Racing Turtles

transcript:

Murderous solipsism. Israeli football fans go on a rampage im Amsterdam, tearing down Palestinian flags and shouting racist slogans. Why? Because the very presence of anything Palestinian is a threat to the integrity of the solipsistic bubble we inhabit even when abroad.

Then, of course, we are surprised. How is it that when we do such things we suffer the consequences? How is it that we are attacked? How is it that the Dutch police doesn't recognize that we are on a mission for peace, that we are good while they must be bad?

Events last night in Amsterdam are presented as a "pogrom" here in Israel. We do not occupy the same plane of existence as the rest of you. Our actions have no implications. We can never be the cause of anything. Everything happens to us. Only we are real. Murderous solipsism.

Every article I've found has presented the Israel fans as innocent victims here, but then I read this paragraph in the middle of A CBS Report

So, as Mr. Goldberg says above, before the game Maccabi fans marched through Amsterdam attacking anything Palestinian and chanting "Death to Arabs", and then later after the game these same fans were attacked throughout the city, and yet the whole incident is being portrayed in the press as a spontaneous antisemitic convulsion.

Obvsl this situation is fairly confused right now. On Bluesky, I'm seeing some commentators I trust talk about the attacks being wider than just Maccabi fans, so it's possible there WAS a larger antisemitic element to this but, as of 9:22 CST, This Article from the Associated Press on the issue said there wasn't yet evidence of that

HOWEVER, there's also talk about discussions on Telegram(widely used by fascist and hate groups) of "Jew Hunting" coming out of the Mayor's office. Now, I'm not acquainted with Dutch politics, but after some prelim reading I feel like the Mayor, Famke Halsema, is a dedicated lefist with a strong sense of personal integrity, so I feel like she wouldn't make that up. So the rhetoric was there, even if we don't yet know if it turned into action.

This Article in The Forward(an independent leftist Jewish newwspaper) is, so far, the clearest and most sensible to me. I won't quote much of it, I'd rec reading it it isn't long, but I want to highlight two parts, this quote from a local community organizer:

And this 2nd quote from him ending the article:

My take, at this time, is that this seems to be a case of two groups of hooligans hooliganing at each other, which was intensified by current political events(including the disparity in how anti-genocide activism is violently suppressed by the very local cops escorting Maccabi fans around, protecting them as they cheer genocide and insult the local population).

transcript:

Murderous solipsism. Israeli football fans go on a rampage im Amsterdam, tearing down Palestinian flags and shouting racist slogans. Why? Because the very presence of anything Palestinian is a threat to the integrity of the solipsistic bubble we inhabit even when abroad.

Then, of course, we are surprised. How is it that when we do such things we suffer the consequences? How is it that we are attacked? How is it that the Dutch police doesn't recognize that we are on a mission for peace, that we are good while they must be bad?

Events last night in Amsterdam are presented as a "pogrom" here in Israel. We do not occupy the same plane of existence as the rest of you. Our actions have no implications. We can never be the cause of anything. Everything happens to us. Only we are real. Murderous solipsism.

Every article I've found has presented the Israel fans as innocent victims here, but then I read this paragraph in the middle of A CBS Report

So, as Mr. Goldberg says above, before the game Maccabi fans marched through Amsterdam attacking anything Palestinian and chanting "Death to Arabs", and then later after the game these same fans were attacked throughout the city, and yet the whole incident is being portrayed in the press as a spontaneous antisemitic convulsion.

“Lighten Up” by Ronald Wimberly

Beautifuly written- and drawn.

Damn. Really powerful and beautifully drawn.

This week on Runaway to the Stars: Talita gets distracted by her long range vision, fails to prevent company property damage, and endures some nasty comments. Catch up with pages on runawaytothestars.com! Read ahead on Patreon!

