JUDAS: A Modern Journal

The Israel-Palestine conflict is an incredibly complex issue at the intersection of religion, politics, sociology, and economics - an ever evolving affair that is both multifaceted and extremely hard to comprehend, let alone attempt to resolve. I apologise if this month's instalment is the Frankie Robinson anthology is a little downbeat, the conflict is an incredibly serious topic that I am very passionate about. This article is not supposed to be non-partisan or non-biased - I have bias that is very obvious: I'm pro-Israel, I identify as a Zionist, I observe rabbinical and Talmudic scripture on the topic, and I am ever aware of the conflict mostly from the view of Israeli media, and Jewish news outlets. There are plenty of very compelling pro-Palestine arguments in the aether, and I'll be pushing for one of our own writers to release a contrasting piece on the topic, to balance me out. With that out of the way, let's begin.  Firstly, a Rabbinical/Talmudic argument for ...

The Encyclopædia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopaedia, defines the social and philosophical movement of Transhumanism as: A philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. To help us grasp the ideas and ethics of Transhumanist ideology, I'll use an example from David DeGrazia, a Bioethicist and Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University. Professor DeGrazia imagines a woman called Marina, who has insecurities and anxieties and is generally unhappy with herself. Marina wants to take Prozac (Fluoxetine) because she's heard that it can make people more confident. Marina, essentially, wants to use a drug (biotechnology) to go beyond her limitations. DeGrazia asks if this is okay, if she's still the same person, is this acceptable, but what he's really trying to ask is  what defines ...

Hatred isn't a feeling I'm often attracted to, but when reading the disgusting, transphobic, hateful rhetoric of J.K. Rowling, Helen Joyce, and Germaine Greer it's hard not to reflect a little of the hate they radiate.  I was watching a clip from the British TV show Good Morning Britain , ironically this evening, in which the presenters (Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid) are discussing J.K. Rowling's (at the time) new, allegedly transphobic, tweet, which read: 'People who menstruate.' I'm sure there used to be a word foor those people. Somebody help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woodmud? Isn't that a jolly little thing to laugh about! J.K. has observed that the woke left is using accurate terminology for, literally, people who menstruate, and she's decided that's bad because she's a transphobe. Anyways they've invited fellow bigot, Professor Kathleen Stock to speak on the issue, captioned as an 'Author and philosopher, University of Sussex....

There have been six dramatisations of Jeffery Dahmer's murders since 1993: The Secret Life: Jeffery Dahmer  (1993), Dahmer (2002), Raising Jeffery Dahmer (2006)(2008), The Jeffery Dahmer Files (2008), My Friend Dahmer (2017), and finally Netflix's Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffery Dahmer Story  (2022). They could be better at coming up with original titles, couldn't they? Or original concepts, come to think of it. It's almost like they're not adding anything, just recycling content to profit off death. True crime dominates the media market, polluting each corner of the internet with the depraved need for gory and gruesome details of actual crimes, involving real people. Where has this need come from? Is true crime as a genre ethical? How can true crime content normalise and even romanticise deviance?  On the 21st of September, 2022, Netflix released their self-produced Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story  which is a biographical crime 'thriller' that docu...

Remy, the main character in Pixar's Ratatouille, is a metaphor for the literally starving, poor artist, who feels resentment towards a capitalist society whilst trying to climb its ranks and escape poverty. My mind simply shall not be changed. In the film, Remy's family exist purely to survive, and his dad has evolved to ignore Remy's love of his art - cooking - and dismiss his passions because passions are for the rich. His father only starts to care about Remy's talents when they become economically viable, and therefore beneficial to their survival as the poor.  When you start to think of the rats as the poor, and the humans as the rich, it starts to make much more sense. Remy yearns for the human (rich) experience because they have the ability to create art and pursue their passions with no care for material expense or wasted time. This is true in our society. Whilst the rich are free to pursue passions on a whim, able to purchase expensive materials easily, the poo...

Yesterday, on my regular post-school depressing Twitter scroll, I came across a repost of an article entitled "Mormons Aren't Nice People: a bitter victims [sic] deep dive into very old theology." Firstly - brushing past the fact that victims is misspelled because I'm not an educational classist - I'd like to point out how incredibly generalised this statement is, just in the title. This author, that's 'Sadie Lee' on Medium, isn't looking for a resolution, and place to unload, a resolution, or even an apology. She's looking for conflict. As a rather devoted agnostic, I'm not known for running to the rescue of horribly oppressed theists, but I will argue against the public slander of a really quite legitimate belief system.  Ignoring the inflammatory title, and proceeding to the main body of the article, I found out that Lee is actually a survivor of a lot of shame, trauma, and hard times at the hands of people who just happened to be member...

Bimbos were a staple of 2000s tabloid gossip, with publications across the globe using the word to degrade and put down women like Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton. In fact, a New York Post cover from the time has a picture of the three women as a backdrop to the text "Bimbo Summit." Yeah, real mature. Since then, the word fell out of fashion, along with the noun bimbofication but it was defined loosely as something along the lines of: Bimbo: an attractive but unintelligent or frivolous young woman (frivolous here meaning not having any purpose or value.) Bimbofication: used by social media users to describe when somebody becomes more attractive, has a 'glow up' or becomes more sexualised. In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. Even ...

We've all wanted to spill the tea on our new bae or comment on how you can't stop cheesin ' because of what your new homie said, even though it was so not woke and probably cap - but do we know where these words come from, and should we be using them at all? Much of the vocabulary we use and hear today has its roots in various oppressed subcultures, namely in African American spaces (especially by women,) and in spaces and media dominated by the LGBTQIA+ community. But with the rise of the digitization of these spaces through popular and social media, this language is spread through all social circles - circles that are ignorant of these terms' origins - and the line between subculture and mainstream is blurred by our new collective cultural consciousness on who can say what and why. The most prominent example of this is through the absorption of queer slang into our cultural knowledge thanks to popular media like RuPaul's Drag Race. However, recognizing the popu...

My father owns a small cabin in the woods near our house. It's small, wooden, nestled in a small valley with a rippling stream. The cabin is stilted, sitting just up a small embankment facing the stream, which my father has reinforced with a small drystone wall on either side. On the other side of the bank is a steep hill, crawling with verdant trees and ferns. Sitting on the balcony that my father build all by himself, I can be one with the natural world, allowing all my superficial stresses and anxieties to melt away as the sound of rippling water, whistling birds, cracking logs on the fire, and the light patter of rain on the tin roof fills my ears. My dad built this whole oasis by himself, using only materials from the valley and unused items from the outside world. Inside the cabin, a rusty old furnace sits in the corner, and a tin chimney passes through the corrugated roof above. A small coffee maker sits on the shelf, its bottom blackened by soot from the fire. It sits next ...