#you have ppl who think you have to be islamophobic in order to not be antisemitic

[priceforrottenjudgement]

...

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

like im personally not fond of organized religion as a concept but being an asshole to people who are a part of it is icky

like yes some of these people definitely do come from a Christian background and definitely don’t understand the complexities of other stuff I’m not denying that. Ppl need to talk to others with lived experience

But like. People are allowed to be critical of things. It’s research and talking to people about it. Like there are far too many “progressives” who will flip out over say, a conservative Christian republican saying something mild about traditional family values because of their religion but then turn around and be like “this is okay actually because of culture and religion” upon being presented with something horrific from a Shariah country. Like if you’ve read the hadiths you’d know that they endorse killing Non/ex muslims and straight up said women have half the mind of a man and encourage killing and lashing homosexuals. Like organized religion like that is the reason queer people are “illegal in 72 countries” as Americans far too often joke about. My partner used to live in Saudi and was told by teachers not to write about certain things in essays because it was dangerous. One of my mutuals who lives there is trying to escape but is in danger of being forced into an arranged marriage and also can literally legally be killed for apostasy and lives in fear of that. Also a huge amount of women there have potentially deadly vitamin D deficiency despite being in an extremely sunny place… hmm i wonder why. Also just look at what’s happening in iran. I’m not gonna go into all the shit to unpack w that stuff, but there’s a lot. but then you get progressive people from other countries. And a lot of them have either been convinced that stuff like that is okay because “ueuuee its a different religion and culture” or recognize the issues but won’t speak up about it because they’re scared it makes them islamophobic. (criticizing a set of beliefs [especially ones used to design governments] is 100% fine, being an asshole to harmless individuals is not). And that seems really frustrating for activists who live in shariah countries. Making it sound like people aren’t allowed to criticize things isn’t helpful to the people who actually live in oppressive environments due to organized religion.

spiritual beliefs n stuff are chill but once you get into organized religion with rules it can become dangerous. But like if someone is being a dickhead to someone else on a bus about having a religious garment I’d help them get out of that situation. Like. it’s possible to dislike organized religion and be an activist against the ways religion can harm people without being an ass about it to individuals hehfhs. Telling people that they shouldn’t think critical thoughts isn’t helpful though and it helps perpetuate oppression

When your takeaway is that “Islam is violent and bad” and not “this region was victimized severely by western imperialists who like to sew dissonance, firebomb cities, and elect dictators in order to keep these countries in a state of disarray and war at all times to justify western troops stationing there to protect and seize western assets (oil and other resources) and use the desperate for cheap labor”

You cannot compare oppression under Islam in the Middle East to oppression under Christianity in the west because it was the Christian nations that did that to the Middle East. And they do the same thing in Latin America, east Asia, and Africa because if imperialists and capitalists can ensure that non-westernized countries at least LOOK less developed to westerners, they can get away with so much out of a self-aggrandizing perceived superiority complex that keeps the people from perceiving the constant US military presence in these countries as the act of imperialistic ethnocide that it is.

This isn’t as black and white as you think it is.

[cannibalisticcorpse]

do you have any recommendations for dick and jason (together or separate, both is fine) comics for someone who’s just starting to read them? i have some knowledge of the characters and batfam and i’ve read several batman comics, but i never really got into the robins-after-they-were-robins comis so i’d like to start with dick and jason…thank you so much :)

so firstly, i deffo reason waaay more jason than i do dick. most of my dick recs will be things i haven't finished reading or haven't read more than like 3 random back issues of XD

dick:

any nightwing solo is a good place to start (okay, not any, but you can find comics on readcomiconline and with an adblocker the site is useable. peruse the different nightwing runs, if it sucks drop it)

i've heard spyral is good, i think the comic might just be called "grayson"

pretty much any titans comic pre-2003 would be dick grayson (typically as robin, but not always)

there are some post 2003 titans comics with dick too

i like "the titans" (1999) the most, personally (my tip for finding the right titans run, because there are so many, is to look at the font of the title. then look at the author)

honestly if you're fine just jumping in and figuring it out as you go (which you kinda need to be), i'd sooo heavily rec that run to start you with

and, of course, there's the outsiders run from 2009 with dick and roy <3

jason:

i dont really have any robin-era jason recs, but he wasn't robin for too long, so if you're interested it's not too hard to read some!

