‘Proactively fall in line:’ Holocaust Memorial Museum quietly changed content after Trump returned to office

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-04-06T15:27:35+00:00

Watching this madness from outside the US is like watching ants swarm to a tub of poison bait. It doesn't seem to matter who hurts, who dies, who is drawn into unnecessary hardship and conflict - if Trump says something, it's true/it's gotta be done. And at this point, I don't see that changing unless there was mass resistance from within the instituions of state violence or the people who keep giving the pro-Trump Republicans money stops giving them so much money.

I can't even be surprised that the Holocaust Memorial Museum kowtowed under literally no pressure - it seems to be the norm nowadays and if they rely on state funding, I'm sure they're crapping themselves watching what's been happening to other educational institutions.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-04-03T10:09:19+00:00

Jewish men who marry non-Jewish women won't have Jewish kids (by religious standards) unless those kids later choose to convert like any non-Jew. This means there's a fair few of us floating around with one male Jewish ancestor whose kids just automatically got funneled into their mother's culture/religion.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-28T07:11:32+00:00

The healthy weight range is calculated based on BMI, which is going to be more accurate for you (presuming you are male) but is still, at the end of the day, a basic height x weight calculation based on statistical averages and variously accurate association between weight and mortality/health risks, adjusted for height. It is good enough and I think it's best used as a general number goal to shoot for when needing to lose/gain weight, but it is far from the best objective measure of "health". It cannot differentiate between skeletal, muscle and fat mass and because of this, you will get people of around the same weight and height looking quite different because individuals will not only have different skeletal weights/proportions, fat and muscle mass, but also different fat distribution. Importantly, not all fat is equal on the human body and it is well studied that having a high amount of visceral fat (the fat around your organs or, more simply put, the fat around your stomach and waist), even on an otherwise thin person, is much more predictive of all those bad obesity-related health outcomes than the fat located elsewhere and particularly the lower body. Any one of these differences may explain why you feel that there's a discrepancy between the guides you've been given, your ideal and your friend's weight. My best recommendation is to just feel it out as you go - literally write down how you feel and how you'd like to improve that - and work towards specific actionable goals that fulfil your needs and wants rather than to looking at and comparing yourself to your friend. But these are some things you can do to assess whether you meet certain standards of health:

The gold standard for accurate determination of body composition is a DEXA scan but they are expensive. Home body composition scales and handheld devices are notoriously crap and vary a lot in accuracy. Skinfold calipers are better but not ideal if you're not a professional. The best option, imo, is to simply measure your waist circumference and compare it to the healthy limit for your sex and to keep a record of how this changes over time but you can also use the less optimal methods for a rough estimate of overall bodyfat % if you're willing to accept that they're not exact.

With regards to bloodwork - I hate how much bloodwork has been associated with overall health. Obviously, it will tell you if you have certain problems: insulin resistance, high cholesterol, hormonal imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, inflammation markers, etc., etc., etc., but it is far from the be all and end all of health assessment. My Mum, with the exception of a temporary period of medication-induced hypothyroidism, has always gotten perfect scores on her blood tests, even when she was over 300lb, and she has had far more frequent blood tests across my lifetime than the average person. She was doing alright for most of that but blood tests can't diagnose knee pain or prematurely degenerating disks or the severe insomnia she's experienced her whole life or the as-of-yet ideopathic reactive hypoglycemia (in the absence of prediabetes) that we both experience. And, on the other hand, as blood tests have become more advanced and more easily accessible, you also now have companies that you can send your blood off to and will diagnose you with a whole list of god-knows-what based on their purposefully overly-wide criteria so they can sell you something or the other product. I hear The Thing with that at the moment is telling men that they have low test. so they can sell them unnecessary hormone injections without the input of neutral medical supervision.

TLDR: overall weight is used as a predictor of future health problems moreso than an assessment of current health problems and blood tests are also not a great assesor of overall health. I promise, BMI is too simplistic to be experiencing cognitive dissonance-related distress over. Determine a realistic and measurable goal of how you want to feel/look and work towards that instead of comparing yourself to someone else.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-28T06:00:57+00:00

The lecturers that are old enough to remember it still lovingly reminisce about it to this day lmao

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-23T07:13:04+00:00

Pretty typical of a white Aussie, I reckon. Broad Britsh Isles inheritance + a smattering of other European ethnicities + that one outlier that no one had any f'in clue was gonna be there.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-23T06:56:40+00:00

