Zionism 101

Weak Hero is really good but there’s like no responsible adults in that webtoon lmao

Excuse the inconsistent art style, these were drawn at different points in time

did you guys know that the mother fucking UN's humanitarian and legal experts have been saying israel's occupation of palestine territories is and has always been illegal, as it violates the FUCKING GENEVA CONVENTION? did you know it was britain that 'gave' the land that wasn't theirs to give to found the state of israel as a tactic to get more jews to join the british army in their already-active war against the ottoman empire? did you know that just between 2008 and 2022 the idf killed almost SEVEN THOUSAND palestinians, as opposed to the 308 israelis by palestinians in the same time period? did you know that israel itself admits to 'forcefully evacuating' palestinians from their homes over the course of their annexation of the country? did you know the british army helped them? did you know that any palestinian who didn't want to have their house taken from them and given to american immigrants being shipped in to populate britain's pet project was killed on their spot? did you know that back in 2018 palestinians did nothing but MARCH in protest of their occupation and in response, the idf is CONFIRMED to have killed almost 400 of them, including FIFTY FIVE CHILDREN? did you know palestinians are not allowed to build anything on the land they have left? did you know they aren't ALLOWED TO LEAVE?? did you know over HALF of christian evangelicals support israel solely because the bible says israel has to exist in order to bring about the second coming? did you know that in 2021, over 88% of us congress were evangelical christians? did you know israel is confirmed to have knowingly bombed palestinian hospitals and the idf had been caught targeting journalists? did you know israel is committing another war crime at this very moment by dropping white phosphorus on gaza civilians? did you know the israeli press was just confirmed to have completely fabricated an account of palestinian war crime right after their own got caught on film? did you know the defense minister of israel openly called all palestinians 'animals' to justify the deaths of their civilians? did you know holocaust survivors are presently speaking out against the israeli state's ethnic cleansing of arabs?

why, in the united states, is criticizing a settler colony's active attempts at extermination labeled antisemitic because of the religion the settlers happen to practice, but rooting for the complete eradication of a muslim country that was already there and is barely still there not islamophobia?? why is religion being used as a shield to justify genocide?

when a sudden act of politically charged violence occurs, like the hamas attack a few days ago, i ask WHY? i ask WHY until i get as far back as i can. i read accounts written by all sides. i try to find out why this is happening in the first place. half of these facts have come from the israeli government itself. all of them are easily found and easily confirmed by reputable sources. a lot of them are caught on film. all of these facts lead me to know that the state of israel was created by britain in order to gain an advantage in an unrelated war. i know the state of israel has caused unimaginable harm to the country it's slowly eating, and has suffered just a fraction in return. i know religion justifies none of it.

palestinians deserve to live in their own country. palestinians deserve to not be forced to give their homes to americans. palestinians deserve to live, to leave, to stay, to wave their own fucking flag. they do not deserve to have another country plopped on top of them and then have their settlers ask 'don't WE have a right to exist?' as their own right to exist is being extinguished.

fuck the idf, fuck israel, fuck manifest destiny, fuck all settlers who think they deserve someone else's home enough to kick them out of it. literally, in israel's case. indigenous americans, indigenous canadians, chicanos, pacific islanders, filipinos, mestizos, we should all be standing with palestine, because we KNOW how colonial violence goes and what it looks like. solidarity between all colonised peoples. free palestine.

no julia☹☹we still technically don't know what happened to her after wolf keum caught her

Collective amnesia makes us feel as if there are no bi people in history. That is, until we see that bi people have been there all along, they’ve just been mislabeled or left out of the narrative. Bisexuality is the sexual and/or romantic attraction to multiple genders. Nestled within the term bisexual are other labels, including pansexual, omnisexual, and polysexual. Which term people use is almost entirely down to preference, although sometimes the choice is driven by an ahistorical misconception that the bi in bisexual reinforces a gender binary and excludes trans and nonbinary people.

One reason why we might “forget” bisexuals is because those who are attracted to people of multiple genders rarely call themselves bi. Historically, there have been a number of reasons for this, including wanting to avoid discrimination and stigma. There have long been toxic misconceptions of bisexual people as promiscuous and unfaithful, in a confused state of sexual transition or experimentation, lying about their attractions for attention or to attract men (particularly bi women), or simply adhering to some sort of trend (particularly young people).

Being bi could also get you kicked out of your local queer space. Bisexuality introduces nuance, which has always made it easier to discard than accommodate it. In tough times, when queer people were fighting for their lives and for basic legal protections, some gay rights groups strategically rejected bisexual people. For example, in the 1970s there were instances where the Gay Liberation Front, a queer-rights group, treated bisexual people as effectively straight, and thus associated them with regressive politics and edged them out of the organization.

