There was a time in Palestine pre Oslo where waving the Palestinian flag was against the law and Palestinians were arrested and jailed for doing so. Apparently it became a custom to wave slices of watermelon instead. mastodon.social/@Lazarou/11121…
When one of the West's most ghoulish fascists in government says they have your back perhaps it's time to stop and think? #UKPOL #Tories #SuellaBraverman #FreeSpeech
Incidentally, the ban is still in place in the 80% of the West Bank still under Israeli military law. Military Order 101 says: “It is forbidden to hold, wave, display or affix flags or political symbols, except in accordance with a permit of the military commander”. (Source btselem.org/demonstrations/mil… )
Over the past decade, the Overton window has shifted so drastically that it is now considered acceptable in mainstream discourse to advocate for the eradication of Palestinians, liken them to animals and place blame on them for their own deaths
Seems horrible. Like First Nations being robbed by Europeans from their lands through genocide, now in real time, an occupation, theft and extermination of human beings presented as something acceptable...
The Israeli government has cut off food, water, and fuel to 2 million people inside Gaza as part of its campaign to stamp out Hamas terrorism. Collective punishment is not only contrary to international law, it is inhumane and illogical. It is what my community once endured in World War II, all because of the actions of others who happened to share our ethnicity. Have we learned nothing? How will this possibly help deescalate the violence rather than radicalize many more? It is madness.
@ajlanes Don't get me wrong, I think it is terrible that people are captured inside a warzone. But I also think it is terrible to put all the blame on Israel.
@Jan Tovar Well, it puts the kibosh on supplies coming in. Regarding people coming out, Egyptian authorities were concerned at the calls from some quarters in Israel for Gazans to resettle in Sinai. Nobody serves the people well in all this.
@ajlanes I will not judge the whole situation because my knowledge about it is not profound enough. I am just very sure that jewish people deserve a country to live in and that neighbours of Israel want to erase that country. Which is why I can understand military consequences by Israel even though I don't like it.
it has been about moving Palestinians from Palestine for a half century. Ideally, through driving them into other countries or other means. Netanyahu and the rest of his government are in their element now. They love war.
I do NOT support Hamas and never would. They aren't for the health and safety of Palestinians. They used the ineffectiveness of the Arafat and the later government as an in road.
As well as the desperation one feels for the Palestinian people there is the immense sadness that so few in the West seem moved by it. The silence of so many is deafening.
Millenials are Killing Capitalism did a good show on this difficult topic. One main point was that there aren't just fash units fighting for Ukraine, but socialists and anarchists as well. Leftists on the front lines defending their homes. Being anti-war and avoiding western left-splaining is the challenge. Here's a link: millennialsarekillingcapitalis…
UPDATE: Transcript of the episode is now available . In this episode we interview Karim from and author Wendy Trevino. Karim is an anti-prison, anti-police anarcho-communist. And an author of the book .
Amidst the performative cries of “Israel has the right to defend itself”, it seems to be heresy to acknowledge the humanity of the few million people who get to live, in perpetuity, as Israel’s ritual punching bag, and are expected to do nothing in response, nothing in prevention, and accept the blame for others doing literally anything.
And even saying this will just result in tedious wankers going, “oh, you support terrorism then?”
The way the Palestinian people are treated is some serious Omelas shit.
You don't even need to say anything. The Tories are currently on a cancellation rampage trying to find opposing politicians who have yet to spout the performative line.
When the state of Israel was formed there was still a significant Palestinian area. Subsequent invasions and occupations by the state of Israel means there is very little left. Even Gaza, which is tiny compared to Israel is now half the size it was. One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fights. They have been invaded, occupied, controlled and had food, power and water controlled by a far more significantly armed nation. And although I can’t condone the murder of innocent civilians BY EITHER SIDE, I can understand the desperation in this action.
@Sarah Brown The main thing I remember from visiting Gaza was how full it was, and how closed in it felt. Border fences on three sides, sea on the fourth (but restricted). Even in the heady days of 1994 just post Oslo it felt like a cage. Sometimes the electricity would go off. You had to queue in the heat to get in or out, divided families shouted news to each other across the barbed wire fence. That was probably the high point of freedom. The thirty years since have raised a generation whose hopes for the future keep getting blown up and locked down at the jailers’ whim.
For UK readers desiring a sense of scale, this is the boundary of the Gaza Strip (area 365 km^2, population 2m) rotated so it can be overlaid on the Isle of Wight (area 381 km^2, population 140k).
49K likes, 339 comments - emilyscartoons on July 4, 2019: "Scroll ➡️ Yes I know I post this every year but God dammit it's my favourite thing I've ever ..."
