Hey there! Welcome to my blog. You may call me Argh. I'm neurodivergent, european and physically disabled.
Here, you will find: Minecraft Obsession (mostly Scarian and Treebark - yes, I hermit- and trafficship), occasional random bits I like, art, maybe nature, and I do post a few things on politics and other topics I'm invested in.
I tag some of my reblogs with #rb, most of my original posts (I'm too lazy to go back and add it to them all) with #argh speaks, and my more recent art, which I hope there'll be a lot of in the future, with #argh arts
Requests are open and I'm also doing the Spotify Wrapped Challenge (tell me a number and I'll write/draw/other something based on the song). Also, feel free to tag me in stuff or come talk to me via DMs! I might not reply immediately, but I'll try to get back to you.
My AO3 (I also have Wattpad, but I'm too lazy to link it here and I also don't really use it anymore) :
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Man, I agree and I don't care if it's cringe to say so. My mom has been saying that she remembers the bicentennial when she was a kid, and people were hyped up. She said sidewalks and poles were painted with the colors of the flag. Now? You only see mentions of the 250th anniversary in advertisements trying to cash in on it, really. But among people, nobody’s heart is in it. It could've been great. This person is right and this was part of what was so gutting about 2024; it was the best of American ideals vs the worst of American society...and the worst won. It's still hard to sit with.
It’s just fucking infuriating that we’ve had to deal with this pig ruining everything he touches for 10 years straight because, for various reasons, people refused to take the world’s biggest walking red flag seriously. I know nihilists will say "well this is Good, you see, cuz people shouldn't celebrate America ever cuz America Bad" but here in reality, we're allowed to be angry because it never had to be this way. It was always so avoidable. There are so many people I will never forgive.
I hope everyone had a great pride, be it people who went to every event imaginable, people who couldn’t make it to any, like me, or people who just didn’t feel up to it. You all matter. We all matter. Everyone deserves to leave pride feeling proud to be queer.
The outlet that the Arab world brands as a propaganda arm of the Zionist entity has never touched a comma of my criticism
I studied mass communication in Qatar – a country routinely described as a heaven for journalists, though the description has always struck me as more aspirational than empirical. I completed my master’s thesis on Israeli media framing of Morocco across three distinct phases – before normalization, after normalization, and during the Gaza war – analyzing the coverage according to three distinct editorial ideologies: left, center, and right.
I arrived at the subject carrying every assumption my academic environment had furnished me with: that Israeli media operates under military censorship so pervasive it functions as state propaganda, that the press serves as an extension of the security establishment, that the entire information ecosystem is engineered to manufacture consent for occupation. I was trained to see Israel as the graveyard of journalism.
What I found, when I actually engaged with the material – and later, with the institutions themselves – was something my professors in Doha had never prepared me for: a media landscape so free, so plural, so aggressively self-critical that it makes every Arab media ecosystem I have encountered, including the Moroccan one I belong to, look curated by comparison.
Let me begin with my own experience, because personal testimony is harder to dismiss than theory. I have written for The Times of Israel and continue to contribute to it to this day. Not once – not a single time – was any article of mine rejected, altered, or suppressed. I wrote pieces critical of Israeli government policy. I wrote pieces questioning Zionist narratives. I wrote pieces that would have made any nationalist editor in any Arab country reach for the delete button before finishing the first paragraph. Every single one was published. Every single one. I want the reader to sit with that fact for a moment, because it is not a small thing.
Here is a news outlet, operating in a country that much of the world has declared a pariah state, that accepts opinions from a Moroccan journalist even when those opinions challenge the very ideological foundations upon which the state was built. Name me one Arab outlet that would do the same in reverse.
Would Al Jazeera – which presents itself as the gold standard of Arab journalism, the fearless voice of the voiceless – publish an op-ed praising Zionism? Would it run a piece arguing that Israel’s existence is legitimate and its security concerns are valid? The question answers itself, and the silence that follows is the sound of a double standard so enormous it has become invisible.
