I Enjoy Playing This Game On Tumblr Dot Com Called, “is That Tag A Keysmash, Slang I Dont Know, Or

white-faced whistling ducks

(photo by halex)

But, for real, do you give a shit about real live Jews? Do you care about the violent antisemitism they face? Do you care about their physical and mental well-being?

OR do you only care about "antisemitism" when it's calling a piece of media out for being "antisemitic?"

I'd like to add also that so many of those people who used to get antisemitism on the left and spoke out about it back in before October, even people who comforted me back in when Israel and Hamas were fighting in 2021 - they have now adopted the very tropes of left-wing antisemitism they used to condemn.

So a while back, a fairly left-wing friend of mine was shocked at the thought of Left-Wing Holocaust Denial, asking how it could even be possible, how can the Left even deny the Holocaust given everything (quote: “why would the LEFT be in denial? After you read Elie Wiesel, you can’t deny any of it. Same with Maus, Frieda Appleman-Jurman’s memoirs, and all that. Also, Lois Lowry won a Newberry medal for Number the Stars”). So I’ve been chewing on this for a while now.

First, Right-Wing Holocaust Denial is straight up “denial that the Holocaust happened”–often with an undertone of “But we wish that it had and it was a great idea”. They deny the number of deaths, or excuse the Nazis, or say that the Jews had it coming, or say that it didn’t happen at all, that sort of thing. It’s a very blunt, straightforward form of denial.

Comparatively, Left-Wing Holocaust Denial takes a different, more sophisticated form that functions on multiple levels–with an undertone of its own along the lines of “the Jews are exaggerating to try to portray themselves as victims”–and to talk about this form of denial, I have to explain what the Holocaust was.

So this gets a bit long, because what is being denied is long, but I will ask you to bear with me.

But, TL:DR:

Right Wing Holocaust Denial denies the body count and the atrocities…

Left Wing Holocaust Denial denies everything that built up to it, the centuries of Othering and murders, and the aftereffects.

Keep reading

Chicago Business District, 1898.

Trying to pick up my broken heart, and standing next to you as we light candles

I know this is such a doomer kind of attitude but I genuinely cannot stand it when people go around talking about the ‘silent majority’ when it comes to Jew hatred. There’s two main problems I have with this statement

— Sure, these people might support Jews now, but it’s probably safe to say the majority of people in the world have deeply ingrained biases against Jews. Those biases are easily exploited, easily brought out, and easily radicalised into rabid hatred. See: large swaths of leftist spaces, who honestly seemed like sleeper agents with how fast they openly admitted raping Jews is a moral thing. There’s also the issue of a lot of these silent majority people not supporting Hamas or believing in the Aryan race or thinking that Jews have no culture and we’re just stealing it from everyone else, but still tolerating those ideas being held in other people— it shows that these people neither understand nor care about the gravity of these views, which then makes those precious biases much, much easier to show

and

— The entire point of the silent majority is that they are silent. Sure, they might chat with their Jewish friends about how bad things are, they might express sympathy in private, things like that. But when push comes to shove, when Jews are being actively murdered wide scale, they don’t show up. They leave us in the dirt. They watch quietly as the Gestappo drags their neighbours away. They look away politely as their Dhimmi shopkeeper is beaten in the street for walking on the wrong side of the pavement. They close their blinds when their friend is tied to the stake and burned alive

I know it’s comforting to think of this vague concept of the silent majority, but it’s not actually reality. I know it sucks feeling like you need to have your guard up all the time (and you don’t, just be careful), it’s going to suck a whole lot more if you put yourself into a false sense of security. The silent majority are not our friends. The silent majority are not there for us. The silent majority don’t care. We can’t just live in a nebulous idea of people who quietly tut to themselves whenever they see someone saying ‘glory to the resistance’ or ‘Jews are trying to taint the Aryan race’, we need to focus on the tangible reality, and the people who are actually present

I think this is also why I, and so many other Jews, absolutely love non-Jewish allies. There’s something so indescribably amazing to see people in this world that’s been so horrible to us standing up for us, listening to us, helping us. Allies go through a lot of shit from others because they care about us, I’ve seen it so much— they’ll get vicious hate for just associating with Jews. And they still do it. They still stick with us. Because they care, and it’s just so wonderful

Spread the love to non-Jewish allies, you are so amazing. And to the silent majority, I hope you can become the help that we desperately need

The Late Rodentocene: 20 million years post-establishment

Riffing the Reefs: Marine Life of the Late Rodentocene

HP-02017 is easily thought of as a planet of hamsters, but other life also thrives. The ecosystem's accessory organisms released onto the planet have since formed ecosystems of their own, equally players in the game of life as the hamsters are, and nowhere is this more evident than the shallow seas of the Late Rodentocene.

