#are the ones that are against ~immigrants~ (even after two generations and even if you were born in a european country you're still an

[maddy-ferguson]

there's very few things i find as abhorrent as white men accusing men of color and immigrants of being the ones who rape/sexually assault women and commit femicide it's so insidious and it's a despicable way to shield themselves from feminist critique

[bogleech]

Hardly anyone even fucking tried to run against Biden for the nomination. Republicans had one option besides Trump and she might have been at least slightly less destructive. I'm not surprised it's officially going to be either Biden or Trump again but it is so utterly miserable and wretched. Pathetic. Now your choice is between two possible presidents who are both friends of Israel and both going to help kill more people but one also wants to kill healthcare, immigration, education, science, unions, environmental policy, LGBT rights and whatever's left of reproductive rights. That's the one half this country thinks is literally appointed by God to save us from evil, and they want to shoot you to death or run you over with their car if you don't like him.

The other half of America is split over whether they're willing to vote at all because they think letting Trump win will force Democrats to become better and fix everything next time, as if there's even a guaranteed next time at all the way shit's been.

We're more than likely going to have a second Trump presidency. He already undid so much progress that Americans fought and died for. With another four years he's likely going to finish a lot of it off, and whether he succeeded or not he will *try* to erode democracy itself because he very much wants to be an indefinite dictator.

Generation after generation has been pleading for a revolution to start that actually topples these two parties but all most liberals apparently intend to do is absolutely nothing and hope it magically works out. Your options now are to stop Trump by voting for what is now his only opponent even in the running, yes knowing both of them are going to be genociders. That's what's left of your 2024 options unless that revolution can happen yesterday or both these decrepit ghouls die before October.

[unspeakable-imagination]

Not My Girl || Logan, Wade x reader

Cw: use of alcohol, sad Logan. It's just sad angst. That's it I think. Not proofread.

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My masterlist is here and my requests are open

Logan's time with wade had been eventful, to say the least. Despite how he made it look, he actually enjoyed his time with his found family. It had only been a few days since they'd come home from the whole debacle with the TVA and void, and Wade was sitting, squished against his thigh, completely ignoring the cushions that were free on the other side of the sofa. He was going on and on, and nothing of the topic really caught his attention. Until now.

“I forgot to tell you about my girlfriend. Oh my god,” he gasped. “I haven't told you about.he her. How could I forget to tell you about her?” Logan finally turned his head to acknowledge Wade. “Oh that caught your attention? Didn't think it would after the argument we had about my stripper ex in the Honda.” Wade patted his pockets and grabbed his phone from the pink pajama bottoms. He swiped over the cracked, taped screen and unlocked his phone before he showed Logan the screen.

Logan Felt his heart drop to his stomach as he gazed at your familiar face. He swallowed Thickly and blinked away his surprise before he looked to Wade. “She's beautiful. She- I, What's her name?” He was double checking if you were who he thought he was.

“[Name], isn't it nice? She's a mutant, too. Shes” wade words faded out as Logan stared at the picture. It was really you. Back in his world, before the incident, you were two peas in a pod. Lovers. You'd never made it official, which was Logan's downfall. He never told you how much he loved you and he'd regretted it every day until Wade brought him home. This place was a new start for him, and he used that idealogy to push down every thought he had of you and lock it away in the deepest parts of his mind.

Wade's phone screen timed out and he noticed, putting it on the coffee table.

“Honestly, I Think i want you to meet her. She couldn't come during the party, she was working the night shift.”

“Is she another stripper?” Wade gasped at Logans comment.

“Oh god no,” he clapped his hands together. “She's a teacher at the night college for adults. She helps teach a lot of immigrants seeking citizenship, and when she's not teaching that class, she's teaching kick-boxing to the kids at a dojo just a few miles away.” She sighed and looked off to the side of the room, making some remark about how generous and kind the reader was before he put his attention back on his roommate.

“She hardly gets a day off. I think her first day off is tomorrow. It's been like two weeks.” Logan quirked a brow, suddenly invested in your life here.

“You'll let me meet her tomorrow?” Wade nodded.

“Yeah, I'll find us A cozy place. There is this underground pizza place. Really nice, I'm thinking about that.”he scratched his head.

Logan hadn't had pizza in years. He hadn't seen you in years. He began to wonder. Had you known him in his world? Were you with him in this world before he died? Would you love him the way you used to? He flexed His fingers, fidgeting to relieve his growing anxiety. He bent them down and popped his knuckles. Wade looked down, still talking.

Loagan stood, coming to his senses as Wade slipped off his thigh, falling towards the armrest. “Wait, where are you going?”

“To take a shower, I'm realizing I really, really need one.”

Wade seemed to have forgotten to mention that the pizza place was also a bar. He sat across from him in a booth, a pizza on the way. They were both waiting for your arrival. The bell above the door jingled and Wade's expression lifted. Logan turned, twisting to look at you. You were dressed in a simple pair of black slacks and a pastel yellow button up. You wore dainty silver jewelry and had a black faux leather bag hanging of one shoulder. You waved at Wade, not even seeing Logan behind the booth seats backing. Your face glowed and your eyes twinkled as you slid into the seat next to Wade, giving him a peck against his cheek. You turned your attention to Logan and stretched your arm over the table to shake his hand.

“Logan, Wade's told me so much about you. Truly, you sound like a great friend to him.” He blew a breath he didn't know he was holding ad he shook your hand.

“Wade didn't even mention you till today. He seemed to have forgotten you while we were in the void.” His words were partially mumbles, But you understood him and broke into a fit of laughter. Logan's heart swelled knowing he made you laugh.

“Hey, stop. I didn't forget about her, I was trying to save the universe? Marvel Jesus?” Wade looked offended as he looked to you.

“No, no, That sounds like you.” he watched your hand lay flatly and Wade's chest and he felt his previous Pride deflate. Perhaps you didn't love him like you did in the other world. He watched as you slid you hand over to the other side and leaned over to him, laying your head on his shoulder. “It's okay, pookie,” you said playfully. “I'll love you even if you forget me.”

Logan Felt awkward, like a third wheel, but his momentary bout of disappointment was put to a swift end when a piping pizza dish slid onto the table. It was a sixteen-inch split into three sections, one with pineapple for Wade, a meat-lovers for Logan, and a mushroom, olive, and chicken for you. You jumped off of Wade's chest and your hand flew to a slice of pizza. Logan watched as you hastily took a bite and hum at the taste. You were enthralled with the pizza and already eating, practically inhaling. Wade and Logan each grabbed their own slices, but logan lost himself, chewing at the same pace as you. He felt like it made him just a hair closer to you. it made him believe He was with you, instead of you with wade. Wade, despite his full mouth, was babbling about the day. You looked away from your boyfriend and focused on Logan.

“So you came from Another universe, like ours- but different? What was yours like?” Logan stiffened. Right now the only differences he's been aw To think if, was the fact that you were with him- not Wade. Deadpool didn't even exist where he came from.

“Uh, the world is alot darker,” he said, looking directly at you. “It's less colorful. It's like the life was sucked out of it. Alot of my friends are gone. Alot of pain has been left behind. People are diffrent.” His face turned awkward and his lips pursed as he shifted his gaze away. “It's not something I don't like to talk about.” You nodded, understanding. It seemed like a sore topic for him, so you dropped that topic.

The rest of the night at the pizza bar passed without a hitch. For the most part. Logan had ended up ordering so many beers that the staff had cut him off, even though he wasn't drunk. After that, the three of you returned to Wade's apartment and settled on the sofa, The merc in-between the two of you. Wade laid his head on Logan and you were leaned away from the two, leaning against the armrest in your side, humming as you watched the movie. You had a glass cup in the shape of a can with a bamboo- sealed lid And straw between your thighs, full of soda that you'd been drinking. There was a bowl of peanut butter covered popcorn on the table. Every few minutes Wade would shive his hand for another fistful That he'd fail to offer to logan, and ended up shoving in his own mouth. Loagn wondered if you disliked popcorn here, the same way that you did once In his world. He remembered how you'd whine at just the smell, talking about how bad it was, about how much you hated it.

By the time you'd been getting ready to go, well after the movie ended, you were standing at the door. Wade was wrapping a scarf around your neck and mumbling something to you that made you laugh. Logan sat on the couch, watching you and envying him. You leaned forward on your tiptoes and kissed him. Logan imagined himself there as Wade dipped his head to meet your own kiss, but Logan Felt his stomach churn. When you waved at them both and but them a good night, it took everything in him To not walk out after you. It took everything in him to remind himself that you're not his girl.

Taglist: @kneelforloki @kathieycarrerarosshley @callsign-ember @clawsandbullets

[jewishvitya]

Hi, I stumbled upon your political posts (and then Yuri, you might get me to watch it now) and I find your perspective fascinating. Maybe it's because I grew up with rather a lot of exposure to Palestinians and various peace movements, but your experience is alien to me, and I am really thankful to be able to read it.

I would like to ask, what do you define as Zionism? As the last month taught me that no two people define this term the same. For me it is the ability for the Jewish people to control our own life in a land that we are bound to, and that has no contradiction with the Palestinian doing the same on this land, that they are bound to it as well. No pressure to answer, just pure curiosity.

And if I may offer some hope for our future? On the fourth day of the war, someone who helps in one of the donation centres for the displaced Israelis ask in the group chat if there is a way to pass the extra clothing and equipment to the people of Gaza. In the past two month I got invites for over a dozes or meeting between Israelis and Palestinians, meetings were both sides shared their sorrows and hopes. When an acquaintance was raising money to help a Bedouin family whose house was hit by a rocket, he has to tell people to stop donating. People in my surrounding have been talking about the day after, building plans so they could help build a better place for both people. A long-fought battle in the courts was won, and a group of settlers were ordered to evacuate Palestinian land. Activists have been going to assist in the olive harvests in the West Bank, despite it all.

There is hope for us here.

Hi! Thank you! If you do watch YOI I hope you enjoy it lol.

I know my experience is not very common. Even other Israelis get shocked by the depth of the hatred and the indoctrination sometimes. I try to emphasize that it comes from the most extremist community we have, because I have no idea what the schooling looks like in other areas.

And sure, I'll try to explain, and maybe also why I choose to label myself as anti-zionist.

I don't know that I can give you a dictionary definition, because I define zionism mainly by what it did in practice - the colonizing of Palestine. And when I say colonizing, I'm not making claims about indigeniety or lack of it. I'm defining it through our tactics and our actions. Especially because early in the movement they openly used colonialist frameworks.

Some of the softer definitions of zionism, things like our right to self determination, our right to seek safety - these aren't things I'm against. And I understand that within zionism there were other proposed ideas that weren't necessarily meant to end up with an ethnostate, resulting in ethnic cleansing. So I know zionism is more complicated than what we see in Israel. But what we see now is the reality people are living as the outcome.