1. 'AND', the most powerful word in any language? Sharon Astyk (a Jew by marriage) wrote the following rules for discussing #Israel / #Palestine / War in a FB group she administers.
"Hi Folks. I just want to set down rules for any discussion of Israel/Palestine/ProtoWWIII. Here are the rules. 1. MORE THAN ONE THING CAN BE TRUE AT THE SAME TIME, INCLUDING BUT NOT EXCLUSIVELY: #Jews were mass murdered over and over again and have a justifiable fear of being murdered again AND that fear has made us do horrifying things to the Palestinians over and over again that are not justified in any way. Jews have lived in Israel for thousands of years, and have a historic claim to it AND we use religious language and assumptions that may be mythological to most. AND real Palestinian people lost their homes unfairly. More than one people can have a historic claim to the same place.
Bit pissed off with the EU for the “solidarity with Israel” posts. Solidarity with the Israeli citizens maybe, but with the state? Nopenopenope. Bet they don’t express solidarity with Palestine when Israel piles in and levels half the city again.
Newsreel footage of the aftermath of the 1952 Train Crash at Harrow & Wealdstone Station, which claimed the lives of 112 people and injured hundreds more.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, in the city of Pittsburgh, there was a nickname for guys like John Moon – The Unemployables. This nickname meant that you simply could not get hired, no matter where you went for a job.
super interesting! Amazing to see the parallels to the Freedom House Ambulance Services - a black community revolutionizing how ambulances work: 99percentinvisible.org/episode…
And since it comes out of Combat Medicine you can track so much back to WW1, with connections to ARP and Civil Defence in WW2. But my views are biased by half-remembered stories told by my parents and grandparents.
I see that the Rishi Sunak announcement of new local transport to use the money "freed up" from cancelling HS2 includes a new tramline in Manchester to Roundthorn. The reason that TfGM proposed that tramline is that Roundthorn is the planned location for the HS2 Manchester Airport station.
@John Loader People need to stop thinking about the speed. HS2 is, and always was, designed to separate mainline and local traffic. That's what it's for.
It was envisaged as an LGV because that's what you do these days. There's no point building a new intercity line at less than LGV spec.
@Fish Id Wardrobe Lord Torydonor. This isn't corruption because money laundering taxation into your party coffers via your mates' bullshit companies is apparently a perfectly legitimate thing to do, because corruption is what they do in Africa.
In theory both the East and West Coast main lines were upgraded to 140mph - hence tilting trains. They weren't. Welwyn viaduct needs a by pass - 2 tracks in the middle of a four track network ridiculous
@John Loader Welwyn is ... difficult to solve. Not just logistically, English Heritage don't want a viaduct spoiling the view of the viaduct, because viaducts.
@OddOpinions5 Yep. A corrupt Tory called Marples owned large stakes in road construction businesses, and coincidentally commissioned a “captain of industry” Dr Richard Beeching to recommend the closure of about 1/3 of the then extant railway network (and over half the stations).
@ajlanes The four track also stops at Northallerton going North from York, a heavily used route but there were plans to add a third line and platform as a short loop for stopping trains there. But trains towards Teesside have to cross both main lines
Maybe it started like the way 15 and 16 are sometimes written as 9+6 or 9+5 in Hebrew numerals rather than 10+5 or 10+6 to avoid a Name? This could also explain the reluctance to explain?
Demande récurrente qui m'embarrasse le plus : "Bonjour est-ce que vous avez des bulles pontificales concernant le prieuré médiéval de Saint-Trucmuche ?"
Alors.
Je vois pourquoi vous pensez qu'on aurait ça hein. On pourrait croire. Oui.
Mais. Est-ce qu'on a ça. Euh.
Peut-être. Ça dépend un peu de quand elle est, votre bulle. Et un peu de ce que vous voulez dire par "bulle". Ou de ce qu'ils entendaient alors par là. Et même si on l'a pas ça veut pas dire qu'y'a pas nulle part. Faut voir.
Do fruit flies remember their larval lives? To find out, scientists made the neurons inside larvae glow, then tracked how they reshuffled as they formed adult brains.
I did a long run at an easy effort this morning. About half an hour in, I encountered this graffito, a clear reminder to do most of your #running at low effort.
Pondering tiredness and how it seems to be working with me at the moment. I had a long day visiting Brighton on Wednesday and so it didn't seem unreasonable that I was a bit sleepy the following day. I did a bit of OU work and life admin stuff and watched TV. Today, two days on, the tiredness feels mental, as if the physical body is fine but the brain wants a time out and is kind of noping out of doing very much at all.
Big uptick in new people here from Twitter - WELCOME PALS, I hope you enjoy it here as much as I am.
For those unfamiliar with the fediverse, the most important thing to note is that favs do absolutely nothing to help me pay my bills. Please boost my toots. Feel free to mock the way that sounds till you're blue in the face, as long as you still boost my toots.
i was going to make a "dont mess with my toot toot/please boost my toots" joke, but I fear no one else remembers this slice of 1985 classic music youtu.be/ZL3Wwo6RGyw?si=SxAomc…
Great point! Posts only propagate here through boosts! There is no algorithm here to show popular posts. A post appears on the timeline then goes away quickly unless others boost it to keep it alive.
Is that the world's first practical electric railway, wot inspired tophatted folk down from London to use the electricalness underground, wot I spot in the background?
Grr. You buy a ticket with Apple Pay on your phone and it turns out to be a paper ticket like it’s the 19th Century or something. So I have to collect it from the machine. Which wants the bank card with which I paid for it. Which is impossible since I used Apple Pay.
(Fortunately any bank card will do and the assistant put hers in, but but but)
ah, that explains something that's worried me for a while. I often buy tickets using PayPal and at the machine I offer up my Amex card (which is probably the funding source for PayPal) and the machine accepts it. I wondered how it knew ... sounds like it doesn't.
Weird dream last night that I had an adaptor that exposed the contents of my phone to GEM via the Atari ST cartridge port. My subconscious needs to get out more
While I might be sceptical of some of the dodgy metaphors (putting concepts in my constitutional bag?) and iconography (toothpaste symbolises a convention, apparently), the subject matter of this OU Public Law module is fascinating. Via a "go search for something to do with the constitution" exercise I came across this article about constitutional conventions. This sort of nitty gritty, the analysis if you like of the "meta-rules" of the constitutional game, is definitely something I am here for. ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cd64…
The Atlantic magazine has created a searchable database from the dataset 'Books3' used to create generative A.I. systems. This dataset was created from 'books free online' - in other words, pirated works.
Authors who write licensed work/tie-ins, please to check for your names. When you find work for Warhammer, Star Trek, Stargate, Halo, etc listed, do please inform their lawyers. For example, I just looked up Dan Abnett (great writer, lovely person, do read his work!)
so your problem is that a book wasn’t bought for $6 or that book was read, because First Sale doctrine is a thing, and I’m sure you learned to write by reading. But if you didn’t, I apologize and would love hear that story.
@jonathankoren No, my problem is that my work product and intellectual property has been taken without permission or payment and used for a purpose which no contract I have ever signed has authorised, or would ever authorise. 'Fair use' is also a thing and so is copyright. This is business and I am not interested in false-equivalence excuses for this wholesale theft from thousands of authors.
I want to see authors screaming like foxes about AI scraping as much as, and probably more than, they carried on about ebook piracy during the Macmillan debacle.
@bunnyjadwiga I want to see Disney, Games Workshop, Microsoft etc realising the damage this could potentially do to their reputations and income - and coming down on the techbros like the proverbial tonne of bricks.
I've done some searching, but can't find the original books3 dataset. I want to send the curators a takedown notice. Any chance you know who maintains the dataset or where they can be reached?
@mwl I have seen it said that the dataset has already been taken down, but I have no more information than that, and have no idea how solid that might be.
Very cool tool by Atlantic. Their tool improves the transparency of the 'Books3' data set. It's something the creators of the dataset probably should have done themselves.
This is the main motorway from Gothenburg to Oslo. Happened overnight. (before 2023-09-22 02:00) EDIT: rescue services commander is saying 4 cars & a bus drove into it. And "half the Burger King" is part of the landslide. Rescue efforts underway. Those cars & bus have been searched. 3 ppl sent to hospital. Seemingly no deaths, thankfully.
First person to call 112 was standing in the way to stop ppl driving into it, says same commander.
Results of the Big Butterfly Count show that butterfly numbers have increased this year after the wetter summer, with numbers at four-year high. But habitat loss is still causing long-term decline
It's rare I leave a demo filled with anxiety or tension in my body, but that's certainly how I felt after leaving the counter-protest to the homophobic transphobic "million march for children" in Montreal this morning. I wanted to share a few thoughts here.
First, it was inspiring to see so many queer folks and accomplices/allies come out to confront people who want to deny their existence, and make schools much less safe for queer kids. When I first arrived around 8:30am, our side outnumbered the other side by about 20-1. But sadly their numbers swelled over time, and within an hour I would estimate that both sides were roughly equal in numbers (400 per side, give or take).
This is a really crucial time for us all to be mobilized as there is an active movement looking to force queer people back into the closet and roll back the clocks on everything we've fought for. From what I'm seeing, the "million march" was an epic failure, with pro-queer counter-protests outnumbering or matching their numbers in most places. In Ottawa, the anti-queer group was completely surround
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It's rare I leave a demo filled with anxiety or tension in my body, but that's certainly how I felt after leaving the counter-protest to the homophobic transphobic "million march for children" in Montreal this morning. I wanted to share a few thoughts here.
First, it was inspiring to see so many queer folks and accomplices/allies come out to confront people who want to deny their existence, and make schools much less safe for queer kids. When I first arrived around 8:30am, our side outnumbered the other side by about 20-1. But sadly their numbers swelled over time, and within an hour I would estimate that both sides were roughly equal in numbers (400 per side, give or take).
This is a really crucial time for us all to be mobilized as there is an active movement looking to force queer people back into the closet and roll back the clocks on everything we've fought for. From what I'm seeing, the "million march" was an epic failure, with pro-queer counter-protests outnumbering or matching their numbers in most places. In Ottawa, the anti-queer group was completely surrounded by counter-protestors on Parliament hill.
But the difficult thing to grapple with is the fact that, at least in Montreal, the "million march" crowd was mostly made up of Muslim folks. There has been a clear effort among the alt-right to make alliances with Muslim communities on the basis of homophobia, despite the alt-right being virulently Islamophobic. There needs to be much more attention paid to this dangerous phenomenon.
I suppose the irony was lost on most folks that they were protesting and making appeals to Quebec's PM Francois Legault outside his office, despite Legault and his party's blatant Islamophobia.
At one point a young Palestinian man came up to me, seeming a bit confused, and asked me what side I was on. He noticed that I was wearing a shirt for The Toronto Palestine Film Festival. I told him I was on the side of "human rights for everyone". He then looked at the queer crowd and said: "Any of these people would be killed in a second if they set foot in Palestine".
To which I said, "That's not true".
"Yes it is!" he shot back. "I should know, I'm Palestinian".
He then took off quickly on bike. I would have loved to have had a nuanced conversation with him. I would have loved to talk about how yes, Hamas has an awful record of being anti-LGBTQ, and that needs to be denounced. I would have loved to talk about أصوات - Aswat and all the amazing Palestinian queer organizing happening in 48 Palestine, or how there is documented evidence that the Israelis exploit Palestinian queers and turn them into informants at the threat of being outed to their families. But alas, it wasn't the moment for that conversation.
I was kind of dis-heartened by the amped-up anti-fascist rhetoric on our side, with people chanting "fascists go home" at a largely Muslim and probably mostly immigrant crowd. As a committed anti-fascist, I think we need to be crystal clear about what exactly we're talking about when we call something or somebody fascist. I think it's safe to say that the "million man march" is organized by white Christian nationalists, and yes, fascists. See this great article from Press Progress: pressprogress.ca/anti-lgbtq-mi…
But I think in this case, the message should have stayed centred on supporting trans youth and calling out homophobia and transphobia rather than "fascism".
I don't want to make excuses for anyone though. Nor do I want to single out any one particular community. The people on the other side are far from innocent, and they need to be called out on their hate and fear. But like everything in this difficult world, it's just so fucking complicated. Some people very dear to me helped to sponsor a refugee family from Iraq who arrived in Canada last year. They are devout Muslims, and they take their kid out of school when pro-queer stuff is discussed. These people are not the enemy. But a dialogue does need to happen.
Our organizing needs to be intersectional, or else it's not gonna go anywhere.
I'm thinking a lot today about my queer Muslim friends and trans friends who are living their lives at the crux of this debate. And the debate is being had at the expense of their lives. They're doing the difficult work, and we all gotta step up to support them.
Lastly, I'm proud of the union I work for, PSAC - AFPC, for encouraging all its staff to take the morning off to go to the demos across the country, and for the clear position it has taken to defend queer workers and queer youth. Solidarity with all the unions, especially teachers unions, who are getting involved in this fight. Left-wing populism for the win.
And finally, a pic of Alabaster dePlume, who I had the sheer joy of seeing play live in Montreal the other night. He repeatedly thanked the mesmerized crowd "for being alive. It's not easy being alive, because to live means you have suffered. And being together helps us heal".
Bit of a long shot. Any post op trans women reading this had a dental implant with bone regeneration and able to share their experiences? I had one placed yesterday and am vaguely worried that I won’t get the needed bone growth (18 years HRT, 17 years postop)
Alexandra Lanes
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