#To protect. WHO they still claim to protect. But when you add Jew | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

irrigos · 1 year

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okay, I finished reading Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett, and i have some opinions on it, and about Clay Men in Fallen London. Shocker, I know. Irrigos? Having opinions? I'm only 80% opinions by volume!

This is really long and rambling, and I WOULD apologize for that, but, idk man you chose to read it.

anyway, I'm gonna preface this by saying that I am not Jewish. I've been pretty forthcoming about that on here, I think, given that every post I make somehow becomes about how I was raised Catholic.

so... the Clay Men are golems, yeah? I don't think I really need to argue that that's so, and even if I did, I'm not really sure how I would (or, rather, I don't know how someone would disagree, beyond "but they're not CALLED golems")

I've always thought the Clay Men were such an odd addition to Fallen London, because like... why are there golems here? In folklore, the golem was made to protect the Jewish people (in the most famous story, the golem was made by Rabbi Loew in 16th century Prague to protect the Jewish ghetto from pogroms and blood libel) but like... there's no imperiled Jewish community in Fallen London. I mean, I don't think there's been any mention of any Jewish community whatsoever. So why are there golems? What purpose do they serve?

I know in canon, they were created by the King with a Hundred Hearts. But I'm not really sure... why. The lore wiki says that the Clay Men come into existence when the King dreams (but also, the article on Clay Men on that wiki doesn't cite any sources, and has a big banner saying it doesn't meet their citation requirements and might contain theories and headcanons. So I can't verify where in the game it says that). I know the King's backstory and all, and I know why he's a city, but I just don't really see why that resulted in the creation of a race of golems. Not really sure how his divorce was aided by the presence of an entire race of swole mud dudes, but... well what do I know

Anyway, the reason that I read Feet of Clay is because it's all about golems, and also... it's kind of the only answer I can think of for why there are golems in this game? I mean, golems aren't really a staple of the Victorian era, like Jack the Ripper or Sherlock Holmes, and they're not a staple of the cosmic horror genre (that the game at least makes a lot of gestures towards), like squid people or uncaring cosmic entities. And it doesn't seem like any of the FL founders were Jewish, or had any particular attachment to the golem as a folkloric character, so like... why? This is just a theory, and I might be totally off-base, but the best reason I can think of is that the Discworld books are incredibly famous and iconic and (especially in the UK) ubiquitous, and... they have golems, I guess? I don't know, I'm grasping at straws here because I have NOTHING. I understand all the talking animals and the fish people and sentient cities from space, but the golems? The golems confound me.

Especially after reading Feet of Clay, I just wish Fallen London would actually DO something with the Clay Men. There's been a few stories focused on Clay Men, but... well I've made no secrets about the fact that they've been the ones I enjoyed least. I think The Clay Man's Arm is gross, I think Factory of Favours is boring, I think the Comtessa storyline is... idk uncomfortably racially coded? ("Rich young white woman is kidnapped and killed by someone that is less than human but still undeniably A Man who claims to be in love with her" is uh. literally a plot point in Birth of a Nation? That really famous 1915 movie about how awesome the KKK are?)

The golems in Discworld are such a rich thematic vein-- they function as allegory for Jews, for oppressed workers, for automation, for the power of words in general. What is the narrative purpose of the Clay Men? What do they add by being in the story? What would be different if any given Clay Man that shows up in a story was replaced by a human? In Feet of Clay, you couldn't replace the golems with humans, because the story would cease to function. If you replaced the Clay Men in the Comtessa story line or in Factory of Favours with a human, or a Rubbery, or literally any other being that exists in the Neath, what would really be different, narratively and thematically? In my opinion, not a whole hell of a lot! So why are they here???

Anyway, I'm hoping that Mask of the Rose has more meat on this particular narrative bone. I know FBG has mentioned several times how much research they're putting into representing Jewish characters in MotR, and I know there's going to be a Clay Man lodging in Horatia's, too, and if David and Rachel don't have something to say about the fact that golems are real, I'm gonna riot.

Also, I couldn't think of a good way to work it into this post, but I really like this Jacob Geller video about the golem.

Thank u for reading all this mess. If you have any thoughts about Clay Men and what they mean, uh... well, let me know, because I'm stumped.

TL;DR:

#fallen london #i feel like i should make a tag for these sorts of posts but idk what exactly #but i love doing narrative criticism on fallen london #this game is my beautiful wife and i love her so much #but also i have to figure out how she works or my brain will grow mold

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writingwithcolor · 3 years

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Patrilineal Jewish girl, Sephardic culture

@feminismandsunflowers said:

hi! my character is a patrilineal Jewish girl in the usa, she didn't convert but still considers herself Jewish. her mom is Christian. her g-grandmother/father were undocumented refugees from Europe (antisemitism) and her g-grandmother was v closed off abt her origins but my character's dad thinks she said something abt being Sephardic. her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture. but could she claim Sephardic culture to any extent if they don't know? trynna get a handle on how to present her.

"My character's dad thinks she said something about being Sephardic"

and

"her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture"

are inconsistent statements.

The first statement sounds like the only indication Dad has of which Jewish culture they are is a statement he's not even sure about ("thinks"?) and the second statement sounds like Dad considers himself Sephardic and practices Sephardic traditions.

So, to me personally, this would depend on the level of Sephardic cultural practice she grew up with. If she grew up with those traditions and Dad sharing them with her, then yes, that's who she is. If Dad isn't even sure he's Sephardic and what she practiced in her upbringing wasn't distinctively Sephardic in any way, I have a hard time seeing why she should claim the culture if she's not even sure if her ancestors were Sephardic.

Disclaimer that the Reform position is to 'count' patrilineal Jewish people as long as they were raised in the traditions. This is not the Orthodox position but I am Reform.

--Shira

I'm also a bit confused about this situation. I think it would be helpful if you start by specifying where in Europe the family comes from and what anti-Semitism they were fleeing from. I'm Ashkenazi and not the most knowledgeable about Sephardi history, but as far as I know it wouldn't make sense for a Sephardi family to be seeking asylum from the pogroms in Russia or Poland, for example. I guess it could make sense if they were from Spain, France or Italy, but we would have to know more, and I'm wondering if this isn't a 'trace your logic' situation. Why do you want them to come from Europe? *Quickly cracks open a Claudia Roden book* Sephardi Jews have origins in many North African and Middle Eastern countries, such as Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq just to give a few examples. If you want Sephardi characters, why not represent those cultures instead of re-hashing the same Euro-centric Jewish stories?

In terms of whether she could claim Sephardi heritage of any sort if they don't know, I'm interested in what Sephardi followers think. Religion-wise, I don't think there would be too much of a problem with it. Yes, Sephardim are more lenient on some things and stricter on others, so by picking the wrong one she may be following some of the rules wrong, but that's just a matter of tradition really. If someone was a ba'al teshuva and had no way of finding out which population their family came from, I imagine a rabbi would advise to choose one and stick to it without worrying too much about which one. I don't know 100%, though.

Culture-wise, I don't know if this is what Shira was getting at but I wonder if it would be cultural appropriation due to Ashkenazi Jews being more likely to be white-passing and getting more media representation. Is Jewish lineage enough to claim Sephardi traditions and culture, or do you need to know for sure that you're Sephardi - that will be for Sephardi followers to decide.

To build on Shira's disclaimer:

I'm Modern Orthodox and I would describe your character as someone who is not halachically Jewish, i.e. not in Jewish law. In most situations, this would be a technicality for me and I wouldn't hesitate to treat her as Jewish if she identifies as such. In particular, with her family history it makes sense that she considers herself ethnically Jewish and the legacy of discrimination is part of her identity - that's not something we can erase or overlook. It would be different if my kid wanted to marry her, I think (not that I ever plan to be one of those parents who would disown their kid or something for marrying out but I'm not going to pretend I completely wouldn't care, either). Then I might be hopeful that she may formally convert, especially if she had always lived as Jewish anyways.

Other things she may experience if she hangs out in Orthodox circles: a few people might act like jerks and be iffy around her like she's 'not really Jewish', probably the same people who are pro-Trump and mansplain why women's exclusion from parts of Orthodox worship is actually protecting us. On the subject of women's exclusion, if you have any male characters with a similar parental background, they can't get an aliyah in shul or count towards a minyan - the character you're describing couldn't anyway, though.

Hopefully if your other Jewish characters are nice people, they take to heart the teaching that you should rather throw yourself into a fire than humiliate someone else in public. When I was a student, there was a patrilineal man in our community who once entered the shul just in time to be the tenth man, making a minyan. A Chasidic man in the congregation quickly stood up and said "Oh no, I left the gas on!" and left. That way no one had to make a whole song and dance about the other guy not being allowed to count. Patrilineal Jewish followers, feel free to add more!

-Shoshi

I'm going to add some things here, about the terms Sephardi and Ashkenazi, that I think might be partially tripping the author up.

Sephardi and Ashkenazi are terms used to describe the traditions that a person follows. Those traditions are heavily linked to the land where they rose up, and to parentage, as people are typically encouraged to follow the traditions they grew up with. However! Converts exist, and converts are usually encouraged to join in on the traditions in their community. So, as an example, a person can be from anywhere in the world, of any racial or ethnic background, convert in a Conservative synagogue, and follow Ashkenazi traditions. A person can be from a place that is usually seen as very Ashkenazi-heavy, like Germany, and then end up converting in an esnoga (synagogue) in Spain, and practice Sephardic traditions. Either of those converts might have children, and those children will take on their minhagim (traditions), and will be a part of the culture their parents joined just like their parents were.

It can be confusing for many people because the terms are so often conflated with ethnicity, which is in turn conflated with genetic lineage. The trouble is, the groups they describe are older than the modern, western conception of race, and ethnicity, and we don't completely fit into these categories. Ashkenazi Jews don't all come from Europe, even their ancestors might not. In the US it's been estimated that at least 12-15% of American Jews are Jews of Color, and those JoC are very, very often Ashkenazi. Some converted, some didn't, but they are still following the traditions, and are still Ashkenazi.

So it's fair to say that the traditions of Sephardim grew in the Iberian peninsula, and North Africa, but they also moved along with those Jewish people as they dispersed, and were expelled. Jews from Portugal fled to the Azores, but also to the Netherlands, where there is a large Sephardic presence, right in the middle of a space that is assumed to be all Ashkenazi! Scores of Jewish people from Morocco moved to France. Then too, people marry folks from other groups. Often they will pick one family's traditions to follow, but sometimes they mix and match, and sometimes they end up moving somewhere else and taking on those traditions.

Because so many people have traditions that match their genetic background we've begun using the term Ashkenazi to mean strictly white, European Jewish people. Sephardi we have taken to mean strictly white, Iberian Jewish people (which doesn't even include the massive number of North African Sephardim). We've forgotten entirely to cover Mizrahim (a tradition associated with the Middle East), or the Romaniote, or Cochin Jews, or any number of other groups. Yes, genetic background accounts for a large portion of those people, but it doesn't map completely, and it's important not to forget that.

This complexity is why the statements Shira drew attention to:

"My character's dad thinks she said something about being Sephardic" "her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture"

Don't make sense. You would know you are Sephardic, because it's something you do first, and may be, secondarily, directly linked to something in your ancestry.

Finally, since you are showing a patrilineal Jewish person, I really encourage you to show them consistently engaging with their Jewishness, and actively participating in Sephardic culture. I'm the Conservative one here, and my movement, and Sephardi tradition (there are no movements for Sephardim, just varying observance) don't allow patrilineal descent to give a person Jewish status halachically. This is not something I endorse. Patrilineal descendants really struggle outside of Reform communities, to be seen as Jewish, and often to just be treated with respect, so it's important that you give this character every opportunity to participate, and show who they are.

-- Dierdra

#Jewish characters #Jewish culture #Sephardi #Ashkenazi #Jewish #Judaism #terms #asks

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aesariwritessometimes · 3 years

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BNHA 314, Lady Nagant and war crimes, the take of history nerd.

This text will contain a discussion of war crimes, human experimentation, and genocide. Please, if you find such topics uncomfortable and upsetting, don't read.

When I was twelve years old, I visited what remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complexes in Oświecim, Poland. I heard about the utter torture people of various nations had to go through. I walked through the cells in which people were starved. I saw names long gone written upon the thousand of thousands of luggage left behind. I saw shoes, belonging to men, women, and children alike. I saw where those alive slept, the pits in which you wouldn't hold a dog, much less a human. I saw the walls against which people were slaughtered.

I looked at what remains of the endless list of names of people who died to the Third Reich's death machine.

Arbeit macht frei, says the slogan atop of the gates, Work sets you free.

Our guide told us the nazis used to smile and add, Durch Krematorium Nummer drei. Through the Crematorium Number three.

The Auschwitz Museum is not all of the testimony of the pain the people suffered under Nazi Germany, but it's the symbol. I can talk much more about it, about the horror of living in Nazi-occupied Poland, about the terror the Jews come through, about the evil residing in the hearts of men but I can never describe it all. You can't really describe the horror of those times.

During the Nuremberg Trial, the war criminals responsible for it all, one after another, claimed they did it all because they were told to.

This argument didn't hold.

In 1942 Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was ordered to execute the war prisoners in Africa. Supposedly, he burned Hitler's orders. Nothing happened to him. He was never punished by the nazi regime for disobeying their leader.

Most of the war criminals on the Nuremberg Trial were sentenced to death. Society decided that the excuse of being ordered to do something meant nothing.

The year is 2021. The leaks of the BNHA 314 chapter are out. I feel... complicated.

I did it because I was ordered to.

It could mean nothing. Just coincidence, right?

But.

The name of the character who said it is mocking me. Lady Nagant is badass; she is the female villain character I was waiting for. She is powerful, she is interesting, she has such potential.

But.

Her name.

