the-incorrigible-chaia:

fromchaostocosmos:

I’m very frustrated with how the various youtubers and streamers talk about Ben Shapiro.

Because they do not understand or have the proper context when talking about him and everything he represents.

They also often go into antisemitic territory when mocking him, while it is unintentional and something they may not not even know they are doing, they are doing it none the less.

When they mock his voice or call him Shabibo that is actually antisemitic territory.

Due to a history of Jewish people having our names stripped from us and voices and names mocked. Now I too find his voice to be personally annoying, but I won’t mock it because of said history.

It is not about the curtsy that Ben Shapiro deserves or doesn’t deserve, but rather about deciding when it is okay to employ antisemitism against a Jewish person.

The answer is never.

The overwhelming majority of these commentators are not Jewish and the few that are Jewish don’t seem to know any of the important details that make what Ben Shapiro says so dangerous for all Jews and such a false representation.

See what is not presented in discussions about him is that Ben Shapiro is not there to pull in a Jewish audience he is there as a token Jew to help further pull in an christian audience.

That is what makes it all so very insidious in nature. And sadly some Jewish people get fooled by this too because they do not look beyond the front facing facade he wears like costume, but they do not actually listen the words he says.

Ben Shapiro harps about a ‘war on christmas’ which no Jewish person would seriously do or care for. Especially any Ashkenazi Jews with our very long long history of being murdered in mass on xmas. Christmas eve is became seen a spiritually impure night that it would be called Nittle Nacht in Yiddish and Jewish people would purposefully not study Torah that night.

American Jews, like many others who belong to non-christian religious and cultural groups, have to deal with living a majority Christian country and country that culturally Christian and only makes concession for Christianity.

Has Ben Shapiro ever talked about that or the actual fights to get time off for our Holidays? No because that doesn’t fit the narrative. But business having employees switch from 'merry christmas’ to 'happy holidays’ most certainly does.

Ben Shapiro has explicitly stated that he believes that conception is when life begins which is something to no in keeping with any Jewish held belief anywhere.

We hold life begins at first breath, the mother comes first (I wrote mother because that is wording used in the various writings, but really it would be the pregnant individual comes first), and that it doesn’t just need to physical health on the line it can also be one’s mental health at stake in order to need an abortion

Ben Shapiro talks about Judeo-Christan values, which a bullshit term that was created after the Holocaust to make it seem like Christian Antisemitism played no role in what happened and that the Church was not a guilty party. It is also a term that essentially holds Jewish people hostage.

He uses this term and talks about these shared values. So I have to ask what values?

Is respecting the elderly, caring for the sick, kindness to others, tending to the poor, and such? Because those are universal values and can be found in pretty much every culture and religion.

What about original sin? Heaven and Hell? Can someone be the literal child of G-d? Does G-d have literal hands, a actual face? What is the gender of G-d?

Just some questions to start with since you know we clearly have the same values and stuff.

Because Judaism would say: No such thing as original sin and in fact Hebrew doesn’t have a word for sin we have words that mean things that wrongly translated in English as sin, but no, word for sin. We hold all people are born blank we go through and have experiences and make choices and those choices speak to who we are.

We believe in This World and The World to Come and the spiritual washing machine so to speak, but no a big nope to heaven and hell. No to Satan too. There is the HaSatan which means prosecutor who is as the name means in the Ultimate Court.

When we say “we are the children of G-d” it is poetic flourish and is metaphorical not literal no one can be the literal hild of G-d.

Same way we anthropomorphize G-d so that we have an easier time contextualizing G-d because otherwise it can be hard to wrap your mind around.

G-d is both genderfull and genderless at the same time. It depends on what you are talking about, in what context, and what aspect of G-d of you using. For example the Voice G-d and Presence of G-d are both in the feminine in Hebrew.

These have just been a tiny amount of examples from a vast vast array them.

My point is that if all these people are going to talk about Ben Shapiro especially ones with large followings please bring on someone who is actually knowledge and qualified to talk about this so the facts can properly be presented and explained.

Like I on occasion will listen to Leftovers podcast in background it hosted by Ethan from H3H and Hassan Piker and in the most recent episode that I was listening, which I had to stop because I was getting to annoyed by, they where talking about Ben Shapiro.

