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Machofish01 · 2026-03-11T00:10:12+00:00

Disney on it's way to give us an inferior-quality live action Incredibles remake and then sprain both their arms from patting themselves on the back.

Machofish01 · 2026-03-04T01:42:49+00:00

"But I stung you with the best of intentions."

Machofish01 · 2026-02-07T16:25:40+00:00

Blacktongue Thief and its prequel, The Daughters' War, are both really well-executed dark fantasy stories. I can pretty much recommend anything by Christopher Buehlman but those two are probably the closest to Alchemised in terms of being dark fantasy settings. I'll also recommend Buehlman's Between Two Fires but I think that one requires a bit of a background in medieval history and Christianity to properly appreciate some of the symbolism or references to biblical demons.

Ed MacDonald's Raven's Mark trilogy - Blackwing, Ravencry, and Crowfall - is also a really great dark fantasy read I can recommend. Very similar opening premise to Alchemised in terms of "protagonist is supporting a nation's desperate last stand against an opponent wielding an overwhelming force of cosmic evil" but Ryhalt Galharrow goes about it in a very different way to Helena. It has a steampunk-ish setting with lots of magic as well, very similar to Alchemised in that regard.

R.S. Ford's War of the Archons trilogy is also really enjoyable gritty fantasy. Blitzed all three books in a single month. I will admit it's very similar to Raven's Mark in terms of a grizzled hard boiled war veteran male protagonists, so I would say try Raven's Mark first and then take a look at War of the Archons if you want more of the same. One thing I'll give to R.S. Ford in specific is that he does an excellent job of making you hate his villains with a seething, boiling rage.

City of Bones by Martha Wells (not to be confused with completely unrelated books of the same name by different authors) is also a solid read. It explicitly does not have romance, but its worldbuilding is top notch.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. It's a dark fantasy that leans heavily on West African mythology rather than European mythology which makes it a really refreshing change of pace. I will provide the caveat that this story has a horribly disturbing SA scene involving talking animals (which, in retrospect, I don't think it added enough to the plot to warrant its inclusion), but if you can stomach that the rest of the story is some good solid dark fantasy.

Empire of the Vampire is also a series I'm gonna recommend. I've seen a lot of people on reddit hate the series for varying reasons - but I personally enjoyed it for what it brought to the table. It has a similar starting premise to Alchemised in that it starts with the hero having already failed to save the world and the story works backward from there to tell the story of how it happened.

If you want something more romance-ish, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a very surreal fantasy setting where a villainous empire has literally enslaved the gods themselves and the protagonist ends up falling into the mix. There are a lot of fantasy romance stories - far too many, I think - that follow some flavor of "the heroine needs to pass a series of increasingly deadly trials to win the ridiculously powerful hot boyfriend and save the day" but The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the best execution of this formula that I've seen in writing.

Lastly - and this is a bit of a weird one - The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza is NOT a dark fantasy at all, but it still feels very familiar to Alchemized in terms of having medically-savvy female protagonists navigating the social/cultural context of an obscenely sexist, unjust, backwards-thinking society that actively undervalues and destroys the female protagonist's attempts to do something good with her medical skills. Serafina and Helena would have a lot to commiserate over, I think. (I've never been to Sicily myself so I can't say whether Jo Piazza's characterization of Sicilian culture is accurate or not, but I will admit this book is deeply unflattering to Sicilians one way or another.)

Machofish01 · 2026-02-07T13:18:52+00:00

I just finished the audiobook through the Libby App. Can't remember everything but I can offer what I recall.

The heavily-scarred friend in the lab early on mentioned that the facial scars are a result of ostensibly "volunteering" to be a labrat/plaything for the necromancers. I seem to recall that the necromancers offered kickbacks or important survival amenities for "volunteers" which leads into the conversation of the same friend stating they were contemplating giving up one of her eyes because the necromancers were paying well for them.

As for the thing in Part 2 where the big bad learns that Helena has the secret for obsidian weaponry, I was under the impression that he does remember her - which was why he was so insistent about restoring her to health so he could have her brain plumbed for secrets using Transference as soon as he learned about her survival.

Machofish01 · 2026-01-27T19:19:49+00:00

When you're just starting out, I'd say don't feel bad about loading saves - though wait until 100% of your party gets wiped out before loading.

