the fact that Israel can precisely target ONE apartment in an entire residential block in BEIRUT to kill two hamas leaders, proves once again that they CHOSE to carpet-bomb Gaza and murder 31.000 Palestinians to "defend themselves" against Hamas. Israel CHOSE to kill civilians, they CHOSE to bomb every hospital, every school, every refugee camp, every residential block. israel does NOTHING to spare the lives of palestinians, they want to thin out the population of gaza so they'd be able to settle their citizens there.
this is a genocide it's an ethnical cleansing PLEASE WAKE UP don't stop talking about Palestine it is not a trend, people are still dying, Israel has no plan to stop if WE don't force it to, through public pressure and protesting and boycotting. it's the least we can do.
the world will remember that it was the global south that held israel accountable, NOT the west, not the “civilised” nations, not any country that deems itself the “first world”, it was south africa who finally said ENOUGH.
Many Afrikaners welcomed the end of apartheid, but 30 years on, they’ve found Black-majority rule in South Africa hard to live with.
This article is from 2022, but it came up in the context of Palestine:
Here are some striking passages, relevant to all colonial aftermaths but certainly also to the forms we see Zionist reaction taking at the moment:
Over the decade I lived in South Africa, I became fascinated by this white minority [i.e. the whole white population post-apartheid as a minority in the country], particularly its members who considered themselves progressive. They reminded me of my liberal peers in America, who had an apparently self-assured enthusiasm about the coming of a so-called majority-minority nation. As with white South Africans who had celebrated the end of apartheid, their enthusiasm often belied, just beneath the surface, a striking degree of fear, bewilderment, disillusionment, and dread.
[...]
Yet these progressives’ response to the end of apartheid was ambivalent. Contemplating South Africa after apartheid, an Economist correspondent observed that “the lives of many whites exude sadness.” The phenomenon perplexed him. In so many ways, white life remained more or less untouched, or had even improved. Despite apartheid’s horrors—and the regime’s violence against those who worked to dismantle it—the ANC encouraged an attitude of forgiveness. It left statues of Afrikaner heroes standing and helped institute the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to some perpetrators of apartheid-era political crimes.
But as time wore on, even wealthy white South Africans began to radiate a degree of fear and frustration that did not match any simple economic analysis of their situation. A startling number of formerly anti-apartheid white people began to voice bitter criticisms of post-apartheid society. An Afrikaner poet who did prison time under apartheid for aiding the Black-liberation cause wrote an essay denouncing the new Black-led country as “a sewer of betrayed expectations and thievery, fear and unbridled greed.”
What accounted for this disillusionment? Many white South Africans told me that Black forgiveness felt like a slap on the face. By not acting toward you as you acted toward us, we’re showing you up, white South Africans seemed to hear. You’ll owe us a debt of gratitude forever.
The article goes on to discuss:
"Mau Mau anxiety," or the fear among whites of violent repercussions, and how this shows up in reported vs confirmed crime stats - possibly to the point of false memories of home invasion
A sense of irrelevance and alienation among this white population, leading to another anxiety: "do we still belong here?"
The sublimation of this anxiety into self-identification as a marginalized minority group, featuring such incredible statements as "I wanted to fight for Afrikaners, but I came to think of myself as a ‘liberal internationalist,’ not a white racist...I found such inspiration from the struggles of the Catalonians and the Basques. Even Tibet" and "[Martin Luther] King [Jr.] also fought for a people without much political representation … That’s why I consider him one of my most important forebears and heroes,” from a self-declared liberal environmentalist who also thinks Afrikaaners should take back government control because they are "naturally good" at governance
Some discussion of the dynamics underlying these reactions, particularly the fact that "admitting past sins seem[ed] to become harder even as they receded into history," and US parallels
And finally, in closing:
The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, has written that, by most measures, its aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated. [...]
He just couldn’t forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. “The Bible was right about a thing or two,” he wrote. “It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if … the gift is mercy.”
another update: Amal El -Mohtar wrote a small article on her blog (https://amalelmohtar.com/i-tried-to-title-this-post-for-twenty-minutes-and-failed/), one which contains the words “[…] and the upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas.”
I know it made it up to #6 at one point. Being a pre-existing fan of both Trigun and This is How You Loose the Time War made this especially enjoyable.
LMFAOO YEAH I JUST SAW IT HIT #3 been trying to keep this post updated but didn’t want to spam, and the speed at which these things have been happening is beautifully astounding so:
trigun, following bigolas dickolas, has also become a trending topic in business and finance
Interview with Bun (or Mr. Bigolas)
Crossover art (https://twitter.com/xxrat__punkxx/status/1656446745088278529?s=20)
thread of semi-current placements on the book
memes
and the situation very much escaping online confinement xD
A significant number of hours later (and too much to summarize):
Time War summary: reached #3 on Amazon overall, #1 (and 2, And 3) in science fiction romance, #3 in lit and fiction, social media presence overseas, and-
printing with a bigolas dickolas sleeve and so much more
Bridging the two: so many articles
slate article
techcrunch article
insider article
kotaku article
Gizmodo article
tor.com
polygon
and etc
And then on the bigolas dickolas trigun side-
And then after tweeting @ dark horse for a potential trigun maximum (trimax) reprint due to the eng verison being out of print for several years by this point:
so everything can now basically be summed by by this tweet!
(I don’t know if i’ll keep updating this thread considering how many branches there are and idk how much more this can escalate, but I’m keeping an eye on the situation so we’ll see!!)
For those asking what time war is about, per Mr. Bigolas’s post: DO NOT look up anything about it. Just read it.
For those asking about trigun, it is an amazing manga, anime adaptation, and new reboot anime.
Math is called the “universal language,” but a unique dialect is being reborn
In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.
Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.
This is so cool. I’ve never seen a number system other than the standard 123′s and the Roman Numerals, and I love how logical this is! It works so well! I can only imagine how much easier it would be for kids to learn math when the answers are right there in front of you like that.
I hadn’t thought much about how a system that’s not base-10 would work, when it comes to comparing the big numbers, and it threw me that instead of the “10s, 100s, and 1000s” you get “20s, 400s, and 8000s.” So foreign. So cool.
I can tell that this will pop into my head every time I mention in a sci-fi that a fictional culture has a different number system. Now I want to research what else is out there that I’ve never heard about.
