desertcandy @desertcandy - Tumblr Blog

untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999) souha bechara after her release from captivity in israeli prison el-khiam in south lebanon.

An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a figure (of resistance) and subject with, Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room taped (during the last year of the Israeli occupation) one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been detained for 10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the distance between the subject and loss, of what is left behind and what remains.

akaratna

On Vimeo (40:46) https://vimeo.com/71401594

desertcandy

Fun fact about this video: it was included in Canada's first ever exhibition of contemporary art by Arab-Canadian artists. The exhibition, however, was set to open just days before 9/11 happened, and so it was postponed -- to a great deal of public controversy -- because the simple fact of the artists being of Arab descent was somehow seen to make the whole thing too much of a hot button issue. This video in particular by Jayce Salloum was seen as being especially controversial.

Thankfully, the Canadian government officially spoke out against the museum's postponement as being a racist conflation of all Arabs with terrorists, and so the show went back on. But it never got the widespread acclaim it deserved as a historic moment in Canadian art, since a lot of the other museums it was supposed to travel to dropped it, and its pioneering curator, Aida Kaouk, was pushed out of her position at the museum :( The artists' open letter about the exhition's censorship here: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/43636/the-postponement-of-exhibition-on-arab-canadian-art

utah-mountain-drifter-deactivat

At face value, this is a ridiculous headline. But the article then says his managers berated and insulted him for leaving the party after an anxiety attack, and the company then fired him for taking days off work for “unsafe work practices,” due to having anxiety?

ivan-fyodorovich-k

Seems like pretty often headlines that paint a lawsuit as frivolous and ridiculous seem a little more rational after some digging

clockworkrobotic

There’s so much more to it as well. He repeatedly asked the company not to throw a party for him due to his anxiety (apparently this is standard practise for their office and he knew it would be triggering for him) and they “forgot” about his request. On the day in question, he predictably had a panic attack and went to his car to do breathing exercises.

The next day he was called into a meeting where he was insulted and grilled about “ruining the party” and “stealing his co-workers’ joy”, which caused him to have another panic attack and start doing coping behaviours like hugging himself, at which point his employers decided he must be angry and was going to turn violent. They then suspended him for days and later told him he’d been fired.

So yeah, it’s not over an “unwanted birthday party”, it’s over employers repeatedly failing to accommodate someone’s disability, trying to frame them as the villain for having accessibility needs, and firing them for not conforming to some stupid office politics.

Source with the court documents

puttingherinhistory

I am completely pro-lawsuit. Lawsuits are often the only tool that otherwise powerless individuals have to demand some accountability from large corporations and institutions, and historically lawsuits have been a very important tool for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, and disability rights. But this is exactly why the media is always depicting lawsuits as something frivolous and silly that only uptight spoiled crybabies who want easy money do, and people just eat up that propaganda without doing any research or critical thinking.

cryoverkiltmilk

REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA AND THAT SENSATIONALIZED JOURNALISM FALLS UNDER THAT

stellanslashgeode

Never forget that McDonald’s coffee gave that lady 3rd degree burns and she just wanted money to cover her medical bills.

lesbostini

One of my favorite cross-cultural practices, women with facial tattooing/markings

Featured cultures from left to right: Saudi Arabia (Bedouin), Palestinian, Fulani (Wodaabe), Egypt (Sinai Bedouin), Imazighen (Kel Tamasheq), Kalash, Myanmar (Chin state tribes), Alaska (Iñupiat)

elierlick

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

lucieslucidity

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

the-haiku-bot

post so nice had to

reblog it twice and force it

down everyone’s throats

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

thoughtportal

ominous-signs

Official ominous sign (apparently translates to "Sorry", in a sincere way)

soul-of-a-ghost

pathetic wet beast on the brink of tears

ominous-signs

OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THEM

precision-instrument

victusinveritas

crowns-of-violets-and-roses

Discussions of trans women in sports often focus on elite/professional sports which honestly I find it hard to care about but the more common scenario of “we’re going to legally ban a high school girl from playing sports with her friends because she’s trans” is just profoundly evil

zzzucker

i remember when utah's (republican) governor ended up vetoing a law banning transgender students from playing high school sports when he looked at the numbers, and there were only four trans students in the state playing sports at all. he released a clumsily worded but surprisingly compassionate statement about the decision.

I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it, and the science is conflicting. When in doubt, however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion. I also try to get proximate, and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56. 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah. 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah. 1 transgender student playing girls sports. 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality. 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide. Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live.

of course, it didn't amount to much. they overrode his veto. it's just so cartoonishly evil. an entire state's political body so desperate to terrorize this one little trans girl.

st-just

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

booksandchainmail

#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

zenosanalytic

XKCD: Degree Off

Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.

burninglights

The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

“Tuberculosis was.”

crazy-pages

“Smallpox was.”

