Live your life as you see fit

2 weeks later:

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

that it was never about gaza. not really.

if it was about gaza. if gaza was so terrible. if i truly believed my actions had consequences, that people in power might listen to me.

fuck. i'd do anything to have even the slightest chance of stopping it. i'd demand the hostages go back, because sure, it's probably all a lie. sure, it's probably just an excuse. but what if it isn't?

what if I could have stopped a genocide, and I didn't, because I was so convinced it was a bluff? that they wouldn't stop when the hostages were returned? how would I be able to live with myself, knowing that?

(and is the return of the hostages really so horrible on its own?)

if it was about gaza (if it was about human suffering it wouldn't have focused on gaza. two million people is a lot but it's not so much, there are eight billion people in the world, in the first six months of 2025 more children starved to death in one state of nigeria, than people starved to death in two years of the gaza war). if it was about the well-being of gazans. then I'd beg and plead for a ceasefire. for a pause. then I'd demand that there be some sort of asylum program, and wouldn't reject out of hand Israel's (alleged) proposal to transfer the population, because sure, it's not good. it's awful.

But when your choice is leaving behind your life, or facing genocide--well, Jews are experts in that choice. you leave. you say goodbye and you hope to one day come back and you get the hell out. if you care about the risk of genocide, you don't beg america to close ellis island. if you care about the risk of genocide, you don't plead for the st. louis to be sent back simply because you refuse to bow. because in a genocide, there aren't easy choices. yeah, these people are being forced out of their homes. yeah, it's unfair. yeah, it's awful.

do you want to negotiate with the genociders? no. no, you really, really, don't. you hate it. you grit your teeth and you do your best to save as many people as you can and you go home and you wash your hands and you feel so very very guilty and you worry about the people you couldn't save and the agreements you're getting into and god you hate this life. but. at the end of the day. you'll have saved lives.

what does it say about them, that they value martyrs more than mothers? value propaganda more than peace? that to avoid the taint of working with who they may genuinely believe to be genociders, they will take the risk of condemning two million people to death?

the haavara agreement sucked. it was terrible. but. at the end of the day, it saved jewish lives. at the end of the day, jews that would have been killed, weren't. and what's your reputation, in comparison to that? what could possibly be worth giving it up? some imagined moral purity?

The blorbo you can look to in hard times, and ask yourself what they would do in a situation, and draw motivation from them on how to be better and stronger!

To keep your stuff from being scraped by / remixed with AI.

2) this is a very badly-conceived question unless you're literally only asking like. KIDS. Because that is such a HUGE gap to the point of the question being laughable. A 13yo, the youngest age someone can have an account on tumblr to vote on this poll, would need to have a 52yo friend to vote "yes". By the time they're 16, they'd need to have a 64yo friend. the 18-24 demo is (i believe) the largest on the site. I don't think most 18-24yos have friends in the 72-96yo range.

I'm not saying that's impossible, obviously, but like... it's VERY unlikely. Plus once you pass 29, you officially can simply no longer have a friend 4x your age, given that the oldest (age independently verified) living person is 116.

(side note but shout out to Jeanne Calment of France, 1875-1997, oldest recorded and independently verified person to ever live, at 122 years. She lived on her own until she was 110, met van Gogh when he moved to her hometown of Arles, France when she was a teenager, and recorded a spoken word musical album shortly before she died. Absolutely fantastic.)

I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.

Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.

A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made. 

I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens. 

Which brings me to my wife. 

(ignore the line going through it, my screen is small and the Internet Archive apparently doesn't handle that great):

So that's our bar -- 73.5 percent.

Note: they ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh when they took it over. And I mean it:

Oh.

Well.

I'm sure this happened entirely peacefully.

(the Manchus also committed genocide, it's worth noting, but the Hakka are a subgroup of the Han, and I'm talking about extermination of ethnic minorities.)

Er. Well, then.

Which, of course, happened entirely peacefully.

Well, at least the Ustase carried out their genocides (of Serbs, that is--they were cool with the Jews and Romani being exterminated) in ways that didn't make the Nazis squeamish?

Oh.

Maybe the Fang were the first people there--

Oh. I see.

