Magneto was right

How do y'all respond when you hear the "I'm gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn't just about Jews and I don't know why people think that yadda yadda yadda" patter?

If it's someone who seems willing to listen I'll explain how the nazi homophobia circles back to antisemitism. If not, maybe some derogatory comments about them and their close family.

there's a lot of great points in the notes about how the Nazis' homophobia was rooted in antisemitism. Another thing for me is the fact that, had the Nazis been successful, there would be no Jewish life today. Queer people will always continue to be born, but for Jews, the only way to become a Jew requires other Jews - either being born to Jewish parents or being affirmed as a Jew by a rabbinical court of three other Jews. Had all presently living Jews been wiped out, all future generations of Jews would have been wiped out as well. The Nazis certainly would've liked to wipe out all queer existence, but that isn't possible. The complete eradication of all Jewish existence was at stake in a way it simply wasn't for queer people.

There isn't a single gay culture, not really. People talk about it, but they mean gay culture in their country, and usually gay, lesbian, and transgender people have different groupings within that. A Chinese gay man is going to have a different experience than a lesbian in the US. People in countries where people are arrested or potentially killed for being queer are not having the same experiences as people in countries where being gay is more acceptable. That's just how it is. And for most people, myself included, this is a culture you discover when you're older. You're not a child going to ballrooms and drag shows; you start doing that as a teen or an adult (if you choose to. No shame if you don't interact with the wider queer community at all). This is not your experience from infancy onwards.

I grew up Jewish. I grew up attending Seders and lighting yartzheit candles. Our house always had a mezuzah. This was my culture since birth, and it's my mom's culture, and my grandparents' culture. And when I talk to Jews in other countries, we have similar experiences. Yes, we have different minhagim, but we're celebrating the same holidays. I say the same prayers as a Jew living in Israel or Argentina or Russia. If you know Hebrew, you can speak to Jews all over the planet because they know it too. We have a unified culture, even if it's been tweaked a little here and there.

That culture was nearly destroyed. My great-grandparents' village is fucking gone. They escaped prior to the Holocaust, but there's nowhere to go back to. I can't find any info on it because their records and letters are in Yiddish, which their children never learned. (My grandfather and great uncles threw out a lot of stuff from the Old Country.) I don't speak a lick of Yiddish, so even with the letters, I couldn't find my way back to where my great-grandparents lived. There are stories of Jews returning to their homes to find everything Jewish destroyed. I remember one story of a Polish man returning to his town to find that the synagogue had been used to house cattle during the Shoah and was unusable (because of all the feces), and the grave markers in the cemetery had been removed and used to pave roads. (You can still find roads with fragments of Hebrew on them throughout Europe for this reason.) Everything was gone.

There's a difference between a community you enter as a teenager or adult and the community you're born into. Right now, my gaming community could implode and I'd be upset, but I wouldn't be devastated the way I'd feel if the US stopped existing. Hell, I was involved in leftist circles that ate themselves alive (iykyk) and that sucked, but I recovered. I don't think I could if my entire childhood was eradicated. If I couldn't go back home or find people who spoke my language, if the cemetery that housed my grandparents was desecrated, if all the important cultural buildings were filled with animal droppings.

You know how when you visit your hometown after you move away, and the ice cream place you really loved went under and it became a gas station? I think we all have an experience similar to that. It hurts, but imagine that on the scale of thousands. It's not just the ice cream place where you celebrated birthdays; it's your school, your library, your soccer fields, your favorite restaurants, your movie theaters, your malls, your parks, your clubs, your house, your neighbor's house, your best friend's house, all gone.

Look, gay culture in Germany was eradicated, too. We know this happened. But those men got to go back to their cities that were still standing. The same people were there. Of course, not all—I won't pretend that Germany didn't lose people in the war and buildings weren't destroyed. But people still spoke GERMAN. Yes, they were occupied, but their culture was intact. It wasn't suddenly impossible to get German food or hear German songs or read German books. That was true of every country hit by the war. Yes, it was tragic, but their culture remained. They got to remain German.

