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Most people who do not identify as transgender would not mind being misgendered. This is because their gender is rooted in reality.

So, for instance, I had short hair for a long time, and I sometimes would get misgendered and be called 'he.' While of course it may cause some slight annoyance or maybe just some insecurity about my haircut, it didn't send me into some sort of spiral, and I didn't demand that that person immediately call me 'she.' Maybe I'd just politely correct them and say, 'Oh, I'm a girl.' But even if they didn't and said, 'No, you're a boy,' I would be fine going about my day because I know the truth.

People who live with an identity that is not rooted in reality require everyone around them to sort of play the game.

Part of my identity is being a mother, and if someone chose to say, 'You're not really a mother,' I would say, 'Okay, you're just mistaken because I know the truth of the matter, because there is something I can point to that is based in reality to show that I am in fact a mother.

And if someone refused to call me a mother, even though I know that's what I am, and I chose to say, 'Call me this, or else I'm going to unalive myself,' I think that would show a big mental instability on my part.

People can ultimately have preferences for how they are perceived by the outside world, but you cannot demand the rest of the world play into something that just isn't based in reality.

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"Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing, 'Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up, must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the law of gravity." – Dan Barker

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." – Richard Dawkins, quoting Robert M. Pirsig.

"What do you call a fixed, false belief not rooted in reality that persists for > 30 days despite evidence and information to the contrary? A DELUSION." – Andrew Zywiec, M.D., paraphrasing the DSM-5 on Delusions and Delusional Disorder

I think it's ironic that the people who say that everything is a social construct don't think we notice them trying to socially construct an alternate reality.

Things that are real don't require others to keep affirming that they're real. They're real whether we like it or not.

Being harangued that failng to collaborate in someone else's belief invalidates their identity or even existence, gives the game away. If my lack of participation in your belief invalidates that belief, then it was never real to begin with.

A conviction can be deeply personal and unassailable – but only if it stays personal. The moment it demands affirmation from everyone else, it becomes a matter of public concern and faces public scrutiny; we can all have an opinion on it. There's no protected middle ground: no deeply held personal belief that society is required to affirm without question.

No belief gets to be both sacredly private and imposably universal.

I've said the same thing about religion and it's no different here.

The relative lack of megafauna on modern Earth is actually quite atypical compared to most other periods of Earth's history since megafauna first evolved IIRC. Even as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago, we had all sorts of giant ice age creatures. For most of the age of dinosaurs, there were numerous terrestrial species that weighed multiple tons or even tens of tons, including predators. Whereas in the modern world, we have exactly zero multi-ton terrestrial predators, only a few in the oceans, and only a handful of multi-ton herbivores (and none that regularly get over 10 tons, IIRC the biggest elephant ever was like 11 tons).

The largest eagle, Haast's eagle (Hieraaetus moorei), had an estimated wingspan of 10 feet (and even then it's noted for having short wings relative to its body size), stood 3 feet tall and weighed as much as 40 pounds.

The largest flying bird, Argentavis magnificens, is estimated to have had a wingspan of 20 feet, stood nearly 5 feet tall and weighed over 150 pounds. Pelagornis sandersi had a longer wingspan (by up to 20%) but only weighed half as much.

Quetzalcoatlus northropi, one of the largest pterosaurs and therefor one of the largest animals to take flight, had a wingspan of 36 feet, stood 16 feet tall and even the higher estimates put it at less than 500 pounds.

How does this compare to the Great Eagles? Well, the only official measurement from Tolkien we get is for Thorondor, the king of the eagles, who was said to have wings that spanned 30 fathoms.

That's a hundred and eighty feet.

Even if we only defer to the eagles as presented in the Peter Jackson movies, we're still talking about birds with wingspans estimated to be somewhere between 50 to 75 feet, stand 20 feet tall and (if scaled up from the golden eagle) weigh nearly 7 tons. That's bigger than most non-avian theropod dinosaurs. They would make even a T. rex look small.

By: Emma Hilton

Published: Aug 20, 2022

As ever, let’s begin with a story. And, trust me, by the end of this piece, you’re going to know a lot more about creationism than you expected.

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In the 1920s, in concert with many other American states, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed the Butler Act, making it illegal for state public schools to: “teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” In other words, they banned schools from teaching the theory of evolution.

Three months later, Tennessee science teacher John Scopes was on trial, charged with teaching the theory of evolution, a crime he was ultimately found guilty of. He was fined $100 – about $1500 in today’s money – so it could have been an expensive affair for him, had he not got off on a really boring administrative technicality.

