moomaldthings-blog

[moomaldthings-blog]

i really love this ilustration!

Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway made a name for herself after the publication of her 1984 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” At the time, it was seen as a reaction to the rise of anti-technological ecofeminism, but it has since been interpreted and reinterpreted by everyone from postmodernist lefties through to transhumanist postgenderists.

Referring to Haraway as a Cyborgian Socialist-Feminist, the futurist and sociologist James Hughes describes her legacy this way:

Haraway argued that it was precisely in the eroding boundary between human beings and machines, and between women and machines in particular, that we can find liberation from the old patriarchal dualisms. Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, and proposes that the cyborg could be the liberatory mythos for women. This essay, and Haraway’s subsequent writings, have inspired a new cultural studies sub-discipline of “cyborgology,” made up of feminist culture and science fiction critics, exploring cyborgs and the woman-machine interface in various permutations.

And as Wired’s Hari Kunzru noted, “Sociologists and academics from around the world have taken her lead and come to the same conclusion about themselves. In terms of the general shift from thinking of individuals as isolated from the “world" to thinking of them as nodes on networks, the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the cyborg era.”

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i thought so, the word for the number 6 is the same as in Hebrew?!

Numbers in Farsi 1-20

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i just want to know the words for numbers in hebrew, and instead all I can find is all this hebrew4christians numerology bullshit ...

ETA: i guess i should have searched for "how to count in hebrew" or something

[moomaldthings-blog]

What’s with these white jews on tumblr insisting that they’re oppressed and then never ever responding about how that’s the case as soon as they realize I’m Jewish?

Hmmm it’s almost like it’s just a thing they’re pretending exists!

[moomaldthings-blog]

prioritizing white goyim or even setting them equal to us in the pro-Palestine movement upsets me a lot either way. do people not realize that white goyim can pack up and leave anytime they want? this shit doesn’t affect them. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict affects every Jew because it’s basically the face of how goyim see us in modern politics—this changes how we’re viewed by people. and it deeply, deeply concerns so many aspects of our Jewish identities.

we have skin in the game. we’ve always had skin in the game. white goyim don’t, and even if they make an education blog, they will still always, always be outsiders. they are not my priority, nor do they have more of a say about anti-Semitism than i do.

[moomaldthings-blog]

just plz dont get confused between what yiddishkeit means and what it evokes bc what it evokes is a very naive and narrow view of history while in reality millions of Yiddish speaking jews were not frum and did not live in backwater villages

[moomaldthings-blog]

Facts: This post is a request for donations.

My computer is over 6 years old and has been suffering from severe overheating problems for the last two. It’s a 2007 iMac all in one, and a growing patch of iridescence has been creeping over the monitor top left for the last year. It is ...

[moomaldthings-blog]

So perfectly, in fact, does the figure of Judas meet the requirements of Christian hostility toward Judaism that it has been suggested by more than one New Testament scholar that he is a purely fictional character, invented by the Gospels for anti-Jewish purposes. There are certainly aspects of the New Testament narrative that would seem to corroborate this, starting with the name Judas itself [which, in the Greek New Testament, is “Ioudas": Jew].

"Why Judas Still Conjures Up Images of the Jew as Christ-Killer"

i read this as "Loudass": Jew 

(via lazersilberstein)

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Oy Vey!: Antisemitism and Islamophobia: Two Sides of the Same Coin

fuckyeajews:

So I’ve been having this thought for a while now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that modern day anti-Arabism and Islamophobia are modelled after anti-Semitism.

Think about it: both of them deal with the idea of a certain group threatening the status-quo in the West, having disproportionate power, and seeking to subjugate the native inhabitants of the land in question, ultimately seeking to take over the world. In the case of the Jews, their purported instrument of power was the banking system, whereas Arabs/Muslims today are supposedly accomplishing this with a “creeping Shar’ia”.

Another popular trope of both of these movements was the idea that these people were/are moving into the West in droves, having a birth rate much higher than that of the average Westerner and refusing to assimilate. Ultimately, this is supposed to lead to a demographic catastrophe where they become the majority and begin to impose their will and culture onto the rest of the population. This is a particularly popular theme in Europe today, as demonstrated bythis video (which, by the way, was completely debunked bythis study). The exact same things were said about the Jews who were moving West in droves to escape the pogroms and persecutions of Tsarist Russia. The European antisemites of the time had a field day because the first generation of immigrants really did have a higher fertility rate than the average Europeans. And yet, as these immigrants’ children and their children’s children settled down and became increasingly educated, their fertility rate went down to the same level as the average European. Strangely enough, the exact same thing is happening to Muslim fertility rate in Europe. Isn’t that odd? But nope, just as the Jews before them, the Muslims will overtake ethnic Europeans and impose their own customs, languages, and religion onto everyone else.That’s what the Jews did, isn’t it?

