Israel is obsessed with playing the victim yet they routinely abduct children and prosecute them in military courts…
Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that automatically and systematically prosecutes children in military courts that lack fundamental fair trial rights and protections. Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year.
3 out of 4 Palestinian child detainees experience physical violence at the hands of Israeli forces.
59% were arrested at night
86% were not informed of the reason for their arrest
97% had their hands bound
89% were blindfolded
75% were subjected to physical violence
58% were subjected to verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation during or after their arrest
54% were transferred from the place of their arrest on the floor of a military vehicle
80% were strip searched
42% were denied adequate food and water
31% were denied access to a toilet
66% were not properly informed of their rights
97% were interrogated without a family member present
55% were shown or made to sign a paper in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not understand
36% were threatened or coerced
25% were subjected to stress positions
23% were detained in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes for a period of two or more days
Congo is silently going through a silent genocide. Millions of people are being killed so that the western world can benefit from its natural resources.
More than 60% of the world’s cobalt reserves are found in Congo, used in the production of smartphones.
Western countries are providing financial military aid to invade regions filled with reserves and in the process millions are getting killed and millions homeless.
Multinational mining companies are enslaving people especially children to mine.
•••
La República Democrática del Congo vive un genocidio silencioso. Millones de personas están siendo asesinadas para que la parte occidental del mundo pueda beneficiarse de sus recursos naturales.
Más del 60% de las reservas mundiales de cobalto se encuentran en el Congo, y se utiliza en la producción de teléfonos inteligentes.
Los países occidentales están proporcionando asistencia financiera militar para invadir regiones llenas de reservas y en el proceso millones de personas mueren y millones se quedan sin hogar.
Las empresas mineras multinacionales están esclavizando a la gente, especialmente a los niños, para trabajar en las minas.
I think people get mixed up a lot about what is fun and what is rewarding. These are two very different kinds of pleasure. You need to be able to tell them apart because if you don’t have a balanced diet of both then it will fuck you up, and I mean that in a “known cause of persistent clinical depression” kind of way.
When people say they enjoy things, they usually mean one of two things. The first is that these things are fun; that is, they satisfy immediate emotional needs or desires for pleasure. Candy Crush is fun, for people who are into that sort of thing; waterslides are fun, watching TV is fun. Fun, in the way I’m defining it for this post, is the party food of pleasure; immediately and usually temporarily satisfying, and after that, mostly satisfying only as a happy memory (although some of these activities, like watching a TV show, can generate further opportunities for pleasure down the line like daydreaming, discussion, and making fanart). Like party food, this kind of fun is a good thing to have, and someone who doesn’t get enough of it is at high risk of stress-related health concerns. Also burnout. A lack of fun is a major contributor to burnout.
The second kind of pleasure that most people talk about is rewarding activity. The lack of rewarding activity in one’s life is a major contributor to depression. It creates a sense of purposelessness and worthlessness and generates a low attention span, sapping the ability to feel long-term motivation or pleasure. People usually try to pick themselves up with the first kind of fun, which is a band-aid but not a very sticky one; the lack of rewarding activity grows and festers over time. Rewarding pleasure involves working on something long-term that feels worthwhile. There are usually also spots of fun (or you wouldn’t have gotten into the activity enough for it to become rewarding), but there also tends to be long slogs that aren’t that fun. Nevertheless, when people report on doing said activity, they will speak about it with great enjoyment and remember it being enjoyable and claim they like it. (I like being a writer. Writing can sometimes be boring as shit.) (Look into Csíkszentmihályi’s work on experience sampling and flow states for more info on this, it is FASCINATING.)
In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal sums up what she thinks are the most important contributing factors to rewarding activity. These are not the only factors, but I agree that they’re a good baseline of the critical ones. I’m going to paraphrase them using different language. The four big contributors are:
Satisfying work. This is the vaguest one because different people find different things satisfying. Basically, the task itself should feel productive, and you should not feel bad about doing it to the point where it causes you distress. Satisfying work involves clear goals with actionable steps and a clear product, preferably something that you can see, touch or use. A clean house, a new high score, a freshly built table, a happy child.
Mastery. Rewarding pleasure is often something that you can get better at. There are things to learn, practice, improve. Improving your ability to solve tricky code problems, getting better at painting landscapes, figuring out fun new strategies in Magic: The Gathering, being able to build computers better or faster or cheaper. Mastery does not require becoming the best at something (although some people enjoy that specifically also), merely seeing progress in yourself and being able to take pride int he fact that you are better than you were.
