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hoodharlow · 8 months

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The Nightmare on the Upper East Side

AN: alexa play Just a Dream by Nelly

Requested? Everyone who said to fix it

Warnings: Jack being unserious and almost smut at the end

Word Count: 1.4k words

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Jack via Instagram Stories

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Miriam via Instagram Stories

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Jack woke up abruptly in cold sweat. He reached for his phone and checked his social media. His dream felt way too vivid. He instantly regretted eating all those bagels when he went to drop off Miriam at NYU for her 8am lecture. In his defense he was hungry as hell because he flew in an hour before Miriam's show started and barely made it to the theater. After her performance they went home because they were tired. Jack from being holed up in the studio in Nashville for over twenty-four hours the day before he flew out and Miriam because she was on campus since the morning and barely had time to get to the theater for makeup which took three hours.

For some reason bagels upsetted his stomach, causing him to have nightmares. He dreamt very realistic social media posts and news articles about him and Miriam breaking up. There were posts from their fan pages spewing drama between them because there was no explanation on why they broke up and their fans blamed the other. He even imagined potential dating rumors between her co-star Jacob Elordi and one of Miriam's classmates' boyfriends, Andrei Iosivas. Miriam was in Martin Scorsese's cinema studies program at NYU and met the NFL player's girlfriend there. Though Miriam and Andrei knew each other because Miriam took a summer class at Princeton. They made it clear they were solely classmates.

Jack wasn't even sure how his subconscious came up with all of that in the three hours he napped. He tapped through some Instagram Stories and saw Miriam had finally gone to pick up her costume for her Hamilton themed birthday party that was in two weeks. Ever since she began rehearsal for the Nightmare Before Christmas, she'd been on a Hamilton phase and she sang one song from the musical each day on repeat.

She was going as Angelica Schuyler. Jack didn't know what he was going on but Miriam reassured him he wasn't going as the man in the ten dollar bill or as the man Angelica Schuyler settled for. All he knew was Miriam wanted to take advantage of his new hairstyle.

He hopped in the shower and a few minutes later he got out and did his routine, changing into some grey sweats and a matching t-shirt. He made his way to the kitchen of their rental. They agreed it would be best if they just rented out a penthouse on the Upper East Side, near the Met Museum, instead of living with Katalina. They eantrd their own space, but that didn't stop Miriam from going over for sister sleepovers. They leased the apartment for two years, the length of Miriam's program at NYU.

Jack found Miriam making herself matcha while she sang along to Satisfied as it played through the speaker. He was caught off guard by the fact that she was wearing her costume but in reality it wasn't the strangest thing he'd walk in on Miriam wearing. He leaned against the wall and enjoyed her performance.

Miriam held up three fingers, "Number three. I know my sister like I know my own mind. You will never find anyone as trusting or as kind. If I tell her that I love him, she'd be silently resigned. He'd be mine. She would say, "I'm fine". She'd be lying. But when I fantasize at night, it's Alexander's eyes. As I romanticize what might have been if I hadn't sized him up so quickly. At least my dear Eliza's his wife. At least I keep his eyes in my life. To the groom. To the–AH!" Miriam let out a high pitch scream. "Don't do that."

"C'mere." He said, pulling her into a hug.

He enveloped her into his arms. He held her curls and nuzzled his face in the crook of her neck.

"Did the bagels I told you not to eat give you nightmares?" She asked, knowing it did.

"Yeah." He smiled sheepishly.

"No se puede contigo." Miriam giggled. She pushed herself up on the counter and Jack sat in front of her, using the huge billowing skirt as a pillow while Miriam played with his curls.

She reached over to her Mac and iPad to save her work and turn off her Lin Manuel Miranda playlist.

"What was your dream about?" She asked, twirling one of his curls.

“We broke up.” He murmured against her lap.

“Wow, living without me is really the worst thing imaginable for you, I love that for me.” she said in a playful tone. “I’m kidding but how did that happen? The bagels couldn’t have triggered all that. ”

“Before my nap, I was scrolling through tiktok and I saw a few videos of me at the Louisville game. Some of the comments were dragging me for being too excited at the game while the rest were calling me a piece of shit for not going to opening night and supporting you.” Jack said quietly as he played with the lace ends of Miriam’s dress sleeves.

“Wait, get me out of this dress so we can have a serious conversation.” she said getting off the counter.

“I don’t think I can have a serious conversation with you naked.” He joked. He held her hips and turned her so her back was to him. “Though this practice for when I take off your wedding dress.”

“Don’t worry, my wedding dress has a zipper in the back.” Miriam reassured him.

“Good because I’m struggling with this shit.” He grumbled under his breath.

“Just loosen up the ribbons.”

“Oh.”

Jack undid the buttons and tugged the ribbons. Miriam shimmed out of the dress, revealing she was wearing one of her short workout rompers she wore to pilates. She quickly rushed to store it in her hallway closet with Jack’s costume. She grabbed one of Jack’s flannels and went to the living room where he was laying on the bisexual velvet green couch he bought her. She laid on his chest. Jack kissed her head and squeezed her tight.

“So what’s this about people giving you shit for not going to opening night? I literally had to beg you not to go.” she giggled.

“I know you asked me not to go, but I still felt guilty for not going. It was your big night and I should've been there lurking in the shadows at least.”

“That means a lot but I would have shit myself if I figured out you were there.” she said truthfully.

Like every theater girlie, Miriam was as superstitious as they came. She had this weird tradition where she couldn’t have her family and other loved ones on opening night. According to her, she needed a feel for the audience and how they interacted with her performance without knowing anyone she knew was sitting there. That allowed her to do her thing without the fear of someone she knew was perceiving her as Miriam and not as the character she was portraying. It was something she’d been doing for years and the one time her parents went to opening night, spring 2012, she got stage fright and ruined the play with her projectile vomiting. Since then they have been skipping opening night.

It didn’t make sense to Jack but he was not one to mess with anyone’s pre-show rituals. He had a of his own and knew if one didn’t go as planned it ruined the video for one of his concerts. He knew it was serious business when her parents and siblings sent out a message reminding him not to show up. Though he had forgotten to relay that to his parents and Clay. They ended up going, but they were sitting far enough for Miriam to not recognize them until the curtain call when the show was over.

“I’m making a notes-app post telling people not to bully you.” She reached for her NYU tote bag.

Jack pushed her hand down. “It’s fine. I just wanted some reassurance from you.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer some head from me?” Miriam smirked, straddling him.

“Always, just take off your ring. The jeweler gave me a weird look when I took it to get it cleaned.” He said before gently pulling her head down to kiss her.

“I love you.” Miriam mumbled against his lips.

“I love you too.”

Soon the kiss grew intense and Jack was pushing down the straps of Miriam’s romper. Jack flipped them over so he was on top of her. In one swift movement he tugged off her romper, leaving her in her panties. Jack stood up and pulled off his shirt. He was met with Daisy jumping on his back.

“Oh shit I forgot I promised Daisy we’d make tiktoks with my new song. Rain check?” He asked, unserious.

“Are you serious telling me you rather make tiktoks with my dog than fuck me?”

“When you put it like that…”

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@'jackharlowsource: Jack via Instagram Stories

@'jackstan: he's soooo 😭

@'mdmxjh: I just know Miriam yelled at him for posting this lol

@'miriamxjack: it's miriam's world and jack is just living in it lmao jackfan: he's her biggest fan i'm hear for it

@'miriamhater: i bet she forced him to take that second picture

-> @'mackshipper: you sound like a bitter sg fan when justin posts a picture of hailey lol

View all comments

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@'macksource: Jack and Miriam after Miriam’s sold-out show

@'mackshipper: New York really suits them

@'mdmxjh: their height differences always get me 🥴🥴🥴

@'mdmfan: Miriam is always gonna serve and I love this for me

@'jackfan: don't let new balance see this or they'll end their deal with Jack like Phocus did

-> @'jackstan: I thought it was a short contract, what are you going on about 😭

View all comments

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Jack on tiktok

@'missionaryjack: uh oh

@'miriamdominguez: we didn't fuck for this 😭

@'twittergirlie: this better not be a First Class

@'jackharlowtt: need this NOW

@'jackhater: mid

@'btsgirlie: imagine if he did this for 3d lmao

View all comments

Taglist: @heavyhitterheaux @cherry4everrr @carma-fanficaddict @youngharleezy @youngharleezyxo @babyharleezy @that-90s-girllll @alinaharlow @harlowcomehome @nattinatalia @webinurcloset @gassyandsassy1 @jackharloww @awhore4moree @noescapricho-essentimiento @neon-lights-and-glitter @purecinnamonextract @whywontyoulovemecami @camificrecs @itsyagirljaz

#jack harlow #jack and miriam #jack harlow fanfic #jack harlow angst #jack harlow fluff #jack harlow smut #jack harlow one shot #jackharlow #jack harlow imagine

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 8 months

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By: Yascha Mounk

Published: Oct 16, 2023

On October 7th, the world witnessed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Hundreds of attendees at a music festival were murdered in cold blood. Families hiding in their homes were burned alive. Jewish mothers and fathers were, in an eerie echo of the 1940s, imploring their children to stay quiet lest their would-be murderers should detect their whereabouts. Nearly two hundred people remain in the clutches of a terrorist organization that announced its genocidal intentions in its founding charter.

Many people, of all faiths and convictions, have recognized the enormity of these crimes. Numerous world leaders denounced the terrorist attacks in clear language. Private citizens shared their grief on social media. Millions mourned. But despite the outpouring of support, there has also been a large contingent of people and organizations who stayed uncharacteristically silent—or went so far as to celebrate the carnage.

Even as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak found clear words about Hamas, for example, the BBC have steadfastly refused to call the Hamas fighters who killed over 1200 people by the name rightfully reserved for those who deliberately target innocent civilians for political ends: terrorists. Meanwhile, many schools and universities, nonprofit organizations and corporations that have over the past years gotten into the business of condemning and commemorating all kinds of tragedies, both small and large, fell uncharacteristically silent.

Some of the most famous universities in the world—including Princeton, Yale and Stanford—only released statements after they came under intense pressure on social media. At Harvard University, it took pressure from alumni and an outraged thread on X by Larry Summers, a former president of the institution, to prompt his successor into belated action.

Worse still were the people and organizations who actively celebrated the pogroms. Multiple chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, which continues to count Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among its ranks, encouraged their followers to attend rallies that glorified Hamas’ terror as a righteous form of resistance. As its San Francisco chapter wrote on X, the “weekend’s events” should be seen as part and parcel of Palestinians’ “right to resist.” The Chicago chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement even glorified the terrorists who murdered scores of people at a rave in southern Israel, pairing a now-deleted image of a paraglider with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.”

