By the way, Dr. Lang keeps this is this is this prescribing

Celexa

This is what this is gaslighting hell doctor you’re jealous you’re a fucking piece of shit you’re a misogynist

And Sidney Jones has fucking jokes

Exactly because Sidney Jones will never be from Australia. Meanwhile, Australia is like oh my god are you a blue healer? Do you know what maybe I am.

I’ll tell you guys what when a princess of Saudi Arabia can be out of the closet that’s the day you guys can call yourselves gay princesses

As far as all of this technology abuse, I don’t need to worry terribly do I who knows I wish we lived in a less corrupt country

Everybody’s corrupt Dennis why don’t you get a nice big cup of reality, check motherfucker, and then Doctors laugh at me saying that I’m small minded

And then other people impersonate Doctors to make them look bad, so it’s getting really weird

J2 Main Panel Nolacon 2023

The stage the boys are on has a catwalk so they play around and do a model walk at the beginning.

Also, before the questions, Jensen shares that he had a senior moment recently, he was taking the kids to school and In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins came on the radio. His daughter asked if they could change it and he told her no and as they were waiting at a stop light he told her to wait for the drum solo, because for those that have never heard this song before- do so but also this song has a very iconic drum solo, and when the drum solo came up he threw his neck out playing along to it. And Jared tells that he did the army certification training during his USO Poland stop and it was like the 2nd day there and there were all these jacked up 25-year-olds and they explained what they had to do and his knee is all jacked but he can’t say no so the time comes for the deadlift portion and he ended up tweaking his lower back a little bit. Then out of frustration, the last part of the test is holding a plank for like a minute and 15 seconds but he decided he was gonna stay in that plank till he dropped so he so he did a four and half minute plank. And then could barely walk and was all hunched over.

Into questions we go, what’s the weirdest space they’ve shared a convention with? Jensen starts to say that they don’t normally share a space but is then reminded they once shared with a furry convention that was going on. Jared says he recalls that probably around 2009-2010, in the first couple of years of them doing cons, at the same time they were doing a con there was a doctor convention a couple of doors down and some of them would get lost and you would just see physicians walk into the room and then back out slowly looking very confused due to some of the questions they were hearing for example about killing Lucifer. So they joke that if you don't know what SPN is or watch the show and you hear the questions they get, you're going to be wondering where you are. x

If they were in a Freaky Friday situation and swapped bodies what are some of the first things they would do as each other? Jared shares that the episode Swap Meat was initially an idea for an episode where Sam and Dean swap bodies and it was pretty wacky but as they started developing it he thinks the network shut it down but Jensen says that he thinks it was changed in an effort to give them some time off because they tried to give the boys a break every once in a while, and if they had gone with this idea they would both be working a lot of hours every day like 14 hours.

Jared answers that if he was body-swapping with Jensen different answer but Sam body swapping with Dean would probably go to the fridge and throw out all the unhealthy shit and swap it for salads and fruits. If he was body-swapping with Jensen, he’d probably get up and play a concert. Jensen would go get his knee surgery and then he’d go play any game of pick-up basketball there was and block the throws. They say that Jared did that the day prior, someone had thrown like car keys and Jared automatically slammed them down to the ground mid-air. Jared says that both with his friend group now and also the one he grew up with if anything is thrown in the vicinity of one of the friend members he'll smack it off the air. And Jensen says that Jared will do it without meaning too, it's just a reaction he has, that there was a scene where Dean throws C something, and Jared without thinking smacked it to the ground and then immediately regretted it cause they had to shoot the scene again. 😂

If they had to rule the world for a day either together or separately how would they do so? Jared says he would make social media not anonymous. You’d have to face all the hate- he thinks the world is a nicer place on the elevator with somebody than when people are behind a computer. And then he'd eat a bunch of candy. Jensen says he’d force government buildings to play New Orleans-style jazz music all the time, he thinks the world is a better place when there’s music involved. x

Are they going to do more voice acting? Do they enjoy it? Jared says he does enjoy it but that there’s a difference between voice acting when the animation is already done like with the SPN anime it was originally in Japanese but there were some sentences that in Japanese are like two words but that wouldn't be the case in the translation to English so he had to speak as fast as possible while trying to act so he’s not interested in dubbing. As Jared is saying this, Jensen laughs and says that it feels like Jared was traumatized by that experience and tells him that those difficulties are why he did not do the dubbing for the anime, and when Jared tells him that he didn't tell him Jensen replies that he tried.

Jensen says the normal process is the voice gets laid down and then the animation gets done like they did for Scoobynatural. He shares that he’s got a recording he'll be doing on Tuesday for a new project. And there are some he’s already done that are being animated, they’ll probably be out maybe later this year. He does enjoy voice acting because it’s such a departure from what they normally do on camera, they go in and deliver dialogue but it's not with a scene partner, he's in a booth by himself so it's odd when you meet someone who you had already done a movie with without actually meeting them. And each line of dialogue has a number next to it so the director might ask him to skip to a certain number and do multiple different readings of it. He looks forward to doing more voice work, it's something his father has made a living off for most of his career, his dad does voice-over for commercials and such, and says that it's a difficult part of the industry to get into.

Jared also mentions that they realized, especially during the early seasons of spn, that if there was something difficult to do but they did it over and over again and they did it well it would be written more so there would be things he enjoyed doing but didn't want to do often so he'd sandbag a little bit and Jensen would do it with Latin incantations, he'd pretend he wasn't good at it so he wouldn't have to do them. x

Is there an episode of the show that is memorable for them or that they feel changed their lives? Jared replies that the short answer is so many, and the shorter but more detailed answer would be when Sam opens up to Dean about some struggles going on in his head and Dean is supportive, that made Jared realize that he could talk about embarrassing stuff because people can respond not judgementally but be supportive. A lot of the eps are special but the Pilot as well holds that importance for him, says there are things in their industry where they know they have lightning in a bottle but it doesn’t matter if the people who are paying for them to play pretend want more viewers or a better streaming situation you can have something great but it get cancelled after an episode or a season or two. So he feels like to the best of his recollection even from the Pilot he felt like they had lightning in a bottle and they had something that was really freaking good but that it might not ever get aired then jokingly says that 15yrs later they were wondering when it was going to end.

Jensen gives two answers, one that changed from the show's perspective and one from a personal perspective. From a personal perspective, Wendigo. That it wasn't one of the amazing episodes of the show but for them, it was really their first step in their journey together. The Pilot was something they were going to do that had no promise of a future, they hoped it would be picked up and turned into a series but when they stepped foot into the set of Wendigo they knew the show was going to see the light of day, they knew they would have multiple episodes and they knew this journey they were about to embark on was going to happen and they didn't how long it was gonna happen but they knew there was at least a journey to be had so that changed him personally. From a show perspective, he’ll say Lazarus Rising because that’s when the show expanded their universe into heaven and hell. x

What’s the best and worse thing about being on such a long-running tv show? Jared can’t think of the worst. He says that the sacrifices if they can be called that are pretty obvious like the long hours, and having their family in Texas while shooting in Vancouver was rough but he just spend a week in Poland with people who are away from their families for nine months at a time so he’s not bitching, but there was a toll on his body like having wrist surgery and having to go into work the next day but on the other side of it the feeling of letting your head hit the pillow after a hard day at work there’s nothing like it. The best would be making lifelong friendships and relationships. He feels like if he had to go to Van tomorrow he'd be texting the SPN cast and crew to catch up, and it would be as if no time had passed.

Jensen would say worst part was the walking away, if you’re on a show for 1-3 seasons it’s much easier to walk away from that than it was to walk away from 15yrs of relationships and laughter and friends and family, and not just walking away from set and the people who made that set but also walking away from a story and characters they had truly grown to love. But that was also the best part being able to build that family, and build that set, and build those relationships and journey with the characters and friends and family for that amout of time that was the best part. x

What non-hunting related habits and quirks do they think Sam and Dean inherited from John? Jared jokes the voice. Then says he thinks Sam fought a lot against turning into who John was for him, and something that having three children and talking to other parents he has learned is every kid is born into a different family. So he thinks the John Sam got was different from the one Dean got if for no other reason that Dean's first 3 or 4 years were with mom still, Sam didn't have that so he thinks Sam put up a facade, he takes after his father and his brother anyways but he tried not to emulate John. Jensen says definitely the voice for Dean also maybe some driving skills and he would say on a more serious level the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the ones you love. x

Can Jensen share some stories about the finale of The Winchesters and Meg Donnelly driving Baby? Jensen says Robbie Thompson knew he wanted to make that happen for the finale quite a while before they even broke that story, it was something to spice up the season finale they try to do that in just about every show wether it's bringing back a familiar character or paying for a very expensive song which they also did, he says that Kripke actually called him and asked how he got Zeppelin and Jensen replied "name your kid Zeppelin you get Zeppelin". So they knew they wanted to somehow incorporate the car and he was on the docket to come back, and they wanted some other familiar faces so luckily Jim Beaver was available and Alex Calvert was available then he says MC offered but he said no. And you might be tempted to think he's making a mean joke but he says it’s true that MC told him he would came back that he wasn't doing anything and Jensen was like oh it's okay, we're good and if you're laughing right now just know you're not laughing nearly as hard as Jensen and Jared were cause those two were cracking up on that stage. Jensen says there was a reason for that but he can’t get into it but depending on the future of the show he’ll say why at sometime, which is professional speak for I'll never tell (and that's professional speak for I didn't want him there).