If we came here and said "we've been longing to go back here for such a long time, we suffered so much abuse, we want to live alongside you in our shared homeland, can we find a way to ensure our safety and yours" - this would have been a different conversation. Still complicated, because mass immigration is complicated, but different.

In reality, we destroyed communities to manufacture an ethnic majority. Tore a whole society apart and shattered it, spread it all over the world. We killed and expelled and traumatized. I called it the cycle of abuse on the scale of nations - taking horrors we suffered and inflicting them on others. So given the practical results of the zionist movement, I can't treat those softer definitions as the "true" definitions that people should go by.

I keep thinking about Jewish refugees being given the homes of Palestinians with meals still on the table. Because of course we have a right to food and shelter, but not at their expense. And I know you agree with me on this.

When I say I oppose zionism, that's generally because I'm talking about the reality, the impact the movement had on human lives, not an idealized version we might imagine or a philosophy someone wrote about that never came to be.

For me, if I want to talk about our safety in our ancestral homeland and detach it from the horrors committed by Israel, zionism isn't the right framework. And after all the destruction we caused the land to conquer and colonize it, if I want to talk about our connection to it, I think zionism shouldn't be the word I'm using.

There's also an aspect of, by insisting on defining zionism through a nicer idea rather than harm done to real people, I see it as taking away a language that oppressed people are using to talk about their oppression.

I hope that makes sense.

I really want us to find a different way to work towards safety, without it being at the expense of another group of people.

And thank you for that last paragraph. I definitely have hope. It's hard, seeing videos of our soldiers being so gleeful about the destruction. I lost a friend of over ten years because of the callous and cruel things he said over the past couple of months, and I can't bring myself to repeat them. But I know that better things are possible, and I'm glad we're building towards them. I'm terrified that our government won't let us move in that direction, but we're going to push there anyway.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

The Republikkkans have been covertly funding minor 3rd party candidates for decades. The RepubliKKKlans are a vocal “numerical MINORITY.” To be successful, which they are more often than the Dems, they must pull out all the stops and do everything possible to siphon votes away from the Dems. They suppress black votes, or any group or geographic region which tends to lean blue. They also fund the “my vote doesn’t matter” and “both parties are the same” propaganda that keeps people who would have other wise voted blue from voting at all. At the local level the often fund someone with a similar name to their Dem rival. They encourage Kanye in the hopes of diverting black votes and they are pushing RFK junior in the hopes of diverting uniformed Dems. RFK Jr is the black sheep of the family and shares No Democratic values with his strongly Democratic family but many people don’t know that.

Putin and the GOP oligarchs channeled money into Jill Stein in 2016 and again this year. The Green Party always siphons off votes from the Dems since they both support the same ideals. The “Bernie or Bust” movement was pushed heavily by oligarch political operatives to siphon off first time voters from Hilary. Many of those voters didn’t understand the primary process where you first vote the person who most represents you before rallying around the party in the general election. A low-level Republican operative even claims to have started the Bernie or Bust movement although this is debatable.

Ralph Nader has said that had he known he would cost Dem Al Gore the win in 2000 that he would not have run. That blunder doomed us to two terms of dumb ass George “Dubya” Bush/Darth Cheney, which in many ways was worse than Trump. Those two clowns (Cheney was literally the shadow president) gave us the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars turned the entire Muslim world against us and strained relations with our NATO allies, cost us trillions, led to tens of thousands of American soldiers being killed or maimed, and raised the deficit to unheard of levels. They also caused two energy crises,one before 9/11 and one after Katrina, that led to record high gas prices that were higher than pandemic levels in many parts of the country. They also allowed a major city, New Orleans, to be wiped off the map and forcibly relocated its residents its poor and minority communities across the country at gun point.

Republikkkans win because they always vote as a solid block in every single election and they do it as if their very lives depended on it. Now some might rebut this by bringing up the Libertarian Party. This lunatic fringe party is basically the same as the Republicans. Most of them in the general election will end up voting GOP but an insignificant number spread out nationwide.

The Dems need to stop trying to claim every single group out their and desperately need to help recreate their union base which Republicans, starting with Reagan, have been killing off. The Dems claim both the Jewish and Muslim people but both groups largely vote Republican. The Dems try to claim all immigrant groups but many don’t vote, aren’t citizens yet, or lean to the autocratic Republican Party because it reminds them of the strongmen of their home countries. The Hispanics are claimed by the Dems but fully one third of them are registered Republicans with the rest going either way. How many elections have the south Florida Cubans cost us with their unyielding support of Republicans wanting to endlessly punish the Castro brothers in Cuba?

The left needs to realize the Hispanics are not a solid block and need to launch a massive outreach program to those who could be swayed left. A disproportionate number of Hispanics are white or white passing and heavily favor the racist Republicans. The letting go of unions and the failure to recruit Hispanics are the two biggest ongoing mistakes of the Dems. But the Dems aren’t as organized or as well funded as the GOP which has unlimited dark money from neo-Nazi autocrats. The legions of dumb ass Evangelicals and racist alt-right groups also help in bringing the Dems down and that’s something else entirely that needs to be addressed. We can’t win playing the game of division. We need to win over voters in massive numbers and do it asap. Dem leadership needs to convince the rank and file that the GOP only supports the wealthy, the religious fringe, and the deplorable racists.

[faelapis]

elemental has turned around at the box office and gone from flop to doing well. it seems this is pretty much entirely because of word of mouth. maybe theres other factors im not considering, but thats pretty fucking impressive.

and i think it deserves it tbh. it is far from perfect, but it might be my favorite pixar film of the 20s so far. granted, the bar isn't as high as the 10s or 00s, but hey, the decade is young. its pretty good!

i think what i liked about it was mainly that it was really emotionally sincere. like. its not too snide or self-aware, it just deeply cares about its characters and is totally committed to the world.

so many newer pixar flicks have this "popcorn filler" middle where there's zany antics that barely connect to the emotional journey. this movie doesn't. its all about these two main characters bonding in a way i found organic and compelling. and there's very little cringe humor. that one annoying tree guy is basically just in it for two seconds. idk why disney marketing still (wrongly) believes that kind of eyebrow wiggle humor is popular, because that made the movie look WAY worse.

anyway. its definitely good for a movie that was written off en-masse as cringey and generic and a lazy race metaphor. i don't think its any of these things. i think the main creative voice speaking about their own immigrant experiences does the job in a decent way.

also, that one clip of "fire girl being racist" is ignoring the crucial context that SHES the immigrant whos discriminated against, not some white-coded karen who needs to learn to be less racist. shes aware that shes less privileged and doesnt want to rock the boat.

also-also, i'm not even going reason with the badfaith twitter take that "she doesn't wanna date the tree boy because she's RACIST instead of it being because he's a CHILD?? #groomer alert!1!!"

like. come on. she's clearly not interested in him, she doesn't need to Spell Out that its because he's a child. that's not the point of the movie. thats just the most lazy twitter hot take for the sake of morally justifying that you found a thing cringe. don't be that person.

if you don't wanna see it, hey, don't. its fine. i'm not gonna go to bat like its the most important movie ever or anything... but its nice seeing pixar have more well-rounded, developed girl characters, after decades of being the emotionally sincere boys club. about time.

also, the romance is cute. i totally get why the aroace community in particular relate. like. its a romance where they Literally cannot touch each other, so its a relationship that actually develops because of their personalities rather than anything physical. its nice :)

[maddogofshimano]

Zhao Character Story

This was requested by the giveaway winner @trixibebe​ ! Hopefully it is worth the wait! I love Zhao a lot so this was great to do

Summary: Zhao’s been informed that one of his long time friends is planning a coup against him, and will be eliminated. This quickly turns into a manhunt--and cathunt--as Zhao faces down his old friend.

Ijincho, Yokohama, has the underground ruled by 3 powers, commonly known as the "Ijin Three". This is a story about one of those people, a few years after the boss of the Liumang had been replaced by Zhao Tianyou... Qing Jin, Ijincho Close Associate of Zhao: ...Tianyou-sama. Regarding the matter with "Jin". (Tl note: the name is 陳 which as usual could be a lot of readings. I went with Jin, but Chen might be more accurate if I were keeping with how localization does it. separately, calling him Tianyou-sama instead of Zhao-sama is interesting)

Zhao: Which Jin do you mean by Jin? Associate: Jin Yangming. (Tl note: okay yeah a name. I am guessing on specific readings as per usual) Zhao: Hmm~? What's Jin-kun done? Did he get a stomach ache? Associate: This is a serious matter. I've long had misgivings about him being a traitor. Zhao: ..... Associate: Recently he's been even more suspicious, so I had an internal investigation check it out. The result-- Associate: We learned that he's been gathering members from within the organization to stage a coup. Zhao: Are you sure there hasn't been a mistake? Jin-kun doesn't have the guts for that.

Associate: No, I'm certain of this information. Zhao: Hmmmm.... Associate: ...By all rights, the planners should have been purged as soon as it was discovered. It never would have needed to be reported. Associate: That man... It's only because Jin is an old friend of yours that it's being brought to your attention. Zhao: So he's a friend of mine. That doesn't mean he's a good person. Associate: It's been decided to do the purge tomorrow night. Just so you're informed. Zhao: ...Gotcha. Knock 'em dead.

Fierce-looking Man: ........

[a shuttered door opens] Zhao: Yo, Jin. How's the beef ramen taste? Jin Yangming: Zhao....! Zhao: Same as ever, this shop's my fave. Zhao: But the stir-fried Chinese cabbage is so good. You know how the garlic really pops? Zhao: Ah, but you were eating Chinese cabbage until two years ago, right? Did you get tired of eating it? Or is it due to your lady friend~? Jin: .......... Zhao: Oh yeah, how's your cat doing, Ranran-chan? It's just 2 years old. It's an indoor cat, right? Jin: ....I can tell you've been monitoring my activities closely. Let's just cut right to the chase then. Zhao: That right? Well, how about we do that. Zhao: Some of the elders in the group, they seem to have caught wind of your little plan. Jin: ....I figured as much. Zhao: The purge is planned for tomorrow night. Couldn't you save your own life by offering yourself up right now? Jin: Your father was a cruel and strict leader, but he had a passion for protecting the immigrants of this city. Jin: But what about you? You don't protect us Liumang at all. Acknowledging you as our leader... how could I do that?

Zhao: So you're throwing a coup? Man, you've always been way too extreme. Jin: ...Thanks for the food. I'll leave the cash for it, boss. [he leaves] Zhao: ...Haaaaa~.