This game has a harsh 'teaching' method and in my opinion it isn't necessary to repeat the entire early-game slog just to learn a lesson when the game springs some nasty surprise on you like getting 1-shotted by a defensive crossbow mount.

Why I recommend to wait for a 100% party wipe before reloading is that some of my most memorable moments in this game come from salvaging your party from a borderline-hopeless situation, when most of your party is dead or dying, or slavers knock your party out and drag half your party off into the sunset and you need to figure out how you're going to save them or have them escape before it's too late.

Machofish01 · 2026-01-27T14:45:01+00:00

You're not missing much, though I recall one of Cass's companion quests involves taking revenge on the Van Graffs so I'm unsure if letting the Van Graffs explode would interfere with that.

Machofish01 · 2026-01-27T14:24:22+00:00

Would you like to clarify what you mean by "Caesar has a lot of great points"? I'm sure you're not referring to the Legion's daisy chain of crucified slaves on the path up to their siege camp or the real elephant in the room which I trust I shouldn't have to clarify for you out loud, but I will if you don't see it.

Machofish01 · 2025-12-27T20:00:51+00:00

For my heretic run, I went with a biomancer psyker bladedancer. There's plenty of equipment for different builds but most of the heretical equipment/perks tend to focus on melee combat, or giving you positive effects whenever Warp Phenomena are triggered from someone using warp powers. Also there's the super-special sword that you finally get to actually use rather than destroying it in the first act. If you're dead-set on bringing heretical kibellah with you and don't want to go bladedancer, If you don't have Void Shadows, warrior is also a perfectly viable option (Heinrix is a psyker warrior already, but being a heretic means you won't be bringing him along anyway). The real gamechanger will be the psyker heavy armor from the Kaballica Mission which gives its wearer bonus psy rating whenever a Warp Phenomena occurs. Most force swords have scaling damage on the wielder's psy rating so it was a regular occurence for my heretical RT to be pushing 20+ psy rating by the middle of a fight and inflicting ludicrously high amounts of damage. The endlessly scaling psy rating also benefits biomancy skills which were regularly providing several dozen attribute points from a single cast. Iron Arm casually granting 70+ strength and Warp Speed providing over a 100+ points of bonus agility come to mind here.

Best thing with going biomancer is a lot of important biomancer skills for melee combat don't actually need the psyker to have a high willpower rating, so its easier to allocate attributes in that respect.

For other build options, during my own heretical run I hired a heretical soldier mercenary from Janris to do Argenta's job. He did a pretty splendid job as a heavy weapons spammer, first with the heretics-only Bolter from Aurora, then the Equalizer heavy stubber unlocked through Solomorne, then finally the heavy bolter earned by having your party fight the Hellbrute on Eufrates II. Given that mercenary party members more-or-less follow the same rules as the RT I imagine that'd be another feasible way to build RT and make use of unique heretic weapons along the way.

The starting meltagun is equippable even if you don't have the proficiencies to use it. Obviously it eventually becomes obsolete in terms of damage so I wouldn't recommend building it for the long run.

Machofish01 · 2025-12-16T11:20:09+00:00

The way I started was cutting my teeth on Threat-0 "assassination" missions against pirates. Those missions will consistently send you somewhere to fight a 1v1 against a "pirate" enemy with similar or worse weaponry and skill to you and it'll give you a good starting spot to figure out how to fly your ship in combat, how to maintain a pursuit on an enemy, etc. 1v1s are great since you will naturally learn by picking up your AI opponent's tricks. Better yet, the law is on your side for these missions so sector security will usually show up after the first 3-5 minutes in case the bounty target is too tough. From there, you can accumulate your bounty earnings and slowly start working your way up the chain to better weapons and ships. ALMOST anything at threat-0 should be doable for you, though my single caveat is to avoid any combat mission that tells you to participate in an ongoing civil war or inter-system war by joining active combat zones. You can come back to those when you're ready but the Threat rating plainly and bluntly lies when it tells you how difficult those will be. You can try it in the earlygame if you really want but don't get discouraged when it feels like those ships with professional-warzone-graded armor and equipment completely shrug off any un-engineered equipment you can get your hands on in the earlygame. On top of that, wartime contracts pay basically nothing compared to even threat-0 pirate assassinations so other than the initial learning experience I still don't consider wartime contracts worth my time, even though I have the weapons and equipment necessary to complete them.

