Links - 20th July 2024 (2 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Ok real talk though. Does the lady on the right knows that if she is in Palestine itself she would be beaten and raped for wearing the keffiyeh in such a manner? Why does she still support them? : r/SingaporeRaw - "The difference is the Israelis never fucking ATTACKED Palestinians first.  Guess who started the 1921 Jaffa Riots?  Guess who started the 1948 war?  Guess who started the Suez Canal blockade leading to the Six Day War?  Guess who started the Yom Kippur War?  Guess who started the Hamas War?  All questions have the same answer pointing to the same party. Here's the funny thing you notice?  Israel has NEVER EVER STARTED any of the wars AT ALL throughout their 75-year history.  Every single fucking pro-Palestinian supporter I speak to seems absolutely clueless on this very fact. The IDF is actually indeed aptly named. Israel has only ever retaliated, not started the bang bang shit"

Ok real talk though. Does the lady on the right knows that if she is in Palestine itself she would be beaten and raped for wearing the keffiyeh in such a manner? Why does she still support them? : r/SingaporeRaw - "Actually no need to look so far to Palestine. Just try to dress like that while in the more backwards states of Malaysia and Indonesia like Kelantan and Acheh, and she will also receive the same kind of treatment. Imagine living in a secular society where you can freely dress like that with no harassment, while protesting for a backwards society that will harm you as soon as they see you like this."

Ok real talk though. Does the lady on the right knows that if she is in Palestine itself she would be beaten and raped for wearing the keffiyeh in such a manner? Why does she still support them? : r/SingaporeRaw - "Your justification can likewise be used to defend the rise of the Nazis.  Just because they suffered unfairly from WW1, doesn't justify their actions in WW2. This is why pro- people like you cant think logically."
"i am all against israel bombing palestine, but some extreme pro palestine exactly have this train of thought. They selectively pick and omit historical events to justify their vengeance or grievances.  Maybe we should all go back to the historical Roman empire to start nitpicking and account for all the war crimes they did during their hey days and demand italy to pay for all reparations. Yeah that is how ridiculous it sounds."
"The funny thing is these idiots dont even know the history they supposedly claim they know. All these, "Oh it started 75 years ago not on Oct 7th.." are braindead ignorant.  The Palestinians and Arabs were the ones to invade Israel first in 1948. They literally started the first bloodshed and brought all this to themselves  Whenever I tell these idiots on social media, they'd rather just straight up deny than look into it themselves."

Thread by @RichardHanania on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App -"The time Israel sent a commando team into downtown Beirut that assassinated three high-ranking members of the PLO and got out. The team was led by Ehud Barak.  Westerners hate Israel because it fills them with a sense of inferiority by showing that heroism is still possible. Stop and read about the Entebbe Raid, after a plane was hijacked and taken to Uganda. The Israelis secretly flew a team from Suez to Uganda, slaughtered the Palestinian terrorists, their German allies, and Idi Amin’s soldiers, bringing almost all of the hostages home alive. What were the Palestinians doing during this time? They had their own version of heroism. They were blowing up synagogues, killing random Jews all over the world, massacring flight crews, and getting the Gulf Arabs to pay them ransom money.
See Benny Morris, Righteous Victims."

Montreal Pride & Palestinian Protest? : r/montreal - "Do you understand that your backing the creation of ANOTHER STATE THAT WILL MURDER EVERY GAY PERSON IN ITS TERRITORY?  You know this right? You understand that Hamas, The PA, and PLO murder gays right? It's official policy.  I understand you want to back the side that seem like the underdogs. The only reason Palestinians are underdogs is because they got themselves In a shit spot after failing to commit genocide on the Jews.... Twice..."
Left wingers like to claim that even though the Palestinians persecute and murder queers, what Israel is doing is worse to queers because it's supposedly murdering queer Palestinians as part of their "genocide". But they still support the formation of a Palestinian state which will do what OP points out. Presumably the best way to protect queers would be a one state solution

Montreal Pride & Palestinian Protest? : r/montreal - "Fucking hell.  Yes the Israeli state pays me to argue with you on Reddit. Been making me rich.....  Has Israel been found guilty of Genocide at the ICC?  No they have not been.  Have the Palestinian/Arab nationalist openly stated that they wish to eradicate the Jews? Yes, yes they have.  So you have one group that has been making real attempts at peace deals, and cooperation over the past 75 years, and the other has done nothing but get in the way of peace, launch terror attacks, and call for the extermination of an entire people for the past 75 years.  The people fighting for the preservation of their state, or the people fighting for the extermination of an entire people based on religious grounds?  Who are the genocidal ones?...  There have been no "Charges" to be clear. The ICC said that they are awaiting evidence from SA. They also acknowledged that the Palestinians people are in the type of situation where a genocide could happen (War).  That's all that has happened. Furthermore I would add that the government of South Africa is currently run by crazy people, not sure how informed you are of the current situation over there.  Enough is enough though. You're not moral. You're just doing the thing that makes you believe that other people will think you're moral. You clearly have no fucking clue what is happening, and what this is about.  Muslims are waging a holy war against Jews. If you back Islam's quest to dominate the world (This is Codified doctrine in Islam btw) and destroy the jews, you will back Palestine. If you think that's a fucking insane goal, you will not...  Ahh yes, the Nakba. The "Catastrophe". Do you know why, and how those people were displaced?  Did it maybe have something to do with 5 armies, united under the cause of Pan-Arab Nationalism invading a sovereign state?  Did it maybe have something to do with the leaders of those 5 nations telling Arab Muslims to leave their homes so they wouldn't be caught in the cross-fire, while they tried to throw the Jews into the sea?  None of these are good things by the way. Displaced peoples, death, destruction, political violence, ethnic violence, religious violence. I don't like any of these things you know.  But I also cannot, get behind the Free Palestine movement simply because of what a "Free Palestine" would look like. Let me ask a few questions to see if we can find common ground. You seem to believe I harbor some sort of racial hatred...
How do you feel about Authoritarianism?
How do you feel about Theocratic dictatorship?
Do you think Homosexuals should be put to death?
Do you think Women should be subject to the will of their husbands and Male relatives?
Do you believe that it is your duty to spread Islam to the entire world?
Do you think Jews and Christians need to convert to Islam, pay a "You get to live" tax, or die?
Do you think Atheists should be put to death?
If your answer is "FUCK NO" or simply no, to all of these things. Then you don't actually want a "Free" Palestine. This is what a "Free" Palestine would look like. Their government, and unfortunately, because of the brainwashing of their youth for the past 75 years. Many of the people of Palestine would say yes, to all of these things.  Do you see why allowing the creation of a state that believes in these things is not a good idea?  Can we agree on this basic premise at least?"

Montreal Pride & Palestinian Protest? : r/montreal - "Israel wants to kill every Palestinian. Even the gay ones."
"A ridiculous statement that is easily debunked through any look at reality. I'll focus on the gay part though... What a weird way of killing every Palestinian (even the gay ones). First they rescued him from Palestine since he was in danger of being killed for being gay... and then he was captured by Palestinians, taken back to Hebron, and beheaded. What a roundabout way for Israel to kill him!... And yet they continue to grant asylum to queer Palestinians in danger...
300,000 Palestinians stayed in Israel after the war of 1948 and were granted citizenship, and now they make up 20% of Israel's population today. Countries that continue to deny citizenship to Palestinians within their borders include Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt.  You have some valid criticisms of Israel in your response, but some others are really untethered from reality. Israel clearly doesn't want to kill every Palestinian. The death toll of every single war/conflict/battle between any Jew and a Palestinian since 1948 ( less than 100K) PALES in comparison to nearby wars happening right now, like Syria (>500K) and Yemen (>300,000). How does that say "total annihilation?" Why wouldn't they just kill in those numbers happening right next door? It reads a lot more like an ongoing conflict for territory with a growing number of tragic deaths. Still, Israel has met with Palestinian leaders to work for peace with an independent Palestine (how, if they want to kill every single Palestinian, like you said). Any time spent there, and you'd see many many Israelis who absolutely want to live next to an independent Palestinian state."
"It's so pointless sometimes.  How do you even argue with people who absolutely refuse to do the basic research into these things.  We're just arguing against raw, misplaced emotional outrage. From people who very clearly don't know what the fuck they are talking about.  There's plenty of criticism that can placed at Israel's feet in their handling of certain events. Ultimately though Israel's government has made real attempts at negotiation. Nobody on the "Palestinian" side has done so."

Montreal Pride & Palestinian Protest? : r/montreal - "Hamas doesn't throw people off of roofs. That's ISIS you're thinking of"
Palestinian Islamic Scholar: Throw Gays Off Roofs, Stone Them - "In a Friday sermon that was posted to the Al-Aqsa Call YouTube channel on June 26, 2022, Palestinian Islamic scholar Sheikh Yousef Abu Islam criticized Gay Pride Month and said that Allah has commanded that homosexuals should be thrown head first off the highest rooftops and then stoned. Abu Islam added that if Muslims do not stand up against the "abomination" of homosexuality, Allah will send the Angel Gabriel to "punish" them like he did Sodom."
Gaza foes tossed from buildings | The Seattle Times - "Rival Palestinian forces clashed in Gaza on Sunday, killing two militants by throwing them out of high-rise buildings"

Montreal Pride & Palestinian Protest? : r/montreal - "That being said, I agree with being against shifting attention if the intent is simply to dismiss the issue...  My intent is not to dismiss the issue. I have always been against sending Israel billions in "military aid."  But why shouldn't we talk about things that matter? Why shouldn't our conversations highlight the imbalance of attention paid to one conflict when a quarter of all people live in conflict-affected areas? That's 2 billion people living in who-knows what kind of reprehensible conditions.  Why aren't we talking about how over 400,000 women experience "gang rapes, genital mutilation, and sexual violence committed by armed groups, gangs, and government and police forces" in the Congo each year?  We might not support it, but couldn't the general public be doing more by rallying behind transparent and accountable NGOs? Couldn't we be protesting for policy changes that more proactively address corruption, support peacekeeping, and legally enforce companies to practice 'ethical consumerism' rather than relying on the general people?  Is it desensitization to African crises? Is it that they don't have the cute watermelon branding and the tiktok videos? Is it lack of a shared identity? Or an easily delineated and historic common enemy?  My frustration is that we put disproportionate attention on the hot item of the moment (Ukraine while completely ignoring that Indigenous kids in Australia are still going blind from an infectious disease that has long since been eradicated in much less wealthy countries.  Why are we not putting more pressure on Australia?  With Uyghers and Yemeni being under conditions of genocide for decades, why are we not protesting and putting more pressure on their governments?   Both of whom we are deeply invested in and the general public could do more.   The fact is, most people don't give a shit as much as they want to pretend by buying watermelon shirts from China, resharing images (the heartbreakingly real and the obviously fake), and putting emojis on Instagram.   Yes, we don't praise Saudi Arabia, but we don't protest for the divestment of their billions of dollars from our country.  I've been following various conflicts and their aftermath for over 20 years... And I just don't see this kind of thing helping.   Mind you, I say all this as someone who, truthfully and shamefully, is embittered and hasn't seen either protests or slacktivism do much good.  I wish it did.  But the global economy is too deeply militarized. And international banks profit too much on lending billions to these countries in the aftermath. While that money gets handed right back out to multinational companies to rebuild critical infrastructure and key sectors, while others buy up the resources being sold off... It's all very intertwined.   If resignations and actions from people like Volker Turk in 2023 and Dennis Halliday, 25 years before him, can't truly made a dent in the indirect casualties of war... I'm not convinced of the power of the general public.   Particularly when our attentions and sympathies are so temporary and changeable."

Turkish Archives on X - "Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry & Turkish-American scientist Prof. Aziz Sancar calls for the recognition of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Turkish Cypriots exist. They’re sick & tired of being discriminated & heritage, identity & rights denied."
Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Here's an actual ethno-state that very few in the West care about or condemn. Turkey ethnically cleansed the entire northern half of a European Union member state and set up their own settler colonial regime there. Where are the protests?"
Terrorism supporters don't even get to claim that Turkey isn't a Western ally or supported by the West, since it's in NATO

Meme - Drew Pavlou @DrewPavlou: "A reminder that Turkey ethnically cleansed Greek communities with thousands of years of history and no university lefties care"
Ares @Archaexplorer: "All towns founded by Greeks in todays Turkey"

Brianna Wu on X - "Free Palestine is not a peace movement. It is an anti-Jew pro-war movement. Just look at the slogans.    “Globalize the Intifada” means people all around the world must support efforts to destroy Israel, including violence.   “By any means necessary” means if Israeli civilians are killed, that is fine.   “Resistance until return” means the violence will continue until Palestinians control Israel. There is no scenario of that happening where 7 million Jews in Israel are not slaughtered and ethnicly cleansed.   I want peace. That is why I oppose the Free Palestine movement. If you don’t believe in a two state solution, you believe in endless war."
Alternatively, there could be a one state solution with only Israel

"Meme - "WHEN ELON COLONIZES MARS WE MUST REMEMBER THE PALESTINIANS WERE THERE FIRST"

Meme - Hamas Atrocities @HamasAtrocities: "The whole Gazan "concentration camp / open air prison" narrative was a hoax  Here's a mega supermarket in Nuseirat before the war. I can guarantee you that it looked better than 99% of Tel Aviv supermarkets.  Can you believe that Nuseirat is defined as a "refugee camp"?"

An Israeli mother on X - " What are the ultimate goals of the "Palestinian liberation movements?  It's not about Israel.  In November 23, a month after the #October7massacre,  Mashni, the head of Australia's pro-Palestine movement, met with Foreign Minister Penny Wong as well as Labor MP Ged Kearney, and found there open ears apparently.  Mashni also opposed the Australian government’s listing of Hamas as a terrorist group .  But listen:  On his radio show in July last year, Mashni said: “The power structures  that exist in the world all focus upon Zionism.  “Israel is the domino. Israel falls over, not just the Middle East – South America, the Africans, the world is a far better place once we destroy Western imperialist control of the world.”  “The liberation of Earth starts with the first domino, and that’s the overcoming and the decolonisation of Palestine and the ending of Zionism.”"

Meme - Isaac Choua @ChouaIsaac: "This is what one may call Tokenization.  There are around 100,000 Jews in Australia.  The "Jewish Council of Australia" sounds like a significant name, but in reality, it's a small group with about 670 supporters (over 100 listed as anonymous - link in the thread), which is just 0.67% of the total Jewish population in Australia.  This organization was formed after the start of the war in opposition to official local Australian Jewish organizations, such as the @ECAJewry , an affiliate of the @WorldJewishCong , which represents 104 Jewish communities globally.  Each organization within the World Jewish Congress represents national communities and votes on larger policies regarding where the Jewish world stands on pressing issues."
Bassem Youssef: "The number one threat to Jewish people in the world is Zionism."
Adam Houda: "The Jewish Council of Australia
It cannot be ignored that the State of Israel and its military have misappropriated the Star of David in grotesque ways which makes it difficult for people to distinguish between the Israeli State and Jewish symbols. Israel's soldiers have been documented emblazoning the Star of David on Palestinian prisoners, graffitiing it on the walls of houses they loot in Gaza, and using tanks to sear it into the rubble of what used to be recreation parks for families, These actions place all Jewish people at risk by tarnishing us with these egregious human rights abuses. It is important for all of us who are advocating for Palestinian freedom, justice and liberation to continue to distinguish between the State of Israel and Jewish people as a whole."

Khaled Hassan on X - "I want to share something deeply personal today. When I tell you that I was taught to hate Jews, like the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the Muslim world, I mean every word. My father died in 2016. I didn't attend his funeral or burial in Cairo. I felt awful, so I asked my family for some belongings to remind me of him. I was given quite a few things, including a book that bought us in 2000 and often read for me and my brother.  The book is called "stories of animals in the Quran". The publisher is based in downtown Cairo and the book can be found anywhere.  Today, I will share some of the quotes from this book (cover page attached in this post and other photos in first comment).
- The Golden Calf: the house of Israel are idol worshippers who are not true to faith.
- Elephant: there was once a man who was king in Yemen, his name was "Zu Nawas", he was a tyrant. Two Jewish men lured him to embrace Judaism and to leave Christianity and force Judaism on the people, but the people didn't abandon Christianity. So, they [the men] suggested that he dig a deep pit and fill it with fire and offer the people an ultimatum, embrace Judaism or be thrown in the fire.
- Donkey: better than Jews who were burdened with the Torah and rather than keep it, they forged it and altered it.
- Apes: the ape Saturday people, Allah never transfigured a nation to the most degenerate animal as he did to the house of Israel. Allah obliged them to Friday, they deviated from it and accepted Saturday.
I was 10 in 2000, my brother was 7. This is what we were told about Jews. This is what kids are taught in Muslim countries.
But, of course, go ahead. Tell yourself that Israel is to blame. Scream, "free Palestine", and fall for the lie that the antisemitism we see on our streets has nothing to do with MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM and a campaign of GLOBAL JIHAD waged by millions of Muslims across the world. Go on, fall for the lies. Be a useful idiot. But, don't you ever dare gaslight me and tell me that what I was taught and experienced, and that the evidence I show you TODAY, is not true!!!
I will speak out against Muslim antisemitism until the last day of my life. I have a favour to ask: please share this with all the loud Muslim activists who argue there's no antisemitism within Muslim communities, especially Mehdi Hasan who blocked me, and the loud broadcasters involved in this conflict, such as Piers Morgan!"
Zionism is Racism

Meme - Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "“It didn’t start on October 7” yes unfortunately the massacres have been taking place for almost a century now"
"1929 Hebron massacre. Part of the 1929 Palestine riots"
Terrorism supporters like to claim that you need to go back to 1948, but even if you do that, history shows how dishonest they are, since the "Nakba" was a failed attempt to massacre all the Jews, and that's a "tragedy"

Visegrád 24 on X - "Bobby Kennedy also known as RFK was murdered in June 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Jordanian-Palestinian.  Sirhan opened fire on him with a .22-calibre revolver, hitting Kennedy three times, and wounding five other people.  In 1989, Sirhan told British journalist David Frost: "My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 fighter jets to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.""
💙🇮🇱Am Yisrael Chai! on X - "Just goes to show you how anti American these pro Palestinians in the US really are. And yeah, this probably has something to do with Trump’s Israel stance too. 💙🇮🇱💙🇮🇱"

Meme - 𝗡𝗶𝗼𝗵 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗴 ♛ ✡︎ @NiohBerg: "1934, Algeria.  Jewish girls had their breasts cut off, families burned to death inside their houses in a massacre by Arab muslims.  There was no Israel, IDF or Mossad. It took place over 1000 miles away from "Palestine".  But sure, "muslims and Jews lived in peace"."
"Girls Mutilated, Many Burned, Report Shows
List of Dead and Injured Runs Into Hundreds, Correspondent Says (Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
CONSTANTINE, Algeria, Aug. 7.- A scene of utter desolation an\d horror, of Jewish girls with their breasts cut off, of little chil- dren with numerous knife wounds and of whole families locked in their homes and burned to death, was described by a Jewish Tele- graphic Agency correspondent, who succeeded in reaching this city today. "It will take days before the world will obtain a true picture of all the atrocities committed by the Arabs during the pogrom on 'I the Jewish quarter," the correspondent wired. "The only comparison I can think of is the Palestine riots of 1929. I found Jewish girls with their breasts cut off, greybearded Jews stabbed to death, little Jewish children dead of numerous .I knife wounds and whole families locked in their homes and burned to death by the rioters."
Clearly, the existence of the State of Israel explains all anti-Semitism around today

Meme - Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 @MarinaMedvin: "Palestinian activist:  “Burning the American flag… it’s a beautiful sight, but it’s not enough.”
“We need to burn the US government… down to the f*cking ground!”
“Thank you and free Palestine!”"
"Just kidding... D3@th to the us emprie"
Left wing beliefs often come in a package

Meme - Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "“The war didn’t start on October 7, Palestine has been occupied for 76 years.”   A Palestinian state could have celebrated its 76th year of existence this year had the Palestinian national leadership accepted the original UN Partition Plan.   Israel accepted the UN Partition Plan; the Palestinian national leadership rejected it and five surrounding Arab nations invaded Israel the second the British Mandate ended in an effort to strangle the Jewish state in its crib. Arab military leaders who had collaborated with Hitler in World War II openly gloated that they would drive the Jews into the sea in another Holocaust.  The root cause of the conflict is the fundamental refusal to recognise Jewish national self-determination alongside Palestinian national self-determination, a refusal to accept that Jews have a real connection to the land and have a right to live there. If the Palestinian political leadership and people can simply accept the existence of Israel alongside a Palestinian state, I truly believe that peace will come.   This requires the renunciation of violence and terrorism and the dismantling of paramilitary organisations like Hamas. The renunciation of maximalist, eliminationist dreams of total ethnic cleansing on both sides. Both the Kahanists and the Hamasniks must step back from the brink. Peaceful co-existence and a two state solution. The world will be so much better for it"
"Palestine Plan of Partition with Economic Union. Proposed by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question"

Meme - Cheryl E 🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱🎗️ @CherylWroteIt: "There’s one thing that has NOT been tried yet that could resolve the issue in the Middle East that’s been raging for a hundred years:
🚨The original total land set to be shared between the Jews and the Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine included all of Gaza, Israel, Samaria, Judea and Jordan.
🚨The Arabs lobbied and pushed and pressured and were given the entire land that is now Jordan. That is 80% of the land that was due to be shared between the Jews and the Arabs.
🚨So now what should happen is that ALL of Gaza, Israel, Samaria and Judea should be given exclusively to the Jewish State of Israel. No ifs. No buts. No maybes. That is NOT ethnic cleansing. That is the true fair solution that was always intended and should have been implemented in the 1929’s when Trans-Jordan was given to the Arabs exclusively.
🚨Denying this solution is denying facts, history and truth.
It doesn’t matter how one wants to spin things, the very fact that the Arabs were already given exclusive rights to the entire land of Trans-Jordan which makes up 80% of the total land meant to be shared means that the only fair solution to resolve the conflict is for all the Palestinian Arabs to move to Jordan which is legally their rightful home. Gaza, Samaria and Judea belong to Israel and should be completely annexed and all Arabs relocated to Jordan where they can finally stop being refugees, can stop moaning about fake Nakbas and Fake genocide and fake famine, and stop starting wars against the Jewish people.   If the world truly wants peace and stability, that is the only solution. The two state solution already exists.   Now it’s time the world tells the United Nations and the Arabs on our land (excluding the Israeli Arabs who are Israeli) to FVCK OFF!!!"
"LEBANON (French Mandate). IRAQ (British Mandate). SYRIA (French Mandate). MANDATE for PALESTINE (British Mandate)  120,466 Sq. Km
Mandate for Palestine, April 24 1920. Showing the boundaries of the land in which the Jewish National Home was to be reconstituted."