Yet, despite the evidence against him and his own confession, he was an innocent man. Scopes was not guilty of teaching the theory of evolution. He admitted to a crime he had not committed. He even coached his students in their testimonies against him. So why would he admit to this wrongdoing of which he was entirely innocent? Why would he contrive apparent guilt? In protest. In protest against a law he viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the pursuit of scientific truth.

The history of creationism and education laws in the US is turbulent and often opaquely legalese, especially for those of us unfamiliar with US law. Some of the methods of the wider creationist movement, however, will be immediately recognisable as they are employed by a new movement, a new religion, Sex Denialism.

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Method 1. Like Creationists did with “species”, Sex Denialists aim to render human descriptions of the natural world “arbitrary”, and thus, a “social construct” that need not exist if we chose to reject it. Never mind that these “arbitrary” understandings of sex appear to be surprisingly similar classifications across all cultures and civilisations, with people happily churning out babies, perhaps oblivious to the argument that this basic biological function is all in their head.

The deconstruction of established scientific knowledge spotlights tricky “boundary cases.” For Creationists, the “missing links’ in the fossil record are unlikely to have a personal problem with being weaponised in pursuit of stupidity. But this is a very real problem in the modern world for people with disorders of sex development whose sex characteristics are ambiguous or atypical, and who are constantly invoked - even fetishized - as “not males” or “not females” to “prove” that understandings of sex are somehow no more than human whimsy. And, with no obvious explanation, why the existence of DSDs makes it apparently-impossible to identify sex in perfectly-typical newborns.

People with DSDs have complex and often traumatic medical histories, perhaps struggling to understand their bodies, and they deserve more respect than to be casually and thoughtlessly used as a postemodernist “gotcha” by the very people so horribly triggered by a pronoun.

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Method 2. Creationists and Sex Denialists alike lean on the development of sciencey-sounding language to create a veneer of academic rigour. Creationists invented “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” to argue that structures like the eye are just too complicated to have evolved. Sex Denialists try to beat people over the head with the dazzling language of “bimodal distributions arranged in n-dimensional space.” Come again?

Creationists, unable to publish in mainstream science journals because they weren’t producing, well, anything that looked like science, established their own “journals”. The lazier Sex Denialists have taken a shortcut and captured existing journals, albeit limited to more news-based ones and to occasional blogs about gender (which is not sex) and - reminiscent of an eye so complex we cannot possibly understand it’s existence without an intelligent God at the helm - about how developmental biology is soooo complicated. It is, you can get a PhD in it and everything, and it’s rather good training for breaking complicated biological systems down to identify fundamental properties and principles (reductionism is not a dirty word for developmental biologists). But this does not mean sex is complicated – the internal combustion engine is complicated but cars still fundamentally go forwards, backwards and, unexpectedly and usually unintentionally, sideways. Occasionally, a journal will remind us that discussing the biology of sex is mean - OK, good luck with that at your doctor’s surgery.

Remarkably, many such blogs and articles are written by scientists who simultaneously deny sex to their captured fanbase while writing academic papers about how female flies make shells for their eggs, about the development of ovaries or testes in fish, about how males make sperm. The dissonance must be hell.

The current editor-in-chief at Nature, the first female to hold this position, studied sex determination in worms for her PhD, and she now presides over a journal with an editorial policy to insert disclaimers about the binary nature of sex into spotlight features about research on, for example, different death rates in male and female cystic fibrosis patients. The authors of the studies are not prevaricating or handwaving about sex, but the editorial team is “bending the knee”. I used to research a genetic disorder that was male-lethal – that is, male human babies died early in gestation. I’d love to know if this disclaimer would be applied there.

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Method 3. Creationists were famous for debate strategies like The Gish Gallop, named for Duane Gish, a prominent creationist who didn’t like the fossil record. What it boils down to is: throw any old argument, regardless of its validity, in quick succession at your opponent and then claim any dismissal or missed response - or even hesitation in response - as a '“score” for your side. In Twitter parlance, we know this as “sealioning”, in political propaganda as the “firehose of falsehood”, although Wikipedia also suggests that it is covered by the term “bullshit”.

Typically: “So, what about intersex people? what about this article about slugs? what about an XY person with a uterus? what about the fa’afafine? what about that article about seahorses? look at this pretty picture of a cuttlefish, what about what about whataboutery what about clownfish clownfish clownfish?” The aim is not to discuss or debate, it is to force submission from frustration or exhaustion.

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Method 4. Creationists don’t like that we are descended form primates, and Sex Denialists also ring fence humans as separate from not just monkeys but the rest of the living world. They employ special pleading for special descriptions that frame humans as the chosen ones, such that the same process of reproducing new individuals - common to humans and asparagus, an observation I chose because it seems superficially silly - requires its own description, one that accounts for gender identity. In this, Sex Denialists come closest to their Creationist cousins, bordering on outright denial of evolution.

