Dreaming and Doing

>look inside bar

No, it’s like asking every Muslim post 9/11 what they think about Al Qaeda. It’s like being suspicious of any person who MIGHT look middle eastern.

Aka, fucking ridiculous and prejudiced.

How the actual fuck did we get from “learn to recognize fascist dog whistles and have a zero tolerance policy about them” to “selectively interrogate members of minority groups you think are suspicious about whether they’re one of the good ones?”

Bruh let’s imagine for a moment that two people walk into your bar:

Person A is not German, but is wearing a literal iron cross. You ask him if the literal iron cross is a Nazi thing. He says that sure, that’s maybe the origin of the iron cross, but obviously he’s not a Nazi, and you need to stop jumping at shadows. The iron cross is really just a symbol of resistance against modernity, and embracing tradition. He wears it because he believes it’s important to preserve ethnic divisions and maintain cultural purity. He thinks stopping modern degeneracy is critically important – in the politics, and also in the arts. There are a lot of sick, evil people out there who are trying to destroy communities, but groups like his are trying to resist that. “We’re stronger together,” he says. “That’s why we need to protect our own.”

Person B is dressed completely normally but he speaks with a German accent. You ask him to clarify whether or not he’s a Nazi right this instant because “all Germans are Nazis until proven otherwise,” and he tells you “fuck off, you racist piece of shit.”

"Jews think you can't criticize them"

"Vile stench"

"Victim complex"

"Global Jewry"

"Parasite"

"The extermination you deserve"

"The world is noticing"

"Clean Jewish people"

Asshole.

But like no duh Jews are not genetically homogenous, getting kidnapped and sold into slavery will get you some genetic variation in there. Israelites were never completely homogenous to begin with, because people used to marry outsiders and still do now but thats beside the point.

The reason was that, if you get pantsed, and you weren't in on the joke / it wasn't planned, that's a massive breakdown in respect and discipline, and you have to make an example of that kid (generally by wrestling them, and in serious cases, taking away candy privileges). But getting pranked is still a bad look, and makes it seem cool to rebel against your authority.

However, if you get pantsed, and you are in on the joke, everyone has a good laugh, including you, and no one was actually rebelling. It both makes you look like a cool authority figure and makes the person doing it look like they're the sort of person in cahoots with counselors. Then, if there's a behavioral issue, you can have that quiet conversation later, away from an audience.

And since those underwear are so culturally specific as punchlines in a pantsing gag that the only plausible reason to be wearing them is if you're in on a slapstick act, you can retroactively Shanghai any would-be prankster into looking like they did it with your consent and planning, which not only keeps you from indignity, it makes sure that they're rewarded by laughter and attention for looking like they're cooperating with the staff, encouraging that in the future and bringing them in from the outside of the social-reward structure you're trying to set up, where it's cool too be wacky but responsible.

That preparation effort paid off maybe four times across three years, but it was completely worth it.

Like, she came to Storybrooke to drop Henry off and go. She wasn’t planning to stay, she didn’t believe anything was wrong, she wasn’t looking for answers.

And then Regina immediately starts acting suspicious, hostile, and lowkey unhinged lmfao

If Regina had just pretended to be nice, played the perfect mother, and let Emma think everything was fine… Emma probably would’ve been gone in like a day or two.

Which makes me think in some ways…Regina needed Emma there.

Like yes, part of it is control and paranoia. But also…She creates the exact tension that keeps Emma in town. She pushes, provokes, and inserts herself into Emma’s space constantly.

You cannot convince me she wasn’t at least a little entertained by it too. After 28 years of a completely frozen life, suddenly there’s this woman challenging her, not afraid of her, and disrupting everything.

Regina could’ve shut it down. Instead, she escalated it.

And the funniest part is… that’s literally what saves everyone in the end. Because if Regina had just been calm and polite, the curse might’ve lasted a whole lot longer.

he recently passed away and last week at his funeral, everyone was in the church waiting for it to begin. they waited for more than 30 minutes past the set time and then came the news: 

the hearse had gotten stuck in traffic. the hearse with his body in it. 

 - Marilyn Monroe, last taped interview, days before her death

Also:

As one of the biggest Ella Fitzgerald fans, she literally helped desegregate her performances. Ella was not allowed to play at Mocambo because of her race.

Ella Fitzgerald: “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt… she personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.” thisisnotmyfairytaleendingg (Source: dmvnessa)

ALSO:

In August 1956, Monroe began filming The Prince and the Showgirl, with Laurence Olivier staring and directing. The production was complicated by conflicts between him and Monroe. He angered her with the patronizing statement “All you have to do is be sexy” and his attempts to get her to replicate Vivien Leigh’s interpretation. She became pregnant and miscarried during the production, which heavily worsened her depression and increased her drug abuse.

She was on courses of strong medication, had invasive surgery to try and limit the damage caused, and despite trying for a baby numerous times, suffered many miscarriages because of her condition. The miscarriages especially sent her into deep depression, since she desperately wanted to be a mother.

There is speculation that the condition may have been one of the triggers in her drug dependency as well, because when you have endo, you will take whatever you can to stop. it. hurting.

From what I can tell, there are only three universally applicable pieces of writing advice:

Read a lot (mandatory)

Show your writing to people (mandatory)

I'm voting today and I cannot fucking believe that one of the main candidates on the ballot in my left-leaning state literally used the phrase, "I need to stand up to Trump and the Jewish Lobby that is behind this evil Luciferian Epstein takeover of the world."

What.

The.

Actual.

Fuck.

They're not even pretending its just about opposition to Israel. Just full on "Jews are Satanic pedophiles" Protocols of the Elders of Zion literal Nazi shit.

And this is why I am begging people to vet their candidates, beyond just looking to see if they're a Democrat or labeled pro-or-anti-establishment or one or two positions and endorsements.

Because once it gets to the general election, you're fucked. With very rare exceptions, your only actually executable choices are going to be MAGA or whoever got the Democratic nomination in that race.

Which means if, say, a literal Nazi manages to get the Democratic nomination... then your choices are going to be between flavours of Nazi.

———–

In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off. 

For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished - usually with a beating. 

Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.

And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.

People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents. 

Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can. 

I also remember a guy whose tiktok was dedicated to showing indian recipes that were slowly being lost because of english and other dominant languages drowning out the language of the culture that made them.

And I remember in my breton class learning about AAVE through US rap, and about how shaming the use of a language or dialect as wrong and/or stupider is also about shaming a culture out of existence; and then I learned about how killing breton was as much about closing schools and forcing administration to be done in french as it was about shaming people who spoke it. There is a well known 1900s school poster with a rule on it that goes “no spitting on the floor and no speaking breton”, and the punishment for either was a whack on the tips of the fingers with a wooden ruler. Breton was called the language of pigs and geese. There’s still insulting words existing in french language that were about bretons, like plouc (a rural and stupid person) or baragouiner (to speak unintelligibly). And then I remember learning about the colonisation of Africa by France and the methods that were used to smother the languages there too.

A language dying is a normal part of life: it usually evolves into something else, like latin giving us a bunch of languages, and historians can reverse engineer it through those languages. A language being killed means nothing of the sort gets left behind. It means meeting an 80yo grandma with alzheimer who cries to a 14yo me because she’s ashamed of remembering a word in her “dirty” mother tongue but not in french. It means learning about the almost century where a language that still has alive native speakers has stagnated so badly that in the early 2010s it still didn’t have a word for computer. It’s learning about how historians were touring retirements homes in hopes that someone there could help them translate documents dating WWI, because the main form of language conservation for breton in the 20th century was oral transmission.

I saw the rape denial coming up again on Twitter last night.

I haven't really talked much about how it's affected me over the past two and a half years.

For a lot of that time, I couldn't put it into words. It had forced me back into the "emergency phase" of recovery from sexual violence. Where it's affecting your entire life, and you aren't yet able to reason with it or talk about it; you're just immersed in it.

As a sexual abuse survivor, it has been extremely, intensely traumatizing to see people publicly and en masse deny that there was any sexual assault on October 7.

A lot of people are still even denying that anything at all happened on October 7. In their version, the IDF killed any and all Israelis who died, solely so they'd have an excuse to invade Gaza.

Before I go any farther, I'm just going to hand everyone the evidence.