People pointed it up already. Rifle Mosin-Nagant, one most famously used by both Simo Häyhä, the White Death, and Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the Lady Death. It seems so badass and cool at the first glance but I always felt somewhat iffy about it. She is named after a weapon, and yes, a weapon is not responsible for committing the crimes, it's always the people.

But for me, this weapon screams the Soviet Union and they didn't use it only in wars. Soviets committed unspeakable crimes, the ones for which they were never punished. They slaughtered people, they starved people, they committed genocide. Soviet Regime was not better than the nazis.

Deportations. Massacres. Gulags. All of it is not as widely discussed but I always felt there was a good, macabre example of how cruel they could be.

There is a book in Polish I read for my literature classes, The Another World by Gustaw Herling-Grudzieński. It talks about the author's memories of living in a Soviet gulag, in starvation and cold, working in inhuman conditions. What heinous crime did he commit to ending up on the end of the world?

You see, Mr. Herling-Grudzieński was wearing the army's boots. And yeah, his name sounded somewhat German. That's all. Only those boots and last name for years of painful labor, starvation, and death.

Am reaching with all of it? Probably. But emotions are not logical. It feels wrong for me to call a character after a weapon that committed genocide but maybe it's just me. After all, I know I'm biased, I was listening to all those things since I was a little girl.

I just don't like the connotation of Lady Nagant's name and those words. Even more, because we see people threatening her while something like that never happened in reality. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? Are we supposed to forgive her and Hawks?

And that, for me goes further: Are we supposed to forgive war criminals now because of orders? Is that what he is trying to say? What is your manga about now, Mr. Horikoshi?

Because I can't. I will not. Too many people suffered because of them. Too many people died.

My thinking does sound like reaching and overinterpretation, but then, I remember the last straw of it all, something I really can't forgive because of how malicious it felt.

When Ujiko's real name was revealed as Maruta Shiga in reference to the human experimentation on the Chinese civilian population by Imperial Division 731, I didn't understand what exactly it means. I don't speak Japanese. But then, oh, god, I learned.

Japanese war crimes, compared to those committed by nazis, are controversial topics. Most of them were swept under the rug by the politics of that time. I wish I could not judge those people for the choices they made. I wish I could say I'm not utterly disgusted by how the perpetrators of those crimes were never truly punished. I can't. Like said, I'm very biased about the subject, I feel strongly about all of it.

I'm not Chinese, though, I can't even imagine how they feel about all of it.

I never learned about what the Japanese did in school, I had to uncover the depravity of Imperial Japan myself. Is it wrong? Absolutely yes. Does the educational system suck? Yes. The thing is, people just try and try to keep those heinous crimes under this stupid rug and I'm ashamed of that, I'm ashamed of myself, and most of all, I'm ashamed of what Horikoshi did as a human being.

I learned that the only country in which nazi is treated as a hero in China. Why? Because even he was so disgusted by what the Japanese did. Because he actually tried to protect the Chinese people.

A nazi.

What does it say?

What did the Imperial Division 731 did, though? Human experimentation, as I mentioned earlier. They infected people with viruses, they tested flamethrowers and weapons on them, they poisoned people, they vivisected humans. They were not better than their western allies, nazis which people are so afraid to speak of.

What happened to them? They exchanged their freedom and lives for the results of their experiments. They were never punished.

I'm going to be cruel: Horikoshi and all of the Jump deserved the backlash they got, their apologies mean nothing. How the hell they let it through in the first place? How the fuck all those editors, all of the staff, saw it and nobody cared? Nobody thought oh, that's a bad idea, let's change it? If they didn't know, it doesn't help either! It only confirms the stereotype of Japanese people not knowing and not caring about the crimes they committed.

Hot take: In some way, calling him that is just as bad as if he was named after Mengele.

All of the people who suffered under the Japanese regime deserved better than being a footnote, a simple reference in Japanese manga of all things. Those were the people we are talking about, for fuck's sake, people who went through hell and never saw justice.

That's... my take on all of it.

All of my words are pretty emotional but the subject is very emotional; it's hard not to feel in such a way when you know what happened. The sheer lack of respect BNHA holds toward the people who suffered through those awful things is astounding.

I always had problems with BNHA, okay? I disagreed about a lot of things Horikoshi did, but I always kept quiet, not wanting to speak up because there were some things I loved.

But it makes me so angry, how the author does things like that. If they did it one time, it could be an accident. Two times would be dangerous. But three? Three creates a habit.

Please, stop that, Mr. Horikoshi.

Your manga is about heroes and their corrupted society. It's action shounen, not a dark story about the war which still haunts people. It's not about our rotten world and making all of those references is disrespectful toward the victims. Stop playing with history like that.

TLDR; Soviets bad. Nazis bad. Imperial Japan bad. Hori, stop this pls, and let me see Dabi already.

#bnha spoilers #bnha 314 #bnha critical #world war two #potentially triggering

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politicaltheatre · 3 years

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Empathy, pt.3

Let’s start with this: Jamal Kashshoggi was a man.

Do you remember him? He was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories.

He was also a journalist. After years of supporting the Saudi royal family and their authoritarian regime, he was murdered in 2018 for writing and speaking out against their abuses and, eventually, their war in Yemen. That was the version of him who fled Saudi Arabia, and the one who was marked for death by the Saudi crown prince he had once called a friend.

Last fall, the Saudi regime commuted the death sentences of the men it offered up as his murderers. Three months ago, an investigation confirmed that it was the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who had ordered his death.

We’re forgetting him. Even now, reading this, we are already forgetting. We can’t help it. At least, we tell ourselves we can’t.

In many ways, Kashshoggi was a lot like Alexei Novalny. Novalny hasn’t left the news quite yet. Like Kashshoggi, he supported the corrupt, authoritarian regime in his country, Russia, before turning against it. The attempt on his life, by poison, failed. Barely. He’s still alive, locked up in a Russian prison, a cautionary tale for those daring to oppose Vladimir Putin.

How long before we’ve forgotten him, too?

It’s a lot to ask of ourselves, remembering everyone around us. Sure, in some abstract way most of us try, “Good will towards men,” and all that, but we have the luxury of looking away and of not having to commit ourselves to thinking of others the way those two men did.

For each of them, it was an inescapable empathy for the suffering of they saw around them that compelled them to risk their lives to draw attention to it. They did so knowing the cost.

That cost - personal loss, imprisonment, death - is enough to keep most of us looking away. So much of what we do is to enable us to look away, to keep unpleasant reality at a distance. When others are already physically far away, it only makes it that much harder for us to do the right thing.

Looking out past our borders, the world today is filled with men, women, and children suffering, more than a few at the hands of authoritarian regimes, and of them far too many paying that cost for standing up against abuse.

The most present case this past week, because videos on social media have made it impossible to ignore in ways that it has been, has been that of the Palestinians.

The facts of this latest series of abuses against them should not be in doubt. During the last days of Ramadan, Israelis began forcing Palestinians out of their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district in East Jerusalem. This was followed in quick succession by Israeli troops occupying the Al-Aqsa mosque following a confrontation between Palestinians at the mosque for Friday prayers and Israelis celebrating the capture of the mosque in 1967.

This was all a deliberate provocation, beyond the aggressive offense of what the Israelis were doing. The timing of it, during the Muslim holy month while right wing Benjamin Netanyahu struggles to cling to power, was intended to add insult to injury.

It worked. Clearly.

Hamas, ever eager for an excuse to be violent and to be seen to be violent, gave an ultimatum that would make Netanyahu’s regime look weak if accepted, Netanyahu gratefully rejected it, and Hamas began firing rockets, knowing that Israel would escalate and retaliate with a kind of brutality that can only be described as criminal.

The unpleasant reality is that both political powers rely on perpetuating the conflict between them, doing so at the expense of the people they claim to want to serve and protect. And those people pay the cost of it.

Note, please, how I have avoided referring to those instigating these atrocities as Muslims or Jews. That they use their religions and their histories as justification for violence and abuse should not be taken as representative of either religion. If anything, it should be taken as a kind of cruel irony, or perhaps an insight into how the abused, as individuals or groups, can become abusers themselves.

Zionism is not Judaism. It never was and never will be. It grew out of two things: the technology-driven late 19th century belief by Europeans, and their North American “cousins”, in their right to colonial domination of non-Europeans; and the centuries-old, routine and systematic attacks on Jews - pogroms - especially in Central and Eastern Europe that led millions of Jews to flee for their lives, many of them to the United States.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 followed the same pattern: that same, late 19th century belief in the right to claim or assign ownership of others’ land - no matter that it had once belonged to your ancestors; and the routine and systematic attempted genocide of all Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - by Europeans who chose to believe Jews not to be Europeans but some other, lesser race from West Asia.

That, of course, has been the assigned role for Jews the world over: they are accepted as insiders when times are good and scapegoated as outsiders when times are bad. To be Jewish - I am - is to understand that this never quite goes away. There’s always somebody having a bad day, always a big lie ready for justification.

Technically, it is true that Jews are Asian, in the way that Palestinians are also Asian, and that Egyptians are, too, but also African because different people have had different maps which they used for different purposes at different times.

Also true is that these things are only true due to the arbitrary drawing of continental lines on maps made by Europeans, from the ancient Greeks to those carving up the “New World” in the century after Columbus to the 1885 conference in Berlin carving up Africa for colonial exploitation.

This is not, strictly speaking, a European thing. Every culture has a tendency to see themselves as the center of the world. Just ask those living in China, or as they call it, Zhongguo, the “Middle Kingdom”.

The difference here is that modern day Israel was carved out of Palestine, a colonial “protectorate” which was itself carved out of the Ottoman Empire and awarded to the British following World War I. As a spoil of war, formerly-Ottoman Iraq, with its vast oil reserves, had greater value to the British. Palestine had ports on the Mediterranean - “the center of the world” - but was otherwise an afterthought.

Not, however, to the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. We must remember that the rest of the world didn’t want them. Jews attempting to flee the atrocity they and everyone else couldn’t help but see coming were turned away by everyone else, including the United States.

This in no way justifies what was done in Palestine in the 1930s and 40s, it’s just to place it in context. By turning Jews away, by attempting to forget them and their suffering, the world gave weight and power to right wing groups within the refugees.

Starting in the 1930s, those groups began to engage in terrorism against Arabs to force their position into Palestine and against the British to force them out. Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and later the Stern Gang carried out assassinations and killed hundreds of Arabs and British with bombs.

After what the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, memorialized in newsreels for all the world to see, who would take the Arabs’ side? Who could? The British were in no position to hold onto their colonial possessions anywhere, so they gave up and pulled out and in 1948 the state of Israel was born. Palestinian Arabs were forced from their homes and stripped of rights they had held under the Ottomans and even the British.

Again, this was not Judaism. As the name “Irgun” suggests, those terrorists were a right wing, nationalist militia doing what right wing, nationalist militias have done before and since, using an ethnic or religious identity to justify committing atrocities to take land and property.

After standing by and allowing the Nazis to do what they did, the world vowed never to forget; part of the price they were willing to pay - that they were willing to allow the Palestinian Arabs to pay - was to forget what Irgun and the Stern Gang had done, and to turn a blind eye to anything the Israelis did going forward.

There was a racist element to it, to be sure. This is part of the pattern of colonial withdrawal, negotiating a partition of land and possessions among the colonized groups, pitting them against each other, and then letting them fend for themselves. Nothing like creating a power vacuum to draw out the worst of us.

The British did the same thing in South Asia in 1947, pitting Muslim and Hindu groups against each other, erupting in spasms of violence before settling into a Cold War, complete with nuclear weapons. Even in their most secular eras, religious nationalism has defined the politics and leadership of each nation.

The result of this, naturally, has been an increasingly corrupt leadership exploiting religious hatred and mistrust to gain more power and wealth for themselves. It should be noted, yet again, that the political entities of Pakistan and India, though led by religious nationalists, do not represent Islam or Hinduism.

Their actions and failures do not represent those religions in any way. They are the actions and failures of men and women seeking power, seeking to acquire it and seeking to hold onto it. They are no different than the Netanyahu regime or Hamas, or our own right wing leaders in the United States.

For all of them, it is in their interest to cling to memory of conflict as a means of manipulation; in Israel and Palestine, nationalist leaders preach as if 1948 or 1967 are now; in India and Pakistan, it’s still 1947; and for America’s white nationalists, it’s either 1865 or 1965, take your pick. For the Serbs slaughtering thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica twenty-six years ago, it was 1389, the year the Ottomans conquered the Balkans.

The wars, cold or hot, can never end because time is never allowed to change. This, again, is a function of proximity. By freezing themselves in the increasingly distant past, the leaders and those choosing to follow them do not have to accept the changes facing them in the present. Their fantasy is to return to that idyllic, earlier time, when they possessed everything and did not have to be accountable to anyone.

And they will all fail for the same reason: in the present or near future, we will have reached a point at which we can no longer allow ourselves to ignore those suffering and in doing so forget them.

That is what we have done to the Palestinians. What has been done and what is being done now is in no small part because we forget them, routinely and systematically and purposefully.

The videos sent from Gaza of children being pulled from rubble should help us remember. They should. Ideally, they will have the same effect as those of last year’s Black Live Matter protests, but the people of Gaza remain far away. For many of us, it will be enough that the missiles and rockets have stopped.

Videos sent from India’s emergency rooms and crematoria should help us remember, but they, too, remain far away. Already, we’re starting to put India’s crisis behind us.

Will we remember either of them a month from now? Two? Or will they fade into the background, as the imprisoned Hong Kong democracy protesters have, or those dying of Covid-19 in Brazil, or those shot down in the streets fighting police brutality in Columbia, or those caught between warring factions in Ethiopia’s Tigray region? Or, for that matter, those half a century ago in Argentina who were simply “disappeared”?

What about the coup in Myanmar? Remember that? How about the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people, supported by the now-deposed and jailed regime of fallen-hero Aung San Suu Kyi? What was done to them was no different than what was done to the Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. That genocide was recently recognized by President Biden, an act of official, international recognition that took over a century and which itself is already being forgotten. The Rohingya may have to wait as long to be remembered themselves, or longer.

