“…the sight of Elon Musk charging towards Wikipedia with his trademark guile and delicacy was so predictable that it was almost relaxing. He saw a collective resource that people prized and he wanted to hurt it.”
Thoth knows Wikipedia’s not perfect, but I’d sooner have it handy than not have it.
Hey, you know how we spent 7.99 at Tumblr for useless blue checkmarks mainly to spite Musk? Maybe we should go donate the same amount to Wikipedia out of spite. And also because Wikipedia is far more useful than the accurately-named useless blue checks.
I mean, same spite, but actually getting something in return? Sounds like a deal to me…
The anti-remote propaganda is driven by companies mad that their remote employees are happier, making the other in-person employees question why they too shouldn’t have good options and good mental health, too.
Also being very heavily driven by wealthy people whose wealth depends on commercial real estate. Owning office buildings is lower maintenance than residential or retail real estate, and it’s very expensive to convert office buildings to something else. A lot of rich people have a good chunk of their money tied up in office buildings and if everyone starts working from our homes, they’re going to lose their shirts.
So at one of my jobs I work with this really nice woman named Liz who has an equally nice boyfriend. Thing is, I don’t know the boyfriends name because Liz only addresses him as boytoy. The term boytoy is used so frequently to describe him that not only does she have no problem using that term but neither do any of her coworkers including myself. One day Liz told me that he would be stopping by and when some dude with a beard came through the door I looked at him and said, “Mr.toy I presume.” And he just looks at me and goes; “The very one.”
My goal with making this post is to use my platform to raise awareness and encourage solidarity and action for the people of Palestine. Over the past few weeks, I have felt powerless to watch the destruction of Gaza before the world’s eyes. However, I realized that I still have a large platform despite this blog’s inactivity. With this, I would like to share information about Palestine and what you can do to help.
In the above post, I have sought out videos of Palestinian food, culture, art, architecture, and nature to share. Israeli propaganda is trying adamantly to dehumanize the population of Palestine in order to further justify their genocide. Regardless, no matter where you are in the world, humans recognize and understand what it is to be human. What it is to make art, to share food with your loved ones, to travel, and laugh, and sing. To experience heartbreak and hardship, and to experience joy. To dream about the future. To stand up for what we believe in, to fight in the face of injustice.
If you are an American citizen, use your voice to stand up for what’s right. Contact your representatives. Demand a ceasefire in Gaza. Boycott companies and celebrities who voice their support of the Israeli settler state. Protest. Donate. Organize. Fight. We are strongest when in community with each other. Our US tax dollars directly fund the murder of Gazan civilians. Make it known that we will not stand idly by while news outlets and propagandists lie to our faces about the atrocities enacted by the IDF and the Knesset.
Here are some links for information on Palestine, as well as places to donate:
decolonizepalestine - A website aiming to educate and dispel myths about the Palestinian people, ran by two Ramallah residents.
Palestine Action US - The US branch of a directive aiming to dismantle the Israeli military regime, directly funded by the US.
Hirbawi Kufiya - The last and only Kufiya factory in Palestine, as featured in the gif above. You can pre-order a kufiya which will be shipped once the blockade has been lifted.
anera - Donate to provide hygiene kits for displaced Gazans.
As of October 27th, 2023, Gazans are losing access to the internet. It is imperative for us to share their stories, to continue to remain active and aware of their martyrdom. The IDF will utilize this information blackout to their advantage. We must do all we can. Do not forget the plight of the Palestinian people. Do not allow their voices to go unheard.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. 🇵🇸
This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.
Don’t deny Jewish history in Palestine. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn’t succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn’t mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn’t help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.
Don’t whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel’s Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they’re in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying “Jews are white Europeans” is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.
Don’t invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to “go back where they came from”. Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can’t return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can’t return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on “other people’s land”, the difference in Palestine is that we’re the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.
Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It’s true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that “most” was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country’s Black population, so…) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was “None is too many.” Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.
Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that “the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing” is specific and precise. To say that “Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want”… do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say “Zionists”, what you really mean is “Jews”?
Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don’t apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn’t involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.
For fuck’s sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They’re very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they’re also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don’t give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.
Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not “when Jews do a thing I don’t like,” and a Zionist is not “a Jew I disagree with/don’t like”. Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn’t fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it’s oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they’re wrong. They’re doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they’re wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.
McDonald’s giving away free fries if you use their mobile app and then updating the terms and conditions to say if you use this app you waive your right to trial in any class action lawsuits and have to do mandatory arbitration is INSANE
Serious explanation here: she’s teaching them the instinct of being alert around enclosure openings! For example, if these were wild cats living in a bush, they’d run the risk of a larger predator running up to the opening and grabbing one of them. The mother cat is also only bapping them lightly without claws, so those slaps are more of an annoyance meant to get the kittens’ attention, and to teach them to keep their eyes out for potential threats.
an article about the incident. michael eisen is jewish and has israeli family and they fired him for “siding” with palestine
if you’re in science and particularly academia, you can sign onto the letter of support for michael eisen here. they allow anonymous signatures as well.
it’s always wild to me how many people use social media exactly like the fake users they make up in tech demos do. just commenting on chipotle’s post about a new type of steak like “😍 can’t wait to try it!” and reacting to articles on mass death events with “😥”
not to be overly rude but i think that in order to be a proponent of these types of theories you need to exist in such a compacted online bubble that you’ve completely forgotten that the world’s leagues of aunts, odd brother in laws, and dimwitted general managers are extremely capable of owning and using computers
I’m sure there’s bots in use for that kinda stuff but I doubt it’s that extensive or anything remotely intelligent. Just whatever increases ad revenue or distracts from something else. Those tech demo fake users are terrible impressions but not inaccurate
I know the users are real, but I swear to god every single website or article I’ve found on google or duckduckgo in the last few years all sound like they were generated by AI. You know, that weird stilted way of writing that sounds like a high schooler trying to bullshit and essay and inflate the word count.
I’ll ask what colors Bob Ross used, and every result sounds like “Bob Ross was a painter who was known for using a wide variety of colors in his paintings. Some examples of colors he used include [list of random colors he never used],
I was in the Wendy’s drive thru the other day, and fhe car in front of me had a bumper sticker that said "VIVA LA” followed by a picture of a stool. What the hell does that mean? I looked up “viva la stool,” and the top result starts with this nonsense
Shouted at the end of a book? Latin? Missing quotation mark? Three full sentences of buzzword salad, “we can achieve the ultimate of the penultimate when wings take dream because success is freedom!” There’s no way a human being wrote this, or else the standard of quality has fallen off a cliff and there are no more editors proofreading things before they go live.
I thought the internet was taken over by AI a long time ago, but I didn’t know there was a name for it. I absolutely 100% believe in the Dead Internet Theory.
dismantle patriarchal body expectations cool cool but when is that and is it before every trans woman with rapidly growing facial hair has to go to a job interview or a school or a street at 12 AM
Electrolysis for permanent hair removal is a required procedure for “MTF” bottom surgery. After a consult with a surgeon, you are often required to have 80% of the genital area completely and permanently free of hair before the hospitals even start scheduling you for surgery. Before the consult, you are not permitted to bill this electrolysis to your insurance, as you will not have the surgical letter dictating its medical necessity. Many health insurance companies routinely deny reimbursement claims or coverage for electrolysis sessions, even with this letter.
Electrolysis is the more painful and expensive hair removal method, but unfortunately it is the only hair removal method that results in permanent removal of every single hair forever. Hair growing in the neovagina is uncomfortable and difficult to remove post-surgery.
Anyone who looks at this and wants to make the process more difficult should just die instead
Yeah you’re right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.
[audio transcription: So I’m sure we’ve all seen the videos recently of these things *squeezes the honking chicken several times* little chickens. Um. Well, so I discovered recently that if you pull the head off and then pull the noisemaker out it’s the right size that you can stick it in the end of a trombone mouthpiece. And then *deep breath* *the loudest, most horrible blatting noises* Yeah.]
Has science gone too far
At black mesa we say: “science will never go far enough” so to me no not yet
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