It was very frustrating for me. I get that Hassan might be very politically involved and knowledge about stuff, don’t really know I don’t watch him, but I was thinking the whole time that this is not an area you know.

You are talking about Jewish stuff and things related Jewish views points and you have no clue what you are talking about. You are talking about a religion and culture you just don’t know anything about and are trying to debunk Ben Shapiro.

It will not work because you don’t have necessary information and understanding to do so.

And you are missing the biggest point of it all which is again Ben is there as a draw for Christians. Because for these kinds of Christians having a Jew give a stamp of approval gives it some kind veneer of legitimacy.

It validates them and allows them to not have to feel guilty for crimes against Jewish people that they are party too.

This doesn’t mean they like Jews or want us around or interested in our problems or helping us.

It is all about them in the same way they have Candace Owens tell them all the thing they want to hear so they never have to self-examine or reflect on anything and can assuage their white-guilt and keep of being horrific anti-Black.

They don’t care about Black people or Black issues because they listen to a Black woman talk.

It is all for self-serving interests that they have been Ben and Candace there. While many seem to get that point (if you didn’t get it before well get it now) in regards to Candace Owens and the purpose of her employment they miss that very important detail when comes to Ben Shapiro.

Exactly this. Ben Shapiro (and Dennis Prager, for that matter) tokenizes himself to pander to Evangelicals, and completely misrepresents Judaism and Jewishness to do it. He’s a grifter.

mariacallous:

Belarus Is Abducting Ukrainian Children in Plain Sight

A trail of evidence on social networks and state media detail Minsk’s role in a potential war crime

Foreign Policy

Belarusian Paralympic athlete Alexei Talai was waiting on the platform of Minsk’s main train station as a locomotive glided in and dozens of children from Ukraine’s besieged Donbas region spilled onto the platform, where they were greeted with a bunch of brightly colored balloons. According to reports in state media, their journey from eastern Ukraine to Belarus was organized by Talai’s charity with the personal backing of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, a man who has described himself as “Europe’s last dictator.”

A broadcast on the state-owned City TV about the children’s arrival last September painted it as a feel-good humanitarian deed: The children surrounded Talai’s wheelchair, chanting “Thank you, thank you.” To international legal experts and U.S. government officials, it is potentially a war crime.

Of all the atrocities that Russian forces have been accused of since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year—a list that includes mass graves, torture, and the bombing of hospitals—the systematic deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the territories it occupies was the subject of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin and a top advisor earlier this year. Ukrainian officials estimate that some 20,000 children have been taken to Russia in what researchers at Yale University have described as a systematic program for the forcible adoption and indoctrination of Ukraine’s children.

While Russia’s role in the deportation of Ukrainian children has been well documented, details have only just begun to emerge of a similar operation in Belarus—details that could expose those involved, including Lukashenko, to war crimes charges.

“I think anyone involved could be charged under the same theories,” said a senior U.S. government official, speaking on background under ground rules set by the Biden administration, noting that the deportation of civilians to Belarus followed a similar “fact pattern” as those to Russia.

The arrival of groups of hundreds of children from eastern Ukraine to Belarus, where they are sent to large recreational camps, has been well documented in the country’s state media, which hews closely to the government’s line. But rights advocates and foreign governments are only just starting to grapple with what happens to the children from there.

“Information about those camps is really in short supply,” said Wayne Jordash, a human rights lawyer who is assisting the Ukrainian government’s war crimes investigations.

Parents themselves have been some of the best sources of information about the deportations, said Kateryna Rashevska, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer who is investigating Belarus’s role. As swaths of Ukrainian territory were liberated in a counteroffensive last year, stories began to emerge of desperate parents traveling to Russia in search of their children. But those taken to Belarus have come from regions that are still under Russian occupation and beyond the reach of investigators.

Pavel Latushka, Belarus’s former minister of culture-turned-opposition figure, has the most detailed public accounting of deportations. By tracking posts on social networks, reports in the state media, and from its own sources, his organization, the National Anti-Crisis Management Group, found evidence that at least 2,100 Ukrainian children were taken to Belarus from occupied territories between September 2022 and May of this year. What they found was evidence of “systematically organized, [large] scale war crimes, led by Lukashenko personally and supported by some individuals and so-called NGOs,” he said in an interview.