The point of all this isn’t that we forget, try as we might, but that despite it we find ways to remember. That Biden recognized the Armenians came because they did not forget and did not allow that crime to be forgotten.

If this sounds like what nationalists all claim to do themselves - always demanding that everyone remember this date or that insult - remember that actual justice never seems to be their goal.

Justice requires memory, full memory. For us to remember anything fully, we must take the good with the bad. We must recognize the good and bad in each of us and in each group and in each series of actions. We must understand that for the worst act done by anyone in the name of any group or religion, there remain those within those groups and religions who stand against it.

So, let’s end with this: George Floyd

George Floyd was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories. He died one year ago today in no small part because we forgot him.

We remember now, today especially, because of what was done to him on this date, but we should recognize the role that forgetting him and people like him played in the events that led to his murder. We as a society have looked away from the suffering of minorities in this country, and from the violence done to certain groups within our society.

The easiest thing to say, certainly as we watched that video and the countless videos of police brutalizing non-violent protesters all last summer, was that “all cops are bad”. They aren’t. Hard as it may be to hear, they aren’t.

They are, however, led by men and women who push an adversarial culture, who encourage violence and racism, who are corrupt, and who thrive on the failure of reform. And most of them, far, far too many, stand by in silence as men and women are murdered in that culture’s name. In that silence, they have failed us all.

If we want to change that culture, we need those who would stand for justice to stand up and speak. They are there, just as they are in Israel and Palestine, and in Pakistan and India and elsewhere: intimidated, ostracized, and struggling to be heard.

Of course, May 25th, 2020 wasn’t just any other day in America. It was Memorial Day. That is a cruel irony. Another is how little we do to honor that day. It was created to honor those who died for this country, to remember not only them but what they did and what they supposedly did it for. Instead, we grill meats and drink beer and forget our troubles for just one day.

Few deaths may have the lasting impact on this country that George Floyd’s has had and will have, and he died in no small part because he, too, had been forgotten. This coming Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember him and all of the others everywhere in this world who have died and deserve to be remembered.

- Daniel Ward

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sirjustice1379 · 3 years

Text

Making more machines

ASK HOW the most supersonic jet with yellow lithium as the replace of siren/oxygen gas made in which way, in which area per ya nation and the boom heap as it uses carbon floxin and the silver such cylinder 1 made in which way and their big jets and radar missiles of long range and get to know as the silver cylinder is called carbon floxin 2 as the coded voice tells ya and ask if at maximum speed the WiFi and the sensors 4 guns or other missile bombs works and the thickness of the bar used to make it as much as the armored glass on it dude

And ask the consequences of building a big island on the south pole shallow waters and what it can grow when another of the same made on the empty water lands of the northern hemisphere and the length in meters the water will encroach on land

If u want to get to know that people do exams with the help of coded voice so in exams u place flutes as when u call a varsity in the USA when being referred that flute to diffuse them same give kids like of 4 years or 6 exam script in the same area with answers of 2 years or 3 class ahead of them and all will pass by that to bring out reality that all those passers of yesterday might have not been smart and simply applied the same taking ya kids to boarding school yet u spent much and little did u know they use the above to make u happy as they siphon ya cash dude

Ask what combination of two things when u get into a bush or where many different crops and even weeds grow what if u pluck and eat and do, shield ya from getting this disease and this and even re-infections as Hiv/Aids, covid, Malaria, cancer and any so hospital declared redundant and even taking people cash as mentioned earlier a thing of the past. Ask 4 discordant people with Hiv and how or what to eat to stop re-infection and those abase with cancer and even ask 4 synonyms and given dude

Don’t investigate me dude if i can be with ya kids do exactly the below dude cause am tired dude and if i get tired 1st or get bored off 1st and u wanna place me somewhere u cant put me on the game lest do the above to ascertain a truth dude

Ask the devil to make islands new on water as suggested above below up to like only 1 M to the water made out of zinc and bras or copper and brass and mixed with muram b4 requesting as writing again hard soil and when it remains like 3 meters to ya desired to grow that crop u write that soil as u check with that nation which such crop is good, delicious and affect not the mind as with google the best wheat from which country and if they have made soil and follow suit and ask how many nations/states currently making soil to grow good crops as above and which are tired and feel defeated and tell us dude

And ask which country in the world still have the Indigenous Ameru blood infused with which blood not of the luo as ask who infused the Ameru people with bad blood and ask what Ameru people did bad 4 such tribe to capture them and if future they were infused with another tribe altogether and ask when will this bad tribe die dude

When u place a cross of any 2 similar thing breaks snakes and if u place such on which surfaces like on top of wooden part of small diameter and of any, any thing kills what so u can use the same as a new mechanism to protect your borders and be the same as island nations in-terms of security and even with ya business and house perimeter and even place such inside machines to kill many hidden in such as rodents and insects and even arachnids and ask with each animal where if u place the same break their bones and even with human beings and the antidote and even with bacteria and viruses

Who made the luo strain as the curse and where was he buried and his appendages inside which building and the associated side effects and how was the curse removed and who introduced it and if good to hook up a strain and the related consequences to those tribe people knowing the same or championing the same

Do the luo got ameru blood and who were ameru and who infused that blood to other tribes and which tribe are those and at that time each african tribe was how many as per the population and ask the not giving up blood in Ameru tribe is of which tribe and who are Ameru as well as why people called Hebrew and if u do the same with yogurt when fucking a woman what u need to do to not grab the curse, if u r another tribe and why the name ameru atrophied dude

Ask if u want to make supersonic jets of maybe say from 4,000 Km - 50,000 Km per hour what u need to do, the boom area, heap and the chop, hang or step on things or need to pear. Ask which sign if i place on these many words as u write what u want incorporated or just single word each gives the best Jets or missiles. Ask on which material i need to write on or put rubber stamp of the same to come up with my specification each per the KM mention and ask if i want or iron, Zinc, aluminum with inside bars running all through what i need to undertake and even with WiFi and bomb, gun, airline, missile long range detection inbuilt and answers given to make ya super sonic jets not of plastic peel out and if so let it not have joint to pop out in high speed and not of fuel but with thermostat heat panel generator inscribed in cooler box like plastic or metal with towel, wool or heat generating many years chemicals to make u spend none and not pollute the air as to be green jet with 2 or 4 gas cylinders if one burst another take shape with automatic switch on between each such glasses or with manual interchange switches

Ask those who have siren gas spry or covid virus fume spry infecting other and those they have infected and answers given and them criticizing the situation dude

Ask those nations with collaboration with Kikuyu wants to attack America and if its possible and why they relent not dude and ask which nations can be super power and underlying reasons why

Ask if they have know i heaven their is only 2 times eating a day and thats why they behave on earth like this to get there or what and ask if their is listening to secular music and the consequences if u r gotten and how its know when u listen to such if suits them and ask if there is inter drinks and if will shift their minds and ask whose angel Gabriel and where is he and currently in whose house and with whom his broke 1 hand and ask if u want to be young in body is going to heaven can help ya or not and ask if the Angel is going to hell or not and let be given the solid reasons if he appeared to Jesus mother or a hoax dude

Ask the names of those making each machine u know or foods per your zip code and how many such they have made and who are targeting to kill them and why using who and on which kind of death and how they can block the same dude or if its their own wish dude

Ask how to make all rubber tire 4 auto-mobiles, bikes and any or non inflated or deflated tires and ask how direct take up jets made or any plane as u can add it to ya drone up or jet above no need 4 the rest on airport thing making you pay much so get u off such dude and ask how jets made of flexible rubber out cage cab be made with metallic bar partitions and of which material as outer cage good 4 hyper-sonic airport dude

Ask how to make padlocks and door locks with long range Bluetooth/WiFi connections to phone and with such enabling apps and ask for flying any machine how it can be made to get it off ya compound or roof or desk without sending 1 as phones, tablets, brief case etc

Ask if making one strain good and the related side effects to people doing so and on what makes u strain or on what chemicals and how done within ya body to make ya the same dude and ask for the remedies as the combination of things u eat or do to get u ought of strain-ship and ask if some people wants the same to get by and going to heaven reality to them when strain or when 1 not strain and whats the jealousy as ask how many heavens are their and races or even families are born again knowing no each other and so why the jealousy as ya race not their u inbuilt in another race with another dialect and ask if calling ya family or friend will either be introduced in Minneapolis, Denver or Auckland and in heaven and if u can maintain ya race or not or Language, things u need to stop and know, if not so then u r deemed insane and we know not what to do with ya

Ask what if u do u get to mass at night when sleeping or if one does to ya and what if u do knives people stub people with or any machine cant be made again or get lost all together and the remedies to keep the world abreast with abundant peace

Ask what if u do to one on what he/she does bad makes them insane, incapacitated in 1 way or another or kill them and let us know dude. And ask the curse of Ameru and why they are that why and what need to be done to them to change or if death the only remaining remedy dude. Who shifted the bible that Kikuyu are the JEW yet not

Race with big booties good looking and not good looking where from which nations and ask on which African nations were slaves taken to the USA and also with other continents and in which years and from each tribe was taken to which current states of America and why and their percentage of intake and get to know instead of claiming this and that dude

Ask how a miniature gun of long range bullet reach can be made as above in the boom process and with any other gun and with their bullets and even missiles

Make an island on ocean, sea, make protectorate and start new nations 4 groups who cant fit within ya land, identify places which grows much cereal and cash crops, make big dude and ask the devil instead of tussle in 1 nation dude

Ther nyako no mit kachieth omera, dhiego mand to ndukle, ma, waru ewimand bwana

ask 4 ps5 phone app and how it is made in the boom process and 4 the computer, ask the coded voice

Ask the owner of Mukumu money transfer app and who she gave to and who told her how made and when and the related consequences if that person not compensated while the whole world uses the same and with any machine u got ask the same 4 the inventor who told the maker cause maybe can be killed yet a curse befall u and the want of Mr White man and ask if its the same and stop lest insane dude

Ask 4 the meaning of each bible name as Jew, Samaritan, Hebrew or gentiles and currently who are they to disappoint others all knowing and create a new re freshness and belonging dude

And ask the devil on where if u stub on one kills the creator of such viruses or on which body parts 4 a woman, the affected, infected, a man or a toddler and get to know to stop some disease and get their cure instead of every day spending much as govt robbing people good-life granting to others who created the same dude and ask on all a/c is viruses, strain, bacteria, protozoa or any disease/syndrome created and how they can be stopped dude and existing who are they per name list dude

And ask what if u do ya body became more brown, chocolate, dark or red and the benefit of every skin to a woman, kid or men and even authorities and ask if making gadgets bars the poor and out of the above list of machine makers ask how many lives in the ghetto as Mad house or iron sheet visa vie those living in deemed posh houses but to them and if they is a stair and can tantamount to actions of violence and who will win and who race/tribe is supporting who and ask Nelson has which country blood relations and esp which tribe per those nations dude

Ask on what if every affected nation does becomes rich again or on what if the employ dude altogether bro to stop this and that, always ask 4 remedy list b4 the above move dude to save the day bro and ask what kikuyu wanted with other nation whom have come out with innovations more than them with going to Russia and championing nelson death and if possible now and ask who got Covid and get to know instead of pointing fingers and blame game on innocent people

African made app like 4 voting in the links below and money transfer app

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37910068

https://www.agakhanschools.org/Kenya/Kenya/Article/1093#

https://www.voanews.com/episode/e-poll-ugandan-elections-app-3712766

https://disrupt-africa.com/2020/08/14/money-transfer-app-kyanda-launched-in-kenya/

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-google-coop&q=instarem+from+which+country

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-google-coop&ei=89YTYJDROf-V1fAPvtalyAk&q=moneymatch+from+which+country&oq=moneymatch+from+which+country&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzoECAAQRzoGCAAQBxAeOgQIABAeOgYIABAIEB46BQgAEIYDUPCEAljHngJg6KICaAFwAngAgAHQAogB0xWSAQcwLjIuNy4ymAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpesgBCMABAQ&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjQlq_V68DuAhX_ShUIHT5rCZkQ4dUDCAw&uact=5

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-google-coop&ei=GtcTYMv3He6i1fAPp9WXuAU&q=kabayanremity+from+which+country&oq=kabayanremity+from+which+country&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzoECAAQR1DwswJY59ACYN_SAmgAcAJ4AIAB-QGIAe4XkgEEMi0xNJgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXrIAQjAAQE&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjL7N_n68DuAhVuURUIHafqBVcQ4dUDCAw&uact=5

https://www.deemoney.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Search&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5tGr7uzA7gIVkbrtCh0w8gy_EAAYASAAEgJNffD_BwE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_for_Tap

https://fintechnews.sg/10216/remittance/top-10-money-transfer-apps-asia/

How to make supersonic jets using demolished cement from the floor or any with the concrete below it place place in wood trunk in ya yard compound on red soil road with made round hole unto it then stir porridge with hay on ya finger inside a pot of cold or warm porridge as u step on hay within CD hole on hot white porridge on grass heap in dim light or step on hay within Cd hole on guava then chop cabbage on wood soaked in milk in the dark or step on egg inside hole on pineapple as carry one on bicycle as u ride or sweep hay leaves on rough drying clay with hard broom if u sweep with reeds broom makes big airplane and with the normal push one makes choppers and try sweeping with any 4 more results dude and 4 missile sweep with green grass broom even if short on dirt on the same land as above or on broken African clay pot and 4 mini airplane wash with detergent dirt on the same pot or remove sand with ya normal finger hand from the same broken round down pot or place paw paw in hay 4 missile, in gone down places within ya land with brown grass, then wash feet in surgical spirit with removed cat head u alone in dim light as if u wash with other parts gives u another something else and even artificial made 1 so not blasphemy as others know the same when the jet made, when u wash with the whole cat gives ya tank as u hand with the former type on the bruise or all concrete not smooth cement enabled floor and more as u try or with big jets still place paw paw in guava in ya compound yard, then chop hay bars on paw paw in groundnuts in dark while bent at your 1 Conner house as u step on hay within CD hole on guava outer peel or hang container with hay inside and reach unto it as u chop guava on wood soaked in milk in the dark and boom ya big jet place much heap and minimum 4 big and small jets 4 better results dude

