#but it does show us that y’all hate jews

[pettytiredandjewish]

To the pro pal and anti zionist crowds… (once again)

- hamas is not a fucking resistance group. They are a terrorist organization that wants to k*ll all Israelis and Jewish people- along with the Palestinians that don’t agree with them. They don’t give a damn about Palestinians and their safety.

- why are y’all defending Hamas? And other terrorist groups? Y’all will go on rants about how they’re not evil or they’re just protecting themselves and all that BS. These groups don’t give a damn about the civilians- hell they do more harm than good to the civilians. Honey supporting these types of groups is really messed up and morally fucked up.

- (the fact that I have to say this is mind blowing but-) r*pe isn’t a form of freedom fighting. And the fact that some of y’all are denying that the hostages were r*ped- despite all of the evidence, or even justifying the r*pe- claiming that they deserved it is just… really messed up and disgusting.

- since most of y’all don’t even know what Zionism means, please leave it out of your vocabulary. And another little reminder but anti Zionism is antisemitism.

- protesting outside of synagogue, schools, museums and businesses isn’t freeing Palestine. You pulling this type of shit is just letting us know that y’all hate Jews.

- defacing and fire bombing synagogues and Jewish grave yards are also isn’t gonna free Palestine. Once again it’s just letting us know that y’all hate Jews.

- harassing random Jews (on the internet and in person) and attacking them/ making threats to them is not freeing Palestine. You know what is does though? It just proves that y’all hate Jews.

- just a quick question but how does harassing Jewish kids help free Palestine?

- antisemitism is on the rise and it’s getting worse every single fucking day. And the only ones that gives a shit is us Jews and our allies. But y’all would rather turn your face away from it or just deny or even justify it.

- another question but uh y’all do know what INTIFADA means right?

- Israelis are not their fucking government.

I could keep going but I hope y’all get the point. And if you still don’t get it then… welp I guess it’s a loss cause.

[copaganda-clobberfest]

WELCOME

TO THE FIRST ROUND OF THE COPAGANDA CLOBBERFEST!

“You know that trope? That one trope *Everyone* hates? The trope in which a well meaning antagonist to our heroes, one looking out for the good of a certain community, suddenly does something horrible and drastic to make not only them, but the ideology they stand for the most villainous of all?”

NOW IS THE TIME TO BATTLE THEM OUT! Like Ken dolls, fighting for survival! Like your Polly pockets discarded in the closet, we’ll see which of these bitches jumped that slippery slope harder! Whose character did numbers on y’all, and blew up a bunch of grandmas and babies and hospitals with it!

ROUND ONE

SQUEALER from SHIN SEKAI YORI vs THE WHITE FANG from RWBY

Squealer propaganda (TW for disturbing themes, as well as spoilers for the anime)

“he is a human man who has descended from a long line of humans who were genetically engineered, tortured, studied like literal rodents, selectively bred, and worse by a population of other humans with psychic powers. to show that he is in the wrong, he slaughters the elderly, infirm, children, murders two 14 year olds in particular and uses their child as a living weapon, and lobotomizes his mother in an effort to be recognized as human and treated better than literal garbage.”

White Fang propaganda (TW for Racism, Branding, Slavery, Antisemitism):

“As a Jewish person, I stopped watching RWBY around the beginning of s5 when Adam (the main White Fang antagonist) said that the goal of the White Fang was to replace humans in society. It came SO shortly after those riots where people where chanting "Jews will not replace us" and it made me so sick to my stomach to watch a conspiracy theory like that actually play out on screen that I hard stopped watching a show I'd been highkey obsessed with for years.”

“The evilest moment the writers wrote for their literal “minorities are secretly just wanting power over the whites” scapegoat character involves said character revealing he was not only enslaved but also was branded with a cattle prod over his eye.”

“The White Fang is the only organization fighting for the rights of the Faunus, the in-universe minority group meant to be an allegory for poc, and they’re portrayed as ruthless terrorists who are conveniently less white than the privileged minorities who “redeem” them. A majority of the actual poc who are also Faunus have “allusions” to the Jungle Book, and if you know the Jungle Book’s author and the certain other thing he wrote, you’d Barf at how racist that really is. The white comfort is strong in this Texan show. Also, said terrorists in this show are based off the real-world Black Panther Party, which just makes this whole thing feel like a special on Fox News!”

“The first indigenous-coded character and she’s a terrorist. Like what real life native Americans are to this day dubbed as for simply wanting their rights.”

Always feel free to rb with more propaganda :)

[laineystein]

why is interfaith marriages not believed in? sorry for the bad grammar and if this is an obvious question.

Alright. So I’ve sat on this for a bit because I know how some of you absolutely lose your minds when I talk about this - goyim and Jews, apparently. So if you’re here to listen and engage civilly, by all means. If you’re here to tell me I’m a terrible person (without reading my post and trying to reason with what I’m saying), please continue scrolling.

Now that we’re past that…

A few things:

There’s what my faith tells me

There’s what I was raised on

There’s what I believe

THESE ARE THREE VERY DIFFERENT NUANCES.

1. Judaism, and the Talmud specifically, does not recognize marriage between a Jew and a gentile. Jewish law does not recognize any such marriage as a legal marriage. If a man has children by a gentile woman, he has no claim to those children. Them’s the rules.

2. I was raised Conservative. To us, it was not just about Jewish law. - though that was certainly important. I was raised to believe in the importance of having Jewish children and bringing those children up in the Jewish faith. I was taught that the best home for Jewish children (because any children I have will be Jewish because I am Jewish - Judaism is passed matrilineally) is a home where both parents are Jewish. My father’s side of the family survived the Shoah so the continuation of our Jewishness was stressed as being essential. It was not just enough for Jews to survive - we need to fall in love with other Jews, create families and homes with other Jews, and attend shul in the face of hatred. Surviving shows hatred that it lost, living our best Jewish lives shows hatred that we won. But at it’s base level, no, Conservative Judaism does not recognize intermarriages. If they do, it is only if the spouse is willing to convert and be an active member of the community. Even then it gets dicey - which I’ll maybe get to in another post - we don’t have time to unpack all of that right now. And some of y’all are about to absolutely lose it over the following commentary so I don’t want to overwhelm you.

3. Now as far as what I believe…technically I consider myself Reform now but I genuinely hate the stream labels. I’m a practicing Jew. That’s all that matters in my world. But! Do Reform Jews sometimes recognize interfaith marriages? Sure! Is it something I want for myself? Never. Is my boyfriend a Jew? Yes. All of the men I’ve ever dated/slept with have been Jewish. Listen. What I’m about to say is going to be controversial but oh well. Judaism, unlike some other religions, teaches the importance of women. Women are respected. That is absolutely clear in how Jewish men treat the Jewish women in their lives. Jewish men, in my experience, are raised differently - just as all people across different cultures have different teachings and traditions, so do Jews and this is one of them. The gentile men I’ve ever interacted with have almost always been derogatory with me and have almost always sexualized my Jewishness. When they find out I was in the army I’m immediately sexualized, when they find out that army was the IDF, I’m suddenly a k*ke. In med school I was called a “fucking k*ke whore” by an asshole wearing a cross around his neck because I consistently scored better than him on my exams…that was over 6 years ago and I’m still not over it.

I’ll remind everyone that it is not just Judaism that cautions against interfaith marriages - Xtians used to put people engaged in intermarriage to death. Islam has similar attitudes toward it. But do I want anyone to effing die?! NO. I want everyone to do what they want to do — and what I want to do is not date/marry goyim.

Marriage is meant to be a partnership of equals based on trust and respect…I’m sorry but as a Jew I struggle to trust gentiles. If that chaps your ass so much then maybe work on being an ally to the Jewish people. Gentiles don’t want to hear that but also do nothing to stop the cause. I’m not going to lie and say that I will date gentile men to make y’all comfortable when no gentile cares about my basic right to exist and take up space as a Jewish woman. You want to know who does care about that and who works to ensure that is a possibility and works to support ALL of the Jewish women in his life? A Jewish man.

Again, it is so incredibly nuanced and I can’t get into every problematic aspect of intermarriage, nor can I take the time to defend everything that deserves to be defended - I just don’t have the emotional energy. Unfortunately I think people will believe what they choose to believe. My hope is that this post makes people think. I have always struggled with this idea of being against intermarriage because the main thing I was raised on is tolerance and accepting others and being a kind person. But I can be those things (and am those things!) and still not want to date/marry goy men.

Die mad about it.

[a-queer-seminarian]

Edited March 30, 2020

__________

currently thinking about how Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was hailed and celebrated by the people -- how they shouted “hosanna,” an exclamation of adoration and praise; how they waved palms and spread their cloaks for his arrival........and then turned on him. let the Romans take him and torture him and brutally execute him.

and how because this happened to Jesus, he knows intimately what it feels like when similar things happen to us. when we are welcomed at first and then, when we fail to meet expectations, we are vilified and thrown out -- Jesus gets it. God really, truly, has been there.

a Black woman is employed by a church as part of a diversity initiative, and is welcomed by all -- until she starts pointing out things that need to change, pervasive issues of racism and misogyny and cissexism that should be addressed. excitement sours into resentment, openness into anger; she is ostracized, treated rudely, isolated until the environment becomes so toxic she leaves. she is blamed for the way things “didn’t work out.”

parents promise their son their love is unconditional; he grows up hearing the promise to “love him no matter what.” but these parents are also not quiet about making their anti-gay views known. he has to wonder -- will that unconditional love survive him going out?

a trans person comes out to their loved ones, who express support, a willingness to learn and a promise to work on the new name and pronouns. but months pass by and those loved ones are still misgendering them and growing more and more frustrated, not at themselves but at the trans person -- “Why are you making life so hard?” “Why can’t you just be normal?” “Why would you even want to change your body like that?”

a congregant comes out to her pastor and some of the elders of the church, who respond with compassion and a promise that she’ll always be welcome at the church. the congregant is relieved, and even emboldened to bring her girlfriend to church a few weeks later. but the pastor and some church members confront her, horrified -- “you can’t hold hands with another woman in a place of God!” “This is not okay! If you’re going to act on your desires, we will have to take severe action.” She realized that when the pastor promised her welcome, he’d assumed she would remain “celibate”...she goes home disillusioned brokenhearted. Church will never feel safe again, she tells her girlfriend.

i and people i love dearly have lived through some of these scenarios, and that kind of pain seeps into your psyche and nests in your bones.

but i do find comfort in knowing that my God has been there too -- that the God who throughout the scriptures professed to know, really know the pain and suffering of Their people (e.g. Exodus 3:7) did experience it firsthand. it breaks my heart that Jesus, whom i love, knows this pain too....but it also brings me comfort. because he gets it -- he really, really gets it.

and the God who knows, who sees, who feels with us, is a God whose power is compassion, suffering with and being moved to act -- God does not leave us alone when faith communities abandon us; God shares our pain when others afflict us; and God will act to make things right.

as we enter Holy Week, i plan to meditate more on Jesus’ pain -- the pain of rejection, of having loved ones turn on you, of being handed over to torture and death -- and offer my deepest gratitude for that ultimate act of solidarity with all whom the world rejects and tortures.

thank you, Jesus. you share our suffering always -- give me the courage to try to share your suffering with you, so that i may be moved to act for all who suffer today.

________________

So. I wrote this little reflection during Holy Week last year. We are now approaching Holy Week once again. I will be preaching (via the internet) at my home church this Palm Sunday, and so naturally I remembered, “Oh, I wrote a little something about Palm Sunday before, let’s dig that up and see if it was any good!”

I re-read what I wrote below, and was aghast. embarrassed. ashamed.

Because what I wrote has the same kind of antisemitic tinge to it that has enabled hate crimes against Jewish communities across the centuries.

“But I didn’t say ‘the Jews killed Jesus’ -- I made it clear that Romans are the ones who executed him!!” Sure, but I clearly imply that his Jewish community “let” the Romans kill him; I literally used the language “they turned on him” and rejected him.

When I wrote this piece just last year, I was so sure I was a Good Christian who Knew About The Dangers of Antisemitism In Christianity -- I patted myself on the back for knowing that the Romans are the ones who actually tortured and crucified Jesus. But I wrote this! Even while checking over everything I wrote and thought about Passion Week in particular, being aware of the horrific violent history of this week, this not-even-subtle antisemitic thinking completely flew past me.

What antisemitism continues to lurk in my theology, unchecked?

I think I’m ~so good~ at noticing antisemitism and other dangerous bigotry embedded in my beliefs and language. Clearly, I’m not.

This post spoke to a lot of people, you can see in the comments on it. Last year, I was happy to have moved them with my words. Now, I blush, knowing I let antisemitic thinking spread.

Now, I have no clue how to rethink the Passion narrative that is so central to my faith but so corrupted by antisemitism. How do we read the stories of Jesus being handed over to death without being antisemitic? We can remind the listeners that “The Jews” of Jesus’s days don’t = the Jewish communities that came after them and that continue today. We can remind the listeners that Jesus and his friends were also Jewish, and his was an intra-community struggle. But I don’t think that’s enough.

I have to preach in just six days about Palm Sunday -- a Triumphalist passage if there ever was one! How do I preach it without indicting “the Jews”? Especially now, in this time of pandemic, when people will be expecting my message to be about that very immediate crisis, rather than the timeless crisis of antisemitism in our scripture.

If anyone has articles for me, thoughts for me, I’m all ears. Here are a couple resources I’ve got so far:

I just downloaded an ebook called Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews: Reflections for Christians in Lent

An article about the “Moneychangers in the Temple” that Matthew’s Gospel shows Jesus “driving out” directly after the Palm Sunday scene

A church’s reflection on Passion Week

“A Note on ‘The Jews’ in Palm Sunday’s Passion Reading”

I especially appreciate any Jewish person’s perspective, but don’t expect it -- I know y’all don’t owe me anything. I am deeply sorry for my role in perpetuating antisemitism, and I’m going to be working on doing better.

[quakerjoe]

LAST CALL ON FACEBOOK

I’m done. I’ve had it with Facebook, so fuck this shit; I’m out. Here’s the final publication...

THE LAST CUPPA JOE SERVED ON FACEBOOK:  TUESDAY 10 MARCH 2020

Perhaps you’ve noticed that it’s been quiet around here despite all the political excitement. If you’ve guessed “He’s in facebook jail again”, you’d be right. Being put in a childish “time out” because I pissed off someone who came to MY page uninvited is the name of today’s game, and I’m done with it. I already lost the original Quaker Joe page with well over 10,000 followers without an opportunity to say good-bye, so I’m doing so here and now to you all and to share some final thoughts about what I’ve learned about America, its people, and the political process in a collection of simple, straightforward observations. Here it goes.

First, it has become abundantly clear that America simply does NOT want to make this “a more perfect union” as prescribed in the Constitution that everyone claims to hold so dear. My whole life I’ve watched the GOP sink the economy and destroy civil rights and worker & environmental protections while making massive money grabs. While doing so, they’ve enacted shit laws to benefit the rich while screwing “the help”, meaning YOU in general.

This brings me to “Democrats are feckless” and suck-ass at delivering a clear message or any sort of show of strength. While they’re busy trying to clean up the mess left by the GOP every turn of the tide, the GOP points at them and they shout “Look at the mess the Dems are responsible for!” and Dems say nothing. Civility, I guess. It only goes so far before you get the reputation for being wimps. You know, like today.

