#infinite oct

[mikeywayarchive]

Instagram story by mikeyway

[Oct 23, 2024]

[magistralucis]

The Lantern Fair [Zultanekh/Djoseras snippet]

(More of the same fic I was writing in this post. After Szarekh imposes peace on their dynasties, the two princes roam a festival together and talk kindly side-by-side. The inspiration for this scene borrows from a flashback Trazyn has in The Infinite and the Divine, a wish-lantern ceremony to hail good health for the new year. Lantern fairs are a very familiar aesthetic to me (I'm Asian), and I wanted to draw something from that mood, that bright and breathless nowhere. More below cut.)

----------------------

It was like how he'd claimed, over the peace treaty they signed, that the next time they spoke it would be to greet Djoseras as dynast. In truth, that never came about, because they did meet again shortly afterwards. Szarekh's peace had far-reaching consequences. All the way over in Gheden, at a New Year's festival, did the two princes meet once more - where among the lords of a hundred dynasties, he recognized Djoseras right away.

"Hail to you, fair kynazh! Come alone, then, or with Oltyx in his splendid magnificence?"

It's a miracle what being in neutral territory can do, as haughty as the Nihilakh are and were. Helps to keep things objective.

Here is a catalogue of their last mortal meeting. Zultanekh is portly and handsome, Djoseras slim and graceful. Zultanekh wears rich warm fabrics, Djoseras cool and plain. Zultanekh is fond of the finer things in life, and would never say no to a sparkling goblet of sulphur-wine, while Djoseras is perfectly at home with a glass of tea. ("That's different," he'll protest when Zultanekh inquires if he does not drink with his brother, "Oltyx is my warrior's life.") In the company of others Zultanekh is a mirthful giant, a bold and booming and vivacious fire of a man; Djoseras, on the other hand, is a soft-spoken august creature, dark-haired and dark-eyed like a well kept secret.

Those eyes fix into his now. "Come together, and he is splendid indeed." Djoseras's voice is as stoic as ever, before it sharpens a little and his eyes flash with warning. "But I must tell you now: there's no room for two on the throne of Ithakas, no matter your fox-cunning."

That's his red hair again. The Crown Prince laughs. "Zultanekh gave you his word, did he not? He will not reckon with your brother. It is not Zultanekh you ought to worry about, but the admirers from your coreworlds, which he appears to be accumulating at a rapid pace."

He nods towards the square. He hardly needs to single out Oltyx among the crowd; ever since the younger scion came of age, he has been much wooed and courted, evidenced by the many lords surrounding his person. Standing closest to him is an exceptionally beautiful youth, turning heads by virtue of his existence, yet with eyes for Oltyx alone. ("The heir to the House of Aetis," Djoseras will explain later, betraying the slightest distaste in his tone, "on Sedh. His radiance is well known, though 'tis a pity to shine in a fringeworld.") The prince's sidelock has been cut and he is sturdier than ever, standing proud as a war hero ought to stand.

A fine sight, but a time come and gone for the older ones. "Already it does men our age no good, all this posturing and flattering. Be reassured that Zultanekh prefers a calmer soul. After all, is it not peacetime?"

It ought not to work, this level exchange of words. Peace does not become the necrontyr. Even so, Zultanekh is rewarded when the kynazh's expression softens in response. "Then it is not just you, since a dose of calm will do us all good," he muses, before - finally - a little smile breaks through. "I wish you luck in finding it, Crown Prince."

Not the thin blade-edged smiles of war. A genuine one, soft and slightly modest.

"Oh, I shan't struggle. Ithakas is a rose-garden even in winter."

He wants to see how far he can take this. If Djoseras was being his fastidious self he'd have pointed out that's the Nihilakh, with all the bright lights and vast nocturnal gardens surrounding them at present, but he has not. Zultanekh's eyes hood over with daring, and not a small amount of pleasure, as he steps forwards and offers his hand. "Since this is no place for our aged souls, Kynazh Djoseras, and the youth are content where they are - what say you to a walk?"

Djoseras glances down at it. Looks away, silver robes shimmering as he walks straight past him.

Stops, some eight steps ahead, before turning around.

"For once the Crown Prince would best lead." He says, and grins, sending love's long-lost shock though Zultanekh like a catastrophe.

For a moment he stares, heart stirred to breaking point, before collecting himself. Outwardly it's as if nothing happened. But for once, he feels he can do naught but follow.