But historians have never let a lack of self-labeling prevent them from trying to find queer people in history. People also shied away from terms like gay or lesbian, and yet we can find many books on their history. Still, it was only when I went back to university for a master’s in queer history that I realized that the absence of bisexuality in most versions of LGBTQ+ history wasn’t because there were no bi people in the past. Rather, that lack of knowledge is the result of an overcompensation for compulsory heterosexuality, which has meant that most people with homosexual desires in the U.S. were forced to live lives that involved heterosexual sex and relationships.

In the search for queer lives in the past, one way that academics have dealt with this is to assume that people who had any kind of same-sex desires or sex must have been gay or lesbian, even if they were also in heterosexual relationships. Partly because of this, the term bisexual is often entirely absent from historians’ writings. By doing so, we are systematically mislabeling people who were attracted to multiple genders, erasing bi history. When we untether bisexual people from their own past, we obscure the ways in which bisexuality is a cornerstone of the human experience.

Here are some important people in bi history you should know:

The bisexuality researchers you need to know

One of the earliest researchers to legitimize the study of bisexual people was Havelock Ellis (1859-1939). Ellis was based in the U.K., and in the 1927 edition of his book Sexual Inversion, he describes many case studies of bisexual people. He includes some negative stereotypes, but also some decidedly positive ones. For example, he wrote that bi women made “great religious and moral leaders.” It is these kinds of positive statements that led to the first edition of his book being ruled “obscene” in an English court because he dared to write about queer lives without condemning them. It took him multiple attempts to get the book published.

Probably the most famous sex researcher of all time was Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956). He was a biologist at Indiana University who introduced nuance into the discussion of sexuality. His Kinsey Scale allows us to categorize sexuality as a number between 0 and 6, from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. In his famous mid-20th century studies, he shocked the world when he found that a huge number of people (he often stated “a quarter to half”) had homosexual and heterosexual desires. He also openly criticized other researchers who assumed that people could only be either gay or straight, and spoke of the “endless intergradations” that captured the reality of people’s sexualities.

Following in Kinsey’s footsteps, Fritz Klein (1932-2006) was a sex researcher and psychiatrist who published the book, The Bisexual Option, in 1978. He was a bisexual man himself, and he started a group for bisexual men to help them feel secure in their own sexuality; that practice grew into affirmative therapy that would help many people better understand their own sexual behaviors and identity. The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid is an expanded version of the Kinsey Scale. Klein also set up the Journal of Bisexuality and the American Institute of Bisexuality, which both continue to further bi research today. These organizations have been fundamental in giving a home to research and writing on bisexuality.

Bi activists who fought for queer rights

There have also been a number of tireless activists who have fought for queer and bisexual rights, including Brenda Howard (1946-2005). Howard is sometimes referred to as the “mother of pride” because after the Stonewall uprising, she played a major role in organizing the first marches of LGBT+ people, which laid the foundations for global Pride marches.

Another activist who worked in some of the same groups as Howard, and continues their work today, is Lani Ka’ahumanu (born in 1943). Ka’ahumanu has been a leader of the bisexual rights movement in the U.S. since 1980. She founded a number of groups that were specifically for bisexual people, which was particularly important given the shaky history between bi people and gay and lesbian communities. Ka’ahumanu created safe political spaces where bi people didn’t need to justify their sexuality or their inclusion. To this effect, in 1983, she co-founded BiPOL, one of the first bisexual political action groups in the country; she later co-coordinated the San Francisco Bay Area Bisexual Network. Ka’ahumanu is also a major reason why the B is included in LGBT, because of her campaigning in the leadup to the 1993 March on Washington.

Other people who are still fighting for bi visibility and protections today include activist Robyn Ochs, who wrote the most widely cited definition of bisexuality; New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who fights for bi visibility including in the Black community; and Kyrsten Sinema, who was the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress in 2012.

The main thing that people get wrong about the history of bisexuality is assuming that there is none. As more people embrace bisexual identities, I expect there will be a new thirst for knowledge, followed by a quenching wave of bisexual stories uncovered from the archives of history.

By uncovering previously untold accounts, and re-telling the stories of people previously too eagerly labeled gay and lesbian, bisexual people will finally be able to remember some of the pieces of their own history.

Dr. Julia Shaw is a criminal psychologist at University College London and part of Queer Politics at Princeton University which works for LGBT+ equality, democracy, and civil rights. She is actively involved in bisexual research and is the founder of the international Bisexual Research Group. Shaw’s latest book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, is set to be released on June 28.

air 🍃

matching zuko, katara & toph:

Radiant Emperor Characters on the Barbie-Oppenheimer Scale

Zhu: Oppenheimer

Ma: Watched Oppenheimer with Zhu, then went to watch Barbie on her own

Xu Da: Barbie

Yuchun: Barbie

Ouyang: Oppenheimer

Esen: Oppenheimer. Brushed hands with Ouyang by accident in the darkened theatre. Thought nothing of it. Ouyang thought about it for the rest of the movie.

