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jessicalprice · 1 year

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christian universalism strikes again

(Reposted from Twitter)

So a rabbi I know came back from LA pretty jazzed about a Jewish addiction treatment facility there called Beit T'shuvah and so we talked about their approach and that got me curious about non-AA approaches to dealing with addiction which, my friends, was fascinating.

I’ll admit that almost everything I know about AA is more or less from The West Wing. I'm fortunate in that no one in my immediate family has dealt with substance abuse issues, and as far as I know, none of my close friends are alcoholics. My knowledge is pop culture knowledge.

But hearing about Beit T’shuvah was very interesting to me because:

I'd heard that a lot of people who aren't Christian have a hard time with AA because it's so Christian.

The difference in philosophy was subtle at first glance but actually paralleled a lot of the differences between Judaism and Christianity if you dug into it.

Anyway, I got curious about whether success rates were different for Christians vs. non-Christians and started googling. I didn't find much in the way of the data I was looking for, but I did find something a lot more disturbing, which is that the whole 12-step thing is not science-based. At all. For example:

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse compared the current current state of addiction treatment to medicine in the early 1900s, when there weren't a lot of standards for who could practice medicine. In order to be a substance abuse counselor in many states, you don't need much more than a GED or high school diploma.

A 2006 survey found "no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems."

And I want to make clear here that I'm not saying AA is bad--clearly it's helped people. The problem is that it's touted as a universal approach, which is a problem when it's not based on any sort of actual science.

AA claims that its success rates for people who "really try" are 75%. (And boy does that mirror gaslighting diet language.) But the most precise study out there that's NOT coming from AA (https://amazon.com/dp/B00FIMWI1O) put actual success rates at 5-8%. One of the major textbooks on treating addiction ranks it at 38th out of 48 on its list of effective treatments.

So just like most fad diets, it fails for almost everyone who tries it, and then blames the individual for its failure.

A glaring issue is that the 12 steps don't really acknowledge--or provide any guidance or structure for dealing with--other mental/emotional health issues. That’s a giant problem when people with substance abuse issues have higher than average rates of those issues. (Take a moment to consider how the victim-blaming approach of “if you didn’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough” is going to intersect with someone’s major depression.)

Now, if 12-step programs were just one available treatment approach out of many, this wouldn’t be that big of an issue.

But 12% of AA members are there because of court orders. Our legal system is requiring people to undergo treatment that is:

Christian-based

Not scientifically supported

A failure for the vast majority of people

I mean, here's a pretty comprehensive breakdown that talks about the lack of scientific support for it, alternative treatments (like those in Finland, and naltrexone), and the fundamentalist origins of AA.

The founder was a member of the Oxford Group, an evangelical organization that taught that all human problems stemmed from fear and selfishness, and could be solved by turning your life over to divine providence, basically. Sound familiar? He based AA on those principles, and given that the only alternative was "drying out" in a sanatorium, and that AA members would show up at bedsides there and invite inpatients to meetings, it must have looked really enlightened to people. In 2022, it bears a queasy resemblance to evangelizing to people in prison, literally a captive audience.

To be fair--to their credit--they were some of the first people out there saying alcoholism was a disease, and not a moral failing. But they didn’t treat it like a disease when it came to testing treatment options:

Mann also collaborated with a physiologist named E. M. Jellinek. Mann was eager to bolster the scientific claims behind AA, and Jellinek wanted to make a name for himself in the growing field of alcohol research. In 1946, Jellinek published the results of a survey mailed to 1,600 AA members. Only 158 were returned. Jellinek and Mann jettisoned 45 that had been improperly completed and another 15 filled out by women, whose responses were so unlike the men’s that they risked complicating the results. From this small sample—98 men—Jellinek drew sweeping conclusions about the “phases of alcoholism,” which included an unavoidable succession of binges that led to blackouts, “indefinable fears,” and hitting bottom. Though the paper was filled with caveats about its lack of scientific rigor, it became AA gospel.

And then Senator Harold Hughes, who was an AA member, got Congress to establish the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which promoted AA's beliefs, and sometimes suppressed research that conflicted with them:

In 1976, for instance, the Rand Corporation released a study of more than 2,000 men who had been patients at 44 different NIAAA-funded treatment centers. The report noted that 18 months after treatment, 22 percent of the men were drinking moderately. The authors concluded that it was possible for some alcohol-dependent men to return to controlled drinking. Researchers at the National Council on Alcoholism charged that the news would lead alcoholics to falsely believe they could drink safely. The NIAAA, which had funded the research, repudiated it. Rand repeated the study, this time looking over a four-year period. The results were similar.

The standard 28-day rehab stay, prescribed and insured:

Marvin D. Seppala, the chief medical officer at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Minnesota, one of the oldest inpatient rehab facilities in the country, described for me how 28 days became the norm: “In 1949, the founders found that it took about a week to get detoxed, another week to come around so [the patients] knew what they were up to, and after a couple of weeks they were doing well, and stable. That’s how it turned out to be 28 days. There’s no magic in it.”

The last sentence here (bolded for emphasis) is especially chilling.

That may be heartening, but it’s not science. As the rehab industry began expanding in the 1970s, its profit motives dovetailed nicely with AA’s view that counseling could be delivered by people who had themselves struggled with addiction, rather than by highly trained (and highly paid) doctors and mental-health professionals. No other area of medicine or counseling makes such allowances.

There is no mandatory national certification exam for addiction counselors. The 2012 Columbia University report on addiction medicine found that only six states required alcohol- and substance-abuse counselors to have at least a bachelor’s degree and that only one state, Vermont, required a master’s degree. Fourteen states had no license requirements whatsoever—not even a GED or an introductory training course was necessary—and yet counselors are often called on by the judicial system and medical boards to give expert opinions on their clients’ prospects for recovery.

And, again, the idea that this is the One True And Only Way to deal with alcohol abuse leads to medical professionals ignoring research and treatment options that could be helping people. They are, in essence, taking all this completely on faith.

There has been some progress: the Hazelden center began prescribing naltrexone and acamprosate to patients in 2003. But this makes Hazelden a pioneer among rehab centers. “Everyone has a bias,” Marvin Seppala, the chief medical officer, told me. “I honestly thought AA was the only way anyone could ever get sober, but I learned that I was wrong.”

Stephanie O’Malley, a clinical researcher in psychiatry at Yale who has studied the use of naltrexone and other drugs for alcohol-use disorder for more than two decades, says naltrexone’s limited use is “baffling.”

“There was never any campaign for this medication that said, ‘Ask your doctor,’ ” she says. “There was never any attempt to reach consumers.” Few doctors accepted that it was possible to treat alcohol-use disorder with a pill. And now that naltrexone is available in an inexpensive generic form, pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to promote it.

I'm not saying that AA is bad. I'm saying its hegemony is bad. It clearly is effective for some people--a minority of people. But it's not for the majority of people, and that's a problem when it's being prescribed by courts (and doctors) as if it's a one-size-fits-all approach.

It’s not an accident that a Christian approach to treating addiction presents itself as the One True Way For All Humankind, insists that courts and doctors privilege it, demands that people take its effectiveness on faith, and blames anyone for whom it doesn’t work for not believing/trying hard enough.

Hegemony is a problem.

(Photo credit: Pixabay)

#christian hegemony #addiction #christian supremacy #aa #maybe courts should be recommending treatment with a better than 8% success rate and actual science behind them just saying

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demeterdefence · 2 months

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Thinking about your "Rachel bashing og greek myths" post, methinks she believed herself to be making greek culture a favor similarly to the author of The Phantom of Manhattan, the unofficial sequel to The Phantom of the Opera

In the preface, the author begins by saying that Phantom, unlike Frankenstein or Dracula, barely made a dent in world culture until Andrew Lloyd Webber came along to make the musical, which he considers the "true" version even tho like...it wouldn't exist without the novel! He bashes Gaston Leroux and basically states that his attempt at writing failed miserably and it's like DUDE, again, the musical and your problematic sequel wouldn't even exist without it, and just because it was bigger in France than in the usa it doesn't mean it had zero impact in culture

But of COURSE unless it's usa-approved then it doesn't count and isn't worth anything *sarcasm*

PHENOMENAL point, FANTASTIC point, absolutely true and correct

i can't be a total dick and say this is an issue solely created and implemented by rachel, because we've seen non-western cultures and religions absolutely whitewashed to hell and back - like, people have been drawing jesus of the bible as white for centuries when he was a middle eastern palestinian jewish man, and good god look what the west has done to the religions of india, china, and japan. but it's the way these kinds of stories drip with a sort of smugness in removing the original culture, in depicting it as backwards and broken.

rachel wants to claim she's making a feminist retelling, but the original myth was already feminist. ancient greece didn't pretend their society was not fiercely male dominated and patriarchal, and hades stealing persephone was absolutely in line with the traditional myths - the twist is that demeter wins. demeter punishes the male gods who stole her daughter, and the ferocity of her rage and grief forces hades and zeus to give in. if persephone hadn't eaten the pomegrante seeds, she wouldn't be in the underworld at all! this is a story that is so clearly a triumph for the mothers and daughters of ancient greece, of many worlds over, because it depicted explicitly that a mother's love was more powerful than even the gods. and rachel pisses all over that.

literally even going beyond that, looking at the society that is olympus and the underworld - all the technology they use, all the innovations they have. who exactly is making these??? where exactly is the material coming from??? you can handwave away most of the inventions by saying it's magic, but we've seen demeter talk about algebra, which was invented in the ninth century by a muslim scholar from persia. in speedrunning to this so called perfect modernized world, rachel actually erases the cultural offerings and developments of dozens of other ancient worlds, and kind of just gives the credit to the underworld, which is run by a slave driver.

persephone constantly bemoans the dullness of the mortal realm, and prefers to literally lounge around doing nothing, when the mortal realm is inventing the olympic games, the democratic forum, FOOTBALL. you have thousands of things to show the gods involved in - largely because the gods were the patrons!!! why do we never see zeus looking over the olympic games??? they happen in his sanctuary!!!

like the disdain rachel has for ancient greece is insane. she can't even bother to research the food typical of the time period, seeing as she writes persephone being looked down on for being vegetarian when vegetables were a key and staple diet of ancient greece. one could argue that a vast majority of ancient greece were vegetarian by general habit. she's baking cheesecake and french desserts and having fast food and carrot cake and maybe - maybe - she'll mention baklava. the ancient greeks are FAMOUS for their art, but we sure wouldn't know that from lore olympus. the only character who even references ancient greek music is apollo, with his lyre, and that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

and this is not to say that an adaption has to follow the ancient text to a t - that's just not feasible and no one is expected to do so. but there's really something to how rachel does dismiss or ignore the canonical importance of so many of these stories to replace them with a western interpretation. even the therapy speak is grating. in episode 227, when persephone is talking about the concept of virginity, she's absolutely correct in pointing out how that's largely a social construct - but in light of the world she lives in and the world she helps control, the same idea could have been reached through means other than americanized psych talk.

so often, people will look back at the ancient world and think we are morally superior because we do not have the same views, or we have seemingly "developed." that is a view i abhor, because it removes the very act of learning and developing and understanding. rachel really talked big about how removing the incest of ancient greece made the story better, but incidentally, she managed to also take out the feminism, and literally the entire lgbt culture of ancient greece. apollo was even considered the patron of homosexuality! he was called to bless same-sex unions! zeus had DOZENS of male lovers; ares, hephestus, and hermes had known male relationships, and several of the ancient heroes and gods of greek mythology were described in terms we would refer to as transgender in modern times.

if rachel had gone "i'm writing a love story that's originally inspired by the myth of persephone and hades but it's very much modern and removed from the myths" that would be one thing, and i would not be bristling at that; myths have inspired countless stories over the centuries and will continue to do so for centuries to come. the problem is rachel wants to claim a rooting in these myths with zero understanding of how they work or why they work, and absolutely lets her contempt for the ancients shine through in every single aspect of her comic. it's gross and it's petty and she deserves none of the self-appointed "mythology expert" she's given herself.

#answered #anti lo #anti lore olympus #oh this is so long im so sorry anon i got heated lmao #me adding yet another run on sentence: AND ANOTHER THING -#i basically crammed six different essays in this reply anon forgive me i am so sorry #me going back to proofread this now that i'm slightly calmer: why did i use so many fucking commas

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jewishconvertthings · 7 months

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Hi! So, I’m a fictive in a plural system. The body is halachally Jewish by reform standards (patrilinear) but in exomemories, my family was WASP-y as hell. I’m reasonably sure I need to go through the process to convert and I consider myself a Jew in progress, however, I’ve got absolutely no idea how to explain the situation to a rabbi. I actually tried reaching out over email to one at the shul we half heartedly attend, but I didn’t get an answer. I’m not sure if it ended up in spam somehow or if he did see it and thought I was fucking with him or crazy. Or both. I don’t have any guarantees I’ll be in the system forever, though I’ve been here for like three years now. Is it worth trying again? The shul is Reform and super chill with LGBT stuff, but I don’t know what that means for the scarier neurodivergences.

Hi there!

So you are definitely not the first (and I doubt you'll be the last) person to ask about plurality and conversion to Judaism here. Because of that, I am giving a much more extensive answer that may exceed the scope of your question, because I want to be able to hopefully assist others with similar questions. Thank you in advance for your patience!

Here's the thing about being plural and conversion - you convert as a unit. Once the body is halachicly Jewish, that's it, you all are. Judaism is interesting in that we already canonically believe in (at least Jews) having multiple souls. Additionally, there is the mystical idea that the soul of every convert was at Sinai and therefore that when someone is driven to convert it's because they already had a Jewish soul. However, they still need to convert.

Why? Because Judaism is an embodied religion. It is very much about taking things that exist in the animal world and elevating them to sanctity through mitzvot. Every human and animal pees, but Jews say a bracha afterwards because we are grateful that our body's innards are working correctly enough to make that possible. Every human and animal eats, but Jews keep kosher and say brachot to sanctify what goes into our bodies. Judaism even has mitzvot related to married couples' conduct with their spouse, especially in relationship to menstruation. For as much as Judaism believes in souls, it equally believes in grounding those souls in the earthly realm and therefore liberating the divine sparks of creation in the process.

Which is all to say: Judaism is also a group project. We are judged collectively as a nation on Rosh Hashana and repent as a nation on Yom Kippur. Even if you were a singlet, you would still need to consider carefully whether you were prepared to join in the collective project of mitzvot. People who have existing familial ties to others may find it more challenging to convert. What if your spouse or teenage children do not wish to convert with you? It is often still possible to convert (I did, and my spouse did not convert with me) but it requires at least some amount of buy-in support from those you live with and are permanently tied to, even if they are not directly joining you. My spouse, who again is not Jewish and did not convert with me, still knows at least as much about kashrut as I do because he does the vast majority of the cooking, he helps me clean and prep for Pesach every year, and he actually eats pesadik food with me every year so as not to bring chametz into the house. He helps me prepare the house for Shabbat and does not interfere with the setup, and works around my observance. It's a huge commitment from a gentile who does not believe in G-d and appreciates but does not wish to join the Jewish people.

Your system has to be on board. They just do. Because if/when you decide not to front or determine that it's time to move on or what-not, the body will still be halachicly Jewish and it will be up to those running it to determine how to act in light of that reality.

For what it's worth, I am very familiar with a system who converted, and I have learned about what their internal conversation was like beforehand. It was extensive! They operate like a family, and there are six of them. Two it was clear right away were dyed-in-the-wool Jewish and were they singlets, nothing could have stopped them from becoming observant Jews. (One probably would have tried to become a rebbetzin and the other would've become a gay yeshiva bochur. Alas ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) Two of them were people who would make excellent Jews, but probably also could've stayed excellent pagans. The fifth is very much a skeptic and the sixth was very much a Witch. The middle two were easy to sway after being exposed to queer-friendly Judaism. The fifth only agreed after understanding enough about Yiddish socialism and the history of Jewish leftism and secular culture that he realized he could very much appreciate yiddishkeit even if he didn't really believe in G-d (or if G-d is real, didn't really trust or like G-d given the state of the world.) He basically agreed that as long as he never had to do the davening or ritual mitzvot, he was cool with it.

The sixth acquiesced to the majority. She was very uneasy about making an eternal vow of any kind to any being, but especially one as powerful as the Almighty, and especially with something as complicated to follow as the mitzvot. She was reassured by the process of Yom Kippur to annul vows (Kol Nidrei) and to reset the slate through teshuva and collective forgiveness. She was also very nervous about the concept of tying one's fate to the collective fate of the Jewish people in terms of said agreement to keep the mitzvot. Her position was basically: You Don't Make Deals With Things You Can't See, and YES That Absolutely Includes Hashem. But! If the rest were going to insist on doing that anyway, well. They'd better be willing to hold by that Forever, even after death. How frum were they willing to be? After some further discussion (fifth alter's reluctance notwithstanding) they collectively agreed that they would agree to the mitzvot on the terms of the Conservative movement. The fifth alter agreed that he would not do anything to disrupt the others' observance even if he personally might have done differently as a secular/atheist Jew, e.g. watched TV on Shabbat or driven somewhere besides shul.