Meanwhile, academics from leading universities were busy defending these terrorist attacks as a form of anti-colonial struggle. “Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop,” a professor in the school of social work at McMaster University, in Canada, wrote on X. “Settlers are not civilians,” a Yale professor who has written for mainstream outlets including The Washington Post and The New York Times, maintained.

All of this raises a simple question: How could such a notable portion of the left side with terrorists who openly announce their genocidal intentions? Why have key institutions proven so reluctant to denounce one of the worst terrorist attacks in living memory? What, to them, renders the victims of these attacks so much less worthy of solidarity than those of the many other atrocities they have full-throatedly condemned?

The ideological roots of the great obfuscation

In the past days, people have offered many possible explanations for this selective silence. Some focus on outright antisemitism. Others emphasize that an understandable concern over the immoral actions that Israeli governments have taken in the past have blinded many activists to the suffering of innocent Israeli civilians. Others still point out that institutional leaders want to avoid eliciting angry reactions from activists, preferring to stay silent on a sensitive issue out of simple fear for their jobs.

Each of these explanations contains a grain of truth. Some people in the world really are consumed by one of the world’s most ancient hatreds. Others are indeed hyper-focused on everything that Israel has done wrong, a stance that is easier to understand in the case of Palestinians whose ancestors have been displaced than it is in the case of leftist activists who have for many decades found the missteps of the one state that happens to be Jewish worthy of much greater condemnation than similar, or greater, missteps perpetrated by any other. Finally, it is indeed true that many university presidents, nonprofit leaders and corporate CEOs have, among the institutional meltdowns of the past years, come to believe that they must avoid controversy at all costs if they are to keep drawing their generous paychecks.

But the double-standard that has in the past days become so obvious on parts of the left also has a more profound source, one that is ideological rather than practical or atavistic. Over the past decades, a new set of ideas about the role that identity does— and should—play in the world have transformed the very nature of what it means to be on the left, displacing an older set of universalist aspirations in the process.

This novel ideology, which I call the “identity synthesis,” insists that we must see the whole world through the prism of identity categories like race. It maintains that the key to understanding any political conflict is to conceive of it in terms of the power relations between different identity groups. It analyzes the nature of those power relations through a simplistic schema that, based on the North American experience, pits so-called whites against so-called “people of color.” Finally, it imposes that schema—in a fashion that might, in the academic jargon of the day, ironically be called “neo-colonial”—on complex conflicts in faraway lands.

The trouble with structural racism

Many advocates of the identity synthesis rightly point out that an account of racism which focuses purely on individual beliefs or motivations runs the danger of concealing important forms of injustice. Even if everyone has the best of intentions, the after effects of historical injustices can ensure that many immigrant students attend underfunded public schools or that many members of ethnic minorities suffer disadvantages in the housing market. It therefore makes sense, they argue, to add a new concept to our vocabulary: structural racism.

As the Cambridge Dictionary explains, structural racism consists of “laws, rules, or official policies in a society that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race.” By pointing out that some forms of racism are “structural” in this way, we are better able to capture—and hopefully remedy—circumstances in which members of some racial groups suffer significant disadvantages for reasons other than individual bias.

This is plausible insofar as it goes. To understand contemporary America, it is indeed helpful to add the notion of structural racism to our conceptual toolbox. But in recent years, many advocates of the identity synthesis have gone one step further: they have begun to claim that this more recent concept of structural racism should altogether supplant the older concept of individual racism.

Rather than acknowledging that there are two different conceptions of racism, each of which helps to elucidate real injustices in its own way, parts of the left have come to conceptualize racism in an exclusively structural form. “Racism,” one online guide puts the growing consensus, “is different from racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination” because it must involve “one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination through the institutional policies and practices of the society and by shaping the cultural beliefs and values that support those racist policies and practices.”

In its most radical form, this claim entails that it is impossible for a member of a historically marginalized group to be racist toward a member of a historically dominant group. Because racism does not have anything to do with individual beliefs or attributes, and members of groups that are comparatively powerless are incapable of carrying out “systematic discrimination” against members of groups that are comparatively powerful, even the vilest forms of hatred need not count as racist. As an article in Vice put it, “It’s literally impossible to be racist to a white person.”

The result has, again and again, been a form of selective blindness when members of minority groups have expressed bigoted attitudes toward supposedly more privileged groups, including those that are themselves minorities. This inability to recognize the importance of the more traditional conception of racism makes it impossible to name what is happening when members of one minority group are the victims of hate crimes committed by members of another minority group that is now considered to suffer from greater disadvantages. In December 2019, for example, two terrorists killed a police detective and then murdered three people at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, close to New York. They had a long trail of posting antisemitic content on social media; one assailant was a follower of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a movement which holds overtly antisemitic beliefs. But because the assailants were black, and the victims perceived as white, many news outlets failed to categorize the shooting as racist, or to treat it as a hate crime, for an astoundingly long period of time.

The trouble with white privilege

The idea that all racism is structural is deeply damaging because it makes it hard for institutions to open their eyes to forms of discrimination towards members of groups that are supposedly dominant. In practice, it is made even worse by the fact that many people on the left have now embraced a very simplistic notion of who is dominant and who is marginalized—one that imposes American conceptions of race onto situations in which they distort rather than illuminate underlying realities.

In North America, the most salient—though by no means the only—racial divide has for centuries been that between whites and blacks. In assessing which group is supposedly privileged in a foreign conflict, many Americans therefore think it is enough to figure out who is “white” and who is a “person of color.” This makes it impossible for them to understand conflicts in which the relevant political cleavage does not neatly pit whites against blacks (or, more broadly, “whites” against “people of color”).

Whoopi Goldberg, for example, has repeatedly insisted that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Since, from an American point of view, both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans are white, she found it impossible to get her head around an ideology that centers around racial distinctions between them. “You could not tell a Jew on a street,” she wrongly claimed. “You could find me. You couldn’t find them.”

In the case of Israel, this has led most observers to assume that there is a clear division in racial roles between Israelis and Palestinians: In their mind, Israelis are white, Palestinians “people of color.” And since white people have historically held power over non-white people, this reinforces the impression that it is impossible for Israelis to be victims of racial hatred.

But this perspective once again turns out to be so simplistic as to verge on the delusional. Ms. Goldberg was wrong to believe that Nazis were unable to spot Jews; though some Jews did manage to survive by passing themselves off as “Aryan,” many Nazis—and their collaborators in Central Europe—were highly effective at spotting people whom they suspected of being Jewish.

More importantly, the assumption that most of the victims of last Saturday’s terrorist attacks were “white” Jews with roots in Europe is simply wrong. It’s not just that there are black Israeli Jews whose ancestors immigrated from Ethiopia, or that Hamas’ victims included many migrants from Thailand and Nepal; it’s also that Israel as a whole is now home to more Mizrahi Jews, who hail from the Middle East, than Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors long lived in Europe.

I will leave it up to others to speculate on whether the visual differences between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans are more or less stark than those between Arabs and Mizrahi Jews. But the prominence of Mizrahi Jews also betrays yet another way in which attempts to fit the Israel-Palestine conflict into a simplistic conceptual scheme go badly wrong.

The trouble with Decolonialism

The actual demographic composition of the country makes claims that Israeli civilians should be seen as settlers who are fair game for terrorist attacks doubly cynical. They are cynical because no political cause, however righteous, justifies the deliberate targeting of babies and grandmothers—neither on the Israeli nor on the Palestinian side. And they are also cynical because the great majority of Mizrahi Jews have, since the end of the Second World War, been violently displaced from the Middle Eastern countries in which their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, with no country other than the world’s only Jewish state willing to offer them a safe harbor.

Postcolonial apologists for terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah love to invoke Frantz Fanon’s glorification of violence. The problem is not just that their tendentious reading of his work overlooks the ways in which violence can be morally corrosive and politically destructive; it’s also that the implied analogy between the so-called pied noirs (white settlers in Algeria who could safely return to the French metropolis if they chose to do so) and Mizrahi Jews (who would be neither welcome nor safe if they were to return to Iran or Iraq, to Morocco or Algeria) is so misleading as to be perverse.

And yet, this misleading analogy governs how many on the left ascribe the role of victim and perpetrator, explaining why dozens of student groups at Harvard could claim that Israel is somehow “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ decision to murder more than 1,000 civilians. At a deeper level, they even help to explain how left-wing activists and academics can contrive to perceive a deeply authoritarian and overtly theocratic regime that is explicitly hostile to sexual minorities as a progressive movement.

According to many progressives, what determines whether a movement should count as left-wing or right-wing is based on whether it claims to be fighting on behalf of those they believe to be marginalized. Since Hamas is an organization of underprivileged “people of color” fighting against “privileged” “white” Jews, it must be seen as part of a global struggle against oppression. Even though its program—which incidentally includes the violent suppression of sexual minorities within the Gaza strip—is reminiscent of some of the world’s most brutal far-right regimes, those marching in support of Hamas consider them to be part of the global struggle for progressive values. As Judith Butler, a central figure in this intellectual tradition, said in 2006, it is “very important” to classify both Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

It’s time for a reckoning with bad ideas on the left

Over the past few days, some observers have started to recognize how badly parts of the left have gone astray. Many leftist academics were genuinely horrified to see their friends and colleagues celebrate the murder of babies. There has been widespread outrage at the decision of influential movements like Black Lives Matter to idolize terrorists. Shri Thanedar, a U.S. Congressman, has publicly renounced his membership in the DSA.

This is a good start. In a free country, anyone must be free to express their support of extremist organizations, however vile; the move by many European governments to suppress pro-Hamas protests or to jail those who glorify the terrorist attacks is a betrayal of the liberal principles on which our opposition to that execrable organization should be based. But mainstream institutions can and absolutely should stop uncritically embracing organizations, like BLM, that openly glorify terrorists. And citizens should demand that moderate political parties, like the Democrats, cease to tolerate in their midst members of organizations, like the DSA, that equivocate about the moral permissibility of mass murder.

Black lives matter, greatly. Colonialism remains one of the greatest historical injustices. Even before this week, though, it should have become clear that the recognition of these important facts is fully compatible with serious concerns about the organizations that now speak on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement, and about a postcolonial discourse that all too often glorifies violent resistance to anybody who, however simplistically, is judged to be an “oppressor.”

