#police response criticism

[townpostin]

Traffic Nightmare Grips Mango Bridge Area for Over 5 Hours

Ambulances trapped, students delayed as gridlock paralyzes key routes in Jamshedpur Severe congestion in Jamshedpur’s Mango Bridge area exposes critical flaws in local traffic management systems. JAMSHEDPUR – The Mango Bridge area of Jamshedpur was paralyzed by an enormous traffic jam on Thursday, which caused widespread disruption and lasted from 10:30 AM to 6 PM. The congestion had an impact on…

[narniangirl1994]

Am I the only one who hated that scene in 9-1-1 where the team goes on a call while unknowingly high, and then get handcuffed by the police once Athena realizes they're high? It just made no sense for Athena to handcuff people she knew who weren't hurting anyone and were drugged against their will.

And the scene is pretty much just played for laughs, without anyone questioning why Athena would do this. Not to mention Eddie is on the verge of crying, and handcuffing him was the last thing he needed while he was stressed over being nonconsensually drugged.

That scene perfectly epitomizes one of my biggest issues with the show, which is all the focus on Athena and the policing storylines. They make Athena seem like she can do no wrong and that her work is crucial to public safety, when it's obvious half the things she and her colleagues do just escalate the situation. Copaganda at it's finest.

Don't even get me started on the police brutality plot, where they downplayed and quickly concluded her family's very real trauma and May's legitimate criticism of police. 🙄🙄

[b-else-writes]

The Jedi Are the Elite, Not the Underdogs in the Prequels

I cannot believe i had to read with my own two eyes a take that the Jedi in the Star Wars Prequels occupy some of the lowest rungs in society because something something "they're meant to be Buddhist monks!!" and "it's based off the Hidden Fortress and the Jedi are the two peasants!!!" - what an utterly brain-dead take that fundamentally misunderstands how the Jedi are actually portrayed in the story, fundamentally misunderstands which characters from Hidden Fortress Lucas was grafting onto which character, and fundamentally misunderstands what story the Prequels were (badly) trying to tell.

So first, at the absolute most basic level, the two peasant characters in Hidden Fortress (which Lucas pulled most from for A New Hope and Phantom Menace) correspond, in Lucas' own words, to C3PO and R2D2 in the A New Hope, and Anakin and Jar Jar in Phantom Menace, NOT any of the Jedi characters. Obi-Wan, the only explicit Jedi in ANH, was inspired by Toshiro Mifune's character, who is, guess what, nobility (as men/samurai of a general status usually were in that time period). Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in TPM occupy that same role as well. It is Anakin (and Jar-Jar, who was expelled from his own society and an outcast) who occupies the lowest rung in society, because he's a literal slave and it's that very fact that drives the entire plot. Yes, Anakin is Force-Sensitive, but he isn't a Jedi in TPM, and he is always narratively positioned as being "not one of them" throughout the story (more on this in a minute).

Which brings us to point two - how are the Jedi actually portrayed in the Prequels? It's an old hat to be like "they're the Space cops" but, well, they are the Space Cops. The Jedi are part of the bureaucratic systems of the Galactic Republic. They can speak directly to the Chancellor and offer advice, they are dispatched to quell unrest in the Republic's name. Visually, they are designed to convey power and prestige based on Western cultural cues (large buildings with European facades, marble, white/beige clothes that are sweeping and regal, rare genetic magical powers, and of course, swords).

The defense I've seen is that the Jedi do not have power because they aren't in charge and have to answer to the Chancellor/Republic, but this is like saying, "the military doesn't have power because it has to answer to the President/Prime Minister", it's nonsensical. While the Jedi are referred to as monks and practice a veneer of vague Hollywood Buddhist beliefs, in practice, they operate like Samurai (because again, that was what Lucas was drawing from), who again, held high prestige and power in society. They are not the scrappy underdogs or the downtrodden poor. And they are certainly not slaves.

