This Isn't The First Time. Last Year, The IDF Would Leave Behind Explosives Disguised To Look Like Toys

i do think there is a degree to which certain kinds of Instagram activists have convinced themselves that traumatising themselves in solidarity is a useful form of activism. "I'm having nightmares and crying so much I want to be sick because of all these videos of dying children but I can't look away while people are getting hurt" I mean don't you think you'd be able to help more if you weren't having nightmares and crying all the time?? don't you think this is a one-way trip to burnout? don't you think maybe increasing the amount of trauma going around is counterproductive? I dunno bro there's something to be said for bearing witness but there comes a point where you gotta look hard at yourself and go "am I helping, or am I just making myself suffer so I don't feel guilty for not suffering while somebody else is experiencing bad shit"

Saving My Fanfiction Work

Due to the recent events in the United States. To clarify the recent events being Trump becoming president of the United States, Project 2025 more than likely going to be integrated. If you are not familiar with Project 2025 I urge you to look it up.

Along with the KOSA bill that has many problems and it has passed the senate now needing the finally vote in the house, which both are majority red. Go here to learn more on why it needs to be stopped and how you can. This is another component that will harm our communities. Go to: stopkosa.com

With all of its harmful plans some of the plans are to take down/restrict internet sites that have LGBTQ+ communities that means communities like the fan-fiction communities/sites in the United States.

I am only giving resources to those inside and out of the US in case they banned sites that hold fan-fiction. Better safe than sorry.

Being that I live in the US the possibly of mine and many others Fanfiction has the possibly of being in danger. Therefore I'm giving you recourses. (I'm not leaving or stopping my writing, I'm here for the fight!)

For those wanting to save my fanfiction, I give you permission to download them off of AO3 and to be used for your personal collection. Meaning, your eyes only. To clarify I’m saying this as others have asked if they could download my fanfic so for those who would like to you can.

If you do not know how to download them many others on online have tutorials on how to download them and add them to our phone libraries.

Here are some links to tutorials:

Downloading Fanfic

Adding to Iphone & Android Library

Adding to Kindle Library - Video on How (On TikTok)

Adding Book Covers (At the bottom) - Good EPUB Cover Changer (I use this)

Types of Files and What they mean

Please stay safe out there! Remember to follow the rules below.

DO NOT share the downloaded file anywhere online.

DO NOT repost the downloaded file under your name.

Fanfiction is protected under copyright law when plagiarism is involved. If you plagiarize my work, either a piece or whole in any language, I will take legal action. Inspiration or the same idea does NOT apply to this, only word-for-word plagiarism in any language.

♥ mx-pastelwriting does not consent to their fanfiction being copied, copied & credited, translated, used in videos and/or audios, screenshotted, used in AI, or reposted on any other platform without permission.

♥ mx-pastelwriting does give consent to "reblog," sharing links to direct work, and being in recommend lists.

Please stay safe out there friends! I love you so much! Know that there will always people that love you and in for the fight to make sure you are loved!

the US is directly bombing syria, iraq (x, x, x, x) and yemen simultaneously tonight (very early hours of 03.02.24) while, of course, continuing to proudly fund israel’s ongoing genocide in ghazzah. they’re saying that this is the only the beginning of their operations in iraq and syria. meanwhile, israel is increasingly targeting rafah, having just martyred 11 palestinians there in one airstrike alone. as a reminder, rafah is essentially the southern most area in ghazzah and is where israel told palestinians to flee to, calling it a ‘safe zone’. this is all happening the same day israel announced it is preparing for a ground invasion in rafah. allah reham kare

i've said this before but i suppose it bears repeating and clarification. it is arabs and palestinians who have suffered the most under islamist rule. we (middle easterners, revolutionaries, religious minorities, gender and sexual minorities) as people, understand what hamas represents better than israelis do, better than anyone does. we understand what the entire spectrum from political islam to outright jihadist extremism does. we understand dictatorship. we understand theocracy. we understand fascism.

the repression israel has created is so absolute, has destroyed civil, diplomatic, intellectual and peaceful avenues so absolutely, that it leaves no avenues for anyone to condemn hamas anymore. even the representative of hamas's ideological and political opponents, the PLO (which oversees the West Bank), is openly frustrated at the request to condemn hamas. and it's not because he sympathizes with them. he has absolutely no political, personal, ideological or economic reason to.