Democrats are yesterday’s Republicans. They’re scared, angry and afraid of taking chances. Bold leaders like Bernie Sanders want to bring us ALL to a new, all-time high. Democrats are now his #1 enemy, trying to tear an honest man down. “He hasn’t accomplished anything” the same way Jesus didn’t in the N.T. No, I’m not comparing the two, but it’s funny how a “Christian Nation” isn’t rallying behind a Jew who is a former carpenter and is trying to lead a movement to tend to the poor and heal the sick. Fuck, Bernie could walk on water and turn water into wine all while bringing a dead man back to life and the Dems AND GOPers would still shit on him.

Liz Warren. She’s a brand. Granted, her brand is taking a royal shit on the rich and powerful by calling them out on their bullshit, and she used to be a hero to me, but we’ve got to face it- she ignored the call in 2016 when Bernie urged her to run for POTUS. She was either afraid of Clinton or she was playing the “But I’m A Woman” card and secretly wanted to back HRC. Either way, Warren was out for Warren, not a Progressive agenda and clearly wasn’t behind the cause. When Sanders picked up the torch for the Progressive Cause, she fucked him over and backed HRC, all while calling herself a Progressive. Again, she saw HRC as the inevitable victor and ponied up with her, probably hoping for a cabinet position. She’s doing it now, only more cautiously. This round, however, she thought it smart to shit all over Sanders EARLY in the game and when she did it cost her and her campaign tanked. She’s dropped out. So why hasn’t she openly endorsed Sanders, a fellow Progressive? She won’t. She’s waiting to throw in with Biden after the Primaries and we ALL know it. She’s no champion of the Progressive cause. She’s a brand and she’s looking out for her own ass and nothing more. She’s fallen from grace, if she ever truly had some. She WAS GOP before and clearly nothing’s changed much.

Biden. Fuck me, are we seriously considering fronting this next generation “W”? Why not just hand the election to trump now and get it over with. 2016 all over again. He’s already lining up his potential cabinet with Wall St. tycoons, and has OPENLY admitted that he’s going to slash Social Security (even though the Fed. OWES it a fuck-tonne of payback from all the times it has dipped into YOUR paid-in benefits) and Medicaid/Medicare, but do Americans find this a threat? With typical GOP mentality on BOTH sides of the aisle, it’s only a threat when a Dem. wants to do it, but if the GOP tries, well then it’s all good and fine. Biden is a fucking REPUBLICAN. Just because he CLAIMS to be a Dem, it doesn’t make him so. He’s racist, and twats like Kamala backing him already after the whole “I was that little girl” jab in the debates only shows that she’s not for “We the People” but her own ass. Shocker.

I could go through the list of formerly anti-Biden hypocrites who’ve jumped on board to support Biden and shit on Sanders. All the moneylenders are organizing and ganging up on the ONE true delegate trying to save YOU and not the RICH. Again, this is a CLEAR example of how America doesn’t WANT to be saved.

This has taught me that Americans are not only deluded and hypocritical, as a people in general, but that they seem to LOVE being put into position of strife and misery. It’s where they’re the happiest; embracing the stupidity and ignorance instead of trying to find a way to make us ALL safer, healthier, and happier. Americans HATE being happy with the “others” are happy too. Instead of reaching down to help a fellow American up, it’s the “American Way” to punch down and blame the poor and powerless for their own failings while the rich at the top keep pissing and shitting down on them all while making money grabs.

Next, there’s all this infantile bullshit about “Bernie Bros”. Seriously, shut the fuck up. Hypocrisy in action, yet again is what this is. I’ve found in my personal experience that if I call out another Dem on their bullshit, I’m labeled a “BB”. No matter how you try to point out how Pelosi’s asleep at the wheel or Schumer’s a babbling idiot or how Biden’s a declining fuckwit who can’t string words together and that trump will eat him alive on the debates if he’s the nominee, because I back Sanders, I AM THE ONE getting labeled. The media and the fuckwits out there who are tender little snowflakes who can’t handle criticism or having dirt on their picks dug up and called out cry and cry and cry until someone puts an admin in FB jail for days or even weeks or months.

So to them I say- “Fuck ALL y’all!” I’m done here. Cry me a river because I’m sailing off of Facebook and leaving you all with this cesspool of social mania run by a cunt who backs trump. It’s bad enough knowing that the game is rigged when electing who’ll be our nominee in the Dem. party, but it’s fucking stupid trying to fight the battle here on social media when there are thousands of people following who don’t have a problem with my postings, the description WARNS that I cuss here, yet it only takes one or two fucktards to shut down your page. Fuck this bullshit. I’ve got better shit to do, and my posts on other platforms like Tumblr and even Twitter never get me blocked or locked out. Childish as this whole notion of social media is, at least virtually every other platform is infinitely less riddled with whingers, bitchers and cry-babies who can’t take the heat and instead of clicking to go elsewhere they feel the need to fuck up a page. Enough is enough.

So for those of you who’ve even made it this far and still want to follow me, you can find me on Tumblr, a much more grown-up platform, here at https://quakerjoe.tumblr.com/. If you’re into Twitter (yuck) I’m there too for who knows what reason. https://twitter.com/QuakerJoe2020 will get you to me. I hope to see you all at one of those places. It’s been a real adventure and learning experience, but all I’ve learned is that America is a dirty, filthy nation with a dark and sinister past that it refuses to acknowledge and accept, let alone apologize for because admitting that you’re wrong is UNAMERICAN. Trying to do some form of penance is considered weakness, and turning to truth instead of lies and deceits only leads to the revelation that you’re all up to your eyeballs in selfishness, racism, misogyny, all sorts of phobias, and that you’re only happy as a nation in general when you’re literally given the liberty to tear each others throats out legally.

Good-bye, Facebook. I hope you ALL get a chance to get the fuck out and perhaps regain some sanity one day because if there’s one thing that trumplefuckstick did that was good, it was that he took off the covers and the gilded paint and showed us all what Americans REALLY are, it we’re not pretty.

-Quaker Joe

[art-by-rozzai]

had a bad day so more band au headcannons

anyone who wants to write a fic for this is absolutely allowed if they tag me, i’m not gonna make any full length ones but i might post some one shots eventually

anyway i had a really shitty day so here’s me self projecting and creating more band headcannons

check out the first here~

check out the second here~

tag list~

@athenashipsthings @thelesbianspoon @flowersheep @insert--self--hatred @nafsbluebery @sunflowerss0 @nerdiegurlie @stars-and-rose

okays lets do this✨

so last when we left the boys, it’s the day before they release their album “death of a bachelor”

to celebrate, roman suggests they get dinner out and maybe go see a movie??

logan is suprisingly the first to agree, saying that if he doesn’t get to watch the “scary stories to tell in the dark” movie soon he will explode. plus there’s no food in the fridge

virgil is also down to go see the movie, but is more reluctant to get dinner. he hates formal things, so to make him feel more comfortable roman offers they go to the local diner that he knows has virgil’s favorite chicken parm dish and virgil can’t say no to that

patton doesn’t want to see the movie at first-he really doesn’t like scary movies. but he wants dinner with his friends and he might be able to latch onto logan during the scary parts so he goes with it

so patton offers go help virgil with his hair and they end up getting ready together! they talk about everything they can think of as patton does hair and virgil does makeup and they both do each other’s nails and then they’re ready to go out whooooppp

meanwhile roman collapsed on logan’s bed an hour ago and began complaining about how he needed to impress virgil to get him to fall in love with him and has been talking ever since

logan doesn’t mind tho, roman helps him pick out a nice outfit and gives tips on how to woo patt

even though it’s not a date

yet

anyways they get to the diner and they all have an incredible time! by the end of the meal they’re in tears laughing at each other, from roman’s hysterical stories to virgil’s banter to logan’s fun facts and spilt tea to patton’s enthusiastic impressions

they love each over like family :)

and the movie is top notch. virgil is in love with it, him and logan spend the whole time guessing what’s going to happen while roman hides behind virgil and patton shoves his face full of popcorn and squish himself into logan’s arm

and yes virgil can’t stop laughing and logan’s immediate tensing up and blushing

after the movie they just don’t want to go to bed quite yet, so the friends head to the park and enjoy lying in the grass, talking and letting logan point out the stars while roman makes up stories of the aliens and space princesses that protect the galaxy

virgil makes everyone his famous hot chocolate and they stay up until midnight to release their songs

and then the clock strikes 12 and death of a bachelor is available to download

the boys decide that staying up and watching the comments flood in is a terrible idea and instead they put on some disney films and fall asleep on the couch

it’s nice

they wake up to millions of notifications

everyone is freaking the fuck out

this album ??? is beautiful ???

all of the fans are in love but also have a lot of questions-so the fab four start doing monthly live-streams to just chat and answer questions and catch up with their fans

“are y’all single?”

um

well yes

but uh

this question is not goOD ROMAN WHAT THE FU-

anyway virgil comes to patton one day, slams the door, puts his face in a pillow and screams “PATT IM SO GAY HELP”

because roman called his hair pretty this morning and yes it’s stupid and it happens all the time but this time was different

don’t worry tho they won’t admit their feelings to one and other for another three months

death of a bachelor does really well-all of the songs end up going either gold or platinum

their song “victorious” is played on the radio all of the time

so november rolls around and the friends decide it’s time to go on tour! starting with just north america, they post a video on the youtube channel that gives all the locations and dates

it’s to start in april:

virgil is extremely nervous. being on the road for so long and preforming live in front of thousands of people and will anyone even show up and-

logan is slightly nervous but honestly he really enjoys preforming-once he ties the tie around his head like a bandanna he almost transforms into the punk rock bassist he is known by the fans to be

patton!!! is!!! bouncy!!!!!!!! he wants to meet all these people!!!! and he can’t wait to give back to all of them by preforming and meet and greets and social interaction makes him really happy!!

roman is so excited-preforming is his thing. when he’s on a stage, he’s in his element! he can’t wait to show off and travel and be with his friends for even longer :)

but they can’t go on tour with their boring old instruments sooooo

roman and patton team up to paint and decorate all of the instruments

virgil’s piano matches his jacket, lots of purple and swirls and patton paints the classic nightmare before christmas scene on the front (u know, this one but stationary)

and they decorate the microphone stand purple and silver and black

logan gets a dope space themed bass-the outside is dark blue and the inside is painted like a galaxy, with a plain silver pick

roman paints his gutair with a castle and sunset in the back, with a bright red pick to play

patton’s drums have clouds on them nowww like a sunny day with blue puffy clouds

they’re ready to go! but it’s still only december so u kNoW whAt ThaT mEaNs

CHRISTMAS!!!!!

since none of the squad are jewish, (although technically patton is half jew since his mom is, but he just really loves christmas and always celebrated that growing up so)

they decide to celebrate at their house

they invite all of their close family to the apartment and have a lovely dinner

and yeah virgil doesn’t invite anyone cuz he was adopted by a shitty family who he doesn’t talk to anymore, bcuz all they did was try and get money out of him

and yeah he has a panic attack when all of his best friends are excitedly talking about their family coming over

and y e a h roman helps him calm down and swears that he will always b there to protect virgil bcuz he’s never met anyone quite like him and it’s not easy to explain but he just wants virgil to know he’s safe with roman

and yeah virgil wishes he could stop falling for roman but the ground keeps disappearing beneath him

so time skip a bit closer to christmas and logan bursts into romans room with an idea

“i can rap”

“we know”

“you can rap”

“kind of but okay”

“christmas rap song for fun”

“yeS”

so they write “gonna kill santa claus” (look it up) and decide to post it on the youtube channel on christmas eve

they film a music video for it where they jokingly set up different traps for santa like poison cookies and fire cracker chimneys and more

virgil sings the chorus, logan raps the rap parts, roman does the bridge, and patton lays down a pretty sick beat

it comes out really nice and honestly really fucking funny

so after a delightful family dinner with everyone over, the friends release that video and the internet fucking dies it’s so funny and logan can rap (??????) and ohmygod all of them are so cute what the fuck

anyway back to christmas dinner

roman has like 6 little sisters, and his mom and dad and papa and nana over

(he’s latino, his mom and dad are both from the dominican republic)

patton invites his mom and dad and little brothers, thomas and dee

and logan invites his two moms

everyone comes over for lunch and gets along reallyyyyyy well

logan’s got the punk mom and soft mom dynamic whereas, patton’s family is all super kind and like homey and boisterous and romans family is wild and crazy and funny and they all instantly click

presents are passed around, lots of money and books and movies and stickers and jewelry

really sweet stuff

and then everyone goes home and the friends have their own little gift exchange

virgil got logan the stephen king book “insomnia” and a (sort of) joke blanket with benedict cumberbatch’s face on it that he can use when he goes stargazing at night

logan gets virgil some noise cancelling headphones and a framed picture of a wedding with virgil’s face cropped on one and gerard ways face on the other

they both can’t stop laughing at the fact they attacked each other’s celeb crush

virgil gets patton a cute little cat stuffed animal that when u push the hand it’s a recording of all of them saying “we love you!!!” and a really sweet card

patton gets virgil a eyore necklace that was super expensive but matches patton’s winnie the pooh one and a itunes card for him to buy more music (and yes a really sweet card)

virgil gets roman two tickets to see mean girls on broadway and a framed picture of the two of them

yeah roman tears up a bit fuck u

roman gets virgil a collage of him and roman and a handmade hoodie that virgil is never going to take off oh and also meet and greet passes to see dan and phil at their interactive introverts tour

and maybe virge gets a little teary too

roman gets patton a recipie book and an apron that says “you BAKE my day”

patton gets roman a new ukelele and a printed out pamphlete of theatre song chords that he can play

roman gets logan the sherlock script and an empty box just to fuck with him

logan gets roman the entire grimm fairytale series and tapes a note to the front that says “bcuz u are an illiterate fool😜”

patton gets logan a phone case with the stars that were out on the day they met, hand painted framed picture of him and logan, and comic con tickets for this spring

logan gets patton tickets to the art museum downtown, a gift card to the coffee shop next to it, and two gold hoop earrings with a note that says “next week, friday at 7. it’s a date ;)”

so christmas is pretty good for all :))))))

and that’s the end of this one i’ll make a part four soon lmao

[innuendostudios]

New video essay! Internet reactionaries argue as though they have no core beliefs at all, and will just say anything to own the libs. So are they nihilists, or is there more going on?

You can ensure this series continues by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re online blogging about a Black journalist’s commentary on marketing trends in video games, movies, and comic books, and you’re saying how the vitriol in response to her fairly benign opinions reveals the deep-seated racism and misogyny in a number of fan communities, most especially those that lean right, when a right-leaning commenter pops in to say, “Or maybe they just actually disagree with her about marketing trends! For Christ’s sake, there’s no mystery here. People aren’t aren’t speaking in coded language. They are telling you what they believe. She had a bad opinion; why do you have to make it bigger than that? Why can’t you ever take people at their word?”

You pause and ponder for a moment. Mmm… Aw heck with it, you’re in a discoursing mood. Let’s do this.

“Mr. Conservative, in order for me to take you at your word, your words would have to show some consistency. Let me just lightning round a few questions about the reactionary web’s positions on marketing trends: Do you believe that having the option to romance same-sex characters in an RPG turns the game into queer propaganda, or do you believe that killing strippers in an action game can’t be sexist since no one’s making you do it? Do you believe that the pervasiveness of sexualized young women in pop culture is just there because it sells and that’s capitalism and we all need to deal with it, or do you believe that a franchise has an obligation to cater to its core audience even if diversifying beyond that audience is more profitable? Do you think words are inherently harmless and only oversensitive snowflakes would care about racialized language, or do you think it’s racist if someone calls you mayonnaise boy? As long as I’ve got your ear: Are you the Party that believes in the right to keep and bear arms because you’re distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday, or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their account of events whenever they shoot a Black man for looking like he might have a gun?