The next night

[people are rushing down the street] Liumang Member: Jin went this way! Don't let him escape!!

Jin: Shit...! Zhao: I got it. Jin: Zhao...! Zhao: But I do gotta ask. What's the point in doing this? Jin: Shut up.... At least I'll be able to deal with you! [they fight, Zhao kicks his ass] Zhao: Hey, how you doing Jin? You had enough?

Jin: Shit... You're fucking dodging non-stop... Associate: Wait! Jin! Jin: ....Tch! [he runs off] Zhao: Tsk tsk tsk... He managed to get away. Associate: You all go after Jin. He absolutely cannot be allowed to escape!

Associate: Are you safe? Zhao: Fit as a fiddle. Associate: To correct the blunder of allowing him to flee, the general foot soldiers have been mobilized. Zhao: OK. Well then, let's seal off the entrances and exits to the district.

Zhao: Be sure to get the sewers and river too, anything that can be used to leave. We want him trapped like a rat. Associate: On it. I'll get it started. Zhao: Alrighty, now do I start my own punishment for the traitor?

[END PART 1]

Liumang A: Oi, did you find that Jin bastard?

Liumang B: Nah, the room was totally empty. He must have come back once and then ran off again. Liumang A: I see.... With the district sealed off he's trapped like a rat. He has to be hiding somewhere here. Liumang A: You guys stay here and kill Jin if he returns. No mercy for traitors! Liumang B: Yes sir! [he leaves] Liumang B: ....Do we really need to keep watch on this place? It's not like Jin-san's gonna come back to his house when he's being chased. Liumang C: Yeahhh. But Jin-san's really boned now. How could he even consider something like a coup? Liumang B: If he gets caught, they're going to turn him into manju filling. Still, I can sorta see why he might not agree with our new nepotism boss. (Tl note: for those unaware, manju is a stuffed bun. also nepotism is a liiiitle bit of a stretch but he is complaining that Zhao just got the job because his dad was the previous boss) Zhao: Excuuuse me. New nepotism boss here. Relying on things like heritage isn't very rational, is it?

Liumang B: B-Boss!? I-I'm sorry!! I was... Zhao: It's all good, man. But maybe watch your back better when you're in the mood for griping. Zhao: ...This here is Jin's house, yeah? You already checked it out? Liumang B: Y-Yes sir. We checked thoroughly for anything that might indicate where he fled to, but nothing turned up. Zhao: Hmmmmm... I gotcha. Was there a cat inside? Liumang B: A-A cat? No, there wasn't one... Zhao: So he took his beloved cat with him... I see. Zhao: Sorry for the bother. ...How bout you keep up the great work as look outs~. [Zhao leaves] Liumang B: Geez... I'm just glad I didn't get turned into manju filling.... [at a different set of apartments, a doorbell rings] Stern man: ...Yeah? Who is it? (Tl note: are these the same apartments you visit in LJ? haven't they been through enough??)

Zhao: Yoooo, Taka. Hope you don't mind me barging in for a sec~. Heyyy~ as I thought this place is pretty nice. Is this stuff for a pet? (Tl note: his name is 王 which has a bunch of possible readings, Taka was a very arbitrary pick) Liumang Taka: Wh-... Boss...!? Zhao: Aw you don't have to call me boss, it's fine~. You're one of the people who disagrees with my hereditary placement, aren't you? Taka: No, that's not... Zhao: It's chill if you do. I'm not here to blame you for anything. Zhao: Actually, I'm here cause I think Jin's cat is here. ...Ranran-cha~n, are you here~? [Ranran meows at Zhao] Taka: !? Zhao: Hey, that hurt~. Zhao: Since it seemed like Jin took his cat when he ran, I've been hitting up all the homes of the anti-hereditary faction to see which ones could keep a pet~. Zhao: So, Taka... This is Jin's cat that you're taking care of, yeah? Taka: No... you've got it all wrong. This is my cat. Come get some food, Ran. Zhao: ...Hmmm~. Is that it. This looks an awful lot like Jin's cat, you know. Zhao: A black and white persian with odd eyes, how'd you end up with one that's just got so many similarities? Taka: ...I saw Ranran and wanted to get a kitten just like it. I also took the name from it. Zhao: Hmmm~ ...But, well, the little bit of thick black fur on the underside of its tail shouldn't be exactly the same as Ranran's, right? Zhao: Just let me check that real quick. Taka: No, you don't need to. It's there. It truly is a miraculous resemblance. Zhao: ........Wooow~, that's a hell of a coincidence. But, hmm, it doesn't seem like this cat has any thick fur like that? Taka: Eh!? Zhao: What I said was a lie, actually. The real Ranran doesn't have any black fur on the underside of its tail. Zhao: Oooh bad luck~. You fell for the oldest trick in the book. Taka: Guh.... uuhh..... uraaaaahghhhh!!!! Zhao: Woah there, I'm not letting you run. I've got a mountain of questions I gotta ask you now. Taka: G-Get ready!! You're already going to kill me...! I'll have to kill you instead to make my escape!!!! [they fight, Zhao wins] Taka: S-So strong... Why's some nepotism baby that strong...

Zhao: Well that's a hurtful thing to say. I've never once lost a fight, you know?

Zhao: Well now that the persuasion session is over... Talk to me~. Where's Jin? Zhao: Since you tried to escape, it doesn't seem like you're hiding him in your house. Taka: I-I don't know... I was just supposed to look after Jin-san's cat for him when it came time for him to escape. Taka: I really don't know anything else.... Zhao: ....You understand from before that you can't lie to me, right? Taka: I-It's not a lie!!!! I really wasn't told anything else!! Please believe me!! Zhao: .................Yeah, okay~. I believe you. Not like you have any room left to lie. Zhao: .........But just to be safe, how about you show me around this place. Zhao: ...Yep, no hidden rooms or signs of another person living here. Seems like he really isn't here. Zhao: Well, hiding in another anti-hereditary faction members' house is basically asking to be caught. Zhao: Sooo... He probably dropped the cat off and went directly to wherever he's hiding. Taka: Y-Yes sir... He wasn't able to bring Ranran with him... so he really stressed how important it was that I look after it... Taka: He knew I had raised and loved a cat, so he believed I would be trustworthy... Zhao: ...Hey Taka, what are some of the things that cats don't like? Taka: Things they don't like...? There's a lot. Hot stuff, the sound of the vacuum cleaner, water...  Taka: Besides those... really strong smells can be bad. All of that varies on the individual cat, though. Zhao: Really strong smells, huh... [flashback] Zhao: Yo, Jin. How's the beef ramen taste?

Zhao: But the stir-fried Chinese cabbage is so good. You know how the garlic really pops? Zhao: Ah, but you were eating Chinese cabbage until two years ago, right? Did you get tired of eating it? Or is it due to your lady friend~? Jin: .......... Zhao: Oh yeah, how's your cat doing, Ranran-chan? It's just 2 years old. It's an indoor cat, right? [flashback over] Zhao: .....I probably got it~. Jin's location. Taka: Eh....?

[END PART 2]

[the sound of the door to the restaurant opening] Zhao: Table for one, please~.

Owner of the Chinese Restaurant: ....Your seat is right this way. Here's some water. Once you decide on your order... Zhao: Owner-san, do you remember me? The other day I was here with a regular named Jin. Owner: ....Ah, so you're Jin's acquaintance. I don't know if something happened, but he hasn't been by recently. Zhao: Is that so~. Jin was a regular here, but you had a private relationship with him too, right? (Tl note: 🤨 🏳️‍🌈 ❓ ) Owner: ...It was a pretty limited relationship. Occasionally we went fishing together. Zhao: Hmmmmmmmm~ ...For having such a limited relationship, it's awfully kind of you to be sheltering Jin from the Yokohama Liumang currently chasing him. Owner: Eh? H-Hold on, where are you going!! Zhao: ...Bathroom~ at least I was planning to, but you're really jumpy huh, Owner-san. Zhao: Could that be becauuuse~.... if I take a single look into the backroom I'll see that Jin is hiding there? Owner: !? Zhao: Looks like I got it in one.... Jin, how about you come out already? All the exits are blocked, you're not getting away again. [Jin exits the back room] Jin: ......How did you know I'd be here?

Zhao: Because you left Ranran with Taka. Jin: ........What? Zhao: You dote on your beloved cat. Therefore you would have taken it with you. But you didn't. Zhao: So the only explanation is that you must have gone to hide somewhere that you couldn't bring Ranran. Zhao: There's plenty of reasons I could think of why you wouldn't take Ranran. Safety, preference, the noise it makes... Zhao: However, you have connections with the Liumang and it's difficult to do a quick investigation, you could have established some trust, and you couldn't take Ranran... Zhao: So that made me think that the only place to hide must be Jinhua. This place reeks of garlic, which Ranran doesn't like. (Tl note: the store name is 金華 and could be some other readings but Jinhua is the reading for the city in China) Jin: ...How the hell did you know that Ranran doesn't like the smell of garlic? Zhao: Well, I didn't know about it originally. Zhao: I just noticed that the time when you stopped eating this place's famous stir-fried Chinese cabbage was the same time that you got Ranran. Zhao: ...That's when the lightbulb went off. Zhao: You started eating beef ramen without any garlic because Ranran hated it, right? Jin: .....Heh, you really solved that. You're a lot more clever than I thought. Zhao: Well, I'm a pretty capable kid, you know~. Jin: You've exceeded my expectations. But, after surrounding the shop and blocking all the exits isn't this a little naïve? Zhao: Hm? What's naïve about it? Jin: Coming at me alone!! I'm going to take you hostage and get the hell out of this town!! [they fight, Zhao wins] Jin: Wh-What was that power....

Jin: Shit... Just kill me already. Call in your men and make an example out of me. Zhao: Ahh, that was a lie actually. The only person here is just me. Jin: What the hell...? Zhao: In 2 hours, there will be a 5 minute gap in the guards at the Jinhua bridge. You can use that to get out of the sealed district. Zhao: I just came here to say that. Well then, good luck. Jin: ! H-Hey...! Hold on! Why are you doing this... Zhao: As long as it saves lives, I'm fine doing anything. Jin: This ain't fine! I just tried to kill you! What sort of game are you playing at...!? Zhao: ...Haaa, don't you know people don't like guys who can't take a hint? Zhao: Just to be perfectly clear, you know how I'm the boss of the organization? So that means I have no choice but to make an example out of you. Zhao: I've known you for a long time. Besides-- Zhao: Since I was the boss's son, everyone treated me like some kind of cancerous growth, but you never had any restraint even with me. Zhao: That pissed me the hell off... but really that isn't a bad thing. Jin: Zhao... Zhao: Well, that's all there is to say on that. Enjoy your second chance at life. See yaaaa. [Zhao leaves] Jin: ....I'm sorry, Zhao....

