@natalunasans / natalunasans.tumblr.com
since some of y'all apparently need a refresher course. as always, use your judement when deciding if it's a dogwhistle or just innocent usage of a number or symbol
In no particular order, here is an illustrated list of reasons I love Sacha Dhawan’s Master, most of which boil down to the way that Sacha Dhawan so expertly embodies the Master to such a degree that we can look into this character’s mind as we never have before.
Find my full series under the HELP I WUVS HIM tag or at the why I love Dhawan Master tag.
Read more about my version of Dhawan Master/Thirteen [plus fam] in The Happy Famverse, a series of comic shorts about the domestic lives of [extended] Team TARDIS.
#51: He’s played by Sacha Dhawan!
Before I get to what I love about Sacha Dhawan, though, I have to talk about the thing I cannot stand about Dhawan Master. It’s also the thing that I cannot stand about Thirteen. Basically, the show [the BBC and writers and directors] refuses to deal with the fact that Dhawan Master is the first British Indian actor playing this character. He’s also playing opposite Jodie Whittaker, who’s the first White woman to play the character of the Doctor. I don’t give a fuck if Time Lords don’t do race and gender the way that Earthlings do; we’re dealing with two Earthling actors, a brown man and a white woman, whose casting is groundbreaking because of their race and gender. Their race and their gender are important. However, the show so strenuously avoids dealing with the race and gender of the Doctor and the Master that they end up in situations with unfortunately racial and gender-based implications.
Talking about Nazis, racism, misogyny, and rape below the cut.
@natalunasans @sclfmastery – my sometime partners in meta…
I feel like this topic gets danced around a lot so I’m just gonna be real specific -
You gotta support psychotic people with delusions that make you uncomfortable. You gotta stop assuming psychotic people are antisemitic because they’re afraid of the illuminati, or lizard people running the world, or other shit nazis use as dogwhistles. A nazi claiming that Jewish people have a secret shadow organisation running the world and a psychotic person claiming that there’s a secret shadow organisation running the world that’s specifically after them are not the same. Not even close.
Yes, there are psychotic people with these delusions that are also antisemitic but there are many that aren’t. There are many whose delusions have absolutely fuckall to do with Jewish people. Scapegoating them all is ableist, plain and simple.
I wish I had a clear guide for you but, unfortunately, it’s not that simple and almost never is. If antisemitic dogwhistles were obvious and easy to separate from the bunch, they wouldn’t be dogwhistles.
So, here’s where I’m probably going to get myself in trouble - full disclosure, I am not Jewish. I’m not an expert on Jewish issues, though I try to keep myself as informed as possible and be supportive where I can. If I say something antisemitic here, please tell me so that I can change it.
This site promotes a very black-and-white view of things when reality is never that simple. Someone using Nazi dogwhistles might be a Nazi, they might be psychotic, or they might just be someone who doesn’t know the impact of their words and doesn’t think they’re talking about Jewish people at all. Dogwhistles are made to be covert, things that can be slipped into casual conversation without drawing attention, so people accidentally use them all the time.
I can’t tell Jewish people how to respond to antisemitism. It’s simply not my place and I don’t feel informed enough to even try to throw my hat in the ring. I can say, though, that avoiding psychotic people with delusions that make you uncomfortable is fair. Letting us know that our delusions have similarities to antisemitic dogwhistles is fair. It may not always change things, as psychotic delusions don’t tend to listen to logic or reason, but, as a psychotic person, I would rather know that my delusions overlap with dogwhistles so that I can speak about them in appropriate spaces and not in public forums where I might do unintended harm.
In general, I think it’s good to remember both that sometimes people who say bigoted things aren’t bigoted, just uneducated on certain issues, and that you have the right to cut people who say bigoted things out of your life without discussion or explanation.
A single dogwhistle by itself is certainly a red flag, but it isn’t necessarily indicative of bigotry. It could just as easily be a lack of education or awareness. Multiple red flags are another story.
