#and it’s not even just one ethnicity used repeatedly

[yooniesim]

I'm sitting here thinking about a pretty age-old debate on simblr... the race of sims that have black hairstyles, particularly in cc preview pics.

I know it's been talked about repeatedly, but when it comes to cc previews for paid cc I think it's especially worth talking about. Some people say, well, the creator only uses a few different sim models each time, it's not like they're intending to be racist or something. It's just for convenience, because they're busy, they're hustling, they gotta pay their bills. They always use the same sim, so it's fine. But like... isn't that gross to y'all? Someone making money off of black hairstyles, but they can't even be assed to go in cas for 15 mins to make a black sim? Isn't that a prime example of appropriation of black culture for profit? Like the human aspect of us as a person is gone, it's just another part of us being advertised and sold. Black hair makes money, black hair cc is limited, it will sell and nothing else matters. It feels like black hairstyles are some kind of trend with them too, because none of these creators made them before it was possible to profit off of them... back then it was "too hard" just like now it's apparently "too hard" to make a different preview sim.

Also, it's not lost of me that when a creator does make a black sim for their previews, they're as light skinned and white looking as possible. Whether just by skintone, very eurocentric features (like they just gave a white sim slightly darker skin), vitiligo to make most of the skin light, or claiming the sim has albinism. And while some of this I'm sure is just finding that aesthetic more "pretty", I also think this has to do with potential sales. I'm going to be honest... besides engagement by black simblr itself, I've noticed a lot of posts I have get less engagement/reblogs if the sim in question has darker skin and darker hair. It's much more likely to pick up in the mainstream cc finds blogs/YouTube videos etc, if the content is for white sims or the sim has lighter skin and light hair. I don't care about engagement and simply make whatever sim I want to make, and since I do have that variety, it's how I noticed this strange trend. And with the volume of content paywall creators make, I think they noticed this too. Posts with lighter skinned sims get better engagement, and thus, make more money.

Have you ever noticed, even in paywalled cc packs, there will usually be a sort of token effect? One white sim, one ethnically ambiguous sim, one black sim. This is great if you're showing off something that will vary for different skintones- makeup and skin details, for example- but why is it always like this? And why is the variety usually only in previews for cc packs instead of solo items (like hairs)? It feels like it's all to sell better, to appeal to different demographics and say, hey, I didn't forget poc exist! Please pay for my content! It feels disgenuine, and since creators like this rarely engage with the community anymore besides paid content, it's hard to figure out whether they feel this way or not.

Personally, I don't care much what people do in their own games- I might look at them weird for a sec, but I move on, cos it's their issue not mine. But like many other aspects to this community, when it crosses over into paid content, it sparks my interest. It feels like everything, everything, is about maximizing profit now. And for the people that focus on that, that's their prerogative and all, I can't exactly stop them, but. It's just something I observed and wouldn't mind discussing with y'all.

(Note: I don't apply the "profiting off black culture" part to black creators, obviously. Also no hate to any creators that do this stuff. Be reasonable adults, please. I'm just discussing in a constructive criticism type of way.)

#ceci speaks #nonsims #text #the patreon issue #ceci speaks a lot more #negative #kinda? #just thinking #first thinkpiece in a while lol

[neechees]

Signs that a scam might be run by Laura Deramas & her common behaviors:

So as we know, that despite making herself famous as one of the most deranged, notorious scammers & perpetual liars on tumblr, its likely that Laura Deramas hasn't actually gone away, and is likely running several scams at any given moment at tumblr, as she's admitted to running multiple (on both twitter AND tumblr) not long ago. With these, we've seen her frequently have the same patterns of behavior on pretty much all of her scams, be it when she's using her own name & face, or someone else's (& she frequently uses other Filipinos' info, but she has racefaked or pretended to be different sexualities/genders/ethnicities multiple times as well).

So with that in mind, in addition to the usual red flag lists for scammers (ex: new blog suddenly asking for money, spamming asks, turns off /hides replies, changes url multiple times suddenly, etc), below are some common red flags to look for in "donation" posts/blogs that indicate this blog is likely a scam and specifically being run by Laura for the following behaviors:

She tries to send you a video or photos of some kind of a flood, a fire, or an old house in poor condition, but usually there's no proof that this is HER or her family's house, that it's HER footage, that it's not old, or that she actually lives there, and she never shows her (or the posters', whoever she's pretending to be) face. This means that the footage is most likely stolen, she isn't actually affected by that situation, & she's trying to pass it off as her own footage.

Uses the phrase "please, sir/maam" a lot. And i don't just mean saying "maam" to women & then "sir" to men, I mean as in sending everyone an ask/message with the phrase, quote, "sir/ma'am" unquote regardless of your gender

Is new to tumblr but somehow knows exactly which popular users to ask to reblog their donation posts, and usually they're Black. They may also target people who were previously victims of Laura's scams.

The user asks you to talk off of tumblr, especially if it's facebook.

The user is reluctant to give out their paypal and doesn't list it on their donation post. They may also use a knockoff fundraising site.

She starts showing you photos of things like a sad family or broken down house unprompted (or on her sockpuppet scam accounts, she uses stolen photos specifically instead) and starts talking about how much she's "suffering", often even if you've never interacted with her on her blog. She does this to manipulate people into feeling bad for her and will often repeatedly harass people this way.

She uses the ❤😩 😭🥺🙏 emojis approximately 50,000 times every sentence. Obviously that's a bit of an exagerration, but her scams DO use these a LOT. Her tumblr asks tend to also use a combination of these specific emojis when asking people for money or to reblog their donation post/scams, especially the crying & praying emojis.

Asks you to make or boost a donation post for her on other sites like twitter or instagram

Will allege that she can't speak English very well, but is only using English for her donation posts. She uses this lil nugget a lot in her other scam personas where she's pretending to be someone else, including ones she's literally admitted to. Laura can actually speak English very well. She's also used this even for accounts where her scamsona allegedly speaks a language that is widely spoken & has their own large presence on tumblr (like French or Arabic), so it doesn't make sense that someone who apparently has a lot of trouble with English ONLY uses English for their posts and ONLY follows English speaking users, & will sometimes use a shitty google translate if soneone who's a Native speaker in that language tries to talk to her in that language.

Might say something like "if you have any questions, ask me!" But then as soon as you ask questions that question whether or not its a scam, even if you ask very nicely or don't outright imply you think she's a scammer, (or even ask like. ANY question at all), instead of answering any questions or addressing any allegations or proof she's not genuine, instead she'll redirect, self victimize, and say that you're "attacking" her, and never actually provide any answers to the questions she said she was open to answering.

If you call her out, she'll keep insisting she's not lying, even if you have very explicit, hard proof that she's lying and that you know where she's stolen the "proof" documents from (like vet bills or xrays) or that her information is incorrect. If shes pretending to be someone else & is using someone else's photos and you say you know its actually her (Laura), even if you show HARD evidence that it's a Laura sockpuppet scam account, she'll continue lying and acting as if she doesn't know what youre talking about. She's done this with scams she later admitted to running.

Below under the cut is tactics/behaviors Laura usually displays when she's either been caught, or she's openly using her own name & face. Her scam sockpuppet accounts might do some of these things too, but the ones below are a bit more specific to when she's been caught, has admitted to lying and admits she is Laura behind the account, and/or when she's using her own name and face.

Might bring up her neighbors if you catch her in a lie and say something like "my neighbors will kill me" or being afraid of her neighbors & using that as some kind of excuse related to the lie/scam

If you catch her in a lie, she might say some story about "the police" or something along the lines of "the police" raiding her home or being afraid they will, and she usually brings this up to beg you not to tell other people she's scamming (she's used this story at least 4 different times and she's never been arrested or had any run in with police.) She's counting on people not knowing a lot about the Phillipines or its geography unless you live there (& this is a predominantly American site), so if she makes some claim about a law in the Phillipines, and it sounds wild, look it up, there's a good chance she's bullshitting you.

she'll start begging you to talk to her family via facebook, and specifically facebook, to "prove" shes not lying (note that her family knows she scams & is in on it, and several of her friends are also scammers on here, so they're there to backup her bullshit, but in cases where she's pretending to be someone else, it's likely one of her scammer friends pretending to be the family members of her scam persona to look more legitimate). She doesn't do this as much on her sockpuppet accounts, but if she does also take it to be suspicious.