I think we as a society tend to forget that the movie "Freaky Friday" starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Mark Harmon hinges entirely on the narrative's assertion that Chinese people have magic powers

The 2003 movie. The movie that came out like 20 years ago. There is no plot without the movie asking the audience to believe, without explanation, that a random middle aged Chinese woman has the ability to very easily place mystical curses on people

The funniest part of it is the running joke that this Chinese lady/Restaurant owner/Wizard has a daughter who implies she does this shit all the time, to customers, and is FED UP with her mother's mystical nonsense. Like obviously it's a blatantly racist plot element, the writers would certainly never would've had the plot kicked off by a curse cast by Mama Ravioli at the Spaghetti Warehouse, and it was specifically the Orientalism of it all that led them to write "and their bodies switched because they had a fight in a Chinese restaurant in front of the owner, and of course Chinese people have Powers" but also like. The dynamic with the restaurant owner and her daughter, who desperately wants her to stop supernaturally meddling in the lives of strangers, is so much more interesting than what's going on with Jamie Lee Curtis and whoever played the daughter in that movie. They could make a banger Disney+ show out of "The Chinese Restaurant That Curses You To Resolve Your Issues If You Have A Fight There" except that it would absolutely remind people that Disney, in Avril Lavigne's America, released a movie that depended entirely on the audience's willingness to believe Chinese people are secretly wizards

Obviously old Italian ladies have magic powers in real life but this is a post about how different groups are portrayed in movies. Also, I can't stress this enough, when an Italian puts a curse on you it's not to help you come out happier and healthier on the other side. It's to make bad things happen to you until you die.

“Schools need to stop teaching critical race theory and gender studies and just focus on the CLASSICS”

Me with a copy of Othello under one arm and Twelfth Night under the other: hehehe

lol i litereally stopped reading right before one of his most important quotes. including it with a lot of added context because i always see that quote on its own without the rest of the conversation which is really fascinating.

The big discourse on twitter right now is ‘you can’t say Columbus was a racist monster because no one knew racism was bad in 1492,’ except Isabella I (yeah, that Isabella I) threw his ass in prison for being a racist monster. There are multiple contemporaneous accounts of Columbus in the Caribbean that are basically like “holy shit, this guy is a legit, Texas chainsaw massacre psychopath.” He was considered bad even then.

When there’s documentation that the queen who got the Spanish Inquisition rolling thought Columbus was bad, I feel like it means we can all feel good about establishing another holiday for mattress discounts in this country.

Yep. Contemporaneous accounts of him and De Soto often have the writer essentially going “what the FUCK are you doing, why are you like this.” People AT THE TIME knew it was fucked up just fine.

His crew wanted to mutiny and kill the man and we are all worse off for the fact that they didn’t.

In 1511, only 19 years after Columbus’s first voyage, a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesinos said this to the Spanish colonists on Hispaniola:

“Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day.”

“Racism” was an unknown word (coined in the early 20th century) and perhaps a difficult concept to explain to 15th and 16th century Europeans. But they were fully capable of understanding that marching into some one’s country, and then immediately killing and enslaving them, was wrong. The fact that they did it any way is their own responsibility, and it’s not inappropriate for us to judge them for it.

Good News: Columbus Wasn't Even Italian. So, hopefully, the US can just rename this fucking holiday already(why not just call it Italy Day? I mean, Jesus Christ, this isn't hard. Honestly tho: Giuseppe Garibaldi was a great friend of the US, an ardent abolitionist, and friend to ALL democratic revolutionaries. We should name it after HIM).

Putting all tabletop players into a college level ethics class and forcing them to turn in a paper on moral philosophy before buying a new book

This is…. An interesting thing to say… on this post in particular….

I think a lot of people reblogging this from @probablybadrpgideas are interpreting this as “this would be such a funny wacky way to make the table soooo complicated” but I mean this as a complaint about the way that so many tabletop players seem to just. completely lack an understanding of ethics. what it actually means to behave ethically and treat others ethically. and i dont mean this as "why do people want to be mean and play as villains? :(" i mean "why are there so many tabletop players that sympathize with outright fascist factions to the point of wondering why theyre listed as 'Lawful Evil' in the book"

can you talk me through why this was a particularly bad or challenging thing for your party to have done