Social connection. Rewarding pleasure often involves social or community connection. A long-term social group that discusses fan theories of their favourite show. Your weekly tabletop rpg. Teaching a room full of kids who to make leather belts. Working at a small bookshop and making small talk with all the tourists. Some people find social activity to be fun in the ‘immediate pleasure’ kind of way, some don’t, but it is a critical factor in mental health and in the long-term… rewardingness (?)… of a hobby. Animals can also partially fill this niche, but be warned, they are far, far less effective than people. Your cat might be able to stop you from committing suicide today. You cat alone will not make your life satisfying.
Contribution. Humans are community animals and have a need to be something larger than ourselves or, more specifically to be of service to something larger than ourselves. Looking after kids, cooking big meals for others, creating art or physical products for others. Teaching the next generation how to read. Serving your God. Saving a species of small fish from extinction. Volunteering at your local charity shop or soup kitchen. Being a member of a crowd to reach the Guinness World Record for “most people fit into a storage crate”. Making useful tutorial videos, being an entertainer, joining your local queer support group or political organisation. Humans fucking love to be part of something bigger than their own brain and they fucking love to help people.
The world is full of rewarding activities, and not all of them rate high in all four categories. The woman working in the charity shop warehouse and chatting with her coworkers isn’t necessarily all that interested in mastery of her job (although I’ve worked in these places and some people do take pride in learning to be as efficient as possible), the musical hermit training to become the best violinist in the world might not be all that interested in social connection or how the audience actually feels about him. You might have noticed that I’ve listed hobbies, jobs, and non-employed but important life work (volunteering and childrearing) as possible rewarding activities; you can find rewarding activities everywhere. (In fact the lack of rewarding pleasure in our work lives is a very serious problem that companies keep trying to condescendingly band-aid over. The late David Graeber had a lot to say about this and I highly recommend his work, particularly Bullshit Jobs, which is a book specifically discussing the lack of above points 1 and 4 (satisfying work and sense of contribution) in so many modern workplaces and its distressing psychological ramifications). Rewarding activities are not 'fun’ all the time; in fact, Csíkszentmihályi’s work found that many of them are quite unfun most of the time. They do, however, create long term pleasure, and are emotionally and psychologically critical.
One final point: research shows that computer stuff counts less. This isn’t a 'hurr durr edison was a witch get off your damn computers and get a real job’ point; plenty of people do most of their rewarding activity on computers, because the supply cost is so low (most of us already own some kind of computer) and it’s so much easier to find an existing community. But it does, psychologically speaking, count less; your brain isn’t very good at seeing computers stuff as as 'real’, on a primitive sensory level, as things you can touch with your hands or people that are right in front of you. Your massive community of fellow fans on the internet are less effective at filling your social needs than the crochet club at your local library, even if you like the people on the internet much more. It doesn’t have to be everything, but ideally you should have at least one physical meatspace social club and at least one physical meatspace hobby, craft, or volunteer job. (They can be the same thing. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen for both.) They don’t have to be the most important thing – I care way more about my writing (electronic) than my crochet (meatspace) and I do the writing a lot more – but the meatspace thing should exist, if you can manage it.
The fact that over 10,000 people and counting in Gaza (likely way more than that considering how many people are missing/buried under the rubble) are dead is fucking unfathomable. I don’t think some people even understand how many 10,000 out of 2.2 million people is. Nearly half a percent of the population. Nearly one in every 200 people are dead in the Gaza Strip. In my home state of Texas, this would be as if you killed roughly 135,000 people. Any number of lives lost to violent military occupation is horrific, but this is on a scale that I don’t think most of us can even wrap our heads around. And just today it was reported by the Wall Street Journal that the United States is sending $320 million to Israel to arm them with more fucking bombs. I hope no one ever forgives us. I hope we never forgive ourselves.