And that's where the fundamental thing comes in of what story were the Prequels trying to tell? Fundamentally, Anakin's fall is a story about the elites in society taking a child who is at the very bottom (a slave) and raising him up onto their level, while simultaneously having nothing but contempt for him, and then systematically failing him at every turn until he decides that the only solution is that the system is completely broken and we should do Fascism (for the record i'm not saying the Prequels tell this story well, and handle it with the subtlety of a brick to the face like Anakin quite literally paraphrases George Bush). Because the Prequels were written in the late 90s-early 2000s by an American man and are a blunt commentary on the elites in the USA failing and sliding into unnecessary war and growing fascism. It's a story about the fall of a society. And for this entire morality tale of Lucas' to work, it would mean that the Jedi are the Elite as well.

And they are - they're shown to be ineffectual and not very smart and their powers have grown weak and they can't see what's directly in front of them! They have become entrenched into the corrupt system. It matters that it is Anakin who occupies the lowest rung in society and not the Jedi, and that is why he is never one of them and what drives the entire story of his fall (for the record (2), this isn't saying Anakin was RIGHT to become fascist).

I think a lot of people try to twist this because they desperately want to love the Jedi (which you can) but can't reconcile that narratively they're portrayed as having messed-up very very badly and that the entire system that they were part of didn't work and shouldn't have been done that way (#maybe Jacen was onto something before he did Space Fascism 2.0), so they try to say that no, no, no, it's the Jedi who are the scrappy underdogs. But to do that is to just completely misunderstand and misrepresent what is actually being presented.

[gibbearish]

i will say arguments online did get a lot easier once i started learning to just directly say when people are misinterpreting things, to the point i hesitate to even call most of them arguments anymore? like it's easy to get caught up in responding to the other person as if their interpretation of what you said was correct because you do still disagree with their conclusion based on that, but like once you point out that there was a misinterpretation involved it becomes a lot easier for people to then follow that to "maybe the fact you had to misinterpret me to make those arguments says something about them too"

[canichangemyblogname]

Coffee stop stranger to my friend watching a TikTok video: “A terrorist organization uses that phrase to call for jihad, just so you know.”

Me playing dumb because I know this person is just being Arabophobic and Islamophobic: “Which phrase? Alhamdulillah?”

*a pause while they “think” because they don’t know Arabic and have no clue what they’re actually arguing against*

Them: “Yeah. You kids need to stop saying it. It makes people uncomfortable.”

Me: “THANK GOD you were here to tell us. Where would we be without you?”

Old people are so bold and they love to comment on things that are none of their damn business 😑

[megamindfandombookclub]

This is how I feel about censoring words like rape, suicide, murder, kill, ect.

When we take away the power that these words/art has, and we sanitize it, then they lose their power and this is why we have so many people online (and off!!) who are way too comfortable with making "kys/unalive yourself" jokes and wishing death on people for whatever small slight that they deemed worthy of wishing harm on that person/people.

On the flip side, if you're uncomfortable with saying any of these in conversation without sanitizing it, (r*pe, su*cide, m*rder, k*ll*, or my personal favorite /disgusted sarcasm/ "unalive", etc) then maybe you're not mature enough to be talking about said topics?

And I get that "we want to make everything comfortable for everybody, every day, all the time!" but when we're too accommodating in this kind of situation, then we are taking away the onus and responsibility of the person/people triggered by those words/topics to curate their own experience and removing themselves from the situation.

Online, it's literally as easy as blocking, backspacing, and/or/also physically removing yourself from the conversation.

But whatever you do, do not make it everyone's else's problem because you found some content that is "icky" to you. :/

I think some people forget that some literature and some media is meant to be deeply uncomfortable and unsettling. It's meant to make you have a very visceral reaction to it. If you genuinely can't handle these stories then you are under no obligation to consume them but acting as if they have no purpose or as if people don't have a right to tell these stories, stories that often relate to the darkest or most disturbing parts of life, then you should do some introspection.

[damienthepious]

watching @nanowrimo within a single hour:

make an awful, ill-conceived, sponsored post about "responsible"/"ethical" uses of ai in writing

immediately get ratio'd in a way i've never seen on tumblr with a small swarm of chastising-to-negative replies and no reblogs

start deleting replies

reply to their own post being like 'agree to disagree!!!' while saying that ai can TOTALLY be ethical because spellcheck exists!! (???) while in NO WAY responding to the criticisms of ai for its environmental impact OR the building of databases on material without author consent, ie, stolen material, OR the money laundering rampant in the industry

when called out on deleting replies, literally messaged me people who called them out to say "We don't have a problem with folks disagreeing with AI. It's the tone of the discourse." So. overtly stated tone policing.

get even MORE replies saying this is a Bad Look, and some reblogs now that people's replies are being deleted

DISABLE REBLOGS when people aren't saying what nano would prefer they say

im juust in literal awe of this fucking mess.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Broke:

Belle has Stockholm syndrome because she falls in love with the Beast, her kidnapper.

Woke:

Stockholm syndrome was coined to slander a woman who had been in a hostage situation but openly criticized the poor police response which recklessly put her in more danger and escalated the violence. She was then belittled and discredited publically by the police for this.

So. Yeah. Maybe Belle does have Stockholm syndrome actually.

[boreal-sea]

Who is Kamala Harris?

These are all from her Wikipedia page. I have picked the top 5 for each of these sections. Maybe you think other things are more important, these are just the things that stood out to me:

Highlights as District Attorney of San Francisco:

was tough on gun crime: created a gun crime unit, set 90-day minimum sentences, raised bail for gun-related crimes, and prosecuted all assault weapon possession cases as felonies.

created a hate crimes unit specifically focused on LGBTQ hate crimes against children and teens in school.

was (and is) against the death penalty; during her time as DA did not cave to pressure in several cases to seek the death penalty.

helped create the San Francisco Reentry Division, aimed at helping prisoners reintegrate after their sentences are through; the program became a national model.

refused to enforce prop 8, which was at the time California's ban on gay marriage.

Highlights as Attorney General of California

introduced the Homeowner Bill of Rights and fought against banks, mortgage companies, and credit card companies.

fought for financial reimbursement for public employee and teacher pensions.

fought for environmental protections and secured settlements and indictments against several oil companies for oil spills.

conducted a review of implicit bias in policing and the use of deadly force and introduced implicit bias training.

declared a law that California law enforcement had to collect and report police violence.

Highlights as a California Senator:

condemned Trump's Muslim ban.

opposed Trump's appointments of Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions, his nomination of Neil Gorsuch, and voted against confirming Kavanaugh.

tried to make lynching a federal hate crime.

urged the Trump administration to investigate the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China.

voted to convict Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Highlights as Vice president:

as President of the Senate, cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate that ensured the passing of the American Rescue Act.

has cast more tie-breaking votes than any other Vice president in US history - she is responsible for many of the achievements of the Biden administration actually passing the Senate.

created task forces on corruption and human trafficking.

created a women's empowerment program.

has criticized Israel's actions during the current conflict in Gaza and called for an immediate ceasefire.

[soon-palestine]

ALERT: We’ve received several reports of the FBI visiting activists in response to their social media posts criticizing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. We want you to #KnowYourRights if approached by federal law enforcement (🧵 thread)

The FBI’s discriminatory targeting of people who speak up for Palestinian rights on social media is an attempt to silence popular criticism of Israel. You have a right to speak up against genocide. You have a right to refuse to speak to FBI agents without an attorney present

Our partners at the @ADC have also documented a disturbing uptick FBI targeting and intimidation of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims since October: We have received multiple calls today regarding Palestinian nationals detained by ICE, and/or visited by the FBI. The FBI has also visited multiple mosques today, in different states, as well as Arab inmates. This is a troubling trend.

