"Remember You're Loved, And You Always Will Be"

Okay, sure, let's have it out. I imagine I'll pretty much piss off everyone with this.

First: the only confidence I have in my understanding of the political situation of the Middle East is that I have no fucking understanding whatsoever of the political situation in the Middle East. Sure, I've read plenty. I have friends of many many stripes. But I'm not a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, folks: I know enough to know how much I don't know, and how much I know is tons.

Second, you say that person is a "zionist." There are three things I find pretty annoying about this as a defense attorney. One is that the term is not defined, and the other is that there is a complete lack of evidence. The third is the implicit assumption that being a "zionist" is enough to wholeheartedly condemn anyone.

Let's tackle these one by one. And, once again, I am neither a scholar of Jewish history nor Middle Eastern history nor anything except American criminal law.

First: definition. There are many possible meanings of zionist that I see people use. One potential meaning of "zionist" seems to be "is Jewish, but fails to disavow Israel as fast and loud as I personally want them to." Sometimes the meaning of "zionist" is just "is Jewish." Sometimes it's "a Jewish person who wishes for a return to a very distant ancestral homeland." Sometimes it's "wholehearted supporter of Israel's war crimes." A lot of pointless arguing, it seems to me, is centered around someone saying they are zionist, i.e., they would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country, and another person hears that they are zionist, i.e. they enjoy wholesale slaughter of civilians.

Second: No evidence. Self-explanatory. You are an anon. I don't know why I'm supposed to trust your word. I read police reports for a living and I am supposed to be able to trust them, and let me tell you how many lies they contain.

Third: the assumption of condemnation. I literally defend the human rights of sex criminals in court. I defend murderers. What we are talking about, right now, at best, is a human person expressing an opinion, however potentially damaging and offensive (depending on definition of zionism and truth of accusation). Do you think I'm gonna say that Jewish people who express an opinion are inhuman and deserve segregation from the rest of us?

Do you think I'm ever going to stop reaching out my hand to people who use violence? Do you think I'm ever going to lose the hope that someday they will lose the fear that makes them resort to violence?

Finally, now that I've spent some time listing my problems with your case, so what.

Let's use an example closer to home. I'm an American, and I do in fact believe that America is a nation and will continue to be so, and that tearing down all government to give it back to indigenous people (something that is, to be clear, to my understanding, not comparable with any kind of political situation in Israel) is not possible as things stand. And yet nobody's here interrogating me about Donald Trump and his bombing of Iran or whether I support ICE's jackbooted thuggery.

A little further from home? If I met a Russian person, my first ask would not be "Tell me in detail your thoughts on Ukraine and Putin."

And in those two examples, I myself and this hypothetical Russian person are actually members of the country in question that is doing the thing. A Jewish person who is not Israeli isn't even that.

Listen. I think there's a lot to be unpacked about how the insularity of Jewish culture and the separateness of it from the countries where it lives is both in the interest of continuing the Jewish ethnicity and in the interest of the people who want Jewish people exterminated, and how the double-pull of those two interests maintain a tension that otherwise might dissipate. I think there's something real to be analyzed about how modern anti-semitism isn't a recurrence of medieval anti-semitism but a different thing, a sign of fascist thinking.

I think there is a horrific tragedy for everyone involved that the group who was decimated beyond belief in the blackest events in human history now has a very loud and visible nation channeling their survival into rage and violence.

I think that there are lots of Arab nations around Israel that would gladly see every person in it subject to that same rage and violence, and I'm not down with that shit either.

I think the history of who colonized who and when and what pogroms did what and how violence and why are all too fucking complicated to untangle.

I think the only way truly forward for Israel and Palestine is some kind of truth and reconciliation type thing and that Israel as it stands is too scared to see all their atrocities come to light.

I was raised atheist with college professor parents, so you can bet Jewish people in academia were part of my life from an early age. I don't understand antisemitism literally at all. It's completely incomprehensible to me. I also think Arab culture is gorgeous and studied Arabic in college. I don't discount the idea that I have subconscious biases; I've done my best to unpick them, but it's lifelong work.

The whole goddamn clusterfuck is a great example of why violence begets violence begets violence. I reject the idea that One Final Ass-Kicking on anyone's part will solve any one of these problems. The only thing that ends violence is not choosing violence. And that can't happen until enough people in and out of power want the violence to stop. There. Not here. There. It can't be imposed from outside. It has to come from within.

And that's a decision -- I must add -- that I seriously could not have less to do with. White Americans should not be making any of the related decisions.

Here endeth the essay, with one final note.

It is best for the civilians caught in the middle to not encourage the continuatiin of violence. And it is best for those of us drowning in the splash effect as the whole world (minus you and a few others) have gleefully turned on Jews.

You are also giving a sign of hope, which has been rapidly disapearing, about the possibility of being able to safely live in the US.

Unless they have chronic can't-shut-the-fuck-up disease, like me.

The US Golden Age of Jewry is over. It is something us American Jews are acutely aware of.

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

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You want to study abroad? Show us proof that there is a quadrillion dollars in your bank account. Oh, an average monthly salary in your country is $400 and you plan to work when you arrive? You can't do that, silly, a student visa only allows you to work 2 hours every third Wednesday, and if we find out that you're working a second more we will deport you.

You want to work abroad? Better be a programmer, then of course you are welcome. Doctor, scientist, white-collar or, god forbid, blue-collar worker? You can fuck right off, your visa application goes straght into trash.

You will have to prove that you can afford a guest, have some income and also usually take responsibility for possible deportation cost.

But if you really are inviting a friend over, they will give you a formal document you can send to your friend. Then the friend applies for a visa while attaching the Very Official document with it. They will get the Schengen visa and most probably will get it expedited too.

Guillermo del Toro’s spellbinding take on one of the most enduring of all modern myths, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, imbues the classic tale with new depths of humanity while pushing it toward dazzling heights of gothic grandeur. Shifting between the perspectives of the brilliant but callous Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and the creature (Jacob Elordi) he fashions from flesh and then cruelly mistreats, del Toro movingly reframes the legend as a story of fathers and sons struggling to break free from cycles of trauma. A decades-in-the-making triumph of darkly ravishing visual invention and operatic storytelling, Frankenstein is a deeply personal statement from a director who has long been drawn to the realm where men and monsters merge.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

4K digital master of the theatrical version of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack

4K digital master of Frankenstein: The Reborn Cut, a new 158-minute extended director’s cut of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack

Two 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the films and special features

New audio commentary on The Reborn Cut, featuring director Guillermo del Toro

The Anatomy Lesson: Director’s Cut, a new documentary on the making of the film

The Parlour, a collection of conversations on craft featuring del Toro; actors Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Oscar Isaac; cinematographer Dan Laustsen; production designer Tamara Deverell; costume designer Kate Hawley; and creature designer Mike Hill

Q&As moderated by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and musician Patti Smith

Interview with composer Alexandre Desplat conducted by film-music scholar Jon Burlingame

PLUS: An essay by scholar and author Christopher Frayling

Eridian Duet