In June, Latushka handed over a dossier of information about his findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC). A spokesperson for the court declined to comment.

When contacted for comment for this article, the charge d’affaires at the Belarusian Embassy in Washington, D.C., Pavel Shidlovsky, responded with a link to a news article in the Belarusian state media in which Lukashenko dismissed concerns about the deportations as “simply ridiculous” and suggested that Ukrainian children were being trafficked to the West to have their organs harvested. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The public face of the deportations is Talai, a Paralympic swimmer, motivational speaker, and strong supporter of the Belarusian regime. According to the website of his eponymous foundation, they began facilitating the transfer of Ukrainian children to Belarus as early as August 2021, before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. The move was backed by a decree signed by Lukashenko, according to a statement by the presidential press service. Starting last September, reports of the deportations became more frequent. Among the facilities they have been dispatched to is Dubrava, a large children’s summer camp run by the state-owned fertilizer behemoth Belaruskali, which is already under sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department. The Talai foundation did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

It can take investigators years to tie battlefield atrocities to senior commanders and a country’s leadership, but efforts to transfer Ukrainian children en masse out of the Donbas into Russia and Belarus have been carried out in plain sight and been widely documented on social networks, in the state media, and in remarks by top government officials in both countries, which is likely why it was the subject of the first ICC arrest warrants.

The deportations to Belarus have been funded by the Union State, an economic and political union between Moscow and Minsk, according to statements by a senior official involved. In October, Dmitry Mezentsev, a Russian official who serves as the head of the union, visited the Dubrava camp. “We are participants in their future,” he said during the visit, according to a Russian government newspaper. The Union State had already given tens of millions of rubles to support Talai’s efforts and would continue doing so, he said.

Social media posts by the Talai foundation and reports in the state media describe the children as being drawn from a variety of backgrounds: orphans, children with disabilities and those from impoverished families, and those living in children’s homes. Latushka’s team claims to have identified at least 50 orphans that were among the children taken to Belarus.

The Geneva Conventions, which serve as the backbone of international humanitarian law, provide detailed provisions regarding the treatment and evacuation of children in wartime: Children are to be evacuated to a neutral third country if possible, and written consent by guardians must be secured when they can be found. The deportations to Russia and Belarus are a flagrant violation of those principles, experts say. “It’s difficult for Belarus to assert that it is a neutral country,” Jordash said, as Belarusian territory was used by the Russian military to launch the assault on Kyiv.

In instances where parents have offered written consent, it’s difficult to argue that they have done so of their own free will. “Cities are under siege, and there is a lot of shelling. And when a man with a gun shows up at your house and offers to send your child to a summer camp, it’s hard to say no,” said Katya Pavlevych, a policy advisor on child deportations to the Ukrainian nonprofit Razom. Parents have sent their children to summer camps in Russia for a few weeks in the hopes of offering them some respite from the war without being told that the children would not be returned.

The Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibit any efforts to change the identity or nationality of children evacuated from war zones. One of the most controversial aspects of Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children has been Moscow’s determination to indoctrinate them, erase their Ukrainian language and culture, and fast-track their Russian citizenship. The smattering of information about the fate of Ukrainian children in Belarus suggests that reeducation efforts may be underway.

An Instagram post by the Talai foundation from last June showed a group of children from the Donbas visiting a unit of the Belarusian security forces that specializes in crowd control. The unit was involved in the violent repression of pro-democracy protests in 2020 after another fraudulent Belarusian election. In an interview last October with Sputnik, the international arm of Russian state media, the head of a Minsk region mining and oil trade union suggested that Ukrainian children from the mining regions of the Donbas were an ideal “target group” to be trained to work in Belarus’ mining industry.

In an interview with Belarusian state TV, Olga Vokova, whose organization “Dolphins” is based in the unrecognized separatist Donetsk People’s Republic and has worked with Talai to bring children from the Donbas to Belarus, described children from newly occupied regions, such as Mariupol in southern Ukraine, as “pre-programmed” for evil. She said that they had to do “everything so as to melt their hearts and show them that we [people from the separatist regions] are not evil.”

Rashevska, the Ukrainian human rights lawyer, said similar efforts were underway in Belarus, as in Russia, to quash their identities.