Many advocates of the identity synthesis are genuinely motivated by good intentions. But key parts of this ideology now provide cover for forms of racism and dehumanization of vulnerable groups that should be anathema to anybody who genuinely cares about the historical values of the left. It is time for the many reasonable people who have bit their tongue as these ideas took on enormous power in mainstream institutions to raise their voice against them.

The suffering to come

Any humane outlook on the world must recognize that civilians never deserve to suffer due to the group into which they were born or because of actions committed by those who claim to speak on their behalf. I feel as much empathy for the Palestinian children who are dying in bombardments of Gaza as I do for the Jewish children who were killed in Hamas’ attack on Israel. Insinuations of collective responsibility are vile, even when voiced in response to a disgusting terrorist attack. Each civilian death is a tragedy on the same moral order.

While every civilian victim is in equal measure undeserving of their tragic fate, moral philosophers have for centuries recognized a key distinction governing the conduct of war. Military action that is directed against military targets may be legitimate; while some civilian deaths are foreseeable as a consequence of such attacks, soldiers must undertake to minimize them as far as possible. By contrast, military action is always illegitimate when the killing of innocents is the goal, not an unintended side effect.

This set of standards helps to explain how spectacularly Hamas, the organization that started the current war with a long-planned surprise attack that killed over a 1,000 men and women, toddlers and grandmothers, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and Thais and Americans and Canadians and Germans and Chinese, failed to obey the most basic moral rules. Now, it should also guide our assessment of Israel’s unfolding actions in Gaza.

This is a war Israel did not choose, and it has every right to defend itself. No democracy would tolerate on its borders the presence of a terrorist organization that has just demonstrated its willingness to engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of its civilian population; it would be the height of hypocrisy for people living in the safety of Berlin or Paris, of London or New York, to expect Israelis to do so.

But the military offensive against Hamas is extremely difficult because the terrorist organization has deliberately based so much of its military infrastructure in the midst of civilian settlements; because it is now doing what it can to stop its own people from moving away from military targets; and because Egypt, worried about the potential for Hamas fighters to destabilize the government or even perpetrate terrorist attacks within its own borders, has refused safe passage for most Gazans. All of this explains why it is so hard for Israel to accomplish its legitimate goals without causing numerous civilian casualties. But it does not constitute permission for Israel to adopt the logic of collective punishment by cutting off access to food and drinking water ahead of a full-scale invasion, or absolve the country’s armed forces from doing what they can to minimize the number of civilian casualties. As and when Israel fails to do so, full-throated criticism of its government is fully justified.

The left has the potential to speak powerfully to this moment. To do so, it needs to jettison the ideological jargon that has made so many supposed idealists fall for the ever-present temptation to contrive reasons why the suffering of one side is outrageous while the suffering of the other side is glorious. To retain our moral composure in the ugly days and weeks now on the horizon, we must recover a moral universalism that, even in the darkest hour, reminds us of our shared humanity—and unhesitatingly laments the death of innocents, irrespective of the group to which they belong.

Yascha Mounk is the founder and editor-in-chief of Persuasion. His latest book is The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas And Power In Our Time.

#Yascha Mounk #antisemitism #identity synthesis #identity politics #Israel #Palestine #hamas #islamic terrorism #islam #islamic violence #intersectionality #BLM #Black Lives Matter #decolonization #postcolonial theory #religion is a mental illness

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reasoningdaily · 1 month

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Hopefully, Vlad will one day understand that he is a guest of the culture and not a fixture – that man has gotten way too comfortable in his position.

The Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef is the most exciting moment in music right now: On Saturday, K. Dot once again dragged Drake for utter filth with his latest diss track “Not Like Us.”

The battle has led to a nonstop flow of social media commentary, including by culture vulture DJ Vlad, who was better off keeping his opinion to himself.

On “Not Like Us” – which is an absolute club banger – Kendrick calls Drizzy a pedophile and an outsider to Black culture. “You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars/No, you not a colleague, you f**kin’ colonizer,” Kendrick ruthlessly rapped.

Though DJ Mustard’s production was impeccable on “Not Like Us,” DJ Vlad, a white man who has profited from Black culture for years, chimed in to give his unwanted view on it. “Kendrick’s ‘Not Like Us’ needed a better mix. It takes away from the song,” he wrote on X.

Many responded to Vlad’s asinine tweet, including author and Princeton University professor Morgan Jerkins. “You are WHITE. This is a BLACK FOLK AFFAIR,” she wrote in a reply that went viral on X.

It took no time for DJ Vlad to channel his inner Karen and tag Jerkins’ university to snitch on her for hurting his feelings. “Wait, so a professor at @Princeton is telling me that a white person shouldn’t be allowed to voice their opinion about Hip-Hop? Is that how you interact with your students,” Vlad wrote.

Jerkins quickly responded: “What I’m saying is that you put your opinion in a discussion that’s not needed. This conversation is and should center Black people, not you.”

Of course, Vlad refused to take the hint or the L: He threatened to contact Jerkins’ place of employment.

“Don’t try to change your words now. I’ll be reaching out to @princeton about this on Monday.” Jerkins – who is the niece of music titan Rodney Jerkins –clarified that her semester was over and that her contract had been completed, prompting Vlad to say his complaint would be placed on “her permanent record” and that Jerkins had a “typical victim mentality.”

Vlad was immediately called out for threatening a Black woman for no reason other than telling him to mind his business. Ultimately, the Kendrick-Drake feud has sparked a larger conversation on Black culture and who authentically represents it.

On Monday, Vlad—who created VladTV to use Hip-Hop and Black culture to line his pockets for almost two decades—tried to backtrack. “I never had any intention of filing a complaint to Princeton for former professor Morgan Jerkins saying that white people aren’t allowed to comment on Kendrick Lamar’s music,” he wrote on X.

“She trolled me and I trolled back. At the end of the day, it created an interesting discussion about race relations in America. I will be discussing it further in my future interviews.” Obviously, this is a lie as he tagged Princeton in his replies to Jerkins.

Also, he has continuously misconstrued her words to make himself look like the victim—in typical Karen fashion. It’s not shocking for him to center himself in this complex topic in order to stay relevant, but going after a Black woman who rightfully embarrassed you is just embarrassing.

Hopefully, Vlad will one day understand that he is a guest of the culture and not a fixture – that man has gotten way too comfortable in his position.

#On Monday #one of Hip-Hop’s biggest culture vultures tried to backtrack but it was no use.#vlad fuckery #trolls #white interloper #white and violating

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tomorrowusa · 7 months

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« Antisemitism is fundamentally antithetical to the progressive movement. Now is the time for those on the left to be crystal clear that social hatred, discrimination and violence toward Jews will not be tolerated within their own ranks. Should those on the left allow these ideas to fester, they will cause enormous long-term damage to the progressive agenda that so many have fought so hard to promote for decades. As the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “Some are guilty, but all are responsible.” »

— Princeton Prof. Julian Zelizer writing at CNN.

It's disturbing how some people who claim to be progressive have been espousing antisemitism. Perhaps they are low information types who feel obliged to hop on any bandwagon driven by fringe elements on social media without really examining it.

It is not at all difficult to support the rights of the Palestinian people without acting like a participant in the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville.

I have long supported a two-state solution to accommodate Israelis and Palestinians. It is extremists on both sides which oppose it. Both Hamas and Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu are vehemently opposed to the Oslo Agreement which began the peace process; Bibi and Hamas are frenemies in their opposition to Oslo. So those demonstrators in Western countries proclaiming their love specifically for Hamas terrorists are indirectly on the same side as the most far right government in Israeli history.

Unfortunately it is not at all an exaggeration to say that some of the people who purport to be pro-Palestine are talking and acting like Nazis and Klansmen.

Cornell University student arrested for making violent antisemitic threats: police

Patrick Dai, 21, a junior from Pittsford, New York, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging him with posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications, according to United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman. [ ... ] In another post, Dai allegedly threatened to “stab” and “slit the throat” of any Jewish males he sees on campus, “to rape and throw off a cliff” any Jewish females, to “behead any Jewish babies” and to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot” Jewish people.

For people outside the US: Cornell is a prestigious Ivy League university.

For historical reasons, Germany is particularly concerned about antisemitism. Robert Habeck is the leader of one of the three parties in Germany's center-left ruling coalition. He is Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economics. Dr. Habeck felt concerned enough about the rise in antisemitism to make a video about it and print the text in the original German as well as English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

The talk was widely praised in Germany.

There is apparently a DOS attack aimed at the Economics Ministry by foreign elements trying to suppress the minister's comments. Fortunately the video is also available at YouTube with English/Arabic/Hebrew subtitles.

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The Vice Chancellor condemns antisemitism regardless of the source – far right, far left, Islamist, and Putin inspired.

What is true in Germany should also be true in its NATO allies, including the United States.

Unfortunately Jewish students at US campuses are being threatened and targeted with hate speech.

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Any person targeting or making threats against Jewish Americans because of events in the Middle East needs to be prosecuted by the feds or local law enforcement under applicable laws.

When people cross the red line from criticizing the Israeli government to scapegoating and harassing Jews, they have forfeited the right to call themselves progressives; such people should be shunned and rebuked.

#antisemitism #anti-semitism #jewish americans #cornell university #patrick dai #robert habeck #yoni kurtz #harassment on campus #hamas #binyamin netanyahu #real progressives are not antisemitic #smash antisemitism

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yukipri · 1 year

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not really related to your art or your writing even though both are sick as hell- i just wanted to share that everytime i see your username on my dash, i read it like how togepi in the pokemon anime would say it's name except its your username. so like, yuki-priiiiiii

Aw, that's super cute! And you're defs not the first person to say that, it's really funny how a lotta English speakers seem to make that connection!

(my url YukiPri comes from a combo of Yukimura + Princeton. When I first started this blog waaay back in the day 10+ years ago, it was my first fandom social media, and I made it specifically to keep in touch with some Sengoku Basara cosplayers I met at a con. I cosplayed Sanada Yukimura. There was also another person cosplaying the same character, so they called me the Princeton Yukimura, since that's where I was going to University at the time. Hence Yuki + Pri!

