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I love scam calls that are easily verifiably false. “Your mortgage is about to default.” Cool 👍 I don’t have one of those

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Why are people calling you a Zionist in random comment sections? (literally just stumbled across some and looked at your blog)

Probably because I have this really fringe hot take where I think antisemitism is bad

And that the largest and most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust may not actually have been the fault of the Jews that were at a festival or asleep when they got murdered and tortured and raped and kidnapped. And that as a general rule of thumb, Jews should have the right not to be murdered in their beds. And that Israel existing in some form perhaps isn't literally the worst thing ever on planet earth and that maybe we can use our thinking brains a little bit to deduce why --out of all the issues happening in the world right now-- "Israel = bad" is the one people are shouting about the most (hint: it's the same reason that right after what was again: the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, people were out in droves protesting in favor of the country that did the massacring)

But all of that really just falls under the umbrella of "I think antisemitism is bad"

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It’s a pity that years from now when people look at the Dow or whatever for 2025 they will mostly only notice the overall drop and not the sheer goofiness that the hour-by-hour and day-to-day trends of the stock market over the last week or so.

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not donald trump singlehandley uniting the world against america and encouraging mass boycotting

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The Five Stages of Passover Panic

Denial: “No, it’s not time for Passover yet. I still have time to enjoy bread and cookies and… all the things.”

Anger: “I hate this stupid holiday! I’d rather do Yom Kippur over than deal with Passover.”

Bargaining: “If I can keep kosher the first three days of Passover then that should be enough to pay homage to my forefathers and foremothers. Right?”

Depression: “But I love pizza so much! And toast in the mornings! And chicken nuggets! And burritos! Tortillas aren’t even leavened! I can’t live without my carbs, please!”

Acceptance: “The first seder is tonight. It’s all over. All the chametz is sealed in a Rubbermaid bin the garage (because I don’t believe Hashem needs me to put my food in the care of my neighbors for a week). At least… at least I have matzah ball soup. I can do this.”

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"the youth will save us" the youth are repeating nazi talking points

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The very worst thing about the “activists” who misunderstand and misuse Zionism is they’ve taken a word and a movement coined by a minority who have been oppressed and persecuted for thousands of years to describe their hope and desire for freedom from that persecution and self determination in their ancestral lands - a right that all people should have - and twisted and distorted it to mean the most evil thing they can possibly think of. And even with the knowledge that the vast majority of Jews are Zionist in some fashion, they still have the absolute audacity to go “I don’t hate Jews, just Zionists” and happily and gleefully spout shit like “Zionists kys” or saying they would be happy if all Zionists died horribly, and they deliberately use ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jew’ to give themselves plausible deniability and to put anyone calling out their rancid behaviour on the back foot. They know damn well what they’re doing. Just say that you want another Shoah and be done with it. At least that would be honest.

It’s despicable. It’s cruelty beyond belief. And, it goes without saying, it’s rancidly antisemitic.

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If you are a Christian that wants to host a Passover seder this year:

1) Don’t. It’s appropriative and gross.

2) Still don’t.

3) Jesus never participated in the type of seder that Jews have today. He lived (if he existed as described in your Christian holy books) during the Second Temple Era of Judaism, when worship was Temple-focused and ritual sacrifice was a key facet of the holiday. The modern seder takes most of its traditions from rabbinic Judaism, which was not the Judaism of Jesus.

4) Don’t do it. Don’t. No, there is no good reason for you to do it.

5) Given the Christian antisemitic violence traditionally inflicted on the Jews during this time of year (the lead up to Easter), it is EXTRA awful for Christians to try and appropriate our traditions related to Passover.

6) Don’t. Pesach is our holiday, and our religion is a semi-closed practice. Don’t appropriate our stuff. Don’t make our stuff about Jesus.

7) There are no exceptions to the rule that Christians should not host Passover seders.

Hope this helps.

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Come on. We need to catch up with the others.

MERLIN ❦ 4.02 | The Darkest Hour: Part Two

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When I was 3 years old I went to a preschool that had this little green crocheted crocodile finger puppet that was my absolute favorite toy to play with of all time. I named her Chelsea, because Chelsea starts with C and crocodile starts with C and more often than not wild animals in fiction aimed at kids have names that start with the same first letter as their species. I played with Chelsea every day, because she was my favorite toy, and because the other kids weren't really interested in her, and also because I eventually started to hide her in a special secret spot in the room so no one else would find her before I did. She was so beloved by me that when I graduated from preschool, my teachers gave Chelsea to me permanently, because it was clear no one else would ever love that little crochet crocodile as much as me anyway (in part because I hid her). They waited a few weeks after I graduated before doing it, too, and sent Chelsea with some post cards as if the crocodile had been on a whirlwind "travel the world" vacation before deciding to come live with me.

And Chelsea remained my favorite toy all through my childhood. There were others I loved nearly as much, like my Imperial Godzilla and the big red T.rex from the first Jurassic Park toy line and my tiny knockoff plush Charmander, but Chelsea always held the place of honor in my heart. She was my absolute favorite toy.

I kept a lot of my favorite toys through adolescence, even if social pressure eventually got me to give away a lot of them (and some, y'know, broke). That's obviously not surprising to you if you've followed my blog, since I still collect toys into my adulthood. But it's important to note because while I know I made a conscious effort to never throw out Chelsea every time I pared down my collection... at some point, she went missing.

I became aware of it when I graduated from high school. I was feeling really emotional about leaving that stage of my life and, y'know, becoming an adult and shit, and in that state I decided to find Chelsea to reassure myself that I hadn't entirely left childhood behind. But Chelsea wasn't there. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find Chelsea anyway.

