We Should Be Fine As Long As We Do Not Reblog Bread.

Ok so my kid had an ear infection, right? As kids often do.

The doctor scraped out a bit of earwax to have a better look inside.

I was sent a bill for $200 PER EAR for this 5 second procedure which I did not give permission for them to do.

That was key- they did not ASK me if they could do this "procedure". And, as I OWN a medical practice (it's me. The medical practice is me, sitting in my house on video calls) I knew to call them when this bill came in to be like "You did not obtain informed consent for this procedure, and it was not en emergency procedure. You had full ability to gain my consent and didn't. I'm not paying."

And the massive hospital who owned the bill said "yuh-huh you do have to pay."

And I said "I own a practice. I know these laws. I do not owe you money for this."

And they conducted an "internal review" and SURPRISE! Decided I totally owed them money and they had never done anything wrong ever.

And so I called my state's Attorney General office, and explained the situation because, as I mentioned, I know the law. The AG got in touch within a couple days to say they were taking the case and would send the massive hospital conglomerate a knock it off, guys letter.

Lo and Behold, today I have a letter where said hospital graciously has agreed to forfeit the payment.

"How not to get screwed over by companies" should be part of civics class.

Know your rights and know who to call when they're infringed on. This whole process cost me $0 and honestly less effort than I would have expected.

May this knowledge find its way to someone else who can use it.

I’m still educating myself on the history of Israel and Palestine, but it seems to me that the main reason that people on the left are so in favor of a Palestinian state and not an Israeli state is because of the widely accepted narrative of Israelis being “the white colonizers” in this situation. If this assessment is correct, I think it exposes part of the problem with how willfully the left has accepted the idea of white people being colonizing bad guys. I don’t want to minimize white European’s legacy of imperialism of course, I believe dismantling that legacy should be done with care and a strong foundation in factual reality, because leftists have learned to hate the white settler, and that seems to be all fine and good until suddenly all it takes to dupe those leftists into anti-Jewish behavior is to convince them that Jewish people are white settlers. It seems that, in a movement aiming to combat hate, prejudice towards ANY group, even if it would appear to be punching up, acts as a blind spot through which they can find themselves acting prejudiced towards a historically down-trodden people.

The problem with antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Someone recently reblogged this post I shared that called out antisemitism in pro-Palestinian rallies. An action I was initially happy about, until I went into this person's blog, and saw a lot of posts that I, as an Israeli-Jewish person, find incredibly antisemitic. I found myself utterly baffled by that. Because this person clearly recognized the things said in these rallies were extremely antisemitic, and yet, they posted a lot of things that were rooted in the same antisemitic worldview. Can't they see it? And I think the main problem with the current pro-Palestinian movement is that they honestly can't see the line between being on the side of compassion and humanity and being critical of Israel's actions, to spreading horrible lies and dehumanizing Israelis and Jewish people. And the ugly truth these people refuse to face is that the reason they can't see when they cross this line is probably unconscious antisemitism.

You don't need to hate Jewish people to be antisemitic

Antisemitism, like many other forms of racism, often works on an unconscious level. Maybe you have Jewish friends. Maybe you fought for better Jewish representation in media. Maybe you are even Jewish yourself. But over the years you have been exposed to a lot of antisemitic ideas and stereotypes that altered your worldview and made you more vulnerable to believing Jewish people are the bad guys.

If your gut reaction to this is- "but Israel is actually doing bad things, so I'm actually right about hating them." Please keep reading.

Your idea of Israel and what it stands for is based on the worldview of the most radical right-wing Israeli activists at best, and blatant lies at worst.

Imagine if we took the words of the most radical Republicans out there, the ones that go after trans kids and believe women should have no right over their own bodies, and believe all Americans are supporting this idea. That wouldn't have been very fair of us, right? Because there are a lot of people in America who are fighting for a better future. A lot of people who are standing up for human rights.

Just like the United States isn't a homogeneous entity, filled with only trump supporters, Israel is also an incredibly diverse place, with people who have radically different ideas about how Israel should look. Even the current Israeli government, which is extremely right-wing, and has people in it I personally believe should have never been in a position of power, is probably a lot less evil than you were led to believe by ill-intent strangers on the internet. Mainly because this is still a democratic government, in a democratic country, which has a lot of checks and balances that (for the most part) manage to prevent people with radical ideas from making them into official policies.

I don't blame you for believing the reports you see from Gaza. As a pacifist, and as someone who voted for left-wing parties ever since I was eligible to vote, someone who truly believes the Palestinians has a right to self-determination and sees how problematic the occupation is, I struggle a lot when I see posts about the suffering of the people in Gaza. Wars are horrible. I never want to see other people suffer. Let alone children. I wish I could go there right now and take all of them somewhere safe. I wish none of this was happening.

But I also know who my people are, and the values they stand for. And what I noticed about these anti-zionist posts is that they are often written in a biased, misleading way. They often attribute malicious intentions to Israel's actions. And they often jump to conclusions, without giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. Without asking the right questions. And often, without any sort of proof. Some of these posts are outrageous lies. Others are incredibly biased and fail to mention the terrorist organization Israel is fighting against.

Only a small amount of them are coming from unbiased sources that describe the reality of the situation without giving in to personal interpretation.

But most of you can't tell the difference. You are seeing lies about how IDF soldiers are targeting children, or about how Israel is lying about their true evil intentions, and you accept them as the truth, without questioning the intention of the person who wrote that post. Without stopping to think this is incredibly dehumanizing to think Israeli people are capable of such monstrous actions. Without examining your own biases. And that's incredibly problematic, and yes, this is antisemitic. Because you would have never spread this kind of accusation about any other group of people without definitive proof.

This isn't to say our soldiers are never wrong, and that there aren't any bad apples, or even systematic problems in the IDF and every allegation should be thoroughly investigated, because any harm to innocent people is terrible, unavoidable as it may be. And ideally, even terrorists should get a fair trial.

But if you think soldiers in Israel defense forces, who are mostly 18-21-year-old Jewish men and women from all sides of the political spectrum, are inherently evil and baby killers, you are in fact antisemitic.

Even if you believe your type of anti Zionism isn't antisemitism being anti-zionist is still not a great position to take.

I never defined myself as a zionist before. But it was more to do with my own disconnection with Judaism and my ideas about the place of religion in modern society than my belief about the right of Israel to exist.

I think it would be amazing to live in a utopian world where we have one multicultural democratic state where everyone lives together in harmony. But I’m also a realistic person. And someone who wants to keep living as a free woman with full rights in my home country.

And while I never felt particularly zionist, I was never an anti-zionist, and I never believed zionist was a bad word.

I'm probably not the first person who tells you this, but Zionist isn't a synonym for "everything I hate about Israel". It doesn't mean "a person who supports the occupation", or even "a person who only cares about the life of Israelis" or "someone who fully supports the Israeli government".

So what does it actually say? Let's look at a dictionary definition.

Do you notice what the definition doesn't say? Anything about Israel's borders or about the idea of a Palestinian state. There are many types of Zionism, some more radical than others. But as I said before, is it really fair to judge an entire group of people based on the idea of the most radical of them?

The truth is, most of us just want to live in peace. We want to go to work without finding ourselves at the scene of a terror attack or running to the shelter because of rockets. We want all the hostages to come home. We want to feel safe in our own homes. This is what it means to be a zionist. This is what you are standing up against. Not the "occupation," or the "settlers" or the extremists in the government. Just regular people who want to live their lives.

Zionism isn't colonialism

Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel. This was the land we dreamed of in 2000 years of exile, and it's a huge part of our religion and our culture. This doesn't mean the Palestinians don't have a claim to the land as well after living on it for so many years, or that what they went through in 1948 wasn't terrible, but it doesn't magically make Israelis into white colonialists who woke up one day and decided to take over a random land.

A lot of mistakes were made. In 1948, and especially in 1967. And we are paying for them now. But the idea that Israel is a colonialist state that represents everything that's wrong with society is entirely false.

If you support the existence of a Palestinian state but don't believe Israel deserves the same right, you need to ask yourself why that is the case.

