answering a couple questions i got on this post since i realized ppl genuinely wanna know:
tl;dr:
israel lets very, very little aid get into gaza. even the UN can't get in as much as they want to. funding individual families, gazan led initiatives, and mutual aid collectives operating out of gaza ensures gazans can provide for themselves and pay for the extremely expensive aid that is available.
with all the civil infrastructure destroyed by israel, the situation on the ground has devolved into unrestricted capitalism, driving up the price of aid (that should be free!). this makes it more urgent for people to have funding for daily survival.
the post linked above has examples of how donating to individual families can help a lot. if you want to help more than one family at a time, there are many gazan-led initiatives focusing on rebuilding their infrastructure and distributing aid fairly that are worth donating to instead of large charities that already get the majority of donations.
as i mentioned in the last post: @/careforgaza on twitter is a nonprofit started by gazans, it's been endorsed by multiple palestinian journalists.
the sameer project is a collective organized by diaspora palestinians offering emergency shelter to gazans.
ele elna elak is a project aiming to bring water, food, shelter, etc. to gazans and has been promoted by bisan owda.
and the municipality of gaza itself is fundraising to rebuild water infrastructure.
all of these organizations are active inside gaza right now and are being run by gazans. if anyone knows of other gazan-led mutual aid projects, nonprofits or charities feel free to link them in the notes! hope this helped!
long answers under the cut!
if you wanna donate to a charity that's absolutely fine, but the thing is most charities (and even the UN!) are unable to make it into gaza in the first place, leaving aid rotting at the egyptian side of the border or subject to israeli settler attacks
not to mention, charities and nonprofits also maintain a paternalistic colonial relationship with the indigenous people they are trying to help, determining what aid they need for them instead of returning power to them and letting them make their own choices
i'm not here to say that one option is better than the other, just that they achieve different things and are equally legitimate. there's an attitude among people who question the legitimacy of these gofundme campaigns that somehow the people promoting them are telling them not to donate to charities. nobody is stopping you from donating to charities. we are just asking that you do not dehumanize the very real gazans in your inbox just because their method of asking for aid is more direct and risky.
unfortunately that's exactly what has happened. because israel destroyed all of gaza's more formalized infrastructure, it seems that organized crime and rampant inflation has taken its place. aid is supposed to be free, but in order to save for evacuation or the cost of living, people have started selling them at an inflated price. and aid that is truly free attracts intense, large crowds that are dangerous to navigate.
this was posted on abc a few days ago
it's pure, unrestrained capitalism. i've had multiple palestinians describe this situation to me confidence. that's why everything's so expensive now. why people have to rent out tiny plots of land for their tents to sit on, why my friend @siraj2024 still has to buy tarps to cover the broken windows of the overpriced bombed out apartment he rented, and why a bag of flour can cost a thousand bucks in the north.
even before israel closed and then bombed the rafah crossing, the egyptian hala travel agency was only allowing people to cross the border if they paid a hefty $5000 USD per adult / $2500 USD per child bribe. it denies doing this, but the hundreds of stories from palestinians say otherwise.
with regard to the economy, here in america we saw something similar happen in the wake of hurricane helene and milton. the podcaster margaret killjoy describes how she saw dual economies rise after asheville was fully cut off from the rest of the country - some people offered each other supplies for free in a sort of mutual aid honor system, and some people required payment when they lent supplies because they themselves needed to buy stuff for their families. these dual economies exist in gaza too. and this means they all still need money to survive.
plugging gaza soup kitchen for those with the means to donate! it's another gazan-led initiative currently providing food, water, classes for children, and medical care across the north and south. you can donate through their website or their gofundme, or follow them on instagram for news about their projects
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Feels like a good time to remind certain people that this is coming from Judith Butler, who is not just a leading feminist philosopher, but also THE COFOUNDER OF QUEER THEORY
The literal cofounder of queer theory as an academic field says that abandoning trans people is fascist logic.
The voices in our community trying to exclude us may be loud, but they are not right, and they do not speak for the community as a whole or our history or anything at all.
Trans people belong here. We always have, and we always will.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
I saw the photo in my feed and went ohh, dude, no, we do not handle yellow rocks with our bare hands until we know for sure what they are. And I know that orange...
In comments, they continue:
and that's where I started cussing at the computer monitor. But someone else had got there first:
So just as a reminder, folks. If you don't know what it is, don't put it in your fucking mouth!
Legendary forager and wild food advocate Euell Gibbons (wrote âStalking the Wild Asparagusâ) gave very good advice for dealing with unknown plants; Before you eat any, its characteristics should be as clear and familiar to you as the differences between an apple and an orange at the grocery store.
I will add:
- Apps like Seek are often good at helping to narrow the identity of a plant down to its family or genus, but very often fall short of an actual species ID (I should specify, they fall short of providing a *correct* species ID. Most will be extremely happy to give you a species ID, even though it is patently false). Once the app gets you close, itâs time to crack open a field guide or consult an expert.
- Speaking of field guides; BEWARE OF ANY PUBLISHED POST-AI. Iâm serious. Once people figured out they could generate whole books using those bloated chatbots, foraging guides (which had experienced a surge in popularity following the threats of food insecurity during the beginning of the COVID Pandemic) were one of the first genres to be overloaded with ai slop. Look for trusted authors like Samuel Thayer, and publishing dates before 2023.
- A good field guide should offer detailed verbal descriptions of the physical characteristics of various plants, using specific botanical terms, and will often contain a glossary with definitions of those terms. It should also feature maps of the known growing ranges of those plants, and ideally, photographs of the plant during various stages of growth, and at different times of year.
- Start slow. Learn a handful of âeasyâ plants or fungi that have distinctive characteristics and few toxic lookalikes, and learn them well. Learn the toxic lookalikes as well as you learn the edible species.
- Once you are confident you have a positive ID, try a little bit and see how it agrees with you. Just because itâs âedibleâ doesnât mean you arenât allergic to it.
Learn Your Land and Black Forager are excellent references for foraging information, especially the ecology, ethics, and history of the practice.
I think leftists need to refer to the United States as a slave state more often. It has one of the highest prison populations per capita of any nation, slavery is legal as punishment for a crime, and Black people are disproportionately imprisoned and given longer sentences. The prison industrial complex is modern-day slavery
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Lately Iâve been really into being honest to people about my positive feelings towards them. I told my classmate that Iâve admired her creativity from the start and named a project of hers that I loved, and her face lit up! I took the train with a project partner the other day and told her that I always have so much fun with her, and it prompted an entire conversation about the difficulties of graduating from âclassmatesâ to âfriendsâ and both of our insecurities in this regard (and how weâre definitely getting coffee later). I express my gratitude honestly. I say what I feel if Iâd be happy hearing it, myself. I remember details so that I can refer to them later. Once you realize how great you can make someone feel, all of those mundane moments become so special. It will maybe even create some lasting connections, something I think we could all use more of.
Funny that the stereotypical cynic is an idealist who aged out of it. In my experience, the reverse is true. I was an extreme cynic as a teenager and then I noticed how profoundly limiting it was, and also that "cynics are cool and smart" was a message that was being constantly reinforced by corporate media for some reason.
#yes! cynicism reads as very juvenile to me#and yes prev often stemming from teen pain
Yeah, like I see black-pilled people on here and my default reaction isn't "oh, these must be world-weary old warriors who've lost their faith in humanity", it's "these people are in their 20s and need a hobby"
I also think that the present era has proven that authoritarian leaders don't actually want a population of wide-eyed idealists, they want a population of jaded assholes who are convinced that everyone is lying, any resistance is either a scam or doomed to failure, and nothing can ever get better.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Historically, one of the most reliable sources of widespread banditry was rulers ramping up military recruitment for major wars, then cutting their soldiers loose afterwards without pay, leaving a bunch of heavily armed men with military experience floating around broke and homeless.
Knowing this, whenever someone jokingly refers to raccoons as "trash bandits", I get a vivid mental image of, like, a raccoon succession crisis leading to a raccoon civil war, the aftermath of which forced the former soldiers of the losing side (who are all raccoons) to take up the life of the raccoon outlaw.
#I've seen the soldier thing in historical Cdramas! #what a bad idea #but also lol (via @fake-married-my-dead-fiance)
The interesting thing about this particular phenomenon in Chinese history is we've got multiple recorded cases of the winner of a civil war going out of their way to make sure the losing side's soldiers got paid; having them all rounded up and executed was politically untenable â in a civil war, the losing side's soldiers are your loyal subjects' friends and neighbours! â so the only real options were either to pay them or to have to deal with an explosion of bandit activity a few years down the road.
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I love this post because the replies are like "for anyone who doesn't know what nestle did, they benefited from [insert human rights violation here]" but nestle has done SO many fucked up things you get a different topic in every comment
Drained water from places suffering from drought for absolute pennies.
Made African mothers dependent on their milk formula, which they gave for free, until their milk dried up. Then they required them to purchase it, mothers could not afford it, mixed in too little to fulfill nutrient needs, and mixed it with polluted water. Children died.
Used slavery to produce their cocoa.
Pushed for water to be considered a âwantâ not a âneedâ and is at the forefront of arguments that water is not a human right.
Poisoned Chinese infants with melamine in their milk formula.
Demanded Ethiopia pay a debt owed to Nestle, during a FAMINE.
Price-fixed food items.
Contributed to deforestation for their cocoa farming.
The worst thing is, Nestle owns TONS of other brands, making it difficult to avoid for certain products.
I know most of those following me know this, but just to make it super clear. An Gorta MĂłr (The Great Hunger/the Great Famine) was a deliberate genocide of the Irish people. There was enough food grown in Ireland to make sure everyone was alive and healthy and survived. Instead it was exported, sent to England and elsewhere for profit while men, women, and children starved in the streets. While the English landlords fucked off and evicted starving families who couldnât afford rent. While babies were too weak to cry and died at the side of the road.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.
Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. Itâs led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and weâll help back.
The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. Weâre still a million less on this island than pre famine. And itâs not that long ago. My grandmotherâs grandparents lived through it. Weâve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but itâs because thereâs that cultural memory of not being able to.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. We will not let them take our lives, we will not let them take our language. We lost so much, but we will not lose it all.
This is why I get so angry when people say âit was the potato famine, it was because of monoculture/microbes.â
Nope. The potatoes were the only thing Irish people were allowed to fucking eat, because as pointed out, the rest of the crops they were growing were for their landlords to ship to England. So when the one âworthlessâ crop they were allowed to eat rotted in the field, the English crown, empire, landlords, all shrugged and carried on. People starved to death lying next to productive fields.
in the beginning, the trump assassination attempts were spaced by twenty four weeks. then twelve, then six, then every two weeks. the last one, at the white house, was a week. in four days we could be seeing a trump assassination attempt every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes. we should witness a double event within seven days,
-dont go to the emergency room with dental problems. go to the dentist
-bagged greens are cheaper than pre-made salads
-taco bell is NOT worth the money anymore. 1/4 cup mayo, 1/4 cup sour cream, 3 tblspoons pickled jalapenos+2tblspoons of the jar liquid, 2 tsp paprika 1 tsp cumin 1 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp onion powder salt+pepper. all in your blender. creamy jalapeno sauce
-dont quit your job unless you have a bunch of job interviews lined up immediately after
-use resources. food bank, unemployment, housing assistance, financial aid, etc. yes there will be paperwork. but Do It
-dont stay awake longer than 20 hours. you Will start to become impulsive and cranky. resting for 20 minutes is better than trying to stay awake
-for every 2 hours you spend looking up close at screens, spend 20 minutes looking at something far away from you. stretch your wrists a lot
-dont do that yoga stretch where you roll your head around your shoulders. youre grinding down the joints in your neck
-be nice to your friends, bullying them as a joke gets old. if you need a ride somewhere at least offer them gas money
-brush your teeth at any time of the day but especially before you sleep. dont snack in bed if you can help it. make your bed the Clean Teeth Zone. keep floss picks by your bed
-dont tell your boss youre adhd/autism/depression/suicidal. dont trust your coworkers with that. you NEVER know how people will take it and its none of their business
-train your pets to go to the front door when they hear a fire alarm
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one of the most insidious things about bludgeoning trans women with "male socialization" is that it so often functions to discredit and poison our childhood experiences
so many of us carry the weight of our traumatic pasts like an infected limb, poisoned by the sex assignment that informed all the transmisogynistic abuse we survived. many of us would rather cut the limb off than try to save it, than try to reclaim our childhood selves
too often "male socialization" is conceived of not as the site of our trauma, but as a permanent mark we must continually apologize for. we are expected to sever all ties with the scared little girls within us who carry our trauma
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