#know the real history

[news4dzhozhar]

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

The stewards of the old world are always keen to give you a glimpse of their might... According to legend, the ancients built specialized chambers to seal away false prophets.

The Arcane is waking up.

[idontmindifuforgetme]

friend wanted to see my tumblr, and when i told him i can’t show it to him bc it’s basically my personal diary he went “oh so I can’t see it but a bunch of strangers on tumblr can??” he literally does not get me. no one will get me like the people in my phone get me

[ljf613]

Alright, Chanukah starts tonight, which means it's time for me to finally make a post about different kinds of menorahs.

This right here? This is the Temple Menorah:

There's some debate over whether the branches were straight or curved, but here's a few things we do know:

It had seven branches of equal length.

It was made of one solid piece of gold

It was at least five feet tall.

It used pure olive oil.

The Temple Menorah is what people mean when they talk about The Menorah. It's what you'll see on historical or commemorative artifacts such as the Arch of Titus in Rome or Israeli currency:

During the time when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the High Priest lit all seven flames on this Menorah every day (using the aforementioned pure olive oil):

No one lights this on Chanukah.

This is a Chanukah menorah:

There are countless variations, but here are the important things:

It has eight branches of equal length, plus a ninth "helper" branch, known as the shamash, which is set apart from the rest of the branches and used to light the others.

It can be made of any material.

It is usually used with wax candles or oil, but, if necessary, one can use anything that burns.

In Hebrew, this kind of menorah is called a chanukiah.

Some Chanukah menorahs, like the one shown above, have the shamash in the middle. Others have it on the side:

Regardless, this kind of menorah is the one that has been lit by Jews on Chanukah for thousands of years. It's the menorah you'll seen in photographs of Jewish households, including this famous picture taken in Germany in 1931:

(The message written on the back of the photo reads: "Death to Judah"/ So the flag says/ "Judah will live forever"/ So the light answers)

On Chanukah, whoever is lighting the menorah will first light the shamash, then the number of candles corresponding to whichever night of Chanukah it is. The first night, only the rightmost candle is lit, the second night the two rightmost, etc. (The newest candle is always lit first):

Again, a valid Chanukah menorah has eight branches of equal length, along with a shamash. There is no such thing as a Chanukah menorah with six branches of equal length and a longer seventh branch, and no valid Chanukah menorah has eight branches of completely different lengths.

If you see either of the above designs (or anything similar) on Chanukah-themed decor, it tells you the creator has absolutely no idea what they're doing and couldn't be bothered to do more than two seconds of research to make sure their product was accurate. Anyone who knows anything about the holiday will laugh at these. (They may buy them anyway, especially if that's all that's available-- my new Chanukah sweater has an invalid menorah pattern, but it's adorable, so I'm still going to wear it. But I am also laughing about it and invite you all to do the same.)

Anyway, have a happy Chanukah, everyone!

[fictionadventurer]

I love libraries.

I'm browsing the WWI shelves (as you do) and notice a very old book about the war. I glance at the first pages that talk about how one day the war will be over and we'll look at this place and not see any signs of the battlefield.

Then it hits me. And I check the publishing date.

This book was printed before the war's end. Not written. Printed. The physical object was created in 1918, while the war in question was raging and the end was as yet uncertain.

Now I'm standing on the other side of the apocalypse, with this physical link to that era in my hands. I'm living proof that the war did end and life did go on and we can all look at the end of the world as a long-ago memory.

Reading old books is cool enough, connecting our minds and hearts through the ideas of people who lived long ago, but there's something extra profound about holding a copy of the book that comes from the time that it was written. It's a physical link between the past and the present connecting me to those long-ago people. A piece of the past come into the future that gives me the chance to almost take the hand of some long-ago reader, to hold something they could have held, connecting not just mentally but physically to their era, a moment of connection across more than a century.

Excuse me while I go weep.

[d4ydream-girl]

comments from smosh cast + crew on shourtney's wedding post!!

ft. mythical, thomas sanders, macdoesit, and www.chess.com?? lol

[infiniteglitterfall]

Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.

Let me teach you too.

The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.

The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.

There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.

Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.

Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.

That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.

The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.

The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.

From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.

Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.

Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)

By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.

In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.

Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.

Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.

Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.

In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.

As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.

At least, that was the plan.

Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.

And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.

They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.

They were very wrong.

He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.

He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.

He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.

Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.

As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.

The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.

But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.

About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.

Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.

By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.

That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.

Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.

(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.

Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.

Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)

Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.

Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.

Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.

Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.

Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.

But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.

Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.

Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.

It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels.  Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."

(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.

It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)

Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.

It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.

Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.

Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.

The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.

Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.

That is how this conflict came about.

A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.

And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."

As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.

Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.