It's worth noting that I got this story because we are friends and that once they had full system buy-in, they decided for safety reasons *not* to discuss this particular wrinkle of psychology with their rabbis. Now, part of that decision was that that are a healthy system that works well together, has had extensive post-trauma therapy that *did* work with each alter individually as well as the system collectively, and were totally functional (after therapy) without any sort of psychiatric intervention. They were unwilling to jeopardize the relative safety from mental health institutions and their professional career by "coming out" about their plurality to anyone of authority in person or online. (I have obtained their collective permission to share this story as anonymized through myself as a third party to help other systems who are considering giyur.)

So to be clear, this is the advice I would offer as a layperson and as an informed friend.

**Major important reminder that I am not a rabbi or a mental health professional.**

Now, your situation is somewhat different from theirs, in that any conversion you make is going to be to solidify your halachic status as someone who is already Jewish in a major way and probably considered Jewish by the Reform movement already. They did not have previously existing ties to Judaism, whereas even if you do nothing, you will still be Jewish (even if not halachicly so by the traditional movements.)

I would recommend having a full system discussion. You want to figure out what your system, as a collective unit, needs, wants, and is willing to go along with. You will want, as part of this discussion, to do a major mental health and system balance analysis as well. How stable is your system? How functional are you as a group in the broader world? How healthy are your relationships to one another? Do you have trauma to unpack first? Need some type of therapeutic intervention? Do it now; do it first.

Then, if everyone is on board (enough) and working well together as a system, I would approach a rabbi to convert as a unit. It's up to you to determine how much, if anything, to disclose about your plurality to the Rabbi, so long as you can honestly tell him that you are [all] mentally well and stable. It is very possible to be a healthy system and/or to have long-term chronic mental illnesses while still being relatively stable and mentally well. Lots of people with well-managed mood disorders, personality disorders, developmental disorders, and even reality and dissociation disorders can and have converted. Judaism can truly be a place of peace and a shelter for the troubled. However, you must know yourself(/ves) well and you must be willing to seek professional help first or along the way if needed.

All of the plural stuff aside, I would recommend reaching out again after the high holidays and/or considering reaching out to a Conservative rabbi. The Reform movement may already consider you Jewish and therefore may not want to do a giyur l'chumra. The Conservative movement (much as I might personally disagree with it on this point) would not consider you halachicly Jewish and would be delighted to help you solidify your Jewish identity. If you ultimately decide not to convert but rather to reclaim and learn through the Reform movement, please know that you still have a place here. It's labeled as a gerische space, but the same types of resources and communities tend to help both gerim and reclaimants. We would be delighted to help you connect to your heritage and people and to support you doing so in a way that feels the most correct and appropriate to you.

Wishing you all the best in your exploration, a shana tova, and a meaningful Yom Kippur if you are observing it!

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freedom-in-truth · 6 months

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youtube

Are they LYING to us? CIA spy tells all

Uploaded Oct 28. Transcript below.

Spoiler, yes the US Gov lies to you. 😱

Added [my edits] to the transcript in square commas.

Biden quote: “Terrorist group Hamas unleashed pure unadulterated evil in the world…”

Now, let’s talk about Hamas for a moment, because President Biden just called them a terrorist group. Let’s be honest about Hamas. They have been labelled a terrorist group by less than 12 countries in the world.

The vast majority of the world, including The UN, does not consider Hamas a terrorist group.

Instead they consider Hamas to be a political party; a force and the legislative body of the Gaza Strip, elected democratically and in power since 2007.

So, Hamas, whether we like to admit it or not, has a militant wing, but they are also a recognised political party inside the Gaza Strip. They were voted into power. They have an established leader and a hierarchy.

And, even worse, they are a political party without any kind of citizenship, because Palestinians (who they represent) aren’t a recognised country [thanks to colonialism]. So, what that means is that Palestine and Hamas are politically accepted by the majority of the world. It’s really only the United States, and US allies Paraguay and the European Union that see Hamas as an actual terrorist organisation. And, of course, Israel as well.

The rest of the world sees Hamas as a political group.

A political group without a country and, importantly, without a military to defend itself.

So, I want to make sure that you understand that when President Biden says that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, he’s really talking from an American point of view in the eyes of Americans and in the eyes of the Israelis.

Hamas is a terrorist group but, to be fair, in the eyes of Iran the US military is a terrorist group. So it’s all about perspective on this one.

[I can assure you! it's not just Iran who view the US military as a terrorist group!! Plenty of countries do as well!]

Biden quote: “Sadly the Jewish people know perhaps better than anyone that there is no limit to the depravity of people when they want to inflict pain on others…”

Now, this is another thing that I think is important, because the President just said ‘the Jewish people’. Hamas exists for one reason; they were created in 1987, specifically to prevent and destroy Israel, because Israel was oppressing the Palestinian people.

It was the oppression of Israel against Palestine that was the birthplace for Hamas. Let’s not get the order of actions confused here. Hamas did not exist prior to 1987.

[Israel first began expelling Palestinians in the late 1940s, look up 1948 Nakba.]

The ongoing pressure and conflict between Israelis and Palestinians [in other words, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people, Palestinians, by Israelis] in the country of Israel, and the marginalisation, oppression, discrimination that they were putting onto the Muslim people there is really what led to the birth of Hamas, as a way of fighting back against Israeli oppression.

[Please note: Palestinians are a mix of faith. While predominantly Muslim, Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Jews also exist, and are also oppressed by Israel. Plenty of footage has been online of Israeli crimes against all three religious groups.]

Hamas is targeting only Israel, not Jews. There’s a big difference between an Israeli and a Jew.

[Plenty of Jewish people do not support the settler state of Isael. Plenty of Jewish people do not condone ethnic cleansing in their name. Being Jewish is not centered around colonizing other countries.]

The president here said that Jews are the target, and that is not accurate. Israel is the target, the country of Israel. Hamas doesn’t care whether Israel is full of Christians, Jews, or other Muslims, if it’s oppressing Palestinians, if it’s depriving the Palestinians of a homeland, then Hamas is there to fight and counteract it.

Outside of Israel, the state of Israel, Hamas doesn’t really exist, which is why the rest of the world does not see them as a terrorist group.

Interestingly, it is also the reason that the United States does label them as a terrorist group, because [the US] is trying to show support for Israel [the US sends up to $4 billion dollars annually to fund Israel’s military, to ‘fight’ a people without a state and without a military, FYI], so I don’t think Hamas is targeting Jews. They are not.

Hamas is in a very clear fight for survival of the Palestinian people in their own [indigenous country], within the landmass that is [currently] known as Israel.

Biden quote: “I also spoke with President Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president…”

Abbas the Palestinian Authority President is not the recognised leader in the Gaza Strip. He is the recognised leader in the West Bank, but not the Gaza Strip. They have two very different forms of government.

So, what the president is saying here without saying it, is that he is speaking to the Palestinian Authority who does not represent the actual body of victims who are being attacked right now.

Biden quote: “The United States remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right and dignity to self-determination…”

This is a very important lie of omission here.

The president just said that he reiterated that American support to Palestinians is there for their right to dignity and self-determination. What he did not say is that they have any right to self-preservation, or to protect themselves.

The president has said that Israel has a right to protect itself. He is not giving the same permission to the Palestinian people. That is an important point in this conversation.

At no point during this address will you hear the president say that the Palestinians have any right to protect or defend themselves. He does not acknowledge them as a group of people. He does not acknowledge them as an oppressed people within the lands of Israel, and that is a sad and frustrating thing.

It’s what’s known as a lie of omission; he is not telling you the total truth. The total truth being that the United States does not actually support the Palestinian people in their fight against Israel. [Reminder: the USA sends up to $4 billion annually to arm Israel.]

(More under the cut)

Biden quote: “The assault on Israel echoes nearly twenty months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine…”

So, here the president is starting to make a transition to compare what’s happening in Israel to what’s happening in Ukraine.

It’s important to me that you understand that this is a lie of influence.

The president is trying to make you believe that there’s a connection between what’s happening in Ukraine and what’s happening in Israel. They are two completely different types of conflict.

In Ukraine, you see an outside nation state [Russia] invading another independent sovereign nation state. That’s not what’s happening in Israel. In Israel you have an oppressed [indigenous] group that is launching an attack against its oppressor, and then you have the oppressor responding and going well above and beyond in terms of capability and response to the original attack. So they cannot be compared, even though in this address you’ll see that he continues to make comparisons to the two in a plea to the American people to support American interests in both conflicts.

While I am all for American interests and I understand that there is a great deal at play, at stake here, for the United States [$4 billion annually, money that could’ve been used on American healthcare), I want to make sure that we highlight this lie of influence because this is not actually an accurate statement. It does not reflect what’s happening in Ukraine in any way. It’s a separate conflict carried out for separate reasons in a different way.

[Again, this is basic facts and history summarised from an American perspective, and yet we are at a point in the misinformation campaign from the Biden administration that these basic factd and corrections to Biden's lies NEED to be said. So please share this.]

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avelera · 9 months

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Looking at your rant on the Crowley-Lucifer theory as a Jewish person myself who actually majored in World Religions- I one hundred percent agree with everything you said. It was nonsensical from the start and I'm glad Neil ran it into the ground. Even without the S1 line stating that Lucifer was not Crowley, Gaiman knows his religion and mythology. Definitely knows it better than the majority of GO fans do. And you didn't come across as antisemitic or ignorant to me at all, idk what that other person was on about.

Thank you! Seriously, this is a huge relief. I know I shouldn’t get this angry about it but I have vast respect for Jewish people and the Jewish tradition and so being accused out of the blue of ignoring or diminishing Jewish people or Jewish thought is incredibly upsetting to me.

I personally am not a Christian (if anything, I’d consider myself a Hellenistic pagan, or an atheist if called upon by those I didn’t want to talk about that faith with) however I was raised in the Catholic tradition albeit unwillingly pretty much from the start. I’m informed on Catholic Christianity from that context, but I feel no connection to it or protectiveness of it (indeed, I welcome future iterations of GO absolutely tearing into Christian dogma, I think it’s hilarious and fertile ground for satire). I also took several courses on religion in college, both on the Christian and Jewish tradition. I don’t claim this makes me an expert by any standard but I am at least educated beyond a casual understanding of these faiths, I would like to think.

Anyway, it’s actually my gut feeling that a pivot from a context where Christ is the explicit son of god in GO to one where the Jewish tradition was actively called upon and needed to understand the text would be absolutely fraught with potential to give offense to the Jewish faith. It’s one reason I think GO stays far away from invoking the Jewish tradition, specifically out of respect.

GO takes place in a fantasy world where the Antichrist is real. To say the Jewish tradition is active would imply it’s only accurate to a point and then it becomes inaccurate because it would mean that Jewish people were wrong about Jesus being the Messiah, ie it means that in that universe Jewish beliefs are wrong and then superseded by the objective existence of Christ as the son of god and the events of the Second Coming, which is an incredibly offensive thing to say and ground that is incredibly fraught with echoes of arguments from the history (and present!) of Christian bigotry towards Judaism. It’s not disrespectful, in my opinion, to separate out the Jewish tradition from the discussions of GO lore, quite the contrary, to borrow from Jewish and Christian tradition while giving Christian dogma and its Messiah preeminence within the story as objective fact would be far far more offensive, and I personally think Neil understands that.

#good omens meta

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djuvlipen · 7 months

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Hi @wild-wombytch💞, I am replying to this post here because I did not want to derail the OP as what I am going to talk about doesn't have much to do with the census.

The reason I am replying is because I have very often seen people choosing Romani people to represent a group that could be considered either PoC or white depending on someone's point of view, alongside Jewish people. This surprises me as Roma and Jews are absolutely different groups. Jews are an ethnoreligion, Roma are a South Asian diaspora, and the challenges we are facing today are very different from the challenges Jewish people are facing.

The vast majority of Roma don't look white, they have brown skin. Those who don't usually are mixed with white. When Roma do a DNA test, we typically get a fairly even split between South Asia, West Asia and Europe. In the Balkans (where a considerable % of the romani population live) South Asian DNA can go up to 60%. That’s significantly not white.

It is true that some Romani communities are light-skinned. The British Romanichals usually are light-skinned and many of them are white-passing. The same holds true for Scandinavian Roma. Even in my group (the Sinti), it’s not unusual to have light-skinned, very pale Roma. Among my relatives, some of them are clearly brown, but some are white-passing. In some places of Eastern Europe, there are Romani groups who have a pale skin too, because of sexual abuse during slavery, which lasted 500 years. Quoting The Pariah Syndrom here: “The offspring from these unwelcome sexual unions automatically became slaves. It was this exploitation, as Colson noted, which was largely responsible for the fact that many Gypsies are now fair-skinned; Cohn (1973:63) estimates the mean percentage of white genetic mixture as 60 percent.”

The thing is that all the groups I have listed (the Romanichal, the Scandinavian Roma, some individual Sinti and Eastern European Roma) make up a minority of that worldwide population. For 15 million Roma on Earth, there are 225.000 Romanichal, 75.000 Norwegian and Swedish Roma, and 17.500 Finnish Roma. If we are to count the Sinti (once again, most are unambiguously brown even if it’s not that uncommon for us to look white), we’d add 200.000 more people. That’s a total of 517.500 (estimate) white-passing Roma, for a global population of 15 million. Why should we take this tiny percentage of white passing Romani people to invalidate the fact that the overwhelming majority of Roma are brown?

Being brown has always been relevant when talking about anti-Roma racism. Ian Hancock has shown that Romani people being of a darker skin than Europeans helped Eastern Europeans enslave us; dark skin meant “Gypsy” and spotting someone with dark skin helped you recognize who was a slave and who wasn’t, making it harder for Roma to escape slavery. During World War II, the Nazis on the Eastern front used to arrest and shoot anyone with dark skin because that’s how they’d recognize “Gypsies” (source: Anton Weiss-Wendt's 'The Nazi Genocide of the Roma'). Once, they arrested all the darkskin people at a market in the North of France because darkskin meant “Gypsy” (source: Germaine Tillion's Ravensbrück). Still today Romani people having a dark skin is used to racially profile us, leading to police brutality, and to bar us from accessing healthcare, employment and housing.

And the same treatment is given to the Roma who live in the USA: in the US, police departments have developed units dedicating to fighting 'Gypsy' crimes and that consists in racially profiling Roma.

As Ian Hancock wrote in The Pariah Syndrome, American Roma first arrived in the US as slaves; they were recognized by Europeans as Romani for their skin colour. Recognizing the importance skin colour played in the designation of Roma as scapegoats, slaves and 'internal enemies' by white Europeans is vital to understand anti-Romani bigotry as a form of racism that has remained unchallenged for centuries and that remains the most widespread form of racism in Europe today. I am adding some examples of past and present racism against Roma below,

#I hope I don't sound condescending or rude by making this post ;_;#Roma #(hope this doesn't sound like i'm coming at you; i just take any opportunity to make posts abt romani people's living conditions in europe)#questions

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mankillercalledbunny · 1 year

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All right fuck it I'm infodumping about MRNYC under the cut

So I have this world called Magical Realism New York City that I've created wherein most species/creatures from folklore and mythology do in fact exist, with... Nebulous knowledge and understanding of this by humans (meaning some are totally in the dark and some absolutely know about it and are part of it). It is the entire world but my main characters are centred around NYC, hence the name. There are other realms/planes/etc which have some crossover with the "mortal" one, and though gods aren't really a thing as such there are other very powerful beings that exist in those other realms that occasionally do rock up in the mortal world and fuck around to varying degrees. There are vampires, werewolves, angels, demons, magic users, Fae, and most things you can probably think of.