If caught and Laura admits to it, she might try to discredit scam busters, specifically me, Kyra45, or mangocheesecakes by saying something along the lines of us allegedly being "bullies" or "targeting her for no reason" or that we are "racist" & alleges we only accused her of scamming because she is Filipino (this is incorrect, we accused her of scamming because we have hard proof she is a scammer & has been doing this for at least 3 years, and mangocheesecakes is also Filipino. Laura being Filipino is incidental.). Obviously her goal in doing this is to victimize herself and demonize us with the hopes that people will not believe us, and will donate to her now or her future scams. You're free to be skeptical of us, but if not us then you can ask the dozens of other people Laura has manipulated, harassed, and tricked into helping her to see that shes a serial liar, scammer, and a bully.

#laura deramas #scam #donation scam #scammers #donation scam warning #feel free to add on to anything i missed!

[foreverlogical]

How is this changed if the actions taken by Musk caused the deaths of soldiers in the alliance America is part of? And how is this changed if after having calls with Vladimir Putin, Musk starts advocating publicly for Ukrainian surrender? And what if he is making money off this? 

And what do we do with the reports that Musk privately acknowledged that he was “in” the Russia-Ukraine War—but not, per the evidence we currently have, on the same side as America?

Is there some reason the House GOP is scared to investigate this? Or DOJ? What am I missing here? 

How is all this inflected by the data confirming Musk complies with the demands of hostile foreign governments at a far higher rate than his Twitter predecessors did? And how is that inflected by the fact that his Twitter coowners are autocratic Saudi butchers allied with Russia? 

And in the midst of all this he comes out publicly and tells 150 million followers to vote Republican? At a time we know both the Russians and the Saudis have secretly interfered in American elections on behalf of the Republicans? And then he starts making all sorts of changes... 

...to what is more or less a public utility (even if it is privately owned) that benefit hostile foreign governments, agents of hostile foreign governments, American disinformation agents operating as “useful idiots” for hostile foreign governments, and anti-American Kremlinists? 

And as I recall, didn’t he at one point threaten to stop providing resources to the American government that he’d previously provided *while* he was simultaneously advocating for a Ukrainian surrender following multiple phone calls with Vladimir Putin? Like—that seems really bad? 

Again, I’m not an expert in this, but I’m asking at what point Musk runs afoul of FARA? Or the Logan Act? Or something rather more serious that relates to military conflicts in which the United States is involved? All of this seems really serious to me and everyone’s ignoring it. 

America just went through an eight-year period in which a narcissistic sociopathic far-right White male billionaire colluded with Russia and the Saudis to interfere in our elections and advance illegal Russian adventurism. Is it just me or is the exact same thing happening again? 

(PS) Obviously I’m leaving a ton of things out here, e.g. the fact that Musk, like Trump, has repeatedly been accused of fraud, or that Kremlin policy inside the U.S. is to foment racial and religious divisions to weaken America... and Musk has been doing exactly that on Twitter. 

(PS2) Are we sure we’re not in the middle of a national security situation here? Is it wrong to think the Senate Intel Committee should be holding hearings to find out what Musk has been doing secretly with the Russians—and whether or how it’s connected to Twitter and the Saudis? 

(PS3) If Elon Musk will do the bidding of Vladimir Putin in terms of disabling Ukrainian military equipment and proposing that Ukraine surrender a good portion of its land area to Putin and his war criminals, what *else* is he doing at the bidding of the Kremlin or Saudi royals? 

(PS4) When we see Musk simultaneously pushing the “Ban the ADL” hashtag even as hostile foreign agents intending to cause chaos in the U.S. are doing the same thing, and we know who Musk is holding secret calls with... uh, isn’t that all super concerning from a NatSec standpoint? 

(PS5) And not for nothing, but many of you will remember the major media report I just posted in which Musk confesses that he wants to “take over the world’s financial system.”

Uh, for whom? Will he seek to benefit Russia and Saudi Arabia and harm the United States in that, too? 

(PS6) Remember how Trump led with racism and antisemitism and other forms of ethnic and religious bigotry that caused *chaos* in the United States, only for us to learn he was in cahoots with Russia and the Saudis?

Does that not feel... familiar, now?

I have some concerns here. 

(PS7) I’ve never claimed to be an expert in these particular areas, which are a subspecialization within federal criminal practice that very rarely comes into play. But I certainly—as a citizen and voter—am wondering why the *hell* we’re not having congressional hearings on this? 

(PS8) There’s no question whatsoever that Congress has an obligation to exercise its oversight responsibilities very aggressively here—as if I’m understanding correctly Elon Musk has a defense contract. The revelations in the new book about him are therefore very f*cking serious. 

(PS9) And remember how Trump always accuses others of what he has just done or is about to do? Just as concerns that Musk could be doing the bidding of hostile foreign nations arise, he starts threatening to sue others for “controlled speech.” We have seen this playbook before...

(PS10) I would think the FBI, DOJ, FTC, FCC, NSA, SEC and *many* others would want to be all over this situation right now. Instead we are getting radio silence. Or, not radio silence, but Musk and his allies pushing racial and religious division inside the U.S. on a daily basis. 

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for complaining about my friend's girlfriend?

💫🔥 <- for searching

I (15X) know this girl in my grade who we'll call F (15F). F is genuinely one of the biggest assholes I've ever met. She has dumped my stuff out of my bag during class, she has repeatedly gossiped about classmates (calling them ugly, stupid, etc.), she has used 'autistic' as an insult, she has used slurs she cannot reclaim, she has outright denied my ethnicity (my ethnicity is not well known, and people confuse it for Pakistani and/or Bangladeshi), and she has punched me before (twice). She has also said she's straight, but once dated a girl in the past because she "felt sorry for her". This is just to give you a scope on who she is as a person.

Flash forward some time, and I'm talking with a friend who we'll call D (15F). I'm fairly close with D, and we talk about a lot of topics together. D then shifts the conversation to relationships, specifically about how she recently got a girlfriend. Obviously, I'm happy for her, and I say as much. I don't push for any details, and she doesn't give any, which I'm fine with and I don't think much of.

The next day, I walk into lunch and sit with D and some other friends. I start unpacking my lunch, when suddenly I overhear D say "yeah, F is a really sweet girlfriend."

Immediately, I turn to D and ask if I heard that right. She confirms, yes, her girlfriend is in fact the one and only F.

I'm dumbfounded, and my friends appear to be as well. I had no idea D and F were friends, let alone close enough to start dating, and immediately the red flags started going off in my head. Very tentatively, I tell D that dating F is a mistake, and I tell her a little bit of what F has done (specifically, the gossiping and the punching me).

You know what D's response is? "Oh, she doesn't mean it! She's really sweet."

This floors me. All I can think about is how awful F has been to me, and why D would ever give F a chance. I continue listing the things F has done, though over and over, D keeps telling me that F is actually really sweet, and that she just has some mental health issues.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I keep trying to tell D to not date F, and D starts making jokes about how I "keep digging dirt up about her girlfriend". And while I did notice that D was starting to become more annoyed, and giving me more clipped answers in response, I continued to try and convince her to leave F.

A few weeks later, I texted D to ask if she's still dating F, but to my surprise, she told me F broke up with her. She even showed me the breakup text F sent to her, which basically said "I'm a horrible person and I can't date you, you deserve better than me." (Which is objectively true, honestly, but I didn't think F would say that...)

Now I'm wondering if I was too hard on D. I'm not sorry for telling her about F, but I don't know if hounding her was the best option. D has become more distant lately, and we haven't really held a real conversation in a while. I'm wondering if it was because I wouldn't stop reminding her how awful F was.

AITA?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

[matan4il]

Do we have a name for the time hundreds of thousands of jews were kicked out of the surrounding middle eastern countries in and after the 1948 war? I know that the Palestinians call theirs the nakba, but, is it just that, even though those particular groups of jews had been living there for hundreds or even thousands of years, we as a whole ethnoreligious group have been kicked out so many times we don't name them any more? Or is there a name I don't know?

Hi, lovely Nonnie!

That's an excellent question.

There is a national memorial day in Israel, to remember the at least 850,000 Jews from Arab countries and Iran who were abused, persecuted, and eventually expelled. This is a process that actually started in the 1930's, before the establishment of the State of Israel, but very much intensified in the 1940's. By the 1960's, the Middle East was basically ethnically cleansed of Jews.

Here's a New York Times headline from May 16, 1948 (days into the invasion of Arab armies during Israel's War of Independence):

There was an ethnic cleansing of Jews in the Land of Israel as it existed under the British Mandate, too. For example, a Jewish community on the east bank of the Jordan River was established in 1928 for Jewish workers, and destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948. There were Jewish communities in east Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria (re-named by the Jordanians as 'The West Bank' in 1948, after they occupied that land and tried to cement the Jordanian claim to it), in Gaza... all were ethnically cleansed of Jews between 1929 and 1948.

In Israel, there are also monuments to commemorate the fate of the Jews from Arab countries and Iran. Here's one in Jerusalem:

So, since there's a remembrance day and memorials, you'd think there would be one unifying, easily identifiable term for this event, right? But sadly, there hasn't been one. Different people have used different terms, such as 'the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran' (the official term), 'the crisis of Jewish refugees from Arab countries' or 'the Jewish exodus from Arab countries,' and so on.

I have also seen people referring to it repeatedly (and of course unofficially) as the Jewish Nakba.

'Nakba' is an Arabic word which means catastrophe, so it's a fitting term for how these Jewish communities experienced what was done to them, I also think it's appropriate since most of them were Arabic speakers before the expulsion, and lastly, I think it is right to remind people that the Palestinian Nakba (a disaster of their own leadership's making, which I'm so sorry for them that they lost their homes, because their leaders rejected the 1947 two state solution) wasn't a one sided case of abuse. There was abuse of Jews in the Middle East, and it started before the State of Israel was even established. And ANY narrative that erases that part, that erases the suffering of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, is inherently antisemitic.

To any Jews who may be reading this, who come from Arab countries and from Iran, I love you, my beautiful brothers and sisters. Your story and your pain deserves to be heard and remembered.

Thank you for the ask, Nonnie. I hope I sort of managed to answer it, and that you have a great day! xoxox

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#ask #anon ask #israel #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #israelunderattack #terrorism #anti terrorism #antisemitism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish

[hero-israel]

I was relating it to something so know. YOU do not want to risk living in a majority Arab or Muslim country because of past actions, you point to these actions as proof that you need to have a form of control over them. So you are okay with their murder. You are okay with the fact that you moved yourselves onto their land and kicked them out. You are okay with the fact that you basically have them behind a militarized wall. Going through all that does not mean you are incapable of doing the same. Or that just because you have not done the exact same or the same amount of time that your actions are not bad. I am ethnically Jewish (not practicing) tho it’s not significant enough in my life for me to claim it as a cultural identity on my father’s side and my step father is Jewish but he’s now anti-religion (He’s on Israel’s side). My cultural upbringing… well I’m a poc and I spent years going to Holocaust memorials, I learned Jewish customs, our family friends were Jewish, and I read Jewish stories/watched the films. Media consumption? All the media I’ve consumed said that Palestinians where the problem because they refused to accept Israel and that Muslims where all terrorists (I grew up post 911). At no point did I ever say I was okay with the massacre of Jewish people or that it was understandable. I feel fine being critical of what you tell me because I know you aren’t saying the whole truth. You are still playing the role of the perfect victim. Everything has been done to you and you have done nothing back.

just because you have not done the exact same or the same amount of time that your actions are not bad

The amount of history that this sentence attempts to wave away.... No. No, that simply won't do.

I showed you dozens of examples of centuries of torture, oppression, and massacres of Jews in Arab / Muslim societies, culminating in the complete and recent destruction of 3,000-year-old Jewish civilization in all MENA countries, and you just breeze by them with no real consideration at all. You have repeatedly mentioned slave revolts because the slaves had good reason to defend themselves. Does the need for self-defense vanish when it's Jewish self-defense? Why can you tolerate violence in slave uprisings, but not in Jews trying to prevent their extermination? Cut us, maybe we don't bleed.

Your final comment of "Everything was done to you, you have done nothing back" likewise disregards the lopsided history and unequal stakes of oppression and loss. There are exactly zero countries where Arabs or Muslims have been reduced to nothing and their histories ended by Jews. Israel has a 20% Arab minority, in most MENA countries you can't even find 20 Jews. Israel is the only regional country that has any diversity, pluralism, and tolerance, instead of an unnatural Nebraska-cornfield ethnic monoculture. How much structural racism, how much systematic violence and hate, does a country need to have for it to EVEN BE POSSIBLE to physically wipe out a minority? With all of America's fucked-up racial problems, do you think they could physically push out the African-Americans or Latinos today if they wanted to? Yet you look at the Middle East and, one after another, the Jews are gone, the Jews are gone, the Jews are gone. You say you are not okay with Jewish massacres, well, I'm glad to hear that, but you don't seem to appreciate that those were the actual stakes. If your enemy says their goal is your extinction, and you survive, then yeah, maybe you do put up a wall and they have to stay on their side of it. Boo and furthermore hoo.

As for "being okay with murder" - forget slave revolts, I'm certainly fine with abolishing slavery altogether and I suspect you are too. That required killing over 600,000 people in 4 years. The combined all-sides grand total death count of the Zionist / Arab conflict is about 120,000 in 140 years. Are you "okay" with the American Civil War taking place, even though Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and all the other imperfect, morally compromised things Confederate LARPers complain about?

Overall I detect a strongly binary way of thinking, that Jewish people / institutions can only be seen as worth physical protection if they are perfect, if they have never harmed anyone, even if the options the world presents to us are Jewish people / institutions as they are or their continued, repeated disappearance. You were never promised better Jews or a better Israel, and you may not shift the goalposts on how we resist those who would repeat our genocide. I am fully comfortable in saying we are morally superior to our enemies. The fact that we still have living enemies proves that.

#israel #palestine #jumblr

[eternityservedcold]

an extremely thorough list of content warnings for jojos bizarre adventure

because the old one was made by a deleted blog so it isnt easily accessible any more (and i dont think it was good enough to begin with)

btw if you say anything to the effect of "why do people like jojo when it has x" or "you guys really excuse y?" on this post im just gonna block you. people who get angry about me saying to skip parts/episodes will also get blocked.

feel free to reply/send an ask with anything i missed, preferably with a chapter or episode number. parts 7 and 8 wont be on here in full until i finish reading them but feel free to send me cws for them and ill add them. also the warnings are just in the order they appear, and more specifically when they appear in the anime, so as to not have weird "x is more important than y" nonsense

general warnings

these are things that…. basically if youre triggered by these i think you should just sit this out tbh. its an amazing series but its not worth repeatedly triggering yourself. this ones just ordered alphabetically bc its throughout (read: in at least 3 parts)

blood, violence, body horror, gore, and death -amputation -animal abuse and death (especially of dogs) -decapitation -eye, nail, and mouth horror -impalement -parental and sibling death -police brutality -suicide and self harm

child abuse -child abandonment -corporal punishment -leering shots of minors bodies -pedophilia (still gets a warning every time) -physical abuse

christian themes and symbolism

drug use -alcohol -tobacco -underage drug use -unspecified white powder

fire and explosions

gambling

misogyny, both in-universe and on the part of the author

racism (gets specific warnings every time)

sexual misconduct -catcalling -rape (still gets a warning every time) -sexual assault -sexual harassment

unsanitary -eating/drinking gross things —being forced to eat/drink gross things -pee -poop -snot -vomit

vehicle accidents -car accidents -plane crashes

part 1: phantom blood

(manga only) ritual sacrifice

restricted eating

non-consensual kissing

(manga only) a dog is shown on fire

poisoning

chinese ethnic stereotypes

a baby gets eaten

part 2: battle tendency

okay im gonna rip the bandaid off now. there are nazis in this one, and its significantly worse than youd expect just reading that. im gonna quote the old list here: "there are so many nazis in this part and they’re not condemned like at all tbh". i would almost say its glorified, one of the main allies is a nazi and another main ally directly praises a different nazi. in the manga, hitler and swastikas are explicitly shown as well as nazis being called by name, but in the anime, they are removed and simply called german soldiers.