"My Precious": Tolkien's Fetishized Ring

This is one of the most impressive pieces of bullshit I've ever read. She quotes BOTH Freud AND Marx, so you know it's going to be especially nonsensical:

"One of the most dramatic scenes in the first Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, is the Council at Rivendell at which elf and dwarf nearly come to blows, while in a golden glow worthy of a Glassner jewelry advertisement, the Ring shines serenely on, untouched and untouchable. The focus shifts so that the combatants fade to soft-focus, and the ring in close-up fills the whole screen. We are all drawn to the Ring: readers, filmmakers, and a number of contributors to this volume. Although the Ring is a feature borrowed from ancient Germanic and Nordic myth, I shall argue that we are all in thrall to the Ring because of its contemporary relevance to the way we perceive, lust after, and use the "rings" or commodities of our own society. For me Tolkien's text is not an escapist fantasy but a challenging work that "reads" us as fetishists and offers us an alternative model for our relations with the world of things by means of sacrifice and gift.

Stockings, Rings, and Erotic Control

To explain what I mean by fetishism let us return to that cinematic frame of the chastely glowing ring. Like any close-up shot the effect is to separate the object from its context, so that it seems to exist alone. In that sense, every photographic or filmic close-up operates fetishistically in the sense emploved by the psychologist Sigmund Freud. For the fetishist the stocking, the glove, the fur or the individual body part becomes the focus of sexual desire in so far as it is fixed and separated off from any relation with the whole person or body. In his 1927 essay, "Fetishism," Freud attributes this desire for fixity to a refusal to fully accept that one's mother is not all-powerful-or, in Freudian terms, does not have the phallus. In pursuing and possessing an object that stands for his mother, the fetishist is able to own and control this maternal sexual power he both fears and loves. For a deep terror of the female genitals underlies such behavior and the fetish provides a safe substitute for the risky self-giving of the sexual act.

It is interesting that the One Ring of Power, which I want to suggest is viewed fetishistically, is twice gained as a result of literal separation from the owner's body, once by Isildur hacking off Sauron's finger, and again by Gollum biting off Frodo's finger. Separation marks the Ring from its creation, since it is forged by Sauron in secret, and is deliberately hidden from the makers of the other nineteen Rings of Power. Even these beneficent Rings, however, have something fetishistic about them because they were made in order to prevent the loss and decay of beautiful things. In aiming to create preventatives against loss, the elves share the fetishist's desire to fix the object of sexual arousal, so that it is untouched by age, decay, or mortality. We are told explicitly in Tolkien's myth collection, The Silmarillion, that the Noldor elves won't give up living in Middle-earth and yet they want also to have the bliss of those across the Sea in the Blessed Realm (S, p. 287).

There is, of course, an element of fetishism in much sexual behavior, but usually the stocking merely articulates a boundary of difference and is a means to arousal because it creates a distinction between flesh and clothing that draws attention to the naked leg above the stocking-top. For the lover, the stocking recapitulates the pursuit and uncovering of the desired body; for the fetishist, possession of the stocking is an end in itself. In the same manner we see the Ring's owners becoming transfixed by the Ring, rather than using it as a means to their desires. Chillingly, each owner, from the great Isildur to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, comes to find it "Precious," and impossible to give up. They become as Smaug the dragon, hoarding treasure for its own sake and meeting threat of its removal with violence. Once Gollum becomes the Ring's possessor he finds himself drawn to underground places, and it is deep in the Misty Mountains that he loses it to Bilbo.

Critics have often noticed the lack of sexual activity in The Lord of the Rings. This, I believe, can be explained through the corrosive power of the Ring, which takes the focus away from the romantic quest and subsumes to itself the power of the erotic. Only with the destruction of the Ring can the characters truly love, marry and have children. And those who have borne the Ring for any length of time do not marry at all. While not wishing to send readers off on a genital-spotting expedition through Middle-earth, it is noticeable that Tolkien offers a most convincing Freudian vagina dentata (teethed vagina) in the ancient and disgustingly gustatory spider Shelob. She represents an ancient maternal power that swallows up masculine identity and autonomy. According to Freud, her castrating hold is pre- cisely what the sexual fetishist fears, and seeks to control by his possession of the fetishized object. She must be faced up to and outwitted before the Ring can be restored to the true maternal source of the fiery "Cracks of Doom." Appropriately, it is the equally ancient and yet empowering woman, Galadriel, who earlier renounced the temptation to be the all-powerful female principle, a "She-who-must-be-obeyed," who provides the light by which Shelob may be overcome. If men in the novel must give up fetishism, women must stand down from their frozen idealization, as Arwen does when she renounces immortality to marry Aragorn.

Paradoxically, although the fetish is intended as a means of erotic control-and a means of warding off the castrating female-its importance as the only possible means to erotic pleasure and the self-identity of the fetishist renders him in its thrall as if it were a god, in the manner of the totemic religious practice from which Freud took his original concept. This process is most graphically exemplified in the transmutation of the river-hobbit Sméagol into the craven Gollum. Possession of the Ring by murder of his friend leads to his self-division and alienation, so that he now speaks of himself in the third person, in babytalk- "Don't hurt us! Don't let them hurt us, precious!"- while the Ring is now personified and looked to as a source of aid and protection. Like early Native American totemists, Gollum has figuratively placed his soul inside the fetish for safe-keeping. Without the Ring, therefore, he is literally torn in two, and, as he replies to Faramir, "no name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty" (TT, p. 335).

In his enthrallment Gollum gives the reader insight into the secret of the mighty Sauron himself. When he forged the Ring, Sauron actually placed some of his power inside, to his great cost when it was lost. Now having lost his physical body he lives a wraithlike existence, akin to that of his slaves, the Nazgûl, with his power transferred to the Ring. Indeed, he is now present mainly as an agent of unceasing surveillance, as a giant and lidless eye, which Frodo glimpses in Galadriel's mirror: "the Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing" (FR, p. 409). Like Gollum, Sauron is empty and there is no purpose in his will for power apart from the desire for the Ring itself. Rather, Sauron is completely nihilistic and seeks to reduce Middle-earth to ashes, to render everything as null as himself.

Rings and Things

It is central to Tolkien's conception that it is not just the depraved who fetishize the Ring but anyone who has to do with it, and even those who, like Boromir, merely see it occasionally. One can infer from this that Middle-earth is already a fallen world, enmeshed in evil. That this evil makes its effect through fetishism, however, marks the onset of a relatively recent form of alienation, particular to a modern capitalist economy. Fifty years before Freud's essay on fetishism the term was employed as a central concept in German philosopher Karl Marx's great critique of industrial capitalist economy. His groundbreaking book Capital describes the disconnected and phantasmal nature of our relations with the things we produce. As Marx observes, once a piece of wood is made into a table, it is still just a table, but once in the market "as soon as it steps forth as a commodity it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas." Any television advertisement showing a nubile woman caressing a car's bodywork provides evidence of our tendency to treat commodities as if they had a life of their own.

Marx went on to argue that in the modern market economy we lose relations between makers and consumers, and are estranged even from the objects of our own labor. Relationships between things are substituted for those between people, and these commodities acquire an idolatrous character as fetishes: they are totally of our own creation but we fail to recognize this. In our own lives this can take the form of a lifestyle constructed by means of designer labels, and of the near impossibility of finding out information about the producers of our clothes and our food.

I am not trying to suggest that The Lord of the Rings is a Marxist text and that Tolkien hoped for the Peoples' Republic of the Shire, but certainly by means of the Ring the novel provides a thoroughgoing critique of our dragonish tendencies to hoard- ing, idolatry, and alienation, the radicalism of which is revealed when put alongside these psychological and economic analyses. Moreover, Tolkien was a devout Catholic and the papal encycli- cals on social teaching in the twentieth century were as critical of capitalism as they were of state socialism. And while secular writers may offer insight into Tolkien's critique, it can be claimed that for an adequate response to the problem of fetishism a religious dimension is important.

For Tolkien, all created things are good, as he states in the myth of creation that opens his Silmarillion. And it is evident from Tolkien's various Indexes to the third volume of The Lord of the Rings that the world of objects is important to him, for he gives an entire section to the category, "Things" (RK, pp. 488-490). Looking down the list of items one finds an unusual combination of those one would expect, such as rings, weapons, flowers, and books, and the unexpected, such as a postal system, battles, meetings, dates, and languages. The reason for the inclusion of such immaterial concepts lies in Tolkien's adoption of a much more ancient usage of the word, "thing." The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its earliest example of the usual modern meaning of "thing" as inanimate object, a reference from 1689.3 Prior to that, a thing meant a matter, an event, even, in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and German, a Parliament, as Heidegger emphasizes in his essay on the Thing, "a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter." It is from a matter brought forward for important deliberation, an event or experience, that our modern understanding of "thing" evolves as something separate from ourselves, and an object of our perception. In origin, however, there is something inherently com- munal in a thing as a matter between people in a meeting-place. "Thinging gathers," as Heidegger puts it. Today, when we are not in thrall to fetishized objects, we go to the opposite extreme and treat things as inert and of no account. Indeed, the object of desire in the December shop-window quickly loses all aura on the January sale rack.

Tolkien's theology so validates making and creativity that the most important objects in his fictional world are good. The relatively rare bad objects are inevitably dominatory or destructive in character, as, for instance, the Grond, the nasty battering ram named from Morgoth's mace, with an iron wolf-shaped head. Furthermore, there are not very many things in The Lord of the Rings, and the "Things" appendix is much shorter than that for people/creatures or places. After leaving the relatively thing-filled Shire, there are few objects, and most of these are "things" in the Middle English sense of the equipment one takes on a journey. The items taken by the Fellowship are few: food, cooking utensils, water bottles, pipes and pipe-weed, gray elven cloaks, and weapons. The world has been pared down to the few things necessary for sustenance and protection. Thus, the paucity of items renders them doubly precious, as, for example, the rope Sam suddenly remembers he brought from the Lórien boat:

"Rope!" cried Sam, talking wildly to himself in his excitement and relief. "Well, if I don't deserve to be hung on the end of one as a warning to numbskulls! You're nowt but a ninnyhammer, Sam Gamgee: that's what the Gaffer said to me often enough, it being a word of his. Rope!"

"Stop chattering!" cried Frodo, now recovered enough to feel both amused and annoyed. "Never mind your Gaffer! Are you try- ing to tell yourself you've got some rope in your pocket? If so, out with it!"

"Yes, Mr. Frodo, in my pack and all. Carried it hundreds of miles, and I'd clean forgotten it!" (TT, p. 237)

There is a distinctly comic tone to this scene with Sam dancing with delight over the rope while Frodo clings to a cliff-face, and the homely language contrasting with the extremity of the situation. This in no way detracts from the magical quality of the rope, indicated by its silken texture and silvery sheen. As it dangles down it evokes other salvific ropes, such as the line let down by the Biblical Rahab for Joshua's spies that then became the sign to spare her when Jericho was attacked.

