essaressellwye

[essaressellwye]

Congress Amended KOSA, But It's Still A Censorship Bill | Electronic Frontier Foundation

If you're in the US, please please please call your federal legislators and ask them not to support this bill

#kosa #stop kosa #kids online safety act #stop kids online safety act #stop censorship #end censorship

[essaressellwye]

If this is correct, the Khazar and Khazar-lite claims about Israel and Ashkenazim and Jewish identity are exactly backwards

ok that's it. tomorrow i'm gonna publish my longer piece on why the modern day Arab Palestinians are NOT the same as the Ancient Greek Philistines (who all died out around 604 BCE when the Babylonians sieged Jerusalem).

Edit: Click here to read the longer version, with links!

but the tl;dr version is this:

we know that the Philistines are Ancient Greeks based on DNA-testing that's been done on their skeletons, and based on their pottery and artifacts, which are Ancient Mycenaean Greek. (the Torah is consistent with this -- it records them as being from Crete, which at that time was under Mycenaean Greek control)

also, being Greeks, the Philistines were not indigenous to the Levant. they were interlopers. the native Israelites fought with the Philistines over and over. the story of David and Goliath is likely a cultural memory of this conflict.

in Hebrew, the Philistines are called Peleshet, and they are likely the same as the Peleset tribe -- one of the tribes of "Sea Peoples" who tried (and failed) to conquer Egypt at the end of the Bronze Age.

and like, duh. obviously the Arab Palestinians and the Greek Philistines are not the same people.

but there are some really bad actors (both in the conspiracy sense, and in the literal "drama" sense) on Tiktok who are trying to erase Jewish history by spreading conspiracy theories that somehow Philistines and Palestinians are "the same". (omg the people who believe this shit are so dumb!!)

they're doing it so they can claim that "Jesus was a Palestinian".

ugh, it gives me a headache even to write something as stupid as that.

no, ya dumb-dumbs. Jesus was a Judaean Jew. he was from Bethlehem. in Judaea.

you know, Judaea. the place where the Jews are from.

deep sigh.

and like, clearly these people have not read a Bible ... ever ... because being associated with the Philistines was NOT a good thing!! they were literally the worst!

the Philistines were Ancient Mycenaean Greeks from Crete.

and the Palestinians are modern day Arabs.

and there is zero connection between them.

the only "connection" is that after the Romans tried to murder all the Jews in the Levant, following the Jewish Bar Kochba revolt in 135 AD, the Romans renamed Judaea, and gave it the name "Syria-Palaestina". they did this to try to wipe the cultural memory of Jews "off the map". they literally went through the Torah, found the name of one of the Judaeans' historical enemies (the Philistines), and renamed the region using that name.

so by claiming that "Jesus was a Palestinian", not only are you calling him a Philistine (ew), you're also giving him the name that the ROMANS WHO CRUCIFIED HIM renamed Judaea after trying to murder LOTS OF OTHER JEWS.

G-d these people are so dumb!!!

#i/p #judaism #jewish history

[essaressellwye]

I keep seeing "abusers know how to manipulate people" and it's more like, would-be abusers who don't know how to manipulate people don't get very far

Truck comes first and if there is any money left over the kids may eat. - Modern Consumer Patriarchy

[essaressellwye]

Well, and Israel, the bit of geography, is actually kinda important in Judaism. "Important" doesn't mean "there should be a state there," mych less "it is good and right that a state be established there," but very few Jews at the time (or any other time) would say "there should be a Jewish state, but the one place it absolutely shouldn't be is Israel"—among the people who supported the creation of a state and cared where it was, there was near unanimous agreement it needed to be there.

this might be a really stupid question but i remember being told in school that israel was created after ww2 for the displaced jewish to have a safe place. but why didn’t they (whoever) just carve out part of poland or germany or something since so many of the displaced were from there anyway? (my history teachers were all football coaches if that explains anything. i wish for a two state solution and that everyone could be happy with that, personally.)

Hi there! This isn’t a stupid question at all, and it is an interesting one. It’s largely interesting because it doesn’t seem to be something the nations involved ever thought about. It never entered their thinking process to create a Jewish state in Europe. I am not aware of any proposals for a Jewish state (whether proposed by Jews or gentiles) that would have put that state in Europe itself - European colonies, yes, but not Europe.

It is not surprising such a plan would never be implemented, for a number of reasons that would have to be its own post about post-WWII Europe and antisemitism, but it is interesting it was never even brought up.

That said, at the end of World War II, the vast majority of Jewish refugees from European countries had no desire, or much ability, to remain in Europe. In polls taken at the allied DP camps, Jewish refugees consistently listed the British Mandate of Palestine and the United States as their top choices for resettlement. (Although Jewish refugees could voluntarily repatriate to the countries they had lived in prior to WWII, very few did so, and Jewish refugees were largely exempted from forced repatriation due to the likelihood of persecution.)

#i/p #israel #uganda #jewish autonomous oblast

[essaressellwye]

If you mean medically or surgically, good news!

If you mean a 16-year-old (or even a 6-year-old, really) should have no say in their appearance or what people call them, that's bizarre!

#'transetion' is a vague term #deliberately so #cw transphobia #transphobia

[essaressellwye]

And then Maxwell House put out a Haggada to clarify to Jews that coffee could be kosher for Passover

sometimes i think about the history of coffee culture in islam and how it spread like it’s so funny

discovered by sufis who decided it was a miracle from Allah since it allowed them to stay up late into the night for night worship

miracle beans = UNLIMITED DHIKR

cue scholars debating for years about whether it’s haram or halal and if it should be classified as an ‘intoxicant’ or not

fast forward to 16th century ottoman empire, where a woman had the legal right to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with enough coffee

europeans called it the “mohammaden gruel” or “devil’s drink” bc they believed it to be a “bitter invention of satan and his followers”

fast forward to pope clement viii finally giving in and tasting it to see what the hype is about and then stating: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

pope clement viii then proceeds to BAPTIZE THE COFFEE BEANS

[essaressellwye]

writing a callout post for our cat:

invading queer spaces (the dining room table)

refusing to listen to queer voices (us telling her to get off the dining room table)

harming queer bodies (puts her claws out when you pick her up)

#this too is tumblr

[essaressellwye]

Similarly, "Reacher Gilt is Elon Musk!" No, Reacher Gilt is an archetype that has existed as long as there've been rich people, because actual rich people have always acted like that

The worst thing you can do is trying to create something "timeless". That's not how anything works, you're not going to create something that doesn't show its age by brushing off all the defining features of the era it was made in - you'll only get something that's bland and featureless. And whatever features you've brushed off do get defined by the era you're living in, and creating from.

A song written in 2003 that makes a reference to every single thing that was A Thing in 2003 is going to sound cringe as hell at 2007, but in 2023 the details of the references are blurred out by enough distance to enjoy the landscape, and all that matters is whether the song itself is a banger or not. And if you start to google every reference, you're opening up a fun window to what, exactly, going to the club in 2003 was like.

And that's why I think there won't be too many period pieces set in the 2020s in the future. Everything is so aggressively bland out of fear of looking dated in five years. Like yeah misery is misery in all ages of all times, but who's going to want to build a set piece depicting a romanticised image of the sense of misplacement and tangible poverty if that's just going to look like white walls and grey hoodies.

Like if good times are not an option, can we at least make the bad times look more fuckable.

#terry pratchett #discworld #going postal #reacher gilt

[essaressellwye]

#antisemitism

[essaressellwye]

Tell Congress: KOSA Will Censor the Internet But Won't Help Kids

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would censor the internet and would make government officials the arbiters of what young people can see online. It will likely lead to age verification, handing more power, and private data, to third-party identity verification companies like Clear or ID.me.

The government should not have the power to decide what topics are "safe" online for young people, and to force services to remove and block access to anything that might be considered unsafe for children. This isn’t safety—it’s censorship.

#KOSA #call to action #stop kosa #kids online safety act #stop kids online safety act #end censorship #stop censorship

[essaressellwye]

A genital preference? Am I wrong about how blowjobs work or …?

genuine q if u wanna answer it: do u consider having sex w a strap & telling someone/letting them assume ur a cis guy is sexual assault? ive seen some ppl talking abt transmascs doing that & it being rape & i wanna hear ur opinion

no. and asserting that it is is a HUGE transphobic talking point.

it’s something people got from stone butch blues and just ran with. but there’s like one in a bajillion chance of this ever happening in real life bc trans ppl tend to get fucking murdered even when we do disclose, so most of us would be too terrified to do this anyway, even if it was better for our dysphoria. there’s also the fact that like. it would be VERY obvious for most people if the person they were having sex with was using a strap on versus a penis connected to their body. so all the fearmongering about this is just ridiculous.

