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Hey! T-t-t-ano here!

@tttano57 / tttano57.tumblr.com

Hi, I'm EJ (they/them/theirs)! I'm neurodivergent and queer, with a bit of a Tolkien obsession. I'm a fandom-loving artist whose art is currently creatively tagged under "myart" or "ejarts". I'm a Jew now (former-Xtian Dominionist and now-survivor), which takes up the rest of my blog.
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'She’d researched it too much. Typical Anastasia. She’d seen some pathways in it that simply didn’t exist. She spoke the Eightfold Word, and it didn’t … work. After we—cleaned up—she asked me if I might end her life. Of course I said no. She had so much more to give.'

to the previous post cause I keep rotating this scene in my mind so much

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jewish-rock

you know what fuck it if any goy wants to talk about zionism, israel, or antisemitism with me you have to get an A on the following quiz (90%+), without looking up anything:

(read more because it’s a 54 question quiz)

#not gonna attempt because I am pretty sure I would fail #but this seems like a pretty complete guideline for looking into the issues further

actually, i would encourage you to try, see what you can answer! will help you find out what you don’t know well. this was a post made mainly out of frustration for people ignoring and attacking jews talking about antisemitism. i don’t care if you “fail”—all that means to me is you should learn more, and needing to learn more is never a failure.

should also note this is by no means a complete list of things people should know. it is a baseline starting point, with a handful of focus points on things i personally know enough about to write a good “quiz question”. it barely touches on so many other points.

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Had Padmé been 20-30 years older than anakin instead of 2-3 it wouldve fixed a significant portion of the franchise, including padmé's own chracterization

he whole "'woah we're doing something we shouldn't this is going to ruin both of our lives" doesn't ring true in the original movies cause they're just two beautiful young people doing what they're supposed to do in a story. the cliché kills the dramatic tension. give me a 45 year old woman ruining her career life and reputation because a dumbass 19year old monk is pathetically throwing himself at her feet THAT'll give the audience something to be anxious about. It's not something people expect to happen.

Would also explain why all the authority figures are like "Sure, lets put this notoriously disobedient and hotheaded beautiful youth as the sole escort of an equally beautiful young woman who's had the entire world on her shoulders from childhood. no prophecy twins will result from this". i could see obiwan allowing it because he can't deny anakin anything, but what about the rest of the jedi council??? What about padmé's own people? The choice of anakin as bodyguard looks like bad optics even if nothing actually happens. What about her reputation??? It would've been satisfying if they'd actually leaned into it instead of vague hints. Like padmé says its improper but nothing in the surrounding world actually makes it seem that way. The prequels at least didn't do a good job establishing the jedi as sexless and chaste. They just seem like cool hot guys with swords of COURSE they fuck.

but if she's 45, even if she's beautiful, a lifetime of dutiful service to the republic would make most people go "ah she would never sleep with a teenage monk, doesn't matter if he asks". Plus the general social standards of star wars being actually identical to those of our own society they'll probably be like "well what would a 19year old even want with a middle aged woman?" the thought wouldn't even occur. She'd be desexualized by virtue of her age so of course give her a hot young bodyguard no one (including the audience) is gonna see potential for impropriety

AND NOW WE COME TO ROTS. Its not impossible for a 45 year old woman ti get pregnant (average menopause is 50 i assume also in space until proven otherwise) but it is rarer, and it would make sense of anidala not to have been expecting it. It would also underline, again, that this pregnancy is a genuine threat to their lives and careers, because two young people in love secretly married having a baby is literally fine. its normal. the audience will forgive and even applaud even if the wider society in the movie doesn't. but a 45 year old senator with a secret baby?? that she's KEEPING?? like already in the original she shouldn't have kept the baby but the movie is christian and the audience too the vibe is "noo pregnancy is beautiful its luke and leia awww". We should be SCARED about the pregnancy.

And then, anakin having nightmares about padmé dying in childbirth are no longer obvious prophecies. like young padmé is healthy and rich, she'll have the best medical care theres no reason to think her pregnancy will have complications. It's actually kind of stupid and dismissive for people to say anakin's nightmares are nothing to worry about, especially considering he's had them before! but if padmé is pregnant at 45 the risk of complications is very high even with good medical care, and it would make sense for anakin to just have regular nightmares about it. The pregnancy is not a good thing! its a big risk they're taking in a lot of ways!

It also complicates the "unavoidable fate" thing they did in rots. Like in the original had anakin not tried to do everything to prevent padmé dying in childbirth she actually wouldve been fine. She died of grief while fully healthy which i think everyone can agree was fucking stupid. But if anakin's descent into the dark side, 100% ensured padmé dying (strangling a 45 year old woman who's already endured a huge amount of stress and throwing her to the ground? narratively speaking, either she's not making it or the baby isn't), i think it would be good if we weren't told with absolute certainty "had anakin stayed a jedi she wouldn't have died". It would be more compelling if we didn't know for sure!!

Plus it would make anakin's freakout so much easier to empathize with. Like sure its scary to think of your loved ones dying but the whole movie she's presented as obviously not at risk. Anakin worries but we don't. We should worry! Are we so much better than him? Wouldn't we also be desperate in his position? Or alternatively we refuse to sympathize with his decision to fall in love with a middle aged woman which is uncomfortable and leads us into much more complicated moral questioning than "become evil or stay good?". It would add drama either way!

And it would make both padmé and anakin so much more 3 dimensional as characters. Now they're making strange, emotionally driven and unexpected decisions instead of following the script for romantic lead 1 and 2. Padmé has actual depth and complications! She makes decisions we can't necessarily appove of, keeping the baby becomes a genuine decision with genuine cost instead of "duh, what else is she gonna do?" Her falling in love with anakin actually adds depth to her character and tells us something about who she is instead of turning her into a cliché. Replaying the trilogy in my head with older padmé instead of young padmé she immediately feels like a character with agency instead of a cardboard cutout of the ideal dead wife.

It would also make the whole "elected child queen" thing make some kind of sense.

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matan4il

To the person who wants us to differentiate the modern political movement that came to be called Zionism, and the Zionist nature of Judaism, I'll address you politely, even though your assertion that I must be a teenager (quick search of my blog would show you that I work at a Holocaust museum, education and research center, that also studies the history of the Jewish people in general, so... not a sound assumption) is very insulting and condescending.

Sure, we can distinguish the thousands of years old Zionist nature of Judaism from the modern political movement that came to be referred to as Zionism.

But do you understand that the modern political movement wouldn't exist without the fact that Judaism has ALWAYS been Zionist? That the distinction is, to a degree, an artificial one, especially in the context of anti-Zionists claiming that Judaism is incompatible with Zionism, which is a lie. With that claim, they mean to deny the very right of Israel to exist as a liberation and land back movement of the Jewish people, and while they're at it, they are de-legitimizing every Zionist movement ever, whether modern or not, they're de-legitimizing every Jew who had returned to Israel, even just as an individual, because they are denying the very Zionist nature of Judaism.

I'll attach at the end an attempt at demonstrating why the distinction is somewhat artificial in this context.

But before that, I'll address some of your other claims. You said that Zionism is a secular movement, and religious Jews are opposed to it. While some ultraorthodox Jews are indeed opposed to active Zionism, and prefer a passive wait for the Mashiach, they too are Zionist in the non-modern-political-movement sense (they still believe and pray for the Mashich to bring all Jews back to Israel and re-establish Jewish sovereignty in this land, not to keep them in the diaspora). And they do not represent all religious Jews. The modern political Zionist movement was very much joined by religious Jews, such as a political organization called "Ha'Mizrachi," which was established in 1902. Their Zionism was connected to the actions and writings of rabbis who preceded many secular Zionist leaders like Herzl (first published a Zionist pamphlet in 1896), such as Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever (first established Ha'Mizrachi as a spiritual and educational pro-Zionist center in 1893), Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai (published "Minchat Yehuda," a Zionist call for Jews to return to Israel in 1840, and established the Society for the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael in 1852), and Rabbi Zvi Kalischer (asked Mayer Amschel Rothschild to help with the purchase of land in Israel for Jews to return there in 1836, and published the Zionist book Drishat Zion in 1862). Even among ultraorthodox Jews, there are Zionist ones. Some of them were a part of Ha'Mizrachi organization. During the British rule in Israel, there were ultraorthodox Jews who actively helped the Zionist underground movements, the Etzel and the Hagana, and in a 2022 poll, 76% of Chassidic Jews defined themselves as Zionist.

You also made the assertion that the modern political movement of Zionism is European. Again, while many of its founders were from Europe, many Jews from Arab and Muslim countries came to Israel as a part of the modern Zionist movement. Please don't erase them. And why would they be a part of this movement? Because of the intrinsically Zionist nature of Judaism. Yemenite Jews didn't need to be a part of the founding fathers of the modern political movement, in order to be a part of the movement, and to see it as a fulfilment of ancient Jewish prophecies, when they were brought to Israel in a special operation in 1952. In fact, there was a Zionist Yemenite movement of return in 1881, following a verse in the Bible, in the Song of Songs book, that they believed told them they had to return to Israel during this year. Many of them settled in a village close to the Temple Mount, which the Arabs refer to as Silwan, a mispronunciation of the ancient Hebrew name Shiloach (that can be found in the Bible). These Yemenite Jews were ethnically cleansed by the Arabs during the 1936-1939 anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish riots. And when Jews tried to return to Kfar Ha'Shiloach, anti-Zionists attacked that as "colonization," too. Anti-Zionists make NO distinction between Jews returning to Israel from Europe, and Jews returning to it from Arab and Muslim countries. We're all just "Zionists" and "incompatible with Judaism," no matter how much our Zionism is derived from our Jewish identity, and no matter that we are native to this land, not colonizers.

You asked, "how can judaism be 'inherently zionist' when the idea of a jewish state has only existed for less than 200 of those years?" and I will ask you, what's unclear when I say that Zionism is about Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish ancestral homeland, which is an idea that I showed was inherent to Jewish tradition and religion? There were Jewish kingdoms here (the unified kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of Yehudah, and the Hasmonean Kingdom), that fulfilled that idea long before there was a Jewish state, and the Jewish state is a direct (and yes, modern) continuation of those ancient Jewish kingdoms (I mean, of course that's the modern reincarnation, we're not going to build a Jewish kingdom now, just so no one can use the accusation that a Jewish state is a modern concept... and I'm sort of weirded out by the fact that I have to defend the right of Jews to implement modern reincarnations of their traditional notions... Also, pretty sure that if we went with the old version and tried to set up a Jewish kingdom, we'd be crucified for being backwards), because it is founded on the same exact principle, that we get to self rule in our own ancestral land. Denying that is erasing Jewish history and parts of Jewish identity.

You said, "our connection to the land does not need to be mediated through a political body the majority of us have absolutely no say in," and I wanna ask you, does every German in the world (or at least most) have to live in Germany, and have a say in it as a citizen, for the nation state of the German people to have the right to exist? Same for every other nation state out there.

You called Israel, "a country younger than our grandparents, and for that matter any other country too," which is untrue on several levels. The state might be younger than some grandparents, but its right to exist is an ancient one, connected to those thousands of years old kingdoms, and in that sense, the modern state of Israel being founded in 1948 is no different to the modern state of India being founded in 1947. Would you tell Indians that their state has no right to exist, erasing its connection to previous forms of Indian self rule in that land, just because those weren't a modern state? Would you offend them by suggesting that the age of their modern state is a factor in its legitimacy? No. But for some reason, you feel comfortable doing that when it comes to the modern Jewish state. While we're at it, whether the current self rule of Palestinians constitutes a state is a matter of debate, but let's say that it counts, and that a Palestinian state started existing when they began self ruling in 1994 following the Oslo accords (the first time ever in history when Arabs in Israel self ruled, rather than be a colony serving a metropole situated in some other Arab or Muslim country), that would make their state not only younger than our grandparents, it would make it younger than quite a few Tumblr users. But I bet you wouldn't say that this de-legitimizes the right of a Palestinian state to exist. Yet you feel it's perfectly okay to say such things about Israel. You should ask yourself why can you accept others, but not a Jewish state. For the record, here's some modern states younger than Israel, that you would never dream to de-legitimize based on their age: Malaysia (1957), Singapore (1965), Zimbabwe (as Rhodesia, 1965), Bangladesh (1971), Guinea-Bissau (1973), Comoros (1975), Lithuania (1990), Latvia (1990), Belarus (1990), Armenia (1990), Georgia (1991), Croatia (1991), Slovenia (1991), Ukraine (1991), Moldova (1991), Uzbekistan (1991), Macedonia (1991), Azerbaijan (1991), Slovakia (1992), Montenegro (2006).

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Okay, a small demonstration of how artificial the distinction between modern political Zionism and historical Zionism is...

Where do we put the start of the modern political movement of Zionism, what is the date when it began?

A lot of people would suggest that it started with Herzl. He's often referred to as "the father of Zionism" (that's incorrect. It would be more accurate to refer to him as "the father of diplomatic Zionism"). Herzl was actually an assimilationist Jew, who believed Jews in Europe should aspire to be like all other Europeans, erase the difference between them and the non-Jews (relinquishing our tradition, culture, religion, everything that makes us unique and a contribution to the richness of the human experience), and rely on the equal rights that Europeans would grant us. He believed in this, but experiencing antisemitism in the cosmopolitan Vienna, as well as covering the Dreyfus trial (when a Jewish officer was convicted of treason, and shamefully exiled, despite his many years of loyal service to his country, just because he was a Jew), he came to publish (as I mentioned) a Zionist pamphlet in 1896.

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1896?

But the term "Zionism" as the name of the movement was actually coined in 1890, by Nathan Birnbaum!

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1890?