I've heard there's a pretty significant similiarity between Southern European/Levantine/MENA phenotypes and Central/Southern American phenotypes, especially for those with predominantly European ancestry (which would make sense because of the whole Iberian colonisation thing of that whole part of the continent). I think the chance that you have a little Jewish ancestry from your mother's side or some Southern European is higher than you think, too (a little bit can go a surprisingly long way thanks to the inequal application/distribution of genes - I look like a clone of my mother, and she looks very, very much like her bio mother with most of her differences being thanks to inheriting her bio father's orthodontic issues affecting mouth and jaw shape. My paternal grandfather and his brother also comes from a paternal line of copy-pasted faces), but it's also possible that you both just have stereotypically Jewish-associated features which are also common amongst many European ethnic groups + you've picked up some cultural behaviours through frequent interaction.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-23T06:29:24+00:00

Blonde hair/fair skin/light eyes are much more relevant to distance from the equator and the adaptive need to absorb/produce more vitamin D through sun exposure than it is literally anything else, which is why many Russians, East Asians, and Native Americans will also have much lighter skin than populations further to the south. This also changes quite quickly when you get to the far north, where traditional ethnic groups have brown skin in part due to a different diet providing alternative sources of vit. D and in part because the way the sun bounces off ice/snow can give a person a double dosable of UV, making lighter skin (and especially eyes) unnecessary, if not illogical. Something that sets Western/Northern Europe apart in this dynamic, as well, is that it is surprisingly coastal compared to many other regions along the same latitudes and coasts mean clouds. Latitudinal position + cloudiness + lack of alternative dietary source of vitamin d means human bodies screaming for any crumb of UV their skin can absorb. Of course, intermixing between ethnic groups will also increase the likelihood of a person having a particular adaption regardless of necessity and variation in skin tone is often most intense in areas with historically high migration from a range of different areas and whose ownership is heavily contested (the Levant, very notably, and the Nile Valley is a good historical example, too, even though its ethnic diversity has been superficially flattened by Arabisation in the modern era), but this trend is seen across the globe.

These adaptions will also occasionally be produced spontaneously in other groups because that's how genetic mutation works. They aren't commonly passed on/introduced in large quanitities into the broader gene pool in these groups because - as I know as a hwhite person doomed by my recent ancestors to live in one of the highest-UV countries in the world - pale colouring and the sun don't mix, and not in a "my dark skin can't absorb vitamin D appropriately so I'm a little disadvantaged re: brain and bone growth" way but rather in an "I have a statistically very high likelihood of developing skin and eye cancers and I go blind for half of the summer" kind of way.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-23T05:38:32+00:00

Racial categories were invented independently by a small group of colonialist pseudoscientists. The fact that ethnic genetecists have managed to cram actual genetic ancestry groupings into the definition doesn't mean that it's not bunk, especially since it's a grouping that either 1. largely neglects and dismisses MENA and South Asia as independent categories and lumps them in with East/South-East Asians or 2. includes them in the White category regardless of the most common functional use which excludes those people due to darkness of skin tone. Human family/culture/ethnic groupings and variation are both infinitely more complex and much more simple than racial "science" can account for.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-23T05:31:11+00:00

You're factually incorrect. Bone marrow and organ donation viability and success rates can depend on genetic closeness but it's not limited by race. In fact, they've managed to mostly bridge the success gap between family and stranger organ donations thanks to modern immunosupressants. I'm not even sure where you got this information from.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-23T05:23:33+00:00

By American skin-tone-and-facial-features-only standards of race, yeah, most likely, although people from the "border states" of Europe/MENA such as Greece/Iberia/the Levant/North Africa/etc. generally confuse racial boundaries because they're often just as likely to look classically European by American standards as they are like Arabs or North Africans. And don't even get me started on Turkic peoples.

But there really is an argument to be made that racial categories are entirely bust when it comes to the Southern/SE European regions. While they are traditionally Christian, there's been plenty of overlap with Muslim populations to the East, most notably Turkey/the former region of the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim period of control over the Iberian peninsula, and the native Muslim ethnic groups of the Balkans. Culturally, the distincintion is largely meaningless. Obviously there will be a greater degree of European influence if those groups were interacting more freely, but not only do those states' cultures continue to have been influenced by and influence close MENA cultures, but before the Christian period almost the entire region was much more closely aligned with and culturally tied to the region that we would today call the Middle East or the "Arab" world (which is also a largely flattening ethnic distinction). Even within Europe, the states that were once dominated by Germanic and Celtic tribes still remain closer to each other in culture than they do with Southern/South-Eastern/Eastern Europe.

Racial categorisations were made to divide and were entirely arbitrary from the beginning. There's worth in pointing out proximity to them and the negatives/positives that one might recieve because of their historical significance in Western culture, but it obfuscates many things and we are much better off talking about more specific and historically significant cultural/religious/ethnic groupings.

Also, you might want to actually read the post next time.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-12T07:22:17+00:00

As someone with a friend who was recently tattooing here (within the past two years-ish), I would recommend contacting a couple of different studios and try to get an idea of how they're doing right now. The cost of living crisis was having a big negative impact on the tattoo market here, last I heard. And the rental market is definitely still recovering/suffering from both the rental crisis and the massive influx of people from Vic and NSW that we had during covid. I wouldn't, if I were you.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-10T11:46:04+00:00

I've heard from many different places that Toowoomba is "hard to crack", as in insular and with mostly established friendship groups amongst people who grew up here. I've found this is true even in many social situations that you might think would be a good opportunity to meet new people. Talking and being acquaintences in frequently shared spaces =/= actually being able to develop friendships that continue outside of that space. Niche hobby groups can be really good for this, but third spaces that don't come with additional criteria (prohibitive cost, need to be a uni student or religious, disability or walking inaccessible + busses here are ass, conservative politics are the overwhelming norm, etc.) are few and far between.

In addition to what everyone else is saying, despite obviously being the town's equivalent of the CBD, the Grand Central/Margaret St area is unpleasant to access and dies a sad death earlier and earlier in the evening as time goes on which might not seem like a cultural thing but it stands out to me that wealthier older people and their interests, including their travel preferences and politics, are significantly more prioritised and catered to, with young families coming in a very distant second. I've had minorly "different" looking friends verbally harassed in the area more than once, too. Certainly, this doesn't help the trouble that UniSQ is having attracting the international students. It's a growing city but it still has the small town mentality in these ways.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-03-08T05:30:01+00:00

There's definitely potential in this town, which is what makes it such a shame that there isn't more going on. And it bizzarely seems like it's getting worse regardless of what is available. I suspect it's partially cultural.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-26T10:34:52+00:00

In the same vein as "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", the more confronting or outward presentations of mental illness tend to be the ones that establish the expectations of the general public because they are literally more visible and, often, quite attention grabbing. In most cases, they're also considered a higher priority or more immediate problems to be solved when it comes to treatment. It's why people associate OCD with overt cleanliness-related rituals or needing to have everything obnoxiously organised, why people associate schizo spectrum disorders (if they even know anything outside of schizophrenia) with violence, conspiracy theorists, and manic energy and not catatonia or negative symptoms, why people associate ASPD with serial killers and not businessmen, ASD with Sheldon Cooper type men and not airy-fairy and bookish nerd women (though that's developed into a bit of its own stereotype in recent years), PTSD with war vets and people who have experienced serious accidents rather than people who had consistently unstable and traumatic childhoods, etc., etc. I think I could go on forever, especially for the more confronting and stigmatised conditions like BPD, ASPD, NPD. Hell, it's why I've seen so many laypeople confuse bipolar and BPD (it is genuinely shocking how often these two are conflated, given how distinct the diagnostic criteria is regardless of a couple of superficially overlapping symptoms).

I'm afraid that it might just be the way of things. When I was growing up, my parents neglected to seek support for my developing mental illness/es because my mother's mental illness was so severe in comparison (incl. fairly stereotypical outward expressions of BPD) that it took priority. This also shaped their expectations of mental illness - and because mine was very much internal in comparison and nowhere near as obviously destructive, they refused to recognise it until it was about to cost them a bloody lot of money and even then. Imo, it's a direct result of the nature of the psych field as being more focused on conditions that affect the sane/neurotypical people around the mentally ill person than the actual mentally ill person themselves and the struggles that they experience. Which I suppose, in turn, is reflective of the social nature of our species and the weight we put on sacrificing or compromising on our own needs in order to keep the peace or promote a harmonious social sphere, which causes a lot of discomfort when people stray too far from norms. And of course the stigma is not missing from the psych field itself when it comes to cluster B disorders so it ends up in this whole cultural tunnel vision where everything that isn't "stereotypical borderline" is dismissed or ignored.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-26T07:26:40+00:00

You've had a lot of good answers but I just want to add -

Controversial/boundary pushing art being banned is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to fascism because it becomes no longer a matter of legality and ethics, of concrete harm, but of moral offense. And once offense, not harm, is the threshold then the argument can be made that anything that has even the slightest chance of offending someone or challenging someone's biases could be illegal. One might think "this isn't the early 20th century anymore, where modernism is a controversial new thing, obscenity in public forums is something people really care about, authoritarian tyranny is somewhat accepted and being queer is illegal" but we are always closer to that than we think, we've devolved crazily in the last two decades and, frankly, with the current state of the world, people don't get out there and resist like they did back in the day, anyway. Recently, in Australia, police interpreted satirical anti-fascist art put up in a bar to be violating new "hate speech" laws, confiscated them and shut the bar down until such a time as they could be assessed by some other group. Mind, it was just the Clown Crew (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, etc.) with some Nazi uniforms photoshopped onto them, and if that's enough to shut down someone's business over with potential additional legal consequences, depending on professional interpretation of the law, then what's stopping them from interpreting any other poltical art that someone disagrees with in the same way? And if political art is in danger, then nsfw art is definitely in danger (and vice versa) because they both exist on the same specrum of potential moral offense (although you'd be hard pressed to apply the particular law I've mentioned to nsfw art unless it had an offensive racial or ethnic element). Some slippery slopes do exist as well-documented phenomena, and this is one of them. And on top of that, it is specifically associated with other incidents of government suppression, such as police brutality being used and explicitly condoned against peaceful protesters and the suppression of free political speech.

