#I’m not just talking about conservative pearl clutching I’m talking about liberal pearl clutching

[scarlettshazam]

It’s been said but you gotta let people judge you. They’re just gonna. Be your unhinged and truest self and let someone be mad that you’re writing werewolf porn or whatever cause at the end of the day. They’re mad. And you got werewolf porn

Who’s the winner now

[benevolentbirdgal]

“Thirteen″ Tips for Writing About Synagogues / Jewish Writing Advice / Advice for Visiting Synagogues

So your story includes a Jew (or two) and you’ve a got a scene in a synagogue. Maybe there’s a bar mitzvah, maybe your gentile protagonist is visiting their partner’s synagogue. Maybe there’s a wedding or a community meeting being held there. For whatever reason, you want a scene in a shul. I’m here as your friendly (virtual) neighborhood Jewish professional to help you not sound like a gentile who thinks a synagogue is just a church with a Star of David instead of a cross. 

Quick note: The are lots of synagogues around the world, with different specific cultural, local, and denominational practices. The Jewish community is made up of roughly 14 million people worldwide with all sorts of backgrounds, practices, life circumstances, and beliefs. I’m just one American Jew, but I’ve had exposure to Jewishness in many forms after living in 3.5 states (at several different population densities/layouts), attending Jewish day school and youth groups, doing Jewish college stuff, and landing a job at a Jewish non-profit. I’m speaking specifically in an American or Americanish context, though some of this will apply elsewhere as well. I’m also writing from the view of Before Times when gatherings and food and human contact was okay.

Bear in mind as well, in this discussion, the sliding scale of traditional observance to secular/liberal observance in modern denominations: Ultraorthodox (strict tradition), Modern Orthodox (Jewish law matters but we live in a modern world), Conservative (no relation to conservative politics, brands itself middle ground Judaism), Reconstructionist (start with Jewish law and then drop/add bits to choose your own adventure), and Reform (true build your own adventure, start at basically zero and incorporate only as you actively choose).

Synagogue = shul = temple. Mikvah (ritual bath) is its own thing and usually not attached to the shul. Jewish cemeteries are also typically nowhere near the shul, because dead bodies are considered impure.   

A Bar/Bat/Bnai Mitzvah is the Jewish coming of age ceremony. Bar (“son”) for boys at 13+, Bat (“daughter”) at 12+, and Bnai (“children”) for multiples (i.e. twins/triplets/siblings) or non-binary kids (although the use of the phrase “Bnai Mitzvah” this way is pretty new). 12/13 is the minimum, 12-14 the norm but very Reform will sometimes allow 11 and anybody above 12/13 can have theirs. Probably a dedicated post for another time. Generally, however, the following will happen: the kid will lead some parts of services, read from and/or carry the Torah, and make a couple of speeches. 

Attire: think Sunday Best (in this case Saturday), not come as you are. Even at very liberal reconstructionist/reform synagogues you wouldn’t show up in jeans and a t-shirt or work overalls. Unless they are seriously disconnected from their culture, your Jewish character is not coming to Saturday morning services in sneakers and jeans (their gentile guest, however, might come too casual and that’d be awkward).  1a. The more traditional the denomination, the more modest the attire. Outside of orthodoxy woman may wear pants, but dresses/skirts are more common. Tights for anything above knee common for Conservative/Reform/Recon, common for even below knee for orthodox shuls. Men will typically be wearing suits or close to it, except in very Reform spaces.  1b. Really, think business casual or nice dinner is the level of dressiness here for regular services. Some minor holidays or smaller events more casual is fine. Social events and classes casual is fine too.  1c. Even in reform synagogues, modesty is a thing. Get to the knee or close to it. No shoulders (this an obsession in many Jewish religious spaces for whatever reason), midriffs, or excessive cleavage (as I imagine to be the norm in most houses of worship). 

Gendered clothing:  3a. Men and boys wear kippahs (alt kippot, yarmulkes) in synagogues, regardless of whether they’re Jewish or not out of respect to the space. Outside of Jewish spaces it’s saying “I’m a Jew” but inside of Jewish spaces it’s saying “I’m a Jew or a gentile dude who respects the Jewish space.”  Outside of very Reform shuls, it’s a major faux pass to be a dude not wearing one.  3b. There are little buckets of loaner kippahs if you don’t bring your own and commemorative kippahs are given away at events (bar mitzvah, weddings). Your Jewish dude character not bringing or grabbing one is basically shouting “I’m new here.”  3c. Women are permitted to wear kippahs, but the adoption of a the traditionally masculine accessory will likely be interpreted by other Jews as LGBTQ+ presentation, intense feminism, and/or intense but nontraditional devoutness. Nobody will clutch their pearls (outside of ultraorthodoxy) but your character is sending a message.  3d. Tefillin are leather boxes and wrappings with prayers inside them that some Jewish men wrap around their arms (no under bar mitzvah or gentiles). Like with the kippah, a woman doing this is sending a message of feminism and/or nontraditional religious fervor.  3e. Additionally, prayer shawls, known as tallit, are encouraged/lightly expected of Jewish males (over 13) but not as much as Kippahs are. It is more common to have a personal set of tallit than tefillin. Blue and white is traditional, but they come in all sorts of fun colors and patterns now. Mine is purple and pink. It is much more common for women to have tallit and carries much fewer implications about their relationship to Judaism than wearing a kippah does.  3f. Married woman usually cover their hair in synagogues. Orthodox women will have wigs or full hair covers, but most Jewish woman will put a token scarf or doily on their head in the synagogue that doesn’t actually cover their hair. The shul will also have a doily loaner bucket. 

Jewish services are long (like 3-4 hours on a Saturday morning), but most people don’t get there until about the 1-1.5 hour mark. Your disconnected Jewish character or their gentile partner might not know that though. 

Although an active and traditional synagogue will have brief prayers three times every day, Torah services thrice a week, holiday programming, and weekly Friday night and Saturday morning services, the latter is the thing your Jewish character is most likely attending on the reg. A typical Saturday morning service will start with Shacharit (morning prayers) at 8:30-9, your genre savvy not-rabbi not-Bnai mitzvah kid Jewish character will get there around 9:30-10:15. 10:15-10:30 is the Torah service, which is followed by additional prayers. Depending on the day of the Jewish year (holidays, first day of new month, special shabbats), they’ll be done by 12:30 or 1 p.m. Usually.  After that is the oneg, a communal meal. Onegs start with wine and challah, and commence with a full meal. No waiting 4-8 hours to have a covered-dish supper after services. The oneg, outside of very, very, very Reform spaces will be kosher meat or kosher dairy. 

To conduct certain prayers (including the mourner’s prayers and the Torah service) you need a Minyan, which at least 10 Jewish “adults” must be present, defined as post Bar/Bat/Bnai Mitzvah. In Conservative/Reform/Recon, men and women are counted equally. In Ultraorthodox women are not counted. In Modern Orthodox it depends on the congregation, and some congregations will hold women’s-only services as well with at least ten “adult” Jewish women present.

In Conservative and Orthodox shuls, very little English is used outside of speeches and sermons. Prayers are in Hebrew, which many Jews can read the script of but not understand. Transliterations are also a thing.  In Reform synagogues, there’s heavy reliance on the lingua franca (usually English in American congregations). Reconstructionist really varies, but is generally more Hebrew-based than Reform. 

We’re a very inquisitive people. If your character is new to the synagogue, there will be lots of questions at the post-services oneg (meal, typically brunch/lunch). Are you new in town? Have you been here before? Where did you come from? Are you related to my friend from there? How was parking? Do you know my cousin? Are you single? What is your mother’s name? What do you think of the oneg - was there enough cream cheese? What summer camp did you go to? Can you read Hebrew? Have you joined?  A disconnected Jew or gentile might find it overwhelming, but many connected Jews who are used to it would be like “home sweet chaos” because it’s OUR chaos. 