Online spaces usually come with the benefit of allowing you to go through someones posts and see if it was a one-off mistake or if it’s part of a larger pattern of behaviour. If it is, you should block and report. If not, then it’s up to you. You could send them an ask yourself, direct them to an already existing post that explains the problem, or you could contact someone else that you know is up for interacting with them.
But you are by no means obligated to educate a stranger or stick around long enough to figure out if the dogwhistle is representative of their beliefs, a lack of knowledge, or an aspect of their psychosis. Especially when they’re saying things that are targeted at you and your community (whether they know the meaning behind their words or not). Not everyone is cut out to be a teacher and that’s okay! Just dont direct hate or harrassment towards them.
With in-person interactions, I deem a single red flag as cause enough to put some distance between me and a potentially dangerous person. Don’t take risks you dont have to.
(Disclaimer: Also not Jewish, so the above is about handling dogwhistles in general and not specified for facing antisemitism. So, @wetwareproblem if any of y'all are comfortable adding on or correcting anything, I’d really appreciate it.)
Speaking from the perspective, specifically, of a white Jewish convert who is not psychotic but does have heavily stigmatized personality disorders: @your-aspd-dad, I get what you’re trying to say here, and it’s a valid point - psychotic people face wildly unfair and dangerous stigma, and after a while everyone who says you’re saying some evil shit sounds the same. You’re fucking exhausted by people giving you suspicious looks - or even outright accusations! - because of a mental health symptom you can’t help, and that’s fair. You deserve better.
But, while I absolutely believe this was not your intent, what you’ve essentially said here is “Jewish people, please lay down your lives for my comfort.”
Speaking from extensive experience existing on tumblr as an Outspoken Trans Jew, somewhere between 80 and 90% of the time you tell someone “Hey, that thing you just said was a [Nazi|TERF] dogwhistle, could you please reexamine that?” the response is going to be “HOW FUCKING DARE YOU ACCUSE ME OF BEING A [NAZI|TERF]?”
So, if we’re to accommodate you as you request, we can’t object to antisemitic dogwhistles at all, lest we be taken as accusing a psychotic person.
You’ve offered us one safe option: We’re allowed to disengage when someone starts saying antisemitic things. We can walk away.
Sorry, but the moment that becomes our only strategy, we lose the ability to participate in public at all, because Nazis will latch on to it.
So… as I see it, you have two options here:
1. When Jewish people ask you for advice on how to reasonably and safely accommodate you, work with us.
2. Accept that we are going to prioritize not dying over not being ableist, even those of us who suffer under ableism and sanism.
Okay, with all that said, what’s my actual strategy?
The basic core of it:
In real life, err on the side of caution. One red flag is enough to mark a person as Threat; two (or one very blatant one) is enough to put the word out to the community.
Online, if somebody presents two red flags, I’ll do a quick sniff test of their blog; finding a third red flag is a fail, as is a general eau de Nazi. (There’s a lot of concrete factors that go into that, but even if I could articulate them all I wouldn’t want to for security reasons.)
If this is a single red flag that seems out of left field, they get one gentle warning, like I described earlier: “Hey, what you’re saying is really antisemitic <possible explanation if I’m feeling generous or patient or think it’s low risk>, maybe reeexamine that?”
And I will watch their response very carefully.
If they fly into a “HOW DARE YOU!” then they’re not actively Nazis, but they’re useful stooges for them - people who are more concerned with making sure nobody gets accused of being a Nazi than with not actually doing Nazi things.
Any new antisemitic red flag is a Nazi, as is anyone who tries to argue the point too cleverly and patiently.
Anyone who actually takes this at face value, apologizes, and corrects what they’re saying (or stops saying those things in public, if it’s not something they can correct outright) gets a green flag - they’re unusually safe and genuine allies.
PUNCHING PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE YOU DISAGREE WITH THEM POLITICALLY IS NOT OK
Ok, so this ask is no doubt in reference to my post that discusses punching nazis. I know people have all kinds of feelings about this, and I’ve decided I’m going to take this ask as an opportunity to lay out my thoughts.