But getting the car back over there was something they knew they were gonna do so when they did he then saw on the script Meg was going to drive it even though she had just gotten her license the previous week but luckily Meg is a skilled performer but also she's a truly talented singer and dancer so she's very athletic so she has very good spatial awareness and motor skills which are a necessity when you're driving. So when she went to drive he was like okay, don't mess this up, and he did know that if anything happened to it the car was immediately going back to a shop and getting fixed. But she did great and he's glad it worked out that way and he was really proud of what everone did in that finale, he thinks it turned out really well and it's something he's very proud of. x

If Baby was possessed and had to be put down what would their last words be to Baby? Jared says Sam would probably be like 'hey Baby, can you just hold here a second I’m gonna try and find Crowley to put him in the trunk before we take care of business'. On a more serious note he thinks Sam would be like 'all right, get up to Heaven and wait for my brother'. Jensen asks the fan if they have seen Marley & Me but the fan hasn't because they know the ending is really sad. Spoiler alert for a movie from 2008, the dog is put down at the end. But Jensen says it would be like Marley & Me for Dean there would be tears and him uttering the words I'm so sorry Baby.

Jared shares a quick story about how years ago like 10-15yrs ago they were on a flight to somewhere and the way they were situated he was facing Jensen and D, and at one point he looked over at them and they had their headphones in like they were watching something but they were a wreck, silently crying and it was because they were watching Marley & Me. Then on the flight back Jared watched it and he was the same, a silently crying wreck. x

Any possibility they’d do an SPN movie? Jensen says yes. Jared asks him if he would prefer doing a limited series or a movie? Jensen answers, yes. Jared says that when they walked away from SPN they weren’t saying goodbye it was see you later and they looked at each other and kept going 'don't think about it too much because we’ll talk again in 2025'. So talk to them in 2025. Jensen says that they decided they were gonna wait 5 years, and then talk about what it would look like to bring it back out that obviously a lot of people need to be involved in those conversations, there's a lot of legalities and business affairs but obviously they can't do it without them and that's something they'll be talking about in a couple years. x

If somebody stole the Impala what would Dean do? Jensen answers that it would be all four John Wick movies rolled into one. He thinks if somebody stole Baby, Dean would go a little nuts, he would get Baby back no matter what the cost. The fan also asks if Dean's answer when Sam asks him that question and Dean says he'd murder them all was improve or if it was in the script, Jensen believes that one was improve.

Also, he does the Dean voice and we get some fangirl!Jared ❣️ x

When they were little kids was there any show they used to act out like if they were one of the characters? Jensen says Zack Morris. Jared says Home Improvement, Jonathan Taylor Thomas. That he was the same age and all the girls he liked had a crush on him and he liked the show, and thought he was funny, and liked that he had brothers and he wanted to be an actor like him so he would have loved to have been one of the brothers on Home Improvement.

Jensen tries to think about some of the shows that were on at the time when they were kids, and Jared asks him what Golden Girl he'd be, he answers Blanche. But he wanted to be Sam from Cheers, they watched that a lot and he just thought that character kinda had the world revolve around him a little bit and that's not to say that's what he wanted but he wanted to be the guy in the middle making it all happen, fixing the bar, making the drinks, having everybody know his name. x

The next question is a long one: of all the projects they've done was SPN their favorite show to act in? If it was what was their favorite part about working with the cast? What was their favorite episode? And what was their favorite Sam and Dean quote? Jared replies that he feels like every emotion he has ever had in his life he's had at some point in time during SPN so it's certainly the most complete, that it's like asking which child is his favorite. It was great, he fell in love and met some friends and got to do everything as Sam, he played every version of Sam he could; that it was awesome to explore and in a sense, especially in the beginning, it was nice that they weren't in LA because in Van they basically went to work, went home, went to bed and every now and then they'd get off early enough to go get a steak and watch some sports but they weren't distracted by like the next red carpet event in LA they just kinda were loving the process. For favorite line he says: "What kind of house doesn't have salt?"

Jensen says it's easy to make an argument why SPN has been his favorite project to work on and it's crazy because you work on a show for 15yrs, you would think there would be plenty of negative aspects to it that would maybe reveal themselves or whatever but he would say there was the least amount of drama, problems, issues on SPN than any other project he's worked on and to have that as long as he did that's his favorite- he would say that's why SPN is his favorite because he's known it the longest and he got to know it the deepest and most engaged with it than he ever has been with any other project. Line wise he goes with the first one that comes to his mind: "That was scary" x

Last question time, the fan first asks Jared when he’s going to bring G to see the fans at a con. Jared answers that it sounds like an awesome idea but then who’s gonna watch the kids…….I could make so many comments but I’m just gonna keep it moving. Jensen asks the fan what they would ask G if she were there and Jared pipes up and says "when are you gonna go back home?" What a loving husband.

Anyway, the actual question is what was their favorite or most memorable ep to film? For Jared most memorable is a little difficult to answer because there are so many but for favorite French Mistake, that it was a lot of fun and he doesn't think he'll ever get the chance to do anything similar to that again. Jensen says Inherit the Earth. x

And at the end of this panel there's also a butt pat! 🍑

J2 Main Panel Nolacon 2023

trying to get glasses like OOOOoooOOoOO welcome to a STRIP MALL DOCTOR. does 1 or 2 work better for you? (trick question.) tell me the NUMBERS AND LETTERS ON MY DMV POSTER. now look at this little house!!!! now here is my secret riddle. -3.5 -4. 0.00 0.00. remember i told you that. the government will KILL ME if i don't tell you. but you have to ask. if you don't ask i won't tell you the last line of my secret riddle (pupillary distance) ;)

ough you want ant-reflective coating?? you want to SEE through this glass??? even when it's bright out?? that will be 500 dollars. also im not in network. yeah i know we're listed on the website funny story about that actu

p.s. also you failed the exam. the eye exam. i didn't even know people could do that.

SAREE MAKDISI

No Human Being Can Exist

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite?

RECENTLY, AN AUSTRALIAN-PALESTINIAN friend of mine was invited to appear on Australia’s national television network to discuss the situation in and around Gaza.1 His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you defend Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently. By the eve of October 7, he pointed out, Israeli forces had already killed more than two hundred Palestinians in 2023. The siege in Gaza was more than sixteen years old, and Israel had been operating outside international law for seventy-five years. “Normal” in Palestine was a killing a day—yet a killing a day in a decades-old occupation was hardly news; it certainly wasn’t justification for a live interview on a national television network. Palestinians were being given the opportunity to speak now because the Western media suddenly cared, and they cared (“as we should care,” my friend added) because, this time, the victims included Israeli civilians. In the days after October 7, Australia made a strong show of support for Israel: Parliament and the Sydney Opera House were lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag; the Prime Minister said pro-Palestinian rallies should be called off out of respect for the Israeli dead; the foreign minister was lambasted for saying Israel should endeavor to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza. “Well, what about our lives?” my friend asked.

What about lighting up a building for us? When our government lights up every building blue and white, how are we [Australian Palestinians] supposed to feel? Are we not Australian? Should nobody care about us? A 14-year-old boy was set on fire in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. What about us?

The news anchors were caught off guard. This isn’t how these interviews are supposed to go.

Those of us, like my friend, who are summoned by Western media outlets to provide a Palestinian perspective on the disaster unfolding in Gaza are well aware of the condition on which we are allowed to speak, which is the tacit assumption that our people’s lives don’t matter as much as the lives of the people who do. Questions are framed by the initial Hamas attack on Israeli civilians (the Hamas attack on Israeli military targets and Israel’s belt of fortifications, watchtowers, and prison gates surrounding Gaza goes unnoticed), and any attempt to place it in a wider historical framework gets diverted back to the attack itself: How can you justify it? Why are you trying to explain it instead of condemning it? Why can’t you just denounce the attack? If Palestinian commentators want to be asked about Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians—about the history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid that produced the contemporary Gaza Strip and the violence we are witnessing today; about the structural violence of decades of Israeli occupation that cuts farmers off from their fields, teachers from their classrooms, doctors from their patients, and children from their parents—we have to ask to be asked. And even then, the questions don’t come.

I’ve spoken to a lot of journalists from a lot of different media organizations over the past two weeks. With rare exceptions, the pattern is consistent, as it has been for years. A recent appearance on a major US cable news channel was canceled at the last minute, immediately after I sent in the talking points the producer requested I submit; they clearly weren’t the talking points they had in mind. For years, I was on the list of regular guests for BBC radio and television interviews concerning Palestine—until, during a previous Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I told the interviewer he was asking the wrong questions and that the questions that mattered had to do with history and context, not just what was happening right now. That was my last appearance on the BBC.

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? How can you explain that the Israeli occupation doesn’t have to resort to explosions—or even bullets and machine-guns—to kill? That occupation and apartheid structure and saturate the everyday life of every Palestinian? That the results are literally murderous even when no shots are fired? Cancer patients in Gaza are cut off from life-saving treatments.2 Babies whose mothers are denied passage by Israeli troops are born in the mud by the side of the road at Israeli military checkpoints. Between 2000 and 2004, at the peak of the Israeli roadblock-and-checkpoint regime in the West Bank (which has been reimposed with a vengeance), sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way; thirty-six of those babies died as a result.3That never constituted news in the Western world. Those weren’t losses to be mourned. They were, at most, statistics.

What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn. During the Haitian revolution in the early 19th century, former slaves massacred white settler men, women, and children. During Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, insurgent slaves massacred white men, women, and children. During the Indian uprising of 1857, Indian rebels massacred English men, women, and children. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, Kenyan rebels massacred settler men, women, and children. At Oran in 1962, Algerian revolutionaries massacred French men, women, and children. Why should anyone expect Palestinians—or anyone else—to be different? To point these things out is not to justify them; it is to understand them. Every single one of these massacres was the result of decades or centuries of colonial violence and oppression, a structure of violence Frantz Fanon explained decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth.

What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit. And that while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before.

