Reconstructionist Musings and Suggestions. I hope to give a historically accurate, inclusive, accessible perspective on Hellenismos. Black Lives Matter. I am 20+. They/them or he/him. kofiwidget2.init('Support Me on Ko-fi', '#8a6f3f', 'A4342XAX');kofiwidget2.draw();
Thanks for visiting my blog! I talk a lot about Greek paganism and community issues, as well as politics, since those are all intricately entwined. This is a sideblog, and I don't follow minors back. Anti-fascist. Trans women are women. I block people.
I have signed the Xenia Declaration.
If you liked my blog, please consider donating to these Gof*ndmes. Helping others is an important part of xenia. I also have a Ko-fi for tips. I work a minimum wage job so I appreciate whatever you can give.
While you’re here -- learn how to use Narcan and save a life. Harm reduction is important.
ESims for Gaza
Gaza Funds: Donate directly to a randomly selected fundraiser for Gazans in need.
Operation Olive Branch: Spreadsheet of Gazan fundraisers.
Click Daily for Palestine
The effects of the war on Gaza are still present in the details of daily life, especially in the lives of those who lost their homes and found no alternative but tents.
I am the mother of a child born during the war, specifically at the height of the bombing, amidst the sounds of explosions, fear, and insecurity. Today, two years later, we still live in a tent.
Living in a tent is not life, but a daily struggle to secure the most basic rights.
Pure drinking water is not easily available. We have to carry it from long distances, and we may wait for hours to get enough water for one day.
Food is also not always available, and we often lack basic ingredients. Sometimes I don't have anything to feed my child and have to wait for aid or donations to arrive.
There is no electricity, no place to shower, and no toilets.
We are not looking for luxury, but for the bare minimum of dignity: a roof over our heads, clean water, and enough food.
Please, any donation, no matter how small, will help us in our war for survival.
This family's fundraiser was shared twice by @90-ghost but both of these posts link to closed-down fundraisers. One on gfm and one on chuffed. However, that post still exists on OP's profile, and has been edited to link to the current chuffed fundraiser.
I'm here in Gaza with my family. None of you know how I feel and what I'm going through now. Sad and tired of everything.😭😭 I was displaced with my children from my beloved city, Gaza, leaving behind my beautiful memories and dreams,💔💔 fleeing to save my life and the lives of my family amidst hunger and oppression. No food, no safety, no shelter.💔😭 I suffered until I found a place to build my tent in the south due to overcrowding.😭😭
My child, Imad, suffered from recurring skin infections due to the high temperatures in the tents and the overcrowding in the south. 😭My son, Mohammed, was also attacked by a dog that bit him, nearly losing an eye.💔
I'm struggling to provide food for my children due to the exorbitant price hikes. We're suffering from hunger and food shortages amidst death, destruction, and displacement. Please help me save my life and the lives of my children. Donate what you can at the link.👇👇
My name is Kristina, I have gotten to know Maryam and her family … Kristina Turner Brown needs your support for Help Maryam’s family to r
Hello friends, I am Doaa, mother of Omar, who suffers from autism. I hope you support, donate, and participate as much as possible to save my little one. He needs your support. He suffers from hyperactivity, needs behavior modification, and lacks visual and sensory focus. He is now sick and needs treatment, and I regret that I do not have the money for that. The war affected him. After a long time he started to improve. Please save Omar. He has now been in Egypt for three months, but unfortunately the centers for his condition are expensive and I do not have any income to support him. I hope to see him as a normal child like other children. I wish I could hear the word “mama” from him, as he does not speak and needs speech sessions. I trust you
Donate and share widely 🆘🆘 1100 Swedish krona = 100 dollars Every $5 will make a difference 🙏
doaa's gofundme has kr94,824/kr300,000 (SEK). let's try to get her past that first kr100,000 mark!
doaa and her son omar have been able to evacuate to egypt, alhamdulillah, but omar is a nonverbal, 5-year-old autistic child who needs lots of support. as i'm sure we all know, that support can be really expensive! all of that on top of the regular costs of living which a recent refugee would already struggle to handle 😢
[plain text: doaa's gofundme has kr94,824/kr300,000 (SEK). let's try to get her past that first kr100,000 mark!
doaa and her son omar have been able to evacuate to egypt, alhamdulillah, but omar is a nonverbal, 5-year-old autistic child who needs lots of support. as i'm sure we all know, that support can be really expensive! all of that on top of the regular costs of living which a recent refugee would already struggle to handle 😢]
the conversion rate will do a lot here if you are in the US or other countries where the currency is high in value! for example, if you donate in USD, your donation will have a little over 10x the impact!! please donate if you can ❤️
kr95,731 SEK raised of kr300,000 as of august 10. for reference this is equivalent to about $9,099 USD/$28,514 please continue supporting doaa and her family!
Hello all, Nedaa has reached out to me and asked if I could make a post for her families fundraiser.
Nedaa, her husband Abd al-Rahman Mohisn, and their two children have been struggling ever since October 7th of 2023. In January, they were forced to evacuate from their home and walk in the freezing cold towards Rafah, before being forced to flee once again to Khan Yunis, and then were displaced again. Their home has been destroyed by Israeli bombing, and they struggle greatly every day to get the basic necessities of food, water, and medical supplies.
THE ABED FAMILY HAVE BEEN REBLOGGED BY 90-GHOST
YOU CAN DONATE TO THEIR FUNDRAISER HERE
This is a family who's fundraiser has barely gotten any attention, and could really use your help! Families like these need as much attention as we can give them, and any amount donated helps a lot.
A mother's plea: Help us survive and protect my child who was born in war.
My name is Sahar. Like any young woman, I dreamed of a stable and happy life. I was engaged to Mohammad, and together, we dreamed of building a warm little home where we could start our life. We spent years preparing our house, but just before our wedding, everything was destroyed in an instant by the war.
I was faced with a choice: to leave Mohammad in the midst of this chaos or to stand by him and begin our journey together, no matter how difficult it might be. I chose him. We got married, not in the dream wedding I had envisioned, but under the harsh reality of war. Our new home became a fragile tent, offering neither comfort nor security.
After we got married, I received the news that I was pregnant with my daughter, and I live in constant fear for my unborn child. I am terrified of the world she will be born into—a world of poverty, hunger, and bitter cold. We have been displaced from our home more than nine times, carrying with us nothing but the burden of loss and the hope of survival. The house we dreamed of is now rubble, and the tent we live in barely protects us from the rain and cold.How will I protect my daughter? We struggle to find enough food. Basic necessities like milk, blankets, and clothing feel impossibly out of reach. The cost of survival has become unbearable. Every night, I am haunted by the thought: how can I bring her into this world, knowing I cannot keep her safe?
After a long pregnancy filled with pain and fear, after nights without sleep, I finally gave birth to my baby girl. She was born in the middle of bombing, surrounded by destruction and poverty—not in a warm room, not in a safe place. Her first cry mixed with the sound of explosions, as if she was announcing her arrival into a cruel world she never chose.
I gave birth to her with nothing but my heart. I cannot promise her anything. Poverty surrounds us from every side, and the cold reaches her tiny body before night even comes. My baby and I are suffering deeply, not because we ask for much, but because I am unable to provide her with the most basic needs: milk, warmth, and safety.
When I look into her eyes, I feel strength. When I look at my empty hands, I break down in tears. I am a mother trying to save her child from hunger and fear, in a world that has shown no mercy even to the dreams of children.😢🥹
To donate or support us, here is the link 👇🙏
Help Sahar and Mohammed Build a Safe Home for Their Baby
Sa… Jordan Brusso needs your support for Help Sahar and Mohammed Build a Safe H
From the depths of my heart, thank you for your kindness and compassion🥹❤️🙏
My name is Hisham, a 26-year-old young man from Gaza. Like any young person, I dreamed of a simple job to achieve my goals and build my future step by step, but the war turned all our dreams into rubble. We were displaced many times, carrying our homes on our shoulders, leaving our memories under the debris.
My family now lives in a tent with no stable shelter, my sister Jana has no school, and I have no steady job. My brother Kamal carries the burden of the entire family, working every day to secure just enough food, while I search for any work, no matter how difficult or dangerous, just to survive.
My mother, the beautiful dream we once cherished, wished for a calm and happy life for us, but the war tore us apart and shattered our hopes. As for Jana, my innocent sister, she lost her school, her books, and even her sense of hope, yet she still writes her dreams on small pieces of paper, hiding them in her torn clothes so they won’t get lost like everything else.
We are not asking for the impossible, only what keeps us alive with dignity and gives us a chance to rebuild our lives. Every donation, no matter how small, means so much to us. Your support will give us hope to keep going and try again. 🙏❤️
The case is a major test of the Trump administration's push to label "antifa" protesters as terrorists.
Federal agents raiding the home of two alleged antifa “operatives” seized a telling piece of evidence, a defense attorney said during closing arguments in a landmark trial Wednesday.
A printing press.
That printing press was never presented to jurors. Still, the government has kept it locked away because it hated the pamphlets and zines it published, lawyer Blake Burns said.
Burns represents Elizabeth Soto, one of nine defendants whose fates were in the hands of jurors as deliberations began Thursday. All are accused of roles during or after a late-night noise demonstration outside Prairieland Detention Center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Dallas that ended with a local police officer wounded by gunfire.
The case has become a bellwether for the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent from the left. The government charged people involved with the anti-ICE protest with a slew of charges, including attempted murder and terrorism counts that defense attorneys said are being used to criminalize protest.
“They’re here asking you guys to put protesters in prison as terrorists.”
“They’re here asking you guys to put protesters in prison as terrorists,” Burns, the defense lawyer, told jurors. “That’s not happened before. And you are literally the only people in the world who can stop it.”
During 10 days of testimony in a packed Fort Worth, Texas, courtroom, prosecutors bombarded jurors with images of radical zines printed on the press, anti-government internet memes, drawings of burning cop cars, and a video of an unidentified street brawl between far-left and far-right protesters.
Prosecutors acknowledged those materials were protected by the First Amendment but said they showed the roughly dozen people who assembled outside the ICE facility were steeped in antifa tactics.
Eight of nine defendants on trial this month face material support for terrorism charges for wearing “black bloc” clothes at the protest. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have hailed the first-ever use of terrorism charges against alleged antifa members.
Defense attorneys argued Wednesday that prosecutors had wildly overcharged a case that should have centered on the alleged shooter, Benjamin Song, instead of the larger group.
Guilt by Zine
Prosecutors presented much of the evidence that might be expected at an attempted murder trial: ballistics and fingerprint experts, eyewitness police officers, and cooperating witnesses.
They also presented lengthy testimony about radical pamphlets and artwork collected from the defendants arrested that night or in raids during the following days.
Despite labeling the defendants “a North Texas antifa cell” in their indictment, prosecutors have acknowledged that they were at most a loose-knit collection of people from the Dallas–Fort Worth’s small leftist scene of anarchists and socialists.
Two of the scene’s fixtures were Elizabeth and Ines Soto, a married couple who operated the printing press and helped run a local reading group called the Emma Goldman Book Club, named for the early 20th-century anarchist revolutionary.
At one point during testimony Tuesday, a prosecutor spent more than half an hour scrolling through a Twitter account allegedly operated by the Sotos. The Twitter feed included a retweet of a December 2016 post with the words “How to handle fash in your hood” that included a shaky video of a street fight between protesters accompanied by the Flatbush Zombies song “Death 2.”
“I crack your fucking skull and use that as a bowl for cereal. I’m so serial. Ted Bundy, give me money, Son of Sam, gun in hand. Jeffrey Dahmer, with two llamas,” the jury heard in the song’s lyrics.
Defense attorneys objected to the introduction of the video as evidence.
“Yes, it is prejudicial,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith told the judge in defense of using the video. “The whole reason we’re putting it into evidence is because it’s prejudicial.”
Though U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee, allowed the Twitter feed to be presented in court, prosecutors could not definitively establish whether the Sotos had posted the video or what incident it depicted.
The Sotos, however, have not disputed that they were key members of the reading group. In his closing argument, Smith said the group was a front to recruit new antifa members.
“Emma Goldman Book Club,” Smith said. “It sounds very innocuous. It’s camouflage for what it is.”
“Your Body as Camouflage”
To help jurors interpret the book club’s readings and other materials, prosecutors presented a researcher at a far-right think tank as an expert.
Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy once focused his research on the Muslim Brotherhood. After the 2020 George Floyd protests raged, he wrote a book about “black identity extremists.” In recent years he has focused on another right-wing boogeyman: antifa.
Shideler said Monday that he helped write the definition of “antifa” included in the government’s indictment. He walked that testimony back Tuesday, saying that he only conferred on a draft.
