Maybe this is just me but I am really surprised that 2023 was the first time a lot of people heard about Palestine because 2021 was when settlers tried expelling Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah - this then escalated to the IOF attacking Palestinians in Al Aqsa and throughout the country (almost 300 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and thousands were injured) - there were massive protests all over the world in response. 2021 really laid the foundations for everything that is happening now but it surprises me how little people actually mention the uprising then or were even aware it was happening.

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If you're having trouble keeping up with what's going on in Palestine because of US news coverage of university protests, here are some articles you can read and a video you can watch:

While CNN & all the other mainstream media try to paint the university protests as "pro terrorism" (which they're not, they're literally anti-war protests.) Palestinians are being slaughtered by the minute.

Please don't stop speaking about Palestine.

neigh

aye

the Columbia University arrests are worse than they seem. They're arresting protesting students for trespassing. It goes without saying students cannot meaningfully "trespass" in the common areas of a university they attend. So Columbia University has suspended all student protestors from their institution, in the process revoking their access to housing, their belonging, and most crucially damaging their academic futures. We are witnessing full scale silencing and removal of anyone of conscience from the next generation of academia.

• “La liberté guidant le peuple” by Eugène Delacroix

and

• “13th attempt to break the Gaza blockade by sea”. Photo by Mustafa Hassouna (Andalou Agency for Getty)

“i don’t understand what’s happening in palestine so i won’t comment on it” of course you don’t understand. most of us will never understand what it’s like to go for months without electricity, without water, without literal food. most of us won’t understand what it’s like talking to loved ones at lunch and then having to witness their bodies in body bags by dinner. no, you will never understand what that feels like—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care. that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t educate yourself. that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t donate. there’s only one thing uglier than willful ignorance—and that’s willful ignorance borne from selfishness and a severe lack of compassion. if you care anything about humanity as a concept, palestine should be your problem regardless of who you are, where you live, or where you’re from.

no children by the mountain goats is an objectively good and interesting song but UNFORTUNATELY I cannot hear the lines "I am drowning / there is no sign of land / you are coming down with me / hand in unlovable hand" without thinking of olympe de gouges and that fucking. letter she wrote to robespierre once

ender and bean are both autistic but the difference lies in that ender has hyperempathy and bean is like 'what the fuck is an empathy what do you mean you feel other people's emotions damn bitch you live like this?'

Really though, like we've made our cities so uncomfortable even for housed people, just in an effort to hurt the homeless. Parks and beaches close at night so homeless can't sleep there. Loitering is illegal so homeless can't sleep there. No bench at the bus stop because someone might sleep on it. No overnight parking because someone might sleep in the car there.

These laws aren't even beneficial to housed populations of the city, and they purely exist out of a) hatred for the homeless and b) an attempt to make your city look "presentable" to tourists. And it just sucks all-around.

It should be a bigger scandal that J.K. Rowling is threatening to sue small accounts for accurately calling her a Holocaust denier. So glad the Streisand effect exists. Now we can all rebuke her reprehensible views more than ever.

daily reminder that boycotting is not a moral stance but a political strategy, so the whole “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” argument is not the gotcha you think it is

you can refer to BDS if you’d like a list of companies to focus your efforts on. you can refer to this website if you’d like to become more conscientious about what you’re buying and check for brands/products to avoid.

*please note that i am a palestinian who has been boycotting my entire life. do not try to explain to me in the tags or reblogs or replies what a targeted boycott is or complain about giving up your comfort for something that you (incorrectly) believe does not make an impact. being quiet is free. exercise your right to remain silent today.

tbh the biggest factor that impacts what supports you can get for mental illness is how capable your particular diagnosis is of making neurotypicals feel Sorry for you

You're extremely incorrect here on many, many points. I generally try to stay away from reblogging arguments, but this is not something that I can in good faith go unrefuted.

Les Miserables is a book published in the 1860s. It is not a literal transcript of what happened in the June Rebellion over 30 years prior. Even so, your assertion that the June Rebellion was a "failed pipe dream" is very ignorant of the historical context and precedent surrounding it. Armed insurrections had worked, multiple times, within recent French history at the time of the June Rebellion. Two years prior, a similar insurrection ousted a hugely unpopular monarch. Insurrections could be touch-and-go, and it would sometimes take multiple attempts to get one that stuck, but there was no reason to believe that 1832 wouldn't work until it didn't. And your claim about them 'not doing their research' is laughable. They did not have the internet back then. They could not look Javert up and find his face on a database. Even today, plainclothes police blend in with insurrectionists all the time, and people still fall for it.

Furthermore, fascism as an ideology relies on capitalism to function. Even Mussolini said so. It's fundamentally incompatible with Marxist philosophy, no matter how much you may personally dislike the latter. And you claim Marxist philosophy leads to tyrants- well, what of the myriad of other ideologies that also lead and have led to tyranny on scales far greater than what pundits continue to fearmonger about a version of "Marxism" that isn't even factually accurate. Your opinion in regards to the viability of large-scale trust is an opinion. You are allowed to believe in it, but that doesn't make it an ontological truth. I have seen large-scale trust in the real world, and I have seen it work. Capitalism tells us that it cannot, because capitalism is self-preserving. That's no reason to believe the system that looks to seek nothing but its own advancement.

And as for the French Revolution? You're spouting propaganda two hundred years in the making, propaganda both academics and activists have spent those two hundred years refuting. The French Revolution was the result of years upon years on condensed fury erupting in the only way it could- against those who continued to take more and more from those who were breaking their backs to survive. Yet you say that the masses are the bloodthirsty ones.

The prevalent view that you promote is that the oppressed are to blame for their own oppression. That their form of resistance is able to justify the mistreatment that necessitated it. You posit that they are too stupid, too uninformed, to put in place a "system of government that works"? They created a republic! And for the time, it was more just than nearly any government in existence! Even today, many principles of the Constitution of 1793 remain more egalitarian and more progressive than today's Western hegemony. What system of government does France, nominally at least, utilize today? When we look back, hundreds of years later, we praise the radicals as forward-thinkers while somehow simultaneously condemning the very ideals they fought and fight for.

You caution about a 'descent into chaos'. What do you think is happening under the status quo as I write this? What do you call the worldwide poverty, violence, corruption, and intentional deprivation? The only ones who caution about the 'chaos' of social change are the ones who are safe in their homes, their beds, their affluence, whether that be real or perceived. The rest know that the chaos is what exists now.

There is no 'free no-risk trial'. There never is. Real life is not a game or a novel. But it's not a question of taking a risk versus not. The rotten shell of this system is collapsing under its own weight. The status quo is not safe. The status quo is not orderly. The status quo is falling apart and taking all of us with it.

And even if you continue to believe everything I previously refuted, that still does not give you the right to judge those in Gaza based on the moral standards you've created. The fault is on the hands of the apartheid Israeli state that created a system of discrimination and injustice that has been primed to fall apart for 75 years. Palestinians are not acceptable collateral in your push for the world to stay "orderly". This order is killing them, and us, and everyone. At this point the 'chaos' you're warning about may be preferable.

One of the wildest things about Tumblr and how people are reacting to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is knowing the obsession Tumblr has had with Les Mis, Karl Marx/communism, and/or the French Revolution (or at least the guillotine part of it).

Like, we saw what happened, right? In Les Mis, the students, though they had a cause many would deem as noble, were doomed to fail. They put blind faith that in a pipe dream that everyone would come to their sides because they were so sure that they were the majority. They didn’t even do their research or know the face of Javert, a local policeman, yet expected to win against an army.

Karl Marx created a system that makes it easier for fascists and tyrannical groups to hold power because it requires limited individualism and a level of trust that’s almost impossible on a large scale.

Or how during the French Revolution, the people started blaming the leaders of the revolution and killed them. Because they got accustomed to shedding blood at every slight instead of putting a form of government in that was actually going to try and do the work. The empty power vacuum made it super easy for people even more radical to take control.

How do you see realistic examples like these and still think things are going to end well? Please explain to me how do you get a free, no-risk trial run to a descent into chaos, know that it’s bad, and still put decide to go full steam ahead?

the concept of jaywalking one of the craziest inventions to me. youre just making shit up