With or without literary parallels, the rope has a fullness of presence in this scene. It is prompt when needed, beautiful and useful. Sam accords the rope full appreciation: "It looks a bit thin, but it's tough; and soft as milk to the hand. Packs close too, and as light as light. Wonderful folk to be sure" (TT, p. 238)! Sam refers here to the elvish makers of his rope and he begins to undo the fetishism of things by restoring the relation of object to maker, and the fixed object to potency and use.

Gift-giving and Ring-bearing

It is also important for the full presence of Sam's rope that it was given to him as a gift by the elves of Lórien. Indeed, practically every good object in the whole novel turns out to be a gift, beginning in the very first chapter with Bilbo's birthday party at which, according to hobbit custom, he gives rather than receives birthday presents. Gandalf too provides a gift in the form of fireworks, which in their spectacular self-destruction are a very pure form of gift-giving. Many of the company's weapons are gifts, the very food they eat comes from Rivendell, or Gollum's rabbit hunting (in the closest he gets to human community), or from the lembas of the Lórien elves. Galadriel and Celeborn are primarily gift-givers, whether by sight of the seeing-pool of prophecy or in the magic objects they give Sam and Frodo-the box of super-potent fertilizer and seed and the phial of light.

In granting gifts, Galadriel and Celeborn imitate the actions of the kings in the Norse and Anglo-Saxon sources from which Tolkien derived his Rings of Power. In one such source, the poem Beowulf, on which Tolkien was an important authority, the king, Hrothgar, is called a "ring giver" and he showers Beowulf with presents after Beowulf has killed the monster Grendel. Rings are gifts that bind the wearer to the giver in these ancient tales. And if one receives gold objects as gifts from the true owner, no harm ensues to the wearer.

A prominent example in Norse mythology is the ring, Draupnir, made by the dwarves Brokk and Eitri for the god Odin, which produced eight new rings every ninth night. It was this ring that the desolated Odin placed on the pyre of his son, Baldur, after the latter's death from the mistletoe dart, and which the son returned to his father as a keepsake via Hermod, who visited him in Hel.8 This enriching ring, marked by gift and sacrifice, is not usually mentioned as an influence on The Lord of the Rings, even though it is the only ring in the early sources that is voluntarily renounced. More frequently discussed by Tolkien critics is the dragon Fafnir's ring that was taken by his slayer, Sigurd, which led to his downfall and that of the whole house of the Volsungs.

What these Northern stories of rings show is that a ring stolen curses its possessor, whereas a ring given cements relationships, even beyond the grave. Both positive and negative connotations can be found in Beowulf, in which the hero first receives rings from Hrothgar, later becomes a ring-giver himself, and only dies when he seeks gold rings for his people from a dragon's lair. Similarly, the elven rings in Tolkien are beneficent, concentrating the powers and unity of their bearers, Galadriel, Elrond and Gandalf, all of whom were given the rings by others, which frees them from the trace of fetishism involved in the original forging, as does their willingness to sacrifice the power of their rings for the common good.

Letting Things Go

In order to benefit from these gifts, the protagonists of The Lord of the Rings have first to give up their possessions, their homes and families. The Quest of the Fellowship charts an attempt to deal with the fetishism of the object, and to restore relations with people and with things. The only way this may be secured is through acts of self-sacrifice, and by the destruction of the fetishized Ring. Unlike most quests, in which a beloved object is gained, the Fellowship is inaugurated to return the Ring to its place of origin, and thereby to reverse the fetishizing process that cuts it off from context, origin and materiality. The whole process is presented in comic mode in the opening of the novel when Bilbo, who had not been candid in his account of how he acquired the Ring from Gollum, sets about a potlatch scale sacrifice of everything and every object in his life. He throws a lavish party and gives away what remains of his dragon gold to make up for his Sigurd-like possession of it; he gives away his home and its contents, his hobbit existence itself, and goes off like some Indian holy man. Frodo then follows the same path and makes the sacrifice of giving up his happy life in the Shire to bear the Ring. Like the Ring he becomes separate, and is unable to return and be accepted by his own community. He is also badly wounded by the Morgul-knife of the Black Rider. So Frodo does not merely sacrifice the Ring but himself, as he indicates to Sam as they leave for the Grey Havens, "When things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them" (RK, p. 338). Note that it is not just people that are in danger but "things," the whole phenomenal cosmos, and it is all that that he must give up.

Frodo, who gave his life, is then himself given passage to the Undying Lands by Arwen to show that giving up is the means of restoration. And in order to show that an unfetishized life is possible, we are earlier given the example of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, who are notably also the exemplars of romantic fulfilment in the story. They were left out of the films, and are often something of an embarrassment to critics as being extraneous to the epic form of the novel. In my view Tom and Goldberry's difference is deliberate and is important to the novel's purposes in offering a challenge to the fetishism rife in Middle-earth. For Tom Bombadil is the unfallen "master of wood, water and hill" precisely because he does not own them. Rather he receives everything as a gift and is himself a gift-giver, who is first seen bringing water-lilies to Goldberry. That a gift-economy is being opposed to fetishism is made quite plain by Tom's behavior with the Ring. To Frodo's disapproval he treats it with scant respect, throws it up in the air, and can see through its invisibility magic. He treats it, in fact, like a very pretty ring and nothing more.

Bombadil nicely illustrates the distinction Tolkien draws between magic and enchantment in his essay "On Fairy-stories": magic "is power in this world, domination of things or wills," whereas enchantment "does not seek delusion, nor bewitch- ment and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and delight, not slaves." There is something cheerfully fictive and enchanted about Bombadil (signaled to us by his talking in verse), and this tells us that we too can transform our world into one of enchantment in which we see things as they really are: rings as pretty pieces of shining metal, and men and women as utterly real and yet utterly mysterious. In contrast to Tom's singing that rescues the hobbits from entrapment, the honeyed tones of Saruman are merely tricks of dominatory magic that fixate their audience so that they do not see what is really going on.

The novel ends, very simply, with Sam's return home from the Grey Havens. His hobbit home is a scene of simple objects appropriately arranged that deliberately recreates the yellow light, fire and waiting woman of Bombadil's house. The great and onerous quest ends with the restoration of the objectified world, which is now freed from fetishism for use:

And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.

He drew a deep breath. "Well, I'm back," he said. (RK, p. 340)

The objects of fire, food, light, and shelter unite here to signify human warmth and community. By making Sam function as a chair for his little daughter in a family trinity, the text affirms the familial relation of objects to persons. Chairs are only chairs; they have no magical qualities, but they allow human connection-"Thinging gathers." The fetishized Ring is now replaced by the family circle. There is a triumphant emphasis on the word "and" in these two final sentences. Its repetition sets up a rhythm of connections between the different things in the scene that asserts their unity in combining to bless human life.

Now that objects are returned to full participation they can signify themselves. Galadriel's phial caught the light of the star Eärendil, and its magic came from participation in the source of light that Eärendil redeemed by rescuing it from fetishization by warring groups and returning it to its origin. Thanks to all that has gone before to redeem the object in The Lord of the Rings, any light can now have that same quality, when it serves human need and is valued for its utility and its beauty. Hobbits in the story seem to have been invented precisely in order to appreciate this ordinary domestic world of objects, just as the proper end of the ents is to love trees. In one sense, the whole complex nest of invented languages and creatures, histories and mythologies exists in order that, like Sam, we can see the ordinary world in an unfetishized manner. This is the "recovery" of vision that Tolkien himself states is the purpose of the fantasy or fairy-tale. And that he means the recovery of a right relation to objects as intrinsic to this recovery is seen in the following passage:

And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be "free with" Nature can be her lover not her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.

Tolkien calls this love "wonder," as a faculty of vision that accords full presence to that which one sees and is challenged by in its otherness. We learn to see things as if for the first time. This wonder is very far indeed from fetish worship because it celebrates the connections that fetishism denies. Treebeard's word for "hill" exemplifies this relationality:

"A-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burúmë. Excuse me: that is part of my name for it; I do not know what the word is in the outside languages: you know, the thing we are on, where I stand and look out on fine mornings, and think about the Sun, and the grass beyond the wood, and the horses, and the clouds, and the unfolding of the world." (TT, p. 66)

In his sign for "hill" Treebeard reconnects the object with the world of phenomena, and of thoughts, and with himself. In ent language an object is signified by the range of its connections by which it achieves its true identity, not by separation, as in hill being defined by those things it is not: "hill" not "rill." Individuality thus comes from the multitude and variety of inter- connections. Again, "Thinging gathers."

The Lord of the Rings, then, is an ethical text that teaches us to give up dominatory and fixed perceptions in order to receive the world back as gift. The novel itself offers an inexhaustible plenitude of things, but they are not self-referential. For the elves, their songs and their gifts originate outside Middle-earth itself in a Blessed Realm just glimpsed by the reader before Frodo disappears forever. This realm is the source of the "light and high beauty" (RK, p. 211) that Sam perceives in the sky above the dreadful plain of Gorgoroth. The wonder and abundance of all the things that constitute Middle-earth have a divine origin, so that, as we leave the novel, we are somewhat melancholy. For we are unable to remain fetishistically fixated by the details of the story, but left rather with a craving for something more: a hunger for breaking our own unnatural attachment to things, a hunger for transcendence itself."

--- "My Precious": Tolkien's Fetishized Ring / Alison Milbank in The Lord of the rings and philosophy : one book to rule them all

Comments from r/counciloftherings:

"Some “Tolkien experts” certainly have some odd takes. Alison Milbank referring to Shelob as a “teethed vagina” gotta be at the top though 😅
Worse than David Day? What do you think? 🤔"

"Freud was a hack who brought 95% of his theories back to sex and sexuality, usually involving the parents of the kids.
A great deal of his ideas have been widely discredited by the psychological community.
So no, Shelob was definitely not some metaphor for teethed vagina."

"Freud has inspired generations to prove him wrong"

"Isn’t incest like the number one most searched genre of porn? As much as I’d love to discredit him, I fear he was right and actually ahead of his time… "

"No. It has some forced popularity since it's comparatively easy to shoot and a fine excuse to for different age combinations between actors. Here are the 2023 statistics:
https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2023-year-in-review"
[Ed: In the US, step mom was #11 in the list and that's not even real incest. There were no other incest terms in the top 14 and it was not in the top 5 categories either nor was it one of the top 5 categories more viewed compared to the world. the Philippines. In France even step mom didn't appear, much less other incest related terms (odd, given France's history with incest). Mexico, the UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Poland, Australia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Sweden didn't have incest as popular by any measure either. Egypt had step mom at #11/#14 in keywords]

"Someone can make whatever interpretation they want, but so much of literary analysis is really just grasping for straws or applying a framework for the sake of it. Sure you can apply almost any kind framework for interpetation but that doesn't make that particular analysis valuable or relevant except to a niche academic group"

"The author is desperate to convey their intelligence."

You just described 90% of literary analysis"

"I have no words... Not just that Shelob description but this entire paragraph makes zero sense."

" Isildur was married as well (though before wearing the ring). Tom also had Goldberry. Her getting basic lore stuff wrong makes her lose any credibility"

"Her use of “for any length of time” is an academic weasel phrase designed to invalidate any counter examples. Only Sauron, Gollum, Bilbo, and Frodo count, because they’re the ones that fit her theory. Everyone else can be discarded because they’re inconvenient to her."

"And Bilbo was a noted bachelor before the Ring... Gollum was an exile (who probably lacked opportunity), and Sauron was a bachelor for thousands of years prior to the Ring. So really only Frodo fits cleanly."