In fact, I have been contributing to the Times of Israel since 2023 – writing freely, publishing without interference, never once told what to say or what to soften. The outlet that the Arab world brands as a propaganda arm of the Zionist entity never touched a comma of my criticism. It was not Israel that silenced me. It was Qatar. The university itself – the very institution that taught me to champion press freedom, to interrogate power, to speak truth without flinching – instructed me to stop writing for an Israeli publication.
The irony is not subtle; it is obscene. The country that hosts Al Jazeera, that markets itself as the citadel of Arab journalism, that hands out press freedom awards and convenes media ethics conferences in five-star hotels, could not tolerate a graduate student publishing opinion pieces in a newspaper three thousand kilometers away.
And the excuse will come – it always does – that these are merely opinions, that opinions do not represent the outlet, that the disclaimer at the bottom of every op-ed absolves the platform of its contributor’s views. Fine. Then explain to me why, if opinions truly do not represent the outlet, Arab media treats them as if they carry the explosive force of state policy. Explain why editors in Cairo kill columns that question normalization. Explain why Algerian platforms scrub comments that deviate from the regime’s position on Western Sahara. Explain why Qatari institutions panic at the sight of a Moroccan byline in an Israeli newspaper.
If opinions are harmless – if they are, as every Arab editor insists, the sole responsibility of their authors – then why does the entire Arab media establishment behave as though a single dissenting paragraph could bring down the house? The answer is that Arab media does not fear opinions. It fears the precedent of allowing them – because once you permit one voice to think freely, you lose the ability to guarantee that every other voice will remain obedient. And obedience, not journalism, is the product that Arab media actually manufactures.
A volatile marketplace of ideas
Israel is a country where Haaretz – a mainstream, widely read daily newspaper – routinely describes its own government’s policies in the occupied territories as apartheid, as ethnic cleansing, as moral catastrophe. Where +972 Magazine operates openly, publishing investigations that would land journalists in prison in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, in my own Morocco.
And here is the irony that should embarrass every Arab newsroom invoking press freedom: these are the very same Israeli platforms that furnish Arab media with the ammunition they later use to attack Israel. When Al Jazeera runs a segment on IDF violations, the sourcing is almost invariably Israeli – B’Tselem reports, Haaretz investigations, +972 exposés, Breaking the Silence testimonies. Arab media does not produce the critical journalism about Israel; it imports it – from Israel itself.
Israel is a country that does not fear outside critics because it manufactures its own critics in industrial quantities, funds their newsrooms, protects their legal right to publish, and tolerates their conclusions even when those conclusions accuse the state of war crimes. Israel investigates its own military, publishes its own failures, airs its own atrocities on its own evening news – and then watches as Arab networks repackage that self-criticism as evidence of Israeli villainy, without ever pausing to ask why no equivalent self-criticism exists in their own countries.
Where far-right outlets like Israel Hayom and Arutz Sheva push narratives so nationalist they would make the most hardline settler blush – and all of these exist simultaneously, in the same media market, funded, read, and debated without anyone being detained at three in the morning for what they wrote.
This is not a controlled information environment. This is a marketplace of ideas so volatile, so unmanageable, so ferociously competitive that it produces more self-criticism per square kilometer than any country in the Middle East and North Africa combined.
Consider i24News, which broadcasts in four languages – English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew – each with a distinct editorial personality. The Arabic edition operates with such sensitivity to Arab audiences that it frequently feels less like an Israeli channel than a Palestinian one broadcasting from inside Israel. Arab citizens of Israel operate their own media outlets – Makan, Panet, Arab48, Kul al-Arab – covering their communities in Arabic, criticizing Israeli policies, advocating for Palestinian rights, and doing so under the legal protection of the very state they critique.
