#AND ONLINE

[mzminola]

This is not a perfect analogy but I am making it anyway to try to convey what being online has been like for me lately.

Seeing people say "Oh, Jews are fine, I just hate zionists!" is like seeing "Oh, women are fine, I just hate feminists!"

Zionism and feminism are both very broad socio-political movements that have changed focus over time, that ostensibly have some very basic core tenets but you really need to ask the specific person you're talking to how they personally define it to be sure.

Both have been subject to legitimate criticism, and hostile reactionary bullshit. Had waves, sub-movements, splinters, people with damn near opposite views sharing the term and people with seemingly identical views rejecting it.

You can give working, broad definitions like these:

Feminism is the belief that all people should be treated equally regardless of gender, with a focus on women's rights due to systemic oppression.

Zionism is the belief that all peoples have the right to self determination and safety, with a focus on Jewish people finding it in Israel.

You can also give different definitions! Many people give different definitions! Many people also hold these beliefs but use different names for them for various reasons.

There are self-described zionists who are jingoistic, racist, etc, and who attribute those attitudes to their zionism. Just as there are feminists who are misandrist, bio-essentialist, transphobic, homophobic, and so on, who attribute those attitudes to their feminism.

There are also incredibly selfless, compassionate activists working for positive change in the world who consider themselves zionists and feminists.

It has been very jarring to see people, who I respect, uncritically reblogging posts or headlines that use "zionists" as a stand in for "bad people", just as jarring as it would be to see them sharing things that use "feminists" that way. Especially when those posts contain easily debunked conspiracy theories that I know you'd have seen right through if the OP said "Jews" but because they said "zionists" you swallowed it whole.

I am not asking anyone to stop sharing important information, petitions, news articles, resources, and so on. I am asking you to slow down and stop spreading inflammatory language that paints a broad socio-political movement for Jewish self-determination as inherently bad. The same way I would ask you not to spread inflammatory language that paints gender equality & women's liberation as inherently bad.

If the information is important, please look for other, more neutrally worded posts. Or verify the links yourself and make a fresh post! There is no situation online in which the only way to share information must be to spread such language.

[cbk1000]

I'm not opening the can of worms that is the Israel-Palestinian conflict on this site, which has some of the worst takes known to man, but one thing that does really concern me, as someone who is a history nerd and has stumbled across many, many examples of antisemitism in my reading, is that some of you do not seem to have any understanding whatsoever of how deep in the heart of human society antisemitism is. And to be clear: this post is not a comprehensive history of antisemitism; that's not my wheelhouse. It is also not a claim that anyone who is critical of the Israeli government is automatically antisemitic. But some of you seem to think that Hitler invented antisemitism, and then it just vanished when the Nazi regime was defeated, and modern Jewish people are being overdramatic? Hysterical? Attention-seeking?? for expressing concerns over the alarming creeping of casual antisemitism back into society.

I have read many books on the Holocaust, but I have never actually read a text that deals solely and comprehensively with the history of antisemitism. When I say I have 'stumbled across many, many examples of antisemitism in my reading' what I mean is not that I was reading about Jewish history, I was reading about the Middle Ages. Or the Victorian era. Or the Russian Empire, and the Jewish pogroms that were carried out there in the 19th century. What I mean is that, as an amateur historian, reading about the Plantagenet reign, and learning about the normal, everyday people who lived during it, going about their jobs and lives, I learnt that Jews were barred from many occupations and trades, for being Jewish. They were pushed into fringe occupations like tax collecting, which was viewed as a sort of necessary evil. Lending money for interest was viewed by the Church as a sin and forbidden for Christians, and so Jewish people did that too, for lack of many options. (Hence the stereotype of the greedy, money-grubbing Jew.) I did not seek this information out: it fell into my lap because it was a notable, prevalent part of the society I was reading about.

The Nazis did not start by slaughtering Jews; they started by isolating them, by turning public opinion against them, and restricting the ways in which they could participate in society. But this was not remotely new. For much of human history, Jewish people have been living in the very narrow margins of society. We hold ideas and stereotypes of them that have been filtered through centuries of antisemitic views held across multiple cultures. My MIL, who is genuinely one of the nicest people I know, and who, so far as I know, does not actively hold antisemitic views, once called her boss a 'money-pinching Jew' to Mr. Jenn because her Christmas 'bonus' was a ten-dollar gift card or something to that effect.

I am not Jewish; I do not talk about Jewish history or practices on my blog. And yet when going through some old, unanswered asks in my inbox, I came across one about Jewish people controlling the media. This is not an idea I have ever expressed on my blog. I can't recall ever even reblogging a post to refute the idea that Jews control the media. I don't think it is something that has ever been referenced, in any capacity, on my blog. And yet this person was not asking my opinion about it and not, I wager from the tone of the ask, even trying to rage bait: they were stating something they felt was a simple fact, to someone who they felt must hold the same view, because it's the reasonable one. 'Jews control the banks and the media' are persistent narratives because they are Bad. Bankers, historically, have done some pretty shit things to economies, that have harmed normal people; and the media is often used as a weapon of propaganda, to try and control what people think. Have Jewish people been involved in these occupations? Of course; in some cases because there was little else they could do. But the narrative of control, of monopoly, is intentionally attributed to Jewish people as a group because it is negative, and because it makes them appear far more powerful, and threatening, as a group, than they are. The Jewish population is estimated at 15.7 million people--that's for the entire world. That's about .02% of the global population. The world Christian population, for comparison, is estimated at about 2.38 billion. There are over one billion Muslims. Hinduism, which is mostly isolated to one single country (94% of Hindus, according to Professor Google, live in India), has 1.8 billion practitioners. These three religions alone make up almost half the world population. Jewish people, practicing or atheist, are a drop in the bucket of the world's society. They are, and always have been, a small people who have had a disproportionate amount of power and malice attributed to them.

In the States, we have white supremacists marching in the streets, and openly endorsing the presidential candidate of one of our two main parties. We have synagogues being defaced, and a general rise in overt antisemitism. Surveys in the States show that antisemitism, once lesser, and weaker, amongst young Americans, has reversed those trends, and now younger generations hold more antisemitic views than older generations. It is willful blindness to deny that this has nothing to do with the way this conflict is talked about by prominent figures in media, or across the echo chambers of the internet.

It is not wrong to support Palestine, or to condemn the actions of Netanyahu and the Israeli government. It is blind, ignorant, and dangerous to espouse the idea that antisemitic rhetoric is and will remain completely independent of this movement, and that bad actors will not take the opportunity to continue to more deeply entrench and legitimize antisemitic views. Did people neatly and rationally contextualize the actions of the Muslims responsible for 9/11, and blame solely them for that attack, or did many of them blame Muslims as a whole, and was there, consequently, a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the wake of 9/11? You can look it up, but I can tell you the answer right now: people, as a group, are dumb, panicked beasts, and they're looking for someone to blame so they can feel more powerful in a world where they are mostly insignificant, and helpless. We can have a conversation, simultaneously, about the rights of Palestinians, and antisemitism. It is possible to acknowledge that this is a shitshow across the board, that innocents on both sides are, as they always are in armed conflict, disprortionately suffering; and that Jewish people have valid concerns about what they're seeing directed at their communities.

Jewish people are afraid because they have good reason to be. The Holocaust was not ancient history; there are still living survivors of it. But moreover, they are afraid because groups have a far longer memory than individuals, and the collective experience of Jews, as a people, is of being outsiders, for most of history, in most societies. There's a reason a Jewish state was created in Palestine in the first place, and it's not because things were going swell for Jews, and they were safe and happy where they were, and decided to just roll in and seize some territory for themselves.

This is a terrible, heartbreaking situation all around. Don't let your ignorance make it worse.

[gale-gentlepenguin]

Anyone here playing Pokérogue?

It’s really fun.

[camscendants]

Me:I wish people contacted me more :(

Also me when they do contact me:

[astronnova]

yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[mzminola]

The wiki vandalism distresses me more than all the misleading or outright false social media posts; Wikipedia is where people often go to double check if what they've just been told is true. Yes we should all actually check the sources, but most of us are tired, inundated with too much information, and just...don't.

I did not actually know of Zionism being a term for a real political / social movement until after college. I grew up in a semi-rural hippie town and the term just didn't come up outside of "Ugh, that guy's spouting Zionist conspiracy theories."

Israel as a modern state exists, and how it came to currently exist barely came up when people were discussing the news, and I can't remember if it even came up at all in my history classes. Not much more than a paragraph if it did, probably. Being a hippie town did not make us less American-centric than our neighbors, much as we'd like to claim otherwise.

It took running into Jewish bloggers online for me to learn Zionism, and by extension Zionist, had meaning outside antisemitic conspiracy theories. I'm pretty sure I ran across the neo-nazi slur "zio" before I learned the actual political movement history of Zionism.

Being me, as soon as I did know there was real history (and modern political meaning too) I immediately jumped into research so I'd know what everyone was talking about, and be able to form my own opinions. Like many other topics, Wikipedia was my go-to for the start of research, and my touchstone whenever I wanted to double check things.

So yeah, the wiki vandalism is...distressing.

the ways in which the wikipedia article on zionism has become biased towards anti-zionism with loads of bogus information and subtle comments is really upsetting to me. “zionists wanted to create a jewish state in palestine with as much land, as many jews, and as few palestinian arabs as zionism as possible.” is such an unreal statement to have on the wikipedia page and the fact nobody has gotten rid of this yet is fucking insane. i cant do this anymore it’s unbelievable to me that goyim feel they can take a word they know nothing about and then change the meaning of it to equate to “racist, genocidal colonist”

[beebfreeb]

Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.

[orpheuslament]

i find the whole "i had unpleasant experiences with leftists before so now im a raging fascist" narrative incredibly funny because we have all had unpleasant experiences with leftists before. it comes free with being a leftist

[falimarcis]

The new Marcille extra by Ryoko Kui

[golyadkin]

you'll get the urge as an artist or a writer to say out loud the things you're worried about "the proportions are off" "kind of out of character" "i'm not good at summaries" "didn't get as much detail as i wanted" "i made a mistake and here's how" and that's the self-conscious part of your brain telling you "it's bad and if you don't tell them you know it's bad then they'll think you're stupid" but you've got to ignore that little voice and pretend you think it's good or else that little voice is going to ruin your life

[bump-inthe-night]

For those who’ve migrated from TikTok: there’s no reward for harassment on Tumblr. You won’t gain a heavy amount of likes, reblogs, and followers for leading harassment campaigns; if anything, it’ll make people block you.

On Tumblr, there’s no popularity contest because many don’t care about the amount of followers, likes, and reblogs you have. A lot of users even hide their likes and who they're following. Users heavily encourage blocking people and filtering out tags. This is why online discourse is more confined to its bubble instead of being so widespread on this website: because people curate their experiences.

If you want to have an enjoyable experience on Tumblr, then you need to use the block button and filtering system. If you don't, then you're going to be extremely miserable.

EDIT: Interesting additions to the post-

[mzminola]

Fandom has gotten smaller for me in the past year.

Before, I could go in the tags, or get a note on one of my posts, or see a post on my dash, and click through to the original blog or on of the reblogs to see what other fun stuff they have. "Oh, fun DC meta, what else have you said?" "Oh, cute Star Wars art, what else have you drawn?" "Oh, clever AtLA ficlet, what else have you written?"

Some people use archival tags so I can stick to whatever fandom it was that interested me. A lot of people don't, though, so I just scroll through their whole blog.

I can't do that anymore.

Sure, it used to be that I'd do that, and run into some bigotry. A little transphobia, some sexism, racism, ableism, cultural imperialism. The whole internet is like that. I have extensive filters, I hit the back button, I hit the block button.

Now, though? For the past eleven months?

The majority of fandom blogs I check out are spreading blood libel. Misinformation. Loaded language. Genocidal dogwhistles. Scams that benefit organized crime.

At first I was just blocking liberally. Sometimes, if I thought someone was simply ignorant, send an ask with correct information. When I pointed out to someone (who wrote meta about one of my favorite characters) that "ethnostate" is a term coined by neo-nazis, they bit my head off and doubled down on misinformation.

One of my real life friends reblogged a post that, if they'd taken five seconds of critical thinking, they'd have realized was just the old "Jews control Hollywood" bullshit in a new hat. They also reblogged a mostly-innocuous post... and I recognized the OP as someone who has been mocking the families of the hostages.

I haven't gone back to my friend's blog in months. I don't talk to them about this. I know they're usually on the ball, so I close my eyes and hope they caught a clue on their own, because I cannot handle trying to speak to them about this and having it turn out badly.

I have a handful of fandom blogs who rarely touch on real-world things that I either follow, or periodically check. I hope they stay fandom focused. I hope I don't open them one day to find sexual violence, mutilation, and murder denied, excused, or celebrated.

I don't look for new people to follow. I don't click through on posts by new people to find more fun stuff anymore.

My world is smaller now.

[apricior]

i remember when i was a child internet safety was like "if you even hint at the country you live in, you're gonna get kidnapped and murdered", and nowadays it is encouraged or even necessary to give corporations every single personal detail if you want to use anything because if they can't sell your information they cry so hard they throw up

[agnesandhilda]

yeah this is a self-evident biological hierarchy. that's why we have to enforce it with violence

[a-sweeter-solarsystem]

take my hand for a moment

your objective from this point on is to survive

the election results are going to take a few days. The world is going to be very tense. I want you to take all the things you like to do to distract yourself and splurge on them. I want you to go eat your favroite foods and spend time with friends. I want you to do what you gotta do to make sure you can make it through the week.

There are people out there who want you to survive. There are people out there who are just as scared as you are.

We'll get through this. We will find a way