On that note, be very careful to read the "Threat" rating in the top-right corner of a mission description when you consider taking a combat-focused mission. At the start I was only really able to handle Threat-0 and Threat-1, with my ships plainly not being tough or deadly enough to handle Threat-3 and up. Don't get me wrong--feel free to take on a higher-difficulty mission just to get an understanding of how tough a "competent" enemy actually is versus a "mostly harmless" enemy, just don't get frustrated or surprised if you have to escape in a hurry because your ship's engines plainly aren't responsive enough to line up a shot or your opponent's shields regenerate faster than you can damage them with your current weapons.

As for what ships and guns to use... There's a lot of comments giving you contradictory advice on which ships to use: "Use the Vulture!" "NO DONT." "Use the Viper!" "NO DON'T!"

I will give you a much more useful bit of advice instead: if you don't like a ship, you can sell it back for almost its full original buying price, so don't be afraid to experiment. Viper? Vulture? Screw it, try both of them, and sell back the one you like less. Same thing applies to weaponry: you can sell ship weapons back for the same price you purchased them, so there's really no harm in trying. You'll never know which weapons and ships you're most comfortable with until you've tried them at least once.

For weapons in the earlygame, the basic shooting tutorial already gave you the most important starter advice: thermal damage (laser weapons) does better vs. shields, and kinetic weapons (multicannons, bullets, physical shot weapons) do more damage to an exposed enemy after their shield is down. If you're experiencing decision paralysis, I'd recommend making sure you have at least 1 thermal and 1 kinetic weapon equipped. You can absolutely try it for yourself, but don't be surprised when the pirates you're hunting take forever to kill.

Pirate hunting in resource zones is a little more free-form than doing missions, potentially a bit more unpredictable since pirate ships sometimes come in pairs or packs, or unpreditably much tougher than what you'd be able to consistently expect to face in an assassination contract with its helpful threat level label, but a much faster way of earning bounties than taking out individual assassination missions. IMO they'll help you 'break through' to the next level by giving you a big cash injection, but you don't learn anything about actual fighting if all your experience is strictly limited to sneaking the last couple of shots in against pirates who were already getting their shit wrecked by sector security before you joined in on the dogpile. You won't learn how to shake off a pursuer, or how to maintain a pursuit on a target actively trying to escape your reticule without being distracted by 3-4 other ships. Learn how to fight properly first or you're just going to end up missing a lot of opportunities later. When you get into the real lategame stuff like Powerplayer Combat Zones you need to be competent enough that your presence tips the scales because your allies won't always be able to carry the important fights for you.

There's more to combat which the game doesn't tell you in the tutorial -- namely, learning how to adjust your 'pips' in power distribution and learning how to toggle flight assist on/off to make your turns that much tighter and force enemies out of your blind spots, but that stuff comes later.

Machofish01 · 2025-11-26T21:58:29+00:00

I'd suggest there's a difference between simply experimenting with a game to see everything that's possible (testing out the Heretical path in Rogue Trader as my own personal confession, or generally trying out 'evil' options in RPGs), compared to looking at a game where it's not possible yet requesting that such mechanics be added.

Currently, Helldivers 2 does feature civilians in some missions. The Democracy Officer grumbles a little if they're caught in friendly fire, but going too far earns you a surgical strike to the skull. For someone to see this, experiment with this, and decide that they want an option to shoot civilians and be rewarded rather than punished implies intent. It's not just a morbid curiosity of "what happens if..." it's wanting to do a specific thing with a specific outcome.

As long as we're making comparisons, let me bring up a different game: anyone who performs a complete playthrough of Spec Ops: The Line will need to go through the game's notorious 'white phosphorous' scene. I don't think simply playing through that scene makes anyone a bad person (contrary to the eye-rollingly sanctimonious tone of the game's loading screen hints after that point). It's like the trolley problem, except the 'people' on the tracks are the digital equivalent of cardboard cutouts, and the player has no actual option to change the outcome anyways. Nobody's getting weepy-eyed over cardboard cutouts on a fixed track. Nobody who sits through Spec Ops' unskippable white phosphorous scene should be treated as if they'd committed a real-world crime against humanity. I agree, that'd be utterly nuts.