Let it be known that Gheden that night was a phantasmagoria of wonders. Along every quarter incense burns sweet upon altars, and the whole place is lit up like the sun, though the winter be cold and dark. As the princes walk through the Lantern Fair they are shined upon like dialectics, turquoise like polar night against Zultanekh's red, the gold mellowed by Djoseras's silver. They spend long stretches of time in silence to take it all in, but spend just as long in deep conversations. Lost between a hundred dynasties, for this one night they might talk man to man - and there's a surprising amount of the world they see alike.

They see other things too. Other people. High up on a ziggurat they glimpse their host, the lead archivist of the Nihilakh, playing senet with the famed diviner of the Sautekh. Now that's a pair seething to strike like vipers one moment, yet are as thick as thieves the next, couched in some arcane understanding afforded by mutual experience. The young could stand to learn from them. They trade silent bows with the Overlord of Pyrrhia, who is alone and melancholy as always. Perhaps he will be so until the end of the world. Zultanekh points out on a balcony the nemesor from the East, the one who oversaw their peace treaty, fanning himself slowly as if he's seen it all. Djoseras expresses some misgivings about his commoner vargard, not in that he's present but that he is idle, nestled faithfully by his master's side. "That may well be the nemesor's wish," Zultanekh suggests gently after they've passed by, for it did not escape his notice how content the pair looked. The Crown Prince has a generous heart for enjoyment. "Does heka preclude rest, Djoseras? No, it does not. He has every right to command it as much as he would action, and to do so tonight makes sense."

Djoseras sighs, exasperated. "They are too leisurely out here in the East, it is unorthodox; it shall be their detriment." What follows, however, is no moral judgement on the nemesor nor the vargard, but a surprisingly vulnerable confession. "I have thought... much about this peace of Szarekh's, in the time we have been apart. Doubtless he wishes for us to be at ease. The necrontyr have ever wished for a purpose, and it would not do to carry our many grudges into it. Yet I do worry about where that leaves us, whether in his pursuit of his great purpose he will erase all of ours. Will we remain how we were after this war? Or will we be subsumed - dissolved - vanished into this calling of the Silent King?"

"Might we not change but remain ourselves?" Zultanekh does not give much thought to those things. He's had the privilege of not needing to, it's true - it's not the Ogdobekh who are concerned about their independence, nor how to define themselves - but for most part, it is simply due to his easygoing nature, confident in every course Anathrosis set them upon. "If not for Szarekh's treaties, would Zultanekh have believed that he would one day walk the same road as the prince of Ithakas? To agree on peace was itself a shift in our ways of thought. Who's to say we cannot permit more?"

"But I do not wish to be changed. I should like to remain myself, thank you very much."

It is clear his answer displeases the kynazh, although he does not have the will to pursue it strongly. After all, it will be millions of years before Zultanekh will understand Djoseras envied him this night, and lamented he could not be the same. Djoseras pauses, his cheeks flushed with rare emotion (Zultanekh admires the height and curve of them quietly), before he glances up at Zultanekh and all is calm again. "I apologize, Prince Zultanekh. It's just that we have been shaped by war, my brother and I. Knowing that we go from there to another war, I..."

A lock of hair has fallen across his forehead, disturbing the surface. Zultanekh longs to brush it back for him. "I do not know whether to call that change, meaningfully speaking."

"If it would reassure you, I can say this much: between the old gods and fair Djoseras, Zultanekh knows whom he would rather have as his enemy. Is it not meaningful that the nature of the combatants is different?" Zultanekh smiles then, and bids the kynazh stand closer; there's a group of Nihilakh lords passing by. It's not quite hand-holding, but Djoseras does not refuse him when Zultanekh touches over his shoulder, which feels like victory enough. "Like you, I was forged by war. I am curious to see what follows it. Say that Szarekh has his way, that the Old Ones are defeated - will we choose peace again, or disorder? I do not know, but I am eager to find out."

"Eager?"

"Yes. Perhaps some day, you will see the excitement in it too."

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

ℌ𝔲𝔪𝔞𝔫 𝔄𝔱𝔯𝔬𝔠𝔦𝔱𝔶 - 𝔒𝔟𝔰𝔠𝔢𝔫𝔢 𝔗𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔰 𝔒𝔣 𝔘𝔫𝔠𝔬𝔫𝔱𝔯𝔬𝔩𝔩𝔞𝔟𝔩𝔢 ℑ𝔫𝔰𝔞𝔫𝔦𝔱𝔶

[catdammitjackie]

omg... i forgot i hadn't cleared out my likes fully since 2021.. yeah there's no way i'm finishing tonight.. byeeeee

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[xclowniex]

For people who claim they want to "deradicalize zionists" they sure are doing the opposite.

Like pre oct 7th and in the few weeks post oct 7th, I've always wanted a land for all solution ideally but realistically a two state solution, but I never posted about it. I never did anything to make it known or two push for it.

Since a few weeks post oct 7th, due to all the antisemitism spewed, I've become more vocal. I wouldn't say I've been radicalized with my opinions, as I've always held the same opinion on solutions since I was young, but I have been radicalized in how vocal I am.

I have also become more involved in my jewishness since a few weeks after Oct 7th.

Back in 2022, I emailed my local synagogue about attending but i chickened out as whilst I did used to go, I went to a different synagogue and hadn't been in years so it was technically a new situation and a difference in my routine and I just felt too anxious.

It was only after I learnt that my ex friends were antisemitic, that I told myself "stop being a fucking pussy and go" and I started going.

I have become more vocal and more jewish post oct 7th.

And it has honestly been so beneficial.

I bow surround myself with amazing people. I have new friends who actually want to hang out with me and invite me to stuff. I am more confident, and stand up for myself more.

And if instead of sticking to what I believe, I got pushed down and silenced, my life would have been worse off.

And this isn't me saying "zionism is the best thing ever, it makes your life infinitely better!!!! Everyone should be a zionist", this is me saying that there is no one ideology fits all, I want the same end game, of peace in the region, with self determination for palestinians and jews. Limiting people to have to parrot the same exact wording or else they are these evil monsters, is harmful.

[tiffycatblog]

plotting out the timeline of some of the horrible things that happen to Tim and my god the 2000's fucking had it out for him

Batman #618, Oct '03 - Jason comes back and slits Tim's throat

Robin #129, Oct '04 - Tim's friend Darla gets shot in front of him

Identity Crisis #6, Jan '05 - His dad dies

Batman #634, Jan '05 - Bruce tells him Stephanie's died

Teen Titans #29, Dec '05 - Jason beats him up again in Titans Tower

Infinite Crisis #6/7, May/June '06 - Conner dies

Batman #657, Nov '06 - Damian shows up and tries to kill him

Flash The Fastest Man Alive #13, Aug '07 - Bart dies

Final Crisis #6, Jan '09 - Batman dies

Red Robin #1, Aug '09 - Dick makes Damian Robin

Over the course of 6 years irl, and almost certainly way less time within the comics, Tim just absolutely gets his shit rocked and I'm positive theres stuff that I've left out or forgotten

[cherubmm]

✖🔪 ⇢ ˗ˏˋ ON MY.Knees࿐ྂ

⊱.𖥔 ݁ ˖ ━━━━FEATURING: CROSS.sans

⊱.𖥔 ݁ ˖ ━━━━CONTENT WARNING: Yandere in general. Soft yandere. Obsessive & Possessive behavior. Unhealthy attachment. Implied neglectful behavior. Established relationship. Delusional mindset. Vague hint of worshipping behavior. Subtly implied abandoment issue. Violence mention. Implied submissive behavior. ANGST. Stalking. OOC. Not proof-read (I got lazy near the end if you can tell)

⊱.𖥔 ݁ ˖ ━━━━PROMPT BY : oozgin

𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞: why am I keep messing up!?!!?😭😭😭😭 I'm merely editing this on my scheduled post but then it keeps publishing????? Huh?????? Why does the Tumblr keep doing this to me😭😭😭 this is supposed to be for Oct.13!!! But *sigh* whatever, its already here. Enjoy the early treat, again >:(( Hope this won't happen' to another one fic for 14.... Tumblr fuck you :(((

It wasn’t often for Cross to come home.

Well, at least, not anymore. He’d leave before the sun rose, returning long after it set. You used to wait for him, staying up into the late hours of the night, but now? You barely bothered. He’d stumble through the door, mumbling something vague before disappearing into the bedroom or onto the couch without so much as a glance your way.

You understood—you really did. Cross was busy, whatever his job was, it demanded a lot from him. He hadn’t exactly shared the details, and you’d stopped asking after the first dozen times he dodged the question. But no matter how much you tried to rationalize it, it was starting to gnaw at you.