When I was in 9th grade and had recently come out, some boys cornered me in the hall, trapped me against a railing, and made various remarks the nature of which I’m sure you can all imagine. I went home, upset and scared, and told my father what had happened. He said, “If someone ever does something like that to you again, hit them.” I objected, saying that I didn’t want to escalate the situation, and my father said, “When someone is threatening your safety, the situation has already escalated.”
I don’t think anyone (with the exception of Roma people) can really understand just how traumatizing the Holocaust is to Jews to this very day. At my Jewish elementary school, almost everyone had grandparents with numbers tattooed on their arms. We didn’t need to learn about the Holocaust in history class. We’d been having nightmares about it our whole lives. It lives with us every day.
A couple of years ago, a family friend had to call Child Protective Services on his own family in order to force his wife to get therapy for her PTSD. Why did she have PTSD? Because her parents were both Holocaust survivors, and they’d been so traumatized when she was a child that they’d been unable to take care of themselves, let alone her. Their trauma caused her suffering, which in turn caused suffering for her spouse and children. Do you think her children don’t know that the Holocaust is the ultimate source of their pain? Three generations later, the Holocaust is still destroying our people.
And now there are Nazis. Now, right now, there are Nazis. No goyim (again, excepting the Roma) can even begin to comprehend how viscerally terrifying that is. My synagogue has metal detectors and armed guards at the doors. My old elementary school has the police bomb disposal unit on speed-dial. Our physical safety is threatened every moment of every day. The situation has already escalated.
So would I punch a Nazi? Fuck yes. Not to prove what a macho leftist I am; I don’t give a fuck. But when my community held a vigil last year for the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the victims of a fucking Nazi, I was standing there, looking over my shoulder, expecting that any moment someone would show up, to mock my family and friends, to celebrate our mourning and cheer our pain, and I was ready to punch them. Because their presence constitutes a threat to our safety. Because their presence would mean that the situation had already escalated.
If I’d ever needed to punch a homophobic bully in high school, I’d have done it, and I would not have apologized. And if a Nazi comes near me or mine and I need to punch him, I’ll do it, and I won’t apologize. If I’m faced with someone who wants to kill me, the situation literally cannot escalate any further. I refuse to relinquish my right to meet the situation we find ourselves in with every tool I have available, including my fists.
Never normalize Nazis.
I hate _% of people statistics being used like “oh it’s such a small number” cause 1% is a small number but 1% of 7 billion is 70 million. That’s more than the population of the UK, France or Italy.
6% of the US is 19 million, as stated above. There are only 3 states that have over 19 million people in them. 19 million is the population of the entire state of New York. That’s more than half the population of California.
Taking populations and turning them into percentages is okay until you try to say “oh that’s not a lot of people” but the reality is… That’s millions. That’s enough to be its own country. That’s fucking scary.
For comparison, that’s 3 neo-Nazis for every Jew in the country. Without allies, we don’t stand a chance.
People adding Nazi apologist shit onto my posts like “but nazis invented cell phones and space rockets so without them we’d be less technologically advanced VuV” like buddy, if you think for one second we wouldn’t have eventually made it to the moon or made instant communication devices without mass genocide then I dunno what to tell you except to get the fuck away from me.
Your kind aren’t welcome here.
Also would I “trade” my cell phone for a world with no Nazis?
Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!
I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.
What the fuck is wrong with you.
??? We’d have probably had cellphones sooner given the amount of inventors, theorists and artists the nazis killed. We’d have been to the moon sooner if we didn’t have segregation. God only knows where we’d be if women were given the opportunity to invent sooner. Disabled people come up with cool stuff too. It’s a whole new world of creation if you value human life equally!