#KnowYourDamnRights: Know your rights if you’re ever approached by law enforcement! Read this booklet by our partners at

@theCCR “If An Agent Knocks”

And our partners at the @NLGnews 's Know Your Rights booklet for dealing with law enforcement: https://t.co/5scK7eb8Ba

You can read more about the increased reports of FBI harassment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim community members in this article by

@theintercept :

[autolenaphilia]

I don’t care about accusations of ”pedophilia.” I will not give a fuck, I won't investigate your claims, I will just ignore it.

For one thing the accusation of pedophilia is often entirely meaningless. This is because pedophile/pedo etc are words that carry the taint of child rape, of calling up the disgust such an act naturally produces, but are accusations that don’t require such an act or a victim of it. If you call someone a “child rapist” that has weight, but you also have to back it up with a victim this person supposedly raped for the accusation to actually be meaningful. But words like “pedophile” carries no such demands, it literally just means “someone who has an attraction to children.” It doesn’t require an actual victim. It’s an accusation about how someone feels in their head and can thus be liberally applied. Someone criticizes your asinine submarine idea to rescue some children in a cave? Call them a pedo. And even words that once had a more specific meaning, such as “grooming” can be stretched beyond all meaning to mean whatever it wants to. Someone talked to under-18 people about sex and gender in a way you don’t want to? Call them a groomer.

In a culture of pedohysteria, pedojacketing is easy. And it’s especially easy to weaponize it against queer people, the idea that queerness spreads through queers recruiting children by molesting them is one of the oldest queerphobic narrativeness out there. I’m using “queer” here because this is a narrative used both against gay and trans people. But in the present transphobic/transmisogynistic backlash it’s most often used against trans people, especially transfems, as transmasc people are more often infantilized.

But on a more deeper level “pedophilia” is the wrong framing of the real problem of child sex abuse. It’s literally a medical term, a diagnosis. It makes child sex abuse a problem of some sick individuals with a diseased attraction.

This is of course a bad and antifeminist understanding of what rape and sexual violence is. It’s an inevitable and natural expression of power. The widespread rape of women is caused by the patriarchy, of men having power over women. And the misogynist oppression of women with sexual violence naturally extends to young girls. But all children are disempowered in our society. Adults have power over them in the patriarchal family, in the capitalist school system and other institutions of our society. Sexual violence against children flows from the power adults institutionally and systemically have over them. The vast majority of sexual violence towards children comes from the family and schools, not the ��stranger danger” of creepy weirdoes hiding in bushes.

This is the reality that the framing of sexual violence as the result of sick individuals with a diseased attraction obscures. And it inevitably calls for a reactionary carceral and psychiatric response, justifying the police, prisons and psychiatric institutions. That’s why “what will we then do with the pedophiles?” is such a popular clichéd response to prison and police abolitionism. This very framing of the problem calls for a carceral response. If the problem of child sex abuse is sick individuals instead of the system, if we constantly root out and punish individuals we will eventually solve the problem.

In reality carceral responses actually make the problem of sexual violence much worse. The police, prisons and involuntary psychiatric hospitals are violent expressions of power and thus create the conditions for rape.

Pedohysteria is constantly used to justify the expansion of state power. Here in European Union we have had a legislative push to ban end-to-end encryption and make all online communication accessible to law enforcement, total online surveillance. And the reasoning is because otherwise pedophiles can use e2e communication to secretly send child porn to each other without the police being able to do anything, which is of course true, that does and will happen, but doesn’t justify killing all online privacy. This “chat control” act is literally called “regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse.”

The pedohysteria also justifies vigilantism, which tumblr callout culture is part of and is also a deeply reactionary and even fascist phenomenon. Vigilantism rests on the idea that what the police do is right, but they are not doing it well enough, because they are too reigned in by liberal ideas such as laws and regulations and the courts. So random people should take on the role of police to punish “criminals”, like pedophiles. And this goes through tumblr callout culture. A subtext running through pedojacketing callouts of transfems is the idea that transmisogyny does not exist and does not lead to transfems being disproportionately punished, but instead transfems are using their minority status to get away with sex crimes.

