#with pro-Empire beliefs

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

When a story is set in the Victorian or Edwardian age, the writers tend to have little trouble creating characters

with pro-Empire beliefs, even when it ultimately undermines their own standing in their time and society.

[girlbob-boypants]

You know there actually *is* a really interesting read to be had with Jade Shadows through the lens of how when a man's political beliefs uphold oppressive systems (even to his own detriment), it does often come with a similar belief that his wife's body is His to decide what to do with.

It creates the question would Jade have survived if her husband was willing to change his ways or swallow his pride sooner? Will he even see it as that or does he still believe it was his choice to deny her the medical expertise of the Tenno's Cephalon because he's pro Imperialism and the Tenno are revolutionaries?

[picaroroboto]

WRT the Garlemald portion of EW: I'm sure that for a lot of FFXIV's history players have been wondering what it would be like to reach Garlemald proper in-game, and daydreaming of epic battles, maybe a sense of "conquering the conquerers"

And it is so, so genius of EW to not give you that.

You don't get any glory or revenge in defeating the evil empire, they already self-destructed on their own. You can't really revel in it. If you're feeling particularly vindictive you might look at the rubble and silently think "Serves you right!" or "Good riddance to bad rubbish." but no matter how much you may have hated the Empire in the past it's hard not to pity what's left.

See, the thing about Garlemald is that in their prejudice and conquest they treated everyone who isn't them as subhuman. But in the end you are all human beings, and so are they. The Empire isn't a nameless, faceless evil, it's a war machine created by the beliefs of humans who saw other humans as inhuman. By helping the survivors you are not only doing the right thing, the human thing to do, you are also disproving their prejudice in the process by reminding them that you're all human. (I'm using the word "human" in abstract sense here, not to refer just to the Hyuran race of FFXIV, but all the races of sentient beings, all deserving of rights, respect, etc.)

I'm trying to shine a light on the significance of this part of the story because it seems like some people have conflicted feelings about helping citizens of a facist former empire, but it would be sheer Reading Comprehension Stat: None to assume that that means FFXIV is condoning their ideology. In fact, it would be antithetical to FFXIV's optimistic, pro-humanity, love-and-peace, a-better-world-is-possible -type philosophy if we instead left the survivors to starve.

[trickstarbrave]

the elder scrolls series ultimately is pro imperialism and colonialism as another post on here said but its also kinda weird how in morrowind the guys of the empire like. totally suck but there is this implicit belief that the empire is still good and full of good guys and you have to side with them morally when you are quite literally coerced into it

the other games dismiss this or downplay it or outright erase it. but morrowind was like. rly weird in that sense. where i cant tell if the person who wrote those things in was aware of how pro-imperialist the game is and was trying to subtly critique it or if they were just clueless and thought it made the empire more badass

for starters you're a prisoner released and pardoned only because the emperor wants to use you as a political pawn to destabilize a country. when you are set free in a hostile country you follow what is familiar to you and what is asked of you, ending up in the service of caius who then implicates you in serious crimes while tasking you with getting information. if you go against your orders the blades have proof you committed a felony going into dwemer ruins. or they could publicly expose you for grave robbing with the explicate purpose of helping someone commit necromancy, a serious crime and social taboo in morrowind that would make every dunmer demand your execution. before he then sends you on increasingly dangerous missions to gather intelligence that could seriously land you dead or imprisoned in the ministry of truth for the rest of your life. and they wont care if you die, they'll just find someone else who doesn't know their parents and was born the same month as you.

it doesn't paint them as particularly noble. it shows that they do not care about you, just furthering their own ends. even caius, the guy giving you orders for a good chunk of the msq, has to leave to deal with the succession crisis and he says he cant stay because he has family back home in cyrodiil they can and will threaten.

and yet, you cant oppose them. in fact it shows powerful people who do oppose the empire's rule as terrible, unjust, and literally crazy. if you have more than a passive annoyance towards the empire you are not a freedom fighter but a deranged cultist.

[zedecksiew]

(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour

In the ongoing project of rescuing useful thoughts off Xwitter, here's another hot take of mine, reheated:

"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."

The quote comes from Luke Gearing and his excellent post "Against Incentive", to which I had been reacting.

My thread was mainly intended as a fulsome nodding along to one of Luke's points. It was posted in 2021, and extended in 2023 after Sidney Icarus posed a question to it. So it is two threads.

Here they are, properly paragraphed, hopefully more cleanly expressed:

+++

(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour

This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character's ethical choice is rendered mercenary.

As Luke Gearing puts it:

"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."

Bear in mind that I'm not saying that pro-social play can't have rewarding outcomes for players. Any decision should have consequences in the fiction. It serves the ideal of portraying a living, world to have these consequences rendered diegetic:

The townsfolk are thankful; the goblins remember your mercy; pamphlets appear, quoting from your revolutionary speech.

What I am saying is that rewarding abstract mechanical benefits (XP tickets, metacurrency points, etc) for ethical decisions stinks.

+

A subtle but absolutely essential distinction, when it comes to portraying and exploring ethics / morality, in roleplaying games.

Say you reward bonus XP for sparing goblins.

Are your players making a decisions based on how much they value life / the personhood of goblins? Or are they making a decision based on how much they want XP?

Say you declare: "If you help the villagers, the party receives a +1 attitude modifier in this village."

Are your players assisting the community because it is the right thing to do, or are they playing optimally, for a +1 effect?

+

XP As Currency

XP is the ur-example of incentive in TTRPGs. It began with D&D's gold-for-XP, and has never strayed far from that logic.

XP is still currency. Do things the GM / game designer wants you to do? Get paid.

Players use XP to buy better mechanical tools (levels, skills, abilities)---which they can then in turn use to better perform the actions that will net them XP.

Like using gold you stole from goblins to buy a sword, so you can now rob orcs.

I genuinely feel that such systems are valuable. They are models that illuminate the drives fuelling amoral / unethical behaviour.

Material gain is the drive of land-grabbing and colonialism. Logger-barons and empires do get wealthier and more privileged, as a reward for their terrible actions.

+

If you want to present an ethical choice in play, congruent to our real-life dilemmas, there is value in asking:

"Hey, if you kill the goblins you can grab their treasure, and you will get richer. There's no reward for sparing their lives, except that they are thankful."

Which is another way of asking:

"Does your commitment to the ideal of preserving life outweigh the guaranteed material incentives for taking life?"

The ethical choice is the difficult choice, precisely because it involves---as it often does, in real life---sacrificing personal growth and gain. Doling out an XP bounty for doing the right thing makes the ethical choice moot.

"I as the player am making a mechanically optimal choice, but my character is making an ethical choice!"

A cop-out. Owning your cake and eating it too. The fictional fig-leaf of empathy over a calculated a decision to make profit.

+

Sidney Icarus asks a question which I will quote here:

"... those who hold to their beliefs of good behaviour don't feel rewarded, and therefore feel punished. And that's not a good feeling. It's an unpleasant experience to play a game where the righteous players are in rags, and the mercenary fucks have crowns and sceptres. So, what's the design opportunity? How do we make doing the right thing feel pleasant without making it mercenary? Or, like reality, do we acknowledge that ethical acts are valuable only intrinsically and philosophically? I have no idea how to reconcile this."

I would suggest that the above dichotomy---"righteous players in rags, mercs in crowns"---is true if property is recognised as the only true incentive.

+

Friends As Property

Modern games try to solve the righteous-players-in-rags "problem" in various ways. Virtue might not net you treasure or XP, but may give you:

Contact or ally slots, which you can fill in;

Relationship meters you can watch tick up;

Favour points you can cash in later;

etc.

How different are these mechanical incentives from treasure or XP, really?

Your relationships with supposedly living, breathing beings are transformed into abilities for your character: skills you can train; powers you can reliably proc. Pump your relationship score with the orc tribe until calling on them for reinforcements becomes a once-per-month ability.

Relationships become contracts. Regard becomes debt. Put your friend in an ally slot, so they become a tool.

If this is what you want play to be---totally fine! As stated previously, games say powerful things when they portray the engines of profit and property.

But I personally don't think game designers should design employer-employee relationships and disguise these as instances of mutual aid.

+

Friends As Friends

In the OSR campaigns I'm part of, I keep forgetting to record money. Which is usually a big deal in such games, seeing as they are in the grand tradition of gold-for-XP?

In both games, my characters are still 1st-Level pukes, though it's been months.

I'm having a blast, anyway.

My GMs, by virtue of running organic, reactive worlds, have made play rewarding for me. NPCs / geographies remember the party's previous actions, and respond accordingly.

I've been given gills from a river god, after constant prayer;

I've befriended a village of monsters, where we now live;

I've parleyed with the witch of a whole forest, where we may now tread;

I've a boon from the touch of wood wose, after answering his summons.

I cannot count on the wood wose showing up. He is a character in the world, not a power I control. Calling on the wood wose might become a whole adventure.

Little of this stuff is codified my stats or abilities or equipment list. They are mostly all under "misc notes".

Diegetic growth. Narrative change that spirals into more play.

This is the design opportunity, to me:

How do we shape TTRPG play culture in such a way that the "misc notes" gaps in our games are as fun as the systemised bits? What kinds of orientation tools must we provide? What should we say, in our advice sections?

+

A Note About Trust

The reason why it is so hard to imagine play beyond conventional incentive structures has a lot to do with trust.

Sidney again:

One of the core issues is the "low trust table". I'm not designing just for myself but for my audience. For a product. How much can I ask purchasers and their friends to codesign this part with me?

Nerds love numbers and things we can write down in inventories or slots because they are sureties. We've learned to fear fiat or player discretion, traumatised as we are by Problem GMs or That Guys.

The reason why the poverty in Sidney's hypothetical ("righteous players are in rags") sounds so bad is because in truth it represents risk at the game table. If you don't participate in the mechanics legible to your ruleset (the XP and gear to do more game things), you risk gradually being excluded from play.

You have no assurance your fellow players will know how hold space for you; be considerate; work together to portray a living world where NPCs react in meaningful ways---in ways that will be fun and rewarding for everybody playing.

You are giving up the guarantee of mechanical relevance for the possibility of fun interactions and creative social play.

+

The "low trust table" is learned behaviour--the cruft of gamer culture and trauma.

When I game with folks new to TTRPGs, they tend to be decent, considerate. I think there's enough anecdotal evidence from folks playing with school kids / newcomers / etc to suggest my experience is not unique.

If the "low trust table" is indeed learned behaviour, it can be unlearned.