"This is the most absurd and offensive thing I’ll read today. And I say this w confidence in today’s political climate. Lol."

"lol at the emphasis on “Crack of Doom”"

"Why
did it take me so many years to run into this joke"

"Man people will just publish anything these days huh"

"I’m just curious why they asked her to write a chapter. She gets basic lore facts wrong."

"Short answer is that publishing companies are often lazy and academic writers are sometimes desperate to get their name out there (sometimes for vanity but sometimes to save their position or career).
The publishing world (especially in academia adjacent topics) is sort of a weird one. It's mostly who you know until you've established yourself. Sometimes bigger titles are willing to roll the dice on someone if they have solid enough connections. I'm assuming that's what has happened here. I'm in the world of "The Philosophy of Art & Literature" which is sort of a weird half way point between the two disciplines. I was once asked to write a book review for a journal over Bettany Hughes' "The Hemlock Cup" (I believe that's the title. It's been years ago).
I'm all for book reviews, but this is a historian/Archeologist writing about Historical facts uncovered in archeological digs. I had to respectfully decline this ask. They wanted a "Philosopher" to write about this book from a "Philosophical point of view" (whatever that means) because it touched on the life of the Historical Socrates, but it was way out of my realm of study. They asked me because 3 of my other philosopher friends (with whom I'd produced other works) had declined for the same reason. Some folks will simply take whatever writing gigs they can get, give it a go, and fall flat on their face."

""Lack of sexual activity"? Tom Bombadil wanders the forest singing songs about he can't wait to get home and bang Goldberry."

"Right? Plus Gimli the simp/hair fetishist"

"WTF was this author smoking?"

"Not everyone should be an academic. Like this one for example."

"In the list of worst takes on Tolkien I need to mention the Belgian nun Mellie Uyldert. She explains all the symbolism and archtypes from Tolkiens work without any knowledge of the writer.
More info https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Symboliek_van_Tolkien%27s_In_de_ban_van_de_ring
For anyone wo understands Dutch, grab your copy here; https://www.veelboeken.nl/alle-boeken/niet-gecategoriseerd/symboliek-van-tolkiens-in-de-ban-van-de-ring-9789020248340/"

"You know, it's actually cool to just enjoy LOTR and keep your batshit insane takes to yourself"

"The representation of Shelob as a vagina dentata is a nonsense.
First and foremost, Tolkien’s entire oeuvre is deeply rooted in his serious philological studies, mythological leanings, and, above all, in his devout Catholicism, through which overt sexual symbolism is hardly ever his primary concern.
In contrast, Shelob is more straightforwardly presented as a monstrous creature in the tradition of mythic beasts, dragons, and trolls, designed to evoke fear and peril within a high-fantasy context, rather than conveying psychoanalytic themes.
This makes it easier for us as readers to understand Shelob’s dangerous role as a stumbling block for the heroes, mainly Frodo and Sam, to fit into the larger narrative framework of “The Lord of the Rings” as an epic journey full of diverse challenges. Her menace represents just another of the monstrous challenges; among others are the Balrog or the Nazgûl, which stand for emblems of heroism and perseverance, not some act of gendered symbolism.
More significantly, it is the very broad mythological context within which Tolkien elaborates his world and the creatures: among them, monstrous spiders are a symbol of danger and chaos but never directly representing female sexuality.
So, reading Shelob exclusively through the perspective of vagina dentata completely fails to acknowledge the wider mythopoetic and narrative significance that her character holds within the tightly woven universe created by Tolkien."

"Sometimes a giant evil spider is just a giant evil spider."

"This is a shippers desperate attempt to justify applying horny thoughts to a text wholly absent of erotica."

"I'm currently selling tickets to a genitalia-spotting expedition through Middle-Earth."

"Legolas: ARAGORN, WHY AINT WE FUCKIN!!?
Aragorn, Gotta, deliver the ring dude.
Legolas: AH, right...we fuck later?
Aragorn: HELL YEAH, I love you bro!"

Links - 20th July 2024 (1)

Meme - *Distracted Girlfriend meme (based on Distracted Boyfriend)*
*Beauty and the Beast's Belle ignoring her Beast to look at X-Men's Beast*

Whitney (E-Girl Ranger) on X - "girls if he knows the difference between the Ottoman and Byzantine empires just know you are the side hoe to his map video game addiction"

Commentary: To ace your first job, invest in your workplace relationships - "Being thrust into the working world with little other experiences for reference can bring rude shocks. Fresh graduates may have been in the nurturing cocoon of education for the past 16 years, where the focus is on learning, rather than performing.   In education, what you need to know is spoon-fed to you, rather than you actively seeking it out. It may explain why some fresh graduates are seen to be laid-back and passive, expecting employers to take the lead in onboarding.   It raises the question: Do fresh graduates lack guidance at work, or might they be less willing to ask for it?... During my first probation review, the director pointed out how colleagues mentioned that I was not sociable and approachable. She cited examples such as eating lunch alone, instead of doing it with colleagues."

Swimmers avoiding the water over fears of raw sewage on UK beaches - "Almost a quarter of the UK’s sea swimmers may not take a dip in the ocean this year because of sewage dumping by water companies, according to a poll. Sewage was dumped into waters near England’s most celebrated beaches for nearly 8,500 hours last year, analysis shows. A separate review earlier this year found there were 1,504 discharges in 2022 on beaches supposed to be free from such pollution"

Nazism and the Failure of Arab Modernity - "Arabs in particular seem to always be getting seduced by bad ideas, and how this fact has influenced the development of the Middle East over the last century... The thing about the Middle East is that it seems, of all the major regions of the world, to be the one most hostile to classical liberalism. For the last several decades, most of the ideological energy has been on the side of Islamism. The main bulwarks against this poisonous worldview are currently royal despotism, and different groups of fanatics checking one another. But before that, what motivated Arab intellectual elites and mass opinion was a kind of nineteenth century romantic nationalism... The Syrian Social Nationalist Party, for example, which has a modified swastika as its symbol, is part of the ruling coalition of the Assad regime today. It had a militia that fought in the Syrian civil war before being integrated into the national army in 2019. Arab elites looked to German unification as a kind of model, explicitly rejected individualism, and kept alive a romantic vision of nationalism long after it had died in the West the moment Hitler shot himself in the head. One branch of this thought, Baathism, was a completely homegrown ideology, and ended up taking over both Iraq and Syria. These events were among only a few instances where a revolutionary ideology that wasn’t originally created in the West (i.e., Marxism) gained control over a state in the post-World War II era... The ultimate question here to me is why are Arabs prone to accepting and promulgating such bad ideas? Moreover, is there some kind of deep collectivism in the culture that causes it to be horrified by the idea of individual freedom? Is there a biological component to the anti-liberal tendency, perhaps related to a long history of inbreeding? Or is all this historically contingent? Are Arab intellectuals and religious leaders themselves driving this process, or are they just channeling the only kinds of ideas that have any hope of gaining power in the culture they find themselves in? What is the role of Islam in all this, and what are we to make of the massive historical overrepresentation of Christians as Arab nationalist thought leaders? As an Arab who finds classical liberalism to be by far the most compelling political philosophy in human history, there’s a personal component to these reflections. And given that we still find Middle East squabbles occasionally dominating American politics, such questions will remain relevant for quite a long time. Regardless, I’m convinced that there is something unique in Arab culture, at least when reinforced by Islam, that makes it particularly unsuited to building functional modern societies. The fact that the region was enamored by romantic nationalism before it fell for Islamism provides strong evidence of that"

Soupeur - Wikipedia - "Soupeur is a sexual practice involving attraction to other male secretions, specifically bread soaked in urine, or semen. This specific meaning refers to individuals who take pleasure in consuming food soaked in the urine of others, in particular bread abandoned and later retrieved at public urinals. This practice was popular in Paris and Marseille up until the 1960s and 1970s...   There existed an alternative where a public urinal is stopped in order to wait for it to fill. Then a person would enter it and submerge his penis into the urine of previous users. This was alternatively called dipping. The term alternatively describes the act of individuals visiting brothels to consume the semen left on the prostitutes by the customers. This act is also named "do dinette."... Sometimes prostitutes "fake" their performance by brushing their pubic hair with ersatz sperm made from a mixture of egg white, urine and a few drops of bleach"

Tying Allowance to Chores Could Kill Kids’ Motivation to Help Out - The Atlantic - "The practice of paying children an allowance kicked off in earnest about 100 years ago. “The motivation was twofold,” says Steven Mintz, a historian of childhood at the University of Texas at Austin. “First, to provide kids with the money that they needed to participate in the emerging commercial culture—allowing them to buy candy, cheap toys, and other inexpensive products—and second, to teach them the value of money.”  These days, American children on average receive about $800 per year in allowance, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Kids, though, are usually not receiving money for nothing—the vast majority of American parents who pay allowance (who themselves are a majority of American parents) tie it to the completion of work around the house. Parents’ preference for this setup has spawned an array of apps that let them dole out allowance money once chores are completed, and even pay for an individual chore... A range of experts I consulted expressed concern that tying allowance very closely to chores, whatever its apparent short-term effectiveness, can send kids unintentionally counterproductive messages about family, community, and personal responsibility. In fact, the way chores work in many households worldwide points to another way, in which kids get involved earlier, feel better about their contributions, and don’t need money as an enticement. Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Arizona State University who studies families, is skeptical of the idea of paying kids on a per-chore basis. “How sustainable is it if you’re going to pay a child a dime for each time he picks up his clothes off the floor?” she says. “What are you saying—that you’re owed something for taking care of your stuff?”... After about 18 months on the Earth, Lancy explained to me, children almost universally become eager to help their parents, and in many cultures, they’re brought in to the processes of doing housework. They may be incompetent little things, but they can learn quickly by watching. “Praise is rare,” Lancy says, “as the principal reward is to be welcomed and included in the flow of family activity.” Gradually, their responsibilities get ratcheted up according to their abilities and strength; they may start by carrying messages or small objects, and work their way up to food preparation or caring for siblings. “In effect, they ‘own’ a suite of chores which they carry out routinely without being told,” Lancy says. And they don’t assume they’ll be paid an allowance. In an email, he made clear how this contrasts with American norms: “In our society—and I’d extend this to most modern, post-industrial nations—we actually deny our children’s bids to help. We distract them with other activities, we do our chores (meal prep) when they’re napping, we convey that their ‘helping’ is burdensome and, not surprisingly, the helping instinct is extinguished. Hence, at 6 or 7 when we think they’re ready to start doing chores or at least taking care of themselves and their ‘stuff,’ they’ve lost all desire to help out.”"