A short time later....

Associate: ...And since then, we haven't been able to locate Jin. He may have left Japan by now.

Zhao: My bad? I messed up on my initial call. I'm sure he must have left the city by then. Zhao: I'm sorry for being an unreliable boss. I'll be sure to work harder next time. Associate: ....We'll see if that happens. Zhao: Hm? Did you say something? Associate: No... Until next time.

[END]

BONUS TIME!

I love Zhao. he just goes around lying to people for fun. his two great loves in life are fucking with people and being a ginormous softie

Whenever I ran a line through deepl to doublecheck something it really really really wanted to call Zhao a girl due to all the tildes he uses lol. Zhao’s got 5 cards which is a pretty solid amount, including these two KSRs

that’s it for now! look forward to two more posts in the near future! I’ve got an event and equipment to share!!

[nearmidnightannex]

Ncuti Gatwa's Attitude

Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa on embracing his identity to find pride and joy By Cliff Joannou Attitude magazine, issue 358

[...]  the title role [of the Doctor in Doctor Who] is being played by one of the most exciting British actors of his generation, a Black and queer man from Rwanda, making this incarnation of the Doctor — the 15th — a casting that is more reflective of the world around it. And it’s needed because, to quote two-time Doctor David Tennant, the world absolutely needs more kindness than ever before. “The Doctor is constantly fighting for every life, even his villains,” says Gatwa when we meet for his interview in a posh London hotel. “He shows mercy and compassion to all because he understands that there’s a need for everything, and that we need each other. It’s really nice to have a show like Doctor Who running after all these years in this era that we are in now.” 

[...]

Did you read social media reactions when they announced you were cast, or that the Doctor would be a Black man? 

No, no, no, no. I got a brief glimpse of it in initial casting, but it’s not something I’ll avidly keep up on. The hate? It is kind of fascinating to me because there’s so much energy they’re putting into it. You are so angry over something so inconsequential that you can’t be an interesting person. You can’t have much in your life. I don’t have the time to do that. And so, I think they need to go find a hobby is one thing. But another thing is that we do see a shift happening in casting, in positions of power and in the status quo. I mean, not a fast shift, things could tip over the other way a little bit quicker, but you see people kind of malfunctioning because things are changing.  

Does the issue of race appear in storylines when they’re going to Earth’s past? 

Race does make appearances, yes. It is quite different for the Doctor. It’s not the first time. Jo Martin is the first Doctor that is Black [she played the time-travelling Fugitive Doctor in 2020], but it is the first time the Doctor’s been Black for this long. And so, we have to address those elements of the character now, because Earth unfortunately is still quite a funny little place. And so, yeah, we will be addressing those things. Russell has such a knack of being able to bring in these elements of our humanity through this sci-fi lens in a really interesting way. 

[...]

There’s such a pushback against individuality, against gender diversity, against trans identities. How do you feel about the current state of the UK at the moment? 

Everything trickles down from the top, and when you see politicians openly attacking marginalised communities, when you see our politicians openly attacking trans people, it makes it OK for everyone else. And it is scary to see that we’ve got to a point where it is fine to attack vulnerable people because that’s essentially what’s happening. People who are the most vulnerable, the most disenfranchised, most disconnected from everyone else are being told that they are the threats. It’s sick because it’s a hiding away of your own ineptitude. You’re going to put the blame on immigrants, Black and Brown people, trans people, queer people, to hide the fact that you are not doing anything for people? It’s easier to just create discord amongst people. It’s divide and conquer, isn’t it? 

[...]

It doesn’t take much to take us back to the frightened person we were.  

No, not at all. Not at all. Which is why we’ve got to keep pushing for more. Lots and lots and lots and lots more diversity, lots more inclusion on our screen. Lots and lots and lots of it for all you male gamons out there! [Laughs] I did an episode the other day where it was five men in a small space, and I realised how desperate I was for female company by the end of the week. When I saw my friend again, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like I can breathe.’ And I was like, ‘That’s so interesting.’ For the past week I felt like I couldn’t, that I was slightly in defence mode. They were all lovely, lovely men, but there was still something in me that was like, ‘Keep a little bit of your guard up. Don’t let them get hold of you.’ As soon as I saw my friend again, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ [Breathes a sigh of relief.]  Women have just always been my safe space. I think [that’s true] for many a queer boy. I feel safe when I’m around women. I dunno whether that’s a really gendered thing to say, but my nervous system seems to be a lot calmer when I’m around women than it is when I’m around men. Will that ever go? I don’t know.  [...]

[linnorabeifong]

DVD commentary from She'll Surprise You:

 For once he accepted her offer. This was his first time smoking. It wasn’t pleasant. He found himself choking from the stench and the dry feeling in the back of his throat. Agni, he couldn’t understand why anyone liked this. Yasuko just laughed and retrieved her cigarette. 

         “You okay there, Mr.Lightning ?” she said, fighting to hold back laughter. She looked like a dog does after finding a turtle-duck to chase. Entirely too pleased with herself.

         She was chewing on her nails as she spoke, another habit of hers he found absolutely disgusting. How Sayuri and the others tolerated her he never knew. She reeked of nicotine and sweat. She was all business, no pleasantries, no small talk, not an ounce of friendliness in sight. 

         Well, unless she was flirting with a client of course. Then there would be a whole show of sweetness put on. A spectacle of the saccharine. Agni, she made him want to gag. 

         She was cold. A ruthless, runty little thing. Eager to make a yuan however she could. Terribly jealous if the rumors were to be trusted. 

         She was never one to accept a nicety either. He’d made the mistake of trying to do her a favor once. She was beyond confused by his actions. As if all friendship was foreign to her. The Agni Kai’s were a family, why wouldn’t she just accept his care ? He was one of them after all. Instead of accepting his generosity she was all too eager to attempt to repay him…in ways he did not request. 

Oh this was fun to write and I need to get off my ass and finish this story. I have this whole elaborate plot in my drafts if anyone’s still interested. Hope you liked it ! This fic I really wanted to look at class differences ? Not super deep as I’m not the most informed. Throughout LoK there’s this clash of lifestyles that’s never really handled. Season one it’s Asami vs the brothers. Season two Bolin’s movie star life compared to his old one. Seasons three and four Suyin’s lifestyle vs the austere conditions across the Earth Kingdom. 👀

I wanted to make Zolt’s gritty world slam into Lin’s. They both have more things in common than not though…

( adult themes ahead)

So it’s a mix of things going on in this passage. Usually I write as ideas and moods come. On a Friday or Sunday I will carve out and edit a chapter to the best of my abilities in a span of an hour or so and then a week or two later when the mood comes again I will write more and maybe the next chapter too and I’ll reread it with fresh eyes, text it to my friends for feedback etc. I don’t just sit and write on a schedule.

Let’s get into the characterization going on…

In general I like female characters with a temper. Korra, Katara, Margaret ( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Azula, Rarity (MLP) , America ( the selection ) . So why not give Yasuko one as well ?

I loved your idea of Yasuko not being the soft tragic Disney mother. Again also enjoyed the thought of her being in a seedy environment and gang affiliated.

I also thought well what if she was still a non bender and still at least partially earth kingdom ? That would completely change her experience. What if she was disgruntled with the discrimination against non-benders ? Then folks it came to me that could generate so much tension between her and Zolt because even if they’re both at the bottom of society he’s better off than her. It gives her a reason to be a cold bitch. So even though she’s not the protagonist this is setting up room for me to write more about her. I wanted to establish her life as a mixed woman, without any bending.

As a mixed woman she’s rejected by both other EK people ( gets called a colonizer) and by other Fire Nationals ( she can’t actually be a member of Kai’s since she’s only half but Zolt doesn’t know that) . She doesn’t have the option of joining them or working at the power plant etc. She’s an impoverished immigrant whose dreams have been crushed . She went from the rural Fire Nation to the big city. From bright engineering student to prostitution when her money ran out.

“ Well, unless she was flirting with a client of course,” in reference to her line of work.

“Instead of accepting his generosity she was all too eager to attempt to repay him…in ways he did not request,” so one time Yasuko offered him a bj and he clutched his pearls like a grandmother seeing her granddaughter in a crop top ….😭. He was so scandalized, a hand on his heart like she had punched him with her words. “Yasuko, you don’t have to do that…,”

4. I envision Yasuko as southern Belle-like in her charms but also a villainess… or at least appearing to be a villain. Like how Asami wears originally written as a villain and is coded as an antagonist with the red and black clothing and sharp features.

5. Appearance is very important to me it communicates a lot. Yasuko’s bone thin, and dressed in dark clothing since the stains would show less. She’s frightening. She’s desperate to survive and that’s made her harsh. Her appearance reflects that.

6. Scent. Very important to me. Really helps with characterization and setting. Creates a mood in a way visuals and dialogue just can’t. Scent is the strongest trigger of memory. It’s an almost animalistic sense.

Really though this scene says more about Zolt than it does about her. He’s observant and caring but also judgmental. He’s making assumptions about Yasuko. It’s also hypocritical of him to frown on her being a prostitute while he himself is a gang member…

He’s also generous when he’s trying to play nice by taking that damn cigarette. That generosity makes him vulnerable. He falls right into her little game when he chokes on that thing… hmm.

Plot Shenanigans

She definitely knows more than she’s letting on and she’s pissed about it. Yasuko is jealous of Zolt… so she takes pleasure in watching him cough while trying the cigarette.

“Agni, she made him want to gag,” Zolt hates insincerity which is going to make his love life exceedingly difficult in a few chapters…

“She reeked of nicotine and sweat,” - He’s absolutely disgusted by her. They’re very reluctant allies. My little frenemies. Also like let women be gross on occasion. Wanted something less than pristine.

Enter my mind

I wanted to contrast her fierceness with just how sad she was.  “She was chewing on her nails as she spoke,”-poor thing is an anxious wreck

saccharine- have you ever had a dessert that was too sweet and gagged ? Or tasted something synthetic like cough syrup ? That feeling exactly.

Conclusion

I just love Yasuko so much. I will have to get started on resuming that story soon. I have so much more Yasuko back story if anyone wants it.

💗 I love bitchy prostitute Yasuko. 💗

Here’s a snippet of a bit further on in the story.

“Zoltan hated seeing women cry. Now seeing her cry he feels a unique kind of pain. A twinge in his chest he hasn’t felt since his mother died. 

Her pretty green eyes are glassy with unshed tears, and the ones she has shed have left tracks down her face and a puffiness in her cheeks. With her face all red like that she looks like one of those imported porcelain dolls. 