At first, it was just a pang of sadness. Then it became annoyance, maybe even anger. You weren’t one of those cliché lovers who needed constant attention—far from it, actually. You valued your independence, enjoyed your solitude. But this was beginning to feel less like space and more of a...neglect.

He was your lover, wasn’t he? You were supposed to be partners, but lately, it felt like you were the only one holding onto that thread. Every time he came home, he avoided you. No more soft conversations over breakfast, no stolen moments in the afternoon. Just excuses, avoidance, and silence.

The worst part was, you’d started to get used to it. Slowly, your love for him had dimmed, like a flame starved of oxygen. You found yourself becoming comfortable in your own company again, just as you had before Cross ever came into your life. It wasn’t a sudden fall out of love—it was gradual, quiet and subtle. You no longer saw him as your lover, just someone who passed through your life occasionally—acquaintance.

Eventually, you couldn’t do it anymore. The words weighed heavy on your tongue as you prepared yourself, sitting at the edge of the bed. Cross had just come home, dragging his feet, knives still strapped to his side. You waited until he was settled, cleaning his weapons at the table.

“Im breaking up with you.”

...

Cross always thought he was the luckiest skeleton in the entire multiverse.

Of all the infinite versions of himself—sometime's even far, far, better than him—of all the different timelines and universes, he was the one who had found you. He was the one who had you by his side, as beautiful and perfect as you were.

Not even the original version of him—the one from the timeline he could never go back to—had what he did. and that made him feel so special.

Even now, as he wiped the blood from his knives, his mind was filled with thoughts of you. He knew he wasn’t home nearly as much as he should be. Every time he left, there was a pang of guilt that dug deep into his bones. He hated leaving you behind, but what choice does he have? His boss wouldn’t hesitate to come after you if he comes to the conclusion that cross was 'slacking off'' of his work due to his lover. Hell, it was merely a stroke of luck that nightmare decided to not only keep you alive and well, but also provide protection —unbeknownst to you— even knowing his distaste for 'distraction' that attaches to those on his side.

This, of course, was a constant weight on his mind — a sense of indebted. Forcing him to swore his loyalty and obedience to the latter even againts his will. But at least, while he was out there doing Nightmare’s dirty work, you were safe, and that's all that ever matters.

While he couldn’t spend time with you like he wanted to, he could make sure nothing— absolutely nothing—harmed you. The Star Sanses? No threat. Any danger from outside your universe? He handled it.

And on the rare nights he did return? When you were already asleep? Those were slowly becoming his favorite moments. Cross would sit at the edge of the bed or crouch beside you, watching you sleep peacefully. He’d run his fingers through your hair, brushing your cheek, whispering softly to your unconscious form. Confessions of love, of guilt. He’d wish for a world where the two of you could just live a domestic, quiet life—where he didn’t have to kill for survival or settle in the constant state of paranoia— again.

He didn't want the history to repeat itself ever again now that you're here. God, he couldn't even imagine what will happen to him if you're no longer on his side to keep him sane.

But alas, he couldn’t give you that, yet. So, he settled on making you safe instead, hoping you’d understand one day.

...

"Im breaking up with you."

The sound of sharpening knives stopped abruptly. Cross froze, his back still turned to you, as if your words had doused him in cold water. Slowly—almost mechanically—he turned his skull in your direction, his pinprick eye shrinking to a tiny dot before flickering in and out like a dying lightbulb. There was something unsettling about the way he stared at you. For a brief second, his usual stoic expression faltered, a flash of... something. Confusion? Betrayal? Fear? But then, he laughed nervously, trying to play it off as a joke.

"Hahaha... t-that’s a good one, darling. You almost caught me,” he stammered, his grin unnaturally wider than the usual as he tried to shake off the tension.

"I’m not joking, Sans,” you replied, your voice steady despite the unease creeping into your gut.

Y-yeah, sure, whatever you say.” He turned back to his knives, trying to focus on his task, but his hands phalanges trembled.

“Sans, listen to me. I wasn’t—”

CRRK!!

The dagger in his hands broke in half as Cross shot to his feet, staring at the shattered blade as if it had betrayed him. His breathing grew uneven as he slowly turned toward you again, his eye flickering with a mix of emotions you couldn’t quite place.

“Why?” His voice cracked, barely above a whisper as he took a hesitant step forward. You took a step back instinctively. "Why are you saying this...?"

