Please Can We Do Inbox Trick-or-treating This Year. Can We Make That A Thing On Tumblr. Please Please

nytimes.com

Israeli and Palestinian Activists Ask Americans to Take Side of Peace

Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Alon-Lee Green, a Jewish Israeli, found polarization in America over the war in Gaza. They

When Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green flew from Israel to New York last week, they found a version of the United States they’d never seen before: split by the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, with fractures tearing at the worlds of art, business, books, academia and even food.

Ms. Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said the situation felt so toxic that they feared their 10-day trip to talk about the ways Palestinians and Jews can work together would only lead to attacks from all sides.

Instead, in New York, Washington and Boston, they found packed auditoriums and eager audiences in community centers, synagogues, libraries and the offices of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Their days have started at 6 a.m. and ended after midnight.

Their quest can be lonely, standing in the face of intense grief and anger — over Hamas’s attacks against Israelis on Oct. 7, and Israel’s retaliatory campaign in the Gaza Strip — and factions that have spent decades staking out positions against each other.

But the staff of their organization, Standing Together, is trying to teach Americans — anyone who will listen, really — about their lived reality and the only path they see moving forward. They describe that path as one that cannot be boiled down to a hashtag: one in which millions of Israelis and Palestinians would remain on the land they each call home, and one that would require enough popular political will to demand peace.

“We’re trying to play a different game in Israel and Palestine,” Mr. Green said on Nov. 9 to a group of people organized by a group in Brooklyn, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. “And this game is very simple. It says that both Jewish people and Palestinians are going to stay on this land. No one is going anywhere.”

“We need to start working from this point,” he said, receiving a wave of nods.

It’s a message that has not been prominently heard or seen in many American protests and rallies. Most events have taken place under an Israeli or Palestinian flag, focusing on one people’s pain, struggle or victimhood.

That type of narrow approach can erase everything around it, said Cara Raich, a conflict adviser based in New York.

“As with most conflicts one feels deeply and personally, a binary choice often offers the simple comfort of pro and con, or right and wrong,” she said. “The magnetic power of false binaries sucks everything that it touches into that paradigm.”

For that reason, the conversations Mr. Green and Ms. Abed came to have with Americans have, at least for their audiences they draw, been something of a spiritual salve. In dozens of talks up and down the East Coast, the two activists have described a desperate need for new Israeli and Palestinian leadership, including leaders willing to work together.

They have called Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, both “the enemy of the Palestinian people” and a “fertilizer for radical Jewish extremism.” And they have voiced a frustration over what they see as a war for the moral high ground, happening outside of Israel and mostly over social media, that denies their experiences.

Libby Lenkinski, a vice president at the New Israel Fund, an organization that funds and supports Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, has had a front-row seat as a moderator. She said she has seen a “palpable sense of relief” among attendees who audibly exhale or place hands over their hearts. The message is so resonant, she said, because of it offers a different kind of simplicity than choosing one of two sides.

“This isn’t, ‘Kumbaya, let’s all hold hands and love each other,’” Ms. Lenkinski said. “It’s: ‘There’s actually no way that one side is going to win. Our futures are intertwined and the only way that we can keep ourselves alive is by keeping each other alive.’”

On Sunday, a group of Israeli peace activists in New York City organized a vigil with that sentiment in mind. The demonstration called for both a cease-fire in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the release of more than 200 hostages held by Palestinian militants. All were welcome, flags and signs were not.

Some 200 attendees gathered to mourn and read testimonies and texts from people in Israel and Gaza.

Tamar Glezerman, one of the organizers, said she had protested in support of a cease-fire before, and does not “find myself in protests that don’t include the demand for an urgent stop to the bloodshed.”

“But at the same time,” she said, “I feel that, on a very personal level, I am being demanded to omit the humanity of my loved ones, those who have died on Oct. 7 and those who have friends and families among the kidnapped, in order to attend most of the protests demanding a cease-fire.”

She said that those demonstrations “have by and large completely omitted these civilians, for either ideological or strategic reasons, as if empathy for brutalized civilians was ever a zero-sum game. As if one war crime could ever justify another. As if acknowledgment means historical symmetry.”

Ms. Abed and Mr. Green were in Washington during that vigil, meeting with a range of Democratic politicians. They said that, sometimes, they struggled to get to the car for their next meeting because people swarmed to ask what more they could do to help.

Friendship has helped carry the pair on, they said, even as exhaustion has weighed them down.

They did not sleep much back home, and they have not slept much since arriving in the states. Mr. Green said he’s afraid to stop working. Ms. Abed worries that he’s not giving himself the space to fall apart, at least a little bit.

Midsentence, Mr. Green gasped. “A goose!” he screamed — Ms. Abed echoed, “a goose!” They laughed and gawked, getting closer to the bird. There are not many geese in Israel.

But it was not quite a wild-goose chase. They were summoned on to their next meeting, one with students, staff members and faculty at M.I.T. “So many people tell us ‘You are our only hope,’” Ms. Abed said. “It’s like, we’re your only hope?”

Mr. Green said that, despite the loneliness they often felt, they had no choice but to keep trying.

“We have only one home,” he said. “She’s Palestinian and I’m Jewish, but the only home we both have is the same home.”

So some people in PA got an email TODAY saying that their vote might not have been counted. If that's true, then they actually fucking cheated.

Edit: Please read this post.

Link here, though Musk will probably try to delete it, so here's the images directly:

I am begging everybody, fucking begging them, to slow the fuck down and fucking look things up. Right now, there are a lot of people who are making money off of creating headlines that are meant to make you mad, and it's going to get worse as we get closer to the election.

If someone tells you that there's a secret conspiracy to [do a thing you don't like] and that it's unique to Biden, you better fucking look that thing up, because chances are you're going to find that it's been happening under every administration for the last 50 years. Is that good? No! Should you want to change it? Probably! Is it a unique crime to Biden? Nope!

"Biden said [bad thing] [X] years ago." Well, this bad thing he said happens to be true, but it looks like it was 45 years ago, and he changed his stance 40 years ago. "Biden said [other bad thing] [Y] years ago." What's the source on that? So there's one person who says he said it? And nobody else who was there has corroborated that account? Who posted the story?

These are all random examples of things I've seen over the last couple of weeks, with the details slightly changed from the Tumblr posts and news articles I've seen, because the point isn't the details of the particular story, so I don't want to get bogged down in particulars that don't matter to the point I'm making.

The point of this post isn't the specific things I'm referencing but the fact that in each of these cases, the reality was not what was initially presented. Either the reality was wildly different, or this story can't be corroborated and was told by someone with a clear and very well-known agenda of their own, which means that at the very least, the story should be treated with extreme suspicion.

And on that note, please don't believe that because you're a leftist that you can't be radicalized in the same way that right-wingers are. You aren't immune to propaganda either. I'm not saying you have to like, or should like, any particular politician or political entity. I am saying, however, that you should view a lot of the news with a gimlet eye, and that goes double for anything that makes you real fucking mad.

You need - need - to stop and read the whole article and ask yourself if you can verify the claims and who benefits from this making you mad.

Please. For the sake of the people around you who have to patiently explain to you that you've gotten fucking bamboozled again by propaganda if for no other reason. We're all very tired of you thinking that leftists can't be propagandized.

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

You seeing this? :D

Excuse me while I SCREEEEEAM

I WROTE AN EIGHT PAGE FINAL PAPER ON VIDEO GAME SOUNDTRACK FOR MY COLLEGE PHILOSOPHY CLASS AND GOT FULL POINTS.

I've peaked. I'm done. I'm literally so happy. Professor just really saw me yap about Ace Attorney music and Toby Fox music and sound effects and said, "Yep. Super philosophical. A+."

I got to mention snd_weirdeffect, which is my FAVORITE sound effect in Deltarune Ch 1 and oh my gosh I can't stop yapping but I'm so happy. 8 pages of my biggest passion and it's 20/20 points! I WIN LIFE.

it gets funnier the longer you look

Source

The conversations about accountability & apologies that we've been having in social justice circles these last few years have basically trained everybody to fawn.

We've been telling people that if they are accused of any wrongdoing or of hurting anybody's feelings, it is their obligation to apologize immediately, and never to hedge, disagree, or to explain their rationale what they've done.

In their apology, we expect them to articulate every single thing that they have done that was damaging in the strongest language possible and to declare outright that they have harmed someone, often multiple groups of people, even if they are not sure of the impact (or could not even possibly be sure).

If a person's apology is anything but immediate and entirely self-excoriating, we accuse the person of downplaying the damage they have done, failing to be accountable, and manipulating others.

In this way, we've made it impossible for a person to ever take their own side lest that be taken itself as a form of wrongdoing. We have trained our fellow social-justice-minded people to believe that if they do anything but worsen the case against themselves, they are being irresponsible.

I say we, in all of this, because I have partaken in all of this rhetoric, made these kinds of criticism, given accused people this type of advice.

And I have followed it myself, often to a damaging effect.

I have taken responsibility for problems in which I truly did not believe I played a part, I've overstated the damage that I've done so as not to risk understating it, I've ascribed malice to my intentions when I knew it wasn't there, I've agreed with people's most negative, bad-faith narratives about conflicts involving me that they were not even present for, offered up information about myself that was not a third party's business in the name of transparency, apologized for things I haven't done -- and in doing all of this, I have denied my loved ones the opportunity to really hear me about what I was going through and my motivations when I was in conflict with them, things that any true friend or close associate would obviously want to hear about if they cared about me.

This aim of giving the perfect apology and taking perfect accountability has been nothing but an isolating force in my life, because it has barred me from openly entering into necessary conflict with people when our needs were incompatible or they had hurt me just as much as I'd hurt them. The fear of being a manipulative, unaccountable DARVO-er has led me to roll onto my back and expose my belly, falling over myself with panicked apologies and the most unflattering information possible cast in the least explicable light, almost outright begging for others to become angrier at me and believing that it was only way I could ever possibly be accepted back.

We've drilled into people that the way to be good and responsible is to allow people to view us as negatively as possible, to even arm others with information that will confirm that point of view, and to never insert our own perspective or needs on the matter at all.

And yeah, there are a lot of shitty people out there who dodge accountability easily because their power ensconces them from any consequences. but the primary problem with that was never that they wrote a shitty notesapp apology that used the unforgivable phrase "I am sorry if you felt XYZ." The real problem was that there was no community that held enough influence to hold them to account, and for their victims there weren't ever adequate supports or protections.

instead of addressing any of that in a remotely systematic way, we have taken to picking apart every accused person's every word and deed for evidence of inner moral failure and created a culture in which we think we can determine a person's safety by how artfully they put words together when they are under threat. and what do you know, plenty of bad faith actors and conflict avoidant cowards and people who just dont understand what they are even being accused of can do that just fine.