This standard conservative rhetoric about how liberals often literally let minorities get away with murder justifies their reactionary vigilantism. Of course in reality, transfems are far less likely to commit sexual abuse of children than other groups of people, because we are systematically excluded from the very institutions where such abuse happens, such as parenthood/the family or schools, because of the transmisogynist stereotype that we are all perverted child rapists. And the callouts of transfems as sex predators are in themselves abusive and protect actual abusers, just like how police and prisons are.

So no, I will continue to not give a fuck if you call someone a pedophile.

[wilwheaton]

In the wake of a near-tragic assassination attempt of a widely reviled figure, some people who loathe him may be wrestling with or suppressing emotions that feel contradictory. But the notions that Trump is dangerous, and that attempting to murder him is also dangerous, are not in tension with each other. The ethics and the practicality of liberal democracy both affirm a strong norm against political violence. [...]    Even though American history has seen a long litany of murders and attempted murders — Gerald Ford survived two attempts on his life within a few weeks of each other — this one feels scarier. That is because our social peace has grown more precarious. An assassination attempt on Donald Trump is a far more dangerous thing than an attempt to kill Mitt Romney would have been a dozen years ago, or Al Gore a dozen years before that.    And while the responsibility for maintaining social peace and the norm of non-violence is shared equally across the political spectrum, the blame for its decay is not.    Trump stokes and feeds upon a lust for violence. He possesses a demagogue’s skill for manipulating his supporters’ most elemental emotions. As a private citizen he exploited a white woman’s rape in Central Park to demand the execution of innocent young men of color. He continues to call for various critics to be executed for their disloyalty. When a maniac attempted to kill Nancy Pelosi and smashed the skull of her husband, he cheered it on. He continues to glorify and promise to free the criminals who assaulted police in the attack on the Capitol in an attempt to seize an unelected second term.    It is not Trump’s fault that someone tried to kill him. It is absolutely his fault that it has immediately set off a widespread fear of reprisals and chaos.

Trump Shooting: He Must Be Defeated by Ballots, Not Bullets

Look, I can’t wait for the guy to die and be gone forever. I just want him to die in prison.

And he’s still a Fascist. Don’t let that get obscured in all of this. He’s still the same wannabe dictator, the same hateful liar, the same corrupt traitor, the same 34 time convicted felon, the same rapist.

Nothing about him has changed. Nothing about Project 2025 has changed.

Obviously, the national conversation is going to be focused on this for the near future, and we can’t forget or minimize that he remains a serious and dire threat to America, and the world.

[drdemonprince]

have you defined the meaning of “white woman brain” anywhere and if not, can you? /gen

Many Black and brown feminist writers have discussed this phenomenon and I encourage you to seek out a lot of writing about this subject, because there are a variety of perspectives, but to distill it, white woman fragility brain is a phenomenon that is not exclusive to either white people or to women, but is especially common among those who can weaponize white womanhood, and it consists of the following qualities:

A view of oneself as a helpless victim that is constantly in threat of being attacked, especially by strangers (even though statistically, this is not the case).

A refusal to consider oneself as capable of doing harm to others, especially a lack of consideration toward others' body autonomy or consent. (even while being highly concerned about one's own autonomy and consent).

A generally passive or passive-aggressive orientation toward the world: seeing oneself as a romantic or sexual object to be approached, but never wanting to initiate (or feeling that one never can), never feeling comfortable directly communicating displeasure or one's desires, believing that others instead must guess at it. (and then resenting people when they don't, but never expressing it).

A tendency to cry, excessively berate oneself, complain about being made to feel "unsafe," or give up when criticized or challenged, especially when challenged by people of color.

A tendency to associate a person's body type with how much of a threat they are. For example, feeling unsafe around people with penises and expecting a social space to accommodate that fear to cater to you, a fear of people who come from cultures where it's common to speak loudly, a fear of those who are large, assertive, and/or darker-skinned.