Who brought curse to bat can and what he did to popcorn to make such teeth that way and reasons why and what again if u do to popcorn are repercussion to you dude

Ask who interlocking blocks, stone or bricks of even up-to 10 meters long or of ya want and with all dimension made of inside not easy to break cause has squire or rectangular wire mesh to hold it and at every side got bars or holes that fix to the other either of metal or of the same product or where such bars are inserted to get to the foundation respectively up or across within each partition and can even be one 2 or 3 with any side wall to eliminate many brick thing prone to fall like in the link below such make dude or write in stanza and sign or cross like wire mesh but slanting going down and do all the step and boom ya already made concrete

https://vickiscuri.blog/2019/11/04/progress-update-east-kellogg-in-wichita-ks/

Japan made of four main islands and their names given and over 3,000 small island which makes Japan traditionally a sea faring nation as in the link below, they say they are angered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6Cg9Irdemk

They are saying they are wanting to make unmanned to attack nations as theirs do not match the same as they know how to play PS4 to miss the same and hit lands which are fertile so those people lose market out of radio active parts attracted to the soil to infuse the plant causing health hazards to their customers so opt 4 their like Wisconsin with Veggies and fruits, the Cameroonians liaising with Kenyans and what they like they force u with like women and what am writing i have finished still the locate me wanting to grab my piece and my food and any time next to me bend down to check my penis position, taming am going to fuck their women their hate while am telling them let me get to another land where their are no such they say i got Aids yet by asking as above u r told all even with machines any1 can incorporate a protocol in any machine by asking, dude bring siren gas so we leave them the world cause better dude they cant destroy the world as their weak also have the same dude, the Hebrew and bring and see if am lying i will not re,move the same and with Land i want not, name has been changed to my brothers and ask and you will be told and Gold if their now Gold price low as made in the boom dude, with my corpse let them eat, i think i have done my part, so waiting 4 ya final response and if u chase them leave me alone i don't want to sit within ya midst i will stub 1 with knife and police will come and not good and if i eat much kill me with voodoo or shoot me while am walking at night and with cash eliminate place in the app as above if u think i can make in the boom if asking the devil or code voice if i have made so but not believing the same u want to term lies yet as u say with machine u trust to create jealousy with the same. U simple minded and foolish of not knowing anything and wants to be 1st disrespecting ya savior to the later making 1 as a kid wanting 1 to feed ya yet not ya parent or did not remove ya mother clothe to fuck ya yet in hell or heaven mind lost u know not yaself, as hell u know but burning in hot porridge like fluid cant talk to 1 so better start to be all alone dude and u despise such advises daily u want 1 food and headed nowhere u want to kill one to take his property u place Jiggers in 1 system u laugh if they love sex u send women to investigate 1 if masturbating yet u have done the above they get piss off they want ya plot and above u tell them, they want to kill ya and take ya small property get into ya house, no matter how much u tell them the curse they relent not, u fools and hooligans

We got the above to ascertain or resolve u r this and that and even with ya parents and evidence yet still they change not get to ya food cause they know all loopholes blocked to dirty cash and cash the are making they will make not more of many nations as cash will be online so starts u as above dude while the rich are their, when it has reached that place i cant but i have won dude, ask how many Negros they want to sleep with have made gadgets and books and accessories esp in Music and movie meaning even if they make it here u cant manipulate them and my happiness only via a fight or if they are willing which i give a hoot no as their own making not sweet plan as above that angers those who hate such and term the Jew thing as lie so true via lies as eliminated completely to set my soul free dude

I write the writings i got daily not that they are new cause i find something to push time tomorrow, cause if i get to social media Mr Hindu send such to my desk saying not good making bad my reputation with such people who help me and that's it, I will get to women photos even in MC Donald Island without getting to those lands as with asking i know who i can marry and get to this country, i say its 3rd world and getting their u will not get, they want to claim lien to eat ya small cash saying if they know how to make machines they will be rich or if their cash crop marketed which will not happen cause them 10 yrs is 1 yr as yours so they give a hoot not cause they live more and has lived and u in ya mid years and when they realized 1 has the remedy to short life can live more they resort to jealousy if they can live long than them or not to stop or build more jealousy if can live more than them and u they put u with kids cause ya life short to make u weak

They get into other nation stuff that are free u want cause their teeth discourage them they got another bad blood yet say the above they are rich than those nations yet not yet they want to attack them in military yet those people got radars even if half the speed of their jets or missile when u see such jets/missile u meet with ya half speed and still u defeat such provided not made within the city, what matters is long range radar as of Vietnam or Denmark of like more than 5, 0000 Km no-matter whether ya missile supersonic from another land and even with drone surveillance system and i want not their advice or stories of alluding, if am with them i want to control cause they cant do the reverse to me, so we go apart we want not dude, Dude give me my cash or money i get out dude, cause a gun or knife in the air in imagery u see flying dude

Money transfer mobile app link below of Asia dude

https://www.penser.co.uk/article/fintech/apacmobilewallets/

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tae-kun · 5 years

Text

If the Main Reason why you log onto Tumblr is for Porn, then you don’t understand what made Tumblr special in the first place

Tumblr is not a Porn Site

It was never intended to be, so for the people that are saying stuff like “Tumblr never supported our sex work anyway” you’re 100% correct. Being allowed to post Pornography isn’t the same as being a source for it. Over the years Tumblr has been ran rampant with porn to the point that content creators that did other stuff that didn’t relate to porn slowly started to go to other platforms; Since their work was being overshadowed by the sheer volume of porn and they struggled to get any attention on their work.

You people are acting like Tumblr is attacking sex workers as if this was their main and only place to earn money for their work.

There are porn sites that are made to promote AND support sex workers. Hell PornHub will pay people for their sextapes and has multiple systems in place for them to make money off Ad revenue alongside having a tip system, content protection and other stuff

Anyone that was serious about their sex work would have been using sites like this instead of relying on Tumblr as a main source of revenue or promotion.

Tumblr is a trash place to try to promote anything! Constant spamming of bots and tags, No reliable Notification system or way for your followers to see you’re new posts out of the sea of reblogs. So to act like these new changes are going to serious kill anyone that is in the sex work is flat out outrageous.

Hell a majority of the popular porn that was on here wasn’t even from amateurs making videos on here. People were taking porn from porn sites and making blogs centered around it and would constantly flood their blogs with this content which would then, overshadow any amateur worker on here that made their own work; since they had no to even compete with the constant bombardment of daily new stuff that these blogs were taking and using.

People would steal other peoples videos and get popular of it without even crediting the original creator and would even go as far as to SELL these videos and make more money of it than the actual people in the damn video.

So Tumblr was never an ideal place for sex work to begin with, so throw that excuse out. Most people only used Tumblr to promote their private snapchat or onlyfans account which you can still do in a regular selfie or post. There are thousands of people on Instagram making hundreds and thousands of dollars doing the same thing and they don’t have one titty out on their page. Just tight clothing and skimpy outfits.

If you’re really upset that you can’t watch porn on here after Dec 17

At first it was funny seeing people joke about the porn being gone. But some of y’all are really upset and mad that you need to actually go to a porn sites to watch porn???

Some of y’all don’t even post nudes or create anything that could be considered sexual and y’all saying “ima delete my blog since tumblr is trying to silence me”

(Side Note: Just because your post got flagged doesn’t mean it will be deleted. They already said stuff like this would happen as they added in this new system. So mistakes like these are bound to happen and will most likely be fixed in a week or so and have no negative affect on your blog. Y’all really acting like Tumblr is out to silence your love for cats and landscapes 🙄)

Like i said before there are plenty of sites to watch porn on and if your favorite sex worker is serious about their job then you will see them on there. Which only makes things easier for both of you. But lets be honest, most of y’all just like the idea of seeing porn without having to actually look for it, like it’s some nasty secret. On Tumblr you couldn’t escape porn even if you searched things that were unrelated to it. Tumblr gave you guys the perfect cover up for it and you guys went overboard with it and here we are. People are so quick to compare this issue to other Tumblr problems but there was never a issue as big as people with dick profile pics dming you no matter who you were (kids or adults) and sending you nude pics; then Porn Bots popped up under everyone’s post no matter if you had the safety lock on or not.

You guys made hundreds of post saying how much you hate porn blogs getting tens of thousands of notes in agreement about it, You guys would put “no porn blogs allowed” in your description box or something similar in meaning.

And now when Tumblr puts a system in place to directly remove it, you guys try to back pedal and claim that it will kill sex workers, freedom of speech and sexuality based off opinions, assumptions and things that aren’t even in the policy change.

Some of y’all honestly suggested “Just add a age verification system” as a way to fix the porn issue.... That shit ain’t never worked since 2002! I got so use to lying on those things that i sometimes forget that i’m grown and that i don’t need to put “01/11/1975″

The only people that this severely hurts are

1a) People that steal porn from other sites to use on their blog to get followers, to then try sell promo slots

1b) People that are stealing other sex workers content and illegally selling them

2) Child Porn Blogs

THAT’S IT

And Honestly is that really a bad thing? Getting rid of people that were stealing other peoples stuff and making money off it and pedophiles.

The way tumblr was set up allowed blogs like these to thrive without any risk, outside of getting their blog deleted (just to make a new one) and it only continued the flood of porn which became the breeding grounds for Porn Bots

Tumblr is suppose to be a place to freely express all forms of art, ideas, and conversations. But because of the nonstop flood of porn, most people only know it for Porn and Emo kids. Which brings me back to my original statement

This isn’t a Porn Site

Porn became so over flooded on here that you didn’t even need to search to find it. All you had todo is take off the safe lock and search anything, even a city. There would be hundreds of porn pics and videos in every slot. And before you say “well just keep the safety lock on”

Any content that had cursing, fighting or even slight nudity got put behind there. So unless you were just on here for kpop, aesthetics and Steven Universe you weren’t really seeing anything different with that lock on.

( Another Side Note: For you people trying to compare the porn flood to white supremacy blogs need to stop it. All the time i’ve been on here i have never NEEEVVVEEER accidentally came across any pro white supremacy post or blog unless it was someone exposing them and their stupidity which would then cause them to delete their blog. If you are constantly seeing anything Pro Nazi, Pro White Supremacy, Pro homophobia or anything similar that supports bigotry; then you are actively searching for it and follow these people. These blogs don’t even make up 5% of the content seen on here with or without the lock. So trying to say that Tumblr supports these blogs since they’re still around is Mr. Fantastic level of reaching. These blogs have never been a serious issue to the point that Nazi Bots were created saying “Hate jews and blacks clck here for more ;)”. So stop this weak comparison.)

I created a Tumblr and made it one of my main platforms to create content on because of the communities and people i found on here.

I found Great stories and Dope artist on here. I found people being able to fully express themselves and find an audience for them that helped share their work through a simple reblog. But if you’ve been noticing or have been on here long enough, most content creators don’t use Tumblr as their main platform to create or promote their content anymore. And why would they?

People barely activate their notifications for blog updates, It’s hella hard to find an audience through the constant reblogging of already popular stuff From Vine and Twitter, people rarely go outside of tumblr to support peoples stores or websites. Hell most artist on here that become popular on here that get continued support are the ones that have made or continue to make some kind of pornography of real or fictional characters. It’s hella rare to find any artist that hasn’t made any porn, that is equally popular or supported like the ones that have; which just goes back to people thinking Tumblr is for porn.

Tumblr isn’t even against the idea of expressing yourself or art through nudity as their post and policy change explicitly explained. And people’s content that’s getting flagged that doesn’t go against that policy is a problem THAT THEY SAID WOULD HAPPEN as they get everything in order with their new system

All of these long post that people are writing about it that and they themselves forgot to do some basic reading on the topic.

Tumblr Staff- “Certain types of artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine. Don’t upload any content, including images, videos, GIFs, or illustrations, that depicts sex acts.

This isn’t an attack on people’s ability to speak out or embrace themselves. They are directly trying to remove Porn which they won’t be able to fully do, even Instagram and Twitter can’t do that; no public site with millions of people can. But they’re at least trying to get rid of the constant overflow of it.

It’s so sad to see hundreds and thousands of you saying “i only used Tumblr for porn” because that just shows how derailed this site has become and why Tumblr had to make these extreme decisions especially after being removed from app stores because of the child pornography.

If you’re going to leave because you can’t make porn on here: I can see why you would do that but there is no reason to. You can still use your blog to promote your stuff and make teases of your work that can be found or bought else where. Tumblr was never a reliable place for sex work and i highly recommend using Sites that will actually protect your work and put some money in your pockets while doing it

If you’re leaving because you can’t watch porn on here: You probably weren’t supporting anyone really and only made the influx of porn worse, making it harder for other content users to be seen. If you were supporting actual sex workers on here then continue to do so, I’m sure anyone serious would have more than just tumblr as their main platform.

For those that got popular and made money off other people sex work: So long and farewell

For the Child Porn Blogs: Hope you get mental help or burn. Either or is fine with me

For the people that may get upset by this: Correct me, Prove me wrong, Let’s have a whole serious discussion about this and hear each others side with no fighting or disrespect :D

For all of Us: Lets actually support and help the people that really make Tumblr the gem that it is. Lets make this platform be known for creative people and unique ideas; and communities that actually comfort and understand us. Let’s actually make this platform something that’s known for more than just Porn and Emo Kids.

Regardless i hope that everyone can calm down and act like there’s more here than just porn..

