i dont think your sense of justice should be rooted in punitive schadenfreude and retribution. this belief of mine is not about moral grandstanding or self-righteousness it is entirely about prioritizing practical efficacy and averting future harm, which are things that i see subsumed by the former two
it relies on societal outrage. that is socially constructed, and it disproportionately targets racial minorities, the impoverished, and “the other.” and then white collar criminals often evade it anyway because their harm is abstract. the bullet always hits these low-risk targets while it under-punishes or spares high-risk systemic actors
rules to interact with westerners on this site if youre from the global south:
youre wrong
your problems dont exist
if they do exist, theyre not as bad as usamerican problems
if they are as bad as usamerican problems, theyre not as important
if they are as important, you should stop complaining about them not acknowledging it because they literally used your problem as a gotcha in an argument/a learning moment for the global north
You can support Hamed Ashour by donating to his gofundme here, which is currently critically low on funds. You can also follow his story via Instagram.
[Image ID] screenshot of a twitter post by @/musIimgojo that reads, "white people when you tell them it's not normal to value an animal's life over a human's" followed by an edited cartoon image of 3 blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white women sneering at the viewer.
screenshot of an instagram post by @/rajaeen1 that reads "In the Genocide I lived in a tent unfit even for a dog so, the world rushed to rescue the dog, not me!
I shared my story a year ago with this very loyal dog friend.
Oh, how lucky this dog is. The story went viral in Arabic and international magazines, and was read by more than 5 million people around the world. The story was translated into seven different languages.
At the time, an organization working in the field of animal rights from the Ireland capital, Dublin, contacted me. They wanted to ensure the dog's health and living conditions in the tent we were living in together. I sent the photos, and afterward, I received a great amount of sympathy and a huge emotional response. They seriously began exploring options to evacuate the dog from the Gaza Strip through licensed institutions.
They wanted a better life, a cleaner place, and a wider sky for the dog
Oh my God! no one even pointed out to me!
I was the one living in a tent unfit for even a dog to live in.
screenshot that reads, "I'm Hamed Ashour - a poet and creative writing trainer from Gaza. Your support will help me survive (food, water, medicine, safe shelter, power, internet) and continue my work: writing, documenting daily life under war, and producing a book of war diaries to be translated so our story cannot be silenced." [End ID]
State is US’s largest user of pesticide that is virtually proven to cause Parkinson’s disease
You know, they wouldn’t have to be doing this state-by-state if, despite knowing it’s a Parkinson’s risk for decades and having seen multiple class action lawsuits by victims conclude as much, the EPA (Biden’s, not Trump’s, surprisingly!) hadn’t caved to lobbies and instead of banning this stuff had made it fully, unrestrictedly legal again in two separate decisions (2021 and 2024).
This is the likely cause of my grandfather’s Parkinson’s, which is what killed him. He was born in 1933. My mom and her siblings all have heightened risk, because they were born/grew up around it in the 1960s. It’s a specter that hangs over all of them as they’re aging.
My generation of cousins was the first who, as far as we know, aren’t under that cloud. We grew up after it was known to be toxic to humans, after its use was discontinued by many farmers, and away from the immediate vicinity of its usage.
I’ve known about what happened to them since I was a kid (I spent years watching him slowly die of it). Back then I never thought I was going to live to see generations of people my age and younger who were at heightened disease risk due to exposure (as adults and children). When I was older, I learned that it was only banned piecemeal, not nationally. It was and is still in use in conditions where largely-migrant farm workers who have no control over their working conditions are poisoned much more directly, sometimes dying before they even have time to develop cancer or Parkinson’s. And that was with restricted usage, when you needed a license to poison people (which is sick in and of itself; but RUA did at least curb it a little in some cases).
In 2021 it was opened up for freer use by anyone, aggressively marketed. The EPA said the many, many longitudinal studies of lung damage, cancer, and Parkinson’s weren’t enough grounds to stop its use.
It is banned in 70 countries. Poisoning from it has no cure. There is no way to undo this for those exposed. The only “treatment” option for my family who grew up on a farm where, in the 1960s and 70s, my grandparents naively thought that what they were told about its safety was true, is a choice between whether to seek expensive testing for microscopically-early signs of what they know to be an incurable disease, or to wait it out without knowing. There are no good options.
