I recently gave up a significant amount of my savings for car and transition-related expenses (about 2k worth). If you are in a place to do so, please consider donating to my Patreon to support my production of feminist video essays analyzing popular fiction. I typically put out two video essays per month, one of general interest for the public and one of an exclusive patron-only for one year Steven Universe review series. I only ask $2 per person (though I am, of course, grateful for more), and each patron gets their name in the credits of my videos and early access to them.

As an example of my work, here is a positive review of the 2020 horror-comedy film Freaky, covering its progressive trans-positive framework in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVqipTkwHqQ

the-last-dillards:

the-last-dillards:

Concept: Cardassian bdsm but instead of being praised for being a good boy or good girl, your dom calls you a good citizen

@soong-type-husband

All valid

Also works with Odo domming Quark. ;)

gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda:

gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda:

gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda:

gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda:

screamingfromuz:

gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda:

magnetothemagnificent:

gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda:

gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to others, the rest is commentary, go and study”

Hillel the Elder

“Then when G-d asks [Cain], ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ he arrogantly responds, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ In essence, the entire Bible is written as an affirmative response to this question.”

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

Thousands of people have died, so many more are injured, hundreds of thousands are displaced.

Please at this time Donate to the Red Crescent and the Red Shield of David… They need all the support possible.

Donation - PRCS

palestinercs.org

https://href.li/?https://www.mdais.org/en/donation

href.li

Also ZaKA (זק"א). They are an organization that works to preserve the dignity of the dead by recovering their bodies and ensuring they receive respect and proper treatment according to their religious rites (they have other religious wings aside from Jewish). I don’t know what the Palestinian equivalent of this organization is, but if it exists please share it and support it. There’s a lot of dead and unfortunately there’s probably going to be many more and they all deserve dignity.

The greatest mitzvah is helping a soul along to its burial, because it’s the only mitzvah where you cannot be thanked by the person you’re helping.

Gaza Cemetery-Gaza Cemetery Project

Gaza cemetery ; a ​​5,500 square meters’ piece of land secured to create a public cemetery in Gaza for the city and neighboring areas.

Seven Spikes Relief

A friend of mine has asked me to specifically mention this project which is near completion.

Sadly it will be sorely needed. The exterior walls are not yet complete and are needed to protect the burials from being disturbed by dogs and other such menaces that may dig into graves.

Adding Medical Aid for Palestinian.

Providing medical aid to Palestinians living under occupation and as refugees

For over 30 years, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) has been reaching out to Palestinian communities, striving to deliver health and medic

map.org.uk

Children in Gaza desperately need lifesaving support

Children affected by the escalation of hostilities need humanitarian assistance and protection. UNICEF and partners are on the ground

unicef.org

If you would like to donate directly to the Gazan Orthodox Christian community for humanitarian supports and repair of the damaged St Porphyrios Orthodox Church you can support this campaign by The Holy Orthodox Order of St George the Great Martyr here. Or at the bottom of the page here

We are suffering! - Orderofsaintgeorge

“We are suffering. We need all the help we can get, and there is no

Orderofsaintgeorge

Please support the joint Palestinian and Israeli project Bereaved Families For Peace (I set the language to English, hopefully that is carried over to the link.) this is a time of bereavement for everybody in this awful situation.

https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/contribution_eng/

Also support Roots, fostering peace and reconciliation between Palestinians a d Israelis

Friends of Roots

Friends of Roots

“Standing Together is a grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice. While the minority who benefit from the status quo of occupation and economic inequality seek to keep us divided, we know that we — the majority — have far more in common than that which sets us apart.”

English | standing-together

Standing Together is the grassroots people’s movement in Israel. We organize Jews and Arabs, locally and nationally, around campaigns for pe

standing-together

the-incorrigible-chaia:

How To Be Anti-Zionist WITHOUT Being Antisemitic

Yes! It’s possible! But it’s not automatic.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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”?
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

ink-and-teeth:

arsanatomica:

arsanatomica:

Today I learned that there are mushroom picking manuals written and illustrated by AI

And they have the potential to kill people because they encourage people to identify wild plants by taste.

How soon are we going to start seeing AI car repair manuals?

AI first aid guides?

There’s already been a problem with AI written travel guides that tell people to go to dangerous crime ridden areas.

AI mushroom collecting guides also tell people to collect endangered species.

How soon are we going to see snake identification AI guides with AI art that doesn’t resemble any specific species? How soon until we get inaccurate CPR instructions?