Which rules conventions, now part of the hobby mainstream, were the result of designers designing defensively---shadowboxing against terrible players and the spectre of "unfairness"?

How can we "undesign" such conventions?

Lack of trust is a problem that we have to address in play culture, not rulesets. You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners.

+

This is too long already. I'll end with an observation:

Elfgames are not praxis, but doesn't this specific dilemma in the microcosm of our silly elfgames ultimately mirror real-world ethics?

To be moral is to trust in a better world; to be amoral / immoral is to hedge against the guarantee of a worse one.

+++

Further Reading

Some words from around the TTRPG community about incentive and advancement in games:

+

However, the reason there is a big debate about this is that behavioural incentives in games clearly do work, either entirely or at various levels. This applies outside gaming, as well. Why do advertising companies and retail business use "rewards" structures to convince people to buy more of their products? Why do people chase after "Likes" on social media?

A comment by Paul_T to "A Hypothesis on Behavioral Incentives" from a discussion on Story-Games.com

+

the structure and symbolism of the D&D game align with certain structures and values of patriarchy. The game is designed to last infinitely by shifting goalposts of character experience in terms of increasing amounts of gold pieces acquired; this resembles the modus operandi of phallic desire which seeks out object after object (most typically, women) in order to quench a lack which always reasserts itself.

D&D's Obsession With Phallic Desire from Traverse Fantasy

+

In short, my feeling is that rewarding players with character improvement in return for achieving goals in a specific way impedes some of the key strengths of TTRPGs for little or no benefit in return. 

Incentives from Bastionland

+

When good deeds arise naturally out of the players choices, especially when players rejected other options that were more beneficial to them, it is immensely satisfying. Far more than if players are just assumed to be heroic by default. It gives agency and meaning to player choice.

Make Players Choose To Be Kind from Cosmic Orrery

+

Much has been made about 1 GP = 1 XP as the core gameplay loop driver of TSR D+D. But XP for gold retrieved also winds up being something of a de facto capitalistic outlook as well. Success is driven by accumulation of individual wealth -- by an adventuring company, even! So what's a new framework that can be used for underpinning a leftist OSR campaign?

A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR from Legacy of the Bieth

+

Growth should be tied to a specific experience occurring in the fiction. It is more important for a PC to grow more interesting than more skilled or capable. PCs experience growth not necessarily because they’ve gotten more skill and experience, but because they are changed in a significant way.

Cairn FAQ from Cairn RPG / Yochai Gal

+++

Thank you Ram for the Story-Games.com deep cut!

( Image sources: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/neuron-activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_Sim https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/special-reports-pdfs/10490978.pdf https://varnam.my/34311/untold-tales-of-indian-labourers-from-rubber-plantations-during-pre-independence-malaya/ https://nobonzo.com/ )

+

PS: used with permission from Sandro, art by Maxa', a reminder to self:

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Just wanted to tell you that pitch fefnep is real as fuck and I appreciate you bringing it to my attention.

Are there any other pitch ships you seriously live for?

My big one is Eridan <3< Calliope (#callidan let's make it happen)! There's a lot of karmic stuff linking them together - I'm not going to say it ALL here, but suffice to mention that cherubs are naturally attracted pitch-wise to people who resemble the half they lost in predomination, and Eridan literally made his username "cal" (caligula, so it's even 8 letters, lmao).

Personality-wise, though, fully-character-developed Eridan and Calliope are like a match made in hell. Eridan is violent, obsessed with murder, deliberately likes to style himself as an arrogant, evil despot, says a lot of slurs, is a complete moron who doesn't listen to people but believes in stuff very very strongly anyways, and, assuming he's finished his character arc, somehow still manages to be a force for good. This makes him similar to Caliborn in a lot of ways (Hussie even calls Eridan a sort of proto-Caliborn MULTIPLE times in the book commentary), and Calliope would have a lot to get infuriated by, especially since that last point would give Eridan that "i hate everything about you, BUT..." factor that makes a pitch relationship work.

OTOH, Calliope gets super fucking smug when she starts winning, Eridan would 100% see her as a poser wizard (who needs to load their MAGIC WAND with BULLETS????) as well as a poser troll. She would also definitely adopt a stance of "every life is precious," and already displayed compassion and forgiveness to a dangerous degree wrt Caliborn, and all of this would probably piss Eridan off. Also, Eridan is easy, and the fact that Calliope is actually willing to entertain him in pitch at all is probably enough to get him to date her in blackrom all by itself. LBR, all it really takes to date Eridan is just being willing to date Eridan. This is both a low and high bar to clear.

Given that murdering and genocide-obsessing literally kept his friends alive long enough to play the game, I just can't see Eridan ever becoming a pacifist, or even coming to see murder as a bad thing (even if he'd feel bad about and apologize for murdering his friends specifically).

It'd also be pretty bad if the Hope player (ideals, convictions, faith, and also turning fake stuff real) had wrong beliefs, so Eridan's character arc wouldn't so much see his obsession with murder dropped so much as having it reoriented, his focus becoming "I care about my friends and will do anything to make sure they succeed in creating a better world. I'd kill for them. I will kill for them. I am going to kill for them."

He's still kind of a token evil teammate as a result - the guy who pipes up at every town hall to go, "y'know, murder is on the table. I'm not saying that I want to do it or even that we should, but I'm just reminding you that it's a tool in our arsenal, and something our enemies might resort to" as well as the debbie downer who reminds people that meat comes from animals that used to have families.

Plus, given that his hipster stuff ties in with being a Hope player - the staunch and firm beliefs in there being "better" stuff, the unshakeable conviction and dedication toward being anti-mainstream, and the fact that it's one of his few genuine interests besides magic - that trait actually gets exacerbated in lieu of the fake pro-empire, dualscar-emulating stuff he was doing before.

So, basically, Eridan given the full redemption arc + character development combo would spit out an Eridan that's MORE annoying than he was before? Because, like, not only is he a turbo pretentious hipster now, but he's also the "heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made an excellent point" guy. He's comfortable in his own skin, no longer trying to be something he isn't. Instead, with absolute, non-negotiable, unshakeable faith in himself, he is 100% of what he is.

"What he is," of course, being a neurotic, murder-obsessed, low-empathy lunatic with zero social skills, a pretentious hipster, a cringe-ass wizard who won't shut up about it and has no self-awareness of how cringe he's being, still 100% aggro 100% of the time, and an obsessive simp. In a very leftist/existentialist way, he would fully own up to having done horrible things, and being willing to do them again, should the circumstances call for them. "Shameless" is probably a good word to use, here.

Meanwhile, Calliope is genuinely well-meaning as fuck, even if she doesn't fully grasp things like "humans going trickster mode is bad actually" and that her fascination/obsession with the trolls and kids as "characters" still borders on dehumanizing.

Still, it's clear that she operates from a place of love and admiration, and given a lease on life free from her brother and surrounded by friends, I do genuinely believe Calliope's arc culminates in her being the embodiement of the ideas that we must be good to each other, kind to each other, loving to each other, and trust and care for each other. After all, she has it within her; her alternate self was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of several universes.

Still, Calliope as this cosmic, karmic force of good - what the comic ultimately exonorates and treats as something worthy of protection and rescue - sets her up against Eridan ideologically really well. Calliope represents "we must do good" in the most optimistic sense - people will be kind back if you are kind to them, and to create a loving society, a caring society, we must care about others, we must believe in others.

Meanwhile, Eridan would represent "we must do good" in the most dark and pessimistic sense - we must be prepared to sacrifice for each other, we hold duties to one another, we must be our best selves because we owe it to each other, we must not accept complacency, we must be ever-vigilant of our worst tendencies, we must take responsibility. No society exists without sacrifice, no revolution is without bloodshed, and nothing is ever worth fighting for that won't eventually need to be fought for - and who will do the fighting? The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools, etc.

Like how pitch FefNep works for me on this axis of pragmatism vs. idealism - Feferi and Nepeta are both fundamentally duking it out over what it means to create and administer a society, with Nepeta representing unbridled freedom, while Feferi brings to the table controlling restraint. Neither is fully correct on their own - Nepeta is anarchic, and so her ideals are inherently unstable, while Feferi is fascistic, which can cause great harm. It's Hegalian dialectics. Thesis, antithesis, and their union/rivalry is the synthesis into a greater nuanced balance between the two.

Callidan works for me in the same way: Calliope and Eridan are both fundamentally aiming to create a world that's good, and Calliope says, we must be kind, while Eridan says, we must be cruel. They're both correct, and both have an ideal that can't stand on its own. Calliope's hardline stance of pure compassion lets bad apples take advantage, while Eridan's hardline stance of sacrifice and personal responsibility leads to misery and unfulfillment. Together, they strike a harmony.

And also they'd be so funny together. Like

UU: i believe that in order to create a kind and beaUtifUl world, we mUst be kind to each other. we mUst believe in each other no matter what. there is no fUtUre if it is not boUnd in love, trUst, and empathy.

CA: yeah fuckin right dont tell me you actually BELIEVVE that codswwallop those ideals sure held up wwhen wwe MURDERED THE EVVER LOVVIN SHIT OUTTA YOUR BROTHER

CA: reality aint so fuckin simple evvery societys got sacrifices need doin evvil bastards need killin and somebodys got to pull the trigger

UU: i swear, speaking with yoU is aboUt as pleasant as a sandpaper facial.

UU: and yet i continUe to do so, and do yoU know why? it's becaUse i do, in fact, believe in what i said, and i will, in fact, continUe to treat yoU with *love and compassion* despite yoUr repeated efforts to throw mine into the bin!!!!!!!!!!!

CA: i nevver asked for your so called lovve and compassion skullhag and i dont bloody need it either

UU: well, that's jUst too bad, isn't it? poor eridan, yoU were treated so poorly on alternia, and now yoU're angry and Upset all the time. my heart aches for yoUr plight!

CA: ill showw you a flippin PLIGHT scumskull meet me at the usual place

UU: <kisses> ~3U

UU's computer exploded!

uranianUmbra [UU] began cheering caligulasAquarium [CA]

UU: STOP DOING THAT.

Also... they're both British... so it's British on British violence... IDK that personally really elevates it for me

[jewreallythinkthat]

I don't know who needs to hear this but:

The British Mandate of Palestine =/= the State of Palestine.

There has never been a Palestinian state. That's not trying to justify anything or whatever, it's just the fucking history. The area now known as Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories was once "Judea" the homeland of the Jewish People, a self governing region/country/area. It was then colonised by multiple empires, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Arab Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire the British, Empire. None of these are a Palestinian states; these are all the result of imperialist colonising ideologies.