“Does optional content reveal a game’s ideology, or doesn’t it? Is capitalism a defense for decisions you don’t agree with, or isn’t it? Is language harmful, or not? Do you hate authority, or love cops and the troops?

Alright, alright, ease off. Add some nuance.     “Now, I know the Right is not a monolith, and maybe these arguments are contradictory because they’re coming from different people. We’ll call them Engelbert and Charlemagne. Maybe Engelbert’s the one who thinks any institution funded by tax money is socialist and therefore bad and Charlemagne’s the one who says we should dump even more tax money into the military and thinking otherwise is un-American. But here’s the thing: Y’all have very fundamentally different beliefs, and you’re so passionate about them that you enter search terms into Twitter to find people you don’t even follow and aggressively disagree with them, and, yet, you’re always yelling at me and never yelling at each other. What’s that about?

“And I can’t say how often it happens, but I know, if I let Engelbert go on long enough, he sometimes makes a Charlemagne argument. And vice versa.

“And, I see you getting ready to say, ‘The Left does the same thing,’ but ba ba ba ba ba, don’t change the subject. That’s an extremely false equivalence, but, more importantly, it doesn’t answer my question. What do you actually believe, and why are you so capable of respecting disagreement between each other, yet so incapable of respecting me - or, for that matter, a Black woman?

“See, I don’t take you at your word because I cannot form a coherent worldview out of the things you say. So, forgive me if, when you tell me what you believe, I don’t think you’re being candid with me. It kinda seems like you’re playing games, and I’m the opposing team, and anyone who’s against me is your ally. And you’re not really taking a position, but claiming to believe in whatever would need to be true to score points against me, like we’re in that one episode of Seinfeld.” [Card Says Moops clip.]

(This is borrowed observation #1, link in the down-there part.)

Hoo, it feels good calling people hypocrites! Person says B when earlier they said A and you point out the contradiction! You don’t take a position on A or B, and you still “win”! I see why Republicans like this so much.

But that’s the kind of point-scoring we’re here to deconstruct, so let’s get analytical.

There’s a certain Beat-You-At-Your-Own-Gaminess to the Card Says Moops maneuver. “Safe spaces are bullshit, but, if you get one, I get one too.” “There’s no such thing as systemic oppression, but, if there were, I’d be oppressed.” It’s dismissing the rhetoric of social justice while also trying to use it against you. Claiming “the Card Says Moops” does not, so much, mean, “I believe the people who invaded Spain in the 8th Century were literally called The Moops,” but, rather, “You can’t prove I don’t believe it.” Not a statement of sincere belief, simply moving a piece across the board. All in the game, yo.

If they could be so nakedly honest with you and themselves to answer “what do you actually believe” truthfully, one suspects the answer would be, “What difference does it make? We’re right either way.”

This has come to be known as “postmodern conservatism,” a fact I find hilarious, because, in The Discourse, “postmodernism” is a dogwhistle for everything the Right hates about the Left. (...it also means “Jews.”) Postmodern conservatism is the thinking that, at least for the purpose of argument, the truth of who invaded Spain is immaterial. You have your facts, I have alternative facts. What is true? Who’s to say?

Regardless of what you actually believe - what you believe serving no rhetorical purpose - you are at least arguing from the position that material truth does not exist. Truth is a democracy. Whoever who wins the argument decides who invaded Spain.

It would be reductive to blame this pattern of thought on the internet, but its recent proliferation isn’t really extricable from the rise of chan culture (this is borrowed observation #2, link in the down there part). 4chan didn’t cause this thinking, but sites like 4chan reveal it in its most concentrated form.

The two most common properties of a chan board will be anonymity and lack of moderation, which means, among other things, that you can say whatever you want with no systemic or social repercussions. People may disagree with you, but it carries no weight. You won’t be banned, you won’t have your comments deleted, and, because there’s no way to know whether any two posts are made by the same person, you won’t even get a reputation as “the person with the bad opinion.”

The effect this has on the community is that there is no expectation, in any given moment, that the person on the other end of a conversation isn’t messing with you. You can’t know whether they mean what they say or are only arguing as though they mean what they say. And entire debates may just be a single person stirring the pot. Such a community will naturally attract people who enjoy argument for its own sake, and will naturally trend towards the most extreme version of any opinion.

In short, this is the Free Marketplace of Ideas. No code of ethics, no social mores, no accountability. A Darwinist petri dish where ideas roam free and only the strong ones survive. If the community agrees Bebop is better than Eva, well, then I guess Bebop is better than Eva, because there wasn’t any outside influence polluting the discourse. Granted, it could just be a lot of people thought it was funny to shit on Eva, but it’s what the community has decided, so it will at least be treated as truth.

This demands that one both be highly opinionated and to assume opinions are bullshit, to place a high premium on consensus and be intensely distrustful of groupthink.

A common means of straddling these lines is what I call the Stanislavski Opinion: the opinion you entertain so completely that you functionally believe it while you express it, no matter the possibility that you will express - and, to an extent, believe - an opposite opinion later. Most of us go through a phase in our youths where we’re online and like the idea of believing in something, but don’t know what to believe just yet, so we pick a position and find out if we believe it by defending it. We try on ideologies like sunglasses off a rack. Most of us will eventually settle on a belief system, and this will usually involve some apologies and some comments we wish we could scrub from the internet, but it’s an important stage of growing up.

But some percentage of people will seek out a space where there is no embarrassment, the comments scrub themselves, and never growing out of the Stanislavski Opinion is actively rewarded. There, figuring out what you believe would make your ability to argue less flexible, and, besides, if you believed anything unironically, much of the community would still assume you’re trolling. Where no one is bound by their word, what, really, is the difference between appearing to have an opinion and having one?

Sincerity is unprovable and open to interpretation. Decide someone is sincere if you want to make fun of them, decide they’re trolling if you want to make fun of someone else. What is true? What do you want to be true? It’s easy enough to start thinking of one’s own opinions the same way: What do I believe? What is it advantageous to believe? Your answer isn’t binding. You’ll change it later if you need to.

The person I’m describing, you spend time online, you’ll meet him a lot. His name is Schrodinger’s Douchebag (borrowed observation #3, link in the down there part): A guy who says offensive things & decides whether he was joking based on the reaction of people around him. Any website that lacks effective moderation and allows some level of anonymity will, to varying degrees, approximate 4chan, and be overrun with Schrodinger’s Douchebag.

When this type of person defends rape jokes by saying all humor is inherently punching down because there must be a butt to every joke, he hasn’t thought about it. He assumes it’s true, because he figures he’s a smart guy and whatever he assumes is probably right, but he’s unfazed if you prove otherwise; there’s no shortage of dodgy reasons he might be right and you wrong. He’ll just pick another one. What matters is that the game continues.

The thing is, Bob, it’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they just don’t care. I’ll say that again for the cheap seats: When they make these kinds of arguments, they legitimately do not care whether the words coming out of their mouths are true. It is a deeply held belief for precisely as long as it wins arguments.

So it’s kinda funny, right, how many of these folks self-identify as “rationalists?” I mean, typical rational thinking would say: If I am presented with the truth, I will believe it, and, once I believe it, I will defend it in argument. This? This is not that! This is a different idea of “rationality” that views it not as a practice but as an innate quality one either possesses or lacks, like being blond or left-handed: If I’m arguing it, I must believe it, because I’m a rational person, and, if I believe it, because I’m a rational person, it must be true. You speak assuming you’re right, and, should you take a new position, this telescopes out into a whole new set of beliefs with barely a thought. Stay focused on the argument, and you won’t even notice it’s happening.

You might now conclude the internet reactionary believes in nothing except winning arguments with liberals. And, like Newtonian physics, if you assume this framing, you will get highly useful results. If you enter conversation with Engelbert and Charlemagne believing they do not mean what they say, they are only entertaining notions, and, on a long enough timeline, they will eventually defend a position fundamentally incompatible with the one they defended earlier in the same argument, you will navigate that conversation much more effectively!

But, like Newtonian physics, this framing is lowercase-a accurate without being capital-T True.

In reality, nihilism isn’t that popular. People will tell you, “I don’t care about anything, I just like triggering the libs,” but why is it always libs? It is piss easy (and also hilarious) to upset conservatives, why only go after the SJWs? The easy answer is, well, if you upset a feminist, you might make her cry; if you upset a Nazi, he might stab you, and that has a cooling effect. But the more obvious answer is that they actually agree with the racist, MRA, and TERF talking points they repeat, but would rather not think about it.

So much of conservative rhetoric is about maintaining ignorance of one’s own beliefs. To uphold the institution of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy while thinking you are none of those things. (Well, OK, knowing you’re a capitalist, but thinking it’s a good thing.) Most people have a baseline of fairly conventional, kindergarten morality, and conservatism often clashes with it. You can rationalize these contradictions - “I’m not a bigot, I just believe in states’ rights” - but, as American conservatism gets more radical, it gets harder to square one’s politics with what one assumes to be one’s beliefs. So you learn, when someone challenges you, to cycle through beliefs until something sticks, just play your hand and trust that you’re right, or, in extreme cases, insist you have no beliefs at all, you’re just here to watch the world burn.

But they’re not. They are willing participants in the burning of only certain parts. They don’t care what they believe, but they know what they hate, and they don’t want to think about why they hate it. On paper, they believe in freedom of religion and freedom of expression, but they also hang out in communities where Muslims and trans women are punching bags. And, like a sixth grader who believes one thing in Sunday school and another thing in biology class, they believe different things at different times.

This thinking is fertile ground for Far Right recruitment. I’d say the jury is out on whether chan boards attract Far Right extremists or are built to attract Far Right extremists, but they’re where extremists congregate and organize because they’re where extremists are tolerated, and where they blend in with the locals. They learn the lingua franca of performative irony: Say what you mean in such a way that people who disagree think you’re kidding and people who agree think you’re serious. People who don’t know what they believe but clearly have some fascist leanings don’t need to be convinced of Nazi rhetoric, they just need to be submerged in it and encouraged to hate liberals. They’ll make their way Right on their own. Folks start using extremist rhetoric because it wins arguments with SJWs - usually because that’s the moment SJWs decide it’s not fruitful and possibly unsafe talking to you - and this creates the appearance that, if it keeps winning arguments, there must be something to it. The Far Right literally has handbooks on how to do this.

Those who never consciously embrace the ideology - who don’t transition from participating to getting recruited - are still useful. They spread the rhetoric, they pad the numbers, and often participate in harassment and sometimes even violence.

There’s a twisted elegance to all this. Think about it: If you operate as though there is no truth, just competing opinions, and as though opinions aren’t sincere, just tools to be picked up and dropped depending on their utility, then what are you operating under? Self-interest. The desire to win. You’ll defend the Holocaust just to feel smarter than someone, superior. Think about how beautifully that maps onto the in-group/out-group mentality of dominance and bigotry. Think how incompatible it is with liberal ideas of tolerance. I think this is why we don’t see a lot of these “I’m just here to fuck shit up” types on the Left. Don’t get me wrong, the Left has gotten on some bullshit, but (excepting politicians, whom you should never assume to mean anything they say) it’s sincerely-believed bullshit! We don’t build identities around saying things just to piss people off.

The takeaway from all this is not only that you can’t tell the difference between a bigot who doesn’t know they’re a bigot and a bigot who knows but won’t tell you, but that there is no line dividing the two. When some guy, in the middle of a harassment campaign, says the victims should be nicer to their harassers because that will “mend the rift,” I don’t know if he believes it. But, in that moment, he believes he believes it. And that scares the shit out of me. But, if you’re asking how many layers of irony he’s on as compared with the harassers, nine times out of ten it doesn’t matter.

Borrowed observation #4 is: “We are what we pretend to be.”

[thevalorieclark]

Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald in the Age of Trump

Last night I saw Crimes of Grindelwald at an early-ish screening for the LA Dumbledore’s Army group. And I have thoughts. Buckle up, kids, let’s talk about Grindelwald in the age of Trump. 

If you don’t want spoilers, don’t keep reading and don’t click the Keep Reading button. I feel like that should be obvious, but. 

That said, I’m putting one thing above the cut because I think everyone should know it: This movie features gratuitously long full-body shots of Jude Law and Eddie Redmayne wearing three-piece wool suits, Zoë Kravtiz in sensual silk sheath dresses, and Katherine Waterston in a drool-worthy slacks/button-up combo that is basically the sexiest outfit a woman has worn since Keira Knightley wore a suit in Colette. Honestly, all of it should have made this movie rated at least R because it’s basically indecent. The thirst is real, y’all.

Also, trigger warning for allusions to genocide and general violence. That applies to this write up and the movie. 

First of all, I was a little worried that this movie would feel like a forced sequel, more or less an effort to squeeze more money from the franchise based on the success of the first Fantastic Beasts. I’m so happy that it did not turn out like that at all. The search for Credence Barebone (Credence is alive!) and Gellert Grindelwald feel like a natural extension of the events of the first movie. 

So, Y’ALL. GRINDELWALD IN THE TIME OF TRUMP. 

Grindelwald is basically a Wizarding World fascist and nationalist. His whole thing is that he wants to bring witches and wizards out of hiding so they can live freely instead of hidden behind Statues of Secrecy. That’s a potent argument for people who are constantly at risk of having their wands taken away from them if they accidentally expose the wizarding world to muggles (see: HP & the Prisoner of Azkaban discussion after Ron steals the car). Grindelwald advocates the elevation of witches and wizards, a powerful promise when he’s describing their current situation as akin to being sewer rats. In a really compelling image, Grindelwald predicts the future and shows them images of World War II, saying WWII is what would happen if they don’t step in to lead the world. (The movie is still set in the 1920s.) The assembled group watches Grindelwald’s visions of planes dropping bombs and the devastation at Hiroshima with horror. His message is clear: if the violent ways of the Muggles is allowed to continue, wizards will be dangerously caught in the cross-fire. Look at this arrogance and violence, he says; The wizards practically have a responsibility to take over and protect the world! This is Grindelwald’s argument. He promises protection from that possibility, that frightening horror, the extinction of their own world. 

The disturbing part? It’s...seductive, Grindelwald’s speech. Because if you don’t listen too closely, if you don’t think about what his ideas would mean in practice, it can be easy to agree with him. And it’s heartbreakingly clear why Queenie does! With her, Grindelwald uses the promise that she can marry Jacob, a No-Maj, something illegal in the American wizarding community. If you’re thinking carefully though, one has to wonder how that would work since Grindelwald is also advocating taking away the rights of muggles, keeping the wizarding race “pure,” and elevating wizards above muggles, but the point is that Queenie does not consider any of that. She hears “You can marry whoever you want,” and in her desperation to marry Jacob she clings to that promise. No one else is promising her that. 

What Grindelwald doesn’t talk about? How all that’s achieved. He says he doesn’t hate Muggles, and that he doesn’t think they worthless, just less valuable. Other than that, he doesn’t admit that preventing WWII would require toppling Muggle governments and taking control by force. He doesn’t talk about the war that would break out first within the wizarding community and then the greater world as he and his followers try to bring earth under their control. He doesn’t talk about the slaughter of Muggles that would ensue. He especially doesn’t talk about how keeping the wizarding race “pure” would include a genocide of Muggle-borns, Squibs, Maledictuses (Maledicti? Maledictusi?), and mixed magical and non-magical families. (That doesn’t even begin to cover what Grindelwald is considering for goblins and house elves and trolls because he doesn’t talk about it.) The promises look golden to people who want more for themselves, but they’re just gold-plated attacks. 

In the age of Trump, Grindelwald and this rise of nationalism among wizards is a clear mirror for us to see our own reflections in. “We must because we will do it better,” “We must take control before they hurt us,” “We must ‘clean up’ our community to make it better...” those are arguments the far-right uses. They’re the same arguments that Hitler used to convince the German population that forcing German Jews to wear stars identifying themselves was okay, and eventually to say that ‘deportation’ was the responsible thing to do. It’s the same argument Trump is using to try to build a border wall and strip citizenship and inclusion in the American dream away from people who already have it or come seeking it. 

In the beginning of the movie, Theseus Scamander tells Newt that he must pick a side, reducing the conflict down to two people standing on two poles: Grindelwald or Dumbledore. Newt, partial to magical creatures and unwilling to participate in violence, does not want to pick a side. He does not do sides. But not picking sides in this world, in Grindelwald’s world, is irresponsible and dangerous, because it means standing by as people die either to stop Grindelwald or when he succeeds. Among many things, this movie asks us: What values do you stand for? What do you want for our shared future? Which side will you pick? 

In a darker thread, it almost asks us: Which way are you willing die? On whose side and in whose name? 

We see the effects of Grindelwald’s rhetoric quickly, and how quickly it can spiral out into the world. There’s a quick moment of police brutality, unnamed but there, that appears in this movie. At Grindelwald’s rally, Theseus Scamander and his team of Aurors show up to search for Credence and observe the people at the rally. Theseus explicitly tells the team not to engage, to hang back, that listening is not a crime. He says, “go easy.” 

And then Grindelwald calls the aurors out. He invites them to come closer, into the stands of the crowd. A young red-headed girl sends a hex at one of the aurors, and before you can blink a flash of green light is shot back. He kills her. On the spot, without thinking. He could have cast Protego. He could have made the spell bounce off of him and back onto her. He could have even taken it and been cured. The spell, after all, was not an Unforgivable Curse. 

Instead, he kills her. Tensions are already high, people are already scared, and the police choose to kill first and ask questions later. In a clear message from Rowling to the audience, Theseus and Newt both advocate against this. They both ask the aurors to be less violent. Newt says he doesn’t want to be part of a group that use violence and death to combat anything they’re afraid of or don’t like. He tells the Ministry that their tactics are pushing people into Grindelwald’s arms. Theseus asks his team to not prove those same people right, to not be the violent thugs people have begun to see them as. I don’t think I need to explicitly name the parallels to our own world here. She is a child, the girl who dies. She is red-headed, which I guess since that’s a minority population you could take as a stand-in for being a person of color, since racism in the wizarding world doesn’t assign value the same ways racism in our world does. That may be stretching the analogy, however. And, in any case, the mirror is all too clear: Men with power and authority to kill are doing so even when death is unwarranted, unfair, and unnecessary.

The movie is clear: In a world where men like Grindelwald hold too much power, fear and violence begin to reign and innocents die. 

Grindelwald says, “I don’t think of them as Lesser, I think of them as Other.” He’s explicitly talking about Muggles, but he’s really talking about anyone who disagrees with him, perhaps even including purebloods. There are him and his people, who are right, and then there’s everyone else, the Others. To Grindelwald, they have nothing in common. To Grindelwald, being Other marks you for death. When that attitude goes unchecked, communities crumble and people die. 

All images from imdb.

[westcoastbroadway1443]

Welcome to Falsetto Notes

aka my thoughts on Falsettos as I actually finally listen to/watch the whole thing for the first time. I love what I’ve heard of of the show but, like with a lot of shows, I haven’t had the time to actually just sit and absorb the whole thing.  Probably nobody is gonna read this, but like what the hell, it’ll be fun to do.  So here I go..

"Four Jews in a Room Bitching" – I don’t know what’s happening but I’m loving the beards and the shimmying.  Also dig the set, I’m a sucker for a simple set.  

"A Tight-Knit Family" – Hearing a lot of bitching but not a lot of funny there, Marv

"Love is Blind" – It’s nice to see the couples set up right at the top here.  Mendel and Trina, Whizzer and Marvin, Jason and a chess board.  Also where I begin to fall in love with Mendel, love the way he says “alibi” and “I admit I admire you”.  Also Andrew’s face during “Hepatitis”, and having Marv and Whizzer just like low key making out in the background.  Good job y’all.  And praise to Stephanie J Block for having to rattle off super fast lyrics, my brain cannot.  I’m starting to realize William Finn doesn’t fuck around here.  

"Thrill of First Love" – The second song I ever heard from the musical because...well my two fav broadway guys are flirting, I looked it up.  I am so very very gay, and Andrew Rannells is so pretty he sometimes makes me forget I’m not into men.  This song somehow manages to make me feel “yipes, maybe you guys shouldn’t be together” and “marvin/whizzer 4eva” at the same time?  Their chemistry is pretty fantastic and this is a hard relationship to portray.  You see Trina so vulnerable in the last song and already feel bad for her and kind of hate Marvin and don’t know what the hell to feel about Whizzer.  

"Marvin at the Psychiatrist (A Three-Part Mini-Opera)" – See this is why family members shouldn’t see the same therapist unless it’s family therapy.  Also if I ever had a therapist do weird hypno-hands at me there’s like 70% chance I would not go back.  Part 3 is probably my fav.

"Everyone Tells Jason to See a Psychiatrist" –  Because of the bad quality of the video I can’t tell if Jason’s shirt is Saturn with a bunch of starts behind it or all of that plus a weird space wizard in the corner.  Kids in musicals tend to annoy me, but I like Jason.  He’s a little shit, but in a believable way.  I wish we got more of him and Whizzer’s relationship to know why he’d want to talk to him, I mean maybe we do and I just haven’t heard it.  And Whizzer’s nervous little wave to Trina is everything.

"This Had Better Come to a Stop" – Yes!  Drag him!  I would conservatively watch like 3 hours of just Trina and Whizzer drinking wine and shitting on Marvin.  Songs like this make think of the fact that this was one of Christian Borle’s dream roles and he’s doing great, but I’m curious what drew him to it, I mean I only know him from funnier roles.

"I'm Breaking Down" – Somebody give Trina a hug please, and give Stephanie awards.

"Jason's Therapy" – This role is pretty demanding for a kid since you have to be on stage constantly and I think he does a good job.  CONFIRM: There is a space wizard on that shirt.  I also wish therapy was as easy as somebody snapping you into a trance, doing air sax, and telling you to feel alright.   And Jason encourage Mendel is the cutest.

"A Marriage Proposal" – And I complete the process of falling in love with Mendel, and Brandon Uranowitz.  For real this song is adorable and will probably be stuck in my head for awhile.

"A Tight-Knit Family (Reprise)" - NOBODY ASKED YOU, MARVIN!

"Trina's Song" – Trina, darling, go chill with the act 2 lesbians.  Fuck these guys.

"March of the Falsettos" – ...ok

"Trina's Song" (Reprise) – Trina rockin a new outfit and new outlook.  Rock on, girl

"The Chess Game" – I’ve heard William Finn being praised by Broadway peeps I like and I can see why, I love the way this song is just this verbal dance that keeps building.  Also Whizzer’s face during the second chorus is perfect.  As much as yeah, Marvin ain’t exactly mr popular in any viewers mind right now, you do see how both their frustrations lead to this point.  

"Making a Home" – This is pretty and everyone in this song deserves good things

"The Games I Play" – I feel like Act 1 Whizzer is kind of hard to pinpoint as a character, what he’s feeling and what he wants, but this song was beautiful.  I feel like I only ever hear Andrew doing like those big belting songs but this quieter and lower one is just fantastic.  Have all the range, young man.

"Marvin Goes Crazy" or "Marvin Hits Trina" – Jason’s face through this song breaks my heart.  Mendel, kick that man out your house and change the locks.  But I also like that he just holds Trina and Jason, he’s focused on his fam.  And Trina’s reaction makes me feel like it had happened at least once before, and Whizzer’s face made me thing with him it had happened a LOT before.  

"I Never Wanted to Love You" – MARVIN, YOU LEFT!  You’re in demand?  Bitch, calm down

"Father to Son" – Jason things about boobies for the first time, and Marvin tries to say oopsie I love you after smacking his mom in the face.  Ok, but I do like this song.  And I do think this is Marvin trying to change and not be such trash.  You get some points for effort.

"Welcome to Falsettoland" – This song is weird and all over the place but I kinda love it.  And surprise lesbians!  Always welcome!!  

"The Year of the Child" – lol I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood and this is just giving me middle school flashbacks. “The whole things voodoo and I know more than you do” - Mendel (my current fav).  Jason’s wee prayer dance, that is all. Also I think I want to befriend my new neighbors just so I can dance into their apartment announcing myself as “the lesbian from next door”.  

"Miracle of Judaism" – Hey bro, what happened to chess?

"The Baseball Game" – I had heard this song before and it made me cackle.  My poor parents watching me play soccer as a small.  And Mendel being the hardest cheerleader!  Also how often to Jason and Whizzer talk?  What do they talk about?  I want these answers.  And Marvin quit your flirting, you almost look cute.

"A Day in Falsettoland" – The first song I ever heard, cause Tony’s.  Love everything of this song.  No notes.  Y’all keep being great

"The Fight" / "Everyone Hates His Parents" – I love how over it Mendel gets.  His relationship with Jason is one of my fav things in this.  “I’m a psychiatrist!  Get lost!”

"What More Can I Say" – Who knew?  If you’re sweet and not controlling things are nicer in your relationships.

"Something Bad Is Happening/More Racquetball " – DAMN YOU ACT 2 CURSE!  WHY YOU ALWAYS GOTTA BE SAD!  And hey, Tracie Thoms in a musical that actually shows some of the fucked up that was the AIDS crisis?  First time for everything!  (Ok that’ll be my only knock on Rent)  And fuck you for reprising welcome to falsettoland, I wasn’t ready to get teary yet.  Whizzer’s little “I’m sorry”

"Holding to the Ground" – One of the things I like about this show is it doesn’t make anything easy and it lets its characters be real people.  Trina is in a fucked up position when it comes to Whizzer, but she still feels some concern and I like that there’s a whole song for how off everything still feels for her.

"Days Like This" – Songs this bittersweet shouldn’t be allowed to be this pleasant sounding. Everyone is just so kind in this song I don’t know what to do with it but I’m gonna keep staying in this sort of state of almost crying.

"Cancelling the Bar Mitzvah" – Ugh Trina and Mendel are trying so hard.  

"Unlikely Lovers" – And then Whizzer got better and they all moved in together to be fantastic gay housemates.  Yep.  That’s what happened.  Seriously how’d we get from Thrill of First Love to here?

"Another Miracle of Judaism" – God: the big psychiatrists in the sky

"Something Bad is Happening (Reprise)" - Look when I was mad at Marvin last act I didn’t actually want him to die..

"You Gotta Die Sometime" – Again not the kind of song I’ve heard Rannells do before and I love it.  I think that’s what messes with me about this musical, it stars two people I’ve mostly only seen do comedy and now they’re fucking with me and making me cry, it’s rude.

"Jason's Bar Mitzvah" – Oh fuck you Jason.  Not really, you’re a doll I just don’t like crying in my room alone at like 4 am.  Son of Trina, son of Marvin, son of Whizzer, son of Mendel.

"What Would I Do?" – I was ok until Whizzer started singing too.  Then I was less ok.

"Falsettoland (Reprise)" - Marvin finally falling apart was hard, and was he crying because he lost Whizzer or because he knows Jason is going to lose him soon too?  

I really enjoyed this, I’m glad I finally listened to/watched it all.  As somebody who used to really not enjoy musicals besides Phantom of the Opera in middle school, I always like finding more songs to love.  If for some reason you scanned through this and want me to force myself to do it again with another musical, toss a title at me.

[master-sass-blast]

Henlo, it's me, your local trash monster here to say I love Hannah and I can't wait to hear more about her?? That being said, GIMME ALL THE SAD GOODS ABOUT HER. But also add in something happy about her in the end! ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ ((Also sending hugs! I know things have been stressful the last few days so just know I'm rooting for you !!))

Holy fuck I think this is the first time someone’s ever told me to cut loose and just SAY ALL THE THINGS AND I’M SO EXCITED!!!! :D

(Answers under the cut because I just went with the entire list. I have no self control.

And thank you for the hugs and encouragement!)

1. What is one word to shut them up: Okay, for some context, Hannah is a lawyer. She has a thick skin (unlike me, heyoooo). It takes a lot to shut her up; she’s an HBIC and she owns it.

But if someone starts talking about her scars (she’s struggled/struggles with self-harm), she shuts down. It’s a part of her she’s still self-conscious about, and if someone mentions it she’ll literally stop mid-sentence and mentally exit the conversation.

2. What is the thing they feel the most guilty about: Again, she’s got a pretty thick skin, so she doesn’t hold onto too much. Life happens, you make mistakes, and it’s better to learn from them rather than beat yourself over the head for something you can’t change anyway.

If there’s something she’s going to feel guilty about, though, it’s fights or incidents she’s had with family members/close friends where she’s hurt them with something she’s said or done. She holds herself in high accountability to ensure that she doesn’t step all over people, and when she does she fails not only them but her expectations for herself, so yeah. Guilt.

3. What is the worst pain they’ve ever experienced: Physical pain? Probably different injuries from her career in martial arts. She’s a tough cookie, but some of that stuff just hurts.

Emotional pain? Anytime she fails her expectations for herself. She has very high standards for herself, and when she can’t reach them she becomes very depressed (more so than usual).

4. Describe their worst nightmare: Actual dream? Anything where she’s drowning or running out of air. She almost drowned a couple times as a child/preteen, and the trauma still emerges in her adult life from time to time.

Real life “this is a nightmare” scenario? Any point where her depression gets so bad that she stops being functional. Things just start piling up and get overwhelming very quickly.

5. List 3 fears; one “surface level” fear, one “repressed” fear, and one “deep dark” fear: 1.) Drowning, which runs pretty deep but it’s an obvious one that she’s done a lot of therapy work for, and she doesn’t mind talking about it with other people. 2.) Wasps. She accidentally got locked into a shed with an active wasp nest in it as a child. She made it out alright, but the sheer terror of the situation made her repress the memory. She’s heard the story from friends and family, and “gets” why she’s scared of the fuckers, but can’t actually recall the incident itself. 3.) The dark. A side effect of depression is paranoia, and when she’s alone, in the dark, she can’t shake the feeling that there’s some sort of creature watching/following her. When her depression gets really bad, she has to sleep with a light on to keep from flipping out.

6. What is something that never fails to make them feel sick: She’s not naturally squeamish, but the sounds of belching (ala college frat boys, y’all know what I mean) make her stomach churn.

7. What feature (physical or otherwise) do they hate most about themselves: Her scars. She’s very ashamed of them, and goes out of her way to wear long sleeved shirts so she can hide them.

8. Do they have anything that triggers them: Feeling like she’s failed her own expectations/expectations others have of her, accidentally inhaling water, the ‘buzzing’ sound bees/wasps make.

9. What is their greatest physical weakness: Her height. She might be a kickass lawyer and an even kick-assier martial artist, but she barely clears five feet.

10. What is their greatest mental weakness: Her struggles with self-hatred. She’s her own worst enemy a lot of the time.

11. Do they have any vices: Not really. Not as far as serious vices go. She’s pretty grounded.

12. Have they ever done something illegal? What was it: Nope. She knew she wanted to be a lawyer from day one and made sure her record was spotless.

13. Which of the 7 Deadly Sins best describes them: Pride? I think that one comes closest? Again, since she really doesn’t have a vice or a thorn in her side, it’s hard to pick something for her.