A Mosque's Refusal to Bury the Manchester Attacker - The Atlantic - "More than a week has passed since 22-year-old Salman Abedi detonated an explosive outside a concert at the Manchester Arena, killing himself and 22 concert-goers and injuring dozens of others. Still, Abedi’s remains have reportedly not been buried. This carries particular significance for a Muslim like Abedi: Islamic law requires that burials take place as soon as possible after death.  The Manchester Central Mosque, one of the largest Muslim funeral providers in the city, has refused to be involved in Abedi’s funeral. Irfan Chishti, an imam at the mosque, told me its executive committee’s decision not to inter Abedi’s remains aimed to reaffirm the local Muslim community’s rejection of his actions... Such a decision is not unprecedented. In the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, a series of shootings and bombings that resulted in 164 people being killed and more than 300 others wounded, India’s Muslim community refused to bury the nine assailants, arguing that the “people who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim.” Boston’s Muslim community came to a similar conclusion following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, after which an imam at the Islamic Institute of Boston said he would not be willing to hold a funeral for one of the attackers because “this is a person who deliberately killed people. … He already left the fold of Islam by doing that.” Following the deadly attack on a church in the French town of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray last July, which resulted in the death of a priest, the town’s Muslim community also refused to be involved with the assailant’s burial. The leader of the local mosque told Le Monde, “We will not sully Islam with this person. We will not participate in the funeral or the burial.”  Not all Muslim community leaders believe funeral prayers should be withheld from those who commit acts of violence. After a Philadelphia police officer was killed in 2008, one mosque leader said that the assailant, who was Muslim and who died in the ensuing confrontation, had the right to be given the funeral prayer—he just refused to be the one to do it. Dagli told me differences of opinion among Muslims may sometimes stem from differing interpretations over Islam’s stance on suicide.  “There are reports that the Prophet Muhammad did not pray the Janaza prayer for someone who committed suicide,” Dagli said, “but there is difference of opinion as to whether this means that we should not do so either, or whether one still can and the Prophet did that to discourage suicide.”"
From 2017

Why India’s Muslims are so moderate - "A combination of factors explains it. Islam in South Asia has a long history, over 1,000 years, but was long dominated by Sufis who integrated closely with non-Muslim Hindus, sharing many cultural practices. In Pakistan, decades of large-scale migration to the Gulf along with close political ties to Saudi Arabia saw harder forms of Sunni Islam adopted, notably the spread of Wahhabi and Deobandi mosques, madrassas and beliefs. By contrast many Indian Muslim migrants to the Gulf, for example from Kerala, have proved less effective at reimporting harder-line forms of Islam on a large scale. Indian madrassas appear to be under more watchful eyes of the state. It is crucial, too, that India—unlike Pakistan and many other countries with large Muslim populations—has long remained as a robust and lively democracy. A secular constitution and the electoral clout of a sizeable minority helps give Muslims in India a stake in the political system. Many are also intensely proud to be Indian, even if a few support Pakistan’s cricket team. Targeted government welfare schemes to assist "backward" Muslim groups may help too... as Indian Muslims are widely dispersed around the country, they are in a small but not insignificant minority almost everywhere: that fact encourages both majority Hindus and Muslims mostly to rub along together, since extremism would prove disruptive for just about everyone... One additional reason at times given for India’s Muslims remaining moderate is that literacy rates and incomes have been low, leaving them relatively isolated from those global forces—such as jihadist websites and news of atrocities against Muslims in the Middle East—that help to spread rage elsewhere. Rising literacy, an ever-more urban population and growing wealth and information may yet encourage more extremist factions to emerge. Large migration flows to the Gulf might yet help to bring back more conservative Islamic beliefs and funds for Wahhabi mosques and madrassas"
From 2014

The Rise and Fall of Sega Enterprises - "When Sega discontinued production of the Dreamcast console in 2001 and withdrew from the domestic hardware market, it marked the conclusion of one of the most tumultuous and error-strewn periods in the company's 72-year history. Sega Enterprises' spectacular fall from grace during the course of the 1990s remains a tragic spectacle of overconfidence and woefully misguided business practice.  At the start of the decade, Sega stood astride the gaming world like a colossus; it had smashed Nintendo's vice-like stranglehold in the US and conquered Europe with its street-smart marketing. But by the close of the '90s, the company's reputation was in tatters, its user-base had all but collapsed and it was driven dangerously close to the yawning abyss of insolvency...   "When I first joined the company, I remember having a meeting with Tom Kalinske - who was then Sega of America CEO - and one of the questions I put to him was whether Sega saw itself primarily as a hardware company or as a software company. I said that if the answer was a software company, then why didn't it develop games for other platforms? Tom smiled at that and acknowledged that it was in the software business but, in his words, Mr Nakayama would rather cut off his right arm than develop anything on Nintendo hardware."... Okawa granted the company the vital transfusion of funds that would ultimately keep it alive. In 1999, he loaned $500 million of his own money to pay off Sega's debts - a loan he would later waiver on his deathbed two years later. When the 74 year-old Okawa succumbed to heart failure in 2001 following an arduous battle with cancer, he also gifted Sega his personal shares in both the company itself and CSK, which equated to a cool $695 million. The immense generosity of this one individual aided Sega's painful move into software publishing, and safeguarded its long-term future.    These days Sega Enterprises is known as Sega Corporation, and is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings. It remains and endures, but as a much-changed organisation. It is now famous primarily for its software, and presides over a glittering catalogue that includes Sonic the Hedgehog, Football Manager, Yakuza, Total War and many other best-selling titles. The company's financial outlook is also positive; it posted a net income of ¥41.5 billion last year - around £338 million - and it ranks as one of the largest publishers of video game software in the world...   "There is no future in selling hardware," replies Brogan emphatically. "In any market, through competition, the hardware eventually becomes a commodity. The future is in software. Sega's fault was to think that its core business was selling consoles, but consoles tend to be a one-time buy for most consumers, until the next version comes along. Software is a repeat purchase, so there's far more profit in it. If a company has to sell hardware then it should only be to leverage software, even if that means taking a hit on the hardware. I think some of the senior people in Sega never really understood that.""

Meme - "look what they took from us
*Apple laptops with fewer and fewer ports, from 9 ports to only 2 USB C ports*"

Meme - Pickup trucks:
1961-1979 - 36% cab, 64% bed
1980-1997 - 40% cab, 60% bed
1997-2003 - 50% cab, 50% bed
2004-2015 - 60% cab, 40% bed
2015-2021 - 63% cab, 37% bed
*The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire - crumbling columns*

Vincent Bevins on failed revolutions in his book 'If We Burn' - Los Angeles Times - "Bevins found himself in São Paulo as a correspondent for the L.A. Times in 2013, when an anarcho-punk collective of bus fare activists semi-accidentally sparked a national protest movement that brought millions of Brazilians to the streets... their movement succeeded in reducing transit costs but then spun out of control, ultimately destabilizing the popular left-wing government and unleashing, in Bevins’ telling, the right-wing forces that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power. The book takes this as a launching point, following similar movements around the world where millions of people poured into streets and squares to protest something but often ended up having exactly the opposite of the intended effect. Starting with the movements that the media dubbed the Arab Spring, Bevins focuses on places where mass protests genuinely threatened or even toppled the government, including Egypt, Turkey, Chile, Hong Kong and Ukraine. That counts out smaller movements in stronger states that were never at risk of falling (sorry, Occupy), countries that collapsed into civil war (Syria) and places where outside governments intervened (Libya). A man stands in front of a red truck, holding an AR-15 assault rifle.  In each case, Bevins manages to find a handful of activists who had helped launch the movement and tracks them through the unintended consequences... The book ends by giving Bevins’ protagonists, the activists who saw their movements shift and warp in front of their eyes, a chance to reflect on what they could have done differently. All land on the idea, to differing degrees, that the anarcho-punk culture of leaderless protest hurt their causes more than they helped them. When the movements got big enough to contest the existing power structures, they were left with no spokespeople, no platform, and no clear plan for taking power. You’re unlikely to find another rigorously reported book this year that ends with its subjects advocating for movements to become more Leninist — in the sense of having a hard core ready to step into a power vacuum...
every time in the news throughout the rest of decade, when something similar is happening elsewhere, lots of people I know in Brazil would watch and say, “We hope it doesn’t go the same way that it did here.”... The people I spoke with, from Egypt to Ukraine to Hong Kong to Brazil, were interested in participating in this book because it was about the future, because it could be a way to learn from mistakes and to try to come up with an optimistic, forward-thinking set of lessons for the next generation."

Meme - "Actual female commoner in feudal Korea *ugly*
Female Commoner in Korean Historical Dramas *pretty*"

Meme - "social media is so interesting because wealthy people cosplay a simple life and broke people cosplay luxury living like there has to be a study done on this
Marisa Baldassaro @Nerdspringbreak: "Sometimes I watch this farm lady's cooking videos when they're suggested on IG.Shes got like 10 kids & always pregnant.I'm always like wow they work so hard on their farm. I googled them and her husbands father was the founder of Jet Blue, and that stove behind her is worth $35k"

Meme - "Myths aren't all they bust *Pixellated so it looks like one is jerking the other off while driving, while the other is enjoying it, from One-Hand Hyneman episode (one man steering and one man controlling the pedals)*"

Meme - "*Homer Simpson's Back Fat*
Japan
Bullet Trains
Robot Store Staff
Electronic Toilet Seats
Talking Showers
The rest of the world
Fax machines
Floppy Disks
Paper filing
Cash society"

Meme - Matt Walsh @WMattWalshBlog: "I would kill every ape in the world to save one human, because humans are more important. This is a very simple concept, folks."
K. Thor Jensen @kthorjensen: "would you suck every ape's dick to save one human"

Meme - "Imagine training hard all your life and doing crazy shit for power just to be second strongest to some orange dude Imao *Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z, Sasuke from Naruto, Bulbasaur from Pokemon, Hillary Clinton*"

Cookie Shop Owner Explains Why He Denied Free Cookies for Bride - "David Maffei, owner of Halfsies Cookie Company, shared an Instagram Reel that revealed an exchange between himself and a bride-to-be who claimed to be an influencer. She tried to set up a collaboration — which included free cookies from the brand to include in her bridesmaid bags.  Maffei showed the messages between the two, where Ana Montealgre's email described herself as an "influencer," who had "collaborated with a few brands." After reviewing her profile and seeing a small, personal-sized following, he responded, "Sorry, you're not an influencer."  The bride-to-be called herself a "beginner influencer," to which Maffei snarkily replied, "I'm a beginner astronaut."

Business calls out woman who identified herself as ‘influencer’ to get free products - "he claimed the term influencer is “a wild label,” before sharing his thoughts on how “beginner influencers can get started.” “You buy the products from the brands that you like and you tag them. They will probably repost you. You’ll pick up some followers and maybe other brands will see what you’re doing and you’ll eventually have an engaged following that’s interested in the products you receive but you just don’t ask in the beginning for free products,” he wrote... “I’m a middle-aged man with maybe a dozen real friends and a private account and I have more followers than her. Never in a million years would I think I’m an influencer or even ask for free stuff from a company I don’t follow,” he wrote."

New York cookie shop owner ruthlessly shuts down 'influencer' with less than 1,000 followers after the bride-to-be asked for freebies for her bridal party boxes to 'spoil my squad rotten' - "'Idk why this is in my algorithm but I’m here for it. You really are an astronaut because you blasted her all the way to the moon,' wrote Haley J Marshall.  'Haha you definitely got much more business from this post than you would’ve if she made a post on your product,' wrote another fan of the exchange."

