This should be a bigger news tbh
The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups — a capitulation to Trump sanctions.
Today's Document
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
No title available
noise dept.
RMH
🪼

oozey mess
Xuebing Du
Misplaced Lens Cap

izzy's playlists!
sheepfilms
cherry valley forever
Three Goblin Art
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Stranger Things

pixel skylines

JVL

#extradirty
Claire Keane
seen from Russia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Netherlands

seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye

seen from United States
@veddartha
This should be a bigger news tbh
The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups — a capitulation to Trump sanctions.
Transcription, because it is worth reading:
There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”
So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.
It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.
I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.
First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.
Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.
Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.
In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]
Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]
Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.
There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”
Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.
And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”
The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.
Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]
A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.
Finally, fifth: Fiction.
However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.
Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.
One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]
Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]
Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.
This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…
The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.
And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.
It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.
Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.
But it plays out along the same general lines: Primary sources replaced with modern fiction, victim perspectives replaced with perpetrators, specificity replaced with Star-Bellied Sneetch-style “Why can’t we all just get along?” metaphors.
Mordrid and Evangelista for my good friend KJ ( @veddartha )!!
Sorry boys, they’re sending you off to fight in The War.
MY BLORBOS, THANKY THANKY, RAAAAAAAAAAAH
If you live in the UK you need to see this
Protect Internet Freedom from now until forever. It's important existentially! Americans stand with UK citizens in our struggle against government censorship
We are consulting on further measures to prepare children for the future in an age of rapid technological change. This includes potential ag
Got the link via @finalducc
If you live in the UK, please be sure to take part in this!
doctor husbands
Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
I am glad this has made the rounds. Some people feel a dense misunderstanding or misinterpretation concerning gentrification, and I think it helps to hear a description/explanation of what gentrification is from those who are both affected by it and educated by the culture from which it hails. I and many others enjoy some of the delights of gentrification while simultaneously having their livelihoods threatened by it.
Hey y’all I have an announcement! My web app that I’ve been working on, Afro Index, is now live! It’s a visual reference library of Black hairstyles, for artist, animators, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about them!
Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨
A reference library for Black hairstyles with accurate naming, structured filtering, and curated reference images.
Happy International Women's Day to all women everywhere, and especially to queer and trans women, big fan.
In 2012 I painted the top image: Rise
In 2026 I am saddened to have to repaint this update: Fall
My account is still blocked from searching/tags/etc on my business blog @foundfamilyadventurecrafts so I'm posting this here. There's something very bad happening with Small Business, Tech, and Amazon. What else is new?
Links: Bobo Design Studio for Updates & Submitting Information
Arrows Aim Greenhouse + Chroma Rex are putting together a complaint with WA State Attorney General's Office + Templates for complaints / opt out
Articles:
Amazon's Buy For Me Information Page
Reuters Article
Ars Technica Article
Business Insider Article
Hey, that's us and a bunch of our friends! This whole thing SUCKS so bad and we're pissed. We've intentionally not listed our products on Amazon for the 15 years we've been in business. We're ready to join a class action lawsuit and kick some ass.
Ena Shinonome has a message
sometimes i think about chatgpt and openai and i randomly remember that sam altman raped and abused his little sister while she was a young child for years and is actively being sued by her over it. Like. This guy is an (alleged) child sexual abuser and no one cares? Like hello? How does everyone not know about this? This guy is extremely wealthy and actively shaping the public policy and economy of the richest country in the world? People should know about this??? Look up Altman V. Altman 4:25-cv-00017. This is all real
quick D, feeling great :')
_
#SaveSpeech its been a week, and while we cannot let up pressure on making phone calls, we need to start applying pressure elsewhere now as
Heres another place to start https://bsky.app/profile/dieselbrain.bsky.social/post/3lv52fxw47c2x [contains quote post or other embedded co