In the Scopes trial, which saw discussion of whether Eve was actually created from Adam’s rib and ruminations on where Cain got his wife, Scopes was defended by a legal group who had begun scouting for a test case subject as soon as the Tennessee ban was enacted. This legal group claimed to advocate for:

"Freedom of speech for ideas from the most extreme left such as anarchists and socialists, to the most extreme right including the Ku Klux Klan, Henry Ford, and others who would now be considered more toward the Fascist end of the spectrum."

The legal group so keen to defend the right to speak the truth, in this case a fundamental, observable scientific truth? The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a group whose modern day social media presence promotes nonsense like:

"The notion of biological sex was developed for the exclusive purpose of being weaponized against people." "Sex and gender are different words for the same thing [that is] a set of politically and socially contingent notions of embodied and expressed identity."

They share articles asserting that biological sex is rooted in white supremacy. I mean, I know the US has a traumatic racial history, but are they saying black people didn’t know what sex was until White Man taught them?

Since the Scopes case, the ACLU have fought against many US laws preventing, or the teaching of evolution. I cannot process the irony of a group of people historically and consistently prepared to robustly defend the truth of evolution now denying one of the most important biological foundations of evolutionary theory.

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How do we fight this current craze of Sex Denialism? A major blow for creationism teaching was delivered in 1986 while the US Supreme Court were considering a Louisiana state law requiring creationism to be taught alongside evolution. The Louisiana law was struck down, in part influenced by the expert opinions, submitted to the court, of scientists who put aside their individual and, as one of them has since described “often violent” differences on Theory X and Experiment Y, to present a unified defence of scientific truth over religious belief. 76 Nobel laureates, 17 state academies of science and a handful of scientific organisations all got behind this single cause, and made a very real change.

Support for creationism has slowly ebbed away and the US is in a much more sensible position these days, although I still meet the occasional student from a Southern state who didn’t learn about evolution until college.

Sadly, one of the Nobel laureates has highlighted how unusual this collective response was and that he could not imagine any other issue that would receive the same groundswell of community support. Although he forged his career listening out for the Big Bang, so maybe I need to go through the list and find the biologists.

Part of the problem petitioning biologists to speak out is not necessarily fear of being cancelled or whatever, but simple lack of awareness of the issue, or incredulity that it is being taken remotely seriously. I’ve been working on a legal document and was discussing with a colleague about my efforts to find a citation for the statement: “there are two sexes, male and female”. He laughed at the idea that this would require a citation, told me to check a textbook, then realised that this statement is so simple that it would not even be included in a textbook.

And he’s right. I can find chapters in textbooks and hundreds of academic papers dedicated to how males and females are made, how they develop, how they differ, yet very few that feel the need to preface any of this with the statement “There are two sexes, male and female”. It is apparently something that biologists do not think needs to be said.

But of course, I think they are wrong, and that we live in a time where it does need to be said, where some aspects of society are being restructured around a scientific untruth, and where females will suffer.

Without recognition of and language to describe our anatomy, and the experiences that stem from that anatomy, mostly uninvited, we can neither detect nor measure things like rates of violence against women, the medical experiences, the social experiences of women and girls.

And, as for creationism, the reality of sex perhaps needs to be said by those with scientific authority, in unambiguous terms. Otherwise, we are living in a society that tolerates nonsense like there is no such thing as male or female, that differences evident to our own eyes are not real, that anatomies readily observable and existing in monkey and man alike do not actually exist. I’m sure this last assertion has the full support of the Creationist community. And perhaps, as for creationism, a true tipping point will be tested when it is our children being taught these scientific untruths, or worse, when it is illegal to say different.

At the end of his trial, the only words Scopes uttered in court were these:

“Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom—that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom.”

I do not exaggerate when I say we are dealing with a new type of religion, a new form of creationism and a new assault on scientific truth. This is the Age of Unenlightenment. I also do not exaggerate when I say it may take a high profile court case to rebalance the public discourse around sex. There is only so far that letters, opinion articles and public statements from eminent scientists about the nature of sex can go.

here’s the thing, I’m not sure we ever see an egg in Avatar. but assuming there are in fact things that lay eggs (maybe the chicken-pig?) then they should probably be native to the Earth Kingdom, since chickens in our world first popped up from domesticated junglefowl in Southeast Asia, right next to China (and also India, but there’s nothing Indian-inspired in Avatar).

you might be thinking “But Mg. Tesika, shouldn’t that mean Toph should know about them? She’s from the Earth Kingdom!” but au contraire, mon ami. omelettes are almost certainly lower-class or at least lower-effort food, meaning you’re more likely to come across them in places like the scattered Earth Kingdom villages or Ba Sing Se’s lower ring. Zuko has been to both of these places; Toph has not.

