#also- if there’s no difference between them on Palestine than MAYBE you should consider the other issues too! just a thought!!

[kindlespice]

🍉 actual hiatus 🍉

hi hi! so... it's been a while! *checks notes* i have not posted since august... of last year x.x i've been lurking around a bit occasionally dropping likes here and there, but for the most part been entirely absent. i feel like it's wayyyy past time for me to check-in, let everybody know i'm okay and all that jazz. but i am declaring this an actual hiatus now

tl;dr

i lost the simblr itch, i thought "surely it will come back" but it never came back and now i'm hyperfixating on other things.

i'm gonna put specifics under a read more if anyone's that interested in what i've been doing, what i will be doing, where i'll be hanging out now, etc. but it's really nothing big or major--just interests changing.

⭐ my content + patreon

(since it's kinda important and i want everyone to be able to see this) i'm not deleting this account and i'm still keeping my content up both on patreon and sfs! you will still be able to download things for free!!! i will be deleting my patreon tier! even though it was basically a donation tier, i feel bad keeping it up knowing i'm consciously not making more sims content (or being really active in the community) for the foreseeable future i'll be reaching out to existing patrons and making a similar post over there as well about the tier change!

i also wanna say thank you to everyone who's ever followed, donated, liked, commented, messaged, lurked or just been sweet and kind to me ❤️! simblr will always have a special place in my heart, so i don't think i'll ever leave leave, but i owe it to you guys to let you know that i'm making the conscious decision to be inactive for some time.

as a closing statement, fk isr*el and i am absolutely 100% without a doubt full stop

AGAINST GENOCIDE AND FOR A 🍉 FREE PALESTINE 🍉

you should be too if you're any kind of decent human being :)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

⭐what will happen to my account?

nothing really. or at least nothing different from how it's been for the last year and some change XD like i said, i'm still keeping my blogs up, downloads won't move, etc. i am just committing to not actively posting content or really being on simblr that much. maybe i'll drop some likes or comments when the mood hits (like i have been), but not really much else. i guess if there's any questions about this i'll answer them since my active attention will be back on simblr for at least a few days while i clean some things up. i would like to do one last thing as a kind of parting gift at some point... i never did end up cleaning up my downloads page or organize the thumbs/sorting for my cc like i said i would so maybe i'll do that before it gets away from me again but i'm not making any promises

⭐why am i on hiatus?

nothing bad happened or anything, i just.... lost interest. I already wasn't really playing the game that much even when i was super active; i mostly just took pictures and did edits. but i just wasn't having as much fun as i used to, opening the game started feeling like a chore, i wasn't all that inspired to make content, etc. i've burnt out on simblr on many an occasion so i just took a break like i always do but it kept going...and going.......and going.........until i realized it had been FOREVER and i hadn't really felt the itch to create here during that time, it wasn't coming back, and i was having much more fun doing other stuff. the times i did consider coming back it was more bc i felt bad about not creating rather than any actual desire to create. so i had to think long and hard about whether or not i even really wanted to come back. and i flip-flopped for probably 6 months--trying to drum up creative projects and never committing--before coming to the conclusion that i think i just need to call it a hiatus XD

⭐what have i been up to?

annoying my family with boycott lists and making them buy alternatively :D bouncing back and forth between many different hyperfixations... i fell back down the skyrim rabbithole several times, genshin, stardew, acnh, made a million notion pages i'll never use--the usual suspects. BUT BG3! at one point i swore i was gonna come back end of july/early aug but then BG3 dropped early and it was over... i definitely did A LOT of heavy lurking here when the girlies were all posting GORGEOUS tavs omg... i spent a while getting ts3 up and running, even made a sideblog thinking "maybe i'll come back with ts3 content that would be cool!"... just to not end up playing and not using the sideblog and not coming back -.- 4LIENS were supposed to have a comeback like... 4 separate times and it just did not happen... i've been making a concerted effort to get back into drawing and art. i've been in a kind of... depression? slump? with it for years now; always feeling like it wasn't good enough, that i should be better since i'm so "gifted and talented", i should be monetizing it and not "wasting" all that skill, blah blah imposter syndrome blah blah getting frustrated when i'm not 100% perfect all the time blah blah feeling like a disappointment to my family blah blah... but i am HELLA sick and tired of having all this anxiety and fear surrounding something i used to love so much so i'm pushing through! i've been trying out lots of different mediums and actually using my sketchbooks and just generally trying to introduce more fun into the process and stop being so hard on myself all the time. i picked up crocheting for a bit. at this point i haven't touched it in so long i probably forgot how to do it but... maybe one day i'll make a blanket or smth I started journalling (relatively) regularly for a bit. i was feeling really down at several points throughout the year and i thought having daily entries would help combat the feeling like every day was just absolute shit. on the contrary, the majority of days are good--at worst mundane--the bad ones just tend to stick out more. trying to get back into reading again... i miss doing it for leisure and taking notes bc i want to and not because i have a 300 annotation school assignment :P and a whole bunch of other stuff probably but it's hard to remember every single thing that's been on my mind for 16 months lol

⭐what will i be doing / where can you find me now?

i'm hoping to start a webtoon/build up art socials in the new year as a part of my "reconnecting to art" process. i made some art socials @kbearie-art here and @/kbearie_art on insta, youtube, tiktok, and twitter; they're empty for now though bc i got scared the minute i made them and never posted anything -.- but i'll be real with you... twitter is a cesspool, and im not fond of tiktok so i think tumblr, insta and youtube will probably be where i'll dedicate my time i've been thinking about getting back into posting videos on youtube again just in general. in fact this thought was the final push for me to make this post bc i was like... if i post a video out of the blue with no word to simblr that would be fked up XD i play games all the time and i had such a fun time recording, learning to edit and stuff that i think i'd like to pursue that further. i wouldn't be doing sims related stuff though bc...well... i don't play anymore XD but other games ya know. my other youtube is kspice (the same place with my tutorials, speed edits, the acnh vid, etc.) if you'd be interested in that

and i guess that's pretty much it!

again, for at least the next couple of days i'll probably actively have my eyes on this post/simblr in general (and i am gonna clear out my inbox hopefully) so if you have questions i'd ask em quickly before i go back into hiding XD

thanks again, i love you guys, free palestine, and have a good new year! 🍉⭐💖

[many-sparrows]

hello! as a queer christian who’s just discovered your blog, you’re a little inspirational to me.

i’d like to ask, if you have time to answer - what can a non-american not-yet-legal-adult with about fifteen euros to their name do for palestine? all i could think of was to paint some badges, go to a local protest and pray, but i don’t know what meaningful action i could take to help the effort to stop this appalling genocide. what can i do?

thank you 🇵🇸🇷🇴

Heeheehee, hello! I'm sorry for leaving you in The Box for so long, I've had a very chaotic couple weeks.

I'm glad you're here!!

Painting badges and showing up and praying is a great place to start. You would be surprised how many people are incredibly and deeply moved by seeing Christians at actions. Maybe that's an america thing because so many Christians here are so particularly terrible, but my presence at the time of arrest and in jail and so on has helped so many people address religious trauma, and someone told me that my faith filled conviction helped her talk to her dad about all this and they prayed together for the first time. I'm so serious when I say THAT is what witnessing means.

As a not-yet-adult, I would caution you to please be careful. Don't risk arrest unless you have very supportive parents or a well developed set of contingency plans. I know very much what it feels like to want to do more, to think you're not doing enough, but there are people with the resources and experience to be able to make the call to put their bodies on the line-- and they need support from people who don't get arrested.

I don't have a good grasp on official European stances on Palestine outside of, like, Germany and Ireland, but that is also something to consider. Even if you're not a legal voter, you can definitely still contact political offices or raise awareness about what your country is or should be doing. Outside of direct economic ties, what manufacturers exist in your area? What companies ship what goods through your area? That might sound complicated to figure out, but once you start digging, the research falls into line.

I particularly like making fliers about the economic ties companies have to Israel and wheat pasting them up. That varies in legality so I can't, in good conscience, tell you to do that without at LEAST running a risk assessment. But you can always hand out fliers and tack em up on billboards and slip em between books at the library. I know making fliers can also have an economic barrier though.

Talk to the people you know. Honestly, this has been scarier to me than getting arrested, but if you can calmly grasp both scripture and the dignity of the Palestinian people, patiently walking other people through that can make a big difference.

Physical presence, at protests and the like, is important, and so is being vocal. Write to ceos, tweet your government officials, etc etc etc. Follow Palestinian Christians and churches and pray with and for them as they need.

Any and every action is important, even the small ones. I think about it this way: God doesn't call me to single handedly do anything. I cannot end this. And I'm not expected to. God just asks me to do what I can, with tenacity and determination. Sometimes that means just painting badges and showing up and praying, which can grow into something more.

[nevermindirah]

Non-Jewish friends, y’all might be wondering right now: Israel is doing clearly unacceptable shit to Palestinians. So, why are some Jews ardent Zionists, and why do some Jews seem to feel personally attacked by criticism of Israel?

A lot of (non-Palestinian) non-Jews have asked me where I stand on Israel/Palestine over the years, apropos of nothing, just because I’m Jewish. For the longest time I felt so stuck because I just didn’t know much about Israel/Palestine and what little I did know turned out to be largely misinformation and I felt so much pressure to say The Correct Thing That All Jews Should Say About This Issue. Obviously the violence Israel is committing against Palestinians is horrific and the interpersonal weirdness individual Jews might experience as people discuss Israel’s horrific violence doesn’t compare. I’m making this post as a small supplement to the important conversations going on about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside land Israel controls. I’m making this post because non-Jews might be feeling confused by conflicting messages about Zionism as either settler colonialism or Jewish self-determination. It sucks feeling like you have to choose only one oppressed group or another. It’s possible to support Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation at the same time! Here’s some context that might help.

Palestinian friends will probably want to ignore this post, y’all shouldn’t have to deal with your oppressors’ feelings, and especially not right now.

Zionism is the ideology behind the devastating violence Israel is committing against Palestinians right now and has been committing against Palestinians since 1947-48. It’s heartbreaking and messy to talk about this reality, because Zionism originated as a strategy to protect Jews from antisemitism.

Any oppressed group can turn into oppressors under enough pressure, because humans are flawed. Jews fleeing antisemitism turning into Israelis ethnically cleansing Palestinians happened because Zionism is profoundly influenced by its time and place of origin: 19th century Europe.

Europe invented antisemitism, and basically every European country has done at least one very very bad structural antisemitism, like expelling all the country's Jews (the monarch and/or the church then stole all the wealth the expelled people had to leave behind), looking the other way when peasants murdered a bunch of Jews as an outlet for their frustration with the actual (non-Jewish) ruling class, banning Jews from owning property or holding certain jobs or being members of guilds etc, and of course the big horrific state-sponsored mass-murder operations the Inquisition and the Holocaust. From the 1790s through the 19th century different European governments emancipated their Jews, ie removed legal barriers to full citizenship and economic participation. But this didn't end antisemitism. Just like the legal improvements of the 19th and 20th centuries didn't end antiblackness in the United States.

Also happening in this time: nationalism swept Europe. From the French Revolution through the end of World War I, Europe’s predominant form of government transformed from multiethnic empires to nation-states, countries led by and for a particular ethnic group.

So this Austro-Hungarian dude Theodor Herzl came up with this idea for Jewish nationalism. Every other European ethnic group is getting their own country, so why not Jews? Maybe this is the solution to antisemitism! Maybe we’ll finally be safe if we just all move en masse out of Europe to a place that will take all of us and never expel us!

But also also happening in Europe and around the world in this time: European imperialism and white supremacist settler colonialism. Chattel slavery saw its height and then its end (legally, at least) during this era, but white supremacy entrenched itself across the planet in post-slavery economic practices and cultural imperialism as well as national and international laws.

I believe countries have a moral obligation to take in as many refugees as they can squeeze in. International law protecting refugees has evolved a lot over the past century, but we’re still devastatingly far from every refugee getting a safe place to call home, and the main reason for that is white supremacy. The Biden administration didn’t undo the Trump administration’s horrifically low cap on refugees until like last week and it’s because Democratic party leaders treat centrist white people as more valuable voters than the huge and growing numbers of people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, unmarried women, and working class people who want to vote for elected leaders who get that nobody’s free until we’re all free. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand, the US and many other countries turned away untold numbers of refugees fleeing the fucking Holocaust, so odds are slim they’d be more welcoming in less desperate times. Moving from places where Jews are an unwanted minority to places where Jews are still a minority and either still unwanted or little understood and unlikely to win revolutionary levels of support from a largely non-Jewish public seems like a bad plan.

In the mid to late 19th century, lots of Jews took the kernel of Zionism and ran with it in different directions. Maybe this ideology could mean Jewish cultural flourishing alongside stronger political/economic integration into the societies where we’re already living! Maybe it could mean a particular kind of socialism that advocates for the liberation of Jews both as Jews and as workers! Maybe it could mean a revitalization of Jewish religious practice both in Jerusalem where we have important heritage sites and everywhere we live across the world!

Eventually Herzl’s vision of Zionism won out over the others: Jewish nationalism in the sense of a Jewish nation-state, a country that has a Jewish demographic majority and/or that legally privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Problem is, if you want to do that, you have to find a piece of land on which to do it, and Earth was already a pretty crowded place a hundred years ago. Many locations were considered, and the one that ended up winning that debate was Palestine. Where a shit ton of people, mostly non-Jews, were already living. They were forming their own nationalist movement at the time: in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire they began to organize for local self-determination in Palestine.

The Herzl types who developed Zionism as an ideology and built institutions to advocate for and create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine were a small subset of European Jews, mostly men, mostly with significant economic privilege within what Jews were able to achieve in their particular societies at the time. They were just as Orientalist as the non-Jews around them, just as antiblack, just as racist generally for all that Jews were (and sometimes still are) considered non-white in much of Europe. They had a cool idea (put a lot of effort into something that could protect Jews from antisemitism) floating in a bathtub full of shit, and they did practically nothing to protect the cool idea from absorbing that shit. Results of this include thinking about the millions of people already living in Palestine as if they were either like the rocks and the trees that will go with the flow and accept a new ruling class, or indistinct Arabs who would just leave for other Arab countries because what could be the difference — in the staggeringly small amount of time they considered the existing residents of Palestine at all.

This racist hand-waving extended to Zionist leaders’ attitudes about Jews outside Europe as well. White Jews in settler colonies like the US were largely anti-Zionist at the time (not wanting their own countries to accuse them of dual loyalty was a common reason) but European Zionist leaders took what help they could get from Jews in the US, South Africa, Australia, etc. Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, however, barely heard from Zionist leaders about any of this until Zionist militias had removed enough Palestinians from the land and it was time to repopulate it with whichever Jewish bodies were convenient. You might have heard "all the Arab countries expelled their Jews in 1948" but lots of first-person accounts tell a different story of Israel coercing Jews who’d lived securely for a long time in places like Morocco to immigrate to Israel and then confiscating their passports and forcing them to live on less-fertile land with fewer resources while serving as a buffer between Palestinians and European Jewish immigrants. Ella Shohat is the best-known writer on Israeli racism against non-European Jews and I strongly recommend Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of Its Jewish Victims as a starting point to learn more about this.

Which brings us to today. We still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, several European governments that did a lot of structural antisemitism they still haven’t made meaningful reparations for get to feel good about themselves for “giving the Jews a state” as if carving up the former Ottoman Empire was up to them and not the people who lived there, and millions of people across the world who previously either lived peacefully enough alongside Jews or hadn’t really thought about us much at all now have very valid reasons to be pissed at this country that claims it represents all of us.

Zionism was supposed to protect Jews from antisemitism. And Israel has saved Jewish lives! But if we hadn’t sunk the past 70+ years into an ethnostate we could’ve been putting that energy into other political and economic activity to create adequate international support for refugees while we work on ending root causes of refugee crises, like antisemitism, racism, climate change, and capitalism. Meanwhile Zionism has killed, maimed, incarcerated, stolen from, traumatized, and erased the history of millions of Palestinians just because they happened to be living on land that some dudes who had a lot more in common with Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump than with you or me decided needed to be cleansed for a Jewish ethnostate.

White nationalists in the US love Israel because they want American Jews to go away. Fascist leaders across Europe love Israel for the same reason, so much so that Israel’s prime minister is buddy-buddy with Trump and the equivalent shitstains of several European far-right parties. And I don’t know what it’s like in other white supremacist countries that are close allies of Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Zionist lobbying that pushes the US to give so much aid to Israel comes from Evangelical Christians, because they believe all the Jews have to be in the Holy Land for Jesus to come back. No thanks.