Her mascara has run down her face. Making a rough picture. A beautiful face like that should never be covered in makeup ruined by tears.

“Miss Beifong if you don’t mind my intrusion a man should ruin your lipstick, not your mascara”

If anyone wants to read it it’s posted on Ao3 you have to be signed in to Ao3 as it’s only available to registered users. My username is the same there as it is here.

Who’s the title referring to ? mmm you pick….

[vergess]

Anonymous asked: If vergess is willing to answer I’ve been wondering what Zionism even is I keep hearing conflicting definitions

The reason you're hearing conflicting definitions is, there's two definitions you'll hear in general conversation.

Okay, so like 150 years ago (late 1800s), a guy was like, "Ahem, ahem. While we're inventing nationalism all over europe, I notice that Jews are constantly left out of national identities. What if, since y'all shitheads refure to acknowledge our humanity and shared history in Europe and elsewhere in the world, considering us to be middle eastern immigrants regardless of how long we've lived among you as your neighbors. So!! What if we made a Jewish National State where Jews could live peacefully as a politically influential block, ideally in the Jewish homeland to which we are indigenous, ie, Palestine."

From this, came two very different conclusions.

Most Jews will define Zionism as the Jewish right to self-determination in the Jewish homeland. Which is a fancy way of saying, "there's exactly one place on earth y'all will let Jews live, so let us fucking LIVE there instead of being executed en masse by the Christian European Bootheel."

Of course, one should always remember that while some pre existing tensions were capitalized upon, this remains a case of two indigenous groups (Jews, Palestinians) pitted against each other by colonial powers looking to expel one and hope we would both exterminate each other after other methods of eliminating us had failed.

Anyway.

Most gentiles will define zionism as Jewish Nationalism, and they'll say it in the same tone they say nationalist socialism out of fucking spite, because the concept of an indigenous group repatriating to their homeland is somehow indistinguishable from colonizers destroying indigenous populations.

The problem, of course, is that the Israeli Government uses colonizer techniques like "the enemy is both weak and strong" and "kill all their children" etc, and they use them against other indigenous groups, which very, very much makes it look like the second, shittier definition is "the real one."

However, it's important to remember that just because the Israeli government is doing a genocide or six, that doesn't mean the people in Israel, be they of middle eastern or global descent, are to blame.

Zionism is about the right of the people to self determine.

It is misused by propagandistic elements in the Israeli government to justify huge levels of violence, in a way directly copied from the US's use of racial propaganda.

Which means it's especially effective at confusing and muddying American conversations.

So, to put it another way:

If you want to remain ideologically consistent, and you hate "zionism" you must also hate all other nationalist movements, including and especially, nationalist movements focused on re-empowering and re-homing indigenous peoples.

Just because Israel's government is genocidal does not make all Jews who believe in the right to one day return home safely are also evil.

I hope that clarified things! If not, I am turning anon back on for a few days so you can ask followup questions directly.

[mariacallous]

U.S. President Joe Biden delivered one of the most political—and politically significant—State of the Union addresses in memory on Thursday night, laying out in the starkest of terms the stakes of the forthcoming election for the United States and the entire world.

Considering that the United States is not under direct threat of war, perhaps what was most striking about the speech was that Biden opened it by invoking President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State of the Union from January 1941, ahead of America’s entry into World War II. “I address you in a moment unprecedented in the history of the union,” Biden quoted FDR as saying.

“Now, it’s we who face an unprecedented moment,” Biden said. And then, without ever naming him, Biden cast his almost-certain 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, in the menacing role of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. If that were not enough, Biden immediately went on to identify Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement with the Confederates who seceded from the union.

“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today,” Biden said. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time.”

In other words, the president seemed to be saying, the nation faces in Trump an even more perilous threat today than FDR and Abraham Lincoln—generally considered two of the greatest U.S. presidents in history—did individually. Biden then proceeded to lambaste his “predecessor”—as he repeatedly called Trump—over and over. Biden accused Trump of “bowing down” to Russian President Vladimir Putin over his Ukraine invasion; fomenting political violence at home (“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said); sounding like a fascist by saying immigrants are “poison in the blood of our country”; and shrugging his shoulders over endemic gun violence.

Biden repeatedly sounded the theme of the combined domestic and foreign threat posed by Trump: that is, peace in peril abroad, democracy undermined at home. “If the United States walks away, it will put Ukraine at risk. Europe is at risk. The free world will be at risk, emboldening others to what they wish to do us harm,” he said. “History is watching. Just like history watched three years ago on Jan. 6, when insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger to the throat of American democracy.”

One thing is clear: Biden and his team were intent on overcoming, all at once, the cascading doubts about his age (81) and his record that have left him with grim approval ratings, virtually turning him into an underdog against Trump with just eight months to go. The president waited until the end of his nearly 70-minute speech to confront the single biggest issue of his reelection bid—his age—but he did it forcefully and without any obvious flagging of energy.

“I know I may not look like it, but I’ve been around awhile,” Biden joked, giving his big, white-toothed grin. “When you get to my age, certain things become clearer than ever before. … My fellow Americans, the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old are our ideas. Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are the oldest of ideas. But you can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back.”

Will it work to save his presidency? Biden’s 2023 State of the Union, despite getting rave reviews, didn’t affect his low approval ratings much. This address, however, landed at a very different moment. Coming only two days after Biden’s big wins on Super Tuesday and the departure of Trump’s last Republican opponent, Nikki Haley, from the presidential race, the speech also served as a harsh reality check for the American electorate. For the first time, it is apparent that Biden isn’t going anywhere and that Trump will be his opponent eight months from now—that only this halting 81-year-old man stands between disaster and the continuation of American democracy, in the eyes of many Americans.

The obvious bet of the Biden campaign is that the threat of a would-be autocrat—much like an imminent hanging—concentrates the mind wonderfully, in Samuel Johnson’s formulation. Suddenly, people no longer have the luxury of wishing they had someone 30 years younger, or more inspirational, to vote for. It’s just Joe and Donald now. People are clearly not excited about a Biden second term, even most Democrats. But if that is all they’re left with—if the choice is a bad cold versus cancer—then the course suddenly becomes clearer.

“People always like to say that they have to choose between the lesser of two evils,” Norm Kurz, Biden’s former Senate communications director, said in an email. “Biden’s refrain that voters should not compare him to the Almighty but to the alternative will begin to resonate.”

His speech recalled past moments when U.S. presidents sought to clarify the stakes at an existential level. None more so than Lincoln’s 1862 State of the Union address, when he said, “The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.” Or John F. Kennedy’s warning in January 1961—at the height of the Cold War—that the nation faced “an hour of national peril and national opportunity” when “we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure.”

Yet it was also a measure of the delicate balance that Biden has been forced to achieve in his presidency—restoring America’s traditional global cop role while playing to the neo-isolationist sentiment that Trump has awakened—that the president deferred to the millions of voters who believe the United States is overextended in the world. He touted his “Buy American” neo-protectionist approach to national security, saying, “Past administrations including my predecessor … failed to buy American”—and even as he pushed again for a $60.1 billion aid package to Ukraine, he repeated that American troops would not get pulled in.

Biden also sought to stamp out a brewing progressive insurgency over his pro-Israel Middle East policy—hundreds of thousands of primary voters registered their discontent with him on Tuesday, and protesters Thursday sought to block his motorcade to the Capitol—by announcing the creation of a pier off the coast of Gaza that would “enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance” going to besieged Palestinians.

Here, as well, Biden pledged, “No U.S. boots will be on the ground.”

Biden spent the majority of his speech in more traditional State of the Union fashion, spelling out a positive agenda that contrasted with Trump’s “ancient ideas” and reminding voters of his greatest accomplishments. Among them, “the most significant action ever on climate in the history of the world”—cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 and creating tens of thousands of clean-energy jobs—and his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including 46,000 new projects “moderniz[ing] our roads and bridges, ports and airports, public transit systems,” as well as a spate of new gun laws. Biden boasted about preserving NATO—“the strongest military alliance the world has ever seen”—and introduced the prime minister of Sweden, the alliance’s newest member, who stood up grinning and waving in the gallery.

The president also announced plans to increase taxes on corporate wealth; remove tax breaks for Big Pharma, Big Oil, and executive pay; and noted he has signed into law a bill that dramatically reduces the cost of prescription drugs. He also hit Trump hard on reproductive rights, which polls show have hurt Republicans badly, saying abortion opponents have “no clue about the power of women” in America. Biden declared, “I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”

On the issue that has most frustrated him, the economy—which polls show a plurality of voters believe Trump would be stronger on despite strong growth numbers—Biden continued to insist that it’s just a matter of time before voters realize how good they now have it. “I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is literally the envy of the world. Fifteen million new jobs in just three years—a record, a record. Unemployment at 50-year lows,” he said. “Wages keep going up. Inflation keeps coming down. Inflation has dropped from 9 percent to 3 percent—the lowest in the world.”

The rhetoric was rousing, even incendiary, possibly a little desperate. But Biden, let’s face it, will never be a great speechmaker. The stiffness, slurring, and occasional stutter that seem to make every Biden speech a breathless high-wire act—one never knows if he’ll get all the way through a sentence without stumbling—were all there Thursday night, accompanied by an occasional coughing spell between applause lines.

Yet the president also didn’t commit any major gaffes and finished as strong as he started. The president was effective, too, in repeating his tactic from last year’s speech in mocking GOP lawmakers who shouted out insults, especially given how ineffective and obstructionist the Republican House has been. Without quite saying so, Biden came close to emulating President Harry S. Truman’s successful 1948 tactic of attacking the infamous “do-nothing” Congress. Over and over, Biden challenged the Republican-led House of Representatives to pass long-stalled legislation, especially the Ukraine national security aid. In any case, the Republicans were repeatedly drowned out by chants of “four more years” from Democrats, which also gave the whole affair the flavor of a campaign rally.

Biden’s State of the Union address was always going to be less about what he said than how he said it—how he spoke, how he walked to the podium, how he responded to his hecklers—and by that measure he succeeded. Above all, Biden was plainly showing his confidence that American voters will come to see, finally, that his programs are working.

The challenge for Biden—and Americans—is that his opponent, the previous president, is now deploying similarly apocalyptic rhetoric. In a speech in late February, Trump also drew comparisons to World War II, saying, “This time, the greatest threat is not from the outside of our country, I really believe this. It’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous. They’re very sick people.” And following his victories in 14 states Tuesday night, Trump said that under Biden the United States had been reduced to “a third-world country.”

The data of accomplishments are clearly on Biden’s side. Even so, Biden can no longer be as confident—as he was after the 2022 midterm elections—that it’s just a question of time before voters appreciate his policies. The day after the midterm elections, Biden projected confidence in the country’s direction, responding “nothing” when asked what he will do differently in the next two years.