You tried to explain, though the words didn’t come easily. You told him how you felt—how distant things had become, how lonely you were. How the relationship was falling apart and you both are better off no longer being in each other.

But every time you spoke, Cross took another step forward, his hand reaching out as if to grab onto you, and you found yourself taking another step back.

In a blink, he was in front of you, faster than you could process. Then, there was a small 'ping' sound before you felt yourself flung backward, slamming into the nearest wall that knocked the breath from your lungs. His hands gripped your shoulders, hard enough to hurt, as his face hovered inches from yours.

"Oww-! Sans what the fuck—!?"

His bony hands gripped your shoulders tightly, an anchor that pinned you in place. “Just LISTEN to me first darling. You have to understand—” Tears began to stream from his eye sockets, glistening like pearls against his skeletal face. “I DON'T have a choice” he cried, his voice cracking with desperation. “It’s all for you! To make you safe! Please, you NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT!!”

You tried to pull away, but his hold only tightened.

His knees buckled, and you stumbled as he dragged you down with him, his hands still clinging to you like a lifeline.“No, no, please— reconsider!! I-i’ll try to change, I’ll do whatever you want—I’ll beg, I’ll be on my knees forever, just—please?”

Ⓒ𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐦 ──── 10/11/24 Navigation | Masterlist

[mariacallous]

(JTA) — Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli peace activist who had been presumed kidnapped by Hamas, was declared dead after her remains were found at her home.

Her death was confirmed to JTA by multiple activists who said they were in touch with Silver’s family. Shifra Bronznick, a prominent Jewish social justice activist and lifelong friend of Silver’s, learned from Silver’s son that her remains were identified via her DNA. 

“Vivian was always persistent in the pursuit of peace and justice,” Bronznick told JTA on Monday evening. “She was a lifelong feminist, a committed activist, a fearless leader, an exceptional friend and a loving mother, wife and grandmother.”

Until Monday, Silver, 74, was assumed to be among the more than 200 people held captive by Hamas. She is now among the approximately 1,200 people murdered by the terror group in its Oct. 7 attack. Hamas terrorists killed more than 100 people at Silver’s home community, Kibbutz Be’eri, in one of the day’s worst massacres. 

She is one of several peace activists to have been killed or captured by Hamas on Oct. 7. Hayim Katsman, 32, who worked with Palestinians in the southern West Bank, was killed in his home in another community on the Gaza border. Yocheved Lifschitz, who helped ferry Palestinians from Gaza to medical care in Israel, was taken captive by Hamas and released in late October; her husband Oded, also involved in peace work, remains missing.

“A woman of infinite, deep, ongoing compassion, humanity and dedication to Arab-Jewish partnership and peace. Yes. Peace,” Anat Saragusti, an Israeli writer and feminist activist, wrote on social media in a post announcing Silver’s death. John Lyndon, the executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, wrote that “she wanted to be free & at peace. Rest in power, Vivian.”

Silver’s sons, like the family members of many of those presumed hostage, lobbied extensively for her release, traveling the country and speaking to journalists around the world to call attention to her story. One son, Yonatan Zeigen, stood out for his calls for a ceasefire, an unusual position in Israel. He said he had learned from his mother to seek peace above all else.

“I would tell her, ‘Israel is dead. It’s hopeless,’ and she would say, ‘Peace could come tomorrow,’” Yonatan, a social worker in Tel Aviv told the Washington Post in a story published last week.

Chen Zeigen, her other son, is a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of Connecticut. She is also survived by four grandchildren.

On the day of the massacre, according to the Washington Post story, Silver took a call with a radio station where she pushed back against the idea that the Palestinians were “insane.” In messages with Yonatan, she expressed fear, frustration and love. “I’m with you,” he wrote to her. Her last message back to him was, “I feel you.”

Born in Winnipeg, Canada, she was the longtime director of  the Arab Jewish Center For Empowerment, Equality, and Cooperation, which organized projects joining communities in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In 2014, after the last major war between Israel and Hamas, she helped found Women Wage Peace, which promotes peace-building actions among women from all communities and across the political spectrum.

Speaking to Forbes in 2021 for a series on women who assist the vulnerable, Silver said she remembered feeling relief after the government built bomb shelters in Kibbutz Be’eri, which had been subject to rocket fire from Gaza for more than a decade.