israel has bombed gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, each and every time with the declared intention of targeting hamas and instead murdering civilians en masse. everyone familiar with israel understands that 'hamas' is meaningless, that israel has no real interest in defeating them (and that defeating militant resistance to an occupation with military force is not possible), that they went so far as to fund them as their choice of preferred enemy. when palestinians hear 'hamas' they correctly understand that israel intends to kill everyone. it is, to use the lingua franca of this period, a dogwhistle. on october 7th, israelis were horrified to see this dogwhistle suddenly become an actual whistle, but nothing else changed except for the intensity and savagery of their attacks on gaza. instead, the more they say hamas, the more they murder civilians en masse, just as they always have. everyone in gaza has said "this is not new, just worse." they have always understood that they are the target. no amount of condemning hamas, being a good palestinian, a good civilian, or even a newborn will change that.

this includes all of hamas's ideological opponents and so-called victims as well. peace activists, intellectuals, palestinian christians, and queer palestinians alike are not condemning hamas right now. they can't because they are busy fighting for their lives and homes against the israeli occupation. if you understood the personal toll this takes on them, if you understood how deeply their trauma runs, you would understand just how evil the israeli narrative on hamas is for all palestinians.

if you want a plurality of palestinian opinion, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want tolerance, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want israelis to be safe in their homes from the threat of hamas militants, get rid of the israeli apartheid state.

the truth is, there is a base and deeply evil racism at the core of asking to condemn hamas, especially by those who would never condemn israel or the violence it requires to maintain itself. it presumes that they have the right to ask for a condemnation of child murder, without ever giving an apology for child murder or the promise to stop murdering children. ghassan kanafani once called this "a conversation between the sword and the neck."

it is absurdity in full display, a macabre delight in impunity disguised as moral superiority. more than treating every palestinian as a terrorist in interrogation, more than its dehumanization and islamophobia, it is at its core asking "do you agree our children are more important than yours?"

and lest you forget, Israel's current minister of national security has already said it directly. as he famously once told arab-israeli reporter mohammad magadli, “Sorry Mohammad, my right to life precedes yours, that is the reality.”

in many ways, that's far more honest than asking "do you condemn hamas?"

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.

nytimes.com

Opinion | The Palestine Double Standard

The task of the Palestinian is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it.

(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.

The Sea Organ is an experimental musical instrument that is located in Zadar, Croatia. Beneath the white marble steps, a series of tubes create a system that could be described as a large piano. When the waves or the wind flow through the holes, they interact with the organ to create random harmonic sounds. (Source)

You can listen to the sounds that the Sea Organ produces here.

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

THIS!!!!!!!!!! most of us feel like we aren't doing enough because we can't physically stop a genocide but speaking helps!! pressuring helps!! boycotting helps and protesting helps!! please don't give up on Palestinians not when the entire world has turned their backs on them

quick psa!🇵🇸

no thanks has been approved and added to the apple appstore. basically you scan a barcode and it tells you if the product is from a company that’s either part of the bds list or supporting isreal. highly recommend u check it out!! ^_^

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/no-thanks-app/id6476206516

App Store

‎No Thanks app

‎Welcome to our No Thanks App! Our app simplifies the process of scanning barcodes, It makes your shopping goes easily, just scan the produc

have you heard about the 30,000 stolen books from palestinian homes in 1948? sounds a whole lot like an attempt to suppress and wipe out palestinian culture.

quite literally everything was stolen from palestinians in 1948, including the jewelry they wore as they were ethnically cleansed from their homes and the clothes they had packed. it was a concentrated strategy of looting, murder and theft where the spoils of land, businesses and personal wealth were then officially divided by israeli leaders and nationalized by the Jewish National Fund.

suppressing and wiping out palestinian culture was already necessary for the establishment of israel—ilan pappe calls it "memoricide" of the nakba, but it's actually an on-going memoricide that happens when zionists tell you that palestinians were "arab colonizers" or that they were trying to kill jews because they hated being their neighbors or that the nakba was caused by a "declaration of war" or that israelis fought a "war of independence" or that it was a land without a people for a people without a land or that the streets had no names or that there's no such thing as palestinians etc etc

this was no limited to 1948 either, it also happened during the invasion of lebanon in 1982:

and it's happening in gaza today as municipalities and hospital records are being systematically targeted, bombed and destroyed