Merry Kirkmas to all, and to all a good 9/11

Heard this to the tune of One Winged Angel

everything for Polly

He’s right

Mod-heavy games that I like to fashion into my own perfect version, like Baldur’s Gate 1/2 or Skyrim, are games that I start modding AFTER I’ve played through it once or twice. Modding a game that’s been out for a week to take friction out is just strange entitled behavior

But engaging with a text is an idea that is just so foreign to the vast majority of the gaming industry

Vile racist, don’t you understand that the entire population of china are brainwashed robots who blindly say they support their government because they lack our enlightened western culture of freedom? Be more like me, the enlightened liberal who truly respects and cares for those hordes of conformist chinese vermin who need to be saved from their backwards culture

death to the zionist occupation

real

This is inspiring to read because I’m not satisfied with my social life but I’m scared to put my self out there and meet people. I’m scared I won’t find people that I share values with and I think it’s not a totally irrational fear but it feels like I need to try anyway

They probably mean the same sound as K, which can be represented by C often in spelling, which we tend to call “hard C”, as opposed to “soft C” which is the same as S

Referring to sounds by letter names can be confusing to do in English as you can see, since our spelling is so all over the place

In American English the voiced/voiceless distinction isn’t really the main way we distinguish T from D and P from B, etc. We aspirate (breathy h sound) kinda heavily on T and P etc. In my experience unaspirated T can be hard to distinguish from D and so on.

Second puberty update: down to 1-2 emotional meltdowns per week from one basically every day in those first two weeks. Progress! Still better than being dead inside!

Fall is undoubtedly the best part of the year. Eventually the weather will be pleasant enough that I can let my hair down outside without dying

hunter2

Yaay congrats!

This is a good point to think about. You’re right that it has its own particular character as the Zionist instance of European settler-colonialism and isn’t simply settler-colonialism in the abstract. And you’re right that in the apartheid, supremacy ideology is a social force that impacts the oppressed and not a mere belief. Hrm.

Judaism and Zionism are separate, and not all Jews are Zionists. There’s a great anti-Zionist community of Jews on reddit that I remember from before I left.

But in the media and the wider internet, I usually see “we have got to separate Judaism from Zionism and stop making all Jews responsible for Israel” deployed to disguise the nature of lone-wolf destructive acts of resistance against Zionist institutions that are synagogues. When a Zionist synagogue is graffiti’d or even attacked, separating Judaism from Zionism is the immediate brainless media reply and no one bothers to investigate whether the synagogue was sending money to the IDF or hosting West Bank land sales. In the media and parroted by the general discourse, the Zionist synagogue becomes just a synagogue free of all context, and therefore the graffiti or attack can only be an antisemitic hate crime. This comes even from nominally leftist libs like Hasan when he goes to the wider media to try to prove he isn’t an antisemite, which is what prompted the original discussion.

So I could definitely have been more specific about what I meant to avoid confusion, that’s on me. I meant that it’s not useful to belabor the separation between Judaism and Zionism when discussing about anti-Zionist actions and we should not use it to police anti-Zionism. However unfortunately that also means we need to critically scrutinize media reports of antisemitic hate crimes at Jewish institutions that may actually be anti-Zionist actions. I definitely didn’t mean to say that we should be conflating Judaism and Zionism, or that we shouldn’t be on the watch for genuine antisemitism to fester out of hatred of Israel’s actions.

I realize now in saying this that this is tough because I’m grappling with a contradiction: we shouldn’t be policing anti-Zionism and feeding the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and yet we can’t let antisemitism fester in our spaces so language and attitudes need to be scrutinized. I don’t know what a synthesis looks like yet.

Comrade I’m saying that if someone replied to your first paragraph by saying “How DARE purpleworm say they want to crush synagogues? What an antisemite!”, that would be crybully behavior.

Yeah, “China is sterilizing women” traces back to a confabulated statistic that purported that 80% of all new IUD insertions in China during some period were in Xinjiang. The leap from that to “this was a campaign to intentionally sterilize the Uyghur population” is the standard China Bad narrative. The statistic doesn’t even make sense; it was ridiculously arrived at by subtracting IUD removals from IUD insertions in each province and then dividing that by the whole, and presenting that as “fraction of new IUD insertions in China”. If there were more removals than insertions in some province, you could end up with “negative 40% of all new IUD insertions happened in Guangdong” which shows how misleading the math is.

Hullo!