almost nothing from this part comes back in the future and what does come back is explained as it comes up or is understandable from context. so please. if you need to skip this part, just do it. i even understand if you skip the whole series because of this.

its possible some may find the mesoamerican aesthetic of the villains in this part to be insensitive or offensive. im mexican and i personally dont, but i could see why someone would

racism toward: -black people -mexican people —slavery and degradation of mexican women is explicitly shown -japanese people

hostage situation

kidnapping

human experimentation

ritual sacrifice

"man in a dress" gag and subsequent transmisogyny

unintentional incest. there are only two scenes of this, which are: -a character spying on someone (later revealed to be their mother) in the bath -going through said mothers belongings and talking about her panties

animal cannibalism

part 3: stardust crusaders

since fights in this part are much more self-contained than the other parts, its possible to skip some of these if youre triggered by them. those will be marked with chapter and episode numbers

a woman gets spontaneously undressed in the middle of a fight (only her bra shows but it happens against her will)

jotaro, a 17 year old, kisses an adult woman to save her from possession. i wouldnt really say this is pedophilia and it lasts for 1 panel/less than 10 seconds but i found it uncomfortable

while incapacitated from sickness, holly will randomly be shown naked with weird leering camera angles. this happens many more times in the anime than the manga

pedophilia (depicted as a bad thing and the victim is saved before anything happens) (skip chapters 17-19/episode 7)

native american stereotypes (skip chapters 20-22/episode 8)

"person gets replaced" trope (skip chapters 23-6/episode 9; chapters 76-79/episode 27)

infection

suffocation

drowning

"child acting like a pervert" trope (skip chapters 92-96/episodes 32-33) -in the same episodes, the child spends the entire fight naked which might be uncomfortable for some

stardust crusaders ova

this gets its own subsection due to being so different that i was having to say "this doesnt apply to the ova" for a lot of the warnings. unlike the main sdc section, since this ova is extremely pared down, there wont be skippable warnings. also note that this is in "manga order", so its 2000 ova then 1993 ova

the english voice actor for avdol (a black/egyptian character) is a white guy doing a vaguely "ethnic" accent

the non-consensual kissing thing above, here its with a girl jotaros age though

infection

suffocation

ritual sacrifice (used as the intro animation for the 1993 portion)

drowning

part 4: diamond is unbreakable

rape, pedophilia, and kidnapping mentions

physical abuse

electrocution

blackmail

yandere trope -emotional abuse -isolation -stalking -kidnapping

restricted eating

skin picking

(anime only) jumpscare

invasion of privacy (skip this part if this bothers you because one of the main allies power is just, doing this, and its constant)

"child acting like a pervert" trope

bodysnatching/"person gets replaced" trope

theres an uncomfortable scene where a child gets attacked in the bath (non-sexually). both the child and the attacker are naked for the duration of the scene

part 5: vento aureo/golden wind

gang violence/the mafia (main crux of the plot)

bullying

(anime only) racism toward japanese people

reckless driving

torture

rape (not shown just heavily implied)

terminal illness/infection/disease

(anime only) pedophilia

forced childbirth (its like, magical childbirth and the mother doesnt register it)

possibly offensive depiction of systems (systems, feel free to correct me on this)

medical malpractice

a guy gets swapped into a girls body and gropes it

part 6: stone ocean

(anime only) heavy use of chromatic aberration, which may be eye straining for some

this part is really horny, comparatively speaking. this isnt really a bad thing but depending on your level of comfort with that you may want to skip

(manga only) misgendering a trans man

hallucinations

memory loss

abuse of religious authority

(manga only, only in some translations) homophobic slur

grooming

gang violence

"disposable sex worker" trope

creepy stalker-ish behavior (the person who does it becomes a main ally & never stops or eases up)

cult

drowning

electrocution

unintentional incest

the kkk (in the anime its a generic racist mob) -lynching

part 7: steel ball run

possibly offensive depiction of native americans (feel free to correct me if youre native)

a 14 year old girl: -is a child bride and im pretty sure this isnt condemned at all -gets hit on by adults -experiences a rape attempt? -gets pregnant?

the entire plot is about curing a disability

medical malpractice

capital punishment

(only in some translations) r slur variant

homophobic slur

attempted pedophilia/rape?

"bisexual sex pest" trope (grown woman making advances toward a minor/trying to rape her)?

part 8: jojolion

ableism?

rape?

part 9: the jojolands

"unsettling gender reveal" trope

pedophilia

#cant catch me gay thoughts #jojos bizarre adventure #jojo's bizarre adventure #jjba #please dont be annoying on this post. please. begging on my knees. #to clarify: question marks are put on chapters i havent gotten to yet #all of them come from other people telling me its true so i take them at their word and assume it is

[hussyknee]

sad how these "freedom for..." posts never include xinjiang because people aren't willing to take a stand against islam the way they are christianity. uygurs are facing genocide on two fronts - from the ccp and from islamists. there's only one uygur temple still standing - all the others have been demolished by muslim extremists. abrahamic religions colonising the world and brutally oppressing native religions and cultures is a tale as old as time, but people are stuck in the weird mindset that abrahamic religions are deserving of respect.

Idk what temples you're talking about, but "Uyghurs are actually a multi-faith society that was forcibly converted to Islam" is CCP propaganda to lie about the fact that they're genociding the Uyghurs for being Turkic Muslims and destroying their mosques and shrines.

I'm just going to lay aside the world-ending irony of accusing "Islamists" (whatever the fuck that is) of colonizing and forcibly converting a people...who live on top of China. I mean I tried to figure out which stage of Chinese history you're trying to erase to get here, but the answer can only be "all of it". China apparently both exists and doesn't exist for you. But Schroedinger's geo-politics or not, I can't let the "Abrahamic religions" bit stand because this horseshit is gaining way too much traction in South Asia.

Judaism, the world's oldest religion, being an upstart colonizing force is a frankly wild thing to say. I even tried to find mention of any colonization by Jews before Palestine and only found a couple of dynasties and vassal states under Ancient Rome. If you're talking about the Khazars in the sixth century, the rulers converted to Judaism voluntarily and there's no evidence it was either imposed or predominant among the rest of the population. Otoh, Jews have been repeatedly expelled, colonized and subjugated by Christians and Muslims (which is why most of their holidays are just "Yay We Didn't All Die"), and Muslims have suffered under Christian colonization for the last two hundred years along with the rest of us, and a lot longer in Europe. Islamic Empires rarely forced conversions (and in fact didn't like having too many Muslim subjects because non-Muslims were made to pay them taxes) and because of that were generally more tolerant than Christian ones, especially of Jews and Christians whom they considered "People of the Book". I mean persecution and ethnic cleansings did happen, depending on who was in charge (the Almohad Empire was particularly awful, which maybe explains the Catholic violence of Spain and Portugal), but in general, mass conversion wasn't the point of colonization. Among the Turkic peoples especially it was trade that spread Islam, not war or colonization, unlike shit-ass Portuguese traders who said, "We come in search of Christians and spices" and proceeded to kill and colonize everyone and torture them into converting. No fucking way you're lumping all of them in one "Abrahamic" colonial basket.

