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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.

This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.

When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/

Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.

The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.

Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.

This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:

https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/

On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens

Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @[email protected] says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112457199729198644

The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:

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

That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.

Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/

Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.

For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3

Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:

https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.

This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.

Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":

https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf

The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.

In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.

But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.

The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks

Also in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

As does public housing:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias

There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

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envysparkler · 5 months

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Jason tucked himself deeper into his hoodie and tried not to shiver. His fingers were numb around the tire iron, more from panic than the chill in the air, and he felt like he was being turned to ice, inch by painful inch.

He could still see the cold look on Johnny Six-Fingers’ face, the reek of tobacco, the ultimatum ringing through the air and echoing inside his head.

Jason had a debt to pay, and Six-Fingers had gotten tired of waiting. Jason had one night to scrounge up two grand in cash, or he’d have to pay it off the usual way. By standing on street corners.

Six-Fingers didn’t care that Jason was only twelve and didn’t have any way to get a real job. He didn’t care that the money had all been funneled into the black hole of Jason’s mother’s hospital expenses. He didn’t care that the money hadn’t even worked, that Jason’s mom had died, wasting away with every breath, and Jason was left with no parents, no home, and a debt to one of Crime Alley’s most infamous money-lenders and pimps.

He didn’t care that there was no way Jason could scramble together two grand in cash in one fucking night.

The wind was biting on his cheeks and Jason took a few deep breaths as his eyes prickled. No. No. There—there had to be a way. Jason wasn’t going to become a whore. He’d find the two grand—he’d steal it if he had to, he wouldn’t become one of the empty-eyed men and women standing on the streets, lighting up to detach themselves from reality.

But it was late. Very late. No one was out on the streets this late at night, not when the Batman lurked. Most people in Gotham had better sense than to get in the way of a prowling nightmare of darkness and claws, lest they end up as another bloody body in a gutter.

Jason unfortunately had to sacrifice sense for speed. The one skill he was very good at was jacking tires, and they didn’t sell for much, but if he found a really good score, he could maybe bargain with Tony at the shop to get the two grand. He’d owe Tony then, but the mechanic would let him pay it off by working at the shop.

It was a horrible plan. It relied on Jason basically stumbling upon a pot of gold, and avoiding Gotham’s most infamous murderer while he was at it. Jason was usually careful to jack tires during the day—if Batman ever caught him, Jason would be seeing his own insides.

At the moment, it was a risk he was willing to take.

It was going to be fine. Everything was going to be fine. He was going to find some tires, sell them, get Six-Fingers his money, and then maybe his mom would come back to life and tuck him into bed. Jason exhaled harshly and tightened his fingers on the tire iron.

He needed to get the cash.

Crime Alley was quiet. The pubs had closed an hour ago, which left no one on the streets. There weren’t many cars here, and none of them had tires that would sell for more than a hundred bucks. Jason was consciously aware of his heart pounding in his ears, like a ticking clock counting down his fate.

Tick tock.

He had to find something.

Tick tock.

He wouldn’t become a whore. He wouldn’t.

Tick tock.

Please—he had to find something, please—

Tick tock.

He wanted his mom. He wanted his dad. He wanted someone, anyone, to tell him it was going to be okay.

Tick tock.

He wanted to find a car that was gleaming and dark and all tricked-up, with massive tires and novelty rims, and—oh shit, that was the Batmobile.

Fuck. Everyone knew of Batman’s tank of a car, how easily he evaded police and gangs and everyone, blasting through Gotham like he owned the goddamn city. And given that no one had been able to stop him even once in the last decade, he probably did.

Jason had already turned to flee before his mind caught up to his legs and reminded him that he hadn’t done anything illegal. Yet. Running would be suspicious.

He let himself casually ogle the car as he took inching steps backwards, his heart pounding so loud he was surprised it wasn’t echoing in the alley. Every fraction of his attention was focused on listening for a whisper of a cape, or perhaps the hiss of claws scything through air, his tire iron clutched firmly to his chest. He was going to get out of the alley calmly and carefully, and—and if Batman was prowling around Crime Alley, Jason’s chances of getting that two grand had just vanished, and he didn’t want to go back to Six Fingers, and—

Those…were nice tires. Fancy tires. The kind of tires that would totally be worth two grand. No sane person would want anything to do with Batman’s tires, but Tony did work for the Families too, and some of them could be interested in trophies.

If Jason actually managed to get the tires off without being murdered or having a heart attack.

He didn’t want to. He desperately didn’t want to. But the choice was between Batman and Six-Fingers, and Batman wasn’t here.

“You can do this,” he whispered to himself, his fingers twisting on the tire iron. Steady and careful. Silent and quick. “You have to do this.”

Jason checked one last time for shining claws and white eyes in the darkness, and got to work.

~#~

The combination of fear, dread, and panic helped Jason work faster than he ever had in his life. He unscrewed the bolts, kicked the tires off, and rolled them to the next alley to hide them below a stack of cardboard. It was going to be tricky to get them all the way to Tony’s shop, but first Jason had to get them off. The minutes ticked by, agonizingly slow, as his fingers grew clammier and his breaths grew shorter.

The world had narrowed down to his numb fingers, the bolts, the tires, and his distressingly loud heartbeat.

Jason, working away at the third tire, didn’t realize he had company until he heard the low growl, right behind him—“What are you doing?”

Nerves strained to the breaking point, Jason reacted on instinct. He jerked away from the tire, yanking the tire iron back with him, and shifted his grip as he spun and swung with the movement.

The tire iron crashed into a nightmare.

The nightmare staggered back with a grunt.

Jason allowed himself a split second to feel—oh no oh fuck oh no—before booking it.

There was a time to fight and a time to flee the fucking country, oh fuck, he attacked Batman, he was going to die, he didn’t want to die and the pulsing sound of his heartbeat was overridden by the too-loud sound of his shoes smacking against loose asphalt. He didn’t hear Batman, but he hadn’t heard the monster before he spoke up, and there was no fucking way Jason was looking back to check what’d happened.

Run, screamed every cell in his body, run and hide, adrenaline coursing through him and narrowing his focus on the desperate effort to get away.

If Jason had been slightly less panicked, he might’ve remembered that this alley was a dead-end before he nearly brained himself smacking against the brick wall.

Run, everything inside him insisted, and Jason clawed at the wall in an attempt to climb it, but there were no handholds, nowhere he could jam his fingers and hoist himself up. The chill down his spine grew to a sharp, vicious ache as the weight of silent regard grew heavier and heavier.

Jason stared blankly at the brick wall and felt his face begin to prickle.

He was going to die. It wasn’t a theoretical. Batman murdered criminals, everyone knew it, and no one could stop him. Certainly no one would care if he murdered Jason. Jason was dead, and every breath he took could be his last.

His face was wet, and he was trembling all over. He felt curiously detached from his body, like he was in a dream, and when he blinked, the world went dark for a stretching moment. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want it to hurt. He desperately didn’t want to feel pain.

A footstep echoed right behind him.

“Please,” Jason’s voice said hollowly, the words spilling from his mouth without permission. Everything was blurry. “Make it quick.”

One punch of the claws through his back, and Batman could rip his heart out. It would be done. He couldn’t hear Batman move, but the presence behind him intensified, and the world retreated a little bit more when a gauntleted, clawed hand settled on his shoulder

A slash of razor-sharp metal through his throat would be equally fast. Jason let himself be maneuvered, let the threatening grip turn him around, let cold and bloody claws tip his chin up to look at Death.

It was terrifying. This was the last thing many people saw before they died. A hulking outline of shadows looming above them, a full-face mask with pointed ears and glowing white eyes, red glinting ever so darkly against the black armor.

“What’s your name?” the growl ground out, distorted and echoey. It sounded like what monsters in the closet were made of.

“Jason,” he forced out through trembling lips. Dead boys had no need of names. A fresh wave of prickling crawled across his face, and everything went blurry again.

“Where are your parents, Jason?” Oh, Batman was really pissed. Luckily, Jason had no family for the monster to take it out on.

“Dead.”

Something changed in Batman’s posture, a tightening that some instinctive part of Jason recognized as anger. There was nowhere to hide though, no kitchen table to crawl under with a dog to wait out the rage, and Jason just cowered against the brick wall.

“Who do you live with?”

“N-no one,” Jason stuttered. Batman was determined to vent his fury. Well, a little voice spoke up in his head, you did steal his tires. What did you expect?

Batman was silent for a stretching moment, studying him. Jason waited for his verdict, shivering despite his hoodie, cold with more than just the wind. When Batman spoke, it was worse than all the horrible things Jason was imagining.