That tactic didn’t work. It remains to be seen whether the president’s new one will.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: David Bernstein

Published: 16 Oct, 2023

Before the blood had even dried on the pavement of the Nova music festival in southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists ruthlessly murdered 260 young people on 7 October 2023, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies (CLES) began posting Instagram memes in support of “Palestinian Liberation.” The CLES is a collection of educational organizations that design curricula for US high schools. They aim to teach students about “critical consciousness” and “intersectional forms of oppression.” One of the memes they posted advertised an upcoming “Long Live Palestinian Resistance” event and another gave a shout out to “The People’s Forum,” which organizes events in New York under the banner “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” The academic activists of CLES are not first-generation immigrants from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank; they are largely home-grown ideologues who teach ethnic and gender studies at American universities and are now seeking to disseminate their ideas in US primary and secondary schools.

Even I—the jaded author of the book Woke Antisemitism and founder of a Jewish organization dedicated to countering this growing variant of the world’s oldest hatred—was stunned by their rhetoric. I would have thought that they would say that the murder of civilians was awful, but that Israel had it coming. But there was not even a token condemnation of Hamas’ violence on 7 October. Instead, the decolonizers publicly justified the bloodletting.

And then came the protests. Before a single Israeli bomb dropped in Gaza, the organizer of a gathering in New York’s Times Square celebrated the violent rampages in front of a cheering crowd. Alluding to the murdered festival-goers, he joked, “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party. They were having a great time and then the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

At a massive rally on the steps of the Sydney Opera House three days after the massacre, protesters chanted “Gas the Jews.” And—among other calumnies on campuses across North America—thirty-one Harvard student groups issued a statement of solidarity with Hamas, pronouncing Israel “entirely responsible” for the terrorist group’s slaughter.

There are two distinct but overlapping camps of the social justice left. The radical decolonization camp is made up of extremist academics, anarchists, and Black Lives Matter activists. It is anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic to its core. It would be easy to dismiss these people as ideological quacks—if it were not for their outsized role in US educational institutions.

By “decolonization,” they don’t mean a colonial power extricating itself from a former colony; they mean the process of freeing institutions and spheres of activity from the cultural or social influences of what they perceive as the dominant white Western class. One early leader of the liberated ethnic studies movement, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, has denounced the United States as a “Eurocentric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-patriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” Influenced by decades of anti-Zionist Soviet propaganda, the decolonizers reserve special ire for the “settler-colonial state” of Israel, and call for the “liberation of Palestine,” by which they mean the displacement of the interloper Jews from their homeland. Witnessing the decolonisers’ zeal for obliterating the Jewish state, political scientist Wilfred Reilly quipped, “De-colonization is just ethnic cleansing, but woke.”

Those of us fighting the decolonizers have a golden opportunity to discredit them and undercut their influence in the days ahead. In their rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis, they’ve outed themselves as the extremists they are. School superintendents who might have seen them as credible educational partners in the new “diversity” initiatives will now have a hard time justifying their role to school boards and community members.

Then there’s the reformist, DEI camp, populated by people who have been deeply influenced by the same forms of neo-Manichaean postmodern thought, but who seek not to overthrow the capitalist system, but to reshuffle the deck of power. Unlike the decolonisers, their antisemitism tends to be latent. They insist that Jews are white, place them in white racial “affinity groups” and frequently downplay the validity of antisemitic claims as distractions from the important task of combating anti-blackness. They include mealy-mouthed university presidents and school superintendents, who see Muslims as a marginalized community and thus susceptible to “harm,” whereas Jews are a privileged minority and thus immune from such harm. These administrators are often held captive by the commitments and hires they made in the summer of 2020 during the great American racial reckoning. Some of them see Western cultural norms, such as being on time to work, as forms of white supremacy. They issue endless statements about racial justice and rightly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they found themselves tongue-tied when Israelis were victims of a slaughter, and their Jewish students were in obvious pain. Suddenly, they rediscovered the merits of academic neutrality and free speech. They, too, stand to lose cultural clout in the intensifying anti-woke backlash.

Two and a half years ago, I left my job as CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the prestigious 75-year-old umbrella body of national and local Jewish advocacy organizations across the US. As a liberal lefty myself, I worried that a radical, illiberal ideology was gaining ground in my own ideological backyard, a phenomenon I first wrote about more than twenty years ago, in a 2003 article for Washington Jewish Week entitled “Consistent Moral Message Missing.” In the wake of the George Floyd murder, I watched with dismay as Jewish organizations in my field fell in line with anti-racist pieties, desperate to remain aligned with their civil rights partners, many of whom had long ditched their liberal principles. While still employed at the JCPA, I wrote articles for Areo Magazine and other publications, expressing my concern. As soon as my departure was official, I wrote a widely circulated article “My Cheshbon Hanefesh (accounting of the soul in Hebrew) for Cowardice in the Face of Wokeness,” which sparked much debate in the Jewish community.

In May 2021, I founded the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values to fight for viewpoint diversity and against the encroachment of radical social justice ideology in the Jewish world. That very month fighting broke out in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, and some of the responses to that conflict foretold our current reality. Media coverage of the ongoing conflict since it first broke out in June 2008, and of each subsequent conflict—in December 2008, November 2012, June 2014, and May 2018, and right up until May 2021—unfolded in a predictable pattern. The stories and editorials first acknowledged that Israel must have leeway to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. Then, as casualties mounted, the coverage turned against Israel, and, within a few days, the same outlets lambasted the Jewish state for using “disproportionate force.” In May 2021—when the last round occurred—Israel was not given the usual benefit of the doubt. In even the earliest stages of the conflict, Israel was demonized as the oppressor in some quarters. “If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency,” Batya Ungar-Sargon pointed out in a Newsweek editorial. I knew then that the fight against wokeness was not just about preserving free thought, but about combating a variant of antisemitism that grows out of the same ideological conditions that stifle free thought.

I have never been entirely at ease making the case for the growth of “woke antisemitism” in liberal humanist circles. Liberal humanists like me are highly suspicious of promiscuous accusations of racism and bigotry, and oppose dogmatic declarations that only marginalized groups with “lived experience” of oppression are entitled to an opinion on social issues. Such political attitudes are the essence of cancel culture. Yet here I was arguing that the very ideology that produced cancel culture also fueled a new variant of antisemitism that sees Jews as white and privileged. In highlighting the threat of antisemitism, I was concerned that I might be engaging in the same tactics as the people I critique.

From the outset, however, I made it clear that I didn’t regard my analysis of antisemitism as beyond scrutiny. I reject the now oft-repeated claim among some Jews, who, echoing the assertions of minority political activists in other communities, argue that only Jews get to define antisemitism. I sought to discuss antisemitism in liberal, not postmodern terms, encouraging multiple viewpoints about the extent and nature of contemporary Jew hatred. But in the eyes of some fellow liberal humanists, I was still partaking in the identity politics of the day.

Now, in the aftermath of the massacre, I sense a shift. Awakened by the outpouring of Jew hatred in the wake of the massacre in Israel, many liberal humanist friends have expressed their shock. This magazine’s editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann has stated, “I don't think I ever really understood anti-Semitism until now. And it is frightening.” Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer was exasperated by the hypocrisy of many:

When I left my perch at JCPA, I was immediately regarded as a heretic by a number of former colleagues. Some actively tried to prevent me from giving speeches about the topic in their Jewish communities. But, on this front, too, I sense movement. This past week, I received a surprise email from one of my chief antagonists on Twitter, Paul Hackner, a South African-born Jewish leftist who earlier excoriated me for using the term “woke” which, he insisted, “is about compassion and awareness AND you weaponized to express a fragile need to be comfortable when addressing racism.” After the massacre, he told me: “It's clear there is a revanchist left in North America that is allying with Hamas. The firestorm of hatred is raging. Hamas is a death cult. Sad to say you were right. Thanks for engaging with me. It helped me find moral clarity.”

Even among Israel’s most ardent Jewish critics, such as Joshua Leifer, a leftist writer and editor for Dissent Magazine, there’s indignation about moral callousness on the left. “There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for,” he has stated:

I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families and children in their beds I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.

Leifer’s discontent might portend greater willingness among American Jews to take on their own political camp.

A local Jewish advocacy organization in my area, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRCGW), tore into the area school superintendent who originally failed to issue a statement of support for Israel and the Jewish community and later released only a tepid one. Much to my chagrin, the JCRCGW had previously actively participated in the school system’s yearlong “anti-racism audit” and subsequent implementation of DEI training and pedagogy. But when their partnership on anti-racism failed to elicit support for Jewish students in the schools in their time of need, the normally restrained JCRCGW lashed out:

We reserve our greatest anger and disappointment for Montgomery County Public Schools … [which has] consistently ignored our agencies’ urgent appeals over the last three days to respond appropriately and sensitively … if our schools can’t call out the brutal murder of Jews right before our eyes, of what use is the Holocaust education and cultural competency that we have worked together to advance?

I believe that this dogmatic version of “cultural competence,” which rigidly ties identity to privilege or oppression, is the source of the school system’s indifference to Jewish life in the first place. But given recent events, it seems unimaginable that mainstream Jewish leaders will continue to deny or ignore the role of ideology in the callousness toward the murder of Jews and the disregard for Jewish concerns. I, for one, will do everything in my power to place the topic on their agenda.

What could really turn the tide is if Jewish donors and trustees at major universities finally use the power of the purse. Marc Rowan, the chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management and the chair of the Board of Overseers of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has taken his own university to task. “While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it,” he writes in The Free Press:

The responsibility also rests with many of our alumni leaders and trustees, myself included, who have sat by quietly as the pursuit of truth—the ostensible mission of our elite institutions—was traded for a poorly organized pursuit of social justice and political correctness.

“It’s long past time,” he argues, “for donors to take notice.”

It’s long past time for all of us to take notice. Let us hope that the horrors of the moment will not only be a turning point in the battle against antisemitism, but in the larger fight against radicalism and illiberalism in the West.

==

This was the world's easiest moral question: celebrate or condemn far-right religious terrorists who dismembered babies alive? And they got the answer wrong.

Atheists who defend Hamas lose the right to criticize the god of the bible.

Exodus 12:29-30

And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

Numbers 31:17-19

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. And do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the seventh day.

Psalm 137:8-9

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

What bible-god did is what Hamas did. You don't get to criticize the morality of bible-god while defending a terrorist organization that did the same kind of thing.

[theunderwrld]

an semi appless, plot-driven discord rp, based in Peaky Blinders and Sons of Anarchy, please feel free to enter the server and get to know about it!