Baoxiang: Gathered his entire household for a public viewing of Barbie, watched Oppenheimer alone in private, then gathered everyone to watch Barbie again just to really drive the point home.

General Zhang: Watched Oppenheimer and then Barbie with Madame Zhang.

Madame Zhang: Watched Oppenheimer and Barbie with General Zhang. Then felt insecure and watched Oppenheimer again, alone.

Rice Bucket Zhang: Oppenheimer

Chen Youliang: Oppenheimer

Lady Ki: Barbie

Third Prince: Wanted to watch Barbie, but watched Oppenheimer with his friends instead.

foodjars_

people are calling what happened today in gaza “the flour massacre”

the flour massacre

these people just wanted to get food for their families, something as basic as flour, one of the things that the very core of humanity is built on, and israel used it as a trap to murder them in cold blood

evil is not enough of a word. there is not a word to describe what they are doing to palestine. they are bleeding her out, they are torturing her and crushing her and hoping that nothing is left to remember her by when they are done. how can anyone stand and watch what is being done with indifference? how can you watch this level of human suffering, this crime against life and feel nothing, do nothing

this song

reminds me of them

Chain of Command Chapter 3

Though Yeongdeungpo was by no means a great neighbourhood- with its graffitied walls and copious amounts of street violence- Bambi was unable to get used to the crumbling walls and dirty streets that were distinct features of the area surrounding Hyeongshin.

The school itself seemed a little dingy, with shabby furniture and even shabbier students, so unlike Yeo-il’s pristine hallways and spotless floors. She eyed an overflowing trash can at the side of the corridor as she walked through, before turning away and sighing.

Whatever. She wasn’t a judgemental person. (She was).

She was headed to Hyeongshin’s meeting room, the usual meet up spot for when she came to do business with Forrest Lee. Despite the not-so-stellar quality of the school, she was in a good mood, as she always was when she was about to meet up with Forrest Lee, though it was a little dampened by the news she was about to deliver to him. It had something to do with business decreasing, which would’ve been fine if it was Ganghak, or Yoosun, or anybody with a reputation accumulated after a long time.

But for someone who just lost to another school and had their management changed in the short span that they were an executive (a position that they only gained through snitching on their ex leader), it would not have been the best thing to hear.

The boys from Hyeongshin were already losing part of their commissions, who knew what Donald would do if they continued to mess up? She frowned. Donald’s wrath was something she did not want to be on the receiving end of.

By now, she was nearly off the first floor, halfway up the staircase to the second storey where the meeting room was located, right at the end of the hallway. Though it wasn’t her school, she was well acquainted with Hyeongshin’s layout due to the numerous times she’d visited.

Like Yeo-il, there weren’t many students still lingering in the hallways, most having already left the school to go to karaoke or the pool hall, or perhaps even a cram school. (She snorted a little at the thought.) However, whatever little students were left identified her immediately and soon she had a small crowd of students whipping their heads towards her at breakneck speed, giving themselves a millisecond to gawk before directing their gazes to the ground, arms stiff by their sides.

In other parts of Yeongdeungpo, when people realised of her affiliation to the Union, they tended to stare and whisper amongst themselves.

But in Hyeongshin, when the boys saw her, or any other Union member, they all grew very silent and still, parting before her like Moses and the Red Sea. It seemed like Myles Joo had them trained well.

…

Before he left, of course.

She paid no mind to them, walking through the now cleared path (though there weren’t that many people in the way in the first place) and quickening her pace as she approached the meeting room, reaching for the handle.

Hyeongshin High’s meeting room, though smaller than a regular classroom, was spacious, with a long table on one side and two couches on the other. Though, officially, its purpose was to serve as a room where the student council would gather (and that was what it was used for, at least to the knowledge of the teachers) but the students of the school were all well aware of what it really was; the gathering area for the school head and his friends.

And there the school head was, sitting across the room quietly, frowning and presumably deep in thought.

“Hey,” Bambi tossed her bag onto the couch opposite Forrest Lee, making herself comfortable, before she noticed the unusual silence in the room and the absence of two certain someones. “Where’d they go?”

Forrest seemed to immediately know who she was referring to.

Robin Ha and Sam Lee (or better known as Grape) were Forrest’s second and third in command, though they seemed to be in disagreement about who was who. The two of them followed Forrest everywhere, and it felt strange when they were gone. Grape, who earned his nickname from his curly purple hair, was the shorter and more talkative one of the duo, with a cocky personality and an overt eagerness whenever it was time to get into a fight. Robin Ha, though less talkative than his friend, was by no means less sadistic or willing to punch somebody in the face.