At first glance, the reefs that grow in the sunlit shallows of the planet's seas look incredibly like those of our own. Forests of algae and kelp grow in the rocks close to shore, as well as corals of all shapes and sizes that sprout in great masses, forming reefs that serve as a shelter for small, colorful sea creatures that thrive in abundance. Yet despite its initial familiarity, the marine biomes of HP-02017 are anything but: its similarities are superficial, and its creatures are something else entirely.

Only a choice few organisms were seeded into the seas: small mollusks such as sea snails and bivalves, as well as sponges and corals, which at first were from but a small collection that have since diversified into a dazzling array. But with so few creatures, and so many empty niches, it didn't take long for the choice few colonists to explode into a diversity rivalling that of Earth's oceans.

Corals, which reproduced via free-swimming planktonic larvae, have filled the empty spaces of their relatives the cnidarians, with some forms becoming tentacled stinging sessile hunters akin to sea anemones, while other drifting larvae become neotenic, remaining in their mobile forms into adulthood and become the transparent, drifting mock jellies.

The humble sea snail has also seen an extreme explosion of diversity in the past 20 million years, spawning thousands of species that came to fill nearly every marine invertebrate niche imaginable. Some lost their shells, coming to resemble sea slugs, and many of which would develop bright body colors for display or as warning coloration, converging heavily on nudibranches present in Earth's oceans. Other snails, developing flattened bodies and a unique vascular system in their belly-foot, become heavily convergent on echinoderms, with some being long-bodied bottom feeders like sea cucumbers, others developing venomous spines akin to urchins, and one strange lineage, developing vaguely-arm-like protrusions on their foot and a radula adapted for feeding on bivalves, becoming a bizarre analogue of a starfish. Others become tentacled swimmers resembling shelled cephalopods: the notiluses.

But by far the most diverse and successful invertebrate clade in the planet's oceans are descendants of planktonic krill, which, in the absence of fish, exploded in diversity to fill as many aquatic niches as they can. Known as shrish, these peculiar crustaceans first emerge as shrimp-like swimmers that propelled themselves through the water with a paddling array of feathery swimming legs.

As they evolved even further, however, they began taking on peculiar niches as time went on. Bottom feeders such as the trilobug became broad and flat, filling roles akin to flatfish or crabs, and some of these bottom-dwellers secondarily re-evolved to become active swimmers, such as the filter-feeding shringray that defends itself with venomous barbs on its tail. Others became elongated, flexible centipede-like predators that hunted other shrish, lurking in caverns in coral much like moray eels in wait to ambush their prey, known as the shreels.

Some shreels would eventually develop a shorter and more streamlined body, and give rise to active swimmers that propelled themselves with undulating waves of their abdomen and tail. Becoming a more efficient means of propulsion with larger or faster species, these paddletailed shrish would eventually modify their rearmost swimming legs along with their tail fan into a caudal fluke of sorts, while their thoracic limbs became used for catching food or filtering particles from water. This lineage of paddletailed shrish would eventually bring about the biggest top predators of the Late Rodentocene seas, the shrarks. Using their barbed rostrums and spiked forelimbs as three grabbing "jaws", the shrarks reach lengths of almost a meter: rivalling the largest marine arthropods of Earth's history, the eurypterids of the Devonian era.

The reefs of the Late Rodentocene are a vast and diverse ecosystem that flourishes in strange new ways independently of the world of rodents above. Life in the ocean takes on unusual new forms in a biome not yet invaded by the hamsters -- at least for the time being.

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So, in the light of the 13 year anniversary of Steam Powered Giraffe, I decided to share a picture that was taken back in 2018, at Weekend at the Asylum steampunk festival. Last year I shared some pictures I took during the concert that evening, but this picture was taken during the day, at the photo op. I don’t believe that I’ve ever shared it before, but I just felt like it was the right time.

I don’t know if I’ll ever meet the band again, but I’ve met them 3 times by now, and this was definitely one of the highlights, though the band was absolutely lovely every time I met them. And as an added bonus, I’ll share the pictures I had taken with David in my The Spine cosplay, because, you know…. That was kind of mandatory, right?

Happy Anniversary @officialsteampoweredgiraffe ! Keep on truckin’!

I have been on hiatus from this site and will continue to be for a while. Just have no energy to sort out who to unfollow anymore

And I unfollowed another person, a game creator I've been interested in. But this time it wasn't surprising, as it's only a more extreme version of what they said in 2021. I pretty much thought that account would say what they ended up saying; only they didn't open their mouth on it until today.

So far unfollowed two people over the war in Israel and Palestine. Thought that after the last conflict I had already sorted out who not to follow. At least none of them are mutuals, but one of them is a conlanger and linguist I've admired for so many years whose insights on PIE reconstruction have been of great interest to me.