I've thought about it changing since, but now a lot of social media sites are old, and a lot of the shorter, catchier urls are long taken, and I've already sorta built my brand around YukiPri. So eh. It's fine, I don't hate it! It's also why I have a separate handlename, "Kazu" in addition to my brand/url ^ ^;

And there's your sudden impromptu YukiPri history lesson lmao)

❀ ❀ Send YukiPri an Ask! ❀ ❀

#YukiPri replies #Anonymous

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dchan87 · 8 months

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This past week, the world witnessed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Hundreds of attendees at a music festival were murdered in cold blood. Families hiding in their homes were burned alive. Jewish mothers and fathers were, in an eerie echo of the 1940s, imploring their children to stay quiet lest their would-be murderers should detect their whereabouts. More than 100 people remain in the clutches of a terrorist organization that announced its genocidal intentions in its founding charter. Many people, of all faiths and convictions, have recognized the enormity of these crimes. Numerous world leaders denounced the terrorist attacks in clear language. Private citizens shared their grief on social media. Millions mourned. But despite the outpouring of support, there has also been a large contingent of people and organizations who stayed uncharacteristically silent – or went so far as to celebrate the carnage. Even as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak found clear words about Hamas, the CBC and the BBC have steadfastly refused to call the Hamas fighters who killed more than 1,300 people by the name rightfully reserved for those who deliberately target innocent civilians for political ends: terrorists. Meanwhile, many schools and universities, non-profit organizations and corporations that have over the past years gotten into the business of condemning and commemorating all kinds of tragedies, both small and large, fell uncharacteristically silent.

Some of the most famous universities in the world – including both American institutions such as Princeton, Yale and Stanford and Canadian ones like the University of Toronto – neglected to release statements, or only did so after they came under intense pressure on social media. At Harvard University, it took an outraged thread on X (formerly Twitter) by Larry Summers, a former president of the institution, to prompt his successor into belated action.

Worse still were the people and organizations who actively celebrated the pogroms. Multiple chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, an influential organization that counts famous members of Congress among its ranks, encouraged their followers to attend rallies that glorified Hamas’s terror as a righteous form of resistance. As its San Francisco chapter wrote on X, the “weekend’s events” should be seen as part and parcel of Palestinians’ “right to resist.” The Chicago chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement even glorified the paragliders who murdered scores of people at a rave in southern Israel in an invitation to yet another solidarity rally, pairing a now-deleted image of a paraglider with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.”

Meanwhile, academics from leading universities were busy defending these terrorist attacks as a form of anti-colonial struggle. “Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop,” a professor in the school of social work at McMaster University wrote on X. “Settlers are not civilians,” a professor at Yale maintained.

All of this raises a simple question: How could such a notable portion of the left side with genocidaire terrorists? Why have key institutions proven so reluctant to denounce one of the worst terrorist attacks in living memory? What, to them, renders the victims of these attacks so much less worthy of solidarity than those of the many other atrocities they have full-throatedly condemned?

The ideological roots of the great obfuscation

In recent days, people have offered many possible explanations for this selective silence. Some focus on outright antisemitism. Others emphasize that an understandable concern over the immoral actions that Israeli governments have taken in the past have blinded many activists to the suffering of innocent Israeli civilians. Others still point out that institutional leaders want to avoid eliciting angry reactions from activists, preferring to stay silent on a sensitive issue out of simple fear for their jobs.

Each of these explanations contains a grain of truth. Though this can be hard to recognize for the kinds of people who like to read a quality newspaper as they enjoy their morning coffee, some people in the world are genuinely consumed by one of the world’s most ancient hatreds.

Others are indeed hyperfocused on everything that Israel has done wrong, a stand that is easier to understand in the case of Palestinians whose ancestors have been displaced than it is in the case of leftist activists, who have for many decades found the missteps of the one state that happens to be Jewish worthy of much greater condemnation than similar, or greater, missteps perpetrated by any other.

Finally, it is indeed true that many university presidents, non-profit leaders and corporate chief executives have, among the institutional meltdowns of the past years, come to believe that they must avoid controversy at all costs if they are to keep drawing their generous paychecks.

But the double-standard that has in past days become so obvious on parts of the left also has a more profound source, one that is ideological rather than practical or atavistic. Over the past decades, a new set of ideas about the role that identity does – and should – play in the world have transformed the very nature of what it means to be on the left, displacing an older set of universalist aspirations in the process.

This novel ideology, which I call the “identity synthesis,” insists that we must see the whole world through the prism of identity categories such as race. It maintains that the key to understanding any political conflict is to conceive of it in terms of the power relations between different identity groups. It analyzes the nature of those power relations through a simplistic schema that, based on the North American experience, pits so-called whites against so-called “people of colour.” Finally, it imposes that schema – in a fashion that might, in the fashionable academic jargon of the day, ironically be called “neo-colonial” – on complex conflicts in faraway lands.

The trouble with structural racism

Many advocates of the identity synthesis rightly point out that an account of racism which focuses purely on individual beliefs or motivations runs the danger of concealing important forms of injustice. Even if everyone has the best of intentions, the aftereffects of historical injustices can ensure that many immigrant students attend underfunded public schools or that many members of ethnic minorities suffer disadvantages in the housing market. It therefore makes sense, they argue, to add a new concept to our vocabulary: structural racism.

As the Cambridge Dictionary explains with reference to the closely related concept of systemic racism, it consists of “laws, rules, or official policies in a society that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race.”

By pointing out that some forms of racism are “structural” in this way, we are better able to capture – and hopefully remedy – circumstances in which members of some racial groups suffer significant disadvantages for reasons other than individual bias.

This is plausible insofar as it goes. To understand contemporary Canada, it is indeed helpful to add the notion of structural racism to our conceptual toolbox. But in recentyears, many advocates of the identity synthesis have gone one step further: They have begun to claim that this more recent concept of structural racism should altogether supplant the older concept of individual racism.

Rather than acknowledging that there are two different forms of racism, each of which deserves careful attention and needs to be combatted, parts of the left have come to conceptualize racism in an exclusively structural form. “Racism,” one online guide puts the growing consensus, “is different from racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination” because it must involve “one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination through the institutional policies and practices of the society and by shaping the cultural beliefs and values that support those racist policies and practices.”

In its most radical form, this claim entails that it is impossible for a member of a historically marginalized group to be racist toward a member of a historically dominant group. Because racism does not have anything to do with individual beliefs or attributes, and members of groups that are comparatively powerless are incapable of carrying out “systematic discrimination” against members of groups that are comparatively powerful, even the vilest forms of hatred need not count as racist. As an article inViceput it, “It is literally impossible to be racist to a white person.”

The result has, again and again, been a form of selective blindness when members of minority groups have expressed bigoted attitudes toward supposedly more privileged groups, including those that are themselves minorities. When Tamika Mallory, one of the founders of the Women’s March, was criticized for calling Louis Farrakhan, a homophobe, misogynist and proud antisemite, the “greatest of all time,” she defended herself by telling The New York Times that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.”

This inability to recognize the importance of the more traditional conception of racism makes it impossible to name what is happening when members of one minority group are the victims of hate crimes committed by members of another minority group that is now considered to suffer from greater disadvantages. In December, 2019, for example, two terrorists killed a police detective and then murdered three people at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, close to New York. They had a long trail of posting antisemitic content on social media; one assailant belonged to a congregation of Black Hebrew Israelites that holds overtly antisemitic beliefs. But because the assailants were Black, and the victims perceived as white, many news outlets failed to categorize the shooting as antisemitic, or to treat it as a hate crime, for an astoundingly long period of time.

The trouble with white privilege

The idea that all racism is structural is deeply damaging because it makes it hard for institutions to open their eyes to forms of discrimination toward members of groups that are supposedly dominant. In practice, it is made even worse by the fact that many people on the left have now embraced a very simplistic notion of who is dominant and who is marginalized – one that imposes American conceptions of race on situations in which they distort rather than illuminate underlying realities.

In North America, the most salient racial divide – though by no means the only one – has for centuries been that between white people and Black people. In assessing which group is supposedly privileged in a foreign conflict, many Americans therefore think it is enough to figure out who is “white” and who is a “person of colour.” This makes it impossible for them to understand conflicts in which the relevant political cleavage does not neatly pit whites against Blacks (or, more broadly, “whites” against “people of colour”).

Whoopi Goldberg, for example, has repeatedly insisted that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Since, from an American point of view, both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans are white, she found it impossible to get her head around an ideology that centres around racial distinctions between them. “You could not tell a Jew on a street,” she wrongly claimed. “You could find me. You couldn’t find them.”

In the case of Israel, this has led most observers to assume that there is a clear division in racial roles between Israelis and Palestinians: In their mind, Israelis are white, Palestinians “people of colour.” And since white people have historically held power over non-white people, this reinforces the impression that it is impossible for Israelis to be victims of racial hatred.

But this perspective once again turns out to be so simplistic as to verge on the delusional. Ms. Goldberg was wrong to believe that Nazis were unable to spot Jews; though some Jews did manage to survive by passing themselves off as “Aryan,” many Nazis were highly effective at spotting people whom they suspected of being Jewish.

More importantly, the assumption that most of the victims of last Saturday’s terrorist attacks were “white” Jews with roots in Europe is simply wrong. It’s not just that there are Black Israeli Jews whose ancestors immigrated from Ethiopia, or that Hamas’s victims included migrant workers from Thailand and Nepal; it’s also that Israel as a whole is now home to more Mizrahi Jews, who hail from the Middle East, than Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors long lived in Europe.

The trouble with decolonialism

The actual demographic composition of the country makes claims that Israeli civilians should be seen as settlers who are fair game for terrorist attacks doubly cynical. They are cynical because no political cause, however righteous, justifies the deliberate targeting of babies and grandmothers – neither on the Israeli nor on the Palestinian side. And they are also cynical because the great majority of Mizrahi Jews have, since the end of the Second World War, been violently displaced from the Middle Eastern countries in which their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, with no country other than the world’s only Jewish state willing to offer them safe harbour.

Postcolonial apologists for terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah love to invoke Frantz Fanon’s glorification of violence. The problem is not just that their tendentious reading of his work overlooks the ways in which violence can be morally corrosive and politically destructive; it’s also that the implied analogy between the so-called pied noirs (white settlers in Algeria who could safely return to the French metropolis if they chose to do so) and Mizrahi Jews (who would be neither welcome nor safe if they were to return to Iran or Iraq, to Morocco or Algeria) is so misleading as to be perverse.

And yet, this misleading analogy governs how many on the left ascribe the role of victim and perpetrator, explaining why dozens of student groups at Harvard could claim that Israel is somehow “entirely responsible” for Hamas’s decision to murder more than 1,300 people. At a deeper level, they even help to explain how some of the world’s most prominent left-wing academics can contrive to perceive a deeply authoritarian and overtly theocratic regime that is explicitly hostile to sexual minorities as a progressive movement.