“In 2009, the [Israeli] government only built shelters for communities that were four kilometers from the border. The community I live in is four and a half kilometers from the border, so we didn’t have shelters then,” Silver told Forbes. “Now we do, so psychologically we feel better, and we feel safer, and in fact, we are safer, we’re a lot safer than the people in Gaza.”

At a 2018 Women Wage Peace event on the Gaza border in 2018, she said that the Israeli government needed to change its approach in order to bring peace to the area. “Show the required courage that will bring changes of policy that will bring us quiet and security,” she said then, addressing the government. “Returning to the routine is not an option.”

Appealing to women across the border, she said, “Terror does not make anything better for anyone, you too deserve quiet and peace.”

Bronznick first met Silver in the early 1970s when both were involved in organizing a national conference of Jewish women. They remained friends and, for a period of six years, took an annual trip together — the last one was to Santa Fe, New Mexico. When Silver would stay at Bronznick’s home, she would prepare an Israeli breakfast, Bronznick recalled. 

“She would be passionately advocating for peace right now,” Bronznick said, referring to Israel’s war against Hamas, launched following the Oct. 7 attack. “She never gave up on bridge-building. She never gave up on making change. She never gave up on people… She always focused on people, children, what motivated them, what meant something to them.”

Before Oct. 7, Silver was due for another stay at Bronznick’s home in New York City in early December. On top of each of the days in Bronznick’s calendar, she had written “Viv.”

[cardassianexpats]

On Good Omens, contentment and happiness

Okay, everybody, please bear with me, this might be long.

This is about something that I've noticed in the past, but that was really painfully obvious following the release/leaks of information around Good Omens season 3 over the last few days.

There seem to be two categories of people. The ones that appreciate what they have and the ones that always demand more. Let's talk about the latter category first:

I am using the word demand here because very often I am more reminded of a toddler throwing a tantrum about not being allowed more candy than a grown person that has any experience about what the world is like. I don't want to over-simplify, but for the sake of brevity, let's call this group "the pessimists".

Let's take a small detour and state the facts (as of Oct 24th):

Good Omens season 3 had been announced as 6 episodes, roughly 45min each.

(Credible) Sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman (NG) -- the head writer and producer -- had been made public.

Good Omens season 3 production had been "paused".

Plenty of rumors about a cancellation, lots of radio silence and finally a few days ago strategic leaks from people actually involved in the production that there might be a chance.

Amazon confirmed (today) that season 3 is going forward, without NG on the production team. The format is now one 90min episode/film/feature.

Now, people's reactions to this reveal have been mixed, very understandable, I also have very mixed feelings about this. So far so normal. From my perspective, the difference (and this is the part that is applicable to life in general, not just Good Omens S3) is which side of the "mixed" feelings wins out.

Reactions I've observed in the "pessimist" group: - Outrage that a company associated with NG is in any way legally involved. - "It is now all ruined". - "One episode can never be enough, we need MORE". - "F*ck this". - "This will be horrible". - "I don't want a film". - People outright demanding to get 6 episodes. - "I am literally crying here, my life sucks so bad".

Now, for contrast and for the sake of clarity, I'll call the other group "optimists": - "omg, I am so glad we will get closure". - "90 minutes is basically 2 full episodes". - "I trust Michael and David to make it work". - "I am so grateful to all the people behind the scenes that fought so hard to make this happen". - "The people working on the production are as dedicated fans as we are, they will make it work". - "Other awesome pieces of media are even less than 90 minutes".

To sum up my reaction to these and quote someone I reblogged earlier today (@paperpoetryandpetrichor), what did you think would happen?!

Feelings of disappointment are 100% to be expected, every fan wants as much high quality content as possible. All feelings are valid, but some are (imo) clearly healthier and more productive than others.

I am also sad that we'll "only" get the equivalent of two episodes instead of six. But you know what would have been way sad-er? Zero episodes. Or if they had kept NG involved (Amazon could have simply tried to ignore all this, as TV producers have in the past). There is an infinite plethora of other outcomes that would have been so much worse.

I for one choose to see the positive sides. We will get closure. NG not on production team. Both Michael and David on board (which, as we've also learned today was not a given, everybody had been released from their contracts!). And speaking of Michael and David, they know how much we all love this show -- and they do as well --, they know how much we love Aziraphale and Crowley. I trust that they will fight tooth and nails to make this the absolute best version it can be.

