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My name is Wadad, and I am a mother of six children. We live in Gaza, where life has become a daily struggle for survival💔🇵🇸

Right now, we are facing the most difficult challenges. The airstrikes and bombings are relentless, and every day feels like a battle. The sound of explosions has become a constant, and fear and uncertainty follow us everywhere. We no longer have food to feed my children, and our home is no longer safe. It has been destroyed, like many others in Gaza😭😭

We are struggling to find the most basic necessities—food, water, and shelter. My children are scared, hungry, and exhausted. They ask me questions I don't have answers to, and my heart breaks because I can't provide them with the safety and peace they deserve😭😭😭😭😭

I am reaching out to you, dear friends around the world, hoping you can offer help. I am asking for any kind of assistance—whether it’s food, water, shelter, or even words of support. We are desperately in need of your help to survive this nightmare.🥺💔

Please, if you can, help us. Every little bit counts in this time of unimaginable suffering. Your support can make a life-changing difference for my children and me. 🙏

I pray for a day when my children can live without fear and know peace. 🕊️

Thank you for hearing our cry.😭😭😭🇵🇸💔

Verified.....🇵🇸

@90-ghost

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I know we are all used to hear bad news from the USA or UK when it comes to trans rights but this time Germany wants to play in the same league.

Our idiots at home ministry came up with the fucking idea to start a register for all transgender and nonbinary people which would mean every person working at some public position could always at any given time see your assigned gender at birth, your deadname, your address and who knows what else.

We had been there in the past. Hitler Germany called it the "Travestite Law" back then. Our politicians didn't learn.

We all know this is unacceptable.

Please, if you are German, sign it. If you are not, spread it wide and far.

This had been stopped once a few years ago. It needs to be stopped again.

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I honestly don't know how she does it, but Mona is still managing the production and distribution of food, bread, and is distributing necessities like water, diapers, and cooking ingredients to displaced people while she herself is displaced. Yes, during a famine. She couldn't have done it without your help from the last donation drive. Donating to these mutual aid funds of groups like Mona's is indispensable help and support right now. You're making a difference. Do not hesitate to donate, every dollar counts! Thank you all for your continued support. P*ypal, Chuffed, Instagram.

(If you live in India or Pakistan and want to donate, contact her through the means listed on her account).

GFM for Mona's family. GFM for Mona's sister and niece.

None of this is possible without Mona and her family's diligence and work. If you would like to send her a thank you note or well wishes, please include it in the replies to this post, in your tags, or in the comments! She always appreciates them ♡

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some organizations working on the ground in gaza right now

gaza soup kitchen

the sameer project

salam charity

watermelon relief

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The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

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Hey guys something fucking bad happened

KOSA/the kids online safety act has been reintroduced into legislature after it passed Senate last year and then got snubbed. It is not unlike the bill that just passed in the UK a few weeks ago. If you don't want what happened in the UK to happen here, now would be a good time to vocally oppose it.

Here is a petition that can be signed by Americans. Attached to the petition is an easy tool that allows you to call and leave messages for your representatives. I have already done so. You can also email your representatives by searching for their name, most have message submission boards as well. This thing died once, it can die again.

Please sign/share the petition and contact your representatives.

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Made a little something on slur reclamation.

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“I’ve really tried to understand the Israelis. I used to work on a farm in Israel. I speak Hebrew. I watch their news. All the time they talk about fear. How they have to run to their bunkers to hide from the rockets. How their children can’t sleep because of the sirens. This is not a good way for them to live. We Palestinians don’t talk about fear, we talk about death. Our rockets scare them; their rockets kill us. We have no bomb shelters, we have no sirens, we have nowhere we can take our children and keep them safe. They are scared. We are dying.”

— Mohammed al-Khoudry a Palestinian farmer in Gaza. (via champagnefather)

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what we lose when we reject porn

let me paraphrase an exchange that you’ve almost certainly seen play out many times by now:

“We can’t let the platforms we use bow to the pressure to ban porn, because conservatives consider queer existence itself to be inherently pornographic. They’ll use it as an excuse to ban all queer content.”

“That’s true, but don’t forget: porn is art, and art has a right to exist even if it is unwholesome smut.”

i agree completely with both of these points, for the record. they’re not mutually exclusive, and they are both relevant, persuasive reasons to support porn. they’re the only reasons you need, honestly. these points alone suffice for a robust defense of pornography!

i want to talk about something else, though.

i want to tell you what gets me about all this.

every time we create and enforce restrictions on pornography, we reify the idea of “pornography” as a meaningful and obligatory category. we are forced to say, for any given work of art, whether it is or isn’t pornography. if it is, we restrict it: we hide it away, we place odious limitations on where it can be seen and sold, and we never, ever talk about it in polite company.

but what about art that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these two boxes?

well, the answer is that, for the most part... it doesn’t get made! it’s just too risky. the benefits of making art in the public sphere are too huge to risk incorporating content or themes that might get your art labeled pornographic. and if you’ve decided from the get-go that you are making adult content, then there’s less than no incentive to waste your time and energy creating art that doesn’t fit cleanly into the box of “pornography”, because your opportunities to reach people outside of that box are so limited.

this sucks ass!!!

eroticism by and for itself is great. but art can be anything. art can be erotic among other things. imagine if you were only allowed to eat frosting straight out of the packet. imagine if you never got to taste a cake, because there’s massive financial disincentives to combine bread and frosting into one foodstuff!

anyone who’s into romance can tell you exactly how cathartic a real, explicit sex scene can be in a story, even when that story is not necessarily about sex. indeed, romance is just about the only genre that gets away with this forbidden combination at scale. but only to a limited extent, in limited contexts, and not without its own share of heavy policing from sales platforms.

sex and sexuality are unavoidable parts of the human experience. horniness is one of the primary colors in the spectrum of human emotions. to restrict the use of sex as a storytelling tool is to make artists forever paint with a limited palette. sure, there is lots of great, sexless art out there. for that matter, there’s tons of full-on porn that is likewise great art. but there is SUCH a huge space of possibility in between these two extremes.

and we can’t have it!

because pornography exists as a category in all of our minds, and because we are compelled to reify that category at monetary gunpoint by the jesus freaks upstairs, art must only ever at most orbit the pornographic: if it touches the event horizon, there is no going back.

we don’t just need to fight back against the censorship of pornography. we need to fight aggressively to normalize the existence of pornography. we need to make pornography mundane.

finally: it goes without saying, but there are, in fact, people who are making the kind of art i’m talking about. including me! that’s one of the great things about the internet: it democratized art for a lot of people in a lot of ways. for all its faults, the internet has enabled a golden age of horny queer art that’s allowed to be anything it wants. that’s why many of us are so distraught by the recent waves of censorship at steam and itch.io. if you’ve read this far, please take a moment to consider giving the payment processors responsible a phone call to let them know how you feel about it.

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strike

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man i really hope my roommates haven’t figured out that if they hear my fan running, it probably means im jacking off 💀

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"you don't owe anyone anything" You are a tar pit. Speak for yourself. I personally owe the cafe employees my dishes put away and my friends a listening ear and small scared insects a cup and a gentle trip outside. Hyperindividualism is a rancid infection borne of capitalism and willfully misinterpreted therapyspeak and I will defy it by continuing to be kind regardless of whether or not it benefits me personally

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many on here need to be learning this lesson

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this isn’t the first time the DHS has tweeted literal nazi propaganda but uuuhhhh I feel like things are going to get Very Bad unless we do something. about the nazis. who are running the US government