I Can't Lie, I Find It Very Odd That Posts Cautioning People Against Donating To Individual* Campaigns

Robot disabilities. Robot who charges slowly and loses power incredibly fast and is always tired. Robot with malfunctioning lenses and can’t process visual information properly. Robot that can’t process anything too large and at a fast rate or else they’ll shut down. Robot with limbs screwed on too loose/just can’t attach correctly, so if they’re not careful they fall out. Robot disabilities,,,

You know what? Im breaking my silence. Im TIRED of people missing Jess’ character on purpose. Like, everyone can use context clues and fill in the blanks for every other character but somehow Jess is the only one taken at face value? Jess is being seen as a cold, detached, mean bitch by fans but I cannot determine whether we even watched the same movie.

Let’s address the elephant in the room, because she is a black woman who is NOT a mammy character, people criticize her harsher. Jess was MORE than Miguel’s “lackey”. She had her own thoughts and opinions. She definitely had her own personality and feelings about the entire situation. She lowkey stalled time to give Gwen chances to fix her mistakes.

If Jess was as cold as Miguel and such a “bitch”, she would’ve left Gwen the first time. Let’s not forget that Miguel was fully about to leave Gwen with her own father holding her at gunpoint, JESS vouched to bring Gwen under her name. Jess put her OWN position at risk to help Gwen and it required that she do her job accordingly. Jess made the boundary VERY clear, she is NOT Gwen’s mother. She is NOT her friend. I seen people argue that “Jess’ maternal instincts” should’ve kicked in to protect Gwen” but fully ignoring that Jess HAS A FAMILY! Jess is PREGNANT with her OWN child. Her instincts DID kick in and she chose her dimension with her family in it!

Jess was stuck in a rock and a hard place. She obviously wanted to help Gwen (considering she brought her in at the cost of her own position) but UNFORTUNATELY, GWEN messed up. Gwen saw Miles and that ultimately led to Spot escaping. You can love these characters and acknowledge that every character had their OWN thoughts and motivations that led to fuck ups. It’s not right to try to make Jess sound worse than the man who fuckin replaced his dead self out of grief, was about to leave a teen at gunpoint, and had an entire society of people chase a teenager who wanted to save his dad.

Don’t get me started on the “she’s fighting crime while pregnant argument” because we can accept superpowered people but NOT the possibility that their bodies are more resilient. NOT TO MENTION THAT PETER B HAS A WHOLE BABY ON MISSIONS???? Like, no one is calling him a bad father so what’s different with Jess? Miguel was mean as fuck to Miles upon meeting but Jess doing her JOB is considered being “mean”.

Then the “I didn’t see her enough to connect with her” is fair until everyone can somehow create entire {TERRIBLE} mischaracterizations of Hobie, Pav, and Peni who (arguably) had just about the same amount of screentime. She also shares traits with every other spider person with being snarky and quick-witted while being completely grounded. She’s literally one of the spider people that Miguel fully trusts but somehow the fandom erases her and goes “He loves Peter B and Lego Spidey🤪🤪”

Like, it’s crazy how people find it so easy to erase Jess and Margo (Spiderbyte) in fanworks for things they easily dismiss from other characters and it’s feelin like misogynoir. Like, Margo and Hobie served the same purpose with deciding to go against Miguel for Miles, yet only Hobie and Gwen gets that credit.

AND THEN THE MANY EXCUSES WHEN IT COMES TO SHIPPING! People keep hating on Jess/Miguel because she’s “obviously pregnant and married” but go right around and ship Miguel with Peter B. Same with Margo/Miles because it’s a bunch of “Miles and Gwen are obviously endgame” ANDDDD???? Since when did every ship HAVE TO be canon in order to be a ship? It’s especially crazy because I BARELY EVER see those comments on Miles/(Peni, Pav, or Hobie) or have no problem with having all the boys huddled around Gwen. The double standard is glaringly obvious.

In conclusion, some of you mfs dont deserve ATSV.

it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!

Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.

Let me teach you too.

The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.

The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.

There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.

Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.

Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.

That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.

The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.

The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.

From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.

Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.

Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)

By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.

In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.

Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.

Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.

Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.

In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.

As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.

At least, that was the plan.

Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.

And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.

They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.

They were very wrong.

The Washington Institute

From Torch to Tunis to El Alamein: Events 80 Years Ago Made the Modern Middle East

The second week of November 1942 has much to tell us about the region’s geopolitical centrality, its enduring political currents, and its ro

He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.

Al Arabiya English

ANALYSIS: The Nazi roots of Muslim Brotherhood

After years of causing disruption on the streets of Egypt, on 30 June 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader Mohammed Morsi was sworn i

He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.

He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.

Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.

As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.

The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.

But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

The Aftershock of the Nazi War against the Jews, 1947–48: Could War in the Middle East Have Been Prevented?

This article deals with the after-effects of Nazi anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world and the antisemitic campaign of the Mufti of Jer

Question of Palestine

UN Palestine Commission - Acts of aggression by Arab States - Memorandum from the Jewish Agency - Question of Palestine

ACTS OF AGGRESSION PROVOKED, COMMITTED AND PREPARED BY ARAB STATES  IN CONCERT WITH THE PALESTINE ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE AGAINST T

About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.

Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.

The Tower

There Was a Jewish Nakba, and It Was Even Bigger than the Palestinian One

The expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, one of the biggest humanitarian crises of the 20th century, is all the more tragic for how little

By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.

That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.

Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.

(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.

Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.

Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)

Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.

Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.

Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.

Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.

Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.

But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.

Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.

Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.

It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels.  Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."

MEMRI

Senior Hamas Official Fathi Hammad To Palestinians In Jerusalem: Buy 5-Shekel Knives And Cut Off The Heads Of The Jews

Hamas Political Bureau Member and former Minister of the Interior Fathi Hammad urged the people of Jerusalem to "cut off...

(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.

Newsweek

Hamas Tortured Me for Dissent. Here's What They Truly Think of Palestinians

I thought I'd left Gaza behind, yet all this time, Hamas was planning to expand its extremism and intimidation.

It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)

Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.

It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.

Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.

Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.

The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.

Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.

That is how this conflict came about.

A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.

And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."

As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.

Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.

Once you become a certain age, it is your responsibility to unlearn behaviors that hinder your growth as a person.

I bring a real "many female characters also have these traits you love male characters for" and "many of your fave male characters have done the same things you hate female characters for" vibe to the conversation they female character haters don't enjoy

So the Jews went from being victims of genocide to commiters of it? Weird how the circle of power goes.

okay no, this is not the way it is. jewish people =/= israel. not all jewish people condone israel’s actions, and a significant number actively oppose it.

and jewish people continue to face antisemitism today, so saying something like “Jewish people went from victims to committers” as a general statement is really gross.

(also a lot of jewish people have expressed discomfort with the word “Jews” and prefer “Jewish” btw)

Sits TF fandom down gently. Please. Please understand that the whole 'Decepticons as revolutionaries/workers/etc' thing is new to TF from IDW1 and Aligned onwards and was not in G1. Or anything through TFA, for that matter. It isn't some inherent part of the canon that must always be there. Please do not 'correct' people on this, because you sound. Silly.