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
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
Just to bring this into a modern context:
“After Trump’s election, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser, compared Trump favorably with Jackson. “This is like Andrew Jackson’s victory,” Giuliani said. “This is the people beating the establishment. And that’s how he (Donald Trump) posited right from the beginning”
“We were children trying to survive environments we couldn’t cope with. Every one of us. The system failed all of us, and we all knew it. Some of us survived, some of us didn’t, none of us came out unscathed.
All of us were singled out as the problem kid with problems, ignoring what surrounded all of us: violence, hopelessness, abuse, neglect, despair, bullying, torture, confusion, oppression.
What the media is doing to these children is its own form of violence. It is an invasion. It is telling our stories the way they see us, not the way we are.”
because messianics are christian evangelicals who believe if they can convert all the jews then they can bring about the end times.
Basically um…when I see people not understand or take messianics serious as an issue, I figure that is because they are deeply unfamiliar with fundamentalist and evangelical christianity. So to explain a little bit, you have to know that the modern messianic movement is from the 60′s and 70′s and was created mostly by fundie evangelicals.
I’m not sure I could tl;dr what is mostly American Fundie Evangelicals to you very well, but let me summarize a few key points, because it explains why Messianics are so horrible and also why you can’t trust an evangelical “pro-Israel” movement farther than you can throw one of their tacky precious moments statues:
Lots of Christians believe that a mass-conversion of Jews to Christianity will help signify or kick-start the end times.
Martin Luther is actually pretty well known for being initially super enthusiastic that all the Jews would convert because of how awesome Protestantism gospel was. Except, of course, all the Jews did not convert, and then he wrote a book called On Jews and Their Lies, because he’s a raging antisemite.
[Sidebar: Muhammad tried to get the Jews to convert too, and there was the whole, “Look, see? We also pray facing towards Jerusalem!” and the Jews said “That’s nice, we’re Jews. Also we don’t do prophets anymore.” And then Muhammad got a nice revelation saying he didn’t have to pray towards that Jewish city anymore anyways.]
anyways lots of christians think if all the jews convert and live in Israel then the literal end of the world will happen and that’s good because after the hellfire and antichrist, they’ll get to “yay jesus.” any bloodshed and general horrors that happen in the meantime are a sign of the end times coming faster!
also if you DON’T convert, you’ll be wiped out and sent to hell
I don’t fully understand why evangelical Christians are so supportive of Israel. Can you walk me through it?
Elizabeth Oldmixon
First, we should remember that “evangelical” is a really broad term. In a most general sense, evangelicals are people who believe in the absolute authority of the Bible, in salvation through Jesus, and in the need to spread the gospel. People who identify as evangelicals internalize those three things to different levels, and so in the same way we talk about cultural Catholics, we can also talk about cultural evangelicals.
So I would really focus here on a subset of the evangelical community for whom the status of Israel is really, really important because of the way they understand the end of time.
Sean Illing
And how large is that subset?
Elizabeth Oldmixon
Roughly a third of the American evangelical population, which is something like 15 million people.
Sean Illing
Why are these evangelicals so interested in the fate of Israel?
Elizabeth Oldmixon
These are the folks who believe that there will be a millennium in the future, a golden age, where Christ reigns on Earth, [and] they believe that before Christ will return, there will be a tribulation where Christ defeats evil. There will be natural disasters and wars, and perhaps an Antichrist, as the book of Revelations notes. Then at the end of that period, the people of the Mosaic covenant, including the Jews, will convert. Then after their conversion, the great millennium starts.
Sean Illing
And what about the people who don’t convert? What becomes of them?
Elizabeth Oldmixon
Well, according to the evangelicals who believe this, they’ll end up with the rest of the unsaved, which means they’ll be wiped out and sent to hell.
tl;dr: messianic christians want to see the end of the world and the destruction of all of judaism outside of “acceptable believers in Jesus” and so purport cultural genocide, meanwhile an atheist jew davens next to me in synagogue, is a real mensch, did nothing wrong.
To understand scale and how bad this is for Jews, that 15 million Evangelicals who are hardcore into this stuff? That’s about as many Jews as there are ON EARTH. More than twice the number of Jews in the US.
And this is why as a general rule I consider any sect that is evangelical, at all, period, and that prioritizes proselytizing is inherently dangerous and suspect.
(No matter the religious background of it, to be honest. Proselytizing inherently implies you think your message is More Correct than everyone else’s and therefore should be Obviously Appealing to All. This makes for very unhappy people when you tell them “no” and a very not-fun conversation.)
