(blue is average of people’s estimate of percentage of population of which x is true, and red is the actual percentage)
I appreciate how it’s perceived jews are 30% of the population, muslims are 27% of the population, and atheists are 33% of the population. nobody wondered why christians were 10% huh
I honestly don’t even think this is as much “minorities being extremely visible”, and more just that the most people don’t understand fractions and statistics.
To most people, anything less than 10%, in any context, is basically “insignificant, not even worth your attention.”
The idea that Asians could be “only” 4% of the US population, and yet you still see a couple Asian people every day of your life, is deeply counterintuitive to most people. People don’t truly grasp that they pass by hundreds if not thousands of strangers every day and about 1 in 25 of them are going to be Asian.
Right now annual inflation is at a pretty high 9%, which is more than triple what the usual inflation rate is. But I guarantee if you asked the average person on the street what the inflation rate is right now, they’d think prices have gone up by anywhere from like 30-100%, because “9%” just doesn’t feel like a substantial or noticeable amount in their minds, even though it is.
Obsessed with the fact that 92% of people live in NYC, California, and Texas
This reminds me of a different post I saw recently, wherein OP was - understandably - irked that so many professionals will characterize something that affects 1%-2% of the population as “a rare illness”. In actuality, if you’re in a lecture hall with 300 people, that means 3-6 of people who are in the same room with you. It means you might meet people with [disorder] every day, and not realize it.
reblogging for that last comment. I’ve been saying this for years
same thing with “only” 1% of the world is trans, and “only” 1% of the world is ace. I saw somewhere on here that if you do the math, there’s more trans people than there are Canadians. This is where the jokes about aces conquering Denmark/Belgium/the Netherlands come from. There are more aces than the populations of some countries.
The day I returned home from the championships, the blood report was leaked to the press, alongside the results of a second test conducted while I was in Berlin. There it was. The things I did not know about my body. I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspapers reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher than normal levels of testosterone. They went on to call me a hermaphrodite. In my culture, this term does not apply to people like me, but the world media forced that label on me and that is what I am called to this day.
It was as if some kind of bomb had exploded … and the fallout just kept getting bigger and bigger. I couldn’t escape it. My face and story was plastered across television screens and newspapers all over the world. It was as if the entirety of humanity had discovered some kind of alien that had been living amongst them. I remember thinking: “Now what? Am I going to run again? OK, so this explains why I haven’t gotten a period. All right. If these people are saying I don’t have a womb, then this means I will never be able to carry a child. I want a family.”
[…]
I kept thinking: “This thing can never be undone.” The girl I had been before I got on that plane to Berlin – happy, joking, innocent, eager, hopeful – she’d been disappeared on the way back. And in these early days of my exile, there was nothing to put in that empty space. Imagine you are told one day that because of some medical this or that, you are actually not a woman. Think about it. In the eyes of the entire world, you are now something other than what you know yourself to be. And the entire world will not stop talking about you. Ever. Until the day you die, you will be the punchline of a joke about genitals or gender or sex or whatever.
Caster Semenya found out she was being gender tested when she showed up for the test, she thought it was a doping test. She found out the results - that she’s intersex - on the news with everyone else. She was 18 years old.
What they did to this woman is evil. She’s handled it with so much grace but she shouldn’t have to. It’s so awful. I’m never going to stop being mad about this.
This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.
Don’t deny Jewish history in Palestine. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn’t succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn’t mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn’t help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.
Don’t whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel’s Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they’re in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying “Jews are white Europeans” is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.
Don’t invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to “go back where they came from”. Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can’t return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can’t return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on “other people’s land”, the difference in Palestine is that we’re the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.
Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It’s true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that “most” was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country’s Black population, so…) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was “None is too many.” Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.
Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that “the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing” is specific and precise. To say that “Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want”… do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say “Zionists”, what you really mean is “Jews”?
Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don’t apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn’t involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.
For fuck’s sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They’re very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they’re also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don’t give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.
Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not “when Jews do a thing I don’t like,” and a Zionist is not “a Jew I disagree with/don’t like”. Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn’t fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it’s oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they’re wrong. They’re doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they’re wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.
While all of Europe is responsible, I think it’s also important for people from the UK to acknowledge the particular and direct culpability of our government in what has happened in Israel and Palestine - mostly because it never is. Politicians don’t mention it, the media never mentions it, they tell you nothing about it in school, no one talks about it. I was just saying exactly the same thing about India, but if you ask an average British person if they think their country did a good job of ruling Palestine you’ll get a blank stare, maybe they’ll pull a massively uninformed opinion out of their arse, I doubt many could tell you exactly when it was. But the fact is that when Britain assumed control of the Holy land in 1918 both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were relatively minor concerns, and when we left in 1948 there was a civil war raging between those two sides. All of the important seeds of the conflict were sown and took root while Britain was in charge. The first major Palestinian uprising of 1936-39 was an anti-colonial struggle against the British Empire.
But today, watching the news, British people are like ‘wow guess we’ll never understand why Jews and Arabs just naturally hate each other’… just like those Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan, and those Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’….. and all of those other places on earth where the legacy of British occupation and partition is division, violence and misery. The Empire is not a distant memory we can feel vaguely proud and nostalgic about (as most British people apparently do) it was a global crime of almost unimaginable proportions and it’s still (in some cases quite literally) blowing up in our faces.
Tumblr shows that the best way to get queer people to like your show is to not put any explicitly queer people in it. So long as nothing is canon, they will ‘Candle Cove’ up a whole entire show with EXCELLENT queer representation out of nothing. If you put actual canon queer representation into it, you’ll get ripped to shreds for being problematic about it.
Query in re: possible (I must stress possible, as even if my inspiration levels are through the roof my executives are extremely dysfunctional) Infernal-verse porn:
How do you feel about knifeplay/very light bloodplay? As in "ha ha, I have captured you little paladin, now struggle in vain as I cut away your clothes or possibly tear them with my mighty claws" stuff?
Dude, anything goes in this sandbox. Whatever nasty, depraved shit is out there, Xenk has...
