I’m so sick of seeing videos and posts of a bunch of privileged college students who decided to make a geopolitical conflict their whole personality and who view college as a LARPing opportunity instead of fucking school. You just know they wouldn’t be screaming about this if they had any actual hobbies or any ideology besides what’s popular online and what pisses off their parents. It’s all about a radikewl aesthetic while affecting absolutely nothing in the real world. And now with Columbia University’s rabbi urging Jewish students to stay away from campus because it’s unsafe, what the fuck have these LARPers done other than harass Jews off campus instead of going to class in their “Gaza solidarity encampment” (AKA their excuse to skip class and not do assignments)? People in Gaza are still hungry and displaced, Hamas still has hostages, but don’t worry, guys! Students at Columbia are being antisemitic by praising 10/7 and cosplaying anarchy instead of going to class “for Palestine”!

They’re just insufferable, and their First Amendment rights don’t exempt them from the rest of us judging them for their actions

Yes, this is antisemitism, you fucking lying sack of shit:

"A lot of these students are Jewish" is a lie that's being used by antisemitic leftists to cover their bigotry. Jewish students aren't being told to stay away from campus because the protests are welcoming to Jews and full of other Jews!

Here's what's actually happening at these fucking "protests":

We are six fucking months into the people on twitter and this website defending blatant antisemitism or straight up lying and pretending that this hasn't been a major component of these protests since day one. There's no way anyone is simply misinformed anymore--this is a very deliberate, misleading framing to get people to stop talking about antisemitism, stop defending Jews, and to accuse anyone of accurately describing their behavior of malice. I know I shouldn't be surprised to see a hammer and sickle icon on twitter defending antisemitism, but I saw this tumblr post out in the wild on my dashboard with no pushback and I'm completely fucking over it

Also: a jewish student reporter was jabbed in the eye with a flagpole,

A visibly orthodox jewish student was surrounded by protestors and prevented from entering a building,

A protester held up a sign calling Zionist counter protesters "al-Qassam’s next targets" (you don’t have to like Zionism but that legally fits the definition of incitement to murder jfc), saying "Hamas we love you […] burn Tel Aviv to the ground" (I thought these people didn’t like to be called Hamasniks?)

A group of Jewish students were surrounded by protesters in a show of intimidation,

https://x.com/jessicaschwalb7/status/1782248103216594996?s=46&t=z53oXC164_q-TRbGTtE8Cw

And a rabbi working at Columbia straight up told Jewish students to stay home

https://x.com/jaketapper/status/1782045735736820222?s=46&t=z53oXC164_q-TRbGTtE8Cw

Jewish students and people, upstate NY is friendly to you for the most part. I'd recommend North of Saratoga.

If you follow that advice, shoot me a message with the nearest city to you and if you want we can meet up there.

I understand if you don't want to leave, but if that's the case then I'd suggest arming up, this is how shit starts. It will inevitably get worse, as it's already started to. Be smart, and per my personal policy, stay strapped, don't get clapped.

If you need lessons in riflery or handgun shooting, as long as you provide arms and ammo, I can handle the rest.

A) Yes change university

B) Druid we talked about this

Googled sharknato instead of sharknado; did not disappoint

they have many current events to discuss

They are ready to sink their teeth into global relations

trying to collectively smooth things over

A lighthouse and a warning, all at once.

A lighthouse monster, to greet all the ships at sea!

THE SANDMAN 1.06 | The Sound of Her Wings

Russia, 1881: We’re gonna kill any Jew that doesn’t flee Russia. We’re restricting Jewish emigration to Europe, but permitting emigration to the Middle East.

Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, France, and others, 1933-1945: We’re gonna kill every Jew in Europe. Flee to the US or Palestine, or die trying.

The US, 1927-1952: Yeah sorry we’re restricting Jewish immigrants to like. 300 people per country. So good luck getting in. We recommend that Jews go to Palestine instead. Btw we are looking to take in Nazi scientists if you know any

Egypt, 1947-1950: We’re rounding up all our Jews and deporting them to Israel

Iraq, 1951-1952: We’re rounding up all our Jews and deporting them to Israel

Algeria, 1962-1965: We’re pressuring and intimidating Jews in the hopes that they’ll all leave the country and go to Israel

Egypt, 1956: We’re rounding up all our Jews and deporting them to Israel (again)

Egypt and Libya, 1967: We’re rounding up, torturing, and killing all our Jews. The ones that survive can flee to Israel

Poland, 1968: The Jews in our country are already loyal to Israel. They will face dire consequences if they don’t leave our country and go to Israel

Ethiopia, 1974-1985: We’re going to marginalize and eventually try to kill all our Jews, and the only way they can escape is by being airlifted out of the country by Israeli helicopters

The US, 2023: Why can’t the Israeli Jews just go back to where they came from? Don’t they all have dual citizenship or whatever?

While I understand the point op is trying to make, it's reductionary to frame the crisis as "people think Jews shouldn't be in Palestine." The issue isn't the Jewish population. The issue is the actions of the Israeli government against non-jewish inhabitants. Peaceful and cooperative cohabitation is not something Palestinians have rejected, but by the settler colonial state of Israel.

Antisemitism doesn't cancel out racism and Islamaphobia and ethnic cleansing.

If that’s your sincerely held belief, then I mostly agree with you. First of all, Palestinians have absolutely rejected peaceful and cooperative cohabitation with Jews dozens of times. But that’s not an incredibly relevant point.

The relevant point is that you and I agree that Jews and Arabs should be able to mutually and peacefully coexist on our shared native land. So this post isn’t directed to you, and it isn’t about you, but it is about the behavior of your community. Every single day, at every single event in the West, there’s a new call to displace us from our ancestral land. Gas the Jews. Palestine will be Arab. Death to Israel. At Columbia University alone over the last few days we’ve heard “Go back to Poland,” calls for October 7 to happen every day until there are no Jews left in Israel, and calls for Hamas to burn Tel Aviv to the ground.

This post is a reaction to that behavior specifically. Millions of people in the West do think that Jews shouldn’t be in Palestine whatsoever. They want us all to “go back to where we came from”. They conveniently forget that we came from Israel in the first place. They ignore that we were never safe in Europe or other MENA countries. They do this constantly, on a daily basis.

Even if that’s not what you do and if that’s not what you believe? Ask around. Talk to your friends. You’ll find that hating Israelis and wanting to destroy Israel is quickly replacing care for Palestinians as the core of this movement. And that’s not safe for Jews.

Made the worst brownies ever created just now

Chat where did I go wrong

the reviews are in

So yeah bit of a fucked up name for a clothing store ngl

These companies still exist btw. Standard Fruit is now the Dole Food Company, United Fruit and Cuyamel merged and eventually were renamed to Chiquita Brands International, and the Guatemala coup is barely scratching the surface of the fucked up shit they did over here.

In 2007 Chiquita admitted to financing far-right paramilitary groups in my country as recently as 1997.

Saw someone mention the new Boston Dynamics' robot was introduced like a Souls boss. Was not expecting it to come out so creepy.

I remember when it used to be so cool having new robots that could walk around and now it's just like "surveillance bot makes sure to always have a camera on your face no matter what happens to it and records you while you get shot to death."

I've met him in person btw and he's a fucking sweetheart

[ID: Text-intensive Twitter thread from the Shapeshifters chest binders Twitter account in reply to a post by artist and author Ursula Vernon. Vernon says, A non-zero number of you apparently did not know that The Last Unicorn was a book before it was a movie. It is by Peter S. Beagle. It is made of spun glass and fairytales and iron knives and there are individual lines that I would give my lungs to have written. Shapechangers replies, I saw him every year at NYCC for several years straight, bought something at his table, asked him to sign it, and we spoke. He remembered me from year to year, no small feat at that con. He remembered which stories he'd told me. One year I came back with a different gender on. He squinted at me a bit and said thoughtfully, "I've seen you before in this place." All I had to say was, "last year you told me the story about the inoshishi." And his face cleared, and he leaned in with a grin and told me about a German guitarist who he traveled with, twice. Who transitioned between the first and second time, so he'd gotten to meet this person all over again on the second round. It was a wonderfully kind way to let me know that everything was fine. I was fresh out of the closet and I needed that, and maybe he could see it. The Last Unicorn is the best book in the world and I will defend it and its author til I die. the end. /end ID]

