Saving terrible cringe posts to drafts like I'm stockpiling nuclear weapons

the flipside of my whole "no filter" thing is sometimes i say things that make sense to me in my head and it is only after i've said them that i realise i sound completely deranged. the other day i tried to describe something round as "soup shaped" and the woman i was talking to was like "soup shaped?" and i briefly attempted to explain that soup is round because you have it in a bowl and so on and so forth, but it was painful for both of us so i just gave up.

not even a full year apart... we stay silly :3 🐈

SPREADSHEET OF PALESTINIAN ESCAPE FUNDS‼️TIME SENSITIVE

Operation Olive Branch is a continuously updating spreadsheet of Palestinian escape funds where progress towards their goals is being tracked. As of right now, there are over 100 funds listed there.

Any amount of money can make a difference. With their recent decision to bomb Rafah, the only remaining “safe” territory in Gaza, Israel has forced Palestinians into a corner by giving them nowhere else to go. The international community has given Israel the ability to act with impunity - it is long past the point in time to rely on those in power to hold Israel to any standard of compassion.

Today, I want you to look at this document, choose a fund, contribute to it, and share it. The people in Rafah are living on borrowed time. Free Palestine.

They need to make a kind of cigarette that kills you instantly

This video grew out of a talk I've given at colleges and conferences in the past, but I fleshed it out further to not only address most anti-trans talking points about "biological sex," but to address recurring intra-community debates about who is "really trans" or whether there are "different types" of trans people.

If it's a little on the long side for you, it is split up into "chapters" on the YouTube description page, so you can watch it in segments or jump ahead to subtopics that interest you. Here are those time stamps:

0:00 Intro, 4:57 Seeing Sex & Gender, 8:43 Essentialism, 13:34 The Sex/Gender Distinction, 14:35 Homogenizing vs Holistic Views of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality, 15:59 Sex Is Multifaceted (a collection of sexually dimorphic traits), 16:45 Sex Is Variable (due to complex traits), 20:44 Sex Is Somewhat Malleable, 21:41 What Does "Sex Is Socially Constructed" Mean?, 24:54 The "Gender Critical" Gamete Gambit, 26:22 Does "Brain Sex" Exist? (& why the sex/gender distinction fails), 29:54 Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sexual Orientation, 48:28 "Brain Sex" Revisited, 54:00 Outro

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I have seen posts on Palestine get thousands on thousands of notes. If each person who engaged with them donated one dollar—literally just one; no more, no less—thousands of dollars would be raised to humanitarian aid in Gaza just like that. I understand there’s the whole bystander effect going on. People are probably like “Well there’s likely someone out there donating right now, so they can probably do without my one puny dollar” wrong. One dollar makes a huge difference. Any amount you can afford can make a huge difference.

I’m not going to say every single person on here can afford to give up a dollar, because that’s absolutely insensitive to people’s individual situations—but if you can, please donate. So many of us on here aren’t swimming in money, but we still make it a point to donate, regardless of how little or how big a sum it is. I promise it adds up.

The PCRF could use every last penny. Don’t be a bystander in a world of bystanders. It matters.

Duha Latif was interviewed Monday on democracy now, here’s a link to her go fund me and the interview itself. I hope if you see this post you consider making a donation, right now she is about 13,000 euros shy of being able to leave Gaza with her family.

Cystolepiota fungus! The most babygirl of all mushrooms. Just a coquette tumblrina trying to find her way in this cruel world🎀

Norwegian shoulder pals. Ca. 1890 - 1910. Source.

To be a cat with wings

By Haidar Eid, associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.

Now that we have heard the interim judgement the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, we can confidently say a new world order is in the making. The World Court confirmed today that South Africa’s charge under the Genocide Convention that “Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza” is “plausible”. It has further ruled that Israel must “take all measures” to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza. The court has stopped short of calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, which has already been demanded by an absolute majority of world nations. Still, most of the “provisional measures” called for by the Republic of South Africa have been endorsed by the court. It is difficult to see how Israel can implement these measures and fulfil its obligations under the Genocide Convention, without agreeing to a ceasefire. There is no indication, of course, that Israel has any intention of heeding the Court’s provisions. In fact, since the ICJ heard South Africa’s case two weeks ago, Israel has doubled down on its genocidal acts in Gaza. In the past 24 hours alone, it carried out 21 mass killings, murdering 200 and injuring 370 civilians. So Israel’s message to the Court, and the world at large, is clear: It does not care for the opinion, demands or “measures” of any international institution – legal or political. It will do as it pleases. [...] Israel may not heed the court’s rulings and provisions, but South Africa’s historic stance will still have consequences. As stated by the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa after the ICJ’s interim decision: “Third States are now on notice of the existence of a serious risk of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They must, therefore, also act independently and immediately to prevent genocide by Israel and to ensure that they are not themselves in violation of the Genocide Convention, including by aiding or assisting in the commission of genocide. This necessarily imposes an obligation on all States to cease funding and facilitating Israel’s military actions, which are plausibly genocidal.” With this case, South Africa has put not only Israel, but the entirety of the global justice system on trial. This case is a major turning point for humanity, because it marks the first time in history when a Global South country bravely crossed a red line drawn by the colonial West and demanded its favourite settler colony, Israel, be held to account for the crimes it has long been committing against an Indigenous people. Today, thanks to South Africa, the entire colonial West, and its centuries-long history of theft, dispossession, and injustice is on trial at the World Court. Future generations will remember January 26, 2024, as the day on which the world has finally decided to hold a genocide state, and its powerful backers, accountable for repeated, longstanding violations of international law. Yes, a new world order is in the making.

. . . full article on al jazeera (26 Jan 2024)

This coming immediately after the ICJ ruling should not be surprising at all, the allegation that 12 UNRWA staffers may have been involved in the al aqsa flood, whatever its merits, is no basis for this kind of complete cut to funding from the U.S. and its allies. Like I'm not a conspiratorial person but it's hard to look at this and not think this is an attempt by the US and its allies to blunt the impact of the ICJ ruling on public opinion. Israel has been saying UNRWA is controlled by Hamas for years, and now all of a sudden it is time to cut off funding? It's just another reminder that they're going to fight to the hilt to preserve the status quo, the fight is far from over and no one can expect international law to just deliver justice for Palestine.

The US Department of State said it was troubled by the allegations, which it said pertained to 12 UNRWA employees. It said it would provide no additional funding to the agency until the allegations were addressed. “The Department of State has temporarily paused additional funding for UNRWA while we review these allegations and the steps the United Nations is taking to address them,” spokesperson Matthew Miller said.

UNRWA has already fired the staffers alleged to have been involved in the attack, the only reason to cut off funding at this critical time is to try and discredit the case for Palestinian human rights and smear Palestinians.

Excellent segment of the listening post with an extended interview with Mohammed el-Kurd. Such a necessary, important voice for these times. There's a lot of overlap between this and the right to speak for ourselves but there's some interesting stuff too about the disconnect between. The "progressive except for Palestine" line that was the standard view in acceptable discourse five years ago in the United States has never been more on the ropes.

I wanted to post something about the ICJ ruling because there's a lot of misinterpretations going around, even from media outlets that should otherwise know better. Strictly speaking (and this is the legal system it's all about persnickety nonsense) Israel hasn't been found guilty of anything, like you can read between the lines and say oh well the court seems sympathetic to South Africa's case but the findings of the court are strictly about whether they have standing to hear the case, whether South Africa has standing to bring the case, and the provisional measures are intended not to prejudice rulings in the case in the event that what Israel's doing will be found to be a genocide. The language of the ruling is much more cautious and provisional than some of the posts on social media and on some news sites would lead you to believe.

This cautiousness has a good side, since if the court had ordered a ceasefire, Israel, the United States and their allies would say "oh this is logistically impossible, Israel needs to defend itself from Hamas etc" but what the ICJ has requested is essentially what the United States claims it wants Israel to do: stop targeting civilian infrastructure and allow more aid in. The provisional measures will be a lot harder to weasel out of without being completely humiliating for the United States. They still will almost certainly, but now the momentum is with other countries on the security council, chiefly China, to push for what the U.S. claims it wants, Palestinian statehood. The whole post-Oslo strategy of Israel's far right has been to delay and delay for as long as possible the creation of an independent Palestinian state, taking more and more land, to eventually contain all attempts at military or civilian resistance, and to make Palestine a dead issue as they develop closer diplomatic ties with their fellow autocracies in the Middle East, chiefly the gulf states. All of that has been completely thrown out the window. Even if Israeli politicians and society will never accept the reality of a Palestinian state and Palestinian freedom forcing them to acknowledge this reality on the world stage, forcing people to recognize that Israel has continued to act in bad faith in all of these negotiations will itself be a huge blow to Israel's legitimacy. It's not at all clear what sort of shape Israel will or even can take after this latest assault on Gaza ends. I do not have high hopes for Israel. At the same time the project of Israel has shown a remarkable resilience, and in recent years Israel has in its rightward shift aligned itself with other far right shifting states, India is talked about in the listening post segment as well. I do wonder whether countries like India or Hungary will embrace Israel or see it as too big of a liability, especially since unlike the BJP or Fidesz, Likud has a far smaller legislative majority. Maybe the army will mutiny at some point if this drags on and impose a temporary government to force through some sort of order.

Now is as good a time as any to share this essay by Perry Anderson from the September/October issue of the New Left Review on international law, because it expresses the fundamental contradictions and problems with international law as a system and its origins in western imperialism so well:

On some real shit though there needs to be a section of the library for the books about trans women I can get for my deeply conservative mom like I do not want to try and figure out how to explain gender studies. Or a movie, a post it note, ao3 story.