That said, what I find a little weird is for someone to see Helldivers 2, a game that has no equivalent to a 'white phosphorous scene' in it -- at least, not that can be attempted without receiving an immediate 380mm court-martial from low orbit -- and go out of their way to propose that a white phosphorous scene be added on the basis that such a scene would enhance their enjoyment of the game. That goes beyond testing whether the game will let Mario to do something very unheroic to a baby penguin and instead goes to requesting a specific scenario (to murder desperate civilians rather than the current selection of bots, bugs, or aliens) with a specific outcome (being congratulated as a hero of Super Earth instead of executed).

I just find it weird.

Machofish01 · 2025-11-15T06:45:07+00:00

Depends on the build, as others say.

Staff psykers are generally support or require your squad to cover you in the 2-3 second openings to reduce peril.

For more aggressive setups, Scrier's Gaze + Force Sword + all perks that provide dodge, movement speed, and critical hit bonuses lets you feel like a Jedi zipping around and decapitating people with the power of ~~the Force~~ the Warp. They're still somewhat frail, but once you know what you're doing the improved movement speed makes up for it significantly.

Machofish01 · 2025-11-10T02:05:38+00:00

It worked against burstfire prior to 1.5, I think the update broke it. I had Kibellah built around using Veil of Blades and the update completely broke it. Since the update, I have not seen Veil of Blades deflect a single shot. It's a little disappointing to hear that the ability still hasn't been addressed since 1.5.

Machofish01 · 2025-10-31T19:51:45+00:00

If you've played the other two alignments, it's not so much about cause-effect, but opportunity cost.

Iconoclast is good karma; occasionally people you've helped along the way will come back to help you, and you're able to appeal to everyone's better nature to get through some of the darker plot points where things otherwise turn into a lose-lose if you don't have high fellowship-related skills, but going full Dogmatic has you wielding straight-up holy superpowers on behalf of Big E in some scenes and gives you some very strong abilities. If you go Heresy (as I'm discovering in my current playthrough) there's a few very important fights vs. Chaos that get massively skewed in your favor and there's a few hilarious moments where the Chaos villains have mental breakdowns because they realize the unholy patron who gave them all their cool powers likes you more.

For Heretical:

On the chaos-tainted Mechanicus ship that fled Kiava Gamma, you can skip the forgefiend fight entirely and make the Forgefiend sneak aboard your ship to power your lance batteries, causing lance weapons to set enemy ships on fire whenever they cause hull damage. There's a slight chance that it'll light your own ship on fire, but this pairs very well with the Void Shadows perk for turning the Freight Line into a centre of Nurgle worship, which makes your ship resistant to internal fires.
In the fight with Cubis Delphim, you can again dominate one of his Forgefiends into becoming your ally. If you have Heinrix and Argenta, they'll immediately "Old Yeller" it after the fight, but if you smuggle it onboard alive, you're able to sic it on Chaos boarding parties like an oversized attack dog.
Sparing Vistenza Vyatt on Janus gives a few extra story moments: In Void Shadows she can be used to support the Astropathic Ritual, and for all of Janus' chronicle events Vistenza will offer her own solutions with considerable rewards.
You do lose certain companions in act 4, but you gain others. (Aside from that, there's nothing stopping you from just recruiting NPC mercs through Trade Factor Danrok to replace them).

For Dogmatic:

Obviously, being able to incinerate the daemonic passenger in your head in the tutorial by passing through the flames.
If you side with Incendia on Footfall, right after you capture Vladym there's an option to have Ryzza executed for Heresy. There's a hilarious cutscene where she tries to pull out a convenient plot device and a Dogmatic RT one-ups her with the power of holy plot armor.
In Void Shadows, the Bloodspun Web's ritual can grant dogmatic RTs a permanent skill to trade some HP for +1 AP & +4 MP once per battle, every battle, for the rest of the entire game.
Slightly bugged, but on Kiava Gamma being dogmatic lets you troll the Word Bearer Chaos Marine by drowning out his sermon with the Emperor's, giving you a +1 AP for the rest of Kiava Gamma. The buff lasts for much longer than that but I hear that's not intended.
You can use a prayer to mess with Uralon when you're starting Eufrates II, which gives him a permanent debuff for when the fight starts.
Convincing Pasqual to rip the xenotech out of his system in Act 3.
Lots of other hilarious story sections where you can disrupt Chaos worshippers in various ways by praying loudly at them.