For people like the feminist theorist Judith Butler, what determines whether a movement should count as left-wing or right-wing is based on whether it claims to be fighting on behalf of those they believe to be marginalized. Since Hamas is an organization of underprivileged “people of colour” fighting against “privileged” “white” Jews, it must be seen as part of a global struggle against oppression. Even though its program – which incidentally includes the violentsuppression of sexual minorities within the Gaza Strip – is reminiscent of some of the world’s most brutal far-right regimes, Mx. Butlerconsiders it “very important” to classify both Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

It’s time for a reckoning with bad ideas on the left

Over the past few days, some observers have started to recognize how badly parts of the left have gone astray. Many leftist academics were genuinely horrified to see their friends and colleagues celebrate the murder of babies. There has been widespread outrage at the decision of influential movements such as Black Lives Matter to idolize terrorists. Shri Thanedar, a U.S. congressman, has publicly renounced his membership in the DSA.

This is a good start. In a free country, anyone must be free to express their support of extremist organizations, however vile. But mainstream institutions should stop uncritically embracing organizations that openly glorify terrorists. And citizens should demand that moderate political parties, like the Democrats, cease to tolerate members of organizationsthat equivocate about the moral permissibility of mass murder.

Black lives matter, greatly. But it should, even before this week, have become clear that the recognition of this important fact is compatible with serious concerns about the organizations that now speak on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement. Similarly, colonialism remains one of history’s greatest injustices. But it should, even before this week, have become clear that the recognition of this important fact is compatible with serious concerns about a postcolonial discourse that all too often glorifies violent resistance to anybody who, however simplistically, is judged to be a “settler.”

The suffering to come

Any humane outlook on the world must recognize that civilians never deserve to suffer due to the group into which they were born or because of actions committed by those who claim to speak on their behalf. For that reason, I feel as much empathy for the Palestinian children who will die in bombardments of Gaza as I do for the Jewish children who were killed in Hamas’s attack on Israel. Each civilian death is a tragedy on the same moral order.

But while every civilian victim is in equal measure undeserving of their tragic fate, moral philosophers have for centuries recognized a key distinction between forms of military action that may be legitimate and forms of terrorism that will always remain illegitimate. In the former, military action is directed against military targets; while some civilian deaths are foreseeable as a consequence of such attacks, soldiers undertake to minimize them insofar as possible. In the latter, political action is directed against civilian targets; the killing of innocents is the goal, not an unintended side effect, of the attack.

This is a war that Israel did not choose, and the country has every right to defend itself. But the next days and weeks will show to what extent the Israeli army stays within the bounds governing the legitimate conduct of such a war. As political leaders including Joe Biden have rightly pointed out, it is imperative that it honour these long-established rules. If it doesn’t, full-throated criticisms of the Israeli government are fully justified.

But we no longer have to speculate as to whether Hamas, the organization which started the current war with a long-planned surprise attack that killed more than 1,300 men and women, toddlers and grandmothers, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and Thais and Americans and Canadiansand Germans and Chinese, obeyed the most basic moral rules. For we already know that they deliberately slaughtered scores of innocents in one of the most brutal terrorist attacks in human history.

The left has the potential to speak powerfully to this moment. To do so, it needs to jettison the ideological jargon that has made so many supposed idealists fall for the ever-present temptation to contrive reasons why my friend’s suffering is outrageous while my enemy’s suffering is glorious. To retain our moral composure in the ugly days and weeks now on the horizon, we must recover a moral universalism that, even in the darkest hour, reminds us of our shared humanity – and unhesitatingly laments the murder of innocents, irrespective of the group to which they belong.

#israel #palestine #israeli palestinian conflict #antisemitism #long article

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mariacallous · 3 months

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Like so many stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Marlo Gorelick picked up a new hobby: cake decorating.

She learned all the trendy techniques of the day, from of-the-moment decorations to how to properly layer colorful cakes and jams in order to create the all-popular rainbow cake.

But, unlike the myriad cottage food businesses that Jewish entrepreneurs launched during and after the pandemic, Gorelick’s cakes stood out for one significant reason: They weren’t edible. But don’t mistake this as a commentary on Gorelick’s baking skills: Gorelick’s cakes were never intended for eating. Rather, they’re designed to be worn — as purses.

“My husband said to me, ‘If you bake, you’re going to burn the house down,’” Gorelick told the New York Jewish Week. “So I took cake and I married it with something that my mother loved, which was handbags.”

During the pandemic she launched Cake Purses — a line of highly decorative vegan leather bags in the shape of confectionery, such as carrot cake and strawberry shortcake. Some of her bags, which can be found on her social media, are bedazzled with crystal stones while others are painted; all come with a zipper in the back to store items in the satin-lined interior.

Last summer, Gorelick wanted to find a new direction for her business. She began experimenting with creating purses in the shape of classic Ashkenazi Jewish foods: challahs, bagels and that New York City classic, black and white cookies.

“I said goodbye to it [cake purses] because I saw that people were just icing boxes and getting tons of hits and money from it,” Gorelick recalled. “I thought, ‘What am I doing? This is silly. This is ridiculous.’”

She began to roll out her first few Jewish food designs ahead of the High Holidays — but then, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel gave her pause. Gorelick admits she was “scared” about being so outwardly Jewish. “I didn’t want anything bad to happen to me or anybody, so I tabled it,” she said.

But life had other plans. After a major illness the following month, Gorelick returned from the hospital knowing that pivoting her business towards Judaism was ultimately “what I was meant to do,” she said. And so, earlier this month, Gorelick, who is based in Princeton, New Jersey, officially launched Glam Judaica, a new line of Jewish food-themed purses and accessories that includes a rhinestone-covered matzah ball soup bag and a very realistic looking potato knish purse. She’s also crafted purses in the shape of Jewish holiday-specific treats like hamantaschen and sufganiyot.

“I’d gone through this near-death experience where so many things had been taken from me. I said to myself, ‘You can’t take away my Judaism — I will always be that,’” she said. “If I’m going to do this [make food purses], I’m going to do it with things that are near and dear to me.’”

Gorelick grew up in a Conservative Jewish family in New Jersey, and said that Judaism is a major part of her life and identity. “My grandfather immigrated from Kyiv, in what is now Ukraine, to escape pogroms. My father’s mother’s side of the family was in the Holocaust. My mother’s family escaped Russia. So [Judaism] is fully ingrained in me,” she said.

During the pandemic, Gorelick’s spangled designs made their way around the internet and to several craft and candy expo shows in the Tri-State area. She also partnered with the iconic East Side restaurant Serendipity3 last year to create exclusive “Frrrrozen Hot Chocolate” purses to celebrate the 30 millionth serving of its “world famous” sweet treat.

For now, she makes the Glam Judaica bags, which are generally between six and 10 inches wide, to order. Gorelick, who runs the business by herself with some design and content creation help from her husband, said it takes her up to three weeks to create a purse.

The Glam Judaica line includes bracelets, necklaces and pins. She adorns one of her bracelets with five different miniature food charms — a hamantaschen, bagel, black and white cookie, rugelach and challah — and decorates a shiny bagel pin with lox, onions and capers. Each item, including the purses, starts around $125, Gorelick said, though she adjusts the prices depending on the type of material and “bling” the customer wants.

The response so far to her new Jewish collection has been “fabulous,” Gorelick said.

“People see it, they identify with it,” she said. “It’s a bit of nostalgia and they want it, because that’s the cookie they baked with their bubbe or that’s what they served when they had their bar or bat mitzvah.”

But Gorelick is not done with cakes quite yet. In addition to Jewish food designs, Gorelick recently made a yellow cake purse with the words “Bring Them Home” written in white “frosting” to raise awareness for the 100-plus Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Gorelick also used the proceeds for one of her other creations — a rainbow sprinkle black and white cookie purse — to raise money for Zaka, Israel’s volunteer emergency response teams.

“Everything I do is a little bit glitzy and glammy because that’s who I am,” Gorelick said. “My stuff is not for everybody — I get that. But if you like a little bit of sparkle and something to make you smile, I have something sweet and sparkly for you.”

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cosmicanger · 8 months

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A “McCarthyite Backlash” Against Pro-Palestine Speech

From university disciplinary hearings to death threats, supporters of Palestinian rights are facing a wave of reprisals.

Alex Kane

October 20, 2023

Students rally for Palestine at Harvard University on October 14th, 2023.

Rick Friedman / Alamy Stock Photo

IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, a religious center received enough threats around an in-person event about Palestine that the program had to be moved online. In Arlington, Virginia, bomb threats forced the country’s largest American Muslim civil rights group to move a banquet partially focused on Gaza to an undisclosed location. In Houston, a hotel pulled out of hosting a conference organized by a prominent Palestinian rights group due to “escalating security concerns.” In Brooklyn, a right-wing City Councilperson brought a gun to a student protest for Gaza. And in Washington, DC, a United States senator called for a Justice Department investigation into student supporters of Palestine.

As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues, Americans are expressing their opposition on college campuses, on social media, and in the streets. But the dissent has come with a cost. Across the US, supporters of Palestinian rights are facing a severe and unprecedented backlash to their speech and activism, ranging from university condemnations of student protest to death threats and intimidation from pro-Israel groups. “We’ve had an exponential surge in requests for legal help. It has been like nothing we’ve seen before,” said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which defends the free speech rights of Palestine advocates. Since October 8th, the group has responded to nearly 200 reports of “suppression of Palestinian rights advocacy”—almost as many incidents as they addressed in all of last year. According to Sainath, attorneys have spoken to everyone from “people being fired from their jobs for tweets or social media messages that support Palestinian human rights” to student critics of Israel who are being “doxxed and put on a website called ‘College Terror List,’” which seeks to make them unemployable. “There is an increase in people who are really concerned with the genocidal intentions of Israel right now—and they’re being met with immense McCarthyite backlash and suppression,” Sainath said.

Colleges and universities are the epicenter of this renewed Palestine solidarity activism, and have quickly become prime sites of the reprisals against it. For years, Israel-advocacy groups have worked to police public discourse on campuses, where pro-Palestinian sentiment is more visible than in perhaps any other forum of American life. Supporters of Israel have urged institutions to cancel pro-Palestine events, created blacklists of students deemed “antisemitic” for their Palestine activism, filed civil rights complaints against universities for allowing such activism, and pressed universities to fire professors who criticize Israel. And since October 7th—when Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel began bombing Gaza—a new wave of activism has garnered fresh backlash.

Last week, student groups at Yale, Dartmouth, and Princeton, among others, posted statements of solidarity with Palestine, arguing that the present violence in Israel/Palestine has its roots in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians; many specifically cited Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and the 16-year blockade of the Gaza Strip as catalysts for recent events. On October 8th, in a statement co-signed by 34 other student groups, Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee said that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The next day, Yale’s pro-Palestinian student group, Yalies4Palestine, released a statement that read: “We mourn the tragic loss of civilian lives, and for this we hold the Zionist regime accountable.”