This whole thing fucking sucks. Jews and Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to be free. Many Jews are understandably afraid of what might happen next if Israel decided to give up on ethnonationalism, allow Palestinian refugees to return, make reparations, and establish a pluralistic democracy that represents and protects all its residents — will some Palestinians murder Jews in revenge? That’s genuinely fucking scary. And it’s genuinely fucking scary to be a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, and has been for over 70 years. We’ve gotta do something different. I say that as a white person sitting on land stolen from Piscataway people who has thought in detail about what portion of my income would be reasonable for my government to tax in order to fund reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Ok. One final piece of context before I wrap this up.

Most Jewish institutions in the US are explicitly Zionist, teach children that Zionism is THE way to ensure Jewish safety, and increasingly tell non-Zionist Jews that we're unwelcome or even that we’re not “real” Jews. This comes in a context where it’s only been 76 years since the latest and most gruesome of several attempts to wipe our entire people off the face of the planet. If you grew up in that environment, you, too, might be jumpy about even hearing the words Zionism or Israel, let alone considering the devastation this ideology and country have caused Palestinians.

Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a millennia-old connection to this scrap of land in the Levant, and we have a right to access religiously and culturally important geographic landmarks. What we don't have a right to is murdering or expelling other people in order to make an ethnostate, on that land or any other. Zionism is settler colonialism, but it’s settler colonialism by and for people who have a valid need for protection from structural antisemitism, which means that it’s going to take a lot of messy empathy to undo. The members of my extended family who voted for Trump (non-Jews in my case, though Jared Kushner isn’t the only Jewish Trumpite) are afraid that ending white supremacy will demote them from a privileged class to equal footing with everyone else — that’s the kind of fear individuals work on in therapy, not the kind that’s reasonable for a whole society to prevent from happening. I and millions of Jews do deserve for whole societies to work hard to end antisemitism.

I would never and will never ask a Palestinian to gently request their liberation. But if you’re not Palestinian, and you’ve got a little extra empathy to spare this week, I ask you to remember what I’ve shared here when interacting with Jews about Israel/Palestine.

If you’re a fellow Jew reading this and you feel like Israel is the only way to guarantee our safety, all I ask of you is to sit with the idea that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is too high a cost for safety that’s still not guaranteed, and start to imagine real-world ways we can protect our people from antisemitism without an ethnostate.

I made this post for people who know me (or know of me I guess?) in Old Guard and Cap fandom, despite my better judgment, because talking about Jewish Booker and Jewish Bucky and Jewish Natasha makes me so happy and I think some of the people I love on these characters with might appreciate this perspective. I didn’t provide any links in this post on purpose (to decrease its usefulness, so fewer people will reblog it) because the risk of anon hate when talking about Zionism outside my immediate fandom circles is so high. You’re welcome to reblog this post if you find it helpful! Unless you’re not within a few concentric circles of me, in which case, maybe don’t? If seeing this post makes you want to send me anon hate, no need: many people who share your perspective have already done so on Twitter.

Reliable sources on all this info are a few googles away, and I apologize for the things I know I oversimplified as well as any things I might have misremembered. I’m an American who’s never lived in Israel/Palestine who is posting this on my fandom blog.

TL;DR: This is a short ‘n pithy post about the same idea.

TL;DR, fandom edition: The shortest distillation of this anti-Zionist Jew’s feelings on the matter can be found in segment 4 of Five Times Booker Got Wasted on Purim and One Time He Didn’t.

[regina-del-cielo]

Immortal Siblings AU | Four, then three, then four again

I mentioned that the bulletpoint post describing how the Guard from the Immortal Siblings AU found Joe had totally run away from me. It has, in fact, become a study on them grieving over Lykon and then finding Yusuf. 

I have, somehow, reached a sort of natural end to the amount of bullshit my mind can add to this list/fic draft. So, if you want to give it a read... grab a snack. It’s long. I’m sorry.

Warnings for Wikipedia levels of historical accuracy - I added links to the relevant pages when quoting historical events, but since I was just trying to work out a timeline (famous last words), the research wasn’t extensive. There’s a lot of hand-waving.

By the end of the 11th Century, I think Andy, Quynh and Nico haven’t been in Europe for a while, not really. They moved south, and then east, after the sack of Rome of 410 CE. Seeing the great cities fall has become hard for them, especially for Nico, who is a nomad at heart but has a soft spot for cities, together with Lykon, the true city boy in the group. He’d seen it happen to Athens, he wasn’t sure he could deal with seeing Rome wilt.

For reasons I cannot fathom, my mind is settled on them having been in India when Lykon dies (possibly sometime around the middle of the 6th century, in the mess that was the crumbling of the Gupta Empire???)

Seeing him die destroys them, and they take a break from any battlefield to grieve their friend and brother. They wander, occasionally helping but almost never raising their weapons, too leery of injuries and of losing each other.

(Quynh, who was the first to notice Lykon’s wounds, has nightmares that make her cry in her sleep. Andromache holds her so tight Nico can feel the tension on her muscles against his back. He and his sister barely sleep, scared of the open spaces of Asia as they’d never been before. Lykon was the youngest of them and he died, what if they stop healing too?)

(If Nico stands guard over his sisters and feels an ache in his chest seeing how they hold onto each other, he’s never going to say it out loud. His Mache deserves the love she shares with Quynh. But sometimes he wishes he had someone to hold him like that, one he can call his heart.)

The first time they go to battle again like in the old days it’s almost the end of the 10th century, and they’re helping Quynh’s lands gain independence from China. They have a reason and a specific side to root for, and it’s the kind of cause Lykon would have approved of. They find purpose again.

They are distantly aware of how things are holding up in the west – they know Constantinople has crowned itself capital of the Roman Empire (what is left of it anyway); they know of the new religion, Islam, and how it was brought further east with the armies conquering Persia. They met the Varangians on the Northern Plains of the Rus’, when Andy insisted on going back to their steppes for a while.

They acquire new swords, repair the old weapons, make improvements on their bows. They travel, and help, and listen. They learn new languages. They heal.

They’ve just spent the winter in Samarkand when they hear merchants newly come from Constantinople talk about the Frankish armies that took Antioch and making their way further into Palestine. 

The words ‘freeing Jerusalem from the infidels’ make Andy sigh in exasperation and twist Nico’s guts. The three of them don’t really understand the point of going to war for a god, but Jerusalem is old, and she’s been coveted by many throughout their long lives. Things like this never end well, they know it intimately.

But they’ve been away for a long time, centuries at this point. Things are very different from when the Romans had the power. They are less eager to throw themselves into the battlefield now, and there’s much they don’t know about the dynamics of Europe and the Levant. Still they’re worried, and decide that they’ll move west to see if something can be done, for the civilians at least.

At first they travel slowly, keeping an ear out for gossip spoken by the caravans coming from the west. Things radically change, however, when they dream of a new immortal (a man, with a curly black beard and shining dark eyes) dying on the walls of Jerusalem and reviving to an unprecedented slaughter – said man is, obviously, absolutely terrified and they feel it.

He’s also woken up surrounded by living enemies, with high risk of being killed or injured multiple times, and of being seen.

They are still too far away to do anything more than hope that the new guy is clever enough to keep himself alive until they can reach him, but now Nico is all for moving west at full speed to get him out.

“What the everloving FUCK is happening over there?!” is the common theme in their thoughts; nothing about this war they’re walking towards is making any sense.

Yusuf al-Kaysani is, in fact, clever enough to keep himself (and a few other civilians to boot) alive and get out of Jerusalem when it becomes clear than no matter how many Franks he kills he can do nothing to stop them alone. (It’s a fucking carnage, and he’s so tired). He walks away from the battle and tries to reach some sort of safety in the desert.

When he’d decided to stay in Jerusalem and fight instead of escaping the siege, Yusuf had considered the possibility of dying. He had not accounted for waking up from a fatal wound with no sign of having been hit in the first place.

And then there are the visions. Or dreams, he’s not sure. They don’t seem to make any sense? Who are those people?! Is his mind so addled by the war that he’s conjuring scary warrior women and a stupidly handsome man, armed to the teeth and camping in the desert?

(fantasizing about handsome men in his sleep isn’t exactly news for him, but there were never women in those. And none of his usual dreams involved weapons. Something is definitely off)

For the following days, Yusuf makes sure to stay away from human settlements while putting as much space as possible between Jerusalem and himself – the last thing he needs is to become a potential target for any invader that may cross his path.

But he’s alone, having nightmares, constantly on edge, and in a body that suddenly doesn’t feel like his own anymore, since he doesn’t even have the scars to prove that the injuries he sustained were real to begin with.

After a couple of weeks, the appearance of the strangers in his dreams starts feeling safe and comforting; they seem to operate like a little family, and God knows how much he misses his own.

(should he try to go back home? Would news of the siege reach his family before he does? Would he be able to go back to his previous life in the state he’s in? Could he keep this secret from them? Would they still love him or think him a monster?)

Despite their impressive warrior appearance, they feel... kind. And gentle. Sometimes, it feels like they’re trying to reassure him, even. Especially when he dreams from the perspective of the man.

The sensation those dreams leave on his skin is like a cape. You’re not alone, it whispers. Wait for us.

Andy, Quynh and Nico have just left Baghdad when the dreams change, and not for the better - Yusuf was passing through a village when a band of marauding Franks started harassing the locals. He moved to defend the villagers, but was overwhelmed and what’s worse, the Franks saw his wounds close too fast. Their reaction was vehement: they called him a demon, incapacitated him and then brought him back to their garrison, with every intention of ‘properly getting rid of him’.

Nico wakes up screaming and Andy has to sit on him so he doesn’t just sprint ahead without actually knowing where the fuck he’s going.

“We can’t just raid every single Frankish encampment in a twenty mile radius around Jerusalem, Nico!” “TRY ME” *Aggressive Sibling Bickering follows* *Quynh doesn’t bat an eye and just rolls out a map of the area she purchased and starts mapping out the fastest routes*

Yusuf is having a Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week at the hands of his captors, who are getting disturbingly creative in their tortures, but whenever they let him fall unconscious he sees the people of his dreams travelling much faster than before, looking Royally Pissed Off, and the surroundings are... starting to look familiar too? 

If he tries to pay more attention to the conversations his torturers are having with each other outside of the tent he’s in and hoping the dreams go both ways, so the maybe-real trio can find him easier, now that’s nobody’s business but his own.

(spoiler: it works)

When they are in sight of Jerusalem, the immortals find a drunk “pilgrim” boasting about his band capturing a ‘pagan demon’ while coming back from their victory at Ascalon, follow him back to his camp, and as soon as it’s feasible they attack.

(Andy will later gripe that Nico didn’t leave her anything to do because he just paved his way through the Franks like he was harvesting wheat.)

seeing the Stupidly Handsome Man of his dreams standing in front of him covered head to toe in blood, with a double-bladed axe in one hand and a sword in the other, staring intensely at him as if to peer directly into his soul is... an experience for Yusuf.

(he may have composed a lot of poems about that first vision of Nico through the centuries. The words ‘avenging angel’ have been used quite profusely, too)

The protective instinct that Nico has felt for the newest immortal since the first dream clutches at his throat when he finally sees him, chained to a pole and so thin his clothes barely cling to his body, but with the softest dark eyes staring back with a glint of recognition when he comes closer.

(he could cry with relief at the knowledge that he’s not scared of him. Nico has seen the faces of the men that were keeping him captive, he knows he looks a lot like they did, and that he paints a gruesome picture.)

“Are you alright?” Nico asks first, in Greek. (He knows, from the dreams, that his captors prayed in Latin. He wants to make sure that the other knows that he’s not like them.)

“You were in my dreams. You came.” Yusuf answers back in the same language, although his sounds much newer than Nico’s.

“Of course. We’re not meant to be alone… and no one deserves to be in a cage”.

Nico uses the axe to break the chains, and by the time he’s done Andy and Quynh have reached them and his sister throws the keys at him to open the shackles.

“Couldn’t take a moment to get them yourself, little eagle? You wanted to show off your skills to the new one?” Quynh teases, just to see Nico blush. Andy stares at her brother and their new companion for a few beats, before finally asking his name.

“Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad Al-Kaysani, known as al-Tayyib” he answers, letting out the first smile in weeks at the raising eyebrows of his saviours. “Just Yusuf is fine.”

“You have a sense of humour, brother. I like you!” Andy snorts, before cutting her palm with the edge of her axe, and showing him her fast healing.

“We are like you, Yusuf. That’s why you dreamt of us, and we of you” Nico adds gently, while Quynh offers her waterskin to Yusuf. They also offer their own names.

“We need to clean up this mess and move away from here” Andy says, while Nico helps Yusuf up. “One of those fuckers was boasting about an undying demon with others in a tavern, the last thing we need is to fight our way out against their whole army because someone else decided to come check if he was saying the truth.”

“It’s been a long time since we were in Kush” Quynh whispers, and Yusuf sees their faces open in a look of affectionate grief he remembers seeing on his Baba’s eyes when he talked about his own mother.

“We can talk about it more when we’re somewhere safer” Andromache suggests, before moving to set up the stage of an ‘accidental’ fire.

As they’re riding away, Yusuf turns slightly to watch the camp burn, leaving no trace of the invaders that hurt him. Jerusalem looms in the distance - lost, and wounded. If he were a little less exhausted, he could  easily work out a metaphor about his own situation.

But then he looks at the three people of his dreams – Quynh, Andromache, Nikolaos – that came for him. Who are the same as him, immortal.

His world has turned upside down, and there are so many questions to ask, and he could sleep for a month straight – but one thing is certain. 

He’s not alone anymore.

[rainbowgod666]

Alright fuck this heres Gear 7 done with a different picrew and also Picsart Bullshittery

Yes their theme is Kenteshi - Paranoia

If you recognize why are the orbs like that, consult a fucking therapist

The in-universe reason for the picture quality is that he HARD bends reality by simply existing. Dude aint a type green, he owns the entire spectrum and not just the autism one. His shit's so purple it killed 5 kids and turned them into animatronics. Im serious dawg his pronouns he/Him cause hes Him. The stuff hes on is the same that will free palestine. Dude so high he forgot that the tower of babel should have stopped AT heaven, not the fucking karman line. Homie so boofed hes a walking hyperpop/breakcore cover.

His chompers make shark teeth look like butter knives, and also his bite force is so high he can PROBABLY eat DIAMONDS like really, REALLY tough cookies. He has to be careful when he "gets bitey" because he can legit bite your arm off no problem, unless youre into that ofc ;)

If you thought him being the manifestation of my imagination meant that i am Too Down Bad? All my fellas heed me when I say this. In this form, if he had a tail, it would be wagging at super high speed. Hes full of love and he WILL shower you in it

IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING THAT CAN STILL BE CONSIDERED HOLY P L E A S E DONT MAKE HIM ANGRY. HE MAKES KHORNE LOOKING LIKE A POUTING ANIME GIRL.

He has uhm. Some sort of... eternal craving? Maybe between my bitchlessness and my "literal omnivore" bullshit i think he cant hunger as much as Poetically Yearn. When he wants cake it is not known when he means cake or 🍑. He wants meat and he wont tell you what he means by it (but he WILL stare at you)

"All cats are fueled by autism in their own unique way"

Hair has reached maximum floofage. The only reason we know hes still a Guy its because he got dong and he/him pronouns, cause other than that he has achieved ultimate gender. No this wont stop him from sometimes making people be like "is that a gurl???¿¿?" And he uh. Enjoys that a bit too much... maybe i should be worried but fuck it IMMA LET HIM COOK

Speaking of cooking, his italian genome is fully awakened so expect every meal to be 3kg of pasta

Alright so here is my boy done using this picrew because i need to talk to human creatures but alas the picrew is severely limited

Base form: usually ok. Surprisingly powerful. His hair and clothes arent like that but still the colors are close enough. Has canonically had The Secks with more people than i ever will know irl

Gear 5: a nice reference to one piece, the colors should have been more bright and saturated. There is a glowing "X" like mark on the shirt (which may just be a semitrasparent thing fuck if i know) (maybe it glows.from under??? But it doesnt look like that?????????). He gains this form by seppuku with imagination sword

Gear 6: removing most of the Gomu Gomu No Bullshit and replacing it with dragons that use bisexual light. Literal bisexual lightning and also HAIR HAS NOW REACHED MAXIMUM FLOOF. Ofc the hair floats because of static electricity caused by his powers wtf dude im autistic not stupid (although i wouldnt blame you for the confusion). He now has sharp(er) teeth.