WELCOME TO HELLSBANE.

Located between the counties of Hampshire and Surrey, in the southeast of England, the protected and mysterious Hellsbane grows strong and sturdy from outside eyes. Born from the society and alliance of five powerful families, the county lives and breathes from crime. These families bred their future generations through blood, money and power, thriving using the method for years and years, fermenting rivalries and animosity between tradition and future. The five families formed a single alliance, calling themselves “The Syndicate”. Hardly accepting outsiders, even with the territory expanding significatively, affirming they aren’t bred like them. The founding families included the Von Tottën, Faulkner, Chevalier, Grecco and Zharkov Clans. Powerful and distrustful vipers, if you ask anyone who lives in Hellsbane. Around the 1960s, immigrants reached the county, and other organizations were born, like the Italian mafia. Cattivo Vecchiano was the man behind the terror for 10 years, after settling by a patch of land granted by the Von Tottën as a manner of keeping him in their good graces. And in twenty years time, the mafia solidified its control and worked alongside the Syndicate, being one of their headaches. In 1985, in the outskirts of the county, two groups joined the political and illegal schemes of Hellsbane, calling themselves — respectively — the Astaroth and Mammons MC. Chapter sisters, and united front against the iron first and vanity of the upper crust of the Syndicate and their associates. The two presidents, brothers by oath, and in a matter of few years, Francisco “Hangmen” Areña and Jonathan “The Reaper” Van Weinsberg gained the respect of the population with their own code and morals. / ˖ 𝐭𝐰𝐨. THE GREAT WAR & THEN ˚ .❞ ₊ In the beginning of the 1990 decade, the tension grew so strong during the years back. initiated because of a love story brewed between the main heir of the Van Tottën, Marie-Ange — also called the ‘white rose’ of the family, because of her personality and looks. — and the president at the time of Astaroth MC, Charles “AK” Harrison. The first blood draw was the fuse needed to start, and sides were chosen while the two lovers fought on their own to protect their romance. More than 70 people, between innocent and guilty, were murdered in cold blood to defend their ideals, resulting in Hellsbane being segregated to attend to their needs of pursuing what they thought it was theirs by right. Since then, Hellsbane has functioned as the most dangerous town in the Southeast, and those who dare to cross the city to own something, had to fight their way tooth and nail to prove their right. Until one day, when the city woke up to the streets covered in blood and every part of the Head of the Syndicate, Dmitri Zharkov, telling one message only. “Bend before ruin”. Now, Hellsbane will need to learn their way around and prepare themselves for another war, with the outsiders and between their own people to survive, and they refuse to give in so easily. Not before all the blood is drawn.

[bluedalahorse]

My two thoughts of the morning:

Politics. I generally don’t post about them here, mostly because my job involves explaining politics and civics and the historical context for how all that plays out in the US. I explain that to an audience that’s half unwilling and bored people, and then maybe there’s a quarter very passionate and another quarter that likes to mock the passionate quarter by saying edgy things. I have to keep the peace between them and am not allowed to use language like “well, this comment in the debate was pretty racist and fucked up, and so was this one, and so was this one” and I have to do all that in like pristine civil language instead and conduct various surveys to find out if the even absorbed my explanations. And then I have to watch to make sure no one I explained stuff to gets into arguments or fights while they’re eating lunch or being outside together. Plus given where I live a significant portion of my audience have people in their lives, family mostly, who are experts in politics or civics or history in some way (or just close to it) and they will absolutely have Thoughts that they will share with me if they don’t like how I do my job. Despite all the weariness I express in this paragraph, I do think this is important work, and I’m glad to do it.

So after all that I come home and I do kind of want to come home and use tumblr to talk about which of my fictional blorbos has cute hair. I feel a little guilty for not talking civics and politics, though. Is that bad? I actually really enjoy reading my friends’ posts; they are able to use the language and sometimes humor I wish I could when I’m doing my For Money Work, and it’s nice and kind of cathartic to see that someone out there is actually allowed to use f-bombs when talking about this debate.

Anyway. I say all this on the bus to work as I’m thinking about how to cover last night, when all I wanna say is “this guy is obviously a fascist and the line about Haitian immigrants eating pets is straight out of the 1930s playbook and we should be fucking terrified but also we should get to work against him.” (Did I mention part of my work also involves explaining the US’s historical relations with Haiti, to said bored/passionate/trolling audience?)

I can do this. I’m not like, worried or anything, or upset. It’s part of my job even though it’s a little annoying. When I come back home at the end of the day, I am going to want to Fandom, though.

My second point is much more trivial. I was just thinking about how I’m like… I don’t tend to use terms of endearment on the internet, and the chain letters of affection sort of fluster me, and I don’t tend to type things like “hugs” because irl I only like hugs under very specific circumstances and I don’t want to assume everyone likes them. But, maybe I’m a fandom New Yorker (or at least, what Tumblr says New Yorkers are, when they talk about them being kind of gruff but willing to help you haul your stroller up some stairs.) Maybe I’m bad at terms of endearment and that kinda affectionate language but I would really like to help you develop your saraugust fic and beta it for you. Is anyone working on a saraugust fic they want a beta for? Or maybe something on the gen side? A solid character study perhaps? I promise you I’ve got your back.

[tirfpikachu]

this is controversial as fuck but i mean this is radblr... complex discussions and nuance are our meals of choice, right? right???

if you hate me after this that's okay. i want to say i at least have more experience in jewish spaces and with jewish history than most, though i obvs am not as knowledgeable as a historian who knows jewish history. so my pov is different than someone who has never been in a synagogue, where jewish history is constantly discussed at length. i'm open to people deeply informed about jewish history, and not just from tiktok vids and tumblr posts and articles written by greedy war-hungry journalists sensationalizing it all.

i have seen a jewish world where the gratitude for the land and the desire to have peace between all kinds of folks, all religions and all races and both sexes (on the leftist side anyways) permeates every speech a rabbi would give. jewish ppl were persecuted and enslaved since the beginning of time. pharaos enslaved jewish ppl bc they were seen as a lesser race and not deserving of their own land, so of course they wouldn't want to oppress another group, only their rich greedy men would, and the rich greedy men would feed their civilians lies and try to turn it into a coliseum battle. we are talking about two heavily marginalized groups with different needs. we are talking about a very complex situation, just as complex as the situation between biological women and transfem activists; at least in the eyes of transmasc & detrans women who have seen the issues in both tra communities and radfem communities and have unique perspectives. ppl hate us, duh. we make things more complicated. it's always so easy in war. one side is obviously righteous and deserves the land (even 100+ years after those new ppl settled there, and even if the current people never chose to take over the land, they were just born there and are usually at the mercy of rich privileged men who are a total minority in israel and heavily exploit people both israel and palestine, terrorizing their women and destroying their country with greed). greedy male billionaires are at the hands of most countries. do you really think people of israel wouldn't choose to go back to their og place if they could go back in time? sure. but right now their family has hundreds of years of connection with the land. i don't want them to have to leave or bow down to me or whatever. i want canada-like response to palestinian injustice. i don't wish for what hamas wants and has called for. you may want to look up everything he's actually said.

if you would not support... and i mean truly support, think about it as if it happened for real to you and your loved ones and local community, how chaotic it would get, how much stress and turmoil it would add to your life. if you would not support native americans - i'm saying this as a part mi'kmaw woman who partially lived in a rez in my very impoverished native community and facing the harsh impact of the government not caring abt indigenous peoples, so i know how much better things would be if white ppl had never come. if my female ancestors didn't get assaulted into pregnancy by white men, and became subhuman in the laws of the society. my family wouldn't be full of generational traumas and internalized racism. it would've been fucking amazing. but it didn't happen. and it would've probably made things worse in some way anyway. "winning" at war against white men wouldn't have solved everything either. i would've wanted peace between everyone who has been a resident of the country and has roots there. i am pro-immigrants. i am pro- focusing on the future and not the past. i am into reform and making the rich greedy men in charge alter their laws to respect palestinian victims and their families and truly atone. i want no more injured. any day spent fighting means more injured ppl, right? so wouldn't it be best to end the war? but i know ppl love a good gamble.

i don't want it to happen between indigenous folks and non-indigenous people. bc i care about my white friends and friends of color who aren't native, and if they suddenly lost their homes or citizenships, on top of their usual life stress, it would be heartbreaking for me to watch. i want white ppl to do better, i really do. and i'm white passing so i can only talk so much about that, but i did see it affect my native fam and i know the dynamic. i want white people to do better in a realistic way. i don't want to daydream about a forceful takeover of canada. hell, canada learned from things and inserted SOOOOO much stuff in laws and in schools to redeem themselves or at least prevent further oppression. and while it's not perfect and they can be stingy, to me it's 100% the right path. it's the right way to do things, the path towards international peace. is war the right way to solve this? aren't israel and palestine democratic countries? isn't there activism to be done THERE instead of just going out in the streets and cheering like war cheerleaders at hamas or at least making a snarky remark and brushing it off. are young progressives (it's mostly younger ppl celebrating the war lbr) really having a positive impact on palestinian lives? or are we just adding fuel to the fire? do you still see yourself as anti-war? or is some war rational, healthy, and worth it? you are cheering for a war. you are empowering a group that is trying to force its ways into a country through weapons and taking in hostages. you aren't doing fuckall to stop the situation for palestinians stuck in that hellish war-damaged land. do palestinian civilians deep in the war really want israel to give up the land and cease to be called israel after hundreds of years of history and culture and immigrant families (palestinian included) making lives there and getting attached to israel and feeling pride in it, since it is a country ravaged by more powerful governments overseas for years and years growing more and more corrupt politically? do citizens not want peace first and foremost? don't they just want the war to end? but people are saying "well this side is right and it's okay that they're encouraged to keep fighting! i want it to win :) yaayyyy go team palestine!!!!!" you are empowering people, hamas included, to harm not just israeli people (low on your priority list, i know... weird how in the russian-ukranian war, no one was cheering for the party who's in the right...? bc we knew that it'd just lead to furthering the war leading to more injuries and deaths and tortures, by encouraging either party and framing them as the inherent heroes who should get to win righteously (valkyrie style) like when schoolchildren fight and one side obviously is right but the fight isn't productive so it needs to end BEFORE they can figure out what happened, you can't try to deal with powerful men by making it a debate room. you can only deal with them by removing the weapons. activists should be focused on destroying weapons of war and empowering gaza civilians into doing protests and try to become a rebellion