In The Fortuneteller, a platypus bear lays an egg in fright, which Sokka picks up with plans to eat (before accidentally dropping it on his head).

In Zuko Alone, some kids throw an egg at the corrupt soldiers, which Zuko then makes a sarcastic remark about a chicken flying over.

That golden egg-shaped thing in The Firebending Masters? That was literally a dragon egg, specifically the one that would eventually hatch into Zuko's pet dragon, Druk.

And that's just off the top of my head!

[Goji is sitting comfortably, reading the morning paper. He glances up, his expression somewhere between boredom, apathy, and very mild annoyance, as if the weather forecast has changed.]

Goji: Pays the bills.

Galadriel was never "under Sauron's thrall." That's something ROP made up. In Unfinished Tales, she was the only one in Eregion who suspected that Annatar was lying about being an emissary of the Valar. Celebrimbor was deceived by him. She was not. She was certainly not "under his thrall." No, not even because she had Nenya.

Yes, when Frodo offered her the One Ring, she was tempted. It could have given her the power to prevent the fading of Lothlórien. But when she makes this speech in the book, and in the Peter Jackson movies, it's her own thought, she's not repeating something that Sauron said to her once:

“You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”

These are Galadriel's words. Her words. Not Sauron's. And she was tempted by the One Ring because she could have been a more powerful queen, not Sauron's queen. Like, you guys really took one of the most powerful and complex female characters in Tolkien's works and you made her story all about a man and his power over her and his manipulation of her. Fuck off.

That's without factoring in anything to do with Tolkien.

When you do consider that it's an adaption of Tolkien, it becomes infinitely worse because of the things mentioned above. It twists canon, invents things that completely go against the original intent and makes the world/characters infinitely more shallow and hollow.

And the fact that, somehow, people are confusing anything in RoP for what Tolkien created is the biggest sin of all.

Not using the Silmarillion does not equal poor dialogue, writing, costumes and production.

Not using the Silmarillion does not equal screwing up the storyline of how the rings were forged.

Not using the Silmarillion does not equal ELROND KISSING GALADRIEL ON THE MOUTH (yes, that actually happened in the show).

They FIRED the Tolkien scholar on staff. They never intended to be faithful.

Let’s not forget the infamous podcast where they basically talked smack about Tolkien’s Annatar plot and “how no one would ever fall for it” and why they went with the Halbrand idea. Only for audiences to reject it, and so they went back and did the Annatar plot they should’ve done in the first place except terrible because they’d already ruined the reveal with Halbrand!

By: Damo

Published: Nov 15, 2024

This month is #IslamophobiaAwarenessMonth. The ostensible goal of this initiative is to “deconstruct and challenge stereotypes about Islam and Muslims”. A noble aim you might think, as apparently do the organisations, institutions & individuals signalling their support.

However, Islamophobia Awareness Month was co-founded by the Islamist group MEND - an organisation closely tied to the terrorist support group CAGE and created with the purpose of “battering the Israel lobby” according to its founder Sufyan Ismail. 

MEND’s idea of challenging stereotypes appears to consist of attacking liberal Muslims & partnering with Salafist hate preachers such as Haitham al Haddad & Shakeel Begg.

Haddad supports death for apostasy. Begg was found by a judge to have “encouraged religious violence.”

One of MEND’s former directors, the now CAGE-employed Azad Ali, is also no stranger to court cases. This unrepentant Hamas supporter launched a libel suit against the Daily Mail for describing him as a hardline extremist who supports the killing of UK troops in Iraq. He lost.

MEND’s founder has pushed the scare-mongering assertion that British society hates Muslims, and has falsely and irresponsibly claimed that UK law does not consider threatening or committing violence against Muslims to be a crime.

Yet for a group who launched an anti-Islamophobia initiative, MEND are not keen on the infinitely more moderate group Tell Mama who exist for the same purpose. MEND have described them as being headed by a “pro-Zionist” & criticised their liberal position on homosexuality.

MEND were also less than enthused with the appointment of liberal Muslim Sara Kahn to lead the counter extremism commission, with one of their officials referring to her as “an Oreo” – a racist reference to those who are deemed brown on the outside but white underneath.

In 2018 head of counter-terrorism policing, Sir Mark Rowley, aptly criticised MEND’s undermining of efforts to tackle hate crime - referencing their absurd and divisive claim that Britain was "approaching the conditions that preceded the Holocaust".