They don't even bother to list anyone else!

Well I'm sure that's all peaceful.

(on the clarification: there have been a lot of Yazidi genocides)

Ah.

@librastrai has a lot of information on Ireland's treatment of it's Minceiri/Irish Traveller population. Spoiler alert: it's. Not good.

Yes, I know I switched sources. Sorry.

Well, perhaps they--

Ah.

POLAND JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. No wait, I can't say that because that is a big part of how they're so homogenous. But seriously:

It's honestly somewhat impressive! That level of ethnic cleansing of Jews (and others) takes genuine effort!

Meanwhile, according to the same source as Poland:

Oh.

Please note that this only includes genocides in modern-day Russia.

If you want to learn more about the Circassian genocide, may I humbly recommend: past me!

Also other resources I have on Russia's genocides: here, here, and this one on the Crimean Tatars.

I'm sure their takeover of Siberia was lovely and peaceful and doesn't have a whole section on the Wikipedia page for genocide of indigenous peoples.

I mean, look at this section of the Wikipedia page for genocides in history (WW1-WW2)

(Amnesty International's reliability is of course dubious, but this isn't about Israel, and also, may I present to you the rest of this??

I'm going to end here, although I note this does not include the Holodomor, Kazakh deaths (in a similar event to the Holodomor), pogroms of Jews (which were primarily carried out in the Pale, which deliberately did not include much of modern Russia) or their ongoing genocide of Ukrainians today.

I cannot emphasize enough that Russia is a colonialist empire with one of the worst track records on human rights of any country in history. Russian history is deeply entwined with oppression of other ethnic groups, and it has been for a long time. Russia's borders are not natural, its expansion was not inevitable. Anyone who is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist and anti-genocide should make Russia a primary target.

Oh.

Similar principle as with Russia and Japan -- this is only within the borders of Turkey.

Yes, that is who Cenk Uygur named his organization after. (Do you think he means to compliment Israel when he accuses it of genocide? "Oh look, you're just like the Young Turks! I love the Young Turks!")

By the way, Turkey officially denies that Kurds exist. Also Turkey refuses to let people name their children names with q, w, and x. Why? Those are all common letters in Kurdish. Children in Turkish schools, all of them, must pledge each day to be a Turk.

Also, they migrated (invaded?) in the mid-medieval period

I wasn't able to get into this in the Russia section, but there were a lot of Ukrainian massacres of Jews. It was really pogrom central. To be fair, I don't know offhand how many were committed by ethnic Ukrainians as opposed to ethnic Russians, so I'm not going to go into too much detail, but let's just say that the one thing everyone in the Ukrainian civil war could agree on was that Jews should be killed.

And finally:

Seriously, the list of Cham-Vietnamese wars is...long.

For years, the white nationalist leader has called for overt ethnic cleansing or “ethnic redistribution” but has tried to pass off his noxious beliefs as intellectual curiosities. Spencer has told journalists that his vision of a white ethnostate ought to be compared to Zionism. “In the mid 19th century, many Jews in Central Europe had an idea of an ethno-state, an idea of Zionism, and they were considered ridiculous and insane,” Spencer told Vice in 2013. He used similar language in 2017 during his brief national college tour, telling students that one state he often turned to for guidance was Israel. That same year, Spencer even told Israel’s Channel 2 News that he saw himself as a “white Zionist.” “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves,” the newspaper Haaretz, quoting from his TV appearance, said. “Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.” Yet, in the leaked audio from Charlottesville, Spencer purportedly screams to a room of cheering supporters: “Little f—— k—-. They get ruled by people like me.”

You can see the google trendline worldwide of the term "Ethnostate" ticking up from 2016-2018, when Spencer sold his goods and was lovingly covered by press as a "Dapper Fascist" and spiking in 2020 with an uptick later. Spencer is a troll who sold a bill of goods and a bunch of leftists who screamed about "Punching Nazis" bought his bullshit, hook, line, and sinker. They just needed some fauxademic gloss on it. Note the interest in Ireland.

In this case, the people who love what Spencer had to say want to call Jews "The new Nazis" and ignore who they're taking their marching orders from, and who they are targeting.