"The Arab Jews Were Perceived In Two Different Paradigmatic Contexts By The Zionist Consciousness. On

"The Arab Jews were perceived in two different paradigmatic contexts by the Zionist consciousness. On the one hand, they were seen as Arabs, and hence as an 'other' of Europe and Zionism, and, on the other, as ancient Jews, hence as exalted, holy objects of the Zionist national-religious discourse. The dichotomy gave rise to a confused and conflicted perception of reality. From the colonial point of view, for instance, the Arab Jews’ religiosity was seen as superficial; from a national point of view, it was considered ancient and authentic. ... 'True religiosity' served as a marker of the depth of the Arab Jews’ Zionist commitment and of the erasure of their Arabness. The Solel Boneh emissaries were engaged simultaneously both in orientalizing the Arab Jews and in marking the difference between them and the Arabs — that is, with establishing themselves as Western Jews. ... The depth of orientalist identification with European colonialism is seen in remarks made by Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a member of the World Zionist Organization executive, at a meeting with representatives of Solel Boneh held at the headquarters of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. There were two types of populations in Palestine, Gruenbaum said: 'We, the Jews, are twentieth-century people of Europe, whereas the Arab population is still at the developmental level of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.' And, as 'people of Europe, we wish to create a European economy here. We believe that the Mandate government must conduct its affairs based on the point of view that Palestine is a European country like England or its dominions.' Yet, at the same time, as noted, the Arab Jews were perceived as Jews and as an integral element in the Zionist paradigm. As such, they were not considered as 'others' of Europe but as nearby 'outsiders' of European Zionism. The colonialist and nationalist categories are not mutually exclusive. In the Indian context, for example, as Partha Chatterjee explains, orientalist categories were subordinated to the ideology of nationalism in order to enhance the glorification of the national past and its ancient lineage. Zionism, too, creates ethnicity within colonial nationalism. To constitute the Jewish community as a modern nation, Zionism seeks to reconstruct the community’s 'organic roots,' primordial lineage, and foundational theological narrative. The Arab Jews supplied the tribal and ancient legitimacy for Jewish nationalism. Thus, for example, Zionism identified the Yemenites as part of the ten lost tribes and as an integral part of the continuity of the nation. At the same time, however, it constituted them as inferior culturally, religiously, and nationally. ... In the Zionist context, the question of the encounter between European Jews and Arab Jews becomes complicated, because the encounter, which creates the 'otherness,' does not end there, but seeks also to recruit the 'other' into its ranks. It was here that the European emissaries in Abadan positioned themselves vis-a-vis the Arab Jews and tried to define them as 'other' (Arab) yet also 'one of us' (Jewish, proto-Zionist). It is just here, in the interstices between the two categories, that the politics of 'difference' lies. The interesting thing is that Zionism (like other colonial enterprises) created a politics of belonging and of difference and spoke in a number of voices, yet, at the same time, declined to acknowledge the cultural ambivalence of its own creation and attempted to enfold it within closed binary distinctions. It was a clear case of Jewish orientalism, where one Jewish group orientalized another."

Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (2006)

Alien Pose Prompts

I was thinking about how it can be difficult to figure out our own creatures' anatomies because there are no direct references to draw from, and how I tend to draw my aliens in the same poses, and boom, this happened. Prompts to practice and push the limits of your alien's anatomy :) Aimed at sophonts, but a lot of them can apply to non-sapient beasties too.

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Sleeping lightly or having a nap

Sleeping deeply after an exhausting day

Scratching an itch in a hard-to-reach place

Carrying an infant

Carrying another grown individual

Holding a piece of food

Sipping a liquid

Reaching for something high up

Making themselves as small as possible

Freezeframe of moving at topspeed

Relaxed, half resting position e.g. sitting or lounging

Inspecting a novel object

Cleaning themselves

Being cleaned by another individual

Fighting without weapons

Preparing to fight with a weapon

Showing casual affection displayed with any kind of loved one; family, friend, partner, etc.

Showing intense affection reserved for a specific kind of loved one

Yawning/stretching mouthparts to their full extent

Gripping a branch or high surface, trying not to fall off

Tripping or slipping on a wet surface

Actively balancing e.g. crossing a tightrope

Suddenly noticing something near them and getting spooked

Engaged in conversation

Treating an injury

For meat eaters: in the middle of a hunt For others: foraging and collecting food

Preparing food for a meal

Tending to a crop

Using a tool

Shaking or brushing something off their body

In a state they don’t usually live in e.g. aquatic being on land, terrestrial being in water

Putting on clothing or accessories

Getting a body modification e.g. tattoo, piercings

Using fine motor control to craft something

Trying to block out unpleasant stimuli e.g. covering ears, closing off nostrils

Reacting to an unpleasant stimulus

Loading cargo for transport

Working on building construction

Riding a vehicle or pack creature

Squeezing into a small space

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sieveplayer

8 years ago

Calculate This!

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sieveplayer

2 years ago

andreas maler of nuremberg fancam

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sieveplayer

2 years ago

has this been done yet

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sieveplayer

2 years ago

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sieveplayer

1 year ago

The Japanese green syllid Megasyllis nipponica, is a bristle worm native from the coast of Japan, but now is know to live in coastal parts of California where is stablished. This little dance seen in the GIF have a reproductive reason, and researchers now explaing better what is happening, and you may not be prepared to this.

The brown and dancing body segment is called the stolon, which detaches from the worm in a unique reproductive process called stolonisation or schizogamy. When gonads are matured, the stolon developed a head, which even posses eyes, antennae and bristles, then the stolon can break off and swim away, to break apart to release eggs or sperm. This bizarre process continues before the stolon detaches when it develops nerves and a ‘brain’, allowing it to swim independently from the original body.

Video and figure by Nakamura et al 2023

Reference (Open Access): Nakamura et al. 2023 Morphological, histological and gene-expression analyses on stolonization in the Japanese Green Syllid, Megasyllis nipponica (Annelida, Syllidae). Sci Rep

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sieveplayer

2 years ago

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

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sieveplayer

6 years ago

*The Intertionale Plays*

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sieveplayer

8 years ago

MIT graphene breakthrough could make chips one million times faster

Researchers at MIT and several other universities have discovered that graphene can be used to slow light down below the speed of electrons to create an intense beam of light.

The researchers call the effect an “optic boom”, since it is similar to the sonic boom caused by shock waves when a jet breaks the speed of sound.

Full Story: ZDNET

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