#the one thing we cannot tolerate is intolerance itself

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Hitchens: People want to pray, you can’t stop them. But we cannot have state subsidized prayer. We cannot have state subsidized preachers or chaplains.

Give it up, or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you.

This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you: resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing.

You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.

Watch out for these symptoms. They are not just symptoms of surrender, very often ecumenically offered to you by men of God in other robes, Christian and Jewish and smarmy ecumenical. These are the ones who hold open the gates for the barbarians. The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own preachers who will do it for you, and your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.

Resist it while you can. And if you wonder what will happen if you don't, look and see how a cricket team in Middlesex in England had to change its name by force last week because it was called, and had been for years, the Middlesex Crusaders. Look and how stories about little pigs can’t be taught to children in English schools anymore, lest offense be taken by the religions of peace.

Resist it while you can.

-

Starmer: One of the things that's coming up over and over again is Islamophobia and well, you can see by the stats, you can see the numbers rising, particularly since October the 7th, although we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that before October the 7th, this was all heading in the right direction. It's been far too high for far too long. Clearly, we need to just say over and over again, Islamophobia is intolerable. It can never, ever be justified and we have to continue with a zero-tolerance approach, and I think there's more we can do in government. There's certainly stuff online, which I think needs tackling much more robustly than it is at the moment.

Q: What I'm hoping, Keir, is your experience as a prosecutor means you'll be thinking about the strategy we can use to make sure we take action against those who break the law.

==

The UK is in very big trouble. There are weekly antisemitic parades through London calling for the eradication of Israel and the Jews, but Starmer's big concern is the imaginary dragon of "Islamophobia." That you are not allowed to oppose or even question Islam or its tenets or its unending and ever escalating demands. That disagreeing with and opposing Islam is itself - or should be - a criminal offence.

Reminder: opposing the imposition of Islamic demand and concessions to fragile Islamic sensibilities is not "bigotry." It's completely reasonable, sensible and necessary.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eric Levitz at Vox:

As of this writing, Israel’s war in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 34,000 Palestinians, including 14,680 women, children, and elderly people, according to the United Nations. But that is just the tally of the identifiable dead. It does not include those rendered invisible or unrecognizable by rubble and fire.  And that death toll could surge in the coming days and weeks. Roughly 80 percent of Gazans have been displaced from their homes, there are acute shortages of food and medical supplies, and thousands of small children are suffering from malnutrition.

Meanwhile, 121 Israeli hostages remain unaccounted for following their kidnapping by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups on October 7. We do not know how many are already dead or what cruelties beset those still alive. We do know that Hamas fighters have subjected some of their captives to rape, according to the United Nations.  On Friday, Joe Biden unveiled a plan to end these nightmares: The president has presented a roadmap to a permanent ceasefire. Broken down into three phases, the plan ostensibly aims to secure an immediate and durable end to hostilities, which would secure the release of all Israeli hostages; a surge of humanitarian relief into Gaza; the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from that territory; and international funding for Gaza’s reconstruction.  Plenty of ceasefire proposals have been floated before, but two things distinguished Friday’s: According to Biden, it was the Israeli government’s own plan, and it did not explicitly call for the total destruction of Hamas as a military and governing power.

Israel’s commitment to complete victory over Hamas has been one major obstacle to peace. To this point, Hamas has proven resilient enough to withstand Israel’s onslaught and tolerant enough of Gazans’ suffering to insist on retaining power, no matter the human cost. Hamas has evinced some interest in trading hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but it has shown none in total surrender. If Israel no longer demanded the latter, then peace might be at hand. In the days since Biden’s announcement, the Israeli government has distanced itself from the ceasefire proposal and reaffirmed its commitment to Hamas’s destruction. “Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Saturday. This response is unsurprising. Many Israeli voters find the idea of Hamas’s ongoing military presence in Gaza to be an intolerable security risk, and this is especially true on the nation’s right. Were Netanyahu to accept the agreement, his governing coalition would likely dissolve. 

Achieving peace in Gaza will therefore require a counterforce to Israel’s domestic political pressures. In recent weeks, the Biden administration threatened to freeze arms transfers to Israel if it conducted an assault on Rafah without a plan for protecting civilians in that city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Israel proceeded to launch an airstrike that killed 45 Palestinian civilians in the city’s safe zone. If the White House wishes to turn its blueprint for peace into a reality, it may need to enforce its own red line. Such a measure would attract considerable opposition. Israel hawks in the United States insist that the Jewish state’s struggle against Hamas is existential and cannot end without that organization’s destruction. From this perspective, the death toll in Gaza is a tragic but unavoidable cost of a necessary war.  World War II analogies figure prominently in this line of argument. Last week, in a column titled, “Do we still understand how wars are won?” the New York Times’s Bret Stephens accused Israel’s critics of historical amnesia.

[...]

Today, Stephens writes, Israel finds itself waging such an existential war: Hamas has called for wiping the country off the map, and the Jewish state cannot know security until it destroys its enemy’s “capability and will to wage war,” a task that entails tragedies like the one that claimed 45 civilian lives in Rafah in late May. Rather than threatening to withhold arms transfers to force Israel into appeasing Hamas, Stephens argues, the United States must “understand that [Israel has] no choice to fight except in the way we once did — back when we knew what it takes to win.” But this line of reasoning is morally and intellectually bankrupt. That we are more horrified by the mass killing of civilians today than we were in 1945 is a mark of progress, not amnesia. And in any case, Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to the Allied cause. 

By the time the United States and Great Britain began bombing Dresden and Tokyo, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were already in the process of mass murdering tens of millions of people. Hamas may have genocidal intentions, but it does not have genocidal capacities. Waging total war on Gaza is not necessary for averting the imminent slaughter of Israeli civilians; to the contrary, doing so risks the lives of the few Israelis whom Hamas is currently in a position to destroy.  Further, the Axis powers genuinely threatened the existence of neighboring states. Hamas is incapable of defending its airspace, let alone conquering Israel. The Israeli government is right to insist that Hamas must not be allowed to launch another October 7, but that attack was only possible due to easily avoidable failures of intelligence and border defense.  More fundamentally, Israel’s ends cannot justify its means in Gaza when those ends are themselves unjust. The Netanyahu government is not fighting to liberate Gazans from despotism and establish the foundations for a two-state solution. To the contrary, it is committed to Palestinian statelessness and dispossession.

The people of Gaza deserve better than Hamas, but the Israeli government has neither the capacity nor the will to give Gazans what they deserve. The best it can do for the moment is stop killing them. 

[...]

But this is not the question that Israel faces today. Hamas may have genocidal aspirations. But as of now, it has scant capacity to kill Israelis outside of Gaza. And bombarding that territory’s cities has made the safe return of Israeli hostages less likely, not more so, a point that has not been lost on many of the captives’ families. In reality, Israel does not need to level Gaza in order to ensure its own existence. To prevent October 7, all the Netanyahu government needed to do was take its intelligence seriously and fortify its borders. Israeli intelligence obtained Hamas’s battle plan for October 7 more than a year in advance. Last July, an Israeli intelligence analyst warned her supervisors that Hamas had conducted a training exercise that appeared to match the intercepted battle plan. But a colonel dismissed these concerns, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. As Israeli officials conceded to the Times,“Had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.”

Instead, Israel persisted in leaving the border fence with Gaza thinly defended, so as to devote more IDF troops to the protection of illegal settlements in the West Bank. The fact that Hamas’s rockets rarely succeed in killing Israelis tells us nothing about the organization’s moral character. But it does tell us something about the scale of the threat that it poses to Israel. Hamas is not a burgeoning imperial power. And it has no serious prospect of becoming one. Israel’s capacity to restrict the flow of arms and goods into Gaza places tight constraints on Hamas’s capacity to amass economic and military power. 

Israel’s obsession over wanting total destruction of Hamas is hindering efforts to end the carnage in Gaza.