But for the term to be coined, it had to describe something that already existed. And in fact, many Zionist groups, counted as a part of the modern political movement, were already active by that time. For example, some people start counting the new Yishuv in Eretz Yisrael as starting with the arrival in Israel of the Zionist Bilu group, in 1882 (they were established in January of that year, and despite being secular Jews, they were drawing from Jewish tradition, naming themselves after a biblical verse from the book of Isaiah. Because like I said, modern political Zionism wouldn't exist without the ancient Zionist nature of Judaism).

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1882?

But that doesn't work either, because by the time the Bilu group arrived in Israel, the first Jewish moshava (a Zionist form of settlement based on values of agriculture and communality), Petach Tikva (sometimes nicknamed "the mother of moshavot"), was already established in 1878.

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1878?

But how did this new movement of Zionists know to work the land, if in the diaspora, for hundreds of years, Jews were prohibited from being farmers, so they would have no claim to the land they worked? Well, many young Zionists learned how to do this work thanks to a Jewish agricultural school called Mikveh Yisrael, which was founded in 1870.

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1870?

But a part of why Mikvah Yisrael was established, was the poor condition of Jews in Jerusalem. By the time demographic surveys were conducted in the 1840's, Jews were the biggest religious group in the Old City of Jerusalem, and so overcrowded that it made their lives much harder, sometimes even endangered (like when a plague would break out). The Jewish minister Moshe Montefiore started building neighborhoods for Jews outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1860, moving Jews out of the old Yishuv and into a new form of settling in the land of Israel, outside the "protecting" walls of the four cities holy to Judaism, and into the idea that they can and should use agriculture to sustain themselves outside these cities, and re-connect with their land.

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1860?

But the first victim of anti-Zionist terrorism in the land of Israel is actually considered to be Rabbi Shlomo Avraham Zalman Zoref, who was murdered by Arabs in 1851 for his Zionist efforts to help in the settlement of Jews in Israel and in the restoring of Jewish religious life in the Old City of Jerusalem through diplomatic efforts vis a vis Muhamad Ali Pasha, the Egyptian occupier of the Land of Israel at the time, and by enlisting the help of the consuls of Russia and Austria (by the way, one of his grandsons was among the founders of Petach Tikva).

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1851?

But his diplomatic Zionist efforts, for which he was murdered, didn't start at the time of his death, they go back to when he managed to get that permit from Muhamad Ali Pasha in 1836 for Jews to re-build the Ashkenazi community in the Old City of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by Muslims over a hundred years earlier.

So, shall we count the start of the modern political movement of Zionism as 1836?

But where did that Ashkenazi Jewish community, which Rabbi Zoref tried to restore, come from? Rabbi Yehuda Ha'Chassid successfully called Jews to return to Israel, and he did manage to inspire many to follow him as he started his own journey to Israel in 1697, and managed to buy land for his community in the Old City of Jerusalem, which was joined by Jews already living there. This WAS a form of a semi-modern Zionist movement. And it IS quite connected to what came later, in more modern times.

Or another example. Dona Garcia Nassi was a crypto Jew from Portugal, whose family had fled the Spanish Inquisition, only for the Portuguese Inquisition to grow stronger and harsher, driving her and a part of her family to Istanbul. There, they could stop pretending to be converts to Christianity, they got to publicly return to their Jewish identity. She did a lot for Jews, and in 1561, she used her financial and political ties to ask the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the First to lease land in Israel, for Jews to self rule there. She first asked for land in Jerusalem, was refused, and so she ended up leasing land in Tiberias instead, helping to re-build the city and the Jewish community there, and allowing for a movement of Jews to return to Israel and settle in Tiberias. It's another type of semi-modern Zionist movement striving for Jewish sovereignty in Israel, in whatever form they could get it.

So where do we draw the line? How do we say, these Jews returning to Israel count as Zionist, but those don't? One of my best friends is a Jew from Morocco, his family was religious and fiercely Zionist, and your ask erased them. How do we accept a narrative that looks at thousands of years of Jews returning to Israel, from all sorts of backgrounds, and from all sorts of countries, and yet doesn't recognize that they all returned for the same reason, drawing from the same Jewish foundation? How do we not see that the separation is an artificial one?

Anti-Zionism is antisemitic in so many ways, and one of them is exactly what this narrative does to so many Jews who were proud, and wanted to be counted as Zionist, precisely because to them it was an expression of their Jewish identity.

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

I do think it’s valuable to discuss zionism as a religious value (connection to the land) vs personal Zionism as a concrete aim (moving to or helping others move to the land) vs political Zionism (state building) vs post 1948 Zionism. But they point would be to discuss the evolution of the concept.

Not to portray all these things as different, but to examine how a single religious/cultural element— the centrality of Eretz Yisrael to Judaism, even in exile—expresses itself across time and space.

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This post doesn't explicitly say that Israel committed the "Flour Massacre," but it doesn't have to. Hamas's claim is so widespread that everyone who sees it will know what it's talking about.