A UK commission spent a full year collecting ALL the evidence of anything that happened on October 7. Forensics, photos, videos, interviews, survivor testimonies, first responder testimonies, et cetera.

They compiled it all into the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report. Which you can read right here.

I will be interspersing relevant screenshots from it throughout this post. It is gnarly as fuck. Consider that your content warning.

I have witnessed many people using their platforms and authority to convince the public that there was no mass rape.

I saw a clip from one podcast on TikTok, in which a woman who was supposed to be some kind of authority got dressed and ready and appeared on this podcast, knowing that she was there to claim that mass rape did not occur.

And with her whole chest, she stated that she was willing to believe that maybe someone was raped, at some point, on October 7... but that she hadn't heard of anyone.

Which meant that, despite knowing she was going to go be on this podcast to talk about this specific topic, she didn't even bother googling it.

Because by October 13, I had heard of mass rapes occurring. Because I had actually bothered to look for eyewitness accounts from people who survived October 7. And the first thing I'd seen, a PBS interview with two survivors, featured one talking about a woman he'd seen being gang-raped and then murdered. (Similar to, but earlier than, this interview from The Times.)

I feel like my arms are vibrating, just typing this now. Almost two and a half years later. I feel like I'm shaking inside.

I was in autistic burnout when October 7 happened. Trying to recover. Trying to put my life back together.

One of my main trauma responses, I have learned, is that I will repeatedly stay up until 3 am researching and writing about a traumatic situation. Trying to find a way to control it or fight it. Trying to gain some understanding of what's going on.

I spent months and months doing that. I had no control over it. I fucked up my sleep cycle really badly, along with my ability to recover from both the preexisting autistic burnout and the new trauma.

I've finally dragged myself out of burnout, mostly, two and a half years later.

It is absolutely terrifying to see people continue to bring up the mass rapes themselves in order to tell people nothing happened.

And there are so many reasons that it's terrifying.

I get why it's still a big deal to me: someone who has read all of the evidence of it repeatedly. Someone who was not only sexually abused, but ritually abused - which means abused in the name/framework of a particular ideology. It's a big deal to me, a survivor of similar things, to have to see people saying these similar things never happened. But there seems to be no reason for people who DON'T believe it happened to keep bringing it up.

2. I can't think of any reason to keep bringing it up that isn't deliberately cruel. Denying it in the first place is weird and entitled and cruel, but many people are very confidently wrong about many things. It's like... denying it when it first comes up is bad enough. Bringing it up years later, and making a big deal again about how it never happened, is deliberate cruelty.

3. The pattern of disinformation and hatred and targeting, over the past two and a half years in particular, has made one thing especially clear to me: A lot of people unconsciously perceive Jews as sus. This is not new. The idea that Jews are sinister, shady, secretive, plotting, nefarious, dishonest, scheming, lying, controlling, is a core part of a ton of antisemitic tropes. This is why there are so many conspiracy theories about Jews. Jews control the world financial systems and media and governments and all that shit, Jews have space lasers, Jews control the weather and use it to influence voter turnout, Jews have a global network of pedophilia, Jews control the drug and alcohol trade, blah blah blah blah blah. It's fucking scary to see this idea extended into, "Jews will even lie about having been publicly raped en masse! Jews will say ANYTHING!"

It's fucking scary to see how thoroughly this idea has spread over the past few years. The idea that you can't trust Jews. The idea that any Jewish organization is likely to be secretly genocidal. Hillel, Chabad, your local synagogue, your local Jewish preschool; any of them. Scheming to support genocide and lying about it. That this is a reasonable premise to use in your approach to the world around you.

4. A lot of people actively believe that Hamas Did Nothing Wrong because it calls itself the Palestinian Resistance. It's extremely reasonable to want a resistance group to be right. To want it to be taking very dramatic, drastic steps for equally dramatic and drastic reasons. Rape is everyone's uncrossable line. People perceive rape as inherently morally wrong and unjustifiable, in a way that (to many people) murder is not. I suppose that we think murdering someone prevents them from harming anyone else, but raping them instead doesn't; and raping them as well is inhumane. So this is the sticking point. People cannot accept that Hamas raped and sexually mutilated people on October 7, because that would mean the "Palestinian Resistance" is unsupportable. And for a lot of people, that would challenge everything they know about the world. This is also why people could not center and platform Gazan activists. Why, instead, almost every Gazan peace and human rights activist I know of gets called a "Zionist" or an "Israeli shill" daily, and has been blocked by pro-Palestinian leaders and influencers. Often before even reaching out to them. Pre-emptively blocked. Because Hamas holds Gaza in a brutal dictatorship. Gazan activists have been fighting Hamas for at least 7 years. Westerners perceive this as a nice neat binary. Israel Versus The Palestinians. Because, for decades, we've been getting our information about it from groups that openly support Hamas. Many of which held rallies celebrating October 7.

