Wolffrankx

Do you believe that Israel as a state should continue to exist? It's a very binary Yes or No.

Yes? Congrats you are a Zionist?

Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.

I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.

In particular, from that second link:

However, they aren’t actually Palestinian, and they do hold power and privilege over Israeli Jews, by virtue of being white gentiles and by virtue of being American.

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

All these assholes who riot and harass people in the name of climate change, Palestine, social justice, or whatever else is fashionable right now aren’t doing it out of love for humanity. They’re doing it out of hate for humanity.

This is what everyone must understand: radical movements today are driven by misanthropy, narcissism and nihilism.

They’re not so desperate to help other people that they are driven to reluctant violence. This is a mere excuse, and a feeble one at that.

The fodder of these movements are miserable losers who feel that humanity hasn’t given them all the toys they deserve. For them, there is no joy in civilization. The leaders are power-hungry cynics who wish to command these armies of morons to gain power.

They’re using these issues, which they don’t understand and barely care about, as an excuse to harass people, to bully people, to destroy beautiful things which they cannot possess. 

Notice how no matter what their goal is, somehow it always include vandalism and the destruction of art and statues. 

They are people who hate humanity.

The suffering they cause is not a byproduct of their noble goals. Causing suffering is their goal. They are pure bullies.

Let’s import the entire third world to the West, let’s make sure people in Europe die from heat because they don’t have air conditioning, let’s make sure universities don’t teach because there is a war 10,000 kilometers away, let’s burn the country to defend criminals who abuse the innocent, let’s convince people to become extinct and be replaced by bronze age barbarians… that is not justice. That is not compassion. That is not virtue.

It’s not even virtue signaling.

It is their way to take revenge upon humanity, to make everyone else as miserable as they are.

So don’t forget: these people are not misguided, they are not desperate, they are not noble.

They are evil.

URI KURLIANCHIK

It's currently close to 4 AM now that I'm posting this, and I've been crying non-stop since midnight because my friends came back online one by one through an unstable connection and said: "Hi, I'm alive." I had prepared myself for the funeral of so many of my friends. Some haven't come back online yet, and we've formed small "search and rescue" groups to find their contacts or families to check if they're okay.

What remains a fact amidst all of this is that nobody in the world ever gave a single fuck about us. I was one of the lucky ones to connect during the complete shutdown via some newly invented way we were too scared to even publish on GitHub for fear of getting arrested. In the time I was connected, I felt immense guilt for having access to the internet, and I begged you all on my socials to be the voice of the people who were about to get executed.

Not even once did I see someone talk about the internet blackout in Iran, and it enrages me.

We've been massacred, mass executed, and then silenced by getting our only way of communicating with the world shut off and the world treats it as some background noise, some irrelevant news that isn't even worth spending time hearing about.

WE’RE LITERALLY STILL ALIVE AND SOME OF US NEVER STOPPED LIVING IN APPALACHIA ASSHOLE

Im so fucking sick and tired of people acting like we don’t exist anymore. Absolutely fuck right off a cliff. Even if we had all left Appalachia, we would still be here and not your fucking marker for some bygone era of the past, and we would still have rights to our ancestral homelands just like any other indigenous people.

I’d also argue that the issue here is not the choice not to press the button, but the choice to cross the street despite the fact that they can’t press the button. They should instead see themselves as not living in walking distance to shul, and accept that the road is an impassable boundary, like a river without a bridge.

I guess what I would ask is —

— If someone lived on one side of the six-lane road and you lived on the other, and they declined an invitation to your house because they couldn’t cross due to not being able to push the button on Shabbat, would you see that as religious extremism/fundamentalism?

— If there was no button at all and no way to stop the cars and they chose to jaywalk across the six-lane road to get to shul, would you that as religious extremism/fundamentalism?

— If they refused to press a button on Shabbat and jaywalked across the six-lane road on Shabbat to go to a park to play basketball, rather than shul, would you see that as religious extremism/fundamentalism?

(I ask because I can see an argument that could be made for one, some, or all; and really what I’m curious about is if you’re situating the extremism more in the danger or more in the refusal to do an action prohibited on Shabbat or more in the choice to get to synagogue at all costs)

The big issue here, that I think is a big part of religious extremism, is the m placing of one’s subjective unproven beliefs above actual material consequences and reality.

If they’re willing to walk through traffic to avoid breaking that rule they apparently believe it is worth the risk

What is classed as Fundamentalist in this thread is missing the point of Jewish orthodoxy. The concept is that you cannot pick and choose which laws to follow, you do them all to the best of your ability.

I'm the opposite. I pick and choose and am 100% lassez fair about the whole thing. Our tradition teaches the opposite and is a constant struggle within as to who and what and how much MUST be observed.

Maybe in this modern world following any religion is seem as fundamentalist and extreme to some.