#even in the same ethnic group

[fly-for-a-lifetime]

idk how to articulate this but i feel like ppl on this site act like speaking about humanitarian issues Correctly the same way christians act like the bible is the only thing keeping them from being an Evil Murderer

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

Nazis are a threat to everyone. We know this, we understand this. HOWEVER. Goyim, non-Jewish people, I'm asking you to think before you speak on Elon's actions.

Yes, the people trying to insist it was just a "Roman salute" and meant nothing are infuriating, but I have seen responses to it that do nothing more than encourage neo-Nazis and their sympathizers. I've seen "comebacks" where people say "Go do a "Roman salute" in a crowd", "go do it in front of a Jewish person". I just saw a video of someone saying, "Better yet, find yourself a synagogue, and go do the "Roman salute", and see how that goes... bet you won't."

You are putting Jewish people in danger. You, leftist who thinks you're being so smart and witty with your comeback, are encouraging neo-nazis to threaten Jewish people. "Better yet"? Go find a synagogue? Go find a synagogue, go there to do the Nazi salute, and that's the better option you're suggesting to them? What you're doing is telling a Nazi that they need to actively harm Jewish people to prove their beliefs to you, and I can tell you that encouragement is embraced by them.

Jewish people are already going to be one of the main targets of any Nazi or white supremacist group, but half of you are actively offering us up for your "gotcha" moment. Y'all don't think before you speak, and you need to examine why you would ever think to give specific ideas on how to harm Jewish people to neo-Nazis who have just been emboldened to a level we haven't seen in decades.

[mixupmycota]

staring at a tag on a post and just mentally reaching for a whiskey bottle

[selfinflictedgunshotwound]

my various mental issues make liking people so hard because i already put people on a pedestal to begin with if i genuinely like them so i am automatically laying myself at their feet like a dog but then i wrestle with the ego death of seeing that they're just a human being who is capable of being wrong and stupid and annoying me and it kind of makes me sick to my stomach not because i expect people to be perfect but because i know if i had like 5 minutes to sit down and talk to this person i would feel more secure in knowing where they stand on any given thing. but you aren't granted that when you just like some random guy who will never know you because you can't take the feeling of someone who could actually know you. or whatever.

[suncattle]

There's something in how some people try to turn the word "Palestinian" to Hamas.

Like immediate you say Palestinian they hear it as Hamas. You say Palestinian children and they hear young Hamas terrorist. You say hey maybe calling an entire ethnic group violent bloodthirsty animals is racist and they go "so you support Hamas?"

[muirneach]

it is fascinating to me that the majority of people it seems have never considered that borders are just lines on a map? its just a piece of paper? not to have anarchic tendencies but like. it’s just words

[aralintheobsessive]

Just unfollwed someone for reblogging an video saying this: Jews are direct descendants of Abraham, who was Arabic, and Abraham was there first, so Arabs were there first, so Jews are White Colonizers. DO YOU KNOW HOW ANCESTRY WORKS???? 'Oh yeah this Arab guy's great-grandkids? They have no claim to being Arabic. But his OTHER great-grandkids? Those are Arabs because he's their ancestor.' It could be argued if you follow Abrahamic geaneology that Ishmael's Arab descendants get their claim to that ethnicity through his mother Hagar, who was Egyptian (although at that time that could have been what we modern people would consider like three different ethnicities but whatever). However, if you are going to say (and he did) that Abraham was Arabic because he was born in the region that is now modern-day Iraq (not set in stone but a viable argument), then that makes ALL of his sons and their grandchildren Arabic! If you want to claim that Arabs were 'there first' because Abraham was Arabic, you then have to admit that all of his descendants are HIS DESCENDANTS

[nicks-disks]

I hope you realise this means we have to boycott AO3. Like, seriously.

People are giving up other things, brands and products they like or hold dear, and it's fucking devastating, but we're gonna have to leave AO3 for the time being. If you're willing to boycott other goods and services for the same reason, I don't think there should be exceptions unless it's for essentials.

I know after this I'm gonna stop using AO3 until I hear anything new, and I use it every day so it's gonna be the worst, but I mean innocent kids and civilians are dying and for what? The literal least I can do is read my gay ass fanfiction on a different site.

just got a second official warning for my use of "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" on the OTW volunteer slack

people are also currently asking board to ban saying that the founding of israel was colonialism—equating this to saying racial slurs—and were complaining about my status back when it was "palestine will be free", too

suffice to say, fuck that place, don't give the OTW your money, and don't fucking volunteer there

(the second screenshot is from the warning I got a few days ago)

[the-cryptographer]

done with guns, germs, steel now and, hmm... feel like the criticisms of diamond and his thesis probably overstated and tbh a fair number of them do seem to be motivated by covert racism, but i do also see where some of his critics are coming from.