Where else in the region does this exist? In Morocco, where the majority of the population is Amazigh, we struggled to secure a single television channel in Tamazight until 2010 – and even now, its editorial independence is a subject best discussed in whispers.
In Qatar, where Al Jazeera is headquartered, can any journalist publish a critical investigation into the Emir’s finances? Into the Al Thani family’s real estate empire across London and Paris? Into labor conditions that built the studios from which Al Jazeera broadcasts? Into Doha’s documented channels of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, for Hamas, for Islamist movements across the region that every neighboring Gulf state has designated as threats to national security? Into the billions spent on a World Cup built on the backs of migrant workers whose passports were confiscated under a kafala system that human rights organizations have called modern slavery? The answer is not merely no – the answer is that the question itself is dangerous to ask.
‘Graveyard of journalism?’
The accusation that Israel is the graveyard of journalists has become a reflex, repeated so often it has acquired the texture of established fact. And yes, journalists have died in conflict zones where the IDF operates – deaths that deserve investigation, accountability, and institutional reform. I do not dismiss them.
But the phrase “graveyard of journalism” implies the systematic destruction of press freedom as institutional practice, and that is a description that applies far more accurately to the countries making the accusation than to the country being accused. Journalists in Egypt rot in prison for years without trial. Saudi Arabia dismembered one inside a consulate. Syria buried its press corps under barrel bombs. Algeria prosecutes reporters under counterterrorism laws for covering protests.
And yet it is Israel – where Cabinet ministers are called criminals on the evening news, where a sitting prime minister’s corruption trial is broadcast live, where the Supreme Court is criticized and defended in the same newspaper on the same day – that the Arab world has decided is hostile to journalism.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, has been called a fascist by Haaretz columnists, a dictator by protest movements covered sympathetically on prime-time television, and a criminal defendant in a corruption trial that Israeli media broadcasts live, dissects nightly, and editorializes about with a ferocity that would be unimaginable in any Arab capital.
President Isaac Herzog fares no better – routinely dismissed as ceremonially irrelevant by right-wing commentators and criticized as insufficiently vocal by the left, his every public statement parsed, challenged, and often ridiculed in real time across Israeli social media and broadcast networks.
These are not fringe voices operating from exile. These are mainstream journalists, on mainstream platforms, in mainstream Israel – treating their most powerful leaders not as untouchable sovereigns but as public servants accountable to public scrutiny. Now ask yourself: in which Arab country can a journalist call the head of state a criminal on the evening news, keep their job, and sleep in their own bed that night?
This is not analysis. It is projection. Arab media establishments that cannot tolerate a cartoon mocking their head of state have appointed themselves arbiters of press freedom in a country where the head of state is mocked, investigated, indicted, and satirized as a matter of daily routine. The hypocrisy is not subtle. It is architectural.
Let me be clear: Israeli media is not perfect. Military censorship exists on narrow security grounds. Editorial pressures operate, as they do everywhere. But the distance between Israel’s media reality and the Arab world’s media reality is not a gap – it is a chasm so wide that the two sides cannot see each other.
When Arab media reaches the minimum threshold of allowing a journalist to call the president a liar on national television without disappearing the next morning, then – and only then – will the accusation that Israel is a graveyard of journalism deserve to be taken seriously. Until that day, the charge is not criticism. It is confession dressed as accusation, and the Arab world would do well to look in the mirror before pointing at Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile pretty much every media source is filled with antisemitic bias. not only does the media not have a so-called pro jewish bias. it actively is very biased AGAINST jewish people and filled with antisemitism and anti-israeli xenophobia. their conspiracy theories are so ridiculously obviously false it would be funny if it weren't so harmful.