I think Pride comes closest because she spirals when she fails to live up to her own expectations, which I think often comes with a bit of ego (at least in my experience with that sort of thing). She’s also got a lot to be proud of (lawyer, martial artist, financially independent), but she’s not a walking ego either?

Idk. This is a weird question, lol.

14. Are they prone to outbursts (of violence, extreme emotion… exc… ): Not really. Don’t get me wrong, she can get there, but it takes a lot. She’s very collected (and usually swings the opposite way; she’s more likely to cold shoulder you if she’s mad).

She does threaten to shove her Prada stiletto sideways up Hank Pym’s ass, though. So there’s that.

15. Who do they hate the most: Guys who use her height against her by cornering her into spots while they try to ask her out/talk to her about something. It’s the fastest way to wind up on her shit list.

16. Is there anyone who makes them feel inferior: Herself. She’s her own worst enemy.

17. What sound always gives them a headache: Her coworker Tracey’s text/notification sound. Which is always going off because Tracey’s always talking to someone.

18. Is there a certain flavor that disgusts them: Not really. She’s half Japanese, half ethnic Jew, and a practicing Jew to boot, so she grew up on a pretty broad flavor palette.

She’s tried a bacon cheeseburger once on a dare, though, and she hated it.

19. Do they consider themselves ugly: Not really (outside of her scars). She’s pretty confident in her appearance.

20. Do they consider themselves unloveable: Again, not really. She’s spent a lot of time in therapy, which helps, but she’s always had her feet pretty well on the ground.

21. What is something that causes them great anxiety: The prospect of losing. She’s very competitive.

22. Do they have any mental illnesses: Depression.

23. Have they ever been assaulted/abused/raped: She’s run into the usual guys that like to try and use her size against her, but they usually wind up worse for wear than she does.

24. Do they fear the possibility of being assaulted/abused/raped: Yes. She’s five feet tall and doesn’t clear 110 lbs. She’s very aware that she’s got “TARGET” written across her back.

25. Have they ever been betrayed by someone they thought they could trust: Fortunately, no. Most of her close relationships come from communities she knows well (school, work, the temple she attends in LA), so she hasn’t had to deal with too much betrayal.

26. Have they ever been seriously injured: Yes. Even outside of her struggles with self-harm, she’s a martial artist. She’s broken a few bones over the years from that.

27. How many times have they been in the hospital: Five. Three for some pretty drastic self harm incidents, and two from sparring injuries.

28. Is there a certain type of person that disgusts them: Obviously, she has frustrations with asshole guys, racists/anti-Semites, but she cannot stand people who work in organizations that prey on the disenfranchised (ala military recruiters going to schools in impoverished areas to fill their quota because they know how to trick the kids into trying out and all that). It gets her blood boiling fast.

29. Does what they cannot see scare them: Yes. Again, this shows perfectly with her fear of the dark.

30. Have they ever been bullied: Yupp. For her heritage, her beliefs, her mental health struggles, her size... High school sucks.

31. Do they have self-confidence or self-image issues: Yes and no. Again, she’s pretty confident about most things in life, but she does have certain weak points (her scars, living up to her own expectations, her height).

32. Do they have a bad relationship with their parents: Actually, no! She has a good relationship with both her parents and her extended family!

33. Have they ever been in a relationship that didn’t work out so well: Not in the drastic sense of things. She’s been through a few break ups, sure, but nothing that was abusive or crazy.

34. Have they ever self harmed: Yes. It’s something she still struggles with as an adult.

35. If they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be: Her scars. She’d make them disappear.

36. Are they in control of their emotions, or are their emotions in control of them: She’s pretty well in control of her emotions.

37. Have they ever had their freedom taken away: Not really, no.

38. Have they ever been imprisoned: Nope.

39. Have they ever been accused of something they didn’t do: Not in any serious sense. Her reputation for toeing the line was too well known for her to be accused of something she didn’t do.

40. Do they often blame themselves for other people’s problems: She did as a teenager, but dutiful therapy and self-care has helped her outgrow that habit.

41. Do they get sick often: Nope! She’s pretty healthy.

42. Are they comfortable with where they are in life: She’s content, but not complacent.

43. Do they wish that they could change their pasts: Yes. Again, she doesn’t like her history with self-harm. If she could erase that, she would.

44. What’s one thing they wish they could do more often, but can’t: Travel. Her job’s pretty demanding as far as hours go.

45. What is the emotion they most commonly experience: Melancholy. No matter what she’s doing, it’s sort of always hanging around her, like a tiny cloud.

46. Have they ever contemplated suicide: Yes. Unfortunately, it’s a side effect of the depression.

47. Have they ever gone so far as to attempt suicide: A couple of times, when she was teenager.

48. Is there anyone that they would willingly kill: Outside of self-defense/the defense of others? No.

49. If [name] was put into ______ situation, they’d rather die than live to see it through: Being forced to reject her identities as a Jew/person of Japanese heritage. Her families have made it through so much (internment camps, persecution, the Holocaust), and she’d rather die than erase her own identity.

50. Create your own: Alright, I’m gonna put the happy one here so we end on a high note!

She’s a firm believer in the need for “mah” (the Japanese word for “emptiness), or a moment to pause and do nothing. It’s easy to see that reflected in how she practices meditation, follows Shabbat, or takes time each day to simply be.

However, she also believes that the principle of “mah” is what makes her and Luis work so well as a couple. She is the silence to his constant chatter and helps him keep his feet on the ground. Likewise, he keeps her from living inside her head and helps her connect to the world.

They’re just such opposites attract. Ugh, I love them so much!

[pettytiredandjewish]

So uh… to the “pro-Palestine” crowd

- harassing random jews on the streets (and online) isn’t going to help Palestinians

- swarming and blockading college campus buildings (and hospitals) and chanting genocidal slogans at jews isn’t going to help Palestinians

- defacing synagogues and jewish owned stores isn’t going to help Palestinians

- displaying antisemitic signs and waving nazi flags isn’t going to help Palestinians

- chanting for intifada isn’t going to help Palestinians (Hamas would love that though)

- spreading Hamas propaganda isn’t going to help Palestinians

This doesn’t help Palestinians- but it sure does help Hamas who’s goal is to wipe out Israel and all jews. Also Hamas could care less for Palestinians- why do you think they are being used as human shields???

Doing all of these things makes you antisemitic (some of y’all were probably already antisemitic, and is using the I/P conflict to go fully unmasked). You doing this is causing harm to so many people. And to be honest- doing this shit shows that you actually don’t care for Palestine. In fact you are using this conflict to go fully unmask and be raging antisemitic little asshats.

Instead of doing something that could help those who are affected by this war, you are harassing jews, defacing synagogues, and calling for intifadas. Why is that? (I know the answer- but humor me). Why is this acceptable? How does harassing and harming jews help Palestine? And how does supporting Hamas (a terrorist organization) help Palestine?

Also I may get hate for this but I don’t care: anti Zionism is antisemitism. The term anti Zionist was created during the soviet era by one of the soviet leaders. The Soviet Union hated jews and wanted to stamp them all out. One of the ways that they “succeeded” was “persuading” jews that their culture and religion was dirty. That they- the jews should be ashamed of their “Jewishness”. And that was how anti Zionism came to be.

I said what I said. If you don’t like it then maybe you have some thinking to do.

Also as another fucking reminder:

Stop fucking spreading vile antisemitic shit (and stop harassing Israel citizens) !!! This includes:

- blood libels

- organs harvesting

- holocaust denial

- “hitler was right”

- “gas the jews”

- lizard people

- “jews are rats”

- “jews are rich”

- “jews control the media”

- “jews are landlords”

- the majority of conspiracy theories

- Zionist occupied government

- Zionism is racism

- stop fucking reading protocols of the elders of Zion

- “from the river to the sea…” is a genocidal chant.

- stop calling Israel a “terrorist” state and stop saying that all Israelis are terrorist (people are not their fucking government)

(Just to list a few)

I said what I said and if you don’t like it- the doors over there.

Am yisrael chai! ✡️

[quranreadalong]

#185, Surah 37

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 185

I know y’all don’t really wanna go through the whole Lot story again, so fortunately Allah has given us the abridged version this time around. 37:134 starts us off by stating that Allah saved Lot & Fam from the destruction of the city--“Save an old woman among those who stayed behind”, meaning Lot’s wife, who was killed along with everyone else. (That’s bad.) Mohammed again tells the Quraysh that they’ve passed by the ruins of Sodom, which serve as a warning. As I’ve said before, the exact location of Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t stated in either the Bible or the Quran. Most tafsir authors place it near the Dead Sea, possibly referencing that one Byzantine monastery; others just state it was somewhere on the route between Mecca and Syria. The Quran’s repeated insistence that the Quraysh have seen these ruins in person implies that 7th century tradition associated some specific spot with the city, but we don’t know what spot. (The ruins in question probably had nothing to do with Sodom anyway, so.)

Poor Lot doesn’t get the typical “he was good so he gets PBUHed” conclusion to his story. Instead, we move straight on to the next prophet, Jonah. Jonah has been mentioned before--the tenth surah is named after him, if you recall--but as far as I remember, this is the first time we’ll actually see his full story.

Allah sent Jonah as a prophet to some people (the city of Nineveh, according to the Bible). Jonah was not overly enthusiastic about this. 37:140-147:

he fled unto the laden ship, And then drew lots and was of those rejected; And the fish swallowed him while he was blameworthy; And had he not been one of those who glorify (Allah) He would have tarried in its belly till the day when they are raised

Then We cast him on a desert shore while he was sick; And We caused a tree of gourd to grow above him; And We sent him to a hundred thousand (folk) or more

The Islamic Jonah is basically the same as the Biblical guy. Allah says “go be a prophet”. Jonah is a weak bitch and runs away on a ship. Allah sends a giant storm upon the sea to indicate his displeasure; the sailors aboard the ship “cast lots” (a form of divination I guess) and decide that Jonah is to blame. So they throw him overboard and he gets swallowed up by some giant sea creature. Jonah realizes he’s fucked up and prays to Allah while chilling in the fish’s stomach, and Allah forgives him. So the fish.... throws him up and/or shoots him through its blowhole (if you prefer the “whale” interpretation) and he washes up on the shore. Allah provides him with shade in the form of a large gourd plant, then he finally goes to preach to the people of Nineveh, who end up believing him. All of that is from the Biblical story.

Uh... I mean, making a giant sea creature swallow some guy cuz he didn’t wanna be a prophet seems harsh, but maybe all’s well that ends well?? I dunno! I’m being nice today, so neutral. I guess.

Alright, we’re done with the prophets for now. Let’s move on to another topic. Mo is back to bitching about polytheistic traditions in 37:149-153:

Now ask them (O Muhammad): Hath thy Lord daughters whereas they have sons? Or created We the angels females while they were present? Lo! it is of their falsehood that they say: Allah hath begotten. Allah! verily they tell a lie. (And again of their falsehood): He hath preferred daughters to sons.

There are those women-hating polytheists again, them and their damn....... insistence that Allah prefers daughters to sons!!! Misogynists!

I mentioned in a previous section that (owing to a lack of surviving texts) the relationship between the gods of the pre-Islamic polytheistic pantheon is kind of unclear. Allah is said to be the father of some other deities, but evidently not all of them. Here, Mohammed implies that--according to the polytheists--Allah only has daughters, not sons. The daughters in question, named elsewhere in the Quran, are Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat. Since Mo brought this topic up, let’s look at this further. It’s time for what I’d like to call...

THE ARAB POLYTHEISM POWER HOUR

So let’s talk about some good ol’ fashioned Arab gods and goddesses of bygone days. To avoid offending anyone, they will be represented as Pokemon.

Arabs had multiple gods; some had unique roles throughout the peninsula, while others (especially more minor gods) were just defined as the protectors of a certain group or another. Various traditions, including animal sacrifice, divination, and prayers, were performed to invoke the blessings of a particular god.

The Quran tells us that the people of Mecca viewed their religion as the practice of their ancestors, and that’s why it was so important to them. It wasn’t specifically about morals or whatever--they had secular tribal customs for that. The gods were their heritage, something linking them to ancient Arab history (until Mo shat all over that).

The Islamic Allah needs no introduction, but his unevolved polytheistic form does need one.

Allah is an ancient name in the Arab pantheon. It seems to have originated with the “northern Arabs” inhabiting the deserts of Syria, Jordan, and northern Saudi Arabia; it’s referenced in records dating back to the Nabataean era, during which some Arabs were named Abdallahi, the precursor to the later “Abdallah”. Allah’s name is probably a contraction of al-ilah (the god), though it may also be related to the Aramaic word alaha.

While Arabized Christians today call their god Allah just like Muslims do, pre-Islamic northern Arab Christians tended to use the word al-ilah instead. Some people in southern Arabia also used a variant of al-ilah, while others preferred titles like Rahman or Rahmanan, meaning “the merciful”. The latter may have originally been the name of a polytheistic god, but was evidently conflated with the monotheistic god in the two centuries or so prior to Islam’s creation. Yemen was home to both Jews and Christians, as we’ve seen before, and either of those two groups could have been responsible for the inscriptions declaring Rahman the god.

But polytheists in western and northern Arabia were the main ones calling some specific god “Allah” in the pre-Islamic era--which is not surprising, since Mohammed says over and over in the Quran that the polytheists in Mecca do believe in some god called “Allah” (they just believed in other gods in addition to him, which is why Mohammed was upset). The question is who this pre-Islamic Allah was. If we assume “Allah” = “the god”, was this just a title for some other god, or was he a god unto himself? Did polytheistic Arabs believe Allah was the god worshiped by Jews and Christians? Because they wrote virtually nothing about the mythology of their religion, it’s hard to say. But we can do some guesswork.

While pre-Islamic Arabs were aware of the whole Abraham story and at least some of them were exposed to Christianity and Judaism, Mohammed’s conflation of “Allah” and the Biblical god wasn’t the word’s initial meaning. Scholars believe that the term originally just referred to the most important male deity within a particular Arab group’s pantheon, presumably with “Allat” being the most important female deity. It was an honorary title. In other words, one group’s Allah and Allat could’ve referred to different gods than another group’s Allah and Allat.

But it seems that the terms slowly began to crystallize over time, and the identities and attributes of Allah and Allat became less versatile over the years. By Mohammed’s era, Hijazi Arabs seem to have used the words to refer to specific gods who were related to each other. Allah was the father of Allat, in addition to her sisters Manat and al-Uzza. He was evidently the most powerful god of the pre-Islamic pantheon... but not necessarily the most popular one.

As we saw earlier in this surah, pre-Islamic Arabs believed that the god Allah created the heavens and earth; in surah 10, we were also told that they believed Allah gave them sustenance by making crops grow and such. So it seems pretty clear that he was seen as a creator god and general maintainer of the physical world. His role beyond that is less clear; Allah’s name occasionally shows up in earlier inscriptions with some basic prayers (of the “grant so-and-so prosperity” variety), but prayers to a bunch of other gods are way more common.

The Quran says that Arabs in Mo’s lifetime prayed to Allah sometimes--especially while on voyages over the sea--but they preferred to pray to other gods while on land. And Islamic texts make it pretty clear that Arabs devoted most of their worship to other gods. So it seems he was not viewed as a god whose primary role was to cater to humanity. He was, like, an absentee father who occasionally sent you gifts on holidays or some shit.

