160 posts
Latest Posts by boyhowdyii - Page 2
I know it’s not much in the face of everything but I have been finding hope & resilience in palestinian poetry these past few weeks and I created a google drive file of poetry collections by palestinian poets that I will keep updating as I keep on reading. I also recommend checking out @fiercynn’s palestinian poets series for more poets + poetry available online
the dubious philosophy of salmon
I can't stop thinking about the news out of Palestine. Israel is sieging al Shifa hospital. Videos of people's limbs being severed off are haunting (graphic video tw). The hospital has ran out of fuel and 39 babies in incubators are fending for their lives by themselves, because Israel has stationed snipers around the hospital and is shooting all medical crew that walks into their sight.
First, the narrative was Israel would never bomb hospitals. Now, the hospitals are Hamas bases. Then, we respect journalists. Now, we have a fucking kill list of journalists because they are Hamas collaborators. First, we are not letting fuel in until the hostages are released. Now, we are not accepting the hostages back because that would stop our ground invasion and let Hamas win. And I could go on about every single lie they're making up. If you look up "Hamas rape" on google, the first link leads to Times of Israel saying Israel has found no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and only one eyewitness testimony out of 3.5k people attending the rave. If you Google "Hamas beheaded babies" the top links say they have no evidence for the claim besides word of mouth from extremist soldiers. Israeli extremists think about the ugliest goriest scene they can make out in their sick heads, tell that to a international journalist and they run away with it like it's gospel.
And children are being killed in the name of these lies. Thousands are being displaced in images that remind me of the pictures of Tantura 75 years ago, with their hands up so the tanks don't shoot them. Amputees are leaving the hospitals in wheelchairs hours after their surgeries because they are being shot at. Elders who survived the Nakba on 48 are having to walk towards Southern Gaza on foot (imagine walking from one end of your city to the other on foot), displaced again. People are cheering for the haunting images of white phosphorus bombs being dropped over Gaza. Gazan workers who were arrested in the West Bank are being thrust back into the bombings wearing numbered labels.
This is not normal. We are seeing the early stages of the settler colonial genocide of an indigenous population. Native leaders who have visited Gaza say its refugee camps look eerily like reservations. We can stop this. For the first time we are able to see wide scale accounts from the hands of the people suffering the genocide, and Israel is so scared of it they have cut all communications in Gaza.
This is our litmus test. I think we have never seen more clearly, with Palestine, Armenia, Congo and Sudan how colonialism has made our world a rotten place to live in.
The South African apartheid collapsed due to boycotts. We have to do everything in our power to stop Israel's hegemony. Even talking to a group of friends about Palestine changes the status quo. There's no world where we can live peacefully if Israel accomplishes their goals.
Educate yourself. Read into Palestinian history and the occupation. You can't common sense people out of decades of propaganda. If your arguments crumble when a zionist brings up the "disengagement of Gaza", you have to learn more.
Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.
Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.
Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe).
Keep yourself updated and share Palestinian voices. Muna El-Kurd said every tweet is like a treasure to them, because their voices are repressed on social media and even on this very app. Make it your action item to share something about the Palestinian plight everyday. Here are some resources:
Al Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, Mondoweiss
Boycott Divest Sanction Movement
Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing protests and direct action against weapons factories across the US
Mohammed El-Kurd (twitter / instagram)
Muhammad Shehada (twitter)
Motaz Azaiza (instagram) - reporting directly from Gaza.
Hind Khudary - reporting directly from Gaza. Her husband and daughter moved South to run from the tanks but she stayed behind to record the genocide. The least we can do is not let her calls fall on deaf ears.
You can participate in boycotts wherever you are in the world, through BDS guidelines. Don't be overwhelmed by gigantic boycott lists. BDS explicitly targets only a few brands which have bigger impact. You can stop consuming from as many brands as you want, though, and by all means feel free to give a 1 star review to McDonalds, Papa John, Pizza Hut, Burger King and Starbucks. Right now, they are focusing on boycotting the following:
Carrefour, HP, Puma, Sabra, Sodastream, Ahava cosmetics, Israeli fruits and vegetables
Push for a cultural boycott - pressure your favorite artist to speak out on Palestine and cancel any upcoming performances on occupied territory (Lorde cancelled her gig in Israel because of this. It works.)
If you can, participate in direct action or donate.
Palestine Action works to shut down Israeli weapons factories in the UK and USA, and have successfully shut down one of their firms in London.Some of the activists are going on trial and are calling for mobilizing on court.
Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing direct actions to stop the shipping of wars to Israel. Follow them.
Educate yourself. Read into Palestinian history and the occupation. You can't common sense people out of decades of propaganda. If your arguments crumble when a zionist brings up the "disengagement of Gaza", you have to learn more.
Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.
Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.
Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe. If you still believe in the two states solution, this book by an Israeli professor debunks it).
Call your representatives. The Labour Party in the UK had an emergency meeting after several councilors threatened to resign if they didn't condemn Israeli war crimes. Calling to show your complaints works, even more if you live in a country that funds genocide.
FOR PEOPLE IN THE USA: USCPR has developed this toolkit for calls, here's a document that autosends emails to your representatives and here's a toolkit by Ceasefire in Gaza NOW!
FOR PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace targeting the European Parliament and one specific for almost all countries in Europe, including Germany, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Austria, Belgium Romania and Ukraine
FOR PEOPLE IN THE UK: Friends of Al-Aqsa UK and Palestine Solidarity UK have made toolkits for calls and emails
FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA: Here's a toolkit by Stand With Palestine
FOR PEOPLE IN CANADA: Here's a toolkit by Indepent Jewish Voices for Canada
Join a protest. Here's a constantly updating list of protests:
Global calendar
Another global calendar (go to the instragram of the organizers to confirm your protest)
USA calendar
Australia calendar
Feel free to add more.
just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees
he fucking killed the other guy
I worry that our collective inability to hold space for grief is a slow hardening for all of us. In my experience the denial of pain is the denial of life and connection to the wide expanse of love, the disconnect makes it much harder to be with those around us from a place of openness. It feels like there is no priority or importance in the west for communal rituals of celebration of life or grieving and it’s only to our detriment. I hope to see and experience the revival of this in my lifetime.
Alejandra Bogue por Joel-Peter Witkin
can we PLEASE normalize bisexual women with warm brown eyes and big bouncy titties and a fat ass and juicy pussy
Help me Father for I am weak and also an idiot.
if i was the ceo or whatever of taco bell i’d be on suicide watch after this
kind of obsessed with this seemingly innocuous blog about fish that told me to kill myself and then immediately deactivated when i told them no
whats cool about being trans is my parents are totally right. i did kill their beautiful son. im the thing that animates his corpse in an ever more convincing parody of a happy girl. i devoured him from the inside out and now there is nothing left of him and he is dead dead dead and there is only me, with my hollow eyes and dark eyeliner and long hair, and my big smile. my limp, effeminate gestures belie the marionetting of the boy they loved. my fagginess is his death. already his body becomes a fitter home for my parasitism in full; the tits, the hips, the thighs. sorry about your kid. thanks for the biomass <3
asexual nicki minaj moodboard
venezuela has announced it's sending 30 tons of humanitarian aid supplies to gaza
@mariyyum twitter post: Recipes that have been passed down to me by my Palestinian mother 🇵🇸, and I've had the honor of sharing them with all of you. #freepalestine
1: Cheese Manakeesh (cheese pies)
2: Homemade Hummus w/ chicken koufta
3: Msakhan (the National dish of Palestine)
4: Sfeeha (meet pies)
Follow her on: twitter instagram youtube tiktok and her own blog for more.
you know when irish people were fighting for freedom the rebels were never considered revolutionaries or freedom fighters. we had only ever been called terrorists by the british government, because when you call a people fighting for their rights and their freedoms terrorists you can distance yourself from them. people aren't fighting because they've been radicalised by 800 years of colonialism or 75 years of brutal settler imperialism, they're fighting because they're dirty terrorists trying to hurt our democracy and kill our children. and now we don't have any responsibility to reckon with the years of subjugation and settler violence and attempted genocide, because how can you expect us to deal with terrorists? the same story repeats itself over and over n it's shocking how people will eat it up every time when it comes to protecting and maintaining western power.
October 10, 2023 - During a protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Sheffield, UK, two people scaled the 60-meter tall town hall to take down the Israeli flag that the local council had raised over hte building. In its stead they raised the flag of Palestine, to cheers from the crowd. [video]/[video]
unfortunate that the united states has been very successful at controlling narratives around word war 2 and positioning itself as the polar opposite of nazism and the main force fighting fascism when america was complicit in the holocaust. not only did american press report positively about hitler and the nazi party up until the end of the 30′s, some publications cooperated with nazi germany, american companies had investments and connections to nazi germany that they maintained until american involvement in the war, and companies like ibm in particular gave nazis the technology necessary to make the holocaust possible in the first place. some company owners themselves had nazi sympathies like henry ford and others just saw it as a business opportunity. the us denied entry to european jewish refugees and deported jewish refugees back to germany, many senators and other government officials during the 1930s openly supported nazism and worked to prevent the us from taking a side in ww2, and during the 30s large pro nazi rallies were held across the us. american eugenics movement, american race laws and american genocide set the model for the holocaust and there shouldnt be any discussion of nazism and the holocaust without also discussing the extent of american complicity in it.
anyways heres some material on it
ibm and the holocaust
hitlers american friends
ap press cooperation with nazis
hitlers american model
general motors and nazi germany
operation paperclip
us reporting on the rise of fascism
Boycott Disney. Boycott McDonald's. Boycott Starbucks. "Oh but it won't work, it won't do anything" Yes it will. Boycotts have worked before and they will again. Think of the Montgomery bus boycotts. Think about American women boycotting imported British goods during the revolution.
Why do you think popular media is so quick to discount boycotts as ineffective? Could it possibly be because they work? Could it be because major corporations understand that they work and are scared? Could it be because boycotts have historically been utilized by marginalized groups to assert their views and fight for change within a conflict in which they have no power?
Do not have give in to the apathetic nihilism of "nothing I do matters, so why bother?" That is exactly what oppressors count on. Be critical of the media you consume. Ask questions. Look to history. Boycott.
i know the nyt regularly edits and rewrites headlines post-publication but it's kind of wild that the basically one (1) good op-ed i've seen them publish in ages that was getting really widely shared was renamed from "Why Must Palestinians Audition For Your Empathy?" to much more vague and defanged "The Palestine Double Standard." like. come on.
anyways.
(link to the archived page with the original headline)
The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched Palestinian activists, lawyers, professors get baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job. At the same time, Palestinians fleeing from bombs have been misidentified. Even when under attack, they must be costumed as another people to elicit humanity. Even in death, they cannot rest — Palestinians are being buried in mass graves or in old graves dug up to make room, and still there is not enough space.
If that weren’t enough, Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts”? When a well-suited man can say brazenly and unflinchingly that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people?
It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.
…
Take it from a writer: There is nothing like the tedium of trying to come up with analogies. There is something humiliating in trying to earn solidarity. I keep seeing infographics desperately trying to appeal to American audiences. Imagine most of the population of Manhattan being told to evacuate in 24 hours. Imagine the president of [ ] going on NBC and saying all [ ] people are [ ].Look! Here’s a strip on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. That’s Gaza. It is about the same size as Philadelphia. Or multiply the entire population of Las Vegas by three.
This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember?That other suffering that was eventually deemed unacceptable? Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Absent that, let me earn your memory. Please.
…
Here’s another thing I know as a writer and psychologist: It matters where you start a narrative. In addiction work, you call this playing the tape. Diasporically or not, being Palestinian is the quintessential disrupter: It messes with a curated, modified tape. We exist, and our existence presents an existential affront. As long as we exist, we challenge several falsehoods, not the least of which is that, for some, we never existed at all. That decades ago, a country was born in the delicious, glittering expanse of nothingness — a birthright, something due. Our very existence challenges a formidable, militarized narrative.
But the days of the Palestine exception are numbered. Palestine is increasingly becoming the litmus test for true liberatory practice.
In the meantime, Palestinians continue to be cast paradoxically — both terror and invisible, both people who never existed and people who cannot return.
Imagine being such a pest, such an obstacle. Or: Imagine being so powerful.
Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.
People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"
Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.
I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.
hozier was so insane for writing francesca. he announces the song and you’re like okay maybe he’s in love with someone named francesca and then really it’s about a pair of lovers from dante’s inferno, who fell deeply for each other outside of marriage and consequently were sent to hell for their “uncontrollable lust”. telling each other “put me back in it”, i would do it all again, i would condemn myself to hell to be with you both in life and after. god could give me the option over and over again and i would not change a single thing. our love has never been wrong, heaven is too small to fit a love like ours. why would he write that
all of the numbers that are divisible by 17 sound so absurd. 51? 68? 85? ridiculous. 102? absolutely not. and don't even get me started on 119
s/o to this skeleton babe from 1936