Jews suddenly had nothing. Our culture was gone. Our little pockets of Yiddish were gone. That culture was ripped from us and from the places we lived. We carried it to different countries, mostly the US and Israel, but it was an effort. There was a concentrated effort in trying to keep Jewish culture going. We built ulpans and yeshivahs to keep our culture going. We worked at ensuring our children knew our heritage and history.

Gay people just... didn't have to do that. Not because they didn't have kids, but because their larger culture was still intact and gay culture was usually transmitted through other ways, outside the families. (Cause let's be honest, if you were a homosexual who had kids in the 1940s, you were closeted and likely didn't tell your kids.)

Yeah, the numbers show how few homosexuals were in the camps, but that's not the important part. The important part is what Jews lost that homosexuals still had. That's why it's so important for queer people nowadays not to compare themselves to those murdered in the Holocaust. They don't have the same culture and their entire way of life wasn't destroyed.

Gays rebuilt communities. Jews continued to be murdered when they went home. Between blood libel and their neighbors wanting to keep what they stole from Jews, drove Jews out of Poland after the war.

I am also not Roma, nor an expert. However, I want to share something from the Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. I took a photograph because I was so overwhelmed but wanted to remember this, because it’s important.

“After World War II Roma were also excluded from the right to restitution, because Federal German authorities denied that Roma were persecued due to racist reasons. After a small step in this direction in 1963, restitutions became possible in small amounts only in 1979, when the West German Federal Parliament declared that the Nazi persecution of Roma was based on racial grounds and Roma survivors were allowed to claim for restitution in a form of a onetime payment. The official acceptance of the Porajmos as genocide by the Federal Republic of Germany followed only in 1982 with a speech by Chancelor Helmut Schmidt. In August 2016, an agreement between the German Ministry for Finance and the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic decided on compensation for survivors of the Porajmos in the Czech Republic. This agreement, which will give 2,500 EUR to each of the handful of survivors, was greeted as a symbolic acknowledgment, but also criticised for its delay and the low amount awarded. However, this agreement has already led to renewed claims from Romani victims from the former Yugoslavia and other regions of 'romocide'.” - Roma and Conflict

A New York City “neighbourhood passport,” created by the city’s official marketing group and available at libraries in the Big Apple for tourists, has been criticised after it excluded Jews from a map of the city’s immigrant neighbourhoods.

The map identifies 30 neighborhoods associated with New York’s “thriving international communities and cultures”, including “Little Palestine” (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn), “Little Egypt” (Astoria, Queens), “Little Pakistan” (Newkirk Plaza, Brooklyn), and multiple Chinatowns.

However, the graphic, which is sourced from the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, does not note any Jewish neighbourhoods, though the immigrant affairs office also doesn’t include official posters for “Little Palestine” or “Little Egypt”.

The lack of depiction of Jewish neighbourhoods, as well as Irish and Italian ones, has drawn criticism from local community members.

“They just couldn’t figure out how to represent 11 per cent of the city,” stated Avital Chizik-Goldschmidt, a writer and New York resident. “Couldn’t decipher where the Jews are from. Asked everyone. Huge riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

The map was intended to show parts of the city that have “substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world,” according to City Hall. “It does not highlight religious groups.”

It added that a map of Little Odessa depicts a neighbourhood with a substantial Jewish population.

“Also, no Italian or Irish enclaves in New York City? Interesting,” stated Karol Markowicz, a prominent, Jewish conservative columnist. “The two Staten Island flags look funnier the longer I look at this. Two small ethnic populations and absolutely no others in the whole of Staten Island.”

“The major Sephardi corridor of South Brooklyn, Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and others, from the East side of Avenue J down toward Avenue V, gets left out completely,” added Isaac Choua, a board member of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America. “So does the Bukharian Jewish community in Queens, largely from Uzbekistan and Central Asia.

"The Brooklyn community is not some tiny side community.

“Flatbush, Midwood, and Gravesend alone have roughly 54,000 people living in Jewish households, comparable in size to the Pakistani community being recognised here.”