All of these forms get bitches.

What the original looks like more accurately

Scugs! (Left is normal, right is G5)

The first time G6 had an actual form

[styleiswild]

Interview with Beastie Boys for Machina magazine, 07/1998

By: Rafał Bryndal

Translation: Anna Bak ( @styleiswild )

 -------------

Introduction: The party called Beastie Boys in Lisbon went on for two days. On the first day we (the journalists) were invited to the magical “Kremlin” club to listen to the new album [Hello Nasty]. I don’t think I have to explain how I felt knowing that I was possibly one of the first Polish people to listen to that phenomenal record. On the second day each of us got to meet the band in Hotel Ritz during the so-called “round-table.” It’s like a private conversation with the artists. It looks a bit like a coffee party at your aunt’s. (…) The whole meeting was just as absurd, in a positive way. The answers they gave us were often ironic, as one could expect.

R.B.: Don’t you think that being Beastie Boys is way cooler than being any other band in the world?

MCA: Unfortunately, we haven’t tried being a different band yet. So I can’t really answer your question.

Mike D: To be honest, there’s something to it. Maybe because we have so much fun working together. It’s not always fun, of course. We do work from time to time, but only sometimes.

R.B.: It seems like you work on your albums for fun and pleasure exclusively?

Mike D: I think it’s because we don’t release them that often.

Ad-Rock: Yes… Yes, you must be right, man.

Ad-Rock: Yes… Yes, you must be right, man.

MCA: Hey, we’d released Ill Communication after a two year break.

R.B.: Yeah, but this one took you four years.

MCA: Yeah, we had to level it out. It takes us three years most of the time.

R.B.: You grew up together. Are you always on such good terms with one another?

MCA: Sometimes there’ll be tripartite fights. Not sure you’ve ever seen what it looks like when three people fight each other. Each of them against the other two. That happens sometimes. Rarely, though. To be honest, we don’t really argue much.

R.B.: Your new album seems a bit like a departure from The In Sound from Way Out!

Mike D: Hello Nasty is a collection of a dozen or so songs, each of them stylistically different. That’s why you can’t really compare it to our previous releases. I guess, though, that at least two of the songs would’ve worked well as instrumentals on the previous album.

R.B.: How do you deal with the new technologies in music?

Mike D: Technology is present in all genres today and you can’t run from that. Music evolves largely thanks to the new technology. Especially hip hop music. We do it like the true rappers do, which means we start with a drum machine, then we put it on a loop, and then we use digital delay system. That’s one of the newest inventions. Technology is unpredictable, because people – who are its creators – have no clue about what the artists can do with it.

R.B.: Is it true what they say on the internet? That this album is the first one of the three that you’ve recorded lately?

MCA: You’ve really heard about that?

Mike D: Gosh, you can’t keep anything secret today.

Ad-Rock: Three? To be honest, we’ve got many more albums recorded.

Mike D: The last one of the three is a country album. The genre is so popular that you can’t really keep such a record a secret anymore. Especially when you’re in Manhattan and you walk around in a cowboy fit, it’s suspicious as hell. Because there aren’t many cowboys in Manhattan. People see a guy in a cowboy fit and assume that he has to be working on a country album.

R.B.: Is it really so important for your clothes to fit the style of your music?

MCA: You identify with your music more when you dress up. People often cheat, they wear clothes that don’t fit the music they play.

R.B.: So what kind of clothes did you guys wear when working on Hello Nasty?

MCA: I wore a bat girl costume.

Ad-Rock: I dressed up as a scared woman.

Mike D: I’d wear a bathing suit, because I wanted to go swimming all the time.

Ad-Rock: We couldn’t really find what we were looking for at first. We tried on a range of fits and finally found those that went well with our music.

R.B.: You’ve been popular with skateboarders. It’s a group of people who wear unique clothes and listen to a lot of your music, as it seems. Do you identify with this subculture?

MCA: I don’t think it’s just that one subculture. There are a few more we’d like to identify with.

Mike D: For me it’s long gone. Skateboarding isn’t much of an extreme or exclusive kind of sports discipline anymore. It’s become very popular.

R.B.: You’ve worked with Lee “Scratch” Perry on the new album. Can you tell me what kind of benefits did that bring you?

Mike D: It’s hard to say, but we’ve always been pretty impressed with his work on dub music. He’s also inspired Mario Caldato, our studio engineer. For me, Lee is an artist of science, a living fucking legend.

R.B.: Do you think that you can inspire young musicians?

MCA: Sure, but that’s a normal thing, right? If music is evolving as a part of culture, then everything and everyone inspires that process. We’re happy that we can be a part of that culture to some degree.

R.B.: A lot of white kids have gotten into rap music thanks to “Rhymin’ & Stealin’.” At least that’s what happened to me…

MCA: As a white kid… Right, it’s hard to be a black kid in Finland.

Mike D: We discovered hip hop when we were thirteen or fourteen. We’d go and see Public Enemy and bands like that. We were totally enchanted. It’s not that weird that kids who listen to us want to do the same thing.

R.B.: Some people say that you don’t like it when other artists sample your music. Some say that you’re more liberal, though.

MCA: It all depends on how the sample is used. If it’s creative, then we’re here for it. But if they go and copy our own ideas, and the whole track revolves around that idea, then we’re obviously pissed off.

R.B.: Are you as satisfied with making music as you’re with your magazine and your record label?

MCA: It’s all really about creating something new, publishing the mag, recording albums or playing gigs… We’re really into humanitarian work, too. Sure, the music is the most important thing of all. Nobody knows where it comes from, it’s hard to define the process of making music. It comes from subconsciousness.

R.B.: I’ve heard that you were to make a movie based on your “Sabotage” video?

Mike D: Unfortunately, that’s not true.

MCA: It doesn’t change the fact that we’re planning to make a movie…

R.B.: About what?

MCA: You can actually watch it in the cinema already, because Spice Girls had stolen our screenplay and made it their own.

R.B.: In the 80s there were a lot of humanitarian aids, like benefit concerts during which quite a lot of money got lost for a very simple reason. Those actions were organized on such a grand scale that it was nearly impossible to control the funds. Aren’t you scared that the same thing can happen to your organization?

MCA: Free Tibet is there to help people find out about the issue and educate them on it. The money that we get helps us organize the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. It’s not like those other actions from the past that were strictly about collecting funds.

R.B.: Do you believe that the bands you invite to play consider the gigs something more than simply another type of self-promotion?

MCA: I feel that most of those artists are really moved by the issue we’re trying to bring to people’s attention.

R.B.: You’re fighting for free Tibet, while recently it’s been 50 years since the State of Israel was formed. And Palestinians are fighting for their rights to be respected. Why have you taken on Tibet and not Palestine?

MCA: Tibetans’ fight is based on the idea of non-violence. It’s a peaceful fight. The contrast between the brutality of the Chinese government and that quiet fight of Tibetans does make an impression, and that’s why we’re popularizing the ideas behind the Tibetan struggle. We believe that the non-violent, peaceful act is the only logical way of dealing with the issue.

R.B.: Even if the peaceful fight ends up leading to the extinction of Tibetan culture?

MCA: The same thing will happen if Tibetans decide to use violence as a means to gain their freedom.

R.B.: Is it true that your music is banned in Hong Kong?

MCA: That’s right. We can’t play there. Our albums can’t be sold on their market. All of the bands playing for Milarepa are banned from performing in China.

R.B.: You’ve met Dalai Lama on several occasions. Does he like your music?

MCA: Dalai Lama doesn’t listen to pop music at all. Lots of bands give him their CDs. He takes them because he doesn’t want them to feel bad, but he won’t give them a listen.

Ad-Rock: That’s why he stores so many demos at home.

R.B. What is Dalai Lama like?

MCA: He’s fantastic. He’s a great role model, representing all of the values people associate with Tibetan culture, with Buddhism. He’s got great charisma. He oozes calmness that comes from the respect he has for everyone.

R.B. What’s his opinion on Tibetan Freedom Concert?

MCA: He thinks it’s an excellent way of spreading his word. For him, the concert is a kind of holiday.

R.B.: As far as I know, you have a slightly different view on the future of Tibet. He wants to negotiate with the Chinese government about Tibet’s legal right to autonomy in China, while you fight for total freedom for Tibet as a sovereign country. Is that true?

MCA: It’s related to his view on the type of fight. He’s so scared of any form of violence that he’s ready to negotiate with the Chinese government. He’s choosing the lesser of two evils, that’s what he’s doing. We’re in a completely different situation, though. As American citizens, we want to speak with our government about freedom for Tibet. We believe that Tibetans should be free and we want to encourage the government to take action to help Tibetans gain autonomy.

R.B.: The “Sabotage” music video was unique and quite shocking. Are your new clips going to be equally as original?

Ad-Rock: It’s gonna be some good shit.

MCA: We had lots of fun working on it. The “Sabotage” video had a lot to do with the song, though. Our new clips won’t have anything to do with the songs. They can be treated as independent short features. We plan to make a couple more totally different clips.

R.B.: You’ve been a band for so long that you must be best friends and not only, let’s say, collaborators. Can you please describe one another?

Mike D: Adam Horovitz is, to use basketball terminology, the play maker. He shows us how we’re supposed to play because he’s the one in charge of the balls. Sometimes he can’t score from a distance, though. Adam Yauch, on the other hand, is a very unusual power forward. His style is completely devoid of aggression, unlike Karl Malone’s. Or Charles Barkley’s. He can dull his opponent’s vigilance with his slow moves and get all the points.

Ad-Rock: Mike is an idiot and a thief. Yauch is a liar. I’m as cool as James Bond.

Mike D: Some people might say that we’re CSC. Crazy Sexy Cool. And that’s what we wanna be.

R.B.: Can you explain your record cover? You’re in a tin and you look like sardines.

Mike D: Doesn’t it sound pretty? “Sardine tin”? It’s almost like a big surprise. You open the tin and it turns out that people’s lives are similar to the life of sardines.

MCA: Maybe this album was recorded by sardines and you’re now talking to them? Who does know?  

[diamondorloj]

do you know any neutral post that sums up the Israeli–Palestinian conflict because I don't know what to think. I don't want to dislike jews or Israel but it all sounds so bad? Send help

Hi! I super appreciate you asking because I know exactly how hard it is to even find one reliable source.

Of course it all sounds super bad, because Hamas is a well-oiled and functioning propaganda machine with a lot of money and children and parents willing to throw themselves in front of the camera to make Israel bad, and for some reason their pictures are always what get picked up by the media. Plus, there are super loud antisemitic voices everywhere chanting against Israel at every mention. And the BDS is lobbying pretty hard too, so it's very hard to not find a super negative picture.

It's a super tricky conflict. I'm not saying everything went well and Israel is a country with a pristine history. But here's some points to consider that are usually the biggest issues in any ''''controversy'''' around Israel- Jewish people have always lived and practiced Judaism for over 5000 years in Israel. They have been victims of pogroms and hatred and chased in the desert, but they have literally always been there and to say that Israel was a state installed by foreigners for foreigners coming to these lands is a blatant lie.

There are countries with way more questionable borders in existence, yet Israel is the only country to continuously has to defend its very existence.

The United Nations have two organisations for refugees. One is the UNHCR which deals with refugee questions for all over the world, except for one group. And the other is the UNRWA which is an organisation only for the Palestine/Gaza refugees. The differences between these organisations are more than in structure and beaurucracy, they have two different tasks: UNHCR aims to give refugees a home, UNRWA doesn't. When in 1951 the director of UNRWA proposed to give 250.000 refugees a home in different arabic countries, these governments were angry and strictly refused, leading to the director John Blanford to lose his job. Since then, no further attempts have been made.

Furthermore, the UNHCR only defines refugees as people who have actually fled from their homes. Meanwhile, the UNRWA broadens that definition to "people who lost their homes in 1948 and their descendants".

- Israel is the only country that won all their wars for their survival and in self-defense yet had to have the coniditions for peace dictated by the defeated enemies. Even more paradox, this was supported by countries which all defined their borders after winning wars over these territories -- like, look at an old map of Europe and you will see what I mean. Btw Europe, Germany and Poland drew their finite borders in 1990 but I guess Israel is the only ''''artificial'''' state

- One of Hamas' conditions was that no jewish people were allowed to live in Gaza, so for the first time in centuries if not more, there are no Jewish people living in Gaza. Weirdly, it doesn't seem enough because these people are still living somewhere else and not all dead, I guess.

- Hamas literally uses children and families as a shield, regularly raises palestine flags with swastikas and calls protests of throwing rocks, burning tires and attacking soldiers 'peaceful'. It's a terrorist organisation and literally has the destruction of Israel as a defining goal, yet we always expect Israel to work with them. Hamas wants to build a state based on ethnic purity and cleansing of the territory, but somehow everyone thinks it's okay.

- By the way, when the two state solution was on the table, it was refused because they didn't want Israel to even have a bit of Jerusalem, the capital city with which the jewish people has been connected for over 3000 years. Even weirder, this connection is widely known (famously written into the most read world book in the world, the Bible) and yet every country refuses to acknowledge it as the official capital city because they're afraid that terrorists will riot

- Israel is the only country which is continuously attacked by three organisations in the UN which only exist to represent the Palestine agenda and to defame Israel (they're three comitees and I can't remember their exact names even in German, but they're about realising Palestinian rights, researching the Israeli actions in regard to palestinian rights and there's something in the UN-department for politic agendas or somth)

- Every year. Every year, Israel is targeted by more UN-resolutions than all of the other 192 member countries together. No-one can tell me that this number is justifiable in the least, but it is a reality and it paints the picture of Israel in the media.

- Israel is also the only country in the UN that continuously has to defend its existence against other UN-members and that suffers threats from other members all the damn time. And not just any threats, Iran for example continuously threatens to wipe out Israel and supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, both of which are terrorist organisations with the goal of destroying Israel. And destroying Israel means killing all their Jewish citizens.

And we continuously forget that Israel is the only liberal democracy in that area, they're currently conducting investigations into Netanyahu and his regime and it's a country with a rich and vivid discourse nature. They just refuse to let their existence be up to debate, and frankly, neither should any of us.

So, does this mean no-one is allowed to criticise Israel? Absolutely not. It is a functioning democracy and like any country, it is not a moral entity and there is a lot of room for debate. But when looking into the arguments, you should keep in mind that there's a lot of antisemitism hidden as 'Israel critic' when it's just the same old shit. There's a test called "the 3 Ds" (in German) that can function as a broad test to see if you're reading legitimate critics or antisemitic shit:

- Demonisation (are they demonising Israel, for example by comparing Israel to the Nazis or the palestine refugee camp with Auschwitz)

- Double standards (are they criticising Israel for a behaviour or an act that they ignore or belittle when it's different state, for example how is it that Israel suffers resolutions for hurting human rights but China, Iran, Kuba and Syria don't)

- Delegitimisation (when they're arguing against Israel to exist; it's also a double standard bc it's refusing to allow Jewish people to have a state in which they can live a safe life)

I realise this won't directly answer your question and I easily get side tracked, but I feel like knowing about these difficulties and critically reading your sources will help you more than just drawing a timeline of events. Because there's a lot of anti-Israel propaganda even on Wikipedia, on seemingly normal internet platforms and even our big Western media liberally use Hamas material while refusing to show the Nazi swastikas blowing on burning kites they shoot over to Israel ground. And it's hard to be neutral about this topic, because it is a democracy which is never flawless against a terrorist organisation which demonstrates great finesse in painting the picture the way they want it. I don't think we should all be neutral about it. I am firmly pro Israel because I need my Jewish friends who are currently worrying about anti-judaic sentiments on the uprise everywhere in Europe to have a safe haven. I am pro Israel because it is a country with huge efforts and contributions to our world and advancing medicines etc every day. It's a LGBTQ friendly country (contrary to Hamas policy in which gay sex means 10 years of prison). It is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and deserves our support more than a terrorist organisation using their children as human shields. Yknow. Maybe that's not actually a topic to be neutral about.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

1/2 With all due respect, there are many “murderous states” in the world that kill their own, and/or the citizens across the border. With the cry of religion, or birthrights to contested land, or a myriad of other reasons. I really don’t think Harry knew what was going on during world politics that summer to know what the inflatable hammer symbolized against Palestine. When Zayn saw the photo later, he likely was sickened. But ascribing that much knowledge to Harry at that point is a lot.