There could have been a self determined state in 1948 but instead there was a war because proto-Israel was attacked and defended herself.

If you need to rewrite history to justify your hate, maybe you're not as progressive as you want to think you are.

Edit: as I've said many times, I'm very pro 2-state solution. This post is not about that but I will not have this being used by other people to straw man me and lie about my beliefs

[dresshistorynerd]

Palestinian History Between Great Powers - Part 1

From Bronze Age to Ottoman Palestine

I started writing this article months ago but as it deserves proper research, it took me a long while, and at one point I started questioning is this helpful anymore. I thought it's obvious at this point to anyone not willfully ignorant that what we are seeing in real time is a genocide, and I'm not going to convince those who are willfully ignorant. I decided to finish it anyway since I do feel obligation to do something and maybe providing some accessible historical context is what I'm capable of doing. Even if I probably won't change any hearts and minds, I think the least we can do is not forget Palestinians and fall into apathy. And at the very least more understanding of the situation is always better even when we already oppose this genocide.

This is quite out of my area of focus, so I will be doing more of a general overview of the history and link in depth sources by more knowledgeable people than try to become an expert on this. My purpose is to offer an accessible starting point for the history of Palestine to help people put historical and current events into their proper context. I don't think the occupation and genocide in Palestine pose complex moral questions - it's pretty simple in my opinion that genocide, apartheid and colonialism are wrong and need to stop for peace to be possible - but the history is complex and it's understanding needs quite a lot of background. I will do my best to represent the complexity accurately and fairly while keeping this concise. Since there is a lot of history, even if this is very general overview, it's still very long, so I did need to cut this in two parts. First part will be covering everything to the beginning of WW1, second part the British Mandate period and Israel period.

Bibliography

I'm linking my sources and further reading here so it's easy to check some specific resources even if you don't want to/have time to read 5 000 years of history right now. Because there's so much misinformation and propaganda, I read as much as I could from academic sources, linked at the top here. They are really interesting and delve deeply into specific subjects so I do recommend checking out anything that peaks your interest (Sci-Hub is your friend against paywalled papers and in JSTOR you can make a free account to access most papers). Some of them I didn't really end up using, but I still linked them here since they provide some additional context that wouldn't fit in this overview. At the end there's some accessible resources (youtube videos, podcasts etc.) which are relevant and I think good.

Pre-Ottoman Era

On The Problem of Reconstructing Pre-Hellenistic Israelite (Palestinian) History - Critique of Biblical historical narratives

Canaanites and Philistines

Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine: Between Large Forces: Palestine in the Hellenistic Period - Everyday life in Hellenistic Palestine

Ottoman Era

Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History - Critique of politics of Ottoman Palestine historiography

The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine

Consequences of the Ottoman Land Law: Agrarian and Privatization Processes in Palestine, 1858–1918

The route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction in Palestine, 1800s–1947

The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880–1908)

Origins of Zionism

Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture

Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins

The Non-Jewish Origin of Zionism

Zionism and Its Jewish "Assimilationist" Critics (1897-1948)

The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company: Herzl's Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine

Books

Boundaries and Baraka - Chapter II of Muslims and Others in Sacred Space - Local syncretic religious beliefs of Muslim and Christian Arabs in Palestine

Further "reading"

Israelis Are Not 'Indigenous' (and other ridiculous pro-Israel arguments) - Properly cited youtube video on settler colonialism of Zionism (Indigenous is defined here in postcolonialist way, in contrast with the colonialist, the video doesn't argue that diaspora Jews didn't originate from the Palestine area)

Gaza: A Clear Case of Genocide - Detailed Legal Analysis - Youtube video detailing current evidence on the ongoing genocide and assessing them through international law

What the Netanyahu Family Did To Palestine: Part 1 , Part 2 - Two part podcast episode of Behind the Bastards about Israel's history and Netanyahu Family's involvement in it with an expert quest

History of Israeli/Palestinian conflict since 1799 - Timeline of Palestinian history by Al Jazeera with documentaries produced by Al Jazeera for most of the entries in the timeline

Ancient Era (33th-4th century BCE)

Palestine's location in the fertile crescent, the connecting land between Africa and Asia and the strip of land between Mediterranean and Red Sea means since the earliest emergence of civilizations it has been in the middle of great powers. Thorough it's history it has been conquered many, many times for it's strategic value. Despite the changing rulers and migrating groups there has been a continuous history history of a people, which has changed, split and evolved, but not fully disappeared or replaced at any point, which is quite rare of a history spanning thousands of years.

Speakers of Semitic languages are the first recorded inhabitants of Palestine. At least from Bronze Age (c. 3300-1200 BCE) onward they inhabited Levant, Arabian peninsula and Ethiopian highlands. Semitic languages belong in the Afroasiatic language group, which includes three other branches; ancient Egypt, Amazigh languages and Cushitic languages of African Horn. Most prominent theories of the origins of proto-Afroasiatic is in Levant, African side of Red Sea or Ethiopia. In the Bronze Age the Levant's Semitic speakers were called Canaanites and there was already urban settlements in Early Bronze Age. Egypt had been extending it's control over Canaan for a while and in Late Bronze Age, 1457 BCE, it took over Canaan. Gaza, which had had habitation for thousand years already, became the Egypt's administrative capital in Canaan. Canaan stayed as Egypt's province until the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1200-1150 BCE, when Egypt started losing it's hold on Levant. Egypt eventually retreated from Canaan around 1100 BCE. The causes of Late Bronze Age collapse are unknown, but theories suggest some kind of environmental changes that caused destruction of cities and wide-spread mass migration all around the East Mediterranean Bronze Age civilizations.

Canaanites was not what most of the people called themselves, but rather what the surrounding empires, especially Egypt and Hittites in the north, called them. Philistines appear in Egyptian sources around the Late Bronze Age collapse as raiders against Egypt, who were likely populating southern parts of Canaan, the Palestine area. Several groups with mutually intelligble languages emerged after Egypt left the area: in Palestine area Philistines, Israelites, in Jordan are Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites, and in Lebanon area Canaanites, who were called by Phoenicians by Greeks. Israelites have been theorized to split from Philistines, possibly after Aegonean migrants during the Late Bronze Age collapse influenced the culture of the costal Philistine city states, and/or through Israelites development of monotheistic faith. During Iron Age these different groups descendant from Caananites had their own kingdoms. In the area of Palestine there was two Israelite kindgoms, Kingdom of Judah is the highlands of Judah, were Israelites likely originated, and Kindom of Israel or Samaria north to it, as well as Philistine city states in the coast around the area of current Gaza strip.

Earliest historical evidence of Israel is from mid 9th century BCE and of Judah from 7th century BCE, though Israelites as a group were mentioned earlier. It's entirely possible the kingdoms predate these mentions, but the archaeological evidence suggests likely not by much. Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian empire in 722 BC, so it's entirely possible kingdom of Judah was created by retreating Israelites of the earlier kingdom. The remaining Israelites under Assyrian rule came to be known as Samaritans, marking also the split of Jewish faith into Judaism and Samaritanism. Neo-Assyrian lingua franca was Aramaic, a Semitic language from southwest Syria, which became the major spoken language in Samaria. Judah became a vassal state of Assyrians and later Babylonians. After a rebellion Babylonians fully conquered Judah in 586-587 BCE and exiled the rebels, though more recent historical study suggests it targeted the rebelling population and was not a mass exile. In 539 BCE Babylon and by extension Judah was conquered by Persian Achaemenid empire, which allowed the exiles to return and rule Judah as their vassals. Persia also conquered Samaria and Philistines. Aramaic was also the official language of the both Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid empires and replaces Old Hebrew as spoken language in Judah too, though Old Hebrew continued to be written language of religious scripture and is known today as Biblical Hebrew. Otherwise in the Palestine area there were Edomites, who migrated to the southern parts of former Judah kingdom, and Qedarites, a nomadic Arabic tribal federation, in southern desert parts.

Biblical narratives tell this early history very differently, and for a long while, those were used as historical texts, but more recent historical study has cast a doubt on their usefulness in historical inquiry. Even more recent archaeological DNA studies (like this and this) have supported the historical narratives constructed from primary historical texts.

Antique Era (4th century BCE - 7th century CE)

Under Persian rule the people in the Palestine area had a relative amount of autonomy, which lasted about 200 years. In the 330s BCE Macedonians conquered Levant along with a lot of other places. The Macedonian empire broke down quickly after the death of Alexander the Great, and Levant was left under the control of the Seleucid empire, which included most of the Asian parts of the Macedonian empire. During this time the whole Palestine area was heavily Hellenized. In the 170s BCE the Seleucian emperor started a repression campaign against the Jewish religion, which led to a Maccabean Revolt in Judea, lasting from 167-160 BCE until the Seleucids were able to defeat the rebels. It started with guerilla violence in the countryside but evolved into a small civil war. Defeat of the rebelling Maccabees didn't curb the discontent and by 134 BCE Maccabees managed to take Judea and establish the Hasmonean dynasty. The dynasty ruled semi-autonomously under the Seleucian empire until it started disintegrating around 110 BCE, and Judea gained more independence and began to conquer the neighbouring areas. At most they controlled Samaria, Galilee, areas around Galilean Sea, Dead Sea and Jordan River between them, Idumea (formerly Kingdom of Edom) and Philistine city states. During the Hasmonean dynasty Judaism spread to some of the other Semitic peoples under their rule. It didn’t take long for the rising power of the Roman Republic to make Judea into their client state in 63 BCE. Next three decades the Roman Republic and Parthian Empire would fight over control of Judea, which ended by Rome gaining control and disposing of the Hasmonean dynasty from power. It was a client state until  6 CE Rome incorporated Judea proper, Samaria, Idumea and Philistine city states into the province of Judea.

The Jewish population was very much discontent under Roman rule and revolted frequently through the first century or so. It led to waves of Jewish migration around the Mediterranean area, which would eventually lead to the formation of European and North-African Jewish groups. The Roman emperor’s decision to build a Roman colony into Jerusalem, which they destroyed along with Second Temple while squashing the previous revolt, provoked a large-scale armed uprising from 132-136 among Judean Jews, which Rome suppressed brutally. Jerusalem was destroyed again, Jews and Christians were banned from there, and a lot of Judean Jews were killed, displaced and enslaved. Rome also suffered high losses. Jews and Christians hadn’t yet fully separated into different faiths yet, but this strained their relations as Christians hadn’t supported the uprising. Galilee and Judea was joined into one province, Syria Palaestina. Galilean Jews hadn’t participated in the revolt and had therefore survived it unscathed, so Galilee became the Jewish heartland. During the Constantine dynasty, in the first half of the 4th century, when Christianity was the Roman state religion, Jerusalem was rebuilt as very Christianized. After the Constantine dynasty the Jewish relations with Rome were briefly improved by a sympathetic emperor, until Justinian came into power in 527 and began authoritarian religious oppression of all non-Christians, casting the whole area into chaos. Samaritans rebelled repeatedly and were almost fully wiped out, while Jews joined forces with several foreign powers in an attempt to destabilize Byzantium rule. By 636 the first Muslim Caliphate emerged as victors over the control of Palestine.

Muslim Period and Crusades (636-1516)

For more than 300 years under the rule of Muslim Caliphate, Palestine saw a much more peaceful period, with relative freedom and economic prosperity. Christianity continued to be the majority religion and Christians, Jews and usually Samaritans were considered People of the Book, who were guaranteed religious freedom. Non-muslims though had to pay taxes and depending on the caliph had more or less restrictions posed upon them. The position of Samaritans as People of the Book was unstable and at points they were persecuted. For the position of Jews it was a marked improvement, and after the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem by Rome in the 2nd century, they were finally allowed to return. Jerusalem became a religious center for the Muslims too, as it was considered the third most holy place of Islam. Cities, especially Jerusalem, saw Arab immigration. The rural agricultural population was mostly Aramaic speaking, though even while Palestinian Arabs had mostly been bedouins in the southern deserts, there were few Arabic villages from the Roman era. People of the Book were protected from forced conversions, but over time conversions among the Christian population slowly increased, until Islam became the majority religion. Cities became Arabicized and slowly Arabic (also Semitic language) replaced Aramaic as the majority language. Towards the end of the first millennium persecution of Christianity increased with the threat of Byzantium.

In 970 a competing dynasty, Fatimids, conquered Palestine beginning a new era of continuous warfare and conquest by foreign powers. In the beginning of the new millennium Palestine was conquered by the Turco-Persian Seljuk empire for a couple of decades, recaptured by Fatimids for only a year, until the Crusaders took Palestine in 1099. During the next two centuries Palestine exchanged hands several times between the Crusaders and the Egyptian Ayyubid Sultanate. After internal struggle the Ayyubid dynasty was overthrown by the mamluk military caste and them in lead, the Sultanate secured Palestine. First they repelled the invading Mongol empire in 1260 and by 1291 they had defeated the remnants of the Cusaders and their Kingdom of Jerusalem. The period was devastating to the Palestinian populations, cities and economic life. The Crusaders especially committed numerous massacres against non-Christians and under Muslim rule Christians were persecuted and forcibly converted. The next two centuries under the Mamluk Sultanate were peaceful and Christian and Jewish communities were afforded some self-governance and relatively high religious freedom for being recognised as People of the Book again. The state had a more contentious relationship with Christians as the wars with the Crusaders were still looming between Christians and Muslims, and at some points Christians faced persecution and forced conversions.

Ottoman Period (1516-1917)

The Ottoman Empire gained dominance in western Asia over the Mamluk Sultanate during the late 15th century and conquered Palestine in 1516. It became a great imperial power in Asia and Europe for two centuries and in the 18th century started a slow decline, eventually becoming the "Sick man of Europe". The Ottoman Empire was very decentralized and under it Palestine was at first ruled by three Palestinian families semi-autonomously. The Ottoman state didn’t pay much attention to economic development, as they considered it contrary to their chivalric culture, so they instead attracted foreign businesses with the capitulation system. Capitulations were treaties between Ottomans and a foreign power by which the citizens of that foreign power were under their jurisdiction inside Ottoman borders. This guaranteed safety and religious freedom for non-Muslim merchants and exempted them from any additional taxes applying to foreigners and non-Muslims, which encouraged them to build businesses in the Ottoman Empire. Ottomans also intentionally attracted European Jews, who faced persecution and pogroms, and had built effective international trade networks through the tight knit diaspora communities. Jews and Christians had quite well secured position in the empire as People of the Book, but Samaritans were persecuted after they had sided with the Mamluk Sultanate against Ottomans and later for being considered "pagans". City elites adopted Turkish culture, while in rural areas peasant villages and Bedouin clans remained Arabic. The rural areas were very much self-governing as both villages and Bedouin clans were fairly self-reliant with their own political structures. Villages consisted of clan-like family groups, hamulas, and the village lands were distributed between their collective ownership.

In the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was leaving behind European imperial powers in economic and military development. With the rise of the international capitalist markets, capitulation approach, which had worked well for the empire in previous centuries, was extended to markets as a very laissez faire economic policy. This did not lead to hoped economic growth however, but rather deindustrialization. The Ottoman Empire opened itself to markets it couldn’t compete in and its resources were then easy to exploit by stronger economies. The other powers, such as the European powers, avoided this by first cultivating strong national industries with protectionist policies, and then opened to international markets. The capitulation system also became a political liability the way it interacted with the protégé system. The Ottoman Empire had agreed to allow some European powers to give their protection over certain minority religious groups (mostly Christian groups) in the Empire, allowing members of those groups to claim citizenship of their protectorate nation. This had allowed those Ottoman citizens to claim the benefits of the capitulation system and cultivated trade and business for the Empire. In the 19th century the European powers, notably France, British Empire, Germany and Russia, turned their interests towards Levant which was important for their access to their colonial interests in Asia and Africa. They had a vested interest in the continuing power of the weakening Ottoman Empire, which they believed they could control through economic dominance and the protégé system. It became a competition on who could gain the most influence in the Ottoman Empire. In Palestine this led to a change in class dynamics. Christian protégés of European imperial powers were given tax exemptions from the increasing taxes, which were implemented to balance the national deposit, and better opportunities to gain wealth from international trade, turning the urban Christian Arabs into elite.

In 1832 Egypt invaded Palestine, marking a point of more rapid decline of Ottoman rule. Egypt attempted to “modernize” Palestine, which was considered backward, but Egypt's policies, especially conscription, were considered intrusive. The local self-ruling clans and families were resistant to outside powers and with their sway over the population, they rose to a popular uprising after two years of Egyptian rule. The suppression of the uprising devastated many villages and Egypt still failed to enforce order and halt violence. In 1840 Britain intervened, returning its control back to the Ottomans. They didn’t yet have capitulations with the Ottomans and were concerned over the other European powers gaining influence over the aging empire, so in return for their military assistance, they gained capitulations and named Jews and Protestants as their protégés in Levant. Palestine rapidly opened to the international markets with the increase in capitulations combined with the laissez faire fiscal policies of the empire, allowing European powers to turn Palestinian cities, especially in the coast, to centers of trade. In 1858 the Ottoman Empire also attempted to privatize land ownership to increase agricultural production and profitability in order to help with their financial troubles. Most Palestinian land was public land, but in practice owned informally by the villagers cultivating it. As long as they paid taxes, they couldn’t be evicted, which rarely happened in those cases either, and their rights to the land were hereditary. The land reform codified and formalized land ownership and removed barriers to non-villagers gaining ownership of peasant land, laying groundwork for commodifying land. The Ottoman Empire also allowed foreigners to purchase private land. This didn’t immediately lead to large-scale transfer of land ownership, but increasing taxes impoverishing the peasantry and indebting them transferred land from its cultivators to urban absentee landlords. Peasants started to turn into landless tenants and a new type of large estates were established.

Birth of Zionism

The British pushed for more control over Levant, since they wanted to secure their access to India and their colonial ventures in Africa. They didn’t have much interest in colonizing Levant themselves, which is why they were interested in backing the Ottoman Empire and gaining stronger control over it via European Jewish immigrants. European Jews had been immigrating to Palestine in small numbers for a while for religious reasons, to escape persecution and to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the Ottoman Empire. The British though also had religious interests in supporting Jewish migration to Palestine. Since the early 19th century, there had been a growing religious movement of Christian Zionism, who sought to restore Jews into Palestine and then convert them to Christianity to cause the second coming of Jesus and the end times. As you do. They were considered fanatics, even lunatics, for their literal interpretations of prophecy, but they were enthusiastic imperialists and when they expressed the idea of restoration of Jewish Palestine in imperial terms, it gained popular acceptance in Britain. Some of the common talking points originating from Christian Zionism were Jews had the right to Palestinian land for Biblical reasons, the only way to not let the “underdeveloped” agrarian land go to waste was colonialism, and Jews would be a civilizing force in Palestine. While the end goal of Christian Zionists was conversion of Jews, they had Orientalist reverence for Jews, but among the wider imperialist support for these ideas there was in addition an explicitly antisemitic aspect. The imperialists' idea was that Britain, and Europe more broadly, could this way also get rid of the Jews.

The trouble was that at the time there was no wide interest at all among Jews to colonize Palestine. The Jews who were migrating there during the first half of the 19th century did so with all intentions of integrating to the Palestinian society. European Jews had since Enlightenment and the French Revolution gained unprecedented levels of social acceptance and equality (which still wasn’t very much), and liberal assimilationism had become the dominant ideology especially among Jewish elites. Assimilationist Jews considered Judaism a religious identity, not an ethnic one, and they rather identified with their nationality. In the latter half of 19th century Jewish socialism was contesting the liberal Jewish idea that antisemitism could be overcome with individualist approach and instead demanded structural change. During the century it became increasingly clear that the assimilationist approach couldn’t fix antisemitism as racial ideology and exclusionist ethnonationalism were gaining traction and fueling antisemitism, which culminated in the 1880s pogroms in Russia and 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France. These events certainly promoted socialist approach among many Jews, but the Jewish elite were certainly not interested in socialist solutions, where they would lose their elite status, even if for white Christians they were all second class citizens. So instead, like many elites facing the threat of socialism, they turned to nationalism. To the question of how to build a nation from a diverse diaspora, they found the answer from Christian Zionism. Jewish Zionism was distinctly secular, so while they did adopt many religious and biblical narratives and goals of Christian Zionism, they put them in nationalist terms. Their end goal was of course different from that of the millennialist Christians so Jewish Zionism was presented as a practical and rational alternative to utopian fanaticism, but they were still natural allies. Zionism was opposed in the European Jewish communities by both assimilationists and socialists, who both viewed it as countering the efforts of opposing antisemitism, which Zionists saw as an inherently impossible endeavor, and also by Orthodox Jews from a religious standpoint. Orthodox Jews denounced the secularization of the Promised Land, which according to them could only be bestowed by God and couldn’t be a state with secular power.