And the Christian legacies that endure in colonized societies are still as legitimate and integral part of their cultural identities. Once something is absorbed into a culture, the way it's shaped and used is unique to that society. Culture is a living, growing thing, like tree roots. It absorbs, merges, winds itself around generational traumas and obstacles and evolves in new trajectories. Whether or not you approve of the contortions of its survival and whether it looks different at the tip than at the root, it's still the same tree. That's why all religions deserve respect. You can't extricate or pathologize them apart from the individuality of the billions of human beings they shape. And all human beings share the same capacity for violence. Ideology has always been a rationalization for the violence we already want to commit. What motivates violence is power, not ideology, which is why we say "history repeats itself"—the dynamics of power are universal and consistent throughout history.

All our civilizations and cultures are as shaped by violent contact as by peaceful ones; ascribing the violence and impact of colonization only to Christian and Islamic empires completely erases thousands of years of histories all over the world (you know, like Imperial China???) Religions don't grow out of the ground; they were always evolved and spread among peoples along the lines of trade, migration, war, annexation, assimilation and resistance. Considering the religious identities of some people (always minorities too—isn't that weird?) inferior or illegitimate because they were "external impositions", and advocating a "return" to a "pure and untouched" past that never existed is the rhetoric of ethnosupremacy, colonization and manifest destiny—in short the language of genocide. I should know, I hear this crap out of fundamentalist Hindus and Buddhists in South Asia all the time. That's why I'm protective of Muslims. Because they're vulnerable to pieces of racist shit like you.

#islamphobia #racism #uyghur genocide #colonization #antisemitism #ethnic cleansing #palestinian genocide #religious tolerance #chinese imperialism #world politics #history #ethnofascism #ethnosupremacy #asks #anon #knee of huss

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

(you recently had a question about the image of Caesar in the Masters of Rome sooo.....)

I hope this isn't too much to ask but could you do a little review of the historical and (maybe) cultural inconsistencies in the Masters of Rome? At least the most obvious ones. Please c:

A great question - and a tough one, since the books are massive and I read them over a year ago, and before I knew more than the basic outline of Roman politics. I'm sure a lot of things went over my head as I was reading.

As far as I can remember, McCullough doesn't usually contradict our historical records. Instead, she tends to invent details to flesh out characterization and fill in the gaps. This is both natural and necessary for a historical fiction writer. So there's a lot of things in the books we have no evidence for, like "Servilius Caepio abused his wife Livia," but we can't exactly call them "wrong," either.

Sometimes her inventions are pretty cool. I actually like what she did with Caepio and Livia, because it gives depth and character growth to a woman who's otherwise just a footnote in history, and Caepio's subsequent conflict with her brother makes for great foreshadowing of the wars of Marius and Sulla, who are also brothers-in-law here.

Other inventions are...strange. Or deeply uncomfortable to read.

Like when she repeatedly tries to reassure us that Octavian and Agrippa are not gay for each other. I'm 99% sure that the gayness emerged organically as she was drafting the story because the classical sources sound really gay to modern western audiences, and it surprised her. Rather than A) leaning into it, B) rewriting the scenes, or C) leaving it up to the reader's interpretation, she D) tried to "clarify" and fumbled it. The resulting story reads as super gay and homophobic at the same time.

(There's nothing inherently wrong with writing Octavian and Agrippa as platonic. The problem is that she executed it poorly, and some of her own bias shows through.)

She also has to invent a lot of characters' motives. Most of the time, we cannot know historical figures' real reasons for why they acted as they did; we have to guess. Again, this is normal and necessary for a story. McCullough's guesses aren't that outlandish - Robert Morstein-Marx and Fred Drogula have a lot of similar takes - but she is biased in Caesar's favor, and there's plenty of room to disagree.

So, there's a lot in these books that isn't historical, but not strictly "false," either. What things are almost certainly false?

Stigma towards homosexuality. McCullough tends to treat homosexual relationships as stigmatized in Rome, and more widely accepted in Greek and eastern Mediterranean areas. In reality stigma only tended to be directed toward a penetrated or effeminate man in a same-sex relationship; men who still acted "masculine enough" according to Roman gender norms were considered perfectly fine. Homosexuality was also not seen as a particularly "Greek" practice, as the books suggest. See my notes on Roman homosexuality for more.

Lucullus as a child molester. Sulla knew Lucullus very well. He appointed Lucullus guardian of his six-year-old children, and Lucullus openly detested Cethegus for "sexual misconduct." (Plut. Lucullus 4-5) So I think this particular invention of McCullough's is very unlikely.

Marius wasn't trying to abort Julius Caesar's career by making him flamen dialis. This is one of several changes McCullough made to make Caesar more competent, special, or important to the story. She acknowledges some of them in her author notes, like expanding his role in the trial of Rabirius and giving him a more innocent excuse to wear red boots than "he wanted to dress up like a king."

Caesar's eye color gets changed from brown to blue, and Octavian's hair color gets lightened. And even after accounting for Rome's high ethnic diversity, blonds and redheads in general are over-represented compared to what you'd expect.

Marius' military reforms are overstated. Although it's true that he abolished the property requirement for soldiers, this requirement had been trending downward for decades, and the proposal wasn't as controversial as it seems in the books. Also, several of the reforms were actually done by his pal Rutilius Rufus.

There are too many cum manu marriages. In a cum manu marriage, the woman was transferred from her father's authority to her husband's, and legally became part of his family. But nearly all Roman marriages during the late republic were sine manu marriages, in which the woman remained part of her father's family, and in practice had more independence and property rights.

Cleopatra was more worldly and politically astute. Although 53-year-old Caesar was certainly more experienced and powerful than the 21-year-old Cleopatra at the time they met, Cleopatra had been Egypt's leading politician and administrator for three years, raised and led her own army, survived multiple coups and civil wars, and realized that Caesar needed her as much as she needed him. I believe McCullough overstated Cleopatra's naivete to make Caesar look more competent. I also find it difficult to believe that much later, at the battle of Actium, Cleopatra still would have been clueless enough about Roman army culture to not realize the impact of her presence on soldiers' morale.

These are just the ones I recall off the top of my head; readers are welcome to add more.

For all the issues with these books, they're still some of my favorite novels about ancient Rome. McCullough did a ton of research, and brings to life many people and events that rarely get portrayed in media. Her characterizations are usually strong and multifaceted. Even Cato gets his heroic moments, while Caesar does have a lot of red flags if you look for them.

And, despite her best efforts, her Octavian and Agrippa still ended up super gay.

#just roman asks #colleen mccullough #masters of rome #jlrrt essays

[herwoahno-after-dark]

Final few drawings from this sketchbook now that I’m recycling it! Kind of sad because this particular notebook was one I used as a little kid, it has some suuuper old and embarrassingly bad (but funny) drawings in it.

Also just going to put this here; I know something kind of blew up here over the weekend in this corner of Tumblr. Dr. Tezuka has been dead for several decades now, so we will never know exactly what “ending” he thought about for Tenma and Astro further than how they got separated and never really permanently reunited throughout his numerous re-writes and loose canon tendencies. That’s up to us to parse and make meaning of and potentially imagine beyond for ourselves as audience members of the series, which many fans have done over the years (And even any other official work done after Tezuka’s passing, like AB2003 and ATB, Pluto etc are basically the same thing). I believe we are allowed to disagree with the evaluations of media that others come up with, whether just in our heads or posted publicly! However, it is not our job to budge every last person’s opinion on the internet. We may “see” each other on a somewhat regular basis because, let’s face it, this fandom is pretty small, but at the end of the day none of us know everything that informs the meaning being made by the others — and we are not obligated to disclose such personal information for any reason, in real life or online. To give you an example and offer up something about myself, Astro as a character resonates with me in large part because he stands on the border between one group and another; although he is certainly a robot, he lives his life as a human would most of the time, creating a split between himself and other robots while still not being accepted fully into human society. It gives him a unique opportunity to bridge the two together, but as a result he can never be entirely one or the other. The reason why I find that fascinating is because I am a second-gen immigrant Asian-American, and it forms some parallels with the way I feel in my own life, having been raised more American than Asian. Also, my parents are culturally Chinese-Indonesian, but ethnically appear Chinese (as do I). I will never be fully accepted into native Chinese, Indonesian, or Chinese-Indonesian communities because I act too much like an “American” despite my appearance. I will also never be fully accepted into the American community I live in because I still cling onto some of my heritage, and of course also because of my appearance. But maybe due to my experience in both worlds, the chances have increased that I could foster greater empathy, interest, or understanding between them, and Astro gives me hope for that.

