MetaFilter

I think lots of people are thinking very hard about it, and that it is happening now specifically because of the U.S. election. Hamas has an excellent relationship with Russia and Putin, and Putin's willingness to create the occasional catastrophic humanitarian crisis to advance his policy goals is well documented.

Yes, it's Putin that created the humanitarian crisis. Israel and its allies have absolutely no culpability--they are simply helpless… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:09 PM on December 27, 2023

I've been relentless in criticizing apologists for Israeli brutality and their massacres in gaza, and people have rightly shut these apologists down.

Have they? There's a tremendous amount of IDF and genocide apologism in these threads and many posters continually writing outright lies about the Palestinian people and their history to mislead people. This place leans far closer towards the side of "maybe the people doing the genocide actually… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 9:16 PM on December 28, 2023

Deliberately killing babies and toddlers and teenagers at a music festival and civilian men and women and pensioners — looking them right in the eye, stabbing them, shooting them, burning their bodies, then ringing your father to boast that "I killed 10 Jews today" — cannot be explained away as "guerrilla resistance".

I think the difference between our perspectives is that I and most others on the pro-Palestinian left believe that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:01 PM on November 29, 2023

I'm fine with agreeing to disagree, but to me it seems painfully clear that the Oct. 7 attacks were terrorism, not war crimes. The casual equation of Hamas and the IDF in comments above also seems, again to me, as so obviously wrong and simpleminded that I'm not quite sure how to respond other than just indicating a lack of agreement and letting it sit with that.

I have to say that I put a fair bit of work into typing up my earlier comment about my… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 4:01 PM on November 29, 2023

I think she's wrong, but I don't think it's coming from a place of actual racism or hate. Just a deep sense of betrayal and a bunkering mentality from feeling that the whole world has turned on her.

I disagree. I think it is coming from an actual place of racism and hate. I don't think it's a coincidence that Margulies and other Zionist celebrities like Amy Schumer and Iliza Schlesinger have all specifically called out Black (and to a lesser degree,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:30 AM on December 1, 2023

Allyship between marginalized groups is different from the allyship of someone in the majority to a marginalized person/group. Of course it’s transactional and there is an expectation of reciprocity. It is a survival strategy.

As a member of quite a few marginalized groups, I'd love to learn when we decided that. As an Asian person, for example, I don't believe that the solidarity I feel with Black people is transactional. I feel solidarity with… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:11 PM on December 1, 2023

The impact of that to America, the world, and the climate is going to make Oct. 7 and/or the genocide in Gaza look like nothing.

Can we avoid phrasing like this please and efforts to refocus the discussion of an unfolding genocide to American electoral politics. For people who have family, friends or other connections to Palestine, being told that the genocide of their people is “nothing” compared to American politics is a grotesque thing to hear… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 12:58 PM on December 9, 2023

The Palestinian experience under Ottoman and British rule as disenfranchised subjects of empires. The Israeli/Jewish experience of the holocaust, antisemtism and seeking refuge in Israel. The unresolved conflict from 1948 and all its echos.

Um, I think you're missing a kind of big one regarding Palestinian experiences of generational trauma as "disenfranchised subjects"!

I don't understand why you continually post… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:27 AM on December 12, 2023

“I’m done with the Left.” I have heard variations of this sentence so many times over the past two months. From Jews who feel betrayed by the racial justice activists they saw as their allies, especially after the broad mobilization of civil society under the banner of Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020; from Never Trump conservatives who are feeling justified to re-embrace their disdain for the Left as an overriding principle; from neighbors, parents at school, acquaintances on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 2:47 PM on December 14, 2023

Just stop. However imperfect the Dems may be, doing anything that makes it more likely that the Republicans will come to power is aiding and abetting genocide right here at home—and I say this as someone who loathes the Israeli Apartheid State and its stranglehold on our politics. It's not conscience; it's pure selfishness.

I'll try to use this line on my Palestinian-American friends! You're selfish for not voting for the guy aiding and abetting the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:25 AM on December 13, 2023

Honestly don’t tell the left about Biden’s secret anti-genocide actions, tell Muslims in Michigan, that is where the problem will be.

Also just a reminder that leftist Muslims exist! Including in Michigan. Framing them as some neublous 'other' is not great.
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:27 AM on December 13, 2023

It's less well-known than his evil in Cambodia and Vietnam but as a person with Bangladeshi heritage, learning about his support of Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh clarified for me for the first time that America is kind of evil in terms of its place in the world and also, that the lives of people like me and my ancestors are worth very little in the eyes of the American foreign policy establishment.

"Nixon and Kissinger were not just motivated by… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 9:21 AM on November 30, 2023

The majority in Israel is already of color, and many are already from the region or nearby, which also puts the kibosh on colonialism.

I feel like this represents a very misinformed understanding of both what colonialism is and what it means to be "of color."
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:11 PM on November 2, 2023

Yet within hours of the Oct 7th attack on Israel, Narendra Modi was among the first of the world leaders to respond, condemning the terror attack and pledging to stand in solidarity with Israel - providing full support without a balancing statement that usually follows it. Israel's ambassador took the statement at face value and thanked India for their 100% support.

This is a big departure from the rest of the global south and also their previous stances, and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 8:58 PM on November 8, 2023

It turns out that, rather than acting to generate greater understanding or sympathy, paradoxically, rage and frustration at Hamas for its awful actions becomes a catalyst that intensifies the anger at Israel (anger that, again, is in large part rooted in Israel's own terrible conduct). Indeed, just as (at some level) Israel's increasingly indefensible forays into repressive fascism make it more essential to the mental wellbeing of the Zionists that they hate the anti-Zionists, so too… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:48 AM on November 20, 2023

I also think, whatever else we want to add into this case, from the perspective of the jury, it did not help that Heard lied, repeatedly, on the stand, in ways that were demonstrated during the trial.

Hey, can you point out some of the lies? I've heard this line repeated almost verbatim by so many people and have yet to actually hear one of the lies. I feel like if there's so many, it shouldn't be hard to cite one and yet people seem to always make… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:38 AM on June 3, 2022

I also watched almost all of the trial, and I think this panel of behavioural experts (old white men) do a really good job explaining what I witnessed.

They start out in episiode one pretty neutral (we are not taking sides, we are just commenting on body language and what we might interpret from it) but by episode four or so it is just too blatant - they are basically saying "Amber Heard is a shitty actor, and she is doing a terrible job pretending to be… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:04 PM on June 3, 2022

. In particular, she appears to be a white woman, raised mostly in wealth and privilege, claiming a burden that is disproportionately borne by people of color. To me, that would seem to be in the ballpark of Rachel Dolezal. I am not interested in championing such a person.

This is an insanely gross and pretty fucking racist thing to say, especially if you're white. It's like the definition of the 'fake liberal' nonsense Frowner discusses above. I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 8:49 AM on March 31, 2022

I didn't suggest tolerating intolerance. But what do you suggest that we do with the intolerant people? We can't strip them of their voting rights - we can't do mass arrests or forced re-education. Germany was an occupied country. But even there, even after being marched through the camps, it took a generation or more to make major changes (and they have their own far right movement).

I was waiting for this! Any discussion about racism on this site… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 5:07 PM on January 18, 2021

And I think modern, "Western" culture in general has a lot to learn about how consensual physical pain, ritual, and sexuality can all be deeply impactful on us.

I was curious about this comment--what are the consensual physical pain, ritual and sexuality in non-Western cultures you are referencing here? I have some inkling but would be interested in learning more about how you see this.

My response to all of this… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:54 PM on December 13, 2020

The Anglo-Saxons also effectively genocided the Celtic speakers all the way to the Welsh/Scottish borders, leaving Old English a more or less purely Germanic language with little Celtic influence. The Vikings didn't make anywhere near as deep an impression on language in the Danelaw.

I read a post on R/AskHistorians a few months ago that argued that this is a popular misconception: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bhnn6/were_the_anglosaxon_invasions_a_catastrophic/
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 8:44 AM on November 24, 2020

I think there is a whole lot of interesting nuanced discussion to be had around that, AND it’s not a conversation that I think metafilter has made itself a safe place to have. It’s wanting to have space for those conversations that isn’t constantly mischaracterized and taken out of context that made me have so many conversations on MeTa about how race is handled here. But the long long history of conversation here makes me entirely aware that any pass at all for not listening to POC… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:25 PM on September 4, 2020

So it's with that in mind that I feel it's particularly illustrative how provoked people feel when a Black woman writes a bog-standard piece in this genre that politely prods at one practice of "good" white people.

Yeah, I strongly agree. It's fascinating to watch how fragile white liberals feel the moment a Black woman insinuates that any aspect of their allyship might merit criticism and how vociferously they respond. I am really, really… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:42 AM on June 5, 2020

I used to feel bad whenever I saw these types of articles, because my life as a Millenial has been a lot easier than those of my parents who are Baby Boomers. This is despite the fact that they are both much more hardworking and smarter than I am. My parents are immigrants, so they did not have a safety net to fall back on, since their parents were all in a different country and didn't have the money to help if anything happened.

That's because these… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 8:40 AM on April 14, 2020

Age is the delimiter and it was terrifyingly clear that we get to live with policies decided upon by people who will not survive to see the consequences of them, and thus don't much care what they are.

