• 1 Post
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2025

help-circle


  • From what I understand, biological systems regulated by sex hormones require one or the other to work at all. For example, you get one pattern of post-puberty bone growth with estrogen, a different pattern with testosterone, and no bone growth at all if you have neither. These systems also have some counterbalancing factor, like your bones constantly being slowly dissolved to keep calcium in your bloodstream, so if you have no gonads and no supplementary hormones, you essentially speedrun osteoporosis over the course of a few years.

    I’m not too clear on other effects, but a lot of things are downstream of “your bones slowly melt,” and lots of other parts of your body rely on sex hormones to regulate them and will have long-term issues without them.







  • A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don’t count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn’t, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)










  • 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.



  • 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.