#that's a mouth

[essaressellwye]

I also don't really care about deficits—money is fake anyway, and people are perfectly happy to lend it to the government—but in the opposite direction

[essaressellwye]

Sounds like a leftspeak (or, to be charitable, leftist) version of "a True Artist would do it for sheer love of creation." Which, maybe, but they still need to eat and live somewhere

(At the extreme you have people saying, in essence, the only people who should be creating are people who are independently wealthy or can secure a patron)

ok, i've gotta branch off the current ai disc horse a little bit because i saw this trash-fire of a comment in the reblogs of that one post that's going around

[reblog by user makiruz (i don't feel bad for putting this asshole on blast) that reads "So here's the thing: every Diane Duane book that I have is stolen, I downloaded it illegally from the Internet; and I am not sorry, I am a thief of books and I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, ideas are not property, they should be free to be used by anyone as they were before the invention of capitalism; for that reason I don't believe it's wrong to use books to train AI models"]

this is asshole behavior. if you do this and if you believe this, you are a Bad Person full stop.

"Capitalism" as an idea is more recent than commerce, and i am So Goddamn Tired of chuds using the language of leftism to justify their shitty behavior. and that's what this is.

like, we live in a society tm

if you like books but you don't have the means to pay for them, the library exists! libraries support authors! you know what doesn't support authors? stealing their books! because if those books don't sell, then you won't get more books from that author and/or the existing books will go out of print! because we live under capitalism.

and like, even leaving aside the capitalism thing, how much of a fucking piece of literal shit do you have to be to believe that you deserve art, that you deserve someone else's labor, but that they don't deserve to be able to live? to feed and clothe themselves? sure, ok, ideas aren't property, and you can't copyright an idea, but you absolutely can copyright the Specific Execution of an idea.

so makiruz, if you're reading this, or if you think like this user does, i hope you shit yourself during a job interview. like explosively. i hope you step on a lego when you get up to pee in the middle of the night. i hope you never get to read another book in your whole miserable goddamn life until you disabuse yourself of the idea that artists are "idea landlords" or whatever the fuck other cancerous ideas you've convinced yourself are true to justify your abhorrent behavior.

[essaressellwye]

Hear me out: Kermit and his assistant Uncle Deadly stitch together (literally) parts of a bunch of generic Muppets on the slab, ⚡⚡⚡, and then it's Adam Sandler

Do you see my vision. (Adam Sandler has to play just the most regular guy known to man while Kermit is absolutely gobsmacked horrified at his abhorrent existence and What He’s Done)

[essaressellwye]

Please listen

#stop kosa #kosa #kids online safety act #stop kids online safety act #anti censorship #stop censorship

[essaressellwye]

There's a food pantry in the building where I work. I've never been, partly out of a neurodivergent fear that there are rules that everyone knows but me but mostly out of an understanding that quantities are limited and I have resources other people do not. But I would never presume to question someone else determining they need to use it

So at my workplace, we fund a Food Is Free shelf. It's the basics: take what you need, give what you can - our town has a high level of poverty, there's a cost of living crisis, be the good you want to see in the world etc etc.

Today we had a guy knock on the door and ask if we had a plastic bag he could use to carry a few things - I said sure, got him a plastic bag, and he started packing up his 2 rolls of toilet paper, his 3 or 4 foodstuff items. He said he'd been to a funeral out of town (1500 kms away) and spent his paycheck on fuel - he was only broke till Friday, he said.

And I said, well I'm glad we could help, it's why we have the shelf. We want the community to use it.

And he said:

But people ABUSE it! I've seen people take heaps of stuff from it - and they don't even have kids or anything. And it's fair enough, some people are struggling until the next paycheck, but other people just ABUSE it. You need a sign that says TAKE ONE ITEM ONLY or something. I've taken something from here maybe twice, but I've seen people coming round every week! I've even put stuff on the shelf! Yeah, you need CAMERAS or something. People abuse it.

So here is a man who is actively utilising a public resource that we created to support our local community...And yet he is so brainwashed by capitalism into thinking that people don't deserve basic needs - if they're not working hard, or maybe they're struggling but they don't have it As Bad as others, or they're using a FREE RESOURCE more often than HE thinks is acceptable. He thinks that we should use security cameras to crack down on people "STEALING" from the Food is FREE shelf. Like he's more worthy, like he's a better person, because he doesn't need as much help as others might.

Sometimes, when something is free, people might abuse it. But isn't it better to offer the support to people who need it? To offer an opportunity for people to get back on their feet (even if they're only broke till Friday)? To provide help, no questions asked and no conditions needed?

So what if people abuse it - isn't it worth it if helps someone?

[essaressellwye]

Though, he needs to do a little fanfare and grandstanding, if only to enable the victories to be built on