Yeah, neither do I. Brusque, absolutely, but he’s not greedy. His arc at the end of DoS and through BotFA is pretty clearly a downward spiral into magical mental illness. (Damn Smaug.)
society needs shame. if you dont embarrass weird greasy kids in high school they turn into adults who walk their girlfriends around on dog leashes in the mall
Nothing wrong with that as long as there’s Mutual consent
did you know that bystanders literally do not consent to being a part of public sexual displays
Seriously. It’s not cool to do that shit in public. Just don’t.
Long story short, I do have an Amazon wishlist as of a few minutes ago, but I’m paranoid enough not to want to post it publicly. If you, amazing human, would like the link, please come off anon and I’ll send it to you. 🙂
2. General apathy towards and denial of anti-semitism by tumblr’s left despite easy evidence being available (try searching the “Jew” tag for about three minutes and I guarantee you that you will find dozens of heinous examples).
4. The revelation of FBI statistics demonstrating that Jews are the number one target of anti-religious hate crimes in the United States.
I’ve lived as a Jew in the United States for my entire life and I had no idea it was that bad because virtually no one reports on it outside of Jewish sources. There’s a sense that the world wants to “move on” from fighting anti-semitism even though there is no evidence that it has truly abated. It’s no longer publicly acceptable, but that’s true of most forms of racism and discrimination in the US. The people who want to end birthright citizenship claim not to be racist, after all. Opponents of the #BlackLivesMatter movement claim not to be racists while ignoring the message and saying #AllLivesMatter. And anti-semitism? Well, it simply doesn’t exist anymore and any accusations about it must be Zionist hasbara. Even a Pro-Palestinian organization that supports BDS like the Jewish Voice for Peace got accused of being Zionists when they called out Alison Weir for spreading blood libel and associating uncritically with White Supremacists. It’s as if the right for Jews to defend themselves against anti-semitism is negated by default because Zionism exists, even if the people making the accusations are non-Zionist Jews who support the BDS movement.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. The Jews, as a diaspora people, don’t conform to most of the contemporary leftist discourse on Race and Indigineity. Even though we share an origin, a culture and an ethnicity, we don’t all share a race or a nationality. As a result, whatever countries we lived in considered us outsiders, no matter how much we resembled the majority physically and no matter how much we were part of the culture. Jews in Europe, Asia and Africa were treated as outsiders who only lived in these countries because the majority allowed it, often with very strict requirements coded into law. These requirements might have been taxes, or requirements to only live in certain areas or to hold certain occupations. The requirements often led to the more horrific like the destruction of our homes, livelihoods and very lives.
This thought process comes out in a number of different ways. For example, if Ashkenazi Jews are not indigenous to the Levant but are Khazars, as some erroneously argue, why are these fighters for indigenous rights not trying to get the Russians and Turks out of Khazaria and give it back to the Ashkenazim? Or why aren’t they trying to convince Italy to give us a chunk of its territory because the Romans were the ones responsible for the 2000 year diaspora when they destroyed the Temple and forced Jews to assimilate or die? The answer is obvious. Because they’re anti-semites and don’t give a damn about whether Jews have a safe home. All that matters is that they can paint us as liars to feed their hateful confirmation bias.
They don’t care where Jews live. We have to be aliens everywhere with no right to exist anywhere. After all, in the zero-sum Manichaean logic of the anti-semitic anti-zionist, Jews and Palestinians can’t both have roots in the region. It’s one or the other. Jews have no indigineity. If we try to live anywhere we’re landless settler colonialist cosmopolitan arch communist capitalists who control the media and the banks and must be exiled to a homeland that doesn’t exist because we clearly spontaneously came into existence out of nowhere with a documented history including references to our existence from contemporary and hostile cultures like the Romans and Egyptians.
And honestly, at this point, I don’t think all that much has changed on this site or on the left since Miller’s massacre. Anti-semitism is largely ignored outside of issues involving celebrities. Jewish discussion of the Holocaust is constantly policed by goyim who lost no family to the Nazi genocide. If a Jew complains about anti-semitism, their opinion on Zionism must first be determined before allies consider coming to our aid, which they probably won’t. After the Hyper-Cacher murder in a Jewish Grocery with clear anti-semitic motivations #JeSuisJuif never really went viral here compared to whether or not your supported #JeSuisCharlie.
And I’m just exhausted right now. I’m tired. I’m sick of living in the dissonance of the contemporary American left where I know no one will give half a damn if I’m terrified for my people in other parts of the world because no matter how much data, how many news reports, how many photographs, videos, anecdotes, I show them about anti-semitism it will only register if we’re having genocide perpetrated against us and by then it will be far too late. I have nightmares about being a Jew in America in the 1940s like Joe Simon or Jack Kirby, begging people to get involved and fight the Nazis and save our people, knowing that time is running out and getting more and more horrifying reports that are proven to not be exaggerated. But those fears, no matter how frequently proven throughout history, are irrelevant to many on the left now. Because “Jews are White” or “I’m not anti-semitic I’m anti-zionist and I don’t have to critically examine my points of view or my allies or my tactics because I’m on the right side even if I uncritically read and spread Nazi or KKK propaganda and ally with white supremacists,” or “Jews complain too much.”