However— I wouldn’t expect anyone here to know that (or even remember after reading it — it’s fine, you can purge the info from your brain LOL) even if it does affect my readings of certain scenarios and stories. If someone were to post something that doesn’t acknowledge or reflect the perspective I have, I can feel any type of way about it, but I have to remind myself I don’t know where they’re coming from and to try not to take it too personally, since they don’t know where I’m coming from either. Maybe someone has had the exact opposite experience from me, maybe they just haven’t been in any comparable situation to begin with, they could also be a lot younger or older, or from another part of the world — on the internet you really just don’t know, and a person doesn’t really have to tell you if they don’t want to. Personally, once I’ve said my piece, I’ve said it. If someone disagrees with me over the same point repeatedly, and I considered their viewpoint but decided to retain mine, I don’t continue to engage them, because I know it gets unproductive sooner or later (neither side changes their mind or learns anything new, if anything we both just become more stubborn about our own arguments because we have to keep making the same one over and over). I do think about Tezuka’s and other artists’ work very seriously, as an artist myself and an aspiring professional, and I believe that’s a valid angle to come from. Yet I often just draw things on a whim despite the aforementioned, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, most of my drawings have very little meaning. I just post on here hoping it might make someone else a bit happier to see it; I suspect that many others in the community do the same. (Obviously if I misrepresent something severely in my own work, which I hope I will not but you never know, I want someone to tell me about it, but I didn’t think this was the case in the particular situation happening now.)

and… I will freely admit to sharing outlandish internet takes both as a kid and as an adult, then changing my mind and looking back on it, as well as my behavior in general, later with regret 😭 it will happen again, I’m sure… perhaps this is one and I should have kept my mouth shut, but I hope this at least gave some of my perspective. If you want to probe any further into my thoughts or ask for clarification you can!

#Astro boy oh boy

[mariacallous]

The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta—Spartaganda, as it were—is alive and well.

Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises—an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.

Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth.

The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War.

Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.

But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved.

The ancient sources are effectively unanimous that the helots were the worst treated slaves in all of Greece; helotry was an institution that shocked the conscience of Athenian slaveholders. Critias, an Athenian collaborator with Sparta, was said to have quipped that it was in Sparta that “the free were most free and the slaves most a slave,” a staggering statement about a society that was mostly enslaved (and about Critias as a person that he thought this was praise). Plutarch reports the various ways that the Spartans humiliated and degraded the helots, while the Athenian orator Isocrates argued that it was a crime to murder enslaved people everywhere in Greece, except Sparta. Sparta, with both the most slaves per capita and the worst treated slaves, was likely the least free society in the whole of the ancient world.

Nor were the Spartans particularly good stewards of Greek freedom. While their place in popular culture, motivated by films such as 300, puts the Spartans at the head of efforts to defend Greek freedom from the expanding Persian Empire, Sparta was not always so averse to Persia. Unable to deal with the Athenian fleet itself, Sparta accepted Persian money during the Peloponnesian War to build its own, selling the Ionian Greeks back into Persian rule in exchange for humbling Athens. That war won the Spartans a brief hegemony in Greece, which they quickly squandered, ending up at war with their former allies in Corinth.

Unable to win that war either, Sparta again turned to Persia to enforce a peace, called the “King’s Peace,” which sold yet more Greek city-states to the Persian king in exchange for making Sparta into Persia’s local enforcer in Greece, tasked with preventing the emergence of larger Greek alliances that could challenge Persia. Far from being the defender of Greek independence, when given the chance the Spartans opened not only the windows but also the doors to Persian rule. They also refused to join in Alexander the Great’s expedition against Persia, for which Alexander mocked them by dedicating the spoils of his first victories “from all of the Greeks, except the Spartans.”

Instead of a society of freedom-defending super-warriors, Sparta is better understood as a place where the wealthiest class of landholder, the Spartans themselves, had succeeded in reducing the great majority of their poor compatriots to slavery and excluded the rest, called the perioikoi, from political participation or citizenship. The tiny minority of Spartan citizens derived their entire income from the labor of slaves, being legally barred from doing any productive work or engaging in commerce.

And rather than spending their time in ascetic military training, they spent their ample leisure time doing the full suite of expensive, aristocratic Greek pastimes: hunting (a pastime for the wealthy rather than a means of subsistence in the ancient world), eating amply, accumulating money, funding Olympic teams, breeding horses, and so on. Greek authors such as Xenophon and Plutarch continually insist that the golden age of Spartan austerity and egalitarianism existed in the distant past, but each author pushes that golden age further and further into that past, and in any event, archaeology tells us it was never so.

And that lavish lifestyle was clearly very important to the Spartans because they were willing to sacrifice all of their other ambitions on the altar to it. Beginning in the early 400s, the population of Spartan citizens, defined by being rich enough in land to make the mess contributions that were a key part of military and social lfie, began to decline as Spartan families used inheritance and marriage to consolidate holdings and increase their wealth, from 8,000 Spartan citizens in 480 B.C. to 3,500 in 418 to 2,500 in 394 to just 1,500 in 371. The collapse in the number of Spartans who qualified for citizenship had disastrous effects on the manpower available for the Spartan army, causing Sparta’s strategic ambitions to all crumble, one by one. Yet efforts by Agis IV (245-241 B.C.) and Cleomenes III (235-222 B.C.) to arrest the decline were foiled precisely because the Spartan political system denied any political voice to any but the leisured rich, who had little incentive to change.

Sparta is no inspiration for the leaders of a free state. Sparta was a prison in the guise of a state and added little to the sum of the human experience except suffering. No American, much less any U.S. soldier, should aspire to be like a Spartan.

[whatevergreen]

"The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened

A man set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington today. He said he did it in protest of the genocide in Gaza.

Independent journalist Talia Jane reports that she was able to obtain footage of the incident, which the unnamed man apparently recorded himself. Jane reports that the man said he is “an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force” and that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.” After igniting he repeatedly yelled “Free Palestine.”

According to Jane, a police officer showed up pointing a gun at the man’s burning body; I guess that’s just what American cops do when they aren’t sure what to do. Someone who was actually trying to save the man reportedly yelled “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”

This just might be the most American thing I have ever heard of. It’s more American than the fake bald eagle cries they put in Hollywood movies. It’s more American than monster trucks and mass shootings. You simply cannot fit more America into a single incident than a man dying a horrifying death in protest of war crimes while a first responder screams at cops to stop pointing their guns at him and go get fire extinguishers. If you were to pick a single moment in history to sum up the essence and expression of the US empire, that would be it.

The New York Times reports that the man “was taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening injuries and remains in critical condition.” A spokesman for the US Air Force has reportedly confirmed that the man is an active duty member.

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” the man reportedly recorded himself saying before the incident. “But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

The nameless protestor is correct. People in Gaza are being burned alive, are suffocating to death under collapsed buildings, are having operations and amputations without anesthesia, are starving to death, are watching their loved ones die in front of them, are experiencing suffering of a degree that very few of us here in the west can even imagine. And our ruling class is absolutely attempting to normalize this for us.

This isn’t even the first self-immolation we’ve seen in protest of Israel’s US-backed atrocities after October 7; back in December an unnamed protester with a Palestinian flag self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate building in Atlanta.

And as I reflect on this I can’t help thinking, how many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of October 7? How many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of the super serious antisemitism crisis they claim is making Jews feel unsafe in their communities? Surely their claims are just as serious and sincere as those of Palestine supporters, no?

