So ... One Of The Interesting Things In This Article Is That There's Already Legal Precedent In Johansson's

I can hate my own government and hate antisemitic , ignorant and privileged anti Zionists at the same time.

Here are some facts :

Most Israelis didn’t vote for this current government/ don’t support it/ protest against it.myself included.

A lot of Israeli Jews have been here before 1948. Most Israelis are people of Color. We were always here and were not going anywhere.

LGBT Israelis telling you they’re not oppressed isn’t pink washing.

Serving in the idf is mandatory by law and needed as we’re in a constant existential threat.

Israel has never started a war. Literally never.

Western media is filled with inaccurate reporting, misinformation.

The thing that’s driving me crazy here is that anti-Zionists say they’re not antisemitic, and yet their fundamental claims about Jews are:

That all Jews are white Europeans, even Jews who are inarguably non-white and don’t even live in Israel, because White = privileged and oppressive, and Jews are both, no matter where we live, by virtue of being Jewish.

That the Holocaust wasn’t that bad, people only care because it happened to (again) white Europeans, and now it’s just a propaganda tool used by Israel. Oh, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist Zionist.

There is a certain region of the world in which Jews Should Not Be Allowed to Live (ironically, the region in question is the one Jews have the most cultural ties to). Therefore, any amount of violence and cruelty is acceptable towards Jews who live in the place where Jews Should Not Be Allowed to Live, as well as any other Jews connected to them, because their existence is inherently evil, so inflicting pain and suffering on them is justified and a moral good.

Like. Forget the Blood Libel, the Elders of Zion conspiracy theories, the Rootless Cosmopolitan tropes, the right wing and neonazi slurs. Just forget all of that for a second. Because the end of the day, this is the general belief-set of the anti-Zionist movement. Hell, these beliefs are the basis of the entire movement. And they are inarguably, fundamentally, genocidally anti-Jewish.

So no. Anti-Zionism cannot be separated from antisemitism. Not until the movement unlearns all of these points and starts treating Jews like people instead of a nebulous evil to be eradicated. And so far, I’ve seen no evidence that any of them are willing to do so. They just want us crushed under their boots until we’re all dead or assimilated out of existence.

It’s wild that every time Israel rescues or recovers a hostage or hostages that antisemites anti-Zionists will come crawling out of woodwork to talk about how bad it was that Israel did so. All the while they’re still justifying Hamas’s actions on October 7th and since then.

Fic authors deserve more credit.

Story time: I started a book about 23 hours ago and just finished it. Also in that time I slept for 10 hours, spent time with family, was at work, etc. Anyway, I enjoyed the book (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda). But it felt like it flew by, so after I finished I looked up the word count because what are pages? Pages are meaningless. I only function in word counts anymore.

The estimate I found was 58,580. My immediate reaction was “oh, that’s why. That’s nothing!” But what a shitty response. Because no. That’s not nothing. That’s a whole. Damn. Book. An entire novel! And Fic authors regularly bust out 30k, 50k, 100k, 150k words. AND THEY DO IT FOR FREE. WHILE WORKING AND LIVING THEIR LIVES.

So anyway, thank your favorite fic author today because they deserve it. Because they’re amazing. They’re the MVPs.

“The opposition is nearing single digits at this point and establishment and moderate Republicans are proving just how meaningless those two descriptors have always been when applied to them. They are proving that the GOP ethos is absolutely clear: party—the MAGA party—over country. The assumption is that Jordan is promising them something, and that he will be able to deliver that something better than anyone else could. Yes, the same Jordan that former Speaker John Boehner called a “legislative terrorist.” The same Jordan who tried to overturn the 2020 election. The one who was on the phone with Donald Trump the morning of Jan. 6, 2021—mere hours before the MAGA mob attacked the Capitol, invaded their chamber, and threatened every member of Congress’s health and lives.”

—

‘Moderate’ House Republicans folding like cheap tents for insurrectionist Jordan’s speaker bid

There is no such thing as a “moderate” Republican.

The tragedy of Gaza was caused by people pretending it is humane to leave people under a bloodthirsty dictatorship

Palestians have received greater international aid per capita than Europe during the Marshall Plan.

But because they are ruled by rich mad men with disregard to human life, including the lives of own civilians, that couldn't be enough to uplift them.

Which was always obvious, but people insisted of it not being obvious.

Zionism is not an insult, and anyone who uses the term in this way is antisemitic and part of the problem. Zionism means that Jews have a jewish state. This state exists and is called Israel.

If "liberating Palestine" to you means wiping out Israel, murdering all Israelis and turning it into an Islamic caliphate state, you are no better than the Nazis under National Socialism.

What was that again about "punching a Nazi"?

A complaint known to the Anglo-Saxons as aelfsgotha (hiccough, or heartburn) was attributed to fairy agency, or perhaps to elfin possession. A Latin charm used to expel it, when translated, runs: "Almighty God, expel from thy servant N. through the laying on of this writing, all attack of the Castalides from his head, from his hair and from all parts of his body". The "Castalides" were the Muses of Classical myth, but the name is used here as a Latin equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon word aelf, "an elf". (W. Bonsor, "Magical Practices against Elves", Folk-Lore, XXXVII, p. 350 ff.)

-The Fairy Tradition in Britain, Lewis Spence, pg. 167

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not