“I will take you to a social worker,” intoned the low growl, and Jason felt a new kind of terror rush through his veins.

“No,” he said automatically, his mind screaming in horror—at least with Six-Fingers he would just be a whore, he wouldn’t be a pet, he wouldn’t be owned—“Please—please don’t—”

“Jason—”

Jason was aware that he was interrupting, aware that this was Batman he was arguing with, but Jason was dead anyway, what more did he have to lose? “Please,” he begged, dropping to his knees to plead for any mercy this nightmare possessed, “Please, just—just kill me, please, don’t—don’t give me to the traffickers, please, I’ll do anything.” Jason had to break off to shudder through a sob, but before he could resume begging, Batman was moving.

The Terror of Gotham knelt in front of him to look Jason in the eyes. The shock was enough to startle Jason into silence.

“Jason, I’m not going to kill you,” the growling voice said, “And I’m certainly not going to give you to traffickers.”

Jason…couldn’t tell which one of those was the lie.

“I know of a trusted foster parent that would give you a safe place to stay while I look into these traffickers,” Batman’s voice rang out firmly, “Would you like to stay with him?”

No, Jason would very much not like to stay with a buddy of Batman’s. It was a trap, that much was obvious, but Jason had no choice but to walk straight into it. This was Batman.

Jason nodded meekly, and took Batman’s proffered claw-tipped hand—slick with drying blood—to be pulled up to his feet. “You can wait in the car while I put the tires back on,” Batman said, opening the door to reveal the darkened interior.

Jason wanted to protest, wanted to take his chances to run at the opposite end of the alley, wanted to wheedle his way into getting the tires himself so he could escape, but those glowing white eyes had transfixed him, and Jason’s fingers were sticky with someone’s blood, and he didn’t feel up to arguing.

He silently got in the car. The tears didn’t stop.

#my snippets #jason&bruce #jason steals the tires au #in a world where batman kills

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kick-a-long · 5 days

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i find it so desperately sad that goyim generally would be so much less antisemitic if jews started physically fighting back with guns or sticks in every country. calling for the murder of muslims all over the world, if the jewish population was big enough to have large scary groups of crazy fringe fundamentalist synagogues all over the world, a billion strong, that preached murder and hate so goyim could look down on jews like some noble savage in need of assistance and western education and protection. so we could be reformed in obvious patronizing ways because there were so many of us that we had militant violent fringe extremists, like christians and muslims have, mixed in with the normal jews.

if jews didn't have such a reputation for success and intelligence maybe conspiracy theories would stop blaming us for controlling the world. if we felt less in danger maybe we wouldn't be so obsessed with long term survival.

is antisemitism some warped form of envy? maybe. what sucks is that jews are no better or worse than anyone else. some jews are brutes and some are the most wonderful people imaginable, just like any other group. what sucks is we don't all live up to the reputation of tactical geniuses and wizards with mind control magic. all of us jews are just tired and abused humans who have lived with 2000+ years of generational trauma and the endless fall out from a popular jewish book written 3000+ years ago describing the best practices of jewish culture. It has some great stories, histories, life advice, diet recommendations, hygiene, and rules about how to treat others.

is that such a crime?

trying to show a path forward? not demanding anyone else follow those rules but wanting to do our best to follow them anyway? how to live a good life that makes the world better and makes you proud to have been on earth for the time you were there? jews fail to do this all the time, just like everyone else. I fail all the time. why are people so obsessed with that? people say shylock is a stereotyped antisemitic character but,

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

so why do jews always have to be the better man? why do we have to apologize for being angry and sad and hating the people that attack us? that was written by Shakespeare, a christian in the 1600s who often was in debt to jewish money lenders, the only profession left to jews at that time. even he saw the double standard. it makes a good point.

now, i don't want vengeance, i don't want violence, but i feel vengeful. i feel angry that i am unsafe because of play actors and terrorist supporters who want revenge for jews existing but scream bloody murder when jews refuse to dig their own graves, beg forgiveness for ever being born, and lay down in them to be mocked and pissed on and abused in the worst ways imaginable for the entertainment and conquest of it. i want peace with them. they are as human as i am, full of foibles and anger. i want nothing to do with them. i want them to never come near a jew again for the rest of time.

i am sad. all i want is to feel my feelings and advocate for what is the most ethical and practical work around to a world filled with unending suffering while i am still alive. i want them on thier side to live in the world they want and me on my side to live in the world i want. why don't these children of all ages, lost in delusions of fantastical battles and ultimate good and evil, see that? why can't I be a human first as well as a jew first? why do they ask me to pick? why am i not allowed to pick?

it's been almost a year. we're all so tired.

