don’t forget the chronic deja vu

via Elle.cordova on tiktok

The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning

Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies

At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds. By Dara Horn; Feb 25, 2024

“In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider ‘Judaism.’ This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider ‘Jewish,’ this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. ‘Anti-Judaism’ thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.”—Dara Horn, Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Antisemitic Lies

That’s it. I don’t think anything else could so succinctly explain the world’s dedicated Jew hatred

pssssssst. I transcribed the full article so you can get around the paywall here.

a phrase that I recommend is sex is not binary

Submitted by @vampiribal

When you’ve been cooking for long enough, you stop making recipes and start making “shit in a skillet” and “whatever soup”

You know the only people more fucking annoying to me than AI bros at this point are anti-AI fuckers.

~Just use picrew like god intended~

Actually! God intended for me to make art however I see fit as an expression of the divine instinct to creation, and your shit ass fucking paper dolls that don't even have amputees and fat people let alone complicated shit like fursonas?

DO NOT ALLOW ME TO CREATE.

DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN READ THE TERMS OF USE ON THE PICREWS YOU USE SO MANY OF THEM ACTIVELY FORBID USE FOR OC ROLEPLAY IN PUBLIC SPACES AND FORBID MAKING POST-PICREW EDITS IN PHOTOSHOP FOR FUCKS SAKES

But yes, I'm so sure that your paper dolls will allow people to make satisfying expressions of their OCs without needing to spend 2 years learning a new medium, you're so right bestie

THERE ARE REAL COMPLAINTS YOU COULD BE MAKING ABOUT GENERATIVE IMAGE MODELS YOU KNOW!!! REAL ONES THAT ACTUALLY HAVE MATERIAL CONSEQUENCES!!!!!!!

But no, it's all harassing artists you don't like for using AI to PARTIALLY generate THREE FRAMES of a movie, and telling random people on the street that they cannot play with the toy because it makes them evil.

Never any actual concern for labour protections, never any actual concern for the EXTREMELY ominous way mega corporations are already using AI to justify even more abusive IP.

No, no, it's all "bash the DnD player for wanting their kobold to have a color fur that the picrew doesn't allow for."

You people are so goddamn FRUSTRATING to share a fucking side with.

You know the only people more fucking annoying to me than AI bros at this point are anti-AI fuckers.

~Just use picrew like god intended~

Actually! God intended for me to make art however I see fit as an expression of the divine instinct to creation, and your shit ass fucking paper dolls that don't even have amputees and fat people let alone complicated shit like fursonas?

DO NOT ALLOW ME TO CREATE.

DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN READ THE TERMS OF USE ON THE PICREWS YOU USE SO MANY OF THEM ACTIVELY FORBID USE FOR OC ROLEPLAY IN PUBLIC SPACES AND FORBID MAKING POST-PICREW EDITS IN PHOTOSHOP FOR FUCKS SAKES

But yes, I'm so sure that your paper dolls will allow people to make satisfying expressions of their OCs without needing to spend 2 years learning a new medium, you're so right bestie

"Fuck CGI all my homies hate CGI here we love practical effects" ok ok ok alright I know I KNOW that I'm being pedantic and nitpicky (which is why I'm making my own post and not adding this to one of those I've seen floating around) but you don't hate CGI you just hate capitalism

CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is a very broad term, but in the context of films it is an 60 year old technique used in a variety of contexts for a variety of reasons. It is not only excessive green screens and bad mocap.

CGI is actually a central part of why practical effects look so much better now than they did in the 60s - I can guarantee that you have not seen one practical effect without the addition of CGI in a film after the 90s and maybe even earlier (excepting micro budget films, and even then). Every squib of fake blood that pops on under the actor's costume is cleaned up in post. And to be clear - this is a good thing! It looks better when it's well done!

What you hate is the overreliance on underpaid, overworked contract workers who are ground into the dirt by big studios with crunch times and wildly unreasonable expectations, that results in catastrophic looking messes. Yes, I also subscribe to "a bad practical effect is better than a bad CGI effect because at least it's there", but there are hundreds of people being exploited for their labor who are honest to god artists and dismissing their entire field is missing the point. A backlash against CGI as a concept could lead to a devaluation of the artists' work - less support from the public isn't exactly what they need. That's exactly what happened after Cats, when two of the actors dared mock the effects on stage during the Academy Awards while the companies which had been crushed by the film were going bankrupt - through no fault of their own.

Pitting those two disciplines against each other isn't only useless it's also just plain wrong - they have been working hand in hand for over 60 years. Know how to recognize the qualities and flaws of both and defend workers in all fields.

Also, the only reason CGI is possible to equate to laziness is because CGI workers aren't union and the studios can get away with underpaying them. I guarantee that if film studios could get away with dramatically underpaying on-set actors and stagehands and set designers and costumers and other people involved in creating practical effects the way they do with CGI, they would.

CGI is intrinsically expensive because you have to create by hand every single thing that is visible on screen - it's not like you can just buy something at the dollar store, paint it, and set it up as a prop, or something, because that's not how CGI works!

If you haven't ever seen bad practical effects in shitty television and low-budget film from around the '80s, do yourself a favor and go see what that looks like - not because practical effects are bad, but because that was what cutting corners looked like back then and it's important to be able to understand the history at play. (Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and the "Dangeresque" bits from Homestar Runner are good lampoons of this kind of, uh, "stagecraft".)

We (The Panthers) were out doing food distribution yesterday and there was a homeless trans woman with cerebral palsy.

And just. Fuck me, man. It was all we could do to get her some estrogen. We gave her some razors but like. Can she even use them?

It felt more personal. Here was one of my sisters at the lowest she could possibly be and there was nothing I could fucking do.

I haven't been able to get her out of my mind.

She couldn't speak. She was terrified of men. She was on the corner begging for cigarettes. There was a smear going down her cheek from where she had applied her lipstick. She started crying when she saw another black transwoman. When she held me I could feel her drowning.

Fuck.

Some if you asked if there were ways to donate. We've put those together now.

Whatever its called to have these kinds of colourful squares in your home i want it

Look

[ID in alt text] 16/25+ of my LGBTQIA+ boots series! transgender flag themed 🏳️‍⚧️ stickers or prints of this series here

"Fuck CGI all my homies hate CGI here we love practical effects" ok ok ok alright I know I KNOW that I'm being pedantic and nitpicky (which is why I'm making my own post and not adding this to one of those I've seen floating around) but you don't hate CGI you just hate capitalism

CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is a very broad term, but in the context of films it is an 60 year old technique used in a variety of contexts for a variety of reasons. It is not only excessive green screens and bad mocap.

CGI is actually a central part of why practical effects look so much better now than they did in the 60s - I can guarantee that you have not seen one practical effect without the addition of CGI in a film after the 90s and maybe even earlier (excepting micro budget films, and even then). Every squib of fake blood that pops on under the actor's costume is cleaned up in post. And to be clear - this is a good thing! It looks better when it's well done!

What you hate is the overreliance on underpaid, overworked contract workers who are ground into the dirt by big studios with crunch times and wildly unreasonable expectations, that results in catastrophic looking messes. Yes, I also subscribe to "a bad practical effect is better than a bad CGI effect because at least it's there", but there are hundreds of people being exploited for their labor who are honest to god artists and dismissing their entire field is missing the point. A backlash against CGI as a concept could lead to a devaluation of the artists' work - less support from the public isn't exactly what they need. That's exactly what happened after Cats, when two of the actors dared mock the effects on stage during the Academy Awards while the companies which had been crushed by the film were going bankrupt - through no fault of their own.

Pitting those two disciplines against each other isn't only useless it's also just plain wrong - they have been working hand in hand for over 60 years. Know how to recognize the qualities and flaws of both and defend workers in all fields.