Before Zionism was fully formalized as a movement, there were proto-Zionist movements in Eastern-Europe as a direct response to the pogroms, with the goal of settling Eastern Jewish refugees to Palestine from 1881 forward. This is considered to be the start of the First Aliyah, the explicitly Zionist mass migrations to Palestine. The funding was secured from the European Jews, and with it the Zionists bought land from the absentee urban landlords with large estates and evicted the tenants in order to form Zionist colonies. This raised concern among Ottoman officials, who had become vary of the European exploitation of their capitulation system, which increased European influence with the immigration of European Jews. They were also concerned about the rising Arab nationalism in Palestine provoked by the European economic exploitation and even more pressingly the peasant displacement. The Ottoman Empire was already facing massive difficulties with nationalist movements in different parts of the empire, like in Armenia. They attempted to restrict Zionist land purchases with legal restrictions and failed.

The 1880s settling to Palestine was still unorganized and leaderless until Theodor Herzl, who is considered to be the founder of Zionism, joined Zionist ranks in mid-1890s and began formulating a colonialist venture in earnest. The British were supportive of the Zionist project, but as long as the Ottoman Empire was in charge of Palestine and the British could extend control over it, they weren’t interested in establishing such a state themselves. So the Zionist movement with Herzl in the lead turned to the Ottoman Empire in 1901. He envisioned the Zionist colonial project as a land company, modeled after the British and Dutch East Indian Companies, which would under imperial blessing operate fairly independently and govern over colonized land. The end goal was to build an ethnonationalist Jewish state and expel the native population. There were even dreams of Jewish empire that would colonize neighbouring countries, “civilize” them and bring them “prosperity”. To persuade the Sultan, Herz proposed to pay for the Ottoman Empire’s depts with European Jewish investments in exchange for allowing the Zionists to settle and govern Palestine. The Ottoman government was well aware of Zionist movement’s end goals and their alliances with European Imperialism, rejecting their proposals.

The Zionists evaded Ottoman restrictions anyway and continued to settle Palestine with British backing. European powers then pressured Ottomans to abolish those restrictions allowing a new wave of Zionist colonialism. The violence and pogroms in Russia had convinced some of the Eastern European Jewish socialists that fighting antisemitism was impossible, so they created Labor Zionism and used the “untouched land” to experiment with utopian socialist communes. In the process they displaced indigenous peasant hamulas, which had often for centuries farmed the land in communal ownership. Mass migration and eviction quickly provoked a predictable opposition in the Palestinian population and spread of Arab nationalist thought. This second wave of Aliyah ended at the First World War, which was also the end of the Ottoman Empire.

[autistic-ben-tennyson]

A rant about Jedi Stans from an ex-Jedi fangirl

After some time I've had to reflect on my own behavior as well as my time in the pro Jedi fandom, I decided it's time to call this shit out. Some people take it really personal if someone criticized your favorite characters or their beliefs. Ironically, you all act more like the Sith than the Jedi with how obsessive you can be and insisting any criticism is equal to wanting genocide.

I'm going to start by saying I was in the pro jedi fandom for a few months. Truth be told, I was using it as an outlet for some of my anger issues with my hate towards Anakin, seeing him as similar to a lot of people I've had to deal with. Some of it was wanting more followers and fear of being disliked by the majority. I would pick fights with Anakin fans and was a bit of an asshole and I apologize for that. I still don't like him but no longer HATE him. Seeing how fandoms treat abuse victims who aren't perfect angels like Shinji Ikari or Lapis Lazuli has caused me to loosen up a bit. Many Jedi stans would probably hate those characters for not being “perfect” victims. In retrospect, this wasn't a good community for me. It was very puritanical and I often felt like I was wrong for enjoying media that went against the beliefs Jedi Stans put on a pedestal. Three of my favorite ships (Madohomu, Reishin and Hodaka x Hina) involve "burning the world for one person" and I felt like I couldn't talk about them without being a hypocrite. That and me agreeing less and less with Luca's beliefs pushed me to leave.

It's fine to enjoy a fictional character and defend them if you feel that they're being unfairly criticized. I've done it myself and have written essays defending my faves. The problem is that Jedi stans don't know when to stop. So many are quick to compare the Jedi to minority religions or marginalized groups as a shield against criticism, not recognizing how insulting that can be. Jewish, asian and aroace people are the ones normally used due to the Jedi beliefs being based off Eastern religions as well as Judaism as well as some aroace people identifying with the Jedi.

One thing I noticed about Jedi stans is their similarities to Jumblr which is full of religious chauvinism reworded to sound progressive. Many of them talk about how the Jedi shouldn't have to change their traditions with the times or to accommodate a few individuals like Anakin or Ahsoka. This can be similar to how a lot of people are quick to defend minority religions from outside criticism based on how they were treated by Christian colonists or missionaries. The problem is that this can veer right into ableist or queerphobic territory. You know who else believe that their religion shouldn't have to change with the times to accommodate people? Conservative Christians who hate being told to be affirming of LGBTQ people. Also, schools and parents/guardians do have a responsibility to accommodate kids with disabilities, mental health issues or trauma, even if it may be inconvenient or force you to bend the rules. Claiming they need to just suck it up is honestly disgusting.

This was all a big reason for why I left this garbage pit of a fandom. While there are some who hate the Jedi because they stan the empire or think people need 50s nuclear families to live fulfilling lives, not everyone does that. Believe it or not, some people have faced abuse and bigotry under Judaism and Buddhism. People can also criticize how Lucas presented their beliefs as some Buddhists think he didn't do a good job. Libsoftiktok is a vile transphobe, an Orthodox Jew and her beliefs are said to be fairly common in her community. Many people of color identify with the clones and dislike how even the nicer Jedi treated them. When Obi Wan told Anakin, "It's okay to have romantic feelings, but you must let them pass," that hits different for queer people who have been told similar things from "polite" homophobes. Some queer people do choose celibacy like Side B christians which is fine as long as they don't treat it as a moral failure to want a relationship. There are many neurodivergent people who don't like the Jedi beliefs as they hit close to home. Lucas may have not intended to come off as ableist but the Jedi did with their beliefs about negative emotions. To some people, platitudes like "just let go" aren't helpful and treating it as bad for not living up to those principles is gross.

I deleted the post, but a while back I made a post asking a popular pro jedi blogger their views on adoption since they claimed Anakin not viewing the Jedi as his "found family" was a moral failure. I found their response to be tone deaf and insulting. I responded in a decent way of course, but felt a bit judged and unhappy for wanting to know my birth mother. Adoptees are another set of people this fandom is insensitive and gross to. The Kenobi series I find insulting for that reason too, having Leia be a foil for Anakin and Obi Wan romanticize his recruitment as a child.

Jedi fans are also shitty to those with religious trauma and who faced abuse. Accusing anyone who criticizes the Jedi of projecting their issues with Christianity while simultaneously talking like conservatives as shown above. Tumblr in general has a weird habit of treating religion as if it’s either conservative evangelicalism, liberal reform Judaism and some vague pagan or eastern spirituality with little nuance. Some Jedi stans really come from a place of privilege. Claiming "they can just leave" is insulting to real religious abuse survivors who were raised with harmful beliefs like creationism or homophobia. I'm no antitheist but treating non christian religion as inherently progressive dismisses a lot of people's experiences.

Let's be real, the writing in this franchise was always a bit sloppy. Lucas's issue was wanting to simultaneously create both a black-and-white morality tale for kids based on the fairy tales and serials he grew up and a deep socio-political commentary about the Vietnam and Iraq wars which required some morally grey themes. Thus, along with his terrible dialogue that made the characters seem unlikable, is why the fandom is so divided over whether he intended people to agree with the prequel Jedi.

To wrap this up, I found the pro jedi fandom to be a terrible experience. It was a mix of faux progressivism mixed with fear of judgement for disagreeing. I ended up editing a post I made, and eventually deleted, comparing Yoda with Garnet from SU because I included a tiny bit of criticism and didn't want to get backlash. As long as it’s not gross or bigoted criticism of your favorite characters isn't the end of the world. People don't have to like George Lucas or his beliefs and put them on a pedestal. I feel like the fandom's worship of George comes in response to OT purists who claimed he "raped their childhoods" but there's fair criticism to be made. Just like how not everyone who criticizes Disney SW or any Disney media in general is an "anti woke" grifter. To the pro jedi fans reading this, here's a suggestion. Just block and ignore people, write an essay if you feel it's important, but don't act like an entitled bully if a blog or even a SW writer disagrees with the Jedi, interprets the story differently or criticizes your favorite characters.

[girlactionfigure]

by design

INTRODUCTION

Since the October 7 massacre, antisemitism worldwide has skyrocketed to levels reminiscent of the eve of the rise of the Nazis. Dozens of synagogues around the world have been firebombed or set on fire. A 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped in France on account of her Jewishness; another French Jewish woman was allegedly kidnapped and raped “to avenge Palestine.” A pro-Palestinian protestor killed a 69-year-old Jewish man in Los Angeles. An ISIS-supporting teenager stabbed a 50-year-old Jewish man in Zurich, leaving him in critical condition. A San Diego Jewish dentist was murdered under suspicious circumstances. Protestors have defaced Holocaust memorials, nearly lynched Israel’s 20-year-old Eurovision participant, the mother of an Israeli female hostage had to be rescued from a pro-Palestine mob in New York City, protestors disrupted a memorial walk at Auschwitz on the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the list goes on and on…

In 2017, the white supremacist Unite the Right Rally, during which participants exclaimed “Jews will not replace us,” drew widespread condemnation from the left. Yet today, day after day, thousands march in main western cities, including New York City, proudly displaying the flags of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Houthis, whose banner proclaims “a curse upon the Jews,” and the left hardly bats an eye. Worse, we are gaslit. We are told that these are merely “ceasefire” or “anti-war” protests. We are told “a few bad apples” don’t represent the movement. We are told we are blowing things out of proportion, or that their hateful actions are valid because of X, Y, and Z. 

But these are not a few bad apples or fringe extremists. I don’t doubt that the vast majority of people worldwide who feel solidarity with Palestinians are not genocidal Jew-haters. But the antisemitism that we see coming from the pro-Palestine crowd is not a fluke. It’s not a coincidence. It’s not an exaggeration, a distortion, or a lie. 

It’s by design. It’s, unfortunately, what this movement was designed to do from its inception, to the detriment of Jews, Palestinians, and Israelis alike. 

THE LONG LEGACY OF DHIMMITUDE 

To really understand what’s going on, we have to go back in time to 637 CE. Following Muhammad’s death in 632, the Arab Islamic empires conquered lands exponentially quickly. As a result of this rapid colonization, the Muslim authorities were faced with the “problem” of how to handle the conquered Indigenous peoples that resisted conversion to Islam.

This “problem” was solved with a treaty known as the Pact of Umar. This so-called treaty allowed select religious and cultural minorities, known as dhimmis, or “People of the Book,” to practice their beliefs so long as they paid the “jizya” tax and abided by a set of restrictive, second-class citizenship laws. 

In other words, to survive, Jews had two choices: pay a tax or convert to Islam. But the system of dhimmitude didn’t end there. Jews faced a myriad of second-class restrictions. For instance, Jews could not govern, lead, or employ Muslims. Jews could not join the military or work for the government. When harmed by a Muslim, Jews had to purchase Muslim witnesses, which left Jews with virtually no legal recourse. 

You may think that dhimmitude, which was only abolished in 1856, is too long ago, too far removed from the conflict and the Palestinians of today. But it isn’t. That’s not how history works. Fast forward to the beginnings of the twentieth century and political Zionism. Palestinian Arabs, the majority of whom were Muslim, might not have held any ill will toward Jews. But they were accustomed to a certain social structure, in which Muslims dominated and Jews and other religious minorities were second-class citizens. The “threat” of Zionism challenged this structure. Jews were fine, so long as they knew their place. Once Jews started asking for more, well, that became a problem. 

THE FORMER DHIMMIS

In 1916, the British promised the Arabs a unified Arab state in Greater Syria, which included Palestine. A year later, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which stated that “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

It’s worth noting that the British did not yet occupy Palestine at the time either of these promises were made. To the Arabs, the Balfour Declaration reneged the earlier promise made to them, whereas the British argued that it, in fact, did not. After all, the Balfour Declaration never specified the exact nature of this Jewish homeland. 

Up until 1917, the vast majority of Arabs in Palestine, save for the higher classes, had never heard of Zionism. To prevent any sort of Jewish homeland from ever coming to fruition, the Palestinian Arab leadership, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, had to mobilize the masses. So what did he do? He incited antisemitic violence, by disseminating the conspiracy that the Jews intended to take over Temple Mount. This incitement resulted in a series of antisemitic massacres, most notably, the 1929 Hebron Massacre. 

A couple of things are telling about these massacres. First, the language that was used. At the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, Muslim Arabs ravaged the Jewish community in Jerusalem, chanting “Palestine is ours!” and “the Jews are our dogs!” Second, if al-Husseini’s problem truly was Zionism, he could’ve incited violence against the new Zionist communities that had been established over the previous decades. Instead, however, this violence almost exclusively targeted the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Palestine, in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and more. The threat of autonomous Jews prompted Palestinian Arabs to attack their very own neighbors, the former dhimmis.

SEEDS OF CONFLICT 

Today, Palestinians certainly have many legitimate human rights grievances against Israel. But up until the 1930s, when the Zionist paramilitary Irgun carried the first Zionist retaliatory attacks against Arabs, this just wasn’t the case. The Zionist movement purchased lands legally. As a matter of official policy, the Zionists avoided purchasing lands occupied by Palestinian farmers. 

The 1937 Peel Commission corroborated this, stating: “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased.” In 1931, the British created a register for landless Arabs; only 664 Arabs out of a total of nearly 900,000 met the criteria. 

It’s worth noting that the Ottoman Empire had restricted Jewish land purchases. Once again, Zionist land purchases upset the previously existing social order, in which Jews were tolerated so long as they stayed in line. 

In fact, Haj Muhammad Said al-Husseini, the Mufti of Gaza, admitted as much in 1948, when he issued a fatwa stating that “Zionism has created a reality in which Jews have forgotten they are dhimmis.” A similar fatwa had been issued in 1935. 

What’s happening today is not at all shocking considering the earliest Palestinian violent “resistance” to Zionism was, to put it plainly, resistance to Jews. In 1937, when Haj Amin al-Husseini was asked whether he would be willing to absorb the 400,000 Jews already residing in Palestine into a future singular Palestinian Arab state, he plainly said, “No,” and implied that they would be expelled. Of course, he also rejected any partition of the land between Arabs and Jews. In other words, Haj Amin al-Husseini rejected the very existence of Jews in Palestine regardless of the political arrangement. 

Their problem wasn’t just with Zionism. From day one, their problem was with Jews. So is it any surprise Jews today are being terrorized around the world in the name of Palestine?

ionist land purchases did not displace Palestinians. As a matter of policy, the Zionist movement avoided purchasing lands occupied by fellahin, or Palestinian farmers. This is corroborated by the 1937 Peel Commission, which noted, “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased.”

But up until 1936, when the Irgun, the right-wing Zionist paramilitary group, carried the first Zionist retaliatory attacks against Arabs, this wasn’t the case. Land purchases 

"His Majesty's government has been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine." 

British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, 1947

SKEWED PRIORITIES

Time and time again from its inception, the Palestinian “resistance” has prioritized the murder of Jews over their own national aspirations. Between 1939-1947, the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected a number of iterations of a “one state solution” with an Arab majority on account of the fact that said state would have too many Jews or afford Jews too much autonomy. 

The original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization is telling. In 1964, the charter explicitly stated, “This Organization [the PLO] does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip, or the Himmah area.” In other words, the PLO’s main aim was the destruction of Israel, as opposed to self-determination for the Palestinian people living under the occupation of two different Arab nations. It was only in 1968, shortly after Israel captured those territories during the Six Day War, that their charter was amended to include Gaza and the West Bank.

The pattern has continued. In the early 1990s, when Israel and the PLO pursued a peace process known as the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat, al-Husseini’s protege and chairman of the PLO, gave an address at a Johannesburg mosque where he assured the worshippers that this peace agreement was merely a “tactical step” in the ultimate goal to annihilate Israel. 

Among the most heard chants at pro-Palestine protests today are a number of variations of “globalize the intifada,” but the intifadas drastically deteriorated the quality of life of Palestinians. The checkpoints and the West Bank wall, for example, were erected in response to the intifadas.There is absolutely no strategic reason in calling for an intifada if the concern is truly Palestinian human rights. The only reason to call for an intifada is if what you wish to prioritize is the murder of Jews. 

In the 1960s, Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giáp advised Arafat to "…stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your [Arafat's] terror war into a struggle for human rights." But the fact remains: Arafat, and his successors, continued to prioritize Israel’s destruction over Palestinian human rights. 

rootsmetals

[mann-walter]

I think I’ve seen enough of it to want to address it: Pro-Sith and Autonomy

I’ve done my rounds around this fandom, and I think I’ve seen enough of the Pro-Jedi/Jedi-critical/Pro-Sith discourse to still be quite baffled by Pro-Sith arguments. And no, although there certainly is an intersection of the Jedi-critical and Pro-Sith camps, their theses are distinct. While the Jedi-critical usually brings up the mishandling of Anakin Skywalker, the Clone Wars and the clones, and the Jedi’s alleged failure to address grave problems in galactic society, the Pro-Sith crowd is less bothered with the Jedi, instead, they forward an argument that they are for the Sith because the order (or the philosophy) promotes agency and autonomy.

And that’s the point where I raise my eyebrow a bit too high.

The Sith philosophy offers autonomy over your body, destiny, morality, and ethics, however, it also promotes megalomania. Besides championing struggle, strength, and the triumph of willpower, there is also encouragement toward seeing yourself as this innately special individual. It’s not meritocratic. It’s (social) Darwinist. It is Might Makes Right. The Sith sports autonomy, only there's a catch: they disregard others’ agency. They don’t hold on to Live and Let Live. It is not a freedom philosophy but a perpetuation of oppression by an elite with the flimsiest excuse to rule over others by the standard of 21st-century liberal democratic thinking. People like Palpatine are not outliers, and the Empire is not a misrepresentation of the order’s values. They are perfect expressions.

Seeing this reality, I would rethink it thrice before choosing to be Pro-Sith if I were a part of this crowd. Especially since the Sith philosophy so closely resembles real-life harmful ways of thinking with the sense of personal and—to a lesser degree, surprisingly—communal superiority, the glorification of power and violence, and the belief that a self-perceived genius or power-giving peculiarity gives one carte blanche to shape the world and to toy with people despite their rights, needs, and feelings.  

The Sith and their claim of freedom-seeking is not a bother to me if only that “freedom” means not trampling over others, especially those supposed lesser beings.

[wetsocksinbed]

small rant about separating characters from their actors

watching recordings of old panels and seeing the way the crowds acted, and the way they failed to seperate Misha from Cass and Jensen from Dean, makes me very uncomfortable. The Spn fandom is probably one of the worst when it comes to this. Even now, years after these panels happened, I still get such visceral second hand embarrassment. Like we all know teenage girls are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to having obsessive crushes on actors, but the way some of these fans acted about Jensen, Jared and Misha, and the way they bulled and harassed the wives/girlfriends of the actors (and some still do) is insane to me.

on top of that, the way the fandom worships the actors? You don’t know Jensen Ackles. You don’t know Misha Collins. You don’t know Jared Padalecki. The fandom sees them and assumes they’re like their characters. These are actors. They lie for a living. They could be horrible people in real life, but you look at them and you see Sam, Dean and Cass, so obviously they can “do no wrong”. I’m not saying they’ve done anything wrong, but if it came out that Jensen was pro-Israel, or that Misha was a raging homophobe, could you really say you’d make a mature decision and stop liking them? Or would you go “but Dean/Cass would never do that!”

it’s like with Mark Hamill. I love Star Wars, and I like Luke Skywalker, but Mark openly supported Biden and was indirectly pro-Israel. Instead of people going “this person has done a bad thing”, the fandom erupted with “Luke skywalker would never do this” like yes obviously the leader of a rebellion against an oppressive empire run by an old wrinkly white guy would never do this, but this is Mark fucking Hamill, not Luke Skywalker. You’re comparing a real person to a fictional character.

You don’t look at the Joker and go “Heath Ledger would never kill someone!” Because it’s obvious that the Joker is a fictional character and that the things the character says and does is not reflected by the actor. So why is it so hard to flip it around? Why are so many people unable to look at a good character and think “these words and actions aren’t the actors real beliefs”??

[fullmetal-scar-simping]

I was talking about the last Airbender with one of my friends and how the whole "ending the cycle of violence" actually works really well and serves the story and the message it wants to send. it's one of these only instances where the choice of not killing the big bad guy makes SO much sense beyond the "murder bad".

