[writeswrongs]

They followed evacuation orders. An Israeli airstrike killed them the next day. — CNN

When Palestinians in north Gaza heeded the warnings issued in the Israeli military's phone calls, text messages, and fliers advising them to

The IDF rounds up Gazans and deliberately bombs them where civilians were told to “evacuate to.” Israel has created an extermination camp.

[chrisdornerfanclub]

Concentrating a people into an enclosed prison they can’t escape so you can drop bombs on them is explicitly genocide.

[sokkalore]

This could be my last report from Gaza by Tareq S. Hajjaj. Please read.

[bemusedbibliophile]

In Palestine, settler-colonists armed to the teeth understand themselves as victims even as they pulverise others. The others – whether they march peacefully towards their old homes, or fire rockets at an enormous Iron Dome, or just mourn for their lost loved ones – are always the lurking, violent, dangerous threat. The dispossessed are, if they fight back, blamed for their own dispossession. They are chided, like children, for losing their temper with an abusive parent who should be allowed to beat up the child in peace.

Palestinians are not unique in this condition; it is the crudest logic of racial violence everywhere. When slaves rebelled on plantations they too were terrorists, disrupting the serenity of the world. What gave them such a violent temperament, their masters asked, and made them so hostile to the peace that reigned while they were in chains? All that is safely in the past now, and academics celebrate the long-forgotten agency of the oppressed, seeking to be free. But in Palestine, it is not past – as indeed on American streets police lynchings are not really past either. The homes and health that Europeans have are like jewels and if others want them – migrants from elsewhere – those people are threats to be drowned at sea in their thousands. The whole world remains saturated by a colonial set of colour lines, dividing properly human lives from expendable ones.

In this bind, the most sympathetic thing Western journalists do is to focus on dead Palestinian children. They are helpless, blameless: pure victims against Israel’s grotesque claim to be the victim. This is how humanitarianism strips its objects of humanity. Palestinians deserve our support because in their abject weakness they do not (contrary to Israel’s charge) really threaten anything. Outsiders wince at resistance and stress the enormous inequality of arms: Palestinian weapons are barely weapons at all. To these supporters, Palestinians cannot be political subjects, people who fight for their freedom from domination as their allies from Algeria to Vietnam once did too. Given that the Israeli state and populace has as little interest as every other colonial society in surrendering their supremacy, the expectation that Palestinians should quietly go on dying in order to merit international support constitutes an insidious form of their dehumanisation. If bullish Western rightwingers see them as savages to be managed, generous Western liberals see them as dying exotic flowers to be treasured on windowsills. After the co-optation, fragmentation and ossification of their liberation movement and its allies abroad, this particular Orientalism gained ground.

Barnaby Raine, “Total Solidarity With Palestine is the Only Anti-Racist Position,” Novara Media (x)

[weepingwidar]

Caleb Hahne Quintana (Mexican-American, 1993) - Brushing My Mother's Hair (2022)

[sivavakkiyar]

[intactics-deactivated20250505]

couples who have been together and stable in their relationship for many years tend to "merge" with each other in the sense that long habit and custom have allowed them to adapt to each other so well that they use each other's brains as an auxiliary storage/work space. things that need to be done and things that need to be remembered wind up distributed to each party in a way that maximixes efficiency and minimizes the costs. they've been around each other for so long, and put so much combined work into the relationship, that they become each other's "other self"

human beings cannot actually merge with each other into a common hivemind. but as social animals we still feel as though we're a part of a common, larger mind whenever we're in a group. we feel this phantom sense of union especially when we fall in love.

turning that feeling into a reality can only be partially accomplished. and in order to do it, to the extent that it's possible at all, it takes years of mundane, unglamorous work learning about each other, how to live with each other... an ecstatic divine union of souls is something our brains are built to feel, for sure, but it's a state resembling drunkenness. like drunkenness, the revelations and insights and emotions it produces are fleeting, beautiful dreams. and when we are dreaming, we are most alone.

some monk I read ages ago said "when we are cautioned to refrain from drunkenness it does not refer only to drinking alcohol, we must also refrain from becoming drunk on nirvana"

[thebroodingprince-deactivated20]

why did this take a crazy twist at the end .. what am I supposed to do with that intactics

[intactics-deactivated20250505]

to expand a little on that "crazy twist", I think that when we are driven to madness by the intoxication of love we are trying to catch the moon by snatching it out of the water, like dragons trying to hoard up illusory treasure. I think that when we understand the nature of the love that intoxicates us, we can leave the moon in the sky and appreciate the jewels it scatters across the waves without trying to seize them

lately I have been thinking about the difference between two people frantically trying to hold on to each other by grabbing at each other's reflections on the water under a moon that must wane and set, versus two people companionably enjoying how beautiful the other party appears to each one, illuminated by the moon from above and by the glittering waves from below, both aware that daylight will return eventually

[sivavakkiyar]

[mortimer]

something about this illustration from playboy september 1965

[cocainejuul]

Good read on how sometimes something becomes too real too fast…..I need! To learn! To stop running from it!