For real - people have to be either actively stupid or deliberately and knowingly lying to believe that nonsense for a second.
you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it
as a certified woman-lover I understand the instinct to say there's no such thing as a woman who isn't beautiful or all women are amazing etc. and i take a lot of comfort in loving women. and beauty is in the eye of the beholder etc. we can't say anyone is objectively attractive or not and "ugly" is a loaded worded riddled with a history of fatphobia, racism, and ableism. that all being said, all women don't have to be beautiful to deserve respect. women are allowed to be "ugly". if we hinge our respect for women solely on how much we love them then what happens when there are women we don't find attractive or nice or pleasant or who actually have no desire to be seen as attractive either. what about grandma? idgaf if you find old women hot, what about their unpaid labour? their rights??
The Court implies that individuals with profound cognitive disabilities cannot be "deprived" of liberty because their condition limits their ability to experience it—a view that devalues their fundamental rights.
july is disability pride month. it is also summer in the northern hemisphere, and this summer we have seen record breaking hot temperatures across the globe. it might be apt to remember that disabled people are a population vulnerable to extreme weather, and significantly more at risk of death or health issues during a heatwave. "the global mortality rate of people with disabilities in natural disasters is up to four times higher than people without disabilities." (source). disability may increase the relative risk of a heatwave more than old age, socioeconomic status, and being outdoors (source). even in the places most affected by the rising heat, disabled people are barely included in action plans for public safety, if at all (source). global warming is a an issue that affects a wide range of people, but let's not forget it is also a disability rights issue
As someone who was alive when Bob Ross (and William Alexander before him — that’s where the approach is from) was on PBS, I can 100% testify that you can paint along with him.
You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:
SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!
They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.
I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.
I've been using this tool called tumblr-utils to back up my tumblr blogs. it creates a locally navigatable archive of a given tumblr url's posts, which is more convenient than the post soup you get from tumblr's native blog export feature.
what that means is that I have a folder on my computer with the name of my url with an index.html file in it, and when i click on that file to open it in a browser I get a simple page with a list of years and months. selecting a specific month will send me to a list of the posts i made or reblogged in that month, similar to tumblr's own archive page. the contents of the post including images are stored locally on your machine.
It can also make a separate index file that organises posts by tag, which is great if you're a consistent tagger, but it will list every single tag you've ever used so it can take a while to find the tag you're looking for in the list if you're a habitual tag commentator. generating the tag archive also takes a while depending on how many posts have to be processed.
you can make it back up any blog as long as it's not set to private. I have backups of both my main and sideblogs and it keeps them in separate folders.
it's had some trouble going all the way back to the start of my main blog in 2012 just by sheer volume of posts, but by making it fetch posts from one month at a time I've been able to go back to 2015 (that's tens of thousands of posts), which was good enough for my purposes.
it might be a little scary to use if you've never touched the command line before, but there's both text and video instructions to set it up and using it is just a matter of typing the command and letting it do its thing in the background.
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but the doctor down the street who gives me my T shots
in a clinic so small that it's just two rooms
was excited for me when she said my voice had dropped
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but the receptionist who could see that I was a man
didn't bat an eyelash when I asked to see the gynecologist
and called me sir when he asked how I wanted to pay
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but the barber cuts my hair exactly how I want it
and never gave me strange looks for being in a men's salon
not even back when I didn't pass as one
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but my friends have always gendered me correctly
and stick to it even when it confuses other people
and my friend's little sibling calls me older brother in Kannada
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but my dog learned my new name quicker than the humans
and she runs to give me a kiss when she's told to
without being confused about who's being referred to
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but I can feel the Adam's apple growing in my throat
and my muscles getting stronger, and my smile more real
and I'm growing a beard, and I talk more freely
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but I'm here, and I'm alive, and so are you
and there are good people, people who care
and don't let them make you forget that--
you are not alone.
this fourth of july I am coming out as a hater about fireworks. no more fireworks. fireworks are neither necessary nor good. they kill and harm birds and wildlife, they pollute the air, they are loud and unpleasant, they terrify my dog, and they trigger people's PTSD. I hate fireworks. can we please not do fireworks anymore
Welcome to my little corner of the Internet @arghthisdoesntwork - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