This is a fantastic example of how successful Hamas has been at suppressing Palestinian voices in Gaza, while getting its own messages to us.

And how the pro-Palestinian movement is failing to seek out and center the voices of actual activists in and from Palestine.

Lifelong Palestinian activist Bassem Eid (West Bank), on February 29:

March 15:

February 14:

February 17:

February 23:

February 21:

March 2:

March 14:

Please, follow and platform the activists of Palestine!

Free Palestine from ALL oppression.

Empower Gaza, not Hamas.

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wulfhalls

dune actually insane from the get go like. hii it's me paulie atreides I'm 15 and just woke up! we're on page 12 and I've uttered the phrase terrible purpose 5 separate times! now I'm in a meeting with my mum and her creepy superior. they're part of a eugenics cult?? who also do evil affirmative action on the side??? for fun?? I had to participate in pain play and now I'm also part of the cult? I think?? they're trying to get me on ketamin to see if I'm the über eugenics progeny they've been selectively breeding for 10.000 years??? I think my mum made me into god?? its giving terrible purpose. help I'm 15 and I just woke up!

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Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.

Harrow is “rather small and feeble”.

Necromantic Ianthe is “the starved shadow” of her non-necromantic twin.

Our first description of Palamedes is “a rangy, underfed young man” who is “gaunt”.

Silas is “knife-faced…He had a necromancer build.”

Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with “if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral’”

Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: ““I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something.”

In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: “I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves.” Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.

In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow’s body is mistaken for a child’s and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: “Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?”

Tamsyn Muir’s descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: “Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is”, Palamedes is “seriously underfed” and “bony”, Harrow is “scrawny”.

And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head - I’m sure there’s more.

Anyway, necromancers aren’t slender in a conventionally attractive way, they’re gaunt in a concerning way…and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn’t a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.

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kettacat

And even though the cavs are better, they’re still not the sort of peak that you’d expect. Marta’s 1k time is fine for a reasonably athletic woman, not what you’d expect from the military elite that specifically trains for this sort of thing.

A few more rambling thoughts about necromantic/House health problems…

In the tags, @arithmonym pointed out about necromancers’ hearts not working as well, which is a reference to when Harrow can tell how many of the crew on the Erebos are necromancers:

a necromancer’s heart myocardium flexed differently to your ears, worked worse, squeezed more feebly.

And as I pointed out in my tags, necromancers also have some serious fertility issues. Some Houses, like the Sixth, have abandoned bodily conception and pregnancy altogether, except for research purposes. Others, like the Fourth, use both. A lack of access to magical fertility technology is one of the things that marks the Ninth out as being in dire straits:

At any point she could have asked for Cohort intervention, and they would have been there the next day with foetal care boxes, and volunteer penitents, and loans, and plant samples.

Access to fertility technology is on par with dealing with the financial crisis and diversifying the crop yields.

Why? Because necromancy appears to absolutely devastate fertility.

When Harrow describes the situation that led her parents to do a spot of genocidal sex magic, she says:

My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do. She had tried and failed already. She was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn’t afford chance.”

Being a necromancer is acknowledged as a specific impediment to carrying a child to term that often necessities the use of fertility technology.

When she tells Jod about her parents, she adds that:

“My mother miscarried multiple times before I was born; I don’t know how many.”

Although it’s not explicitly stated, it seems likely that Abigail Pent has also experienced multiple miscarriages. The Cohort Intelligence Files note that their infertility is due to “due to genetic failure of their chromosomes” which is a somewhat vague phrase, but which probably refers to the presence of the kind of genetic abnormalities that can result in either a failure to implant or a miscarriage, rather than an inability to become pregnant. This could, of course, simply be unfortunate and have nothing to do with necromancy at all (as the Glossary states, necromancy isn’t genetic), but it could also be evidence of the broader impact of life in a thanergetic system in human bodies, or the impact of necromancy on gametes (being in a body that’s regularly chugging large amounts of cell death energy can’t be great on that front…). And clearly there are limitations to what necromantic fertility tech can achieve.

Also, while we’re on the subject of the Glossary, here’s the full description of the physical aspect of necromancy:

There is no isolated genetic code associated with necromantic potential, nor the presence of any extra biological feature apart from heightened activity from organs we would otherwise mark as vestigial… A very common side effect is physical weakness and an inability to keep and form muscle mass.

Which…is probably mostly a build up for a very bad appendix pun, but is also rather intriguing…necromancy isn’t genetically encoded, but we know that necromancers are only born in the Dominicus system and that children born out of system need to be literally wrapped up in “grave dirt” from a planet in the system. The Glossary also notes that:

Thalergenic planets may be converted to be thanergy planets, i.e. dying planets, but almost never thanergenic (producing death energy but on a stable basis).