Is that because you don't believe Jewish people when they tell you about their connection to the land of Israel? Because you think there is something inherently wrong with the existence of a state that is only for Jewish people? (But have no problem with all the Muslim and Christian states out there) Because you think Palestinian deserves to live from the river to the sea and Israelis should have nothing, or whatever the Palestinians would be willing to give them? Because you are more comfortable with the idea of Jewish people as a minority in a Palestinian Muslim state than the idea of them having their own free country? Because you think you know better than us what our future should look like?

Because all of these reasons are antisemitic.

In a bit of a Slay the Princess Mood.

Yeah I’ve heard that before but it never seems to stick. No matter how many times people put forward this more enlightened idea of privilege, the wider leftist movement fails to adopt it, and we’re left in the same place of people acting like the disheveled homeless guy on the side of the street rambling to no one about nothing with seemingly no knowledge that everyone can hear him because he’s just that broken is benefitting from oppression or part of a privileged class because he’s white.

Its been said a thousand times but the idea that "privileged groups" are uniformly benefited by the oppression of their complementary "oppressed groups" is both detached from reality and fundamentally anti-solidarity

White agricultural workers in the antebellum and sharecropper-era american south did not fucking benefit from a captive black workforce working for nothing or close to it. They very much the opposite of benefited from this arrangement, and anyone trying to tell them otherwise was trying to sucker them. Cannot feed yr kids with psychological wages! What could compel anyone to intervene 150yrs after the fact on the side of the slavery propagandists?

So she’s essentially just spellcarving like Falst does but with lightning

Heyy, sorry if I'm missing something very obvious but I don't fully understand what Tess is doing on page 4.18. Is she carving a stone spell into the ceiling with her lightning to get VoidErin to fall to the ground? Because in that case I thought she'd have to use a stone lacrima. Or is she just carving a lightning spell and using it to magnetize Erin to the ground, and the sound effect's color being a blend of lightning and stone is because both magics are at play simultaneously?

The breakdown is as follows:

Step 1: Shape lightning into runes for a Sealing spell.

Step 2: shoot that shit at the ceiling

Void Dragon has already started releasing his hold on Erin at this point, convinced by Tess's argument that he needs her to stop Erin's uncontrolled magic and she won't do it if he doesn't bail. The magic isn't knocking Erin over, he's falling because the Dragon isn't holding him up anymore.

Step 3: Spell brands itself into the rock. No stone magic is required for this, although it would have made things easier for Tess - she's essentially using the lightning to break the rock in extremely precise patterns to spell the runes.

Sealing spells repel all forms of elemental energy, so this breaks the loop on Erin's uncontrolled channeling.

I know that all of you may feel bored with me constantly sharing the campaign here, but I assure you I have no other choice in order to save my family from annihilation and the difficulties we are living through,Please donate, share and spread the word.

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Sana’a and her family evacuate from Gaza, organized by Suha Shroof

Dear friends, We are reaching out to you with a heartfelt plea for help.… Suha Shroof needs your support for Help Sana’a and her family

My fellow American isat fans, be honest, did you really look at all the French sounding names and think it was symbolism for something and not the creators actual culture? I’m not trying to pull the “enlightened” card here, I know about as much about France as any other clueless American but idk how you get any conclusion from ISaT other than “Oh, seems like the creator is French. Neat.” 😂

Is project TS also in France? Is it elsewhere? Is it a mystery???

another fantasy france yeah, but my god people were so annoying about fantasy france that i really had to force myself to do it this time. im doing it out of spite now. for all the americans who played isat and went "baguettes.... french names..... french words.... what could this french symbolism really be about??? a mystery"

You know, a Minecraft Movie could have been a literal masterpiece if you had the right mindset to do it, and I'm not joking. I feel like nowadays studios are afraid of being genuine like a teen is afraid of being genuine. If a movie suddenly gets too excited about something, it needs to put it down so it doesn't sound "lame" or "cringe". You cannot be honest, and you cannot show love or absurdity without pointing out that it's stupid because you think OTHERS will believe it's stupid. So please bear with me:

Currently we have only a teaser trailer, it looks bad, it puts itself down, it's afraid of being genuine, it somehow managed to whitewash Steve (again), and I doubt that it will use things like the End Poem or how it feels to play Minecraft for its themes and story. I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm very cynical. So, let's think about it together.