The whole notion actually spawned around the idea of vampires and werewolves. I thought the idea of the garlic thing being BS but widely believed means that an Italian restaurant would be the perfect cover for a vampire family. They have a long standing partnership with the werewolf pack that runs the meatpacking district both for actual meat products (it is a restaurant after all) and for the blood that would otherwise be disposed of, so they don't have to worry about their supply or anyone going off the shits. In MRNYC, there's one main vampire colony and one main werewolf pack, though there are smaller packs in each of the five boroughs and a collection of werejaguars on Long Island. The colony is mostly one big Italian family, and the Wolfpack is one big Dutch family, and they've both been here for centuries at this point. The werewolves also do a lot of community work, they're very social, they hold block parties and stuff. The vampires are less so, but they do keep in touch. One of the werewolf great-grandchildren and one of the vampire grandkids are dating, their names are Katherine and Catarina respectively, they are very cute and their families are very happy for them. (There are a number of vampire subspecies as well as numerous types of weres, but the following rules apply to basically everyone). Both communities are remarkably self-policing; it takes months of preparation and understanding of the community, the change, and the consequences before someone is allowed to become either. This is not something to go into unprepared, and consent is incredibly important. (I did take some inspiration here from the Jewish conversion system e.g. it's not active and in order to do so you gotta COMMIT and DO YOUT RESEARCH before you're granted the opportunity.) If a bite/transformation happens by accident/maliciously, that is one of the only circumstances where seeking treatment would be considered, and if someone decided they didn't want to the community would welcome and educate them, helping them however they could. Whoever did the unconsensual transforming though... Would not be so lucky. That's a serious transgression and would be treated as such. The Manhattan pack and colony are not the only wolves and vamps on the island, just the largest collections, and they do outreach to new arrivals and have connections with other packs/colonies. There are plenty of small packs, and of course New York has universities where you'll get young members of social species away from their families for the first time, so there's a lot of outreach and connection to provide a safety net for people who need it.

Angels and demons do exist, from their respective (linked) realms, but they don't have the inherent attributes given to them by superstitious/religious humans, they're just people. They (along with most species) can interbreed with humans, although instead of creating a super powerful nightmare child they just... Have a nephil or cambion kid. Who has some of the abilities of their supernatural parent, but probably not all of them. The vast majority of those who interact with humans are "lesser" demons or angels, the Just Some Dudes of their respective realms, and it's not particularly common for "greater" ones to show up. They're in charge, they have shit to do.

While "sorcerer" is a general description that can be applied to magic users of any species, witch and warlock are actually their own species, not the same but closely related (think like Vulcans and Romulans, for example). Both are longer-lived than humans (averaging a couple centuries) and have inherent magic which presents in small ways, like oddly coloured eyes or faint patterns on the skin. Warlock blood is faintly silvery and inherently toxic, they can't be changed into vampires or werewolves, and if their blood gets on human skin it will leave a chemical burn. Witch blood isn't toxic, and they can be transformed. If you meet a magical wolf or vamp, they likely either have witch parentage or were one first.

The Fae exist. They have their own realm, but some places in the mortal world have entrances to it. The Fae have a particular attachment to Ireland (with some of Scotland and Wales as well) and are very protective of it, meaning that the vast majority of non-human activity there is either the Fae or requires their blessing. They can be particularly vindictive if they feel that their permission has not been properly asked or that someone is trespassing on their protected ground. This can lead to some... Less than favourable situations for non-fae supernatural families, unfortunately, and can be a reason people end up leaving the Isles.

There are two major protective organisations that deal with various issues and threats, as well as things that may cause problems between realms. These are the Wardens, who deal with the living, and the Reapers, who deal with the dead. Both are joinable by anyone, and are very good employers. Wardens are somewhere between Witchers, border patrol, and bounty hunters, investigating/finding/returning extradimensional creatures from whence they came and dealing with unexpected incursions. Listen, not everyone is nice. Reapers, meanwhile, deal with the dead or those manipulating the dead, as well as guiding wayward spirits home. If there's a haunting, things coming out of graves, anything of that nature, that's a Reaper's job to deal with. All Reapers are dead themselves; if someone feels like they're not done but in a... Non-haunting way, they can become a Reaper. There's a training process as well as some physical and spiritual reinforcing, but it's also a job so you get days off and holiday and all that. Death is a very fair employer. There's also the Guardian of the Veil, who isn't any of these, but whose job it is to essentially watch borders between worlds and deal with anything that is a Massive Fucking Problem, and they have leave to call in as many Wardens or Reapers (or both) as necessary. If the Guardian calls, whatever you're working on can wait because this is an Imminent Threat To Global Existence and you are needed now.

Okay that's all the worldbuilding I can really think of at the moment! My wonderful partner @themechanicsnightmare has helped me flesh out this marvelous world with significant contributions (the Reapers and the Guardian were their ideas, plus witches being a species as well as warlocks), it wouldn't be the lived-in world it has become without them. If the worldbuilding here interests you and/or you want to know about the main characters in the world, let me know!

And before anyone asks: no, there is no webcomic or novel or anything for this, and no there is not going to be one. While things like the Wardens and the specific ways the species work are my invention, urban fantasy/magical realism is a broad genre for a reason. I took inspiration from Grimm, Supernatural, Percy Jackson/the Riordanverse, and The Mortal Instruments (albeit mainly the bits I liked or wanted to fix) as well as many, many pieces of mythology and folklore. This is just my iterations of it. The characters are very much mine, and the specifics of the world are mine, but urban fantasy is a wonderful base for a worldbuilding concept and I highly encourage people to use it.

#am i insufficiently kinglike?#MRNYC #also guns don't exist because i said so

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idabackwardsintherain · 1 year

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Obligatory, your character can be trans, there’s a trans character in the game, the goblins are a fictional race, there is no ties to any real world race other than what you made up. Jk gets paid pennies on top of her already inflated billions through royalties, she wasn’t even a part of the game, she’s a scumbag, but attacking innocent people for playing a video game isn’t helping your cause.

Have you never heard of allegories in fantasy? If not, here's a pertinent example: JKR openly stated werewolves (a fictional species) are an allegory for people living with HIV/AIDS. Werewolves are not real, but are specifically tied to a group of people who actually exist.

Something else to consider: a lot of people don't consider Jews human, and find it very easy to either compare us to a mythical race or to accuse us of literally being a nonhuman species. Look at dual seed (also called second or serpent seed) theory, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being the basis of Icke's reptilian conspiracy, the belief (less popular today but still brought up regularly) that Jews have horns, the superstitions about us being able to curse people, and—for extra credit—the various antisemitic tropes that accuse us of nonhuman behaviour without alleging that we're a nonhuman species. (If you don't know where to start with that last one, check out the Wittenberg Judensau which Luther used as cover art for his book about how Jews worship the Devil.) These are things many antisemites use as allegories for their beliefs, while others believe these things to be literally true.

Regarding the ones who use fiction, particularly mythical beings, as a symbol of their antisemitism: I've encountered neo-Nazi forums where members explicitly suggest to one another that they should use Skeksis (a fantasy race from the Dark Crystal franchise) as code for Jews so people won't immediately know what they mean. Here's another example of people discussing the possible use of Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance as a rallying point to encourage people to see the "truth" that Jews engage in blood libel and general behind-the-scenes manipulation of power. There was also a nasty incident when Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg announced their Christmas-themed show Baking It! and the official YouTube channel had to turn comments off because people who were angry about two Jews celebrating Christmas started posting antisemitic quotes with the word "Jew" swapped out for "elf". They didn't literally believe Jews are elves, but they seized the opportunity to use a fantasy race as a metaphor for Jews when it suited them (even though Christmas elves are more frequently equated with Sámi). I've included screenshots of that below the cut.

Point is, many aspects of real Jewish history as well as popular anti-Jewish myths have strong parallels in the Potterverse goblins. The vast majority of these things were not a part of goblin folklore prior to the 20th century, so the "that's just what they're like in traditional mythology!" doesn't hold water. I genuinely believe the parallels in the books were unconscious on JKR's part, being a product of the insidious saturation of antisemitism in our society, but the film franchise expanded on it and added additional features (e.g. long noses, something never mentioned in the books), and now this game is adding even more. Hogwarts Legacy's plot and design normalises antisemitic narratives and visual motifs, and if any neo-Nazis are looking for a new dogwhistle, they'll have plenty to work with here.

You can easily write fantasy without doing this shit. Hell, you can even write about goblins stealing babies without doing this shit! It's not some massive insurmountable task to exclude antisemitism from your work. Together, Moira Squier, Adrian Ropp, Adam Koford and Shane Lewis formed a team of experienced writers who should have more than enough talent to come up with something other than On the Jews And Their Lies 2.0 for a backstory.

As promised, here are some of the comments left on the Baking It! trailer before they were turned off:

If you don't recognise the dogwhistles here, look up 109/"make it 110", "the Jewish problem" and "Jews will not replace us"; also consider why people reference showers or ovens apropos of nothing.

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dchan87 · 5 months

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“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews. For more unambiguous actors such as Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, freeing Palestine simply means the total eradication of Israel without qualification. This is not a polemical point, but a basic reality and fact of our lives that demands scrutiny. Consider the ideological milieu in which many Arabs and Muslims have been raised, including me. Growing up as a Muslim in Egypt, the concept of Palestine was never a geopolitical issue; it was a deeply ingrained part of our collective moral identity, the unifying element of both our religious and secular Arab nationalism. It was, and remains, a cause that resonated with us politically, socially, and spiritually, often approaching a fervor that defies rationality. This emotional charge, embedded in the political and religious narratives of much of the Arab Muslim world, has made rubbish of the idea that the Palestinian cause is merely based on anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism. This milieu, however, is not in any way essential to what it means to be Arab or Muslim—it is a thoroughly modern phenomenon shaped largely by the influence of European revolutionary ideologies on Arab intellectuals and political activists. Among these imported systems of thought is a strain of revolutionary antisemitism that casts Jews as the eternal enemy not just of Arabs but of all human beings. Not every Arab or Muslim subscribes to these views, of course, but when fused with preexisting religious and cultural biases, they have infected almost every institution, pattern of thought, and aspect of life in the Arab Muslim world. Modern Arab political and religious literature is filled with the claim that Jews are hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind—a classical European libel, and a French revolutionary cry. The problems of this poisonous strain of thought are compounded by the concept that “freeing Palestine” is a species of resistance against foreign settler colonialists, a Fanonian revolution in which violence against civilians is defended as a legitimate means of achieving racial justice. The wholesale labeling of Israeli Jews—the vast majority of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab Muslim dictatorships and Soviet totalitarianism—as colonizers, settlers, and imperialists is in fact a type of collective ethnic punishment, nonsensical even on its own twisted terms, which recalls the medieval Christian denunciation of Jews as moral abominations, as a group and as individuals.

You might have noticed in the last few days that those committed to liberating Palestine can’t seem to avoid the abject dehumanization of the Jews as a people—and that their aim is not for Palestinians to simply live in peace, dignity, and freedom alongside Israelis, but a state that is necessarily established upon the ruins of Israel. Hamas is explicit in its intention to murder the Jewish population of Israel and enslave any survivors; its partisans in the Middle East and the West are coyer on this point.

Islamists articulate the fantasy of Jewish eradication in the language of jihad, framed in eschatological terms, and imbued with a sense of divine justice and cosmic warfare—what Westerners would ordinarily recognize as a type of religious fascism. But while the Islamist version of this idea is potent for the purposes of mobilizing the impoverished and uneducated masses, the “left-wing” or secular version—couched in the language of Fanon and Karl Marx, of human emancipation, equality, anti-capitalism, and social justice—is the more effective means of mobilizing opinion among the Western intelligentsia. The point is that they are two sides of the same coin, the value of which is set in Jewish blood.

For those who are shaped by such a worldview—whether the “right-wing” or the “left-wing” version, the religious or the atheistic—celebrating the murder of innocent Israeli civilians, including children, women, and the elderly, is an expression of the partial fulfillment of a moral vision. As a teenager in Egypt, I recall nearly all the adults around me expressing such feelings when following the news of suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada. Egypt’s most prominent religious authorities declared the perpetrators to be martyrs and saints. In a way, it was not unlike the valorization and even canonization of those who destroyed livelihoods, burned property, and targeted police officers during the protests in America in the summer of 2020. I do not mean to inject American domestic politics where they do not belong, or to suggest a perfect moral equivalence, but there is a reason that leaders of Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran themselves insist that they are engaged in the same struggle against racism.

Almost every Arab Muslim knows that what I’m describing is not a personal opinion but objective reality. We may try to belittle these facts, or dismiss them as the delusional daydreams of uneducated know-nothings under the influence of religious and populist fanatics. But we should not deny that they are true.

My fear is that the impulse to dismiss and belittle is the byproduct not of sincere belief but of a deep sense of helplessness. After many recent conversations with the rising generation of young, intelligent, Westernized, and highly educated Arab professionals and diplomats, I have witnessed a strong urge not to confront this reality. Even among those who genuinely accept the legitimacy of Israel in a way their parents would have never been capable of, I almost always hear them describe the deaths of innocent Israelis as somehow being their own fault, or at least the fault of the Israeli government for not unilaterally making peace and ending the conflict. There is nothing more depressing than the surrender of the young to a problem they see as too big to solve.

Those of us who belong to the cosmopolitan professional class of Arabs, who jump from country to country and from one lifestyle to another, benefiting from foreign cultures that live on the moral currency of liberalism and tolerance, are in many cases secretly ashamed. We see the antisemitism, the bloodlust, the insanity, and we cringe—but we hope it goes away. It’s easier for us to look forward to a hypothetical future where things are otherwise. It’s easier to ingratiate ourselves to the new social world where we want to belong, rather than grapple with the failures of the one we’ve left behind. We dismiss, we belitte, we explain away, we say, “What about Shireen Abu Akleh?”—and we go on pretending.

To the Arabs of my own generation, I say we need a truly different approach. I’m not asking you to love Israel or Zionism, or to hang a poster of hipster Herzl in your bedroom. If you are critical of Israel and think there should be a Palestine, continue to do so. All I ask is for you to be authentically courageous, to admit that the murder we all witnessed in the last few days is an accurate representation and logical consequence of a catastrophic moral system, the one we all know intimately. This is a moment for collective introspection. It’s time to confront the darker corners of our ideological heritage, and question the ideas and beliefs we may have uncritically absorbed. Only by doing so can we hope to contribute to a more constructive and humane world for ourselves.

#palestine #anti free palestine #israel #israeli palestinian conflict #long reads #tablet magazine

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brekkie-e · 1 year

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This is a PSA: Wycome is on the border of Antiva.

Don't believe me? Look:

My bestie @dalish-kunoichi and I went through the trippy experience last month of discovering our perception of Northern Thedas's map was in no way based in reality. This lead to many fun geographical discoveries, not the least of which was the proximity of Wycome to Antiva. Quick disclaimer, I have a lot of headcanons, but I am in no way an expert on language. Nor am I claiming to be the keeper of all DA lore.

:readmore:

Now, upon further scouring over the map, I think this really hammers home how much the British accent (in its' varying forms) for the Free Marchers simply does not make sense. Yes, they are North of Ferelden. They are also across a sea. Every country bordering the Free Marches is shown with a thick accent in some capacity. Are they consistent? Not always. Do they make sense? Perhaps not. But for the most part, accents all around.

This is my justification for arguing that characters from the Free Marches should for the most part be bilingual at the minimum, and have more diverse accents than simply "insert fantasy British stereotype." This extends to Trevelyan, Cadash, and Adaar mostly but also many of the people we meet in DA2.

For a Lavellan, the situation becomes a little trickier. There are so many ways for Dalish accents to be developed. The base is Elvhen, but after spending years in Tevinter the dialect would grow into something new over time.

I have a selfish little headcanon that Dalish vs Elvhen is essentially Yiddish vs Hebrew. Considering the other Jewish influences in the Elven storyline, I feel like Im justified, and will continue to run with it. Also I dislike the fact that the vast majority of Dalish clans in the series are only given snippets of Elven language because they "lost it" over time. That would make sense if they had completely assimilated back into Orlais after the Exhaulted Marches. But they didn't, and remain seperate to this day. So the fact that their primary language is "Thedas common" feels like a gap in the lore that I headcanon away. There are many arguments for their language now being a combination of Ancient Elvhen and other languages, but for it to be widdled down to nothing but a few phrases feels unrealistic.

That being said, considering Clan Lavellan travels as far as the Antivan border, there is nothing to say they don't migrate even further through the years. They roam. They could spend years in the Free Marchesnand also years in Antiva. There is a good chance they atleast learned the languages of the surrounding areas if they were indeed trading with humans as frequently as canon suggest. Therefore, consider, bilingual Lavellans who's primary languages are Dalish Elven and Antivan.

I think it would be really interesting both on how that frees up a lot of room for cool headcanons about your characters accent, but also because it would change the politics of the game. It briefly touches upon the "Inquisition is a foreign power sitting with an army on the border" in Trespasser. However, the impact it could have on the player's perception of the situation if the Inquisitor is walking through Fereldan, and sounds like Josephine and Zevran. For role-playing purposes, there is now another visible element of your characters story to connect with. They have travelled a long way and are far from their home and loved ones. Sure, that is true regardless of the presence of an accent. But it is an element that is pretty much untouched in the narrative. And it would be a huge emptional impact for many characters to be trapped in a foreign land, forced to become the "great savior of the world" while so far away from all you know and love. I mean they go into how homesick Josie, Dorian, and Varric are. Why would the Inquisitor feel any different?

It also helps raise the stakes of the Winter Palace. For many Inquisitors, the writers relied on the racial issue to make your character be seen as "other" in that mission. But with politics, your place of origin can be just as much of a setback. So doing things to highlight the many ways the Inquisitor is a foreigner at this ball would have added missing depth.

To a lot of new players, the scenario presented in the game almost encourages you to miss the fact the Inquisitor is just as much from a different country as Josie, Cass, and Dorian. Despite having more in common with them geographically than anyone in Fereldan. Now, I get that there is a responsibility to the fan to educate yourself on the other games if you are coming in to a series in the 3rd installment. But things like this fall to the wayside often even for long term fans, like myself. There's areas of the game that could help reinforce your lore and foster an understanding of the setting better, and this is an area that I think fails to do that.

Also, I just think elves and dwarves and qunari with Spanish accents are amazing. I want more of them.

#dragon age #dragon age inquisition #clan lavellan #cadash #adaar #trevelyan #inquisitor #da4 #dragon age dreadwolf #dragon age meta #meta #brekkie thoughts #long post #text post #languages #yiddish

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jewishtwig · 1 year

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Hey! I’m wondering if you have any tips for reaching out to a Rabbi. I’ve been considering converting and I want to know where I can reach out to one online. Also how did you get rid of your nerves and actually do it. I’m kinda scared to talk to anyone.

There are very few Rabbis that will allow people to convert solely online. Not saying there are zero, but there aren’t many and likely only reform would be open to the idea.

You best bet would be to figure out which branch of Judaism you are most interested in and reach out to a congregation of that branch in your area (if there is one).

When you send an email, include a little bit about who you are, your interest in Judaism, and politely ask if you would be allowed to attend a service or meet with a Rabbi.

As for nerves, you just have to want it badly enough. That’s it. I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but the conversion process is long and it is challenging. If the fear of reaching out to start the process is too daunting right now, take some time and do some independent learning then reevaluate. If in the end, being Jewish is not worth the discomfort of getting starting started, then it may not be for you and that is okay. It is not a journey for everyone.

That being said, the vast majority of Rabbi’s I have interacted with are very nice. Also, the worst that happens is they tell you you cannot visit and they aren’t willing to talk to you. In that case, you can email someone else and try again.

Sending the email is your first challenge and you can overcome it if this is something you want badly enough.

#I hope this comes across as inspiring and not mean #the intent is motivation #jumblr #asks #<3 #jewish conversion #conversion to judaism

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uboat53 · 1 year

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I think today is a good day to talk about Scott Adams. LONG RANT (TM) ahead.

WHO?

For those who aren't aware, Scott Adams is the creator of the comic strip Dilbert. He's also been in the news previously for comments that veer toward far-right racism.

Recently, on a podcast, Mr. Adams went on a rant, responding to a poll showing that a large amount of African-Americans disagree with the statement that "it's okay to be white". In this rant, Mr. Adams declared that he wanted nothing to do with black people and that "white people should get the hell away from black people". As a result, many major newspaper chains have dropped the Dilbert comic. He is now claiming that he is being "canceled".

THE POLL

So this is where it starts to get interesting. The poll Mr. Adams references was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a far-right pollster with, frankly, questionable methodology. They polled what they viewed as "anti-white beliefs" and one of the questions was whether or not a person agreed with the statement "it's okay to be white". 72% of respondents agreed with the statement, including 53% of African-Americans.

This result, along with others from the poll, are being reported by Rasmussen as well as other conservative media outlets like the Washington Examiner as somehow being a refutation of "wokism". In reality, the idea that only whites can be racists or that all white people are inherently bad (beliefs examined by this poll) is a straw man concocted by the far-right rather than a true representation of what the vast majority of people who would consider themselves "woke" actually believe, so this result is unsurprising. But that is beside the point.

Mr. Adams, though, took issue with the fact that 47% of African-Americans in this poll DID NOT agree with the statement that "it's okay to be white". He took this to mean that nearly half of African-Americans harbor animus toward whites and that, for this reason, engagement of any sort with African-Americans by whites, including himself, was potentially unsafe.

"IT'S OKAY TO BE WHITE"?

Yeah, let's look at that question, shall we? It turns out there's some "fun" history here.

You see, "it's okay to be white" started off as a trolling slogan among white supremacists on 4Chan in 2017. White supremacist ideas are not the sort of thing that most people feel comfortable expressing openly, so dog whistles like this are the main way that they are expressed in public. In particular, the racist right has shown a propensity to prefer statements that appear innocuous on their face, allowing them to accuse others of anti-white racism if they object to them.

A "dog whistle", for those who don't know, is a seemingly inoffensive statement that is taken by a group and given a more offensive secret meaning. Like a dog whistle, the real message is designed only to be heard by the intended group, the dogs, while leaving others unaware of that message.

AWARENESS OF RACISM

This, I think, is the key to the whole thing, and it's something I'm actually fairly familiar with myself so I'm going to talk from personal experience here.

I'm Jewish. By birth, not religiously. But, being Jewish in any sense, you are made very aware of anti-Semitism, mainly because those people can (and occasionally do!) kill you and people like you. I'm sure I'm aware of many times more information about anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic beliefs than the vast majority of non-Jews are and I'm not even religious!

I should point out that this isn't necessarily because non-Jews are malicious or because they don't care about Jews, it's just that they aren't as directly affected by it. Anti-Semites attack and threaten Jews all the time, but they prefer to do this out of sight and hearing of other non-Jews. If you're not Jewish and you don't put any particular effort into becoming aware of it, it's very easy to live your entire life perfectly unaware of the anti-Semitic harassment and violence that is happening all around you.

In much the same way, I'd bet that African-Americans are far more aware of anti-black racism than whites are. This includes dog whistles; you're far more likely to know that the guy who says things like "globalists" and "it's okay to be white" is secretly racist if your life may depend on it.

In other words, African-Americans probably showed relatively low levels of agreement with that statement in the poll because a reasonably high percentage of them recognized it as a racist dog whistle.

THE CROSSOVER

So why is a "mainstream" right-wing polling organization like Rasmussen asking a question based off of a racist dog whistle from 4Chan?

Well, this is where we have to look at the crossover between the right-wing generally and the racist right. The far right in this country is increasingly racist, but they form a key part of the right-wing base in ever closer elections as the Republican Party loses appeal with other parts of electorate. Because of this, there's a big incentive for the larger right-wing to ignore that racism and even to deny that it is happening at all.

The dog whistles are key to this, by speaking in dog whistles the racist right is able to signal solidarity and express their beliefs while allowing the broader right-wing to deny the truth of their intent by focusing only on the literal meaning of the statement. Those on the more "mainstream" right are also incentivized to try to normalize those statements in order to "prove" that they aren't just secret statements of racism.

This is what Rasmussen is doing here. By pretending that "it's okay to be white" is just a plain statement rather than a racist dog whistle they are attempting to normalize it and demonize those who attempt to point out its nature as a dog whistle for racism.

DUE DILIGENCE

This is where Mr. Adam's racism becomes very clear. You see, on the face of it, I too would be concerned if I saw that a large amount of people of a certain group expressed what appeared to be a racist opinion about my group (note to white people, this is how racial minorities feel just about all the time, but I digress). But the first thing I would do is try to see if there's other context behind that.

And it's not as if the context is hard to find. I just Googled "it's okay to be white" and the very first result I got was the Anti-Defamation League (an anti-racism group) article that I linked above which explains the origins and meaning of this phrase.

Mr. Adams clearly did not even do this one basic thing, he just jumped to exactly the racist conclusion that the white supremacists who created this dog whistle intended for him to jump to. He is, at the bare minimum, racist enough to believe inflammatory things about African-Americans without the slightest bit of hesitation.

BROADER IMPLICATIONS

Here's the thing, though, it would be bad enough if a public figure like Mr. Adams were so committed to racist ideas, one person with his influence can do a lot of damage, but it's not just him.

This type of dog whistle racism is endemic across conservative spaces and has been for some time. It is repeated and accepted as normal discourse in right-wing politics and punditry, particularly among those who support the MAGA movement and the former President, and it is defended even by those conservatives and Republicans who are not otherwise seen as being racist themselves.

The conservative movement in general has a problem when racist ideas are defended and racists are allowed to use dog whistle language to convince others of those ideas. People like Mr. Adams and his turn to overt racism are just the tip of the iceberg that indicates a much deeper problem beneath.

CONCLUSION

Mr. Adam's statements are despicable and he is rightly being condemned for his bigotry, but he's far from alone. There is an entire system of dog whistles, denial of racism, and latent beliefs about minorities which enables people like him and allows these kinds of racist ideas to be brought to those who might otherwise reject them outright.

That's why it's important that all Americans, regardless of your political or racial beliefs, do at least the bare minimum. If you see information that surprises you and makes you feel upset, particularly if it encourages you to think poorly of an entire group of people, find out where it's coming from and what's behind it. The odds are pretty good that you're being manipulated.

The racists are out there and they are growing in influence. Don't sleepwalk into becoming one, learn their codes so that you don't get taken in.

#scott adams #dilbert #racism #rasmussen #washington examiner #anti defamation league #dog whistle #antisemitism #anti blackness #politics #us politics #republicans #republican party #conservative media

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vaveyard · 2 years

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I always found it weird how white Americans say "I'm Italian", "I'm Irish", "I'm Polish" and yet don't speak the language, read the literature, know the history, or the different cultures (Italians aren't a monolith) besides a few skin deep details. It's almost like a fetish. Unless your relatives or ancestors are from specific native ethnic groups, or unless you grow up with that culture (language, stories, traditions, history, etc.), Italian, Irish, Polish are just nationalities. Tell an Italian "I'm Italian American!" and they'll start speaking to you in Italian, because if you don't speak the language why would you say you're Italian at all, right?

The obsession is even weirder considering how people of color struggle to trace their ancestry and find their culture because their ancestors were mostly brought to the US against their will, or in the case of Natives, their communities and cultures were wiped out 🤦🏾‍♀️

Now that you're an "influencer", you should be more careful and less ignorant. Ignorance spreads like a disease. There's enough white Americans already using ancestry as something that makes them "special". With the boom of 23andMe I've seen so many white Americans excited to find out they are 0.8% Native, completely ignoring the implications of that.

Considering that the vast majority of your following seems to be white and privileged (I wonder why), and how you can influence them, it'd be nice to see some effort to fight ignorance. This liberal approach of exclusively talking about issues that personally affect you and people like you, the refusal to talk about the racism in publishing, for example, (or to call out publishing at all, really), or how a few authors getting 6 figure deals means others (mostly poc and queer) get almost nothing, or how you're always ready to scold readers of color or queer who rightfully complain about the representation in your books, how you say they dehumanize you (when people of color and queer are literally dehumanized to the point they get beaten and killed in the streets), speaks volumes. Add this fetish to all of it, and of course liberal racist women are going to flock to you. You can say you're anti-racism all you want, but until you you put action behind your words, it's empty virtue signalling. Retconning a character's ethnicity because your work is otherwise all white is racist (like JKR making one character gay when the series is over, and saying there's one Jewish character at Hogwarts). Just like creating queer characters just to serve the straight ones/get them together, or to portray how evil the society is, is homophobic (unless you're writing from experience, which you're not; you're just associating queerness with suffering and abuse, which are big stereotypes).

Everywhere I turn there's people wearing their alleged ancestry like a trendy bag. "I'm Italian :) wait that's not cool anymore? I'm also 5% Irish! No? I'm 4% French! 15% Scottish Gaelic!"

I know white Americans who say "My family is Italian from Sicily" but the few Italian dialect words and songs they know are in Neapolitan (Sicily and Campania are two completely different regions, with over 700km/400 miles between them). Or white Americans who say "I gesticulate a lot because I'm Italian!" but don't know anything about the country's history and cultures.

It's like you are constantly looking for something to make you special and "not like other Americans" when the truth is that most white Americans have ancestors from other countries, and they arrived to the US by choice.

Italian-American is a very specific ethnic subgroup, with its own literature and working class culture, of immigrants who've faced poverty, starvation, racism (in the beginning, Italians in the US were considered poc) and who've had to climb their way up to a decent life.

You're a privileged white woman, who got published through connections made at an expensive college, who brags about how rich she is to her audience of kids and who airs her dirty laundry against air companies online, all the while managing to brag about how she travelled first class to another continent, so she's entitled to better treatment than other people (I mention this because that's how I discovered you, people in reading circles where shocked at how you were trying to use your audience to call out and shame a company for an inconvenient, but common and not world ending mistake. First world problems).

Your Italian ancestors are rolling in their graves.

Lots of people like to say I'm this, I'm that, and yet can't even find the country on a map, or know the names of its regions.

You said your mother (?) is Scottish and you regularly visit family in Scotland, yes? You're much closer to Scottish than Italian. Or is that not quirky and exotic enough?

ma’am this is a Wendy’s

please focus on yourself, this fixation you have with me seems really taxing on you

(p.s. when my grandmother came to the US she wasn’t allowed to go to school unless she could speak English, so she sat in silence for years before she felt it was safe to speak in her classroom, it caused her a huge amount of trauma so she never taught her children and grandchildren Italian, I don’t think policing people’s backgrounds and how they identify, especially based on language, is terribly useful)

#ask #that anon

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oliverfinalmajorproject · 23 days

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Final Major Project - Thoughts 16

Protest Songs

Among social movements that have an associated body of songs are the abolition movement, prohibition, women's suffrage, the labour movement, the human rights movement, civil rights, the Native American rights movement, the Jewish rights movement, disability rights, the anti-war movement and 1960s counterculture, art repatriation, opposition towards blood diamonds, abortion rights, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution, the LGBT rights movement, animal rights movement, vegetarianism and veganism, gun rights, legalisation of marijuana and environmentalism.

Martin Luther King Jr. described the freedom songs this way: "They invigorate the movement in a most significant way... these freedom songs serve to give unity to a movement."

EXAMPLE IN EAST-ASIA

China

Chinese-Korean Cui Jian's 1986 song "Nothing to My Name" was popular with protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Chinese singer Li Zhi made references to the Tiananmen Square massacre in his songs and were subsequently banned from China in 2019. Three years later, during the anti-lockdown protests in China, this was used as a protest song across YouTube.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong rock band Beyond's "Boundless Oceans Vast Skies" (1993) and "Glory Days" (光輝歲月) (1990) have been considered as protest anthems in various social movements.

During the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, Les Misérables' "Do You Hear The People Sing" (1980) and Thomas dgx yhl's "Glory to Hong Kong" (2019) were sung in support of the movement. The latter has been widely adopted as the anthem of these protests, with some even regarding it as the "national anthem of Hong Kong".

Philippines

From the revolutionary songs of the Katipunan to the songs being sung by the New People's Army, Filipino protest music deals with poverty, oppression as well as anti-imperialism and independence. A typical example was during the American era, as Jose Corazon de Jesus created a well-known protest song entitled "Bayan Ko", which calls for redeeming the nation against oppression, mainly colonialism, and also became popular as a song against the Marcos regime.

During the 1960s, Filipino protest music became aligned with the ideas of Communism as well as of revolution. The protest song "Ang Linyang Masa" came from Mao Zedong and his Mass Line and "Papuri sa Pag-aaral" was from Bertolt Brecht. These songs, although Filipinized, rose to become another part of Filipino protest music known as Revolutionary songs that became popular during protests and campaign struggles.

South Korea

See also: Music of South Korea and Korean protest songs

Commonly, protest songs in South Korea are known as Minjung Gayo (Korean: 민중 가요, literally "People's song"), and the genre of protest songs is called "Norae Undong", translating to the literal meaning "song movement". The starting point of Korean protest songs was the music culture of Korean students movements around 1970.[66] It was common in the 1970s~1980s, especially before and after of the June Democracy Movement in 1987, and associated with against the military governments of presidents Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan reflecting the will of crowd and voices of criticism of the day. From the middle of the 1990s, following the democratisation of South Korea, Korean protest songs have lost their popularity.

Taiwan

"Island's Sunrise" (Chinese: 島嶼天光) is the theme song of 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan. Also, the theme song of Lan Ling Wang TV drama series Into The Array Song (Chinese: 入陣曲), sung by Mayday, expressed all the social and political controversies during Taiwan under the president Ma Ying-jeou administration.

Thailand