AT ANY MOMENT, without warning, at any time of the day or night, any apartment building in the densely populated Gaza Strip can be struck by an Israeli bomb or missile. Some of the stricken buildings simply collapse into layers of concrete pancakes, the dead and the living alike entombed in the shattered ruins. Often, rescuers shouting “hadan sami’ana?” (“can anyone hear us?”) hear calls for help from survivors deep in the rubble, but without heavy lifting equipment all they can do is helplessly scrabble at the concrete slabs with crowbars or their bare hands, hoping against hope to pry open gaps wide enough to get survivors or the injured out. Some buildings are struck with such heavy bombs that the ensuing fireballs shower body parts and sometimes whole charred bodies—usually, because of their small size, those of children—over surrounding neighborhoods. Phosphorus shells, primed by Israeli gunners to detonate with airburst proximity fuses so that incendiary particles rain down over as wide an area as possible, set fire to anything flammable, including furniture, clothing, and human bodies. Phosphorus is pyrophoric—it will burn as long as it has access to air and basically can’t be extinguished. If it makes contact with a human body it has to be dug out by scalpel and will keep burning into the flesh until it’s extracted.

“We live,” one of Al Jazeera’s Arabic correspondents said, talking over the ubiquitous buzz of Israel’s lethal drones, “enveloped in the smell of smoke and death.” Entire families—twenty, thirty people at a time—have been wiped out. Friends and relatives desperately checking on each other often find smoking ruins where close relations once lived, their fate unknown, vanished either under the concrete or scattered in the remnants of other increasingly unrecognizable areas. Survivors find themselves in one of the most crowded areas on earth with crumbling telecommunications, faltering electricity, failing medical systems, a looming internet outage, and an uncertain future.4

In 2018, the United Nations warned that Gaza—its basic infrastructure of electricity, water, and sewage systems smashed over years of Israeli incursions and bombings, leaving 95 percent of the population without ready access to fresh drinking water—would be “unlivable” by 2020. It’s now 2023, and the entire territory, cut off from the outside world, is without any access to food, water, medical supplies, fuel and electricity, all while under continuous bombardment from land, sea, and air.5 “Attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes,” pointed out Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. “Cutting off men, women, children [from] water, electricity and heating with winter coming,” she continued—“these are acts of pure terror.” Von der Leyen is right, of course, but in this instance she was referring to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. As for Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s infrastructure, Von der Leyen says that Israel has the right to defend itself.

900, 1000, 1500, 1800, 2600, 3500, 4600, 5000, 5900, 6500. The fatality figures, with which no one can keep up, are augmented every few hours with another twenty here and thirty there as this building or that is brought down in a cataclysmic burst of fire, smoke, and rubble. Three or four hundred people—or more—are being killed every day. At one point, health sources in Gaza reported 100 fatalities in a single hour. For every person killed there are two or three or more wounded, often severely. Almost half the dead and wounded are young children; some of the most painful images coming out of the current bombardment of Gaza, as in the ones past, are those of dead children, battered, ashen, covered in soot and dust, wrapped in the final embrace of parents who were killed trying to protect them. So far, with no end in sight, Israel has killed almost three thousand children. The dead and wounded or often simply recovered body parts—charred legs, trunks, heads—are taken to hospitals overflowing with casualties, running out of medical supplies and fuel for their emergency generators. Hospital beds have long since been fully occupied; new arrivals to Gaza’s hospitals crowd together in their own blood in hallways or on the pavements outside; doctors report napping on operating tables on which they now have to operate without anesthetic by the light of mobile phones, using household vinegar to clean wounds because they’ve run out of everything else.6

With morgues full to capacity and cemeteries running out of space, health authorities in Gaza have started storing bodies in ice cream trucks, with blood dripping slowly from doors emblazoned with the bright childish colors of ice cream brands.7 In alleys, courtyards, and makeshift mosques, those who are able gather in silent tears and prayers over arrays of bodies, large and often pitifully small, wrapped in blood-soaked shrouds in preparation for burial. Relatives sob over each bundle, give a bobbing forehead one last kiss as it is taken away for the last time, leaving only weeping mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins in each other’s arms, their own turn in their shrouds surely not far away. Sometimes there are no relatives; they’re all gone, too. The scale of the death and destruction is so massive, so unrelenting, there’s often no time to mourn, and every day, every hour, the Israelis shower more death on Gaza. One hospital has begun burying the anonymous dead in mass graves for lack of any other option.8

In the first week of the round-the-clock bombardment, the Israelis said they had dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza, a number equivalent to about a month of bombing at the peak of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—countries many, many times larger than the Gaza Strip.9 (Iraq is over a thousand times the size of Gaza.) They also claimed to have dropped over a thousand tons of high explosives; by the end of week one, we were, in other words, already into the kiloton measurements of nuclear weapons, and weeks two and three are upon us.10 In the first week of bombing, 1,700 entire buildings in Gaza were destroyed. Many times that number were damaged, often beyond repair. Each building includes seven, eight, nine, or more separate apartments, each one the former home of some family now either homeless once more or dead. As ever, the Israelis claim that they are targeting “the terror infrastructure.” As ever, the bodies (or body parts) actually pulled from the rubble or picked up from the neighboring streets are mostly of women and children, unlikely constituents of the phantom “terror infrastructure” from which the occupying power—with the blessing and benediction of its superpower patron—claims to be defending itself.

It is obvious from the harrowing footage coming out of Gaza that the Israelis, unable to locate any clear military targets—no guerrilla fighters in the history of anticolonial struggle have ever stood around waving their hands and making themselves obvious targets—are indiscriminately striking civilian targets instead, systematically destroying one concrete building after another, often annihilating entire neighborhoods at a time; the UN estimates that Israel’s bombing campaign has already damaged or destroyed 40 percent of all of the housing units in Gaza.11 On its websites and social media accounts, the Israeli state proudly boasts of the success of its campaign against Hamas, but the evidence it musters generally amounts to photographs of urban ruin, and the result is the carefully calculated infliction of mass homelessness on an entire population.

On October 12, the Israelis told one million people in the northern part of Gaza to flee for their lives.12 But there is nowhere for them to flee to, and those who attempt flight compound risk upon risk. The Gaza Strip is all of 140 square miles; it is already one of the most densely populated areas in the entire world. If the United States had the population density of Gaza, it would have 60,000,000,000 inhabitants. That’s sixty billion. And now the Israelis are bellowing that they want the tiny territory’s population to somehow squeeze into half the remaining area—and anyway they are bombing the south of Gaza as well as the north and the center. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.

Already refugees once or sometimes twice over (80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees, survivors or descendants of survivors of the ethnic cleansing of the rest of southwestern Palestine in 1948), new refugees find themselves in search of refuge once more, even as the Israelis warn darkly that there is far, far more to come.13 On October 14, a column of terrified refugees making their way north to south down Salah al Din Street in Gaza City—specifically singled out by Israeli leaflets as a safe corridor—were bombed, and seventy survivors of other bombings were killed and scores more injured. Doctors in clinics and hospitals in northern Gaza refused to move altogether, saying that it would be impossible primarily because there’s nowhere to move their patients to. All the other hospitals are full, said Dr. Yousef Abu al-Rish of the Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza. “And the other thing,” he added, “most of the cases are unstable. And if we want to even transfer them, even if there [are] extra beds in the other hospitals, which is not true, they will die because they are too unstable to be transported.” Patients in the ICU, newborns in incubators, people on ventilators—they would all just die if they were moved. Of course they might die if they stay put too, especially once the last drops of diesel run out and the lights go off. Or if the Israelis continue to bomb hospitals and ambulances as they have been doing. Already, a third of the hospitals and clinics in Gaza have had to shut down due to a lack of resources.14

“The specter of death is hanging over Gaza,” warned Martin Griffiths, UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. “With no water, no power, no food and no medicine, thousands will die. Plain and simple.”

A few days ago the Israelis said that it would be best, on the whole, for the entire population of the territory—over two million people, half of them children—to leave, either to Egypt or to the Gulf. We aim, the Israeli analyst Giora Eiland said approvingly, “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” As a result, he added, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”15 Major-General Ghassan Alian of the Israeli army, echoing the Defense Minister’s recent reference to Palestinians as “human animals,” said, “human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”16

What kind of people talk like this, with a godlike sense of their power over literally millions of people? What mindset produces such genocidal proclamations on the disposition of entire populations?

WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING before our eyes is, I think, unprecedented in the history of colonial warfare. Ethnic cleansing, in itself, is unfortunately not as rare an occasion as one would like; only a few weeks ago, 130,000 Armenians were driven in terror from their homes in Artsakh by (not coincidentally Israeli-armed) Azerbaijan. In the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, thousands of people of the “wrong” religion or ethnicity were expelled at a time from their communities in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. Almost all—90 percent—of the Christian and Muslim population of Palestine itself was ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948. And we can go back to the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries and recall the sordid history of genocide, extermination, and slavery with which Western civilization made its enlightened presence felt all around the planet.

But in no instance that I know of has ethnic cleansing been accomplished through the use of massive ordnance and heavy bombardment with ultra-modern weapons systems, including the one-ton bombs (and even heavier bunker-buster munitions) used by Israelis flying the latest American jets. Such matters are normally conducted in person, with rifles or at the point of the bayonet. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was carried out almost entirely with small arms, for instance; the Palestinian civilians massacred at Deir Yassin, Tantura, and other sites to inspire others into terrified flight were shot with pistols, rifles, or machine-guns at close range, not struck by thousand-pound bombs dropped from F-35s flying at 10,000 feet or higher.

What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st, packaged and wrapped up in language that harks back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes involving the smiting of whole peoples—the Jebusites, the Amelikites, the Canaanites, and of course the Philistines.

What’s worse, if anything could be worse, is the near total indifference on display by so many in and out of government in the Western world. Given the shock and outrage over the Palestinian massacre of Israeli civilians expressed by journalists, politicians, governments, and university presidents, the nearly blanket silence concerning the fate of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Israel is deafening: an earth-shattering, bellowing silence. We who live in Western countries didn’t support or pay for any Palestinian to kill Israeli civilians, but every bomb dropped on Gaza from aircraft the US provided is added to a bill that we pay for. Our officials are falling over themselves to join in the encouragement of the bombing and to rush the delivery of new bombs.

State Department officials issued internal briefings calling on spokespeople not to use phrases such as “end to violence/bloodshed,” “restoring calm,” or “de-escalation/ceasefire.”17 The Biden Administration actually wants the bombing and killing to continue. Asked about the tiny handful of more or less progressive congressional voices calling for a ceasefire and a cessation of hostilities, White House Spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said, “we believe they’re wrong. We believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.”18 There are “not two sides here,” Jean-Pierre added. “There are not two sides.”

Government spokespeople are calculating and insincere; the ultimate nihilists, they don’t actually believe in anything, least of all anything they say themselves. But the same cannot be said of the people all around us who, so desperately moved by the images and narratives of Israeli suffering, have nothing to say about Palestinian suffering on a far greater scale. How can anyone be so heartless? I’m not talking about overt racists who explicitly call for the destruction of Gaza and the expulsion of the Palestinians. I’m talking about ordinary people, many—maybe even most—of them solid liberals when it comes to politics: advocates of gender and racial equality, anxious about climate change, concerned for the unhoused, insistent on wearing face masks out of humane consideration for others, voters for the most progressive of Democrats. Their indifference is not personal, but a manifestation of a broader culture of denial.19 Such people seem not to see or to recognize Palestinian suffering because they literally do not see or recognize it. They are far too intent, far too focused, on the suffering of people with whom they can more readily identify, people they understand to be just like themselves.

Of course, the corporate media know how to encourage such forms of identification, how to construct protagonists, and how to make viewers sympathize with a subject, to imagine themselves in her shoes. In throttling information, Western media outlets cut off access to identification with Palestinians, and reaffirm the perception that there is only one side. Meanwhile on Al Jazeera Arabic—whose team of correspondents in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine and Lebanon have been providing gripping and unflinching coverage of the catastrophe in Gaza—tragedy unfolds in real time. On October 25, the Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh was on air when he received news that his wife, son, and daughter were killed in an Israeli airstrike nearby.20 Footage shows him on his knees as he weeps and places a hand on his teenage son’s chest.21 “They’re taking their revenge on us through children?” Dahdouh says. For those of us glued to Arabic Jazeera these days, to whom Dahdouh is a familiar face, the loss feels personal.

Some lives are to be grieved and given names and life stories, their narratives and photographs printed out in the New York Times or the Guardian along with photos of mourning parents. Other lives are just numbers, statistics coming out of an accounting machine that doesn’t seem to stop adding new digits, twenty or thirty at a time.

I think a lot of anti-voting posts miss the point.

It's not about voting for someone who doesn't give a shit about your human rights, whether You're disabled, trans, a POC, etc.

It's about getting another four years to use actually useful strategies that AREN'T voting to try and cause change. It's about delaying the worst and not letting people who are ACTIVELY TRYING TO KILL YOU get into power so you can work on everything from building stronger community support networks to getting ranked choice voting to make voting less futile to all sorts of other efforts.

I mean, yeah, I hate all the D options on the ballot. It's still better than fucking DeSantis McFascist. It's not about thinking elections are actually that effective. It's about doing one thing to try and keep things from getting worse.

Like yeah, Biden hasn't done jack shit for the marginalized groups I'm in.

He also hasn't actively endangered us one bit more than the fucked up system we're in already does.

I remember bills trying to cut SSI significantly under Trump. Multiple bills under Biden have been introduced trying to make it better, even if they're not NEARLY enough.

The whole point is that there's a difference between "maintaining a bad status quo allowing us TIME to fix things" and "voting for the person who would be quite happy to start an actual literal physical genocide". I genuinely sometimes feel like you could take any genocidal fascist dictator from the past at the very start of their rise to power and it would be an apt comparison to say people are saying "oh yeah Hitler/Stalin/Mussolini is really bad but their opposition won't actually FIX anything so why bother trying to keep them from coming into power".

Like no, I don't think that makes anyone a fascist or a plant themselves. I think it's just shortsighted and ignorant.

Right now, it's not about finding a candidate in our deeply broken system that shares our ideals and will achieve all our goals. It's about taking the safest option so that we have time to continue fixing the system ourselves. It's a bit like going to the doctor with a chronic illness - you're never gonna find one that is both competent AND listens to you AND won't actively medically abuse you. So you pick one that won't medically abuse you and usually go for one that listens and bring the competency to the appointment yourself.

So that, y'know, your chronic illness doesn't kill you before you can tear down the massively ableist medical system and build a better one in it's place.

The doctors are never gonna do that, but when you're in a position where in our current system you NEED a doctor to survive - just like we don't have a choice not to have a president - you don't just say "well they're all shit so I'll just lay down and die instead".

(Also, even if you live somewhere where national elections are completely useless, uh, STATE AND LOCAL ELECTIONS?! Especially since there are genuinely people at that level who do EXACTLY align with your values and genuinely do want to change everything they can??? Like, having enough people in my state government to make SNAP benefits not be reduced based on income if you're on disability would make a HUGE difference in the lives of my partner and I. Voting at least has a CHANCE on that one.)

Anyway, by all means DO NOT STOP with just voting. There's hardly use in delaying the rise of fascism if you're ONLY delaying it. That just shifts the burden from this generation to the next, all while the fascists can build power and resources.

But I will side eye you a little if you choose not to vote even because someone doesn't recognize your human rights as long as they maintain the status quo enough to allow us to keep fighting for those rights. Like sorry, we live in a world where the rights of minorities are neither enshrined nor recognized by majority society. Yeah, it sucks to vote for someone who doesn't care enough to change that. It's better than by inaction allowing someone to come to power who actively wants to strip more rights away and make it so that we don't even have the power to fight it anymore.

Because the fascists ARE voting. Which means taking a few hours once every four years to vote for someone who sucks and doesn't recognize your humanity might leave a bad taste in your mouth - but it also still leaves you alive and with the ability to vote and with enough autonomy and individual ability left to fight to make that no longer an issue by the next time.

The Struggle to Save Lives Inside Gaza’s Hospitals

Photograph by Ahmad Salem—Bloomberg/Getty Images

— BY Sanya Mansoor | November 6, 2023 | Time

Within minutes of the Oct. 31 Israeli attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, the victims began flooding the Indonesian Hospital a mile away. Dr. Marwan Sultan, the hospital’s medical director, says that most of the injured and dead were women and children. Some had deep burns, serious head injuries, or missing limbs, Sultan told TIME four hours after the attack. There are only 16 intensive-­care beds in the hospital, which was running dangerously low on fuel, threatening the lives of his patients. If the electricity goes, says Sultan, “they will die. They will die.”

The conditions for medical care in Gaza are deteriorating across the besieged 140-sq.-mi. coastal strip. Surgeons are operating by flashlight and rationing water, anesthesia, and the generator fuel needed to perform surgeries, provide electricity for incubators, and care for kidney-dialysis patients, doctors and health organizations tell TIME. The roughly two dozen hospitals still operating in Gaza are absorbing the patients of the 12 that have closed because of a lack of supplies and the ongoing bombing, says the World Health Organization (WHO). “Medical teams are on their knees,” says Hisham Mhanna, spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza.

A man mourns as he attends a funeral of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 24, 2023.Mohammed Salem—Reuters

All war zones are awful, but Gaza presents a unique hell. Much of the enclave of 2 million is now a battlefield, with civilians and combatants intermixed, and homes and businesses sitting side by side with military infrastructure. Nowhere is that reality felt more keenly than at the territory’s hospitals, which have simultaneously become safe havens and potential targets, and where the impact of Israel’s offensive is measured every day in lives—more than 9,000 killed as of Nov. 2, including 135 medical personnel, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,400 people in Israel and started the war, the Israeli military began a massive bombing campaign. On Oct. 13, it ordered civilians to depart the northern part of the strip for the south, and on Oct. 27 it sent in ground troops and armored vehicles. Hamas has fought back above and below ground, from a network of concrete tunnels extending hundreds of miles.

For the estimated 1 million people displaced by fighting, the search for shelter has brought many to makeshift tent cities. More than 50,000 are packed into the Al-Shifa hospital complex in northern Gaza, says Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon. Mattresses line the floor, kids run around, and a stench hangs in the air. So many people in such a small space, with inadequate access to hygiene and sanitation, will lead to an outbreak of infectious diseases, Abu-Sittah worries. Hospitals are struggling to dispose of dead bodies, which pose their own health ­hazards. Abu-Sittah has been going to a corner store to buy bottles of vinegar and laundry detergent to clean wounds. “Every day you make more and more compromises,” he says.

An injured child receives treatment at the Nasser Hospital as the Israeli attacks continue in Khan Yunis, Gaza on Oct. 29, 2023.Abed Zagout—Anadolu/Getty Images

Some two dozen hospitals have been asked to evacuate to the south, according to the WHO, which says doing so would risk patients’ lives. When Israeli government officials called Al-Awda hospital and told its manager, Dr. Ahmed Mhanna, to evacuate staff and patients, “I refused, of course,” he says. “Where can I deal with my patients?”

Doctors worry that their facilities will be hit in the bombardment. On Oct. 30, an Israeli airstrike damaged part of Gaza’s only cancer hospital, the Turkish-­Palestinian Friendship Hospital, says its director, Dr. Sobhi Skeik. “My message is please don’t kill cancer patients,” Skeik says. On Nov. 1, the WHO said that the hospital had shut down.

Days before that, the Israel Defense Forces presented evidence it said showed Hamas had established a command center in and beneath Al-Shifa hospital. A Hamas official ­denied the allegation. Targeting a hospital would be a war crime, whether or not Hamas is using it to hide in, says Susan Akram, a law professor who directs Boston University’s International Human Rights Clinic. “Israel has an obligation to protect the entire population in Gaza,” she says. For its part, Israel notes that using a hospital to hide military equipment or facilities is itself a war crime.

Even without a direct attack, the hospitals lack key supplies, which are coming in at a painfully slow pace amid the Israeli siege. On Oct. 31, the U.S. said that 66 trucks of humanitarian aid were entering Gaza daily, a fraction of the hundreds per day before the war. Fuel remains a critical issue. The Israeli military reportedly believes Hamas holds more than 500,000 liters that it could provide to hospitals. The U.S. says it is pressuring Israel to break its blockade and allow aid in. President Biden called Nov. 1 for a humanitarian “pause” in the war, but faces criticism for providing military aid to Israel.

Everyone in Gaza has been affected. “We often focus on the victims of airstrikes,” says Dr. Brenda Kelly, a consultant obstetrician in Oxford, U.K., “but ordinary lives don’t stop. Women still go into labor. They still have miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, preterm births.” Dr. Hatem Edhair, the head of the neonatal intensive-­care unit at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, fears that electricity shutting off will mean the deaths of five babies in his care who are dependent on ventilators. “If there is no electricity,” he says, “it means the end of their life.”

Al-Awda hospital’s Mhanna, speaking by phone Oct. 23 in southern Gaza, seemed unfazed by the sound of a blast during the interview. “We are afraid; we are human beings,” Mhanna says. “But we cannot do anything except continue our mission with our patients.”

—With reporting by Leslie Dickstein

An injured child is rushed into a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, following an Israeli air strike on Oct. 24, 2023.Yousef Masoud—The New York Times/Redux

but how are we, as leftists and media consumers, supposed interact with people in the global south when we can’t even admit that, despite all the negative influences of the military on their life, marginalised people can’t stop to think that maybe they shouldn’t go and kill brown people because their government said to? like this isn’t meant to fight, and im coming from a standing point of wanting to understand, but isn’t people in the global south’s right to life more important than an american’s financial aspirations? shouldn’t recruited people be ashamed of themselves for falling for drivel about people in the global south that 95% of the time is used against them instead, all for a pay check or a college degree? it seems like that original post is quite “don’t make the killers feel bad despite the fact that they kill because they’re victims too” which is really quite victim blame-y.

Hi again! Wonderful to hear you're genuinely trying to understand. This is such a difficult and messy set of things to talk about. (For those just joining us, we're talking about this this post.)

People in countries targeted by US imperialism 100% deserve to live free from our bullshit. Absolutely. I agree. People in the US also deserve to live. Every human being on this planet deserves a life where they can get their needs met without undue struggle and no threats like violence or poverty loom over their heads.

Because of the nightmare US healthcare system, a college degree and the better pay it promises often feels like and sometimes very much is a matter of life and death. My country lets people die painfully of treatable things all the time just because they can't afford treatment, including plenty of people who have health insurance (I'll spare you the detailed rant about deductibles and copays and out-of-network providers and excluded services and corporations overriding doctors' determinations of what is and is not medically necessary), and there are so many more treatments we could have if only medical research and the expensive steps involved in FDA approval for new medications/devices weren't predominantly driven by what corporations decide will be sufficiently profitable.

But even if life in the US weren't so dire for those on the losing end of our severe economic stratification, shaming people for harmful choices is rarely an effective strategy to get them to stop.

I don't think OP was saying that people targeted by US imperialism need to be patient and understanding with US-Americans who join the military. I'm certainly not saying that. What I think OP was saying and what I'm definitely saying is that SOMEONE needs to be patient and understanding with these people and the more third parties who can extend some empathy the better. Understanding people's reasons for doing harmful things is an essential step in disrupting those reasons.

(Some people never completed that childhood development milestone where you learn not to be a selfish monster, where you learn to regulate your impulses and weigh the potential impacts on others when you're making choices. Or put more simply, some people are selfish assholes who won't ever change and all we can do is out-organize them. I'm not talking about that subset of people here. I'm talking instead about people like Nile.)

I think the crux of our misunderstanding or disagreement is about shame. You've talked about shame like it's morally important to make people who make bad choices feel ashamed of themselves. It's an understandable impulse to want people who've hurt us to suffer, and I think it's wildly unfair to expect marginalized or abused people to choke back their anger and pain and grief for their abusers' benefit — that's a main reason why this isn't about policing the reactions of directly targeted people. But for third parties like you and me, "don’t make the killers feel bad despite the fact that they kill" isn't a claim of moral equivalency, it's a strategy recommendation.

Shame is strategically counterproductive: feeling shame shuts down the higher-level parts of our cognition, which means that people who might be willing to change will have a harder time taking in new information, analyzing it accurately, and changing their behavior in light of that new information when they feel shamed. Some other cognitive things going on here: humans weren't built for the massively complex and interconnected world we live in now and it's difficult to hold the visceral reality of the costs of US imperialism to faraway strangers when you're in 21-year-old Nile's shoes, and many people find it so difficult to admit they were wrong that being confronted with information that proves them wrong causes them to believe inaccurate things more strongly.

Let me give you a few concrete examples.

People misgender me all the time, and I have a right to be mad about it. It fucking sucks. It makes my mental illness symptoms worse and makes it so much harder for me to cope with a lot of the basic stuff of life. Morally I have a right to express my pain without worrying about the precious cognitive abilities of the people who are causing that pain. But I've found that telling people they're being shitty for misgendering me only works a little bit of the time to get people to stop, and often it backfires and they just give me more shit for my trouble. What works a lot more often, especially with people I interact with on a regular basis, is to ask them questions about what about my gender is confusing for them and if there's anything that feels — "No judgment" I say with a polite smile that sucks to have to make, but fuck does it work — scary to them about shifting their beliefs about gender.

I've learned that a lot of people, when faced with the fact that there are more than two genders and mine is one they hadn't heard of before, have a gut fear that accepting what I'm telling them somehow also means their own gender isn't real. If I was assigned a gender at birth that turned out to be wrong, what does that say about theirs?? I've had dozens of irl experiences where doing some empathetic listening with someone who's harmed me and then reassuring them that, for example, they don't have to have thought carefully about their gender in order for it to be valid, if they were assigned a gender at birth and they've never really thought about it or challenged it and they want to keep being that gender without doing any more work that they can totally just do that — my reassuring them helps them resolve the fear that was at the root of their reasons for misgendering me.

It shouldn't have to be my job to do all that work, but we've yet to reach critical mass of cis people who have enough knowledge and put in enough energy to educate enough people effectively enough so that I don't have to do that shit myself. Some days I have the energy to do that work myself, and some days I spend energy I don't have to cope with misgendering I didn't have the energy to disrupt. None of it's fair. The way to make it fair is systemic changes, like changing every form on the planet with a gender box and doing all kinds of public education, including updating middle school bio curriculum to point out that we've historically assigned male and female at birth based on visual assumptions despite scientists being aware for decades that biological sex is a lot more complicated, and anyway identity is even more complicated than what parts and hormones you have. Those systemic changes will help me. Someone on Tumblr saying "terfs fuck off" might feel morally satisfying — a very real benefit when I'm having one of those days where I wonder if I'm the only one who will ever stand up for me — but it doesn't stop more people from becoming terfs. Tactics that do help stop people from becoming terfs include patiently listening to people with terfy leanings and making it as easy as possible for them to hear and process and come to accept accurate information to replace those terf leanings.

I've had conversations I treasure with Palestinians who've talked with me and other US Jews with way more patience and understanding than is fair to ask them to give us, levels of empathy that genuinely touched my soul, that have taught me so much about how to have rough conversations with fellow US Jews about Israel/Palestine and letting go of the Jewish-trauma reasons so many of us understandably but wrongly cling to Zionism. The Palestinians who were so generous with me, and the many more who've been so generous with their energy and understanding with others unlearning Zionism, shouldn't have had to do that, and they chose to do that in the context of a horrific system with practically no good choices. I take that generosity with me when I hear Jews in my life saying shitty and wrong things about Palestinians and I do my best in those situations to be more patient and empathetic than I want to be in the hope that it'll help someone reconsider their reasons for supporting a vision of Jewish political sovereignty that sees equality for non-Jewish citizens as an existential threat.

Expecting marginalized or abused people to be patient with their abusers is not ever ok and I want to emphasize again the empathy I was giving Nile in my previous response is never ever something fictional people targeted by the US military let alone real-life targeted people should be expected to do. From my reading, OP wasn't talking about directly targeted people at all, only third parties. Maybe I've complicated things for you here by adding that directly targeted people sometimes choose to do this terribly unfair work — because it can be very effective, because it can feel like the best of bad options, and personally because it can be healing and hopeful and empowering when I'm successful in patience-and-understanding-ing someone into stopping their behavior that hurts me. I added that because you asked how you, as a leftist and media consumer, are supposed to interact with people directly targeted by US militarism and you might find my experiences on different sides of that power dynamic on other issues helpful as you continue figuring out how you can best contribute to working to end US imperialism.

Solving complex problems requires a variety of long-term work from a lot of people playing different roles, and ultimately it requires people who are causing harm to stop. Shaming people for harmful behavior is so rarely effective and so often backfires, but it's profoundly unfair to expect people directly targeted to be careful not to express themselves in ways that might make their abusers feel shame, so I think it is fair to encourage third parties to take a little extra care to avoid adding to the shame pile.

Trigeminal Neuralgia.

Cold air seeped in after a warm day, and I didn’t notice until pain like a cramp spread over my face. The bottom of my neck hurt in a way that made me check to see if I had been cut somehow. It’s nerve damage - the aftermath of a removed parotid tumour. It’s incurable and progressive. People used to kill themselves when they got this. It is what it is. Currently it has died down, with only brief weird reminders. My left ear feels quite ready to fall off. It’s huge, my mind insists, like a balloon, but dead tissue. Of course the mirror reflects the same picture as always; nothing wrong. The misfiring nerve causes the brain to create a false picture of the body. After it hit, I gave up on trying to make dinner and ordered some takeaway as a distraction, but the driver was confused, and kept telling me how I should alter the property i don’t own to make it clearer to drivers as to where I am. I kept trying to point out I have no legal right to do what he was saying, but then gave up and just nodded. It’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t listening when your nerve is screaming in your ear. I tried making an appointment for a medical review I am required to do for my disability pension. I am permanently disabled, but the government here lives in hope of finding a loophole they can use to move me out of that category so I don’t have to be paid. That would result in either death or incarceration, the latter which would be more expensive, but it would be in a different section’s budget, and governments are mostly a group of competing departments trying to save their own money even if it means the death of others. And the medical advise is often worse than useless. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/trigeminal-neuralgia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353344 “ having trigeminal neuralgia doesn't necessarily mean that you're doomed to a life of pain “ Yes, it does. “ Doctors usually can effectively manage trigeminal neuralgia with medications, injections or surgery. “ Not according to the experts I consulted, or the GPs who manage me. There was one experimental medication which I was involved with. The side effects were the worst I have experienced in my lifetime. I barely survived, but the government is now trying to treat every patient with that drug. I guess it solves their problem if patients kill themselves - they can write it off as toxic masculinity if male, and patriarchal oppression if female. They don’t have to deal with the fact the drug is worse than the disease. Surgery? They cut the nerve.

You will lose control of the side they cut. You will drool from that side, your speech is slurred, you have trouble drinking and eating. And the pain can come back anyway.  The injection treatment I was notified of was botox. It was too expensive for me to try. It might work, but recommending it for me is like recommending I hire servants to carry me about. It’s insane to tell someone on a disability pension to pay for it when most can barely manage their rent. So the Canadian Solution is supposed to be coming to Australia, or so they claim. They will be pressuring people like me to stop being a burden on the government, to stop draining the money from budgets that are collapsing thanks to lockdownerism. The pandermic response is going to kill more people than the disease ever could, but in quiet ways. Less money means poor people die from the cold, or the heat, or in some countries, they will starve. Diseases of other kinds take advantage - other plagues will spread if economies fail. Dysentery is a favorite. It used to follow wars, and the weird thing was you were far more likely to die from such things than the actual battles. Pestilence and War go hand in hand.

I was like this after the surgery, and I knew that it might be permanent. It wasn’t, but the recovery was at a cost. The nerve had to be stretched to access the parotid, and the nearest analogy is to take an electrical network cable, bend it too far, then put it back in soggy soil. The breaks in the sheathing mean that the signal is disrupted, but nerve signals are analog, not digital, and that means that error detection and correction have never evolved. In the wild, as it were, animals who went through what I did just die. It’s only recently that humans have had a fair survival rate - of course there’s no evolutionary adaption to it. And trig neur. is rare - to give you an idea, 13 years ago, when I first had to see experts, there was ONE expert in Australia. Yes, a grand total of one. I think he retired after me, so I have no idea who manages the cases now. The only treatment available was the total avoidance of stress, and I was told that I should get into a cannabis trial, as it had proven effective overseas. 

I did. Twice. Twice I went through all the hoops, only to be told they had had to be cancelled because of political interference from America, which was imposing Nixon’s rules on the rest of the world because .... I have no fucking idea. I’ve always been angry at this, especially since I heard Nixon’s tapes, where he was recorded rigging medical trials. He wanted to have cannabis banned because he saw it as somehow Jewish. Alcohol was good clean American fun, so it was ok. And no President has challenged that ruling, not even Obama who admitted to recreational use. Leftists used to claim that they were going to hold Biden’s feet to the fire, make sure he was accountable. I haven’t seen ONE protest from them of the criminalisation of cannabis, despite the fact that it would be trivial for Biden to undo - he could devolve it to the States - but he won’t. Either the cannabis competing drug companies are paying him top dollar to maintain the status quo, or maybe it is from religious groups. I don’t know or care. Left or right, whoever doing it is a fucking asshole in my book.  I remember really changing my perspective on politics when i heard a libertarian say they believed cannabis should be legal, but they would never use it themselves. It is refreshing to see someone who would walk the walk of morality, doing something that doesn’t benefit themselves, simply because it is the right thing to do. Note that i do not believe that legalisation of cannabis has to solve the problems. Do it stupidly, and you will be in trouble. The excessive taxation in some parts means that illegal cannabis can actually be cheaper than the legal product. How do you mess up that badly? How?!!  A reminder than cannabis is a bloody weed, that will thrive in terrible soils and neglect. It takes little skill or love to make a crop. It is incredibly cheap, especially compared to rival pharmaceuticals that can cost thousands of times more for the same efficacy or less.

My conditions are progressive, and the hell of it is that suffering from attacks makes the attacks worse - as it was explained to me, the condition accelerates the condition, so that preventing attacks prevents attacks. For example, i had to stop working because that stress permanently damages the nerve further. I grew a beard, to shield the areas as best as I could from changes of temperature, and sit inside on days when the air is cold, and hide from the night’s chill. But if the medical advise I was given decades ago was correct, I would have still been able to work if I had had access to medical cannabis. If true, that would mean a totally different history for me. Work means not only money, but status, and it also means the difference between retiring with a partner - or being placed into a communal home, without privacy, and potentially with drug-addicted psychotics or thieves... So that path ... perhaps it would have worked, but I will never know. I cannot flip to that history that never was. I am left to tread what remains of this walk. And the Australian government will be trying to steer me into the grave at every opportunity, and if they implement the Canadian model, I expect that will be done with gusto. The sick, the poor, the old, all seen as parasites, as vermin; and dealt with with disgust, and ultimately, violence.

I always hear a lot of people complain how Shigarakis character became ruined ever since the whole AFO is possessing him thing became prominent in the manga. They often argue that Shigaraki was on track to becoming his own villain and that AFO ruined that and it doesn't make sense and it ruined Shigarakis character arc. I've seen a lot even say that AFO should've died a long time ago in the story so we could've had Shigaraki as the main villain. But like the whole point of Shigarakis character is that he's a puppet of AFOs. Like I would argue in the beginning he only had the illusion of control, he's really nothing more than a tool in the end. Killing AFO earlier on and making Shigaraki the main villain would require a lot of rewriting of Shigarakis character, because his character is pretty dependent on AFO I would argue. I mean I think the whole body possession thing could've been handled better and generally AFOs character as a whole couldve been handled better as well, but to say Shigaraki should've became the main villain is like eh...

The ones saying that are likely young people or nonwriters who can't see the signs that since the beginning Tomura was ALWAYS the victim being used and abused.

So they see him losing control and being manipulated just to get mad. Like how dare he just be a puppet!? How dare he not be the main villain!?

But I agree his role was NEVER to be the main villain. He acted like a child in the first few chapters to show how his emotional growth was stunted. He was still TENKO the hurt child lashing out at the world that abandoned him taking the guise of Tomura.

Killing AFO early would do nothing but ruin his character because he is why he is like this.

I think how AFO took over his body is perfect because it was not with any consent. It shows AFO never CARED about Tomura about him as a person. It has been implied many times that he wanted Tomura to be the next him. You know how many time he said was going to be the next him?

It just turned out to be a lot more literal but also Shigaraki is not big villain material.

He IS a villain mind you, but he has not reached over arching villain level.

Who has a giant network of criminals? Who has government officials in the pocket? Who funded the creation of the Nomu? Who took in Tomura and 'gave' him everything he wanted?

All for One.

What does Tomura have the MOMENT All for One wasn't around?

They were stuck in a warehouse scraping by. They were hungry and directionless, Tomura was confused and still figuring things out. He made a tight nit group of people and how did they get out of that? Doctor Garaki told them to take on Machia, and it led to them fighting the paranormal front.

AGAIN BECAUSE OF AFO SETUP.

IF ANYTHING Tomura is more like a 'hero' of his own story. He does NOT give me Big Bad vibes because he is the underdog. He is a tragic figure who was set up to fall into a trap, this ILLUSION of choice that he somehow chose anything.

He is a villain, a murderer, AND a victim.

And that is why Izuku needs to save him because Tomura is still trapped by this illusion of choice AFO picked for him. When he only playing into what AFO wanted.

TLDR;

Tomura ARC is only an illusion of choice and freedom set up by AFO that was never made for him to be the big bad. The story was always set up to show that Tomura isn't a traditional Villain but also a victim. And him being the big bad would have actually ruined his arc since would erase the fact he was used his whole life.

You would have to change a lot if want to make him the big bad if AFO the one who made Tomura (not Tenko) is out of the picture.

2024-02-21

Singapore

Cordlife begins offering refunds to affected customers

OCBC to give junior staff here $1K each to help cope with rising cost of living

Jail for man who crashed lorry into tree, killing 2 of his friends

HDB launches 4K+ BTO flats, with over 80% having waits of less than 3½ years

Fires involving mobility devices on the rise again

Government to invest up to $100m to upgrade Nationwide Broadband Network to deliver 10Gbps speed

Travel

4 drivers caught by LTA providing illegal cross-border rides between Singapore & Malaysia

Politics

India’s export of lethal drones to Israel raises concerns over its position in Gaza war - way to stoke the Middle East fire 😒

Transport

Singapore: COE prices fall across all categories except for commercial vehicles

Photography

^ Ummmm yeahhhh, StockCake's AI-generated images are free for a good reason!!! 🤣 (In case you didn't notice, why is the microphone head in the woman's mouth?!)

Society

More evidence Koreans are scumbags - Even their doctors are selfish f***s; they would rather innocent people die due to lack of medical attention than risk their salaries possibly decreasing!!! Unbelievable!!! 😲 If you ever go to South Korea, you just have to hope & pray you don't fall sick & require any medical aid!!!

By • Olalekan Fagbade JUST IN; Suspected kilkers of Imo DPO arrested by operatives Spokesperson, Imo State Police Command, Henry Okoye The Imo State Police Command has statex that it had arrested the killers of the Divisional Police Officer of the Ahiazu Mbaise Local Government Area of the state. PUNCH reports some gunmen had last Monday killed the DPO, an Inspector of police and a civilian in an attack at Ahiara. Confirming the new development at the command headquarters, the Commissioner of Police in the state, Danjuma Aboki, said the arrest of the suspects followed a coordinated operation by the operatives of the command. The CP said, “Following the murder of DPO Ahiazu Mbaise and an Inspector of Police on 27/11/2023, at Ahiara Junction in Ahiazu Mbaise by disgruntled elements suspected to be members of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra and its armed militia, Eastern Security Network, and the subsequent confessions of suspects arrested at the scene by police operatives in synergy with the military, operatives of the anti-kidnapping unit on 29/11/2023 stormed the camp of the criminal syndicate at Umuohie in the Ngor Okpala LGA of Imo State, dislodged the terrorists, recovered two automatic pump-action riffles and six rounds of life cartridges. “The determined operatives continued their operation in search of the fleeing terrorists, storming Igbodo-Etche in Rivers State through a technical intelligence tracking device wherein a native doctor, named Everest Agbaragam, ‘m’, 62 years, of Umuoma, Igbodo, Etche Rivers State AKA Mount Everest, was arrested. “On searching his shrine, one pump-action gun loaded with 12 rounds of live cartridges, one big bag containing various denominations of Biafran currencies, one live crocodile, and fetish items were recovered. “On interrogation, he confessed to being a member of IPOB/ESN. He stated that he usually prepares local bulletproof charms, popular known as ‘Odeshi’, for his cohorts before they embark on any operation. He provided useful information to the gallant operatives in storming Umuogwu Forest in the Aboh Mbaise LGA on 1/12/23. “The terrorists, on sighting the police, engaged them in a gun battle but were subdued by the combat-ready operatives who professionally manoeuvered into vintage position and returned fire. In the ensuing gun duel, some of them were neutralised while others escaped into the thick forest with bullet wounds. “The terrorist camp was dislodged and the following exhibits were recovered: Five (AK-47 riffles; six magazines containing 220 rounds of live ammunition; six pump-action guns; 121 rounds of live cartridges; one Revolver; four locally-made pistols; three Toyota Venza cars, including the one they used in attacking the DPO, one Toyota Highlander SUV, and IEDs. “An intense manhunt is ongoing to track down other fleeing suspects. They will be arraigned in court upon completion of a comprehensive investigation.” The CP said the state police command under his leadership had continued to intensify its effort to provide maximum security for the people of the state as the state had been relatively peaceful

Casualties

11,470 killed*, including 4,707 children, and more than 29,000 wounded in Gaza

More than 200 Palestinians killed and 2,750 injured in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem

Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,200

*This figure covers the casualties from October 7 to November 16. Due to breakdowns in communication networks within the Gaza Strip (particularly in northern Gaza), the Gaza Ministry of Health has not been able to regularly update its tolls.

Key Developments

Israeli forces ordered the immediate evacuation of Al-Shifa’ hospital on Saturday morning — leaving only 120 patients in critical state and five doctors on the premises.

Civilians flee Al-Shifa’ carrying people in wheelchairs and gurneys, amid reports that Israeli forces barred men from entering southern Gaza.

Israeli forces reportedly took the bodies of 18 Palestinians from Al-Shifa’, with no information on their whereabouts.

An Israeli airstrike on al-Fakhura school in Jabalia refugee camp on Saturday has killed at least 50 people.

Scores of deadly Israeli airstrikes pummel Gaza schools, mosques, and homes, killing at least 26 in the southern town of Khan Younis.

Israel decides to allow two trucks’ worth of fuel a day into Gaza — a paltry amount that has nonetheless angered the government’s most extreme members.

Forty-eight Democrats send letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling on the White House to pressure Israel to let more fuel into Gaza.

The WHO says Gaza’s health system is “on its knees”.

Israeli media reports that Israeli army killed Vice President of the Palestinian Legislative Council Ahmed Bahr.

Fighting continues between Palestinian resistance groups and Israeli ground forces in northern Gaza and Gaza City.

In the West Bank, Israeli forces bombed the Fatah party headquarters in Balata refugee camp, killing five.

At least two other Palestinians die in the West Bank after being shot by Israeli forces, while armed confrontations continue in several areas of the occupied territory.

Palestinians raise the alarm about growing Israeli settler threat of takeover of Palestinian homes in the Old City’s Armenian Quarter in occupied East Jerusalem.

Hezbollah and other armed groups in Lebanon continue to trade fire with Israeli forces, as Lebanese media reports several wounded and an aluminum factory hit in southern Lebanon.

The International Criminal Court said on Friday that five countries had sent referrals requesting it investigate whether Israel’s actions in the wake of October 7 constituted crimes.

Israel’s Channel 12 says Hamas fighters who staged Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7 most likely weren’t aware that a music festival was taking place in Reim. 

Saturday marks the first anniversary of the adoption of the Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences Arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas. U.N.’s Martin Griffiths says “there is no greater reminder of the importance of its universal endorsement and implementation” than the current situation in Palestine.

U.N. Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation calls on Israel to “stop using water as a weapon of war.”

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi tells conference in Bahrain: “Israel says it wants to wipe out Hamas. There’s a lot of military people here, I just don’t understand how this objective can be realised.”

Thousands of Israelis, including opposition leader Yair Lapid, march to prime minister’s office in Jerusalem calling for the return of hostages held by Hamas.

Biden’s Middle East adviser Brett McGurk says humanitarian relief to Gaza hinges on release of Israeli hostages, as Qatari mediators were reportedly negotiating this week for the release of around 50 civilian hostages held by Palestinian resistance groups in exchange for a three-day ceasefire.

Despite numerous reports of Washington applying more pressure onto Israel in private, an Israeli official tells The Times of Israel that Tel Aviv doesn’t feel that the U.S. is closing its “window of support”.

Israeli army generals express concern over behavior of a number of soldiers in Gaza, including playing soccer and racing military vehicles. 

Sept 10 (Reuters) - At least 40 civilians were killed and dozens injured in an air strike by the army on a market in southern Khartoum, a local volunteer group said in a statement on Sunday, marking the largest single-incident death toll since the war in Sudan began in April.

Air and artillery strikes in residential areas have intensified as the war between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) nears the five-month mark with neither side declaring victory or showing any concrete signs of pursuing mediation.

Drones carried out a series of heavy air strikes on Sunday morning on southern Khartoum, a large district of the city occupied mainly by the RSF, an eyewitness who saw the strike told Reuters, asking not to be identified for security reasons.

Images shared by a body of local volunteers called the Southern Khartoum Emergency Room showed many women and men injured as well as what appeared to be dead bodies covered in cloth, some piled together.

Residents of the area tend to be day workers who, cut off from jobs, are too poor to afford the cost of escaping from the capital.

Mohamed Abdallah, a spokesman for the Emergency Room, which tries to provide medical and other services, said the injured had to be transported on rickshaws or donkey carts.

In a statement, the RSF accused the Sudanese army of carrying out the attack, as well as other strikes. The Sudanese army denied responsibility and blamed the RSF.

"We only aim our attacks at the enemy's groupings and stations in different areas," Brigadier General Nabil Abdallah told Reuters.

While the RSF has fanned out across residential areas throughout the capital Khartoum and neighbouring Bahri and Omdurman, the army has used its advantage of heavy artillery and air strikes to try to push them back, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties.

Strikes in western Omdurman last week killed at least 51 people across two separate days. With most hospitals closed and no functioning local government, volunteers struggle to document the full extent of deaths.

Medical aid agency MSF, which operates Bashair hospital in southern Khartoum, said on social media network X that the crowded Gorro market was hit at 7 am, and that at least 60 people were wounded. Doctors had stopped trying to count as they operated on torn body parts.

"Khartoum has been at war for almost six months. But still, the volunteers ... are shocked and overwhelmed by the scale of horror that struck the city today," emergency coordinator Marie Burton said.

On Friday, the Southern Khartoum emergency room said in a statement that the hospital, one of few still operating, was threatened with closure as supplies run out and staff struggle to reach it.

The army and Rapid Support Forces began fighting on April 15, after tensions arose over integration of their troops in a new transition to democracy. While several countries have launched mediation efforts, none has succeeded in bringing a halt to the fighting.

— British Artist Yusuf Islam, Formerly Known as Cat Stevens, posted on X calling for Israel to be held to account. In his post, he said "I don't think we can ever look at Israel the same again. People have finally woken up to the long years of injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people."

Stevens adds that the arrival of social media has countered reliance on the media for learning about the plight of Palestinian people.

On Monday morning, Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital after a two-week siege. The entire medical complex was left in ruins with bodies found scattered in the vicinity.

— A Norwegian Doctor Who Previously Volunteered in Gaza shared scenes from the aftermath of the Israeli army's siege on al-Shifa Hospital and condemned the assault.

"The name Shifa meaning 'The House of Healing'; now turned into a 'House of Death' by Israel and the US, burnt, totally destroyed to rubble and turned into a graveyard of patients, medical staff, relatives and refugees," wrote Dr Mads Gilbert in a post on X.

Earlier on Monday, Israeli forces withdrew from the hospital after a two-week siege, leaving in its wake destroyed buildings and piles of dead bodies.

Military officials said that its forces killed 200 people and arrested 900 during its 15-day military assault on the hospital. Gaza's civil defence put the figure of those killed at around 300. The army said it conducted its raid without harming civilians and medical personnel, but medical organisations and eyewitnesses have strongly rejected the claim.

The World Health Organization said at least 21 patients died during the siege. Survivors told Middle East Eye that scores of civilians were killed during the fortnight-long siege. Gaza's civil defence arrived at the hospital on Monday to begin a recovery operation following Israel's withdrawal.

Outside in the courtyard, people dug graves to bury those killed whose bodies were left to rot over the past two weeks. Wafa news agency reported that a temporary cemetery that had been set up in al-Shifa was dug up by Israeli forces, with bodies exhumed and dumped in different areas of the hospital.

— Isra-heili Prime Minister Benjamin 🐖 Satan-Yahu called on the Knesset to pass the so-called Al Jazeera law this evening, which would allow the government to shut down foreign news networks operating in Israel.

The law would allow the prime minister and the minister of communications to order the closure of foreign networks in Israel and confiscate their equipment if they believe they pose "an actual harm to the state's security".

Netanyahu promised to "immediately act to close Al Jazeera" after the law passes.

The prime minister's Likud party said that he spoke with coalition whip Ofir Katz to ask him to ensure the bill's passing through second and third readings today.

— The Israeli army announced the death of 20-year-old soldier Nadav Cohen and updated its death toll, saying 600 soldiers have now been killed since the start of the war in Gaza.

Of those 600, 256 have been killed since the beginning of the army's ground invasion.

— A Palestinian Surgeon was among those killed by Israeli forces during its two week raid on al-Shifa Hospital.

Ahmad Maqadmeh was killed during the siege, according to his friend and colleague, British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta.

"We worked together in the Great Marches of Return and the 2021 war and then this recent war. His dedication was unlike anything I have ever seen. We will never forgive," Abu Sitta wrote on X.

"He spent this war going from Shifa hospital to Al Quds Hospital and when he was free he would join me at Al Ahli. Always dedicated, always wanting to learn.

"He refused to leave the north and kept sending me photos of his surgeries. He leaves behind a wife and baby."

Abu Sitta added that Maqadmeh was a former recipient of the UK's Royal College of Surgeons' humanitarian innovation fellowship.

May God this Evil Criminal SATAN die on the Operation Theatre Table!

— Isra-heili Prime Minister Benjamin 🐖 Satan-Yahu will undergo hernia surgery tonight, his office announced.

His hernia was discovered by doctors "during a routine examination".

During the period of surgery, Justice Minister Yariv Levin will serve as acting prime minister.

The timing of Netanyahu's surgery is deemed critical, as families of Israelis held hostage in Gaza are staging a protest outside the Knesset building in Jerusalem, calling for a deal to release their relatives and accusing Netanyahu of deliberately sabotaging efforts to secure an agreement with Hamas.

On Saturday night, thousands of anti-government protesters took to the streets in Tel Aviv, chanting slogans against Netanyahu and calling for the government's resignation and early elections.

— World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said around 9,000 patients urgently need to be evacuated from Gaza for lifesaving treatment abroad.

These patients are in need of treatment for wounds suffered in Israeli bombing, cancer treatment, kidneys dialysis, and treatments of other chronic conditions, Tedros wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

This exposé of Moscow’s funeral business is a snapshot of modern Russia

This week our main story is a summary of Ivan Golunov’s powerful investigation into Moscow’s funeral business that takes in everything from venal intelligence officers to Lamborghinis, nightclubs and a cemetery shoot-out. We also analyse the blame game among officials as the Russian economy slides towards recession, and lay out what we know about the fire that struck a top-secret nuclear submarine operating in the Arctic.

This exposé of Moscow’s funeral business is a snapshot of modern Russia Journalist Ivan Golunov said last month in court that his yet-to-be published investigation about Moscow’s funeral business may have been the reason he was arrested on fabricated drug charges. Since then, seven Russian publications, including The Bell, have been helping him finish the investigation, which was published this week. The article is extremely complex, but paints a compelling picture of today’s Russia: from pitched battles in cemeteries to the security services, pyramid schemes and an orange Lamborghini worth over $300,000.

While Russian law states that every citizen must be provided with a free burial, in reality, this is impossible in Moscow. A space in a cemetery far from the city costs 1 million rubles ($16,000), while a plot in a prestigious cemetery near the center can cost up to 4 million roubles ($70,000). It is a cynical business: to get commissions from grieving relatives, undertakers use a network of compromised doctors and police officers. But it is also lucrative: Moscow’s funeral market is estimated to be worth 13 billion roubles ($200 million) annually. The state company that owns Moscow’s cemeteries is called Ritual.

The funeral business has always been highly criminalized. Since the early 2010s, the most prestigious Moscow cemeteries have been run by former officials from Moscow region. In 2016, one of these ex-officials hired thugs to pressure workers from Tajikistan employed in one of the cemeteries and a huge brawl broke out, guns were pulled and three people were killed.

After this scandal, Artyom Yekimov, a former police officer, was put in charge of Ritual in the hope he would restore order. Day-to-day management was handled by Yekimov’s deputy, Valerian Mazaraki, a businessman with a dubious reputation. In the early 2000s, Mazaraki owned a vodka factory jointly with his brother, Lev, in Stavropol region in southern Russia. When the authorities tried to shut down the factory for using illegal alcohol, Mazaraki tried to set-up a lottery scheme, but that too was shut down for the illegal use of a photograph of Dmitry Medvedev. In the early 2010s, the Mazaraki brothers worked as top managers in banks known for money laundering. Then, along with Mazaraki, at least 12 people from Stavropol — including a local singer and a former cruise ship waiter — were given managerial positions at Ritual.

However, it’s likely that neither the former Moscow region officials, nor the appointees from Stavropol, are the real beneficiaries of Ritual. Marat Medoev, the man behind the appointment of Yekimov, is an assistant to Aleksei Dorofeev, the Moscow head of the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service. Meduza’s sources referred to Dorofeev as a “demigod”, explaining that even some senior figures at the FSB can’t get an appointment with him. Dorofeev, Medoev, and Mazaraki own houses next to each other in the same luxury development outside Moscow.

Russia wouldn’t be Russia if this alliance of security service officers and questionable businessmen didn’t make extravgant purchases. And, sure enough, Lev Mazaraki’s wife owns one of the most expensive cars in Moscow, an orange Lamborghini Aventador LP that cost no less than $300,000. Their son was the owner of several expensive night clubs in Moscow favored by playboys with rich parents.

Officials are scrabbling for a way of staving off economic recession The liberal economists in government have a problem: the Russian economy is not just stagnating, but showing signs of recession. The only way to restore growth without serious structural reform is for the government to invest tens of billions of dollars. While the state doesn’t have a problem with access to funds, an influx of cheap money could drive up inflation.

Signs of a recession appeared one after another this week. First, it emerged that railroad cargo volumes fell 5.4 percent in June, which, for the Russian market, is almost as good an indicator of recession as the inverted yield curve is for economic fortunes in the United States (needless to say, railroad cargo volumes fell badly ahead of the economic crises of 2008-2009 and 2013-2016). Second, we learned that the PMI index of business activity fell below 50 points in June for the first time since 2016. Add to this that Russian GDP grew only 0.2 percent in May, and by 0.8 percent in the first half of 2019, and the picture is not a pretty one. This level of economic growth is not enough to meet the official forecast of 1.3 percent growth this year, let alone the 3 percent annual growth President Vladimir Putin is demanding for his fourth term.

The main victim of a recession could be Putin’s favorite, Minister of Economic Development Maksim Oreshkin (GDP growth is his responsibility). Oreshkin is in a difficult position. As a former investment banker, he understands that growth is impossible without reducing pressure on private businesses and judicial reform — but he doesn’t have the power to make such things happen. Oreshkin can only try to blame others: last week, he said twice that the Russian economy’s number one problem is a credit bubble that the Central Bank isn’t tackling.

Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank, responded to Oreshkin in an interview with Reuters. Her main point was that stagnation is being caused not by sanctions, which officials like to blame, but by domestic problems: business is depressed, real incomes are not growing, and major reforms are off the agenda. She added that attempts to stimulate growth with cheap state money will destroy macroeconomic stability, and significant interventions by the Central Bank will lead to an increase in inflation and a bubble in financial markets.

The day after her interview, Nabiullina admitted her tough talk will not lead to change. “We have been saying the same words for many years. At first, they seemed correct, then commonplace, then like the empty words of officials — but now they sound like a cries of despair,” she said (Rus) at a banking conference. This is an admission that the Russian economy is at a dead end. While reform is needed for growth, there is no political will for difficult decisions. Ironically, the regime needs growth to survive: Putin’s approval ratings are falling alongside real incomes.

Why the world should care Government investment remains the only way of creating growth. But despite Nabiullina’s warnings over this path, it appears almost inevitable — and that means that the risk of inflation will increase. The Russian Central Bank may be forced into raising rates.

A fatal nuclear submarine accident in the Arctic remains shrouded in secrecy Fourteen sailors died as a result of an onboard fire this week on a nuclear submarine that is part of the navy’s Northern Fleet. While we know the vessel managed to return to port, the public was given almost no details about the accident or, most importantly of all, whether there was any serious threat to the stability of the nuclear reactor.

For Russians, a submarine accident is a particularly emotive event because of memories of the Kursk submarine disaster 19 years ago that defined the beginning of Putin’s presidency. Aside from the horrific death toll, the accident is remembered for the lies told by the military, who revealed the catastrophe one and a half days after it occurred, refused foreign aid and concealed information from relatives of the dead.

Secrecy was also a hallmark of the latest accident. The fire was only announced a day after it happened, and there still has been no official confirmation of the vessel on which it occurred. On the one hand, this isn’t surprising: no one doubts the fire took place on board the Losharik, a top-secret vessel capable of diving to depths of up to 6,000 meters (the U.S. considers it to be a sabotage submarine, which can cut deep water communication cables). On the other hand, just like with the Kursk, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for society to know the circumstances surrounding an accident on a nuclear-powered submarine. Officially, the Ministry of Defense has given the cause of the fire, but they managed to do this without revealing anything of note.

No one doubts that the military has to keep secrets, but in the 21st century there is a high risk of being found out anyway — and looking a fool. An excellent example of this is the sole existing photograph of the Losharik, which all Russian and international media used in their reporting of the incident. In 2015, the top-secret submarine accidently appeared in a photo published by the Russian version of car magazine Top Gear, which had organized a photo shoot for a new Mercedes on the edge of the Barents Sea.