“This is not a small omission,” he went on. “It is one of New York’s most distinctive immigrant-descended Jewish communities, and it gets erased from the story. Weirdly enough, Zohran Mamdani’s office wanted to speak with me about this very issue and has not followed up since the election.”

However, others dismissed the purported controversy.

“The Chasidic neighbourhoods are overwhelmingly composed of American citizens, who have been here a long time,” said journalist Jesse Singal. “I don’t get this. It comes across like looking for something to get mad about.

"Could just as easily 180 this and be, ‘Oh, so you’re saying they aren’t quite American?”

Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, a Chabad rabbi, added that he finds “the absence frustrating as well”.

“But what exactly would we call it and where?” he asked. “Little Israel? Surely not the right name for Borough Park, the largest enclave of Jews and Jewish culture. Doesn’t really work for the Upper West Side or the Lower East Side either.”

the argument is that these groups are fully assimilated over a century or more of history and no longer immigrants, which is true to an extent when speaking about generations of residents, but there are still tens of thousands of current Jewish immigrants (and others from the excluded groups) living in New York.

an Italian and Jewish New Yorker said: “it was so obvious that you could have included us here, and it felt like you made the choice not to.”

this may not have been malicious, but because of the sentence “it does not highlight religious groups,” this is relevant food for thought:

I WILL !!! I WILL DO THAT

some of my favourite indigenous artists, in no particular order:

Inuit artists:

the jerry cans (esp their album Inuusiq)

beatrice deer

twin flames

Māori artists:

jordyn with a why

Indigenous australian artists:

tilly tjala thomas (i particularly love ngai yurlku nhiina)

kardajala kirridarra (srlsly check out ngajabu (Grandmother's Song))

And one of her own:

Oh and of course there's also the HU and Bloodywood for people who like more rock and metal mixed in:

Darkaside is a Papuan metal band

Shepherds Reign is a Samoan metal band

Lenin Tamayo, Quechua pop singer.

And of course I can't not add Mari Boine (Sámi) to a post like this:

And Arvvas, who I think have moved on to other things but did mashups of Sámi traditional singing and jazz:

Behold the pocket-sized western pygmy possum! (Cercartetus concinnus). One of the world’s smallest possums, this species typically weighs just 0.5 oz (14 g)—the size of an AA battery. This dainty marsupial is a nectarivore, meaning that its diet consists primarily of plant nectar. It inhabits treetops in forests throughout parts of Australia, using its long prehensile tail like a fifth limb as it moves from branch to branch.

when, actually:

- anyone is allowed in any public bomb shelter

- the train stations are bomb shelters

SIKE

THEY'RE GAY

And they're not some rare exception to the rule, either!!!

About 25% of black swan couples consist of two swans of the same sex (typically, two males).

These couples will court each other, build a nest, and raise their young together in a more-or-less committed monogamous relationship.

In fact, these same-sex couples have a high success rate of 80% when raising their young to adulthood, as opposed to the 30% of their heterosexual counterparts! Two big buff papa swans are better than one when it comes to stomping on invaders of nesting territory.

"But," I hear you say, "where do their baby floofballs come from? Does mpreg exist among black swans?"

Alas, no, but there is a very elegant solution to this. The swan couple may simply temporarily associate themselves with a female swan.

Afterwards, the female swan deposits their eggs and swims off free to live her single girlie life if she wishes (or, find a boyfriend. Preferably one who isn't already committed to another boyfriend.)

So whenever someone commits the naturalistic fallacy "homosexuality bad because unnatural >:(" I like to point out not only their glaring illogicality, but also, respectfully, there is homosexuality happening in the local lake right now.

One- Your characters can be bad people, they can do bad things. There doesn't have to be a reason or a moral. You can make them bad if you want to. No other reason needed.

Two- it doesn't have to be good, it just needs to be written. On my last book i literally wrote the words "dumbest version" on the top of the page because I had seen some advice to do that. It changed everything. I stopped trying to make it perfect, I just tried to make it. Period. Full stop. You can edit bad writing. You can't edit a blank page.

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6