Fuck. That hit me hard.

duckbunny

death and the stars

hedwig-dordt

I'm quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse

bronzeageecho

animal figurine, perhaps a child's toy | c. 1350-1250 BCE | mycenaean

in the acropolis museum collection

desertcandy

Reminds me of this

I think the hole in the pottery is in fact, its ass

#Youtube

tilthat

TIL that the reason lead levels in children’s blood have dropped 85% in the past thirty years is because of an unknown scientist who fought car companies to end leaded gasoline. He also removed it from paint, suggested its removal from pipes, and campaigned for the removal of lead solder from cans.

via ift.tt

squeeful

Yep. It also correlates extremely strongly with an increasing decrease of violent crime. One of the symptoms of low level constant lead exposure is increased aggression and volatility.

kurowrites

“Unknown scientist”? That was Clair Cameron Patterson.

solarpunkcast

Gas companies are still so mad at him he’s “unknown scientist”, know his name

bogleech

Daily reminder that health and safety standards like these are what politicians mean when they talk about “deregulation.”

prismatic-bell

Patterson died 5 December 1995.

Petition to make his date of death a Tumblr holiday celebrated by talking about cool shit the gas and petroleum industries don’t want us to know about, and fighting to continue his work.

kittydesade

Happy Clair Cameron Patterson day!

ailelie

Oh, hey, it’s almost Clair Cameron Patterson day!

barryogg

I wish all environmentalists a very suck cocks in hell

barryogg

I wish that this person would receive perfect clarity of mind about her actions and their consequences, and I wish a gun with a single bullet would be placed before her so that she could make good use of this mindstate

barryogg

Step 1: Mandate alternatives to emission-heavy systems

Step 2: Fail to provide energy for said systems

Step 3: ???

Step 4: ??? still

Step 5: Guess I’ll die

barryogg

Ma! Maaaaa! The Germans are blowing up their power plants again!

shieldfoss

i-love-linux-and-need-cat-ears

my favorite graph regarding nuclear

dragon-in-a-fez

reminds me of the time I said something pro-nuclear to my ex and they said “I don’t think you’d feel that way if you grew up near a nuclear plant like I did” and I asked “oh what happened” and they were like “well. nothing. nevertheless”

headspace-hotel

no discussion of nuclear power is complete without the fact that coal and other fossil fuels very much do produce toxic and radioactive waste

theemeraldwings

Anyone who is anti-nuclear is anti-environment. Nuclear is safe, it is clean, and it is even more energy dense than fossil fuels. It might not be truly renewable, but there’s so much energy available that it doesn’t make much of a difference. To try and shut it down is to put down one of your strongest allies in the fight against fossil fuels.

whisperingsoup

Everytime this comes around again, I remember that there was a push to refit coal power plants to run on nuclear, due to the fact that other than the power source, your still just boiling water so everything else is the same.

They couldn’t get the ok to refit the coal plants tho, because the coal power plants were too radioactive to pass nuclear power plant standards.

THE COAL PLANTS WERE TOO RADIOACTIVE TO BE TURNED INTO NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS.

morwentrouble

wha- hang on

By burning away all the pesky carbon and other impurities, coal power plants produce heaps of radiation

^ 2007 v 2024

A recent study concluded that even small amounts of coal ash can lead to harmful health effects, including much higher risks of cancer.

that’s cool it’s cool I’m learning things today

▓▒░(°◡°)░▒▓

I knew nuclear got a bad rap and was our best non-renewable option but HOT DAMN I didn’t realize quite how close the competition isn’t

maykitz

the persecution of lefthandedness is insane to think about because it was so intense for so long, in some places still is, without any clear profit motivation. sheer love of the game. as late as the 70s at least they were smacking my stepdad's hands for it with a wooden ruler at school, to this day he's in weird ambidexterity situation where he's not great with either side and notably clumsy due to poor hand-eye coordination. just wtf

seeingteacupsindragons

It is fascinating to me that people also think of handedness as an example of bigotry that just...went away. As you note, it...hasn't in some places. I know people who grew up in the mid-late 90s who still had this problem.

But also, and this is really important to keep in mind regarding bigotry that still causes in many ways larger problems, that the structural problems are not actually fixed.

If you go to any computer lab or public library, the mice will be on the right side of the computer. Sometimes they can be moved. Sometimes they can't. Many computer mice are curved to only fit in right hands.

It is impossible to find lefthanded scissors without going to a specialty store, because most scissor makers don't even make them. And it's not just a matter of grip; the slicing side of the blades is obscured if you use righty scissors in your left hand, so your cut is off.

All those signing pads with the little chained styluses? Almost always on the right side, often not even long enough to stretch to the left. Makes signing for lefties extremely difficult.

I caused actual muscular problems in college having to twist around in order to write at right-handed desks in college when there weren't enough lefty desks--and there never were. Some classrooms didn't even have a single one.

I could go on.