It should be clear that partnering with extremists groups like MEND and their cohorts, or otherwise legitimising them, does nothing to challenge actual bigotry, and that anyone interested in actually making a difference in this area should be giving MEND a very wide berth.

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In other words, "Islamophobia Awareness Month" is completely bogus, a tactic by Islamists to try to culturally bed in the idea that any resistance to the demands of Islam constitutes bigotry; namely, the imaginary crime of "Islamophobia."

The last time I posted about the fact "Islamophobia" doesn't exist, a number of people lost their minds, calling me the usual, predictable, tedious epithets.

So, before anyone screams at me like a blue-hair banshee, know that I will block and remove all traces of your reply or reblog unless you meet the following challenge: describe a real, legitimate, justified criticism of Islam in a way that does NOT and CANNOT constitute "Islamophobia."

That is my threshold. These kinds of people like to pretend that they're not trying to censor all criticism of Islam, they're just trying to protect people, by pretending that I just don't know enough (when I demonstrably know more than they do) and that it's the way I'm criticising it. So, demonstrate how it's done. If you cannot meet this straightforward challenge - and I'm pretty sure you can't, and you know you can't - then don't bother wasting my time or your own, because nobody needs to listen do you and you've proven my point.

I'll give you some more numbers:

2,200 servicemen killed at Pearl Harbor. We go on to kill 3.5 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night.

2,800 Americans on 9/11. We go on to kill 400,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq. We weren't accused of genocide.

You had-- if Mexico had elected a Jihadist cartel to run their country, and then they incurred into Texas and on a per capita basis, killed 35,000 people, or the population of the University of Texas, and on the way back took the freshman class at SMU hostage and hid them under tunnels, what would we do? It'd be the great Sonora radioactive parking lot.

But Jews are not allowed, and Israel is not allowed to prosecute a war. And they are prosecuting a war more humanely than we have done. The ratio of combatants to civilians is... of civilian death to combatant mortality is lower than it was in Mosul, lower than it was in Japan, lower than it was in Germany.

So, there's just a different standard for Jews in Israel when it comes to prosecuting a war. They're allowed to fight back to a truce, but unlike America or any other western nation that is attacked this viciously, they're not allowed to win a war.

It's a double standard.

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Israel has absolutely nothing to apologise for.

Hamas killed 1200 and kidnapped 200 in one day. But pro-Hamas supporters don't consider 1200 per day a "genocide."

So, let's do some math.

If we take the current numbers of ~35,200 throughout the current 224 days of the war (since Oct 7), that's 157 per day, which is somehow a "genocide." A number which includes Hamas combatants, who are fair game. Estimates are about 13-14,000 combatants killed, which makes it ~21-22,000 civilian deaths.

In 224 days, that's roughly ~100 civilians per day, versus Hamas racking up 1200 civilians per day. And you're delusional if you think Hamas wouldn't salivate at killing 1200 or more every day... by hand. They've explicitly said they intend to repeat October 7 "again and again."

Let's go further.

In the sixty years between 1960 and 2020, the "Palestine" population rose 4.0m. 60 years = ~21,900 days. That's a net gain - i.e. births minus deaths - of 182 per day. And that's an average across all sixty years. As the graph shows, the slope of the green line rises noticeably indicating a greater change over time, so it would be higher more recently.

But, even taking only this average of 182, the change of "Palestinian" population isn't even in the negative.

There's no definition of "genocide" that sees the population continuing to grow faster than it declines, where births exceed deaths.

genocide | ˈjenəˌsīd |  noun the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group: a campaign of genocide | [count noun] :  news of genocides went unreported.

If Israel wanted to "genocide" the "Palestinians," they're doing an extremely piss-poor job of it. Especially when they drop evacuation warnings and set up safe areas that will be free from military operations.

Civilian deaths are unfortunate, but they're a fact of war. Nobody was wringing their hands over whether the bombing of Dresden was justified.

[ A pile of bodies before cremation after a bombing raid on Dresden, 1945 ]

LOL. Sure, hon. How much did that new globe cost, because you're projecting. You're talking about yourself. Something is not right in the pit of your stomach, and you're projecting it onto me.

Here's what's funny. Zionism is political, not religious. It's not about making everyone Jewish, its about maintaining a political entity of Israel.

Zionism | ˈzīəˌnizəm | noun a movement for (originally) the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel. It was established as a political organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, and was later led by Chaim Weizmann.

So, by saying this:

genocidal religious extremists

What you've accidentally done is admit that you're not talking about political Zionism, you're talking about religious Judaism. You've revealed yourself as a Nazi-grade antisemite for all the world to see.