[schraubd]

IHRA Cited In Pitch To Ban "Israel Apartheid Week" Displays

One of the more common points of controversy over the "IHRA" working definition of antisemitism is the allegation that it is used to chill free speech. For what it's worth, my sense is that the attempt to censor speech has actually very little to do with IHRA as a text, and is more related to IHRA's perceived symbolic status. If IHRA didn't exist, the claims wouldn't look much different.

In any event, in assessing whether IHRA "is used to chill speech," we could look at one of two things: cases where persons trying to censor speech appeal to IHRA, and cases where persons engaging in censorship justify it by reference to IHRA. The difference between attempt and success, basically. There are undoubtedly more cases of the former than the latter, and one could fairly argue that the former shouldn't "count" both because they did not actually lead to the suppression of speech and because they're functionally impossible to police (any yahoo with a web browser can say "don't allow this speech because of IHRA"; it doesn't mean anything if they're consistently not successful).

Nonetheless, I do think it is notable when semi-prominent actors use IHRA in order to call for censoring speech. Recently, for instance, a group called the "Combat Antisemitism Movement" released a report that called for universities to adopt IHRA and then use that understanding of antisemitism to bar "Israel Apartheid Week" demonstrations (via).

Allowing this virulent form of discrimination to persist under the auspices of academic freedom is simply intolerable during a time where antisemitism is rising. If such hateful displays would not be tolerated when directed at other ethnic or religious minorities, Jewish students should not be an exception.

.... While universities have an obligation to promote a diverse marketplace of ideas, they also must ensure principles of tolerance and respect for diversity are upheld. Given that it would certainly be deemed inappropriate to set up a week-long demonstration on campus calling for the destruction of another sovereign state, such as Italy, then Israel cannot be the outlier.

On the level of free speech and academic freedom, the university indeed must permit "Israel Apartheid Week" demonstrations; just as they regularly do permit displays and presentations that are deemed offensive to other minorities. But beyond that seemingly banal but nonetheless apparently not-taken-for-granted point, much lies in the framing here. There are university demonstrations which target, for example, Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang, Turkish repression of Armenians, American police violence against racial minorities, or Russian aggression in Ukraine, in extremely harsh tones. No doubt the governments of those nations, to say nothing of any nationals present on campus, may find the claims objectionable or unfair. But the university is not permitted, nor should it be permitted, to say that such protests (and "displays" thereto) are "inappropriate" and can be banned from campus. Israel indeed cannot be the outlier.

Of course, one could argue that Israel is not properly compared to China or Russia. It is better thought of, perhaps, as an Italy. But -- leaving aside whether the university would prohibit raucous protests against Italy that were deemed offensive to Italian students (I'm doubtful -- cf. protests against Columbus Day and claims by Italian-American groups that these protests constitute anti-Italian discrimination) -- the problem is that enforcing this norm would require the university to decide as a matter of institutional policy the correctness or soundness of moral appraisals about Israel's status or conduct. This, of course, is the very centerpiece of what academic freedom is meant to avoid. As the University of Chicago's famous Kalven Report argued, "The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic." It is generally not the business of universities to institutionally affirm or reject a particular political stance, whether popular or unpopular; the university rather is designed to serve as a forum where these issues can be debated and hashed out. 

This does not mean tolerating actual discrimination. But discomfort with speech, even outrageous speech, is not discrimination. To keep on the Chicago theme, the U of C's widely-praised principles of freedom of expression address this very point:

Of course, the ideas of different members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.

[....]

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.

And despite the mau-mauing about what is allegedly "not tolerated" for other groups, these principles are the same that explain why Kyle Duncan must be allowed to speak at Stanford, Milo must be allowed to speak at Berkeley, and Christina Hoff Sommers must be allowed to speak ta Lewis & Clark. It's not because there aren't colorable arguments that any or all of these speeches or speakers are hateful. It's not even -- though the Kalven Report might disagree -- that the university isn't allowed to issue its own judgment about the propriety or not of the speech. It's that these judgments cannot, consistent with the basic principles of academic freedom, be used as a vector for prohibiting the speech.

Again, I don't think "IHRA", as a text, is responsible for these calls for censorship. But IHRA is symbol as much as it is text, and its symbolic usage has become increasingly tied to appeals such as this. Those who wish to promote IHRA's utility should think very carefully about standing by and letting it become an avatar of institutional censorship in this way. It does no service to the fight against antisemitism, nor IHRA's role in supporting that fight.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/NdTzLyY

[thisisbensilver]

Peace and nonviolence are not a promise.

They are a treaty- part of our social contract.

And if you violate the terms of our treaty, our treaty no longer applies to you or protects you.

That is the “Paradox of Tolerance…” that in order to construct a tolerant society, we necessarily cannot tolerate one thing- Intolerance.

Because, allowed to run amok unchallenged, it will cannibalize and consume the entire system.

If you attack someone for being Gay or Trans or whatever, and that person defends themself against you with incredible violence, those are not the same thing.

One of them is an immune response.

It is the system protecting itself, because the system has a right to preserve itself in the same way that if I discover I have cancer, I'm gonna burn the cancerous cells right the fuck out of my body, even though I'm generally in favor of life, because those cells have decided to attack the system.

Being a fascist or a bigot or a Nazi or whatever- those are acts of violence, in and of themselves.

And so those people need to be burned out of society.

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary218

4/20-21/2024

saturday - sunday

working on the notes i took last night.

going well i think. we'll see later but this stuff seems to be going over well with me atm.

was recently exposed to hito steyerl's bizarre words on palestine, which have less to do with the ongoing genocide and horror israel perpetuates than the art world being overtaken with, or i guess the outspoken-ness of what she calls "5%" of the art community in berlin being outspoken about hating what israel is doing, while the majority are also horrified by what hamas has done also. that classic of bourgeois liberal moralism appearing. it throws me off wanting to really read her work, although her work also, for the bits i got out of it, her essays an object like you and me and the wretched of the screen being rather good, imo, or at least having enough in them into spin into something else, information at least, there is a mechanism to her writing i don't entirely enjoy. it does not feel particularly, i don't know, it feels like political writing might want to connect quicker, not that it should be without abstraction, tiqqun certainly aren't afraid of this but they also couch critique in things that are all sort of apparent or ongoing or just parts of life. they also reckon with the thing i continually return to from that end of the ill-will essay, this:

But perhaps here it is now criticism itself that, by reintroducing a clumsy universal in spite of itself, struggles to enter the field of experience. It no longer allows itself to grasp things by the hand, but boasts of having understood them without bothering to penetrate them. The quest for meaning, the desire for liberation, and, in this way, the revolutionary aspect that the plurality of alternative ways of life currently proliferating give themselves — are these not the new lie that adopts the face of criticism today? This excessive politicization of existence, this unavowed desire to make oneself an example to follow — is this not the last myth to be destroyed?

i wonder if she is exemplary of this in some way, her tied so deeply in her practice as an artist and having her theory, she desires to instantiate something. it is perhaps not uncommon, to want to be example and authority. i also return to the very end of this:

To set out from this wound, as our concrete starting point: the point where denied being ceases to lie to itself, and grasps itself from within the gap between lived unreality and the derealization of its being.

hoping that i am at least somewhere in this region, the gap, i can only grope in the dark and in pain, but i feel in communion with corporeality and the suffering of not knowing, rich experiences they are i suppose, or hope. but i don't know.

i just want to understand, what i don't really know. possibility of new forms of life, or to grasp what i can't tolerate about this life, about these surroundings, the pain and so on, the pain of being disappointed and the intolerability of not being able to articulate something so i may be left to life, so everyone could be left to living. it feels so impossible.