Just like the Jews were (and to an extent still are), Arabs and Muslims are labelled perpetual foreigners in the countries in which they reside, even if their families had been living there for several generations. They are the Other, and can never become a part of the fabric of Western society. Even if they appear assimilated, they are merely practicingTaqiyya (which apparently means that Muslims have the obligation to lie to non-Muslims to further their own cause!), waiting for the chance to strike, just like the Jews of the antisemitic imagination.

It sickens me that such claims are thrown around, especially when it’s done by Jews. I’ve noticed a trend in the Russian-Jewish community here that they actually buy into these conspiracy theories. What particularly boggles my mind is that most of these people came here to escape the anti-Semitic persecution in the Soviet Union, where similar claims were often thrown around by commoners. And yet, they can’t think critically for just a minute and realize just how ridiculous these claims are. I’ve heard things that are actually really fucking scary. For instance, one time my half-brother (the same one who has Robert Spencer stuff lying all over his house) told me that Muslims ought to be rounded up into concentration camps. I just lost it when I heard that. How fucking dare anybody, especially a Jew, suggest that people be rounded up and exterminated just because they’re the followers of a certain religion?

The same thing goes with Muslims who buy into antisemitic conspiracies by the way. When I see Muslims talk about the Elders of Zion and how Hitler was right in what he was doing, it makes me want to bash my head in. How do you not understand that the same exact things are being said about you by the same people who came up with antisemitism?

Anyway, I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but that should explain why I feel solidarity with Muslims and especially Arabs. They have to deal with the same shit that my own people dealt with, and to an extent continue to deal with. I can’t therefore stand by and do nothing with a good conscience while my brothers and sisters in humanity are targeted and slandered because of their ethnicity and/or religious convictions.

[moomaldthings-blog]

Youngist Indiegogo Update: We’ve Raised 82% of Our Goal, 10 Days to Raise the Last $2,099!

Friends,

We’re in the home stretch. It’s been a thrilling (read: nerve-racking) past two weeks here at Youngist. We’ve already managed to raise over 82% of our Indiegogo campaign’s $12,000 fundraising goal!

That $9,901 alone could put us a long way towards building the full website we so-need to effectively showcase and amplify the untold stories and independent news and analysis of Millennials worldwide. 

Here’s the thing: unless we reach our full $12,000 goal by July 11, we won’t receive even a penny of that $9,901. So, we need to raise $2,099 more in the next 10 days.

But fear not! That’s just $197/day. And, If you can spare the next 2 minutes to help out, I’m confident we can hit that goal. Hell, maybe even exceed it. 

Step 1: Share this video on Facebook

Step 2: Reblog this video on Tumblr

Step 3: Chip in $10, $25, or more to the Indiegogo campaign. Donate $50 or more and we’ll send you a limited edition Youngist t-shirt designed by or own design guru, Tom Acker!

If you dig the work we’ve been doing, I hope you’ll take a couple minutes to help make certain this campaign is a success!

Cheers,

Alex Stevens, {Young}ist Engagement Editor

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Dr. B. J. Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, wrote his graduate dissertation with a far less aggressive commitment. Even if he came home from a party at 3:00 A.M., he had to write one sentence per day. He finished in record time while classmates languished for years, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.

Tim Ferriss, The 4 Hour Body

If I had taken this advice from day one, I'd be done by now.

[moomaldthings-blog]

Talking about racism without being a "good white person".

One of the hardest things for me as a white anti-racist is to remember to always implicate myself.

There is always a strong pull to try and be the "good white person" and to think that if you say and do all the right things you can transcend your whiteness. Well of course this isn't true ... it's literally impossible to benefit from white supremacy if you have any degree of whiteness, and so by definition that makes you complicit ... like if a robber sells you a stolen bike, ethically you're at least partly guilty of the theft, even if you didn't know it was stolen.

So it's a start to admit to and claim your white privlidge. Unfortunately this isn't where the "good white person" complex ends. In fact people find it relatively easy to admit white privlidge, because it doesn't seem like an issue of personal respnosibility (even though I believe it is, like with the stolen bike). 

Bigotry is the big elephant in the room in post-civil rights "colourblind" white socities. As I learnt when I took the Undoing Racism workshop at NCORE this year, the colourblind ideology arose a direct result of civil rights legislation. The idea is that in order to be prosecuted for a civil rights violation, the case must pass the "Intend Doctrine" -- this is actually a thing, look it up. So you actually have to have said something bigoted in order to be sued. If you don't say anything bigoted, then the law doesn't consider you racist. 