So yeah, what about the overall lesson I draw from this and from the two groups?

I believe that people who are able to focus their energy on the positive aspects of anything really live much happier lives. The same set of facts spark two totally opposite directions of thoughts. We all start out with "oh. I don't know how I feel about this new piece of information?" but where we go from there is totally up to us. For me, the greatest driver of happiness is contentment. Be happy with what you have. You can always want more, because it is important to have aspirations and goals and places/versions of yourself you want to be. But focussing only on what you do not have will just make you unhappy, on top of the not-having.

Breathe. Most everything has a bright side to it, if you focus on that you'll be way better off. The world is not fair and likely never will be, but letting that stop you from enjoying the things in it that are good and bright and joyful only makes you feel worse. Fight to make the world fairer and a better place for everybody. But stop every now and then to smell a flower (or re-watch your favourite series) on the way to remind yourself what you are fighting so hard for.

"To the world."

I want to round this out with a quote from the Good Omens novel:

Because, underneath it all, Crowley was an optimist.

If you want your life to be a South Downs cottage, be like Crowley.

[rotzaprachim]

essential reading.

Opinion - There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. - by Peter Beinart

 And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

"In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”

Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.

There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.

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Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.

In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.

The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.

As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.

Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never step foot in it.

Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.

Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”

But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.

It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.

And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which represents more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.

The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.

Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.

The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.

That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.

The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.

Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”

Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.

The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.

After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”

As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.

Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”

Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.

Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.

Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.

From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.

[starlightomatic]

Why say "assigns blame to jews not Netanyahu's government"? why not highlight that who is to blame is not merely Netanyahu and his immediate lackeys but rather the existence of the israeli state itself as an extension of american and european imperialist interests in the region. Israel is brutality and cruelty and has been from day one and when we position it as merely the responsibility of one political clique we obscure the situation and do a dissersive to those who suffer under it.

The short answer is just don't believe in inevitability like this.

You can argue that once the Nakba happened, an ideology of domination and displacement was baked into Israel. And, maybe.

But, I don't think that all paths led here. Had Rabin not been assassinated, we might have had a two state solution, which while I understand is not what Palestinians actually want would have meant no brutal occupation of the West Bank. I'm not sure what it would have meant for Gaza, but I can't imagine that Hamas would have the hold it does.

And without Netanyahu's government having funded and supported Hamas they would not be what they are. Without Hamas Oct 7 would not have happened, and thus this response would not have happened. In a universe where Yahya Sinwar did not exist, or did not get caught and put in Israeli prison, or got into Israeli prison but was still there because Gilad Shalit was not captured and exchanged, Oct 7 would not have happened (I am not against the Shalit swap, it's just likely true that this wouldn't have happened if not for Sinwar).

Basically there are infinitely many paths, and a lot of decisions made by a lot of people, and reasons we're here now. But it wasn't inevitable.

But I realize I'm not responding to what you're actually saying because I fundamentally don't agree. I don't know that there's an "intrinsic" nature to Israel, or to anything, such that you're describing.

[batty-pham]

Daily BatPham Fic Rec

Oct 27

TWINcognito mode

By nerdpoe

Tags: twin shinanigans, Danny is a clone but he and Tim have decided to proceed as twins, Tim saw the situation presented to him and thought, how can I use this to fuck everyone up, and Danny replied, well Tim have you ever seen the parent trap?, Adopted Sibling Relationship, Twin AU, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Tim Drake is a Menace, Damian Wayne is a Little Shit, Jason Todd Has a Heart, Dick Grayson Tries to Be a Good Older Sibling, Cassandra Cain Being a Little Shit, Duke Thomas is So Done, Barbara Gordon Appreciation, Danny Fenton is a Professional Little Brother, I nerfed Danny

Wordcount:23,369

Summary: Danny, High King of the Infinite Realms, has been tricked into inhabiting the brainwashed and soulless clone of Tim Drake-Wayne. Tim Drake-Wayne, CEO of Wayne Industries and Red Robin, found a clone of himself that fought against Ra's brainwashing enough to request help. So Tim and Danny, upon both being cognizant enough to be on the same wavelength, looked at each other and decided hey; it's a free twin. Now how do we make that everyone elses problem?

Complete: yes

Amazing situational humor, amazing fic if you love how the batfam are great detectives but miss what is right underneath their noses.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Human Atrocity  –Horrible Disfiguration

[charlidos]

I've always wondered if Viggo and Orlando ever did any interview together. Turns out they at least did one! Found in the Russian edition of Bravo from January 2004, an interview I think was conducted sometime around Oct-Nov 2003. Viggo, Orlando and Elijah were interviewed together.