Minecraft Movie. I saw a post suggesting stop-motion animation for it, and, honestly, it feels perfect, just like stylized 3D animation. Live action actors do not work with how Minecraft looks, and that's okay. Let's do an animated movie.

The plot. There's so, so many possibilities, but the beauty of making a Minecraft animated movie is that you won't ever be able to tackle all the possibilities it brings to the table. The community has made so many stories for the game, so we might as well just think of an "official" movie as a homage to the game and its community. We are adapting the way Minecraft feels.

End Poem, one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. Let's take that and put it in the movie, simple as that. You can only find it by defeating the Ender Dragon, so this will be how our movie ends. If we want it to end like this, then the objective of our protagonists must be to defeat the dragon.

Let's have Steve as our protagonist - not a whitewashed version, just Steve with his actual skin color left just the way it is. He'll represent us as players for our hypothetical movie. Have him wake up in an unknown world, not knowing why he's there. Just like how the game was all the way back in 2009, he's alone in a very lonely and foggy world. We follow him trying to look for other people, and then he has to survive his first night. This first part is both whimsical and a bit scary, because that's how many players felt when they first started it when they were kids, aallllll the way back.

Steve survives his first night. He's horrified, and then he realizes that he'll have to do it again. He doesn't know the "rules" of this world, but he's figuring them out, and the idea of "rules" and "what to do" will be important. Because, at its core, Minecraft doesn't have that many rules. It has no actual objective. You can do whatever you want, and this will be very (very) important.

Steve ends up building a small base with wood. Survives a bit more, and then, someway, somehow, he finds Alex. While he's more careful around things and very thoughtful on how and what to build, Alex is more of an adventurer, following the little tidbits of personality we see from them during Minecraft trailers. They're happy to know that they aren't alone, and we follow them build a very strong friendship and teach each other new things, just like how it is playing Minecraft in real life. They find a village, and find out that maybe they can leave this world, or at least find some answers, if they defeat the Ender Dragon.

From there, we have a good objective. The two continue progressing, and their base ends up becoming a castle, because who didn't want to build a castle when they were kids? And the world seems progressively more alive thanks to their interference on it, thanks to them helping the villagers, thanks to them being the players that they are. If you want more conflict, just add the pillagers as well.

Eventually, Steve and Alex have an argument about their points of view. They both want to know what's going on, but their way of doing things are different, and they care a LOT about each other, they're best friends, but who is doing things the "right" way? I don't like the idea of them separating because that happens in way too many movies. I want to see these two stick together, but their insistence on trying to do it "correctly" ends up putting them in a lot of trouble because they can't cooperate anymore. Y'know. How people fight and argue about a "correct" way of playing the game. How we as players miss old Minecraft - or do we? Do we miss the simplicity of older times, or do we miss our childhood creativity and willigness to do whatever comes to mind?

Anyways. A good alternative to this conflict would be either Alex or Steve - I'm leaning more towards Steve - being hesitant at completing the End Portal. He doesn't want to end his "dream", he doesn't want answers or to escape this world (aka leave good memories behind), he wants to stay there, but Alex knows that they can't be like this forever, even if she wants to stay. Regardless, they eventually come to a mutual understanding, and, TOGETHER, they go and fight the Ender Dragon. They win, and then the End Poem happens.

The fight against the dragon wasn't the ending; the realization that there are, indeed, no rules to put them down, or that they HAVE to leave everything behind, is the ending. They hear the poem while sitting next to each other. The world changed because of them, and sometimes it was for the worse, and sometimes it was for the better, but it did become much kinder, and they weren't alone. They don't HAVE to be. Just like how it actually happened in the actual game, through the 15 YEARS since it started to exist, and oh my God it's been 15 years already?! Oh my God-

Anyways. Movie ends with Alex and Steve having a lighthearted argument over what to build next. Steve wants another castle, Alex says that she has amazing ideas for something she's calling a "mob farm", and "trust me, it'll make our lives SO MUCH easier". And they're just being silly, because there are no rules.

Anyways thanks for reading this post, feel free to add your own things to it! Just had to get it out of my chest.

my favorite calvin and hobbes comic is the one where his dad just rolls up and casually destroys his entire night by pointing out some neat trivia about record players

Las serpientes son pajitas grandes