I Keep Toying With Writing This, Because Words Are Hard And I'm Not Sure How To Fully Articulate This

USA please listen to me: the price of “teaching them a lesson” is too high. take it from New Zealand, who voted our Labour government out in the last election because they weren’t doing exactly what we wanted and got facism instead.

Trans rights are being attacked, public transport has been defunded, tax cuts issued for the wealthy, they've mass-defunded public services, cut and attacked the disability funding model, cut benefits, diverted transport funding to roads, cut all recent public transport subsidies, cancelled massive important infrastructure projects like damns and ferries (we are three ISLANDS), fast tracked mining, oil, and other massive environmentally detrimental projects and gave the power the to approve these projects singularly to three ministers who have been wined and dined by lobbyists of the companies that have put the bids in to approve them while one of the main minister infers he will not prioritise the protection of endangered species like the archeys frog over mining projects that do massive environmental harm. They have attacked indigenous rights in an attempt to negate the Treaty of Waitangi by “redefining it”; as a backup, they are also trying to remove all mentions of the treaty from legislation starting with our Child Protection laws no longer requiring social workers to consider the importance of Maori children’s culture when placing those children; when the Waitangi Tribunal who oversees indigenous matters sought to enquire about this, the Minister for Children blocked their enquiry in a breach of comity that was condemned in a ruling — too late to do anything — by our Supreme Court. They have repealed labour protections around pay and 90 day trials, reversed our smoking ban, cancelled our EV subsidy, cancelled our water infrastructure scheme that would have given Maori iwi a say in water asset management, cancelled our biggest city’s fuel tax, made our treasury and inland revenue departments less accountable, dispensed of our Productivity Commission, begun work on charter schools and military boot camps in an obvious push towards privatisation, cancelled grants for first home buyers, reduced access to emergency housing, allowed no cause evictions, cancelled our Maori health system that would have given Maori control over their own public medical care and funding, cut funding of services like budgeting advice and food banks, cancelled the consumer advocacy council, cancelled our medicine regulations, repealed free prescriptions, deferred multiple hospital builds, failed to deliver on pre-election medical promises, reversed a gun ban created in response to the mosque shootings, brought back three strikes = life sentence policy, increased minimum wage by half the recommended amount, cancelled fair pay for disabled workers, reduced wheelchair services, reversed our oil and gas exploration ban, cancelled our climate emergency fund, cut science research funding including climate research, removed limits on killing sea lions, cut funding for the climate change commission, weakened our methane targets, cancelled Significant National Areas protections, have begun reversing our ban on live exports. Much of this was passed under urgency.

It’s been six months.

Shana Tova!!! May your enemies, haters, and those who wish evil upon you be cut off. The blessing for the leek has always felt resonant but this year it's been on my mind a lot. For me at least, 5785 is a year of practicing healthy boundaries and taking care of myself - even if I have to run on spite. I hope everyone has a safe Rosh Hashanah ❤️

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

Just tossing this here so non-jewish mutuals/followers are aware, since I think this isn't as well known: Jewish Voice for Peace is as representative of jews as Autism Speaks is of autistic people. That is to say - not at all.

To clarify, I do not disagree with the idea of jews fighting for.. well, peace. I am a big supporter of organizations like Standing Together which pushes for exactly that. The issue is that JVP just makes shit up, often misrepresents or totally messes up jewish tradition (like the time when they misspelled every single hebrew word on their passover plate), and is generally such a car crash that it would be a bad idea to take their comments on judaism at face value.