Of course not. This has not happened and the very idea is laughable. Israel apologists insist that it is they and their favorite ethnostate who are the real victims in all this, rather than the population of Gaza who has seen tens of thousands of Palestinians annihilated while Israeli soldiers openly celebrate their mass displacement and death. But you don’t see them self-immolating; you see them cheerleading for ethnic cleansing and genocide. They wouldn’t do anything to cause themselves pain or inconvenience to promote their pet agenda. They wouldn’t even miss brunch for it.

It’s a horrific thing, burning alive. I suspect that pretty much everyone who’s ever self-immolated has had serious regrets about it within the first few seconds. There’s simply nothing one can do to prepare oneself for the experience of that kind of pain, or for how long it can take them to lose consciousness after it’s started. At that point the only comfort they could possibly offer themselves is that it can’t go on forever.

But the fact that anyone would ever take such a measure at all shows how profoundly urgent they recognize this issue to be, and how much more sincere they are about it than those on the other side."

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1761939039937335584

#aaron bushnell #protest #israel #gaza #cops

[candied-cae]

Support For Palestine - No $$$ Needed!

Firstly, I highly recommend This Site, That Will Donate With One Click! (Seriously, no signing up, no inputing information, no costs, just press the button, I used it myself and you can revisit it every 24 hrs! So try to bookmark it or keep the tab open!)

And secondly, I recommend contacting your representatives in government and advocating for the millions of innocents currently facing danger in the Gaza Strip.

Joseph Biden, in a recent address, acknowledged that the "overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas". I believe this time, right now, is our chance to try and break through our decades long, wrongfully given, support of the Ethnic Cleansing of the Gaza Strip. So I urge you, anyone with even just the time to spare, to try. Plead. Demand. At the worst, you tried and lost a little bit of time. At the best... maybe some people don't die.

So, I wrote a twt thread with instructions/advice for American Residents to reach out to their local representatives as simply, easily, and quickly as possible, and I wanted to share that same info here. I promise I only wants a few minutes of your time.

You can use this White House Contact Page to send one message to Biden and another to Harris. Just fill in your info and you can either write your own message, or feel free to copy and paste mine (it'll be at the bottom of this post)! The focus is first demanding that the US withdraws its support of the Israeli State.

Next, you can use this Common Cause page and instantly get all the information to reach out to your local representatives, it even tells you which committees they sit on! Just put in your address and it'll use that to find which jurisdictions you're in and provide links to all their contact pages. Again, fill in your info, some of mine also required a Topic, so I selected either "Foreign Relations/Affairs" or "Civil Rights and Humanities" and put in my message.

I clicked through all of mine, sent in my messages, used the exact same ones for all of them, only adding an additional note for my most direct representative as I grew up in the same town and wanted to express that to hopefully assist in drawing on his humanity, and it only took me about 30 minutes to get through.

Personally, I wanted to scream and rage and throw my whole beating angry heart at them and their gross, racist bigotry that allowed them to not only neglect the issue of the Israeli Occupation, but fund it. The US has been aiding Israel in their ceaselessly cruel genocide against the Palestinian people, and I'm sure it lights a white-hot fury in many of us. But, I wrote this plea with as much restraint and grace as I could bring myself to allow, if only for the sake of them possibly listening instead of tuning it out.

My statement -

Subject : We Cannot Support a Genocidal Ethnic Cleansing

To the Office of  _________ - 

I am pleading with the governing powers in place to help the people of Palestine. The government in Israel has said not only with their actions, by committing multitudes of War Crimes and breaking the Geneva Convention repeatedly, but even in their own words that they intend to entirely decimate and wipe out the citizens of Gaza. They have already killed and injured thousands in only these last few days - to say nothing of the past 7 decades they have spent doing the very same - and this devastation is a human rights violation like something we have never seen to this degree being supported and under-reported. Especially by the American Government, which has always held its citizens to the belief that they are a good and just organization that stands for humanity wherever it can. 

We have already lost so many innocents in Palestine, but there are still so many that can be spared and saved if our government can withdraw its support of the Israeli Occupation. If they can inform their citizens of the truth that has been happening for so, so very long.

The U.S. has been wrong in its history of supporting and ignoring the cruelty that has been taking place for so long. But only by righting ourselves, by admitting and accepting that the financial aid we've sent has, at this point, become a sunken investment without the extermination of the Palestinian people. It hurts to lose so much money, it hurts to admit we've been on the wrong side of history, but the only way to stop the damage from growing exponentially worse, is to address it honestly now. 

This is not about Judaism. This is not about Jewish people by ethnicity or religious affiliation. This is not about Nazism or Antisemitism.

This is about the colonizing power of the IDF that has been ignored and allowed for almost a century.

Please. Try to save some of them before it's too late.

This comes from a concerned citizen who is feeling extremely devastated by the state of things currently. 

As a human being, who I hope cares for the lives of fellow human beings, we cannot allow this to happen. Least of all with our seal of approval. 

-[Your Name and any Salutations]

#Please Repost #If there are any other questions do not hesitate to ask for help! #I will offer whatever I can to assist in making sure we can get as many voices to ring #From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free #Free Palestine #All my heart goes out to the people of Palestine #To the people currently in Gaza and to their friends and family who cannot help them right now #And though many of us don't have the spare money to donate to their aid #and many of us might not be in areas to attend protests #and many of us know it's difficult to get the people in power to listen to helping the most people if it doesn't bring in money #And the US has already put in so much of an investment. It's going to take a lot of voices to get them to accept that loss. #But we have to try #I believe we just have to #Palestine #Palestinians #Pro-Palestine #Palestinian Support #Politics #American Politics

[oneshortdamnfuse]

I’m still reeling from the fact that anyone can think this is a logical interpretation of my post explaining that The United States and Israel are participating in genocide by mass starvation of Gazans which has been a tactic used in genocides throughout history including the Holocaust. The Holocaust prefaced the post to contextualize my knowledge of refeeding syndrome, which is a phenomenon I first heard about in studying the Holocaust. No implied or explicit connection was made between Jewish people and Nazis, which is a valid concern within any discourse involving Israel. That’s why this response is so completely and utterly wild:

So Israel (Jews) is (are) historically connected to (responsible for) the holocaust, uniquely obligated to do no harm, and fundamentally dishonest. Not knowing you at all, I’d like to hope that you never would have meant for your post to be read that way. But it is an extremely predictable reading of your post, even if not the intended one. You’re knee-deep in antisemitic tropes, and that is fundamentally counterproductive to what I will continue to assume is your guiding principle — social justice and bettering the world.

This, here, is disingenuous because if you go back and look at my post there’s no implication that I was conflating Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness with Israel. No claim was made by me that Israel is historically connected to the Holocaust and thus, as A State, they are uniquely responsible to do no harm. That is a very horrible statement to begin with because, as A State, Israel is obligated to do no harm along with The U.S. We have international laws “protecting” human rights for that reason. They were taken to court for a reason. The United States and Israel have also repeatedly lied over the course of the bombing of Gaza. To then say that I am positioning Jews as “fundamentally dishonest” is an extremely bad faith take.

The above statement was also not made by a Jewish person. I want to make that very clear because when a non-Jewish person gives uncritical support to Israel and conflates Israel with Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, they are both empowering Zionists and antisemites to view Israel as another word for Jews (See: “Israel (Jews)”). It emboldens Zionists in their belief that Israel is above reproach because any criticisms of them are “antisemitic.” It also emboldens antisemites to view Jews as universally responsible for the State of Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people - a people, I must remind you, who are not a religious monolith. Palestinian Jews preexist the State of Israel. For this reason, the conflation of Israel (A State) with Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness is harmful and dangerous.

I am also not Jewish, so I understand that I can have blind spots on this issue. However, this “reading” of my post is not “an extremely predictable reading” nor was it “knee-deep in antisemitic tropes” given thousands of people DID NOT interpret it that way. If you think that, then you need to work on how and why you closely conflate any criticism of Israel as A State with antisemitism. Claiming “Holocaust Inversion” as a diversion from criticism of Israel when Israel as A State participates in a documented genocide and uses tactics common across genocides clearly demonstrates an unwillingness to engage with reality - that Israel is an occupying power that is attempting to ethnically cleanse territories they’ve occupied of Palestinians using methods common in genocide.