I would also add that in general, mind your own damn business because people are allowed to wear whatever they feel fabulous in and who cares? We are all going to be dirt at some point. so DO IT. Wear the fuck out of what makes you happy.
I’ve learned a lot of things from this site, but recently the most important one, through repeated negative experiences with people who haven’t learned this, is that your actions aren’t excused no matter how much you truss them up in progressive/activism language.
You’ve read dozens of books on feminist theory and you can recite quotes from history’s most influential women’s liberators on demand? Great, but if your activism justifies demonizing trans women you’re just as trashy as any right wing conservative.
You have a good cause to fight for? Wonderful, but if the way you go about that is by shaming and manipulating people online with social shaming and guilt-baiting, then you’re just another playground bully.
You want to criticize media tropes? Wonderful. But if you do that solely by starting witchhunts and harassing an exclusive group of young independent queer artists whose follower counts you’re jealous of (and who have no actual influence over wider corporate trends), then you are re-enforcing toxic social power dynamics, stepping on queer creators for being imperfect humans and using social justice to justify your petty grudge.
I don’t care if you can wrap up and package your actions in a nice progressive forward thinking bow with all the right rhetoric if your actual actions and targets are reactionary, selfish or discriminatory. Just because you have learned some rhetoric doesn’t make you any better than bigots or conservatives unless you actually care for the spirit of that rhetoric and not just how you can lever it towards your own ends or to justify your pre-existing biases.
same for people who do bad things in relationships but couch it in terms of respect, boundaries, and consent. knowing the right words doesn’t make your actions automatically decent.
Antiamericanism is good. smug Europeans who denigrate American in order to presume their own nations are not equally complicit in colonialism and imperialist violence are bad.
???? our own nations aren’t complicit in colonialism n imperialist violence, and that’s WHY we look down on america?????
I mean… I mean… America??? as it is now??? is a RESULT of european colonialism??? like its a literal colony of Europe??? with indigenous people
somehow
being a minority??? what the fuck are you talking about @ass-th-etic
I also have to add that targeting individuals for hostility–rather than the actual harmful systems–for a cheap shot ego boost is just obnoxious. Also unfortunately par for the course with a certain type of smug person.
I would also like to go a step further and say that what is bad about America is those circumstances in which it violates human rights inside and outside its borders and props up authoritarian regimes. Criticizing American democracy and freedoms in favor of governments which do those things more often and more blatantly, but with lower budgets, is hypocritical and destructive.
Like most people don’t like to admit this, but one of the reasons a lot of us have so many mental health issues is because we live in a world that has basically become untenable. People can’t afford basic necessities, let alone to cultivate their interests or take breaks and rest or do any of the things necessary for good mental health. People my age are wracked with debt, working at jobs they hate or studying topics they hate, living in a shitty apartment with five roommates. We live in a world that’s very hard to be healthy in. So while yeah, a lot of people obviously do have mental illnesses that would need medication no matter what, they are greatly exacerbated by these issues, and a lot of people have basically just been thrust into an eternal situational depression. So if that doesn’t change, medication is just a band-aid.
And for people suffering, it’s okay to acknowledge your illness is a direct result of being in a terrible situation. It neither invalidates your illness or people who have that illness genetically.
Same goes for more personal-level harmful life situations. If you’re stuck in a destabilizing environment, medications may or may not even help while you’re still living under bad conditions.
None of that is your fault. No matter how invested some people may be in blaming things on you, to avoid looking at/addressing bigger problems in the situation.
And none of this is zero-sum. That type of thinking only harms people more.
I feel like getting people to recognize this as a default would make a huge difference in how bad it is too. Like it is another whole level of miserable frustration that you can be endlessly asking for help while simultaiously being shamed for NOT GETTING HELP or that help not working, because you are for all intensive purposes just stopping the bleeding on a wound that involves broken bones.
Sometimes just hearing yes, this is bullshit you did nothing to deserve is way more helpful then encoragement. Especially since there is a minimum amount of outrage needed for things to change and the fact there isn’t that much over the fact the majority of the population are mathamatically fucked as far as their odds for making it through things.
Once again I’ve seen on my dash that…art project? making claims about how horribly unrealistic Barbie is, with the smiling young lady standing next to a bizarrely-proportioned homunculus that claims to be how Barbie would look if life-size, and there’s text claiming unbelievable things about Barbie’s “real” proportions.
