#highly recommend reading the article

[asthevermincrawls]

just in case you needed further confirmation that teslas are an environmentally destructive sham, chinese companies partnered with tesla are expanding nickle mines and coal powered factories in indonesia to meet the increased demand for electric vehicles, leading to deforestization, pollution, and higher rates of respiratory illness in the local indigenous peoples

[zabadi]

"An intense internal dialogue unfolds where Palestinians are torn between the radical potentiality of resistance and their visceral dread of the relentless Israeli military juggernaut. Consider the paradox between the desire for liberation and the gnawing fear that any disturbance of everyday life--even one caused by resistance--could unravel the fragile semblance of normalcy. This is the true site of ideological struggle, not only in the public sphere but at the level of the individual, where the sublime possibility of freedom confronts the traumatic reality of potential annihilation by a superior military machine."

-Abduljawad Omar, The Question of Hamas and the Left

[red-moon-at-night]

Etruscan mirrors are so bloody interesting like... What do you mean Hermes carried the egg with Helen in it from the underworld to Castor/Pollux/Leda/Tyndareus/all of them??

What do you mean sometimes they're pointing down to the ground and sometimes the ground is actually depicted as the ocean??? You're saying that the egg was LAID in the underworld and not up here???? The implication being yet again that Nemesis is the mother in these scenarios.

Carpino, Alexandra (1996) "The Delivery of Helen's Egg: An Examination of an Etruscan Relief Mirror," Etruscan Studies: Vol. 3 , Article 2.

Literally knowing of death before her life has begun.

[thetzar]

Via Instagram & Men's Health AU

[thatsrightice]

Is there perhaps a page 3 of the callsigns? 178?

[kindahoping4forever]

Galantis and Michael spoke with Rolling Stone about the origins of Lighter and the collaborative process

[jacksprostate]

I consider Tyler's permanency in the narrator's psyche to be equivalent to that one bobbit worm

[petit-papillion]

Just trying to imagine Fernando giving rookie Charles advice on which hotel to stay at in Abu Dhabi...

Maybe instead of Drive to Survive we need Driver Tips to Survive.

Source: Top Gear

[winnipegwinterpeg]

“There’s a great, beautiful quirkiness to Winnipeg that if you’re from here, you get it,” Mr. Gillingham said. “Whether you’re talking about burgers at Mr. Mikes or being proud to be from the North End, or Ukrainian heritage, or the fact that we don’t have freeways, but we have some streets that change names six times from one end to the other.”

They do; it’s bonkers. And if I hadn’t already fallen head over heels for Winnipeg, a ludicrous intersection known by locals as Confusion Corner would have done it.

Mr. Gillingham has talked to corporate recruiters who tell him they have a hard time getting people to come to Winnipeg, but once they’re in, you can’t get them to leave. It’s a ridiculous cliché to say a city’s greatest asset is its people, he said – but then he couldn’t help himself, raving about how resilient, witty, fun, sarcastic, talented, educated and skilled Winnipeggers are.

But it was that first quality – resilience – that he came back to again and again. Winnipeg has faced big obstacles over and over in its history and scaled them together, whether it was floods or losing the Jets, he said, and through all of the city’s problems, it never abandons hope.

[laughableillusions]

Rewatching the X-men and Wolverine movies has just made me think about the “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” article again.

[masayomi]

kinda wild to me how many people on radblr are zionists… i was reading this article earlier today about antisemitism in the ALAA (a labor union for lawyers) and when i got to this part:

[ID:

Even though the pro-Palestine ALAA members successfully passed their cease-fire resolution, anti-Israel comments continue to appear in the workplace gaggle. On January 31, the following message stated: “All settler colonial projects should stop and be dissolved—Israel, the US, and all others alike—and restorative justice must start.”

Edda Ness, a Jewish attorney and ALAA member, called the emails “sick.” She said the time poured into debating the war, planning protests, and fighting over a cease-fire resolution is taking away from members’ valuable work.

“It’s so disturbing because all of that energy could have been spent on the clients we work with,” Ness said. “The oxygen is instead going toward their hate.” 

Goldstein, the lawyer in the Juvenile Rights Practice, agreed.

End ID.]

and i was like what kinda mental gymnastics... how is saying colonialism is bad "sick" and antisemitic? like sure some of the other example emails in the article are needlessly inflammatory for a work group chat but... none of them seemed hateful towards jewish people, just critical of israel. i thought maybe i was misunderstanding something about the definition of antisemitism so i went on to read this article which talks about how the legal definition of antisemitism in the US has changed over time to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”, which has led pro-israel groups to weaponize this definition into silencing pro-palestinians. it rly reminded me of the tactics TRAs use to silence women by changing the definition of a woman to anyone who identifies as one, taking away the language necessary for us to discuss our sex based oppression, while effectively denying us our free speech by making many women afraid to speak up since TRAs will call anyone who disagrees w them a TERF or a transphobe. idk it's disappointing to me to see some other radfems do the same by labeling any criticism of israel or even simple solidarity with palestinians "antisemitic"

[urmomsstuntdouble]

not to be political but I've seen a lot of people saying that those who call Israel an apartheid don't know what they're talking about and um. As someone who has studied South African apartheid as well as grown up in a Jewish community. This claim has more merit than you think

[arysthaeniru]

"This language of work was by no means the private language of a single-minded maniac who had lived too long under the volcano. To the contrary, Hill’s ideas were on the leading edge of the terrain where biological science and social science intersected. In particular, the concept of the calorie, as a measure of both energy consumed and work done, emerged in connection with the steam-engine-based economics of work in mid-nineteenth century Europe. By the turn of the twentieth century, the calorie had developed into a unit of equivalency between what people ate and how much work they could generate, what they needed to consume and what they were capable of producing—effectively recasting the body as a measurable machine.Whether or not Hill had a formal grasp of the field of expert knowledge cohering around the calorie and its implications for labor management and social policy, he did understand it implicitly, for he paid his employees in food. He used the way of seeing the relation of food and work that gained expression in the science of the calorie in his campaign to reduce the people who worked on his plantations to mechanisms of value production—to make them his."