You cannot claim Holocaust Inversion any time someone makes a comparison between the impact of the Holocaust on its victims and the impact of modern day genocides on its victims, just because that genocide happens to be perpetrated by Israel (among many other actors such as The U.S.) To say that starvation negatively impacted Holocaust survivors even after liberation due to refeeding syndrome and that we can see the same thing happening to Gazans isn’t Holocaust Inversion. This does not place blame on Jews for the condition Gazans are in nor make them collectively responsible for that harm. Further, to argue that criticizing States as dishonest and participating in political games is not to accuse an entire ethnoreligious group of being dishonest and it would be foolish to even think that.

The ultimate point of my post was to talk about the historical consequences of intentional starvation and refeeding syndrome (which I first learned about in my study of the Holocaust), how intentional starvation is used by states to commit genocide as it is viewed as a “passive” consequence of political turmoil, and place blame on The United States and Israel for the current conditions Palestinians are suffering under. I don’t feel bad about saying those things and I’m not going to coddle anyone who objects to criticism of either State. If I implied or made any explicit connection between Jews, Judaism, and/or Jewishness and antisemitic tropes, then I’d take accountability for that but that’s not been proven in the response given and I don’t trust feedback from people defending Israel in any way.

#/ #// #/// #//// #///// #antisemitsm tw #holocaust discussion tw #reblogs are turned off #replies aren’t #zionists will be blocked immediately

[sevenoctober7]

The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened

A man set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington today. He said he did it in protest of the genocide in Gaza.

Independent journalist Talia Jane reports that she was able to obtain footage of the incident, which the unnamed man apparently recorded himself. Jane reports that the man said he is “an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force” and that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.” After igniting he repeatedly yelled “Free Palestine.”

According to Jane, a police officer showed up pointing a gun at the man’s burning body; I guess that’s just what American cops do when they aren’t sure what to do. Someone who was actually trying to save the man reportedly yelled “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”

This just might be the most American thing I have ever heard of. It’s more American than the fake bald eagle cries they put in Hollywood movies. It’s more American than monster trucks and mass shootings. You simply cannot fit more America into a single incident than a man dying a horrifying death in protest of war crimes while a first responder screams at cops to stop pointing their guns at him and go get fire extinguishers. If you were to pick a single moment in history to sum up the essence and expression of the US empire, that would be it.

The New York Times reports that the man “was taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening injuries and remains in critical condition.” A spokesman for the US Air Force has reportedly confirmed that the man is an active duty member.

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” the man reportedly recorded himself saying before the incident. “But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

The nameless protestor is correct. People in Gaza are being burned alive, are suffocating to death under collapsed buildings, are having operations and amputations without anesthesia, are starving to death, are watching their loved ones die in front of them, are experiencing suffering of a degree that very few of us here in the west can even imagine. And our ruling class is absolutely attempting to normalize this for us.

This isn’t even the first self-immolation we’ve seen in protest of Israel’s US-backed atrocities after October 7; back in December an unnamed protester with a Palestinian flag self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate building in Atlanta.

And as I reflect on this I can’t help thinking, how many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of October 7? How many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of the super serious antisemitism crisis they claim is making Jews feel unsafe in their communities? Surely their claims are just as serious and sincere as those of Palestine supporters, no?

Of course not. This has not happened and the very idea is laughable. Israel apologists insist that it is they and their favorite ethnostate who are the real victims in all this, rather than the population of Gaza who has seen tens of thousands of Palestinians annihilated while Israeli soldiers openly celebrate their mass displacement and death. But you don’t see them self-immolating; you see them cheerleading for ethnic cleansing and genocide. They wouldn’t do anything to cause themselves pain or inconvenience to promote their pet agenda. They wouldn’t even miss brunch for it.

It’s a horrific thing, burning alive. I suspect that pretty much everyone who’s ever self-immolated has had serious regrets about it within the first few seconds. There’s simply nothing one can do to prepare oneself for the experience of that kind of pain, or for how long it can take them to lose consciousness after it’s started. At that point the only comfort they could possibly offer themselves is that it can’t go on forever.

But the fact that anyone would ever take such a measure at all shows how profoundly urgent they recognize this issue to be, and how much more sincere they are about it than those on the other side.

#palestine #gazaunderattack #gaza #gaza hospital #free palestine #israel is a terrorist state #غزة تحت القصف #فلسطين #طوفان الاقصي #غزة

[pussypopstiel]

Holy fucking shit dude. I am 10000% here for Palestine, I got detained by the NYPD yesterday for daring to exercise my right to protest at Grand Central in the Jewish Voice for Peace rally. But it is undeniable that there is a massive wave of antisemitism growing within the movement and that shit you just posted is absolutely part of it.

"Jewish people" as a whole aren't framing the liberation of Palestine as something inherently violent and reblogging a post that repeatedly accuses of this is antisemitism! And don't ever, ever make light of Jewish people being concerned for our own safety and compare it to a hysterical white supremacist idea of "white genocide," are you fucking nuts?? Yeah those crazy paranoid genocidal Jews who make up all this nonsense about being in danger. Oh hey what are those massive camps over there with those gas chambers in them haha I wonder what that's about??

I'm sure you will take this and turn it around on me and say yeah well the Holocaust doesn't justify what's happening to the Palestinians and OBVIOUSLY it doesn't. But holy SHIT. Sometimes when people say "criticizing Israel isn't antisemitism" you really have to take a pause and realize that what antisemitism you are being accused of has nothing to do with criticizing Israel at all. There are swastikas painted all over my fucking neighborhood right now!! The way you talk about this genocide matters!! That post is HUGELY antisemetic. Please don't accuse me of claiming criticizing Israel is antisemitism, because that's not what I'm doing! I'm saying that you specifically reblogging a post in which Jews worldwide are repeatedly accused of making up hysterical fears for our safety and falsely equivocating this to what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is antisemitism, which it IS! Don't ever, ever act like Jews globally are making up nonsense fears in order to justify the Israeli governments genocide. That is NOT what is happening! The Holocaust isn't some made up rhetorical device that Jews use as a get out of jail free card, holy fuck! It's an actual genocide that occurred in living memory and it is not comparable in any way to a made up imaginary white genocide. And posting something that accuses Jews, JEWS rather than the Israeli government, of using a nonsense fear for our safety to justify the Israeli government's actions is absolutely textbook antisemitism! For the love of God watch the way you talk before this wave of antisemitism and Holocaust denialism and conflating of Judaism with the Israeli government gets even more people killed.

I think youre taking what i reblogged in a completely different way than what i had in mind when i reblogged it. Many zionists are saying that if Israel were to not exist than where would the jewish population in Israel go, as if jewish and muslim people cannot peacefully coexist on one land. I understand the fear jewish people would have about waves of antisemitism, but the whole “screaming about white genocide” part is not a criticism of jewish people as a whole who may fear antisemitism—but Israeli zionists who cannot fathom Palestinian liberation without their own personal harm. If the post youre talking about is the one i think it is, ive read over it many times and i dont see anyone claiming its jewish people as a whole who frame Palestinian liberation as a violence against them, and I know jewish people as a whole arent framing it that way. I’d never invalidate your personal experience with antisemitism. The post is a criticism of people who feel Palestinian liberation is directly linked to jewish harm, because people who really take the time and care about the issue know that whats happening to the people of Palestine is not a Jewish vs Muslim issue as some may try to turn it into, but an issue of an apartheid state ethnically cleansing a population for nearly 80 years.

#my silly little posts #ask #if you have any more qualms don’t refrain from telling me. when I reblogged that post I didn’t think it was a criticism of Jewish ppl #and I still don’t think it is #but if that’s what you feel I want you to know that wasn’t what I thought it was 👍 and I wouldn’t want you to feel like #I was making a post grouping Jewish ppl as a whole into that of being zionists or whatnot #this is about an aparthied ethnostate #and people who fight tooth and nail to justify its existence and all its done to a group of people #not jewish people as a whole