Instinctive fawning-type responses to stress, and a pattern of feigning happiness, agreeability, and ease when one is not genuinely feeling it, and expecting all other people (but especially other women) to feign happiness as well, paired with a deep-seated resentment of anyone who violates this illusion and expresses any negativity (being especially punitive toward women of color).

Instinctively "smoothing over" conflict between other people before it even begins, even when healthy conflict is necessary and not at all your business-- often performed by gossiping behind other people's backs, triangulating information when it is not yours to share, asking people to alter their behavior in order to avoid a reaction from somebody else, presenting your concerns as if they were somebody else's ("what will people think!"), tone-policing the airing of grievances, derailing hard conversations with more light-hearted topics, and excluding people who are known to be candid and assertive.

Here are some articles on elements of the phenomenon and why it is so dangerous:

Now, I single white cis women out a lot when I am describing this phenomenon, because they have the most to gain from exhibiting these qualities, but make no mistake: this is a pattern that many types of people can and do use. I have seen white trans women use white women's tears to silence critique. I have witnessed women of color being passive-aggressively derailed and silenced by a Black manager who was in a position of institutional power over them. Multiple of the women who sexually harassed me in the story linked above were not white. And LORD knows I see plenty of t boys falling back on this shit, as well as cis men from wealthy backgrounds. It's a mindset that has deep colonial roots and we all must be on the look out for it in ourselves and others, and we must be vigilant in uprooting it.

[megamindfandombookclub]

It's why I put this up on both my blogs.

It's the fine print, lol

I hate when I see "minors DNI" on smut. I'm not going to be tainted by reading it. I'm not going to read it and go out and do it - trust me, the immature jackasses at my school are not worth banging no matter how horny I get - and I'm not even capable of doing a good chunk of what I read anyway because I'm into vampires. And in the event I got vampire powers, I'd have other shit to do besides go get laid.

Possibly unpopular hot take but "minors DNI" isn't about keeping me safe, it's about keeping adults comfortable. And obviously you're allowed not to be comfortable with me commenting on it or talking to you about it. I can see why that'd feel gross to you. But me reading it without saying a word can't possibly make you feel uncomfortable because you have no way to know it happened or didn't happen. It's about being able to tell the other adults you're one of the good and not creepy smut writers who doesn't talk to kids when no one even accused you of that. It's about comforting them and comforting yourself with the idea you're good.

But the thing is, even if I read your work and I go "I'm going to go out and use blood as lube!", I read one story by you. I was raised by my parents for 16 years. Even if we ignore the idea I have the ability to think things through - which is stupid, but for the sake of argument we'll do it - if I'm allegedly easily influenced by the world around me, wouldn't the blame still not be on you anyway? You're not my mom, my mom is my mom.

I was trying to find fic with my favorite sex position (to read about, I've never done it IRL) and had to wade through a bunch of "minors DNI!" "I block minors!" "minors go do your homework!" and it was just. So dumb. So dumb and theatrical and pointless.

And also so, so easy to get around just by lying and writing "18" in my bio.

--

I suspect they're more afraid of legal trouble than of discomfort, but I agree the warnings don't carry any actual legal weight.

Personally, I don't care what you do unless you have shitty parents and you're dumb enough to let them catch you reading my porn or my gay stuff or whatever and they come make it my problem. Most teens are smart enough to hide things from this kind of parent though.

[theabigailthorn]

We know you were on accutane. Stop lying

not that it would matter if I had, and not that it's any of your business, but I have in fact never taken accutane.

This is a useful teaching moment though, because what you're doing is a well-studied phenomenon in digital media called 'policing fake femininity.' It's a thing people do to women in the public eye, a specific kind of criticism centred around accusations of being inauthentic, fake, or having cheated in some way. Often it's men doing the policing but women do it to each other a lot too, there are whole websites dedicated to it in fact. Often those criticisms centre around our appearances, as yours did here.