“In these camps, the national identity of Ukrainian children is eradicated. These children are brainwashed, Russified, militarized,” she said.

autisticaboutstufflol:

Chronically ill/Disabled people rise up but don’t do it fast or dislocate anything or raise your blood pressure or move your limbs too quick or 

pilot-star:

Some kneading techniques that I have observed

grownupgeekgirl:

myautisticpov:

vaspider:

keepcalmandcarriefischer:

:

Clean the mold out of your reusable water bottle including the cap and straw

Mold poisoning will kill you and has a high chance of causing severe hallucinations and nightmares while it’s doing it. My final message goodbye

Oh, hey, yea that’s a good reminder! Wait a second tho

A year or so ago I saw someone who studies bacteria on food surfaces talking about how she never ever uses a water bottle for longer than 2 days without washing it with hot water and soap or running it through the dishwasher and I’ve become really adamant about it ever since. Everyone has enough water bottles to keep them cycling through the dishwasher and in use.

Also please don’t die.

Yup to all of this, but also, if you read this and went “lol, I have too much ADHD for that - do you know how many water bottles I would actually need to buy?”

I need you to listen closely, right now

Yes, you might, in fact, need to buy a mountain of water bottles

“But the plastic-”

There comes times when disability, sustainability best practices, and your health cannot co-exist

And you cannot stop being disabled

You might need to not only buy a mountain of water bottles, but also keep prepackaged single use water bottles for emergencies when every surface of your house is covered in reusable water bottles that haven’t been cleaned, and you find yourself asking “what’s the harm in using this one for one more day?” for the seventh day in a row

Or going “well, I’m not that thirsty anyway” and stopping drinking water altogether

Don’t make yourself ill holding yourself to standards you cannot meet

Well, this stopped me cold.

“There comes a time when disability, sustainability best practices, and your health cannot co-exist.

"And you cannot stop being disabled.”

iamat0m:

antifainternational:

melonsap:

Cheat code for writing disabled characters in sci-fi/fantasy without eliminating their disability:

Don’t change humanity, change what’s available to humanity.

i.e.: If your magic removes/fixes a defect or your sci-fi lets you select for traits at birth, that’s changing humanity. That’s altering a fundamental aspect that real humans live with, and distancing your fictional version of humanity from the real deal by cutting out a portion of it that your setting deems “undesirable.”

If your magic/sci-fi aids a defect (like magic netting that acts as a brace, or a wheelchair with wheels that transform to fit the environment), then you’re taking humanity as we know it and saying “wouldn’t it be cool if we had these tools?”

Don’t change what makes us human, change what humans can create.

Cheat Code 2: What kinds of aid to use to accommodate disability

Cheat Code 3: How to make your setting itself disability-friendly

brakshow:

brakshow:

I think Americans in general should maybe start taking xenophobia more seriously. Because with the. Everything going on in the world right now. It’s gotten really really bad. And while lefties might not be reactionary to the same extent as republicans it’s still very much prevalent. I went to dinner with my family recently and the stuff they said about my cousin’s family who emigrated from Russia made me feel like I was losing my mind. He’s 2 years old. How are you going to discriminate against a baby with a clear conscience. Then you read the news and it’s like “China is spying on you with TikTok and weather balloons” and you hear people on all angles of the political compass repeat it. Are you hearing yourself right now. Are you for real

Cannot believe I have to say this but I am Lakota. as in native american. As in almost everyone’s family came to the united states from another country at one point, except for the people who were already living here. Like my mom’s family. And I live here.

Immediately assuming I must be a white european because I disagree with widespread american xenophobia is prelly wild. Honestly. When I mentioned my family and America in the same post I thought it was clear that I live here.

“But you said you had family from Russia?”

Yes. People get married sometimes. My cousin married someone from Russia. They had a baby. He’s a good baby btw. Fantastic little dude. I hope he grows up in a better world than this one.

I can’t speak for people living in other countries because I don’t live there. I live here. I don’t think it’s my place to berate people from other countries because that’s kind of the problem. Maybe I should have started this post out like a presidential speech. My fellow Americans. Now more than ever.

Reading comprehension test:

1. Where is OP from? What country?

2. What does “xenophobia” mean?

3. Is possible to care about other people? if yes, then:

3.1: even if they’re from another country?

3.2: even if they speak another language?

