a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.
care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.
connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims
gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme
glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.
ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme
life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure
taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies
the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care
islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support
baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies
gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.
hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste
anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care
palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon
dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram
certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.
Hi people, my friend Shenna needs some assistance with money. She lives in the Philippines and currently works cleaning peoples houses but hasn't been able to find work for a week or so. Please consider helping her out or share the post if you cant help directly.
Go to paypal.me/Shennasky and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
Donations and reblogs have came to a standstill but my friend still does need some help. If anyone can lend a hand and match me donating at least £5 you would really be helping a girl in the global south out.
This has slowed down again and there still hasn't been many donations given. If anyone could give any amount thatd be really helpful as my friend has moved back to Manila from her small town and is currently job hunting but until she can find something, she needs some assistance. Please share if you can't donate.
this has officially gone to its new home which means i can post about it without ruining the surprise! baby's first quilt! it fought me a bit, and it definitely fought my 50 year old sears kenmore sewing machine until i bought a walking foot, but i'm sooo happy with how it turned out!!
it's based on the cats on cats pattern from birch fabrics, although i just drew out the pattern to suit the size i needed rather than actually using the pattern. i made it 50"x60" so although it's a baby blanket, it won't be outgrown!
still have leftover batting so maybe a smaller quilt for myself is in the future.....
I need some people to realize that calling AI technologies “algorithms” is actually even less useful than calling them AI and also does not make you as smart as you think you sound.
SORRY BUT YOUR PASSWORD MUST CONTAIN ONE NUMBER, ONE CAPITAL LETTER, THE COW AS WHITE AS MILK, THE CAPE AS RED AS BLOOD, THE HAIR AS YELLOW AS CORN, AND THE SLIPPER AS PURE AS GOLD
Updating a tracker of persistent rhetoric by Russian leaders and their associates that may constitute evidence of genocidal intent.
Published (updated) on February 24, 2026
“Legal and policy experts and historians for the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights with New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, Ukraine’s National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic with the International Partnership for Human Rights – all have noted a pattern since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine: persistent rhetoric by Russian leaders and their associates that goes far beyond the ordinary bounds of verbal hostilities towards a wartime enemy, and may constitute evidence of genocidal intent.
A number of such reports and briefs have cited Just Security’s chart below, which documents more than 500 examples of eliminationist rhetoric against Ukraine by Russian government officials, media commentators, and other public figures close to the Kremlin since the February 2022 invasion. The resource records genocidal, dehumanizing themes appearing to express an intent to eliminate the Ukrainian nation. The invective occurs in addresses, news articles, and social media posts issued by no less than Russian President Vladimir Putin, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev (a former Russian president and prime minister), and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, as well as Patriarch and Russian Orthodox Bishop Kirill of Moscow, Russian State TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, and Zakhar Vinogradov, editor-in-chief of the state-owned publication Ukraina.ru, among others.
Alongside the intensifying bombardments across Ukraine in more than three years of full-scale war, the clear and pervasive Russian rhetoric “compels us to conclude that the Russian Federation has not only continued but escalated its efforts to commit genocide,” wrote Kennesaw State University Professor Kristina Hook and four legal advisers in a July 2023 report for New Lines and the Wallenberg Centre, updating an analysis they issued in May 2022.
A legal memorandum to Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General from Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) and the International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR) stated, “Russian officials’ declared intent is to target the Ukrainian nation, both physically and ideologically, and eliminate any manifestation of its collective identity.”
Long before the February 2022 invasion and even prior to Putin’s 2014 capture of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, analysts had noted the threatening rhetoric against Ukraine by the Russian president and figures within his control. Dating at least to 2008 or 2009, increasingly hostile language laid the groundwork for rejecting Ukraine’s existence as a state, a national group, and a culture.
In May 2022, Beth Van Schaack, then-U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, observed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in response to a question about the Russian atrocities coming to light in Ukraine, “Some of the genocidal rhetoric that we’re hearing out of Russia is extremely worrying.”
