天竺へ

[grox]

[grox]

Nobody seems to appreciate the gentle urgency of it

[tall]

[chiikawagifs]

[icarianarts]

Squidward looks so cute and happy here he is loving this bath

[helenvaughans]

[possessedopossum]

Not fandom related at all but the news about Marjane Satrapi made me really angry and I really need to vent about it

I fucking hate Marjane Satrapi and I fucking hate Persepolis. Imagine writing a graphic novel "to combat Western stereotypes" about your homeland and then putting nothing but Western stereotypes in there. That thing about giving plastic "keys to heaven" to young soldiers to encourage martyrdom is insane level of bullshit. What else? Did they also fly to Iraq on a fucking carpet? Literally never happened, you will never find anything about it written in Farsi, it's all Israeli and diaspora bullshit. The concept of keys to heaven itself isn't even Islamic, for fuck's sake, it's Christian, how stupid do you need to be to fall for this? The fact that allegedly Satrapi learned it from her parents' SERVANT should already make you side eye her. Do you have a servant? I do not. The keys bullshit was disproved even by a guy who worked for BBC, and BBC isn't known for its great nuanced perspectives on the Middle East.

The claim of her being a native informant and therefore reliable is so laughable. She was an upper middle class Tehrani from a leftist secular family with access to Western culture and the funds to send her to Vienna. She went to an elite French school. Is this supposed to be a universal Iranian everygirl? Before the revolution, only, like, 3% of the population had college degrees. She's representative of less than 3% of the population bc not even other rich kids of that era universally love her. Would you consider a woman with Mar-a-lago face a universal American everywoman? Why not?

She called Shi'a rituals fake and insincere but never criticized US/Israel as an existential threat to her homeland, how US sanctions devastate ordinary Iranians, US military interventions and what Israel is doing both in Gaza and Lebanon. But do you know WHAT she criticized? French visa policy, because poor, poor children of Tehrani rich shits can't immigrate to Western Europe so easily.

Her book is such a typical post 9/11 jerkoff material for people with white savior fantasy, I just can't. Off course, everybody religious in Iran is grim and depressing and rude, the veil is oppressive and the Western culture and attire are so, so liberating. Everything about Islamic government is terror, misery and stagnation. She's like "Please, US, bomb my country, but do so in a cool, progressive and feminist way". Btw did you know that Iran now has more women with STEM degrees than US or any European country?

Satrapi's political position is pure delulu. She said she rejects East-West binary and thinks that the only conflict is the conflict between fanatics and everyone else. Did fanatics steal Iranian oil? Did fanatics hang signs "Entry of dogs and Iranians prohibited"? Did fanatics bring both Pahlavis to power with a coup?

Persepolis is nothing but flimsy ideological justification for US military intervention and agressive foreign policies in the Middle East. Even other Iranians living abroad think that it's bullshit, please consult Hamid Dabashi and Roksana Bahramitash. The ones not living abroad will be even less kind with their criticism.

I'm genuinely scared for people from Tumblr who think that Persepolis is in any way enlightening... The social justice anti-racism website falls for the stupidest neo-orientalist propaganda, haha classic. Western feminists don't give a shit about second and third world women and just want to play saviors, because most of them believe that it's brown men who are evil and at fault for everything wrong with their countries, and totally not the West that has been fucking with the said countries for more than a century and continues to do that even now. I am disgusted, genuinely disgusted.

[komsomolka]

this poor little meow meowfication of uкraine needs to stop. sure, we all feel incredibly awful about the great soviet republic becoming the wests fascist attack dog neocolony but it's still fascist attack dog.

[creekfiend]

thing I am proud of: when the doctor started going on a weird rant about long covid not being real I paused and listened to his nonsense for a bit and then very calmly said, in a polite and curious tone, "you don't believe in post-viral illness?" and he like. stammered a bunch and was like OH WELL I'M NOT SAYING -- I DON'T...I just think ..! and backpedaled awkwardly while I just sat there like :3c interesting :3c thank you so much for clarifying your stance on this :3c

[creekfiend]

an important skill for chronically ill people to develop is the ability to treat the doctor as though they are simply a person you are interviewing to find out how much they know about your condition.

[nightmare-from-heaven]

Holy shit op this is LITERALLY in the book 'Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depends On It'. Written by a guy who did hostage negotiation and then tried doing business negotiation, and mopped the floor with industry experts.

I'm fortunate enough to have a primary care doctor who knows about hEDS, but it's occurring to me that the skills in this book could be medically life changing for chronically ill folks of all kinds. Like. Literally a matter of life and death, especially for BIPOC and/or fat and/or young people who are having their issues dismissed.

[creekfiend]

HMMM interesting!! will have to check this out

[innerchildabortionclinic]

peopl will post stuff like "the person who makes $50k more than you a year is not your enemy btw" as if i'm not still putting him in the torture maze

[hotvampireadjacent]

You never hear someone telling the rich fucks “the person making 50 k less than you is not your enemy” why the fuck is the burden a one way street 🤨

[commissarpiglet]

We need a more specific name for people that are so class reductionist, they don’t even understand gentrification.

I know you really hate Elon Musk but even the people making 20k more than me just suburbanized my small town, drove up property values so nobody can even afford to rent public housing, and put some of the most incompetent racists in our school board.

[nonpsychotic]

I love seeing content like this and that they have hundreds of thousands of likes. it warms my heart. its been too long

[mollyjames]

I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".

[serenityvalleyradio]

I work at a nonprofit, and it is absolutely wild explaining to folks that being part of a program that reduces their energy bill actually helps us get funding to help even more people get energy bill savings.

You aren’t taking resources from anyone by using programs you qualify for. You are making a case for those programs being important enough to continue to exist and (in many cases) grow.

[headspace-hotel]

We live in a world so controlled by the idea of resource scarcity that we reason "If I get help, that must be taking help away from someone else!"

[lilium--bosniacum]

children’s dreams / al-yarmouk, palestinian refugee camp in damascus, syria 

little palestine; diary of a siege (2021) dir. abdallah al khatib 

[ninakaina]

"civilians" in white countries: ex-military, military contractors, weapons manufacturers, fascist vigilantes, active duty military

"legitimate targets" in nonwhite countries: children in elementary school

[saveaboud]

I just survived a bombing and what was almost certain death.

[saveaboud]

[saveaboud]

Shrapnel flew around us and killed a little child before my eyes. He was the last child his mother had left.

[saveaboud]

If I do not die from illness, I may die from the bombing. Please do not forget my little siblings after I am gone.

Chuffed – PayPal – Verified 

[aboud-lives]

Guys, I swear your silence could be the reason I die. Please share.

[aboud-lives]

I am very sad and exhausted because donations have dropped so much

[our-lady-of-haymakers]

Apparently after the counterrevolution in the USSR there was a significant number of Western Marxists who actually rejoiced about this calamity, saying that finally Marxism had been liberated from the 'iron cage' of Marxism-Leninism and could now grow and prosper without the evil and controlling hand of the USSR hovering over it. In addition to being the kind of wildly ungrateful and nasty opinion that could only be held by people who see one of the greatest catastrophes for the left in modern history as a chance to promote their shitty micro party, it's also a take that has aged so badly as to rival Fukuyama's end of history.

More than a third of a century after the liberation of leftists from that 'iron cage', where exactly has the slew of glorious new revolutions built on innovative theories been? Why is every single major surviving and thriving socialist state led by a vanguard party that upholds the legacy of the Soviet Union as a monumentally positive influence? Why is the left, supposedly freed from the shackles of doctrine produced by an actual revolutionary superpower, struggling with a record degree of disorganization, alienation and dilution in the face of new fascisms?

The only 'liberation' that the fall of the USSR created for the left was the freedom to peddle ahistorical, revisionist and dilettantish nonsense dressed up in the robes of bold new theories, the freedom to engage in asinine debates on basic points clarified long ago by Soviet theory and practice, and the freedom to practice the kind of rank opportunism among imperial core leftists that leads inevitably into either malnourished social democracy or shameless social fascism.

Without seriously studying and examining the USSR in all its history- not just till Lenin's death, but right up to its final decade- as a serious socialist project that worked as a positive force in the world, made sincere attempts to combat imperialism, contended with serious internal and external issues of encirclement and revisionism that all successful socialist parties shall inevitably face, and produced, despite its ultimate failure, an incredibly diverse body of data and experience that is of vital educational value for the left, there will be no socialist movement that can surpass its achievements. The path beyond the USSR's era is not away from it, but through it, through an honest and comprehensive engagement with its tactics, struggles, errors, reversals and strategies, carried out from a place of deep engagement with the material and ideological conditions that it had to navigate, not with some projected fantasy of what it could have been.

If the seriousness required to do this is an 'iron cage', then it is the cage of material conditions that every socialist must contend with. What was lost with the fall of the USSR was not the cage, but the ability of countless workers across the world to even see the world beyond the bars, condemned to think of the cage as their whole world. If we are ever to break those bars, it shall only be through the study of those who came closest to doing so, and through the gaps in the world system of capitalism that they prised in order to allow the light of socialism to shine through.

[robertreich]

Hello?

[arrows-for-pens]

Cyclosporiasis Is Here: How to Protect Yourself | Shouldn't Need to Be a Lawyer by Matthew Cortland

Cyclospora infection is often asymptomatic, but when symptoms occur, illness is characterized by anorexia, nausea, flatulence, fatigue, abdo

[kineticpenguin]

[brilliantlgbtmanga-deactivated2]