Israel could annihilate the entire Gaza Strip, but don't. Hamas want to obliterate Israel, but can't. You haven't even figured that out yet. If there was an actual "genocide," it would have been over months ago. How monumentally dumb are you?

There is no "genocide." There is a war. They are different and you know it. A war Hamas, the Nazis Of Color (NOC), started. One you celebrated until it became clear Hamas is inevitably going to lose. It's only a matter of time.

The IDF said it was intended to enable residents to "evacuate from specific places for their safety if required." 

Residents in multiple numbered areas were sent SMS warnings on Friday, the military said.  

"The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas," the warnings said, urging people in the sectors to seek shelter and "stay away from all military activity of every kind."

"As someone who teaches division level urban warfare, what has really blown my mind is that Israel issued maps to the civilians [in Gaza] telling them where they would be operating each day. … I've never seen a military do that," said Spencer, who visited Israel last month and toured the combat zone in and around Gaza. 

"Doing this puts the attacking military at a disadvantage because it signals to the defending military what they’re doing," he said. "The element of surprise is usually a top priority in wars, but Israel is giving up all of that in order to prevent civilian harm.

"If that is going to be the standard going forward, I don't know how the U.S. military and others are going to do that. We’re not going to send text messages. We’re not going to be able to put out maps, even if we do decide to give warnings."

What the hell kind of "genocide" involves sending text messages and distributing maps of where Israel's military initiatives will be conducted to the same people your pea-sized brain thinks they want to exterminate? Do you even comprehend how completely fucking retarded you are? Of course you can't.

Israel does everything it can to minimize civilian casualties. Hamas does everything it can to maximize civilian casualties.

The civilian to target (i.e. Hamas) casualty ratio for the Israel initiatives has been 1.5:1. In normal urban warfare, 9:1 is regarded as acceptable. You have literally nothing to back up your stupid, ignorant claim. It's false. It's demonstrably false. It's ridiculously false.

And that's when you started pretending and lying and gaslighting and lying some more. You know it's not a genocide. You know it. You know it for a fact. You're just repeating stupid mantras because you're a shallow, mindless follower and you're afraid of what would happen if you sat down and thought for yourself. You might lose your tribe and your unwarranted moral certitude.

What you're angry about is that I tell the truth and I don't care who it upsets, while you're too cowardly to step out of line with the authoritarian tribalists you've associated yourself with. You're terrified they'll turn on you, and you're taking it out on me because I don't carry the same burden as you.

What's fascinating is that your whole "Zionist" schtick is literally the same "Jews control the world" tinfoil hat conspiracy nutcase crap as right-wing cranks have been spewing for years. The far-left and the far-right are now collaborating on their conspiracy theories, apparently, because you're completely in sync. You're regurgitating far-right talking points, yet you think you're being original and progressive.

So, let's loop back to this, because it's jaw-droppingly astonishing.

genocidal religious extremists

It's the most self-unaware thing I've heard of in months.

You want to talk genocidal religious extremists? You support literal fundamentalist terrorists. Actual, literal Islamic far-far-far-right, fundamentalist terrorists. People who murder gay people and throw acid in the faces of women who do not cover properly.

That law is shari'a. That means, no music. That means no memes, no fandoms, no art with representations of living creatures. That means one religion and one religion only: Islam. That means no history other than Islamic history. You want to leave? You die. You object? You die. You violate the tenets of Islam? You die.

Every single thing you love, they hate. Everything you are, they hate. Everything about you, they hate. They want to destroy all of it. Nothing about you is acceptable within shari'a.

Nothing. Everything about you disappears when the genocidal religious extremists of Hamas get their way.

You're an ignorant, stupid, smooth-brained lemming being used by religious fanatics who hate you and intend to murder you when they achieve Islamic supremacy.

You doubt me? Here's a Palestinian imam saying so himself.

It's absolutely astonishing how mindlessly ignorant and desperate you are to be murdered by the totalitarian fanatics for whom you work overtime as an apologist.

Imagine being a "they/them" and defending the most extreme far-right oppressive, misogynistic, homophobic, violent ideology that has ever existed, and thinking you were a moral and intellectual genius.

They want to kill you. They intend to kill you. They hate you. They will not accept you. They regard you as an abomination. When they get their hands on you, your "pronouns" will be was/were.

That's the blunt reality.

https://quranx.com/27.55

Do you indeed approach men with desire instead of women? Rather, you are a people behaving ignorantly."

https://quranx.com/29.28

And [mention] Lot, when he said to his people, "Indeed, you commit such immorality as no one has preceded you with from among the worlds.

https://quranx.com/26.173

And We rained upon them a rain [of stones], and evil was the rain of those who were warned.

https://quranx.com/9.29

Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.

https://quranx.com/Hadith/Bukhari/USC-MSA/Volume-1/Book-8/Hadith-387

Narrated Anas bin Malik: Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said, "I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.' And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally and their reckoning will be with Allah."