perhaps i am too lazy and wrong in my readings, perhaps i have to become some sort of leftcom or something, hate all the french people i love, submit myself to some immortal material science. but the french feel right and coming across people who hate them deeply, haters of deleuze and bataille, you encounter such odd turns in their explications of their hate. i came across someone hating bataille earlier, they began being very queerphobic about geneis p orridge, it feels utterly pointless to go there, even as one is trying to make some point about how extreme art of that nature, in debt to bataille by some measure, is easily absorbed by the art world and easily sold. it is true, but we cannot blame bataille for this, i think. we can only attempt to take him where no one would like to buy, but they would like to see. an image you can see freely, without cost, not being given away but penetrating you as you penetrate it. somewhere beyond representation, merely, at least. i dunno. i wonder if i am just stupid and really can't read or something.

obviously, i will not become a leftcom, i don't even really know what that entails. i have taken up this position of being totally lost and caught in these throes of pain and intolerability. it is my lot in life.

anyway, i am gonna get thru six of the songs tonight, that's good, but it's 6 am i have spent too long in the sort of miserable nexus of thinking too much about things that get me nowhere and touch on passions and non-passions of mine, the pointless bickering among my kind, and the heat of trying to express a way out, trying to know who is saying anything, trusting/not trusting senses. it's odd. i am having a friend over tomorrow. i really should be getting to sleep now. ... ugh. and it's so fucking hot in here now.

i wonder now about reading steyer's essay about objects, i wonder if i try and think of ways out of what she says or ways to exceed it. she talks of turning to images, as becoming an object, i suppose though we might want to imagine an inversion, that at this stage, we are objects, we are categories and bases of knowledge, data is an object now, we are clusters of data, we are the database in some sense. what of internal relations within the object and its non-compliance, its being an image, myself the object, and imprinted on by images, and the failed relation back to then norm, noncommunicative moments, and so on? this is i guess what i want to get at in some ways and have theorized but perhaps i should take what she says as less something that affirms what i say, which is what i thought really, it felt like i could see someone agreeing, was she? i don't know. her desire to fall back on weird platitudes, to evoke fanon in an essay of hers and totally fail his project, it seems counter to the idea of her trying to know the objectified as perhaps capable, not just feeling but attempting something, ways out, to become. it is difficult.

everything is difficult.

but these songs sound good at least... so that's yay... also yay are these mag scans i found of kera magazine today:

love the pixel event hunting thing... gotta crib that maybe...

anyways. i am tired and it is freaking 6 am w t f !!

so

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[modernerrors]

Skimming Briefly Through Some Historical Points, to Remind us that the Racial Condemnation we are Subject to Now, is Out-Of-Kilter.

Beliefs

People in Britain, probably more than any other country, have seen many races and cultures come to live here. Tolerant people are generally civil to others, so that, many were accepting of these different ones coming and settling. Partly because of colonialism, there was a readiness to open the country to these foreigners, from many different places. Jews and Africans had already come to Britain throughout the 1800s and earlier. Jews had come to UK in the 11th century, but during those medieval centuries, there was much unrest and upheaval. They came, at a later date, they got expelled, and so did other forms of religious cultures and peoples. There was continual hostility between Roman Catholics and Protestants, right up until the 20th century, fed by fear of reprisal from leaders in Court circles. Race was not so much the problem as forms of Christianity. Yet, Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism all had their basis in the twelve tribes of Israel, and the Messiah, of Whom we read in the New Testament.

Non-nationals

Describing words … cannot use certain ones today …were just that – adjectives. They may or may not have had emotions behind them, they were just useful adjectives of the time. Victorian novels unashamedly use the sensible words ‘Jews’, Negroes … and many others that I don’t dare put here, because political correctness took over where Victorian etiquette left off. NB [Apparently Africans first came to Britain in the Roman army in 2nd and 3rd centuries]

People are Tribal

Humankind has been tribal since Biblical times. People in many countries, even in these modern times, stare attentively at people who do not look or behave like they do. Having lived in the Middle East and the Far East, I can testify to that. Offence can be taken ,,, or not. That response is usually within us all depending on upbringing, and if one grows up in a family where there is nurturing and confidence to see friendship, in the world, then offence will not be a problem to those fortunate ones. Words will not take that optimistic confidence away from such people.

Like Attracts Like

Employment, schooling, socialising … all these things are subject to our tribal instincts. We continue to see how communities are drawn together by their ‘alikeness’. For one instance, take food – the food that settlers are culturally used to, will remain their diet, and generally they do not try different foods. That is why we have Chinese, Indian, African … etc, all with their own shops and produce. These differing shopping cultures have changed the look of many high streets. Nevertheless … Live and Let Live.

An Alternative View Point

Racism or other types of activism are not the main problem, or even the motivation. Rebellion, violence and an upbringing that has formed hate, resentment and intolerance, will show itself whenever challenged and any reason will be used by such people, just so that they can let loose what has been encouraged in the home.

The Contrite English

Too many of us, are gullible to the modern interpretationof history, too ready to accept the condemnation of our history as well as our modern-day lives. Yet consciences had to grow into the empathy that we now encourage, and life was not as it is now. The growing and developing of conscience may seem unrealistic, because every small thing, especially cute animals, makes us feel soft and emotional. Yet the hard living of earlier times had not produced softened conscience. Reading Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens [and the life of John Newton] can help us understand how awareness of hardship began to affect treatment towards others. The whole world has gone on the same journey, and thinking in particular of African tribes that sold their own people into slavery, [read Olaudah Equiano] also need to change their mindset. Contrition is a Biblical trait, but on the other hand – accepting guilt that is not real, is dis-empowering.

Having said all this, we have a Creator God Who puts all things right, at the end.

[allysketches]

what's ur opinion on TERFs

not welcome in this blog or anywhere near me in general, in fact, if I see someone like that interacting with my posts it's an automatic report/block.

but I understand the ask and I must make it clear that I want nothing to do with that vile woman who shall not be named as I stand for everything that she's against, and since I can't simply delete her from reality (or send her to prison, since, frankly, that's where she should be) the least I can do is be vocal about it.

it pains me and saddens me deeply that this beloved story that has been for so long a refuge to many people, especially those of marginalised groups and minorities that saw themselves in some aspect of this fantastical world, despite its flaws, and felt empowered by its positive themes - friendship, acceptance, belonging and its power to triumph over evil and hatred - turned out to be written by this terrible, hateful, egotistical person that is now actively harassing and persecuting one of these marginalised group non-stop and with seemingly no consequences... it would be ironic if it wasn't utterly tragic and didn't have very real consequences to very real people.

this simply isn't something we can overlook. she is using her influence and her money to hurt people, and the more she gets the more evil she'll do. trans people's lives have to come first, so above anything, support them, amplify their voices, do what you can. I, for a while now, no longer consume or support anything officially hp, the movies, the books, licenced merch, bc under no circumstances I want to support this woman, whatever small the difference may be at the end of the day...

and, for this same reason, I heavily debated for a long time if I should even post anything hp related to begin with and why I ultimately decided to. I saw how the fandom reclaimed this story and characters and made it their own, working with passion and creativity to transform this universe, each making small differences for the better, to give it more depth, make it more unique, more personal, diverse and inclusive - from short headcanons, to gigantic fics - and so I thought that maybe that's what matters: this collective transformative power, building a wonderful, welcoming community for everyone. adding your own voice to a conversation but also listening to others. going against whatever the creator thinks or wants, in favour of your peers.

it is an admirable thing to love something and not only be capable of acknowledging its flaws, but to try to make it better. 

and for those that grew up comforted by this story, and realised, because of it, that you were not alone, that there is a place for you, that you could be truly yourself and be loved for it: all of this still stands true, nothing that that woman says or does can destroy that, you already yield the power of this message and the meaning of it lies with you, not with her. we can't let the bigots win.

