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ghazzah has no food. this is the most important thing you can say today. the israeli occupation has gotten away with starving 1.8 million+ ppl for long enough to where tht ppl are dying everyday from it now.

protests are no longer effective. there must be a loud, consistent, and coordinated response to the continued policy of collective punishment. because 85% of Gazzans are malnourished. these people will die if we don’t take real action NOW.

what is also important is to keep assisting palestinians in gaza via donating to their campaign. the $ is still used in various ways whether that be for sourcing scarce medical supplies, water, future evacuation, etc. support @blackeagleplog’s, my dear friend mohammed who’s become his family’s sole provider at 23 years old, campaign here. he’s been severely weakened by hunger & told me today he’s only ate lentils once.

how many times did you eat today?

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you'd think "nudity on its own is not taboo in many cultures of the world" is essential trivia that everyone encounters by the age of ten, which informs people how taboos are non-rigid social constructs. but no, every day you will meet people containing a lifetime of informed opinions and moral frameworks, whose world views would be shattered by telling them "nudity on its own is not taboo in many cultures of the world"

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there's something about circles

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sorry wait. I contacted visa to file a complaint about the censorship stuff they've been doing and their AI. immediately threatened to kill itself?

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mahmoud khalil spent more than 3 months locked up by this administration for peaceful protests over palestine. he was sent to hell in louisiana, he was forced to miss the birth of his son, he was trapped in byzantine legal procedures. and yet, while israel implements the final solution in gaza, CNN still asked him whether he supports hamas in an interview from two days ago

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two million people starving to death because it's geopolitically convenient and we're all expected to go about our day normally like the casual cruelty on display for the past two years has been so insane to me like i'm not even trying to make a point it's just truly something i can't wrap my mind around

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Whenever i get sad I just think about sour cream baby and get smiled again

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'kids these days have it easy' thats the point thats the point thats the whole point we're here to make it better for whoever comes after you sad selfish self absorbed puddle of wank

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They should add a second child and see if omelas gets more awesome

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If you have not yet heard, starvation in Gaza is worsening and people are still risking their lives just to access aid--nearly 100 people were killed seeking aid on Sunday. A UNWRA worker stated: “Everything around people at the moment is death, whether it’s bombs or strikes, children wasting away in front of their eyes from malnourishment, from dehydration, and dying.”

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word of the day: “woowoo”

definition:

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[75] weeks until wonwoo is back ↳ 🙋🙋🙋

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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

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i love hearing about the declining birth rate like yesss that is a major problem considering our dominant economic model. a problem i plan on contributing to 👍 joining the war on declining birth rates on the side of declining birth rates