I'm going to a music festival. I'm trying to decide whether to wear a star. why is it dangerous to wear a star around my neck?

#jumblr #antisemitism #ramble #jewish #jewblr #the sadness hit me like a gust of wind before a storm #i wanted to say something before it hits #whenever it hits #judaism #jewish history #a moment of grief #I'm trying my best

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evilwickedme · 1 year

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I said I'd never do jumblr content again and yet here I am because this keeps coming up and it's like the only thing I can think about. That said I will not hesitate to turn off reblogs if y'all are horrible in the notes again, and be warned that I will be blocking anybody who supports any of the theories I mention immediately

There is no such thing as a conspiracy theory that isn't antisemitic. There is no such animal

Antisemitic conspiracy theories go back thousands of years. The ones that still have the most hold on culture to this day are the blood libel, and the protocols of the elders of zion

The blood libel was an accusation that would be brought against Jewish populations in Europe often but especially around Passover claiming that we were killing Christian children for ritual purposes, usually to use their blood for baking matza or other nonsense (it is important to me that you know that this is nonsense. It is horrible and damaging but also to the core a ridiculous lie that never at any point made any sense. They just didn't care). Debatably this trope is present in the merchant of Venice. Undebatably Jews were killed because people did and still do sincerely believe this

The protocols of the elders of zion is a fictitious document published in Russia at the very beginning of the 20th century, supposedly detailing the meetings of the Jewish people who secretly run the world. The protocols were almost immediately proven to be a rip off of another document - ah, plagiarism - but that hasn't stopped antisemites from embracing it wholeheartedly (special thanks fuck you to Henry Ford for publishing them in his newspaper, spreading it across the USA). It built on previous antisemitic tropes, from the greedy banker trope (Jews were forced to be money lenders in medieval Europe as it was forbidden in Christianity and Jews weren't allowed to join any guilds, preventing them from making money in any other capacity - the reason why there are so many Jews in Hollywood is identical, but in the early 20th century) to the concept of dual loyalty (i.e. Jewish are loyal to ourselves above all else and cannot be trusted to be loyal to the country where we live, see: modern trope that every Jew is probably loyal to Israel and the subsequent idea that it's okay to ask every single diaspora Jew how they feel about Israel immediately upon meeting them). It's also worth noting that the word cabal, used to denote the shadowy organizations that supposedly control the world, comes from kabbala, which is Jewish mysticism

The idea of lizard people, created by a guy literally named Icke because he is a gross human being, was designed to repackage the antisemitic shadow cabal concept to be supposedly more palatable

Most qanon theories also build on all of this, such as world leaders preying on children (remember pizzagate?)

But more importantly conspiratorial thinking always positions you as the good guy standing against a mysterious "them", an other which is influencing things behind the scenes. The Jew is the ultimate other, and specifically an other that supposedly forms a shadowy world government, controlling everything and yet somehow not managing to get rid of antisemitism (see: protocols of Zion, lizard people, we control Hollywood and the government which is of course conspiring against you). There is no way to decouple the idea of an evil shadowy organization (usually also referred to as a cabal to really hammer it in) from antisemitism and antisemitic tropes

And this means that even supposedly "harmless" conspiracy theories attract antisemites and train people who aren't necessarily rabid antisemites to confirm those kinds of biases. Obviously Qanon and lizard people are antisemitic, but what does the moon landing have to do with Jews? Well, it was Hollywood and the government that faked it, obviously. Hell, even the conspiracy that Taylor Swift is secretly a lesbian and is either still secretly dating or is exes with Karlie Kloss is riddled with antisemitism -

