hot take

December should not be the month for talking about "X of the year" or "Y wrapped" or anything like that. All those discussions and summaries should happen in January. The year is not over yet. Get your act together

if I ran the zoo, there would only be four continents:

• Afroeurasia
• Austronesia
• Turtle Island
• Antarctica

you show up at a movie theater to see the latest blockbuster and it quickly becomes apparent that they're showing you a pirated copy that was surreptitiously recorded on someone's phone while in the theater across the street

if cole slaw is cold then there should be a ware slaw that's warm. bonus points if it's extra polish somehow

Hi, my name's Matthew Paintings and *huge sigh* I used to work in movies

points in favor of a film being a Liz Special:

• it's gay (Liz often pulls from queer film rec shelves)
• it's obscure (less likely to be recommended to me)
• it's bad (my friends have great taste but random Scarecrow shelves can be pretty hit-or-miss)

Every week, Liz goes to Scarecrow Video and grabs a bunch of movies for me at random off my Letterboxd watchlist. But as I power through movies week after week, year after year, that watchlist is dwindling... especially for English-language films I can watch while doing other stuff. So she's started throwing in the occasional movie that catches her eye from one of Scarecrow's many exciting curated sections. At the same time, I have absolutely no memory for what I put on my watchlist and why. So every time I watch a movie now, it's a fun game for me to try to figure out if someone recommended it, if I saw someone else on Letterboxd enjoy it, or if Liz grabbed it sight-unseen.

Zandra has a song she sings about this frog:

🎵 Push a block, ring a bell,
🎵 send a frog straight to hell

🎵 Turn the clock round and round,
🎵 put a frog in the ground

🎵 well it's a long, hard, cold day in hell
🎵 but that's especially true for a frog
🎵 and it's a long, hard, cold road ahead
🎵 so watch out if you happen to be a frog

The thing about making the world a better place is that all you have to do is make the world a better place. You don't have to dismantle capitalism, you don't have to stop every atrocity you've ever heard of, you just have to wake up most days with the intention to leave things better than you found them. There's so much that needs doing, and even if you just do a bit of it you're helping.

(loosely inspired by this post)

I've been reading Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, a fascinating book that makes an extremely compelling argument^[1] that the Zionist cause as well as many individual Zionists threw European Jewry as a whole under the bus during the Nazi years and particularly during the holocaust in order to eke out the highest possible number of Jews emigrating to Palestine in particular. The book emphasizes the solidarity between Palestinian and Jewish liberation, by framing the Zionist philosophy as collaborationist not just in practice but at its roots: Zionism is fundamentally the agreement with the antisemitic trope that Jews are a separate nation who do not belong in solidarity with the other inhabitants of the countries they have made their diasporic homes.

What the book doesn't point out explicitly, but I've realized while reading it, is another aspect to why Zionists seemed so blasé about averting or mitigating the murder of six million Jews^[2]. Because who were the six million Jews who died in Europe? They were specifically those Jews who did not immigrate to Palestine. The holocaust was, by and large, a slaughtering of one of the most potent threats to Zionist ideology: non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. And Zionists demonstrated (and stated outright) again and again that their first priority was establishing a Jewish state, not the welfare of actual Jews, so of course they didn't lift a finger to stop it. The Nazis were doing them a favor.

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1. Pointedly using only Jewish-authored sources to avoid charges of antisemitism! ↩︎

2. This is abundantly clear in both their actions and in Zionist primary sources during and immediately after the holocaust. Zionists only started accurately portraying it as the massive culture-defining tragedy that it is once it was safely ensconced in the past—and even then, actual survivors were reportedly look down on in Israel as weak and pathetic. ↩︎