Hindi Word Yesterday and Tomorrow - "The Hindi word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same, “kal”. When I shared this with some of my students understandably many of them were like:  Seriously?!? It’s the SAME word?"
This helps explain Indian time

Dr. Eli David on X - "🇮🇹 @GiorgiaMeloni's expressions are next-level: 🇦🇷 Milei 😍 🇮🇳 Modi 🥰 🇧🇷 Lula 🤬 🇫🇷 Macron 🤮"

The guy Missouri forgot to imprison for 13 years has been cleared of new, different charges - The Washington Post - "Do you remember Cornealious “Mike” Anderson, the Missouri man who was supposed to be sent to prison, only wound up being free for 13 years before the state realized it and imprisoned him after all? Well, he is back in the news, this time because he was cleared of a different and unrelated crime.  First, for anyone who does not remember, let us recount Anderson’s story: He was convicted of armed robbery in 2000 and sentenced to 13 years in prison. But then, due to a strange mix-up, Missouri forgot to actually put him in prison until 13 years later, when the state corrections department prepared to release him and realized he was never actually there... Anderson was arrested in 2013 and spent nearly a year behind bars, before a judge released him last May and credited him with time served."
From 2015

‘A Mess’: Harvard Med School Professor Plagiarized in Expert Report, Judge Says - "Harvard Medical School assistant professor Dipak Panigrahy plagiarized large portions of an expert report on possibly carcinogenic chemicals, a federal judge wrote... Panigrahy submitted a more than 500-page report on behalf of the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, alleging the company's manufacturing facility in Orlando released toxic chemicals into the surrounding area causing various injuries, including cancer.  But in a March 18 court order, U.S. District Court Judge Roy B. Dalton Jr. granted a motion by Lockheed Martin to exclude Panigrahy’s report as evidence, saying that the report extensively plagiarized from works by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.  “Dr. Panigrahy’s report is — put plainly — a mess,” Dalton wrote.  “Indeed, the plagiarism is so ubiquitous throughout the report that it is frankly overwhelming to try to make heads or tails of just what is Dr. Panigrahy’s own work,” Dalton added... “His deposition made the plagiarism appear deliberate, as he repeatedly outright refused to acknowledge the long swaths of his report that quote other work verbatim without any quotation marks at all — instead stubbornly insisting that he cited over 1,100 references, as if that resolves the attribution issue (it does not),” Dalton wrote.  “The volume of references actually makes the problems with Dr. Panigrahy’s methodology more glaring, as he admitted that he did not even read the 1,100 papers in their entirety,” he added in a footnote, referring to a deposition of Panigrahy as part of the case. The report also alleges that at times, Panigrahy misrepresented the IARC’s research... Panigrahy’s testimony has been called into question in previous court cases.  In October, his report in an Ohio case was dismissed after the judge determined that it was based on a “novel” theory regarding chemical markers — a topic on which “no expert has ever been permitted to offer an opinion.”"

Max on X - "Why does Rufo only go after—oh nevermind."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "Is this the "witch hunt against Black women" I've been hearing so much about?"

Links - 19th July 2024 (2 - Feminism)

Why do feminists expect men to control how other men behave? : r/MensRights - "The whole concept of collective responsibility where men as a whole take responsibility of actions of other men, I’m seeing this rhetoric a lot, especially after the man Vs bear debate, where feminists say “men need to look within themselves and see why women are picking bear.” Like it’s my fault that women think all men are rapists. And when I saw a man comment “what did I do” there was a reply that read “they didn’t mean you specifically but men in general,” even if the message was directed at him as a man. I’m so sick and tired of the idea that I’m supposed to control the actions of other men. If a man is a rapist, why is that my fault. I’m so sick of this. I hate being associated with crimes I didn’t commit."
Good luck if you tell Muslims to be responsible for the actions of other Muslims. Or any "minority"

Meme - Faye Peterson House: "Sexual violence is any type of action, comment, or behaviour of sexual nature that is unwanted and non-consensual. The concern for 𝘀𝗲𝘅𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝘀 𝘄𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗲𝘅𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀. Below are just a sample of some of the issues in sports culture that are continually surfacing in our communities.  headlines from CBC articles. To view the articles from the headlines below, visit our link in bio on our Facebook profile"
"As NHL teams, players opt out of Pride Night events, concerns grow about league's commitment to change"
"World chess federation bans transgender women from competing in women's events"
"Rape culture manifests at all levels of sports, normalizing aggression, domination, and exclusion of women, and gender-diverse people."
No wonder "sexual violence" is so rampant - it's defined so broadly that someone looking at someone else can count. And their examples are even more ridiculous

This east LA girl went on a date with a masculine guy and "felt the feminism leaving" her body 😂 - "her heart is aflutter for this guys' guy out of Santa Monica who was confident, assertive, responsible, and caring."

TikTok user poses a race relations alternative to Man vs Bear question - ends up exposing white women’s hypocrisy : r/MensRights - "TikTok user White Woman Whisperer posed an alternative to the man vs bear question to black women: would you rather be alone in a conference room with a white man or a white woman?  She said she would choose the white man because if a white man doesn’t like/respect her he simply won’t engage with her, whereas a white woman will fake niceties and will likely try to hide her disdain but will covertly express it via underhanded remarks/actions  It seems many black women felt the same way, but how did white women respond?
But what about the rape and murder of women? A man is way more of a threat!
This is hurtful that you’d accuse us of trying to harm you
You can’t really generalize all of us into one group
Now, correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t those the exact arguments men made in the man vs bear question? The exact arguments that these same women immediately discredited? Suddenly they’re valid points when they’re in your defence?  These white women got so mad at this that the TikTok creator is now completely demonetized  To me this so clearly proves that feminism has fuck all to do with privilege/rights/injustice and has everything to do with playing the victim"

Meme - Feminist News: Alisa Valdes, Novelist: "I'm 55. My divorced straight women friends would rather eat flaming turds than get into a relationship with a man again. My divorced straight male friends are desperate to find another wife. With time comes wisdom. Women realize men are overrated, men realize... they're overrated."
We're still told that feminism isn't about hating men

This is the season of crunchy leaves, chunky knits - and pumpkin spice latte misogyny
You're only allowed to mock and shame men. Teasing women is misogyny

Meme - Genie: "I shall grant you one wish"
Woman: "I wish for equal rights"
Genie: "Granted"
Woman: "Wait nothing changed?"

“I Refused To Be Operated In Room Full Of Men”: Woman Shares Controversial Rant On Doctors : r/MensRights - "I'm a medical student and though this story is really crappy, you'd be surprised at how many women specifically REQUEST male doctors and how many women choose male OBGYNs over a female. These are conscious decisions made by them. Don't worry, for every 1 person like her, there are a hundred that request us. And to the feminists who support her being sexist, I await the day you come and take my job as an Oncologist from me. Cancer doesn't heal itself and I assure you my female patients would choose me over you a thousand times over."
"I am a woman who prefers male gynecologists. In my experience, women doctors have been judgmental and only used their experiences as truth. A man can’t do that and usually will be overly gentle and careful."
"Both my sisters refuse to see female gynecologists. Both will tell you the men are gentler."
"It's exactly this mindset (of the OOP) thats causing men to not help women. And they only have themselves to blame."
"We have a huge issue in the Family Doctor/Pediatrician department. Every specialist around here complains about how family medicine has turned into a dumpster fire. Your feelings are validated and that's your right to seek male physicians. My wife has met her fair share of underwhelming female docs and she personally has been frustrated about it.  I haven't personally met many female docs so I don't want to judge just yet. However, large studies have shown female docs undergo regret in the med field higher than males and work less hours alongside completely leaving the field of medicine at much higher rates. In my specialty (oncology) very few women exist (80% male). The women that do exist are usually foreign born and the American oncologists usually don't go very far. I don't know why just yet. But on the flip side, you have many male docs who go far yet often end up killing themselves due to what we see as cancer docs. We had an oncologist who recently left in the middle of his shift, went home, and hung himself. These are real gender differences that exist in the medical field. It's often not a pretty sight, but it is like those men who work on oil rigs - if we don't do it, then who will? As long as I can save lives, I will endure."
"as soon as I commented on this post that popped up in my feed from a sub I’ve not joined, I was banned from another sub for participating in a red pill/incel sub. I may not know the purpose of this sub, but men are cool, I’m a chick, hope y’all aren’t a bunch of incel psychos. 😂"

Kaidi Wu, Ph.D. on X - "How women IMAGINE they'd react to sexual harassment is wildly different from how they ACTUALLY react when harassed. Julie Woodzicka & @ProfLaFrance created sexual harassment in lab and tested how women reacted when harassed by a male interviewer in real time. What happened:🧵"
David Getzin on X - "But did they control for the appearance of the male interviewer? That’s an impactful variable."
Kaidi Wu, Ph.D. on X - "Harassment is harassment. It's a grave misperception that harassment is welcome if the harasser is "hot"."
Count Stackula on X - "If women cant even slightly accurately predict how they will react to harassment why should I believe you (a woman) when you insinuate you can predict how women would react given different hotness levels of the harasser.  Ofc they will react more favourable to someone who they are attracted to."
Skoboto on X - "It is interesting that once you got to this question, you stopped thinking rationally and started thinking emotionally. The question is valid and testable, regardless of its morality."
Mark Milley’s Stylist 🇺🇸 on X- "Is it? Your statement implies there is some clear and objective binary standard delineating between “is harassment” and “is not harassment” Intuitively, other than at the extremes, this clearly is not true. It’s highly subjective Totally reasonable to wonder how appearance of the male impacts both perception and response of the woman"
Not to mention how Fairchild (2010) reports that "Attractiveness and age of the perpetrator, time of day, and whether the victim was alone or with friends were some of the categories that were selected as influencing both fear and enjoyment"
Naturally, she blocked those who asked her the questions she was unwilling and/or unable to answer

How Polarized Western Politics Affect Arab Women's Rights - "Many of the verses of the Quran portray women in a sexist way...   Moreover, the belief that the Quran is the immutable and divine word of God, leaves very little—if any—space for critical thinking, opposition or reform. Such opposition may be considered blasphemy or heresy and the person concerned may be at risk of the death penalty in some Arab countries, or of being the victim of retaliation by religious fanatics.  Rizvi’s piece was written in response to Max Fischer’s argument “that some of the most important architects of institutionalized Arab misogyny weren’t actually Arab. They were Turkish—or, as they called themselves at the time, Ottoman—British, and French.” This kind of argument is not only false and reductive, but dangerous and detrimental to the work of Arab feminists like me, who are being oppressed in the name of scripture.   Imperialism played a role in the past, but it was not the only factor then or now. We have to acknowledge the cultural and religious factors that have made misogyny a norm among Arab communities or regressiveness and misogyny will continue to fester...   If the right is concerned about women’s rights in the Arab world, to avoid hypocrisy they should also fight for women’s rights in the west... the implicit claim that we should tolerate the misogyny in our culture demonstrates a kind of racism: we are not held to the same standards as westerners. This attitude enables patriarchy and misogyny in Arab communities both in the west and in the Arab region.  The left must also reflect on their motives and methods, they must fight to achieve equality for all, on the basis of individual rights rather than group identities."
I like how you need to obsess over minor non issues in the West or you're a hypocrite for caring about huge problems in the rest of the world