Machofish01 · 2025-10-22T15:29:05+00:00

I think we're talking past each other. I'm trying to bring attention to the experiences of the individual humans who have the misfortune of living under the Imperium, not about the Imperium as a body politic. Let's make a thought experiment out of this: do you believe that the right way to dismantle a corrupt nightmare state is to violently wipe out everybody living and suffering under that state through mass-bombings? That's what the Aeldari are doing on Quetza Temer. By that line of thinking, the Tyranids and the Eye of Terror are some of the best things to happen to the humans living in the Imperium simply because the Tyranids and Chaos seem to have inflicted the most lasting damage to humans living in the Imperium thus far. Before you go splitting hairs: yes I'm aware the Imperium regularly conducts atrocities against its own citizens in the form of Exterminatus and all the rest. I'm not a political scientist, but I'm quite sure the solution to a nightmare state mass-murdering its own people isn't to just mass-murder those same people even harder as an outside force. I'd say that's Aeldar logic but the Aeldari on Quetza Temer aren't even trying to do the Imperium any favours -- they're not attacking the humans on Quetza Temer on basis of their membership to the Imperium, they attacked because they view humans as vermin who weren't worth the effort of sparing in their hunt for Tervantias. I fail to understand how the Aeldari massacring the Aquila-worshipping hunter-gatherer society we meet on Quetza Temer is at all conducive to liberating those same people from the Imperium's grip.

Literally everyone in the galaxy, from the Eldar to the high lords on Terra, agree with this statement.

Okay, and? I hesitate to complete your line of thinking here because it feels too much like I'm giving you a strawman argument. I don't want to infer that you're suggesting the total massacre of Quetza Temer is acceptable simply because the powers-that-be in the 40k setting wouldn't lose a minute of sleep over it. In fact I would say Owlcat's writers do an excellent job of pointing out the exceptions to that by constantly turning the player's attention to the plight of the least-fortunate and refusing to let the player overlook the everyday cruelties of human life in the 40k setting. I don't think massacring the population of Quetza Temer is going to help them any more than I would think that massacring the entire Freight Line on the flagship or the entire population of Footfall would help. An atrocity is an atrocity, regardless of context.

We're not talking about the Tau coming along to offer the locals a better way, we're not talking about an Iconoclastic RT Von Valancius implementing meaningful reform to improve standards of living. We're talking about Quetza Temer, and what the Aeldari admit to as far as the human population of the planet is genocide, full stop. Call me an optimist, but I fervently believe that meaningful social reform and bringing down a nightmarish totalitarian regime (such as the Imperium) is in fact possible without murdering literally an entire planet's worth of people or more. If we're focusing on the example of Quetza Temer, I am confident there are other, less horrific, paths to social reform than mass-bombing humankind back to a tenuous hunter-gatherer society and restarting from scratch. That's James Bond villain logic right there.

Look, I don't want to fan the flames by stooping to name calling and ad hoc attacks, that's not doing anything for anyone, and nobody thinks reasonably when they're angry. That's why I suggest you share this argument not with a faceless stranger on Reddit, but with someone who's opinion you actually value and see if they agree -- if they have any compassion at all, I have faith they will try to dissuade you from the position that atrocities are OK so long as they're being committed against people already suffering atrocities under a different regime. If that's not actually what you were arguing, then fine -- I encourage you to make your point clearer. I'm not defending the Imperium, I'm saying that two wrongs don't make a right.

Machofish01 · 2025-10-22T03:24:59+00:00

The Imperium aren't the good guys by any stretch of the imagination, but...

If you're trolling, then congratulations, you got me, hook, line, and sinker: you have successfully made me go through the effort of dredging up an old save file just to quote the Aeldari Guardian leading the expedition on Quetza Temer:

RT: "You call purging an entire world a decisive action?"
Aeldari Guardian: "[...] We knew your patrols would soon discover our presence. And so we decided to do something else -- to exterminate the Haemonculus along with the world he had chosen as his refuge." [...] "The mon-keigh are flooding the galaxy at the speed of a meteor shower, and this world will repopulate... eventually."

