Yeah, the thing about diversity is it doesn’t mean any particular way of being is superior full stop. Different ways may do better in *some circumstances.*

Being different from the norm can feel superior because your way of being is *underutilized.*

https://twitter.com/AyeshaASiddiqi/status/1709705196312383537

The thing you learn if your brain doesn’t work like the standard, when you dig into how the world isn’t designed for you, and then apply what you’ve learned about yourself to observing other people?

There are no normies.

So, don’t take it from me: take it from someone with a PhD: the way we conceptualize “religion” means that the only religion that exists is Christianity (and *maybe* Islam). (Thanks, @maklelan !) (1/x) This is why I generally use the term “tradition” or “culture” or “practice” when talking about Jewish stuff.

As I keep saying, the religious/secular distinction is a Christian framework, and it is—sometimes explicitly, sometimes unacknowledged—a tool of colonialism.

THIS.

IIRC correctly, there's a correlation between higher IQ and higher rates of depression and other unhappiness--as one of my therapists said, "it's harder for smart people to figure out to be happy."

But what if happiness is a form of intelligence?

https://twitter.com/silentpenitent/status/1708992719987876170

Like, we have a habit, in our fiction, of characterizing happiness as foolishness or oblivious. Simple people are happy because they don't know better.

But identifying what *actually makes us happy* is an emotional intelligence challenge most of us fail.

I’m hardly the first person to say this, but Luke’s gloss on the lost sheep parable that there’s more rejoicing over the repentant sinner than the 99 who didn’t stray has probably done more harm to the world than anything in the NT other than the Great Commission. So toxic. Like imagine being a child abused by your youth pastor and hearing in essence that having abused you is PART of why he’s more spiritually valuable than you are.

So—and this is not about Jamie Foxx, I’m not touching that one other than to point out that you should prioritize listening to Black Jews over anyone else on it—let’s talk about why the figure/story of Judas is antisemitic by itself, and why that’s so invisible to most Christians The reason some Jewish scholars have suggested that the story of Judas is a later, ahistorical, and intentionally antisemitic addition is that it *doesn’t actually make sense* in the story.

The Kokobot thing is SO dark and like, I don't wanna be an AI doomer (there are some things that (human-supervised) AI can do better than humans without AI! we're just not doing much of that for some reason) but this is literally the only thread talking about this I found. (1/x)

https://twitter.com/seanphagen/status/1686073659771797523

And hey, it's from someone who follows me! That makes me feel sort of warm and fuzzy about the sort of people who follow me!

But also, wow, tweets in this thread have maybe one like each, which tells me very few people read it. So READ IT, and I'm going to elaborate on it.

THANK YOU

comparing one's military to the Spartans is an *incredible* self-own

foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/22/spa… "Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed."

*stares at 300*

So.

One of the main drivers of antisemitism has always been that people don’t like the message that what the divine wants is primarily ethical behavior.

Christianity dealt with that by dividing up the divine.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1670813630475161600

They personify the loving and forgiving aspects of the divine as Jesus, and usually reserve the demanding and angry—or inexplicable—ones for God the Father.

And look: I get the attraction of that approach. It’s a lot neater and easier.

I think another component of this is that while different communities across the centuries have had different levels of strictness, there's a prioritization of life and wellbeing over that strictness that sometimes isn't clear to outsiders (1/x)

https://twitter.com/MODOX613/status/1609938358775447553

Like, when people from authoritarian Christian backgrounds actually bother to learn about the Jewish approach to the text, and to the relationship between tradition and the individual, a lot of them are like whoa that's way more humane than I imagined.

re: the idea that European Christians “appropriated” their own pre-Christian traditions by continuing to practice them after becoming Christian:

If Bob has a bike, and changes his name to Tim, Tim did not steal Bob’s bike Most supposed pre-Christian European traditions only survive because the same people that practiced them before becoming Christian continued to practice them after becoming Christian.

That’s not appropriation, and calling it appropriation trivializes the concept.

Adults who don’t have children of their own were VERY important in my life when I was a kid (and my great-aunt was a second mother to my mom). It takes more than two parents to raise a kid well.

https://twitter.com/wagatwe/status/1651963369061068800

More importantly, this is such a deeply dehumanizing way to view both children and adults.