Just because you hate yourself, your life and the safe, comfortable, western world you live in doesn't mean the rest of us are going to let you take us down with you.

You want to annihilate yourself? Go for it. But you won't take the rest of us along off the cliff you're determined to go flying off.

"Lived experience" is the same thing as "I feel Jesus in my heart."

By: Salomé Sibonex

Published: Jan 29, 2024

I’ve been seeking a reprieve from the ugly sides of our world lately and I found it in Hogwarts Wizarding School of Magic.

Even though Harry Potter’s world isn’t utopian, the whimsy of magic and the drama of a battle between good and evil helped wash away the ugly banality of the real world’s problems. There was one problem I couldn’t find a reprieve from, though. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry encounters a problem I’m all too familiar with and that lives at the core of many societal issues. At this point in the series, Harry’s known for his infamous past as a child who survived a direct attack from the embodiment of evil, Voldemort, and his battles against evil and chaos conquering Hogwarts. And yet, even Harry Potter in a world of elves and flying brooms can’t escape the ever-present human problem of conformity.

Watching Harry Potter struggle to overcome other people’s desire for conformity and disdain for anyone who threatens it made me realize: many people cheering this fictional protagonist on would fight against him in real life.

Despite having proven his loyalty, courage, and inclination to fight against evil, Harry Potter’s warning that Voldemort has returned is met with annoyance and disbelief from everyone but his close friends and the embodiment of wisdom, Dumbledore. This problem introduces a crucial element of what causes a lot of today’s destructive conformity: motivated reasoning. Similar to confirmation bias, motivated reasoning happens when someone is motivated to either agree or disagree with new information based on their current beliefs, thus letting that motivation shape their response more than whether the information is true.

You often hear people lament how, despite having access to all the information in the world, it seems like people are getting dumber. A big part of why access to information alone doesn’t reduce ignorance is because of motivated reasoning. People today are inclined to fight against information that challenges their worldview, often because it’s just easier than updating it.

It would be easier for his peers and the authorities if Harry Potter was wrong about danger on the horizon, so they decide to believe he’s wrong, regardless of whether he’s wrong. They deride and dismiss him with accusations I’ve faced myself when sharing inconvenient truths; his classmates scoff “he just wants to be famous!”, which our culture has shortened to “grifter!” Harry Potter—the infamous beacon of hope and repeated warrior for good over evil—is accused of grifting by his own classmates simply because it’d be easier if that were true. Unfortunately for them, it’s not. 

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is a masterpiece for many reasons, but one reason is that her characters and the stories they live out are so real despite happening in such a surreal world. Watching the scene where Harry Potter tries to warn people about a problem he’s proven himself trustworthy and competent to assess—only to be shouted down by people who want the easy route today at the risk of hardship tomorrow—felt uncomfortably real.

I criticized the manipulative pressure activists used to make people pledge allegiance to BLM without researching the organization (which turned out to be corrupt) or the movement itself (which turned out to be a guise for spreading destructive ideas in the name of “anti-racism”). When I speak about that today, I’m praised. But then the Israel attack on October 7th happened and suddenly the same message against letting social pressure rush you to pledge allegiance to positions you don’t understand now got me derided for not “using my platform” properly. The pattern repeats.

You can be the same person with the same message, but other people will respond to you differently based on where the winds of culture have blown them this week.

Unprincipled people are constantly shifting their targets because their worldviews aren’t tethered to anything deeper than seeking social approval and avoiding cognitive dissonance. They will wish death on you for not posting a flag emoji while claiming to hold the moral high ground.

Unprincipled people believe their frantic rushing from Current Thing to Current Thing is proof of their moral character, but it’s actually proof of how unreliable the opinions of anyone but your close friends and personal Dumbledores can be. Just look at J.K. Rowling’s experience. 

While the fact that people with Harry Potter tattoos were the quickest to turn on the creator of their favorite story simply because her opinions didn’t sway with the ever-changing winds of culture (she maintains the once-uncontested reality that trans-women are trans-women and biological women are biological women), that’s only one example of a conformist culture that hates heroes. Harry Potter himself is the perfect litmus test for whether we have a culture that praises heroes or villains.

