shiba

i really don't have the words for how things have escalated to outright race riots in the last few weeks. just to collect a few of the stories the bbc is reporting in their live thread:

Families led to safety through flames (Dan Johnson) Homes were targeted and burned. Families had to be led to safety through the flames - rescued by emergency services risking their lives in the most dangerous situation. It’s what the authorities feared all day. What they warned against and pleaded not to see. The condemnation came quickly and was widespread. It wasn’t just homes, cars were also torched by young masked man in these predominantly unionist streets but the target here was immigrants and the message to entirely innocent families was: "You’re not welcome". In the north of the city, more people were forced to flee including an African family who’ve lived here for 20 years.

People being put out 'because they're black' - pastor A pastor who has been helping those in houses targeted in tonight's violence says people were being put out of their homes "because they're black". Pastor Jack McKee was at the scene where multiple houses were on fire around the Crumlin Road in north Belfast - he says some members of his church "who have been with us for 20 years" were "getting put out of their home, had their house attacked, windows smashed, houses beside them burned". "They're good Christian people and they're getting put out just because they're black," he says. "I'm doing my best to help them, it's as simple as that." [...]

Masked men shouting 'foreigners out' (Kelly Bonner) Last night on the Lower Newtownards Road in Belfast hundreds of masked men walked down the street carrying bottles, bricks and masonry. They set bins on fire and shouted "foreigners out". As they walked street to street, they were banging on doors, kicking doors down and breaking windows. Masked man set cars alight and at one point I witnessed them trying to burn a car until a woman came out of her home and told them it belonged to a "local and not a foreigner" and they stopped. A young family had to be moved from their home by police. The scenes of this young family fleeing their home were really quite shocking.

My house was destroyed at the beginning of the war. We live in the Shuja'iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza 🏚️. I lost my job, and I was injured during the war and am still suffering 💥🤕… Now I'm fighting just to keep my family alive.

I'm responsible for a very large family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦:

👴 My father is elderly and needs care.

👶 My young children are innocent.

🧠 My brother has a mental disability, can't work, and has children of his own.

🤰 My wife is pregnant and needs care amidst a complete lack of basic necessities. She needs so much, the simplest of which is clothing.

👧👧 My children are Salwa and Massa. My little Massa was born during the height of the war. We were living in my sister's house when my wife went into labor. We were trapped and couldn't leave the house because of the intense shelling all around us. Miraculously, by the grace of God, my wife gave birth to Massa at home.

When we finally managed to leave a week later, the occupation forces demolished my sister's house.

Now we live in tents inside Gaza, destitute. The tents offer no protection from the heat or the winter. In the winter, we suffered greatly, and in the summer, the children developed skin diseases from the extreme heat.

There is no income… no work… and prices are sky-high. 🔥

We are living through harsh days, caught between hunger and fear. We have nothing but hope in God and in your hearts. 🙏 I never imagined I would have to ask for help, but today… I sincerely reach out to you:

Please extend a helping hand 🙏 Any amount, even a small one, can provide food, medicine, and warm clothes for my children.

💔 We truly need any help, even the smallest… It could mean a meal, medicine, or even just hope for life.

🤍 Don't leave us alone… Your support is our lifeline.

🙏 Please, from a broken heart… Any help, even a small one, could make a huge difference in our lives and help us to keep going and survive.

May God reward you all. Your support will be a light in our lives 🤍

These are my children. One of them was born during the war inside our home because we couldn’t go to the hospital due to the intensity of the war we were living through at that time. Until now, the suffering continues, with shortages of food, medicine, and clothing. I ask you for your prayers and support.

@fundraiser-reblogs

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

My daughters spend their days standing in long lines for water and bread instead of living their childhood 🥺 My husband was also injured while trying to bring food for us during the famine.

I created this fundraiser with a broken heart, only hoping to protect my daughters and give them a chance to live with dignity, safety, and hope again 🙏

Any donation, no matter how small, can help us survive. And if you cannot donate, sharing our story may help us reach someone who can, but please try to support us with a donation because my campaign is still new and my little girls desperately need your help 🌿

My name is Abdullah Salem, I am 27 years old, married, and a father of two daughters, Iman and Masa. My wife, Sarah, is currently seven months pregnant. Before the war, I worked as a driver and lived a simple but stable life. Everything changed when my car was destroyed, I lost my job, and our home was completely destroyed.

Today, we live in a tent under very difficult conditions, struggling with food shortages, lack of clean water, and rising prices. I am doing my best to provide for my family and protect my children from hunger. We have also lost several family members during the war, and every day is a struggle to survive.

If you are able to support or share my campaign, any contribution—no matter how small—can help us secure food, water, and basic necessities. Thank you for taking the time to read our story and for giving us hope.

Donate & share

I am Hamza from Gaza, a husband and father of four children. Before the war, I worked and provided for my family, and we lived a simple but stable life. Since the war began, everything has changed. We were displaced many times, and our home was eventually completely destroyed, leaving us without shelter or stability.

During this period, I was seriously injured in my hand while trying to obtain food for my children, which left me unable to work and in need of surgery I cannot afford. My young daughter Amira was also injured and urgently needs medical treatment. We have lost relatives, our home, and all our belongings, and we are now living in a tent under very harsh conditions. My youngest daughter, Aya, was born during the war and needs basic supplies and care.

I created this campaign to seek support for my family — to help cover urgent medical treatment, food, and essential needs for my children. Any support, no matter how small, can make a real difference and give my family hope for a safer, more dignified life. 🤍

So please help me and my daughter 🙏

Before the war, our life was simple, but it was filled with warmth, safety, and happiness. 🏠 Our home was our safe haven, and my children’s laughter filled every corner of it.

But in a single moment, everything changed...

We lost our home and became homeless. Today, we live in a small tent that cannot protect us from the heat of summer or the cold of winter. ⛺

My children are still beside me, but fear never leaves their eyes. Every day, I struggle to provide food, clean water, clothes, and even their most basic needs. As a mother, it breaks my heart to see them suffering while feeling helpless.

try to stay strong for my children, but the truth is that I am exhausted. All I want is to give them back even a small part of the safety and dignity they have lost.

🙏 We are in desperate need of help to survive — a decent tent, food, clothing, and basic necessities for my children.

Any support, no matter how small, can make a huge difference in our lives. And if you are unable to help directly, please share our story. Maybe it will reach someone who can.

My name is Maram, I am 25 years old from Gaza. I dreamed of a peaceful life, spending my life with my husband and my three children... but the war turned this dream into an impossible one 💔😭. We lived through this genocide with all its painful details and we are still suffering from it😭. We were so happy when the ceasefire was announced, and we returned to our homes in northern Gaza after being displaced for a year and a half in a tent in the south of the Gaza Strip. After repairing a small room in our destroyed house, we began to live there and start over. Unfortunately, the war came back, and it was even stronger than before 💔. Now, we have no shelter or source of income. We have used up all our savings during the war. I know I created my campaign very late, but that's because I have no other means to help my family 🙏. I am completely confident and hopeful that someone here will help us as much as they can and save my family in these tough circumstances 😔.

I know how painful and frustrating it is to start over from scratch, but I hope to get any amount for my family 🥺🙏.

My children tremble with fear, death, and hunger every day here in Gaza.

My children would be happy with $10 so they could forget what happened. 🥹🥹🥹

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #605 )✅️

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.