The backlash to these efforts has been swift and resounding. Two days after the Harvard students released their statement, for instance, more than 350 Harvard faculty signed a letter saying that the activists’ stance amounted to “nothing less than condoning the mass murder” of Israelis. Several US lawmakers issued similar denunciations. And the opposition did not stop there. On October 12th, the right-wing group Accuracy in Media dispatched a truck to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to publicize images of students who were thought to be part of signatory organizations. The truck was emblazoned with the URL “HarvardHatesJews.com,” which redirected to the Accuracy in Media site. According to a former American Civil Liberties Union president who spoke to the New York Times, such actions aim to suppress students’ speech. They may also be impacting their employment prospects: After the Harvard students’ letter was published, CEOs at multiple companies publicly demanded that the university release the names of students whose groups had signed the statement so that they could be sure not to hire them. And the prominent law firm Davis Polk rescinded three job offers it had made to students suspected of signing the Harvard statement and a similar statement at Columbia University. (After two of the students said they had not been involved in their groups’ decisions to sign, the firm said it would reconsider.)

Such job offer revocations are sometimes accompanied by further harassment, as in the case of New York University Law School’s student body president Ryna Workman. On October 10th, Workman sent a newsletter to the law school’s student body expressing solidarity with Palestinians and blaming the “tremendous loss of life” in the region on Israel’s apartheid regime. In a statement sent to journalists, Workman said their message was “inspired [by] what many Jewish peace activists and Israelis, including the editorial board of Israel’s largest newspaper, have voiced over the past week in response to the violence.” However, in response to their newsletter, Workman lost a job offer at the law firm Winston & Strawn. The law school’s Student Bar Association also voted to begin the process of ousting Workman as student body president, and NYU law alumni have since called for their expulsion from the university. “I’ve been getting death threats online,” Workman said in the statement, adding that they have been attacked for being Black, queer, and nonbinary. “The harassment campaign against me has targeted all facets of my identity.”

Students say that educational institutions have not done enough to protect them from such harassment. For instance, at an October 12th pro-Israel gathering at Columbia University, a self-described Columbia administrative employee told student reporters that he wished students at the Palestine rally would “die.” Pro-Palestine student activists at Columbia told Jewish Currents that the incident was only one example of the harassment they had faced. “Students on campus have been taunted in the dining hall, hijabs have been ripped off, students have been spat on, just for things like wearing a keffiyeh,” one member of the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation, said in an interview. Students said the Columbia administration’s response had fallen short. On October 18th, the university’s president sent a message to Columbia staff and students lamenting those who “are using this moment to spread antisemitism, Islamophobia, bigotry against Palestinians and Israelis, and various other forms of hate,” and referenced “that some of this abhorrent rhetoric is coming from members of our community, including members of our faculty and staff,” but the message did not specifically address the threat to pro-Palestine ralliers or other incidents of harassment on campus. (In response to questions from Jewish Currents, a Columbia spokesperson said “the safety of our campus community is our primary and ongoing concern.”)

Some institutions have themselves cracked down on students’ political expression. A high school student in Frankfort, Illinois, who requested anonymity because they are applying to universities, said that on October 13th, school officials told a group of Palestinian students to stop wearing keffiyehs—scarves that are a Palestinian national symbol.

Such policing of expression is sometimes backed up by disciplinary actions. Maddy Ward, a student at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York, told Jewish Currents that when she interrupted a “unity gathering for Israel” by walking in and shouting, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine,” campus police officers told her that she would be subject to a campus disciplinary hearing, and that her actions could also be investigated as a crime. Ward was punished in advance of the October 19th disciplinary hearing by not being permitted to register for classes or obtain a transcript, according to a letter from a school official that Ward shared with Jewish Currents. Palestine Legal said that this move raised concerns about due process—as did the university’s denial of Ward’s request to have Sainath, the Palestine Legal attorney, present via speakerphone during the hearing. “They’re trying to criminalize and suppress people for speaking out,” Ward said. In a letter to the college, Palestine Legal said the administration’s actions raise “serious First Amendment and due process concerns.” (A spokesperson for the university told Jewish Currents that “officials are investigating an incident involving an allegation of disruption at an on-campus event” and that the school “is following applicable procedures set forth in the Student Code of Conduct.”)

On other campuses, the threats to Palestine activists have been even more severe, such as the October 12th rally at Brooklyn College where Inna Vernikov, a Republican New York City Councilwoman, showed up openly carrying a gun. Vernikov filmed herself calling the student ralliers “pro-Hamas” and “nothing short of terrorists without the bombs.” (The councilwoman was later arrested for openly carrying a weapon at a rally, which is prohibited in New York.) One member of Brooklyn College’s SJP chapter, who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, said that students were alarmed by Vernikov’s presence. “We felt threatened. A lot of students felt like their lives were in danger,” they said. SJP leaders at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, recounted similar fears amid the barrage of death threats that followed their Instagram posts defending Palestinians’ “right to resist.” “We haven’t been to classes in a week because we feel unsafe,” said Ruya Hazeyen, a co-president of the school’s SJP chapter. Hazeyan said that the university administration has temporarily exempted her from attending class, but that she hasn’t received any further information from the school on what she and the other students should be doing in response to the threats.

While many of these threats have been aimed at student activists, Palestine Legal’s Sainath said the climate of repression has also affected professors and university administrators. “Professors are being questioned, their classes are being canceled, and they are being locked out of their emails over supporting Palestinian rights,” she said. “Some university administrators have reported to us that they feel that they can’t even publicly support their Palestinian students right now.” Pro-Israel donors have also put pressure on institutions themselves. Multiple donors to Harvard said they would cut off their funds because the university had been too slow to condemn the Hamas attack and the student groups’ statement. Some donors to the University of Pennsylvania have also said they will no longer fund the school because of what they described as its “silence” on the Hamas attacks, though the president in fact condemned Hamas’s “abhorrent attacks” three days after the assault.

While campuses are at the center of the clash over pro-Palestinian speech, human rights groups and other non-academic institutions have also been targeted by harassment campaigns. A co-leader of local solidarity group Rochester Witness Palestine, who requested anonymity due to safety concerns, told Jewish Currents that Ahmad Abuznaid, the executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), was scheduled to give an in-person keynote speech in Rochester, New York, during an October 13th event. The speech was slated to be held at an Islamic center in Rochester; however, the center had to pull out of hosting the event because of threats it received. (Abuznaid spoke online instead.) Such concerns have also affected other events in Rochester, with a Palestinian film festival organized by Witness Palestine also being moved online after the host theater pulled out for safety reasons.

The Rochester talk featuring Abuznaid was not the only USCPR event that was affected. In Texas, a Hilton hotel canceled the group’s upcoming conference, saying that it posed “potential risks to our Team Members and guests.” But the hotel did not cite “any specific threats or provid[e] any record of the threats received,” Abuznaid said, noting that “without any of that information, it’s hard to believe they didn’t simply cave to anti-Palestinian racists.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott praised the hotel for canceling an event he said was put on by “Hamas supporters,” adding that “no location in Texas should host or sponsor USCPR.” Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim American civil rights group, said it had to move the location of an annual banquet because, after it updated the event programming to focus on Palestinian human rights, the hotel hosting the event received calls from anonymous people threatening “to plant bombs in the hotel’s parking garage, kill specific hotel staff in their homes, and storm the hotel.”

As the Israeli bombing of Gaza continues with no end in sight, Sainath said she is bracing for more such instances. “The repression we’re seeing is different in nature and more intense than anything we have witnessed in recent years,” she said. At the same time, Sainath predicts the crackdown on speech won’t stop dissent. “People of conscience—particularly of the youngest generations—are continuing to speak out despite immense personal risk,” she said.

#theory #news

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beardedmrbean · 2 years

Note

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/16/archives/trusting-khomeini.html

Another legacy media article aged like fine dairy.

It's NYT, how far off were they on heavier than air powered flight again?

I gotta look

You should see where they hide corrections, when they have to do them or get sued.

Gonna do the whole article text because there's a paywall so this way the curious don't have to worry about that. _______________________________________

PRINCETON, N.J. — Part of the confusion in America about Iran's social revolution involves Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. More even than any third‐world leader, he has been depicted in a manner calculated to frighten.

President Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski have until very recently associated him with religious fanaticism. The news media have defamed him in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti‐Semitism, and with a new political disorder, “theocratic fascism,” about to be set loose on the world. About the best he has fared has been to be called (by Newsweek) “Iran's Mystery Man.”

The historical record of revolutionary zeal's degenerating into excess is such as to temper enthusiasm about Iran's future. Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs, including the character and role of Ayatollah Khomeini.

An early test of his prospects is being posed by the outbreaks of violence in Teheran and elsewhere in the country. Some chaos at this stage of the revolutionary conflict was virtually inevitable, given the cleavages and climate of intensity in Iran. It is uncertain that Ayatollah Khomeini can control the extreme left or even those segments of his own followers who bear arms. What happens in the next few days is likely to determine both whether the movement's largely nonviolent record will be spoiled further and whether a new political order can be successfully brought into existence.

In recent months, before his triumphant return to Teheran, the Ayatollah gave numerous reassurances to nonMoslem communities in Iran. He told Jewish‐community leaders that it would be a tragedy if many of the 80,000 Jews left the country. Of course, this view is qualified by his hostility to Israel because of its support of the Shah and its failure to resolve the Palestinian question.

He has also indicated that the nonreligious left will be free to express its views in an Islamic republic and to participate in political life, provided only that it does not “commit treason against the country” by establishing foreign connections — a lightly‐veiled reference to anxiety about Soviet interference. What the left does in coming days will likely indicate whether it will be seen as treasonous.

To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. His political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. Thus, the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems cer tainly and happily false. What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals. For another thing, the key appointees to the provisional Government include Mehdi Bazargan, the Prime Minister, Karim Sanjabi, leader of the National Front political federation, and Daryoush Farouhar, deputy leader of the National Front; they are widely respected in Iran butside religious circles, share a notable record of concern for human rights and seem eager to achieve economic development that results in a modern society oriented on satisfying the whole population's basic needs.

