Echoes

Antisemitism is in everything, and once you start looking for it you will never stop.

It is in Christianity -- the Catholic Church, yes, I feel like I don't really need to get into the antisemitic history of the group behind the Spanish Inquisition, but Martin Luther was one of the most influential antisemites in Europe, and a direct line of thought can be traced from his ideas to Hitler's.

It is in Islam -- which says that the day of judgment will come only when the Muslims kill the Jews (and also apparently one type of tree will hide us as the others are ratting us out because that type of tree is Jewish, which is weird).

Those two religions are followed by a majority of people in the world. In the West, most people grow up in a vague culturally Christian hegemony, even if they're not actively Christian.

But there's more!

The Corpus Juris Civilis has had massive consequences and underpins many legal systems today. It is foundational in so much Western law.

It also codified the principles that Jews weren't citizens, that we couldn't testify in court against Christians. It banned Hebrew prayer and conversion to Judaism.

So many famous people were deeply antisemitic. Ezra Pound was a Nazi, yeah, but it's just...everywhere. I've talked about Bram Stoker a lot, but it's also other people: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Cicero, Oscar Wilde, a random "humorous" book of joke definitions that I was only able to read through the AR's because it said Arson was derived from the Hebrew (see Insurance) or something which references the myth that Jews set fire to things for the insurance money. It is all over literature and cabals come from kabbalah and hip-hip is from the chant of the rioters in Germany and Denmark as they attacked Jews for daring to maybe want some rights and you try to go into botany and are confronted with the Wandering Jew plant and and and.

And to undo that would require serious, concerted, effort that would almost certainly make Christian and Muslim students uncomfortable, and that just didn't happen. There was some reckoning in Germany, imposed upon them.

Nowhere else. Antisemitism didn't go away, it just went underground, and we patted ourselves on the back and thought that this time we would be safe and this time we'd finally be able to settle down and it's starting to look like we were wrong.

You have a big work project?

They provide simple, video-game puzzle style mysteries that explain why people feel completely helpless and powerless.

Solving the Why Does Everything Suck puzzle which reveals the secret reason why the world is evil actually gives people a sense of control over it, because it’s explicable. Everyone else is a sheep, while the conspiracist is uniquely capable of seeing the master plan.

so, in other words,

tags via @procrastinatorproject

So while it’s true that the Enterprise is not as big as people think, that goes double for the Falcon!

A good way of thinking about the relative size is by using a bridge comparison:

The Enterprise bridge has space for 11 people to work, as well as a significant amount of space between stations to move around comfortably:

[Bridge illustration by Tobias Weinmann via here]

And the whole thing fits in the nipple thing up on top of the saucer:

Meanwhile the Falcon (beloved weed bus) has a cockpit that seats 4, with only 2 main operational stations, and zero floor space:

And since Serenity was mentioned too…

Serenity has a bridge more comparable to La Sirena - with 2 stations at the front and quite a bit of floor space.

And for those interested in a visual comparison:

(Boeing 747 for scale as well as the Delta Flyer because Why Not)

War IS peace.

Freedom IS slavery.

Ignorance IS strength.

Some of you useful idiots need to recognize that you're being used.

Russia wants a return to Russian imperialism (which never stopped during the USSR, just the langauge), and to defeat their biggest enemy on the world stage, the USA.

Now, Russia is busy shitting itself to death thanks to Ukraine. Putin knows the second he admits defeat in Ukraine, he will, like many other Russian oligarchs, learn how gravity is a harsh mistress. Any sane leader whose intent was conquest would have backed out by 2023. Sanity cannot be found on the Russian side of the attempt to conquer and commit genocide in Ukraine. Russia also loves to DARVO.

Iran, meanwhile, finds itself in the smaller proxy war in the Middle East. There are three main powers in the Middle East. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The IRGC has set itself up primarily as opposition to Israel. It has funded (along with Qatar) several proxy groups to fight Israel and Saudi Arabia: Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Two of these are Shiite groups, Hamas was a more practical 'they oppose Israel' group. Hamas actually gave the IRGC certain advice, by, again, engaging in DARVO. Among other things, by entering leftwing spaces and using leftwing language to repaint the situation. Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. Arabs are there by conquest. This is also why, for example, you will find Arabs ruling much of Northern Africa, instead of the indigenous peoples, such as the Amazigh. (As a digression, many of the indigenous peoples of North Africa had been displaced or assimilated already by Carthage and Rome, but that's a separate issue.) Iran helped Assad commit multiple genocides against native Syrian peoples in the 2010s, many of whom sought refuge, and were given it, by Israel.

Iran seeks the destruction of Israel. Like Hamas and the PLO, they agree that Israel belongs to Islam by right of conquest.

Meanwhile, Israel started from a group of Jews that had bought land at huge markups in Israel, agreed to a partition plan (which the Arabs refused because they couldn't accept the existence of Israel), declared independence when the UK wussed out, were immediately attacked by 5 arab nations who they defeated. Arabs living in the area who did not flee, they became Israeli citizens. There are Arab Muslims in the IDF, in the Knesset, serving as judges. That said, most of Israel's population comes from Jews who were living in Arab majority countries who were blamed for Israel existing, as if they did a damned thing. In 1948 there were 851,000 Jews living in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen. Now, if we include the UAE, which didn't exist at the time, we have under 4000 Jews living in those countries. They were subjected to repeated pogroms in the 20th century as rulers blamed their failures (the actual nakba, that 5 nations couldn't defeat a newly formed one) on their own Jewish communities, who then fled to the one place Jews were safe: Israel.

WW2 and shortly after showed Jews were not safe anywhere. Not in Europe, who refused to take in Jewish refugees until they started being slaughtered. Not in the USA, which did the same. Not in the USSR, which started oppressing its Jews because Israel existed. So forming a country in their homeland as a safe haven for Jews was really the only choice. Assimilation didn't work. Coexistence didn't work. So rebuilding their homeland was the only option.

Now, obviously, not every Jew went to Israel. But a real fact is this: there are more Arab Muslims living in Israel than there are Jews living in every country except for Israel and the USA.

Now, as a note: only the Jews get to define Zionism. And while there are many branches of it, some of which most people (including most Zionists) find abhorrent, they are typically a small minority. Zionism, at it's core, is this: Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and they have a right to live there, defended from those who would harm them.

Israel is the most successful landback ever.

Israel is landback. Palestinian Arabs are the settlers. You are regurgitating someone else's DARVO.

Israel was created by the imperial core and was formed in an ethnic cleanse. If you truly want to end the genocide of marginalized peoples, you wouldn’t be supporting them.

I think Israel should be abolished because I am opposed to white nationalism, genocide, rape, murder, pedophilia, forced famines, imperialism, forced sterilization, capitalism, Nazism, and mass surveillance.

Jews have the right to live in Palestine. I am not opposed to that. But this doesn’t excuse the mass murder of middle eastern people. Forcefully displacing an entire population by means of unrelenting violence is abhorrent in every meaning of the word.

My original point is that all ethnostates are bad, regardless of who created them. If Zionism is meant to provide safety to the Jews, then it is hypocritical in its entirety.

Zionism, fundamentally, is the belief that certain ethnic groups are more important than others. In other words, racist nationalism. If you really didn’t like Nazi Germany, then you would hate Israel.

B - I am not antisemitic, and the original post was against antisemitism.

B: You are. You are just in denial.

Arabs aren't the first people to do that, nor the last, but they do seem to get overlooked in this because a bunch of people view them as noble savages

The claim that Israel is antisemitic is just farcical. Maybe you think it's antisemitic because Arabs are a 'semitic' people. You are ignoring the origin of the term antisemitism. Back in the 18th century in Germany, it was just called Judenhass, or Jew Hate. Someone who wanted his hatred to sound more scientific called it 'antisemitism', based on the idea that there were three main types of peoples: those of Ham, Shem, and Japheth, and Jews were, of course, of Shem's people. Thus, Semites. See? Scientific racism.

While there are semitic languages, the idea of a 'semitic people' is largely discounted in modern anthropology and ethnology.

Your arguments are based, again, on the nonsense found in Mein Kampf, only repackages to be more palatable to a leftist point of view. The Jews aren't filthy Palestinians who should go back to Palestine (common view in the early 20th century), but they're now horrible European Colonists stealing from the uwu smol bean Arabs. Who had been oppressing the Jews among them almost as much as the Europeans (and in many specific instances, worse). Hamas and the PA (and the PLO before it) hold to the idea that Israel was conquered by Muslims, and so it should be theirs forever. Not every Muslim holds this view. But viewed in this light, every attack on Israel (each of which was repulsed, they only ever took land in defensive wars, they tried to GIVE BACK Gaza and the West Bank, but Egypt and Jordan refused) is Arab Muslim Imperialism.

Also, the idea of the Imperial Core is literal Soviet propaganda, from the country that continued Russian Imperialism only now we're pretending we're doing it for good Communist reasons, and then after its collapse, look, Russia's invading Ukraine for what are clearly imperialist reasons.

Israel had no backing from any 'Imperial Core', actually acting in opposition to it (they declared independence from the UK), and in fact it wasn't until the 70s that the USA started actually allying with it.

I dare you to go to a starving Gazan and tell them that their people are invaders. I dare you to go to a mother whose child was killed and tell her that her people are colonizers.

My point, as always, is that genocide is wrong.

I'm mad that you are accusing people of genocide who have been subjected to it for millennia, and who aren't doing it now. I am mad that you are misrepresenting things to shit on people who don't deserve it. I am mad that you either don't know what genocide is, or what the facts on the ground actually are, because with the definition of genocide, and the facts on the ground, Israel isn't committing genocide. But Hamas did commit a genocidal act on October 7th.

I'm mad that you're at best a useful idiot for genocidal assholes who intentionally put their own people in danger so they can blame Israel for their own war crimes. Putting military targets in among civilians is a war crime. Israel's response has been designed to try and get the civilians to leave the targets. And in urban warfare, an under 1:2 ratio of combatants to civilians killed is actually much better than pretty much anyone else achieves.

Gazans don't have missiles fired randomly from Israel in an attempt at maximum civilian damage. Israel has had that from Gaza, South Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Jews are not allowed to own property in Gaza. Palestinians own a lot of property in Israel, and hell, there are Palestinian Arabs in Likud, aka the political party that would like to annex the West Bank and Gaza.