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transalfiesolomons · 5 years

Note

I’ve had to deal w a lot of transphobia the last few days, you have any trans headcanons to spare? 🌸💀

You’ve come to the right place friend. I hope you’re cool with an unanticipatedly large dump of ‘em (specifically on Alfie and Michael) below the cut

(oh I should mention up front these are all modern au)

(a quick caveat with this. I talk a little bit about the intersection of being trans and being Jewish and while I try to be as culturally sensitive as possible, I am not myself Jewish, so if anyone reading this has something to add or to correct please please do not hesitate to do so)

(there’s also probably some sentence fragments and thoughts that trail off because i’m a fool who can’t proofread)

me: hey just do a few happy ones

also me, 3,000 words later, basically having written two fics: ah,

Alfie –

Alfie Solomons spends a lot of his childhood chasing on the heels of older male cousins, refusing to be cooped up inside with the women of the family. He knows there are things that his cousins will never let their single little girl cousin know or see, condescendingly protecting her from a world that is her birthright just as much as it is theirs.

He grows up hearing about the “family business” without ever seeing it or knowing anything about it, other than sometimes the police came to rough up family members and make arrests and hurl slurs while they did so. But whether this had anything to do with illegality on his family’s part or just people hating Jews, Alfie never really figured out, only that after such raids his cousins are quieter and afraid and those are the times a place for Alfie opens up among them, a desire to hold family close.

When he was younger, growing up around his father’s extended family in Camden Town, Alfie had pretty constantly railed against not being able to do what his male cousins did and also pretty constantly did that stuff anyway, which garnered him both amusement and consternation from his family who only occasionally attempted to stop him.

The men in the family paid him absolutely no attention, which he felt was wrong for some reason but could never find the words to explain why until much alter in his life, until after he stumbles over the word “transsexual” in a medical diary while waiting for a physical exam and until after he first applies the word to himself. Both of which come when he is already an adult. But even before he knows, it complicates a lot of his life, especially when he came to gender roles in worship. Even after he turned 13, he was not allowed to be part of a minyan which felt wrong until someone explained that it was because he’s a girl and only men can be part of a minyan which felt even more wrong but he didn’t push it because there’s a look on his mother’s face when he asked why that told him this was just one of those things (and there were many, admittedly) that just wasn’t up for debate.

II.

Alfie makes the realization that he’s trans when he is 27. Five years into his enlistment in the British Army, sitting on Basra air base in 2004 during the British-to-American turnover, twiddling his thumbs and sweating his ass off watching supplies be loaded and unloaded on the airstrip. Two months from home for good and suddenly skin-crawlingly aware he doesn’t recognize what he sees in the mirror anymore as himself. He remembers that word then, thinks back to not understanding it at the time, thinking it was strange and wrong, and he spends the rest of the day rolling it (and rolling he, him, his) over on his tongue until its stone-heavy and nearly wrung of meaning.

It’s a sudden and stomach-swooping realization, a long-time-coming clarity that still bowls him over with the sheer force of it.

His last month there, he buzzes his hair just to see how it would be, what it would feel like under his hands. When asked why - and he goes from a regulation cut, but just barely regulation to as short as the clippers will allow him without just shaving his head, so he is asked quite a lot - he claims that the heat just finally got to him and he couldn’t take it anymore. His face is too soft then, a roundness in the cheeks he’d never shed from childhood, to allow him to pass with just a buzz but it gives him a modicum of personal comfort to run his hands over his scalp and feel that soft prickle under his fingers.

He comes home and out-processes from the military and almost immediately jumps into figuring out where the fuck to go from here, pouring over what few online resources he can find and feeling more and more adrift from himself every day. He doesn’t fit into the common narrative of “knew all along” and he doesn’t exactly feel “wrong” in his body (frankly, he’s proud of it) so it’s a long time before he’s able to truly accept that he is transgender and not actively losing his mind and that there isn’t something wrong with him.

His place as a trans man and his decision to transition put him not necessarily at odds with but in a weird position with his Jewishness. So much of Judaism is split along gender lines: where you sit in temple, what you wear, how you’re addressed, what prayers you lead, what prayers you say, if you can lead prayers at all. It causes a radical reevaluation of where he stands in relation to his faith and to g-d but in the end it wholly reaffirms both his faith and how he feels about himself.There are actually two (incredibly progressive) rabbis that help him - one who reaffirms his identity as a trans man and as a Jewish man and another who tells him in Halachic terms that he can get gender-affirming surgery if it is something he wishes to pursue.

The cool thing about realizing when he did is that Alfie doesn’t have anyone he has (or wants) to come out to - his mother had died some years before, he was estranged from his only (half) sister, he was only ever rarely in contact with any member of his maternal family (spread out between Russia and Israel), and he’d lost contact with his paternal family after his father died when he was eight and his mother moved them away from Camden Town out of fear. He had no close friends or relationships due to his “inability to relate to others” and “aloofness” (the army’s words) and his being “an utter sociopath” (his XO’s words). The not so cool thing is the not inconsiderable amount of loneliness he feels when transitioning alone, celebrating milestones like his first year on T alone, especially when recuperating alone from surgery with only his dog to keep him company (and the complications he didn’t consider - like having to take the dog on walks when he could barely get off the sofa.) But that’s, uh, that’s what alcohol is there for right?

(Already fit from military training, he dedicates a lot of time during his early transition to weight training and a continuation of the hand-to-hand he learned in basic.)

III.

His father’s family (the little that’s left of it after a brutal turf war between the Jews and the Italians over a decade ago) reaches out to him when he’s 31, after the murder of his uncle by a small Italian gang of upstarts who took old age for infirmity and, in his cousin’s words, “paid dearly” for it. The invitation is for his uncle’s funeral, but he ends up staying in Camden Town afterwards, working for his cousin who has assumed control of the gang after his father’s murder. Alfie very quickly garners a reputation for just vicious brutality against people that cross the gang.

Alfie considers it strange that his cousin invites him back, considering, well – but no one (including his cousin) actually seems to remember him well enough to remember that he was a girl child once. People remember that he is his father’s child but apparently not what gender he was assigned at birth. People remember him roughhousing with the boys, not that he was reprimanded for doing so because he was not “one of the boys.” It begs the question of how his cousin tracked him down but Alfie supposes there may only be so many Solomons in England. And it’s weird but it’s also incredibly welcome. Gifts and horses and mouths.

Alfie’s assumption of control of the Solomons Gang right out from under his cousin (who was never fit for the job anyway) is an incredibly nebulous affair that followed very closely on the heels of his uncle’s death. Like, before shiva is even over close on the heels of (which is an exaggeration, but it makes him out to be all the more ruthless, really). Legitimately no one but Alfie knows how exactly any of it went down other than it has a body count somewhere between 2 and 15 people. He describes it to this way as a coup de grace. What that means, no one is even kind of willing to ask.

IV.

He’s outed twice: once by a man in his own gang (a few years after he gains control) and once not long after by a competitor who thinks it will cost Alfie everything. It doesn’t go the way either of them wanted.

His boy does it internally, digs up his service record and his discharge papers and starts to spread the “truth” in an effort to undermine Alfie and possibly gain control of the gang himself. He doesn’t live long past the first wave of rumors and it’s fairly quickly forgotten, just a power-hungry man trying to start something he couldn’t finish.

The competitor spreads it among his supplies and allies, many many of whom have negative reactions and cut ties with the Solomons gang. This costs him the most, at least in the short term - suppliers, support, respect, a modicum of safety - but he doesn’t let it intimidate him. And because it never destabilizes him or truly threatens his leadership of the gang (who actually stand by him, not because they’re supportive but because he’s already proven to be incredibly volatile and unpredictable but also fair to and protective of those loyal to him), he gains a lot in the long term.

(By the time Tommy comes into the picture when he’s 39, there’s been so much turnover in the ranks of nearly every gang and blackmarket business that barely anyone knows and the ones that do either don’t care or just don’t feel like its worth acting on.)

The second time someone internally tries to use his being trans against him, his boys doesn’t even flinch because, cis or trans, Alfie terrifies them. He’s 5′9, built like a brick shithouse, like an American Bulldog, probably 16 stone of mostly muscle, deadlifts twice that, and he punches like a freight train hauling cinder blocks and he terrifies them.

There’s not a person in this world that can make Alfie Solomons ashamed of who he is.

Michael –

Polly spends so much of her life scouring the country looking for her stolen daughters, devastated beyond the ability of words to convey - after searching for twelve hard, long, lonely, terrified years - to find one daughter dead (buried in a country she has never been to and will never see, she can’t even visit her baby’s grave) and the other seemingly wiped from the system after her (private) adoption, no record or her past six years old.

She hits roadblock after roadblock, denied access to privileged and private information she has no legal right to access anymore. It’s helpless, desperate work and it almost breaks her because how could her eldest daughter just disappear?

It’s Tommy who eventually gets access to the records, who digs and digs (and bribes and threatens, but Polly probably doesn’t need to know about that part but probably does anyway, she knows her nephews too well to expect anything different, especially Thomas) until he hits pay dirt. The gender recognition certificate, the legal name change barely half a year ago, the parental consent forms for treatment of gender dysphoria.

It’s a week after he finds it all that he shows her, having mulled over how to tell her and finally settles on just laying it all out. He slides her the folder over breakfast and drinks his coffee – black, two sugars, a Shelby staple – while she reads what she initially thinks are some financial documents or some other Family Business™ family business.

He watches her face morph from shock to confusion to hope to awe and around to the same kind of fond exasperation she looks at him and his siblings with, the closest to love-comfort-softness that Polly gets.

And somewhere in that mix of emotions he knows there is a tug of grief (and it stings, it will never stop stinging, that grief, but for once it isn’t aimed at him), grief because she has lost both of her daughters, grief that is outweighed by the joy of having gained a son, just like the joy of gaining a nephew that outweighed the grief of losing a niece all those years ago.

“Michael,” she says, awe unmistakable. Traces a hand along the papers with as much tenderness as if they were the face of her lost son, soon soon so soon to be found again and brought home to them.

(Michael, she thinks later, of course he’d somehow pick a family name. It’s only right and it’s perfectly right, she wouldn’t have chosen any different.)

II.

They wait to reach out until after Michael turns 18, until he has been legally emancipated from his adopted parents. And the wait kills Polly but she understands it, given the circumstances. It’s Tommy that reaches out, somewhat awkwardly, a voicemail left on a cellphone. Perfunctory, because how do you explain the weight of a history like their family’s over voicemail, with a rushed callback number just before the cutoff tone.

And Michael, for his part, two years on HRT and attending uni in London and happy as hell and finally free from parents who were tepidly accepting (at least enough to help him medically transition) but suffocating in their palpable discomfort, jumps at the chance to meet Tommy.

It’s validating that his birth family has reached out to him and even more validating that, to have found him at all, they would have had to found out that he was trans. And to have reached out, they would have had to accept that fact or at least grapple with it. To have reached out, they would have had to want to see him and that’s reason enough to want to meet Tommy. That’s even reason enough to forget that his parents haven’t spoken to him since the day he moved out of their home, to forget that they looked relieved when he left.

III.

And two weeks later they’re sitting across from each other at a coffee shop in north London, a hipster hole in the wall place with good pastries - Michael’s suggestion. They both order coffee – black, two sugars. Michael doesn’t understand why that’s funny to Tommy.

Tommy sits across from him, eyes a shade of blue so startling it’s both hard to maintain eye contact and to look away at all, and offers Michael a a chance to rejoin the family he barely remembers he lost and it almost breaks Michael in half, because he didn’t expect any of this to be so easy. Except it’s not easy, of course it’s not, there’s a weight between then the heft of many people, fathers and brothers and sisters and daughters, but Tommy carries that weight somehow better, with a straight-backed pride Michael finds he would like to learn. To carry the weight of his past like a talisman and not an albatross.

“What does my mum think,” Michael asks just before they say goodbye, standing there on the sunniest day London has seen in months, on the corner outside Warren Street station. He’s put off actually asking this question, unwilling to hear the answer. Unwilling to have another parent see him as a disappointment. “Of me? Of… me.”

Tommy doesn’t speak for a long time, pulling drags and exhaling slowly. When he does speak, he doesn’t look at Michael and Michael can’t help the way his stomach drops to his feet in bitter, sickening anticipation of some kind of rebuff, some kind of confirmation that this will be hard. Instead, Tommy smiles, just slightly, the corner of his mouth blink-and-you’ll-miss-it twitching, and says “You’re her son. She loves you.”

Like it’s just that easy. And for the Shelbys, it kind of is. Family is family, all baggage included. (Ride or die, bitch.)

And Michael isn’t really given to strong emotions (another Shelby staple) but he carries that answer with him for days after, holds it in his body like a physical thing, right next to his heart tucked protectively behind his ribcage. Her son, her son, her son.

(He finds out later that Tommy himself is trans but that is not for some time - it’s definitely one of the last pieces of the puzzle for him, that last missing piece of sky that completes a nearly two decades long year search for who he is and where he belongs. But it’s not for a while yet.)

IV.

He meets his birth mother on a stormy day two weeks after he first meets Tommy. He stands on a curb in Small Heath with an address on a scrap of paper, hastily scribbled while on a confirmation call with Tommy (who does not and will not text, the neanderthal) when he arrived in Birmingham.

She’s not at all what he expected (smaller, thinner, stress-worn. but he has her nose he thinks, and her chin, the curls in her hair) but he supposes he isn’t what she suspected either so they’re at least on equal footing.

Her home smells of incense and perfume, the tea she brews is stout-dark but bright-sweet, her hands are soft and warm on his back when she hugs him and with tears threatening to choke him, his forehead on her shoulder, he thinks oh, I remember this.too

#i've been in a similar situation vis a vis transphobia recently so I relate and i'm very honored you came to me #i hope things get better for you friend #and i hope these help in their own small way #and if you ever wanted to talk or vent (anon or not) i'm absolutely here to listen #peaky blinders #trans posts #Anonymous #self made man au #(that's the tag!)

