Disabled Children Not Allowed Be Children.

Making this a separate post: It's super super important that we keep our activist work focussed on Palestine after the ceasefire. On the food aid, on the prisoner releases, on the reconstruction of essential services and the reconstruction as a whole, on the free travel of journalists and researchers to document the genocide, on the human rights and land rights of Palestinians, on the new political conditions, on BSD and on continued pressure on Israel and it's collaborators, on the West Bank, and more.

From Naomi Klein's Doppelganger about 2009:

We met Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist, who told me, “We had more hope during the attacks; at least then we believed things would change.” Now, she said, outside attention had moved on and Gazans once again felt abandoned by the world. The idea that there was more hope when they were under active air assault still haunts me.

We can not abandon Palestine. This time has to be different.

Foragers (2022, Jumana Manna 🇵🇸)

Za’atar and akkoub are popular herbs in Palestinian culture and cuisine. In 1977, however, Ariel Sharon declared za’atar a ‘protected plant’, rendering its foraging, possession or trade a criminal offense. Akkoub suffered a similar fate when it was labelled protected in 2005. Those who pick za’atar and akkoub subsequently became lawbreakers and in many cases were indicted and convicted. The picking of za’atar and akkoub, nonetheless, continues while many regard it as an act of resistance. (src)

Bitches Get Riches

The Expensive Difference Between Recreation and Recovery

Recovering from work is a cost of work... for which you're not compensated. How do we reduce recovery time so we can recreate instead?

The Expensive Difference Between Recreation and Recovery

Have you ever worked a long shift, then gotten hammered with your coworkers while complaining about said shift? Gone to bed early and slept in late after a particularly hard day of work, instead of going on that run with a friend? Scheduled an emergency appointment with your therapist to work out your negative emotions about your shitty boss?

All of that is recovery from work. The money you spend on drinks, the time you lose by sleeping too late on weekends, the emotional logistics and cost of unexpected therapy… all of that is how you recover from the stress, burden, exhaustion, and burnout of your work.

The problem is not just that those costs go completely uncompensated by most jobs. It’s that those costs dig into your take-home pay… like an insidious form of wage theft.

Keep reading.

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I mean the whole damn point of the Nativity story is that the supposed son of God (interpret Jesus how you fucking want, of course) was born to a couple of poor, exhausted peasants in the stable for the inn, and his first bed was a feeding trough for animals. That would nowadays be like a poor couple where the mother gives birth in a parking garage behind the motel because they couldn’t find a better place and nobody else would take them in. It’s a pretty gritty setting, and the idea is that God was reborn in some of the rock-bottom lowest circumstances. The only thing majestic was all the angels and shit, and of course motherly love

I get that a lot of the art portraying Madonna and Child as fabulously wealthy europeans in splendid robes and golden light was meant to glorify God + whichever nobility was sponsoring the artist, and while of course it’s genuinely beautiful art, it just always struck me as horribly missing the point, which is that the supposed son of God started in incredibly humble circumstances, among the kind of people that everyone else looks down on

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

Putting bioessentialist up on the high shelf until tumblr users understand that it's not just a word for when someone says genders are different

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful