Joan's Political Posts

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Weeks later, Mr. Wiener was walking near his home in San Francisco’s Castro District, the city’s historic gay neighborhood, and spotted a startling flier taped to phone pole. It featured a black and white image of his face with the words, “I put foreign state interests above your own!” coming out of his open mouth.

he’s “demonic”, he looks “satanic”, he’s secretly controlling everything behind the scenes. he’s allegedly harming actors he doesn’t like. he has this hidden power over the workplace, over the show, over people’s careers, over the rest of the writers, over the SHOWRUNNER. he will fire fellow cast members that piss him off or are “too progressive” to his liking. and whether people intend it or not, that is not neutral language when it is being aimed at a jewish man, because this is the thing: antisemitism is not just slurs and swastikas, and a lot of the time it works through older narrative patterns. the jew as secretly powerful, the jew as manipulative, the jew as corrupting, the jew as physically marked by evil. the jew as someone who tries to appear respectable in public while supposedly pulling the strings in private. those ideas have been around for a very long time, and they do not suddenly become harmless because the people saying them are in a fandom space and think they are just “criticizing a celebrity.”

and to be clear, this doesn’t mean ashkenazi jews are never white, or that jewish celebrities can’t have white privilege, class privilege, or industry power. the point is that jewishness does not always fit neatly into the sometimes flattened american white/non-white framework we’re all familiar with. ashkenazi jews can be perceived as white, move through the world with many of the advantages of whiteness, and still be racialized through antisemitism when the context shifts. that conditional quality matters. jewishness can be treated as irrelevant when people want to talk about privilege, then suddenly become legible through conspiratorial or dehumanizing tropes when people want to construct a jewish person as dangerous.

#he gets the ​‘generic privileged white man’ rhetoric until you get a chance to use antisemitic rhetoric #i do not know noah wyle as a person and i am not trying to defend someone i dont personally know #if you want to criticize him please do it without the nazi germany rhetoric please

Because seriously, this is the ask:

I recently saw a headline in a british newspaper about 'this one manor house has so many hacks for climat econtrol without hvac!' and it was just... "orient the building and windows to catch or deflect the sun", which is something I learned just living in southern california and having a bedroom on the west side of the house.

Most houses that are older than the McMansion boom are oriented to catch the most HEAT. That's why bedrooms are on the west and south sides of the house usually. Because people used to worry about the cold more than the heat, in most places!

I read a lot of midcentury plan books and most of them are still oriented in this way, despite saying the plans can be mirrored.

Colonialism has fuelled this idea of people ignoring the true seasons of their biome in favour of just using "winter/spring/summer/fall" for everything, everywhere. But that's not how all of the world works, and so that's not the environment we should build for in the desert, the everglades, the pacific northwest, etc.

Houses should not be commodities or investment portfolios. Houses should be for the people that live there, and should be anchored to THAT reality, that biome, and those plants and weather patterns, as well as the materials available in that environment. And we should make use of hills and build into the sides of them--that will regulate the temperature of our house much better than sticking it on top of the hill!

With a warming planet, it behooves us to build for coolth, not warmth; we should look to indigenous architectural styles from hot places for cues on what will help keep the building cool without needing expensive HVAC systems. Sinking the house down even a few inches into the ground will help cool it off, so will going back to using lathe and plaster and other "mud" building materials, building into hills, and being mindful of wind currents and using breezeways and window alignment to create breezes--my childhood home was like this and stayed surprisingly cool even in 100F California summers, because the breezeway was oriented to catch the south-to-north winds, and opening all the windows and doors meant it sucked the air through the whole house. The deep eaves of California-style houses act as awnings and shield the windows from the sun, keeping the house shaded and cool even without trees surrounding the house (which is dangerous in fire-prone environments like most of california!). Mud walls are extremely effective in desert environs, as well as being very cheap--and plaster is a kind of mud btw, so is stucco and adobe. All very good cheap building materials used in deserts all over.

At the Irvine Arboretum there's a museum house that was built and oriented so that a small breeze always circulates through the house from down to upstairs. It's amazing to witness!!! All because the builders used to care about that sort of thing.

Are you a religious Christian for whom a Pride parade is considered "work" and therefore something you would not be able to attend were it scheduled on a Sunday? Do you attend Mass on Sunday that takes all day and therefore limits your free time on Sunday? No? So then why is it such a hassle for things to be scheduled on a Sunday? In fact, many workplaces still don't give off Saturday as a given, but they do give off Sunday. Wouldn't you want more people (Jewish or not) to be included?

Jews, whether you like it or not, were and are deeply foundational to the modern LGBTQ Pride and Rights movement. Magnus Hirschfeld was a Jew. Harvey Milk was a Jew. Brenda Howard, the literal "Mother of Pride" was a Jew. They may not have been Orthodox Jews or Shabbat-observant, but Jews of all levels of observance and religiosity deserve to be included. And Jewish religious institutions have been supportive of LGBTQ causes for decades. And even if Jews weren't part of and supporters of the community from the start, Jews are part of the community now and ought to be included, as should people of all ethnicities, races, religions, and nationalities.

But honestly? My views have changed since I made that post that earned it a screenshot and post onto reddit saying "look how crazy and entitled those Jews are". I think the Western LGBTQ movement's exclusion and hatred of Jews now goes far beyond scheduling things on Saturdays. That's just the surface level. Things are far more overt when Jewish interest groups are quite literally banned from Pride events, when Jews are regularly harassed and attacked both off-line and online, when the overwhelming message from the Western LGBTQ world is that an LGBTQ person who is also a Jew is a traitor to their own kind. And it gets worse and worse each year as more LGBTQ people trade in their own safety and welfare and future prospects to spend their time, energy, and money hating Jews. Not only is it disgustingly hateful, it's counterproductive. LGBTQ rights are being attacked and stripped away all around the Western world, but people care more about investing their energy into best excluding Jews, Jews who, LGBTQ or not, would be and are supportive of LGBTQ causes. It's deeply insidious.

My schedule isn't more important than anyone else's. I know that. You know that, and you know that you were reading my post in bad faith. Jews are not the only people who would benefit from important Pride events not being scheduled on Saturdays. People who still have to work on Saturdays would benefit too. And I know you read a tiny snippet of my post and blacked out, because in that post I also mentioned Pride events being scheduled on Jewish holidays (Shavuot often times falls out in June). I think if you are in a community with a large number of Jews who are contributing members, it's only basic decency to be considerate. I am annoyed at conventions that do that same thing, mind you. But "niche interest conventions" are not a broad, umbrella movement the way the Western LGBTQ movement is. A science fiction convention isn't part of the same movement as a WWII history airshow, for example, and they are often not run by the same kinds of people and they are often not even attended by the same kinds of people.

(i am aware the rest of europe was doing this, but in this specific instance it is only relevant to bring the netherlands into the conversation)

I really don't think that's a healthy way to look at media.

It’s a bit like saying you won’t watch Schindler’s List because do you know what was happening in Nazi-occupied Poland? Concentration camps.

It was also used in Australia btw. And just five fucking years ago I would have had to say “is.” The gay panic defence was finally outlawed in our last state in 2020. It was most recently used in 2015.

Your "natural scavengers" who "Just have very different ideas of how property works and what counts as theft", with "An optimistic and opportunistic attitude - How was I meant to know you were still using that, when it looked so tempting and so unattended?" who "Interpret these situations to their own benefit"...

The idea of a race of people who are just naturally happy to scavenge the edges of your society, who are cheeky thieves but also resourceful recyclers so any well-ran city should welcome them for keeping the place clean even if it does mean the odd lawnmower goes missing, who just naturally have lower standards than other people so will happily eat roadkill and wear secondhand clothes, and have a parallel society to yours with incomprehensible property laws that always seem to favour them... This is an old, old libel about both Romany Gypsies and An Lucht Siúil and Nawken and the other Traveller ethnicities in the UK, and Roma and Sinti especially in the rest of Europe.