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Just a Friend Looking to Make More Friends

@cancersurvivinggingerjew

Ben, 27, he/him, straight, single, doing my best to be an open ally to all. Occasional NSFW. Icon is Me. Photo by https://jacquelingracecortiphoto.tumblr.com/
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I don't like the music of Boygenius but by god I support women holding electric guitars and making out sloppy style and having their boobs out. I'm the supporter. If you ask me to vote? Well I'm voting in favor. Yes sir. You can knock on my door and ask me do I support the Boy Geniuses kissing and rolling around and I will say I'm the supporter. Thank you women

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Like this is so true and good. Yes

CW: antisemitism, pale of settlement, pogroms, genocide, cultural erasure

I don't think goyim can really conceive of how much Jews actually hold back in our criticism of antisemitism in media, and when you hear us it is often because we see a dangerous message that you don't... Yet.

I have a complicated relationship with Tim Burton's rendition of The Corpse Bride. I love it as a beautiful piece of stop motion art, but it isn't what it should have been, he took a Jewish story from the Pale and with intention stripped it of its Jewish origins. This alone is incredibly antisemitic. The criticism you will hear has probably been "this is a Jewish story, it should have retained its Jewish elements" but have you heard why we feel strongly about this story?

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The story of the corpse bride is incredibly important to me and was born from Jewish trauma and Christian violence. Mobs would routinely attack Jewish weddings, they would murder brides and they would bury them in unmarked graves by the roadside still in their wedding clothes, they reasoned that without Jewish wives there are no Jewish mother's. Jews are intrinsic to the story.

It is antisemitism to take our story, about our pain, at the hands of non-jews and strip it for "useful" parts, in fact it is heartbreaking every time.

We are often forced to pick our battles and fighting a battle over a movie that has already been released by a director with a cult following is not worth it, you only hear us speak up in numbers when the antisemitism may lead to another century of violence, because raising our voice means picking a fight, because so many of you already see our pain as inconvenient and it is exhausting to never be heard.

-anyone can reblog

Reminding everyone that antisemitism is one word. No space, no hyphen. Semitic is a linguistic category, a language can be Semitic but people can't be.

The term antisemitism was popularised by white supremacists who wanted to replace the term JudenHaas (Jew Hatred) and make their hatred of Jews sound more scientific. The term antisemitism was popularised by the proto-fascist Wilhelm Marr in his 1879 pamphlet, “The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism,”.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't use the term antisemitism, but you should use it correctly, knowing that it has only ever meant hatred of Jews and can only mean this. It's been the term under which thousands of years of violence against Jews was codified into and justified by the new antisemitism of the 20th century and onwards.

(Tumblr don't nuke this addition again, it's educational and written by a Jew.... Me.... to explain correct use of terms)

All useful things turn to shit when you privatize them.

Basically, any politician talking about privatization of any public service should be taken as a glowing neon sign reading “I’M CORRUPT AND I WANT TO MAKE MY CRONIES RICHER AT YOUR EXPENSE”

“In order to improve performance and lighten the load on the public coffers, I propose to privatize-” [gunshot]

This is gonna be a very American-centric rant, sorry, but any politician who says that government should be run “more like a business” should be immediately barred from serving in public office, because they’re either an idiot who doesn’t know how government works or they’re a grifter who is planning on ripping the copper wiring out of the walls of public infrastructure and selling it to their rich friends. Possibly both. Probably both.

Governments are not businesses. A business’s number one goal is to make a profit. That’s it. A government’s role is, ideally, to collect an amount of resources that its citizens collectively decided was fair, then use those resources (usually taxes) to provide services the People decided was necessary. Water, roads, electricity, busses, trains, libraries, education, and (if you’re not American) medical care.

Public services are exactly that: a service. Their sole mission is to provide said service to the public. Full stop. Profit isn’t a factor because their goal (ideally) isn’t to make money, it’s simply to provide the service for which they were created.

The post office is not a business. The library is not a business. Public transportation is not a business. K-12 schools are not a business. Any money you pay them outside what is given to them by taxes is to help cover costs. That’s why using the printers at a public library is cheaper than printing the same amount of pages at a for-profit print-shop. It’s why there are some places in the United States, such as communities in Alaska, where private companies like DHL, UPS, and Fedex simply refuse to make deliveries because it makes zero business sense to ship parcels at great expense to isolated, low-population areas.

The Post Office however, has a Constitution Mandate that every American is entitled to mail service. It is, in the parlance of conservatives, a God-Given Right. Thus, they are the only ones that deliver things out to those isolated communities. When you take profit motive out of the equation and focus purely on the service it was created to provide, you have a system that is built to work for everyone.

Are these institutions perfect? No, of course not. They’re large, bulky, aged, bureaucratic behemoths that are constantly underfunded and are making due with the bare minimum of resources to stay functional.

There’s a reason that the United States Postal Service for years has been actively sabotaged by conservatives who had a financial interest in private package carrier companies and are hostile to the idea of mail-in voting. There’s a reason that libraries and schools for years have been struggling for funding, and why they’re now targets of “culture war” fanatics who think privately run but tax-funded schools should teach kids more about Jesus and librarians offering free books to children is “grooming”

There’s a reason Americans pay the most for healthcare but have some of the worst healthcare outcomes of any western country.

School cafeteria workers used to be unionized, directly-hired employees of a school district. My best friend’s mom raised three kids and could afford a house on the salary she used to make doing that job. Now most cafeteria workers are contractors that get paid much less to do the same work, serving lower-quality food. Your taxes still pay for it, but their employer - the private third-party service company - is the one pocketing the difference. Janitors and cleaning staff are also a heavily “outsourced” occupation.

Taxation is theft? No, taking public infrastructure that was built by unionized employees and paid for by public tax revenue only to sell it off to private corporations so they do a shittier job, pay the workers less, and charge us all more for the privilege is fucking theft.

“Just run it like a business,” says the businessman who didn’t build it, never used it, doesn’t depend on it, and will make money from dismantling and selling it.