3.3: even if I don’t like their government?

bemusedlybespectacled:

marzipanandminutiae:

random-brushstrokes:

Emil Doerstling - Preußisches Liebesglück (1890)

though the original title of the painting is unknown, it’s believed to have been inspired by Gustav Sabac el Cher, a Prussian military musician who eventually married a white woman (Gertrud Perlig)

they were married in 1901, but I don’t know how long they courted, so it’s possible this is based on another woman in his life before he met Gertrud. or possibly just his willingness to court white women in general? it’s unclear. he was biracial, so the painting could have been based on his father’s marriage as easily as his own courtship

anyway, here are Gustav and Gertrude after their marriage:

also, for anyone who doesn’t speak German, the title translates to “Prussian happiness in love.”

tanadrin:

by far the most interesting part of the latest You’re Wrong About on homosexuality in the animal kingdom is the account of how science missed it for so long. the guest, lulu miller (of radiolab fame) basically divides the reasons into three categories: ignorance, self-suppression, and what you might call “official” suppression.

essentially, since the days of thomas aquinas when it had been simply declared that homosexuality was inherently against nature, you had a lot of observers of the natural world, even once the enlightenment got underway, who simply didn’t know what they were looking at. many animal species are very sexually dimorphic and thus easy to sex; but many more are not, and if your background assumption (because the background assumption of society in general) is that homosexuality does not occur in nature, if you see two animals of unidentified sex mating, you will assume one is male and one is female. or you might simply assume what you are seeing is an aberration, with no real systemic significance, and not pointing to any kind of underlying phenomenon, and simply fail to note it down–or talk to any other naturalists about it.

and this blends into self-suppression, which includes all researchers who might have noticed homosexuality among animals in the wild, but didn’t write about it. this includes researchers who might not have thought it was significant, or who might have thought nobody was interested in it–miller offers the example of a guy who died relatively recently who spent his life studying mountain rams, who omitted mentioning from his quite detailed survey of their behavior that about one in twelve males mate exclusively with other males, because it seemed to him (at the time of writing) an aberrant and unpleasant fact about an otherwise majestic creature.

“official” suppression we might apply to any time a researcher noticed and wanted to write about the phenomenon, but who simply couldn’t get their data published, including researchers who might have pressed the scientific community at large to recognize this phenomenon, only to be greeted with hostility and suspicion–i.e., what kind of pervert is so obsessed with this topic?

and out of a combination of all these factors you get centuries of a bias being confirmed, because anybody who might care to ask, “well, homosexuality clearly occurs in humans, have we observed it in other animals?” would have been confronted with a vast lacuna in the scientific literature, not because it did not occur, but because multiple intersecting cultural biases prevented anybody from actually talking about it. and it makes it hard to have a conversation about natural phenomena from an empirical and rational perspective when a bias that irrational runs that deep! and i cannot help but wonder what other biases we have in our culture, that might be producing similarly irrational lacunae in our apprehension of the world.

iww-gnv:

Termination risks, collecting unemployment: A look at workers rights amid a 'summer of strikes'

Going on strike can be a powerful tool for workers, but they face a number of risks when doing so. Here's what workers should know about the

CNBC

The recent wave of worker strikes have ushered in a new era: the “summer of strikes,” also known as hot strike summer.

Employees at UPS, Amazon, Starbucks and entertainment companies across Hollywood have walked off the job or threatened to do so over the last few months in an effort to pressure their bosses to improve conditions and pay them more.

More than 200 strikes have occurred across the U.S. so far in 2023, involving more than 320,000 workers, compared with 116 strikes and 27,000 workers over the same period in 2021, according to data by the Cornell ILR School Labor Action Tracker.

“Workers have more bargaining power given the strength of the economy,” said Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell University.

too-music:

So many gays on Twitter are really losing their shit about the fact that apparently aces experience discrimination bc “it’s just sex, why would anyone be oppressed for not wanting it?”

It’s not about not having sex, it’s about the fact that we are seen as less human for not experiencing sexual attraction - a supposed “universal human experience” - and that often times people do not believe us for not being interested/wanting sex when the topic comes up. There’s also the fact that it can lead to sexual harassment and corrective rape if a person really doesn’t like the fact that an ace person doesn’t want to have sex. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of other issues regarding asexuals and other areas of life, but we still have to deal with it regardless if we want to or not.