So of course white kids are taught from a young age to be colorblind and "not see race" -- our parents are trying to protect us (and protect white supremacy) from getting caught by civil rights laws. So my generation grows up thinking we're not bigots. But of course we are, we're just trained to keep it all secret. 

And it's really hard to admit your own BIGOTRY, past or present. As soon I  started learning about how racism actually operates ... for example through microagressions, I started pretending that I'd always known, and that that somehow made me to superior to other white people who didn't know about race or were just starting to learn (supposedly unlike me who's been learning about race for a whole 18 months or so?!) And it's really bad to not do this. Because if you're serious about being an anti-racist, you can't distance yourself from other white people, becauase it's not all about you, you need to build a sense of solidarity with other white people, 

So my resolution has been that whenever I call out racism, as much as I can I will admit to an aspect of my own bigotry, whether it's something that I used to think before I learned about race theory, or whether it's something I still struggle with. 

For example last night I surprised my friends by admitting that I used to be bigoted against Asian people, partly because my highschool was so white that I didn't know any, partly because of my parents, and partly because I was just a little shit. Well it wasn't an easy thing to admit, it actually still hurts (how shit is that ... but it proves how invested even us "good whites" are to white supremacy underneath all our self-righteousness).

So I had to give up being a somehow superior person and go back being just like my friends who are learning togther. But then as a consequence we went on to have a really good conversation abut race, and my friends were a lot more relaxed and open, and less defensive, and also I think we'll be more ready to talk about race in the future. Of course I can't forget my resolution!

[moomaldthings-blog]

No Google, Yiddish isn't the same as Hebrew fuck you Google for trying to erase my cultural birthright

PS what's with the wacky transliteration in the Google translate box, also is tsufridn even an appropriate word in this situation?! I don't trust you Google Translate, I bet you're feeding me dodgy translations on purpose to fuck me up so I can't learn about my culture

[moomaldthings-blog]

i'm no art historian but this painting reminds me of how expressionism can get pretty racist, the way they appropriate and caricature African and Indigenous cultures to symbolise "primitive and raw emotions" or whatever it is they're supposedly on about.

Paul Klee, Black Knight, 1927

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Whenever I see some hipster with a Hitler mo or a "Nazi haircut" I get this sort of panicky feeling in the pit of my stomach. And I always tell myself "what's your problem, it's just a haircut, they're not going to put in a death camp". But I just realized, there are actually  neo-Nazi currently groups active IN MY CITY, not to mention what's currently going on around the world. So you're pretty much a jerk if you're going to make your ironic-fascist "not Nazi just '30s" fashion statement without engaging with what this might mean politically. 

ETA: OK I realize that actual neo-Nazis don't really wear these haircuts and are more likely to rock skinheads, or just a regular haircut. But still fuck you Wil Anderson and your racist haircut.

[moomaldthings-blog]

This morning I've had a bit of a realisation about having kids ... all/some of the things that I dread it involve having to do things that I don't really like, for example working a job I hate, driving around everywhere, doing boring sports, bike riding, reading aloud, ... but the reality is that other dads (often) do those things because they like them ... I could do things with my kid that I like: housework, cooking, talking about racism, wrestling, playing computer games, ... because if you're patient with them, kids are up for whatever, I could teach a kid to do things I love ... imagine if cooking together was our thing ... that would be beautiful, I would have loved it so much if I'd learned cooking from my parents. Housework too!

Also if I don't have a kid of my own, I can still do these things with other kids as an "uncle", and still get the same joy and rewards ... so that's a realisation: I've always thought I'm bad with kids, but it's because I feel like I have to do things I don't like with them, but with some work, and careful thought, I could teach them the things that I do like. 

I do want to go live overseas for a while with L, I really hope we can do it. But we also need to work on relationships with our families, and with other white people in Melbourne ... that's the sad / scary reality. God it would push us if we had kids ... it seems too hard. But I'd give it my all ... seriously, with L as my partner, I'm never going to find someone who's so on the same page as me, and with our closeness, intimacy, communication, everything, I'm never going to have a better opportunity. 

I still think I haven't quite let go of the fantasy of finding the perfect hippy commune somewhere. But that's not right. The work has to start with me and L, or it won't be real. I know that in my heart.

[moomaldthings-blog]

What a good point. I've always wondered why humanism seemed so empty to me ... I have a hunch that its "universalism" was developed as part of Western Europe's program of minimising the importance of culture in order to dehumanise the peoples being crushed through colonisation and imperialism, as well as being a means of promoting & invisibilising white supremacy?

lbr talking about literature “touching our souls” is some empty, humanist bull crap which obfuscates the very real and political issues behind things like ~canonicity~ and eg racism and sexism

sry followers but i don’t have the patience to do a proper take-down of such basic ideas from online...