death in the family (comic where he dies. it's weird and also islamophobic iirc, buut it's important to his backstory. not too long. im a slow slow slow heavily dyslexic reader and it only took me 2 days)

under the red hood (comic where he comes back. a longer read, but VERY fun. villain jason and competent jason. you understand the framework for all of his post-robin/post-resurrection drive)

lost days (also pretty long. i go back and forth on if i personally liked it. but it covers the time between him coming back to life and him returning to gotham- because he stayed gone even after he came back)

red hood and the outlaws n52 (i think it came out in 2011)- this comic sucks, but it's kinda fun! i really enjoy it. if you're fanfic-inclined you might like it (because it prompts a lot of fun ideas without ever presenting very many on its own and never doing anything with them). it's the origin of the jason/roy thing which i am so obsessed with

red hood/arsenal (continuation of the last comic, now without The Girl.. buut kori was written really misogynistically so, congrats kori on getting free

then there's red hood and the outlaws rebirth (which is a different team and some ppl like this comic more), then there's red hood: outlaw, i forget if there's more or whatever the order is. there's also a webtoon with the same naming scheme. im collecting the physical comic, you'd think i'd know this. but these runs are LONG.

for current comics, there's "task force z" which came out like a year or two ago, and then "joker: the man who stopped laughing" which is mostly abt the joker but also about jason hunting him and trying to kill him

jason & dick, together:

honestly i dont read too much stuff with the both of them in it? idk. jason doesn't team up with many batfam ppl on the reg, i guess. like they're never really On A Team together. most of their comics together are from Events. but dick appears in task force z, a little red hood and the outlaws too, and jason is in a little bit of outsiders. like they have cameos, i mean.

there was a nightwing annual (i think 2021) about jason & dick teaming up.

they were both in robin war (but that's the conclusion of "we are robin") (not too long, i think it took me about a week to read all 3 paperbacks)

other ppl feel free to add on!

[jyndor]

paul krugman and the art of doubling down on shitty takes

so on september 11th, famed nyt editorial writer, keynesian economist and fave of your racist liberal uncle, paul krugman, wrote one of the shittiest takes I have ever seen on twitter, which is SAYING SOMETHING.

krugman famously tweeted this:

and got a million virtual shoes thrown at him for being so ignorant, because anti-muslim hate crimes did actually escalate after 9/11, and the bush administration eagerly fanned the flames of islamophobia in order to make their illegal wars in afghanistan and iraq popular with the public. muslims, sikhs, indians, literally anyone vaguely brown, and lots of black ppl too, were terrorized by their neighbors, (former) friends, classmates, coworkers, etc. and anyone with a muslim friend knows this happened because they've told us about it. and these attacks were reported on. they were, I remember reading about them when I was a kid.

(paul krugman works for the new york fucking times, and while I think the nyt is warmongering centrist garbage, they do actually report on things that happen in the world. he writes editorials for them, surely he reads the damn paper once in a while).

so today, I log on to twitter and see he has decided not to apologize, but rather do the ol' double down, which always works out well.

here are some highlights:

okay so first thing's first, no apology (obviously) since this is a double down. but we got a chart, and liberals do love a good chart when they are being racist and ahistorical.

he admits that the chart is actually inaccurate because it excludes all the other victims of anti-muslim hate crimes who weren't actually muslim (read: the innocents). okay. so already he is losing credibility because he is using an inaccurate chart as the basis of his double down, and really, we love to see it.

after this there's some shit about how he didn't say there wasn't an outbreak of white americans attacking muslims and people mistaken for muslims, but rather that it could have been worse. lol well anything can be worse than it was, as 2020 has taught us. it’s a pedantic mess and I didn’t feel like that was the meat of the double down.