In a little over two weeks, the number has risen to over 14,500 and counting. And that’s at the very least. Israel has launched sieges on multiple hospitals since then, making it extremely difficult to obtain accurate casualty numbers. At least 14,500 people, dead. 1.6 million displaced, evacuating on foot, having to reckon with heavy rain and winter cold in makeshift tents. The healthcare system is collapsing while conditions become increasingly overcrowded and resources grow thinner and thinner, which will make the impact of hunger, thirst, and disease outbreaks exponentially worse. The entire population is starving, unable to find safe shelter anywhere, unable to even get basic healthcare, or clean water, or reliable internet/cell service in order to keep in touch with loved ones or call emergency services. Rescue workers and other civilians are resorting to digging through rubble with their bare hands to save anyone they can because there’s no fuel to power machinery for proper rescue missions, and while they try to rescue people they’re being targeted. 60 journalists have been killed, some in the field and some in their homes with their families. And even now that a truce has been announced, there has been confusion about when exactly it’s going to start, which could be disastrous for people in Gaza who mistakenly think that they’ll be able to move safely tomorrow. Israel is ramping up the destruction during these last 24 hours before the ceasefire starts, targeting refugee camps, hospitals, schools, and other places where people are trying to shelter. And they are promising that once the pause has ended and the exchanges have been made, they’re going to keep on bombing Gaza.
We cannot afford to give one single fucking inch. Keep pushing harder and harder until Palestine is free, once and for all.
and another reminder that the quileute tribe (the very real tribe that was featured in twilight and received no compensation) is still located in a tsunami zone and is trying to move to higher ground. please consider donating.
A Palestinian man stands on the balcony of his destroyed house as he waits for the visit of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah to Gaza’s neighborhood of Shijaeyih on October 9, 2014. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
i want to highlight some of different pro palestine actions happened at the macy’s thanksgiving.
let’s get started with a group of climate activists that super glued their hands to the concrete on 6th avenue, which is a key point on the parade route:
another group that made some noise and staged a sit-in were the writers against the war on gaza:
you can read their official statement bellow.
the mashpee wampanoe tribe of massachusetts had a member of their trip lifting a palestinian flag on their float. this action noticeably made it onto national broadcasts of the parade:
and amogst all the planned disruptions were people in the crowds simply taking advantage of the visibility of this parade to make support known:
zionists who are more upset by people accusing israel of evil things than the evil things israel does—the best, most realistic and easiest solution was and continues to be sanctions on israel. this is only possible if israel is a pariah state. crying about how people “don’t like” israel instead of rightfully joining the pressure to transform your government from a genocidal occupying entity into some semblance of a democratic and civil partner in the peace process makes more violence inevitable. this doesn’t mean some lukewarm “the israeli government is so bad :(” sentiment, it means accepting the conditions that created the apartheid regime and palestinian dispossession in the first place, and fully understanding and reckoning with the colonial nature of it and the enshrined palestinian right of return.
a week long ceasfire is not enough. the occupation needs to end. a ceasfire will not free palestine. this is about liberation as well as ending a genocide
Israel has basically broken the “ceasfire” immediately I’m being so serious when I say STOP FIGHTING FOR A CEASFIRE AND START FIGHTING FOR A FREE PALESTINE YOU CANNOT “CEASFIRE” THIS “AWAY”
I haven’t personally verified this as I’m not at a computer, but multiple people in multiple places are saying the same thing. This is fucking insane. First the endless war on UBlock, then the Chromium changes to shut out some blocker functionalities entirely next year, now this?
Something is deeply rotten in recent Google/YouTube policy. I can’t imagine that this is legal - how is this not anticompetitive? Google needs to get mega fucked in the press and the courts sooner rather than later.
And I need to switch to Firefox as soon as I get home.
Hello it's Angie I felt the need to start over kinda so if you are an old moot heyy
My pronouns are she/her but tbh they/them is totally fine too
I'm 25 minors pls dni
“But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”
― A.A. Milne
![This is not the medicine I thought I would be practicing. I always wanted to progress in my field—to learn more, to teach more. In Gaza, I haven’t been able to do that. I hope to raise my kids to be ambitious—not to think about war, missiles, rockets. Every day, I see a fear in their eyes that I can’t do much about. It’s very painful. If you have kids, you know how horrible it is not to be able to comfort them, to ensure they are alright, to make them hope for anything beyond living one more day. We want to live freely like other people—to grow scientifically and economically, to walk in the street without fearing bombardments, to make plans. We want to be able to learn, think, grow, travel, dream—to feel like we are really human. Not to think only about meeting our basic needs. This is what life has always been about for us, and now—I want the world to know—we are being eradicated en masse. This is not what life should look like. — Dr. Hammam Alloh, nephrologist at Aqsa Martyrs and Shifa Hospitals, as told to Maya Rosen, October 26th [Note: On November 11th, Dr. Hammam Alloh was killed in an Israeli airstrike.]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/ef3f929bf742f32fd1dec4cc8c03aaa9/06d9d29ec3608f75-98/s640x960/d7f2bfd5ee1ab21f45eb5c2bc4bc002dd9fcb6ee.png)