Goblins were in fact, for me, a turning point on this concept. I had a player who wanted to be a goblin, and I forgot about this fact up to the point that the party got a quest to kill goblins. As soon as I was announcing the quest I realized it would be a problem, though I didn't have anything else ready so I went with it. And it was! The players immediately questioned why the mayor was paying mercenaries to kill goblins, and then further questioned his justifications, at which point I realized it would be a better story if the goblins were a scapegoat and not an actual villain. This turned into a terse interrogation where the mayor threatened to put them in jail once their questions got pointed enough that he would have to either field accusations or lie; they then went CSI on the situation and drilled through his political cabinet to get answers. I had to improv pretty much all of it and I don't remember the actual ending (I know they sided with the goblins and the mayor was guilty), but this helped me realize that the Gary Gygax writing style of "certain races are just BAD and that's why they hang out in dungeons" was very short-sighted.

D&D writing, by and large, encourages a lack of questions. The surface runs deep. "Go into a cave and chop up goblins." Why are we doing this? "Goblins are bad." All goblins? "Yes."

I think the question of "why are there players comfortable siding with fascist factions and wondering why they're called 'lawful evil'" is pretty easily answered with... because D&D itself is inherently kind of fascist. And it's the most insidious kind of fascist, too- its villains are fascists, so how could you point fingers at the book?

Fire Giants are dwarf slavers. Drow are a megalomaniacal theocracy who hate men. Orcs are violent tribes of marauding killers. Illithids want to destroy all life and keep an entire civilization to scrub their floors. But these narratives still push the idea that "evil" is a racial trait. The players are not only justified in their campaign to destroy these cultures, they're encouraged to do it.

They let the cat out of the bag by making these playable races; because now, they're not cut-and-dry villanous societies. They're people. There are Drow accountants whose lives are about balancing taxes, not worshipping Lolth. There are Yuan-Ti who don't sacrifice babies on altars, and much prefer playing the lute or sewing blankets. Yet we're still expected to read "Chaotic Evil" under the Monster Manual entry for a bugbear and take it seriously.

So obviously we should have way way more immigrants, one billion Americans, BUT this graph is so heartening to me:

Were back to all time peak immigrant rates! :) like the immigrant freak out is stupid but it's not like, based on an imagined trend the way recent crime panics are. The immortal science of 1 billion Americans ism will win?

Given that the freakout predates the current peak and has been a part of Republican messaging and policy since at least the 80s, independent of immigration levels, I'm hesitant to say it isn't based in imagination.

Ultimately, the immigration freakout isn't actl about immigration at all; rather it's racism and white-supremacy hiding behind immigration.

Al-Khalil, or Hebron, is so famous for making people understand how deeply entrenched apartheid is in Israeli occupation i even met a random white guy that was part of PSL who was like "I studied arabic in Hebron and it was so sad there's a metal fence separating the top floor and the bottom floor of some neighborhoods because israeli settlers would throw trash and waste down on the Palestinians on the bottom floor" and this is before I even told him I was from Al-Khalil he just volunteered that information when I asked him how he started advocating for Palestine. My dad and I always "joke" about how for years before, people would be shocked about how terrible the situation for Palestinians is in Hebron and it was a surefire way to radicalize anyone as long as you take them through the perspective of the Palestinians. All the stories you hear about Al-Khalil are things you hear straight out of Jim Crow America and that's not an exaggeration. So these people who like to talk about "how there's no apartheid" in Israel by ignoring the occupation of the Westbank and how Palestinians within the Green Line are subject to segregated neighborhoods and schools should not be taken seriously.

What is it with trust-fund-kids-turned-tech-moguls and unwittingly confessing to felony tax evasion while trying to own some rando on the Internet? First Musk, now Mullenweg – like, do these guys see a cute tax filing trick and just automatically assume that they're the first person in the world ever to think of it, without bothering to check whether it's, you know, a federal crime?

