Elspethdixon

i haven't seen many options for people outside to donate. easiest way is this fundraiser from the I Love Venezuela Foundation

you can also donate directly through zelle and binance to Organizacion Solo con Fe in barquisimeto, but !!! make sure to label it "donacion" so it can be correctly identified. everything will be used for relief in the affected zones.

lastly, Passagio is a Miami-based courier that's put a special fare of $4/lb for aid to be sent to venezuela. no profits will be made from this, that's strictly transportation costs. they're accepting: medicine, non-perishable food, hygiene products, clothing, essential supplies.

thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.

except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.

Pineapple-Tailed Cat - Sketchbook 2022

"I would simply dismantle the tracks/create a third track!" cool. and you're planning on doing this in the next ten seconds? because while you're trying to take the tracks apart – which, yes, would be a good permanent solution to the issue of tying people to the trolley tracks – the trolley is still going to hit those people. like. that's a great long-term fix and you can and should absolutely do that, but that doesn't help the five people tied to the tracks right now.

"I would find the guy tying people to the tracks and stop him!" fantastic. again, great long-term solution to permanently solve the problem. but since you can't go back in time and catch the guy before he put those people on the tracks, you still need to decide what to do with these five people right the fuck now. like, stopping him later on isn't fixing the current issue of people being actively tied to the tracks right this second.

Human worth is quantifiable such that it is better to save five humans than one human (that is, one human is worth less than five humans)

When someone says, "You are obligated to act and the only morally viable options you have are ones that harm people," they are accurately representing the reality of the situation.

(The second one could be true ever.)

I have a not-well-thought-out third issue which I will vaguely outline as "you should make decisions based on ideas about the most good [according to the problem-proposer's idea of good] you could achieve rather than based on an understanding of yourself and your limits and values and responsibilities and your understanding of the reality of the situation."

“I refuse to pull the lever because deliberately committing murder ‘for the greater good’ is still an evil act” is a valid answer to the trolley problem.

“I refuse to pull the lever because the existence of the situation is not my fault, but killing someone on purpose would be my fault” is a valid answer to the trolley problem.

If there are 5 random strangers tied to a track and one random stranger is crossing the other track and will be hit if the track is changed, a lot of respondents WILL in fact place the value of 5 people over the value of the one person. Until that one person is a friend or family member or a stranger but its a child or a stranger but its a rail line employee trying to help free the 5 trapped people. If the one person is a friend and the 5 are strangers, most respondents let the 5 die because most humans value people they know and like over people they've never met Up To A Point.

If the one person is a good friend, how many people need to be tied to the track (assuming the trolley has the momentum to kill all of them) before the respondent starts to lose confidence in their choice? If the 5 people tied down are all little children, it gets a lot more difficult for most people to let them die no matter how close they are to the one person.

Then there are variations on the action the respondent has to hypothetically take: the main one i know of is where, instead of flipping a level from a position off to the side, the respondent is on a bridge above the track at some point where a falling body would stop the trolley from continuing on and killing the people tied to the track. The specifics of physics and track design are irrelevant here. If the respondent and another person are on this bridge and the respondent knows that forcefully shoving the other person off the bridge to land on the track will stop the trolley, will they do it? Turns out that people react very differently to this one, and are much less likely to kill the one person to save the many. And the theory about this is that flipping a lever from a place of safety is very different to physically touching another person and effectively murdering them.

Why? We're not sure, but there seems to be a distancing effect when the murder is done indirectly by pulling a lever. This has loads of implications for how we as a society condemn others to death through war and starvation and homelessness and lack of healthcare bc yeah, the more distance between the decision makers and the dead human at the end of the chain, the easier it is to condemn those people to death.

Earthquakes in Venezuela: What We Know by Caracas Chronicles

Key Information About Venezuela’s State of Emergency by Caracas Chronicles

VENEZUELA’S EARTHQUAKE STATE OF EMERGENCY: HOW TO HELP

We Love Foundation: Provinding food, water, medical support, hygiene kits, shelter supplies, logistics, and direct support for vulnerable families on the ground. They have worked with global partners and Venezuelan nonprofits for the past 13 years.

The Gio Foundation: Humanitarian and animal aid nonprofit organization accepting donations through their portal.

