I Feel Like I'm Losing My Mind Why Has The AI Debate Pivoted Away From Material/labor Concerns Back To

i feel like i'm losing my mind why has the AI debate pivoted away from material/labor concerns back to debates about Real vs Fake Art. cannot express just how little i care about relitigating Art and high art and low art and skilled vs unskilled art. what i care about is the treatment and compensation of workers, the power corporations are exerting over intellectual property and creators, the continued extraction of resources, and the omnipresent glut of spam and disinformation with few or no regulations/resources that filter out the SEO AI generated nonsense

Before you punch a nazi, hug a Jewish person.

Before you punch a TERF, hug a trans person.

Being hateful is not going to stop hate.

I don’t think most non-Jews understand how disappointed we are in the left right now. How completely abandoned we’ve become. How our contributions to progress for other groups have been erased or disavowed or hidden. How the actual tangible things that Jews have contributed to black rights and civil rights are being ignored. How we’re being told we contribute and have contributed nothing.

How we are being told that the world has been kind to us when it never has. As if my mom didn’t grow up getting called a Kike and getting beat up for being Jewish. How I thought I had friends until I caught them saying “xyz was beautiful until Jews showed up.” How people told me I was pretty “for a Jew.” How I grew up hearing stories about bombs being set off in Israel in buses and markets. How I couldn’t even go two weeks without hearing that and how nobody cared and somehow, every time that happened, the whole world became more hostile to me for some reason.

I just don’t understand. I don’t understand what leftists are doing. Or why. I hate that I have to say—of course, I support a free and self determined Palestine (which I truly do)—in order for you to decide I’m worthy of care and support.

We showed up for you. All of you. And the entire movement is abandoning us at best or targeting us at worst. Celebrating our deaths. Saying we deserved it. How are we supposed to trust you ever again? How are we supposed to feel safe ever again?

A very few select people who are in my life have taken the chance to actually learn about and dismantle their own unconscious antisemitism during this time. And I’m eternally grateful for them. But most people haven’t reached out at all. Most people are still sharing hateful things that could get me hurt and they don’t care. Most people Reblogging my posts are still Jews. Because we are alone. And it sucks. You need to be as loud about antisemitism as you are about Palestine or you’re an antisemite (unless you’re Arab/Muslim/Palestinian—I totally get that these groups are also doing damage control in their own communities just like Jews are).

But we are all in tremendous pain right now.

This moment will pass. And when it does, I will remember how many people let me down. I will remember that when I needed support more than I’ve ever needed it in my life, people fucking vanished. They pretended violence against my people wasn’t happening. They ignored and rewrote the history of Israel to suit their own narratives.

You don’t know what it feels like to be hated this much for opposite things. PoC hate us for being too white. White supremacists hate us for not being white enough. Europeans hate us for being middle eastern. Middle easterners hate us for being western/European. Everyone hates us for being settlers but continually kicks us out of their countries so that we have to settle somewhere else.

I saw a post going around from a Black person who said that the reason he and his fellow black activists go protest for Palestinians instead of fighting antisemitism (as if it’s a binary, which it’s not) is that Jews don’t show up. Muslims and Palestinians do. And honestly? Fuck that guy. Heather Heyer died standing shoulder to shoulder against racism in 2017. I have devoted substantial time and effort and money that I don’t even get paid a lot of because I don’t get paid a living wage. I have continually reached out to PoC people in my life of all religions to ask how they are doing and what I could be doing to help more—both for them personally and how they would best like me to help their community. I have elevated their voices at every opportunity. And not one person I checked in with has done the same for me or for my community.

And it’s bone chilling. It’s awful. And it’s even worse knowing that when it’s over, people will want to go back to normal. They won’t apologize. They won’t self reflect. They’ll just live their lives, maybe a little more aware of how much they hate us and completely indifferent to the harm they’ve caused us. How disposable they made us feel. And the thing is…it’s not hard for you to know. You just have to ask.

Too many people are cowards. Too many people care about looking good than actually learning something or making the world better. And to those people: you should be ashamed of yourself.

I don’t have any hate in my heart. Truly. Not a drop for any group of people. But I have a tremendous lack of trust that anyone would actually lift a finger to keep me safe.

🧿 ושמו את שמי על בני ישראל ואני אברכם 🪬

A Family portrait during the Spanish Flu, 1918 ♡

Honestly after seeing all the pink washing accusations against Israel I feel like people are becoming more comfortable being openly homophobic online again too.

I think you're right.

Fandom spaces may be one thing (I feel like you're referencing this post of mine, hence me bringing up fandom), but even those spaces aren't as welcoming as we want them to be. Most of the transphobia I've dealt with online came from self-identified trans people in fandom spaces, for example.

However, in this broader space where we discuss I/P, there is a huge uptick in homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, etc. This is definitely coming from without the community in the form of tokenizing, objectifying, making unreasonable/unmeetable demands, insisting on the reality of a Queer Hive Mind, and the like. I've seen too much of right-wingers posting support for Israel who then slip poison pills about queer and trans folk into their rants to deny this.

But the call is also coming from inside the house.

The kind of LGBTQ+s who were comfortable with Punch A Nazi rhetoric (and are now, largely, part of the Queers For Palestine-style movement) now perceive many of their own community as Nazis. And if it's okay to punch a Nazi, it's even more okay to use slurs against them. To mock their bodies and their perceived ability to pass as cis or straight. To reject them just as hard as cishet society rejects them and laugh at them when they say they feel isolated and alone.

To deliberately trigger them and then tell them to commit suicide.

I have the extremely controversial opinion that these behaviors are wrong, and that it's bad to be homophobic/queerphobic/transphobic because bigotry is bad no matter who it's coming from.