I don't think the people who do things like that actually pay attention to what they're doing. It's like a subconscious reflex for small-time Christian singers, or something.

iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries "for free" (even though they already chip in).

Maybe they listened to one of the covers that seemingly obliviously changes the line to "the shrine of your light"

Chabad are mostly notable for being less insular than most Orthodox sects, doing a lot of outreach to secular/Reform/Conservative Jews, and thus ending up as one of the big names in overseas funding for Zionism in the modern day. They're really the mainstream face of Orthodox Judaism, and the fucked up abuse scandals in Israel have tended to come from fringe, Messianic sects that the state's Rabbinate and larger organizations like Chabad can at least pretend to distance themselves from.

As for the Talmud, it's weird how much it tends to get played up in antisemitic narratives, because in my (very limited) experience it is really, incredibly dry and mostly boring. It's like reading Reddit comments on every page of the scriptures, where 5 incredibly pedantic nerds are arguing over what exactly counts as a fork, or what a story about a wage dispute is supposed to say about contract law and social hierarchy. There's a predictably authoritarian "just listen to your boss and your rabbi" bent to the morals it extracts, but at the end of the day it's a couple thousand pages of mundane, day-to-day legal doctrine. Anyone can learn Talmud, it's just a lot of effort, and like a lot of difficult religious texts, it mostly ends up being a source local authority figures can pull out to settle arguments in their favor.

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

There's a lot of government and religious NGO money funneled around Israel for religious schools and student stipends, so any unscrupulous rabbis looking to start an abusive cult have plenty of opportunities handed to them. It's really not unlike the various Christian cults that sprouted up on compounds in the American West, taking advantage of cheap resources and isolation tactics to build organizations that beat the shit out of children or do whatever else they want.

Edit: I think the settlements in particular create a similar physical dynamic, where living on stolen land ringed with fences and security checkpoints allows leaders to create an insular community that keeps victims in and accountability out. Even twenty minutes' drive from Jerusalem, no one gets into a settlement without arranged permission, and a housewife with no car may as well be stranded out on the prairie.

A lot of those reports are nonsense. There's solid evidence that several dozen, maybe a hundred at most, people were killed by friendly fire, which tends to get exaggerated to "every single victim at the Nova festival was killed by helicopter strafing under the Hannibal Directive." Neither side anticipated how easy the siege would be to break, and the resulting undisciplined bloodbath isn't out of line with similar anticolonial revolts throughout history. I don't think there's any reason to jump to conspiracy theories to explain the results of the Israeli government getting lost in its militaristic hubris and dehumanization of Palestinians.

It would make a very apt metaphor for the machines as a social construct, fragments of billions of people's subconscious thoughts combining to maintain the system that holds them captive.

So? That's their problem. There are people who'd dance on my grave if I died tomorrow, too, and what they think has just as little bearing on my decision to keep living. Categorically irrelevant. You can't show someone the beauty and joy of living by dragging them through shame. Worse still, pegging your self-worth to others' suffering creates an implicit threshold, a thought stuck in the back of your mind: "What if the suffering I cause now is more than the momentary pain I'd cause by stopping?"

It feels good to tell people things like this. It's one of the most awful things to hear.

For years I lived right by the sea. I had plenty of alcohol and medications. the prevailing currents would've swept my body across the border into a hostile country, where no one who found it would've cared. I don't live to spare anyone else's feelings, not least those who would mourn me as dead for living the life I want to live. I live because I deserve it, I deserve my family's respect and care while we're both here, and I don't need anyone else's shame.

To live on solely for obligation and guilt isn't living at all, and anyone who wishes that on someone else just so they can remain a half-dead trophy they can congratulate themselves for "saving" can eat shit. If you're reading this and you need to hear something, keep going. Keep trying. We live in an insane world; sometimes you have to try the same thing over and over so you can get different results. Live another day and see what happens. Not for anyone else, but because it's a shame to miss out on this wild a ride.

This post honestly just pisses me off. Your life is worth living. Not your parents' child's life. Yours.

The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe