I Have A Thing To Get To But Had To Get This Out Real Quick

Sidewinder Snake

The arcane tag is so funny right now

for the love of god, do not use chores to punish your kids!!!! it's just going to make them struggle deeply to keep their houses tidy as adults since you made them associate necessary chores with punishment and suffering, and it's going to take years of therapy to undo. don't use chores as punishments!!!

If I had a nickel for every time two sciencey guys had a situationship where one of them died and got better, then turned into a Jesus figure and the other had to do a internal battle against loneliness and choose to help the person who had hurt him really badly, and then the world goes bad and the human one has to convince the Jesus figure not to end the world and then they die(?) in the gayest way possible I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Sometimes I feel like the only one who never bought for a second that Gertrude was this doddering old lady who was starting to go senile. She’s the previous archivist, our protagonists predecessor in the Magnus Institute, and only eleven episodes in, we were being told that Gertrude faced a horrible end. I never saw the archives being a mess as her being really disorganized and going all “Oh silly me”, I saw it as Jon walking in on her room-wide pin and thread conspiracy board without context.

TMA is so hilarious for introducing Gertrude from the perspective of someone who never knew her, letting us assume she was a confused, old lady losing her touch, only to then reveal she was a morally fucked up arsonist that tried to burn down her workplace, killed like two of her assistants, was an active menace to society and nuisance to all the Avatars, and arguably one of the most badass characters in the series.

When we talk about men’s issues, it feels like it’s always the same handful of things (high suicide rate, drafting, divorce court, etc.) and even then it always feels like a token gesture. This is something that I always felt like us leftists need to talk more about, precisely because it’s something the movement actively needs to fix within itself. As a cishet man, it can be very strange to see how, no matter how much I value consent and the happiness of my partner, and no matter how deeply I understand that, as good as sex feels, a fulfilling emotional connection is more important, my sexuality is still seen as evil by a pretty big chunk of the movement. And of course, I understand why this is. Men have a long history of rapey behavior and right now it’s sorta getting better and worse at the same time, with lots of guys learning to confront and unlearn their misogyny and lots of other guys looking to people like Andrew Tate for solutions to their loneliness. I don’t think activism should be reactionary though. I mean what good do we accomplish if our “activism” is just reacting to societal issues that make us upset in whatever way feels right to our monkey brains? We should have an ideal that we’re striving towards, a specific vision of a better world that we have a plan for achieving. I know that to me, that ideal is a world where no one is ashamed of their sexuality while also still knowing where it is appropriate vs inappropriate to display it, and that we trust each other and that trust is earned because we’re all tuned in to each other’s wants and desires. That ideal doesn’t change depending on how mad or happy with men and/or women I am.

I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

I’m still educating myself on the history of Israel and Palestine, but it seems to me that the main reason that people on the left are so in favor of a Palestinian state and not an Israeli state is because of the widely accepted narrative of Israelis being “the white colonizers” in this situation. If this assessment is correct, I think it exposes part of the problem with how willfully the left has accepted the idea of white people being colonizing bad guys. I don’t want to minimize white European’s legacy of imperialism of course, I believe dismantling that legacy should be done with care and a strong foundation in factual reality, because leftists have learned to hate the white settler, and that seems to be all fine and good until suddenly all it takes to dupe those leftists into anti-Jewish behavior is to convince them that Jewish people are white settlers. It seems that, in a movement aiming to combat hate, prejudice towards ANY group, even if it would appear to be punching up, acts as a blind spot through which they can find themselves acting prejudiced towards a historically down-trodden people.

The problem with antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Someone recently reblogged this post I shared that called out antisemitism in pro-Palestinian rallies. An action I was initially happy about, until I went into this person's blog, and saw a lot of posts that I, as an Israeli-Jewish person, find incredibly antisemitic. I found myself utterly baffled by that. Because this person clearly recognized the things said in these rallies were extremely antisemitic, and yet, they posted a lot of things that were rooted in the same antisemitic worldview. Can't they see it? And I think the main problem with the current pro-Palestinian movement is that they honestly can't see the line between being on the side of compassion and humanity and being critical of Israel's actions, to spreading horrible lies and dehumanizing Israelis and Jewish people. And the ugly truth these people refuse to face is that the reason they can't see when they cross this line is probably unconscious antisemitism.

You don't need to hate Jewish people to be antisemitic

Antisemitism, like many other forms of racism, often works on an unconscious level. Maybe you have Jewish friends. Maybe you fought for better Jewish representation in media. Maybe you are even Jewish yourself. But over the years you have been exposed to a lot of antisemitic ideas and stereotypes that altered your worldview and made you more vulnerable to believing Jewish people are the bad guys.

If your gut reaction to this is- "but Israel is actually doing bad things, so I'm actually right about hating them." Please keep reading.

Your idea of Israel and what it stands for is based on the worldview of the most radical right-wing Israeli activists at best, and blatant lies at worst.

Imagine if we took the words of the most radical Republicans out there, the ones that go after trans kids and believe women should have no right over their own bodies, and believe all Americans are supporting this idea. That wouldn't have been very fair of us, right? Because there are a lot of people in America who are fighting for a better future. A lot of people who are standing up for human rights.

Just like the United States isn't a homogeneous entity, filled with only trump supporters, Israel is also an incredibly diverse place, with people who have radically different ideas about how Israel should look. Even the current Israeli government, which is extremely right-wing, and has people in it I personally believe should have never been in a position of power, is probably a lot less evil than you were led to believe by ill-intent strangers on the internet. Mainly because this is still a democratic government, in a democratic country, which has a lot of checks and balances that (for the most part) manage to prevent people with radical ideas from making them into official policies.

I don't blame you for believing the reports you see from Gaza. As a pacifist, and as someone who voted for left-wing parties ever since I was eligible to vote, someone who truly believes the Palestinians has a right to self-determination and sees how problematic the occupation is, I struggle a lot when I see posts about the suffering of the people in Gaza. Wars are horrible. I never want to see other people suffer. Let alone children. I wish I could go there right now and take all of them somewhere safe. I wish none of this was happening.

But I also know who my people are, and the values they stand for. And what I noticed about these anti-zionist posts is that they are often written in a biased, misleading way. They often attribute malicious intentions to Israel's actions. And they often jump to conclusions, without giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. Without asking the right questions. And often, without any sort of proof. Some of these posts are outrageous lies. Others are incredibly biased and fail to mention the terrorist organization Israel is fighting against.

Only a small amount of them are coming from unbiased sources that describe the reality of the situation without giving in to personal interpretation.

But most of you can't tell the difference. You are seeing lies about how IDF soldiers are targeting children, or about how Israel is lying about their true evil intentions, and you accept them as the truth, without questioning the intention of the person who wrote that post. Without stopping to think this is incredibly dehumanizing to think Israeli people are capable of such monstrous actions. Without examining your own biases. And that's incredibly problematic, and yes, this is antisemitic. Because you would have never spread this kind of accusation about any other group of people without definitive proof.

This isn't to say our soldiers are never wrong, and that there aren't any bad apples, or even systematic problems in the IDF and every allegation should be thoroughly investigated, because any harm to innocent people is terrible, unavoidable as it may be. And ideally, even terrorists should get a fair trial.

But if you think soldiers in Israel defense forces, who are mostly 18-21-year-old Jewish men and women from all sides of the political spectrum, are inherently evil and baby killers, you are in fact antisemitic.

Even if you believe your type of anti Zionism isn't antisemitism being anti-zionist is still not a great position to take.

I never defined myself as a zionist before. But it was more to do with my own disconnection with Judaism and my ideas about the place of religion in modern society than my belief about the right of Israel to exist.

I think it would be amazing to live in a utopian world where we have one multicultural democratic state where everyone lives together in harmony. But I’m also a realistic person. And someone who wants to keep living as a free woman with full rights in my home country.

And while I never felt particularly zionist, I was never an anti-zionist, and I never believed zionist was a bad word.

I'm probably not the first person who tells you this, but Zionist isn't a synonym for "everything I hate about Israel". It doesn't mean "a person who supports the occupation", or even "a person who only cares about the life of Israelis" or "someone who fully supports the Israeli government".

So what does it actually say? Let's look at a dictionary definition.

Do you notice what the definition doesn't say? Anything about Israel's borders or about the idea of a Palestinian state. There are many types of Zionism, some more radical than others. But as I said before, is it really fair to judge an entire group of people based on the idea of the most radical of them?

The truth is, most of us just want to live in peace. We want to go to work without finding ourselves at the scene of a terror attack or running to the shelter because of rockets. We want all the hostages to come home. We want to feel safe in our own homes. This is what it means to be a zionist. This is what you are standing up against. Not the "occupation," or the "settlers" or the extremists in the government. Just regular people who want to live their lives.

Zionism isn't colonialism

Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel. This was the land we dreamed of in 2000 years of exile, and it's a huge part of our religion and our culture. This doesn't mean the Palestinians don't have a claim to the land as well after living on it for so many years, or that what they went through in 1948 wasn't terrible, but it doesn't magically make Israelis into white colonialists who woke up one day and decided to take over a random land.

A lot of mistakes were made. In 1948, and especially in 1967. And we are paying for them now. But the idea that Israel is a colonialist state that represents everything that's wrong with society is entirely false.

If you support the existence of a Palestinian state but don't believe Israel deserves the same right, you need to ask yourself why that is the case.

Is that because you don't believe Jewish people when they tell you about their connection to the land of Israel? Because you think there is something inherently wrong with the existence of a state that is only for Jewish people? (But have no problem with all the Muslim and Christian states out there) Because you think Palestinian deserves to live from the river to the sea and Israelis should have nothing, or whatever the Palestinians would be willing to give them? Because you are more comfortable with the idea of Jewish people as a minority in a Palestinian Muslim state than the idea of them having their own free country? Because you think you know better than us what our future should look like?

Because all of these reasons are antisemitic.