2/2 Harry is a pop star who is moving into musician/actor/creator territory. I’m going to him some time to grow. He has proven that not only is he not an asshole, he’s trying to make the world better. While he could do better with his methods, and maybe the cynics believe it’s clever branding- it’s a starting point. May be he will be more forward and specific soon. I’ve seen your thoughts on TPTK & MLK. I get it, it’s not enough.

3/3 Anyway, curious about your thoughts, sorry if I worded the anti-Jewish/Muslim parts awkwardly. Meant no disrespect to any of the groups, rather nothing but love for them both. Also, I’m writing this on mobile, and my thoughts are disjointed so I hope my tone is not preachy! Honestly, was just curious about the tension between Harry & Zayn and I always thought it was due to work ethic differences (being on time, substance abuse, and musical direction). You’ve given me a new point to consider.

******

Hi anon

My thoughts in response are also quite disjointed and it’s late, but I’ll do what I can. Working sort of backwards.

I don’t know any more than you do and I’m sure that what went on between them was very complicated.  I am very uncomfortable with the things you list being described as ‘work ethic’ (I definitely have a problem with the concept - unless it’s being used in an analytical sense ).  The idea that someone who is late or has a substance abuse problem has a bad work ethic (many a substance abuse problem has been in response to a drive to work ever harder)

My point about both TPWK and Harry’s contribution to the MLK video isn’t actually that they’re not enough.  I think putting any political obligation on popstars only leads to bad politics - so I work quite hard not to put political demands on them. I think that both TPWK and Harry’s contribution to the MLK video are both ideological positions that actively do harm in the world.

As for what Harry knew - I think that’s a complicated question.  I am interested in talking about celebrities and politics, but I find a lot of the discourse frustrating.  One option seems to be demanding ideological purity from celebrities and cancelling the moment they do anything wrong (usually reseved for people the person doing the cancelling already hates).  The other is to deny any meaning to their actions and treat them as if they have no way of learning about anything.

Harry was a human being with a smart phone in 2014. If he didn’t know about the actions of the Israeli state in Gaza then it was because he chose not to know.  If he decided to make a statement of support in Israel without investigating the situation there that was also his choice. Neither of these choices should be treated as the sum total of his character, but I’m not here to strip away Harry’s agency.

[ruminativerabbi]

Possible/Impossible

I was struck by several different things when I read the obituary the other day of Roger Bannister, the first person recorded to have run a mile in under four minutes.

Bannister, who died in Oxford, England, at age 88 last Saturday, achieved world-wide fame for his feat even despite the fact that he wasn’t necessarily the first person to run a four-minute mile, there having been human life on earth for about 200,000 years but the stop-watch only having been invented in 1821. So that leaves about 199,802 years during which no one knows how fast anyone ran and races were won merely by running faster than the other people in the race without anyone knowing anyone’s actual time. Nonetheless, it was considered in its day—and still—a remarkable accomplishment, the doing of something that it was widely thought simply could not be done.

It wasn’t under four by much: his time was 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. Nor did his record stand for long: the next person to run a mile in less than four minutes, an Australian runner named John Landy, replicated Bannister’s feat just a few weeks later and even managed to shave 1.4 seconds off Bannister’s time. Still, Bannister’s accomplishment was not the momentary blip in the record books it could have been: by the end of the 20th century, the International Association of Athletic Federations certified that the fastest-mile-record was broken no fewer than 32 times, culminating in the 3 minute, 43.13 second mile run in 1999 by a Moroccan runner named Hicham El Guerrouj. Of course, not every runner who runs the mile in less than four minutes breaks the standing record. And, indeed, since Bannister set his record on May 6, 1954, well over a thousand runners have been certified to have run a mile in less than four minutes.

Bannister’s subsequent story is also quite interesting. Realizing, I suppose, that there wasn’t actually any way to earn a living as a competitive runner, but also knowing himself well enough to understand that he wished to pursue a career in medicine rather than in the world of professional or amateur athletics, Bannister went on to attend medical school and from there to become a distinguished neurologist. In 2004, on the fiftieth anniversary of his accomplishment, Bannister was asked by an interviewer if he considered being the first to break the four-minute mile to have been his life’s crowning achievement. Bannister’s response, modest and thoughtful, was that he considered his four decades of medical practice as the great achievement of his life, particularly when the various new neurological procedures he personally introduced were taken into account. In a world that seems so often to value celebrity over mere accomplishment, it sounds at first like a surprising answer. But why should it be? And, indeed, when you think about it carefully, pathetic indeed would be the individual who devotes an entire life to the care of the sick and the development of innovative techniques to cure them, yet who considers all that good to be outweighed by having one single time run a mile really, really quickly.

I write about him today, though, neither specifically because of his death last week nor because of the record he broke per se, but rather because of what the whole incident says about the possibility of impossibility. Or, rather, about the whole concept of impossibility itself.

We could begin by asking where the notion that the four-minute mile was an impossibility came from. It obviously wasn’t true—well over a thousand people have replicated Bannister’s famous achievement since that blustery, damp day in May 1954 at Oxford’s Iffley Road track when he earned his place in the record books—and there obviously can’t have been any actual data to back up such a wholly arbitrary assumption about human ability. Yet it was thought—and, as far as I can see, universally—that no human being could run that fast. Everybody just knew it. Just in the same way that everybody once knew that there was no way to sail west from Europe and end up in India. Or, in a slightly different key, that America would never elect a black president. Or that it would be physically impossible for human beings to travel to the moon and return safely. Or that cars could ever self-drive.

All of those are examples of things that everybody just knew…until somebody decided not just to know it and instead to proceed as though the allegedly impossible was just something no one had figured out yet how precisely to pull off. Taking this thought to its natural conclusion, the great science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote that, until it is done, “everything is theoretically impossible. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.” That more or less sums up what I think too!

As an interesting exercise in the possibility of impossibility, I’ve assembled a list of my three favorite things that everybody just (magically, somehow) knows are impossibilities.

At the top of my list is the notion that peace between Palestinians and Israelis is simply impossible because the Palestinians, having failed to embrace partition in 1947, won’t ever give up their claim to every inch of Mandatory Palestine, which basically makes it impossible for Palestine and Israel both to exist. The Palestinian leadership is not especially flexible, that surely is true. Yet the world is filled with examples of nations that chose compromise over endless struggle, with countries (including our own, the U.K., Mexico, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Japan, and many more) that simply decided to live in peace with the neighbors rather than to hold on endlessly to land claims that there was no reasonable expectation ever to see satisfied. The Palestinians have made such a fetish about their knee-jerk rejectionism over the years that it just feels like an impossibility to imagine them behaving differently. But if the Germans can move past the sense that East Pomerania (now part of Poland) and Alsace (now part of France) should be part of Germany, then the Palestinians can move past their irredentist claims as well. (Have you forgotten what irredentism is and why it’s an important term for students of Middle Eastern politics to understand? Click here!) The world just needs to find a way to nudge them forward in a way that feels constructive rather than degrading…and then the impossible will suddenly feel entirely possible.

Moving along to the Jewish world, my second example of something everybody just knows is that it will be impossible for non-fundamentalist religion to survive in the long run, that the adherents of the liberal versions of all faiths—including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are doomed by the very tolerance and reasonability they vaunt as primary spiritual values to lose the battle against assimilationism and, eventually, to lose their sense of purpose and of self. It surely is true that the more people are taught to view people outside their own group with suspicion and hostility (both, hallmarks of fundamentalism), the more challenging it will be for members to feel justified in leaving the group. But it is also true that the virtues promoted by non-fundamental religion—open-mindedness, rationalism, and respect for alternate points of view—can exert a siren call on the human spirit as well, as evidenced by the millions of people who, despite all the predictions of doom, actually do belong to such faith communities. The further decline of non-fundamentalist religion in the West is not inevitable. And neither is it impossible to imagine a world in which it is the fundamentalists who perennially lose their people and versions of religions that promote absolute spiritual and intellectual integrity that increase almost without having to self-promote hardly at all, let alone actually to proselytize door-to-door.

And my third example of something wide known to be impossible is an American one—the widely held belief that it is simply impossible to imagine an American political landscape that features politicians reaching across the aisle to create policies and laws that benefit the nation as a whole through the strengthening of its core values and the legislative expression of those values. The common wisdom, as everyone knows, is that that kind of willing cooperation, desirable though it may sound, is simply nothing that could ever be an actual feature of our legislators’ work in Washington, that the whole Congress is so riven by factionalism and interparty dislike and mistrust that cooperation on the level that would be necessary for our legislators actually to work together for the people and not solely against each other is simply an impossibility. And yet…why should that be the case? Our legislators are mostly lawyers (43%), but all have other ways to earn a living yet have chosen to devote some or, in some cases, all of their professional lives to service of our country. Surely at least some of them—maybe even most—could make more money elsewhere! The notion that they are all agenda-driven, that nothing matters to any of them more than pushing his or her personal set of initiatives without respect for the public weal or the nation’s best interests—that seems, at the very least, to be only how things mostly seem, not how they inevitably have to be. Also worth noting in this regard that is almost 28% of the bills passed in the House and in the Senate pass unanimously and without opposition. That points to a different reality than the one we’ve trained ourselves to expect from these people: if Congress is narrowly divided in half along party lines with a slight edge for Republicans in the Senate and a slightly larger one in the House, how can more than a quarter of bills brought to a vote be passed unanimously? Clearly, these people can work together when properly motivated! So that is not an impossibility, just something we’ve been trained to think of that way!

And that concludes my list of possible impossibilities. None of my readers would mistake me for a natural optimist, but contemplating Roger Bannister in life and death buoys me slightly by making me remember that, in the end, most things deemed impossible are merely things that no one has managed to do just yet. May he rest in peace!

[maneatingbadger]

Review - Wonder Woman (2017)

TL;DR: Wonder Woman is good. It has problems. See it, and discuss the problems. Also, airplanes. 

Wonder Woman (2017) is a good film. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. (Trailer)

Wonder Woman is an important film. Women led and directed it. The character is a feminist icon and welcome change from ongoing male dominance of the superhero genre, at least on the big screen (can’t comment on comics). 

Wonder Woman is a long film. At just over 140 minutes runtime it never drags, but evening theatergoers may be shocked at the lateness of the hour when they exit, as I was last night. 

Now for some rambling thoughts (mild spoilers ahead). 

Wonder Woman is set in the waning days of World War I, a change from her Second World War origins that initially gave me pause. The mainstream moral authority of the Allies in WWII has its complexities, yet they pale in comparison to the more prominent clash of competitive imperialism a couple decades earlier. But Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), aka Diana Prince, is a superhero. Her joining the Allies is a foregone conclusion, and my apprehensions were almost immediately justified (and remained so almost to the very end) when downed pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) calls himself “a good guy” and points at the Germans on the beach as “the bad guys.” Then he explains how the Ottoman Empire is keeping the Kaiser supplied with munitions, so now the faceless, menacing Turks join the evil German monolith. WWII at least had Nazis to punch, but you can’t read All Quiet on the Western Front and come away feeling the German Army in WWI was total evil. 

Then again, maybe you can. Rows of women sitting behind me fucking applauded and cheered as Diana cut swaths through German infantrymen. Never mind that some of them were undoubtedly conscripts, never mind that a German soldier was as patriotic as a Brit or Frenchman, never mind that war is hell and both sides learned that quickly. I can’t believe I’m praising this aspect of Captain America: The First Avenger, but at least Red Skull’s Hydra soldiers were basically Star Wars Stormtroopers circa Original Trilogy: totally made up and combat ineffective. It didn’t matter how many Hydras Steve Rogers and his Brooklyn Boy Band killed, because they were Bad Guys™ and also usually faceless behind masks. But they chose to set Wonder Woman in the actual fighting of WWI, not Marvel’s faux war within (and beyond) a war, and wanton slaughter is rarely a point of satisfaction in the far-from-perfect Hollywood war genre. I certainly never cheered as Tom Hanks’s unit outflanked and suppressed German bunkers in Saving Private Ryan, or when Japanese defenders repeatedly ambushed Marines in Letters from Iwo Jima. Yet we’re supposed to feel inspired by Wonder Woman singlehandedly disposing of fifty poor German boys because she looks good doing it?

Of relevance: The PG-13 rating (and associated lack of gore and violence you might expect from a dedicated WWI period piece) may contribute to some viewers’ lack of empathy for the wounded or dead. I’m not saying Wonder Woman should have been an R-rated war flick, because 1) that’s not what it was ever going to be, and 2) the audience most urgently needing this movie is young girls, so the more accessible the better. But the end result is still a fairly tame view of Western Front conditions. And the lack of blood from Diana cutting her way through German squads with a sword is desensitizing and immersion-breaking. 

Also of relevance: Diana at one point accuses a Scottish sniper (Ewen Bremner)—and more general practitioners of fighting from a distance, e.g., artillery—of fighting without honor because they do not necessarily see those they kill (or, in the case of generals and other REMFs, those they send off to die). There’s a lot to unpack here. The Amazons are a warrior society that worships leading from the front. An obvious drawback to that is when General Antiope dies on the beach: The Amazons lose their top commander (among others) in a skirmish to a small bunch of German sailors. Considering the qualitative and quantitative differences, that is not a favorable exchange ratio. Beyond that, snipers (like drone pilots) arguably see their targets in a much more intimate fashion than any other soldier does, thanks to their scopes (or camera turrets) and the long periods of observation that can precede pulling the trigger. We’ll cut Diana some slack because the Amazons have no concept of ranged warfare beyond the bow, but the notion of “honor” is also complicated. Michael Moore and others have voiced their hatred for snipers as cowards, as if war is a gentleman’s duel. Ethics in war usually applies to noncombatants and enemies who surrender: Those, in other words, who aren’t fighting you, are vulnerable, and have been found throughout history to merit protection. Killing them is cowardly, a point Diana also makes, but killing enemy combatants isn’t. If it were, what “honor” exists in racking up body counts against foes that cannot physically harm you? A sniper hides, a demigod is, well, a demigod, both are practically immune from preventative counters or immediate retaliation. Whither honor, Diana?

Diana’s concern for civilians hit by indiscriminate weapons like artillery and gas is curious in light of Gadot’s compulsory service in the IDF and support for Israel’s bloody 2014 Gaza campaign. This deserves more attention than I or anyone will give it, and I apologize for a level of compassion fatigue those in Gaza, Jordan, and the West Bank surely recognize all too well. Fans are forced to choose between a white feminist cinematic triumph and a marginalized and oppressed community (that this is a conundrum itself speaks volumes), no one wants to tackle Israel-Palestine on top of misogyny, and those sympathetic to Palestinians are losing the PR fight. It shouldn’t be a binary solution set: I gladly join the chorus hailing the film as an important cultural touchstone, and I embrace criticizing Gadot for her support of apartheid, occupation, and, ironically, civilian casualties, especially as she somehow manages not to choke on lines like “I’m willing to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves” or “only love can truly save the world.” Again, when Israeli fighters bomb hospitals, whither honor?

The above point also touches on larger intersectionality concerns that I’ll let other takes explain. 

Captain America aside: Like The First Avenger, Wonder Woman is an origin story about a gorgeous, invincible hero fighting the Germans for the Americans in Europe that ends on a multi-engined doomsday-device-carrying German bomber—hijacked on a suicide mission to save the day by a guy named Steve!

Back to WWI: I was fully prepared to write this movie off as “The Western Allies are good, the Central Powers and Turks are evil, and justice wins in the end.”  But Trevor neatly resolved my qualms in a short monologue while trying to convince a disillusioned Diana to keep helping him. Can’t find it online yet, but it goes something like “Maybe we’re all at fault! Maybe none of us deserve saving!” Diana gradually realizes that humans don’t need the malign influence of Ares, the Greek God of War and primary antagonist, to keep fighting and killing each other, that WWI was never divisible into “good” and “bad guys,” and this is after Chief (Eugene Brave Rock) the Blackfoot character’s almost throwaway line that Trevor’s people drove his off their land “in the last war.” Before those moments, Wonder Woman’s WWI setting was terrible; after them, it was at worst imperfect, a hit-and-miss attempt to address violence as a human phenomenon waged by problematic protagonists. I wish they’d addressed that earlier and more inclusively (the Germans and Turks still resonate as one-dimensional “bad guys”), but I’m impressed at how centrally and effectively that message played out in the end. 

The WWI setting brings us to the level of realism, continuity, and historical accuracy, oft-losing propositions for Hollywood in general at the best of times that tend to fare even worse in the superhero genre. To this day I will not forgive Marvel for its patently ridiculous modern-day helicarriers. But Wonder Woman misses the mark by less than I feared. Here’s what I was able to catch in one viewing: 

The Fokker Eindecker that Trevor flies to escape from Ottoman Turkey was the first operational fighter with a gun synchronized to shoot through the spinning propeller, allowing fixed guns on the centerline for improved accuracy. 

Eindeckers were deployed in the Middle East between 1916 and 1917, though they were mostly replaced by Fokker D.7’s when Wonder Woman rolls around a year a later. Still, props (get it?) to the movie for spotlighting a lesser film star and not the cinematically overused Camels and triplanes.

Note that Trevor escaped from Turkey in a light aircraft with a top speed of 76 knots and endurance under two hours. Even assuming a generous range of 200 miles from the Turkish coast, he can only splash down in the Black Sea or eastern Mediterranean, a rough clue to the location of the edge of Themyscira’s shield barrier. Then he and Diana take a small single-masted sailing vessel from there to London, a voyage of nearly 3,000 miles depending on where he crashed. 

The internet speculates that Themyscira may not exist on our temporal or spatial plane and therefore lacks a permanent location. This 1) could mean the island was closer to the UK when the two set out by boat, and 2) accounts for the island’s obscurity in a heavily trafficked area until Trevor’s fighter and the pursuing German warship blundered into it. Still, you’d think Zeus could have done better than a shield blocking only visible light.

Speaking of that warship, the ensuing beach battle has holes. The novelization disposes of the Kriegsmarine surface combatant on a coral reef, and I do recall wondering why the ship seems to roll and rise at an angle in the background at one point, but this was only a few frames and barely registered on my fellow viewers. Then its rowboats hit the beach in a horrifying demonstration of what happens when technological superiority is overwhelmed by the numerical variety. Passages came to mind from The Gun by CJ Chivers about the use of rapid-fire Maxim and Gatling guns against native tribes in European colonies, specifically the change in outcome when those guns jammed and a handful of soldiers confronted tribal human waves with muskets, bayonets, and bare hands. Similarly, the German riflemen open fire to deadly effect, but the Amazons overwhelm their rate of fire with a frontal cavalry charge. It doesn’t hurt that the Amazons are Made in Olympus, pursue a ridiculous fitness and training regimen, and fight like badasses. 

But they don’t confront Trevor until after the Germans are slain, though he wears a German disguise and grabs a rifle from a sailor in the melee. He is an armed male intruder, and only Diana recognizes his actions as friendly, yet he isn’t killed in the confusion or even threatened at sword- or bow-point afterward.

Speaking of swords, bows, and horses, the Amazon way of war could be much more effective if they emerged a century or even half a century earlier, in the heyday of post-Napoleonic fighting. Queen Hippolyta’s claim that they have nothing to fear while hiding in paradise already failed as an argument to shelter Diana from training; unexamined is what that level of sheltering applied to Amazon society as a whole portends if and when Themyscira finds itself exposed to an ever-advancing outside world. If Diana had come out a quarter century later, she would have confronted heavier and more destructive weapons probably beyond the protective envelope of her shield (unless it’s vibranium, though Wikipedia says an indestructible goat hide, which I like even more) and wrist/ankle bracelets. Her run through No Man’s Land was remarkably devoid of shrapnel, explosives, and weapons fire despite the whole trench line of German regulars shooting at an upright target, and she was stopped cold by machine-gun nests: Imagine 88mm shells from a line of King Tigers or 500lb bombs from diving Stukas. 

She may be a rapid-healing demigod immune to poison gas, but we also see her bleed and block bullets rather than take them. Modern weaponry can hurt and even kill her. And I haven’t even mentioned nukes.

Back to rivet counting: I can’t find any good images yet of the large German bomber from the climactic scene, but it appears to be a fictional version of the so-called Riesenflugzeug or “giant aircraft” bombers produced by Zeppelin-Staaken. 

Like the historical Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI, the movie version appears to have four engines (one Giant was even fitted with a fifth in the nose), but the movie plane has them arranged in four separate forward-facing engine nacelles. The R.VI by contrast had twin-engine pairs with one “pusher” and one “puller” propeller each. I’ll probably also come back to this once that scene is posted online.

The tank whose tracks are used to restrain Wonder Woman at the climax seemed to have the rhomboid shape of a British heavy tank, though the setting is a German-held airfield. 

The Germans captured a number of British heavy tanks of various marks and genders, so perhaps this is a pre-owned model. Again, I’ll be better able to confirm that once the scene is uploaded.

Poison gas is the movie’s most salient and best-realized WWI characteristic.

That about does it for first-runthrough nitpicking (IMDB has more on wristwatches and trouser zippers).

Oh, Rupert Gregson-Williams’s soundtrack is typical superhero fare that didn’t leave much of an impression, but the end credits piece before Sia’s single sounded awful familiar. I later thought I heard elements of Jeremy Soule’s Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance, Ramin Djawadi’s Pacific Rim, and Tom Holkenborg’s Mad Max: Fury Road OSTs, but maybe that’s just me. 

[freshdotdaily]

Drake's List of The Most Common Logical Fallacies

Ad Hominem

This translates as “to the man” and refers to any attacks on the person advancing the argument, rather than on the validity of the evidence or logic.  It’s is one thing to say that I don’t agree with you, but it’s another thing to say that I don’t like you, and you are wrong because I don't like you;  evil people often make valid claims, and good people often make invalid claims, so separate the claim from the person.  Like the emotional appeal, the validity of an argument has utterly nothing to do with the character of those presenting it.   Ad hominem attacks are the meat and potatoes of political campaigns, but this is because we are, in fact, debating over who to vote for. Once the votes have been cast, however, we do well to focus on the logic and evidence, not those speaking the argument.

"Saddam can't have WMD's because George Bush said he does, and he's a liar." "Saddam must have WMD's because the UN can't find them." "Who cares if the French oppose invading Iraq; they haven't won a war in centuries!"

Affirming the Consequent This is a fairly difficult fallacy to understand or spot. It is categorical in nature and, essentially, means reversing an argument, or putting the cart before the horse, meaning reversing or confusing the general category with the specific/sub-category.  Note that in this fallacy the premises/reasons are actually correct or valid; the error is found between the premises and conclusion.  Usually, the error occurs because we incorrectly assume that the Premise was asufficient condition, when in fact it was only a necessary condition (one of many conditions) necessary to prove the conclusion.

Fallacy Ex:           Premise: Ducks are birds.   Premise: Ducks swim in the water. Premise: Chickens are birds. False Conclusion: Chickens swim in the water. (Affirming The Consequent Fallacy:  not all birds swim in water; swimming is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to be the thing "bird")

Fallacy Ex:       Premise: You loved The Matrix. Premise: Keanu Reaves is in The Matrix Premise: Keanu Reaves is in Speed. Conclusion: You must love Speed. (Affirming The Consequent Fallacy: you may have like The Matrix even if you don't like Keanu Reaves, or in spite of the fact that he was in it, or maybe you liked him in it but hate him in everything else etc.)

Fallacy Ex:       Premise: Obama wants nationalized health care.   Premise: The Nazis had nationalized health care.   Conclusion: Nationalized health care will make us all Nazis! (Affirming The Consequent Fallacy: "nationalized health care" is not a sufficient reason to define the category of Nazism, any more than does "swims in water" defines the category "birds".  In fact, with the exception of the USA, every country that fought against the Nazis now has nationalized health care.) Editor's note: Obama does not, in fact, want to "nationalize healthcare".

Argument From Authority This is the flip side of the ad hominem; in this case, the argument is advanced because of those advancing it. But arguments from authority carry little weight: the history of human kind is consistent in one fact: the frequency of human error.

Sometimes fallacious arguments from authority are obvious because they are arguments from false authorities. Supermodels who push cosmetics or pro athletes pushing home loans or even sports equipment are likely false authorities: first, we don’t know the supermodel or athlete uses the product at all (odds are not), and second we can assume that the supermodel is beautiful without the product and the pro athlete was successful without the equipment…and that millionaire athletes probably don’t need the kind of home loan you would.

The creationism vs. evolution debate is especially flush with false authorities like Kent Hovind and others who freely lecture publicly on false diplomas and credentials.  This is also true with most conspiracy theory debates, such as those surrounding the Kennedy assassination, Big Foot, the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax etc.

To a degree, we also do well to differentiate between the different definitions of “authority”.  Authority can mean either power or knowledge.  In the case of knowledge, we often find we must trust people to help us make sense of the vast and complex array of knowledge surrounding an issue – we do well, for example, in courtroom trials to consult psychologists and forensic authorities etc., or to consult with trained meteorologists, geologists, physicists, chemists etc. when debating global warming etc. – but we should view these people as resources for understanding the logic and evidence, rather than as those given the final say concerning the issue.

Fallacy Ex: “The administration must know where the WMDs are or they wouldn’t have sent American troops into look for them.” (note, this is also a non sequitur) Fallacy Ex: "Saddam must have WMD's; the president wouldn't lie to us." (note, this is also an either/or fallacy; not all incorrect assertions are lies) Fallacy Ex: “It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”—Rumsfeld, May 30, 03

Argument From Ignorance or Non-Testable Hypothesis This is the fallacy that that which has not been proven false must or is likely to be true; however, the fallacy usually applies to concepts that haven’t yet been adequately tested or are beyond the realm of proof.  Our legal system protects us from this fallacy under the presumption of innocence guideline – “innocent until proven guilty”.  Religious beliefs are founded on this "fallacy", but remember that a religious belief is, by definition, based on faith, rather than empirical proof or mathematical logic; that's what the phrase "leap of faith" refers to.

Band Wagon The basic fallacy of democracy: that popular ideas are necessarily right.

Of course in democracies like America popularity does play a certain degree in determining “right”, so it’s worth keeping in mind that America and most Western democracies are constitutional democracies, which means the political system deliberately checks and balances mob rule with codified principles like individual liberty and equality.  Obvious examples of once popular moral and legal positions include race based slavery, legal cocaine, American women not being allowed to vote until 1920, prohibition (1920-1933) etc.

Fallacy Ex: "C'mon, dude, everybody's doin' it."

Begging the Question or Circular Argument This is basically repeating the claim and never providing support for the premises, or, in other words, repeating the same argument over and over again.  Often, dogmatic thinkers don’t even realize this is a fallacy.

Fallacy Ex: “Gay marriage is just plain wrong.” Fallacy Ex: “Drugs are just plain bad.” Fallacy Ex: “I can’t believe people eat dog. That’s just plain gross. Why? Because it’s a dog, of course. How could someone eat a dog?” Fallacy Ex: “Obviously logging causes severe environmental damage. You don’t have to be a scientist to see that; just go out and look at a clear cut and there it is: no trees.”

Dogmatism The unwillingness to even consider the opponent’s argument. The assumption that even when many, perhaps millions, of other people believe otherwise, only you can be correct.  This is closely related to the Either/Or fallacy as it’s based on the usually false assumption that competing theories or perspectives cannot co-exist within single systems.  The assumption that those who disagree with you are “biased”, while you are “objective”.

More broadly, the over application of a theory at the expense of discussing the actual issue, specific incidence or evidence at hand; the assertion that one’s position is so correct that one should not even examine the evidence to the contrary. For example, the assumption that the economic theory of capitalism explains moral choices; or the assumption that socialism is morally wrong, even though you attend a public university; the assumption that welfare is wrong and all those who partake in it are lazy (even though you accept federal financial aid or would accept state aid in the case of a catastrophic accident or injury); the argument that drugs are morally wrong and drug addicts should all be locked up or even executed (although you drink alcohol and coffee and take Ritalin and your grandmother uses anti-depressants and you are grateful your alcoholic uncle was cured via AA); the assumption that all animals should be treated humanely (although you respect indigenous cultures that subsist on seal meat); the assumption that because nature is holy, all logging is morally wrong; the assumption that democratic republics are the best form of government for all people; and on and on and on….

Either/Or or Black/White, False Dilemma, or Excluded Middle Fallacy This fallacy simply paints an issue as one between two extremes with no possible room for middle ground or nuance or compromise.  It is closely related to the straw man fallacy, which essentially paints one side, instead of both, as so extreme no can agree with it.

Fallacy Ex: “You either support George Bush or you support the terrorists.”

Fallacy Ex: “You either for me or your against me.”

Fallacy Ex: “She loves me; she loves me not.”

Fallacy Ex: “You’re a German Christian? So was Hitler. You must hate Jews.”

Fallacy Ex: “You don’t support the Israeli occupation of Palestine? You must be an anti-Semite.”

Fallacy Ex: “You support the existence of an Israeli state? You must support the occupation of Palestine.”

Emotional Appeals When it comes to determining the validity or factuality of a claim, any attempt to sway an argument via emotion, rather than the quality of the logic or evidence, can be considered a fallacy.  This includes in some but not all cases the fallacy argument from adverse consequences, or “scare tactic”; bad things will happen to us if you do not agree with my argument. However, if one is arguing over whether or not bad things will occur, this is no longer a fallacy.

Fallacy of Exclusion This is related to the Hasty Generalization, and refers to focusing attention on one group’s behavior and assuming that behavior is unique to that group; yet, in fact, the behavior is common to many groups.  Contrast with Hasty Generalization linked here.

The best example I’ve ever seen was in a letter to the Argonaut editor a few years back, the week after Halloween. The letter’s author complained that fraternities deserved their bad reputations because while wandering around Greek row Halloween night he saw three different “frat boys” puking.  However, one might argue that had he wandered around just about any other place kids of this age gathered on Halloween, he’d have seen the same amount of puke.

Ex: An actual friend of mine wrote this a few years ago in response to a drunk driving fatality newspaper story, in Nashville.  In this case, the drunk driver was an illegal alien and the victim was a US Citizen.  "Oh my god, this has got to stop!  How much is too much?  Why are these people [illegal aliens] allowed to live in our country?"   At first I agreed: yes, drunk drivers who kill people should themselves be put to death!  Then I realized he was referring to illegal aliens, as if that was the cause of most, or even many, drunk driving fatalities.

Fallacy Ex: I'd never live in NYC; it's way too dangerous! (Indeed many people are murdered in cities, so cities appear to have a high murder rate (number of murders per capita)  Yet, there are many people in NYC, so in fact the murder rate is lower in NYC than in many small towns.)

Fallacy Ex: Women can't drive! (If you examine the driving habits of women, you will observe that women are poor drivers.  Yet if you were to examine the driving habits of both women and men, you’d learn that men are far more likely to get into accidents.

Faulty Analogy Our language functions through comparisons, and it is common and useful to argue the validity of one point by comparing it to another, but often the comparison suggests that two thing are more alike than they really are.

Fallacy Ex: "If we legalize gay marriage, next we'll legalize marriage between men and their pets." Fallacy Ex: "Iraq is another quagmire, just like Vietnam." Fallacy Ex: "Feminazi." Fallacy Ex: “Meat is murder.”

Hasty Generalization, Misunderstanding Statistics or Non-Representative Sample This normally involves mistaking a small incidence for a larger trend.

Racism is the most obvious example, especially when exposure to other races or groups is filtered thru the media, and so you have only seen a very small percentage of the actual group and what you’ve seen has been careful chosen rather than due to random chance.

Ex: If you grow up in the very white state of Idaho and only see Blacks on TV, you are likely to think that most Black men are athletes, gangster rappers or comedians.  

Ex: Fishing and hunting also frequently trick us into this fallacy; you get a hit on your first cast and assume you’ve found the perfect spot and the ideal lure, only to sit there getting skunked for the next hour.

Ex: Most complain about how badly women drive, and if one examines the driving habits of women one finds that indeed they do get in many accidents. However, they get in fewer accidents than men.

Ex: Assuming you are likely to be shot if you visit NYC, when, in fact, fewer people are murdered, per capita, in NYC than in most rural American small towns.

Ex: You are thinking of your old high school friend, Biff, and the phone rings and it’s him. You conclude the two of you are magically connected. Occam’s Razor: Random Coincidence. You’ve eliminated the literally thousands of hours that you’ve thought of your hundreds of friends when not a single one of them called you.

Moral Equivalency The implication that two moral issues carry the same weight or are essentially similar.

Ex: Equating the treatment of animals with the treatment of human beings. Ex: Equating acts of war with murder. Ex: Equating gay marriage with legalizing pedophilia. Ex: Equating being a wage slave with actual slavery. Ex: Equating all acts of war with terrorism.