The fact that the pro-Palestine movement has refused to center and platform the people directly affected by its work is a huge red flag.

5. It's terrifying to watch the left abandon all sorts of progressive principles when it comes to Jews. We listen to marginalized groups about what harms them, except for Jews. We don't accuse them of weaponizing their oppression, except for Jews.

We believe them when they talk about the hate crimes and discrimination they experience, except for Jews. We believe people who say they've been raped, except for Jews. We center and platform the people directly affected by our actions, except for Jews. (And Palestinians, if ignoring them is necessary in order to stay mad at Jews.)

We fight for diversity and representation and inclusion of marginalized groups, except for Jews.

6. It's terrifying to discover that there's a group out there whose sole mission is to destroy and conquer Israel -- and that it's motivated by the belief that the land belongs to the Muslim world by right of conquest 1,400 years ago, and also, the belief that Jews are Evil.

It's terrifying that Hamas didn't just explicitly plan out how to attack each village, with floor plans of its dentist offices and supermarkets and kindergartens, but also, how it would build a new caliphate afterward.

How it would decide which Jews must die, which ones must stand trial, which ones could flee, and which ones must stay and contribute their skills/education.

How it would recreate the Pact of Umar, a dense network of Jim Crow-style laws subjugating non-Muslims for profit. The same legal system that the entire region had lived under throughout 1,300 years of Arab colonization.

It's terrifying that it's promised publicly to repeat its attack "again and again" until Israel has been "annihilated."

7. It's terrifying that Hamas's original plan had been for Hezbollah and Iran to join in its attack, from the north and east, and for Iran to target the big cities. That Hamas believed it could destroy Israel that way. But its allies weren't prepared to join in, and Hamas decided it needed to act ASAP.

Because I think it's possible that it's right. If that many more forces had attacked on that many fronts at once, it would have taken much, much longer for the IDF to drive them off. I think they would have succeeded in hitting the big cities pretty hard. Bomb shelters in Israel aren't equipped with locks. For safety reasons. Imagine if Iran had just bombed people into the shelters, ready for slaughter by Hamas and Hezbollah.

I'm just saying. Almost half the Jews on earth live in Israel. These groups explicitly want to take them out. And their fans have been explicitly calling for the destruction of Israel.

You guys just finished killing off almost half the Jews on earth 80 years ago.

Maybe you could just not??

8. Lastly, it's especially fucking terrifying that this is resurfacing at a time when the dictatorship of Iran is threatened.

A time when somehow, people are also not hearing from or seeking out Iranian voices.

A time when the dictatorship of Iran has been raping and massacring the people for protesting it.

When somehow, the only thing I hear about it on the left is "we bombed a girls' school!" (Because we're, yet again, unreservedly believing what dictatorships tell us.)

This seems like a desperate stab at keeping us mad at the U.S. and Israel, and keeping us uninformed about and distracted from what Iran is doing.

It's all just a pattern of lies to cover up fascists' torture of innocent civilians.

And, yes, also: it regularly makes me want to hide in a corner of a dark room until I'm done screaming silently into the internet for the day.

It makes me feel like someone has scraped my nerve endings. Like there's sandpaper facing inward underneath my skin.

I can’t help but feel like this blurb introducing Supergirl on the website by going “What if Superman but x?” Is a bit… reductive to Kara’s character.

A lot of writers and fans think that Supergirl can only be interesting in contrast to her cousin. “Superman is nice, Supergirl is angry!” “Clark was raised as a human first, Kara was a Kryptonian and doesn’t understand/care about humanity.” “Clark is a dorky good guy, Kara is a Snarky badass!”