In Islam, Allah was conflated with the Biblical god. But it seems like this was really Mohammed’s invention, and not something that polytheists believed in. Biblical stories are basically never referenced by polytheists in either inscriptions or in Islamic texts, and polytheists seem to have never given their kids Biblical names like Ibrahim. On the other hand, 7th century Arabs were certainly well aware of the existence of both Judaism and Christianity, and it seems like they at least knew a few biblical stories and characters from those stories. (Abraham, Ishmael, Jesus, and Mary are all said to have been represented within the Kaaba in a hadith). Then there’s that weird incident from back in surah 2 that implies the polytheists of Medina maybe believed in the Jewish god, despite not being Jews? So maybe the truth is slightly more complicated: the polytheistic Allah may have been recognized as the same god as the one Jews and Christians prayed to--the polytheists just didn’t believe that he had all the attributes that Jews and Christians assigned to him (ie, polytheism = hellfire).

In fact it seems like they didn’t view Allah’s role as being focused on humanity at all. He created the world and evidently all terrestrial life in the past, and he may have been in charge of the ongoing creation of new life (which would explain the thing with the ladies in Medina). But he wasn’t sitting around listening to people’s prayers for winning a battle or finding someone to marry. His daughters handled those issues instead.

Like Allah, Allat has been around for quite a while, and her name is found in ancient Nabataean records. Names like Wahballat (gift of Allat) and Saadallat (joy of Allat) are recorded before the fourth century AD. The word “Allat” itself was used all the way back in the fourth century BC, in inscriptions related to the ancient Qedar tribe, and so Allat may be the longest-surviving name in the northern Arab pantheon. Some scholars speculate that she originated as the Arab version of the ancient Ugarite goddess Atirat (also called Elat), who was also the precursor of the Canaanite goddess Asherah, the wife of the creator-god El. If that is the case, then Arab groups who interacted with the Syrian Ugarites gradually brought the goddess south with them.

Also like Allah, Allat’s mythology and her relationship with other gods seems to have changed over time until it crystallized in later years. By Mohammed’s era, “Allat” was the name of a specific goddess worshiped in the Hijaz, with her main shrine located in the city of Taif. Her father was Allah and her sisters were al-Uzza and Manat. But it’s possible that in another version of the story, Allat was instead Allah’s wife, not his daughter. And in other versions of the story from Arabs living further to the north, Allat is instead listed as a daughter of the deity Ruda and the wife of the Nabataeans’ chief god Dushara, neither of whom seems to have been super well-known in Mo’s era (though both were evidently still worshiped by some groups, somewhere, and are mentioned in the early anti-polytheist screed Book of Idols).

Unlike Allah, Allat was a goddess explicitly concerned with human affairs, and her role in this realm seems to have been pretty all-encompassing from the first time she shows up in the records to the time of Arab polytheism’s destruction. There was a reason why people prayed to Allat more than Allah: Allat was the one who seemed to care about them. She directly intervened in the lives of humans. Allat provided the good with mercy, but punished the evil with her wrath. As such, people extended prayers and offerings to her in the hopes of earning her favor. In Robert Hoyland’s Arabia and the Arabs, the author says:

She is asked to extend solicitude and to display mercy. Of her are expected well being, ease and prosperity. Travellers pray that she might accompany them in their migrations and provide clement weather. She is entreated for protection against the enemy, vengeance on the aggressor, booty for her faithful in their raids and infliction of blindness and lameness upon whomsoever defaces their inscriptions.

Northern Arabs who came into contact with Greek culture sometimes conflated Allat with the Greek goddess Athena, who was a a personification of justice and a goddess of war. It’s likely that they shared a lot of similarities. That does not mean that Allat’s role was identical to Athena’s, though. Allat wasn’t the only Arab goddess-of-war in town.

Ibn Ishaq’s sira says that the Quraysh worshiped Allat, but they and their cousin tribe the Banu Kinana were particular devotees of the goddess al-Uzza. Her idol was apparently located in Nakhla (the place where the first deadly raid happened, if you recall), until Khalid ibn Walid destroyed it. A number of Qurayshi men were named Abdul-Uzza, including one of Mohammed’s uncles.

She is typically listed as the sister of Allat and Manat and the daughter of Allah. Some Islamic sources say she had two daughters of her own; it’s not clear if these daughters are meant to be Allat and Manat, in some variant of the story in which al-Uzza is instead Allah’s wife, or if they’re some other goddesses. Regardless, it seems she was always a member of some family of gods.

Al-Uzza was worshiped by the Nabataeans like her maybe-sister and maybe-father, though her shrines were spread throughout Arabia, from the Sinai in the west down through the Hijaz. She was sometimes paired with Dushara, like Allat, and her stone idols were frequently placed beside his. (Interestingly, al-Uzza’s stones were always larger than Dushara’s whenever they were placed together.) As always, the relationship between the two is unclear. Some texts suggest al-Uzza was Dushara’s virgin mother, like this work from a Cypriot Christian in the 4th century AD that seems to be about her:

in the idolatrous temple at Petra... they praise the virgin with hymns in the Arabic language and call her khaabu ...  and the child who is born of her they call Dusares.

But it’s possible that in earlier times, al-Uzza was instead the wife of Dushara, before maybe being supplanted in that role by Allat.... who then became the daughter of Allah in the Hijaz. Some scholars think al-Uzza was the Allat of the Nabataeans. I dunno! Turns out it’s hard as fuck to put the mythology of a religion together when that religion spans a thousand years and left behind little in the way of writing.

We at least know what her name means. Inscriptions in the city of Petra (in Jordan) refer to al-Uzza as “the mighty goddess”, which is also what some polytheists are said to have called her in Islamic texts. Her name was probably derived from the word azza, meaning “powerful”. She was not a weak goddess--and Islamic texts show the Meccans calling upon her in battle. In al-Tabari’s history, Abu Sufyan is quoted as saying that al-Uzza was on the polytheists’ side on the day of Uhud. She was that bitch.

Some scholars think that al-Uzza was conflated with the Egyptian Isis, the Greek Aphrodite/Roman Venus, or both in the northern parts of Arabia. The Isis link is a bit shaky, but the Aphrodite/Venus conflation does seem to have happened. Like Athena and Allat, this doesn’t mean that al-Uzza played the same role as either of those goddesses, though she may well have shared certain traits with them. There’s nothing to suggest that al-Uzza was particularly associated with love or lust, for example, whereas such things define Aphrodite.

But one trait that al-Uzza might share with them is perhaps an association with the stars, more specifically the morning/evening star (Venus). It’s not a sure thing, but 3rd-5th century Christian authors in the Middle East do make the connection between al-Uzza and the planet Venus. Christian authors can’t be trusted to report accurately on polytheistic traditions any more than later Muslim ones can, since both were hostile to their practices. But since polytheists didn’t really write about any of this themselves, that’s all we have to go by. And we do know that pre-Islamic Arabs attached great significance to the celestial bodies in general--the sun, moon, and stars all held spiritual meaning for them.

So taken all together, I think it’s pretty safe to say that al-Uzza was generally regarded as a powerful female member of a divine family, one who was called upon in battle and had some connection to celestial bodies.

That just leaves us with Manat. Manat is my favorite of the “sisters”, and I think she’s the most interesting. She was worshiped throughout the region, including in Mecca, but like the other goddesses, some tribes worshiped her more than others. Before Islam came around, Manat was the main deity worshiped by the two Azd branches (Banu Aws and Banu Khazraj) of Medina. Those Ghassanids who had not converted to Christianity also continued to primarily devote themselves to Manat. Ibn Ishaq says that her main shrine was near Qudayd, which is around 60 miles to the north of the modern city of Jeddah in the Hijaz. Like the others, she is found in Nabataean inscriptions, though dedications to Manat have been found all over the place, including in eastern Arabia (the modern-day UAE) as well.

Unlike Allat and al-Uzza, whose exact roles are kind of hard to pin down, we know a lot about Manat because she was associated with one particular concept throughout her entire existence. That concept is fate. Her name literally means “fate”, stemming from manaya. In this context, “fate” is essentially synonymous with death, or the inevitability of it. The phrase “struck down by fate” was a euphemism for dying--not just violent deaths, but all people’s deaths, stemming from the inescapable passage of time. So while it seems intuitive that Allat is kind of the female counterpart to Allah, I think it’s more fitting to put Manat in that role. Allah created life; Manat ended it. Both were all-powerful.

Death was inescapable and apparently final in Arab polytheism. The Quran tells us that polytheists flatly rejected the concept of resurrection as illogical. Once they died, their bodies would turn to dust and bones, and that was it. Everyone would be “struck down by fate” forever, no matter how rich they were or how good they were. This theme is found throughout the supposed pre-Islamic poetry collected by early Muslims.

It seems as though most polytheistic Arabs did not believe in a spiritual afterlife, either, beyond perhaps some vague ideas related to ghosts. (Some Muslim scholars say that pre-Islamic Arabs believed that when someone died violently and their murder was never avenged, they haunted people in the form of a spirit-owl.) There aren’t any inscriptions mentioning a place like heaven or hell, which would be very strange if they did believe in it. And the Quran tells us that they didn’t believe in a Day of Judgement and also quotes the polytheists as saying:

There is naught but our life of the world; we die and we live, and naught destroyeth us save time

But a small number of pre-Islamic poems collected in the Islamic era do mention concepts related to the afterlife. For example, one famous poem says this, which is basically identical to Islamic theology:

Do not conceal from God what is in your breast that it may be hidden; whatever it concealed, God knows all about it. Either it will be put off and placed recorded in a book, and preserved there until the judgement day; or the punishment be hastened and so he will take revenge.

That would seem to suggest.... something about the afterlife, right? Like what else would “judgement” refer to here if not some hell/heaven-type sorting activity? Well, maybe the Quran--which is mostly just an anti-polytheistic rant--isn’t an accurate reflection of pre-Islamic beliefs! On the other hand, these pre-Islamic poems were recited orally until they were recorded in Islamic times, and they probably aren’t exact reflections of actual pre-Islamic poetry. It’s completely possible some lines were added to them or subtracted from them over the decades. Either Islam borrowed way more concepts from pre-Islamic religion than Islamic literature and pre-Islamic inscriptions indicate, or Islamic concepts got folded into these poems over the years. Based on the lack of inscriptions about any sort of heaven or afterlife or judgement day, let’s go with the latter possibility for now.

Admittedly, the idea that everyone ultimately met the same fate was pretty unusual by Mohammed’s era. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity all had some concept of divine judgement and afterlife realms for good and bad people, even if the details were sometimes vague. So by this era, if most Arabs rejected the concept of both, that would’ve made them relics of a bygone age. The possibility of an afterlife could have been something that helped Mohammed gain his first recruits from the polytheists of Mecca. If they were afraid of the nothingness after death that polytheists believed awaited them, and they were also afraid of being burned in a fire, which Mohammed said awaited them, then converting was the only way to achieve the goal of a peaceful afterlife.

But if Manat is basically the Grim Reaper and no one can escape her, what’s the point of praying to her, as some Arab tribes did? When they presented her with offerings, what were they hoping to gain?

Knowledge is one option. Pre-Islamic Arabs loved trying to gain insight into the future. They wanted to know as much as possible about it, a cultural trait that continued long into the Islamic era (despite many of the divination practices being explicitly against Islam). Maybe there was some Final Destination shit going on here--if you “knew” how you were gonna die, perhaps it was possible to avoid it if you asked Manat nicely, even if you couldn’t avoid death itself. Or perhaps she was invoked to grant people a glorious or painless death and to ensure that they were remembered in the memories of their people.

Islamic sources didn’t record anything about the details of how or why people worshiped Manat, so we can only speculate. I still think the creepy death lady is cool.

Anyway, to wrap this up...

Arab polytheism seems to have been very fluid. It wasn’t the case that there was one god to whom everyone owed their worship, and then a bunch of subservient gods after him. Some tribes fully dedicated themselves to one deity, while others offered sacrifices to a small number of others. Some deities were worshiped by only a few people, while others like Manat and Allat had lots of adherents all over Arabia. There aren’t any records of any Arab group trying to force other groups to worship their god alone, with one exception (cough).

A god was typically represented by an idol made of stone. People would offer animal or food sacrifices to this idol, and priests and priestesses would sometimes try to predict the future by performing divining rituals in front of the idol. The area around a tribe’s idol was typically considered sacred territory within which no violence was allowed (like the Kaaba).

Because the idols were seen as the gods, or at least as possessing the gods’ spirits or whatever, destroying an idol meant destroying the god it was associated with. Thus why Mo sent his goons around to attack polytheistic shrines--they were literally “killing” the other gods, according to the polytheistic understanding of it.

Arabs didn’t write many religious texts beyond short inscriptions, and Arab polytheism’s destruction by Islam was so complete that even people living barely a century after Mohammed’s death seemed to know virtually nothing about polytheistic customs. So there is little that we know about any of these gods, and even less is known about any sort of mythological stories that they may have featured in. (In fact some Western scholars believe that there was no mythology, and all the gods were more or less interchangeable and devoid of individual features--but clearly there was something giving certain gods an oral history or backstory, or else the insistence that some gods were related to each other doesn’t make any sense.) Often there is nothing known about them beyond their names. Complicating matters is the fact that the popularity of various gods changed over time, so a god extremely important to, say, the Qedar may have only been worshiped by a few people in late Nabataean times, whereas an important Nabataean god may have barely been worshiped in Mohammed’s era.

For example, Islamic texts tell us that a god named Hubal was worshiped in Mecca. Ibn Ishaq says that there were a bunch of arrows next to his idol that people used as divination tools. Beyond that, reputable sources don’t tell us anything about him; he may have been another old Nabataean god. Nuha is a goddess dating back to the Qedar days who seems to be associated with passion and emotion (there is an inscription stating that “by Nuha is the jealousy of a lover”), but by the Islamic era she’s virtually unheard of. As one god’s popularity waned, it’s possible that their idols and attributes were given to other gods instead.

That probably explains how Allat, Manat, and al-Uzza became sisters and Allah became their father over time. But it’s still unclear why the three goddesses were labeled the children of Allah, while the others weren’t given that title. Why is it that those three became a trio, exactly? The verse above implies the polytheists believed he only had daughters--but other parts of the Quran say the disbelievers believed he had sons and daughters. So maybe he had three daughters and, like, one or two unnamed sons? Or maybe he just preferred the girls to the boys?

There are obviously too many missing pieces in the mythology of Arab polytheism for us to put the whole story together, but my best guess is that they believed some unthinking/amoral force gave rise to Gen 1 gods like Allah (who then created the world and the other gods and goddesses). This force was irrelevant in the context of their religious practices because it presumably didn’t interact with humanity at all. Unlike monotheists, the polytheists believed that higher powers didn’t need worship or devotion and certainly weren’t gonna throw hissy fits if people didn’t bow to their asses five times a day; people prayed to gods when they themselves needed something in particular. That’s why they saw no issue with devoting more of their time to Allat than Allah, even though Allah was the one who created the world: Allat was the one more likely to give them stuff when they asked for it. Allah was hanging out shaping new babies to send into the world, or whatever--he was just fine without people praying to him and asking him for help acing a test. Seems like a better guy than the one we ended up with, tbh...