It's the air tribe SURVIVING the genocide the fire nation despite all the hurt. It's so thematically powerful.

But having the supposedly anti imperialist show KEEP the military at the end? Is misguided at best. We're talking abt the same military that is built upon the blood and exploitation of others. Like the point is RIGHT THERE, and yet...

And gen I think that's what Arakawa is; misguided.

Cause she gets so many things right in her works that I don't get how else she could've chosen to end Scar's arc like *that*.

I just think she hasn't been properly introduced to intersectionality and radicalism and thus she's stuck in the liberal limbo. But then again, I might be wrong idk ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

ATLA shares a similar anxiety towards the oppressed who become "too violent" ala Jet and Hama. Pulls the classic "make the radical/angered victim of genocide behave cruelly to their fellows in order to equivocate the violence of entrenched power with those lacking".

Though I can give it to ATLA that, narratively, Aang defanging Ozai rather than killing him is an act of reclamation of his culture, as the sole surviving Air Nomad. Though we can ask how the meta-narrative uses this cultural context to soften the blow against an empire. But, given the homage to existing pacifist practices and ideologies, it feels more earnest and less nakedly protective of imperialist institutions compared to mangahood. But the cycle of violence is the growth of the Fire Nation as an imperial power, not the retaliation against the war machine; if Aang had chosen to kill Ozai, that's not a perpetuation of a cycle. Empires don't arise simply because someone took one down, and empires don't conquer and slaughter people because an empire had been quelled. The cycle of violence doesn't really map onto such things as imperialism, not without flattening all violence to "bad always".

It's been a long time since I watched the show; contrasting it to Brotherhood would work well, but who has the time? If nothing else, ATLA at least follows the victims and survivors of the Fire Nation's imperialism and massacres, rather than mangahood which largely stars genociders and imperial citizens. From what I can recall, it also has better pacing, doesn't squander its more serious and sombre moments with ill-timed gags, and the comedy/gags are more seamless/less intrusive than Brotherhood in particular. So hey, there's that too.

The supposedly "leftist", "anti-imperialist" show (Brotherhood) sure does a lot of excusing, coddling, and valorizing the military as an institution. It rests on a juvenile conception of noble idealism that, surely, all proud upstanding soldiers want to achieve for the nation. Positive nationalism! That's good and righteous, yeah? (No.) We sidestep the fact that no amount of 'noble' propaganda changes the exceptional violence that a military is literally meant to wield against those the state governs/wishes to govern/wishes to eradicate because, actually! It's the homunculi! Father makes the military and the nation it controls bad!

So there, problem solved. Anti-imperialism achieved.

We can only speculate on Arakawa's personal political beliefs. One's works are not necessarily indicative of every thought, belief, and action you hold or wish to see in the world. So no doubt she is simultaneously misguided on some things, liberal/nationalist/reactionary in others, and perhaps holds some quality beliefs as well. People are multifaceted messes, all of us. But, at least while looking at the politic of this one work of hers, it is boldly pro-military, pro-nationalist via reformism and the maintenance of the hegemon of powerful nation, and, frankly, racist towards brown people. Arguably mangahood is orientalist in its treatment of Ishval (exotified and negative/"savage"/"primitive"), Xerxes (exotified and 'positive', excuses and exemplifies the protags and their heritage, "advanced"/"civilized"/tragic in contrast with Ishval which is seen as aggressive on par with Amestris), and to an extent Xing.

Tbh, my biases prevent me from shaking the thought that she hated that Sho Aikawa et al had Amestris be shone in the hideous light of its systematic cruelty. That she resented Scar being made to be the enemy of Amestris as an entity, and a direct enemy of its military. (Oh no, he's an enemy of all the "~good~" that militaries stand for! 😱😱😱/immense sarcasm)

Perhaps she always planned for her version of her character to be 'reformed' (I have to hold in my bile). Perhaps that plot beat only blossomed in her mind after witnessing Scar kill off 7000 soldiers in his final act, 1) because she thinks that's cruel to the soldiers (🙄🙄🙄), and 2) because waaaah Scar died 'evil' (🙄🙄🙄🙄). As Brotherhood carried forward in its plot, all I could see were direct inversions of 03. And Liore (as well as Scar) is a prime example. Look at how Brotherhood assures us that actually the Liorans are fiiiiiiiine, they all banded together to work as a team to rebuild, they just got all turned around and violent but it's no one's fault except the nebulous sins of humanity, haha whoops! They're super happy, their outlook bright and cheery! No more military aggression here, and all without the violence of resistance fighters! We don't even blame the guy who upended the theocratic rule of the city, no sirree. All is well! Rose even thanks Ed for showing them "the way". All of this is a direct rebuttal to the horrific violence of the military invasion shown in 03, of the mass slaughter, of the rape, of Ed being shown the part he played in this destruction. Edward surrounded by the crowded graveyard of murdered Liorans as Scar stands above him, having been right all along about the role people working in the military will play, is one of 03's clear-eyed condemnations of the sabotage and subterfuge powerful states use against their targets. Rose doesn't thank Ed for what he did, for what happened to Liore, and the mass suffering caused on behalf of the state, for which his meddling accomplished.

It couldn't be more clear that Arakawa was not ok with any of this. I could chalk it up to "she simply wanted to set her manga apart from the first anime" which I know to be the case more broadly, given her statements on the matter. But it's the way she ignores Liore in her version of the story, the way everyone is oddly... fine. The way Rose assures Winry that they've improved as a people as a result. And the way Scar is just routinely tarred and flogged until he bends to the military while decrying his own actions as "terrorism" (I won't dive into the numerous meanings of such a loaded term for now). It's all of that that makes me see her work as a more active, intentional political statement rather than an accidental, incidental one.

As I stated before though, neither of us can be certain on what she believes within herself, let alone what she would claim. (People have a tendency to feel one way but their actions and reactions may claim otherwise. You can say you're against imperial violence while making millions of excuses for imperial nations.) It's still worth dissecting what can be seen, directly stated, and interpreted from mangahood itself, sans the author. Because regardless, the works themselves do have a voice. And that voice is often heard without the context of 03. Because I'm sorry, but mangahood would not be so stringent on its reformism without 03's more stark, relatively realistic take on militarism and imperialism.

Yet mangahood purists would have us believe that it exists not in conversation or rebuttal to 03 but instead in a vacuum. Pure. At best some fans see mangahood as a 'correction' of the 'mistake' of the 2003 adaptation, simply because the source material is king even when that source material doesn't fully predate the 03 anime. And that's fucking ridiculous and warps the chronology of fma's history as a franchise all for the convenience of ignoring mangahood's glaring contrivances and issues.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Early DS9 Garak would not recognize himself as the baddie in this meme.

If you post stuff about the Paradox of (In)Tolerance or memes like this in order to inform the vulnerable that you see them and consider their concerns to be your concerns, this does not really pertain to you. Different people have different understandings of the function of a meme or a pithy saying and that is part of what makes communication in this medium so bedeviling.

However, there is a sort of "In this house we..." type of poster who I believe understands themselves as doing an act of communication with the explicit intent to shame bigots and to inform bigotry curious normies that its not okay.

I am extremely pro-discourse with anyone who is acting in goodfaith on an interpersonal level and I am still pro-discourse with people who are acting in badfaith if done with the express purpose to try to provide a better representation of the ideas the badfaith actor routinely strawmans. Meme wars ain't that. Or at least shallow memes.

And this? This is a shallow meme. I'm sorry, but it is. Its a weak form of engagement that feels good to share, may reassure some allies, but if reassurance isn't the point, then its almost entirely a waste of bandwidth. And let me state again: reassurance is a valid use of bandwidth, I just don't think most people sharing this stuff have that as their primary motive.

Let me unpack this using Garak as a case study.

Among the majority of Star Trek fans whose complaints about Discovery don't begin or end with "identity politics" it ought not to be controversial to call early DS9 Garak a fascist. Heck, depending on your feelings about his actions in "In the Pale Moonlight" Garak may very well still be a fascist, albeit one who is questioning, until late into DS9.

He's not a fascist in the sense that he checks every silly little box that would describe a German who has bought into an Aryan fantastical reimagining of malignant Italian nostalgia for the "good old days" of the Roman Empire. Rather Garak appears to be believe in the innate desirability of a strong paternalistic state that advances the interests of its people, as defined by its oligarchy, through expansionary violence abroad while using hefty amounts of coercion backed by threat of violence to ensure order at home.

This is fascism not as a specific historic belief system, but rather the colloquial fascism. A thermostatic measurement of how fast the average citizen can be exposed to state violence, how narrow their civil liberties are, and how fast those liberties can be suspended if authorities within the state deem it necessary. Rights are far from inalienable in the face of the collective good, as dictated by a narrow elite whose only accountability is censure or murder by a peer.

Colonization, assassination, and disinformation are tools without intrinsic moral weight detached from their aims. Murder isn't wrong because murder is wrong in Garak's world, murder is either an effective means to an end or it isn't. In Garak's moral universe, if murder is useful then murder is good. There's really never any sense from Garak that he is burning his decency to build a paradise he will never see - ala Andor's Luthen Rael or The Operative from Serenity. Garak lives easily with the things he's done, even enjoying throwing the way that Sisko benefited from the way that Garak did what Sisko himself understood was necessary but could not morally bring himself to do when it came to the murder of the Romulan Ambassador.

It might register on some level to Garak, especially later, that he's been conditioned by his society broadly and by his Obsidian Order training specifically to be far from unbiased when considering violence as a tool and thus he gives less weight than he probably ought to the downsides like blowback, unintended consequences, or just the risks of becoming too reliant on violence relative to other options. But ultimately it takes several seasons of exposure to Federation moral and practical arguments about the plurality and nonviolence to wear Garak down.

One could even argue he doesn't truly become a convert to something resembling Federation secular humanism until he is forced to watch proud Cardassia become a barely tolerated vassal to the Dominion and its these people that he, Quark and others have sneered at as soft, too trusting rubes who are willing to die to protect Garak from his own people. To be sure, its the Dominion that bombs Cardassia, but I think we can safely say that Garak understands by the end that its generations of self serving Legates, Obsidian Order directors including his own father, and their ruinous ideology with its unchecked ambition and stifling of imagination that set that particular historical Rube Goldberg machine in motion.

But for early Garak, his ruthless cultural chauvinism wasn't bigotry as he would understand it. The system produced unequal results by design but to him it wouldn't appear to be personal. Garak lived inside a zero sum ideology and thus it was necessary for his people to sabotage and loot other peoples. It was necessary for Garak personally to lie, torture, assassinate, and massacre. He didn't hate other races and cultures, he just preferred Cardassians be the ones to be the masters in a universe of dominator and dominated.