Kinda relevant xkcd:

Does anyone know of good writing specifically about trans women, class and sex work? I feel like sex work is a fantastic place to start analysing class from, esp in a population that disproportionately does sex work, and I feel like the way socioeconomic class division among trans women is ignored is a huge part of the neoliberalisation of trans politics in the maintstream. I'd quite like to write about the intersection of those three or an analysis of class in the trans community starting from sex work, but it'd be cool to find other writing about that if it already exists

RBing this. I've picked up Transgender Marxism and Revolting Prostitutes and I had a chat with someone from SWARM for Red Planet a few months ago, and there is my own experience going FSSW after my income collapsed, but I'd love more sources to draw from esp if they're about trans women and sex work specifically.

A thing that really stood out that I'm probably going to write about was the uniformity of the response from other trans women who I told that I was doing FSSW to be able to pay rent who told me that they'd considered doing it or thought about having to do it if they needed to as well, though the women I was talking to were in a huge variety of different material circumstances. An ex of mine talked about maybe doing FSSW but looking for dyke clients, and it became clear that she was imagining having her extant sex life as is but she would get paid for it. I think in a lot of the discussions I've seen these kinds of "sure I'd just do sw it would be easy" is understood as whorephobia and I don't really disagree that it is but I think it's interesting in a community where sex work is so common that this specific kind of ignorance around sw is also an occlusion of class politics within our community

The social production of a population who are seen as fetish objects by broader society and sometimes by each other means the social production of a class of potential sex workers, and when the usual differences in background, education, racialized identity, etc promote some within that group to a position where they can speak for them despite not having experienced something that constitutes a widespread class trauma it flattens the material realities of transness into a liberal identity category. In short: since liberal allies suddenly love listening to trannies, where are all the trans sex workers of colour?

Really the kicker about discussing colonialism intrinsic to certain fictional tropes/archetypes/genres/what-have-you is that white bitches et al get SO mad about it. "Ohh so I'm not allowed to play farming sims? Wearing a silly hat makes me a fascist now?" I was just exercising critical thought but yknow what? Just for you? Yeah it does

& it really speaks for... a certain way of thinking about how racism works, the way they'll jump to this dichotomy of Allowed vs Not Allowed. Cause that's not really how it works. If we actually wanted to simply #cancel everything with any sort of Historical Context or Unsavory Implications it'd never fucking end, due to the world that we live in. Good thing we're just telling you to think even a little bit about the ideas you engage with & this suggestion makes people Really Mad

It's that whole thing of, like, being more afraid of being labelled A Racist than really caring about minimizing harm. "Oohh this thing I like can't be racist because I'm Not Racist" no ❤

I sometimes think that this reaction is really about hierarchy.

Like: you talk about the need to be aware and think about this stuff and they immediately twist it into these questions of "allowed/not allowed", "racist/not racist"; they immediately turn it into an accusation and an accounting. Into a question of them being called to answer, and them believing that to be unfair. Into a situation where you have the power to make them explain themselves(where THEY are the put-upon underdogs and YOU the demanding tyrant), and isn't that so unfair?

Really the kicker about discussing colonialism intrinsic to certain fictional tropes/archetypes/genres/what-have-you is that white bitches et al get SO mad about it. "Ohh so I'm not allowed to play farming sims? Wearing a silly hat makes me a fascist now?" I was just exercising critical thought but yknow what? Just for you? Yeah it does

& it really speaks for... a certain way of thinking about how racism works, the way they'll jump to this dichotomy of Allowed vs Not Allowed. Cause that's not really how it works. If we actually wanted to simply #cancel everything with any sort of Historical Context or Unsavory Implications it'd never fucking end, due to the world that we live in. Good thing we're just telling you to think even a little bit about the ideas you engage with & this suggestion makes people Really Mad

It's that whole thing of, like, being more afraid of being labelled A Racist than really caring about minimizing harm. "Oohh this thing I like can't be racist because I'm Not Racist" no ❤

White people are gonna make a bunch of jokes and memes about what was said during the debates, on the basis that they are too "absurd" and "silly" for anyone to take seriously

And then wonder why antiblack(immigrant) hate crimes are on the rise

It's been a few days, since then we've seen White libs go far and beyond defending why they should joke around about this in order to "diminish it's impact"

Meanwhile, Haitians(Black ppl alike) are getting bomb threats in their communities, and politicians are threatening to mass deport them