I don't usually talk about celebrities; artists, when I do, and I'm keenly aware that one needn't be a good person to be a hell of a heartwrenching artist. But Peter S. Beagle has written a few of my favorite things in the world, he's an excellent singer and filker, and this Twitter thread was dreadfully important to me. I don't want it going away as Twitter becomes Shitter, because it's so often bad news, isn't it? It's important to me to share trans joy.

as a trans who used this book as a medium to help rationalise my feelings, this makes my heart so happy

Yeah... I think about The Last Unicorn prolly several times a week on average. At some point after my egg finally shattered in 2018 in my 30s, I started to worry, what with all the other folks who seem to need to opine and array against us, what that sweetheart of a man would think of me now. That's when my wife pointed out this thread to me. I cried. Happy tears, you know how it is. I most often linked it to people on Discord, but decided it was time to put it somewhere I could find it when Xitter was done flushing. I am very very glad it's been so important to people. It is important. But sometimes important things don't get traction.

A golden memory.

Tumblrinas, I have a very important question for you.

Reblog for reach

A commonly overlooked symptom of depression is anhedonia, the inability to feel joy or pleasure. The reason that it's easy to overlook is that it's easier to miss the absence of something that's not around all the time than it is to miss a symptom that causes active distress, such as feeling tired and miserable all the time.

Anhedonia is good at being a persistent undercurrent to your life. My aunt, who has major depressive disorder, related to me that she figured out that something was wrong when she looked at the daffodils she had planted blooming, and couldn't recognize the emotion that she felt when she looked at them. It had been long enough since she had felt happy that she lost the ability to recognize the emotion.

It's a particularly dangerous depressive symptom, because it robs you of the ability to feel those little spots of joy that keep a lot of people going, while not doing anything to impair your ability to function. If you don't know that this is a treatable symptom of depression, it's easy to assume that your ability to feel good is permanently broken, and decide to commit suicide because you don't want to live like that. It's not an irrational conclusion, but it is an uninformed one, and everyone deserves to have all the information when making a major decision.

This is what a lot of questionnaires are trying to look for when they ask about "loss of enjoyment". If you can't remember a loss of enjoyment because you can't remember enjoyment, then you probably have anhedonia. If you struggle to define how it is to feel "happy", "content", or "good", or how it feels when you feel those emotions, you probably have anhedonia. If you can't remember feeling any of those emotions for a week or more, you probably have anhedonia.

Symptoms commonly co-occurring with anhedonia are fatigue (often the cause), clear and thoughtful consideration of suicide, loss of desire to socialize or do activities that used to make you happy, and weight loss (due to lack of enjoyment of food).

This section is anecdotal. In what I have observed, anhedonia due to fatigue rarely responds well to depression treatment unless depression was causing the fatigue. If fatigue and anhedonia are co-occurring and are not both alleviated by depression treatment, consider other causes for the fatigue.

A couple notes that I forgot when I originally posted this:

It's also a common symptom of schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, but often doesn't respond to antipsychotics. In addition, in schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, anhedonia generally tends to "come and go", as opposed to depressive disorders, where when untreated, it often doesn't let up for months or years. This can make it more difficult to spot and treat than in depressive disorders.

ADHD can also have "come and go" anhedonia as a symptom, and ADHD medication has mixed results with alleviating it.

An early warning sign is if you've tried the "enrichment in your enclosure" by rolling out something new and fun or something you rarely do that generally brings you joy, and the result is an emotional reaction you can describe as "null".

I've been rolling something around in my head.

If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?

Just let that marinate for a moment.

Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.

Not for nothing, but this is literally part of the entire point of Universal Basic Income.

When abused people can just literally walk away, knowing they can still have enough money to live, the world will be a lot less sheltering of abusers and that is a massive fucking benefit.