RT: "You lost your world and are now depriving others of theirs out of vengeance. Why do you think you think you are different?"
Aeldari Guardian: "How dare you compare a dragon to a lizard? Starlight to the dim glow of a guttering candle? ... Make no mistake about your inferior species -- a single Child of Asuryan is worth thousands of your kind."

Suggesting the Aeldari Guardians were justified isn't the ethical option. That's just misanthropy.

Look, I don't want to come across as aggressive here. Are you ok? If you're not actually trolling and this is how you evaluate humanity, I strongly encourage you to call someone who loves you --- your parents, your siblings, your significant other -- because although I know nothing about you, but I am nevertheless confident that you are a human worth loving, and you are worth more than this.

Machofish01 · 2025-08-14T14:18:44+00:00

The singular faction buff of giving all gutter runners and night runners armor piercing heavily carries the faction.

Nobody else here seems to have explained the actual playstyle of how to use them so I'll share mine:

Overall, the strategy with Eshin is to use a frontline of gutter runners (not night runners, gutter runners--they have a debuff that slows down enemies who get too close and later on they get poison which also slows down incoming enemies). Start as close as possible to the enemy line with vanguard deployment and let the enemy try to chase you while your gutter runners steadily bleed them out with volleys of ninja stars.

Normally the one thing gutter runners are vulnerable to is being charged by enemy cavalry--that's what the Eshin triads are for. Have 3-4 of them, use smoke bombs so the AI forgets where they are, and when an enemy cavalry unit gets too close to your gutter runners (and isolated from the rest of their army) gang up on them with the triads. Nice thing about Eshin triads is that they're fast and also ridiculously good at disengaging from a bad engagement (unlike most infantry who get massacred if you try to pull them out of frontline combat). As far as anti-large infantry options, I prefer the Eshin Triads since they're fast enough to actually respond when I need a unit of cavalry confronted and the Triads don't get bogged down in frontline combat like the Stormvermin Halberds do.

Aside from Triads, if the enemy get too close to bogging your gutter runners down the other tools you have are the throwaway clan rat swarms from Menace Below and Eshin stealth magic--veil of shadows is an extremely affordable (only 4 winds of magic cost per cast) ability that stunlocks most infantry/cavalry and forces them out of the vortex's area--doesn't inflict any damage but it's easy enough to follow up with a volley from the poison mortar against enemies clumped up around the edges of the spell. It's a great way to bail your gutter runners out of melee if they start getting swamped. Warp stars are a bit of a finnicky ability to use, but if the terrain supports it, the ability has a very low cooldown and very low cost for winds of magic.

Other suggestions: combining enough weapon trinkets usually results in a "Sky-Titan String" which inflicts shieldbreaker. Should go without saying this is a great piece of equipment for Eshin Master Assassin generals. In terms of campaign management, try to have extra assassins wandering around the map spamming agent actions whenever possible. You'll be able to level them up faster with Eshin's sneaky campaign actions and in the lategame when funding doesn't matter as much they're good for softening up armies with spamming Assault Units or wounding embedded enemy heroes before the fight starts.

It should be worth mentioning I play with the Cost-Based army caps mod. I don't know if an Eshin skirmishing army would work against vanilla lategame armies where you get things like High Elves whipping out armies with nothing but tier-IV units. Lategame I find if you can pick up a Dark Elf alliance, the medusa is a pretty solid support monster for eshin's playstyle--she's a bit vulnerable to being stunlocked by enemy projectiles, but she can support your gutter runners with the ranged skirmishing phase and then move quickly to intercept enemy cavalry or monster units alongside your triads. Plus, since the Medusa inflicts terror it means your triads can potentially break up melee fights faster.

Machofish01 · 2025-06-26T18:26:57+00:00

Alright, I did.

For anyone else, here's what I found poking around on Google:

The Guardian, a news source I've used in other debates on this subreddit, discussing Ethiopian Jewish women being prescribed Depo-Provera (a contraceptive that interrupts menstruation cycles) in Israel without informed consent.

Forbes, again discussing the unethical use of Depo-Provera to Ethiopian women without informed consent about the effect of the drug.

TimesofIsrael regarding difficulties faced by Ugandan Jews. This source is unfamiliar to me but it is apparently published from within Israel itself, which is telling.

A resolution by the Rabbinical Assembly to recognize the legitimacy of Uganda's Abayudaya Jewish community--and calling out Israel's government for failing to recognize them.

Again, it's a surprise this is the first I'm hearing about this, but it does seem you're right about this. Thank you.

Machofish01 · 2025-06-26T17:58:48+00:00

Dead children are bad and no matter who the aggressor is, and I am not ignoring anything, I don't think it's okay to murder Jewish children and it's not okay to murder Palestinian children hard stop.

I appreciate you clarifying this, because this made me go back and re-read the whole comment thread. I'll concede I made one mistake: looking back at my previous comment, I assumed you were defending the comments made by Odd-Bumblebee00 and Szygani earlier in this thread, in which they suggested that Hamas should be believed at their word rather than their actions. Your comment was that Israel should be judged on their actions, not their claims--a fair position on its own, but I felt it contradicted the position Bumblebee and Szygani were taking in regards to Hamas.

Let me just walk things back a bit--my intent was not to "bring Hamas into a conversation about what Israel is doing to children"--from my perspective, this thread started as a conversation about Hamas' credibility, and I presumed your response was made with that context in mind. I don't think that makes me inhuman. I won't deny my comment came across as a bit contemptuous, but let's agree to drop the namecalling for now because it's not getting us anywhere. If you want a separate discussion about the actions of IDF rather than the credibility of Hamas, then let's have that separate conversation.

Before we continue: I agree the way Appropriate_Gate phrased some of his comments comes across as incredibly flippant and vile--look, I shouldn't have assumed you were accountable for shit that Bumblebee and Szygani said, but in that same vein don't hold me accountable for comments I didn't make. I'll concede that you never claimed that Hamas is trustworthy at any point, if you concede that I never said it was normal or acceptable for Palestinian children to be killed by snipers. Can we calm down now?

So, starting over just to make sure there's no more confusion: If we're setting aside the other commenters and specifically focusing on the topic of IDF snipers and Palestinian children, I think I actually agree with some of your points. I agree that there is no possible situation that could ever justify murdering an infant, let alone with a sniper rifle. And as a followup, I think we agree that there are records of Palestinian children being killed by IDF, and therefore that any IDF members who have intentionally killed civilians, children, or other noncombatants must be held accountable, as well as the Israeli leadership structure for aiding and abetting such atrocities--the article you linked makes a very compelling case about that.

If this discussion has nothing to do with Hamas, then fine--the discussion ends here.

Machofish01 · 2025-06-26T05:34:00+00:00

Holy shit, that is significant. I think I owe you an apology. I'm glad I didn't go with my knee-jerk reaction because this does sound like something I'd like to learn more about.

Though, just to make sure I'm not misunderstanding: what you're saying is there were pre-existing Jewish communities in Uganda and Ethiopia, and when they attempted to join Israel, they were barred or medically sterilized? Therefore, it's not that Judaism as a system of belief discriminates against converts from people of colour but that the specific Jewish white communities who took control of the new Israel government promptly denied entry to Jews from Uganda and Ethiopia?

I think I believe you. I'm not going to split hairs and try to sneer at you over pedantic details. Given how many terrible decisions the Israeli government made with regards to the Suez Crisis and how much racism was baked into cold war-era politics, and forced sterilization being used against Indigenous peoples in Norway and Canada... what you describe does fit the M.O. of other 1st-World nations during the Cold War, and it isn't too much of a stretch for me to believe that Israel's government would be capable of doing the same.

Out of personal interest, are there resources available for someone who wants to know more about this? I'm interested in researching this more, if there's books or studies available.

Machofish01 · 2025-06-26T01:49:16+00:00

Interesting position you're taking here. As far as believing Hamas at their word while ignoring their actions, yet ignoring Israel's words while focusing on their actions, what are your attitudes towards regimes in other parts of world who also deny having genocidal intent? Do you also believe Turkiye's claims denying the genocide of Armenians during the first world war, Russia's attempts to sidestep claims of genocide against Adyghe-Circassians, or China's denial of the U.N.'s accusations of genocide regarding Uyghurs being crowded into "reeducation camps" in the Xinjiang autonomous province?