Mr Coconut employee alleges unfair dismissal due to pregnancy, company releases findings pointing to her poor performance - "Mr Coconut, a popular retail chain selling coconut drinks here, rebutted claims of “unfair dismissal and discrimination to a pregnant woman”, after a Facebook post by a former employee went viral.  Responding to TODAY’s queries on Wednesday (Feb 7), the company said that its former customer service officer Charissa Tan’s poor performance, and not her pregnancy, was what led to her being dismissed... when Mr Coconut contacted her formally to give more details on her allegations and sought her consent to make public their communications "in the spirit of full transparency", she "suddenly refused" to cooperate with the investigations...   Mr Coconut said that Ms Tan had joined the company on Nov 7 last year on a three-month probationary basis and this probation period was supposed to end on Feb 6.  During this period, either party may give the other 24-hours’ notice in writing to terminate the contract, on a no-fault basis.  Therefore, on Jan 17 when she was dismissed, Ms Tan was "actually not a confirmed employee" and was still in the midst of serving her three-month probation, Mr Coconut said.  It added that her termination was based on the 24-hours’ notice period stated in her contract.  It insisted that her pregnancy was “never a consideration” for her termination, and a longer one-week’s notice period was initially offered to her, but she then declined it...   In its statement, Mr Coconut said: “At the material time that the decision was made to not confirm Ms Charissa Tan’s probation on Jan 15, no one had any reason to believe or suspect that Ms Charissa Tan was pregnant. From closed-circuit television footages, Ms Charissa Tan was still heavily smoking, more than three to four times a day.”   In her Jan 18 post, Ms Tan said that she had laid her head down on her desk one of the days when she was feeling unwell, having just recovered from Covid-19.  She added that she did the same for a few days to rest during her lunch hour.  In response, Mr Coconut revealed that through its investigations, she had propped her mobile phone up against her laptop screen and was watching a movie on it openly during office hours.  “This was not during lunch hour or nearing the end of the day as alleged in Ms Charissa Tan’s Facebook post,” it said.  The company separately addressed claims of Ms Tan taking unpaid leave due to Covid-19, saying that she had already taken 12.5 days of leave days before completing her probation. Her leave entitlement of 14 days would have started only after her probation.   Mr Coconut said that Ms Tan had filed a complaint with TADM and is trying to make a claim of S$53,000 from the company. This sum is nearly 18 times her monthly salary of S$3,000.  It also said that although she had posted several screenshots of her alleged WhatsApp conversations with her direct supervisor in her Facebook post, she failed to disclose everything that had transpired.  This included one exchange of Ms Tan saying that she was going to “seize this opportunity” to “make this a big hooha”, it added."

Carl on X - "Listening to WNYC (an affiliate of NPR) and it’s an amazing intellectual bubble. The gobs of assumptions in every sentence blow my mind. Ruth Whippman, author of “BoyMom” “Raising boys was this incredibly fraught political project.” Is it? Really? How about just…raising them?"

Argentina’s far-right president poised to shut down anti-gender violence agency
Visegrád 24 on X - "BREAKING: Javier Milei has disbanded the Ministry of Women and fired 85% of its employees. The rest were redirected to work in the old Department of Gender Protection, which will now be renamed as the “Department of Family Protection” 🇦🇷
The changes mean that the department will now help all people who are in abusive relationships, not just women."
Feminism is not about equality, after all
Gender equality is "far right"

Police investigate after woman's identity shared on misogynistic Facebook groups. Double standard? : r/MensRights - "9News Australia reports on group of 11,000 men in a group sharing images and info about women from dating apps. It is brought to attention of 9News there are 3.5 million women in similar groups doing same thing to men. 9News argues “yeah, but different for women.” Facebook takes down both groups for violating community standards."

Neil Gaiman on X - "As a feminist and a human being, I agree with @emwatson (read her speech) @UN_women #heforshe (pic by @amandapalmer)"
Exclusive: Neil Gaiman accused of sexual assault - "Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault by two women with whom he was in consensual relationships and is the subject of a police complaint in New Zealand. Gaiman’s position is that he strongly denies any allegations of non-consensual sex with the women and adds New Zealand police did not take up his offer of assistance over one woman’s complaint in 2022, which, he says, reflects its lack of substance...   Tortoise understands that he believes K’s allegations are motivated by her regret over their relationship and that Scarlett was suffering from a condition associated with false memories at the time of her relationship with him, a claim which is not supported by her medical records and medical history."
Let’s look at the sex accusations against Neil Gaiman - "He has described his politics as “far to the left of any political party,” though in his mind all politics just reduces to the question: “Why can’t we all be nice to each other?” That’s what he says, anyway. He has been a voice for many progressive causes like trans rights, and regularly pipes up with a prompt to “believe women” in the context of accusations made against other men. In 2018, during the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, for example, Gaiman tweeted his support for accusations made by Christine Blasey Ford. “Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world,” he sermonizes... In The Sandman, currently being adapted as a series on Netflix, there’s an odd focus on a writer known as the ‘The Master’ who captures and rapes a mythical woman, Calliople, for creative inspiration. For years it has been received by readers as queasy-making. His writer character in “The Sandman” also wanted to be called “Master.” It began to seem as if his work was heavily rooted in S&M, when this prospect might not be apparent to casual readers... I imagine the writer who sees a continual stream of young women. They think they’re getting into a relationship with a superstar writer. Instead, they’re fodder for his work. Was his “far left” politics and advocacy for female victims part of an effort to distract from or disguise this personal situation? But really, he never intended his fans to find out—and when a few details emerged, he denied them."
Only misogynists don't BelieveWomen

Man Up and Take It: Do We Under-detect Men’s Suffering? - "When we think about the relative success of men and women in our society, our minds tend to jump to examples in which men excel. We have only to look at the greater proportion of male CEOs, professors, scientists, and world leaders to come to the conclusion that being a man in our society gives a person an advantage. At the same time, patterns that run in the opposite direction — where men experience negative outcomes — don’t seem to attract much attention. We focus on the success stories while essentially brushing aside statistics showing that a greater proportion of men are homeless, incarcerated, high school dropouts, or affected by substance use disorders. Why is it that when we consider examples of gender disparities, we seem to only consider areas where men achieve success? And why, when we look at distribution among the lowest social strata, those who experience the most hardship, do we struggle to acknowledge the fact that men are vastly over-represented there too... for centuries, women were denied educational and occupational opportunities that men could take for granted. It was not until we discussed men’s forced conscription and experiences in warfare that I began to question my assumptions. When we reached the topic of early working conditions (before the advent of legal workplace protections), I began to consider how societal stereotypes of men as breadwinners placed pressure on men to sacrifice their bodies in order to provide for their families. As the examples kept coming, I started to wonder why it had taken me so long to really contemplate this perspective... Through a series of studies, my colleagues and I set out to examine the psychological basis for this unexpected asymmetry, beginning with the seemingly logical hypothesis of gender bias in our moral typecasting. Moral typecasting theory contends that when individuals observe or evaluate a situation involving harm, they instinctively make a value judgment regarding the involved parties, perceiving one as malevolent, and the other as innocent. This cognitive expectation makes sense, given that many moral violations — a robbery or an assault, for instance — fit into a dualistic pattern. From this angle, it seemed to follow that we would more readily classify men as perpetrators and women as victims.  However, as Kurt Gray and his colleagues have demonstrated, the human brain treats these roles as inverses and mutually exclusive. In other words, the more we perceive someone as a perpetrator, the more challenging it becomes to simultaneously perceive that same person as a victim. Since our psychological systems are ill-equipped to process ambiguity, we instinctively assign blame on one side of the equation and place our sympathies on the other.  That observation alone, of course, doesn’t really explain why a gender bias might exist in our tendency to label individuals as perpetrators or victims. For that, we must look at gender stereotypes... The agency we ascribe to men seems to fit the agency inherent in the perpetrator (or harm-doer) role, while the passivity we ascribe to women is consistent with that of a suffering victim, even though feminists have rallied against these assumptions for over a century... men’s bodies have higher proportions of lean muscle mass than women’s. Research has found that increased musculature evokes lower levels of pity from others; the comparatively formidable physicality of men may make it more challenging to view them as deserving of sympathy.  Likewise, there are numerous reasons why we more readily perceive women as victims. Through the lens of evolution, such a tendency can be associated with reproductive roles... it’s not unreasonable to assume that natural selection has favored psychological mechanisms that protect women from harm... With an awareness of all these factors, my colleagues and I undertook an examination of our tendency toward gender bias in our moral typecasting. We conducted six studies among over 3,000 individuals from four countries. In one, participants were asked to read a vignette depicting harm in the workplace. For this experiment, we specified the gender of the inflictor but left the recipient’s gender ambiguous. Participants were then asked to “recall” the gender of the harmed individual. Supporting our predictions, we found they were overwhelmingly more likely to assume that the harmed individual was female, even though we never specified any gender. People instinctively assumed a female victim!... This pattern supports the notion of a cognitive link between womanhood and victimhood; when influenced by a framework implying harm, using words such as victim or perpetrator, this link becomes even tighter... Across all six of our studies, we consistently observed a pattern in which participants more readily linked women with victimhood and men with harm perpetration. Our results repeatedly supported the existence of a gender bias in moral typecasting... Consistently, participants felt more pity and outrage when women were harmed in comparison to examples in which men experienced identical harm. This bias emerged even in the context of job loss. Other research reveals that when men lose their jobs, they experience worse outcomes than women who similarly become unemployed. Men’s greater suffering makes sense in this context, given our stereotyping of males as “the breadwinners.” Nonetheless, participants in our studies felt greater moral outrage and pity when it was a woman who had been laid off than they did when it was a man. These findings suggest that, even in cases where we should presumably be more capable of perceiving men as victims, our emotions continue to respond as though women have experienced greater suffering... when men are presumed to have inflicted harm, we will feel less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, data from real world court rulings cohere with our findings. Male defendants are more likely to be found guilty and receive longer sentences than female defendants, even after holding the severity of the crime constant... We relegate men without question to community roles that require physical suffering and sacrifice, but when they suffer, we feel comparatively little compassion. When it comes to deciding who deserves our sympathy or our aid, our cognitive biases lead us to presume that men should just man up and take it."
Stereotypes are only bad when they impede the left wing agenda

Jennifer Leigh on X - "European/western cultures are by far the most egalitarian in the world yet modern feminists act like white men are the final boss of patriarchy, somehow uniquely awful among men. Be serious."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "White men actually made modern feminism possible, when you think about it. Ottomans just would have impaled 18,000 or whatever it took feminists, gone on with life."

Meme - "WHY ARE PEOPLE USING EXAMPLES FROM FICTION FOR THE "WAR ON WOMEN" *The Handmaid's Tale*
WHEN WE HAVE REAL LIFE EXAMPLES? *Afghan women in burqas*"
When you don't love women, but hate Christianity/The West

Meme - "*He-Man and Castle Grayskull* I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE!"

Meme - "How to identify a fake feminist. *almost all women kneeling, with one woman kneeling in position good for doggy style sex*"

Meme - "I'm a Feminist but I Can't Be Happy for Other Women
I need to get this off my chest because it's been eating me up inside. I'm a 29 year old female, and I've always identified as a feminist. I believe in equality and the empowerment of women. I advocate for women's rights, advocate for equal pay, and often speak out against sexism and misogyny (especially when the issues seem to affect me). But here's the thing: I can't seem to genuinely be happy for other women's successes. Whenever a friend gets a promotion, achieves a personal milestone, or even just receives a compliment, I feel this intense, gnawing jealousy. Instead of celebrating with them, I immediately start thinking of ways to one-up them, to make myself the center of attention. I hate this part of myself. I want to be supportive and uplifting, but instead, I find myself making snide comments or diverting the conversation back to me and my achievements. It's like I can't help but try to upstage them, to prove that I'm better, more accomplished, more deserving of attention. It's exhausting and I know it's toxic. How can I be the feminist I claim to be without all this jealousy and insecurity?"

Meme - Jake Shields @jakeshieldsajj: "Out of the world's ten richest women, all 10 got their wealth from their husbands or fathers   This is kinda hilarious if you think about it"