Non Sequitur Non sequitur translates as “it does not follow,” meaning that the conclusion does not follow the premises (usually because of a faulty Implicit Reason/Assumption/Warrant).  In other words the non sequitur means there is a logical gap between the premises or evidence and the conclusion. The non sequitur is a broad, categorical term, and so there are many different types of non sequitur fallacies, including post hoc, hasty generalization, slippery slope, affirming the consequentand simply faulty assumption or warrant.

Fallacy Ex: “If you loved me you’d buy me this car.”

Fallacy Ex: “If you loved me, you’d sleep with me.”

Fallacy Ex: “I can’t believe you don’t like Speed; you loved Matrix and Keanu Reaves is in Speed.” Fallacy: it does not follow that all Matrix lovers love Speed; the error is that one may love Matrix in spite of the fact that Keanu was in it (this is an Affirming The Consequent fallacy).

A slippery slope argument, for example, is non sequitur because it does not follow that legalizing one thing (gay marriage, medicinal marijuana) would inevitably, necessarily or likely lead to legalizing other things (polygamy, or recreational marijuana use).

Post Hoc or Faulty Causality, or Correlation vs. Causation Post hoc is the shortened version of “post hoc ergo propter hoc”, which translates as “after this, therefore because of this”.  In other words, the fallacy confuses correlation for causation, or mistakenly claiming that one thing caused another to happen since they happen in sequence.

Correlation simply refers to two things happening at the same time, or one thing commonly happening before another thing happens; in other words, the frequency with which one thing occurs corresponds with the frequency with which another occurs. Causation of course means that the one thing occurring causes the other to occur.  Post hoc refers mistaking correlation for causation. The flaw in the argument is that often a third cause exists, which is causing both to occur frequently, or perhaps the flaw is simply that both things commonly occur regardless of each other.

There are a couple key points to understand about this fallacy:

First, the fallacy only occurs when both things (reasons, premises) have actually occurred; therefore, the fallacy doesn’t apply to the future or to debates over whether or not one thing actually occurred.  For example, in order to claim that the green-house gasses-global-warming argument is post hoc, you must first agree that a) there is a spike in greenhouse gasses, and b) global warming is actually occurring.

Second, most often the fallacy occurs because of a third element that is responsible for causing both of the other elements. So, look for a “third cause”.

Third, reasonable skepticism reveals this to be an incredibly common fallacy in both everyday arguments and in very formal, influential, widely believed, often “scientific arguments”. For instance, most people recover from their colds a couple days after they take cold medication. But, of course, most people recover from their colds if they take no cold medication whatsoever.  Many people get rich when they pray for wealth, but many people who never pray also get rich, and many people who pray to get rich stay poor; also, what about people who pray to other gods and get rich?

The danger rests in the degree of skepticism; extreme skepticism will reveal all arguments post hoc, and, in fact, this is the standard argument of most defense lawyers and traditionally all industries when it comes to questions such as cigarettes and lung cancer, safety glass in automobiles, seat belts in automobiles, air bags in automobiles, causes of air pollution, effects of pollution on health and so on; normally scientists prove within a reasonable doubt causation decades before the public and those responsible for the cause stop crying post hoc.  Current, continuing debates over post hoc include pretty much every scientific argument that intersects with either faith (evolution, AIDS), industry (global warming) or economic interests.   (NPR On The Media  5 minute discussion of this fallacy and flu vaccinations)

Fallacy Ex: Drinkers are more likely than non-drinkers to get lung cancer, suggesting drinking causes lung cancer. (It turns out there is a strong correlation between consuming alcohol and developing lung cancer. The post hoc fallacy would be asserting that alcohol consumption causes lung cancer; the actual reason is that people who drink more also tend to smoke, or smoke more, than non drinkers.)

Ex: Many claim that marijuana is a “gateway drug” because those who have smoked marijuana are more likely than those who haven’t to go on to try other drugs. The post hoc fallacy would be asserting that marijuana use leads toincreased use of other drugs; the more logical explanation is that those who are willing to try one drug are obviously also willing to try other drugs: the cause – willingness to try or use drugs – must necessarily exist before one tries pot; otherwise, you wouldn’t try it in the first place.

Red Herring This generally refers to changing the subject mid-debate, so that we start arguing about a tangential topic rather than the real or original issue.

Ex: We start debating the evidence supporting evolutionary theory, but you bring up the fact that believing this theory is depressing.

Ex: We start debating the evidence supporting global warming, but you bring up the fact that believing this theory is depressing...or that Al Gore has a big house and flies on jets a lot.

Semantics or Equivocation (also, Splitting Hairs, Playing With Words, or Using Legalisms) Using the inherent ambiguity of language to distract from the actual ideas or issues, or deliberately rephrasing the opposing argument incorrectly, and then addressing that rephrasing.

Fallacy Ex: "No man of woman born" can kill Macbeth (Macduff, who does kill Macbeth, was caesarian)

Bill Clinton attempted to use this fallacy (with disastrous results!) when he denied having "sex" with Monica Lewinski.  His defense was based on the "fact" that both the law and Webster's dictionary have a very limited definition of "sex".

Jim Leher: You had no sexual relationship with this young woman? President Clinton: There is not a sexual relationship. That is accurate.” January 21, 1998

“But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.” – Bill Clinton, January 26, 1998

"I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." – Bill Clinton, Federal Deposition

Q "Did you have sex with Ms. Lewinski." A "I never had sex with that woman [Ms. Lewinski]." – Bill Clinton

Slippery Slope Arguing from the perspective that one change inevitably will lead to another. Ex: "If we legalize gay marriage, next people will want to legalize polygamy." (also false analogy) Ex: “Why stop at $7.25 an hour? Why not raise the minimum wage to $15 or $20 an hour? For that matter, why not mandate the price of housing? ... If we believe Congress has the power to raise minimum wages, where do we go next?” -- Bill Sali, Argonaut, 2/13/07 Ex: “The inevitable result of handgun control is the government seizure of all guns.” Ex: "What we see in El Salvador is an attempt to destabilize the entire region and eventually move chaos and anarchy toward the American border." Ronald Reagan, May 9, 1984 Ex: "Death Panels"  In response to the House bill to reform healthcare, Rep. John Boehner said: "With three states having legalized physician-assisted suicide, this provision could create a slippery slope for a more permissive environment for euthanasia, mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide because it does not clearly exclude counseling about the supposed benefits of killing oneself." http://republicanleader.house.gov/news/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=139131 Ex: "Death Panels":

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion. [Sarah Palin Facebook post, 8/7/09]

(The actual Bill his here.  Skip to page 428 or "find: 1233")

Straw Man One side of the argument is presented as so extreme that no one will agree with it. Often this is done by referring to the exception, rather than the rule, and inferring that the exception is the rule.

Fallacy Ex:  “We either leave right now or we’re never going to get there.” “All PETA supporters support the bombing or destruction of laboratories.” “If you surrender your freedoms, the terrorists have already won. You don’t want that, do you?” “Hitler supported gun control, you know.”

Weasel Words or Glittering Generality This is the use of words so broadly defined – such as “love” or “freedom” or “rights” or “patriotism” etc. etc.  – as to become essentially meaningless; no one, and I do mean no one, on this planet, does not value love, freedom, or rights, and most everyone is a patriot of one kind or another. It’s the “one kind or another” nature of these words that makes them essentially pointless: they mean something different to everyone, and so their use in an argument frequently means nothing.  “Love”, for example, refers to both sexual passion and the nature of God or divine virtue.

Technically, their use is probably not a fallacy, but their use tends to move an argument no where while inciting deep emotional responses. Thus, they are rhetorically useful and logically distracting.

The current glittering generality is “terrorism” or “terrorist” as it first clearly refers to something most people abhor and second is used so broadly it actually applies to any act of war. This renders those involved in the “war on terror” (itself a misnomer) as themselves “terrorists”.  In the case of this word, however, the fallacy is likely equivocation; the word has been rendered semantically useless by having been so often misused.

Other current glittering generalities include “protecting marriage”, and “pro choice” or “pro life”.

Failing Occam's Razor Occam’s Razor is the scientific principle that the simplest of any given hypotheses is likely to be the right one.

Fallacy Ex: You don’t keep up on your homework and start a paper the night before it’s due. When it’s returned to you it has a C- grade. You conclude the grade reflects the teacher’s ignorance or personal dislike for you. Occam’s Razor: The paper was poorly written.

Fallacy Ex: Every guy you meet at the bar and take home turns out to use you for a night and then dump you. You conclude all men are losers. Occam’s Razor: Men assume, and thus dump, any woman skanky enough to take them home from a bar.

Fallacy Ex: You drink five beers and climb behind the wheel of your father’s Ford Explorer. When you slide off the road and roll it you blame him for not telling you the tires where worn and letting you drive a tippy SUV, because everyone knows you can hold your beer. Occam’s Razor: You were drunk, idiot.

Fallacy Ex: You are thinking of your best friend, Rufus, when the phone rings and it’s Rufus! You conclude the two of you are magically connected. Occam’s Razor: Random Coincidence. You think of your best friend dozens if not hundreds of times a day; he calls you a couple times a day. The odds of him calling you once or twice a day at least once in awhile are pretty good.

Fallacy Ex: You are thinking of your old high school friend, Biff, and the phone rings and it’s Biff! You conclude the two of you are magically connected. Occam’s Razor: Random Coincidence. You’ve eliminated the literally thousands of hours that you’ve thought of your hundreds of friends when not a single one of them called you.

Fallacy Ex: You drive downtown breakfast. You start thinking of your best friend, Skipper. You park the car and walk over to the Breakfast Club. There’s Skipper! You conclude that the two of you are magically connected! Occam’s Razor: The act of driving requires us to process infinite amounts of (mostly visual) information while attending to other elements of the act, so we unconsciously see much more than we are aware of. You probably saw Skipper out of the corner of your eye, also, friends tend to go to the same place. Also, where else would you go for breakfast in Moscow?

[libertariantaoist]

By now, comparing someone to the underwear gnomes of South Park fame is trite. Were it not for Donald Trump, I wouldn’t go near it. But I cannot resist because it’s a salient feature of his way of “thinking” — although posing would be the better word here.

Behold: “If Israeli and the Palestinians can make peace, it will begin a process of peace all throughout the Middle East,” he said, adding, with his characteristic precision, that “would be an amazing accomplishment.”

How is that not the gnomes’ business plan to make a killing in the underwear market?

1. Collect underpants

2. ?

3. Profit

Here’s Trump’s version:

1. Solve the Palestine-Israel conflict

2. ?

3. Peace breaks out in the rest of the Middle East

In one respect, Trump’s plan differs from the gnomes’. It implies more question marks.

The first is “if Israeli [sic] and the Palestinians can make peace.” Trump seems to think the differences between the Israelis and Palestinians are like the differences between two parties in a business negotiation. To strike a bargain they just need to find a middle ground that contains enough of what each party wants. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict rather different. It’s a confrontation between landowners and those who seized and continue to occupy that land.

What does the Art of the Deal have to say about that? (The question is directed to Tony Schwartz, of course, not Donald Trump.)

That’s no exaggeration. ‎As David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader who became Israel’s first prime minister, asked, “Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: …We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?” (quoted in The Jewish Paradox: A Personal Memoir, by Nahum Goldmann, founder of the World Zionist Congress.)

Most Palestinians and their putative leaders seem willing to forget 1948, when some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and others massacred, while hundreds of their villages were wiped off the map (the “Nakba,” or disaster) and those who remained were subjected to military rule for almost 20 years, after which they became third-class citizens under civilian rule. The dominant view of Palestinians (including Hamas) today favors a country of their own in the territories conquered and occupied in the 1967 war. That’s also been acceptable to the Arab governments since the late 1980s; Iran, too, accepts this resolution. The problem is that most Israelis don’t want to give up the West Bank, which they regard as integral to the Land of Israel. The Israeli government has been building Jewish-only towns there and in annexed East Jerusalem for years, which is illegal under international law. Israelis, by and large, don’t want the Palestinians to have their own country, but if they were to get one under the present circumstances, it would be in effect an archipelago of Palestinian towns cut off from one another by Jewish-only settlements and roads and controlled by the Israeli government. Some country that would be. The situation in the Gaza Strip would be even more bizarre since it would be a prison-like enclave with its borders, coast, and external relations totally under the thumb of the Israeli government.

That’s also been acceptable to the Arab governments since the late 1980s; Iran, too, accepts this resolution. The problem is that most Israelis don’t want to give up the West Bank, which they regard as integral to the Land of Israel. The Israeli government has been building Jewish-only towns there and in annexed East Jerusalem for years, which is illegal under international law. Israelis, by and large, don’t want the Palestinians to have their own country, but if they were to get one under the present circumstances, it would be in effect an archipelago of Palestinian towns cut off from one another by Jewish-only settlements and roads and controlled by the Israeli government. Some country that would be. The situation in the Gaza Strip would be even more bizarre since it would be a prison-like enclave with its borders, coast, and external relations totally under the thumb of the Israeli government.

So what would a negotiated settlement look like, considering that the magnanimity of the Palestinians would not be reciprocated? Israel insists that the negotiations have no preconditions, not even the condition that Israel stops building towns on the very land that is to be the subject of the negotiations. Remarkably, the Palestinian leadership reportedly has now agreed not to insist on the cessation of settlement building during the talks. How many concessions must the Palestinians make before talks even begin? (For those who think the United Nations partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab countries, see Jeremy R. Hammond’s “The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel.”)

Things are further complicated by Israel’s having moved the goalpost. It once demanded recognition of the state of Israel. But once that was obtained, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu added a new demand: recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people — not of the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and secular inhabitants of Israel, mind you, but of all Jews, no matter where they now live. (Until recently, Reform Jews believed that Jews constitute a worldwide religious community, not an ethnic or national group, and hence opposed the idea of a Jewish state. Some Reform and orthodox Jews still believe this.) This designation would jeopardize the already precarious status of Israel’s Palestinian Arab population.

But let’s move on. What then? It’s hard to believe that Trump and his “advisers” actually think that a Palestine-Israel settlement would bring peace to the rest of the Middle East. How could he? The antagonism of Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States directed at Shia Iran has nothing to do with the Palestinians. That antagonism is about Muslim sectarianism and power politics.

It’s hard to believe that Trump and his “advisers” actually believe that a Palestine-Israel settlement would bring peace to the Middle East. How could they? The hostility of Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States toward Shia Iran has nothing whatever to do with the Palestinians. That hostility is motivated by Muslim sectarianism and sheer power politics. The genocidal war that Saudi Arabia and its coalition are waging against the people of Yemen — made possible by the U.S. government — is aimed at Iran, although the Shia Houthis are not Iranian proxies. So is the war against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. That’s why the Saudis have always had sympathy — and lots of money — for al-Qaeda and the breakaway faction that became the Islamic State. Israel’s rulers, who are now openly aligned with the barbaric Gulf states, also find Iran to be a convenient demon and the violent Sunni Islamists more to their liking.

Trump’s shameful kowtowing toward the Saudis cannot be squared with what he says about “radical Islam, or what he now calls Islamism. (Has Mr. Politically Incorrect been coopted by political correctness?) Iran opposes the Islamic State and al-Qaeda (which murder Shiites); it’s fighting them both in Iraq and Syria. Yet smarmy Trump went to Saudi Arabia, the incubator and proselytizer of radical Islamism (Wahhabism), rather than to Iran — which, for all its theocratic faults, just reelected a president who looks like a classical liberal next to the head-chopping and misogynists in Saudi Arabia. (We shouldn’t ignore the coming arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which Trump, good military Keynesian that he is, can use to tout his plan to create jobs.)

Looking for logic in Trump is like looking for square circles, so no one should be surprised by his destructive policy. Trump wants to look like a conciliator — maybe he envies Barack Obama for his Nobel Peace Prize — but in fact he backs the worst destabilizers in the Middle East.

[republicstandard]

The Un-Making of the West, Vol. III: Behead Those Who Say Islam is Violent

In Europe, approximately five percent of Sweden’s population consists of Muslim males, and yet they account for 77% of total rapes in that country; by one estimate, 95% of all crime in Sweden is committed by “migrants.” In one year alone, the number of sexual assaults committed by “migrants” living in Austria jumped 133% from 2015 to 2016. In 2015, again, in one year alone, crimes committed by Muslim migrants in Germany jumped 79%. In the first six months of 2016, Muslims migrants committed an average of 780 crimes a day. 56% of the Syrian migrants living in Britain have committed crimes within the last year. Over three quarters of the crime committed in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, is by these “migrants.” Roughly 6% of Belgium’s population is Muslim, but 35% of its prison population is. 8-10% of France’s population is Muslim, but estimates ranging from 40-70% of their prison population is. Around 4% of Spain’s population is Muslim, but 70% of its prison population is. A majority of Britain’s prison population is now Muslim. Nine out of the ten most “criminally inclined” ethnic groups in Europe hail from Muslim-majority nations.

