the important part. The important part is what Jews lost that homosexuals still had. That's why it's so important for queer people nowadays not to compare themselves to those murdered in the Holocaust. They don't have the same culture and their entire way of life wasn't destroyed.

And while I'm on an infodump, this happened to the Roma as well. I'm not Romani and I'm not well educated on how they handled life after the Holocaust, but their culture was also nearly eradicated. (And in some places, 100% of Roma was killed, so they lost whole towns and communities as well.) They suffered in the way that Jews suffered, which was markedly different from homosexuals, communists, "asocials", and everyone else killed in the camps. The only people I'm okay with comparing themselves to Jewish people are Romani people, because that suffering was so similar. And again, the numbers don't matter. There were fewer Roma at the start of the Holocaust, so fewer of them died, but the harm to their community was similar.

[darcylightninglewis]

Gayness and queerness was also blamed on Jews. Gayness was a byproduct, side effect or symptom of Jews and Jewishness to the Nazis. Jews were seen as effeminate to Nazis. Stands to follow, a subset of that thinking is us (Jews) creating gays. They were containing the spread, so to speak. (This is how it’s always been explained in the books I’ve read, exhibits I’ve seen and docs I’ve watched. But happy if folks have other interesting sources.)

Gays rebuilt communities. Jews continued to be murdered when they went home. Between blood libel and their neighbors wanting to keep what they stole from Jews, drove Jews out of Poland after the war.

I am also not Roma, nor an expert. However, I want to share something from the Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. I took a photograph because I was so overwhelmed but wanted to remember this, because it’s important.

“After World War II Roma were also excluded from the right to restitution, because Federal German authorities denied that Roma were persecued due to racist reasons. After a small step in this direction in 1963, restitutions became possible in small amounts only in 1979, when the West German Federal Parliament declared that the Nazi persecution of Roma was based on racial grounds and Roma survivors were allowed to claim for restitution in a form of a onetime payment. The official acceptance of the Porajmos as genocide by the Federal Republic of Germany followed only in 1982 with a speech by Chancelor Helmut Schmidt. In August 2016, an agreement between the German Ministry for Finance and the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic decided on compensation for survivors of the Porajmos in the Czech Republic. This agreement, which will give 2,500 EUR to each of the handful of survivors, was greeted as a symbolic acknowledgment, but also criticised for its delay and the low amount awarded. However, this agreement has already led to renewed claims from Romani victims from the former Yugoslavia and other regions of 'romocide'.” - Roma and Conflict

Many of people on tumblr were alive when ‘reparations’ were made. It was nearly ten. fucking. years. ago. And yet their history and mention as victims continues to get lower and lower.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Ever fracture a vertebrae?

0/10

Zero stars

F-tier

Do not recommend

-----

Still: the disc below isn't damaged. This will suck, it will hurt for many weeks, but it should heal just fine with no lasting harm.

The sort of injury from which one recovers with no lasting harm is the very best kind of injury to have.

And the people at my local ED, from registration to nurses to RTs to were, without exception, amazing.

10/10

5 stars

S-Tier

Strongest possible recommendation

[xenothedigital]

What is pantheism?

basically the belief that there isnt one conscious, sentient god, but rather that "god" or the divine or whatever is in everything, and ties everything in the universe together it could be described as a religion, but its not really organized at all and there arent any real rules, so its more of a system of beliefs? I'm not the best at describing these things basically just "god is everything, everything is god" that includes people, animals, objects, time, space, etc

[unsolicited-opinions]

Pantheism and Atheism are often indistinguishable - and I mean that in the best possible way.

[unsolicited-opinions]

I'm curious.

How do y'all respond when you hear the "I'm gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn't just about Jews and I don't know why people think that yadda yadda yadda" patter?

( @mascula-sappho, your comments elsewhere inspired this question.)

[some-israeli-guy]

I'd find that bar graph that shows the amount of Jewish Holocaust victims and next to it a barely visible, one pixel high bar of people imprisoned by the nazis for homosexuality.

If it's someone who seems willing to listen I'll explain how the nazi homophobia circles back to antisemitism. If not, maybe some derogatory comments about them and their close family.

Is it the "good" choice? No. But it gets me through the day a bit easier.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Looking for that graph, found these:

[unsolicited-opinions]

I'm curious.

How do y'all respond when you hear the "I'm gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn't just about Jews and I don't know why people think that yadda yadda yadda" patter?

( @mascula-sappho, your comments elsewhere inspired this question.)

[unsolicited-opinions]

Your post does a great job breaking down the rhetorical devices used by mamdani. Have you considered turning that critical lens onto the rhetoric coming from the IDF? In the name of impartiality

(Anon is talking about this post)

I'm game to try that, Anon. Please suggest a comparable example of rhetorical deception from an IDF spokesperson?

[unsolicited-opinions]

It's been a couple days, Anon. Hope you'll suggest an example soon.

[unsolicited-opinions]

[unsolicited-opinions]

It's been a week, Anon.

[unsolicited-opinions]

That's two weeks, Anon.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Three weeks, Anon...

[unsolicited-opinions]

Three months, Anon.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Four months.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Five months, Anon.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Six months.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Seven months.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Eight months.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Question that I'm asking in good faith because I really do want to know about it: why does Herzl describe israel as a colony if it isn't one?

(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)

TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.

In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.

It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.

The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.

So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.

It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.

Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.

Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.

That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.

There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.

Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.

The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)

So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?

They move the goalposts.

The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."

The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.

The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.

So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.

Why Israel is Not a Settler Colonial State

From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)

Much more in this post.

_______________ *(See what I did there?)

[shalom-adamah-lekhem]

Okay, there's actually a lot of interesting history around this, so let's dig into it.

It's completely correct that the semiotics of "colony", "colonization", etc., have evolved over time, and that back in the late 19th Century when Herzl was writing the connotation was more neutral than it became in the 20th Century. (I also need to stress that that one "it is something colonial" quote-mine you see shared everywhere is from a letter that was never even sent, because Herzl realized it was a bad idea.)

But more to the point: the old guard Zionists were fully aware of accusations they were European colonizers - and they actively refuted those claims.

— Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Jacob Lassner, Ilan S. Troen, 2007)

— Hebrew Repatriation to Eretz Yisrael (Samuel Kruglikoff, 1930)

— Eliahu Eliachar, Testimony to UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) Regarding Jews in Arab Countries (1947)

— Ber Borochov, Poalei Tziyon Peace Manifesto (1917)

— David Ben-Gurion, Statement to the Elected Assembly of Palestine Jewry (1947)

Zionists wrote copious volumes about the indigeneity of Judeans to Eretz Yisrael, and denying accusations that they were merely pawns of an imperialist agenda (initially it was claimed they were Russian agents, and then later British colonists) or seeking to conquer or to exploit the land or its people. Contrary to the popular claim that Zionists thought (or promoted the concept) the land was uninhabited, a very substantial amount was written about the Palestinians (particularly from the perspective of class analysis), and how the return and liberation of Judeans must go hand-in-hand with class solidarity and the liberation of Arab workers. In other words: the exact opposite of colonialism. What we today would call decolonization - and specifically decolonization via proletarian revolution.

The simplistic quote-mining about "colonization" used today is a hundred years outdated: all such arguments were debunked before the state was even founded.