*the sound of a thousand nuclear physicists laughing* Buckle up kids, today we’re talking about why the Nazis never invented the atom bomb. We’re gonna do this
to white supremacist minds. Ok. So the Nazis were all about physics … as long as it was with things you could see & touch. Rockets, improved motors, even radio tech (which gives tangible audio and/or visual results) were awesome and very good careers for good German boys. Theoretical physics, on the other hand, was viewed as made-up Jewish bullshit. The German scientific old guard did NOT like little punks like Einstein. Who did they think they were, running around with their “time is relative” and “the interstellar ether doesn’t exist” and who the shit even cares what’s INSIDE an atom, Albert, it’s not like the INSIDE does anything. JESUS. The Nazis saw modern physics as being the same thing as Freud’s psychology, Klimt’s modern art, and Kafka’s stories: a decadent waste of time, way too Jewish, and definitely not cool or manly. So to combat uncool Jewish science, pro-Nazi German scientists founded an actual movement– “Deutsche Physik/Aryan Physics”– all about real stuff like engines and bombs and it was gonna serve the SHIT out of the fatherland. No Jews allowed.
“Ugh, GROSS.” -Nazis Jewish nerds who wanted to study physics & engineering had to settle for theoretical physics. And boy did they ever. Niels Bohr, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Epstein, James Franck, Rudolf Kompfner, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf , Eugene Wigner, Frank and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and some dude named Albert Einstein among others were all turning their lemons into sweet, sticky theoretical physics lemonade in 1920s Germany. Every single one of them, and more, emigrated to the US in the 1930s. Jewish colleagues from Axis Italy, like Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi– aka the guy who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and married to a Jewish woman– joined the brain drain as Europe hemorrhaged nuclear physicists right into America’s warm, heaving, bloodthirsty bosom.
*artist’s rendition
Albert Einstein’s application to become a US citizen. Dated Jan 18th, 1936. The few Gentile nuclear physicists Germany had managed to produce– Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Arnold Sommerfeld– were persecuted just for being into Jewish stuff. Like, “were called out in the official SS newspaper for being ‘White Jews’” and “Heisenberg’s mom called Himmler’s mom and told her to tell Himmler to make the Nazis stop being mean to her boy”-level persecuted. That’s right, these badass Reich science dudes couldn’t even do their job without their moms running interference. THAT’s how fucking great the Nazis were at science. Meanwhile the bright lights over in Deutsche Physik were talking about how there’s actually been a bunch of moons and when of the last ones fell down it buried Atlantis and also the sun’s gravity suddenly stops at 3x the orbital radius of Neptune. Like… thank God for those Nazi scientific advances, amirite?
Nationalist German scientists cheerfully joined the persecution of their Jewish colleagues, because Nazi scientists just really wanted Jewish physicists’ jobs. But the bummer was, the Nazi scientists couldn’t handle the mathematics that made relativity work. They were too dumb to do that science. Look– we’ve all been there. But the nationalist German scientists’ approach was– instead of leveling up their game, just discredit everything their rivals did. Declare it dumb, and made-up, and all the good parts of this stuff we just said was dumb and made-up were already invented by Aryans anyway, so why keep Jewish scientists around? Just forget about this atomic physics crap and keep giving us money to talk shit about Neptune, it’ll be great.
“Hahaha wut?” -Nazis Eventually the Third Reich figured out that atom bombs were a thing and they should probably make one. They put Heisenberg– who, if you’ll recall, just had to have his mom call in an anti-bullying PSA to the Fuhrer’s secretary three short paragraphs ago– in charge. With every single other person who knew about nuclear fission having left Germany years ago, Heisenberg was pretty much on his own. The Nazi bomb project went nowhere. A Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons would been able to do whatever the fuck they wanted. The only thing that stood in their way? Their own. goddamn. antisemitism.
Director of Los Alamos weapons lab and Jewish American, J. Robert Oppenheimer, seen in profile as he oversees final assembly of the Trinity test bomb. Trinity was the first test detonation in the US nuclear weapons program. (x) Is this a post in support of atom bombs? No. This is a post about how being so high on your own inferiority complex that you’re down to murder people smarter than you, will fuck you in assholes you didn’t even know you had.