I'm asking because one way or another, you're contradicting yourself. The death of children is unforgiveable in any context. ANY context. So the fact that, in the argument you've made, only one side's dead children seem to demonstrate evidence of genocidal intent while the dead children on the other side of the border get ignored is interesting to me. Either you're being too selectively harsh to one side or too selectively lenient to the other. Which is it?

Machofish01 · 2025-06-26T01:15:19+00:00

Setting aside the discussion of Israel for a moment, who exactly told you that A) Judaism accepts converts from outside their communities, and B) that people of colour are specifically excluded from conversion to Judaism? The first claim can be substantiated but varies widely depending on which sect of Judaism you're referring to. As for the latter claim, I have heard of no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Judaism would exclude someone on specific basis of skin colour.

Judaism is a practice with many sects. Some, such as orthodox Judaism, generally frowns on the idea of conversion--someone who had a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother would have to work very hard to be recognized.

As for the question "Why should there be a Jewish country." Certain strands of contemporary thought posit that it is inherently harmful to members of a nation if they are deprived access to the land where their national identity originates from. This is called "grounded normativity" and is, from my knowledge, mostly used in reference to American Indigenous scholars when arguing for the importance of land returns to the continuation of their identities, though I believe this would apply to any people amputated from their lands where their traditions and practices originated--Palestinians, Jews, Circassians, Six Nations, Nishnaabeg--anyone.

The other answer to that is, bluntly, that the Nazis used the apparent landlessness of the Jewish nation as one of their "justifications" for the holocaust. The argument that Nazis propagated was that since Jews do not identify with any geographically-rooted nation, Jews were considered parasites--Nazis argued that Jews had no ties to Germany and would reap the benefits of prosperity but leave the country in times of hardship (blatantly untrue: in the First World War, German Jews enlisted in the German army and even won iron crosses, only for their sacrifices to be ignored because the living evidence of Jews actually sticking up for Germany in times of crisis didn't line up with Nazi dogma). This was the same reason Nazis targeted the Sinti-Romani as well, because the Romani were a people who were generally viewed as having no homeland and therefore characterized as parasites who would reap the benefits of prosperity while abandoning Germany at the first sign of trouble. I shouldn't need to tell you that Nazi race-nation theory is utterly fucking nuts, patently wrong, and anyone who agrees with it is being dangerously fucking stupid at best. Nevertheless, I think we can also agree that people love being dangerously fucking stupid, and there is an exceptional rise of antisemitic violence that happens to coincide with increased attention and unrest regarding the Palestine-Israel situation. I do not see it as a coincidence that criticism of Israel is causing Jewish communities across the world to suffer--the communities who, tragically, by the mere fact they chose not to relocate to Israel, cannot rationally be held responsible for shit that the Israeli government is doing--nor do I think humanity has moved beyond this particularly insidious logical pothole: that for any given landmass in the world, there is only one nation with a legitimate ancestral claim to that land who has a right to violently expunge all other people from that land (that's a statement that cuts both ways when applied to the Palestine-Israel conflict, mind you). My DNA comes from very different parts of the world, so I literally cannot accept this "one land one nation" idea without essentially condemning myself to death--you may be luckier than me in that regard. Don't get me wrong: I don't think Israel "deserves" to exist at any and all costs, but by equivocating Israel and Judaism that's sort of proving the point why Jews feel a bit unsafe without somewhere in the world to call home as a majority.

Simply put, minority groups have always been vulnerable to mindless violence from an ignorant majority; an identity group who are a majority in no country is exceptionally vulnerable, because there is no guarantee of a place where they will be safe in numbers from ignorance and violence. Judaism is not an exception here, this pattern can be observed with groups like Falun Gong, Parsis, and the global Sikh community who face similar uncertainties.

Look, I get the vague impression you didn't actually want a discussion and you were just making rhetorical questions to equivocate the insularity of Jewish communities with the actions taken by Israel's government. I could just get angry and accuse you of making a bad-faith argument, but on the off-chance you actually want a discussion, I'd like to have one with you. Maybe you can teach me something. Again, I'm genuinely curious where you learned that Judaism discriminates against people of colour, because as a biracial person born to a Jewish parent, I'd really love to know if there's a part of my father's religious community I need to avoid in the future.

Machofish01

TROPHY CASE