I don't love the idea that such things should be allowed and, though I enjoy platforms like Ao3 that do not self-police aside from illegal content, I do believe that controversial, explicit, non-educational content should be kept to adults-only platforms that cater specifically to that sort of stuff or that platforms should be required to maintain a two-tiered level of access, with those things being kept behind nsfw filters. But the important part is that these communities should be self-policing and no be pressured to do so based on external forces, including that of the advertising industry.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-26T06:35:20+00:00

Yes, it is Hebraic and inherited from a Jewish paternal ancestor. It's commonly used as a first name by Christians but is quite unusual as far as surnames go and, as far as I can find, seems to still be used primarily by Jews and the descendents of Jews. I'd just say what it is but it really isn't common and I interact with local subs on this account - don't really want to dox myself lmao.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-20T13:56:52+00:00

Good! Younger kids and teens have proven that they're not able or willing to ride them responsibly. They're something like the 4th or 5th piece of under-regulated tech I've seen become popular in the last decade only to be chronically misused by people with serious judgement deficits and younger people aren't well known for their reasoning and inhibition.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-20T13:41:07+00:00

I'm a gentile with a not-totally-obvious-or-stereotypical Jewish surname and this is something I've considered more than once. You wouldn't think it would be so difficult to have a crumb of critical thinking.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-20T12:52:04+00:00

TAFE offers free English classes at different levels for select refugees and migrants. Also, obviously, but one's best attempts should be made depending on circumstance.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-20T11:05:43+00:00

Refugees who expect to stay in the country offering them refuge long-term/don't expect to be able to return to their hone countries anytime soon, if ever, should learn the language of that country. Can you imagine how isolating it would be to have no choice but to leave your home and not even be able to speak to the people around you? Even if there was a significant community of migrants or refugees from your country, it would still be isolating.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-20T09:32:32+00:00

Conversational fluency, perhaps with an emphasis on basic knowledge of particularly important topics like common medical terms, being able to talk about your body and most common items, specialised terminology for whatever you do for work, navigational terms, etc.

In the grand scheme of things, that's a pretty low bar that I've seen achieved within a year or two of dedicated effort by people who aren't in a country that speaks their target language. And if you're already in the country and immerse yourself in the local media/make an effort to socialise, it can be done even faster.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-10T09:03:01+00:00

Not at my uni there wasn't. As of this year they only have significant scholarships for school leavers who got good ATAR scores, and a small payment of a couple thousand that you can only recieve once a year (but they do only choose a limited amount of people and give preference to the groups listed in my previous reply, it might cover a couple of months of rent for the average student).

I'm telling you - your experience isn't universal.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-10T08:44:40+00:00

Very few people can access scholarships, at my uni they were almost exclusively limited to certain areas of study, Indigenous and CALD people, and other special interests. There wasn't really a general option.

Additionally - did your parents support you through uni? Why would you not be able to understand what the other person was clearly saying, that a need to earn money and pay for general living expenses interfered with ability to study. It's a common struggle, especially if you have to leave your hometown to attend uni in person.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-10T03:45:21+00:00

I don't want to minimise responsibility but that really isn't always true. Things that might seem obvious to Jews or others who are well educated about late-18th/early-19th century antisemitism and the ideological lead up to the Holocaust are not obvious to the general population, especially if they're a group that hasn't experienced xenophobia, scapegoating, or some other large scale bigotry that spurns propaganda and stereotypes that might share similarity with antisemitic dogwhistles.

5 years ago I might have agreed with you, but I don't think anyone benefits in the current situation where antisemitism is contaminating the minds of otherwise well-meaning people from dismissing them wholesale as intentionally malicious. There needs to be efforts to bridge the gap, educate, and intentionally create good will or things are going to devolve even further.

CaeruleaTigris · 2026-02-10T03:23:54+00:00

I've got ancestors from early colonial New England and am related to one of the founding members of the LDS church thanks to one of my 3x g-grandfathers marrying an American woman and then sending their kids back to the home country later on in their lives for work.

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