It gets better than that, if we go with my ideal UBI scenario, in which we peg UBI to "enough to live in any major metropolitan city in the country" and do NOT adjust it for cost of living.

Suddenly, the poverty and scrabbling for survival of rural areas? Gone. That UBI will go a whole long fucking way out there. Suddenly, people who had to move to the cities to get jobs that paid enough? Can afford to move back. Heck, they can afford to get decent fucking broadband out there and continue working, just, not in the city. Suddenly, people who live in rural areas but want to move to the cities with like-minded people? That's affordable, too. Suddenly, people who want to have a bigger house, but are stuck in a tiny apartment in a city? They can afford to move out to where there are bigger houses.

Universal Basic Income would realign our whole damn society, and I think it would long-term be for the better.

You’re meeting the friend of a friend for the first time, who’s apparently an empath. When they shake your hand, they immediately rip their hand away from you.

Covered mine in sweet strawberry jam cause I value my goddamn privacy

HETEROSEXUAL CIS-PEOPLE LOOK HERE

Snaps my fingers at you as you scroll past this post

Look at me. Listen.

I'm not the best at serious posts, but that article up there reminded me of how important it is that people like you stand up for us. So hold on while I try to get this out of my mushy end-of-work-day brain.

We could fight this fight ourselves for decades trying to reach the equal laws, gender affirming trans healthcare that doesn't have a 2-5+ soul-eating years of waiting time, medical care with equal knowledge of lgbtqia+ bodies, and, what is often forgotten, inclusion in the little everyday areas of life like our way of speaking or things being set up or designed with the existence of queer people in mind.

But you joining in could get us there so much faster.

The power you have as a hetero cis person is that you set the standard for what is seen as the average way of treating us among other hetero cis people. You have been given the power of deciding what's "normal" and I'm begging you to use it.

Richard Green is a great example of to what extent your actions can help our situation, and smaller ways of support still add up to a great impact on society, and could make the days of the queer people you interact with.

Educate yourself before you speak up, but don't be silent.

to all the cis ppl reading this right now, remember what OP said. you've been given the power of deciding what's "normal." use it. please.

Something about the idea that voting for president only matters if you live in a swing state, and that all the people in blue states or red states can indulge themselves in principled nonparticipation because the outcomes are preordained, strikes me as akin to playing with fire.

Is it really coherent to say "both sides are awful, write in Mickey Mouse or burn your ballot or just stay home and get drunk, unless you live in Pennsylvania, in which case maybe consider taking one for the team and compromising yourself by voting for the lesser evil?" Is that really the message that will lead to a preferable outcome?

What it sounds like to me is a sign that 1) you take your local electorate for granted, and 2) you see avoiding the worst case scenario as somebody else's problem.

I remember when Florida was a swing state. I also remember when Pennsylvania wasn't.

For the love of fuck, vote in your local elections and don't fuck around with presidential ones either. States are in play now that I would never have dreamed of being 'swing' states. When I first started voting, PA absolutely was not a swing state. The district where I cast my first vote went blue for the first time I can remember last election.

Washington state, universally considered a safe blue state, has voted Democrat between 50.1% and 58.0% in presidential elections since 2000. Those are pretty healthy margins. But they are not insurmountable - Washington was reliably red up to 1984, by similar amounts - and they don't happen by magic. They happen because people fucking vote blue even though it's considered a safe state.

If enough people think, "eh, I don't have to vote, Washington is going to go blue no matter what," then guess what happens? The state goes red. And we don't want that.

Oregon is also considered by outside viewers to be super liberal. Then, when you zoom in on individual counties, it's like 90% red. A lower than average Democratic voter turnout in the larger cities could easily make the whole state as Republican as the bigoted Oregon town I currently live in. A higher turnout in rural areas could start making the state look like people think it does.

If you feel safe that your state is a "blue" state, look at the county maps and see just how few of them are actually as blue as you imagine.

As someone who has lived in rural Oregon and rural Kansas, I found rural Kansas less conservative. Do not trust in your state's reputation as one color or another. That reputation is often defined by a very small part of the map.

Jewish Song of the Day #28: Arbeter Froyen

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