Experts such as Francine Hirsch, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg,” pointed early on to such language as evidence of genocidal intent toward the Ukrainian people. Whether and how the concept of “genocide” applies to Russia’s campaign against Ukraine is the subject of debate, notwithstanding the reference in Article II of the Genocide Convention to “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” A related issue under discussion is a concept often referred to as “cultural genocide,” which generally connotes the intentional destruction of a group’s identity even in the absence of mass killings. “These calls for ‘de-Ukrainization’ are an incitement to genocide: to ‘destroy, in whole or in part,’ the Ukrainian nation,” Hirsch wrote in April 2022. And Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, in reference to the same article in the Russian outlet RIA Novosti that prompted Hirsch’s conclusion, wrote, “Russia has just issued a genocide handbook for its war on Ukraine.”
Just Security’s documentation indicates several themes in Russia’s eliminationist rhetoric:
The denial of Ukrainian identity and statehood. Russian leaders and propagandists portray Ukraine as having “always” been an inseparable part of Russia. They argue there is “no historical basis” for an independent Ukrainian state, delegitimize the country’s current government, and claim that Ukraine’s existence threatens Russian security. According to Mykola Riabchuck, a Ukrainian poet, author, and essayist who is an honorary president of Ukrainian PEN-center, this perception of Ukraine as a “historical aberration” with no right to exist legitimates the so-called “special military operation,” which intends to return Ukrainian territories to Russian control, as was the case in the Soviet Union.
The desire to eliminate the Ukrainian national group. Russian officials and others close to the Kremlin – including media personalities – express a desire or intent to destroy Ukraine’s culture and even the very existence of its population. Russian politicians and media figures have endorsed “total Russification,” “a complete ban” on teaching Ukrainian language,” “partially squeez[ing] out” of Ukrainians disloyal to Russia, wiping the country’s decision-making centers “off the face of the earth,” and incorporating Ukrainian territory into Russia so that “there are no more remnants of Ukraine.” This discourse presents “cultural eradication” as a “moral necessity” to salvage Ukraine, aiming to “create a generation of Ukrainians who identify as Russians,” writes political scientist Martin Laryš, deputy research director at the Institute of International Relations Prague.
The dehumanization of Ukrainians. Russian eliminationist rhetoric characterizes Ukrainians as subhumans requiring spiritual cleansing and treatment. State officials and others have referred to Ukrainians as “tumors,” “rabid dogs,” “cockroaches,” “lice” and “vermin” that Russia must “disinfect,” while also alluding to a larger Ukrainian “organism” no longer capable of “reproducing itself.” There is a precedent for such dehumanizing terminologies in past genocides, write National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy professors Denys Azarov, Dmytro Koval, Gaiane Nuridzhanian, and Volodymyr Venher. Tutsis were labelled “cockroaches” in Rwanda, while the Nazis referred to Jews as “lice” and “rats.”
Civil society organizations, legal scholars, and others are concluding that eliminationist rhetoric by Russian state officials and other affiliated individuals incites genocide and expresses a willingness to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity:
The July 2023 report by the New Lines Institute and the Wallenberg Centre concluded that Russia’s public messages of incitement to genocide have intensified throughout the war, with new dehumanization tropes and narratives. This incitement provides evidence that Russia has a “general plan” to “destroy the Ukrainian national group.”
An October 2023 Congressional Research Service report found that statements by senior Russian officials denying Ukraine’s existence and calling for the elimination of its population “could be considered evidence of the intent to commit genocide in Ukraine.”
In their April 2025 legal memo, IHRC and IPHR concluded that statements by Russian government officials and the use of aerial attacks to inflict civilian harm provide evidence that Russian officials have “acted with the knowledge and intent necessary to hold them accountable for crimes against humanity and war crimes.” A November 2022 statement from State Duma Deputy Speaker Boris Chernyshov, for example, claimed that Russian retaliatory strikes were “an expression of our hatred, our holy hatred. They’ll be sitting without gas, without light, and without everything else. If the Kyiv regime chose the path of war criminals, they have to freeze and rot over there.” These statements, among others, demonstrate that Russian officials “knew and intended the attacks to cause civilian harm and death,” according to IHRC and IPHR.
And, in a May 2025 article, international human rights lawyer and director of IHRC Susan Farbstein wrote in an article for Just Security that the “devastating humanitarian effects” of aerial attacks, combined with Russian officials’ rhetoric, “make clear that Russia’s relentless aerial campaign against Ukraine is intended to exterminate Ukrainian civilians.”
Laryš of the Prague institute took the analysis a step further to show how such rhetoric has impacted Russian society. “This discursive ecosystem operates with tacit approval from the Kremlin, which allows such rhetoric to thrive while criminalizing anti-war dissent. The result is a competitive landscape of ideologues and propagandists vying to outdo each other in their expressions of loyalty to the regime’s goals. This environment not only sustains but actively amplifies genocidal ideologies, ensuring their widespread penetration into mainstream Russian society.”
The following compilation seeks to collect examples of such rhetoric in one place, organized in chronological order and necessarily non-exhaustive, since such declarations occur at high frequency in various media controlled by the Russian government. We express our sincere respect and thanks for the work of expert monitors of Russian media such as Julia Davis and Francis Scarr, who are credited below for their entries, and to Maksym Vishchyk for his contributions.
The statements range from formal presidential addresses and articles by Putin and other officials to commentary on Russian State television and on social media. Sources include (but are not limited to) news articles; books; the Kremlin’s online repository of speeches and addresses; Russian State-controlled news agencies, including RIA Novosti and Kommersant; and posts on Twitter/X and Telegram.”
russians are striking kyiv and region with zircon hypersonic missiles. these are actually anti-ship missiles. what kind of ships are they targeting in kyiv? no ships. because they themselves measure zircon's accuracy in five-storey buildings
"the accuracy of the target is literally up to centimetres."
"centimetres? and this is true about zircon as well?"
"yes, zircon as well."
"so if there's a cross target, you can hit it like a sniper."
"practically, yes. if there is a five-storey building, and we target one of the entrances, if it won't hit this exact entrance, it will hit the next one for sure."
now-dead russian occupier on a russian state tv channel "zvezda"
is anyone else annoyed that "ai" encompasses both chatgpt and tools we train to do repetitive tedious work for us. and by the ripple effect of articles like "scientists develop ai to detect cancer early" that make people argue for the merit of chatgpt or become anti-medicine. and by the general state of the world and society
The technologies used for cancer detection and chatgpt are not that far apart and are highly overlapping, in fact. There is no distinctly good AI technology and distinctly bad AI technology that we just put together under the umbrella of AI and never distinguish when discussing them for no reason. “AI” as a term IS nebulous and sometimes unclear in definition, but we don’t call technologies AI for no reason.
For example, a Honda civic and a jeep wrangler are different things with slightly different uses but we do call them both cars for a reason. And ultimately their engines have a lot more similarities than differences, which is why they are both called car engines…
[insert matrix meme here] what if i told you chatgpt was also “specifically trained” and the specifics was just language prediction tasks… i don’t even blame this person for thinking this, this is entirely the fault of OpenAI and its ilk for acting like training a model on human language means it’s captured everything a human could know.
why do closed captions keep pretending english is the only intelligible language? when a character speaks spanish what exactly is forcing your hand to transcribe it as "[speaks foreign language]" rather than "Si"
This intersection of Anglocentric bias + ableism and audism makes my blood boil.
People commonly defend this practise with "But the audience isn't meant to understand!" or "It's inconsequential!", neither of which actually address a) their assumption that the [ideal Anglo] audience wouldn't understand, or, perhaps most crucially in the context of CCs, b) that this is a failure of accessibility. A hearing person who speaks that "foreign" language will know exactly what's being said. A deaf or HoH person – the people CCs are primarily intended for – who speaks or reads that language should therefore have the exact same opportunity to understand. It very much feels to me like an assumption that we deaf and HoH people couldn't possibly understand any language but English, so there's no point in getting those languages transcribed for us. I hope it goes without saying how profoundly audist that sentiment is.
There is also, I think, a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of Deaf culture at play. Which is to say, CCs in English-language media are written with not only the assumption that the audience will be native English speakers, but that all d/Deaf and HoH people speak English as their first language, so all other languages are as supposedly foreign to them as they are for hearing people. But sign languages are their own distinct language. BSL, ASL, ISL, AusLan, NZSL etc ≠ English (and are indeed different from one another), LIS ≠ Italian, JSL ≠ Japanese, and so on. So, if you follow the captioners' logic to its natural extreme, all non-signed dialogue is "foreign" to many d/Deaf and HoH people and should therefore be labelled [speaks foreign language] / [speaks English] / [speaks own language] / etc. – which is, obviously, a terrible idea that perfectly highlights all the biases implicit in closed captioning.
TL;DR: your accessibility feature fails in its function as soon as you fail to transcribe all spoken languages.