But the point is, bigotry isn't just a mindset shift. People can't just decide they're not bothered by that particular difference anymore and everything's fine, because society is still structured and designed to cause problems for marginalized people. And they're never even going to notice all the little ways their life is bent to convenience them that inconveniences others.

gaystation4

glowingghosty

i don't say this very often so you can trust me when i say for the love of god please unmute

foxofninetales

Audio description: Very loud trilling purrring.

comicgeekscomicgeek

Very important kitty noises

teaboot

I think your cat is probably a dove

petermorwood

The cat is ringing, pick up!

naamahdarling

....PURRGLING!!!

desertcandy

a pigeon??

bijoumikhawal

Egyptian Women's Forehead Tattoos!

Traditionally, these were tattoos, called dakk, and were at one point fairly common among Egyptians. However, the practice of traditional tattooing has faded in Egypt, except for among the Copts, who still get tattoos for religious reasons. When you see a young woman with marks on her face today, she has drawn them on in a temporary ink or dye.

The most common forehead designs are of 6 types: this one is what I would call a palm branches, though I'm not sure what it was named when tattoos were more common.

This is what I've termed a trefoil. I actually have more examples of this, and it seems to be the most common forehead design in depictions of Egyptian tattoos.

This one is a curl; this design is uncommon, and this is the only photo I've found of it. I suspect this design was drawn on with kohl or another temporary ink.

You may also see a circle or sun. The second photo here may actually have been a trefoil when the tattoo was fresh.

The next motif I've seen is a cross (figures 10-11). The cross on the forehead was specific to Copts, and this motif was also used by Ethiopians, who Copts have a kinship with.

The Beoduins in Egypt also have a unique set of tattoos, and their forehead tattoos are usually triangular. This design is also seen in Palestine, and a similar design is used in the Maghreb.

Tattoos are worn by both men and women in Egypt, but this type of tattoo is most common with women. It is unclear when this way of tattooing started in Egypt. The Pharaonic Egyptians tattooed, but I have not seen much evidence they tattooed the face. Unfortunately, the history of tattooing is full of holes. I can't even definitively tell you when Copts started tattooing; if it was a continued tradition from earlier parts of Egyptian culture or if it was re-adopted later.

bijoumikhawal

More depictions of trefoil designs

lesbostini

It's always interesting to see the similarities but also the differences with tattooing across the regions. There's considerable overlap, but also many aspects that make each region unique. There's Dakk, Dag, Deq, and other ways to say it.

I know many people discuss tattooing as if it were an uncommon thing but it's not true. It's completely ahistorical, and it really only became uncommon in the past hundred years. There's even a Bedouin poem mentioning it - it goes: "O you with the pin-pricked arms and the eight pure (front teeth)". The pin-pricked here refers to tattooing. In Iraq it was noted to actually be so important that some men wouldn't consider marrying a woman if she didn't have any kind of tattoo.

The more triangular shape you see in Sinai is very common in Palestine and Jordan I've noticed. It holds a lot of similarities to a type of Kurdish tattoo which symbolizes the sun (roj).

(left: Bedouin Women from Jordan, right: Kurdish woman with deq)

(Left: A Jordanian woman, Right: A Palestinian woman)

Researchers have also noted that the consistency of certain designs within different tribal groups would suggest that tattooing was often used as a way of identification.

The illustration of the tattooed Egyptian girl reminds me of a type of tattoo that was actually related to the use of nose rings (which were also very common but faded just like tattoos) - tattoos above or below the mouth that had the shape of a dot were called fa al-khazama (shadow of the nose ring).

(above: An Iraqi woman with the tattoo described)

Aside from tribal reasons, a lot of the intentions behind it were cosmetic - at least this is what I was able to gauge from a couple of sources and from my own family. My Great Grandmother had a tattoo pretty similar to the fifth image you posted. I was told it was part of their own beautification rituals, and having a tattooed face was regarded as very attractive.

I know Winfred Blackman described tattooing from the fellaheen in Upper Egypt as being common among both sexes and fulfilled a decorative purpose. She also noted dots arranged in threes in the shape of a triangle to be very popular in Egypt - which you can also see in Palestine quite often.

(left: Palestinian woman from Huwara, right: Palestinian woman from Bethlehem)

Most famously in Jerusalem, there are Coptic tattooers who would stamp patterns onto the arms of Pilgrims as a guide for the needles. One Coptic family in particular had been using tattoo designs on woodblocks that had been passed down from father to son since the 17th century! Their tattoo shop is still open, and they still do tattoos for pilgrims to this day.

(Above: A scene from a documentary about Razzouk Tattoo)

If anyone would like to check out their traditional Coptic woodblocks, they actually have a website you can buy art from:

This is the official Razzouk Tattoo online store. Visit us for a more in-depth presentation of what we are about!

sapropel

Top 10 most racist land acknowledgments, ranked by how extinct the author believes the indigenous inhabitants are

sapropel

Hi this is actually crazy

patrochilles-or-bust

"we're going to dig up the bodies of the people who lived here and learn about them!"

"the people who still live here can tell you about their own culture and past, though. They're perfectly capable."

"..... But then how can we treat them as an Exotic, Discoverable Other without defining them through the white western lens and intervention??"

blueboxfive

thatdorianguy

the sound is a very important aspect of this

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