Patola

“isn’t she the leader of the opposition still?” no. that’s not really how it works in the US.

she would have become the leader had she won the election. she was chosen as the electoral nominee, not as the democratic leader. they don’t really have one now they’ve lost.

she’s essentially just a private citizen now and an attorney. you didn’t vote her in. she doesn’t really have government power anymore. trump didn’t either once biden took over.

the man LITERALLY ratfucked our entire democracy… spread so much violent misogyny and hate and misinformation and just kept yelling about socialism and isolating the voting base… refused to endorse Hillary for months after he lost soundly (too little too late) and then his supporters swung VITAL states and HANDED us trump. cannot WAIT for him to die.

But in reality, Bernie has never done well outside of fucking New England because he doesn't know how to engage with Black people, or women.

Polls can and will be biased. We saw that clearly in 2024, and even before the overcorrection, there was always an implicit bias towards Trimp whenever matched with Clinton because of years and years of the media and Republicans trying to bring her down.

Voters: “WHY AREN’T DEMOCRATS STOPPING THE REPUBLICANS???”

This is pseudoscience where it isn’t actively anti-science.

The pines planted in Israel are Aleppo pines, which are indigenous and have been recorded by observers for literally millennia.  Far from “devastating” native oaks and carobs and whatever, Israel planted tons of those varieties too.  And there can be no discussion of the well-being of Israeli forests without noting that Palestinian militants are highly proficient at arson and have practically made mountainous tire-fires their trademark.

As for the idea that the Zionists were “trying to create European-style forests” - the implication that the local environment was “normal” before they “changed” it is entirely a social construct reeking of unexamined privilege.  The Roman Empire massively deforested Israel along with the rest of the Mediterranean.  Our popular concept of the Middle East as a land of desert and scrubland is  artificial, but comes naturally to people who think the world began in like 1700.  

The Palestinian mountain gazelle is indeed endangered in Israel, and some of their populations are jeopardized by habitat and genetic fragmentation caused by the West Bank barriers.  However, the largest and most stable population of the species is found in the Golan Heights, where they roam freely without such barriers and have enjoyed a significant rebound in numbers now that they are no longer subject to hunting from Syria.  More importantly, the Palestinian mountain gazelle has already been wiped out in Egypt, and also in Syria and Jordan - perhaps some invisible Mossad agents went on safari?  The species was on the brink of extinction in Turkey, until it was quite accidentally saved when the Turkish military set up a no-man’s-land on the border with Syria in response to its civil war.    

It’s also worth noting that the first post in that Twitter thread (not screencapped onto the Tumblr post, hmm...) was Heron calling for BDS.  When Israel really is the only country in that region where forest cover is growing and where the mountain gazelles have any chance at survival, uh, why should we overthrow the government, again?  That would help the environment how, precisely?  The Kai Herons of the world would call that “greenwashing,” because they don’t actually give a shit about the environment, they just misappropriate journal-jargon to mask how ridiculous and unprincipled their accusations are.   

Last and least, the concept that “Palestinian liberation is a climate issue” is just a perfect crystallization, French waiter palm-kiss, of how lefty activists try to run in every direction at once and get nowhere.  Climate protection has failed because it requires the entire world to unfuck foundational problems in our economic, technological, and political lives - but Palestinian liberation is still a matter of a signature and a handshake, two parties looking at made-up lines on a very small map.  For white European activists to insist that Palestinians may only make progress if we first make progress on climate change just shows how they only see Palestinians as tools and symbols and not as people.  

CODA:

This is a case of me being ABSOLUTELY fucking petty enough to reconstruct and restart a post after someone blocked me and prevented reblogs of the original.

My jaw is on the fucking FLOOR. You're blaming DEMOCRATS? STILL? What the fuck is a "permission structure for trust," Layla??? What are you FUCKING talking about??

I get that it’s not exciting or theatrical but lawyers holding up pieces of paper and saying “umm you can’t do that?” Is genuinely how several major civil rights victories were achieved.

Brown v Board of Education

Loving v Virginia

Griswold v Connecticut

Obergefell v Hodges

Roe v Wade protected abortion rights for 50 years and was only just overturned as a result of Lawyers Holding Papers

so people were immediately confused, and that confusion turned to anger because martial law means people can get arrested much more easily, and also, what the general fuck? and protests began at parliament, and the combination of protestors and police were blocking the way in.

and then 190 parliament members showed up in the middle of the night, at least some of them had to to jump a fence and/or evade police not letting them in, and they got inside and voted 190-0 to un-declare martial law. not a single person there voted to maintain martial law, and not a single person who would have voted to maintain martial law bothered to show up. that vote happened at around 1am.

and within a few hours the president announced that fine, he will undo martial law. and then he undid it. and then people started calling for his resignation or impeachment.

Mi Al Har Horev: The Earliest Recorded Jewish Music and the Norman Convert who Saved It for Us

Out of all the obscure and fascinating coincidences of the Cairo Genizah, this is one of my absolute favourites.

Amazingly, among the documents of the Genizah were found seven leaves from an autobiographical memoir (of sorts) of a convert named Obadiah, and scholars were able to piece his life story together. He was born around 1070 in Norman Italy to a noble Christian family, and was originally named Johannes, son of Dreux. Although he received religious training in a local monastery and was a serious student of the Christian Bible, he was drawn to Judaism from his early teens, and eventually converted in 1102.

Leaving Europe, he made his way to Jewish communities in Aleppo, Baghdad, Damascus, and eventually, Fustat [Cairo], having mastered by this time both Hebrew and Arabic, and having survived several harrowing encounters with the soldiers of the First Crusade… It was here that he made his great contribution to the history of Jewish music.

For decades, scholars had been puzzled by another set of fragments found in the Genizah: Hebrew piyyutim [devotional poems], clearly written in the handwriting of 12th-century Levantine Hebrew script, i.e. somewhere in Egypt, Syria or Baghdad… But each line was also written out with the neumes of medieval musical notation — specifically, in the 12th-century southern Italian School of “Lombardic” or “Beneventane notation.” How was a Levantine Hebrew piyyut recorded with a system of musical notation that was at this time confined to Christian monasteries in southern Europe?

It was only in 1964 that the scholar Norman Golb saw the musical manuscript and recognized that the handwriting was identical to the script of Obadiah’s memoirs which he was preparing for publication. And thus the mystery was solved: Obadiah had taken the piyyutim of the Jewish community around him and recorded them with the musical notation he had learnt in his youth in Italy. It seems that in some cases he was transcribing the traditional tunes, and in others he was setting the words to music of his own composition in a Gregorian-Italian style.

I am fully aware that women frequently aren't believed either

I am fully aware that men also use the system and false allegations against women

I am fully aware of the statistics and the gendered power imbalance in society

I have personally seen numerous cases of the opposite and I am well aware of the myriad of ways that abusive men hurt their female partners and relatives

Two things can be true at once:

We live in a misogynistic society that doesn't listen to women on a good day, let alone when she's just gone through hell and doesn't have a press statement ready for the police, and so there are tons of female victims who are revictimized by the system; AND

We live in a chauvenistic society that downplays women's physical strength, sexual strength, and/or willingness to engage in any number of other abusive behaviors and that drastically overestimates men's capabilities and invulnerability. This leads to male victims not being believed, especially if their abuser is a woman.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Let me spell it out for you: abusers are often adept at using whatever tools they have available to them, and victims frequently struggle to be heard and respected especially when in crisis. Society in general really really sucks at identifying interpersonal power dynamics and abusive patterns, and sucks even more at intervening in a timely and compassionate way.

✨ Please reblog to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