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Funniest thing about putting out a new fic is that people read it, same few people comment(!), and then every other fic you've written starts getting hits too. Like hey guys how's it going, Khajiit has other wares for you.

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A Christmas cartoon for the Guardian. Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Reading a Terry Pratchett book is literally just: Here's a funny little joke Here's something that you can tell is a joke but don't get and will only figure out five years later Here's a surprisingly cool fantasy concept Here's a unique and well written simile Here's a lil guy Here's something that has aged depressingly well into the modern day Here's something that has aged remarkably queer into the modern day Here's a character that you can barely understand what he's saying Here is the most terrifying and deeply disturbing concept you have ever heard, casually mentioned Here is the dumbest fucking pun you've ever heard but in the best way Here is a quote so profound that it makes you view morality and the world in a different way Here is a plot twist that you can't tell if it's genius or stupid Congratulations! You've finished the book! It has fundamentally changed you as a person and you will never be the same!

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And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.

And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.

This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.

Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.

Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.

Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.

https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/

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Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

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I was listening to a non-religious podcast where an Evangelical Lutheran priest was talking about Satan and he was like “If you take away everything about the devil that isn’t in the Old and New Testament what do you have? An angel who isn’t anti-God but anti-human. He loves God. He sees God and the world He created as perfect, but by placing humans over angles the perfect order of things were cast into chaos. All Satan ever does is point out how dirty and disgusting and unworthy of God’s love humans are. When God is excited about Adam and Eve the snake, who admittedly may or may not actually be Satan, goes out of his way to expose them. When God gets excited about Job Satan tries to prove that Job doesn’t actually love God. When God chose a new leader for the Jews Satan says he is unworthy because his clothes is filthy. When God himself becomes human Satan is besides himself with disgust. Satan is at the heart of his being a conservative”

And I know this is probably going to turn into a religious debate or whatever but I’m just so tickled by the mental image of conservative Satan getting nauseous and throwing up a little in his mouth at the sight of his perfect beautiful God in a disgusting, smelly human body. Just fucking keeping a bucket nearby every time he talks to Jesus because it’s the worst fucking thing he has ever been exposed to.

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chekov’s cat: if you see a cat, it will probably be relevant later.

schroedinger’s gun: there’s no way to know if a gun is loaded or not until you physically inspect and check it yourself, so it’s safest to assume all guns are loaded.

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Where is the International protection the Palestinian people is entitled to when the occupying power violates international law and harms those it is obliged to protect. Aren't Palestinians lives worth saving?

-Riyad Mansour (Palestinian representative to the UN)

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Jew here with a friendly reminder that:

Criticizing Isreal ≠ antisemetic

Supporting Palestine ≠ antisemitic

Believing in the Free Palestine cause ≠ antisemitic

BUT ALSO

A random ass Jew just living their life oceans away has nothing to do with the Isreal-Palestine conflict

Palestinian Jews exist

Jews that support Palestine exist (I am one of them)

Calling out ACTUAL antisemitism ≠ supporting Isreal

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As a leftist Jew who believes strongly in the cause of dignity and freedom for the Palestinian people, and that Israel has abused them, I am begging fellow leftists to understand that real life is not a comic book. A government being “the bad guy” in a situation does not automatically make anyone who opposes it “the good guy”.

Hamas denies the Holocaust. Hamas disseminates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the conspiracy theory it paints is what they mean by “Zionist”. Hamas forbids foreign aid educators from teaching human rights to Palestinians, and claims that even teaching that the Holocaust happened is a war crime. Hamas has written the aim of annihilating Israel (the country and its people) into its charter—the mass slaughter and violent expulsion of 7 million Jews from the land is written into its laws.

There is no crime any state could ever do that would justify any of that; there is no act of state repression that could ever make it acceptable to side with the organization spreading Nazi pamphlets and Holocaust denial.

Oppose Bibi Netanyahu. Oppose Israel’s far-right, authoritarian government. Oppose its apartheid policies. Oppose its violent abuse of the Palestinian people. That isn’t antisemitic. But Hamas is—verifiably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to its core—antisemitic. Its portrayal of Israeli Jews as blood-thirsty, child-killing master manipulators that control international media and finance is antisemitic. Its insistence that Palestinian freedom necessitates the death & expulsion of Jews from the land is antisemitic. Its redefinition of “Zionism” as a pejorative to mean genocidal Jewish/Israeli Supremacy is antisemitic.

Supporting the Palestinian people in their plight is a noble and loving goal; please never stop that. But do not let Hamas co-opt that into excusing or denying their rampant antisemitism and war crimes.

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Many things can be true at once.

Israel is an apartheid state that unjustly occupies Palestinian land.

Israel is a Jewish state.

Jews worldwide do not bear the responsibility of the Israeli army or government.

The American government backs Israel, largely because of the efforts of evangelical Christian lobbyists. Wether or not Jewish Americans want this is irrelevant to the USA military.

The American government is rooted in white supremacy and antisemitism, and is constantly verging on Christian theocracy.

Criticism of Israel, while necessary, can very easily be co-opted into antisemitism. It needs to be handled carefully.

We can expect both antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes to spike in the coming weeks.

Jews and Muslims are not enemies. We have to remember that and stand up for each other.

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I am an American Jew, and I support this message.

If we could stop blowing each other up that would be really great.

Beautiful display of solidarity ongoing right now from the US calling for a ceasefire in Gaza

Source: @jvplive on Twitter

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As someone who has actually studied the English language there's a common phrase about English that kinda annoys me because while it makes for a funny haha line it's such a gross oversimplification that it actually ceases to be funny. It's the one that goes "The English language is just three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat" or something to that effect.

I'm not going to go into detail as to why that sentence is inaccurate, just take my word for it as a person with a master's in English. I suggest we withdraw this expression from usage and replace it with the much more accurate "The English language is a dirty little slut that loves it when other languages cum big loads in it"