you need to empower the marginalized to fight their own battles. and those battles are AGAINST THE RICH MEN, NOT THE OTHER CIVILIAN SIDE. YOU GOTTA BE WELCOMING THE OTHER SIDE AS ALLIES BC CLASS IS A HUGE DIVISION AND MOST OF US ARE BROKE UNDER CAPITALISM. THEY WERE ALL CIVILIANS SCREWED OVER BY POWERFUL MEN TOO LIKE THE CIVILIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES, FROM THE AGES OF GREEDY KINGS. WE NEED TO DETHRONE BOTH RICH PALESTINIANS IN POWER AND ISRAELI PEOPLE IN POWER BC OBVIOUSLY THEY KEEP FUCKING UP. most of the ppl in offices are older, and are stuck in old ways and make the country do dumb shit against another country. like with blm, like with #metoo, born this way, etc we had bystandards cheering for those social activist movements and the marginalized people made sure to have a strong message and clear demands, otherwise it was wasted breath and wasted activist energy. once dust settled and the injured were healed and ppl were housed properly, then we would reach out to the other side, do peaceful protests, and try to find realistic compromises. once both sides had time to cool their heads down and prioritize peace above all. gyns... we should be focused on the innocent civilians, especially in gaza, who are fucking struggling. we should pour water on the war flames, not boost the ego of one side, bc listen gang the rich men are in feral mode, they're privileged rich toddlers with too much influence, too stuck in the thrill of battle to notice the ppl hurting and if we keep the war going they'll get dumber and dumber. one side asks the other to stop the war, but the other side says that they're in the right so they need to rekindle the battle and settle the score properly to atone by doing something super drastic and unrealistic, and something that would be economically desastrous and dangerous for women and children especially. and something the other side doesn't fucking want to do bc it's been hundreds of years and their peoples (immigrants included) have settled there and built pride as a jewish people, a people who was heavily oppressed but now gets a life of safety after years and years of slavery and torture and mass killings by antisemites, especially around times of political stress. and ofc gaza has been ravaged with political tensions and greedy rich men for ages. there shouldn't be a war. people should be left to pick up the pieces of their life and rebuild their homes and get proper food and water before any kind of battle to prove their worth was to happen. at the very least there should be rules in the war. but usually one side is too inflammatory and it starts the bickering again. violent bickering btw. men in power during wars are greedy, impulsive toddlers who don't care about casualties. it's not israel that's the threat that needs to be squished down, it's the rich men in charge of BOTH SIDES

please read up on the actual history of israel & palestine. something NUANCED for once, with no bias whatsoever, totally neutral information gathering. if the message you're reading is simple and obvious, then you're probably not reading something nuanced. the world will always complex. more than tiktoks make it sound. radblr is about knowledge gathering and neutral sharing of information, right? so we should be able to have respectful female discussions of current events without bickering or generalizing or demanding for uncompromising forceful actions by a powerful greedy man (do we really trust hamas? do we? a greedy rich dude who has so much to gain by being the King of the war? has anyone done a background check on this guy? what is actually going on in gaza, are influential groups actually treating palestinians well? should they really be empowered or will the war just keep hurting civilians and isn't worth it in the end? is palestinian pain just collateral damage to us?

we should be able to sit down as a community, throw out the term zionist bc so many people are misusing it, cool off our heads as civilians, mostly civilians barely if at all impacted by the war and just watching on like sports commentors. we get caught up in the lore and the storylines too. we get really hyped up wanting Our Side to win. just need one more battle! and THEN we'll win. nope, we can't possibly consider stopping the powerful men battling it out. we can't possibly simply state "i believe in this bc of xyz" and talk it out spock style, like there's a marriage counsellor between the people tras call zionist and palestine activists. we're on the left, people. most of us are marginalized in some way, shape or form. do we really want two marginalized group to dish it out and hurt their civilians? just for an ego boost at finally winning at war? can you even truly win at war?

didn't we use to say that no one wins in war? like oldschool movies? didn't we use to look up to hippies?

hippies would be ashamed of the left.

oldschool anti-war cartoons would be ashamed of leftists.

victims are who matter the most, not the righteousness of men.

also, horrific things are happening to jewish ppl everywhere. antisemitism has always been consistent and terrifying. synagogues get so many fucking threats, even before all this. now it's next level. make sure to be a good ally to ALL marginalized folks. and, ofc, don't forget to call shit out on the jewish side too.

i am anti-war. can you really say the same if you don't want it to end? or you only want it to end "successfully"?

victims matter most.

peace is essential.

minimizing harm is our #1 priority. which means ending the war.

everything else is secondary.

and i know righteousness feels great. i know we want the perfect magnificent revolution. but if you watched a war movie before and listened to the war-stricken civilians... you know how this movie would end. you know how the survivors of the "winning side" feel years after winning. they're full of bitterness. or maybe romanticize it in their minds. but they have deep, haunting regret about the chaos it cost in everyone's lives, and anger at the greedy men in charge. it's why they're so full of ptsd. bc war is hell. fuck the war.

what is it good for? absolutely NOTHING!!! we are pawns being used by powerful countries who want to influence control over their citizens. they often love being at war and are excited at the violent prospect of taking over the other side. war can make them even richer. it can give them foreign women at their mercy. it can give them political power and pawns to play with to make their nation the greatest, of whatever patriarchal bullshit goes through their mind.

so yeah. fuck capitalism. fuck the war. end it first and foremost or palestinians will be more traumatized and tensions between the peoples will escalate year after year endlessly. end the war!!!

who knows though. maybe i'm just a naive feminazi hippie who dreams of peace and love and an end to all wars lol :']

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Clay Bennett, The Chattanooga Times

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 17, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 18, 2024

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton responded this evening to the federal government’s demand that state troops give U.S. Border Patrol agents access to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, the site where three migrants died last week as they tried to cross the Rio Grande. 

Aarón Torres and Joseph Morton of The Dallas Morning News reported that Paxton’s letter acknowledged that by law the federal government’s Border Patrol officers are allowed  “warrantless access to land within 25 miles of the border, but only ‘for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.’” Paxton claimed that this law doesn’t apply because the current administration’s policies—the law, after all, is written by Congress—are not intended to stop undocumented immigration. “There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens,” he wrote. 

Torres and Morton note that, in fact, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 142,000 migrants in 2023 and that Paxton presented no evidence for his claims.

Two weeks ago, House Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) demanded that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testify as part of the House’s impeachment proceedings against him. As Rebecca Beitsch points out in The Hill, testimony from a cabinet secretary is usually arranged several weeks or even months in advance, and Mayorkas said he could not make the date because he will be discussing immigration with a delegation from Mexico at that time but he asked to arrange another time. Mayorkas has testified before the House panel twice in the past year and before Congress 27 times since he took office.

In a letter obtained by Punchbowl News, Green wrote: “Since you continue to decline to come in person, I invite you to submit written testimony for the January 18th hearing record, so that our Committee Members may hear from you directly.” 

This evening, an inadvertently circulated internal Republican memo obtained by Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill shows that Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee likely have switched their demand for live testimony to a demand for written answers because they have already committed to impeachment on a tight timeline and cannot wait for the live hearing to be rescheduled. 

Green had previously suggested on the Fox News Channel that an impeachment document had already been written even though there had been no impeachment hearings. The memo appears to corroborate that suggestion, saying: “We have scheduled the markup for impeachment articles at 10:00 AM ET on Wednesday, January 31, 2024.” 

Republicans argue that Mayorkas lied to Congress because he said the government has operational control over the border. They dispute this characterization because the Secure Fence Act defines operational control as one in which not a single person or object enters the country improperly. This perfect standard has never been met, and yet they apparently decided to impeach over it before even holding hearings.  

Republicans are clearly hoping to use the issue of immigration against President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the upcoming election. After insisting in November that immigration was in such a crisis that there could be no more aid to Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan without it, Republicans in December rejected the idea of new legislation and said Biden must handle the issue himself. Then, in early January, 64 Republicans traveled to the border to demonstrate the importance of the issue.

But now that the Senate appears to have hammered out a bipartisan immigration reform measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said this morning: “It’s a complex issue. I don’t think now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform, because we know how complicated that is.” After a meeting at the White House today with President Biden, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and committee heads, Johnson still refused to put the proposed deal up for a vote in the House.

In today’s meeting, Biden emphasized the danger of leaving Ukraine’s defense unfunded. “He was clear,” the White House said, “Congress’s continued failure to act endangers the United States’ national security, the NATO Alliance, and the rest of the free world.” 

Johnson is caught between U.S. national security and Trump. On the Fox News Channel tonight, Laura Ingraham told Johnson she had just gotten off a phone call with Trump and Trump had told her that he was against the immigration deal and had urged Johnson to oppose it. “He…was extremely adamant about it,” she said. Johnson agreed and said that he and Trump had been “talking about this pretty frequently.”   

Trump needs the issue of immigration to whip up his base for the 2024 election.

Today the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chaired by James Comer (R-KY) held a hearing titled “The Biden Administration’s Regulatory and Policymaking Efforts to Undermine U.S. Immigration Law.” The administration has asked for additional funding for border patrol officers, immigration courts, and so on, but Comer said in his opening statement that the problem is not a lack of resources but rather an unwillingness to enforce the law. 

Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) replied: “You know we have failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform up here for decades.” He noted that one of his colleagues had provided statistics showing that President Barack Obama deported more people in each term than Trump did, so “if the border wasn’t a problem until President Biden was elected, then how are we deporting all of these people in administrations before Trump was elected? It’s because this situation has been going on for decades. So stop lying to the American people that none of this happened until President Biden was elected.”

Comer has also used the House Oversight Committee to spread the idea that President Biden is corrupt, but while he has made many allegations on right-wing media channels, the committee has not, in fact, turned up any evidence linking the president to illegal activity. Instead, the investigations there appear to be a continuation of the technique Republicans have used since  the 1990s to insinuate that a Democrat has engaged in wrongdoing simply by holding investigations. 

Trump employed this technique effectively in 2016 in his constant refrain that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, had illegally deleted emails, and less effectively in 2019 when he tried to strong-arm Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden. It was central to the plan of convincing state legislatures that they could recast their 2020 electoral votes: lawyer Jeffrey Clark wanted to tell them (falsely) that there were voting irregularities that the Department of Justice was investigating.

But this technique has backfired so far in this Congress. After a year of hearing that Biden is corrupt, MAGA Republicans have expected to see him impeached. But Democrats have come to hearings exceedingly well prepared and have pushed back on MAGA talking points, turning the tables on the Republicans so thoroughly that Comer recently was forced to back down, saying, “My job was never to impeach.” 

Creating a false reality to trick voters is central to undermining democracy, and it is no secret that autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and China are spreading disinformation in the U.S. But I have always wondered what would happen when the American people finally pushed back against suggestions and innuendo and instead demanded actual evidence and policies designed to address problems, as they did before American politics turned into entertainment.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON