JUDAS: A Modern Journal

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...

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...

1894, Paris. Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French Army is accused of handing top-secret military documents to members of the Imperial German military.  An investigation by the French army had found damning evidence against Dreyfus, the worst being a letter to the German military attache in Paris penned in Dreyfus' own handwriting.  But why would Dreyfus commit such a crime? He was a wealthy man from a prominent family, with no need for the alleged payoffs from the German Empire. He reportedly loved France and enjoyed serving his nation in the army. Dreyfus himself refused to confess, adamant he had done nothing wrong. Although France wasn't convinced, they believed Dreyfus was a liar. But why? Well, Dreyfus was a Jew.  Whilst Dreyfus sat in jail awaiting his trial, France's right-wing newspapers got a hold of the story and used it as a catalyst for their already popular anti-semitism. One of France's biggest talking points in the 1890s was the Jewish people; particularl...