#in this time and age ]

[narwhalsarefalling]

my (cis) brother is using my old license to buy wine and it has the gender marker F on there. so whenever he gets asked he just says “oh i’m trans”. its literally worked every single time.

[doom-dreaming]

"when i was your age, i was working three jobs to help support my family" and "when i was in college i was sleeping on a mattress on the floor and living off of soup"

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO DO THAT. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO DO THAT. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN TO YOU THAT THIS ISN'T A CHARACTER-BUILDING LESSON, IT'S JUST BAD

[ruushes]

i'm sure there's a canon timeline but dao is a springtime game to me

[jewishvitya]

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

[dirt-goth]

As much as I want to be a wholly joyous about the fact that Henry Kissinger is finally fucking dead, as he deserves... There's a lot of me that can't help being upset with. With the fact that he lived to 100 years old. He got better medical care, better housing, and a better, more stable life for those 100 years than billions on this planet ever going to see and he did it specifically through exploitation, state sanctioned murder, and lies. He lived to 100 years comfortably on a legacy of violence that rarely threatened his personal comfort. I want to be joyous that he's finally dead, because the world IS better with him dead, but the reality is he won a long time ago.

[irabelas]

they stopped a whole ass blight. give them the griffon.

[nicecrumbart]

Keep thinking about that one scene in secret life

[bubblingsteam]

How did you get so cool Kim??

+shitposts

[july-19th-club]

seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything

[solasyoulittleshit]

[marxistgnome]

Memes shared by kids who grew up on starships I think they should have sea scout/land scout beef with kids that grew up on Starbases

[anneapocalypse]

"lol isn't it funny how there are hardly any dragons in the dragon age games! and how dragons are barely relevant to the story lol" Anyway isn't it funny how the true importance of dragons in Dragon Age has been such a slow-burn concept despite the final boss of the first game being a dragon? One of the most important recurring NPCs in the series transforms into a dragon and is associated with dragon imagery. The big repeated world-ravaging catastrophes are led by corrupted dragons. These dragons and said catastrophes are connected to at least three of the world's major religions. The current age was named the "Dragon Age" because of the resurgence of dragons after they were thought to be extinct. A daughter of the aforementioned recurring character is revealed to have been deliberately breeding dragons to bring them back, and tells us that "the blood of dragons is the blood of the world." A major character from ancient times finds the idea of all the old god dragons being killed really upsetting and hasn't told us why. We found out in the last game that dragons have an unusual resistance to that world-ravaging catastrophe. There are only a couple old god dragons left. Dragons aren't always in the foreground of the story, but they're always there, they've always been there, in the background or just offscreen, hiding, sleeping, deep under the surface, waiting.

[perplexingly]

Just a silly based on this post

[artoflevity]

"the mages always betray you!!" NOT morrigan. not with that attitude

[bioshzrd]

this random ass guy who’s entire bit is that he can move like this is the only good wesker fan ever

[joesferatu]

I’m not immune to pretty dragon age elves