Aldeas Infantiles SOS: Accepts donations in bolívares (Venezuelan currency) through their Venezuelan branch. Donations in foreign currencies can be sent through Aldeas Infantiles SOS Spain.

Save the Children’s Emergency Fund: Donations will go towards providing urgent, life-saving support to Venezuelan children.

UNICEF Spain: Has launched an Emergency Fund for Venezuelan children.

Miami-based Venezuelan American Chamber of Commerce Foundation: Launched a fundraising campaign to provide food, water, medicine, shelter and emergency relief.

Source: Caracas Chronicles

There is a peculiar human instinct to believe that certain things happen only to other people. Until they happen to you, prejudice or discrimination can feel like distant problems – possible, certainly, but not immediate.

When I booked a summer holiday rental for my family in eastern France at the start of May, I thought nothing of using my personal email address. I had used it countless times before. The address happens to contain the word “rabbi”, but it had never caused an issue. The correspondence with the property owners was entirely routine: emails were exchanged, the booking was accepted, and we paid the required 50 per cent deposit. Then, just under a month later, an email arrived from the owners that transformed our ordinary family holiday booking into something else entirely.

“We hesitated for some time whether to present or not the following to you, as it concerns a very sensitive and painful matter,” it began.

“We are always curious about who our guests are. In your case, our curiosity was piqued by your email address, from which we gather that you are a rabbi, and we quickly found some more information on the internet.

“Can you confirm to us that you are a member of a progressive, liberal Jewish movement and that this movement condemns the violent actions of the Israeli army, on orders from the Israeli government, in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and recently in Lebanon?

“We are against every form of terrorism, such as that of Hamas and Hezbollah, and also believe that every country and people has the right to defend themselves, whether Israeli, Palestinian, or Lebanese, regardless of their faith or beliefs. However, we completely disagree with the violent and, in our view, inhumane and criminal actions of the Israeli army in the areas mentioned; we also consider the boarding of ships and the imprisonment of, among others, our compatriots in international waters to be highly reprehensible and unacceptable.

“We would like to hear whether you belong to the ones who likewise disapprove of this and speak out against it, and whether you are opposed to the violent and criminal actions of the Israeli government and army.

“If that is not the case, we are unfortunately unable to offer you accommodation, as this conflicts too strongly with our principles. In that case, we will have to cancel the reservation and, of course, refund the deposit.

“We are curious to know your position on these matters; it is very unusual for us to present such matters to our guests, but it is also a very unusual situation taking place in that region, which we could not reconcile with providing hospitality to persons who supports these inhumane and criminal practices. We would present the same question to a guest from Lebanon, Gaza, or Iran, insofar as they distance themselves from terrorism towards Israel.”

The moment I finished reading the email, I felt that deep sadness grip me, which is familiar to so many Jews. Having discovered that I was a rabbi, the owners of the property had decided that before my family could spend a week in their holiday home, I would first have to satisfy them about my views on the war in the Middle East. They are, of course, entitled to their opinions. They are entitled to condemn the actions of the Israeli government in the strongest of terms. They are entitled to support whatever political cause they wish. Their email was carefully considered and polite. Yet beneath the courtesy lay a proposition that should trouble anyone who values a genuinely liberal society: that no Jew is beneath suspicion.

I sent the following reply: “I have spent the past few days reflecting on the contents of your email with great sadness. Let me begin by sharing a few details about my background. I am a British Jew. My great-grandparents were raised in this country, their parents having fled persecution in Russia in the 19th century. I also have the privilege of serving as senior rabbi of Finchley United Synagogue, one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. My community is diverse in every respect, and it consists of over 2,000 good, upright citizens of the United Kingdom. Every one of us is a proud British Jew.

“At no stage in our correspondence to date did I ever mention my Jewish faith. It wasn’t relevant. We are simply a British family like any other, seeking to rent a property from you for a summer holiday in France. But noticing that my email address contained the word ‘Rabbi’, you decided that it would be appropriate to interrogate my political position and affiliation. On the basis of my response, you will now decide whether to reject our confirmed booking for the summer.

“In other words, you wished to subject me to a purity test. Am I one of the ‘good Jews’ or one of the ‘bad Jews’? Because while some Jews might be welcome at your property, others will be turned away. Let me ask you a simple question: You say that you would ask the same question to any ‘guest from Lebanon, Gaza or Iran’.

