Luna - Nerd Type

Did a Google deep dive into some early 2000s Orthodykes content and thought these articles might be helpful for any Orthodox individual struggling with gender dysphoria! 

The Addams Family (1991) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld

used to refute an argument that claimed isaac functioned as a “human sacrifice” yuck

“What G‑d was doing when he asked Abraham to offer up his son was not requesting a child sacrifice but something quite different. He wanted Abraham to renounce ownership of his son. He wanted to establish as a non-negotiable principle of Jewish law that children are not the property of their parents.”

“The principle to which the entire story of Isaac, from birth to binding, is opposed is the idea that a child is the property of the father. First, Isaac’s birth is miraculous. Sarah is already post-menopausal when she conceives. In this respect the Isaac story is parallel to that of the birth of Samuel to Hannah, like Sarah also unable naturally to conceive. That is why, when he is born Hannah says, “I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” This passage is the key to understanding the message from heaven telling Abraham to stop: “Now I know that you fear G‑d, because you have not withheld from Me your son, your only son” (the statement appears twice, in Genesis 22:12 and 16). The test was not whether Abraham would sacrifice his son but whether he would give him over to G‑d.”

telushkin and kushner both have excellent viewpoints on this as well. telushkin argues that g-d did it as a teaching moment, he said “sacrifice your son” because up until that point, people didnt know that human sacrifice was against g-d’s will, so g-d had abraham go through the motions and then powerfully, abruptly stop him. this taught everyone that human sacrifice is wrong. kushner’s view is more nuanced, he argues that there are in fact two voices, one of g-d (compassion, logic) and one of adversarial malice (sacrifice, pain, suffering, loss). abraham was given a test, could he distinguish the real voice of g-d? he obeys the first voice up until a degree, but when he is commanded to stop, he realizes the true voice of g-d in kindness and compassion, and stops. for this he is rewarded with the covenant.

— Emma Thompson in the commentary for Sense and Sensibility (1995)

Keep reading

colour-code your infants so strangers know what their genitals look like

this is THE WORST idea anyone has ever had on this site. ever.

yeah you’re right……haha……..imagine some sort of dystopia where newborns were dressed in certain colours according to their genitals……….jeez……..how fucked up would that be……..how could I have ever come up with something so silly

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

This was on fb and I can’t deal with it

Gay_IRL

the thing folks living in Christian dominant cultures gotta realize is that even if you’re not Christian, your basic understanding of religion and spirituality and morality is still being filtered through a Christian lens. your very concept of what religion is and does is filtered through that lens.

This is what I call cultural Christianity, for those who are still confused

“But everyone celebrates christmas.” No. No we don’t.

“Religion is based on complete blind submission and not asking any questions ever”

No. That’s Christianity.

“Religion is totally focused on the afterlife and getting into heaven and avoiding hell”

Nope. Christianity again.

“Religion is about pushing your beliefs on others and trying to get them to convert”

Still Christianity.

Actually that’s even more specific - that’s Calvinism, which predominates in America. America isn’t just culturally Christian,it’s culturally Calvinist, which very specifically focuses on submission, the fear of damnation, and conversion. It’s also not just any old Calvinism, but a very rigidly puritanical variety thanks to our roots.

There are other culturally Christian countries, which are of other denominations and therefore have a slightly different bent. England is culturally Anglican, Germany is culturally Lutheran, Italy and Spain are culturally Catholic, Russia is culturally Orthodox, etc. However, even the cultural Catholicism of Italy is different from, say, the cultural Catholicism of Ireland.

So even here, we need to be careful not to filter other cultures’ Christianities through what is a very Americanized (via @queertilly) Christianity, and vice versa with other countries. Speaking as an American, even our concept of what Christianity is has been Americanised.

^^^ that

Inscription from a medieval synagogue in Cochin, India. There was a thriving Jewish community in this and many other Indian Ocean trade cities dating back perhaps to late antiquity. 

Photo by Robin Klein

Religious education: Jewish Child in Yemen

(via A Matter of Faith | Steve McCurry)

Jewish woman from Damascus, Syria, 1870

“[A rabbi in 1969] looked at his Jewish ‘bookshelf.’ And he said ‘I don’t see anything that deals with homosexuality.’ [He concluded] that homosexuals don’t exist in Jewish history. But the mistake that he makes is that he looks at what happens to be on his 'bookshelf’ – the Mishnah, and Talmud, and Medieval compilations of Jewish law, all written by men, mostly written in Europe – and thinks 'that’s everything I need to know about Judaism.’ But that bookshelf is just a sliver – the '1%.’ As soon as we move the spotlight over a bit, we see an entirely different picture of Judaism.”

Listen in to the latest episode of Judaism Unbound, featuring Noam Sienna, author of A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts!

I got to see Noam give a book talk the other night l, and flipped through the book a bit. It's incredible, and I'm really looking forward to when I can afford it, some day in the future!!

It's very diverse in genre, history, location, etc. as well - which is really amazing!!

(it's affordably priced, I just have no money)

If the Government Treated Men Like It Treats Women

A cantor was brutally attacked Friday night [May 24, 2019] after leaving the Mikdash Yosef synagogue in  Buenos Aires’ Palermo neighborhood. “I left the shul with a friend and we were about to cross the street when suddenly I felt something strike my head and cheek from the side,” Cantor Eliyahu Chamen told The Jerusalem Post. He said he turned around to see what hit him and saw a man poised to attack.

“He was screaming, ‘the Jews,’ ‘the Jews.’ He started shouting antisemitic slurs,” Chamen said. “I called for the police, but there were no police. Then he came at me again, chasing after me and broke my hand, but I just kept running.” Chamen said several passersby witnessed the incident but neither stepped in nor offered comfort when the event was over. This, he said, is what hurt the most. “Maybe they could have helped, maybe not,” he said, “But when you see something like this happen, why don’t you come over? Help me calm down. Tell me it’s going to be OK. Say we’ll call the police. Something. Anything. But there was nothing.” Chamen waited until after Shabbat to go to the hospital where his broken bone was X-rayed. He then notified the police of the attack. Nevertheless, he does not believe that Buenos Aires is antisemitic.

“This is not common in Buenos Aires,” he said, guessing his assailant was either drunk or high on drugs. The majority of antisemitic rhetoric in Argentina stems from “uneducated people,” he said. “They just don’t know what antisemitic is. They know they are supposed to hate Jews.

…This was not the first attack against Mikdash Yosef’s worshipers in recent days. Last month, two people physically attacked a group of around 10 to 15 Jews as they left the center on Friday night and made antisemitic comments during the attack. The attackers shouted, “We need to kill you Jews,” the center’s rabbi, Uriel Husni, said after the attack. One of the attackers threw a rock at the rabbi, injuring him in the foot.

In this incident, non-Jewish neighbors and a security guard came to the Jews’ rescue…

In February, the chief rabbi of Argentina, Gabriel Davidovich, was severely beaten at his Buenos Aires home in the middle of the night. All three incidents remain under investigation by Argentinian security officials.

This is the first news I have of this fact. No news outlet has said anything yet.

I never disclose personal information on this hellsite, but for this one time, I’ll make an exception. I live in Buenos Aires and I’m a Jew. And this city is antisemitic as fuck.

Want some proof? Google the attack on AMIA (1994), or the Israel Emabassy (1992). No suspects were ever arrested. Most people don’t care at all, they make jokes and say shit. And it’s very exhausting.

Just to put a personal example, I had a discussion with two non Jew classmates in university (!), and they were saying that orthodox couples had to have sex in front of their families. When I corrected them, and told them they were being ridiculous, all they said was that someone Jewish had told them this fact, and therefore, it must be true. I mean, people want to be ignorant.

Sorry about the rant.