In the political background, of course; is a strong, active sense of deference to the views and judgment of Ayatollah Khomeini. This is not a matter of coercion, or even agreement, but of the special character of the movement. It is inconceivable, for instance, for someone as devout as Mr. Bazargan to govern without manifesting, naturally and without any compulsion, acute sensitivity to the values of Shiite Islam. including responsiveness to Ayatollah Khomeini's views. Yet, as every religious leader is quick to underscore, the Shiite tradition is flexible in its approach to the Koran and evolves interpretations that correspond to the changing needs and experience of the people. What is distinctive, perhaps, about this religious orientation is its concern with resisting oppression and promoting social justice.

As if to contrast its vision with that of the Shah's rule, Ayatollah Khomeini said recently, in France, that in any well‐governed society “the ruler does not live very differently from the ordinary person.” For him, to be religious Is to struggle for these political goals, yet the religious leader's role is to inspire politics, not to govern. Hence, it is widely expected that he will soon go to the holy city of Qum, at a remove from the daily exercise of power. There he will function as a guide or, if necessary, as a critic of the republic.

In looking to the future, Ayatollah Khomeini has spoken of his hopes to show the world what a genuine Islamic government can do on behalf of its people. He has made clear frequently that he scorns what he considers to be the so‐called Islamic Governments in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Pakistan.## Despite the turbulence, many nonreligious Iranians talk of this period as “Islam's finest hour.” Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately‐needed model of humane governance for a third‐world country. If this is true, then indeed the exotic Ayatollah may yet convince the world that “politics is the opiate of the people.” __________________-

Couple lines that stand out

His political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. Thus, the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems cer tainly and happily false.

I'd say they'd learned their lesson and that's why they were so hard on Trump for having a similar style, but they never learn their lesson.

Ayatollah Khomeini said recently, in France, that in any well‐governed society “the ruler does not live very differently from the ordinary person.”

This is your mausoleum

Your dead carcas is there, granted yes your home was more humble, but it still beat the hell out of most everyone else there, kinda fun knowing protesters firebombed it recently even if I'm not a fan of that kind of thing.

In looking to the future, Ayatollah Khomeini has spoken of his hopes to show the world what a genuine Islamic government can do on behalf of its people.

You wanted to know that you should have talked to some of the older folks in the Balkans or even just cracked open the old books of records that the Ottoman Empire kept, maybe check the section where they kidnapped Christian children, forced them to convert to Islam, then used them to form the standing army of their empire. ___________-

Times keeps up with their swing and a miss style of journalism.

Shocking

#eggs n ham sam

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dk-thrive · 2 years

Text

But there is power in reading slowly

There is something about churning through books that induces envy and even admiration, never more than at this time of year when piles of finished tomes are splashed across social media. Bragging rights seem to go to those who have read lots of books and read them quickly – how many times have you seen someone boast about finishing 10 books in a year? What about five?

But there is power in reading slowly, something the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li tells her creative writing students at Princeton University. “They say, ‘I can read 100 pages an hour’,” she says. “But I say, ‘I don’t want you to read 100 pages an hour. I want you to read three pages an hour’.”

That’s the speed Li is happy to read at, even if she is re-reading a familiar text. “People often say they devoured a book in one sitting. But I want to savour a book, which means I give myself just 10 pages a day of any book.” On an average day, Li, best known for her novels A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Where Reasons End, reads 10 different books, spending half an hour on each title.

At that pace it can take Li up to three weeks to finish a novel. “When you spend two to three weeks with a book, you live in that world,” she says. “I think reading slowly is such an important skill. Nobody has ever talked about it, or taught me that. I’m a very patient reader. Even if it’s a very compelling book. I don’t want to rush from the beginning to the end.”

Elizabeth Strout, the Booker-shortlisted author of Olive Kitteridge and the Lucy Barton books, is also taking books at a more tranquil pace. “I was never a fast reader [but] I think I read more slowly than I used to. This is partly to savour every word. The way a sentence sounds to my ear is so important to me in the whole reading experience, and I always want to get it all – like when you read poetry.”

These words hit a nerve because I am an archetypal impatient reader, desperate to have finished a book as soon as I start. I want to know what happens – now. Ever since I started keeping track of the books I read (because I was sick of forgetting what I’d read) I’ve wanted to read more, to read faster.

So, in an effort to follow Li’s advice, I resolve both to linger and to juggle more than one book [...]

Taking my time with multiple books at once feels liberating; as if I have permission to pick up books I’ve spent years meaning to tackle. I’m not promising never to cane something again but I really think Li is on to something. Oh, and I’m at 85 books for the year, not that I’m counting.

— Susie Mesure, from ‘I want to savour every word’: the joy of reading slowly' (The Guardian, December 2, 2022). Bragging rights seem to go to people who devour books, but, as this impatient reader found, turning the pages over many days or even weeks can immerse one deeper in the writer’s world

#read #reading #slow #books #Yiyun Li #Elizabeth Strout

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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By: Heather Mac Donald

Published: May 9, 2024

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.

It was not too long ago when administrators started bringing in therapy dogs to campus libraries and dining halls to help a female-heavy student body cope with psychic distress, especially after the election of Donald Trump. “Trigger warnings” were implemented to protect female students from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other great works of literature. Campus discourse and its media echo chamber rang with accounts of the mental-health crisis on campus, whose alleged sufferers were overwhelmingly female.

Par for the course, then, when the editors at the Columbia Law Review (majority female) adopted the rhetoric of trauma in demanding that Columbia Law School hand out a universal pass for Spring 2024 coursework. A May 1 action by the New York Police Department to evict violent trespassers from an administration building had left them, they wrote, “highly emotional,” “irrevocably shaken,” “unwell,” and “unable to focus”—in other words, displaying all the symptoms of Victorian neurasthenia.

It was not too long ago when a predominantly female professoriate, student population, and bureaucratic apparatus embraced the idea that students’ “safety” should be protected against the “hate speech” that allegedly jeopardized it. (Males, by contrast, place greater emphasis on academic freedom and truth-seeking, regardless of the alleged emotional consequences of intellectual inquiry.) Examples of dangerous speech included arguments that racial disparities are not caused by racism and that human beings cannot change their sex by proclamation.

Now, while still asserting their own unsafety, the pro-Hamas protesters have done an about-face when it comes to political disagreement and “safety,” at least where pro-Israel students are concerned. Nas Issa, a Palestinian alumna of Columbia University, told the New York Times that she saw a difference between feeling uncomfortable and feeling that you are in danger. Challenges to your identity or political ideology “can be personally affecting,” said Issa. “But I think the conflation between that and safety—it can be a bit misleading.”

It was also not too long ago when college campuses were shutting down or locking students in their dorms as an anti-Covid policy, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence showing that adolescents faced virtually no chance of serious Covid complications. This zero-risk policy, in its inability to balance costs and benefits rationally, was quintessentially female. It is fitting, therefore, that N95 masks have been repurposed as go-to accessories for the most up-to-date anti-settler-colonialist look. Females at the Columbia rally in front of Butler Library passed out the masks to the few participants not already wrapped up like mummies. When asked what the point was, one distributor answered, “to protect against Covid”—an answer that, sadly, could as easily be sincere as duplicitous.

Assuming the latter to be the case, hiding one’s face to escape accountability for one’s actions is the antithesis of manly virtue. The swaddled students would say that they have been forced into such precautions by the risk of “doxing.” But while a home address is properly private and should not be disclosed without permission, a face is public, and participation in public protest fair game for political accountability. The muffled freedom fighters are also aping Third World terrorists, of course, but the worst that might befall these revolutionary wannabes is rejection from their favored investment or consulting firm, not execution.

The dead white males emblazoned on the frieze of Columbia’s Butler Library would not have been surprised by the scene below them. Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Virgil knew a thing or two about herd behavior and the irrationality of the mob, even if the students knew nothing about the great minds etched above. Our classical forebears developed philosophy, history, and the arts of persuasion to overcome the mind-numbing conformity on display at the greensward.

The founders of Columbia University would have been alarmed, however, to see students illegally colonizing campus grounds and vandalizing college buildings. They would have been dumbfounded to learn that university administrators were meekly negotiating with the vandals and that faculty in neon vests were protecting the trespassers. The idea that student demands should set the school’s agenda would have struck any nineteenth-century academic as surreal.

Universities now assume that students have the right (some would say the duty) to disrupt the system; they bow before students’ every whim. The pro-Hamas protests have unleashed a wave of 1960s nostalgia. They remind Serge Schmemann, a member of the New York Times editorial board, of those “stormy, fateful and thrilling days” of 1968, when Columbia students took control of campus buildings and held an administrator hostage for 26 hours. A front-page Times article on campus activism claimed that college protesters bring “fresh thinking . . . to the world’s most difficult questions.”

Actually, the pro-Hamas encampments have little to do with “thinking,” fresh or otherwise. Like the spread of trans identity among young females, the tent eruptions are a case of social contagion. No change in Israel’s tactics in the Gaza Strip over the last two months explains the ubiquity of encampments now. Rather, they are copy-cat behavior, like the early 1960s hula-hoop craze among teenyboppers—accelerated by the fact, so galling for the participants, that they are about to lose their sympathetic administrative foils come summer vacation.

Schmemann enthuses that disruptive student protests are an “extension of education by other means.” If so, that education now means refusing to engage with contrary viewpoints. At the April 29 protest at Columbia, a masked marcher was wearing a “Fags for Falestine” (not a typo) t-shirt. Asked how far he thought he would get organizing a gay-pride demonstration in Gaza, he stormed off and declined to answer. Every other question posed to the zombie file, such as whether a black protester knew anything about the long history of Arabs enslaving black Africans—a practice ended only by Britain’s naval vigilance—or was aware of current racial views among Arabs, was met with a similar stony silence.

Two days before the march, Iraq passed a law imposing up to 15 years’ imprisonment for gay sex. One of the chants whined out by Columbia’s female chant-callers was:

Hands off Iran, hands of Iraq and the Middle East; We want justice, we want peace.

The protesters’ demands for LGBTQ justice extend only to docile Western powers. They give their Middle Eastern idols’ overt homophobia a free pass—if they even know about it.

Theater requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But to take seriously the narcissistic melodramas played out on campus quads today requires active commitment to untruth—the untruth that the students know enough about the world to deserve attention from adults; the untruth that they are engaged in heroic behavior, when their brightly colored tents resemble nothing so much as childhood forts, well provisioned with cookies and comic books; the untruth that the trespassers and vandals possess any bargaining leverage independent of what the university voluntarily confers on them; the untruth that an American college could have any effect on Middle East politics. These mediagenic morality plays are well-rehearsed; they spring from hundreds of such theatrical interactions over the last several decades between self-involved students proclaiming various forms of victimhood and co-dependent student-services bureaucrats who need performative conflict to justify their jobs.

