Stahp!

and I’d just like to say:

it was started by 4chan trolls

it does not come from trans, non-binary, or pan people

it is meant to cause fighting within the community

My doggo, Ezri, who rarely barks and mostly borks.

She’s a German spitz - in the same family as keeshonds and pomeranians. She might be crossed with something else as her freckled coat, non-pointy nose, and personality are not standard for her breed (they’re usually a lot more high energy and excitable - she’s super laid back and chill). She’s a bit less fluffy than breed-standard too, mostly because she’s grown out from her spring/summer trim (not usually necessary/good for her type of coat but she gets terribly itchy otherwise). It also makes her look like a puppy of a large breed:

Ezri’s best friend is Murder Cat, who is a gentle friend to humans and Ezri, but does things to mice that would make Hannibal Lecter go “Isn’t that a bit much?”

I got Murder Cat as a kitten, and she used to try to nurse on everything when she was small. Eventually, she settled on her favourite thing to nurse on, Ezri, who has never had puppies and a little confused at first but eventually went with it. She grew out of it, but they have stayed snuggly buddies ever since.

New Years here is full of fireworks outside and Ezri gets Vry Scared. I usually set her up somewhere with a snuggly spot right by me, and Murder Cat comes and does this all night: 

She goes everywhere with me in my bakfiets (cargo bike) and lets me warm my hands in her fur on cold days.

And her ears disappear if I say her name to get her attention.

ok so great thanks for coming to my TED talk about my dog, good night, drive safe

Buddha Statues’ Heads: What it actually means.

Yesterday, I went shopping at Homegoods with my mom for some interior decorations and a few gifts. And what do you know: Buddha’s heads, either in brass and sold as “antique” or dipped in bright neon paint. My mom shook her head in disapproval and laughed. This really got my mind thinking that shoppers have literally no clue what these statues’ heads are really about.

This really got my mind thinking about that Thai movie “Ong-Bak“ about how a group of thieves decapitated a Buddha statue’s head  & how a Muay Thai skilled warrior volunteered to return it before it is sold in the black market. Cutting off that religious statue’s head is seen as an act of vandalism & violence. It is one of the utmost disrespectful marks one could do in the religion. The original heads were stolen from respected places of worship. Cutting off Buddha statues’ heads have been happening for who-knows-how-long originally by greedy thieves.

Honestly, fuck that. She and her family didn’t ‘miraculously’ survive; there was never intent to kill them. They were to be systematically oppressed and subjugated, not exterminated. As much as the Nazi ideology considered ethnic Poles inferior by virtue of ethnicity, only the intelligentsia were targeted for execution, to prevent pushback.

If you were a Polish Jew the point of rounding you up was to feed you to the gas chambers. 90% of Polish Jews died – not went into the camps, died. Those Jews were 10% of the Polish population, but twice as many Polish Jews died in the Holocaust as did all non-Jewish Poles in WWII. Polish Jews accounted for about half of the victims of the Shoah; liquidating the Polish ghettos killed more Jews than existed in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandinavia as a whole, and the Balkans as a whole - combined.  

(source; this is all Jews, it doesn’t include any non-Jewish victims)

The Lublin-Majdanek camp that the post refers to was a forced labor camp, and gas chambers were constructed there in 1942. Again, at least twice as many Jews died there as non-Jews, and the specific death campaigns there, such as Aktion Erkenfest, were part of the Final Solution and intended exclusively for Jewish prisoners.