But I am from the United Kingdom. My grandfather fought in the British Army in World War Two, risking his life countless times so that you and your compatriots could build the so-called ‘liberal, progressive’ society which you say you value so highly. Would you insist on a similar purity test from a British citizen who had some reference to their Muslim faith or their Persian heritage in their email address?

“Perhaps I can illustrate the problem in a slightly different way: I note from your website that you are of Dutch heritage, now living in France. You may be aware that 70 per cent of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, a higher proportion than any other country in Western Europe. In May 1941, the Nazis created a detailed map of Amsterdam, containing thousands of small dots. Each dot on the map represents ten Jews.

“In order to create this map, and support their subsequent efforts at locating and then forcibly deporting these Jews to mass extermination camps, the Nazis relied on thousands of local Dutch collaborators, both within the administrative system and in general society. In fact, last year, the Netherlands published a list of some 425,000 suspected Nazi collaborators.

“How would you feel if I asked you what your Dutch grandparents did during the war, before deciding whether to rent from you? Did they have Jewish neighbours, perhaps? What did they do when the Nazis came for those neighbours? Did it ‘conflict too strongly with their principles’? Or did they keep their heads down, choosing to turn a blind eye at the murder of their fellow Dutch citizens?

“I imagine you would consider such a question to be unconscionable, and you would be correct. I have no right to make any judgment about you based on what I think I may know about those I associate with you, let alone to refuse to enter into a rental agreement with you because of it.

“You might know that at the time, those who collaborated with the Nazis did not necessarily view themselves as bad people. They allowed themselves to believe a warped narrative. They did not view the Jews as their fellow citizens or their equals. Instead, they saw them as foreigners, aliens, different. No doubt, you wrote your email to me out of some kind of twisted sense of virtue. But it seems clear to me that what lies at the heart of your demand for me to declare my views on the conflict in the Middle East, is that to you, before anything else, I am a Jew. Therefore, at the very least, you feel you have to test me and family.

“I hope the above makes it abundantly clear just how morally blind I believe you have been. It should also be very clear that we no longer wish to spend the summer at your rental house. I would be grateful, therefore, if you would cancel our booking and refund our deposit as soon as possible.

“I very much hope that you will reflect on what I have said and on the implication of what you have written here. If you can do that, I would welcome an honest dialogue with you.”

As you might expect, their reply did not contain an apology. It doubled down. They insisted that they did not discriminate on the basis of “origin, religion, skin colour, etc”. They assured me that they had “family and friends in both Muslim and Jewish circles”. They explained that they had asked me for my position “as an individual, not as a Jew, not because you are Jewish”. They merely “refuse to provide shelter to anyone who expresses or supports racist or fascist behaviour”. Therefore, they stood by their decision to cancel our booking.

The contradiction at the heart of their position was impossible to miss. They claimed they were not judging me because I was Jewish. Yet had my email address not contained the word ‘rabbi’, this exchange would never have happened. They had said themselves how unusual it was to ask their guests about these issues. They asked me because they knew I was Jewish.

Many people imagine antisemitism only in its crudest forms: swastikas daubed on walls, abuse shouted in the street, threats and violence. Those forms are far too prevalent, and they are rightly and routinely condemned. But the prejudice we face today as Jews often presents itself in more subtle ways. It arrives wrapped in the language of human rights and social justice. It insists that it has nothing against Jews as such. It simply posits that all Jews must be regarded as suspect until they have proven their purity.

This is very familiar to us.

In medieval Europe, Jews were forced to prove their religious purity through conversion, baptism or public renunciation of their faith. The Nazis demanded a certain racial purity. Under oppressive regimes of various kinds, Jews had to demonstrate their political purity – that they were not either capitalist conspirators or communist subversives. In every case the perpetrators believed they were standing on some noble principle or cause.

That is why the lesson from this episode extends far beyond one holiday rental in France. It is a reminder that antisemitism, and indeed prejudice of any kind rarely announces itself as prejudice. It almost always arrives convinced of its own virtue. That can make it harder for people to see it in themselves.

Translation: Don’t worry! We’re not JUST openly antisemitic and targeting you because of your religion; we demand invasive political litmus tests from middle eastern people, too! We’re antisemitic AND racist!

UK work guidance has a minimum safe temperature for employees at work, but not a maximum one.

SIGN BOTH!!!