“For a thousand years the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christian in a Christian Europe, non-Muslim outsiders in an Islamic Middle East. But this chapter is not primarily about antisemitism. It is about what gives rise to it. Antisemitism is only contingently about Jews. Jews are its victims but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within a culture. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society. Recall Girard’s point: the scapegoat is the mechanism by which a society deflects violence away from itself by focusing it on an external victim. Hence, wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews they would start killing one another. That is what happened in Europe in the seventeenth century and again in two world wars in the twentieth, and what is happening today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn regions in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To understand the emergence of the Jew-as-scapegoat we must focus on certain key historic moments. The first is 1095 when Pope Urban II delivered his historic call for the First Crusade. In 1096 some of the Crusaders, on their way to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe: in Cologne, Worms, and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than be seized by the mob and forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry, and the portent of worse to come. From this point onwards Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen by many not as human beings at all but as a malevolent force, as an evil presence, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the fourteenth century cost many millions of lives. It was an age in which Jews lived in fear. That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fé, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity it ranks among one of the most sustained chronicles of hatred in history… …Eventually Europe moved on, but not before two events that were to have significant consequences centuries later. The first took place in Spain, where, under threat of persecution, Jews had been living in fear from 1391, Spain’s Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned and Jews massacred, until their expulsion in 1492. Many, under threat, had converted. Some were suspected of maintaining Jewish practice in private and became victims of the Inquisition. Others, though, embraced the new faith and achieved positions of prominence in Spanish society. It was then that a new phenomenon appeared: the persistence of prejudice after its overt cause had been removed. The ‘new’ Christians were still hated by some, now not for their religion but for their race. Legislation was introduced to protect Limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’. The first such statue appeared in Toledo in 1449. Originally opposed by the Church, it received the approval of Pope Alexander VI in 1496 and lasted well into the nineteenth century. It was the first appearance in history of the racial antisemitism that would flow through mainland Europe four and a half centuries later. The second significant development was Martin Luther. Initially favorably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds. In 1543 he published a pamphlet entitled On the Jews and their Lies that became a classic in the literature of hate. Synagogues should be burned. Jewish homes should be destroyed. Jews should be made to live in a single room or stable to know that they were no more than ‘miserable captives’. Their prayer books and Talmuds should be confiscated and their rabbis forbidden to teach. They should be forbidden to travel and given no legal protection until the world was rid of what he called 'our plague, pestilence, and misfortune’. The pamphlet was reprinted several times during the Nazi era, and its suggestions paralleled by the Nuremberg laws. Luther’s outburst ensured that hostility to the Jews would persist after the Reformation, and it left a lasting impression in countries where Lutheranism held sway. The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews. This had a lasting effect on Holland in the sixteenth century and England in the seventeenth, as well as on the Pilgrim Fathers in America. These were among the first places to develop religious liberty. It is at this point that the story takes a remarkable and tragic twist. Western Europe in the eighteenth century turned to the Enlightenment in the belief that reason could overcome the prejudices of the past. In the nineteenth century this was followed by Emancipation, through which minority religious groups, among them the Jews, were granted civil rights in the new nation states, held together not as in the past by religion but by citizenship and civil law. Yet prejudice persisted, as it had done in post-expulsion Spain. Among its practitioners were some of Europe’s leading minds. Voltaire called Jews 'an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by who they are tolerated and enriched.’ He added, generously, 'Still, we ought not to burn them.’ Immanuel Kant spoke of Jews as 'the vampires of society’, and called for 'the euthanasia of Judaism’. Georg Hegel saw Jews and Judaism as paradigms of a 'slave morality’, unable to conceive or practice a religion of love. By rejecting Christianity, Jews had been stranded by history and were left as a 'fossil nation’, a 'ghost-race’… …Friedrich Nietzsche castigated Judaism as the 'falsification’ of all natural values. His great originality is that, instead of criticizing Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for having given birth to it in the first place. Anyone who blames religion for creating hate should consider these examples…philosophical antisemitism from Voltaire to Heidegger is a little-known phenomenon but a devastating one. As European culture became secularized and religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial antisemitism, the consequences were lethal. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews, because you can change your religion. But you cannot change your blood or your genes. Antisemites could therefore only work for the elimination of the Jews. The result was the Holocaust.”

— Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015. (p. 76-80). (via eshusplayground)

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy6hjeeyq4i/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

today i was in the museum of world war ii in gdańsk (poland) and hmmm.......

A)

B)

C)

what a coincidence