It's sometimes a response to perceived inequality, of which there is plenty! Women in the public eye - myself included - do benefit from a lot of privilege. I've always been quite open about that. People who engage in that kind of public bullying often tell themselves that because of the privilege (or perceived privilege) of their targets the fake femininity policing is socially justified, or the fault of the target. But it doesn't really do anything to correct the structural problems that give rise to that inequality.

In their paper "Policing Fake Femininity," scholars Brooke Duffy, Kate Miltner, and Amanda Wahlstedt say,

“The solution to the structural concerns associated with capitalist patriarchy is not, we contend, to label individual influencers “stupid famewhores” and disparage their mental health in ways that invoke the spectre of hysteria (e.g., “batsh*t crazy,” “delusional,” and “lunatic”). As Chemaly [Rage Becomes Her, 2018] argues, it is necessary that girls and women express their anger, but such a directive “is not an endorsement of unbridled rage, or permission to deliver a swift roundhouse kick to the face of anyone who upsets you, or to regularly fill the spaces you live and work in with hostility and discomfort.” While venting anger at these influencers and their purportedly questionable choices may provide some form of much-needed catharsis, such gender-coded vitriol amplifies the rampant misogyny and toxicity that women already face in online environments.”

If you'd like to know more, I recommend:

Steve Cross & Jo Littler, “Celebrity and schadenfreude: The cultural economy of fame in freefall,” in Cultural Studies

Brooke Duffy, Kate Miltner, & Amanda Wahlstedt, “Policing “fake” femininity: Authenticity, accountability, and influencer anti-fandom,” in New Media & Society

[historicity-was-already-taken]

I hate what the Israeli government is doing but I'm scared of contributing to the rise in anti-semitism in the US. I'm not Jewish and not super keyed in to anti-semitism. Obviously, anyone talking shit about the Jewish people is someone I should fight, but there are things I should watch out for even when they say "Israel," right? What kind of rhetoric should I be on the lookout for?

What makes this hard, is that there is no collective Jewish take on this. There are some Jews who would tell you that any criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic. There are other Jews who would tell you that Jewish support for the modern state is antithetical to the values at the core of our ethics and faith.

Both of those types of Jewish thinkers follow this blog, as do Jews holding views everywhere in between.

So what I'm going to tell you isn't The Jewish Stance on this, but the stance I've developed as a Modern Jewish historian who also happens to be a Jewish person with leftist politics.

Here is a list of narratives and rhetorical patterns to watch out for:

-individuals or spaces which view jews as inherently unworthy of trust, and require them to consistently prove that they are a "Good Jew"

-rhetoric which continuously singles out Israeli human and civil rights abuses, while failing to hold other states committing equal or much larger scale abuses to the same standards

-speech which implies that the Jews can fit neatly into the role of "white colonizer"

-visual languages which super-impose Nazi imagery over Jewish symbols

-Blood Libel rhetoric, which accuses Israel of using the blood or murdered Palestinian babies for its bread, or harvesting Palestinian organs for the black market. This type of rhetoric has been circulating the western world for literal centuries, and it always ends with Jews being expelled and/or burnt at the stake.

And this is kind of where the classic "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" porn definition comes in. Sometimes someone screaming about "The Zionists" is someone deeply disturbed by, say, the frankly fascistic behavior of Israelis in West Bank Settlements. Sometimes, that person is furious that Jews are asking them to critically examine the role of any or some of the above elements in their speech regarding Israel and Israelis.

Some Jews will weaponize a lot of our traumatic past to silence other Jews, and say that by writing this I am no better than the Jewish Police who rounded up their people for the Treblinka transports. Other Jews will say that by writing any of this, I'm silencing necessary speech regarding the war crimes in Gaza and that I'm complicit in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian civilians as a result.

But this is my basic, 101 level response, and it's not going to change.

I really, truly, appreciate your how deeply you care about grasping these issues. If you have any follow-up questions I'd be happy to answer them under similar understandings of username exclusion.