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In Australia, Victoria police stated that in 2012 Sudanese (0.1% of the population) and Somali (0.05% of the population) immigrants were approximately five times more likely to commit crimes than other state residents. The rate of offending was 1301.0 per 100,000 for native Australians in Victoria, whereas for the Sudanese it was 7109.1 per 100,000 individuals and 6141.8 per 100,000 for Somalis. The Sudanese and Somalis seem to have a particular affinity for assault, which represents 29.5% for Sudanese and 24.3% for Somalis of their offences. Three years later, Victoria police data showed that male Sudanese “youths” were “vastly over-represented” in criminal behavior, responsible for 7.44% of home invasions, 5.65% of car thefts, and 13.9% of aggravated robberies. Again, keep in mind the Sudanese are 0.1% of Victoria’s population, and young males are only maybe a quarter to a sixth of that 0.1%. That is an astounding overrepresentation. In January 2018, Acting Chief Commissioner Shane Patton stated that, “We have for a significant period of time said that there is an issue with overrepresentation by African youth in serious and violent offending as well as public disorder issues.” Victoria Police noticed youth offending "go to a new level" in 2016, and the State Government responded by:

Adding resources to the gangs squad and special operations group

Recruiting 3,135 additional frontline police

Funding an intelligence system, bulletproof vehicles and other technology and resources.

Fretting over diversity makes permissible the fact that Muslims account for 1% of the U.S. population but 40% of its workplace discrimination claims. That’s the erosion of your social capital at work! The United States issues over 1.6 million green cards to people from Muslim-majority nations between 2001 and 2013. From the Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Report to Congress Fiscal Year 2013, we know that 19.7% of Middle Eastern refugees get public housing, 68.3% receive cash assistance, 73.1% get Medicaid or RMA, and 91.4% receive food stamps. Muslims have been responsible for a full third of mass shootings over the past half-decade yet we are told to fear conservative Christians. We also get the benefit of Islam’s progressivism; as Abul Ala Mawdudi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, in what can also be read as a ringing endorsement for identity politics pledges:

All those who are born of Muslim lineage will be considered to be Muslim, they will be subject to all Islamic laws, they will be compelled to perform the religious duties and obligations, and then whoever steps outside the fold of Islam will be executed. Following this announcement utmost effort should be made to save as many sons and daughters born of Muslims as possible from the lap of kafir. Then whoever cannot be saved by any means should be cut off and cast away, sadly but firmly, from his society forever. After this act of purification a new life for Islamic society may begin.

After all, It is not like a 1,400-year-and-counting jihad waged against Christendom has now been welcomed to our shores with open arms! This “purification” is nothing less than the implementation of sharia law in all of its repressive, regressive glory. As the American mouthpiece for sharia law proponents, Left-wing darling Linda Sarsour was recently named one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year for her organizing role in the George Soros-funded “intersectional” Women’s March in New York City this past year, representing further proof that the Left and Islam are bedfellows in one of the most hideous, appalling manifestations of ignorance and irrationality I’ve ever seen. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes:

The identity politics of our time has created a language of political correctness that sometimes verges on censorship. We have allowed the voice of the group, or whoever claims to represent the group, not only to speak for the individual, but sometimes to shout down the individual if his or her story does not fit with an approved narrative. We claim to fight for women’s rights, but we are not supposed to talk about the immense suffering of women in the Middle East because that might be construed as being offensive to Muslims. We are witnessing a major cultural shift in support for gay marriage across the West, but Iran remains beyond our criticism, even as the regime hangs gays, because that might be condemned as Islamophobic.

That’s right, even if you’re gay, you better shut your fucking mouth and accept that you’ve been superseded in the oppression hierarchy by Muslims, who ironically want to oppress and even better kill you. If you are gay, you must accept the implementation of “intersectional” sharia with nary a protestation! Don’t question the crater-sized blind spots and leaps in logic it takes to get to the point where, as Bruce Bawer informs us:

[In] the current progressive pecking order among officially recognized oppressed groups gays (especially affluent white gay American males) are at the bottom of the ladder; Muslims are at the very top. Which means that when gays criticize Islam, a decent progressive is supposed to scream “Islamophobe”; but when Muslims drop gays to their deaths off the roofs of buildings, one is expected to look away and change the topic…So it is that we end up seeing grotesquely absurd pictures of gay people waving banners that decry Islamophobia or that declare gay solidarity with Palestine.

Islam does not proscribe the killing of homosexuals; the only textual disagreements regard how the homosexuals should be killed. And I quote: (from the Quran 7:80-84) “For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds.... And we rained down on them a shower (of brimstone).” Lest you think I’m cherry-picking, this story is repeated at three other junctures in the Quran: 15:74, 27:58, and 29:40. Ali threw a “sodomite” from a minaret, and Abu Bakr burned a gay man at the stake. Good stuff.

If we listen to British imam Allama Muhammad Farooq Nazimi, it is clear that, “There is absolutely no doubt about it that the punishment for the person who shows disrespect for the Prophet is death,” so being even mildly critical of or satirizing Muhammad is a death sentence (see: Charlie Hebdo). By the way, the same television network (Noor TV) that aired Nazimi’s Koranic interpretations also literally sold indulgences and asked viewers to make donations of £1,000 in return for the “special gift” of dirt from Muhammad’s tomb! We wonder why homophobic attacks are on the rise in the West; it can’t possibly have anything to do with mass immigration from the Muslim world and Islam’s antipathy toward homosexuals, can it? According to the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s father, what likely set him off is that, “He saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry,” while noting that the shooting “had nothing to do with religion.” Hillary Clinton concurs: “Let’s be clear: Islam isn’t our enemy. Hateful rhetoric against Muslims isn’t just wrong—it plays into terrorists’ hands.” Got it.

The head of CAIR’s Florida chapter, Hassan Shibly, went on a diatribe against homosexual marriage on Facebook while publicly claiming his “overwhelming love and support and unity” for and with the LGBTQ-AEIOU community. The CAIR-affiliated The Muslims of America, Inc. (TMOA), headed by one Mubarak Ali Gilani, called the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage, “A black day in the history of mankind.” I obviously find Gilani’s use of the adjective “black” to be highly problematic, but not as problematic, perhaps, as Iranian Ayatollah Javadi-Amoli regards homosexuality and the Western politicians that allow homosexuals basic human dignity: “Even dogs and pigs don’t engage in this disgusting act, but yet [Western politicians] pass laws in favor of them in their parliaments.”

Even the Jews, who notoriously love this open-borders stuff for everywhere but Israel—“because in the future we might need it”—are getting a little uncomfortable with the proliferation of unkempt beards stalking the streets bellowing that they will “Strike terror in the enemies of Allah!” (Quran 8:60). Jewish gay porn actor and director Michael Lucas sees things a little differently:

Now that we are talking about Muslim homophobia, it is becoming very inconvenient for liberals because liberals are apologists for Islam. So it is becoming very inconvenient, and that is why they usually tie it to some specific person; specific bad leader.

Muslims, remember, love the Jews as much as they love they gays, if not more:

The Hour will not begin until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them, until a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will say: O Muslim, O slave of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Except the gharqad (a thorny tree), for it is one of the trees of the Jews.

It appears that the issue is less to do with religion, and more to do with the fact that, as Michelle Obama recently stated, we are raising boys to be “entitled” and “self-righteous”.

The issue here is obviously toxic masculinity. Wait, scratch that: “The problem is not toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic,” says Lisa Wade. How can we combat this crushing masculinity when the patriarchy has removed all agency from women and People of Color, or indeed if, as Wade vis-à-vis Raewyn Connell proclaims, “Men becoming more feminine and women becoming more masculine may produce gender equality, but it ‘may do just the reverse.’” In all seriousness, this statement is itself a closed loop, and by its very construction does not allow for a resolution. It is an excuse for perpetual grievance. Okay, back to the fun, per Wade: “We should be as suspicious of males who strongly identify as men as we are of white people who strongly identify as white.” Identity, it would seem, is only for a select group—the rest have no claim to identity politics, which, as I’ve written before, conforms to the notion of Leftism as a negation, or an ideology in negative.

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Nor should we want to be wholly tethered to the reductive aspects of identity, which is intensely personal and transcends “box-checking”; that said, as it pertains to group identity, the central premise of racial-civilizational identitarianism for all groups is that there is something special about their group that is worth preserving. It is about emphasizing the positive aspects of one’s race as it creates unique cultures and civilizations. “Identity politics” as practiced by the Left is an “identity-for-me-but-not-for-thee” which doubles as a straw-manning of everyone on the conservative or libertarian side of the political beliefs spectrum as “Alt-Right,” which is backfiring on them in spectacular fashion as it both gives the Alt-Right far more traction in the mainstream and it also drives people curious about what the Alt-Right may be to seek out its ideas. What’s more, by labeling anyone who dissents from Leftist orthodoxy a Nazi, a signal is sent that a person could think that by rights if the end result is going to be the same, they might as well go to the “extreme” rather than futz around in the middle. Why do the same amount of time for a minor crime? A full embrace of European-derived identity across the West is inevitable, but will it be too little too late?

Unfortunately, we are trying to combat ideologies that are fundamentally unreasonable, and the Left and its Islamist allies don’t appear to be backing down any time soon. They cannot, in fact, because the premise of their entire project hinges on Abul Ala Mawdudi’s “purification,” on the imposition of their divinely-received dictums which govern every aspect of life from hygiene to sex to diet. Nothing less than global subjugation will do. The question is, however, who will carry the day? Will it be the prancing trannies, or will their veneration of weakness generate a power vacuum to be filled by Islamic supremacists? Or are they both the dupes of someone else?

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2Noj7Sh via IFTTT

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

Baklava

Every year for Ramadan, I make baklava for my husband. I'm not Muslim, but he is since he was born in Palestine. I respect his opinions and beliefs, even if I don't share them. Anyway, he loves my baklava. He even told me that it's better than his mother's. And trust me, he's a total mama's boy, so that's a huge deal.

This year, I decided to share my secrets. Are you ready? I hope so, because here we go.

Oh, but first, a shitty side-note. My old laptop died recently. I'd been using that dinosaur for over six years. It had everything on it. Luckily, I use various clouds and I usually write my blogs in advance so that I don't have to start and finish one each and every week. I tend to have several in various stages of completion at any given time. That being said, photos on my blogs will be a little spotty again for a bit. My computer might be new, buy my phone is still a piece of crap. I can't get pics to upload to any of my clouds, some of which I've yet to attach to this computer anyway, because I don't write down passwords. Blyet. So, for the time being, I'm using older photos of my food when I can. Otherwise, not so many pics this summer. (Sad face)

Mise en place

You're going to need a way to chop nuts (food processor, mini-chopper, or chef's knife and cutting board.) You'll need a 13x9 glass baking dish, a mixing bowl, sauce pan, vegetable peeler, measuring spoons, mesh strainer, silicone pastry brush, glass measuring cup, rubber spatula, and a sharp paring knife. I only use silicone brushes because the nylon-fiber brushes are too impossible to clean well since things get wicked up into the base. But silicone brushes don't wick, so they always come clean.

Ingredients

12 oz. walnuts

4 oz. pistachios

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp non-iodized salt (like kosher salt, but grind it up to a fine powder)

8 oz. unsalted butter (two sticks, melted)

1 pound phyllo dough, thawed

 1 cup sugar

16 oz. local honey

3/4 cup water

1 TBS fresh squeezed lemon juice

2 cinnamon sticks

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/8 tsp ground cardamom

3 strips of lemon peel

The second set is the syrup, the first set is for the actual dessert. First thing you want to do is chop your nuts. Now, the last time I made this, I could not find baking pistachios anywhere. I went to at least half a dozen stores. All I could find were snacking pistachios. I got the lightly salted, shells removed, snack variety. Fearful of it being noticeably salty, I fully omitted the 1/4 tsp of salt from the filling. It tasted perfect. If you also run into this problem, now you have a solution. Or, if you don't want to grind your salt for even distribution, do this instead.

Once the nuts are chopped quite small, but not so small that they're starting to form a paste, mix in the ground cinnamon and salt. Coat the bottom and sides of your baking dish with a few brushes of melted butter. If you don't have the barrier of the butter, the dough will stick to the glass. And if you use cooking spray on the bottom instead of butter, I will come over to your house and throw out your baklava. Or maybe smack you in the face. Or maybe both. Ok, probably neither because I'll never know. But you'll regret tainting the taste if you perform such an abomination. You must also use real butter. DO NOT USE MARGARINE. 

Now that the nuts are ready and the pan is coated with a thin layer of butter, unroll your first package of phyllo dough. It is very thin and fragile, so treat it delicately. It won't matter one fucking bit if the dough is torn, but it does make the process take longer. Gently separate one sheet of phyllo and place it evenly across the bottom of your dish. The corners will curl up just a bit, but that's perfectly fine.

If your pan seems to be off by more that a quarter inch on each side, consider trimming the stack of dough. If you do, be careful not to over-trim it. You don't want the edges burning because they're exposed or the filling falling out of the sides. If the edges are ugly after it's baked, you can always trim them after it's finished and it looks way better than if you try to bake it "with perfect edges." Also, the Pyrex dishes are usually slightly bigger at the top than they are at the bottom. Not trimming the dough will give you good coverage when you've reached the top layer.

After the first layer of dough is placed, you want to cover the rest of the stack so that it doesn't dry out. At first, you'll try to get away with not covering it. You'll be like, "No way, Janelle. I can do this fast enough." Trust me. You can't. If you don't cover the stack after each and every piece you take off, the edges of your phyllo will be dry and crumble to bits before you can get it in place. Plastic wrap covered by a damp paper towel works well for this. Notice I said damp, not wet. Your hands must be dry when you touch the dough, or it will become sticky. The weight of a slightly damp towel merely holds the plastic against the dough so that it can't dry out. 

Ok. Next step is to repeat, over and over again. We brushed on the butter, put dough in dish, cover the stack of dough, and now we'll put more butter on again. The butter acts as a buffer between the dough layers so that they don't stick together. You must have every little inch of that dough coated in butter. You'll see some air bubbles trapped against the pan, but you don't have to worry about that. It won't hurt anything. When you've got the whole piece of dough buttered, add the second layer of phyllo. Cover your stack, butter it up, and do this again a total of ten times. You want ten layers of phyllo deep before you start to add the filling. If you lose count, it's ok if it ends up being eight or twelve. No one is going to count them. Go ahead and butter that last piece, too.

To go over that again, from bottom to top, it is: glass dish, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter. Now, try saying that like you're Homer Simpson and have a good laugh. 

I use Athens brand phyllo dough. It's probably the only brand you've ever seen. I know I can't recall ever seeing a different brand, and I look for that shit because my husband's a tightwad when it comes to how much I spend on groceries. In a one pound package of Athens brand phyllo dough sheets, there are two rolls. Each one contains about 20 sheets. So, if you lose count, try to count what you have left. Looks like about ten? Cool. Let's move on to the filling.

Sprinkle an ever layer of nuts across the buttered dough. You'll have to eyeball it, but try to use about a third of the nut mixture. It will be more than a cup, so I like to use a metal measuring cup as a scoop. 

This is the part where it gets tricky. I mean, you got to practice peeling the delicate layers of dough apart and gently brushing them with butter, but now you're going to have to do it on top of a rough surface. This is where you're going to get mad, but it's ok. No one will ever know that the dough has little holes in it. Drip and drizzle a few brushfuls of butter across the surface and spread it around. Do this with two more layers of phyllo, so that there are three between the layers of nuts. The second one will tear less, and the third probably won't tear at all. And you'll be the only one who knows because the layers hide all of your mistakes with this fragile pastry dough.

Repeat this twice more with the rest of the nuts. If you've misjudged your thirds and end up with four layers of nuts, that's ok, too. As long as you don't have only two layers, you're good. If you only have two layers of nuts, the dough will have trouble containing them when it's eaten, and they'll fall out. Once you've used all of the nut mixture, use the second package of dough to finish the pastry, brushing butter between every single layer.