Forget about Harry’s magic abilities. What truly makes Harry Potter a magical character isn’t his ability to wield magic, which most of the magic world can do—it’s his character that makes him stand apart from all others. If Harry Potter were a real, non-magical person in our society today, his unusually strong character would make him a pariah. Unlike most of the magical world’s people, Harry Potter is pursuing a goal far bigger than himself; this makes him the target of both disgruntled plebs and power-hungry tyrants. People who don’t have a strong and honorable mission in life hate seeing people who do—it either reminds them they’re wasting their lives or threatens their ability to fulfill their evil mission. A lot of arm-chair internet activists and government officials would hate Harry Potter. 

It’s not just that Harry has a unique destiny that makes his character compelling—it’s the fact that he has the courage and determination to pursue that destiny and develop the necessary skills to do so that makes his character admirable. Every person—especially in an individualistic culture that valorizes people who make their own way in life—wants to feel like they have a unique life path that leads to greatness. Luckily for those living in a free society, they do. Unlike in centrally-planned economies like Cuba and China, where your destiny is mostly determined by what your government allows, people in free countries can determine the course of their lives.

The government doesn’t dictate what you can study, what businesses you can open, how many kids you can have, or how much money you’re allowed to make. We’re free to imagine a future for ourselves and set out to develop the skills needed to achieve it. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone will.

Businesses fail, personal tragedies happen, and obstacles appear. The people who give up on their journey or never get going but believe they could’ve done otherwise harbor regrets, and those regrets easily turn to resentment. These are the bitter people who see the hope and success of others as a stinging reminder of their failures. People who’ve given up or never tried to forge the future they wanted would hate some as determined and ambitious as Harry Potter.

Despite being an orphan, a victim of neglect by his step-family, stalked by a violent gang of death-eaters working for Voldemort, and a childhood victim of assault, Harry Potter doesn’t wear the label of victim.

In a culture like ours that sees victimhood as a hierarchy that dictates your treatment, an individual who refuses to identify as a victim is inherently subversive.

Instead of demanding special treatment because of his hardships, Harry Potter strives not just to overcome them, but uses his hardships as fuel to make him stronger than he would be without them. One might argue it would’ve been better if Harry Potter’s parents were never killed by Voldemort and thus he would’ve never been fated to fight him—and if your idea of a good life is ease and subsistence, that would be true—but your life would make a terrible story. Harry Potter’s victimization by Voldemort’s evil is what imbued him with the ability to become a hero. With darkness comes light, but in a culture that doesn’t believe in light, many people linger in the dark and resent anyone who reminds them their darkness is a choice.

Harry Potter is the archetypical hero. He pursues a mission that starts with his personal journey of understanding himself and helping those close to him, which leads him to help the world. He goes above and beyond what others do to become worthy of the future he wants. He never identifies with the many ways he’s been victimized, but instead transmutes his hardships into victories. And for all these heroic qualities, Harry Potter would be maligned by our culture as privileged, “alt-right,” and much like his creator has experienced, his efforts to do good would be met with hostility and accusations of grifting from people who care more about the ease of clinging to their worldview than discovering the truth. 

Kong before Jia: World never did anything for me. Why should I care?

Jia: *smiles*

Jia: *holds up her Kong doll and waves its little hand*

Most of the responses are not about that, though. Most of them are mentioning the inaccuracy of depicting evolution as a linear process ending with Homo sapiens, instead of one constantly branching and spawning new variations over time. Which would be a fair criticism if the image claimed to be a representation of evolution as a whole, but... it's literally titled "Human Evolution". Of course it follows a single line from the origin of life to Homo sapiens! It makes no sense to complain that it does not show parallel branches leading to other modern species; you might as well complain that a map of France is inaccurate because it neglects to include Japan. Drawing my own family tree is not a claim that the whole of human history culminates in my own birth.

(Maybe I'm oversensitive here because I've made a diagram of the same type myself, and I'm quite satisfied of it.)

Particularly curious is that comment that calls OP's image "dangerous", because it could lead to the misunderstandings above described is one were to completely fail to understand its point. I wonder if the same person would claim that 2d world maps are dangerous misinformation because someone might conclude from them that Earth is flat and rectangular.

I can't help but have a very uncharitable thought. Few people mention the actual factual inaccuracies in the chart because that requires specific knowledge that most people, even most users of /r/biology, do not have. But plenty of people jump at the opportunity of saying "evolution is not linear", "humankind is not the endpoint of evolution", "we don't descend from monkeys we share a common ancestor with them" not because they have understood these statements and know their relevance to the case, but because they have memorized these tidbits as the sort of things you are supposed to say about evolution to show that you are not one of those contemptible Science Deniers, while not requiring you to learn any more actual biology than the average creationist.

Fantasy atheist: I don't believe you.

Fantasy god: HI THERE

Fantasy no-longer-an-atheist: Oh! Never mind.

--

Real-life religious: My god is real.

Real-life atheist: I don't believe you.