This is the archetypal reader who I most imagine as needing to see themselves as targeted in this meme but instead would gloss over it and find nothing controversial. At best, the reader who needs to see themselves in this meme would be irked by the meta signaling that their lib friends think they're racist and tolerate overt racism in their midst.

Still, they don't see themselves as the baddie because most of them are not Nick Fuentes or Nick Fuentes adjacent. There's only ever been a few thousand Proud Boys and that's according to the Proud Boys who have every reason to exaggerate. Instead what the average reader of concern is is comfortable with unequal outcomes, comfortable with social orders ordered by the stick rather than the carrot because they assume it creates meritocracy and even if it doesn't, a system that is more likely to issue a loan to people like themselves and less likely to gun them down in a routine traffic stop ensures their status and comfort are unlikely to be challenged in a world of scarcity.

Garak probably even thought Cardassians are biologically more intelligent than Klingons or Nausicaans because he thought the cultural products of Cardassia were intrinsically superior to those of the Klingons and the power and prosperity of the Cardassians relative to the Nausicaans were evidence of innate superiority. As for the Federation's dominance, most of the Federation's enemies rationalize it as a house of cards that will fall apart if enough pressure is applied to a pain point, while Garak and Quark would come to have a more nuanced view. They saw the Federation as a Human Empire hiding within a web of co-dependency, acquired favors, and cultural exports like root beer that erode out the foundations of enemies and result in assimilation if they're not careful to police their cultures.

It's not a stretch to think that the secular Cardassians told themselves they were civilizing the religiously stringent Bajorans and liberating them from their rigid caste structure by replacing it with a new, meritocratic hierarchy in which merit was defined as loyal and effective service to the Cardassians. Meanwhile slavery was a natural condition of those who could not be trusted to serve directly below the Cardassian overseers who were "reparenting" the Bajorans and redirecting natural resources back to Cardassia as payment for "services rendered."

The occupation of Bajor through Garak's eyes would not be an act of hate, far from it, but rather because the Cardassians were empirically superior so how could that be bigotry? The Bajorans could complain and kill all they wanted in the mistaken belief they deserved sovereignty but facts don't care about your feelings.

Gul Dukat on the other hand knows he's your villain and while he would prefer you recognize his superiority and love him for his magnanimity in being a less harsh master than some or the "supreme act of generosity" that is granting the Bajorans their freedom; a part of him would be tickled to know he lives rent free on your Promenade.

So what does this have to do with non-fiction? Think carefully about whether you think there are more Gul Dukats or Elim Garaks in the world and communicate appropriately. Communicate effectively.

Damned if I know what effectively even is, we've had ten years to figure this out and have demonstrably and spectacularly failed. I suspect a lot of it has to do with communicating better offline or 1:1 with people who already know us as more than just a witty handle and an avatar and thus can see as more fully human with hopes, dreams, fears, and feelings. I'm not unaware of the irony of this message coming at the end of a lengthy social media diatribe.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

In Latin America, Nostalgia Can Be “One Hell of a Drug”

A new book by a veteran journalist tracks the political uses and abuses of the region’s history.

The novelist William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In other words, the past haunts the present in ways that are sometimes deliberate, and sometimes not. In Patria, a retelling of the history of Latin America since its pre-Columbian period, Laurence Blair gives this phrase a different spin. Nostalgia for the past can be “one hell of a drug,” he writes.

Blair is referring to how the memory of Francisco Solano López, Paraguay’s president during the devastating Paraguayan War that took place between 1862 and 1870 and killed around two-thirds of the population, has fed popular beliefs about what Paraguay could have been had it not been defeated. This dream, Blair says, has been used by the Colorado Party to solidify its rule for 70 years. The past is an opiate that keeps Paraguayans distracted while their political leaders plunder the country.

To achieve a more nuanced view of Latin America, Blair argues, we need to pay attention to the way historical narratives are constructed. Out of the centuries-long debate that Latin Americans have conducted over their history, Blair highlights two clashing extremes. On the one side, there are the anti-colonialists, like decolonial Argentine academic Walter Migolo, who mourn the cultures erased from the map after colonization. On the other, pro-Hispanists like Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa argue that Latin America is better off having been conquered.

Blair rightly points out that both views are incomplete. “Either approach—dwelling endlessly on past trauma, or launching into a headlong fight to forget—is likely to yield similar results,” he writes. Through rich storytelling, Patria demonstrates that the way we remember cultures from long ago—the Inca empire in Peru, the escaped slaves of Palmares in Brazil, the Diaguita in Argentina, to name a few—still very much influences how each country is building its present. And we must be mindful of what we choose to remember.

Continue reading.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Undoing

Chapter 3: Undoing

Chapter 2: Frontiers

Chapter 1: Backstory

Chapter 4: Casting

Chapter 5: Continuing

Chapter 6: Ergonomics

Chapter 7: Facts

Chapter 8: Gods

Chapter 9: Oneiric

Chapter 10: Replaying

Chapter 11: Storing

Chapter 12: Subsumption

Chapter 13: Transfer

Chapter 14: Transience

Chapter 15: Unlearning

Chapter 16: Velocity

Chapter 17: Vietnam

Chapter 18: Vilification

Chapter 19: While you were gone

Chapter 20: Xitalis

Chapter 21: Zooming

Chapter 22: Treatment plan

Chapter 23: What was it?

Chapter 24: Planning

Chapter 25: Acceptance

Chapter 26: Simple

Chapter 27: Editing

Chapter 28: Siphon

Chapter 29: Evening

Chapter 30: Universes

Chapter 31: Belief

Chapter 32: Meeting

Chapter 33: Molly

Chapter 34: The best of times

Chapter 35: Is that why?

Chapter 36: Sport

Chapter 37: Starlight

Chapter 38: Effects

Chapter 39: Girlbossification

Chapter 40: Status

Chapter 41: Fearful symmetry

Chapter 42: Reference

Chapter 43: Venom

Chapter 44: Letting go

Chapter 45: Sincerity

Chapter 46: Megido

Chapter 47: Mockery

Chapter 48: Freezing

Chapter 49: Ring

Chapter 50: New

Chapter 51: Discovering

Chapter 52: Destroying

Chapter 53: Conquest

Chapter 54: Liberation

Chapter 55: Seclusion

Chapter 56: Swelling

Chapter 57: Shaking

Chapter 58: Considerations

Chapter 59: Magick

Chapter 60: Dog

Chapter 61: Goncharov

Chapter 62: Lonely

Chapter 63: Hobbits

Chapter 64: Giving up

Chapter 65: Water

Chapter 66: Drops

Chapter 67: Depths

Chapter 68: Improvising

Chapter 69: Quid pro quo

Chapter 70: Hurting

Chapter 71: Anticipating

Chapter 72: Cavity

Chapter 73: Bypassing

Chapter 74: Building

Chapter 75: Assembly

Chapter 76: Nocturne

Chapter 77: Disappearing

Chapter 78: Memory

Chapter 79: Extinguishing

Chapter 80: Approaching

Chapter 81: Interpreting

Chapter 82: Target

Chapter 83: Numbers

Chapter 84: Late

Chapter 85: Safety

Chapter 86: Measures

Chapter 87: Worlds

Chapter 88: Granting

Chapter 89: Jumping

Chapter 90: Fleeing

Chapter 91: Discerning

Chapter 92: Now

Chapter 93: Ultimate

Chapter 94: Brackets

Chapter 95: Instructions

Chapter 96: Severing

Chapter 97: Dire

Chapter 98: Bodies

Chapter 99: Heal

Chapter 100: Consciousness

Chapter 101: Cyclical

Chapter 102: Heaven

Chapter 103: Species

Chapter 104: Empires

Chapter 105: Light

Chapter 106: Waterfront

Chapter 107: Impermanence

Chapter 108: Consummation

Chapter 109: Salving

Chapter 110: Unlimited

Chapter 111: Mediating

Chapter 112: Unity

Chapter 113: Space

Chapter 114: Birds

Chapter 115: Stars

Chapter 116: Telepathy

Chapter 117: Dawn

Chapter 118: Vortex

Chapter 119: Passages

Chapter 120: Defending

Chapter 121: Averting

Chapter 122: Control

Chapter 123: Stars

Chapter 124: Inhabiting

Chapter 125: Stars

Chapter 126: Spoons

Chapter 127: Stars

Chapter 128: Room

Chapter 129: Angels

Chapter 130: Shining

Chapter 131: Offerings

Chapter 132: Rhythm

Chapter 133: Overcoming

Chapter 134: Stars

Chapter 135: Patriarchy

Chapter 136: Rage

Chapter 137: Myopia

Chapter 138: Devouring

Chapter 139: Void

Chapter 140: Juggernaut

Chapter 141: Slumber

Chapter 142: Growing

Chapter 143: Flight

Chapter 144: Showing

Chapter 145: Mutation

Chapter 146: Revolution

Chapter 147: Customization

Chapter 148: Introspection

Chapter 149: Mandates

Chapter 150: Carnival

Chapter 151: Credulous

Chapter 152: Snack

Chapter 153: Earth

Chapter 154: Liberty

Chapter 155: Arete

Chapter 156: Instruction

Chapter 157: Allowing

Chapter 158: Memories

Chapter 159: Traveling

Chapter 160: Binding

Chapter 161: Outside

Chapter 162: Returning

Chapter 163: Birds

Chapter 164: Cabin

Chapter 165: Starlight

Chapter 166: Heat

Chapter 167: Service

Chapter 168: Severing

Chapter 169: Woods

Chapter 170: Siding

Chapter 171: Flowing

Chapter 172: Unreasonable

Chapter 173: Golden

Chapter 174: Unfolding

Chapter 175: Holding

Chapter 176: Sloth

Chapter 177: Wind

Chapter 178: Quarantining

Chapter 179: Awakenings

Chapter 180: Errors

Chapter 181: Motors

Chapter 182: Geometry

Chapter 183: Subsumption

Chapter 184: Crossroads

Chapter 185: Release

Chapter 186: Explaining

Chapter 187: Retrofit

Chapter 188: Returning

Chapter 189: Molly

Chapter 190: Haunted

Chapter 191: Bestowal

Chapter 192: Chances

Chapter 193: Firsts

Chapter 194: Margin

Chapter 195: Thy Kingdom Come

Chapter 196: Harbor

Chapter 197: Crisis

Chapter 198: Searching

Chapter