Children don’t exist to make you happy and be your insurance policy against loneliness and having to pay for care in old age.

https://twitter.com/SihleStan231/status/1651145588581232640

I recently overheard someone say, "Well, he prides himself on being brutally honest."

People who pride themselves on brutal honesty are 100% there for the brutality half of that equation, not the honesty.

And you can tell because they never apply it to themselves. They'll tell you, "see, the honest truth is, people find you annoying and arrogant."

They'll never tell you, "the reason I'm annoyed with you so often is because I'm envious of your success and your confidence is like salt in that wound."

what is the standard of beauty for male actors?

everyone: uhhhh maybe thin? or very muscley? bearded! wait, no, clean-shaven! androgynous! no, hypermasculine! uhhhhh

what is the standard of beauty for cat actors?

everyone: ORANGE sorry, I don't make the rules

cat movie stars are usually orange

Friend, looking at my outline: this is just a bunch of paragraph-long descriptions of conversations with “they go somewhere else” or “action happens” between them

Me: yes

Them: you seem annoyed that characters ever have to do anything besides talk to each other

Me: yes YES ACTUALLY BECAUSE WHAT IS LIFE BESIDES A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS THAT KEEP GETTING INTERRUPTED

Seriously.

The “we HAVE to celebrate Christmas in public school classrooms!” crowd is always like “well, we can celebrate non-Christian holidays too, that’s how children learn about other cultures!”

And no, you can learn about a religious practice without performing it. (1/x)

https://twitter.com/JustSayXtian/status/1598374493990572036

The real reason they lose their shit at the idea that maybe classrooms shouldn’t be full of Christmas decorations and maybe kids should learn about religious holidays as a subject they study rather than a norm they’re forced to participate in…

Unfriendly reminder to neopagans that Lilith is a figure from Jewish myth/folklore

While I personally don’t have issues with non-Jews engaging with her

Claiming she’s NOT Jewish bc you don’t want to grapple with what it means to use a figure from a closed tradition is gross af Yeah, L-L-T indicates a demon in some other Near Eastern languages.

And that’s literally all we know about it.

There are attempts to connect bits of Gilgamesh and inscriptions with Lilith, but they’re highly tenuous and disputed

Reviving my Tumblr has taken me back to 2016 when I had to think about extraplanar sex a lot for my actual job.

E.g. this tumblr post which I shall reproduce here on twitter (you don't NEED to go read it because I'm about to provide it in threadform):

tumblr.com/jessicalprice/… In Pathfinder, given that human + whatever is pretty much the standard for crossblooded species like half-elves or tieflings, humans will apparently screw anything. They’re like chihuahuas: if it moves, try humping it.

Amazing to argue that basic courtesies, like cats bumping noses, are somehow badwrongfake.

We are social animals. Rituals have a purpose.

https://twitter.com/punished_cait/status/1591839971165753351

Like, if you don’t like it, that’s fine.

But that doesn’t mean it’s bad or other people shouldn’t do it.

Watching people seize on this and yell “See?! Jews are disproportionately wealthy! Therefore they control the world!” is convincing me that either they’re being WILDLY disingenuous or they don’t understand how percentages work.

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1589796537789747201

This is like watching someone declare that because Jews are 2% of the US population and a company of 100 people has 3 Jewish employees, Jews control the company.

As I was saying about Twitter, it makes us all meaner, but the fact that everything you say is happening in front of potentially *everyone* means that bad shit does get challenged here more than it does in the walled gardens of FB groups and Discords and Mastodon servers.

https://twitter.com/AnMuiren/status/1590463108874907649

Like you get waaaaay more Nazis yelling at you here, but it feels like you get way less polite, unchallenged misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc.

Twitter tends to make people either shut up or say the quiet part out loud.

This week's parsha is Vayera, the parsha in which the Jewish story really gets started, and I'm stuck again on the eden-edna link.

But this year I'm thinking about teenagers and parents. The connection I'm talking about is this one (part of a longer thread):

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1175809348783759360