like... i'm not well read in most of the fields of study he is drawing from, but there were imho a number of... if not outright inaccuracies, definitely dichotomies drawn in the linguistics portion of the book that i felt were misleading or examples I thought were poorly considered. the one i remember most readily is him using english as an example for how languages usually have more phonemes than alphabetic symbols - which I cannot wholly contest without further research, but most linguists could tell you english is quite unusual insofar as languages go for its number of phonemically distinct vowels and is very much not a language you would want to use as a typical example for how languages and their alphabets interact. so i imagine people more into the nitty gritty of some of the other fields he is summarising work from are likewise finding these types of small irritations and disagreement on some of his flashpoints.

and i do feel he often loses sense of scale moving between different parts of his book. like... i think he builds a very holistic and, lbr, socially important argument that the geographical landscape and barriers to animal and plant domestication and the spread of information and technology were the deciding factors in favouring eurasians in social conflict and colonial struggles with other peoples, in contrast to culture, behaviour, and, most importantly, genetic variation between ethnic groups. and on a macroscale that works, but at the same time I feel he does describe what sound to me like bottlenecks on a microscale where it's hard to imagine culture did not play a role. for instance, he fails to sell me on the fact that aboriginal Austrailians failing to adopt bows and arrows through the inhabited archipelago between them and Papua New Guinea could not have been culturally determined, when he invokes an image of a very limited group of communities with specific cultures moving through this one point of contact (and when he also admits women were moving between these communities because they were being abducted and taken as wives by neighbouring communities, but were it seems not considered meaningful vectors for the transfer of cultural information and technology). not that aboriginal australians having bows and arrows could have been sufficient to chase out european invaders with firearms and standing armies but... I guess a more important one is that he admits that cultural changes in how european colonialists approached indiginous peoples changed so much in the space of only a few centuries that it effectively led to different outcomes for Papua New Guinea's sovreignty than that of indiginous peoples in the Americas. so the line between where things are large scale enough to dismiss cultural factors as a random variable in determining current geopolitical landscape, versus where they are small scale enough we cannot dismiss them as such, is poorly construed imho even if I find myself impressed by his work and thesis overall. so I would be interested in reading at least some of what his critics have to say, I think.

will have to wait tho. for now i'm considering listening to either clash of kings or jane eyre next. haven't quite made up my mind.

[i-am-the-egg-to-rule-all-eggs]

Arghhhh there's a person on the bus explaining why humanity is sinful by saying that christ had our sins on his skin (?) and he knew all of humanity was sinful like ouuuuuughhhh make some more sweeping generalizations about the morality of an entire race puhLEASE and refuse to think about why the concept of sin might be useful for controlling uneducated people.

[busket]

I notice sometimes in queer and feminist spaces the idea of "this group is generally given more leniency and privileges in wider society; it's okay for us to be critical or even a little nasty to them because anywhere else they'd be praised". and that's understandable, i think. when you have real issues with men and how men act, it's ok to express that and to mock mens behavior. cis men who are generally praised and celebrated in society should be able to take some mean jokes or criticisms and accept they're not always going to be lauded.

but since queer and feminist spaces are generally more accepting of trans people and the wider society is not, this is also projected on to trans men. "trans men are men" was an affirming statement to our validity, but that was interpreted as "since trans men are men, and men are celebrated by society, I get to be a little nasty to them because the rest of society worships men. they can take it."

but the rest of society doesn't have that same level of trans acceptance. they don't see trans men as men, they see trans men as mentally ill, broken, mutilated women. so it's absolutely aggravating when we turn to queer and feminist spaces for solidarity, we face the same reactive nastiness cis men get and are told "come on, trans men are men. you are celebrated in society. you can take it." and when we look at the rest of society there's no celebration. there's only more nastiness and cruelty. so how can we "take it" when we have no community that accepts us and treats us without mockery? we don't have the shelter of acceptance that cis men have in the status quo, and sometimes we can't find a small umbrella of acceptance in queer communities either.

to be honest, I think a lot of people view trans men as a safe punching bag to vent their frustrations with men. you can mistreat a trans man and he's probably not going to fight you back since he's already so beat down. you can feel like you put a man in his place, you can feel like you're resisting the patriarchy. but all you did was act cruel to a marginalized person. and you know if you treated a cis man like that you might be putting yourself in danger, cos he might not take it lying down and he might not care as much about your wellbeing!

trans men are men, but trans men are not cis men. cis men are lauded and celebrated in society as long as they conform to the gender roles that were placed on them at birth. and this privilege is extremely conditional and not equally spread between men of different sexualities, races, ethnicities, ability, age, etc; trans men and intersex men are thrown to the side completely. I understand needing to vent about men. trans men do it too. but a persistent attitude of resentment and cruelty towards all men, including trans men, is not activism. all you do is push marginalized men out of the only communities they belong

[mashpotatoe]

im a white jew, i was born in israel,

ive lived there all my life and was brought up in an environment that fosters racism driven by nationalism, nationalism driven by racism.

in israel, they teach you jews and muslims (though usually, they just say arabs) have always been enemies, the same way the US deems the entire middle east as a inherent war zone, ridding them of the responsibility for perpetuating war in thst region.

they tell you "were the fair and humane side who strives for peace! its the arabs who never accept the offer!"

i remember the first time i began doubting that sentiment was in fourth grade, when we were having a discussion in class about the character of Saul from the Torah. the teacher was talking about how Saul, the first monarch of the Kingdom of Israel, used to fight the Philistines, and when she added that the Philistines were the natural enemy of the Israelites, she asked the class what group of people is their modern equivalent to which everyone very eagerly replied "Arabs!" and nevermind that there in that same class sat two arab boys, one of whom sat next to me, who i looked at and thought "but he isnt my enemy? hes just a boy in my class."

they teach you to hate arabs. sometimes they say it outright. sometimes they say it more carefully, or make a distinction between good and bad arabs, those who are with us and those who are against us.

in a state based on the idea of (white) jewish supremacy, they teach you jews are naturally superior. they use the conspiratorial narrative of "jews controlling the world" to their favor, giving their own watered down explanation for why antisemitism exists, saying that it must be driven by jealousy.

the zionist movement always used antisemitism to its advantage, either for reinforcing the notion of jewish supremacy or appealing to the real pain and trauma of generations, people who survived the holocaust, connecting them to stolen land where they are "guaranteed" safety ergo granting "justification" for the suffering of others.

its using peoples real pain that makes fear mongering so effective, and when the israeli population grows up being told all of their neighboring countries want to kill them, they quickly get defensive of the "only land where they can feel safe", but the only explanation ever provided for Why these neighboring countries are considered enemies is because theyre arabs.

and when it comes to palestine, it isnt even recognized as a country, nor identity. just a threat. ive talked to many people who are genuinely unaware of the occupation, and they arent willing to believe it either, because the media narrative has successfully shifted the blame on hamas. because "how could it be us? we want peace! its the terrorists who make us look bad! and their children, they grow up to be antisemites*, might as well get rid of them too!" they never stop to think what environment these children must grow up in to develop these "radical" ideas.

* what they mean by antisemite is really just antizionist, but the term anti/zionist isnt practiced in local dialect, being a zionist is treated as a given

any jew who stands against israels oppression is dubbed a self hating jew, but the biggest contributors to antisemitism is the people in charge of an ethnostate, because at any moment they could decide who is not white enough to be jewish, who is too jewish to be white, who stood against the current coalition government and who is an obedient dog.

israelis arent a monolith, but many of them have been won over, convinced its an "us v them" situation, when in reality it could never be the "us" that "loses"

the israeli government was waiting for an event like the massacre on the seventh of october to declare war, to have the so called "right to defend itself", so they could initiate the final steps of an ethnic genocide and displace, if not kill, all remaining palestinians. under the guise of bringing peace.

it isnt too late to call for a permanent ceasefire, to end the occupation.

please contact your representatives, attend protests and rallies if you are able. palestine will be free, and the flowers will rise again.

[star-spangled-man]

not to get political on the main. but if you make a comment that about someone or a certain social group which you obviously have not walked in their shoes or experience it on a daily basis and then say “chill out. It’s just a joke!”

I hate you. You’re a dick and there is a special place for you in hell.

[recreationaldivorce]

ppl using "indigenous" to mean "~place where an ethnic group was originally from~" (as if that's something that can even be objectively determined) instead of as an ongoing political relationship to a colonising power is really giving race science lol

edit: this post is literally not about zionism (though zionists' claim of "indigeneity" is using the particular definition i am calling racist here) but if every mention of colonialism without any reference to israel whatsoever makes you think of zionism perhaps that tells you a little thing or two about zionism! also it is not saying that people are "misusing" the term indigenous, if you used another word to mean the same thing ("ethnic group who originated in this place") it would still be racist pseudo-science. now stop being illiterate under my post and actually read what it says

[nonbinary-vents]

I remember that when everything was happening with Noah Schnapp, so many people were saying that ‘he’s a white coloniser!’ ‘he’s clearly European!’ and ‘how are we supposed to think he’s indigenous to the Middle East when he looks like that?!’ They were screaming so much about he couldn’t possibly be from the swana region due to being pale, despite the fact that… wait for it…

Noah Schnapp is a Moroccan Jew.

The exact the same thing happened with Jerry Seinfeld too, despite him being a Syrian Jew.

But what this tells me is that so many American and European leftists fundamentally do not understand what North Africans and Southwest Asians look like. They do not understand that many Middle Eastern groups are pale, many Middle Eastern groups share features with Europeans— I mean, the Middle East literally borders Europe, did you not expect us to have similarities? This stretches back to the ancient world too. We know that in Yehuda there were gingers, as shown by King David*. Iirc, studies on Rameses the second’s remains show that he most likely had an olive tanned complexion and reddish-blondish hair, similar to a European Mediterranean look— which makes total sense seeing as Egypt is literally a Mediterranean country as well

It’s not just Jews. Persians, Kurds, Assyrians, Copts, Amazigh, Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula**, all of these ethnic groups are incredibly diverse in their features, even without any significant genetic influence from other areas. You cannot just project American and European black and white concepts of race onto the Middle East and act as if that is reality. The world is not split into pale people in the north, brown people in the middle, and black people in the south, and if you genuinely believe that then you really need to look at some pictures of the groups that you’re claiming to be the defender of. Please. I’m so tired of this bullshit lol

*I know that the historical evidence for David is shaky at best and we’re not sure if he was real or not (I personally believe it’s a King Arthur sort of situation where there was a real person here that got turned into legend), what I’m trying to say is that if the Ivrim could have a figure like this who was ginger, then the Ivrim clearly had gingers. Nobody come for me please

**not adding other Arabs because there tends to be genetic mixes with other groups, and my point is about how even without distinct genetic markers from each other, middle easterners groups can turn out with a super intense variation in appearance, especially skin tone

[jellybeanium124]

if you'll allow me to flaunt my psych minor for a second, I'd like to talk about epigenetics. there's studies that show that if you shock a rat when you let them taste a certain flavor, they will immediately become averse to that flavor. not surprising. what is surprising is that the rat's grandchildren, who have never been shocked when given that flavor, will also be averse to it and afraid of it and avoid it. there's also correlational evidence to suggest that the descendants of people who suffered through famine are more likely to put on weight and keep it on easier, even if they have never been through a famine themself.

trauma gets passed down. the kinds of trauma your parents, grandparents, and so-on lived through is still living in you. even if your parents were the most well-off, loving, best parents in the world, their trauma is still in you.

now if you'll allow me to take a slight turn here: there's a wild rabbit inside every jew.

my dad grew up being called "jew-boy." my mother had a coworker throw pennies at her at her job in the 2010s. and that's just two examples. they both grew up being harassed for being jewish. I wasn't. I'm incredibly lucky. the amount of antisemitism I've experienced in real life has been incredibly minimal. I didn't even hear anyone make an antisemitic joke in front of me until college.

and none of us were seriously persecuted. none of my grandparents were seriously persecuted. but even though nobody's broken my windows, nobody's beaten me in the streets, and I haven't been at any of those horrible protests in person, the fear is there. this deep seated, blood-pumping fear of the ancient jewish rabbit in me telling me to run. to run for dear life, to run as far as my legs can get me, as long as my heart keeps pumping and my lungs keep breathing.

we all feel this.

everyone feels this.

I called my mother yesterday. when I brought up this feeling she paused, and the silence said everything. she told me I wasn't alone. she feels it. my dad feels it. my brother feels it. my nana and grampa feel it. every jew you know, online, in real life, hell, even the famous ones, they feel it. the rabbit is inside us all, and the rabbit knows, because its brothers who didn't flee in the past were slaughtered.

the rabbit is leaping around my chest, all of our chests, chanting run run run run run run run.

I don't know if I can explain it to gentiles. I don't know if this makes sense to you. I don't know how to get across how crystal clear and deep and primal this fear is, and how much all of us are feeling the exact same fear, despite our different lives and different histories and the fact we're different people.

part of me wishes it didn't matter. that I didn't feel like I needed to get goyim to understand my specific cultural and ethnic experiences. because I don't feel like I need to deeply understand everyone else's. I am a white passing ashkenazi american jew, and I will never fully understand what it is like to be anything else. that doesn't dissolve my responsibility to educate myself and practice empathy, but it's ok. idk, maybe other people do desperately wish they could get people not in their specific group to deeply understand what it's like to be them. I imagine that feeling is universal. I guess, it's just like, the left is unified that everyone is a person, everyone is equal, everyone is human, except the jews. nobody is left out but the jews. everyone's word is believed, but the jews. and it makes me feel like I have to beg and plead with people to understand what being jewish means, because we're not included with everyone else. we're the enemy. and I want people to see we're not the enemy.

epigenetics.