But while the “uprisings” will have no effect on the Middle East, administrators’ prolonged paralysis in dealing with them, only now cracking up here and there, will confirm their participants’ self-importance—what Schmemann calls the “frightening and beautiful . . . faith that mere students could do something about what’s wrong with the world.” Graduates will take this self-importance with them into what used to be called the real world, now being remade in the image of intersectional theory, with the same teary, excitable females leading the way.

This is indicative of the female shift to the far-left, as well as the ideological infiltration of the Humanities. The mere presence of corrupt domains such as "Palestine Studies" proves this.

We're looking at live-action Gender Studies in real time.

#hamas supporters #pro hamas #hamas #college protests #palestine #pro palestine #israel #intersectional feminism #college violence #violent protests #narcissism #narcissistic personality disorder #victim ideology #victimhood #victimhood culture #religion is a mental illness

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naturalrights-retard · 1 year

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This article compares the path of Transhumanism with Christianity, noting similarities and contrasts. The Transhuman’s Holy Grail is achieving immortality, but alas, without a truly human body. Such a post-human dream is a dead end street because it strips away all that it means to be human. ⁃ TN Editor

Transhumanism’s time seems to have come. The movement’s goals and most prominent personalities are ubiquitously boosted with laudatory stories in the media, its scientific-research projects bounteously funded by the hyper-rich of Silicon Valley, and its potentiality (and consequences) increasingly prominent as Hollywood plotlines. Indeed, the movement is receiving so much positive attention these days that one would think its utopian goals are really achievable.

For those few readers who may still be unaware of this futuristic social movement, transhumanists seek to “seize control of human evolution” by harnessing the naked power of biotech, cyber tech, and computer tech, to engineer into themselves the powers of movie super-heroes and, eventually, achieve life without end. When transhumanism first emerged from the high academy such as Oxford and Yale, the focus was on radical individual redesign. Transhumanists believed that they could genetically alter themselves to increase their intelligence exponentially or, say, harness hawk genes to radically improve their eyesight. Society would, they believed, soon be divided between what Princeton biologist Lee Silver called “naturals” — e.g., the unenhanced — and the superior “gen-rich” post-humans.

Over time, transhumanism’s goals grew even more ambitious and grandiose. No longer satisfied with merely attaining extraordinary capabilities, the movement shifted its primary focus to fulfilling the age-old dream of immortality in the material world, giving a new meaning to Saint Paul’s triumphant declaration, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

Transhumanists believe that as technology grows increasingly sophisticated, particularly research into artificial intelligence (AI), a moment— “the Singularity” — will come in which the cascade of technological advances will become self-generating, unstoppable, and uncontrollable. This crescendo of scientific leaps forward will culminate in everlasting life via the ability to upload our minds into computers. Once safely in cyberspace, transhumans can live indefinitely, perhaps melding their cyber-minds with others, being downloaded into a cyborg, their own cryogenically frozen heads attached to new bodies, or perhaps into their own clones. The details can become a bit murky, but Google’s Ray Kurzweil believes that software heaven will be with us by the 2040s.

And this is where transhumanists’ desperation becomes most clearly visible. You see, transhumanism is overwhelmingly a materialist’s obsession. Polls show that most of the movement’s adherents are atheists, with a scattering of agnostics and apostate religionists thrown in. In any event, the focus of their movement is materialistic. Most of them believe or fear that nothing of them will survive their own dying.

That kind of thinking leads to nihilism or, at the very least, a temptation to despair. Something must be done! Enter transhumanism. As movement proselytizer Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president in 2016 on the Transhumanist Party ticket and is now a Libertarian candidate for California governor, wrote in “I’m an Atheist, Therefore I’m a Transhumanist”:

The challenging idea that everyone in the 21st Century must decide how far they are willing to go to use technology and science to improve their lives is loudly calling. And the faithless will answer it. It’s inevitable that hundreds of millions will soon come to call themselves transhumanists, if not in name, then in spirit. Many will end up supporting indefinite life extension and technologies that strip away our humanness and promote our transhumanness. Further into the future, many more will begin to discard the human body in favor of embracing synthetic forms of being.

So there you have it. Transhumanism offers adherents the comforts and promises of traditional faith — without the humility that comes from being a created creature, and with the further benefit of eschewing all worry about the eternal consequences of sin, the laws of karma, or a future reincarnation in which our condition is based directly on how we live our present life. In short, transhumanism’s primary purpose is to substitute religious belief with a nonjudgmental and ironic technological echo of Christian eschatology. Consider:

Christ’s second coming and the Singularity are both expected to occur at a specific moment in time.

Both lead to death’s final defeat: For Christians, in the “New Jerusalem,” and for transhumanists, in their embrace of a corporeal post-humanity.

For Christian believers, life in the hereafter will mean an end to all suffering. Likewise the Singularity, for transhumanists. Indeed, eliminating suffering in fleshly living is one of transhumanism’s major aims.

Christians expect to live in glorified bodies that are both real and immortal. Kurzweil’s promise of what he calls “non-biological bodies” appears to be a similar concept.

Transhumanism even predicts that the already dead will be raised, an offshoot of a core principle of Christian faith. For example, Kurzweil is planning to construct a technological version of his long-dead father. He told ABC News, “You can certainly argue that, philosophically, that [replica of your father] is not your father, . . . but I can actually make a strong case that it would be more like my father than my father would be, were he to live.”

But here’s an intractable problem for transhumanists. Whatever would be created by the supposed transhumanist-mind upload, it wouldn’t be the same thing as being truly alive. Real life requires a living body. We don’t just think in the way a computer calls up programs. We also feel. Our emotions change our bodies. Our bodies affect our emotions. Both impact our thinking, and the whole fleshly mix affects our life’s course. Then there’s that pesky subconscious. So, at best, your mind uploaded into a computer would be a pale substitute for the real McCoy, perhaps mimicking your attitudes, but not being really you. As Duke University neurologist Miguel Nicolelis told the BBC when discussing this subject:

You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot code love or hate. There is no way you will ever see a human brain reduced to a digital medium. It’s simply impossible to reduce that complexity to the kind of algorithmic process that you will have to have to do that.

So why go through the pretense that you in a computer would be real? The answer is as human as life gets: We all need hope — and that includes atheists, agnostics, and other assorted materialists. Or, as Bob Dylan sang, you gotta serve somebody — and for transhumanists lacking a belief in the transcendent, that means they have to serve themselves.

But let’s see the transhumanism philosophy for what it really is, a wail of despair in the night, a desperate yearning to escape what most true transhumanists bemoan as an all too brief and maddeningly restricted existence, that will be utterly obliterated once their heart stops beating. That’s depressing! As Istvan writes, embracing transhumanism offers the prospect that he and other atheists will “become godlike” transhumans. No wonder transhumanists are such true believers. Transhumanism offers them purpose — and the comfort that their salvation is simply a technological detail away.

Read full story here…

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azurlaneincorrectquotes · 2 years

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July 12, 2024.

Two years since SCP-001 when Day breaks destroyed humanity. Miraculously, some social media sites and internet providers still work.

Check Twitter, see the usual stuff. Azur Lane Official tweets for the first time in 2 years. Announcing a rerun of the Shinano event, their first event since the Princeton rerun.

They refuse to give out apologems

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sportsbroad121 · 16 days

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The Evolution of Sports Broadcasting: From Radio to Live Streaming

Sports broadcasting has undergone a remarkable transformation over the decades, evolving from humble radio broadcasts to today's high-definition live streaming. This evolution has not only changed how we experience sports but also how athletes, teams, and leagues interact with their fans. This article explores the journey of sports broadcasting, highlighting key milestones and the impact of technological advancements.

Early Days: The Rise of Radio Broadcasts

The history of sports broadcasting can be traced back to the early 20th century when radio emerged as a powerful medium for sharing live events with the public. Radio broadcasts allowed fans to follow games in real-time, bringing the excitement of sports into living rooms across the country. One of the most famous early broadcasts was the boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921, which drew millions of listeners 해외스포츠중계.

Television: Bringing Sports to the Masses

The real breakthrough for sports broadcasting came with the advent of television. The first live sports event on television was a college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton in 1939. Television brought a new level of immersion, allowing viewers to see the action unfold before their eyes. Major events like the Olympics and World Cup became global spectacles, captivating audiences with their visual and emotional impact.

The Golden Age: Iconic Moments in Broadcasting

The 1960s and 70s are often considered the golden age of sports broadcasting. This era saw the rise of iconic broadcasters like Howard Cosell and Vin Scully, whose voices became synonymous with their respective sports. Memorable moments, such as the "Miracle on Ice" during the 1980 Winter Olympics, further cemented sports broadcasting as a cultural phenomenon.

Digital Revolution: The Rise of Cable and Satellite

The late 20th century brought another major shift with the rise of cable and satellite television. This enabled sports fans to access a wider range of games and events, including niche sports and international competitions. Channels like ESPN became household names, providing 24/7 coverage and analysis that appealed to die-hard fans and casual viewers alike.

Internet Age: Streaming and On-Demand Content

The 21st century ushered in the era of streaming and on-demand content. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch allowed fans to watch highlights, interviews, and even live games from their computers and mobile devices. This democratization of content gave rise to a new generation of sports broadcasters, from independent commentators to professional esports casters.

The Role of Social Media

Social media has also played a pivotal role in sports broadcasting, enabling fans to engage with their favorite teams and athletes in real-time. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram have become essential tools for breaking news, sharing highlights, and building a global community of sports enthusiasts.

Technological Advancements: Virtual Reality and Beyond

Looking to the future, technological advancements like virtual reality (VR) promise to further revolutionize sports broadcasting. VR allows fans to experience games from the best seats in the house, providing an immersive and interactive viewing experience like never before.

Challenges and Opportunities

While sports broadcasting has made tremendous strides, it also faces challenges. Issues such as broadcasting rights, piracy, and the saturation of content present ongoing concerns. However, these challenges also present opportunities for innovation and growth, as broadcasters seek to adapt to changing consumer preferences and technological advancements.

Conclusion

The evolution of sports broadcasting has been nothing short of extraordinary. From the early days of radio to today's world of streaming and virtual reality, each era has brought new opportunities and challenges. As we look to the future, one thing is clear: sports broadcasting will continue to evolve, driven by technological innovation and the passion of fans around the world.

Sports broadcasting isn't just about watching a game; it's about connecting with the athletes, teams, and fellow fans who share our love for sports. Whether you're tuning in on the radio, watching on television, or experiencing it in virtual reality, the magic of sports broadcasting lies in its ability to bring us together and inspire us with unforgettable moments.

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