Criticize Israel. Be for a one state solution. Those aren’t the issues. The issue is the dehumanization of Jewish people. The issue is the erasure of our history. The issue is pretending that the majority of Jews who live in Israel aren’t there because they were fleeing persecution be it from the Nazis, MENA countries, the Soviet Union or the Ethiopian government and Israel was the only place that was guaranteed to take them in. Treating refugees as the equivalent of Imperialist profiteers makes me angry because it has no sympathy for those circumstances. And when I see people who still live in countries like Poland or Algeria or Russia act like the Jews decided to leave those countries because they were “tricked” by Zionists instead of fleeing from violent oppression, it makes me want to punch a hand through the wall. If you don’t make your countries safe for Jews, what right to do you have to complain about where they go? What kind of hypocrisy is it to victimize a people and then demonizing them for doing what was necessary to stay alive?
Do I hold non-Palestinians to a different level than other goyim when it comes to anti-semitism? You bet your ass I do. Because their righteousness is the false righteousness of a judge who forces innocent people to engage in trial by combat because he didn’t like having them in his neighborhood. Does that mean that these people shouldn’t criticize Israel? No. Does it mean that they can be both anti-zionist and anti-semitic and they’d better watch themselves? Yes. It’s so easy to play judge when its not your own peoples’ lives on the line.
But the problem here is people drawing lines in the sand. The idea that anti-semitism doesn’t need to be fought because the Palestinian situation in Israel/Palestine is more desperate than that of the Jews is incredibly wrongheaded. Zionism is a direct response to anti-semitism. Without a viable alternative, Jews will do what they have to to survive. And if Israeli Jews are treated with classical anti-semitic tropes by “anti-zionists” who live in the countries that oppressed, murdered, exiled and dehumanized them for centuries do you really expect them to be drawing lines for them between anti-zionism and anti-semitism and giving them the benefit of the doubt?
But people are averse to complexity. They want to take sides and get drunk on confirmation bias. It’s fun and fulfilling to be filled with righteous anger. But if you are not concerned with the fact that being Pro-Palestinian does not free you from your responsibility to recognize and fight anti-semitism within your movement, you are not engaging in an act of justice, you are taking sides in a tribal conflict that is not yours but is one that you have helped cause and then exacerbated. Whatever your motives, you are working in favor of conflict and against co-existence, no matter what form of co-existence you prefer.
If you want the Jews out of Israel, how safe is your country, really? And if you want them to stay in a one-state solution, how are you supposed to be a reliable partner for peace if you freely quote from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion without even having the self-awareness that you are doing so?
When I see non-Palestinian goyim treating Israeli Jews more harshly than they would treat the people of countries like the USA, UK, France, China, Russia, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Japan and Belgium, countries that have engaged in violent slaughter and imperialist conquest on a scale far beyond Israel, that sets off alarms. If my grandparents fled to Israel after the Holocaust instead of the United States, would I be evil by default as well? Even though I’m living as a citizen of a colonizing power to which I have no indigenous connection?
People who don’t fight for the safety of the Jews in their own countries and don’t want Jews to live in Israel don’t believe that Jews have a right to safety anywhere.
I’m not asking for anyone to suddenly shift their priorities and make the fight against anti-semitism the core of their activism. But don’t be silent about it. Don’t do half-assed research about it then talk over Jews. Don’t make assumptions of bad faith from Jews who call people out on it. Don’t ally with people who are anti-semitic or think that the fight against anti-semitism is irrelevant to your cause. It’s not.
The Left is becoming hostile territory for far too many Jews and it’s not because we don’t want to be there. What astonishes me is that we’ve put up with so much of it and the majority of American Jews still lean that way. It speaks to the core of who we are as a people. I want to feel safe on the Left again. But I don’t. And it’s going to take more than what I’ve seen these past two years to change that, and Jews aren’t going to be able to make those changes on our own. There aren’t enough of us, and too many people believe our voices don’t matter.
The thing that abled people who advocate for the disabled community don’t get is that there are times when disabilities/accommodations clash. Horribly.
Like I spent years having to come up with a solution to get therapy dogs into a series of residence halls. Why years? Because we had to decide who got to stay and who got to leave: the people who needed therapy dogs or the people with severe allergies to animals. Who got the alternative housing?