Prosecutors also had Shideler read Trump’s September 22 executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, in an apparent attempt to suggest that the language was borrowed from the order.
Shideler described what he said were common tactics of antifa, including using the messaging app Signal — which Shideler said he also used — and wearing “black bloc” clothes to obscure identities. The phrase refers to instances where groups of left-wing demonstrators dress in all black to make them less individually identifiable.
The point of that testimony came into focus during the prosecution’s closing arguments. Using Signal and wearing black-bloc clothing were “tactics that assisted in the ambush of a cop,” said Smith.
“Material support. It sounds — I don’t know — nefarious. Complicated. It’s actually very simple,” Smith said.
He said that wearing black clothes at the noise demonstration would be enough to convict the eight defendants accused of material support.
“Providing your body as camouflage for others to do the enumerated acts is providing support,” he said. “It’s impossible to tell who is doing what. That’s the point.”
The government used Shideler and the antifa talk to try to distract jurors from the defendants’ actual actions on the night of July 4, said MarQuetta Clayton, an attorney for defendant Maricela Rueda. She also warned that the trial served as a larger proving ground for the government’s attempts to criminalize antifa.
“The government’s expert on antifa said his career may be boosted by the outcome of this case,” she said. “This is an experiment for them. But this courtroom is not a laboratory, and Maricela is not a lab rat.”
Charged for Carrying a Box
Rueda’s husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, is the only defendant on trial who is not accused of participating in the July 4 protest. Instead, prosecutors have charged him and his wife with conspiring to obstruct justice by moving a box of zines out of Rueda’s house after her arrest.
Free speech advocates say that Estrada’s arrest sets a dangerous precedent that criminalizes the mere possession of anti-government material.
“He is on trial for two things: Carrying a box, and conspiracy to carry a box.”
“He is on trial for two things,” said Sanchez’s public defender, Christopher Weinbel. “Carrying a box, and conspiracy to carry a box, of which they try to call evidence.”
Weinbel said the box contained Sanchez’s own possessions, the timeline of his movements disproved the theory that he was acting at the direction of his wife, and that a government agent had also testified that none of the materials were used in the investigation.
Smith, the prosecutor, argued that moving the boxes was part of a larger cover-up in the hours and days after the demonstration.
“What is important to the group is hiding their material,” he said. “This anarchist, insurrectionist, hating-the-government material.”
Song and the Rest
Defense attorneys chose their words carefully when it came to Song, the person accused of shooting an AR-15 rifle at two detention center guards and the Alvarado, Texas, police officer who was hit.
None of the defense lawyers overtly blamed Song for the bloodshed, but several suggested that the government should have distinguished between Song and the rest of the protesters.
“This should have been a three-day attempted murder trial of one person,” Weinbel said.
Prosecutors painted Song as the ringleader that night. Still, they argued that four defendants who are also on trial for attempted murder — Song, Rueda, Autumn Hill, and Megan Morris — could have reasonably foreseen that Song would use violence based on conversations before the demonstration.
The eight defendants who face material support charges gave aid to the attack by wearing black clothes, prosecutors allege. They include the defendants accused of attempted murder along with the Sotos, Savanna Batten, and Zachary Evetts.
Song’s attorney, Phillip Hayes, said during his closing argument that Song was only trying to shoot “suppressive” fire at the ground after police arrived on the scene. Hayes suggested that a ricocheting bullet wounded the officer."
everything is political and it’s not even the slightest bit hard to understand why that is. im so sick of purposeful obtuseness being the norm now. get fucking real immediately like we do not have the time for this
The effects of the war on Gaza are still present in the details of daily life, especially in the lives of those who lost their homes and found no alternative but tents.
I am the mother of a child born during the war, specifically at the height of the bombing, amidst the sounds of explosions, fear, and insecurity. Today, two years later, we still live in a tent.
Living in a tent is not life, but a daily struggle to secure the most basic rights.
Pure drinking water is not easily available. We have to carry it from long distances, and we may wait for hours to get enough water for one day.
Food is also not always available, and we often lack basic ingredients. Sometimes I don't have anything to feed my child and have to wait for aid or donations to arrive.
There is no electricity, no place to shower, and no toilets.
We are not looking for luxury, but for the bare minimum of dignity: a roof over our heads, clean water, and enough food.
Please, any donation, no matter how small, will help us in our war for survival.