Thank you, Science Tumblr, for that deconstruction of Nazi bullshit.
This is excellent as is, but, I need to point out that the USA political situation is in many ways falling into this same hole now. We are becoming xenophobic and anti science at our top political level. The GOP is practically anti reality at this point. We need to fix this.
Holy shit, this is the best addition to any of my posts.
I don’t remember if I’ve reblogged this with the small correction before, but Fermi wasn’t Jewish. He DID flee persecution of Jews, though, because he was a lapsed Catholic who married a Jewish woman. Otherwise, yeah, this is 100%
Hey now, some of them will grow up and go pro.
I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people
also the american eugenics movement which started in the late 1800′s was a huge inspiration for Hitler, and was even where the idea of blonde hair blue eyed superiority came from, and the idea of a “gas chamber” to take care of “undesirables”. In the early part of the third reich, the american eugenics movement saw it as the logical conclusion of their ““research”” and republished lots and lots of nazi propaganda
but yeah, nazism is so un-american uwu
Hitler praised American immigration restrictions in Mein Kampf. When the nazis wrote the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime, they specifically modelled them after the Jim Crow Laws, the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law of the United States.
Big chunks of the American legal system and history inspired the nazi’s in their organisation of the Holocaust.
Welp
I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people
also the american eugenics movement which started in the late 1800′s was a huge inspiration for Hitler, and was even where the idea of blonde hair blue eyed superiority came from, and the idea of a “gas chamber” to take care of “undesirables”. In the early part of the third reich, the american eugenics movement saw it as the logical conclusion of their ““research”” and republished lots and lots of nazi propaganda
but yeah, nazism is so un-american uwu
Hitler praised American immigration restrictions in Mein Kampf. When the nazis wrote the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime, they specifically modelled them after the Jim Crow Laws, the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law of the United States.
Big chunks of the American legal system and history inspired the nazi’s in their organisation of the Holocaust.
Welp
At bare minimum, America was founded on two massive crimes against humanity: native genocide and slavery. To pretend that it’s some pristine shining beacon of freedom actually weakens us as a country, because we don’t deal with the demons of our past, which makes us vulnerable to continued injustice.
For people to cast realism as “hating America” is disgusting. We’re a flawed nation built on a good principle that we applied unevenly. Admitting that and trying to do better is strength, not weakness.
What do you think about the reclamation of the pink triangle (and the black triangle which isn't even fully or mainly ours) and the way it's handled. Because I honestly kind of hate it. I'm German. Those were the deaths of people who may have lived in my house before me. But Americans decided they could "reclaim" (as if it had ever been ours/theirs) it as a fun pop symbol. And instead of respecting the dead (like it is done with aids) it's for celebration. And I feel that's wrong.
You are always entitled to your feelings, however, I think that you’re missing some pieces of the puzzle and attributing some meaning to it (”fun pop symbol”) that it simply doesn’t have in the United States – at least, not any part of the communities I’ve been a part of.
Let’s walk through some of the pieces that I think you’re missing, and how those things expressly make it clear that it is not a ‘fun pop symbol’, and never has been, not to us.
I’m going to put this all behind a cut, because this is going to delve into some painful history. Content warnings have been tagged.
when ppl act like the goal of anti-nazi ppl is to “”change their minds”” about their “”beliefs”” like… that’s…
we don’t give a shit about their ~beliefs~??? I dont care if mr dick is sittin in his house thinking jews are awful. I would LIKE for him to not think that but I ultimately do not care. I do not care about changing his thoughts.
i care about preventing him from having enough of a public platform that he and people like him gain the power to ACT ON those beliefs.
so yes actually! punching nazis when they are trying to be suave on television, such that they are unwilling to try to go and appear suave on television again, does accomplish that.