Things like fidget toys might seem great for some disabled people but having them in the room could be distracting/overstimulating for others. The same goes with stimming. It can’t be helped but neither can the anxiety that another person in the room feels as they watch/hear it. Additionally, something like a weighted blanket might immediately calm one kid down and send the other one into a panic attack due to the claustrophobia it causes. (*Points to myself*)
Every Metro bus in New York City has a series of seats at the front that can be lifted up to accommodate people in wheelchairs but if I’m in one of those spots then someone with a cane/walker has to journey even further to sit down.
The flashing lights of a fire alarm are there to help deaf/hearing impaired but if they’re not properly timed, they can also cause a person to have a seizure.
The worst part about all of these is that there is rarely a concrete solution that makes everyone happy/safe. And I’m not here to offer any because I don’t know them. I’m just here to remind you all that as you’re taking your education/health classes, as you’re reading your textbooks, as you’re preparing to go be an advocate, just remember that there is rarely ever such a thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to advocacy and that something you do that can help one disabled person might actually hinder another.
Food for thought.
I have heard this referred to by some in the disability advocacy profession as “duelling disabilities” and it’s definitely something I wish people would be more mindful of when discussing accessibility.
Jewish women are REALLY going to bat for Jewish men today over that Washington Post piece on twitter and I’d like to voice my appreciation, especially to Mara Wilson, Helen Rosner and Talia Lavin.
They are and it’s fantastic, however—I will say that the article was also incredibly anti-semisogynistic. Between the author painting herself as this beautiful, blonde, pearl-wearing, WASP goddess figure, and her tearing apart of Jewish mothers, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t just attack on Jewish men, but Jewish women, as well.
Because, you know, if Jewish men weren’t so weak-willed, they wouldn’t allow their overbearing mothers to drive them into the arms of those undesirable frizzy-and-dark-haired shrews who could never be white sophisticated enough to pull off something as elegant as a string of pearls. Because Jewish women are just so grubby and awful and obviously nobody would outright choose to marry one of us over a pert, pretty, bacon martini-sipping, old-money princess. OBVIOUSLY.
And haha this is just like Sex and City, nevermind that Carrie Bradshaw was played by a Jewish woman who has been ridiculed for her Semitic looks nigh on three decades now, because who has time to pay attention to which actresses are IRL Jewish women? Ew!
Why don’t you Google average wait times to receive a medical procedure. There are Canadians that come to the U.S. to get medical care rather than wait over a month to get it done in Canada.
I had cancer and im canadian dumbass i know full well what the wait times are like and its only long if its shit that can wait. Im sorry but im ok with waiting with a non life threatening injury if no one gets turned away from healthcare because they’re poor. The only canadians that go to the united states are rich enough that they are willing to spend the money to save a few hours waiting
Except people with life threatening injuries have to wait as well. My father had to go to the ER because the screws in his knee busted making his stitches rip open and my parents waited for hours before finally leaving when they noticed an elderly woman with a head injury and broken leg waiting at least four hours BEFORE my parents arrived.
Brian Sinclair’s death was completely preventable, yet he waited 34 HOURS in the ER for treatment that would have taken 30 minutes to an hour at most.
There are pros and cons to Canada’s healthcare, and if people want to spend extra money for arguably better treatment and shorter wait lines, I’m personally going to support them any way I can.
Yeah, that happens in the US too though. Literally every single day. Go into any ER in the country at like 9:30 pm and you will see dozens of people with painful injuries waiting hours to see a doctor. People die in the US waiting to see a doctor. The only difference is that it costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.
I had to wait six months to see an endocrinologist in the US and when I wanted to switch doctors I had to wait another six months to see somebody else, who are these people in the US who don’t have wait times?
(Brian Sinclair’s death, by the way? It’s a terrible tragedy… but the problem there was not that health care resources are spread too thin. It was racism. They saw a native man and assumed he was homeless and drunk, not in distress. As the study I cited above shows, racism is also a factor in US health care.)
So basically, you’re paying a lot more, at both the end-user and governmental levels… but you’re not actually getting a lot more.
Finally: You know what else Canada has that the US doesn’t? Wait time guarantees that require offering a faster alternative if they’re blown.
All those stories of Canadians coming to the US? Yeah, they’re basically made up. Even the highly shady right-wing think tank that Fuckface von Clownstick got the story from, trying to make the best possible case for privatization, only found that 1% of Canadian patients received health care abroad. One. percent. And that’s not “went to the US for health care,” that’s “received health care literally anywhere else for any reason, including just happening to be in another country when we got sick or injured.”
The actual numbers? Well, this study is old, but… out of a pool of 18 000 respondents, they found twenty who went to the US specifically for care.
Twenty. 0.11%.
They found that this data was consistent with Canadian payment records and US border region hospital data, so… yeah. It basically doesn’t happen. And when it does? Frequently that’s because there is an issue with the normal procedures in Canada… so the provincial government covers the cost of getting the patient to the US and treating them there.