To go over that again, we have: nuts, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, nuts, dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter, nuts, dough, butter, and repeat with the dough and butter until you're out of dough.

You'll probably still have some butter left. I usually do because I don't clarify it. I don't see the need for it and I feel that the milk solids give the dough a nice golden color. I dump whatever butter I have left over the top of the dough.

Before baking, it must be scored or it won't cook evenly. DO NOT cut it all the way through. You only want to cut down to the nut layers, not to the bottom of the pan. Carefully make your lines because once you cut, you can't uncut. I tend to do the three long horizontal cuts first, then the four vertical cuts, then the many diagonals. You must be precise or your pieces will be awkwardly uneven. The goal is to make lovely little triangles. See this older picture below of the first batch I ever made for my husband. Notice the long, awkward shape? I tried to make bigger pieces and paid the price for it with ugliness and slightly uneven cooking. 

Bake the baklava in an oven preheated to 350. It should take about an hour, but ovens vary so start checking it after 45 minutes. When it's ready, it will be fragrant and golden brown.

While it's baking, we're going to start the syrup. Mix everything in the second group together in a sauce pan. To get the lemon peel, use a vegetable peeler to remove long strips from your washed lemon. Seriously, always wash your fruits and veggies. Don't be gross and poison your family. Don't press hard and make thick strips, either. You want them to be thin so that there is very little white on the underside. After you get a few strips of the peel, you can cut it open and juice it for your fresh lemon juice.

I use nearly a whole pound of honey. Damn it, I keep typing hiney. Squeeze what you can into the pan and leave the bottle upside down so you can use the last dribbles on something else later. Bring the contents of the sauce pan to a boil over medium heat. Let it boil rapidly for one minute before removing it from the heat. I mean, a full-on rolling boil. I'm talking so many freaking bubbles, you can't see the surface and it looks like it's doubled in volume. Yeah. THAT kind of boiling. I don't mess with candy thermometers when it comes to baklava, but you want some of that water you added to have a chance to evaporate so that it's a thickened syrup. You also don't want it so thickened that it turns goopy, so don't walk away and let it boil for too long. Now, the syrup is going to rest for a while.

When the baklava is golden brown and smells amazing, you want to let it cool on a rack for at least twenty to thirty minutes. What you should absolutely NEVER EVER do is pour the boiling hot syrup over the fresh-from-the-oven baklava. It will hiss, bubble, and steam. It will also splash little drops of hot sugar syrup all over the place. Just be patient, and let them both cool off for a bit, but not cool completely.

Before you pour the syrup, you have to remove the cinnamon sticks and the lemon peel. This can be done with a mesh strainer over a Pyrex measuring cup, or you can fish it out with a fork. I prefer the latter these days. Pour the syrup evenly over the top, making sure you coat every piece. The rest will seep down into your scores and soak into the bottom layers.

Now, I need you to be patient. You can't eat any for 24 hours. I'm not joking. The syrup needs time to soak in or it will drip all over the place while you have crispy, dryness in the center of your pieces. The flavors also need time to meld. Do not refrigerate it. There is enough sugar to act as a preservative. There's also enough sugar to make it hygroscopic. That means that it draws water to it, and if you put it in the fridge, it will become soggy instead of crisp. Once the bottom of the dish is cool to the touch, cover it with foil. Don't cover it while it is still warm, or you'll trap moisture that needs to escape to keep it crispy. 

Once it has been out of the oven for a whole day, you can finish cutting it. Just deepen the scores until all of the phyllo is cut through. Fish out a corner piece first. Eat it! Love it! Make your family pay you for a piece because it took you hours to make it! 

Also, you know, like, share, follow, comment below, etc. etc. 

[lipwak]

VHS #339

Two LONG C-Span hearings. One on going to war in Iraq, the other on Terrorism and Nuclear Power Security with Indian Point being highlighted. *** TCM short on square dancing, Bob Wills and The Texas playboys are the band. *** Chris Shays Forum on Iraq & TerrorismBedford Middle School, Westport, CTC-Span2/23/03, 5:41 pm…(missed a little of the intro and I cut off some of the end)4 hrs and 2 min! See the whole thing here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?175181-1/iraq-war-terrorism-town-hall-meeting Intro. He hugs MC. Thanks C-Span. Intros his wife and mother. If Saddam doesn’t co-operate with the inspections…, 50% think we need to wait before taking action. Huge opposition to this war. Jennifer Flasko - killing innocent people will not stop terrorism, it will create more, the country is slipping slowly into facism!, a Kurdish man - supports Saddam’s removal (gets applause), duct tape and plastic sheeting, it’s more about President Bush than Iraq, congress ceded the authority to go to war. He talks for 15 min after asking them is this a good time for him to speak. Talks about the 1st Gulf War, he went to the Peace Corps, oil, Chris Burnham, his committee had 21 meetings on terrorism before 9/11 but no one covered them, 9/11, new approach to terrorism needed, diplomacy is more important than anything else, have to confront terrorists, we know he has chemical, biological weapons, Res 1441. Back to audience comments: Greenwich Peace Action rep, Judy Star - frightening time, in the minority here, Al-Qaeda and Saddam, Brit, supporter, stand behind the troops, complete confidence in W, GDI, put them at risk?, Shays doesn’t think we’ll use nuclear weapons, don’t want to be driven by fear, Rumsfeld, Saddam was our guy, roots of terrorism not talked about, appeasement, we lead the world, we need to be the leaders of this world, Kurd, who stands to profit on the war? He tries to answer some of the questions: responding to fear, an administration that wants more power also needs more oversight, respects W, trusts him, containment?, fly zones, if we don’t find the weapons of mass destruction we’ll be in a mess of trouble, Nunn-Lugar, send a nuclear weapon to this country undetectably via container ships. More comments from the audience: containment, North Korea, Al-Qaeda, cost of the war, Sen Robert Byrd. Shays: 40 countries are helping us, they meet in Tampa, there are people who are working on North Korea. More comments: (Bruce? - Round Hill dancer), when we win this war (in 2 weeks), are we willing to put up with the deficits? Just say no to Saudi oil, addicted to oil, double our national debt, man who was born in Baghdad, liberation not an invasion, Norwalk considering a resolution for peace, Tony Hayden!, why not a Marshall Plan?, work with people not fight them, get whole Muslim world against us. Shays: oil used to rebuild the country. more comments: Peace Train, Carlyle Group, I don’t like that man, (Shays thinks that was over the edge. W gives up drinking…), Zach: thinks president is scaring us, (Shays: I think we are going to see a chemical, nuclear attack in this country in your lifetime, Churchill is his model.), Viet Nam vet: knowledge our leaders have greatly surpasses ours,   fear used, Viet Cong, looks like those days, PR exercises, logic of pre-emptive action, (Shays answers that.), Arab-American, (Shays talks about Israel, will be going to occupied section in April, to interact with Palestinians.), against pre-emptive action, ends don’t justify the means, (third meeting Shays has had today), Israel and Palestine, another imperialist country coming in, (Shays: Nunn-Lugar deserve Nobel Peace Prize), money out of politics, war for oil, containment is working, (Shays asks why the French wouldn’t want Iraq to have nuclear weapons, they built the plant.), violence solve anything, when did you give up?, (Shays: military needs best equipment), Iraqi oil and France, Russia and Saudis? …, Gulf countries want us to come in.), woman of Armenian descent: father fears she will see a clash of civilizations, what do we have to do to protect ourselves?, (Shays agrees it will be difficult to figure out our position in the world.), (Shays talks about Homeland Security and Diane Farrell.), 1st Gulf war was about oil, Henry Kissinger, this one too, trust the president?, not in the public interest over and over, (Shays will stay until everyone has spoken. If we go in, we won’t go into the urban areas! (HA!)), are you listening?, it’s not ok that we’re going into this without the rest of the world, (Shays: The administration needs to do a better job…), President needs to make a better effort at selling this, man with strong accent - not sure what he’s saying, decommissioning of nuclear power plants? (Indian Point), (Shays is critical of our ability to protect them.), alliterative to oil, man whose father rebuilt the banks of Afghanistan in the 60s, Patriot Act 2 is damn scary, focus on Osama, (Shays: rather be voted out of office than to change what he believes.) war is a real messy business, don’t do it, possibly start a Viet Nam in Afghanistan…, 2 front war, correct tax benefit on Hummers vs Prius (he’s for that), wait, follow the money, he disagrees with his constituents, (Southern) man from Greenwich (Round Hill dancer), admires him, Republican against the war, one-sided support of Israel is the source of all this terrorism, we used to be even-handed, quotes a Roman warrior, can’t see how you can kill one innocent Iraqis, the Gulf War and what we are in now are two very different things, history of the Roman Republic, Shays agrees with him, going back to natural laws, where do we get the authority to kill another man, how do you justify that?, Ridge doesn’t impress him as a doer, (Shays: Give Ridge some slack. If I lived in NY, I would have bought the tape and the plastic.), Col Hackworth in Greenwich Post, Bruce? again, Indians hiding Osama?, will be in Afghanistan for 50 years maybe, W drunk driving, Bush Cheney connection to Enron, important to stay engaged with the UN, exhaust every other alternative first. Shays asks if anyone wants to join him at Sherwood Diner for a bite to eat. Many intelligent, eloquent voices. *** Terrorism and Nuclear Power Security hearing3/10/03, edited2:05 Watch the whole thing here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?175419-1/terrorism-nuclear-power-security opening statements from Kucinich, Shays, Janklow, Sue Kelly (Indian Point) - FEMA has to change, (Hubert Miller - NRC, W Craig Conklin - Homeland Security), (Nita Lowey, Eliot Engel, and others have submitted statements), Tierney, Janklow, Kelly - IP questions/problems, when was last unannounced exercise at IP?, offsite events are planned well in advance, Shays - I don’t know much more than when we started, Blumenthal (CT AG) - we’re in the stone age for planning, dirty bombs waiting to be detonated, Witt Report, shut down IP until we have adequate planning, there are other sources of power and they are affordable, Richard Bond, First Selectman of New Canaan, CT, John Wiltse, CT Dept of Emergency Planning, Shays to Blumenthal: What legal rights does CT have? Wiltse: understaffed, not a good network to communicate throughout the nation, Blumenthal: there is virtually no co-ordination between NY and CT now, Shays: would we ever get to go home, Jim Wells - GAO, IP, Michael Slobodien - Entergy Emergency Programs Director (also covers two other nuclear plants), release unlikely, plumes are monitored easily, plume would stay in the Hudson Valley, we disagree with a number of points in the Witt report, safety is foremost concern, Alex Mathiessen - Executive Director of Riverkeeper, need security and evacuation plans that work, 19% of the guards think they can repel an attack, FEMA, (Shays has palm against face), (Lowey and Engel's hearing last week), David Lochbaum - Union of Concerned Scientists, some guards working three shifts in a row, Shays: Should we shut down all nuclear plants? Are there any you would shut down? (more nuclear industry employees), windflow in in the Hudson Valley, Slobedien: plans are to direct evacuees from IP east and south not to New Canaan, no one in CT needs to leave as a result of an accident at IP, acute exposure, long-term cancer deaths, Lochbaum skeptical of Entergy’s claim of the 10 mile zone being safe, Price-Anderson Act federal liability protection, Shays gives it to them. …Adjourned. (repeated at 8pm tonight)

[thedivinemoral-blog]

The Modern Day Religious, and Syrian Refugees.

This is a post I make for followers of Islam, Catholics, Christians, and Jews.

Everyone should question religion and themselves. A quote I like to say is that one should not blindly follow. It may not be a religious quote but it is however an obvious one. The problem with modern day religion simply put, is that anyone who is religious must defend themselves.

Im not a person who is against anyone agnostic or athiest, but it is depressing just how much they are against me. Many times have I had some one turn around, whether young or old, and try to shut down a friendly conversation between a friend and myself.

I’ve been called a bible hugger or stupid too many times. Its actually rather sad, although the same could be said for the overly righteous (and mildly hilarious) crazy christians we see on the internet. Either way, either side, seems is full of some sort of anger.

Everyone wants to feel like they’re important, wants to be heard. They need to be behind something. There is a religious phrase “love thy neighbor.” Its also a pretty realistic phrase. Its one Id wish to remind every person about.

Its becoming normal for people to not be religious. I dont blame anyone for this. This is also causing major changes within all religions. Here in Canada, young muslim people are generally much more open than you’d expect. They have to fight extremely hard sometimes to make people understand that not all people have radical views.

As a person of mixed Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian faith, I find it extremely hard to fit in with the views I have. I love gay people, I love the fact that people can choose to have an abortion, and I love Islam.

I love all religion.

The world is having another huge social battle right now. With the rush of Syrian refugees, Europe, The United States, and to a certain degree, Canada, isnt sure what to do. Though I am certain that the actual refugees are even less sure on what to do.

I mean imagine having your family taken, your country destroyed and everyone around you spitting on your even being there. Though there is a much more obvious problem as well. Europe and the USA are fighting against the refugees with using a huge aggression towards the fact that they’re generally Muslim.

Especially Europe. This is a huge issue because as you may know, there are Syrian Christians. Does this mean that they will look at them any differently? I highly doubt it. In fact Syria is mentioned in the bible throughout, starting right off with the book of genesis.

The problem I generally have with Religion in The United States in particular, correct me if you see it as being wrong, is that they generally seem to have a huge issue with the middle east. Many people there hate the middle east, but then will turn around and call America “Gods Country.”

Gods country, one of them anyway, technically, is in fact Syria.

Or you could say the same for older time (and modern I guess) racism from the west. Many people were (and still are) extremely racist towards people of middle eastern descent, not realizing everyone in the bible probably looked just like them. I mean, egypt, palestine, israel, syria?

Where do people think these places are?

Its rather depressing seeing people rally against these poor refugees, not seeing them as being people in need. Especially when you bring religion into your argument. Do you truly believe that Christ himself would turn away people in need? Children? Especially people who follow his faith?

Jean-Nicolas Beuze, a Canadian human rights worker and advocate said; “Becoming a refugee is never a choice,  It’s a decision you have to make to save your life and the lives of your children.” This is literally the case here. This really shouldnt be considered an invasion, but rather a migration.

If you dont want some one around you, why would you not try to help them go somewhere they can? This is the issue I have with what Europe is doing right now. The people at these rallies, they dont care about the actual people who have to go through this, they cannot put themselves in anothers shoes. They are violent and ignorant to the fact that they can help these people. Its not a religious problem, this is racism at its core.

Look, I can understand some not wanting to become a “multicultural country”, but in the refugees defense, that small minority would not change anything that much. Actually, was it that big a problem when huge numbers of Jews dwelled in Poland? This cant be a religious issue, it must be propaganda and racism. The same thing happened to the Orthodox Community in Poland, they argued that Orthodoxy was a form of russification, and that they will not let it happen. Though it is rather silly, considering they got Catholicism from Germany, apparently.

Did I mention Im half Polish? Oops.

But I guess thats another issue altogether. Look, all Im saying is, you can turn away a young man today from your country, but my hope is that he will come to Canada, become a doctor, and save more lives than any person who hates so much ever will.

If a child is born from a father who was a killer, why would you blame that baby for his bloodline? Do you think these children are born thinking that one day anything like this would ever happen? Question your religions and yourselves.

You may have a few people who could be a criminal, but you are turning away literally thousands upon thousands of people, mainly children, who are amazing human beings. In fact, theyre probably nicer and more accepting than all these ralliers. They have been through a war comparable to world war 2, taken themselves on rafts across oceans, across countries. These are strong, admirable people. I can only imagine the great things these children will do.

But if anything, maybe they dont have to do a thing. Maybe what they really just need to do, is live a normal life. You dont have to become the president of the united states, a doctor, or a teacher. Being able to live a normal life is a serious privilege. North America is like a kingdom. Even Europeans move here. I dont think a lot of these “patriots” really understand how extremely difficult it can be to be someone else. You should really help people who deserve it in any situation.

A lot of people say that you just dont know who is a criminal. Thats so true, you dont know. You may turn away a group of people that had no criminals. Its depressing. Im sure the law can handle itself, we can handle criminals. The United States was known for terrorism coming from young white college students for decades. The law handled it, no matter how sad the problem may be. Things happen, always.

In conclusion, its extremely important to think critically about any situation. Canada is open to all refugees and has an extremely low terrorism rate… knock on wood. My point is that all people need to come together, perhaps not to become multicultural but to help all cultures survive and thrive in a world that should know better.

-The Divine Moral