“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; one day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hallow mockery; your prayers and hyms [sic], your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
— Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), from a speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852.
If you had to navigate the internet in Arabic, could you?
I already do
Yes, easily
I could probably find my way around
It would not be easy, but maybe a little bit
I would have great difficulty
No, I would be entirely lost
Other
Voting ended onJul 17
If you had to navigate the internet in a language you didn't understand and couldn't even read, how would you go about it?
My friend Wesal (@deemagaza) doesn't speak English. The only way she can find her way around the English internet is by using Google Translate or ask others like me for help. It is very difficult for her.
Yet she has no choice but to do so for her daughter Farah, almost sixteen now, who is autistic and has a kidney problem that - without treatment - makes her deficient in potassium, which, if it becomes too severe, can lead to cardiac arrest.
^ Farah spends most of her days like this now, feeling uncomfortable in her body, but not understanding why.
Farah's medication has become unavailable in Gaza, which has endangered her life and means she has to be treated in the hospital, which is costly and where they are running out of resources as well. Farah's case has now been referred to the WHO to be transferred abroad. If the opportunity for evacuation arises, we must make sure the funds are available!
Please help by donating to Farah's fundraiser and by sharing this post! Farah's fundraiser has been verified by gazavetters, #451!
If anyone has wants to donate but has questions about how the funds are transferred to Farah's family, feel free to get in touch!
If you donate to Farah's campaign, you can get a free commission by @fablebagel! Thank you, Fable! ❤️
Note: if you would prefer to pay via paypal, you can do so here.
tagging for reach, please share and aks your friends to share as well, thank you <3 (let me know if you don't want me to tag you anymore, apologies for any multiple tags)
My daughter is only 16.She has lived her entire life with a disability and chronic kidney failure. Every day is a fight to survive.Please help us give her hope. Every donation—or even a share—can change her life💔🥹
Every mother in this world dreams of a future for her child, but I dream of providing even one pill for the next day of her life. Please take action and help us.💔💔
🦋Thank you to every kind heart, every hand that reached out to help, and everyone who still believes that humanity is alive.🩷🫂
My family's wound is still bleeding, and my little daughter's illness is greater than words can describe. Please don't hold back your donations, your prayers, or sharing our appeal.Take a step for Farah, for the sake of everything you love. I am a mother who, instead of dreaming about my daughter's future, now dreams only of providing the medicine and every dose she needs to keep her alive.🥹🙏🏻🇵🇸
Please help her stay by my side for a longer life. 🙏🏻💔
Thank you to everyone standing in solidarity with the innocent children of Gaza and supporting our people in their time of hardship. Your solidarity means so much to us, and your voices raised for humanity will not be forgotten. It is truly heartening to feel this closeness, and your message reaches our hearts. We are deeply grateful to you. 🇵🇸❤️🇵🇸
Come to think of it, it really is insane that my entire country is burning alive and literally no one in the rest of the world cares. Thousands of Indians are dying every day from the heat, it's 45+ degrees in multiple areas, the government couldn't give two fucks, we're getting severe warnings and red alerts, and not a soul outside of South Asia is speaking about it because why would you ever care about brown people
'assigned' is past tense. it was an event, coercive, forced without your approval because you were only minutes old. its not a label, its not an identity
"i am afab" no, you WERE afab. you ARE whatever gender you currently are. stop identifying with an event forced upon you at birth, even if you are cis.
if you wanna help a disabled trans woman get through this cost of living crisis & pay for her food, bills, medication etc then consider tipping me on paypal or buying me a kofi. thanks! 🥰
it is beyond cruel that venezuela is now a US colony for all intents and purposes and the US still continues to wield sanctions against it to the detriment of the nation's poorest and most desperate people even in the aftermath of an earthquake that's killed thousands
I appeal to every free person, to those with kind hearts, and to lovers of الخير.
Whoever spends in the way of Allah is like a grain that grows seven ears; in every ear are a hundred grains. And God multiplies for whom He wills.
I am your brother, Mahmoud Al-Qassas from Gaza. I kindly ask for your help in repaying a debt I took on to cover the funeral expenses of my 5-year-old son.