i dont care what mr dick thinking in the privacy of the hole he crawled out of, at this point. we are at a point where there are way more pressing things regarding nazis. which is like. nazis get to be suave on television.
we – and by this i mean ‘people targeted by nazis’, but mostly jews, because i am a jew and that’s where my experience lies – we did not want to end up in a scenario where the highlight of our day could be some guy getting punched. in fact, that’s kind of ghoulish.
like, ok. i am pretty much the worst kind of bleeding-heart, dyed-in-the-wool pacifist you will ever meet, when circumstances allow me to be. i don’t, personally, want to kill nazis; i just want nazis to stop being nazis. ideally, the world would work like it did in my 10-year-old fantasies, where i could walk up to a nazi and be like “jews are people,” and he would be like “holy shit!!! mind blown” and stop being a nazi and we’d sit down and have a deep philosophical discussion.
but real nazis have this unfortunate, terrifying habit of continuing to be nazis. when you hit them with intellectual debate, or reason, or “tolerance”, or “just giving them a chance”, or “compromise”, or any of that shit. they continue to be nazis, which means they still want to wipe out me and my people, and many other swathes of people as well.
which is why i understand people who want to kill nazis. or, in a milder variation, punch them.
i wish they would stop being nazis but they wish i would die. when you, historically, adhere to an ideology that advocates mass murder past the point of any nonviolent resistance, you have forfeited your right to a fair debate. you have forfeited your right to any response but self-defense that is as violent as whatever you make necessary.
nazis forfeited their right to nice counter-tactics long ago, and jews know this.
there’s another reason, too, why i whooped at that video. not because someone was getting hurt – don’t be dense. as i said, that’s ghoulish. we did not want to end up with our livelihood as a people so threatened that violent self-defense makes us cheer. can you think about that for a second? can you think about the kind of corner we’re backed into, here? it’s not a natural state of being. it’s a place where most people, as far as we can tell, truly do not give a shit if we live or die, because they’re talking about “tolerating” people whose ideology involves straight-up killing us. and so if we see somebody punch a nazi, it’s evidence: that person in the black mask, they’re on my side.
there is one person who recognizes the nazi as a mortal threat, which means they recognize that jews are people. that people of color are people. that any of the groups threatened by nazis deserve to have their fear recognized.
and every time you, a moderate liberal, a white goy, wring your hands about a nazi getting punched, about violent tactics, about fighting hate with hate, you push us further and further into the corner where we have to cheer at that. it’s sheer relief, at somebody recognizing the terror enough to punch back.
so no, we weren’t born bloodthirsty, just salivating at the chance to kick a nazi in the balls. we got driven here reluctantly, by history, to a place where violence in our defense can make us weep with gratitude. you drove us here.
“we got driven here reluctantly, by history, to a place where violence in our defense can make us weep with gratitude” !!!!!!!!!
This.
I feel like there’s a distinction to be drawn between e.g. somebody who uses the r-word and a literal nazi. not that using the r-word or any slur is okay (not sure what specific slurs you’re thinking of) but comparisons of nazis to non-nazis should be made only with extreme caution, lest nazism start to seem like just another problematic ism, no worse than any other.
I at least interpreted the OP as referring to the people who think it’s helpful to describe right wing extremists as psychos, retards, etc. And I would extend that to others who want to throw around ableist rhetoric to explain terrible attitudes and behavior, besides to insult the extremists. That’s really not helpful, to say the least. Dangerous racist ideologies are not mental illness.
(And yeah, that includes the “inbred pieces of trash who shouldn’t be allowed to produce more of the same for everyone’s good” type stuff, coming from the left. I shouldn’t need to even start on all the ways that’s messed up, maybe especially in this specific context–and yet it keeps happening. One of the things I was thinking of with my tag commentary earlier.)
It’s also not helpful to conflate very different things, as you say.
the nazis started with eugenics of disabled ppl that was literally the first people they dehumanized. so no, dehumanizing disabled people for whatever reason... there is no good reason and that is never okay.