Y’know, these:
Oh, where to start…well, let’s start with the weight issue. The 110lb number comes, as the text admits, from 1965. In 1965, Barbie was still very much being marketed as a 16 year old ‘girl next door.‘ Illustrations from the time portray the character as younger and less curvy than the actual doll, because, honestly, the doll’s shape was ‘borrowed’ from a German sexy novelty toy, and not custom-designed to represent a 16 year old girl. So, tell me this–do you think it’s unreasonable for a 16 year old to weigh 110 lbs? I sure hope not, because that’s what I weighed at that age.
Let’s look closer at those measurements. We’ll start with the fact that Barbie is 1:6 scale–that means that for every inch Barbie has, it would be 6" in ‘real life.‘ Using that information, I took this doll, which used the body that’s been standard for Barbie since 1999, so is most familiar with modern youth, and made some measurements:
I won’t argue that, wow, those are some slender measurements, but…I don’t see anything like a 39" bust. Even the older Barbie bodies, with their slightly larger breasts, measure in at a mere 5.5", which that chart up there tells you is 33" (and she did have an 18" waist, but her hips are just under 5", so, again, I have no idea what the ‘facts’ up there are based upon.) And here’s the thing about those slim measurements–they’re not attempting to project an ideal of womaniness as much as to take into account the fact that, although the doll is 1:6, the cloth used for her clothes is still 1:1, which means they’ll add a lot of bulk to the clothed doll, making her look, oh, I dunno, maybe more like a ‘real’ person?
But I’m not done.
Let’s talk about that…thing…purporting to be a life-size representation of Barbie.
Oh, yeah. Nailed it. Looks spot on. I’m totally swayed by this.
And then I decided to do this
I honestly thought about using a random stock photo of a woman, or maybe a picture of my short self, but this seemed more…poetic.
I’m not saying there aren’t problems with Barbie (I don’t have the knowledge to argue with the shoe size claim, but, like the slender build, the reasons for the design of Barbie’s feet has to do with physical limitations of dressing something so small, especially when that something was designed with the technology of the 1950s.) But, the problems that Barbie does have? Aren’t any of those addressed by that project.
I first posted this in 2013, seemed like it might be time to bring it back.
I never understood how anyone cold take that life size “Barbie” thing seriously. Like, a life sized Barbie would just look like a regular Barbie but bigger? Why would it suddenly look all wonky and deformed because its big?
I firmly believe that unless the couple has discussed and agreed to marriage ahead of time, nobody has any business making a surprise public proposal.
Okay except some people want a surprise public proposal.
Girl my husband took me to Spain and gave me a kinder egg on the beach, the ring was inside the capsule (Lord knows how he did that) if any feminist tried to take that away from me I may cut a bitch. Best surprise of my life.
I wish people were capable of analyzing larger social trends and figuring that a significant number of women end up getting pressured into engagements or marriages they don’t want bc the audience that comes along with a public proposal will think she’s a bitch if she says no – instead of thinking “i liked it when it happened to me, therefore it could never turn out badly for anyone, not ever!!!!”
I think what people are misunderstanding here is that agreeing to marriage ahead of time doesn’t need to be like, asking permission to propose? I surprised my now spouse with a proposal in Disneyland but before that we had several conversations about the future of our relationship, future plans for our retirements and how we’d have to get married eventually for immigration purposes. I didn’t go to her and say “so would you say yeah if I proposed?” or hash out deets ahead of time, but we had enough of a mutual understanding and communicated desire to get married that, although it was a surprise for when and how I proposed, it wasn’t out of left field at all.
This is exactly like conversations about consent, people get up in arms thinking that it means you have to have contracts and serious sit down conversations before doing anything when its REALLY EASY to simply COMMUNICATE with your partner so things like this are done properly, yeesh
“proposal can be a surprise, engagement shouldn’t be“ – saw that somewhere, thought it was the most accurate
not to mention op specifically stated that it was about communication, not “surprise proposals are toxic”
but hey any excuse to bash feminism amirite
Also I want to point out there is a key difference between surprise proposals and public proposals. A public proposal puts a lot of pressure on the person to say ‘yes’ as they are being watched by a lot of people. There is nothing wrong with proposing with few of no people around as then that person has time to think. I also want to add that if you don’t think the person proposing will be ok with you saying ‘I’ll think about it’ they probably aren’t the person for you.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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