My son passed away after falling from the fourth floor. He had been looking out of the room’s window to see how high our apartment was, and he fell from that height. As everyone knows, we are suffering in Gaza, and since I had no money, I borrowed $1,500 to cover the funeral expenses. The amount was spent as follows:
$750 went toward grave digging, the shroud, washing the deceased, and transportation for the burial.
The remaining $750 covered the costs of the condolence gathering for three days.
The person who lent me the money is now asking for it back, and I have nothing to repay him. Therefore, I kindly ask for your help in settling this debt, and I humbly ask you to extend a helping hand to us.
Please help us by donating via PayPal.
Go to paypal.me/Abdalqader97am and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
America killed 3 million Vietnamese people, we put half of South Vietnam in Concentration Camps, we dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than were dropped by both sides in WW2, We permeantly poisoned the land with Agent Orange, the American war on Vietnam was the most inhuman and despicable action in this nations history, the Vietnamese had every right to do whatever they wanted to the occupation
Everyone say thank you to trans femmes for showing us a version of femininity born from joy and desire instead of just through coercion
Everyone say thank you to trans mascs for showing us a version of masculinity born from joy and desire instead of just through coercion
Everyone say thank you to all people outside of the cis gender binary for showing us a version of gender born from joy and desire instead of just through a simple frame work in which our oppressor have used to kill, erase, and censor us.
Thank you for showing us the existence of a history before and a future ahead.
Hello all, miss Mimi has been diagnosed with severe anxiety that is affecting her FIC. We have to spend a lot of money on food, feliway, and anxiety medication and we'd appreciate some help.
Ill be posting the vet bill + prices for everything later as we're still at the vet, but for now, if youre able to donate, that would be appreciated.
Go to paypal.me/Charded and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
With a heavy heart, I come to you all with the news announced by close friends of Cat Frazier that she had passed away on Monday, June 29.
She had been running @animatedtext since 2012, with her impact on the internet SHAPING tumblr. If you have a years long history on this site, you’ve seen her art.
She ran a venue in Oakland called Oakland Secret, a punk venue where I’d vend at regularly as an artist. She made a safe space for queer artists, artists of color, and local furs too. I am forever grateful for her work both in the Bay Area creative scene and online, and am forever changed by the totality of her impact.
I’ll be linking some articles from the 2010’s about her impact online: The Fader | Action | Jezebel | ObviouslySocial
I invite you to take a visit through her archive, and if you have a long history with this site like I do, it’s like walking down memory lane.
The thing about American "leftist" comedians is that they aren't actually leftist, they are the Imperial Court Jesters. They stand on a stage, point directly at the blood-soaked gears of the war machine, make a little tee-hee noise, and the crowd erupts. Not because they are critiquing the machine, but because the laughter is a pressure release valve for the people inside it. Take the video of that stand-up asking the defense contractor if she helped Trump bomb those 160 Iranian school girls, and everyone laughing, including the contractor herself. That laughter is ritual absolution. The contractor laughs because she knows she will never face a tribunal. The audience laughs because they get to feel "self-aware" without having to actually stop anything. The joke doesn't condemn the contractor; it humanizes her, turns her into a lovable scamp who just happens to have a job graphing the velocity of shrapnel through children's bodies. By making it a punchline, the comedian sanitizes the atrocity. The blood is scrubbed off the stage. The audience gets to say "wow, we are so edgy for talking about it" while the person who builds the bombs gets to chuckle and order another drink. It is not satire, it is a team-building exercise for the empire.
Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.
And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.
Americans don't hate the machine; they love the output. They hate the mess of it. So they turn it into jokes, into aesthetic, into "whatever." Because if they stopped laughing, if they stopped scrolling, if they actually looked at the 4K drone footage of the aftermath instead of the cool explosion CGI in their movies, they would have to realize that the lithium in their phones, the gas in their tanks, and the comfort of their suburban cul-de-sacs are all greased with the fat of foreign children. And they can't handle that. So they laugh. They turn it into a vibe. They call it "the Iraq war or whatever." You can't deconstruct the master's house with the master's jokes, especially when the punchline is the corpses holding up the floorboards.