I’ll take that over “you must be this rich to live” any day of the week.
It was also found Canadians who are treated in the States are far morely to be there because they became sick or injured while on vacation or are snow birds rather than they purposefully crossed the border.
‘Cause let me tell ya, as someone with a few chronic issues, if my choice is a 20 minute trip to the local hospital in bad traffic, where I’ll at least get coping treatment while I wait or an hour trip, plus border wait, to the States? Yeah, I’ll go local every time. The whole not having to shell out money thing is nice.
I also live near the second busiest hospital in BC. (Possibly Western Canada) Longest I have EVER waited is two hours.. and that was for a shot of toradol for pain treatment.
Another thing the liars above leave out is the huge number of working people in the US who just… don’t go to the doctor when they get injured. Because they know they can’t afford either the cost or the time away from work to get treatment and let it do its work. The US is filled with manual laborers -from roofers to bartenders to painters to stockers- with chronic pain conditions, un- or poorly healed injuries. How do they live with it? Every advil/tylenol/aspirin commericial tells you how. The importance of pain-meds to Pharma profits and easy availability of blackmarket opiates suggests an alternate answer.
The US is 300million people largely self-medicating their pain-management because they don’t want to lose their jobs, can’t afford to see a doctor for it, and don’t trust doctors because of previous bad past experiences caused by the private healthcare system. These people are, effectively, stuck in life-long wait-times, yet conservative defenders of our broken system always seem to forget to mention them when the subject of public healthcare arises.
I have a friend who right now is waiting for a surgery to fix her very badly torn ACL. You know, the ligament that makes it so you can walk, which is kind of important for basically all kinds of work. She is in constant pain, and she already has depression problems so it’s really a precarious situation for her to be in mental-health-wise. She can’t work, so she’s losing money sitting at home unable to do anything. They won’t give her a wheelchair, and she had to pay for her crutches so she can hobble around her house. She can’t drive with her leg jacked up, so she’s homebound. They’re making her wait til the end of March to get it fixed. (It happened late December.)
Oh yeah, and she’s in the US. She’s being told to wait because she’s on a bad insurance plan (the only one she could afford) that won’t let her go to a further away specialist, and the only one in her area is booked up through March. She can’t afford to pay out-of-pocket for the specialists further away and since her insurance won’t let her go there, she’s stuck waiting. Tell me again how great American health systems are and how we don’t have wait times because of it?
On top of this, can anyone explain to me how a shortage of available personnel is the fault of the insurance system and not the physical limitations of population size in proportion to currently standing/staffed hospitals and doctors? I’m trying to wrap my head around “more people getting seen” being a bad thing, is the US system’s solution to this “poor people just do not get care so there are fewer people in line”? Wouldn’t the solution to the problem be “encourage more people to become doctors and nurses, subsidize education and build more emergency care centers”? I’m??
So like can we stop pretending that just because Canada hasn’t absolutely perfected it’s healthcare yet that it somehow isn’t still a far better way of doing things?
When I had my consult with the neurosurgeon for my decompressive craniectomy, it was in early March. Since it was not a life-threatening situation and the doctor was also the chief surgeon and the head of oncology in a neurological hospital, I was told I’d likely have to wait a bit, and was given an estimate of “Early June”. So, three months. Not terrible for a non-urgent procedure by an incredibly busy, incredibly qualified doctor.
I got a phone call in the beginning of April telling me that some space had opened up and my surgery would now be April 19th. I literally did not have time to train a replacement at work, get a will done up, etc.
So yeah, the wait times here in Quebec can be pretty irritating for non-urgent things, but when it’s stuff that really needs to get done, *it gets done*. And often even sooner than estimated.
My surgery ended up costing a whopping $240, because I requested a private room and WiFi access. Had I been willing to sleep in a ward and just use the internet on my phone, it would have been free. Same procedure in a similar facility in Colorado that specialises in neuro procedures? Estimated $140,000. And a six-month waitlist.
OK, time for the US to wake up and realise all they think they know about healthcare in other countries is pretty much just lies and propaganda to make them accept their broken system.
Lets see if I’m following here.
Wait times happen because the health system has a supply/demand mis-match, thus priority has to be given to some patients over others. Wait times based on medical need mean that people with less severe issues will wait longer.
This is unfair, says the person against socialized health care, because who has to wait for service shouldn’t depend on the severity of their issue, but instead, their capability of paying for the access.
So we have, in essence, two proposed solutions to there being a shortage of health care, one is that the people with the greatest need would get priority, and the other is those with the greatest wealth will get priority.
This is the fundamental flaw with treating issues of public good as commodities.
The millionaire with the cold gets the room, doesn’t matter if someone else has a broken arm.
Death By Catchphrase 