People seem to think this is fake because it's written in English. Apart from the racism in believing that Arab doctors and nurses aren't fluent in English (a second or official language for half of Asia), Palestinians have deliberately been addressing their audience in English on every social media, from journalists to children, because they know speaking English to Westerners immediately makes people more human in their eyes. Because language is one of the ways the imperial cultural hegemony conditions us (yes, everyone in the world) to see who qualifies as "people" and who are simply a mass of bodies who were always made to suffer and die. Gazans know this deeply, which is why they have been using English to beg and plead through social media, "We're not numbers! We're not numbers! We're people like you, we speak your language, we deserve to live!" all the while they're systematically slaughtered.
Israeli forces also encircled Al Shifa Hospital yesterday and bombed it for several hours while shooting dead anyone trying to flee including medical staff moving between buildings. Not sure whether it's still continuing because WHO lost all communications with its staff there a few hours after. The last new report said that thirty-nine babies had been removed from the incubators before the power went out. It's extremely unlikely they will survive.
Please understand that these atrocities depend on the war of attrition between governments and public attention. The momentum of public outcry is difficult to sustain through repeated stonewalling and bureaucratic intractability. When we're flooded with these reports and a sense of futility and despair replaces the anger, it allows compassion fatigue to set in and the violence to become normalized. Massacring hospitals, killing sick children and openly targeting humanitarian aid workers (Netanyahu just declared the UNRWA is in league with Hamas) will become simply more news articles that fade into the background, and open genocides will soon become part of the "lesser evil".
Take care of yourselves how you can, take distance where needed, but please never tune out and give up on the two million people for whom we are the only witness and hope. Never stop boosting and sharing the news and posts you find, never stop getting out there and joining every protest you can, however small. Anger burns out, which is why activism must depend on an immovable sense of justice and uncompromising value for human life. It's not just about Gaza, it's about the kind of evil our generation will be coerced into accepting as unchangeable and inevitable hereafter.
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People ask me sometimes how I'm so confident that we can beat climate change.
There are a lot of reasons, but here's a major one: it would take a really, really long time for Earth to genuinely become uninhabitable for humans.
Humans have, throughout history, carved out a living for themselves in some of the most harsh, uninhabitable corners of the world. The Arctic Circle. The Sahara. The peaks of the Himalayas. The densest, most tropical regions of the Amazon Rainforest. The Australian Outback. etc. etc.
Frankly, if there had been a land bridge to Antarctica, I'm pretty sure we would have been living there for thousands of years, too. And in fact, there are humans living in Antarctica now, albeit not permanently.
And now, we're not even facing down apocalypse, anymore. Here's a 2022 quote from the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, a leader on climate change and the furthest thing from a climate optimist:
"The most terrifying predictions [have been] made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.”"
-David Wallace-Wells for the New York Times, October 26, 2022
If we can adapt to some of the harshest climates on the planet - if we could adapt to them thousands of years ago, without any hint of modern technology - then I have every faith that we can adjust to the world that is coming.
What matters now is how fast we can change, because there is a wide, wide gap between "climate apocalypse" and "no harm done." We've already passed no harm done; the climate disasters are here, and they've been here. People have died from climate disasters already, especially in the Global South, and that will keep happening.
But as long as we stay alive - as long as we keep each other alive - we will have centuries to fix the effects of climate change, as much as we possibly can.
And looking at how far we've come in the past two decades alone - in the past five years alone - I genuinely think it is inevitable that we will overcome climate change.
So, we're going to survive climate change, as a species.
What matters now is making sure that every possible individual human survives climate change as well.
What matters now is cutting emissions and reinventing the world as quickly as we possibly can.
What matters now is saving every life and livelihood and way of life that we possibly can.
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there's something about nickname drift that always gets me, so it starts like this:
steph call duke a pineapple one time, duke retaliates by calling her aubergine, then he calls her eggplant, then finally just "egg", steph calls him "pine" and eventually just starts calling him different tree varieties
this culminates with duke calling on the comms "this is tree boy paging egg" (babs, who hasn't run day shift comms for a fat second has to be like uhhh come again) this is their little inside joke when its just them and eventually when they run into each other at GothU
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Sometimes I think about how Adrien must grieve
How, when he lost his mother, it was a gradual thing, where he lost more and more of her, where he was slowly prepared for an eventuality and a future in which she would not be there anymore. How it was longstanding and tormenting and how his grief began long before the day he would never see her again. How though the pain of loss must have been sharp and aching for him, and he must desperately miss Emilie, at least he achieved some solace in not having to see her in pain anymore.
But then once he's reached a healthy stage and coping style in his grief for Emilie, the wounds are reopened once again.
How his father went from existing to suddenly being gone to Adrien. How he had no warning, no indication that he would never see him again. How even though the grief is sudden and unexpected, it had really started months before Gabriel was gone, and even long before he became injured.
It's how despite the fact that Gabriel was seemingly in good health, and Adrien had no reason to fear losing him, Adrien has actually been grieving for Gabriel and their relationship for a long time. How Adrien has had to watch his father slip away, lose himself, and slowly give less and less of himself over to Adrien, until Adrien could hardly recognize the man that was supposed to be sitting across the table from him.
Sometimes I just think about how grief became a comfort for Adrien, a lifestyle, because he has been taught that all good things in his life, all things he loves, must come to an end eventually.
And I think about how that must affect him as a person.
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