[bixels]

I'm not explaining why re-imagining characters as POC is not the same as white-washing, here of all places should fucking understand.

[worfsbarmitzvah]

there’s such an attitude among ex-christian atheists that religions just spring up out of the void with no cultural context behind them. like ive heard people say shit like “those (((zionists))) think they own a piece of land bc their book of fairy tales told them so!!!” and they refuse to understand that no, we don’t belong there because of the torah, it’s in the torah because we belong there. because we’re from there. the torah (from a reform perspective) was written by ancient jews in and about the land that they were actively living on at the time. the torah contains instructions for agriculture because the people who lived in the land needed a way to teach their children how to care for it. it contains laws of jurisprudence because those are pretty important to have when you’re trying to run a society. same for the parts that talk about city planning. it contains our national origin story for the same reason that american schools teach kids about the boston tea party. it’s an extremely complex and fascinating text that is the furthest thing from just a “book of fairy tales”

[manda-kat]

Friendly reminder that if you used to go to Church or a Christian school as a kid, but did not continue to study or grow your faith as you got older, than - no, you actually don't understand Christianity on the same level as a practicing adult believer.

I'm tired of hearing people dismiss the Christian faith and say 'well, I went to church as a kid, so I know what you believe'. That's the same as saying, 'my parents took my to the aquarium every week as a kid, so I know as much as your average marine biologist'.

If you're going to brag about how much knowledge you have about Christianity anyway, you should at least try not to say it on posts where you get things blatantly wrong about the Bible, the Church or- idk- the core message of the Gospel.

[trans-androgyne]

Touching on the history of transmasculinity some more, here are some usually derogatory terms that have historically been used for people considered masculine women (due to gender presentation, sexuality, or both, as sapphism and transmasculinity are conflated):

Tribade: Comes from the Ancient Greek concept of "tribadism" (scissoring/rubbing genitals together), especially descriptive of masculine women who use a dildo to penetrate other women

Tom/Tommy (as early as 1773): "Tom" originally referring to masculine prostitutes and women who prefer to associate with only women; often used for women considered sexually aggressive or otherwise "loose"

(Female) Invert (from 1860s): Based on the pathologizing concept of "sexual inversion," which proposed that there was essentially a continuum of "perverts" with sexual/gender deviants from femmes who prefer women but would also have sex with men to "true inverts" who feel themselves to be men trapped in female bodies; often associated with sexual aggression

Bulldyke/Dyke (from 1920s): Especially describing lesbians considered more masculine in appearance, believed by some scholars to come from a word meaning hermaphrodite

Lezzie/Lesbo (from 1930s): Shortenings of lesbian often used in a derogatory manner and applied to people who "look like lesbians" regardless of their actual sexuality

And of course, slang terms like "carpet muncher," "muff diver," and "bean flicker" have been used to describe lesbian sex, and often applied to anyone seen as a woman who liked women

[prolibytherium]

Just in general I think trying to look to pre-late modern period history for validation of LGBT+ identities is an absolutely useless venture. Every single underlying human experience defined through the lens and framework of LGBT identity has always existed, but it's impossible to pin down Exactly who and what a figure might have been if they existed in this contemporary context and decided to self identify via these labels.

It's also a wildly reductive lens that flattens the complexity and variety of how sex and gender has been constructed across time in different cultures, how sexual norms have varied, etc. This is not a constructive approach to learn about history and you're never going to be able to fit historical figures neatly into little identity categories.

[kacievvbbbb]

Honestly with the workload these kids be getting, what they are studying in school and just generally how they are treated. You really forget these kids are like 6 years old.

Anya is the only one that consistently acts her age and so she sometimes comes off as immature which is insane when you think about it they are all literally 6. This also works cause we can assume she is a year or 2 younger than the rest of her grade, still, even then it’s insane.

Which is why when the other kids actually start to show their age usually in situations of great emotion, the bus hijacking for one. Or even when the kids think one of them is going to have to leave because his family is now poor and they all rally around this kid they never even really spoke to, or when they literally think that some macaroons will make them smarter and help them pass the test. Or when they simply want to play outside.

it’s so jarring and you’re left being like oh right they're six, this isn’t normal. Six-year-olds shouldn't be put under this kind of pressure.

It's another neat little insight into just what kind of society these kids are living in. And a little bit of irony that Loid who wants to create a society where little kids don't have to cry anymore is on a mission that requires the infiltration of a school where little kids can't even be ones.

[raionmimi]

I feel like Symmetra would be up Venture's alley specifically because she wouldn't break their immersion if she was starring in a historical film

[ccuniculusmolestus]

Bunny corcoran after finding the macaulay twins incesting and then also finding mean things Henry wrote about him in his secret diary (oh and the murders too I guess but that's secondary)