[tanadrin]

one last thing about religion: i’m always especially skeptical when people argue that while Christianity may be narrow-minded and intolerant at times, Judaism is different and the criticisms of Christianity cannot apply to Judaism. There are enough people like Shalom Auslander who have talked about their experience with religious abuse and scrupulosity in Judaism that I think it’s fair to say that the experiences of certain people raised in Christianity and certain people raised in Judaism is at times eerily similar; like Christianity, Judaism is not a monolith, and while your experience of Judaism may be more open and tolerant, so are most people’s experience of Christianity. The existence of healthy Jewish spirituality does not invalidate the experiences of people raised with repressive and unhealthy Jewish spirituality, any more than the existence of mainline Protestantism negates the existence of those polygamist compounds in rural Utah.

Religion can be, among many things, an instrument for the exercise of power; and of course people with positive experiences of an institution or belief system are going to discount abusive instances of this as an aberration, just like people who are enthusiastic about the positives of democracy (or Marxism-Leninism, or psychiatry, or high school, or anything else) are going to discount its failures, or attribute them to aberrations of the system, or to misreporting, or to outright lies. That doesn’t mean those criticisms are actually wrong or in bad faith. And while you may be convinced that your version of the religion is the True and Unaltered Form that embodies its spirit, there are plenty of abusive assholes who will say the same about their version of religion, so it seems to me that it’s really beside the point.

And you can try to separate bad conduct from the institution itself, but I think then you will fail to understand the way that a particular institution can facilitate that bad conduct, like trying to understand why some cops are abusive while refusing to understand the problems with the institution of the police, or why doctors can be abusive without understanding the social role and attitude we have toward the medical establishment.

[hillbillyoracle]

Shadow Work and the Language of Trauma

***note: this is not a well thought-out essay, it's three ideas in a trench coat. please forgive the spelling mistakes and understand that this is a thought process not a thought finished ***

It is my great hope that the way we talk about trauma has a fundamental reckoning soon.

The toll moralistic language around trauma has taken on me personally has been staggering and I can't imagine I'm the only person. What I mean by that is how western psychology in particular responded to the research around trauma by spreading this message of "it's not your fault" and "you didn't deserve that" and "you're not a bad person".

"What? But it's true!" you might say. Well, it's true - in a specific context. But when it's generalized there are issues that come from using such heavy language like "deserve", "bad", and "fault". I've seen a progressive uptick in people using the language of trauma in contexts where it really does not apply as talking about trauma (in this loaded moral way) is normalized*.* I think I've seen it most often used to escape the discomfort of being held accountable but I've also been seeing it used to hide an intolerance for experiences someone merely does not enjoy by moralizing it through the language of trauma and integrating it through a traumatic narrative instead of actually attending to the tolerance issue.

Example: Person A is upset with Person B. Person A is speaking in a way Person B does not like but that they are not unhealthy or abusive for doing so (ie. being slightly louder than Person B would prefer, naming their experience of a situation in a different way than Person B would). Person B physically and emotionally cannot tolerate this exposure to something they don't like but rather than use a healthy coping mechanism like breathwork and then active listening, they connect the discomfort with a past largely dissimilar traumatic experience and begin to paint Person A as if they're being abusive for doing what they don't like - "Stop yelling at me!" or "You're gaslighting me!" For Person A, this send the message their neutral/healthy behavior is actually abusive and bad and healthy behavior is only what Person B has a tolerance for.

Here's the rub of it though. Person B's lack of physical and emotional tolerance is itself a symptom of past trauma. Connecting the experience to unrelated trauma and painting the other person as abusive as a way to deal with that intolerance is also a trauma response. But for Person A this is fresh trauma or possibly retraumatizing depending on their experiences.

Everyone involved is dealing with trauma, but since trauma carries this moral weight in our discussions, Person B is highly incentivized to focus the conversation on their trauma so they can escape being a "bad" person. Moral language tends to be totalizing meaning Person A might not feel like they can acknowledge Person B's past trauma for fear of their own being erased and not getting support. It's a bad fucking time.

This situation is not one of resilience, it makes communities weaker, and it's a conversation trauma professionals are only relatively recently having. But those of you who've been here a minute know I'm not really social theorist, I'm a shadow worker.

And my concern with is that this type of moralizing and the trauma-as-coping-mechanism in particular pose a real risk for shadow workers who don't confront and name it in themselves and others. For a few reasons.

For one, trauma is fundamentally disruptive to how we organize our personhood - an importance factor in doing magic - and if you are in a position where you're either using your trauma to moralize your way out of situations you can't tolerate or having to be around someone who is doing that frequently, there's a high incentive not to integrate fully, to give up your Power generally so you can exert what seems like more control in the micro of how those situations play out. By incentive I mean - who the fuck wants to be the "bad" person at the end of that and if "good" people are the one that's more traumatized than the other, well...you see where I'm going. If your immediate circumstances are so compelling that giving up your Power feels like a matter of life and death - it's going to be hard to do any integration work that doesn't immediately get undone.

Because of it's impact on Power, any spellwork done on the issue - without remediation for the issue itself - is likely to get weaker and be less helpful as time wears on. It's just kind of a black hole of a situation.

Two, it encourages black and white thinking which is at odds with Reality and you can't reshape reality skillfully if your view to begin with is prone to narrowing and narrowing. Not only are you less likely to assess and isolate an accurate root cause to perform work on, you're also less likely to select an effective spell given the situation in front of you. If you're continually using trauma-as-coping-mechanism and villainizing other people for what some part of you likely knows is totally neutral behavior, you're more likely to isolate them as the root cause and cast spell toward changing them. There are two outcomes from this - the spell work works on them but doesn't ultimately achieve what you want because what you really want is to be safe and they weren't being unsafe to begin with or, what more likely from what I've seen, the spellwork doesn't work because a faction of you knows that the root cause is inside you - which can even lead to curses or cutting ties to backfire on to you if you're not careful.

Okay so what do you do? To be honest, I've not seen a specific modality that works terribly effectively on this. I wish socially we'd have a reckoning and that would help a good many people. The best I have is something that I know will be incredibly unpopular but - stop moralizing trauma. Both people who've caused it and people who have it. I think the prospect of that is so scary because people think it's the only way to hold abusers accountable for their actions. But I promise you it's not. In actuality, labeling someone as "bad" is more harmful for us and holds less weight than talking about the material harms their abuse has had on us. I include emotional harm in material harms because I mean, it is. The body and the mind aren't separate so feelings are material.

From the prior example, maybe Person A makes the decision not to participate in the moralizing and instead stops to name the harms Person B's coping mechanism is having on them - confusing healthy behavior with preferred behavior, distress at being told a neutral/healthy behavior is abusive and by extension they're bad and deserving of being socially isolated or worse. Even Person B doesn't respond in a material perspective, Person A retains their Power by naming what's happening in reality as they see it and not fracturing to maintain the high ground.

Better yet, Person B, when they can't tolerate the actions Person A is doing that they don't like, could name that - "I'm having trouble tolerating what you're doing even though it's neutral/healthy. Parts of me want to say what you're doing is abusive even though in reality it is not." Then Person B would be able to rob the trauma-as-coping mechanism of it's appeal and retain their Power as well.

Clarity of language, free for the totalizing effects of morality, I think is the clearest path forward to putting down the trauma-as-coping mechanism. But it has to go both ways; stop using it for those who've harmed you and stop using it to describe yourself. I know that's the part I'm still struggling with a lot.

Anyways, I hope this is helpful to someone out there. You're not bad person for overgeneralizing your trauma to cope with things you merely dislike - but it does, in my experience, come at a cost to your ability to do effective spellwork. It's worth looking at the cost and seeing if it's worth continuing to use the coping mechanism to you.

[lettersfromthelevant]

Currently reading through various articles on this lady, and she is all kinds of weird. She is very much one of those alt-leftie breeds of Xian, who pretends to have unlearned all of the harmful parts of Xianity, while still happily participating in bigoted Xian rhetoric and "No True Scotsman-ing" shitty Xians, along with scapegoating the absolute fuck out of the OT. She has repeatedly taken her congregations to mosques, synagogues, and Buddhist temples so they can observe the way other religions practice. Not too bad on the surface, but combined with how she actually talks about other religions, it's clear she is one of those "hate the sin, love the sinner" types just of a different flavor.