“Hey. Robin went for a smoke, and Grape went to look for him.”

Forrest paused a little before he continued, and the look on his face told Bambi he was only expecting the absolute worst.

“So why’d you come down here today?”

She grimaced a little; it was too bad that she was going to have to validate his fears.

“It involves KHG industries.”

“Hyeongshin’s uniform sales have dipped after your loss to Eunjang. It’s not so bad for Yoosun, since Jimmy Bae’s in charge, but you haven’t been school head for long so…”

She studied his face, and when he stayed silent, she continued.

“Anyways, just get your boys to beat a bunch of guys up, or whatever. The method doesn’t really matter, as long as Donald doesn’t lose his commission.” Bambi pursed her lips; she usually never had trouble relaying instructions, but watching Forrest Lee’s cressfallenness made her feel a little guilty. “It’s better for all of us anyways, for sales to be high.”

Her attempt to lighten the tone didn’t seem to work very well, as Forrest continued to stare down at the table in front of him, his eyes never meeting hers. There was a grim yet pensive look on his face, like he was slowly processing the information.

After a moment, he finally responded.

“Yeah, okay.”

Bambi raised an eyebrow.

She’d been around Forrest long enough to put a name to each of his mannerisms, and the tone of voice he was currently talking with was the one he used when he was down- dejectedness badly disguised as impassiveness.

Usually he was brimming with confidence, making small talk and laughing with her, the large smirk on his face one of someone who knew he had power. But today it was different. She thought back to the events of the last Union assembly, sighing inwardly as she observed his downcast form.

She didn’t have to guess to know why.

“Has Ganghak come over to collect the files yet?” She inquired, neither addressing nor ignoring the elephant in the room, choosing to awkwardly skirt around it instead.

“Robin offered to pass them to Wolf, but I’m not sure if he’s arrived yet. I’ll check later.” Forrest’s grim look seemed to worsen at the thought of Ganghak’s leader.

“Okay.”

To be fair, who could really blame Forrest for being disheartened? Bambi certainly didn’t, but she was never really good at situations like this; she was more used to just saying something snarky and leaving.

She directed her gaze back to Forrest Lee, who was now staring at the wall behind her. His eyes were narrowed, like he was contemplating something, and she sighed again, out loud this time.

“Look, man.”

Forrest finally directed his gaze towards her, seemingly apprehensive about what she was going to say.

“I don’t like this new shift in management either. But if you and Jimmy Bae handled the situation with Eunjang better, this wouldn’t’ve happened. Not to mention what happened with Myles…”

Forrest Lee flinched, and for a split second both of them recalled the events that came before Myles Joo’s excommunication.

Bambi had already been suspicious of Myles after his show of displeasure at being demoted after Jake Ji’s arrival; his obvious anger at Jake and Donald Na, and even his hostility towards her and hesitation to follow orders, which had never been a problem before. She had the observers planted around Yeongdeungpo to report to her if Myles Joo was caught acting out, before Forrest Lee came to her all of a sudden with evidence that Myles was betraying the Union.

She narrowed her eyes.

She was pretty new to the Union too at that point of time, so Forrest’s information had definitely helped her in gaining Donald’s trust. Perhaps it was considered cowardly, or disloyal, to go behind your leader’s back to rat him out, but so what? The Union benefited from disloyalty.

If the boys were just going to sit by as their leader plotted a coup, it could end up leading to the downfall of the Union. And she couldn’t let that happen, could she?

“But I guess I can’t complain, since it was beneficial for me, too.” She finished, and Forrest nodded quietly. He seemed relieved that she hadn’t drawn the topic out any longer. Nobody wanted to think about the punishment that Donald had bestowed upon Myles, and the betrayal that had led to it.

“I’m gonna go now. Don’t forget to make sure the files are handed off to Ganghak. See you.”

“Later.”

She caught a glimpse of his face as the door slammed; his expression had shifted into something steely, like the gears in his head were slowly turning.

The sky outside had turned a dark blue while she was in the meeting room. She made her way down the stairs and out of the school gate. Though the school was empty by now, the streets were busy, cars rushing past her in a stream of colour.

She stood there for a moment, idly watching the traffic before a loud roar came from behind, forcing her to jump to the side as a group of motorbikes sped past her.

(God, she fucking hated motorcycles. Every goddamn Union assembly was full of them, leaking exhaust and polluting the air.)

Bambi glared at the bikers, her eyes catching sight of their red blazers and gray slacks. Could it be?  Her eyes narrowed in on the boy at the front of the group, his messy purple hair slowly becoming less visible as he sped away into the distance, turning a bend and disappearing. She grimaced.

Seems like Ganghak did come over to make a pick up after all.