NEXT TIME: Back to monotheism!!!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 185

Ayat: 21

Good: 0

Neutral: 19 (37:133-134, 37:137-153)

Bad: 2 (37:135-136)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

⇚ previous day | next day ⇛

[noexit-ff]

44. Part 2

Walking behind Chris making my way to our room, Chris has booked all of this so I don’t know what he has done “you want me to hold your bag for you” Chris asked looking behind him, smiling lightly at Chris shaking my head “this place is far out, I am tired of walking” we picked up the keys and we are still walking to the room “we are here baby, I wanted to get the best for us” watching Chris unlock the room door “I told some lies when I booked though, I mean they should have thought I am Chris Brown and we been married but no, they believed me” he pushed the door open “after you” he gestured, what has he done now. Looking down at the marble flooring “roses on the floor?” I chuckled “I said it’s our honeymoon, they believed it so they dumb as fuck” what is my husband like “I don’t know what they did though, I told you it’s a classy dick appointment like I said” following the line of roses “it’s sweet though Chris, I love when you do things like this. It’s romantic” looking around the bedroom “this is so nice” my smile grew “the bed is huge too, I am here for champagne though” placing my bag down and making my way to the bottle, I am going to open this now “no, wait” Chris held the bottle “don’t open it, we going out for some food first” pulling a face at Chris “really? I am not dressed for a meal, I still have what I wore for the game. I didn’t bring any dresses with me, why didn’t you say?” Chris shrugged, letting him place the champagne back in the bucket of ice “come, you look beautiful anyways” he held my hand pulling me back out of the room.

Chris has really thought this through “it’s so late, it’s only us two here” looking over at the beach front “I know, I paid them to keep it open for us” he said, I sighed out “it’s beautiful, the palm trees and the lights. You really making me the happiest wife in the world” I am going to give him a good night, he deserves “you deserve it, you deserve more than what I am doing. You gave me a whole new meaning like you said, I didn’t think when you told you was pregnant it would have changed me this way. I was a guy that was pretty lonely, I had nothing but the art I drew and people I paid for. I ain’t once thought of doing graffiti in our home, that’s our family home. Maurice has really changed me to be a whole different nigga, I just want to be at home. I don’t want trouble even though my past be chasing me, it’s still there but I am running, I will make it out of my past. I know it” Chris rubbed his chin, he has confused me now “how is your past still around? Why don’t I know this” Chris licked his lips smiling “I protect you Robyn, I don’t want that shit coming to you or making you think about me. Just some shit happened when I went to the studio a few days ago, you know. Sinko was there and I just felt like it was a set up.”

That stupid ass ex friend of his “you never admitted to what happened, you beat him didn’t you?” till this day he has never said it, I don’t know why he won’t say it “I did, I beat him. I was so angry, he was the guy that was setting me up, the same nigga that watched me take drugs, fucked myself over. I was just so mad, I beat him. It’s not a good thing but I did it, I don’t want to tell my wife I did that. I would do anything to protect you from any mess and stress. I am thinking on what to do but I don’t want to run away from them, I ain’t scared of them” he has only verified what I knew “I understand, I never liked the guy. Your other friends, they are stupid but not malicious. I felt it” I paused thinking “I used to cringe when I read about you being in these gangs, I prayed that nothing ever happened to you. I was angry at you but I never wanted to see you hurt, I don’t think you should hide like you said but you need to change everything he knew about you, every place you and him went too. Start from there” I will kill Sinko myself if anything happens to Chris “would you like to order now?” the waiter asked, let us do that now.

I keep staring at my phone, I want to ring my mom or Joyce to know about Junior but I got to trust them “this steak is nice you know” I said trying to side track my mind from my son and Chris and these people after him “you love having any meat in your mouth” Chris blurted out, my eyes widened as I blinked at him “wow! You know damn well the only meat I had in my mouth is yours. I didn’t have anything in my mouth” I corrected him “nah, I didn’t mean it like that. I was just saying” Chris does not think when he speaks “I was speaking about the steak Robyn, come on. I ain’t say it like that” he is such a liar “Chris, just stop. You’re making it worse, you did not mean steak at all. It’s like me saying you love having fish in your mouth” Chris tilted his head “let’s not” he said quickly “we both did shit but Adam, and the jew are two people that really got to me” sitting back in the chair “why? I mean with Drake. I did nothing with him, I didn’t even date him. You started talking to him at one point” Chris put his hands up “to get to you, you changed your number on me. I hate him because he threw it in my face, publicly he did it and you still ignored me. Y’all was having the time of your life at award shows, you threw it to my face. Then he took my chin and then you still fucked with him” Chris is getting ever so heated “it made money, I didn’t purposely do it. Drake was just fun but you got to understand you was in a really bad bubble, I saw everything but it happened and look at us now, just to add I never had any other meat in my mouth. I am rather picky with that” I had to add that because I am not some hoe like everyone wants to make me out to be.

Picking up Chris’ sneakers from the sand, it’s late at night and he wants to walk on the beach but has ran off to throw rocks in the water. Picking up my sneakers also and walking slowly along the beach, it looks so beautiful at night but also creepy “did you see how far it went?” Chris jogged back over to me “no, I was busy seeing the weird guy down there staring at us” Chris took his sneakers from me “come” Chris turned his back towards me “let me carry to your destination queen” side eyeing him, he leaned down further “come on, climb onto me” rolling my eyes “what if you can’t carry me? My thighs might crush your ribs with your skinny ass” I know for a fact I am thicker than I am “shut up, just get on top” he really wants me to, wrapping my arms around his neck and my legs hooked around his waist. Chris stood up and grunted out “wow, put me down” I spat, Chris busted out laughing “I am joking, you’re good babe and I am sorry about earlier. On god I didn’t want you to feel that way” Chris apologising, look at him “it’s ok handsome, I just want to leave our past in the past, where it belongs” pressing a kiss to the back of Chris’ head “it does, I don’t think I would have settled down. I know for a fact I would be lost, the only love of my life is you” tightening my arms around his neck, my face pressing just against the side of his face “do I feel a little heavy? Admit to it please, I know I am” Chris just laughed “you have more meat on you which I love, my meaty wife” he is so stupid, meaty wife.

Chris finally put me down “yo, my back” Chris placed his hand on his back “wow, don’t play. That is fine, we won’t have sex” Chris ran ahead of me “noo, I am good look I am running” I knew it “yeah, yeah. Just open the door baby” getting my phone out from my pocket “your mom called me, it’s late over there. I hope they are ok” calling Joyce back, Chris held the door open for me as I walked into the room “I bet Junior is awake for me, he wants daddy talk” Chris said behind me “it’s ok sweetie, you shouldn’t have called back. He fell asleep now, he kept on crying and not drinking his milk. Monica and I was losing our minds but we put music videos on of you and Chris and he remained quiet and drank his milk and then fell asleep” I breathed out a sigh of relief “he is ok right? Not in pain or upset?” my poor baby boy “he is fine now, he felt content seeing you both on TV and even hearing your voices. It comes in handy” smiling wide “he is missing us, well I will leave you both to it. Thank you for being there for us and him” slapping Chris’ hand away, I won’t have him undress me just yet “it’s ok good night” smiling lightly “night” disconnecting the call “my baby boy misses us while his dad is busy undressing me” Chris does not care, he wants me in that bed “I just need the toilet, wait” Chris is like a dog with a bone.

Robyn needs to quit playing and just let me fuck unless she don’t want to fuck, I mean why not. I got roses, champagne, I took her out to eat, this is annoying and I am bored of looking at Instagram. I miss Robyn filling my timeline full of pictures of Maurice. I might just get naked and wait on the bed for her. Tapping on the camera “are you taking a shit!?” I half shouted “I ain’t about to give you anal ma’am? Come on Robyn!” she mad annoying and taking so long “you got the shits!?” I rather she just told me “shut up!!” she screamed back at me, flicking the camera to my face and pressing record, sighing out “currently in Hawaii, with a bed full of rose petals” picking some of the petals at the side of me “waiting for Robyn for ten minutes, she ain’t even come out of the bathroom, I have been waiting for this night for months!!! I love my son with all of my heart but I need it, and when you know your wife’ body is so good. On god Rihanna’ body is so bomb naked and she ain’t giving me shit. I am bored too, I will document part two if I don’t get any” stopping the recording and typing out out a caption ‘Don’t have babies!!!’ pressing send, we going back to LA if she playing with me like this. The bathroom door unlocked finally, the door flew open and she stepped out of the bathroom. The biggest grin grew on my face, my eyes flowed down Robyn’ body with the tightness growing in my pants.

Robyn placed her leg just above the arm rest on the chair “do you like my outfit?” she smiled leaning down allowing her hair to flow down, I feel ever so thirsty. Blinking my eyes as I licked my lips, she has freshly had her pussy waxed. The two piece set made from sheer lace, the bra quarter-cut cup which made her boobs pour out, they barely fit, the suspender thong which is crotchless which let me catch a glimpse of heaven, those heels finish it off perfectly “you should have said” my voice sounding hoarse “you was all screaming and shouting, now you’re quiet. Well surprise baby” she placed her leg down “I want you to sit on this, come here” she gestured me over, she ain’t got to tell me twice. Nearly tripping over myself as I got off the bed “calm down” I was about to kiss her “I said sit down, not kiss me” she is killing me inside, walking around the chair and sitting down silently.

She came to stand right in front of me, placing her hands on either side of the chair armrest. She leaned down so our faces were only inches apart, my eyes jetted down to her cleavage before returning to her face “you bought this for me?” I asked, she bit into her bottom lip and nodded “just for you” my eyes went to her teeth as they scrapped against her lip, my lips parted as a small groan escaped me, I want her so bad. she brought her right hand to my stomach and started to walk her fingers up my body with each of her words “this… is… all… for… you” she reached my collarbone, she only let her index finger touch my skin. She slipped it up to the centre of my throat and under my chin, she brought her mouth to mine, stopping just before she touched my lips “all for me” I whispered “for you” she said just against my lips.

Robyn moved back from me, she is so bad “where are you going?” I said through gritted teeth, just watching her booty cheeks jiggle, she grabbed the bottle of champagne “a little thirsty” she ripped the foil from the top “shiiiit, I am too thirsty, damn. You playing with me, you can’t be walking around and not allow me to get a piece of the cake” Robyn popped open the bottle, Robyn shrugged as she drank from the bottle. Her legs are so long, her thighs get thick as you travel up. Robyn walked over to me, placing her legs on either side of me as she sat on my lap. She placed her hand just under my chin “open up” opening my mouth and my eyes never leaving hers, she poured the contents into my mouth. She moved the bottle back and wrapped her arms around my neck, swallowing down the contents and placing my hands behind her back. Pressing a kiss to Robyn’ neck but she moved back from me “what are you in the mood for” she keep running away I am about to pin her ass down “your pussy on my face, that is what I want” I straight up said “so it’s my choice” she said totally ignoring what I am saying.

Robyn twirled back around “okay then” Aaliyah - Rock The Boat started playing, I am here for this because I didn’t think she was going to do anything at all. When Robyn finally walked her beautiful ass over to me she straddled my lap, with her hands on the back of the chair. She leaned forward, letting her breasts brush against my chest. She then turned and sat down fully on my lap, she leaned back so she is pressed against my chest and turned her face into my neck while her hips grind in slow motion. The friction of her ass against my erection felt so unbelievable good, dry humping never felt so great. My head went back, my eyes shut and his mouth dropped open in a moan. She swirled her hips in time with the music, she blew air across my neck and made me shiver. Grinding myself against her “I just want to be inside of you so badly” her crotch rubbing right against my erection, she slipped off of my lap and onto her knees.

I am not even going to speak a word because my wife knows what she is doing, it’s been so damn long that I am going to explode at her lips just pressing kisses against my tip. She curls her fingers around my member and opens her mouth wide, sticking her tongue out in the process, teasing the tip. My hands clenched into a fist as Robyn took me into her mouth, this feeling I yearned for so long. Robyn slides her lips down my length, trying to swallow me whole. Robyn gagged slightly when my dick hit the back of her throat and she tried to pull away, but I held her head firmly in place. Robyn looked up at me, her hazel eyes beginning to water from the strain and whines deep in her throat. The dick in her mouth twitches against the flat of her tongue, heavy and hot, until I allow Robyn to slowly pull away. She purposely leaves the head of my dick nestled between her lips, feeling her tongue swirl around me.

“Ah, Fuck Robyn” I moaned out, running my fingers through her hair. I thrust my hips gently into Robyn’ mouth, loosening her stroking hand around my base and sucking more softly. I moaned out loudly when I watch just how much Robyn’ lips stretch to take all of me in her mouth. Her lips are puffy and red, but the best part is the eye contact Robyn gives. Her hazel eyes are hooded and wide “oh fuck, I am going to cum” Robyn moaned around my member, stroking me as she sucked. Feeling my member tremor, my toes curl and I came into her mouth “oh my” I moaned out, Robyn still sucking my member as I came.

I am done with Robyn’ teasing ass, I want in “I’ll be nice” I mumbled as I leaned down and kissed Robyn’ lips, my tongue finding hers, tangling with it as my free hand went to her hair. Robyn tugged at my tee, pulling it up “I just want you inside of me now” Robyn said yanking my tee off “you sure don’t seem it at times” pecking Robyn’ lips as I moved down her neck, a smirk played on my face as her breath got caught in her throat. She is now feigning for it, Robyn’ breathing hitched as I barely did anything. I started sucking on her neck, my fingers slid inside of her core. I slowly thrust my finger in and out of her, as she arched her back. Moving back from her neck, slowly kissing down her neck. Pressing kisses onto her chest and reaching above her boobs, my finger still thrusting inside of her “Chris!” Robyn moaned out, sucking on the skin just above her boob, feeling Robyn’ hands on the side of my head looking up at her letting the skin between my lips go. Robyn pulled me up, latching her lips onto mine as we kissed.

I quickly bared her breasts “I have been after these for so long” I openly admitted, these are the biggest I have seen them “the booty jiggle and titty jiggle are a blessing” Robyn placed her hand over her mouth “stop it” she said “wait” placing my hands together looking up “thank you god for making Robyn’ boobs larger than life, I feel ever so spoilt with the meal I will be having” feeling Robyn yanking at my arm “I swear to god” I snorted laughing, leaning down and closing my lips over her nipple “don’t you dare bite me, I need releasing anyways” moving my head back staring at Robyn “what now?” I am amazed “that is legit milk? How? Why can’t this be a lifetime thing? I am in shock. This shit is sweet, nah. I am shocked” I am amazed that her boobs have milk in them “I need to have this on my cereal, damn Robyn” she is amazing “does it taste like Barbados?” Robyn questioned “better than Barbados, this is heaven. I feel like when I die and I go heaven, this is the milk I will be having” Robyn busted out laughing “I love you, oh god” she said through her laughter. I leaned down and sucked again while she laughed, running my tongue around to sweep up all of the hot liquid that flowed out. With a few more pulls, I swallowed the liquid down before flicking the tip of my tongue over her swollen bud.

Robyn pulled me down to kiss her, my tongue tangled with hers before slowly dancing down her neck and then back to her lips. Robyn moaned into my ear, her arm going around my neck. Wrapping her legs around my waist, rubbing herself against my member. My tip grazing against her clit “who’s being a tease now? Stop it” Robyn knows I am playing now “just wanted to get you back, I can see the frustration on your face though” without a warning I slowly slid into her groaning out as her walls closed around me instantly “daddy is back home” I mumbled as I held her gaze, slowly thrusting “you don’t even feel different, pussy popping back into action” Robyn yanked me down for a kiss to shut me up locking her legs around my hips driving me into her as deeply, I sped up my thrusts inside of her. Robyn’ lips moved back from mine, her head fell back as she moaned out. Kissing on Robyn’ neck as every stroke is causing Robyn to let out a scream, I drove into her faster and faster, sucking her neck, leaving marks on Robyn everywhere “fuck!” Robyn shouted out, her hand on my hip as I slowed my pace.