And that was, like, devastating, because the only explanation was that somehow, at some point, I had accidentally tossed her out with some other "childhood junk" while trying to grow up and be responsible in my teen years. I had literally thrown away my childhood in a careless attempt to be more grown up.

Of course I knew she was just a toy - nothing more than some yarn twisted together in the loose shape of a crocodile, lifeless and soul-less and more or less worthless in the objective light of day. But she was also Chelsea, my best friend since i was three, my stalwart little pal, a source of comfort for most of my life at that point, and I had just... tossed her out! Like garbage! What kind of person was I becoming if I could do that to my best friend?

I was very visibly distraught, and my mom noticed. Being very crafty, she tried to find the pattern for Chelsea so she could knit me a new one. The problem is, she had no idea where to find said pattern. She checked all her books of crochet patterns, and when that failed she tried the internet, but no matter how hard she looked, she found nothing.

So my mom found the next best thing.

The original Chelsea was a tiny finger puppet, and I had "met" her when I was three. Well, I was eighteen now - shouldn't Chelsea have grown too? And as has been established, this crocodile was fond of whirlwind vacations. My mom found a pattern that looked as much like Chelsea as possible while also being a much bigger crocodile, and gifted her to me before I left for college - to show that while we can't stop the flow of time or how it changes us, that doesn't mean we have to leave it behind.

And yeah, I decided to believe it. That's Chelsea now. Yeah, I know that in reality it's a completely different set of yarn made by my mom rather than... whoever it was that crocheted the original Chelsea, but then, Chelsea was never really the yarn. She was the feelings I put into the yarn, you know? So that's Chelsea, all grown up, and still my most prized toy.

...

Flash forward... Jesus, eighteen years, holy shit. A few weeks ago I saw a post trying to identify a different crochet crocodile pattern, and thinking it was cute, I decided to try and look for it on ebay and etsy, just to see if maybe I could find it. I didn't, but do you know what I found instead?

A very familiar crochet crocodile finger puppet. An intensely familiar one, you might say. Of course I bought it. And of course I asked the seller if, perhaps, they might have the pattern for it or know where it came from (they did not, alas). And after a few days, she showed up at my house.

She's not Chelsea, obviously. For one thing, she's far too clean and fresh looking - Chelsea was very well loved, and looked the part, while this crocodile finger puppet has definitely not endured years upon years of a child's affection. And, more importantly, she's not Chelsea because we've already established that Chelsea grew up into a bigger crochet crocodile. This has to be Chelsea's younger sister, Cici.

And if I could find another of Chelsea's kind after all these years, then maybe, with a bit of luck, I might find the pattern for her, and be able to make more of them. Fill the world with Chelseas.

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One of humanity's greatest contributions to the art of creating chaos is the humble U-Haul rental van. All over this great country, people who have never driven anything larger than a minivan are now asked to operate a full-ton vehicle that's about as aerodynamic as an enormous cube on skinny tires is.

This wouldn't be a big problem, except U-Hauls, to a vehicle, are barely maintained. Here's why. When you are fleeing the depressing post-industrial city of your birth to move to a new, shiny town in order to get a job in theatre, you don't bring the U-Haul back to that cesspool. You just drop it off in the New Shiny Town U-Haul lot, and it stays there for awhile. The ownership of that U-Haul truck is sort of ambiguous, and so too is the responsibility for its maintenance.

Maybe it didn't belong to Trauma Town U-Haul, either, and nobody feels much like doing an oil change on it if it only benefits some asshole in another state that they've never met. After all, that truck could very well never make it back to its hometown before it is retired by way of a haggard father of two putting it into the ditch at 4am. They certainly aren't going to do something like replacing ball joints, or fixing that worn steering coupler, or replacing the cracked tires when the guy before you stole them for his Super Duty.

Learning how to drive an enormous, poorly-handling, badly-maintained vehicle in unfamiliar areas wouldn't be so bad if you weren't also stressed out at the time. Moving is hard, even when things are going great. Trying not to run over a Geo Metro when you're on your fourth run, haven't had a meal with vegetables in it since last week, and have exactly fifteen minutes to clear out before the landlord sets your coffee table on fire is significantly harder.

The next time you see someone in a U-Haul van, give them a bit of extra room. Let them know that you've got their back, and we're all aligned against the evil forces of capitalism that made this interaction as hellish as it needed to be. Maybe stay a little further back than that, in case they decide to pop a u-turn in the middle of the highway and end up firing an entire Ikea kitchen set through your windshield.

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Wacław Koniuszko (1854-1900) - "Old Jew repairing a carpet", ca. 1890

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I think part of what is so upsetting about some people's participation in activism related to I/P is that many have framed the conflict as a binary choice between two opposing teams.

What if I genuinely want the best for everybody involved? What if I believe violence against anybody on the basis of their nationality/ethnicity/religion is wrong? What if I see both Israelis and Palestinians as fully human, worthy of dignity and respect, undeserving of violence directed at them?

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Mahmoud Khalil calling the issue of campus antisemitism "manufactured mass hysteria" reminds me of this something that really stuck with me from the second report from the Columbia antisemitism task force:

In some cases, students relayed that when they complained about antisemitism, some school administrators tried to steer them to mental health counseling. One student reported, “I tried to reach out to the school but they made me meet with the school social worker before I could meet with the Dean of Student Affairs.” While mental health services should be available to anyone who wants or needs them, administrators should not medicalize a student experience of discrimination in lieu of addressing it. (Page 32)

There is this prevalent and unshakeable idea that antisemitism is all in the Jews' heads, that the issue is really the Jewish inability to cope. That if someone thinks they've experienced antisemitism there is something wrong with their head.