maybe you weren't really mx-missiles proof.

i thought about it just now when i saw this image of dr hussam abu safiya walking towards an israeli tank after his "hospital fell" — the words of the poet mosab abu toha, that he used unconsciously in how he described the israeli siege of the last remaining hospital in the north of gaza. he said the hospital fell like it was a fortress. dr hussam abu safiya's teenage son was killed the first time israel raided the hospital. for over a month he refused to abandon his patients while he grieved. in that time we found out other hospital directors had been tortured after being arrested by israeli: doctor muhamed abu silmiya of al-shifa hospital (who was released after months of torture) and doctor adnan al-bursh who was tortured to death. in that month of starvation we saw him comforting his colleagues who lost their children to israeli attacks, and then he lost those colleagues themselves in israeli shelling of the hospital. still the hospital stayed, and dr hussam abu safiya stayed. he recorded a video from inside the hospital almost every day, showing the immobile patients and the brave staff, explaining that he would not abandon them. a delegation from indonesia made it to the hospital and tried to stay with the palestinian staff, israel forced them to leave at gunpoint. dr hussam stayed through it all.

after two months of siege, after ethnically cleansing the rest of northern gaza, israel finally forced its way into kamal adwan hospital and forcibly evacuated the staff and the patients. fifty people were killed during the attack, numerous patients and civilians (including women) stripped and abused by the soldiers, and forced to march in their underwear out in the freezing cold. and finally this is how we get this image, the last time dr hussam abu safiya was seen as israel burned down the hospital he had done his best for, walking alone through the rubble towards the israeli tanks, knowing what awaits him:

a lot of the things happening in gaza right now and over the past year are much larger than most people can accept. they are acts of heroism and tragedy that demand to be remembered. and because palestinians have asked us to bear witness, at least to bear witness, we have fallen into the habit of a kind of mythologizing. in arabic and english. i've seen it from gazans themselves, who have often written their own eulogies and wills before dying. this is how systemic this genocide has been. how forecasted. how foretold.

i think a lot about refaat al areer's work, and his famous poem "if i must die" that he wrote before his death. refaat is another story from gaza that was already mythologized by none other than himself. but i also know people who knew refaat personally. they don't talk about him like a story. they talk about him like a friend they lost. they talk about him like a teacher they lost. when that happens the mythology around him seems very small and worthless compared to the scale of the loss.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.

The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.

BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.

The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.