Augustine Sedgewick - Against Flows

(emphasis mine)

[not-so-superheroine]

deseret book is more persistent than duolingo.

i ordered 2 books for a church research project on Black saints in the early Church and also in the Reorganization, on which the one book had a small section us and all had info from the our shared early church history, and it was an ebook too!

and i get physical mail from them once a month. i have no idea how to cancel.

herald house, the community of christ publishing house, contacts me much less, and i buy books from them all the time.

and oh their church book app reminds me to read my scriptures and the words of their prophets regularly if it's not in sleep mode.

i have to admire the effort behind it, ngl.

[rollercoasterwords]

i'm currently rereading thtf rn, and in one of the author's notes at the end of the chapter you said that you think voldemort wasn't a good villain. i agree with you on that 100%, and i'd really like to hear all your thoughts on why you think that way.

fun question!!! i am happy 2 discuss w the caveat of course that this is all my subjective opinion etc etc

i feel like the reasons i don't think voldemort is a "good" villain (in terms of storytelling) can sort of be broken into 2 main things

1: voldemort as a character

so by this i mean, without looking at the broader story or wizarding society + how voldemort's character functions like...narratively within the story, just looking at the character itself. characterwise i think voldemort is just....pretty flat.

like, from the way dumbledore describes voldemort as a child, we're basically supposed to view him as a character who has always been fundamentally evil, like he was "born bad." sure, there's some gesturing towards society with the tragic backstory w his parents, growing up in an orphanage, hating his dad, etc. but none of that is fully fleshed out in a way that indicates voldemort might have been good if his circumstances had been different; instead, it's mostly just used to explain why he hates muggles so much. but he's portrayed as sadistic and manipulative from the time he's a child, a kid who has always wanted power and just continues to seek power his entire life. this is just....a boring character, in my opinion. tautological evil doesn't really give us anything to think about, anything to question, anything to pull from the story and relate to real life--because in real life, people aren't just born evil, y'know?

and obviously people can say "oh well it's a kids' story of course it's gonna be simple and black + white when it comes to good + evil!" but honestly i just don't buy that argument. i've encountered plenty of kids' media that is not so boring and black + white with its portrayals of good vs evil (animorphs comes immediately to mind). so! to me it still just feels like a flat + boring character.

2: voldemort as a figural evil

a lot of what i have to say here can be summed up in this quote from harry potter and the leaky genre:

"And herein lies the true fantasy in Harry Potter: that systemic dysfunction can be destroyed because it has been artificially projected onto, and reduced to, one locus: the person of Voldemort."

rao talks about this in his essay very succintly, but basically--in the harry potter universe + the overarching narrative of the story, voldemort functions as a figural symbol onto which all of the systemic issues of wizarding society can be projected + neatly defeated in one fell swoop. throughout the series, we see an abundance of systemic flaws + oppression in the wizarding world, all of which are deeply ingrained and none of which can be boiled down to one single person's individual intent. and yet, voldemort becomes the symbol for Everything That's Wrong, and we are led to believe that if harry potter can just triumph over Evil, then everything will be fixed.

essentially, voldemort becomes a political sleight of hand. our eyes are drawn away from the systemic issues that need to be uprooted and overhauled, and we're so busy watching harry potter embark on his quest to defeat The Bad Guy that by the time the dust settles we're supposed to be satisfied with our nice little happy ending, rather than questioning why harry potter would become a wizard cop working for the ministry of magic when that institution was shown to be fundamentally flawed throughout the course of the series.

this representation of evil is very much rooted in jkr's conservative politics + worldview, and it's something that you'll find throughout a lot of political rhetoric--the idea that there is a specific outside figure or group who is the Source of Evil and a Threat to Good (read: our pre-existing institutions + society), and so we need to focus all our energy on destroying The Bad Guy rather than taking a look at our own flawed institutions and overturning existing oppressive structures. all in all, it's a type of evil/villainy that i do not find compelling in storytelling and that i think is actively bad because of the political narrative it perpetuates. and so that's what i'm getting at when i say that i don't think voldemort is a "good" villain!

[the--sound--of--rain]

"Israel claims Jews as its national asset, and it weaponises us, as Jews – both as bodies in the demographic battle vis-a-vis non-Jews and particularly Palestinians, and ideologically as born representatives of the Jewish state (...)"

Farjoun told Al Jazeera that the Hamas attack on Israel brought her "great sorrow ... causing suffering no one should endure. But she added: "I believe the current tragic events are a direct result of years of abuse, repression, violence and deprivation implemented by the State of Israel."

"When I first started identifying myself as Jewish and supporting Palestinian rights on X [formerly Twitter], the issue in the UK was closely bound up with Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party," said British citizen Tom London, referring to the strident pro-Palestinian convictions of former United Kingdom opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn.

He added to Al Jazeera: "I got plenty of abuse then on X, including describing me as an anti-Semite and saying I was lying about being Jewish. Someone once went through every tweet I had ever sent – but found nothing to help their vile and ridiculous claim that I was an anti-Semite."