so first off, the iraq war was definitely started for many reasons, but islamophobia was part of it. the bush administration wanted to invade iraq and depose saddam hussein, and steal iraq’s oil for multinational oil companies lbr, and so they exploited americans’ fears about muslims by propagandizing about how it was important for us to attack them over there before they attacked us over here with their weapons of mass destruction, and of course they would attack us over here if given the chance. why? because they hate our way of life here, our freedom. those things were LITERALLY said by bush people and also by their stans at fox news and the wsj, and yes, in the editorial pages at the nyt.

so to someone like paul krugman, who knows lots of conservatives who don’t seem racist, or are educated and distinguished and just... like war? idk but to him, he sees people like them and says, well... they’re not like uneducated filthy poors in west virginia, not that kind of racist.

but what he doesn’t get, or he is being deliberately obtuse about, is that in order for the bush people to dehumanize muslims the way they did, they had to personally place less value on the lives of iraqis than on the value of that sweet crude oil. they were willing to go to war, sacrifice hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process (as well as thousands of american soldiers, but this isn’t about them) because they didn’t see them as anything but collateral damage. and that is fucking racist.

and while I have no interest in playing the “which racist is worse” game, when the west virginia uneducated racist endangers those around them, the politician rich harvard educated racist writes policy and lies us into illegal wars that endanger millions. both are bad, both are racist.

and by the way, him “sticking his neck out” to speak up against going to iraq was brave and necessary, especially because the nyt was pushing the invasion. but when you put it like that... you just sound like a tool. like it was a burden to call out the liars and imperialists. bitch, you’re paul krugman, a nobel laureate and renowned economist. I do not want to discount the IMMENSE pressure and blacklisting that opponents of the bush administration experienced, because showing any opposition to the wars at the time was risky. but idk the way he put that just irked me, especially since he didn’t even lose his job like many in the media did when they spoke up.

usually what liberals do when they fuck up publically is a fake ass apology and a few hail marys, and I assumed he would be on twitter begging for forgiveness on this one since his garbage take went so viral and pissed off so many people. and of course was wrong.

but then he does this:

yeah. your eyes are not deceiving you. that chart is measuring anti-black, anti-lgbtq and anti-”islamic” (lmao who says that bro just say anti-muslim or islamophobic) hate crimes. shut up leftist twitter, black people have it worse than muslims according to my inaccurate chart. so stop attacking me, a rich white man who doesn’t really care about anything other than my reputation.

there is a lot to unpack here, namely that paul krugman is using faux concern for black people as a way to deflect from his shitty ahistorical take about how much restraint white americans showed after 9/11 towards muslims. maybe krugman doesn’t know any black muslims, but they exist. also oppression olympics is stupid even when used by well meaning essentialists, let alone by milquetoast academics.

not to mention that he has already discounted his own shitty chart by saying it doesn’t show the full picture of what happened in these anti-muslim attacks. but even if we take this chart seriously, it actually does not really support his point. look at how many more hate crimes there were against muslims in 2001 than there were in 2000. there are significantly more black people than muslims in the united states. I am not good at math, and surely I am no nobel laureate, but it seems to me that hate crimes against black people increased a little, and hate crimes against muslims increased a lot. and this chart only takes into account three years, and only two of which are post-9/11. so... idk man maybe we should look at what happened in, say, 2003? 2004? how about all of the 2000s?

(source: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-12/data-hate-crimes-against-muslims-increased-after-911)

oh, that is actually pretty consistently bad! yes, there was one spike in 2001/2002, but it isn’t like we went back down to pre-9/11 numbers afterwards. and I am not sure if this information includes non-muslims targeted for “looking muslim” but I would say it is unlikely, since the data seem pretty similar to krugman’s olympic shit.