Okay so I need to explain my position on this because I fucking hate this conspiracy theory, and the fact that most people simply won't acknowledge that that's what it is. Firstly, Taylor Swift has stated that she is not gay or considers herself an ally at least three times off the top of my head, and specifically denied that she was dating Karlie Kloss. Secondly, outing people is wrong. Thirdly, the conspiracy theory hinges on the idea that she would be risking her career by coming out, except that she's proven that basically no controversy can come in the way of her career, she's already "come out" as an ally, donated to glaad and the equality act, promoted queer musicians & artists & designers (there was a song in the reputation tour that was dedicated to a gay designer every single night of the tour). So what's stopping her from coming out at this point? Mysterious forces, clearly. The antisemitism in that I've already explained, but also the virulent antisemitism among Kaylor shippers aimed at her husband and at the fact that she converted to Judaism is fucking disgusting

Again: even a supposedly harmless conspiracy theory leads to antisemitism and attracts antisemites

A few years ago I tried to rewatch white collar cause I remembered really enjoying that show as a preteen and after around a season I just couldn't stand it anymore, because all I wanted to do was jump into the universe and yell at Mozzie to shut the fuck up because these conspiracy theories were barely presented as a joke and never challenged even once by any of the characters. When I rewatched that 70s show it also fucking sucked, but at least it wasn't showing up in every single episode. The blacklist focuses entirely on a literal Cabal, that's what they're called

This stuff is so normalized and it's fucking everywhere and it's exhausting. Jews are to this day being murdered over this. I can't change the world by myself, unfortunately, but if you don't have a specific person to blame for your troubles, shut the fuck up. Just shut up. There is no conspiracy against you. Sometimes life just sucks. Or definitely does for the Jews who get shot at over this shit

Again, I'll be blocking anybody who parrots this bullshit in the comments but especially fucking gaylors y'all are one of the main reasons that being a fan of Taylor Swift's music is fucking unbearable. Just accept you can connect to music made by somebody different than yourself it's not that difficult of a concept

#this post brought to you by my burning hatred of gaylors #antisemitism #jumblr #jew tag #jewish history #conspiracy theories #t swizzle #to the people who will inevitably come into my inbox after this and ask me questions about antisemitism: pay me first #ko-fi link is through my bio #gail speaks

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reality-detective · 7 months

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Questions To Ask Ourselves:

1. What is an Egyptian pyramid doing on a US dollar bill?

2. Why did 56 countries sign a treaty not to take risks and enter Antarctica?

3. Why do planes never fly over Antarctica?

4. How did NASA "lose" the photos of the moon landing, one of the most important moments for humanity?

5. If Neil Armstrong was the first to walk on the moon, who held the camera?

6. Why haven't we gone back to the moon?

7. If monkeys evolved into humans, why are there still monkeys?

8. Why does 95% of our DNA exist as "junk"? Who decided it was actually "garbage"?

9. How were huge, symmetrical, detailed, sacred, and geometrically regular structures such as cathedrals and parliamentary buildings created by people who lived in log cabins, rode horse-drawn carriages, and had no machines or lasers?

10. How is it that similar pre-Columbian architecture is found all over the world?

11. Why are there images in ancient Egyptian art that resemble "spaceships"?

12. Why were remains and images of giant people found? And why do different ancient scriptures from various cultures, including the Bible, talk about giants?

13. Why are there images of mushrooms in ancient Christian art? And why does the Pope dress up like a giant Amanita muscaria mushroom?

14. Why do ancient Egyptian artworks show jaws, and is it a coincidence that the pineal gland resembles jaws?

15. Why are there descriptions of dragons all over the world and in different cultures, thousands of years apart, and also mentioned in the Bible?

16. Why is there so much blatant satanic symbolism in the music and entertainment industry?

17. Why do most video games revolve around killing?

18. How is it possible that movies and cartoons like The Simpsons can predict certain cultural events so accurately?

19. How do forest fires melt cars but leave trees intact?

20. What is the national debt? If there is a borrower, there must also be a lender: who is it?

21. How is it that the so-called "national debt" has increased despite tax increases? Where does the taxpayer's money go?

22. Why is alcohol and tobacco poisoning considered "normal" and referred to simply as "drinking" and "smoking"?

23. Why are alcohol and tobacco shown in almost all shows and movies?

24. How do news presenters around the world and on various channels say and repeat the same script word for word?

25. If we are more progressive and informed than ever before, why do we have the highest rates of obesity, cancer, and heart disease, not to mention depression?

Questions you should have already been asking yourself and there are many more you should be asking. 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think about it #think for yourselves #think for yourself #do your homework #do your own research #do some research #ask yourself questions #question everything #ask questions #fitfo

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