They are the lucky ones, in a lot of ways. They were not the chemical factory workers whose lungs and livers and kidneys fail in days or weeks if they are exposed. They are not the migrant children of today working in the fields directly, burning their skin, showered with dilute poison sprayed from airplanes. They are not even their father, working outside all day in the midst of his crops. But they still have to live with that fear, had to live with the trauma of decades of their father’s slow, degenerative sickness, because they once were little kids who lived near their land. They went out in the wheat to find a quiet spot to read; they played outdoors; they existed like any child would. The chemical manufacturers would say my grandparents are to blame; that they were at fault for not knowing what they did not know. Stupid and naive for believing in modernity, responsible for poisoning themselves and risking their children’s health. It’s what they say about the class action plaintiffs now, as legal battles drag out with the sued parties just hoping it will take long enough that the injured parties might give up or lose their cognitive function or die.
The only thing we can do is push for bans. That is the only way to break this fucking curse of poisoning for future generations.
My sister XX, I haven’t said this yet, had something wrong with her. She had less fun than she pretended to have. Since she was spying so much, or wanted to be a writer, and so an artist, or wanted to see, or even to compete at who might be happiest — or unhappiest. Terms that are always quite insignificant. But one does have to give words some credit. One has to at least pretend that they more or less resemble their meaning. Their shady meaning.
I don’t want to talk about the parents because this is the story of a brother, or rather, my story, and of a sister, or her story, as a big spy. The two I don’t want to talk about are watching television sitting next to each other, and before dying they didn’t have time to prepare us because they were in a rush, or perhaps just a little impatient. And so my sister and I were left alone in the big house.
When I talk my sister pays too much attention. She watches me. Maybe she is writing my story, as long as I am not dead yet like my parents. I’ve always wondered whether one of them might have died because of her. Then I think that parents always die because of their children. One always dies because of someone else. I don’t know if it’s correct to say “because of.” But one dies for others. On behalf of others, might be more correct.
Fleur Jaeggy, “I Am the Brother of XX,” in I Am the Brother of XX, trans. Gini Alhadeff
the other day in the groupchat we were talking about how historical fiction will often try to code aristocrat characters as more sympathetic by only having them have a single servant instead of a whole household of staff but instead this just makes them look like an exploitative employer who’s so cheap he would rather pile impossible amounts of labor upon a single guy than hire enough help to actually run his house
not related to anything you've posted recently, but what do you make of forcing vaccinations children when they are frightened of them/reject them? not sure how to reconcile my beliefs in children's bodily autonomy and right to reject medical care with my belief that universal immunization is necessary to save lives and make public life accessible for the immunocompromised
honestly ive been as guilty as anyone in the past but we need to just stop skirting around it. bodily autonomy/consent is not an absolute value, there are cases in which something else should override it, and vaccination is one such. i would add that it is certainly possible to design a medical encounter such that kids are less overwhelmed, scared, and resistant, & we should do that. but ultimately vaccination as an individual choice ethical free-for-all is dangerous to everyone, and esp our most vulnerable. if you are going to violate consent you should think long and hard first, & be confident that you have a really good and defensible reason. and this is one.
Precisely because it's riddled with problems and nowhere close to utopia, yet still part of the most looked-to city on the planet, Queens could in someways be a bizarro model for diversifying cities, towns, and suburbs everywhere, not to mention the thousands of sending communities from which people migrate. There is a remarkable record of tolerance precisely here, where the city (and the world) is at its most diverse. While diversification in the short term can bring challenges, the example of Queens strongly suggests that more difference over time means less conflict, and that it matters how contact happens, is managed, and is mediated. Deep difference can come to seem utterly natural.
The idea that people who speak differently can't get along is just as wrong as the idea that people who speak the same will always get along. We won't all learn to speak each other's languages, but a few words can go a long way, and at minimum we need to grow familiar and comfortable with hearing them all the time. We need ways to communicate, which is why the city has not one but a dozen lingua francas. We need people who speak four, five, or six languages, the constant connectors who are on every block in certain parts of Queens. We need language keepers, who keep up endangered ways of speaking, knowing, and being, despite the loneliness and pressure, reflecting everything we are.
Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York
At the heart of linguistics itself is a radical premise: all languages are cognitively and communicatively equal. Language is a universal and democratic fact cutting across all human societies: no human group is without it, and no language is superior to any other. Some languages may specialize in talking about melancholy, or seaweed, or atomic structure; some grammars may glory in conjugating verbs while others bristle with syntactic invention. Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding, and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human. [...] Perceptions of linguistic superiority or inferiority are not based on anything about the languages themselves, but on the power, class, or status of the speakers. Every language signed or spoken natively is a fully equipped system for handling the core communicative tasks of daily life, able to coin or borrow words as needed. "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey," said the linguist and polyglot Jakobson. In other words: it's possible to say anything in any language, but each language's grammar requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously. This is the essence or what makes linguistics fascinating and revealing.
Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York
turnnoffyourmind
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
amandla
vaporwave