I am not writing this because paul krugman is particularly shit-for-brains, or because I hate him more than like... idk any other moron on twitter. there were plenty of anti-muslim takes on twitter friday like there are every 9/11, and every day. but krugman is actually someone liberals respect. he is, after all, a nobel laureate and a keynesian economist, and fairly mild mannered. when people in the media like krugman write these ahistorical shitty takes they are, as chomsky wrote, MANUFACTURING CONSENT. it is a deliberate tactic, and it works. and if you want to learn more about this theory, check out this short clip by al jazeera narrated by amy goodman (of democracy now). the media manufactured american consent when they pushed the wars. they continue to do so when they try to rewrite george bush’s history by making trump seem uniquely terrible to muslims.

elites in the press and in government have been trying to whitewash and rehabilitate george bush’s reputation for YEARS, and they are succeeding. and why would they want to do that? well, there are a lot of reasons. one, a lot of people in washington are complicit in bush’s crimes. two, democrats think they need to appeal to moderate republicans (lol) in order to win elections, and I guess they think there are moderate republicans left (lol!), and that those moderate republicans like george bush (LOLLL). three, they want to make trump look uniquely terrible. if they do that, then no one but trump needs to be held to account for his government’s failings. but these are just my speculation.

do not let them rehabilitate george bush any further than they have. it is a fucking shame he will never be held to account for war crimes, but an extra slap in the face to all of his victims when we act like he didn’t do things he did. like stoke anti-muslim hate. he invaded muslim countries with a smile on his face, and that is pretty fucking hateful.

paul krugman doubled down and tried to use Black Lives Matter like a human fucking shield. seems a bit racist imo.

[j4ya]

One thing I really hate about Zayn stans, or at least some of them, seem really intent to make me feel guilty about not liking him when he said the N word and what he said about police brutality. Like I LOVED Zayn and I was hurt deeply by that. Idk if he apologized or not, but even so it still hurts me and I really hate that a lot of his stans will erase black people's thoughts on that. I just wish some people would sit down and really just think & stop attacking the blk ppl who feel like that.

don’t take his hardcore stans’ words to heart. a lot of them will try to brush away your legitimate reasons for being concerned or having your guard up and turn it around on you. there’re always stans (for anyone) who will get super uglie when it comes to idolizing their fave and not admitting to their fave’s faults. they don’t understand that you can’t just easily forgive or trust some people like that, especially when they adore that person, and the best way to be is to understand other people’s hesitation and know that not everyone may adore who you adore--I wish those kinds of stans would learn that.

zayn stans used to come in my inbox all the time and tell me that i had internalized racism because i wasn’t attracted to ‘zayn or any other south asian men’ just because i had mentioned that I didn’t think he was attractive and they couldn’t fathom that idea. also bc zayn was my #5 for a long time in my ‘order’ or whatever but it never had anything to do with his race and everything to do with his personality. i just didn’t relate to him very much and there always seemed to be this unspoken rule that south asian girls HAD to support zayn no matter what so I was ostracized by quite a few of my south asian friends after a certain person (who i thought i’d been good friends with) announced that I didn’t support south asian people and was racist or whatnot. what really got to me was that she wasn’t south asian and so she didn’t know the relationship a lot of south asian women have with south asian men, and even though all those other friends of mine definitely knew (and had agreed with me a lot) about the subject, they chose to side with her and I was at that time already struggling with my identity as a desi since I didn’t really grow up in the community and those south asian friends that I’d made on here had been some of the first real south asian friends I’d had in my life so it was just kind of a shitshow for a while. (and now i’ve reconnected with a few of them but i found out they reacted the way they did mostly out of fear of that other person who’d ‘called me out’ would do the same to them so i understand and i don’t harbor bad feelings towards them anymore.)

SO the point of this is that after this, every time I mentioned zayn, casually or though a reblogged post or in any other way, I had at least 10/20 people in my inbox talking about how i had no right to speak his name or how i was islamophobic or that i wasn’t a true south asian because I didn’t support him or shit like that, so my guard is always up when it comes to talking about zayn. I honestly used to write posts about him once in a while and then i would just save them in my drafts because I was so scared to post them bc of the hate I would get. which is stupid because he is literally so much like every other brown boy i’ve ever met and he acts the same way they do and I wasn’t even allowed to talk about the shit I’ve endured when it comes to south asian men on my own damn blog lmfao.

ok this is too long but it was kind of therapeutic ANYWAYS I really do understand where you’re coming from. I really wish those people would understand it too. I’m sorry you were hurt and I hope that you still don’t get that shit from them!