She also cannot take her own advice to save her fucking life:

She did not learn her lesson. How is that little sermon she gave up there any different from the dangerously condensed lessons she gave in college? She is still isolating her sermons from real world politics by completely ignoring the dangers of deicide rhetoric. The entire concept of deicide is what resulted in 2,000 years of violent persecution and the deaths of millions of Jews. How are her constituents going to substitute their ignorance of Jews with anything but negative stereotypes when she is literally platforming blood libel?

And yet she still preaches the one piece of antisemitic conspiracy that has probably done the most damage to us over time. Cool. Way to not unlearn any of your own bullshit, Barb. It's not enough to just say, "I don't hate Jews anymore." You have to actually introspect and look at how your culture hurt us. If you continue to ignore how Xianity has been the direct cause of probably the worst instances of antisemitism in history, then you aren't actually listening to Jews. I'm curious what synagogues she was going to, for them to be so unwilling to hold her up to legitimate questioning of her antisemitism and the inherent incompatibility of Xianity and tolerance. I'm guessing the massive congregation of white, intolerant Xians she brought along with her was probably intimidating to the poor temples she was visiting.

She isn't teaching about the inherent dangers of Xianity, she's teaching people how to use the No True Scotsman fallacy. You can't effectively discourage bigotry in Xians if you aren't actually addressing how the scripture itself is bigoted. If your only point is that Xianity got "hijacked" and that people are just interpreting the scripture wrong, then you aren't fixing anything. There is just so much wrong with her method of doing things, I could write a thesis on it.

Also, can we stop letting Xians teach world religion and theology classes? The universalizing religious culture that violently oppressed and proselytized the entire world because it fucking hates other cultures so much, does not need to be the one in charge of teaching about other cultures.

[arcticdementor]

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

…

It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

…

That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

…

I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. 

…

What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

…

The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks.

…

Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

…

And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

…

The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

…

What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in.

…

The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

[evindimeta]

Are You Experiencing Some of the Common Symptoms of Ascension?

(Long Post)

Some of you may find this helpful, please only take what helps and do not worry or fret if something in this list does not resonate with you. You can take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. That is okay.

Those who need to hear this will be drawn to it, for that is the way of our great Universe.

~ Blessings to All ~

I was just looking at quite a few pages of COVID long haulers support groups...where a COVID-positive was indicated and they have not fully recovered their well being. 85% of the descriptions of their symptoms (which are found as negative health concerns) are labelled as COVID...some are being told it’s Lyme, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue among other unknown causes. As I reviewed the endless lists and common symptoms I found that they are very similar to ascension symptoms.

However most do not realize that they are going through a physical change in their DNA structure. Those who are aware and have gone through the many waves of change understand and roll with the fatigue and other symptoms in gratitude and not fear, trusting and seeing the positive change in who they are as this occurs. It is a leaving or shedding what has been known... to reveal the true self within.

I felt it would be supportive for you, and for your friends and loved ones to review to find a “positive outlook” on a changing body and world. May this fill you with hope, for all are emerging through this great transformation.

PLEASE NOTE: This article is based on work presented by Samuel Greenberg's original list and is not authored by Dr. Nickerson. Before you read this, realize that you are okay and that what you are experiencing is "The SHIFT". This is a normal process when the universal vibrational energy forces you to rise above your normal 3D level of existence here on Earth.  It’s all okay.  When in doubt, please see your doctor to confirm to alleviate fear.

Ascension Symptoms:

1. Feeling as though you are in a pressure cooker or in intense energy; feeling stress. Remember, you are adjusting to a higher vibration and you will eventually adjust. Old patterns, behaviors and beliefs are also being pushed to the surface. There is a lot going on inside of you.

2. A feeling of disorientation; not knowing where you are; a loss of a sense of place. You are not in 3D anymore, as you have moved or in the process of moving into the higher realms.

3. Unusual aches and pains throughout different parts of your body. You are purifying and releasing blocked energy vibrating at 3D, while you are vibrating in a higher dimension.

4. Waking at night between 2 and 4 a.m. Much is going on in your dream state. You can’t be there for long lengths of time and need a break. This is also the ‘cleansing and releasing’ hour.

5. Memory loss. A great abundance of short term memory loss and only vague remembrances of your past. You are in more than one dimension at a time, and going back and forth as part of the transition, you are experiencing a ‘disconnect’. Also, your past is part of the Old, and the Old is forever gone. Being in the Now is the way of the New World.

6. ‘Seeing’ and ‘hearing’ things. You are experiencing different dimensions as you transition, all according to how sensitive you are and how you are wired.

7. Loss of identity. You try to access the Old you, but it is no longer there. You may not know who you are looking at in the mirror. You have cleared much of your old patterns and are now embodying much more light and a simpler, more purified divine you. All is in order, You are okay.

8. Feeling ‘out of body’. You may feel as though someone is talking, but it is not you. This is our natural defense mechanism of survival when we are under acute stress or feeling traumatized or out of control. Your body is going through a lot and you may not want to be in it. My ascension guide told me that this was a way of easing the transition process, and that I did not need to experience what my body was going through. This only lasted a short time. It passes.

9. Periods of deep sleeping. You are resting from all the acclimating and are integrating, as well as building up for the next phase.

10. Heightened sensitivities to your surroundings. Crowds, noise, foods, TV, other human voices and various other stimulations are barely tolerable. You also overwhelm very easily and become easily overstimulated. You are tuning up. Know that this will eventually pass.

11. You don’t feel like doing anything. You are in a rest period, ‘rebooting’. Your body knows what it needs. In addition, when you begin reaching the higher realms, ‘doing’ and ‘making things happen’ becomes obsolete as the New energies support the feminine of basking, receiving, creating, self-care and nurturing. Ask the Universe to ‘bring’ you what you want while you are enjoying yourself and having fun.

12. An intolerance for lower vibrational things of the 3D, reflected in conversations, attitudes, societal structures, healing modalities, etc. They literally make you feel ‘sick’ inside. You are in a higher vibration and your energies are no longer in alignment. You are being ‘pushed, to move forward; to ‘be’ and create the New.

13. A loss of desire for food. Your body is adjusting to a new, higher state of being. Also, part of you does not want to be here anymore in the Old.

14. A sudden disappearance of friends, activities, habits, jobs and residences. You are evolving beyond what you used to be, and these people and surroundings no longer match your vibration. The New will soon arrive and feel so-o-o-o much better.

15. You absolutely cannot do certain things anymore. When you try to do your usual routine and activities, it feels downright awful. You are evolving beyond what you used to be, and these people and surroundings no longer match your vibration. The New will soon arrive and feel so-o-o-o much better.

16. Days of extreme fatigue. Your body is losing density and going through intense restructuring.

17. A need to eat often along with what feels like attacks of low blood sugar. Weight gain, especially in the abdominal area. A craving for protein. You are requiring an enormous amount of fuel for this ascension process. Weight gain with an inability to loose it no matter what you do is one of the most typical experiences. Trust that your body knows what it is doing.

18. Experiencing emotional ups and downs; weeping. Our emotions are our outlet for release, and we are releasing a lot.

19. A wanting to go Home, as if everything is over and you don’t belong here anymore. We are returning to Source. Everything is over, but many of us are staying to experience and create the New World. Also, our old plans for coming have been completed.

20. Feeling you are going insane, or must be developing a mental illness of some sort. You are rapidly experiencing several dimensions and greatly opening. Much is available to you now. You are just not used to it. Your awareness has been heightened and your barriers are gone. This will pass and you will eventually feel very at Home like you have never felt before, as Home is now here.

21. Anxiety and panic. Your ego is losing much of itself and is afraid. Your system is also on overload. Things are happening to you that you may not understand. You are also losing behavior patterns of a lower vibration that you developed for survival in 3D. This may make you feel vulnerable and powerless. These patterns and behaviors you are losing are not needed in the higher realms. This will pass and you will eventually feel so much love, safety and unity. Just wait.

22. Depression. The outer world may not be in alignment with the New, higher vibrational you. It doesn’t feel so good out there. You are also releasing lower, darker energies and you are ‘seeing’ through them. Hang in there.

23. Vivid, wild and sometimes violent dreams. You are releasing many, many lifetimes of lower vibrational energy. Many are now reporting that they are experiencing beautiful dreams. Your dream state will eventually improve and you will enjoy it again. Some experience this releasing while awake. My mother commented one day that she believed I was having nightmares in the daytime.

24. Night sweats and hot flashes. Your body is ‘heating’ up as it burns off residue.

25. Your plans suddenly change in mid-stream and go in a completely different direction. Your soul is balancing out your energy. It usually feels great in this new direction, as your soul knows more than you do. It is breaking your ‘rut’ choices and vibration.

26. You have created a situation that seems like your worst nightmare, with many ‘worst nightmare’ aspects to it. Your soul is guiding you into ‘stretching’ into aspects of yourself where you were lacking, or into ‘toning down’ aspects where you had an overabundance. Your energy is just balancing itself.

 Remember.....Finding your way to peace through this situation is the test you have set up for yourself. This is your journey, and your soul would not have set it up if you weren’t ready. You are the one who finds your way out and you will. 

Looking back, you will have gratitude for the experience and realize that you are a different person.

I hope this helps.

[conservativetradlife]

I saw your less white post about coca cola and thought, wouldn't being 'less white' be cultural appropriation or something bad like that? Like wtf are they thinking? Smh.

I’ve decided to go in depth with my thoughts on this, but its a bit of a book. If you want to read the details you’ll find them under the cut, but I thought I’d give my two cents at the chance that someone might agree or see where the problems lie with this situation as a whole. That being said, I presume I’ll end up having people attack me about this post, so know I’m just a random person on the internet with opinions which might vary from your own. Please be respectful.

If the logic here is ‘if you’re not as white, you’re something else’ then I can agree with that to some degree, but I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘cultural appropriation.’ 

Cultural Appropriation is defined by Wikipedia (so take this with a grain of salt) as adopting elements or identities of a culture which is not your own. (As cited from the page) This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures. In the case of what Coca Cola is requesting, this would be “White People”, taking on manners or elements of an identity which is not their own by shedding their identity (as ‘white) and adjusting it to whatever is requested of them (acting not white) 

The problem therein lies when what is asked of someone is not the way they act naturally (or as expected) simply due to their racial identity. This would be similar to lumping together a majority of people, over the actions or behaviors of a minority of that particular race (to generalize this is stereotyping.)

To say ‘Every white person is racist and thusly they need to stop being racist by doing ‘A B & C’’ (in this case, Coca Cola hosted an online training program for their employees, which included slides that say “Understand what it means to be white” along with a list of personal traits to adopt which explain how to be less white.) This in itself is stereotyping a particular race of people by actions which can’t be justifiably lumped together as a guarantee of the thoughts and opinions of all people who fall under the term ‘Caucasian’/’White’. To do so with other races would result in a backlash being labelled as racist to that particular race. 

This list that was provided in the slide (unless my link is removed because said tweet is deleted in the interim) include things like ‘be less oppressive’ ‘be less arrogant’ ‘be less ignorant’ ‘break with apathy’ ‘break with white solidarity’. 

What I have found that most Caucasian people I have met feel as though they cannot defend themselves or their values without being labelled as racist or objective to change in themselves. The idea that ‘White People’ are racist has become what a majority of people (including other Caucasian folks) believe. To object to changing oneself to match what people believe to be coincided with White Behavior, is to offer allowance to racism and bigotry toward POC.

The behavior changes which were cited in the slide are generalizing to what they (being those who created the slideshow in the first place) believe all Caucasian people to be. The Coca Cola company is saying, that White People are oppressive, we are arrogant, we are defensive, we are ignorant. These are things they (the Coca Cola company) believe should be changed about their White employees and say these are things that all their White Employees have in common and thusly they should be made to acknowledge and change.

If the shoe was on the other foot (if for example, they used Native American folks or other People of Color) and there were demands in place that their generalized behaviour was offensive enough to warrant a slideshow to expect change to act ‘Less ___’ any whistleblowers who chose to react to said behavior would demand that the company be ‘cancelled’ and all product cease purchase in solidarity to those who were wronged by said offensive/abusive content.

People have just begun to accept that White Guilt is an acceptable way to live. That those who have been wronged in the past, those who have been discriminated in the past have the right to repeat the behavior now to all of those who share similar traits to their historical oppressors. I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist. I am saying that most people I know aren’t racist. 

As a conservative I can say all of the people I have met have been uniquely opinionated and racism in general isn’t tolerated amongst a great deal of us. This includes racism towards white people as well. I personally believe that most people are guilty until proven innocent. I never assume that someone is racist before meeting them, but allow their actions to speak for them. This might sound preachy, but I generally expect similar treatment in return. When someone calls me racist as a call to win an argument (example, having a conversation with a customer while I was working in which an item could not be returned and was referred to as racist when I told the customer I could not help them with a return as I wasn’t in the returns area of the store, but rather, front end.)

I am defensive because I am not a racist person, and calling someone something doesn’t make it true. I’m not racist for denying the customers return. It wasn’t an issue about race, it was an issue about my checkout counter not allowing me to make returns in the Front End. When everything becomes a race issue, the world proves its general intolerance to one another.

I don’t need to change myself as I don’t view myself as a racist nor do I feel prejudice towards people who have different skin tones, ethnicities or cultures than my own. I am not threatened by other races. I am not hateful towards people of different races, cultures or ethnicities to myself because that isn’t the kind of person I am. Coca-Cola chose to generalize people and attempt to rob them of their own right to their autonomy simply because of a generalized coloring of their skin. There is no other race which would tolerate such a display of blatant racism, nor be as well received by apologists than White people. 

We can’t be anything but who we are. Until someone shows their inner thoughts about race issues, which can be honestly deemed as racist (general intolerance, name calling, denial of rights and freedoms or belief that ones race determines ones superiority over another) then one should be presumed to be not racist. 

That’s just my two cents on the matter.

[thebibliosphere]

So, your post(s) about anaphylaxis is making my red flags wave. Would it be possible for anaphylaxis to start, instead of immediately after eating the food, after you've eaten so much your body can't tolerate it? I've had gastrointestinal symptoms for years, but all my specialists just sorta threw their hands up in the air since it doesn't match symptoms for anything else. Hope you're having a good day ^-^

Hey Dawnie

I’m going to put this under a cut cause it gets really long, but the tl;dr version of this reply is yes, yes it is.

So the way histamine intolerance works, is that sometimes the person can tolerate certain foods in small doses, but if their body gets overloaded, it builds up and up because people with HIT and damaged mast cells, can’t process it out their system the way healthy people do, (there’s some enzyme we’re lacking in) and it can trigger the mast cells into a degranulation, and then the person may experience anaphylaxis or milder symptoms like itching, or gastrointestinal symptoms. The analogy used is often a “histamine bucket”, in that if something is full, and you keep adding to it, it will eventually spillover. (Although more recently they’ve updated it to “histamine window” as in “your window of tolerance” for something.)