So the development of necromantic ability in an individual seems to be a result of the stable production of death energy by thanergetic planets. And it clearly also impacts the bodies of people without aptitude as well, as @kettacat points out.

(Also, it’s worth pointing out that when the Sixth defect, they’re not just rejecting Jod’s empire, they’re committing to the end of the fundamental basis of their society - one assumes this means no more necromancers will be born on the Sixth…)

i love all the points here, but i just wanted to add my own thoughts.

i’ve always found necromancers having this innate weakness something so interesting about tlt. i don’t know how much this makes sense from a watsonian perspective, but from a doylist one: this all reads as malnutrition, specifically undernutrition: fatigue, physical weakness, loss of fat and muscle mass, cardiac issues, infertility. i have to wonder if a necromancer’s thanergy causes poor nutrient absorption.

the concept of thanergy often reminds me of ionizing radiation, specifically in regards to flipping planets (which, as we are told in htn, then kills off or mutates the living creatures on the planet). we know all of the houses are thanergetic planets, so perhaps the nine houses are one big containment zone and necromancy is the condition that results (in a portion of the population) from living in such an area. i also wonder if necromantic aptitude is something acquired in young childhood, not just something present at birth. remember in gtn how they said the nuns waited until gideon was 6 before they figured out she wasn’t a necromancer? maybe it’s a build-up of thanergy exposure at such a young age that could determine aptitude. this would also likely contribute to the adult necromancer health state, as poor health in childhood (like, for example, being exposed to radiation as a child, or childhood malnutrition) is something that generally affects people throughout their entire lives.

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Israel and Palestine, History, Politics, Confirmation Bias and the Hypocritical Racist Saviourism of the Western Left

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Confirmation bias

"im doing a paper on antisemitism and it so difficult to find sources that aren't pro-isreal. They're all going on about how saying that Israel shouldn't exist is antisemitic. no how is thinking something should not exist if genocide is a part of its creation antisemitic? The Israeli state itself is antisemitic and has continuously failed to support its population of Holocaust victims.

any help on finding decent sources would be much appreciated."

When all of your references are telling you that your starting external point of reference is Antisemitic, that is because it is... You can't unpack your biases and unlearn them by searching for references that confirm your biases. Learn that your assumptions are likely bigoted and you need to learn what you don't know instead of seeking validation of what you believe.

To specifically address "saying that Israel shouldn't exist is Antisemitic", Israel DOES exist and more than 40% of all Jews live there, and no matter your opinion of its founding or the conduct of its government.... unless you intend to conquer Israel by force, and believe me it's been tried, it will not cease to exist by political pressure. So the expression that Israel shouldn't exist is tacit war mongering. There is more to be said on the topic, but that will come later.

More below the cut, very long

Part 2 continues here

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humphul

this is so far the single best summary of what's happening in Israel, Palestine and the West that i've seen on tumblr. of course it only has 240 notes.

please don't scroll past this

Thank you, I put a lot of effort into it💓💓💓

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matan4il
Anonymous asked:

I have a query and I'm sorry that this question is going to upset you in advance. I see a post circling on here about Holocaust survivors apparently saying that Palestinians are exactly like them during attacks on Gaza. I just scroll past it because I have poor attention span that cannot stay focused more than one sentence but I wanted to know your opinion on this post or if you have seen it. Again, deep apologies that this ask is upsetting. Thank you for still being here and sharing with us.

Hi Nonnie!

Thank you for the kind way you approached this.

I have seen a post that might be the one you're referring to... It's a screenshot of a tweet:

The original tweet shows an interview with one Holocaust survivor. The response falsely expands this to survivors, in the plural, as if this one tweet shows a whole movement of Holocaust survivors, that people simply refuse to listen to.

The original tweet comes from an account that calls itself a "media company," but has no website (something I would expect from an actual media company), and is at least 80% tweets that are anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. I'll give you an example. We all know Elon Musk has allowed antisemitism to thrive on Twitter, all kinds of it, including the white supremacist type, and others that have nothing to do with Israel. In an attempt to educate him, he was invited to a tour of Auschwitz. But apparently, according to this "media company," that was just meant to stop anti-genocide speech on his social media platform:

Of the up to 20% of tweets this "media company" posts or shares, many are anti-democratic or in support of dictatorial regimes.

This account also amplified the words of Julius Malema, leader of the South African EFF party, as he justified the Oct 7 massacre, and demanded support for the (genocidal) Hamas and its "resistance."

Malema himself has repeatedly sang, "Kill the Boer," a song which many understand as a genocidal chant against the Boers, the South Africans of Dutch descent. This guy is a controversial figure at best, doesn't seem to have an issue with an actual genocide, and this "media company" upholds his words as if he is a role model.

But if this account tweets Israel hate, then I guess the Tumblr user who passed the tweet along has no issue with how questionable of a source this is.

I recognized the face of the survivor. This is what it looks like in the cut off screenshot in the Tumblr post I saw:

So how did I recognize him? Because the number of anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors is SO small (around 5), and I have seen every single one of them repeatedly tokenized by antisemites so much, that I'm familiar with the name and face of each. The man in this vid is Hajo Meyer, who died in 2014. He couldn't possibly make any comments about Hamas' massacre on Oct 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza since, unless this "media company" has managed to somehow contact the afterlife. Here's a screenshot from Google, showing a recent re-upload of this vid to IG:

And here's a very brief bio, mentioning his date of death:

I'm guessing that "media company" didn't name him, or specify the date out of the vid, because it didn't want people to know the guy was dead, and the views he expressed were pre-Hamas' massacre.

Hajo Meyer was, without a doubt, an anti-Zionist. But would he still be using this rhetoric after Oct 7, after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, after better understanding the kind of threat that Israel and Jews worldwide (since Hamas has tried to target Jews in European countries as well, including in the Netherlands, where Meyer lived) are facing from this genocidal terrorist organization ruling Gaza? IDK. I'd like to think he would be better than to continue distorting the Holocaust through this false comparison, but I can't say for sure, and I'm not about to claim that I do, putting words in his mouth just to exploit a dead Holocaust survivor. The fact that the anti-Israel crowd would continue to tokenize (meaning, exploit) a dead survivor like that, as if anyone could know for sure that Meyer would continue to toe the same line, just shows there really is no moral low they can't stoop to.

And here I wanna emphasize how wrong this antisemitic practice is, tokenizing Jews. Because no marginalized group is immune to the hatred spread against it, there will ALWAYS be some of its members, who will internalize and embrace poison aimed at it. There were gay Nazis (the notorious Ernest Roehm was the highest ranking one) and we also have contemporary gay neo-Nazis. So, should we use them in order to pretend that Nazi ideology is not homophobic? That it didn't harm hundreds of thousands of gay people? No, we know that the overwhelming majority of gay people suffered due to it, and would insist that Nazism IS homophobic. So, using those few exceptions to ignore (and embolden) the homophbia of this ideology, ends up being homophobic in itself. Embracing the unrepresentative few over the representative, mainstream majority of a marginalized group in "exonerating" what the group says is hateful and harmful towards it, ends up being hateful and harmful in itself.

And that's what people who only listen to the few anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors are doing. They're basically saying, "Listen to Holocaust survivors!" but they mean only the few who say what the anti-Israel movement does. All the other survivors they ignore, dismiss, silence or even erase.

They're ignoring the voices of the overwhelming majority of Holocaust survivors who WERE (and are) Zionist. Who do not agree with this distorted narrative. Yad Vashem estimates that two thirds of Holocaust survivors came to Israel at the end of WWII, and many more supported Israel even when they chose to settle elsewhere. Just recently, we had a group of 870 American survivors (along with their descendants, altogether 2,500 Jews) thank Biden for standing with Israel after the Hamas massacre. These anti-Israel haters are also erasing the survivors who were themselves targeted on Oct 7, whether threatened, kidnapped, injured or murdered (I've talked about several in my posts on this blog). This anti-Israel mob is exploiting Hajo Meyer even in ignoring that if he had been alive and present in Israel, even just to visit a friend or family member, he would have been targeted, too. These haters are ignoring survivors who said that what Hamas has done is similar to what the Nazis did (I've talked about several of them in my posts on this blog, too. All can be found in my Israel tag).

It is unconscionable, to treat most Holocaust survivors like they don't count, and only see a (literal) handful of anti-Zionist ones as if they do. And it certainly does NOT show the respect the anti-Israel haters imply survivors are owed, through the demand that we all defer to the opinion of the survivors, but ONLY the few anti-Zionist ones.

All that said, off the top of my head, here's a small number of HUGE differences between the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, and anyone ignoring them IS guilty of distorting the Holocaust.

-> The Holocaust did NOT start due to Jews repeatedly murdering Germans on German soil, in an attempt to keep Germans down and prevent them from establishing self rule in the German ancestral land. The Holocaust was completely unprovoked, unjustified and one-sided. Every oppressive measure taken by the Nazis against the Jews, was motivated by antisemitism, and was NOT a reaction to Jewish anti-German terrorism, that the Nazis had to protect their German citizens from. Speaking of unprovoked, unjustified and for a very long time one-sided, that describes the Arab anti-Jewish violence that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel by almost 100 years. But Jewish self-defense in this conflict, which only started about 50 years after said violence began, was provoked, was justified, was a response to what was done to the Jews first.

-> The Holocaust did NOT consist of Jews on German soil collaborating militarily with several Jewish countries surrounding Germany, with the goal of these combined Jewish armies invading and wiping it off the map, in order to prevent German self rule. Guess what the Arabs did to the Jews...

-> The Holocaust did NOT entail repeated German efforts to find a solution for how Jews and Germans could live together on the same land. In pre-state Israel, Jews did try repeatedly to reach an understanding that would allow Jews and Arabs to peacefully share (and co-exist in) the Jewish ancestral land.

-> When Jews finally started rebelling against the Nazis, they did NOT try to get as many Jewish civilians as possible killed. On the contrary, the outbreak of the most famous Jewish revolt, the one in the Warsaw Ghetto, was postponed until the Nazis entered, and the Jewish fighters believed this to be the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto (meaning, the deportation and extermination of the roughly 60,000 Jews still alive there). Only then did they fight back, because (in their own words), they did not want their decision to rebel to cost another Jew "even one hour of life." Compare that to how Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Or even to the Arab leadership back in 1948, which did not hesitate in risking or displacing the entire Arab population in the Land of Israel, in favor of fighting what they called "an extermination war" against the Jews.

-> The Holocaust did NOT see a single day where Germans worked en masse to try and alleviate the suffering of Jews, whether by providing them with humanitarian aid, or by moving them to areas where they would be safe from death. That's in direct contrast to Israel's efforts to make Palestinians' lives better, whether through humanitarian aid, work permits in Israel that guarantee a higher salary and better social rights, medical treatments, warnings when a terrorist target is about to be struck, etc.

-> The Holocaust was NOT supposed to end with even one Jew alive at the end of it. The Germans were going for total extermination of the Jewish people. All Jews who had German citizens were stripped of it in 1935, even before the most murderous parts of this genocide commenced. In contrast, Israel did NOT seek to kill all Arabs, there were many calls for Arabs not to flee Israel and the war which the Arab leadership had started, at the end of the war Israel gave citizenship to 150,000 Arabs who did not leave and did not take arms against Jews, and there was even an offer for tens of thousands of Arabs to return (Weitzmann presented it to the UN), if they do so peacefully. Just a few thousands accepted that offer, but those who did, got citizenship and land.

-> The Nazis were so eager to kill every Jew, that they came to the conclusion they HAD to industrialize their genocide of the Jewish people. That's why they built extermination camps with gas chambers at their core. Auschwitz alone could, on certain days, kill about 20,000 people. No Jew was meant to leave those camps alive. The crematoria were mass murder factories. ANY crime that you want to compare to the Holocaust specifically, you have to show that it includes this industrialization element. Currently, NO GENOCIDE, no matter how horrific, has. And God help us all, I hope it stays that way (this is one of the reasons why the Holocaust mustn't be distorted or minimized. We can't prevent something from happening, if we don't understand what HAS happened, and that we're trying to stop from being repeated). There is not a SINGLE thing in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict that comes CLOSE to being an industrialized form of massacre. Even the brutality of Hamas on Oct 7, the single bloodiest day in the history of this conflict for either side, doesn't come close.

-> While there are still Jews around, meaning the Holocaust as conceptualized by the Nazis failed, it was so deadly, that it DID lead to the murder of around 70-80% of the Jews living under the Nazi occupation over a short number of years. Even more than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, Jews have not recovered demographically. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population has increased by about 10 times since Israel's Independence War. But let's say people wanna claim that just this current war is comparable to the Holocaust. There are presently around 7 million Arabs in the territories of the Jewish ancestral land, of which about 2 million are Israeli citizens. I'm gonna go with the anti-Israel narrative for a second, which claims ALL of them are occupied and oppressed by Israel (even though they're not). In order for the ruin of Palestinians to be indeed on the same level, that would mean 70-80% of them would have to be murdered by Israel during the war. Let's go with the lower percent, so it's easier for the anti-Israel crowd to reach the number of deaths that would support their claim. To have killed 70% of 7 million, that would mean Israel would have to kill 4.9 million Arabs in this so-called "genocide." Even if we exclude Israeli Arabs, and only focus on the 5 million Palestinians living in areas where the Israeli army currently operates (imagine the German Nazis allowing Jews safety inside Germany, and only killing them outside it *eyeroll*), that would mean at least 3.5 million Palestinians killed. But after almost 5 months of this war, the number of Palestinian fatalities, as claimed by Hamas, is around 30,000 people (I'm putting aside the fact that at least 12,000 are Hamas terrorists). The gap between what is happening, and what people who make this false comparison are implying is happening, is incomprehensible.

Sorry for the length, but I hope this is helpful!

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

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