“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” ― Miguel de Cervantes
Matthew Benjamin: 27 years, Connecticut Champion, Cis, Bi, Student of Theater and Psychology, Compulsive Consumer of Comicbooks, Clothes & Hip Hop, Aggressively Disorganized.
i was at a bookshop yesterday buying three books and the cashier looked at my stack and went “oh one of my favorites! oh another one of my favorites! oh three of my favorites !!” and all i could think was
bro i was homoerotically cleaning and patching up my friend’s wounds and you ruined it. i was scolding him for being an idiot in an exasperated but fond tone of voice while i tenderly bandaged his knuckles and we both tried unsuccessfully to avoid looking into each other’s eyes until the tension between us became unbearable when you entered the room without knocking and fucking killed the mood. what the hell, man.
Zionism isn’t the idea that Jews should have a homeland. That doesn’t even make sense. We have a homeland, we’ve always had a homeland. Zionism is the idea that we should have an ethnostate in the homeland, big difference. Zionism was designed by assimilationists who held our own culture in low regard and were simply attempting to find a different way to assimilate - if the (European, imperial) nations wouldn’t welcome us into their societies, then making our own society modeled after them and aligned with them would allow us to ‘elevate’ ourselves to their level. Zionism is designed to shift us away from a people bound by culture and towards national identity. Zionism is designed to mold us into being as European as possible. Hertzl was a raging self hating Jew who believed Jews of “superstition” in the shtetls deserved what they suffered for not even trying to assimilate, he hated them because they were poor. In his words, “the unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of antisemitism into England, they have already introduced it to America”. To him, the root cause of European antisemitism was the refusal to assimilate, and that it had already destroyed any hope for wealthier Jews to become truly comfortable in whatever nation they preferred.
There’s a reason Zionism has had strange supporters - including Eichmann. Hertzl’s OTHER plan to deal with antisemitism was mass conversion to Christianity. No, that’s not a joke. Another Hertzl quote, “We, the Jews, not only have degenerated and are located at the end of the path, we spoiled the blood of all the peoples of Europe … Jews are descended from a mixture of waste of all races”. Seems like a pretty shitty bedrock for what’s supposedly the Jewish savior ideology. The internal consequences of Zionism have been devastating - sabra machismo, growing dismissal and disillusionment with any other political stances beyond Zionism, an ever increasing corrosion of Jewish culture, and persist alignment with imperialist, white supremacist forces like clockwork. The hatred of diaspora to the extent of hating diaspora Jews and refusing to acknowledge that we NEED a degree of diaspora to survive. Zionism is a cancer to the Jewish community, suffocating everything else out of Jewish life. In my own life, the most glaring example of this was my high school having us take a three week seminar about antisemitism, and the entire thing was about anti-Israel sentiment, BDS, and antizionist Jews. I and several students pointed at that maybe we should consider that some students within that very room weren’t exactly firm Zionists, and our Rabbi yelled at us until he turned red and we had tears in our eyes. He outright refused to acknowledge the issue of rising neonazism, especially on campus, and told us we should be more concerned about people critical of Israel. Zionism is toxic, and I fear it will do to us what the Egyptians, Persians, Romans, and Nazis failed to do - destroy us from the inside out.
Y’all this woman made money off of misleading people during the AIDS and caused many people to go off their meds and DIE. This isn’t cute or funny, it’s white liberal “spirituality” that preys on isolated people and desperate communities. It’s cultish, it’s deadly. Stop boosting her. She’s the same energy as antivaxxers.
Wine forgery, like art forgery and art theft, shouldn’t be illegal, just like any other crime where the only consequence is obscenely rich people having slightly less money
While we’re on the topic of art forgery, what about a poor family that saves every dollar to make an art investment only to find out later that it’s worthless? That’s not someone “obscenely rich” losing out.
sorry johnny there’s no dinner tonight, we need to save all the money we can to get that Rothko at Sotheby’s next week