So for example, I eat spinach in moderation every day, which is an incredibly high histamine food, but also extremely high in nutritional value and I desperately need everything it can provide me to deal with my pernicious and regular anemia. The reason my body can tolerate it, however, in small regular doses, is because I emptied out my “histamine bucket” through avoiding all my triggers as best I can, which includes things like other high histamine foods that I do not need to survive (chocolate, tea, alcohol, etc), external triggers like dust, pollen, strong scents, strenuous exercise (due to the hormones released), exposure to certain chemicals, and yes also stress because stress causes your body to create excess cortisol which is a mast cell destabilizer, which is also why they think HIT/MCAS is more common in people with PTSD due to the damage untreated and prolonged stress can do to the endocrine system, but that’s a whole other post I could go into for hours. 

Unfortunately, you cannot completely eradicate histamines from your food, as all foods have histamine, just some more than others. But even then we need to eat some of those high histamine things, cause without them we become malnourished. Which is why you’ll find me, trying to put new foods back into my diet every now and then, with my epi-pens out on the table, my phone readily available, and always under the supervision of an adult who knows how to use my epi-pen and to call 911 if something goes wrong. Cause as scary as it is, I’m not about to nearly die from malnourishment again. (Putting foods back in, however, is a thing only to be attempted under medical guidance, and done incredibly slowly and one at a time so as not to flood your system.)

I’m also able to regulate symptoms with antiallergen meds like xyzal, although for some people with HIT (which some doctors now believe to be part of the lower end of the MCAS spectrum disorder, and not separate like previously thought) antihistamines can stop the body from processing histamine properly, which can also lead to further complications, so really it’s the luck of your genetics and the severity of symptoms. For me, I can’t stop it or my PoTS symptoms go off the charts, even though I’ve been taking it for so long it no longer helps with day to day symptoms like pollen or dust. Some people also become reactive to the fillers in the meds over time, which is why a lot of MCAS patients require their medications to be individually compounded to their needs.

There are some other supplements you can take which are mast cell regulators. Quercitin comes to mind as being extremely effective, and there’s some evidence to show that vitamin c can help the body process out excess histamine, but the dosage required can affect other meds so should always be consulted with over a doctor first. The supplements, however, do need to be as refined as possible, and avoiding triggers in the fillers and bindings of pills is probably the hardest part about using them to help your body deal with its shit.

Lack of sleep is also a huge factor because if you’re not sleeping, your body isn’t processing things out the way it should and that can also affect your mast cell stability.Also being low on Vitamin D, as Vitamin D is necessary for healthy mast cells, so if you’re deficient you may find yourself developing new or intensifying allergies as the mast cells start to break down.

I also saw your comment on my other post re: seizures, and while seizures are not a particularly common symptom of MCAS, due to the fact that there are mast cells in literally every part of your body, they can and do affect brain function (as well as the blood-brain-barrier) which can result in seizures for some people. For me, it used to be debilitating migraines that felt like I was going to go blind from the pain. I used to lie on the floor and writhe while clutching my head. Now when I get migraines, they’re still bad, and can really make me ill, but nothing as bad as they used to be in my teens, when, with hindsight, I was dealing with a lot of stress and unfolding trauma.

So, tl;dr reply to your question: Yes, sometimes you can eat certain things in small amounts and be just fine, but if something tips the scales of your balance, it can result in symptoms of MCAS flares and even anaphylaxis if severe enough.

For me, food, environment, and stress are my biggest triggers (so just y’know, life) and  I have to take steps to regulate those things as best I can to keep my body under control. If I recall, you already have an MCAS doctor, did they try you on a low histamine elimination diet? Did they talk to you about other external triggers and how to avoid them? Did they mention lifestyle changes and therapy for helping you to manage stress better? If not, they really need to because those all first-line responses to HIT/MCAS (along with appropriate medication) and I’m a little surprised they didn’t tell you about histamine build-up through certain foods!NB for anyone reading this: I’m more comfortable giving Dawnie in-depth info about certain meds and supplements because we are friends and I know something of their situation. If you’re reading any of this and it sounds familiar, please speak to a doctor first before attempting to self regulate or medicate. The treatment for MCAS is almost as dangerous (in terms of high risk for malnutrition) as the illness itself.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

How do I write a world where non-earth religions (I’m creating them) are both diverse, and also common place to see people participate in multiple religions’ festivities or rituals. One, because there’s distance to actual religion and entering common lifestyle. Example like on earth plenty of non Christians are holding Christmas parties, it’s a common thing and not overtly religious. Two, or why not because of the diversity, religions simply mix together. Like on earth why not have fasting like Muslims do simply become a common lifestyle custom alongside Buddhist meditations also being common lifestyle customs. Three. Like two, but why can’t someone on earth be both Muslim and Buddhist?? Does that even make sense?

I only gave you real life religions as example only, for ease of explaining, not at all what I’ll use.

Also in this kind of world, how would you see religious tolerance? Can it honestly really be in harmony? How about the bigots? There’s still got to be some won’t there? Especially when daily lifestyles, or simply in the architecture and design throw all sorts of religion in their faces they can’t avoid unless they live under a rock.

Feral:

I’m not sure what the question is here. Should some people in your world participate in religious festivals that do not align with their beliefs? It’s certainly possible, and it depends on the religion in question. Christianity is inherently an evangelical religion; “witnessing” is the call of every Christian, so Christian religious activities tend to be geared towards welcoming non-believers with the intent on making them believers. Not to mention nearly all Christian festivals were the festivals of other religions that Christians reshaped into their own. And not to mention the commercialization of Christmas specifically has fundamentally changed how Christmas is viewed by Christians and non-Christians alike; I’ve heard it said, and am inclined to believe more or less, that even Christians in Victorian England really didn’t celebrate Christmas until Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol.” So, Christmas, for example, is of such mixed ancestry and exists in such a way as to be welcome for outsiders to “celebrate” without already believing in the underlying religion. It’s very important to keep in mind that this happens in culturally Christian regions or where Christmas has been so commercialized that people couldn’t even tell you its religious significance; and a lot of people of minority religions really fucking hate it - it’s insulting to be told that displaying a hanukiah at work is against company policy because you can’t have anything overtly religious on display when you’re surrounded by Christmas trees and listening to Christmas carols like “Oh Holy Night” piped in over the sound system. So you’ll want to keep in mind that some people will view a religious festival that’s “ubiquitously” celebrated as a dominant religion being forced on them at the expense of their own religious identity. You’ll also likely have religions that don’t proselytize and have absolutely no interest whatsoever in non-believers participating in their holy days - they’re holy! They’re meant for the people who already believe.

I’ve already briefly touched on why some religions would have a problem with non-believers crowding in on their holidays, but it’s worth repeating - not all religions are like Christianity. I’d go so far as to say that no other religions are like Christianity in this particular way. As for your examples regarding “Muslim fasting” and “Buddhist meditation”? People do fast. People do meditate. And it has nothing to do with religion. A lot of what makes “Muslim fasting” Muslim is prayer and dedication to Allah; if you’re removing that religious aspect of it, then you’re just fasting. And fasting is part of a number of religions, so it’s really hard to say which religion it comes from once the religion has been stripped away. As for meditation, meditation gained a lot of traction in the West because of the explosion of yoga. Which is a religious practice in Hinduism and Buddhism (and Jainism). It’s just been stripped of the religion, and like with fasting, meditation is found in many religions around the world; it’s just not that unique.

So, Buddhism is quite famous for being adoptable into other religious practices. Like if you had asked “why can’t someone be Muslim and Hindu?” my answer would have to be a run-down of the many fundamental theological reasons why those two religions are incapable of coinciding in a single person’s beliefs; however, Buddhism or Buddhist practices can be practiced alongside most religions. It’s non-theist, so there’s no creator deity that could contradict the beliefs of monotheists, polytheists, and atheists. Buddhism and Christianity have this whole huge long history, and Buddhism and Catholicism specifically dovetail really nicely together. What you’re talking about is syncretic religion, and it’s pretty common worldwide and throughout history.

