my favorite song is “Intro” and my favorite album is “Greatest Hits” and my favorite tv episode is “Pilot” and every midnight a deliicate raven flies in through the window and puts me to bed so I can have my scarydream
something about foreshadowing being more prominent the second time around reading a story but in a way that the meaning is changed forever and you can never view a story the same as you once did before. do you know what i mean.
literally so insane how you can never go back to the innocence of it all. you see all the signs coming and you know how it ends. but there’s nothing you can do to turn a blind eye to it anymore. it hits you and you just have to keep going.
my cats are in a toxic gay relationship. the one in the foreground is Joseph and the one who is sneezing is Lenny. sometimes they frolick together. Joseph encourages Lenny to sniff his ass. Joseph beats the shit out of Lenny, which makes him have a sneezing fit.
putting “lying to kids is ok” on the table immediately looks bad. but theres nuance. because kids deserve to have as much context and respect as anyone else you live with. but also. telling them that leaving doors open will make ants carry away the entire house is necessary until their brains can quantify the heating&air bill
truly just learn the phrase “I did not like this” instead of trying to give some moral or ethical reasoning behind why it’s actually evil and morally wrong and problematic. you are allowed to just not like things because they’re not good in your personal opinion, they don’t have to be problematic you can just not like them
They have since left four premature babies to decompose on their beds. They have since kidnapped, stripped, tortured civilians and tried to frame them as Hamas fighters for their propaganda. They have since shot people at refugee camps execution style. They have since targeted academics and poets and directors. They have since killed 86 journalists. Still no ceasefire.
psa: i know that many of us did NOT doubt this for a second, neither did i. this is targeted at the people who educated themselves for the first time about this genocide and discovered the absolute horrific things that Israel is capable of doing to Palestinians, with the unwavering support of its allies.
Suha writes: when my sister was little, she used to pronounce amu (uncle) as abo and my uncle muneer thought it was the cutest thing ever. so it stuck and it was our collective nickname. we’d yell abo when we saw him and he’d yell back abo before we raced to each other’s arms.
abo was the spoiled baby brother of nine. his father died when he was a year old. when he was 8 years old, the zionist army shot him in the leg twice. he was one of the first children brought to the united states through @thepcrf to receive treatment, but he was never able to play soccer like the rest of the kids again. he lived with us for a while in the states before moving back permanently to gaza. his favorite movie of all time was blue streak and until the last time i saw him he would say “what you gonna do with one shoelace?” and i’d respond with “floss your ass?” we’d then spend the next 10 minutes quoting and laughing at his favorite lines. he’d always rent a fancy car and sneak us away from the crowded family home to take us to the newest popular shawarma and knafa joints in gaza city. i remember during one of those getaways he told me that my dad was not only his brother, but his father. he swore he would name his son after my father in accordance with our tradition of naming one’s firstborn son after their father. and he did.
today, abo was executed right before his mother’s eyes by the merciless zionist army. the soldiers raided our family home and forced themselves into my grandmother’s bedroom. she said he was trying to explain to the soldiers that she was his mother and no one was there when they suddenly and ruthlessly shot him in the neck. he exhaled a faint “يما” (mama) before collapsing to the ground. and that was it. he’s gone.
my devastated and heart shattered grandmother was not even given a chance to say goodbye. she begged them to let her take her son’s body with her. instead they expelled her from her house and forced her to leave her baby boy’s precious body behind. then they abducted her two other sons and her grandchildren.
Hey, everyone, This is Bisan from Gaza. I’m still aliveand these are some figures you need to know to know what the situation is in Gaza after 70 days of continuous bombing.
So, 25,000 children became orphans after they lost one or both parents in the bombing. Nine out of ten people cannot eat every day and people in Gaza lost 70% of the water before the war. By the way, even before the war, We had so many problems and so many issues with the water: It was not clean, not drinkable, it was not enough for washing or drinking.
More than 25,0000 were killed, either found or still under the rubble, 12,0000 of them being children. Yes, you can now tell what is happening. By the way, 22 hospitals are out of service, more than 100 medical centers are out of service, more than 100 ambulances are out of service, and more than 300 doctors or medical staff were killed.
You can’t survive this. You can’t have medical care, you can’t eat, you can’t drink. You can’t have anything in the Gaza Strip.
thinking of when I had a dream I was an aging white father of 3 kids and my weeping wife was begging me to not leave (I don’t know why I was leaving her) and as I walked out the front door of our suburban home I turned around in my khakis and said “I’m sorry, but I have to go now and….I’m never coming back. I love you” and then woke up like
i forgot to celebrate it earlierbut it’s been a full year since I came to be the custodian of these two small soft horses and have somehow kept them alive for that entire time. Please wish them many more years of playing SPORTBAW, because I love them very much.
Its the last essay of the year and the events going on in Gaza - and similar events elsewhere - had me pondering some thoughts for those who may feel powerless and like they can’t do anything. It’s not perfect, but its something.
A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.