[dykecostanza-deactivated2024112]

“There is such a generous soul who would say, in another time, that the trial must be brought against the king, not for the crimes of his administration, but for that of having been a king, because nothing in the world can legitimize this usurpation. Whatever illusion, whatever conventions that royalty envelops, it is an eternal crime against which every man has the right to rise up and arm himself. It is one of those outrages which even the blindness of a whole people cannot justify. […] One cannot reign innocently: the madness is too obvious. Every king is a rebel and an usurper.”

— Saint-Just, speech of 13 November (1792)

[russiansappho]

Hermia and Lysander, a Midsummer Night's Dream (detail) by John Simmons

[fadedlovemp3]

the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only way out is through the only

[firstfullmoon]

Carrie Fountain, “Burn Lake 2,” in Burn Lake

[heavensghost]

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

-Wendy Cope, excerpt of "From June to December" (A Summer Villanelle)

[firstfullmoon]

Christopher Citro, from “The Hay Out There and the Hay in You”

[metamatar-deactivated20250401]

“Before leaving that night, my friend asked me if I knew what Einstein had once said: “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks!” Perhaps, it was not so much about the Fourth World War, but war in the Fourth World, the one that lies buried under the first three. The Third World has forgotten that it was once colonized, controlled, enslaved. It celebrates its freedom, but under its feet it tramples those for whom dates like 1947 don’t resonate freedom, but rather its opposite. This Fourth World lies strewn across the world in patches, disconnected, dismembered, and beleaguered. Or, perhaps, the Fourth World War is on after all. It started before the Third, and is being fought with stones.”

—

It was a June afternoon of a sleepy hartal day in 2009. Kashmir was hotter than any summer in previous memory. On a hartal day, everything would be shut down in protest, and the streets would simmer with anger. Protests against the rape and murder of two women, attacked by Indian soldiers in an adjoining town the week before, had reached the boiling point as the India-loyalist local government refused to admit that the crime had taken place. To remain in the Indian army’s good books, the local government argued that the women had drowned in water. The bodies had been found on the banks of a gently flowing stream no more than knee deep, in close proximity to three large Indian security camps. Why the bodies had struggle wounds, why at least one was found stark naked—for these questions, the government had no answer. Clampdowns and extended curfews, the government’s old strategies, followed its failure to answer or investigate impartially—a chronic problem under the military occupation. (…)

Stone wars test human endurance, and their long history in Kashmir also says something about the collective endurance of Kashmiris. No one remembers anymore when the stone wars began in Kashmir. There is a legend that it was a practice invented in the older neighborhoods of Kashmir’s capital city, Srinagar, more than a century back, and deployed first against oppressive moneylenders and then against the region’s autocratic rulers. Older Kashmiris remember throwing stones at the cavalcade of Indian Prime Minister Nehru on one of his visits to Kashmir. They hold him responsible for occupying Kashmir against the wishes of Kashmir’s inhabitants. As India became the hungriest and poorest nuclear weapons state in the world, Kashmiris persisted with throwing stones at symbols of its presence in their country. (…)

Hum kya chahte? Azadi!—What do we want? Freedom! Ae zaalim-o ae jaabir-o, Kashmir hamara chhodh do!—O tyrants, o oppressors, quit our Kashmir!

The first tear gas shells started landing on the protesters a few minutes after the slogans began. A few enterprising young boys had brought big, wet jute bags with them, and instantly placed them over the shells spurting noxious gas. One boy even managed to catch a couple straight into his bag. Everyone clapped and whistled. This was an old game. Both sides were good at it. In the distance, a couple of armored cars appeared on the scene and started driving quickly toward the crowd, which just as quickly splintered into the alleys. As the lead car reached where the protesters had been, a spatter of stones greeted it. The car stood there as if stupefied, unable to move, unsure of its purpose. No one came out of it. The intensity of stones increased. The car retreated. The stone warriors returned in triumphant joy. They had won the first round. The slogans grew shriller. Bharat ko ragda, ye ragda!—We clobbered India, here we did! See-Aar-Pee (CRP) ko ragda, ye ragda!–We clobbered the CRP, yes here we did! (…)

I reached home with eyes red and itchy. Nobody believed that I had only watched. My hands were inspected carefully. “How did you manage to run in your sandals? You should have worn proper shoes!” I should have. My mother was right. She told me about young boys who had died over the years throwing stones. 

 “How is this going to help?” she pleaded. “No one in the world gives a care.”

Those who threw stones knew that the world didn’t care. Perhaps, they also didn’t care for such a world. I told my mother what I had heard all along: “Then what else can Kashmiris do?”

STONE WARS | GUERNICA

(via kuanios)

[en--dear]

“Tear It Down” by Jack Gilbert