I find this kind of mind-reading for why people vote the way to do is really frustrating, especially as I doubt you've met a non-Bernie supporter who told you that they voted for their preferred candidate because they "don't much care."… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:15 AM on April 9, 2020

Things Parker & Stone did NOT invent, and should not be blamed for:
--Ableism
--Racism
--Crypto-fascism
--Charismatic evil characters

Um, you can be blamed for being racist and ableist even if you didn't invent racism? What even.

I haven't thought very much about South Park since the early to mid-2000s/Bush era because it seems so thoroughly a cultural artifact of that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 8:09 PM on April 7, 2020

Let's be clear about one thing: Bernie's supporters are younger, poorer, and less white than Warren's supporters were. This is a group that is far more online than other candidates' supporters, and a group that has a huge number of legitimate reasons to be angry. Plenty of them see this primary as a matter of life and death. I do.

The harassment and just aggressive smugness and bullshit I've seen online (including Facebook from people I vaguely know)… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 3:24 PM on March 8, 2020

It would be really nice if some of you could acknowledge that access to health care is a real issue that effects real people, like me, for instance, and that may have affected how some of us voted.

This is just such a perplexing comment. Are there people not affected by "access to health care"? All the people in the immortal segment of the electorate perhaps?
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 9:20 AM on March 11, 2020

So what is the answer here? Do white people need to stop doing Yoga? Or stop teaching Yoga?

How do whites approach something that they love (Yoga) without hurting the civilization that it comes from?

I love that in any thread on cultural appropriation on an overwhelmingly white website/community, you end up with a comment like this almost immediately: these kinds of histrionic, defensive and absurd leaps of imagination--like… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 9:03 AM on October 25, 2019

What finally got me to stop lurking and make an account here was to talk about the seminar I'd recently attended where the old "antidepressants mostly don't work except for severe cases" was revealed to be a statistical error that got picked up and widely, widely, widely reported because it fed into the rampant med-skep mentality our society has.

Do you have a link to anything about this? Pretty much everything I've read on the subject… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 9:35 AM on May 19, 2019

If my husband were hit by a bus tomorrow, I would never be in a long term relationship with a man again. If for some reason I felt I needed to be in a long term relationship, I would probably try to engage with women. I'm not currently sexually attracted to them, but also - the culmination of my lived experiences has taught me that I probably could be if I worked on it, or at least enough to get by.

I have to say, my last relationship was with a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:16 AM on April 10, 2019

I think liberal American Jews tend to have a deeper understanding of the situation because we're required to, but at the same time, we're not allowed to say anything that goes against the narrative of Israel is always bad without being called Islamophobic or Zionist-as-a-slur.

I have literally never seen this. Certainly not in mainstream American politics. You are claiming that American Jews are not allowed to say anything that "goes against… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 2:25 PM on February 12, 2019

And it is problematic that when the Republicans dig up dirt on other politicians involving racism or sexism, we're quick to right it, but when it comes to anything anti-Semitic, we're more likely to defend it.

I find this troubling because I completely disagree with you that we are always quick to condemn racism and sexism or that it is not present or tolerated in the left. I see white leftists defending racism all the time. If anything, I feel like… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 2:32 PM on February 12, 2019

I suspect JBP sees the rapid emergence of the tendency to categorize people by superficial traits -- race, sex, gender, orientation, etc. -- as enormously regressive, when compared to the gradual cultural liberalization project that has unfolded since ancient times.

When did this tendency "rapidly emerge"? I have to say, as a woman of color and a queer person, I've felt categorized by my "superficial traits" my whole life. Also,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 8:33 AM on November 2, 2018

So,my dislike of Jenny was mostly around how a show purporting to be about gay women needed to be centered around a straight character for... reasons?

A straight character? Doesn't Jenny come out as a gay really early into the first season? All of her relationships in the show are with women (aside from the boyfriend she has when the show starts).

I did a rewatch of the show pretty recently and I don't think the dislike of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 6:48 PM on September 3, 2018

What I'm saying is that I don't think Jenny was complex or interesting. She was a horribly-written character and The L Word is not the show you want to compare to Breaking Bad and Mad Men. It hurts the writer's argument to do that.
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:24 PM on September 3, 2018

In case Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's name sounds familiar, she got into a kerfuffle about some things she said about trans women in 2017.