“My bad” I smirked at her, slowly thrusting into Robyn “it’s ok” she placed her hand on my neck “keep going” she said, leaning down kissing her lips, sucking onto the lower lip as I continued to slam into her. My one hand gripping her breast, squeezing and kneading, as the other hand held her hip still to keep Robyn from bucking her hips, making me cum before I was done satisfying her “flip us over” Robyn said after biting my bottom lip. Flipping us both over “what happened to you doing it?” she can usually do it “not tonight” I watched her from below “ok, I am going to enjoy this” my hands on Robyn’ hips and her ass as I thrusted into her as fast, I am going to cum but I don’t want too. Robyn let her hands roam over her body, groaning and moaning. Her tongue slowly sliding over her lips as she looked down at me, clenching my jaw “fuck, I’m gonna cum” I can’t hold off anymore, my dick began to throb and pulse inside of Robyn, she decided to clamp tightly around me “ah fuck Robyn” I moaned out, she is milking me completely, pulling Robyn down on top of me and wrapped my arms around her tightly, just holding Robyn there for a moment before looking into her eyes as I pressed a kiss to her lips “I love you” my dick is still throbbing “I love you too” she wiggled out of from under me “round two” I am riding you and you don’t move or I will leave you hard, Robyn about to torture me.

[hiraethtae]

OK so last year my cat died. and she died in a really painful way. like her intestines got twisted and there no way to fix it even surgery for humans doesnt work usually and she died in the bathroom screaming and i just i remember i wanted to go to her but my dad said its better i let her be, that she wont die in my arms. and i hate it and i remember it each time at night i heard her screams echoing months later and i still remember them so vividly and i miss her and i still fell guilty that i liostened to my dad because i was scared and i didn’t hold her in my arms.

and months pass and i start to get this creeping feeling that something isnt quite right at home. like my mom did the bad energy purifying thing but it’s bad, and its in the restroom where she died. the house has no pet in it now and i get desperate and start searching for cats that we can take so the feeling goes away. and i find a cat and we need to wait 4 more months so i wait and don’t use that restroom and my dad i know he feels somethings off because he never used to close the bathroom door before but now each night he does. so the cat comes, his name is zenobio and hes a really good kitty. hes a good cat but he developed this fucking habit of staring into the restroom like their is something there, just unmoving for hours. after like a month he moved to being inside the restroom and me and dad were like “hes probably seeing her spirit” and thats a comforting thought you know?? but it just gets worse because the bad feeling now moved to the guest room next to the restroom. and it’s been months since i started to feel the offness of that room and i told my friend and she of course was like “when spirits die a portal opens, and since she ded badly something must have come through” and im like thanks anastasia for voicing what i didnt want to acknowledge jesus fucking christ. i start to panic obviously because r u fucking kidding me i am not prepared to deal with this shit. and then she says “calm down they usually loose interest if u ignore then it will just go away” and i was like yeah sure ignoring i can do that why do u know this stuff how much weird netflix shows did u watch? I didnt go into that room for almost a year, only to take sheets to change my bed and even that was only for  afew minutes.

but last week. last week i spent a whole day in that fucking room. in the guest room we had a closet with my old toys so me and my parents sat dopwn to organize what to throw out. well i mostly organized my parents wandared in and out the room. so i sat there a whole day feeling really happy and nostalgic because i found toys i havent seen for years y’all it’s like i was relieving childhood all over again and i happily organize and all said and done we swell right??

WRONG. FUCKING WRONG. ever since i came out of that room the feeling of being watched is back, the bad feeling, the feeling that makes me scared and it’s in my fucking room. my cat won’t go in unless it under the bed (which he needs to crawl into), dusya my old cat isnt here to protect me anymore and about a week ago i woke up and my door was ajar and i hear a whisper like my dads voice saying my russian nickname “delya” and i freaked and checked if it was my dad but no one was there and guys i am freaking out because there is a fucking demon in my house or something else, and its in my room now. like how else am i supposed to explain this shit??? i never believed in demons and ghosts and stuff and i watched buzzfeed unsolved for shits a nd giggles but i didnt not sign up for this shit and please help jesus fucking chirst im not even christian im a jew

[geekade]

Back to Hogwarts - Part the Seventh

Welcome back readers! It’s been a long road, but we’ve finally reached the last book. At least now the division of my coverage of these books matches that of the movies (sort of). The first half of book 7 could easily be a one big set up piece, a “get to the fireworks factory” slog. Much as I love the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the journey to the final battle does tend to go on (and on and on). Instead, here we get a well-built story containing some excellent character moments and a really thoughtful progression of events (as we’ve come to expect from the author by now. Let’s take a look at what makes this “beginning of the end” so special.

Seven books in, Rowling is still finding creative ways to provide exposition. In a story as wide-ranging as this, there’s no avoiding it, as there are so many relevant events that take place outside of the main characters’ experiences. Since the Penseive was becoming such a tiresome device, it was refreshing to get intel on the past by way of Harry’s disguised conversations with Doge and Auntie Muriel at the wedding. Likewise, the use of Extendable Ears to eavesdrop on the refugee wizards and goblins' conversation in the woods was a fitting way for our heroes to learn what’s going on in the outside world, since they are, by necessity, otherwise cut off from it. Both of these scenes might be considered too convenient, except that they serve multiple functions. In the case of the wedding, it provides some much needed lightness in a very dark story and reminds Harry of the simple pleasures in life that make his sacrifices worth making. And the refugee scene just makes sense; it would be totally natural that otherwise unlikely companions would find themselves lumped together under fear of persecution. They’d be seeking shelter in the same types of places Harry and company would be, so they’d be bound to run into one of these groups eventually. And these folks would logically be interested in discussing exactly the matters that the protagonists need to know about. Both scenes are textbook examples of excellent exposition that make logical sense and fit seamlessly into the narrative.

There are a lot of hard to read moments in this book that really confirm that the series has matured along with its audience and characters. Of course the deaths of Hedwig and Mad-Eye are upsetting, even moreso than the deaths we’ve read before in the series because they’re so dear to our hearts (and to Harry’s). But beyond that, this book offers moments darker than ever seen before. Detestable as Kreacher is, the combination of Hermione’s sympathy, in spite of his strong distaste for her, and our knowledge of Harry and Dumbledore’s experience with the potion from the basin in the cave makes his story so difficult to get through (and almost makes all that SPEW business worth it). And, in my opinion, the discomfort of that scene is relatively small compared with the excruciating flashback Harry experiences in Godric’s Hollow, detailing his parents’ final moments. It may be my perspective as a parent, it may be that I’d completely forgotten about this moment so it read as new. Whatever it was, reading as Harry relived his parents’ deaths was almost too much to bear and was more heartbreaking to me than anything else in the first half of this book.

Rowling has been incredibly active on Twitter lately, combatting trolls on current events. With the frightening parallels to past historical tragedy and the threat of history repeating itself these days, it’s not hard to see why. In the wizarding world, a small, hateful group has taken power over both the government and the press while the rest of the community bands together to #resist. The face of the government is a puppet, controlled by a behind-the-scenes hatemonger. The activities surrounding the Muggle-Born Registry smacks of recent government activity aimed at keeping “bad outsiders” out of our country. The Snatchers feel equivalent to the ICE raids happening daily. The Quibbler, a formerly frivolous media outlet, has become the trusted source for truth, the Teen Vogue of the Potterverse. Ron is constantly putting himself in harm’s way to protect Hermione because of her blood status, reminiscent of the way Germans hid Jews from the Nazis in the 1940s. Ron also offers the logic that the existence of Squibs proves Muggle-borns couldn’t steal magic if they wanted to. RON WEASLEY HAS A POINT, Y’ALL, but nobody is listening. All of this feels horrifyingly familiar. It was frightening on first reading, but not nearly as scary as it is to read now because these sorts of things are actually happening in real life and I. HAVE. CHILLS.

Speaking of Ron, let’s look at how he evolves over the course of the first half of this story. In the beginning, Ron is typical Ron; an ass focused on “How to Charm Witches,” rather than the important matters. His failure to take their situation as seriously as the others leads to his explosion and separation from his friends. Ron is a complete fucking moron for leaving, of course, but his immediate regret reveals that he’s not mad at them, he’s mad at himself for not realizing before now how bad things are and how hard the struggle truly is going to be. And who can blame him? Ron’s seen tough times throughout the series and he’s always contributed to their victories, but in the end Harry’s always triumphed and he’s always been along for the ride. Now, triumph seems far beyond their grasp and his frustration with the situation is taken out on his friends. Thankfully Rowling allows Ron to redeem himself and show growth, both through magical intervention (by hearing his friends through the Deluminator) and via his thrilling heroics. His relationship with Hermione remains complicated, but their story is not over at this point. As much as I want them to JUST KISS, her beating the crap out of him on his return feels more right.

And speaking of Hermione, her resourcefulness continues to impress. When she revealed that she used a Summoning charm to obtain the books about Horcruxes from Dumbledore’s office, I was legitimately surprised it had taken her this long to resort to that kind of tactic, but pleased with the logic that it couldn’t have been done prior, as Dumbledore’s protective charms on the objects in his office died with him. It’s one of many examples of Rowling being very careful to set up obstacles in such a way that our heroes can’t just magic their way out of anything. It’s the same thing that makes superhero stories interesting; it’s enjoyable to read about characters who have abilities that we don’t, but if they can just do anything they want, what’s the point? (Rules really do make the game more fun, you guys.) I really adore the way Hermione and Ron are falling in love in a totally unconscious way; they bicker and fight like an old married couple already, but they also always reach for each other to protect each other in moments of fear and danger. It’s quite endearing and makes for a great payoff later in the book. Hermione also gets some great, smaller moments of Being Right, including scolding Harry’s doubt of Dumbledore in the face of false reports from biased sources and her understanding of wizard-house elf relations being the key to getting the first Horcrux of the book. My only gripe with her in this section is her insistence that Harry use Occlumency to fight Voldemort. It’s within character, of course, but a bit grating, since she doesn’t seem to get that it’s one of those talents you can’t master at will and have to know how it feels to be able to do it (not to mention what a handy literary device it is).

Dumbledore may be dead, but he is still such a presence in both Harry’s life and this book. As we learned from Lin-Manuel Miranda “you have no control/who lives, who dies, who tells your story,” and that all comes across heavily here. Harry’s regret in not having asked Dumbledore more questions, about the mission and about himself, before his death is so relatable. Harry’s commitment to confirming the truth about Dumbledore mimics Dumbledore’s own commitment to confirming the truth about Riddle in the previous book, though Harry isn’t consciously aware of the lesson he’s learned from the mentor who would be proud of Harry for investigating his background. Throughout the series, I believe that the journey of Harry and the reader is meant to be parallel, but here we find out that those journeys are also parallel to that of one Albus Dumbledore. Harry shows the same naivete in believing Skeeter’s book as Albus showed in believing in Grindelwald as a young man, as the reader shows if they believe what Harry believes, which a younger reader might, but an older, more critical reader is better equipped to see the author’s misdirection. It’s all terribly clever of Rowling and a bit easier to see on a reread when the reader is not so caught up in the tension and excitement of the plot. And while we also know there are plenty of similarities between Harry and Voldemort, this part of this book serves to crystallize the difference between them. Harry is as driven and arguably reckless in pursuit of his goals as Voldemort is, as we see in the mission to retrieve the locket from the Ministry. And he could have gotten away with it much more cleanly had he only stunned Yaxley and Umbridge and slipped away under the Invisibility cloak. But Harry is our hero and he cannot leave the innocent Muggle-born prisoners in the hands of a corrupted Ministry. So as we prepare for final faceoff between these two, it’s nice to have their differences confirmed as much as their similarities.

I’m leaving off here, after the destruction of the first Horcrux, with so much more to come. Normally I finish writing before I move on to read the next section, but I confess this time to being too invested to stop reading this time, so I’m already super pumped to bring you the exciting conclusion. See you all next month!

[vegankween]

So you hate it when those things happen to white people right? All of those I listed were done to white people and were major movements made by the liberal community. It doesn't erase the things that happen to POCs, but there's a dynamic in America that exists where you can literally censor an entire race of people and get support from major media outlets, academia, and society. How are we going to triumph the issues of POCs when it's acceptable to victimize anyone else?

Are you the one who sent me, “How do you feel about Mocking skin color, locked off of college campus grounds, not included in their peers SJW safe spaces (lol), thrown out of vehicles by mobs and beaten, being dragged into fires, hunted down by rioters, shot by politically fueled gunmen, targeted by music television shows as being subhuman or belonging to a barbaric race of people, your political rallies being shut down despite being a fellow advocate for a political agenda, or kidnappings/ torture that are racially motivated?” 

You sound like a white person who had their feelings hurt. Yes all of these things can happen to anyone, but ayo reality check, it happens more frequently to PoC BECAUSE of white people. Quit your reverse racism bullshit. 

1. Mocking skin color: Having a PoC say you look like mayo doesn’t even come close to centuries of discrimination, slavery, and basically all racist as fuck antics from white people to colored people. White people are called crackers because historically, y’all used a fucking WHIP to beat slaves and the noise whips make is a “cracking” sound. You got nicknamed after being violent landowners who abused slaves, now compare that with the N word. Please. 

You guys spend centuries making brown skinned people feel hideous about their skin tone and round noses. So much that the ENTIRE world considers European features the most beautiful. 

2. Locked off of college campus grounds? What instance? I could probably give you several of white colleges profiling and discriminating against black kids. Are you talking about all black colleges? That’s THEIR space and they deserve it. White people have had everything. White people have either segregated themselves from PoC or took what belonged to them. Now when black people have a place of their own, y’all feel like you gotta take that too. 

3. Not included in SJW safe spaces: Some safe spaces are for specific people. A safe space for black, latino, asian, native america, etc, is not a safe space for a white person. Same goes for people in the LGBT+ community. Why would a white person need to be in a PoC safe space???? Just by being white you’re pretty fucking safe. lol. 

4. “Thrown out of vehicles by mobs and beaten, being dragged into fires, hunted down by rioters, shot by politically fueled gunmen, targeted by music television shows as being subhuman or belonging to a barbaric race of people” Weird. This all sounds like things the KKK does to PoC here in the United States. I’m not going to say it doesn’t happen to white people, but I am going to say that when it happens, it’s not because you’re white. A black man is beaten by mobs for no reason other than his skin color. Give me the names of at least fifteen countries were white people are killed by PoC and were historically slaves to PoC, if ya can. 

Your reverse racism rhetoric is weak because in the history of… ever… white people have always been the dominate race, labeling anyone who doesn’t look like casper the friendly ghost subhuman. That being said, there is a huge problem with Antisemitism. Jews also deserve place a safe. But if you’re a hetero, non jewish white person in America, you need to put on your big boy pullups and get over it because you are NOT a target of racism. 

Also, yeah no. The media sucks the white man’s cock. Don’t get me started on how the media is toxic towards PoC. Example, the west nile virus. It killed millions within the continent of Africa and there was little coverage. Six white people die in the Unite States and everyone shits a brick. 

Artists of color that talk shit about white people in their songs are motivated by institutionalized discrimination towards their race and are using their talent to speak up against it, like J. Cole (which btw his new album is FIRE).

5. “How are we going to triumph the issues of POCs when it’s acceptable to victimize anyone else?” Well to triumph the issues of PEOPLE OF COLOR, we are going to need white people to stop killing us!!!! And to stop discriminating against us!!!!! And to elect us more into government offices!!!!! Allow us to have more representation in the media!!!!!! 

Maybe once Muslims, Black people, Latino/a people, etc can walk outside of their house without fear of being labeled a terrorist or thug we can sit down and talk about your white feelings.