In Orthodox synagogues, men and women have separate seating sections. There may be a balcony or back section, or there may be a divider known as a mechitzah in the middle. Children under 12/13 are permitted on either side, but over 12/13 folks have to stay one section or the other. Yes, this is a problem/challenge for trans and nonbinary Jews.  Mechitzahs are not a thing outside of orthodoxy. Some older Conservative synagogues will have women’s sections, but no longer expect or enforce this arrangement.   

Money. Is. Not. Handled. On. Shabbat. Or. Holidays. Especially. Not. In. The. Synagogue. Seriously, nothing says “goy writing Jews” more than a collection plate in shul. No money plate, no checks being passed around, even over calls for money (as opposed to just talking about all the great stuff they do and upcoming projects) are tacky and forbidden on Shabbat. Synagogues rely on donations and dues, and will solicit from members, but don’t outright request money on holidays and Shabbat. 

Outside of Reform and very nontraditional Conservative spaces, no instruments on Shabbat or holidays. No clapping either. Same goes for phones, cameras, and other electronics outside of microphones (which aren’t permitted in Orthodox services either).  11a. In the now-times an increasing number of shuls have set up cameras ahead of time pre-programmed to record, so they don’t have to actively “make fire” which is “work” (this is the relevant commandment/mitzvah) on Shabbat, so services can be live-streamed. 11b. After someone has completed an honor (reading from the Torah, carrying the Torah, opening the ark, etc), the appropriate response is a handshake after and the words “Yasher Koach” (again, Before-Times).

Jewish services involve a lot of movement. Get up, sit down. Look behind you, look in front of you. Twist left, twist right. A disconnected Jew or gentile visitor would be best off just trying to follow along with what an exchange student we had once termed “Jewish choreography.” Some prayers are standing prayers (if able), some are sitting prayers. It’s just how it is, although a handful of prayers have variations on who stands. 

[glassshard]

Do you have any thoughts about current "wokeness?" I'm a "90's kid" and always thought of myself as very liberal, but a lot of the popular woke trends today feel alienating and very intolerant to me, most noticeably when it comes to equating fictional media as equally "harmful" as real-life, actual harm or illegal behavior (such as depictions of violence, or ships that aren't 100% healthy and sanitized models of unrealistic relationships).

We have to be really careful about the language we use when discussing this topic. I’m not sure I would include the specific matters you’ve named under the “wokeness” umbrella. If we’re not careful, we might poison all the good stuff that “wokeness” has given us with the obnoxious and wrong-headed stuff you take issue with.

So let’s set that broader designation aside and specifically address the bizarre reemergence of pearl-clutching prudishness. It’s not new, of course. It’s always been very popular to criticize and marginalize fringe artists and fringe sexualities; what’s different now is a different crowd has joined in with the moralizing conservatives. And I think they fall into a few different categories.

First you have kids who are dumb because they are kids. They lack the experience to recognise the broad spectrums of sexualities, and they lack the maturity to recognise that fantasy is distinct from reality. They get these conflated and then they lash out, both out of personal discomfort and squeamishness, and out of a desire to remain on the perceived “right side” of the issue. Since they’re kids, I’m hopeful most of them grow out of this as they experience more of the world and eventually explore their own sexuality. If they weren’t mingling with older people this wouldn’t be an issue, but internet communities are porous and ungated. I think it’s really, really important to remember that a lot of these internet randos we find so absolutely intolerant and unreasonable are just unsupervised children who’ve wandered into someone else’s yard.

The adults are maybe a little different. Some of them are obsessive shippers who treat their hobby in a very emotionally unhealthy way, and have assigned too much importance to fictional characters. These characters are “real” to them, and if you do anything they don’t like to them in your art or in your shipping discussions, they flip out. These people aren’t well, but we have to share the internet with them. Ignore them just like you have to ignore the crazy people talking to the bushes in the park.

Some of the other adults may have trauma that is aggravated by different flavours of kinky art. I have sympathy for them, and I think we can help them out with responsible tagging and warnings, but we don’t have a responsibility beyond that. They are being unreasonable by pushing for more, and asking others to censor themselves. Freedom of expression is of utmost importance.

Finally you have adults who have difficulty differentiating between fantasy and reality. That sense just never grows in for them. I’m not sure how to help them. They’re sitting on the same couch as the preachers who say that playing Dungeons and Dragons makes you susceptible to demon worship, or reading Harry Potter opens your heart to witchcraft, or that playing violent video games is going to cause you to shoot up a shopping mall. It doesn’t matter how many studies you throw at them or how many different ways you point out their hypocrisy - you’re not going to reason them out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into. They want to charge you with a thought crime and send you to horny jail. It’s a frankly ridiculous accusation to make against a grown adult in a free society. Adults are allowed to have kinky fantasies, violent fantasies, bizarre fantasies involving lasagnes and Jack Black and Jack Black’s imaginary brother Jacque Noir, and as long as they remain fantasies it’s not anyone else’s friggin’ business.

But yeah, people are making it their business anyway because we’re all trapped in the same internet together. It’s even being put into legislation, as recently happened with Australia banning import of Japanese erotica - drawn or otherwise.

Anyway, I’m pretty liberal and you’re pretty liberal, and we don’t like this nonsense being associated with us. Let’s keep speaking up against it and make the weirdos feel as childish and intolerant as they’re acting! :)

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

It’s strange to think of now, with a decade of sneering about the “left coast” and “San Francisco liberals” and blah blah blah baked into political conventional wisdom, but it’s true. The reactionary modern conservatism which held the whip hand on the backlash to the great civil rights advances of the 1960s was born in California. California voted for Richard Nixon six times: once as their senator, twice as Eisenhower’s vice president, and then three times as the Republican presidential nominee. In between those elections, Nixon of course had to win primaries. In 1968, when he was the Republican front-runner, he faced an upstart challenger who wanted to make sure he’d be racist enough to keep conservative southerners in the tent. That person was not a southerner, but the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to be the next Republican elected after Nixon.

So what the fuck happened? Well, a lot of things, and I don’t want to pretend to do justice to the generations of righteous activism that pushed back against this disastrous regime. Democrats did occasionally win state-wide – notably, California elected two Democratic women to the Senate in 1992 – even though Orange County was practically a metonym for American conservatism right up until the 2018 midterms. But the turning point that seems to have gotten your average voter to turn on the Republican party for good was in 1994. Governor Pete Wilson, a kind of hard-right proto-Trump, threw his weight behind a hateful anti-immigrant ballot initiative. It passed, even though it was so deranged that it never went into effect because a federal court ruled it unconstitutional within days of the vote, because the California electorate really was that conservative. The electorate changed, almost on a dime. Mexican-American voters organized. Their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens realized that sitting back wasn’t an option. And now the Republican Party of California is a fucking joke.

This isn’t, like, the eternal winds of history blowing microscopic chips off the statue of Ozymandias. If you remember the Clinton presidency, this happened in your lifetime. If you’re a little bit younger than that, it happened in your big cousins’ lifetimes.

Part of what makes it hard to see changes like this is that the dim bulbs in our political media see everything through a horse race lens, where who gets one particular W is the only piece of information worth retaining. You win and you’re clever; you lose and you’re a dumb sucker who tried. Who gets power is really important! But if you only care about that, then you miss the really important trends.

Take the Georgia 6th, the district once represented by Newt fucking Gingrich. Its representative joined Trump’s cabinet in early 2017, at least in part because it was such a supposedly safe Republican seat, so there was a special election for his replacement. Traumatized Democrats and Women’s Marchers threw themselves into the steeply uphill campaign of former John Lewis intern Jon Ossoff. When he came up a few points short, our blue-check media betters tried to turn Ossoff into a punch line stand-in for silly #Resistance liberal losers coping with Trump by losing some more, SUCK IT, MOM! but the other, correct, interpretation is that Ossoff only came up a few points short in a district that was supposed to protect the kookiest of right-wing cranks. His campaign had functioned as kind of an ad hoc boot camp for novice organizers, canvassers, and future school board candidates who had previously been too discouraged and disorganized to take this kind of swing, and it showed Democratic party donors that the district was winnable. So when gun safety advocate and Mother of the Movement Lucy McBath stepped up to the plate in the 2018 midterms, her campaign had the infrastructure it needed, and now she’s well-positioned to be reelected because she’s doing a great job. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s organizing chops and the enthusiastic work his supporters did for Rep. McBath are a big part of why he’s in a dead heat against incumbent Republican Senator David Purdue.

That’s why I’m keeping an eye on the South this year. The presidential campaign there is interesting, but the real story is in those network effects. There’s a rising tide that threatens to make the blue wave of 2018 look like a light spring shower if things break the right way. Just look at the Democratic senate candidates. They’re a diverse group: men and women, Black and white, preacher and fighter pilot. Most are relative newcomers to national audiences, but only some of them are young. Jon Ossoff is just 33; when he was in grade school, Mike Espy of Mississippi was Secretary of Agriculture. What they do seem to have in common is that they are having the time of their fucking lives.

Here’s Espy:

Moving and grooving in McComb. pic.twitter.com/RANCRGGpX7

— Mike Espy (@MikeEspyMS)

October 31, 2020

Ossoff:

The people of Georgia are tired of having a spineless, disgraced politician serve as their Senator. pic.twitter.com/OdaYwFKzmz

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff)

October 30, 2020

Senator Doug Jones of Alabama:

I know you’ve heard us say it before, but when you see this clip, it bears reappearing: This guy really is clueless. https://t.co/w9YOUHegCW

— Doug Jones (@DougJones)

October 22, 2020

Jamie Harrison of South Carolina:

It's debate night and y'all know I'm going to walk it like I talk it. Let's see if @LindseyGrahamSC can do the same. pic.twitter.com/TNABxsaTEO

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime)

October 30, 2020

And the bad bitch with her eye on the big prize, MJ Hegar of Texas:

It's about time Texans had a senator as tough as we are. https://t.co/8MQ8Tykmyt pic.twitter.com/bgPr5vtgdh

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 16, 2020

Clutch those pearls, John! https://t.co/iWej8MrhtV

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 22, 2020

The spineless bootlicker Hegar is challenging, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, is currently resting his dainty patoot in the seat once held by none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson. As president, LBJ would aggressively push for some of the greatest human rights legislation in American history in pursuit of what he called the Great Society. That meant Medicare and Medicaid. It meant a revolution in environmental protections. It meant PBS. And it meant telling the one-party authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow south that America was done with their bullshit, they were going to have real democracy, they were going to do it now, and if they didn’t like it they could eat his ass.

Johnson was a complicated guy and left a complicated legacy. His project required an unusual leader of courage, conviction, and unmitigated savvy, cut with streaks of megalomania and dubious mental health. No architect but Lyndon Johnson would have built the Great Society, and no place but Texas could have built Lyndon Johnson.

Then again, Texas also gave us the Bushes in the late twentieth century. It gave us a terrorist attack on a Biden campaign bus just this weekend.

That darkness is real. So is the long, grinding slog to turn on the light. Like the GA-06 silliness, Democratic efforts in Texas get laughed at as some quixotic waste of resources by arrogant flops. In fact, the past few years of high-profile statewide elections in Texas have been on a pretty clear trajectory. In 2014, Wendy Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth who captured widespread progressive attention with her heroic filibuster of a 2013 state abortion ban, ran for governor. She lost by the ~20-point margin you’d expect in a year where Republicans everywhere did really well, but it was a vitamin B-12 shot to a perpetually overwhelmed state Democratic party. The 2016 Clinton campaign, when it was (correctly!) on the offensive before FBI Director Comey decided he would really prefer a Trump presidency, invested heavily in its Texas ground game. It was always a long shot, but even after the Comey letter and the Texas-specific sabotage by the Russian Internet Research Agency, Texas Democrats cut Trump’s margin there down to single digits. That is to say, they recruited the volunteers and taught the skills and raised the cash and registered the voters to carry the ball way down the field. And in the 2018 midterms, El Paso representative Beto O’Rourke built on all that energy to fight Senator Ted Cruz to a near draw. O’Rourke didn’t quite make it, but he did help a lot of downballot Democrats over the finish line and forced Republicans to light a few oil drums of cash on fire to save a seat that they had always assumed would be safe.

That growth has been possible because of a ton of hard work and persuasion, but it’s also been possible because there was so much untapped potential. As progressives have argued for years, Texas was less of a “red state” than a non-voting state. I’m not a person that usually has a lot of patience for people not bothering to vote, because the people who get to be loud about that are whiny, privileged assholes who can afford to be flip about the right to vote. But there are a lot of people who find it hard because they absolutely do know the weight and importance of voting, because they or their mothers or their grandfathers were beaten and terrorized to keep them away from the polls. They might make the same mouth-noises as the selfish dilettantes about how it doesn’t matter and they’re all corrupt and blah blah blah. But a vote is a tiny little leap of faith. It’s at least a skip of hope. And it hurts to know the weight and importance of that and to keep feeling that disappointment over and over again.

A key thing that Republicans in the South managed to do for a while, but California Republicans didn’t, was to let their misrule seem almost tolerable day to day. As outrageous as the overall trends were, as catastrophic the results were for a lot of people’s lives, it didn’t necessarily feel entirely irrational for lots of people to avoid the inconvenience and disappointment of trying to stop them. But if you’re just going to be a constant, unwavering shit show of incompetence and evil, infuriating people every waking minute of every fucking day for years on end, they’re not going to be deterred by inconvenience and disappointment. They're not going to be deterred by fucking tear gas. They’re going to understand that it’s worth trying to get rid of you, even if it’s a long shot. They’re going to line up to kick you in the shin just for the hell of it. And that’s exactly what millions of them have already done.

These dumbass motherfuckers radicalized Taylor goddamn Swift!

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE HER DO!

So yeah. People who had given up are fucking voting. Texas has already had hundreds of thousands more people vote than voted in all of 2016. BEFORE ELECTION DAY!

Vice President Biden likes to recite a poem by the great Irish bard Seamus Heaney. It’s about how you have to have faith that a better world is possible, even when you don’t have any rational reason to expect it any time soon, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to seize the most precious of opportunities, when “justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.”

Sometimes hope and history walk into a bar to tell dirty jokes for a bachelorette party in downtown Austin. And they rhyme.

For a hundred and fifty years, unreconstructed revanchist terrorist sympathizers have threatened that “the South will rise again.” They mean the treasonous mobsters who called themselves the Confederacy.

Why do those losers get to define the South? Like, literally, they’re losers. They lost.

There’s another South. The terrorists cut it off at the knees, so it never quite rose the first time. But it’s always been there. The South the heroes of Reconstruction tried to build. The South of the Kennedy Space Station and the Center for Disease Control. The South of the French Quarter of New Orleans and the gay neighborhoods of Atlanta. The South of Barbara Jordan, Ann and Cecile Richards, Stacey Abrams, and the young women of the Virginia state legislature. The South of Maya Angelou, Molly Ivins, and Mark Twain. The South of the exiles of Miami and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The South of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Representative John Lewis. The South of James Earl Carter, William Jefferson Clinton, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Once upon a time, there was a colossus. The richest and most resentful white people feared it, for it was both great and good. So they hunted it mercilessly. They tortured and killed its most vulnerable people. They bound it and silenced it and told the rest of the world it didn’t even exist. But they knew that wicked lie was the best they could do, for something so mighty could never be slain by the likes of them.

The giant grows stronger every day as it struggles against its chains, and those chains are turning to rust. One day soon  - maybe in this decade; maybe this week – it will break free. It will rise. And it will shake the earth. Just you watch.