What a bizarre comment. It's much more likely her name sounds familiar because, as the Vox article you link says in its first line, she is "a literary sensation known the world over for her beautiful prose and complex, lively characters."
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 9:23 PM on July 9, 2018

If it turns out the young woman in this encounter was a young white woman, I will have far less pity for her with respect to the "lack of agency". Historically speaking, white people have raped and genocided the Indians in their colonial lands for enough centuries now, that to say to me she didn't have the personal agency to say, "No, you're really not hearing me. I don't want to have sex. Let's call it a night" is crap. This, in the land where it is socially… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:33 AM on January 18, 2018

As a woman of color (of the very same race as Aziz, at that!), I'm still deeply confused as to how the historical context really has any bearing on this particular encounter.
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:35 AM on January 18, 2018

Sorry, I think that I wrote that comment in a bit of a knee-jerk way. I think seeing so many white people (like Caitlin Flanagan in that atrocious Atlantic article) invent a racial angle for this story has made me defensive. Aziz Ansari has been a pretty important entertainment figure in my life and having him in the media, as an example of a sexually attractive, normal, assimilated but still not completely whitewashed brown guy has been emotionally important. I am very familiar with the fact… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:44 AM on January 18, 2018

Yes, Taylor Swift was a victim, too, and I do admire the way she handled it. I object to the name Silence Breaker. I am not saying she wasn't a victim. I am not saying she doesn't deserve support. I am saying it's an odd title to give her when she uses silencing as a tactic herself. I happen to think that's relevant in an article called The Silence Breakers.

The article is explicitly about people who have broken silence on sexual assault, not just… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 9:51 AM on December 6, 2017

I don’t think it’s natural at all, but I think the primary motivations of folks in the industry making these decisions are financial, and I think the writer overlooks that in this article.

This is the exact justification they've used for decades to justify not casting people of color in prominent roles in Hollywood movies. No one will watch them! 'Mainstream' people don't want to see minorities in movies! How can you know if you… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 2:01 PM on December 2, 2017

That was me 7 years ago. I'm not inclined to mount a defense for Apu or his creators, in 2017 at least. In general I'm much less willing to give white writers the benefit of the doubt in attempting a deep exploration of an identity they (mostly) only have a surface reading of. Hire Indian writers. Hire Indian actors. Give us the time of day to tell our stories.

I'm Indian-American and was born in the early 90s and Apu may have been the only major… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:17 AM on November 15, 2017

It's probably closer to "require that people who may or not may not be offenders of civil rights harms receive the same rights and/or treatment as people who may or may not be victims of civil rights harms.” That's how we treat other serious crimes, and I think it makes sense to treat these as serious crimes.

Given that when I was in college, the punishment for being found 'responsible' for sexual assault was identical and sometimes more lenient… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 11:13 AM on October 22, 2017

I'm a twentysomething South Asian-American woman and practically everyone I know (especially those on the younger side and really into social media) is so into Rupi Kaur. She came to my city a few days ago and everyone wanted to go see her. I don't really get it? Her poetry strikes me as very greeting card-like. I'm glad she's having such success but I wonder if a lot of is just excitement at representation. I've seen people in my social circles latch onto other not particularly compelling… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 10:17 AM on October 20, 2017

The media in general, has not been great at fostering Asian voices. But social media has democratized self expression - and this an example of a positive outcome. It's no coincidence that some of the most popular food bloggers, for example, are Asian women (in my neck of the woods, Chinese women especially). And as a food writer myself, I completely applaud this. And it has helped, I think, raised awareness and understanding of all sorts cultural issues.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 10:33 AM on October 20, 2017

Wow, that story is just insane. Every time you think you know how it's going to end, there's another twist.

I don't know how to feel about the guy who originally catfished her.
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:27 AM on October 20, 2017

I had this horrible dread that the "happy ending" was going to be that she fell in love with him anyway. But this is not what happened!

Yeah, I had this fear that it was going to be this Beauty and the Beast type story about learning to look beyond your preconceptions and learning to love people you weren't initially attracted to (which is advice that only women seem to get from popular culture).

I love that she ended up with the guy she initially found attractive.
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 7:57 AM on October 20, 2017

I think the one of the theories mentioned in last year's article was that all the people who wanted to pair up or get married mostly did just that and stopped using the apps, so whoever's left are the "last people at the party trying to go home with someone".

That just...doesn't really make sense to me, as a theory? It sort of assumes that every single person who wanted or will ever want a relationship joined dating apps the moment they… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 1:12 PM on October 14, 2017

It always feels like this evolutionary psychology stuff tries to create some sort of primordial, universal, ancient, unchangeable aura around phenomena that is really...not that. At all. Unsurprisingly, so much of it seems to come from Western white men who tend to view anything they do or feel or anything happening around them as totally universal. Mass shootings are not an ancient or common or culturally universal phenomenon. Serial murder is in itself something that's become vastly more… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armadillo1224 at 10:24 AM on October 10, 2017