Veterinary manuals for drug dosages and drug interactions? Those types of books are hundreds of dollars a piece. If there was a even slightly cheaper alternative available…..

@inneskeeper pls share bc Holy Shit

sylveondreams:

vanilla-kitty:

luckymewciano:

luckymewciano:

One of my favorite genres of post

i gotta show yall a our discord classic

biglawbear:

So I went to read the Kids Online Safety Act, thinking that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what people are making it out to be, I mean I’m a lawyer and expert in statutory interpretation, it can’t be that bad, right?

Oh no. KOSA IS that bad. It will literally eradicate queer people online.

The bill says that a “covered platform” - broadly defined as “anything on the internet a minor might use” which is literally the entire fucking internet- has a “duty” to protect minors from anything that might harm them, including “sexual exploitation” and other undefined terms

It also gives state attorneys general the ability to sue to enforce it.

So here’s exactly what’s gonna happen:

Wacko republicans, as they’ve been doing with increasing force this year and last, are going to sue any and every website in existence, saying that the mere existence of LGBT people online constitutes sexual abuse of minors. And websites are gonna be so afraid of not doing the most that they’ll just axe all LGBT everything.

Like. Republicans have been calling all LGBT people groomers and child molesters for years. The lead Republican literally admitted this bill will be used to attack trans people.

This bill is BAD bad. I’m appalled that democrats are lining up behind what is clearly a republican Trojan horse to eradicate LGBT people from the entire internet.

Call your senator

darantha:

the-warlock-syndicate:

Alright US mutuals, if you are interested in, morbidly fascinated by, or anxiously doomscrolling through AI news, including Stable Diffusion, Llama, ChatGPT or Dalle, you need to be aware of this.

The US Copyright Office has submitted a request for comment from the general public. Guidelines can be found on their site, but the gist of it is that they are taking citizen statements on what your views on AI are, and how the Copyright Office should address the admittedly thorny issues in rulings.

Be polite, be succinct, and be honest. They have a list of questions or suggestions, but in truth are looking to get as much data from the general public as possible. If you have links to papers or studies examining the economic impacts of AI, they want them. If you have anecdotal stories of losing commissions, they want them. If you have legal opinions, experience using these tools, or even a layman’s perspective of how much human input is required for a piece of work to gain copyright, they want it.

The deadline is Oct 18th and can be submitted via the link in the article. While the regulatory apparatus of the US is largely under sway by corporate interests, this is still the actual, official time for you to directly tell the government what you think and what they should do. Comments can be submitted by individuals or on behalf of organizations. So if you are a small business, say a print shop, you can comment on behalf of the print shop as well.

Thorny AI copyright questions have Copyright Office seeking public input

Should AI-created works be copyrighted? US regulators want to know what you think.

Ars Technica

Do a illustrator a favour and do this.

letrune:

loveerran:

vaspider:

gwydionmisha:

National Anti-Trans Bans Loom: Will Democrats Surrender Trans Rights?

Republicans have introduced a new amendment banning any federal funds from gender affirming care in several must-pass bills, with very littl

erininthemorning.com

Now is an excellent time to tell your Democratic Congress Critters trans Healthcare is important

If you can’t safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

This is extremely important, y'all. They’re trying to Hyde Amendment trans care for people of all ages.

Medicaid and Medicare coverage would go away, no matter what state you are in. ACA plan coverage would go away. Hospitals would fully just have to stop offering trans care, full stop, or lose their federal funding.

I know we hate the phone but we absolutely can’t sleep on this. If you have a Democrat rep, you absolutely have to tell them to hold the line against this.

This isn’t getting enough attention. Must pass bills are Must Pass or the government doesn’t function. And they’re putting these anti trans care bits into everything. The one banning all gender affirming care for members of the military and veterans seem likely to pass. That includes a ban on prescription hrt.

Anti-trans legislation is fast becoming a touchstone of the Republican Party platform. There are not enough of us to solidify, through the political process, our access to essential human rights, including medical care and basic self-determination.

We need allies who will make phone calls, send faxes, send letters and stand up for us.

For any US citizens reading this, or anyone caring for the LGBTQ+ in the US: us Hungarians had this before, it ended up banning ALL LGBTQ+ people. The same laws were expanded to ban being gay, asexual or gender non-conforming in public.

Your reoublicans want that and more, they seem to want Russia on your soil but wrapped in crosses and stars-amd-stripes. Pay attention, because where one group loses rights, MORE GROUPS WILL. They already started banning women’s rights, act! Act, before the US becomes yet another copy of Russia.