New York, Regency Hotel on the prestigious Park Avenue. Elijah Wood appears first. We have to wait for the cute Orlando Bloom and the cool Viggo Mortensen. [The reporter chats with Elijah while waiting.] At this moment the door opens quietly and Viggo and Orlando enter. Viggo: Sorry! Orlando: Yes, please forgive us! We were chatting over lunch… BRAVO. No worries! We were just talking about the Internet! Orlando: Oh God! I can’t say anything here, I’ve never had a computer. BRAVO: How do you get fan mail then? O: What I love most is regular, handwritten letters. V: Me too. Most of all I like handwritten letters. Already from the handwriting one can learn something about the character of the sender. BRAVO: Elijah, you are very close to Sam in the film… Elijah: What??? Okay, now I can pull the skeleton out of the closet: we are gay (laughs). The relationship between Frodo and Sam is very important to the film because without Sam's help, Frodo would never have made it to Mount Doom. V: And without Aragorn, Frodo would have died in the first part! (Laughs.) O: And without Legolas it wouldn't be entertaining at all. Isn't it great how I killed a huge elephant in the third part, or what? BRAVO: Orlando, were you really allowed to keep Legolas' bow? O: Peter Jackson, the director, gave each of us a gift from the set. I received my quiver and a bow, but Legolas's real bow broke on the penultimate day of shooting so I have a completely different one! V: As befits a true King of Gondor, I have kept Aragorn's crown for myself. E: But what could be cooler than the “ring of all power” that I received?

[Translated with the help of google, so not very exact...]

Love, LOVE that V&O apparently were out eating lunch together, eating, chatting, losing track of time. Enjoying spending time together too much, having infinite things to talk about, staring deep into each other's eyes...

Also love that they have all these things in common. For one, this whole "hating the internet" and "refusing to have a phone" they both professed for many years. Instead they want to write very long letters (to each other). Probably written in the most beautiful style, and, for Viggo, including lots of art. While Orlando's are long, written quickly but full of sincere emotions and little hearts doodled everywhere.

These two have a lot more in common than you might think at first glance.

[rippleberries]

I'm 99% sure this is the role that got Jeffrey Combs cast as Herbert West.

He frequently tells the story that a casting director approached him for the role after seeing him perform a similar character in a play. Based on the date of this article and the description and appearance of Jeffrey's character, this must be it.

LA Weekly [Los Angeles, CA], 13, September 1984, p. 114

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PICK OF THE WEEK

PVT. WARS

James McClure's play about three men in a veterans' hospital receives a near- flawless production under John C. Fletcher's impeccable direction. Though the play's three characters are survivors of Vietnam, this story has nothing to say about that war, or even about the nature of man and his military, other than the vague sanctioning of an individual's right to fight "private wars" of conscience. Rather, the emphasis is upon one of theater's most enduring situations, the heterosexual male triangle. Woodruff Gately is a hick grunt who now spends his time putting together a radio while two other patients vie for his attention and loyalty: Silvio, an Italian-American emasculated by shrapnel, and Natwick, a prissy rich kid hated by everyone but the affable Gately. Silvio's main form of recreation is flashing his nonexistent genitals to the nurses; Natwick's grasping for poetry leads him to a pathetic evening of failed suicide attempts. Both men make Gately's task infinitely more difficult by secretly stealing pieces from his radio, partly to assert their "superiority" over him, partly to insure his stay at the hospital.

Originally written as a one-act, McClure has expanded - and somewhat overextended - his play to two acts, using a lot of blackouts that fail to tighten the dramatic thread as they progress. It's a simple script with a pat metaphor (the radio as Gately's attempt to construct order in a fragmented world), but with enough. sincerity and concern for its characters to overcome its deficiencies. Gregory Grove is touching without being sappy as Gately, Tony Campisi wonderfully vulnerable as the blustering Silvio, and Jeffery Combs is perfectly brittle as the unpopular prig Natwick. Together the three reveal moments that are both refreshingly sad and funny in their depiction of men whose overriding need is to be heard by other men. Zephyr Theater, 7456 Melrose Ave., W. Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m.; thru Oct. 7. Call 851-3771. -Steven Mikulan

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