The answers to all of those questions depend so intimately on how you build your religions and what their specific beliefs are. Some religions are naturally exclusivist, or you might have soft polytheism. It’s your world and your religions; we cannot make these decisions for you. If you want fundamentalism and bigotry to be a part of your world, then you can build your religions in such a way that those things would naturally occur. If you want harmony across religions to be a part of your world, then you can build your religions in such a way that that would naturally occur. You can even have it both ways! A world is a big place, and how people interact with their religion and the religions of others depends largely on where in the world they are and who else is there with them. A cosmopolitan culture where you have everyone brushing elbows with everyone else will have people developing a tolerance and softening their hardline views that would not occur in a more homogenous society where one religion is dominant.

Delta: A note about bigotry and prejudice: In geopolitics on earth, religious intolerance tends to be about one of two things: first, the majority religion (in the western world, Christianity) feeling compelled to force itself on other populations who do not share their beliefs. Examples of this include the Spanish Inquisition and, to some extent, “evangelical aid.” In Christianity, evangelicalism is a very important concept; sharing the religion is almost as important as a person’s personal faith. Off the top of my head, as Feral discussed, I can’t think of another religion with quite the same focus; so, by eliminating this element of religion, a huge amount of conflict could be eliminated if practitioners weren’t compelled to make all their acquaintances agree with them all the time. (Which is not to say all Christians just walk around proselytizing all the time, but it is fairly common in America; though I understand it to be somewhat less common in Europe, which through both culture and law has become more secular; more on this later.)

Second, it’s also about not wanting to concede power or control. A huge motivating factor behind all the Medieval Inquisitions, including the Spanish Inquisition, was the effort to curb what people in power considered religious heresy or just straight-up religious differences. They thought it was their place to dictate a group’s religious beliefs. Spain in particular was trying to stop the spread of Islam through the growing Ottoman Empire, which comes down to Medieval geopolitics as much as it does the religious differences between Islam and Christianity. Modern Islamophobia and religious conflict falls in this category a lot, too. But if your religions weren’t tied to more extensive geopolitical conflicts, you won’t have politicians using them as leverage to take and keep power like we do, so you could reduce religious tolerance that way, too.

Finally, secularism, which doesn’t directly address your question, but I wanted to mention it. In China, the official Communist Party has been somewhat infamously aggressively secular because religion was seen as a potentially rebellious force. Soviet Russia had similar experiences, both particularly with Muslim populations with whom they have political differences with besides, religion in this instance becoming a motivating factor for rebellion.

This is different from someplace like France, which aims to simply be neutral. Europe, overall, does not share the same public religious zeal that places like Israel, America, and Saudi Arabia have, but that doesn’t mean the conflict isn’t there.

Utuabzu: Something worth considering is are these gods real in the world you’re building? If the gods are demonstrably real, religiousness will be a lot more common and people are probably going to be more accepting of those that worship different deities given that any claims about them being false are easily refuted. Another thing to consider is the difference between philosophy and religion. In the West, Christianity fills both slots for many people (Judaism and Islam also do for some). In much of Asia, however, philosophies like Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Yoga (the Hindu philosophical school, one of six major Hindu schools), etc. are practiced in addition to a more localised traditional religion, often comprised of a local pantheon of gods and some degree of ancestor worship. To some degree, even Christianity is sometimes treated like this, see the Chinese Rites controversy for example. It is entirely possible to have people simultaneously believing in local animistic deities (local forest/mountain/river gods), regional major deities (Sun god, moon god, justice god etc.) and one or more universalist philosophies. Add in the possibility of mystery religions (closed faiths that do not publicise their theologies and often don’t accept converts, see Mithraism, the Orphic Mysteries, or for a modern example, Yazidiism) and ethnic religions that don’t seek or don’t accept converts (see Judaism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism), and it is very possible to have a wide variety of beliefs coexisting in a society. If they’ve been coexisting over a long period, one would generally expect most people to be aware of the major festivals, ceremonies, etc. of each, and while some may be open to all and treated by non-believers as more of a cultural festival (probably the animist ones), others may be believers-only, or invitation-only. Some festivals might be shared by several religions, because they either come from the same root, or both revere the same prophet/saint/whatever, or both worship the same deity, or maybe just had similar festivals happening at roughly the same time and though mutual influence ended up doing them at the same time. It really depends how you’ve built these religions and what their stances on non-believers are, how long they’ve been coexisting and how orthodox/orthopraxic (emphasis on believing the right things vs. emphasis on performing rituals correctly) they are.

[rametarin]

Fiction. Is. Not. Reality.

Once upon a time, there were people that disapproved of sexual stuff in movies, comics and games, and those that were ambivilant to approving of it.

We defined them as ‘conservatives’, those that tended to defer to their organized religion or small community for those values, and ‘liberals.’ At least, here in the states. It was not accurate, but hey.

It was thought that getting your conscience from group think and religious nonsense was beneath a thinking, secular, self-actualized person that was on the side of reason, logic and facts. The path of sheep, idiots and those scared of their own reality, so they desperately clung to the abstractions presented in religious texts and the comforts of a support group that believe in it.

It was also thought that it was religion itself that made you a close minded moron that does whatever the group leader or the dogma of the text and its metaphysics says. That if religion just ceased to exist, then those close minded people would have nothing to cling to. That they’d be forced to consider the logic, facts and reason of their actions and be unable to continue down the path they were on without admitting they were wrong. That we just needed to abolish organized religion and disparage and embarrass the religious to make them see reason and abandon their faith, both personal and cultural.

That if we did that, all sexual stigmas and absurdities would give way to reasonable ones. Homophobia, intolerance of women doing stuff like wearing pants and driving. You know.

Well. Time went on, and some decidedly a-religious people started exhibiting behaviors in fandom and society while feigning being secular, empathetic, reason driven individuals. It turns out that religion doesn’t make you into a close minded psychopath, the sort that wishes those that support goofy ‘ships’ in cartoons and comic books would be raped or their children damaged/raped/murdered for the ‘ships of their parents. Those can come from decidedly agnostic/atheist people, themselves.

Turns out that petty sentiments like this don’t require organized religion, much less a specific one, for the worst sort of people to materialize from the rabble. You just need someone that feels very strongly about something and gets too invested in fiction to decide for other people that they shouldn’t like that anymore because imaginary things happening somehow is harmful to real life people somewhere at some time or another.

Yeah. So. Uh. We really need to reaffirm:

Fictional characters are not real

Fiction does not affect reality

Fiction in “society” does not make that society perform to the fiction.

Fiction has no effect on the sexuality, criminality or violence of a society.

Society is not a reality embodying all of us and defining us. It is a derivative. A shadow. You cannot control ‘society’ and thus control everybody’s thoughts and actions, nor make them think “right” thoughts, nor make them thing “wrong” thoughts by censoring materials from behind published or hiding them behind material you’d prefer they see.

And if you are one of those people that think censorship is alright if it’s to make sure the messages you approve of are read and experienced and the ones you don’t are unavailable, then you need to be oppressed. You’ve missed the meaning of liberalism. That which is not objectively harmful or doing harm actively, is fine. We do not need asterisks affirming that child marriage in the past was a bad thing for every history lesson, we do not need every comic or manga series to star objectively and inherently good people.

I’d hoped that ‘free thinking open minded liberal people’ would be more tolerant of content that they don’t personally approve of, but these toxic ideas about what is “good for the conscience of society” are creeping in thanks to a jealous, secular cult of people with very disgusting social science ideas of how being human and being groups of humans works. I’d hoped. But this venomous culture is threatening to usurp liberalism openly, now.

Even still, I welcome it. It’s a cancer that has subverted and subsumed liberalism for so long, manipulating it, co-opting it. It’s trying to take over the body or split it by mitosis; it’ll have a solid body to itself before long.

And I hope that when this divide happens, liberalism will be free of the disgusting culture platforming it. Because when the far-left sound like and have the social ambitions of the “far right” religious, that is terrifying beyond measure.