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joshiesjourney · 5 years

Text

Pesach

Based on this text I am gathering a first overview of the themes around Pesach:

Slavery in Egypt

The first topic of interest is the slavery in Egypt. Some notes from the resources:

1. Historical background:

In the Torah, Joseph is sold into Egyptian slavery where he climbs the social ladder into becoming second-in-command over the Egyptian empire. Through him the Israelites arrive in Egypt to live there when a great famine made Israel uninhabitable. At a later time a pharaoh rises to power who does not remember the good Joseph did for the land and who puts the jewish people into slavery.

Side note: There is not, to this day, conclusive evidence to support that this slavery and the exodus actually happened, however there are many theories surrounding it, different calculations of which year they actually had the Exodus from Egypt (I’ve read the year 2448 and 1265 BCE) My favorite that was explained and criticized in the Torah study class by Prof. Hayes at Yale (who assumes the Exodus happened in 1265 BCE):

It involves the conquering of Egypt by the semitic people called the Hyksos around the 1700s BCE, around the time when Joseph might have been brough to Egypt. This theory explains how a jewish foreigner, part of the semitic people, could rise to a high position, and also why they were later enslaved: in the 16th century BCE the Egyptians regained control over their land, ending the Hyksos regime.

Coincidentally, at the time of the Exodus Ramses II was in power in Egypt and he was well known for his building projects. In the torah it is mentioned that the jewish people were forced to work on big building projects.

However, where the Hyksos theory falls apart according to Hayes: The years named in the torah are not necessarily reliable, may even be contradictory. Where Exodus 6:16-20 suggests a total stay of four generations, which would mean Joseph would have arrived and brought the Israelites after the Hyksos’ reign, rather than having a 430 year stay. (She also suggests the 430 year number would fit with a hebrew bible numeric ideal. I might go into numbers in judaism (gematria) some other day but honestly I am not too interested in mysticism at this time, I am still learning the absolute basics. Also the worksheet says it was 210 years, which is confirmed in Nedarim 32a. MORE RESEARCH NEEDED BY ME)

Long story short, there is not enough evidence to back up the claim. However there are opinions that support there probably was some kind of truth in this story, since it doesn’t make much sense for a nation to recall that one time it was enslaved and humiliated for many years at the forefront of its history in the first place. It is unheard of for a people to create a fictional time of enslavement.

Prof. Hayes held this lecture in 2006, the source cited by the worksheet, Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen’s, Permission to Receive which provides and sums up secular evidence for the Israelite slaves in Egypt, is from 1996. So you know what, I would need to do a bit more digging here to find more info and a conclusive opinion. I don’t have one yet, I’m just gathering data.

ANYWAY back on topic.

2. Reasons for slavery in Egypt:

The worksheet cites three reasons:

a) To strengthen the jewish people’s trust in God

b) To develop a closer relationship between the people and God

c) “To show the Jews the consequences of an over-zealous pursuit of materialism”

Let’s go through them one by one.

- Abraham doubted God’s word that Israel would belong to his descendants, so the slavery would be a punishment for that (meant is this passage in Genesis)

- It is argued that the slavery they suffered through was akin to the process of a crucible purifying the metal it melts (Deuteronomy 4:20)

- Rashi’s commentary suggests that 4/5 of the jewish people in Egypt perished during the 3-day-darkness that came upon the land as one of the last of the plagues because they were “unworthy” of becoming part of the new people

- God changes the order of events and the world around to dictate the fate of the Israelites

- by experiencing the evil they strive towards good

- Apparently the jewish people were being greedy and it got them stuck doing hard manual labor for pitiful pay, however I struggle to find the source of this. Might add later

3. Physical and spiritual slavery

This part is about identifying how the mind can be enslaved and bound.

- addictive behaviors: they shroud the mind and make it harder to be true to yourself as you will put them above your spiritual pursuits and they bind you to them

- “Every generation has its Egypt”: There is always something that is binding the current generation. Everyone is called upon to reflect upon themselves that God helped them, personally, out of Egypt - after all every jewish person is part of the entity “the jewish people” who once were lead out, meaning so did every individual

- Pesach is there to make us reflect on these bondages in life

Pesach Miracles and Their Lessons

1. Miracles of Exodus

The purpose of the plagues: Set one (blood, frogs, lice): proving the existence of God to the Pharao who denies this. Performed by Aaron. Set two (wild animals, epidemic, boils): proving God’s control over the world, performed by Moses. Set tree (hail, locusts, darkness): proving that God’s power is absolute not comparable, performed by God. The final plague is the death of each first born Egyptian son.

Each third plague came without warning.

Shabbat HaGadol: Sheep were considered Idolized symbols of Gods in Egypt. The sacrifice of the sheep on this shabbat, rather than to cause them to be killed, was what saved the jewish people from the killing of the first borns, since they used the sacrifice’s blood to mark their doors.

- Then comes the splitting of the Reed Sea and the successful battle against the Amalek

- Yitro, Moses’ father in law, is said to meet with them after the war of Amalek and eventually converting to Judaism

2. Lessons taught by the miracles

- for us to realize that there is more than just what we see with our eyes/that we only see the surface layer

- each plague has a lesson about God, the most important ones being: a) to gain more awareness of God b) to demonstrate that the Israelites were the chosen people/set apart from the rest c) to show that false Gods cannot protect from God d) to instill gratitude in the jewish people so they will accept and be loyal to the Torah

#jumblr #judaism #pesach #history #lessons #miracle #exodus

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schraubd · 5 years

Text

Vectors of Threat for Academic Freedom

The prospect that Temple Professor Marc Lamont Hill might be dismissed from his tenured university position -- the Chair of the Temple University's Board of Trustees said he would "look at what remedies we have", but suggested that many on the board and the administration would like to fire Hill -- has sparked a renewed round of the ever-popular "who's the real threat to academic freedom" game. For all the belly-aching conservatives have issued over liberal universities which can't tolerate opposing viewpoints, there sure are a lot of cases where conservatives have successfully censored progressive academics!

I doubt that Hill will end up being fired, and it's been good to say many conservative academics make clear that any such university sanction would be an egregious violation of academic freedom (see, e.g., Robert George, Jonathan Marks, and Keith Whittington -- FIRE, which sometimes is viewed as conservative though I don't think that reputation is deserved, also has come out swinging backing Hill's academic freedom rights).

But this case did help crystallize in my mind the different vectors of threats to academic freedom, which may help explain how both the left and the right think it's self-evident that the "other side" is the real danger (beyond the usual self-serving reasons I mean). To generalize:

When threats to academic freedom bubble "up" from below -- come from students or faculty -- they tend to come from the left;

When threats to academic freedom percolate "down" from above -- come from politicians or the Board of Trustees -- they tend to come from the right.

Front-line administrators (like Deans), who can encounter pressure from both sources, are "swing votes". No doubt there are exceptions. And I hasten to add that this typology only holds on a political axis -- along other axes of campus identity (e.g., racial, sexual, or religious lines), there are different stories to be told about who and what prevents certain groups from engaging as equals in campus discourse. But on the purely political side of things, and based on my admittedly non-scientific recollection of cases, this distinction seems to hold up pretty well. Start with the threats progressives face: It is the Temple Board of Trustees threatening Hill's job. Steven Salaita was "unhired" by the Univeristy of Illinois' Board, validating a decision by the Chancellor. It was UNC's board which voted to shut down centers and clinics which clashed with conservative political priorities, for nakedly political reasons. If you move over to cases of conservative academics being targeted, examples like Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State or Charles Murray at Middlebury are primarily cases of student behavior. Academic BDS campaigns almost exclusively emanate from students or faculty, while facing strong administrative resistance (see Pitzer or Michigan). And the more general claims that conservative views are "unwelcome" or that college is an "unsafe space" to be a conservative are typically directed at the conduct and outlook of students and faculty. No doubt this divergence is in large part attributable to the relative political make-up of college faculties and students versus governing boards or political overseers (in retrospect, it also explained the instincts behind my "Do Jews Need a Protest Politic" post, which posited that campus groups who protect their rights via administrative action rather than student protests will automatically code as conservative). But the differences between these threat-vectors has significant practical ramifications, that go far in explaining why both conservatives and liberals think they're the primary victims of academic freedom violations. On the one hand, it perhaps shouldn't surprise -- though many people were surprised -- that there have been more "political" firings of left-wing professors on campus than right-wing professors, and the gap has gotten bigger over the past few years. And if you think of who has the capacity to issue blunt, sweeping, heavy-handed assaults on academic freedom -- terminating employment, shuttering a program, passing a law -- then that figure makes sense. For the most part, students and faculty can't do that (or at least, not with much greater expenditures effort). So the liberals can justly point out to the conservatives that, if they're the political orientation threatened by the elements within academia that have the de jure authority to end a career or eliminate a program with the stroke of a pen, then they are the group more threatened by academic freedom violations -- period. But there's another way of viewing the problem. It's true that boards and politicians have greater blunt dominative authority which, when exercised, poses a greater threat to academic freedom than any power faculty or students hold. But it's also true that board and politicians "touch" the day-to-day operations of academia far more infrequently than faculty and students do. What the latter lack in bluntness, they make up for in terms of omnipresence -- the conservative complaint regarding the state of academic freedom tends to rely less on direct cases of censorship by administrators and more about an atmosphere or mood where certain views are shunned or difficult to air (see this profile of conservative women at UNC, or this account from NYU). It is not a single act of censorial pronouncement that silences conservatives on campus, but the constant prick and needle of dismissiveness, eye rolls, "jokes", and shunning that together creates a landscape where conservative views are effectively unable to be aired.

So the conservatives could reply by saying that a few stray bolts of administrative lightning might be flashy, but they hardly overwhelm the suffocating blanket of ubiquitous liberalism which they see as draped over their academic communities. It is nuts, they would argue, to suggest that in general academic squelches liberal ideas and facilitates conservative ones.

One reason that I suspect progressives would find this argument frustrating is that it adopts a view of power that conservatives tend not to find attractive in other contexts. When speaking of racism, for example, conservatives are not generally sympathetic to any understanding of the term other than deliberate de jure action by an official authority. The complaints about eye rolls and dismissals are -- dare I say it -- best characterized as "microaggressions", and we all know how conservatives feel about those.

This framework also has some difficulty distinguishing between bad de facto "censorship" and simple widespread negative reactions to ideas. After all, thinking "this idea is wrong" -- or even "this idea is racist" -- is not censorship, it's judgment. That one's speeches are met with protests, one's classroom contributions are met with snickers, and that nobody wants to date you after that column you wrote calling abortion murder -- none of these would be viewed as a form of oppression by conservatives but for the fact that conservatives are experiencing them.

Hence, the conservative appeal to this framework in the academic context reasonably comes off as opportunistic. It also opens the door to a more expansive liberal retort, identifying a still-further basic threat to, if not "academic freedom", then at least the diverse and pluralistic exchange of ideas. If academia is built for a particular type of student -- one who is, on average, wealthier and Whiter than America writ large, then it follows that certain types of views and arguments will most likely be systematically underrepresented and underconsidered. If, for example, campuses are poorly equipped to engage with and include undocumented immigrant students, that likely has an impact on the way campus debates about immigration will proceed. This argument relies on a similar (albeit not identical) understanding of power as does the conservative case; if they admit one, they really should have to admit the other.

Be that as it may, I do think that a focus on the vectors of threats to academic freedom -- the different ways in which those threats manifest when they stem from politicians and boards (right targeting left) versus when they stem from faculty and students (left targeting right) -- can help explain the sense of talking past each other that is so prevalent in these conversations.

Brazen acts of censorship, firings, or political interference are more likely to stem from the right. Day-to-day discomfort, including microaggressions, and an overall atmosphere of having to "walk on eggshells" are more likely to be the product of the left -- though any consistent theory of academic freedom then has to also admit that these same dynamics might also "censor" or "chill" other campus outgroups (such as racial, religious, or sexual minorities). The former is more nakedly wrong and more individually dangerous, but also rarer. The latter is more omnipresent, but also primarily an issue in aggregate and in any event more complicated at the case level.