I guess the Haitian slaves, American colonists in 1776, the French during the 1790s, the Bolsheviks, the Union strikers who gave you a five day week, the Civil Rights leaders, the Black Panthers, the United Farmworker Chicanos, the members of AIM, Native Americans who opposed colonization, the American Red Guard, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, the Kanaka Maoli group, Nelson Mandela and other anti Apartheid leaders, the drivers of the De-Nazification Movement in Germany, and EVERY FUCKING ANTI COLONIALISM INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT ON EARTH should have just shut up and let the status quo of society remained
@brainstatic This has honestly got to be the worst most neoliberal take I’ve ever read. Read a history book, literally any book. You should honestly change your name to @lackofbrainstatic
Son, do you not realize that the Bolsheviks replaced a bad system with a worse one? As did the French in the 1790s, after the moderates were pushed out and guillotined? Or are you one of those idiots who just treats every revolution as an inherently good thing because it’s a revolution, aka the exact person being talked about by OP?
Girlypop I’m a woman, don’t call me son you shitass
Ma’am, even US internal documents considered the USSR to be better than feudal tsarist Russia.
The USSR was industrialized, was able to take on Hitler, had high literacy rates, but yes had a lot of fucking problems… but saying feudal tsarist Russia was better just shows you’re a fucking dumbass with shit for brains
After the Russian revolution the USSR became the second most powerful country on earth. Prior to it, it was a feudal crumbling empire about to make the way of Austria Hungary
The USSR was industrialized,
So that was worth the Great Terror?
After the Russian revolution the USSR became the second most powerful country on earth.
So that makes inventing the Gulag system ok?
>Ma’am, even US internal documents considered the USSR to be better than feudal tsarist Russia.
Are you talking about those documents that said they got more calories than the Yanks?
Most of which were (checks notes) potatoes and other cheap vegetables?
Which was based on USSR propaganda documents?
“Radicalism is always good because I think it worked a few famous times” is not a very good argument.
Flipping the table, by definition, means you make a mess.
Ignoring the bad results is not a good idea.
Oh, wow, okay then. I guess the US should have never declared independence. I guess we should have never gotten rid of the monarchies. I guess women’s rights are a big sham, why did they ever get the right to vote anyways? I therefore think that several European states should undemocratically control the entire world. Black people should go back from where they came instead of asking for “equality”, how dare they have such radical and terrorist viewpoints. BLM is an extremist terrorist organisation! The communist vermin are the enemy from within and our great and totally not radical future president Trump will save us!
… Condemning “radicalism” even when the members of said movement clearly don’t intend to harm non-oppressors is a dangerous slippery slope towards condemning all progress, as the definition of radical can change over time.
Nazis are clearly a dangerous radical movement, it’s in their core tenets to needlessly oppress one group of people for the supposed benefit of another.
Movements for equal rights and so on generally don’t do that.
“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”
no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it
The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.
The fact that people are so comfortable with being censored that they Voluntarily censor themselves on words and topics that aren’t even being limited is a terrifying sign
I hate to be like the “THIS IS JUST LIKE 1984” guy but. there was literally a thing in that book where you had to say “double plus ungood” instead of “bad” because you weren’t supposed to talk about bad things. if you told me ten years ago that “unalive” was a word that George Orwell had coined for Newspeak I would have believed you.
Deep breath everyone. People are code switching. So that they can talk about sex and death. This is not cowing to censorship, it is language flowing around it. ‘oh we can’t say ‘sex’? Fine I’m just gonna say ‘She Bojangles on my Hardee til I Jimmy John’ which is in fact much more explicit than ‘we had sex’.
You understand that when someone says ‘self delete’ or ‘auto terminate’ that they’re discussing suicide. You understand that ‘unalive(v)’ means 'kill’ and that 'unalive(adj)’ means 'deceased’ without having that explicitly explained. Because it’s a valid construction in the English Language.
If you comprehend the meaning of the words, language is working. It’s doing its job of taking ideas and concepts from the head of one human and conveying them to another. Linguistic relativity does not in fact prevent the transmission of ideas and concepts.
Put down your copy of 1984, take a breath, and pick up a copy of A Clockwork Orange.
the issue here isn’t whether terms like “unalive” are comprehensible or not though. it’s pretty obvious what they mean, and I don’t see anyone disputing that.
what’s unsettling is that people are voluntarily mincing words that are so integral to the human experience. death is natural. sex is natural. why are we so uncomfortable talking about them that we need make up new, softer words?
censorship is, unfortunately, an undeniable fact of modern media and being online. we are adapting to it, yes. we’re still communicating the ideas that corporations are trying to censor. and yeah, some of us are effectively code switching in order to bypass the censors. but I can tell you from personal experience that there are definitely people who just talk like that now. like all the time. they’ll say “unalive” to my face, in person, completely seriously. that is what’s worrisome to me. it doesn’t seem like “rebellious youth culture” to me. it seems like the opposite of that. it seems like corporate interests seeping into our genuine, private, offline interactions where they shouldn’t have any control.
Last time I checked, this kind of thing has not and never has been solely the wheelhouse of private companies.
Censorship is generally done by governments. The euphemism treadmill is often operated by sincere and well-meaning activists.
If people are using this kind of language offline, they have responsibility for their own actions. Not some vague collective Other boogeyman.
And frankly, this isn’t even remotely the first time e-euphemisms have escaped containment. It’s just the first time y'all noticed.
