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He thinks climate change can be lumped in with acid rain and the ozone layer of "things that were overblown and not really important because no one talks about it anymore."

It didn't even occur to him that we actively fixed the problem. Here's the EPA page on acid rainfall.

From the page:

youre about to

this is the most profound "fuck you and your shitass underhanded tactics" i have ever seen from an official Quaker source. do you know how badly you have to fuck up for the clerks to outline five different ways you're out of right ordering?

and they have, as one would expect of Quaker bureaucracy, brought the goddamn receipts.

nyah nyah yah boo sucks

like i am just. I'm not surprised but it's still always good to see it acknowledged that Quakers are disproportionately trans and non-binary (literally four times higher percentage of us in Britain Yearly Meeting than in Britain as a whole) and also as a disabled Somewhat Trans the original message leaning so heavily on "but think of the poor disabled people!" pissed me off so fucking much. so. another W here.

yes i know this is just the stuff trans activists have been saying the whole time but this is the stuff we've been saying the whole time and it's laid out just. so fucking succinctly and obviously that it just feels like a sick burn, you know?

HOOTIN AND A-HOLLERIN again, i know this, but having it in official terms as A Fact Of The Situation is just like. ugh. my heart is healing.

it is a very quaker "shut the fuck up" move to repeat "discerned" twice in one paragraph just so you know for damn sure it was done under the quaker process and is divinely/spiritually/bureaucratically solid, and i know because i have done this exact thing while clerking

fellas is it possible to do a pacifist murder

SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP again like. if you are not used to quaker spaces i need you to know that it is SUPER uncommon for modern quakers to straight-up say "this is offensive and wrong" to each other. like. it is frankly one of the real problems in the Society, our tendency to be conflict-avoidant and try to find a middle road and be polite.

so i need you to know that being this unequivocal on a contentious issue, in a published communication from BYM, is a fucking nuke in Quaker terms. this is gloves-off bare-knuckle quaker convincement. fucking get 'em.

and finishing out on one final "no YOU'RE out of order!" which, again. as someone who clerks on an area meeting level and has wanted to say this kind of thing to people a lot, this is additionally satisfying in ways that aren't even about the trans rights of it all.

although also

including pronouns in the sign-off is also, i think, standard practice for the Clerks now, but god it's satisfying in this context

the minute from Meeting for Sufferings is also worth reading (it's in the full letter at the link), it's not nearly as savage and is a lot more "let's try to find a way to explore common ground" but it's still pretty unequivocal.

the person who pointed me to this (who is ironically neither Quaker nor British) also pointed out the inherent comedy in claiming that the trans agenda is going to end Quakerism now when like i think that would have happened two hundred years ago if it was gonna, at least in the States?

#this is truly excellent#and also so rare like there is no way to stress enough#that this is a last resort move for BYM

like yeah that's an important point. for better and worse, this is not, like... the first step BYM or BYM trustees have taken here. Sex Matters has been stirring shit with Yearly Meeting, Meeting for Sufferings, and other Quaker bodies for at least a couple of years now afaik (my mum was on Sufferings until the end of 2023 and they were definitely being a pain in the arse then as well)

it has taken a lot for the clerks to reach a point where they're this blunt and targeted, and as the letter suggests, part of that is that the Sex Matters convener not only reached out inappropriately and outside the proper channels, but also shared it with a whole bunch of people. I saw the Sex Matters letter weeks ago (it was attached along with the Sufferings report in July) which, in hindsight: yeah that was weird actually

side note but the Sex Matters letter is so bad. like. not just in the ethical regard. it contains a massive """""equality impact assessment"""" to support them on how totally unsafe mixed-gender bathrooms are. they have marked every equality group as severely negatively affected, including on the basis of gender reassignment. (their argument for this was, i believe, essentially "this might upset detransitioners" with no further evidence or explanation). none of the "risks" are evidenced. many of them are just questions of "could this affect...?". i think i found maybe 5 risks that were actually founded and all of them had been considered in BYM's own EqIA. as someone who has done a lot of equalities paperwork in professional contexts and takes it seriously i was personally offended by the lameness of the paperwork but also they were directly accusing BYM of not fulfilling their legal requirements to assess impact under the Equalities Act, and they then circulated that through BCC and socials. this was a clear attempt at intimidation. it's also hilarious because like. this is the Bureaucracy Religion. if you come at bym staff on the basis of paperwork you had better be so fucking sure.

the point being that this is kind of the nuclear option for BYM, and it's been earned. Sex Matters have already been heard in Meetings, and it has not changed the feeling of the Meeting; they have already been spoken to privately by elders and pastoral care in at least some cases; the existence of their viewpoints has already been noted in minutes on the subject.

One of the reasons that this sort of thing doesn't happen often internally (this kind of bluntness is usually reserved for external statements, like the statement on the Westminster police raid a few months ago) is that usually it doesn't have to. On a national level, Quakers usually don't go further than saying "Friend, you have been heard" and either discouraging or ignoring things that are outside of the main business processes (Meeting for Sufferings, Yearly Meeting sessions, Area Meetings, etc.) until they go away. is this ideal? probably not. but it is why you rarely see this kind of thing.

Back in the day (like, up until the 19th century, when Quakerism was a much more insular and controlled group), irreconcilable dissent might have got people (including the Public Universal Friend, actually) kicked out of the Society. we... don't really do that any more. I'm not sure we could do that any more, the approach to membership has got a lot more relaxed and people really only leave membership when they choose to resign it.

So in a lot of ways, this is the most BYM can possibly do - be blunt, be categorical in their condemnation, and make it publicly available to Friends to make up their own minds.

(That publicity is also very unusual. Typically, we would only see these things addressed through minutes, epistles, or other notes addressed to the record rather than to an individual. We would also usually expect them to come from a Meeting rather than individuals - I'm not entirely clear whether this letter is from Trustees as a whole, or from the Clerks individually, but it looks like it's from the Clerks. I imagine there must have been a lot of discussion before they decided to publish this to the website.)

this is not a casual thing for BYM Clerks to do. they have committed here. I've been involved in Quakers since I was a small child, and I don't remember anything like this happening before, not even following the (quite polarising) decision on gay marriage BYM took in 2010. The severity here really speaks both to how hard Sex Matters have been prepared to push their agenda (and how little they have been prepared to accept Quaker discipline*) and to just how little patience BYM Clerks have left. This isn't just a sternly-worded letter: this is more or less the harshest BYM can get without themselves stretching the bounds of Quaker discipline*.

The Big Quaker Idea is that ordinary people don't need the mediation of priests to understand God and can instead understand God through spending time with one another in silence. Sometimes people in these silent meetings are "moved to speak" and "give ministry". This is both how we worship and how we make decisions, sitting in silence waiting for people to speak with divine inspiration with the aim of "discerning" a way forward on whatever issue we have to make a decision about. Invoking "discernment" in this context means that Quakers believe there is some amount of divine inspiration behind a decision because it was made in this way.

The issue is about the political reality that Zionism is a settler colonial project that is carrying out the genocide of the indigenous Palestinians while giving their land to settlers.

These settlers aregranted automatic citizenship, land, and superior rights under Israeli law , rights systematically denied to Palestinians who literally are indigenous and living there right now.

Modern Hebrew was constructed by combining Biblical Hebrew with living languages like Yiddish and Arabic (ironic, isn’t that?)

The purpose of this ‘language revival’ was explicitly Zionist, explicitly colonial. The Jewish settlers spoke many different languages depending on where the settlers were actually coming from (Yiddish, Ladino, French etc) - Modern Hebrew was designed as a new national Jewish language for the colonial state of Israel. It was a nationalizing project, one similar to and connected with the changing of settlers’ surnames to sound more indigenous to the region.

addressing the tags first, why are you pretending like you care about yiddish. the reason yiddish speakers dropped off steeply in the 1940s was because of this thing called the holocaust, maybe you've heard of it? israel ensures that another holocaust will not happen.

zionism isn't a colonial project, so right off the bat, that's incorrect.

that being said, languages get revived all the time. modern hebrew was constructed so israelis raised in yemen, israelis raised in morocco, israelis raised in poland, and israelis raised in america would have a common language. and quite literally what language do we have in common other than hebrew? biblical hebrew is still significant, and comparing it to latin isn't a valid comparison because hebrew is the language of an ethnoreligious group and latin is the language of a universalizing religion (catholicism).

"Modern Hebrew was constructed by combining Biblical Hebrew with living languages like Yiddish and Arabic (ironic, isn’t that?)"

not...not really? languages will overlap with those in neighboring regions. also, biblical hebrew didn't have words for modern slang lmao, obviously we're gonna have to borrow some things. i fail to see the irony.

"The purpose of this ‘language revival’ was explicitly Zionist"

sure, that doesn't make it any less valid or legit.

"The Jewish settlers spoke many different languages depending on where the settlers were actually coming from (Yiddish, Ladino, French etc)"

yes, that does tend to happen when you spend a few centuries in diaspora. excellent observation!!!

doesn't change the fact that we're not ethnically spanish, french, german, slavic, etc

"Modern Hebrew was designed as a new national Jewish language"

well, yes.

"It was a nationalizing project, one similar to and connected with the changing of settlers’ surnames to sound more indigenous to the region."

well the reason they sound more indigenous is because they are!! hebrew names are indigenous to the levant!!!

"Actually indigenous Jewish families didn’t need to change their names to sound less Polish or whatever- because they just ARE indigenous families. Palestinian families."

i know you don't give a shit about "palestinian jews" (aka israelis) because if you did, you wouldn't be spewing all of this. literally every single palestinian jew supports israel and our decolonization.

palestinian families have names indigenous to the arabian peninsula. arab = arabian peninsula. jewish = judea.

does that make sense?

Well, that's not for you to decide, it is specifically clear by the founding fathers of Zionism, as a national movement, that it was colonial.

The settlement of the Land of Israel must on without interruption, and it must aim at a Jewish majority in the entire country.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun (referencing the Amalekites), behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality[...}

Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.

The Iron Wall, (1923), Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

We should there [In Palestine] form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism. We should, as a neutral state, remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.

In both countries important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews.An infiltration is bound to end in disaster. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population [Arabs] feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop the further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless based on an assured supremacy.

Der Judenstaat, (1894), Theodor Herzl.

Remember, Mr Herzl here was very impressed by the Scramble for Africa that he attempted to consult an audience with Cecil Rhodes, the imperial colonizer of Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe), when that didn't work, he tried to send a letter.

"You are being invited to help make history. It doesn't involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial."

You then proceed to concede that Modern Hebrew is part of the Zionist project, which is... you know colonial.

When Gram was about six, she lived with her parents in the hills of California, and their closest neighbor was a couple of miles away, on the other side of the hill. Gram was playing outside in the rain, then came into the house to tell her mother that Mrs. Neighbor had fallen in the mud and would need a hot bath and a change of clothes. So G3 used the kettle to fill the tub, and waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, Mrs. Neighbor arrived, soaked and covered in mud, and after G3 got her into the bath, Mrs. Neighbor asked how she'd known to draw it, and G3 told her, "[Gram] saw you fall in the mud, she told me," to which Mrs. Neighbor replied, "That's impossible. I fell on the other side of the hill, and she never goes past your garden."

Story 2: When Gram was in her twenties, she was in her sewing room doing some mending, and passed out on the bed. Her husband found her just pushing upright, and the immediate words out of her mouth were, "Dad fell off a ladder changing a lightbulb and broke his hip, we have to go see him in the hospital." Her husband told her she'd dreamt it, as the telegraph containing the message arrived at their door: her father had fallen and broken a hip, they were needed.

Her husband cited to the judge that her 'being a witch' was why he wanted a divorce.

Story 3:

Gram's second husband was a Wild Princess. Injured animals would come to him from literal miles around to be nursed back to health. He rescued a baby monkey (I was never told what kind but small enough to be a Shoulder Guy) from a flash flood and hand raised several orphaned kittens, chinchillas, escaped pet parakeets (one spoke very clear English and had a better memory than Gram), and one old desert tortoise with a ring drilled into the front of his shell that he called Clyde.

Gram warned him of flash floods and helped him locate and rescue creatures caught in them. By his count, she didn't miss once, and he'd swing at any man that called her a witch, because to him she was an angel.

She called him to say goodbye right before he was sent out on the call (he was a lineman by trade) that killed him.

Bonus story: Gram and her daughter, my Nana, lived alone across the street from the fire station and a block from the police, so any time they had a problem they called the firemen. They had a man try to break into their house once, and Nana called the firemen while Gram, calmly putting back the shotgun in the hallway, said, "he's gonna break his leg running in the dark."

Vermis I - Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods by Plastiboo