And then even below those, there's a whole additional layer of ideas and perspectives which are not aired on campus because their proponents never make it to campus, because campus isn't built for them. Different vectors, all threatening the pluralistic exchange of ideas in different ways.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2rikS9M

#academia #academic freedom #conservatives #Liberals

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peakyblinders-au · 6 years

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Ekaterina Lvovna Smirnova

Tumblr Url & Your Real Name: @peakytoms // Kat

Character Full Name: Ekaterina Lvovna Smirnova

Nicknames/Alias: Kitty (only by Tommy), Katherine for all the other english people, some (Arthur, Alfie) call her Kit

Face Claim:

Backstory for nicknames/alias/names: Tommy is the only one who can call her Kitty because he’s the only one that has made her purr

Gender: Female

Gender Role: if you want a backstory for this add anymore necessary info here as well for the gender prompt

Sexual Orientation: She’s whatever she has to be but mostly hetero

Age: 19

Birthday: August 21 1900

Deathday: I mean I don’t want her to die, but honestly you guys are the writers and do what you do

Birthplace: Anapa, Russia

Ethnicity: Russian

Family Members: Orphan- mother (Nadezhda) died on the way to England from russia, father (Lev) was killed in a bar-fight when she was 16, she has a brother (Pyotr/Peter) who moved to Scotland for work but they are not close

Children: none

Face shape: Heart Shape

Eye colour: Green

Hair colour: Black

Hairstyle: long curly hair that is normally down but pinned up when needed (especially when I was on the street)

Skin tone: she was born close to the sea so she tan easily, but because it’s England she is now quite pale

Complexion: a light olive (like mila kunis/penelope cruz) but shes hella pale rn

Body type/Build: slim (but she’s got some hips)

Height: 5’4

Weight: 90-100 lbs

Breast size: 34B (they seem bigger on her since she’s so tiny but its a good handful)

Facial Hair: none (well-eyebrows and like baby hairs)

Scars/Birthmarks/Prominent Features:

Scars

She has a scar about 5 cm on her chest from when she was once attacked with a bottle while on the streets (but really it happened when she killed her dad…oooh plot twist), and a few cigarette burns on her arms from her dad as well

Birthmarks

She has a tiny one in the shape of a heart on her cheekbone- like scarlett Johansson

A birthmark the size of Tommy’s palm on her right buttcheek—its light brown (Tommy says it was a sign that he was meant for me because it’s the perfect size of his hand)

Preferred hand: Righty,

Health: she was malnourished as a child and teen so she’s slim and has a problem with eating food- like she likes to store food cuz she’s always worried she will one day have none

Phobias: she is kinda afraid of the dark, but the fear dwindles the longer she lives with tommy

Addictions: she eventually becomes addicted to cigarettes after living with Tommy

Mental Disorders: slight anxiety but nothing too maladaptive

Attitude: she seems pretty meek and quiet when you first meet her so many underestimate her (also because of how small she is). but in reality she has a non-nonsense attitude and is not at all afraid to speak her mind. she’s kinda like a less exuberant Tatiana

Expressions: when she’s nervous she scratches at the scar on her chest and nibbles on her lips

Residence: she used to live on the street and would get a room when she could afford one, now she lives with Tommy and his wife (Erika)

Political Affiliation: she doesn’t know enough about politics since she’s not educated and hasn’t worked in any organization or legitimate place. plus she’s an immigrant (came to England as a child)— but probably more communist since she hates Imperialism and the imbalances of capitalism

Friends: Erikas character is one of her friends (she found her on the street and took her in since she was so young (but really, she was 19 just looked so young since she was so malnourished), she’s also pretty close to Finn, and Isiah because they are close in age (eventually Michael but she doesn’t really get good vibes from him and so avoids him) but she doesn’t spend much time with them since she’s so busy

Enemies: she HATES the Russians because they’re the bourgeoisie and ran the Jews out of Russia

Boss: Erika is kinda her boss (She help look after the kid and work around the house to earn her keep) but Tommy also sometimes uses her to help in business (he once tried to set her on Kimber and Erika bitched him out for it, but she’s still willing to help because she’s cunning and has a good eye for who tommy should/should not trust)

Pets: She has one dog (Nochka) who was a stray that she found and bonded with, Nochka is like her little guardian (She is a mutt and kinda like a scruffy collie; see picture)

Finances: PISS POOR, she’s living on the streets, stealing when she can (which she doesn’t like but a girls gotta eat), she wants to work but finds it hard since all the men came back, so sometimes she has to work the streets out of sheer desperation)

Marital Status: not married

Sex Life: HECK YES. I want her to smash Alfie cuz she’s a Jewess and Tommy sets them up (he figured since Alfie is such a loud mouth and she was Jewish, he would tell her all his secrets- which he did since its Alfie)

Lovers: so eventually she is going to become Tommy’s mistress (but not at the beginning since she’s young and he doesn’t trust her), though eventually as they spend more time together (because she starts to work for him) he starts to trust herm talk to her about business, and develop feelings (he’s an older man though and feels weird about it at first and doesn’t want to take advantage, but she makes it clear that the feelings are reciprocated)

Turn-ons: she’s kinda a masochist (her abuse from when she was young left her kinda damaged so she likes pain, but she also likes giving it since she sometimes also has a power kink

Turn-offs: she hates men with dirty hands since they remind her of her father (she makes sure Alfie washes his hands thoroughly before the bang bang)

Dom or Sub: she’s a switch– usually she’s more sub cuz of her masochism, but she knows when Tommy is being to hard on himself and needs to take the reigns herself)

Fantasies: if you want this written or at least known go ahead but i can’t promise it will be apart of the story, there is only so much time and so many episodes y’know!

Occupation: she’s worked as a seamstress and a prostitute, but now she’s whatever she needs to be for Tommy and his wife (babysitter, maid, trojan horse— meaning that Tommy sometimes uses her to get info from his enemies, kinda like lizzie in season 2)

Income: she doesn’t have one for the beginning since she’s getting to live with Tommy for free, but eventually he starts paying her because he knows how much she needs to have money saved to feel safe

Work Experience: seamstress, factory worker, child-care worker, prostitute

Religion: she grew up in Judaism but she doesn’t identify with it (If a god put her through what she went through then it’s not a god she wants to worship)

Criminal Record: she’s been arrested for theft and solicitation but because everyone thinks she’s so young she’s never been to jail for long

Morals: she tries her best to be a good person, she doesn’t like picking on the little guys, but doesn’t mind knocking the big ones down a few pegs. She also knows that morals sometimes get in the way when you need stuff (she would steal and sell herself when she needed to) so she’s not fused to her morals

Main Goal: she just wants to get out of her destitution and feel safe somewhere. Once she feels safe in Tommy’s home and begins to trust him, she becomes loyal as a dog (Russians are fiercely loyal). She just wants to be happy and healthy and safe

Ambitions: her only ambition is to better her life and protect the ones she loves, she is willing to kill if she has to

Regrets: she doesn’t really regret anything, she believes that things happen as they will happen and it’s pointless to regret and worry about things (she’s a total Russian)

Secrets: her dad died “in a bar fight” but in reality she killed him. After the mum died, her dad would get drunk and mistake her for her mum and assault her, her brother used to help but when he went off to war it was just the two of them, and she killed him and that’s how she became homeless. No one except Tommy knows what her dad did to her, and what she did to him.

Best memories: anything to do with her mum, her and her mum used to garden and go to the beach, so when she moves in with Tommy, she asks very kindly for a small garden in memory of her mama.

Also the first time that Tommy smiled at her (she was admiring his horse one day when she thought he wasn’t around, and she fed the horse an apple, and she heard Tommy chuckle because of how amazed she was with the horse eating it, and it was the first time she saw him smile at her– this was back when she first moved in and Tommy didn’t trust her)

Worst memories: literally all of her life from when her mum died to when Tommy’s wife took her in

Hobbies: she’s started smoking since she’s moved into Tommy’s (it’s silly but she started smoking so they would have something in common, she was always smitten by him)

Skills: she’s really good with knives (duh she’s Russian), she’s also really good at languages and picking them up, accents etc. (but this isn’t like essential i guess), she’s also very stealthy and sneaky

Likes: LOVES READING and gardening so much, and just hanging out by water and laying down on the grass and just relaxing and feeling safe, she loves the sun (which sucks cuz lel it’s Birmingham and England), LOVES baths (and loves having them with Tommyboy)

Dislikes: she hates when people are rude to those who have less than them,

Superstitions: SO SUPERSTITIOUS SHE’S RUSSIAN (but not superstitious about anything to do with cats, she loves all animals)

Quirks: she talks to herself a lot

Guilty Pleasures: she LOVES sweets. Like if there is a sweet in the house for Tommy’s kids, she’s eating them. She saves up what she can just to buy sweets and when Tommy is feeling kind, he brings her back some and just acts all chill and non-chalant about it, but loves how excited and happy she reacts every time)

Strengths: she’s strong and capable, she’s smart and knows how to read people really well

Weaknesses: she doesn’t trust anyone really

Languages: Russian, English, Yiddish/Hebrew, she’s picked up French from Erikas character and thus find its easy to pick up other romance and Slavic languages- at least she has a rudimentary knowledge of understanding (she cant speak most but she can listen)

Accent: English, Brummie

Speech Impediments: none

Voice:

Reputation: she has a pretty poor reputation, since she was a nuisance to most of society while on the streets, now she has a reputation for being Tommy mistress, which means people fear and ‘respect’ her (at least to her face, but to her back, they think she’s just a gold digging whore)

Backstory: KAY SO, what I was thinking was, Ekaterina and her fam, emigrated from Russia (though really they were like forced because they were Jewish) when she was like 10, and her mum died when she was 11 before they got to the UK. Since her mum died, her dad has been abusing her when he gets drunk (which was very frequent) because she looked like her mama. Her brother used to try to protect her but papa was big and when he was drunk it would be one helluva mess to fight with him. When brother went to war, and it was just her and her dad, it was awful and one day she snapped and she killed him (and everyone just assumed it was some barfight). She stayed in the house for a bit but eventually was thrown onto the streets when the men came back from war and she lost her job. Now homeless, she had to steal, and sell her body to live. She befriended a stray who would stay with her and cuddle her for warmth on nights that she spent on the streets, and the dog became her guardian and security. One day Tommy’s wife saw her and the dog curled up in some corner on the street and legit thought it was a dead child (because she was so tiny), so she took her in to her home (and the dog to since it refused to leave Kit (it was barking like mad until it was let in). Tommy’s wife was nice and at first Kit lied about her age figuring it would be easier to get pity if she were younger and not an adult). Tommy was mad as hell that she let some stranger into the house, but he couldn’t force her to throw Kit out, so she stayed and started helping out around the house (baby-sitting, housework, etc). Tommy, who was suspicious of Kit, ignored her at first, but then started ‘asking’ (read: manipulating, psychological coercing) her to help with the business (used her to sweeten the deal with Alfie and get some deets, wanted her to seduce some potential enemies etc.).

Eventually, as she spend more time with Tommy, they get used to one another, and he begins to trust her and see her worth as a business advisor kinda. He knows that she’s good at reading people and he trusts her to help him out so they become close. Tommy has known that she has been lying about her age for a while and as they get closer, he becomes more and more attracted to her, but feels awks about it since she’s like the young hot nanny, and he’s older (so modest and insecure for someone so beautiful sigh). She obviously feels the same (since Hello it’s Tommy Shelby and god those eyes????), so eventually she just flat out asks him if he’s attracted to her “because I am attracted to you”. And badda boom badda bing, they get it on. She at first feels kinda bad about it because she genuinely loves his wife and owes her her life for taking her in, but she’s still Russian and so thinks that things happen for a reason (so the universe wanted them to all be together because it brought them together). Kitty is definitely the one that gets Tommy the most, and helps him out with the business. She understand him and why he does what he does, but she isn’t afraid to give him shit when he’s being unnecessarily awful.

Her and Tommy’s relationship is very unique– like they are friends and confidantes first and they share everything with one another and trust each other completely. But they also get down and dirty and that’s where Tommy lets out all his kinks (she’s Russian so she judged nothing in the bedroom…nothing).

#Ekaterina Lvovna Smirnova #Ekaterina Lvovna Smirnova pbau #Ekaterina Lvovna Smirnova post #character template pbau #pbau #submission

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moviedailymotion · 4 years

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- Ein Geschenk von Bob - VOLLEDIG 2020 - M O V I E S [STREAMING ONLINE]

Ein Geschenk von Bob - VOLLEDIG 2020 - M O V I E S [STREAMING ONLINE]

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Our relationship is strained. It feels like it has been for a while. For the last four years, there has been an elephant in the room — I’d joke and call it an orange elephant, but I’m nervous that might end this earnest conversation before it even begins. Have I changed? I mean, yes, of course I have. I’ve gotten older. I’ve had two children. I’ve tried to read and learn as much as possible, just as you taught me. In fact, that’s sort of the weirdest thing. I don’t think I’ve changed much. I still believe, deep in my bones, all the fundamental things you not only talked to me about, but showed me when I was little. I believe in character. I believe in competence. I believe in treating people decently. I believe in moderation. I believe in a better future and I believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that the system we were given by the Founding Fathers, although imperfect, has been an incredible vehicle for progress, moral improvement, and greatness, unlike any other system of government or country yet conceived. I believe this exceptionalism comes with responsibilities. Politically, I’m pretty much the same, too. Government is best when limited, but it’s nonetheless necessary. Fair but low taxes grow the economy. Rights must be protected, privacy respected. Partisanship stops at the water’s edge. No law can make people virtuous — that obligation rests on every individual. So how is it even possible that we’re here? Unable to travel, banned from entry by countless nations. The laughingstock of the developed world for our woeful response to a pandemic. 200,000 dead. It hasn’t been safe to see you guys or grandma for months, despite being just a plane ride away. My children — your grandchildren — are deprived of their friends and school. Meanwhile, the U.S., which was built on immigration — grandma being one who fled the ravages of war in Europe for a better life here — is now a bastion of anti-immigrant hysteria. Our relatives on your side fought for the Union in the Civil War. Great-grandpa fought against the Russians in WWI, and granddad landed at Normandy to stop the rise of fascism. And now people are marching with tiki-torches shouting, “the Jews will not replace us.” What is happening?! Black men are shot down in the streets? Foreign nations are offering bounties on American soldiers? And the President of the United States defends, rationalizes, or does nothing to stop this? I’d say that’s insane, but I’m too heartbroken. Because every step of the way, I’ve heard you defend, rationalize, or enable him and the politicians around him. Not since I was a kid have I craved to hear your strong voice more, to hear you say anything reassuring, inspiring, morally cogent. If not for me, then for the world that will be left to your grandchildren. This does not feel like a good road we are going down… Look, I know you’re not to blame for this. You hold no position of power besides the one we all have as voters, but I guess I just always thought you believed in the lessons you taught me, and the things we used to listen to on talk radio on our drives home from the lake. All those conversations about American dignity, the power of private enterprise, the sacredness of the Oval Office, the primacy of the rule of law. Now Donald Trump gushes over foreign strongmen. He cheats on his wife with porn stars (and bribes them with illegal campaign funds). He attacks whistleblowers (career army officers, that is). He lies blatantly and habitually, about both the smallest and largest of things. He enriches himself, his family members, and his business with expenditures straight from the public treasury. And that’s just the stuff we know about. God knows what else has happened these last four years that executive privilege has allowed him to obscure from public view. I still think about the joke you made when we walked past Trump Tower in New York when I was kid. Tacky, you said. A reality show fool. Now that fool has his finger on the nuclear button — which I think he thinks is an actual button — and I can’t understand why you’re OK with this. I mean, the guy can’t even spell! You demanded better of me in the papers I turned in when I was in middle school. I know you don’t like any of it. If you’d have had your choice, any other Republican would have been elected but Trump. You’re not an extremist, and you’ve never once said anything as repulsive as what people now seem comfortable saying on TV and social media (and in emails to your son, I might add). Four years ago, I wrote to you to ask you not to vote for Donald Trump. But this time around, that’s no longer enough. At some point, just finding it all unpleasant and shaking your head at the tweets, while saying or doing nothing more about it, is moral complicity. You told me that as a kid! That the bad prevail when good people do nothing. A while back I emailed a friend of mine who is an advisor to the administration. I said to him, why do you think my dad’s support of Trump bothers me so much more than yours? Because it does. This is someone who helped put Trump in office and wants to keep him there, but we’re still friends. Talking to him doesn’t hurt my heart the way it does when politics come up over family meals. The man’s answer was telling, and I am quoting. He said, “Because I am irredeemable, but your dad ought to know better.” Does that register with you at all? One of the things you taught me well was how to spot a scam. Double check everything, you said. Do your research. Look at what the people around them say. Look at their history. Remember when you used to quote Reagan’s line to me, “Trust, but verify”? I’ve been lucky enough to make a few trips to Washington the last few years. I’ve sat across from Senators and Congressmen. I’ve talked to generals who have briefed the president, and business leaders who worked with him before the election. This is a guy who doesn’t read, they said, a guy with the attention span of a child. Everybody avoided doing business with him. Because he didn’t listen, because he stiffed people on bills, because he was clueless. He treated women horribly. He’s awful, they said. I thought this was a particularly damning line: If Donald Trump were even half-competent, one elected official told me, he could probably rule this country for 20 years. I have trouble figuring what’s worse — that he wants to, or that he wants to but isn’t competent enough to pull it off. Instead, Washington is so broken and so filled with cowards that Trump just spent the last four years breaking stuff and embarrassing himself. I learned from you how to recognize a dangerous or unreliable person. If you don’t trust the news, could you trust what I’m bringing you, right from the source? Let’s trust our gut, not our political sensibility. Based on what I’ve told you, and what you’ve seen: Would you let him manage your money? Would you want your wife or daughter to work for him without supervision? I’m not even sure I would stay in one of his hotels, after what I’ve read. Watching the RNC a few weeks ago, I wondered what planet I was on. What’s with all the yelling? How is this happening on the White House lawn? Why are his loser kids on the bill? His kid’s girlfriend??? And what is this picture of America they are painting? They are the ones in charge! Yet they choose to campaign against the dystopian nightmare that is 2020… which is to say, they are campaigning against themselves. Look, I agree there is crazy stuff happening in the world. The civil unrest is palpable, violence is on the rise, and Americans have never been so openly divided. Sure, rioting and looting are bad. But who is to blame for all the chaos? The President. Remember what you told me about the sign on Truman’s desk? The buck stops here. (May we contrast that with: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”) In any case, what some crazy people in Portland are doing is not ours to repeatedly disavow. What the president does? The citizens are complicit in that. Especially if we endorse it at the ballot box come November 3rd. Besides, what credibility do we have to insist on the ‘rule of law’ when eight of the president’s associates have faced criminal charges? His former lawyer went to jail, too! And then the president commutes their sentences, dangles pardons to keep them quiet, or tries to prevent them from cooperating with authorities? When he’s fined millions of dollars for illegally using his charity as a slush fund? When he cheats on his taxes? When he helped his parents avoid taxes, too? I remember you once told me the story of a police officer in your department who was caught filling up his personal car with gas paid for by the city. The problem, you said, wasn’t just the mistake. It was that when he was confronted by it, he lied. But the cameras showed the proof and so he was fired, for being untrustworthy most of all. Would you fire Trump if he worked for you? What kind of culture do you think your work would have had if the boss acted like Trump? As for the lying, that’s the craziest part, because we can, as the kids say, check the receipts: Was it bad enough to call John McCain a loser? Yes, but then, of course, Trump lied and claimed he didn’t. Bad enough to cheat on his wife? Yes, but of course, he lied about it, and committed crimes covering it up (which he also lied about). Was it bad enough to solicit help from Russia and Wikileaks in the election? Yes, but then he, his son, and his campaign have lied about it so many times, in so many forums, that some of them went to jail over it. Was it stupid that, in February, Trump was tweeting about how Covid-29 was like the flu and that we didn’t need to worry? Yes, but it takes on a different color when you listen to him tell Bob Woodward that in January he knew how bad it was, how much worse it was than even the worst flu, and that he was deliberately going to downplay the virus for political purposes. I’m sure we could quibble over some, but The Fact Checker database currently tallys over 20,000 lies since he took office. Even if we cut it in half, that’s insane! It’s impossible to deny: Trump lied, and Americans have died because of it. A friend of mine had a one-on-one dinner with Trump at the White House a while back. It was actually amazing, he said. Half the evening was spent telling lies about the size of his inaugural address. This was in private — not even for public relations purposes, and years after the controversy had died down. That’s when he realized: The lying is pathological. It can’t be helped. Which is to say, it makes a person unfit to lead. Politics should not come before family. I don’t want you to think this affects how I feel about you. But it does make it harder for us to spend time together — not just literally so, since Trump’s bumbling response to the pandemic has crippled America and made travel difficult. It’s that I feel grief. I feel real grief — were the lessons you taught me as a kid not true? Did you not mean them? Was it self-serving stuff to make sure I behaved? Was I a fool for listening? Or is it worse, that my own father cares more about his retirement accounts — and I’ll grant, the runup of the market has been nice for me, too — than the future he is leaving for his children? Are you so afraid of change, of that liberal boogeyman Limbaugh and Hannity and these other folks have concocted, that you’d rather entrust the country to a degenerate carnival barker than anyone else? I see all this anger, what is it that you’re so angry about? You’ve won. Society has worked for you. My own success is proof. So what is it? Because it can’t possibly be that you think this guy is trustworthy, decent, or kind. It’s definitely not about his policies… because almost every single one is anathema to what Republicans — and you — have talked about my entire life. The one thing I hold onto is hope. I believe in America. I believe in the goodness of hardworking people like you and Mom. I know that this is not what you wanted to happen, that this is not the America you grew up in nor the one you would like for me and my kids to grow up in. I hold onto hope that you’re tired enough to draw the line. That you are not irredeemable as that Trump advisor allowed himself to become. The right thing is always the right thing, you’ve said. Even when it’s hard. Even when it goes against what your friends think, or what you’ve done in the past. The right thing is obviously to end this. To cancel this horrendous experiment with its cavalcade of daily horrors and vulgarities and stupidities and historical humiliations. America is a great nation. …

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koljabartsaderawegf · 4 years

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BEKIJK - Ein Geschenk von Bob - VOLLEDIG 2020 - M O V I E S [STREAMING ONLINE]

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bareklyionasery · 4 years

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WATCH — Ein Geschenk von Bobs — FULL 2020 — M O V I E S [STREAMING ONLINE]

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jam2289 · 5 years

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Fighting Local Government Corruption - Part 6 of ?

Why do some people feel that they can trample other people's rights and that's fine? This article will be fast and heavy. We are going to see the eight ways that people detach morality from their actions, why it's hard to tell when politicians are lying, a disturbing statistic related to the dark triad, two experiments that show the tendency of some people to abuse power and other people to follow bad orders, how stories reveal some of these processes, and the possibility for redemption.

There are eight techniques that people use to make the bad things that they do seem okay. The psychologist Albert Bandura wrote the book "Moral Disengagement". He also has a five page paper by the same name. By knowing about these you can be more alert and aware of the various manipulation techniques that are used. This will be a short overview. They have semi-confusing names, so I'll break down what they really mean.

Moral Justification

This is simply doing bad things as a means to a "good" end. "I'll sacrifice those people over there so that I can get to this thing I want." Those other people are just collateral damage. It's all for the greater good anyway. This basic view is that humans aren't really ends in themselves, they are just tools or obstacles. (It's disturbing, I know, but it will get worse. Still, it's important to know these things.)

Euphemistic Labeling

This is how politicians talk. It's why it's often confusing and boring to listen to them. If, for instance, they were to tell the truth they wouldn't say, "I lied." Nope, they will say something like, "I presented the information through a medium in which I believed we would be able to protect the lives of innocent children." What does that have to do with it? We'll all wonder what they're talking about, because they aren't really talking about anything. It's often worse than that too. Sometimes they do something like this, "Things that were untrue were communicated." It means the same thing as "I lied.", it just sounds like they didn't do anything wrong, and that's why they use it.

Exonerative Comparison; or, Advantageous Comparison

"Maybe I've done bad things, but look at that guy over there, he does even worse things. So, maybe I'm not really that bad."

Displacement of Responsibility

"Someone else told me to do this bad thing, so it's not really my fault."

Diffusion of Responsibility

"I wasn't alone in doing this, a bunch of other people were part of it too, so you can't really blame me."

Minimizing, Ignoring, or Misconstruing the Consequences; or Disregarding or Misrepresenting Injurious Consequences

There are a lot of examples that fall into this category, but here's one simple example: "It's not really hurting them that bad."

Dehumanization

This is where you think of other humans as not human. It's often used in atrocities of various sorts, like when the Nazis called Jews pests. "These people are lower than us, they don't have rights because they don't deserve rights." (I think this is the most disturbing.)

Attribution of Blame

This one seems odd at first, but it's common. They just blame the victim for what they're doing to them. "You brought this on yourself."

Obviously some of these techniques are also why it's hard to tell when politicians are lying, but there is specific research into this too. Here is a tiny look into that. This is a piece of the abstract from the paper "Manipulating Public Opinion with Moral Justification" by Kathleen McGraw.

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...why it is so difficult to detect deceptive moral justifications. The difficulty arises because (1) people are not very good at detecting deception in general; (2) the mediated nature of political communication eliminates the nonverbal cues that are the most predictive of deception; (3) social judgment biases lead people to focus on the individual and inhibit suspicion; (4) the norms of political culture constrain politicians from accusing each other of lying, so that the public is not prompted by other sources to regard moral claims with suspicion.

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Luckily, not everyone is so constrained. For instance, let me reveal some information for you.

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This is from the Muskegon Circuit Court's website showing the township suing Hidden Creek Farm.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ynL4G4o3kY1ZCX8UB3nKQoWt1JFt8JWQ

Here's the township supervisor lying about it.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1X9TVcNZIubvTI49iR7ZOnxtuWuzo0kQM

Here's a recording of the township lying about it. (It's a phone call just over 6 minutes long. You'll have to download it to listen to it.)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YDg8L1yU6xfO99ggWTw-YcR3GePglc9O

Here's a trustee saying he wasn't informed.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mcDn0hBEHCiPpl3VTui_Z3GsOgT9bcwN

Here are the minutes before the lawsuit and injunction showing that it wasn't discussed in an open meeting.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11ou0UvSKl8Ddpd0tkv3ECCWSo4B8hb78

Here are the minutes after the lawsuit and injunction. The lawsuit still isn't discussed, and the injunction is voted on after it was already done.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BpP4jVZ34d0VErSIEGFzjRLFs3mWkFMA

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Next, there truly are dark individuals. Most reasonable people know this, but they never expect to interact with them. They think they only exist on the news or in drama shows.

The dark triad is a set of three dangerous traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Narcissism means the person lacks empathy and has an overly grandiose view of themselves. Machiavellianism means the person manipulates and exploits people, doesn't worry about morality, and uses deception to get their way. Psychopathy means the person can be remorselessly antisocial.

There are people out there with these traits. Here's the scary statistic: one percent of people are psychopaths. That means that out of the next 100 people you see... yeah. Add sociopaths into the mix and you at least double that number. Think about that when you're at a large gathering of people, look around, think about it, it's scary.

The environment makes a strong difference as well. The controversial Stanford Prison Experiment was funded by the Navy to see how and why abuse comes about in prisons. Students were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners. With small suggestions to do what was necessary to keep the "prisoners" in line, the "guards" quickly turned to classic methods of prisoner abuse. Power and authority given to the wrong people in the wrong situation results in bad things.

Not always is it even the people with the most authority that do the actual deeds, sometimes they are just ordered to. Stanley Milgram did experiments to see if it might be true that the people that committed atrocities in the Holocaust felt like they were truly "just following orders." As it turns out, most people are willing to give massive electric shocks to people if they are told to do so by an authority figure. They are uncomfortable doing it, but they still do it. People question it, they feel like it's wrong, but when reassured and told to continue, they do. In the struggle between obedience and conscience, the conscience usually loses.

Some narratives do a good job of exploring these processes. For instance, in the television show "Poldark" Elizabeth makes small compromises. Slowly, over years of moral compromises, she puts herself in a position where she has to do bad things to try to justify the previous compromises she has made. Her bad decisions and bad deeds grow over the years until they become destructively large. It was bad at the beginning, but because it was small she got away with it, she thought.

Another way it can happen is like Danny from "Game of Thrones". At first she is doing bad things to bad people, and it's justified. But, over time she keeps doing those bad things, even when she is crushing innocent people.

This all brings us to the possibility for redemption. I believe that there is always some possibility for redemption in life, even Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol". But, if there is a jewel thief that is seeking for redemption, he still shouldn't be left alone in a jewelry store at night with a key. It's the same with positions of authority. When moral and legal violations have been made I believe there should be attempts to restore justice by the individuals that committed those wrongs. That process is best completed as a personal journey, after those people are removed from their positions of authority, by themselves or by the citizens.

Many of the things mentioned in this article are unsavory to look at, to listen to, to think about, but if we forgo our responsibility of being aware, then who will stop them?

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You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

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